In this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler pick apart DEI like a Christmas turkey.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a segment from today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Jack Fowler: Speaking of not speaking English, you saw the headline about the mayor of Lawrence, Massachusetts. He’s been mayor since 2021, and he needs an interpreter. Allegedly, he needs an interpreter in court. He can’t speak English.
Victor Davis Hanson: I think everybody out there of any nationality or ethnic background has to understand something. DEI is the most toxic ideology we’ve ever experienced because it gave exemption to people to do things on the assumption that they could do things and not be held accountable because of their race, sexual orientation, or gender, or whatever.
And we’ve seen it in spades with the multibillion-dollar fraud in California. Mandami is going to select for one of his interior offices, I think economic justice, Julie Su, who was the labor secretary in California that oversaw $40 billion in Medi-Cal or unemployment fraud.
And we’re seeing a multibillion fraud in Somalia. [Note: Fraud in Minnesota committed by Somalis.] We’re looking at truck driver fraud. We’re looking at violence. They all have one thing in common.
The Left has told us these people are all victims, not on any imperial evidence, just because DEI says that they’re not white. They’re not Christian in some cases, or whatever the DEI rubric is, not heterosexual, male, whatever, white.
But basically, they’re not white, and therefore, they’re the oppressed, and you have to give them special compensation. And when you do that to anybody for any reason, whether you’re a Russian in 1942 and you say you’re a communist and you’re a commissar, it doesn’t matter. To end that will help this country recover from its insanity.
All of these scandals have that one thing in common, that when you’re on the BART, and you’re in San Francisco and you assault somebody and you are on the oppressor side, BART will say we’re not going to release the video of what you did because you’re oppressed, and it might discourage people from being nice to you. And that will encourage violence.
If you’re DeCarlos Brown and you get out 11 times because of your circumstances, that means that you’ll be more likely to slit somebody’s throat. So, there is no deterrence for DEI.
And the worst thing about it is that we were at a point where people who were not so-called white were competitively upwardly mobile with the so-called dominant population. And now that has all been thrown into confusion because every time somebody, and I’m now referencing that Compact magazine, Mr. [Jacob] Savage, his article about DEI and prejudice.
When you give somebody special consideration, exemption from meritocracy and audit, the first thing they have to do—look at [former Harvard President] Claudine Gay, look at any of those people, look at any DEI appointment—the first thing they have to do is say, “I am a perpetual victim” because you were put there because you were a victim.
And therefore, you have to find racism, racism, racism. And therefore, when you don’t find it, you’ve got to invent it. If you don’t do that, you’re going to be evaluated on your merit. And if you were selected for that job because you did not have a competitive meritocracy, then you’re going to be very angry. So, it’s self-perpetuating. It’s a perpetual motion machine.
I got into Harvard because I was a minority. I didn’t have the SAT score, I didn’t have the GPA of somebody else, but once I’m here and people suggest I’m not qualified, I will say that somebody put something on my door that was racist, and somebody said something that was unkind, and it’s systemic, you don’t understand.
And that’s going to continue and then the university is going to be afraid to say, no, no, you weren’t qualified and you proved it because you can’t do the work in your case. They can’t say that.
It’s so ironic because I’m at a very competitive Hoover Institution. And the people who spoke, I felt, the most analytically of the fellows were Shelby Steele and Tom Sowell. No doubt about it. Kyron Skinner as well. Our director, Condoleezza Rice, very well-spoken, analytical, and guess what? All four of them are African American. They didn’t just excel, they’re preeminent. And then you get DEI, and you think, they’re here. No, they’re not. They came in that are meritocratic.
Tom Sowell’s probably the brightest guy I’ve met. He’s very understated. He doesn’t seek attention. But every time he opens his mouth, all those lunches I had with him, it was like, that is so true and so transparent and so common sense. And you just sliced and diced a complex problem into one sentence. I wish I could have said that. That’s how he was. Shelby Steele was the same way.
It’s just baffling why we did this to ourselves.
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