Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words

Victor Davis Hanson: I Left Academia Because I Was Sick of the Blatant Racial Politics

July 30, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In a meeting at Cal State Fresno, a professor screamed at Victor Davis Hanson to “shut the F up.” When he responded by asking if she wanted to slap him instead, she burst into tears and accused him of “sexist violence.” The next day, campus police showed up at his truck—an old Ram, dirty from the farm he commuted from—because someone had reported the shotgun in his gun rack. The officers were skeptical that a Latin professor who lived on a farm could be real. Hanson was 51 years old, had written sixteen books, and was done. He walked into the retirement office and quit.

The Rot Inside Academia

Hanson’s departure from academia was not a single event but the culmination of decades of watching the institution abandon merit and intellectual honesty for racial politics. He describes arriving at graduate school at Stanford in 1975, where the department chair told four white male students point-blank: “None of you are gonna get a job. Everybody’s told they’re gonna hire women and minorities, no matter what.” Hanson finished his exams in two and a half years, wrote his thesis in the third, and applied to seventeen jobs. He got one interview—at the Naval Academy, where they told him he was qualified but they had to hire a woman.

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (03:26) **College Majors in “Influencing”** - Jack Fowler introduces the topic of Arizona State University offering a major in how to be an influencer, and Victor Davis Hanson responds with his critique of the concept.
  • 2 (12:15) **Ro Khanna’s Plan for a Democrat House** - The conversation shifts to a New York Post article detailing five policy priorities House Democrats would pursue if they regain the majority, including Medicare for All and a $25 minimum wage.
  • 3 (18:41) **October 7th as a Liberating Event for Anti-Semites** - Hanson explains the strategic brilliance of Hamas, arguing that the sheer barbarism of the attack was designed to remove all inhibitions for future anti-Israel sentiment.
  • 4 (25:39) **The Centrist Trap and Democrats’ Fake Moderation** - Jack Fowler brings up a piece from Power Line titled “The Centrist Trap,” and the discussion moves to how Democrats like Amy Klobuchar are portrayed as moderates despite their voting records.
  • 5 (29:34) **GOP Candidates and the 2026 Midterms** - The conversation turns to specific candidates in the 2026 midterm elections, including the Maine and Michigan races, and the financial state of the parties.
  • 6 (34:57) **ActBlue as a Money Laundering Machine** - Jack Fowler presents a story by Robert Spencer about a single woman who made 14,696 donations via ActBlue, totaling $150,000, suggesting the platform is a massive money laundering operation.
  • 7 (46:40) **The St. Glory Ruiz Incident and Police Defunding** - The discussion moves to a recent incident in Madison, Wisconsin, where a man stabbed a police officer and was shot dead, leading to protests by BLM and Antifa.

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Guests on this episode

Victor Davis Hanson

Show Notes

Modern higher education standards are being ruined by the wokeness taking over America.

Look no further than Arizona State University, where its School of Journalism just announced a new major dedicated to becoming an “influencer.” 

Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” examine Congressman Ro Khanna’s policy priorities for a Democratic House majority, including Medicare for All, living wage mandates, and cutting off aid to Israel.

They describe how the progressives are hypocritical elites, operating as capitalists while pandering to anti-Israel hard-liners.

Addressing the public exhaustion with anti-police hostility, Hanson then shares insights from his own career as a classicist, detailing the blatant racial preferences in hiring and ideological rot that ultimately drove him to resign his university tenure. He describes how the woke and DEI standards across America are running higher education into the ground, and influenced his decision to resign his tenure at age 51.  


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Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words

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