This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
Jack Fowler: Victor, let’s conclude with a couple of crime [stories]. I think crime was just mentioned before, and I have a bevy of things here, but I just want to mention a few and get your take on this. We brought it up in prior podcasts, the Democrat Party being the party that almost loves crime and criminals.
In Colorado, four Colorado Democrats blocked a Senate bill which would have required jail time for child rapists. They’ve—I’ll mention their names, these Democrats—Adrienne Benavidez, Nick Hinrichsen, Katie Wallace, and Mike Weissman. Do humans do this? They do there. In New York, I’m holding today’s New York Post for those who can or are watching this on YouTube.
Albany, that’s the capital of New York, there’s a bill being put forward there that would parole—this is David Berkowitz, by the way, the Son of Sam. He’s in prison. And under this law, anyone that’s 55 or older who has served 15 years would have immediate recourse to a parole hearing and hearings every two years.
And there’s also some legislation about letting people out after a certain age period. And I thought I had—I have like 10 other criminality—oh, the last criminality one is in California. It’s in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Unified School District has come to a settlement with the teachers union.
Let me see. If a union teacher sexually abuses a student in Los Angeles, they have unlimited job security. They just get sent to a new school. This is an agreement that LA’s education officials have. I mean, this is sick.
Victor Davis Hanson: The subtext is that the epidemic is not what you would think, a bunch of bald, obese white guys chasing beautiful 16-year-old girls around the desk.
It’s sophisticated, supposedly sexually experienced teachers, feminine, female, that are having sex with boys to fulfill that old 1950s jock-type idea that it’s not really sexual. It’s initiation—harassment.
You know, the idea being, if you said in my high school class to a bunch of guys, the hot Mrs. Smith, who’s 28, is going to have sex with you at 15 or 16, they would say, “Oh, yeah,” you know. But that’s what one of my—I bring that up because that’s what they’re going back to. You know what I mean? That attitude that maybe these women are mentors or groomers or something.
And it’s really sexist because if it was an older male, unattractive, trying to coerce a woman, they wouldn’t do that. But maybe they would under this statute.
I don’t know whether it’s epidemic or it’s just in the news all the time of these young women in their 20s who are teachers that are having sexual relations with young men. And where does it come from?
I think it’s part of—it started with the idea that pederasty that was in the gay world of, you know, Harvey Milk was accused allegedly of having a live-in person who was under the age of 18. I don’t know if that’s true, but I think people in Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon wanted to rename the—didn’t they want to rename the USS Harvey Milk, a logistic ship?
Fowler: Yes.
Hanson: I don’t know if they did for that reason.
But there are a lot of people, I think there’s a person in the California Legislature, gay guy, who wants to water that down because they feel there’s a long romantic literary tradition in the West, partly in the public schools, which are the private schools in Britain and in Europe. Tea and Sympathy, right? Yeah.
But also same-sex grooming.
Fowler: Gay.
Hanson: Yeah, what the Greeks called the erastes, the active older man, and the eromenos. And that tradition that was imbued with philosophical seriousness, supposedly—that was the idea. And it’s kind of scary.
What I’m getting at is the—
Fowler: I think it’s one of the pluses, by the way, Victor.
On the flag, I think that’s—that man-boy love is now one of these plus, plus, pluses. Yeah.
Hanson: Well, you know what? What’s so funny is that in the ’70s and ’80s, it was the Democratic Party that really—it was not the libertarian Republicans as much. They were moralistic, much more moralistic. I should say moral, not moralistic, but they were not driving these laws about the age of consent.
It was the Democrats—remember that it was the children, it was Hillary. We have to save the children. And they were really going after any sexual activity under the age of 18 in most states. And now it’s just they’ve come 180 degrees. It’s now, well, who are you to say that the person isn’t old enough to give an age of consent?
You know? And I think it comes from the idea they feel that it’s oppressing the gay community somehow, that they can’t date young boys. Because that’s the people who are the most advocate of the pederasty, which is a Greek word. It just means pais, the word for boy, and then eras—erao, the verb, and erastes, the noun, loving a boy.
Pedophilia is a little different. That is termed with under the age, I think, of 12, pedophilia. But—or that’s love for a child, and over the age of 12, given the etymology, it’s sexual acts with a child. But in our world, we call pedophilia, I think, the worst crime because a person’s not even at puberty yet. That was the distinction.
But it’s funny how the Democrat—this new Jacobin party—they want to destroy all of these norms that they used to say were so important, you know? Remember about abortion? I think that abortion should be—here’s Bill Clinton—I think that abortion should be, you know, legal and rare, he said that. Now it’s legal and common.
Fowler: Safe, legal, and rare. Yeah. Right.
You know, this stuff with the teachers, with moving the teachers around or just moving them to another school—this is the same group of people that various states, the Left, extended the laws in order to go after priests. And I’m not defending priests here who were engaged in—but to say, oh, the Catholic Diocese was bad because the priest did this, and he abused this boy here, and they moved him to another parish, and that’s bad.
Now, it doesn’t matter if it happened 50 years ago, we have to go after them. Meanwhile, if you’re a teacher, it’s OK to move you around if you—well, they’re not done yet—molested a kid.
Hanson: They may feel that liberation theologists in the church have certain dispensations because they’re trying to groom people in national liberation theology and things happen. Who knows what they’re capable of?
They’re a very fluid mindset, the Left, and whatever is necessary or whatever is convenient. They don’t believe in absolutes or norms or unchanging human nature. And so they come up with all these—I mean, I never, if we had this discussion 10 years ago, 15, we wouldn’t even know what a transgendered person was.
It was some clinical description called a transsexual that affected 0.0001 of the population. Christine Jorgensen from the 1960s who changed hers. And all of a sudden, it became 30% of the kids at Ivy League schools were saying they would like to transition.
So as I keep saying, every bad idea starts in the faculty lounge. And from the faculty lounge to the American popular culture is about two years.
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