Below are the video and transcript to Victor Davis Hanson’s speech at the Freedom Center’s 2015 West Coast Retreat. The event was held March 6-8 in Palos Verdes, CA.
Victor Davis Hanson: I have spoken about the brilliance and, believe it or not, the morality of William Tecumseh Sherman at Louisiana State University and I did not get shouted down. I spoke about why the surge would work at UC Berkeley and it wasn’t shouted down. Every time I’ve spoken at a university about illegal immigration, I’ve been shouted down. I get more hate mail on that one topic than Barack Obama, Israel, any other controversial hot topic. It’s an issue that nobody wants to address. I didn’t want to address it either, but I grew up, as Michael said, on a rural farm where it was primarily, by 1960, Hispanic. My mother, who was a Pat Brown-appointed – she was a Democrat, and then Jerry Brown-appointed superior court, and appellate court, first woman appellate court justice in California. She really was an old-type Democrat who believed that if you were going to talk about social justice, then you had to put your money where your mouth was, so she forbid us to go to the rural school out in the country with all the other farm kids, where it was racially diverse, instead, insisted that we go to the barrio, where there was only about six of us who were not Hispanic. Any my father then said, well, they’ll even be better because they’ll either make it or they won’t. If they make it, they’ll be stronger; if they won’t, they don’t deserve it. So, that was a very formative experience.
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