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Add up a corrupt admissions system, a corrupt DEI industry, a corrupt therapeutic curriculum, a corrupt method of grading and a corrupt, politicized faculty, and it’s no wonder the Ivy League is in crisis and higher education is in panic.

Harvard, with the help of the state of Massachusetts, whose Democrat governor is an alumnus, hopes to issue $675 million in tax-exempt bonds as applications took a 21% dive for the 2025-26 academic year, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

This, coupled with rising. “grade inflation”—more and more professors giving out A’s to unqualified students—has many asking right now: Are America’s preeminent institutions of higher learning still worth their salt?

Probably not, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.”

By that I mean, I went to a rural high school. It wasn’t that competitive, Selma High School. They would just say, “If Victor Hanson applies to Harvard, and he has an A, it’s the same A as somebody from Sacred Heart Prep School in Palo Alto, where the curriculum was much more difficult.” And they did that, and the result was they had students who could not do the work, and the faculty was confronted with the dilemma. They either had to water down the curriculum. Or they had to introduce new therapeutic courses, or they had to give 60% or 70% of the people A’s, and they could do all three at the same time, which they did.

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Following the Democrats’ crushing defeat at the ballot box in 2024, the DNC launched a postmortem to answer a very simple yet surprisingly elusive question: What went wrong?

Their findings? On 70-30 issues, Democrats landed on the 30 side.

Their solution? Democrats aren’t changing their message—they’re just rebranding the mess. From Pete Buttigieg in flannel to Tim Walz playing hunter, the “working-class pivot” looks more like political cosplay. Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to connect on issues that actually matter to voters. The bottom line: You can’t fake authenticity—and voters aren’t buying it.

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Most NATO members were unwilling to directly assist the United States and Israel in their fight to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, saying, “This isn’t our war.”

The United Kingdom’s mission to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982 wasn’t the United States’ war, yet President Ronald Reagan still gave them the supplies necessary to retake the islands.

Germany’s invasion of France wasn’t our war, yet Franklin D. Roosevelt still sent military equipment, and later soldiers, to retake Western Europe.

However, Europe’s cold shoulder may not be out of spite, but an inability to help at all, explains Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words”:

“They have dreamed of utopia and a good life, and the result is that their fertility rate is 1.3. They are shrinking. They are aging. They’re not competitive. So they don’t have the manpower, even though they have a 450 million-person population. Europe is larger than us by 100 million.

“And even though they have a $22 trillion GDP, which is the third-largest, apparently they don’t want to invest that in their own defense, or they haven’t so far. They don’t want us to use it when we need it.”

(00:00) NATO Crisis Returns

(00:26) Iran Strikes And Allied Refusals

(02:44) Why Europe Cannot Contribute

(05:26) Moral Posturing And Base Politics

(06:08) Let NATO Fade New Alliances

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President Donald Trump recently outlined the endgame for Iran. How does it end? There are three scenarios:

👉 Bomb the mullahs back to the Stone Age, hoping a popular uprising takes root and overthrows the regime.

👉 The Venezuela solution: Install a current, more moderate member of the regime as a transitional figure until elections can be held.

👉 Bomb the infrastructure and leave.Donald Trump recently outlined the end game for Iran.

We’ve been there about a month, and he was saying in week five it would take two or three weeks, so maybe seven weeks total or two months. That got people very angry and said it’s an endless war.

And the people on the left, remember, don’t want the war to work because they want to win the midterms. And they’re not, they haven’t been successful so far in hurting Trump, but they feel that if they can create a narrative that this is an Afghanistan-like withdrawal, which they oversaw that was a disaster, or a Vietnam or an Afghanistan or Iraq, maybe they can bring him down.

(00:00) Trump’s Iran Endgame
(00:58) Endless War Narrative
(02:21) Casualties vs. Costs
(04:03) Size, Scale, and Military Impact
(06:12) Denuclearization and Strategic Results
(08:10) Closing Takeaways

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Within the first 30 days of the conflict in Iran, the United States and Israel have achieved military successes not previously seen in modern warfare: a country, with the population of Texas, has had its entire navy and air force decimated within a month.

Battlefield wins mean nothing if you can’t sell the war back home.

Here’s how President Donald Trump can make the political reality equal to the military reality, which is a near success.

00:00 30-Day Air Supremacy

02:32 Iran Under Pressure

03:47 Cutting Off Resupply

04:31 Counting the True Cost

06:04 Messaging the War

08:23 Regime Change and No Ground War

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👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications:  https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com
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