Best of the Program | Guests: Ezra Levant & Spencer Klavan | 9/25/23

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Hey, welcome to the podcast.

You gotta hear the whole story here from the New York Times, so it's gotta be true.

Nearly a year ago, as Ron DeSantis' political stock was rising, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee came forward with a stunning claim.

Before he was Florida's governor as a young Navy lawyer, Ron DeSantis had taken part in force feeding of a hunger striker by pouring down cases of the dietary supplement and sure

down his throat.

And he laughed as he did so.

Now, in the last paragraph, they go like, yeah, but that's not really probably true.

But I appreciate the New York Times doing that great, great work.

And I know that DeSantis camp appreciates it too.

So much to talk about on today's program.

And I just want to throw out a note.

I'm going to be giving a speech on the American covenant.

Are we a covenant nation or not?

I'm going to be speaking October 19th at 7 p.m.

at the Mountain America Expo Center in Sandy, Utah.

It's just outside of Salt Lake City.

You can get your tickets.

All you have to do is go to Eventbrite and look at my name, Glenn Beck, and you'll get all the information.

Again, it's October 19th, 7 p.m.

Don't miss it.

Bring your family.

These are $10 tickets, general omission.

So we'll see you there.

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You're listening to the best of the blend back program.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, there's no, this is, I'm telling you.

Who even notices things like inflation?

You know what I mean?

Go by Nomics.

Remember, the idea is that you will own nothing.

You'll own nothing, and you'll like it.

So, what are the things that you just think you're never gonna get people out of their home, never gonna get people to stop driving cars?

Well,

well, now let's look at this for a second.

The Home Affordability Index has fallen from 169-point point average in 2020 to 87.8 points as of July.

That's according to the National Association of Realtors.

One key driver of the expense is, of course, inflation,

which peaked at 9.1%.

Both housing and automobiles now are

mostly unaffordable to American households.

And why is that?

Well, the government spent an awful lot of money and the feds had to raise the rates.

That's how most people, you don't go out and buy a house or car with cash.

The Biden administration has introduced,

I would say, a lot of high-spending bills.

We have the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

Then you have the Inflation Reduction Act, Act, which

he says, I wish we wouldn't have named it that because people think it's about inflation and it's not.

It's a green new deal.

That was $750 billion in new spending, $370 billion for that going towards green initiatives.

And then the Fed was like, hey,

we're going to have inflation.

And so they've brought the Fed rate up to 5.5.

Now,

that's the amount

they loan to the banks, not you.

You're not getting 5.5.

So, as housing becomes unaffordable, what's it look like?

Well, in most markets across the U.S., home prices have risen between 10 and 15 percent just in the last couple of years.

The median home price in July was $412,300.

That's insanity.

That's insanity.

Half a million dollars almost for the average house?

That's crazy.

Mortgage rates were 6.92.

So

you're paying 7%

on your mortgage compared to 2020 when the median home was $300,000.

Plus, I refinanced just a couple of years ago at like 2.8 or something.

The average at the time was 3.17.

6.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

And still, historically, that is low, but we haven't seen that in a long time.

Long time.

Okay.

$412,000 for the average house.

Who can afford that?

Real wages have been downgraded by inflation.

The median weekly real earnings for both wage and salary workers, according to the Federal Reserve of St.

Louis, has declined 7.1%

in the second quarter of this year.

7.1?

Also, you want to buy a car, you have the high interest rates, you have, how much is the average car now?

I have

got to be over 30.

Yeah.

Easily over 30.

I remember when I was growing up, a Mercedes, which which I didn't know anybody who had in a Mercedes or anything.

No, I didn't either.

Was like $30,000 or $20,000.

I think it was $20,000.

Probably more like $20,000.

Yeah, $20,000.

The price of auto insurance is now up 19.1%.

Why is that?

Why is that?

Why is it up?

A lot of tickets, a lot of speeding tickets.

No, no, no, no, it's not that.

Not that.

No, that's you.

That's you.

It's a little close to home.

Yeah, no.

What is it?

People stealing cars, people breaking into cars all over the country, breaking their glass, having to be repaired over and over and over again.

So that makes...

So the crime that the left brought us

and the inflation that both the right and the left have brought us, but now crazy from

the left.

And so what's happening?

Nobody's buying cars, which is hurting Detroit and hurting the workers.

And new home construction is crashing.

It's down 33% from last year at this time.

But don't worry,

there's a lot of, you know, jobless construction workers out there, and we're importing millions of new hardworking illegals.

So that's going to make that even better for the construction workers.

By the way, how much does it take to now qualify for a mortgage?

$104,000 for you to even qualify.

Our national debt is now $33 trillion last Tuesday,

more than $5 trillion over Biden's term, far greater than the $2.48 trillion increase seen under Donald Trump and the 4.3 trillion under Obama.

In eight years?

In eight years,

$5 trillion in two.

Wow.

So, you know.

Yeah, but he told us over the weekend, he just hasn't been getting the message out.

He's got to get the message out to people out there.

I'm trying to help him.

I'm trying.

I'm trying to help him.

Thank you.

And I'm sure he'd thank you for this.

Yeah, thank you.

So

there's another story.

Remember, the whole goal is you don't own anything.

And the only way they can make that happen is if you just can't afford anything.

And so you'll have to go to renting.

You'll rent your car.

You'll take an Uber.

You won't drive.

You'll rent a bike.

You'll rent a house.

All of it.

And you won't have any place to go because they want to reclaim the national parks and 30%

of the country.

So they don't want you driving very far.

Another reason for electric cars, 400 miles tops.

They don't want you driving across the country.

You won't be flying across the country.

And

in something that I'm sure is absolutely, has nothing to do with anything that I just talked about, La Jolla Beach in San Diego.

Known for its beauty and rugged rocks,

mainly what people really love, the sea lion population.

I know I love that.

I love that.

Well, they're now

going to

ban and protect the sea lion population in San Diego.

The

8-0 vote in the city council said they're going to close the beach.

Close the beach in La Jolla,

but just for seven years.

Oh, okay.

So just seven years to stop the spread.

That's all that's all

that is.

What happens after seven years?

The sea lions have had enough babies in order to repopulate the beach?

Of course.

Of course.

Of course.

And anybody who stands in the way, of course, you know,

you're a problem.

By the way, Gavin Newsom kind of hit the panic button over the weekend.

He found out that his son listens to Joe Rogan

and said that,

you know, I really worry about the misinformation and the disinformation from Rogan, you know, about what's happening to our country.

I worry about these micro cults that my kids are in.

So really, it's a micro.

If you listen to Joe Rogan, you're in a micro cult.

Ha.

I didn't realize that.

By the way, speaking of Joe Rogan, did you see what he did over the weekend?

I did not.

Well, we told you last week that the House and the Senate, or the Assembly and the Senate, they voted to pass something really special, and it was only waiting for Gavin Newsom's signature.

It passed overwhelmingly, and it was

just say no to parents being notified.

You couldn't, you were not allowed to tell a parent if your kid was going to

be, you know, have a sex change operation.

And the bigger part of it, the teeth, if your parent did not affirm your treatment,

you could be arrested.

The kids could be taken away.

Now, I thought there was no way.

Gavin Newsom's not going to sign that?

Gavin in California, when it passed the House and the Senate, he's going to stand in the way of it.

Everybody thought it was a foregone conclusion.

Hmm.

Yeah, he vetoed it.

Now, I'm not saying

that he's going to be running for president.

But with the rest of the news coming out this weekend about how bad Joe Biden is performing in the polls,

I'm not

saying that either.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

So

I have questions, many questions about Canada.

You know, I grew up right by the northern border,

and especially, you know, we had problems with the Canadians coming across that border, you know, in droves.

And

then just, you know, going to like the Kmart and Walmart and getting deals and then just coming right back across their their border.

It was crazy.

Anyway,

you know,

I've always thought Canadians had some common sense.

I don't think that's still true

because some of the things that are going on, there's good news and bad news coming

out of Canada.

Ezra Levant is with us now.

He's a rebel news founder.

It's kind of like the Blaze up in Canada.

He is the host of the Ezra Levant show,

and he's here to tell us the happenings this weekend.

Let's start with

the big standing ovation that

was given to a Canadian Nazi

Ezra.

Glenn, it's absolutely crazy.

Yaroslav Hunke is the name of a former Nazi SS officer.

So I'm not just talking about some regular GI in the Wehrmacht who was conscripted and just fought in a tank.

I'm talking about someone who volunteered to be part of Hitler's elite Nazis in Ukraine.

Now, he's 98 years old, and he's been living a very low-profile life in Canada.

So unlike some other Nazis, he hasn't been hunted down by the Mossad.

Imagine how surprised he must have been to receive a phone call that he would be the honored guest in parliament when Justin Trudeau welcomed Vladimir Zelensky on Friday.

And he was just like in your American State State of the Union address where they point the camera at someone in the audience and they give him a shout out and everyone gives him applause.

They literally did that for Yaroslav Hunke, a 98-year-old Nazi SS officer.

But they didn't introduce him that way, Glenn.

They said he, quote, fought the Russians.

Well, the Nazis did that.

Hitler did that.

That's right.

Amongst other things, you know, they also fought the Poles.

They also fought the Jews.

And this guy, Hunka, couldn't believe it.

He's been hiding in Canada for 70 years.

And then in the twilight of his life, he's cheered and he raises his fist and he gets a standing O.

But later on, and I did a little bit of digging here, I thought, well, who is this guy?

And he was one of 2,000 Nazis that sort of sneaked into Canada after the war.

They went to Argentina and other Latin American countries.

And 2,000 of them came to Canada.

And don't tell me they didn't know.

Don't tell me you don't have a guest of honor at our version of a State of the Union address where the entire parliament is assembled.

Don't tell me when Vladimir Zelensky comes, they have a very high security, vetting everybody rule.

Don't tell me they didn't know who this guy was.

They absolutely knew who he was, Glenn.

Here is the interesting thing to me: they cheer in parliament an actual SS Nazi, and yet they accuse, what, half of Canada, anybody who stood behind the truckers, they accuse them of Nazis and threaten to put them all in jail.

Well, that's a good way to understand Justin Trudeau.

He calls himself a male feminist, but he admits that he sexually assaulted a woman named Rose Knight.

He just said, oh, she experienced it differently.

He calls you a racist, but he's the guy who dressed up in blackface so many times, he says he lost count he calls everyone he doesn't like a Nazi including Jewish people he called a Jewish MP a Nazi he called a black MP a Nazi but he's the one leading the standing ovation for an actual Nazi not Nazi-linked or Nazi vibes this guy was out there with his gun obeying their fuhrer And it's just incredible.

And the kind of mop-up work that the media party is doing, Glenn, is just incredible.

And do you think for a second that Trudeau will stop calling people Nazis?

It's such a total meltdown.

Trudeau's taken a day off from question period today.

Normally, he goes into parliament and answers questions.

He can't be bothered.

He's got other things to do.

By the way, this is one week after he accused the country of India of

murdering a Canadian, and his deputy actually suggested that India might be sabotaging Trudeau's plane to kill him.

Canada is becoming a failed state.

We're falling apart economically.

The only countries in the world that we have stronger relations with now than we did 10 years ago are Cuba and Ukraine.

It's a mess up here, Glenn.

Well, we're going the same route.

I don't even know if we have good relations with Ukraine.

I mean, we're sending them money, but I think they come over and they're like,

you pigs, they still eat you.

Give me more money.

Now,

there was some good news uh i saw on friday and then again on saturday parents were marching something you don't see in america anymore because january 6th scared the pants off of people and so now they're not going out and marching but no matter what trudeau did to the truckers you had people out on the streets marching

against what's being done in their schools.

Oh, it's amazing.

It was called the million-person march.

It was parents marching to protect their kids from gender ideology in schools.

And here's the crazy thing.

The leader of this march was a Muslim immigrant to Canada.

And what's so interesting is some of the parents who care the most about their kids come from abroad.

They're newcomers to Canada, and they have family values, and they don't understand gender ideology.

I think the most iconic picture from those, and I don't know if there was quite a million people.

That would be an awful lot for a country as small as Canada but there were hundreds of thousands we had 14 reporters in seven cities and it was eye-popping it really was

comparable to the trucker convoy the most iconic picture was a Muslim woman wearing a hijab

holding up a sign that said, don't trust anyone who tells you to keep secrets from your parents.

It was something like that.

I don't have the picture in front of me.

And that's what it is.

Across Canada, our our provincial governments are introducing laws that would require schools to tell parents if their minor children were switching genders, changing their name, changing their pronouns, just to let parents know.

Because until this point, it's being kept a secret between sex ed counselors at school and the kids.

And that's so gross.

Keeping secrets about sexual matters from your parents, that's something that you used to arrest people for a decade ago.

So

public opinion polls show that about 80% of Canadians support the parents' right to be informed.

But Trudeau called those people transphobic.

No surprise.

So where is Trudeau?

Because he's kind of, I think, kind of like our Gavin Newsom.

The guy's batcrap crazy.

And where is he in his cycle?

I mean,

do you have term limits on him?

And when is he up for re-election?

We do not have term limits.

He has been prime minister for eight years and his father, Pierre Trudeau, was prime minister for 16 years.

And I fear that Justin Trudeau wants to equal or better his father.

Now, there is some hopeful news, though.

He's had so many missteps.

And by the way, it all started when the truckers made him blink.

He overreacted.

He declared martial law.

He deployed riot horses.

He seized bank accounts of his political opponents.

And he felt pretty proud of himself.

But that marked, I think, the end of the honeymoon.

And he's been on decline in the polls ever since.

The latest polls put him 15% behind the new Conservative Party leader, who again was installed because the truckers, because the old Conservative Party leader wouldn't even meet the truckers.

And so the Conservative caucus threw out their old leader, and they chose a leader who's got a little bit more courage.

So those truckers, I think, really not only helped end the lockdowns, but I think they put Canada on a more hopeful path.

Now it's very dark right now, but Trudeau is 15%

behind the polls.

He's alienating so many different communities.

And I have to think that, you know, a lot of people were sort of in love with Trudeau.

And when you fall out of love with someone, it often turns to hate.

It's not just neutrality.

I think people feel duped by him.

People who were enthralled by him feel that they were tricked and hoodwinked.

They realized that he is an odious man.

He's an actor.

Like many male feminists, he was faking it.

I think he's going to be thrown out.

I sure hope so, Glenn.

Well, that would be good news for the United States as long as he's replaced with somebody better and not necessarily, you know, we could do worse.

I don't know how, but I think the devil has some time on his hands.

You know, I'm sure he would take the job into either of our countries.

Ezra, thank you so much.

I appreciate everything you guys do up in Canada.

Thank you.

Thanks, my friend.

Be better.

Bye-bye.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Spencer Clavin is a friend of the program.

His father is a dear friend, Andrew Clavin.

And Spencer is probably one of the more brilliant people I happen to know.

He wrote the book, How to Save the West.

And we wanted to get him on today to talk a little bit about, you know, roman the roman empire because we've been thinking about it a lot spencer we have yeah

it's a pleasure to be back and i think this will fill our quota for the entire week you know

i mean you are the

you're the one guy that probably does think of the roman empire i don't understand i don't understand i never think of the roman empire

i'm glad you i'm glad you can admit that and take a big man to admit that you're like no i'm so put me in coach you know i'm ready as i've been doing okay all right

so

are we repeating the pattern of the Roman Empire?

Well, there's a good case to be made that the pattern we're actually repeating is the pattern of the Roman Republic at its very end, right when it became an empire.

We in America are a republic.

That's how our nation was founded.

That's the regime our founders put in place.

And they put it in place for a very specific reason because they had studied ancient history as well as more recent history and they knew that all sorts of forms of tyranny can come into place with all different kinds of government.

You can even have a tyranny of the mob under democracy.

You can of course have the tyranny of a monarchy which they had just escaped from.

And in order to preserve American liberty against those forms of tyranny, they created this threefold government.

The three different branches of our government are meant to balance the different powers that compete against one another so that individual Americans can be free.

The only way that you can destroy that kind of system is from within.

Republics die by suicide.

And in Rome, what happened is a very small coterie of elites, of well-heeled, rich, well-to-do people, got together among their cronies and conspired to deprive large masses of the citizenry from their birthright, from the lands that they were supposed to have access to after their military service.

Holy colours.

I know, imagine that.

And

it's impossible, of course, for us to think about this happening in America.

You know, a huge group of elites getting together and

lording it over the people.

That would never happen here.

But, of course, that's exactly what we're starting to look at.

And it's part of why guys like me, and I think you as well, you know, are so concerned about the way that the Davos crowd and these sort of hoity-toity upper-crusted elites are trying effectively to take control away from the people.

So, what caused the downfall of the Republic?

What was it besides the elites?

The people had to be

probably like we are now.

That's right.

Well, this is part of why elite capture is so poisonous for republics.

You know, Machiavelli, the great

Renaissance-era thinker in political philosophy, looked back on the Roman Republic and he said, were the elites or the people worse?

It's kind of hard to tell who was more to blame.

But ultimately he said it was the elites who failed most because in their failure, they not only discredited themselves, but the entire system that they were supposed to represent.

And that is also what happened in Rome, that public trust started to drain, to hemorrhage out of these Republican institutions.

And by the time the era of Julius Caesar came along, Plutarch, one of the great essayists of antiquity, said there were were many observers who thought they would be lucky if nothing worse than a tyranny emerged from this situation.

You start to get populist rulers who agitate the crowd.

It becomes very, very easy for one person or one group of people to effectively promise the people that

they'll give them everything they want.

They'll give them all their land and all their money back.

They'll just take it out of the hands of the elite.

And then you have a populist uprising, which eventually turns into a monarchy or a tyranny, which is what you got after many, many many years of civil war in Rome.

Yeah, I can kind of relate to all of that.

Where are we on this cycle?

Well, one thing I think it's important to bear in mind so that we don't despair here is that this is not

an ironclad prophecy.

These things don't always happen exactly the same way.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

And so I would propose that in many ways at home, what we're looking at is this kind of decay of a republic at the point at which the people begin to become fed up.

There is an enormous mass of populist energy, not just on the right, also on the left,

with people feeling that both political parties have completely failed to serve their interests or even to offer them a solution to the problems that they refuse to acknowledge and, in many cases, undertake to make worse.

And so that populist energy is now, I think, brewing in our country in some very dangerous ways.

We've seen the way that, you know, when people take to the streets, as in 2020, for example, things can get really hairy really quickly.

It doesn't mean that we are doomed, I don't think, to tear our government down to the studs and institute a monarchy, but it does mean that very careful and serious engagement with the legitimate concerns of those people that feel underserved by the government is the only way for anybody to take serious political power in this country right now.

And I think that explains a lot of what you're seeing in the presidential race as well.

Trevor Burrus: Has anyone gotten to this point and turned it around?

Yeah, it's a great question.

We talked about this when I went on your

podcast.

I mean, I think that the Romans got to this point several times before it all collapsed and did turn it around.

And the way that they did that was by a meeting between the elites and the people.

Several times in Rome's history, the people clamored again in the way that they did at the end for more rights, for more attention,

to be given what they believed was their due as Romans.

And it was not that they simply, the elites then just rolled over and gave citizenship to everybody that wanted it and just kind of answered every populist claim, but they understood that they were now responsible.

They had what you might call now a noblesse oblige, a sense that as elites, they had an obligation to listen to the the voice of the people and to negotiate.

One thing that's true about America is we are not going to get rid of elites altogether.

It's a mistake to think that what's coming up next is, well, we'll just have a bright new future of equality for all in every respect.

Everybody's going to be the same.

There are always going to be elites

because there are always going to, even in a meritocracy, people are going to rise to the top.

The key is to replace our current elites who have no interest in negotiating with the people with elites who have a sense of responsibility toward those people that they are elevated above.

And that kind of negotiation can turn this thing around.

It did in Rome, men, several times before the end, and it could for us too if we have a little bit of help from upstairs.

How do you convince people?

Have you thought about this, Spencer, on

the way we have been brainwashed?

I look at the 1930s, and I think we are repeating many of those same mistakes.

And I never understood how the German populace could go from, you know, decent people with a republic to 15 years later, the Nazis.

How did that happen?

I understand it much more now.

All you have to do is start pitting people against each other

and

telling bigger and bigger lies, and people tend to believe them.

Right.

Yes, I think about this a lot, And it's something that is discussed at the beginning of Plato's Republic, actually.

Socrates says, well, if you won't listen to persuasion, then I have no way of convincing you.

If people are actually dead set against hearing because they've been brainwashed, then it becomes very, very difficult to break through that cloud of lies.

But I go back again and again to something that Alexander Solchanitsyn said.

And here's a guy who lived through a far worse version of this kind of brainwashing, you know, a dissident in the Soviet regime, a prisoner in the gulag.

And he gave a speech in which he said, live not by lies.

And what he personally concluded in that speech is that the only thing that can undo that kind of spell of media deception, of educational brainwash, all of that stuff, is a personal non-participation in lies.

Every one of us that thinks that something is up, something is going wrong, has to be forthright and open about that.

Because the hypnotism that happens when everybody is kind of towing one dishonest line isn't just about people believing these lies.

It's also about cowardice.

It's also about people that say, I think there's something wrong with this, but I'm afraid of what's going to happen if I speak up.

Soltanitsin said that one man who refuses to say that lie can turn the world upside down.

And I think courage really is the virtue that we are most in need of right now.

It's not that you need to be brilliant and see perfectly to every truth that has been concealed.

It's just that you need to state forthrightly what you believe: that men can't turn into women, that socialism has failed everywhere it's tried.

I mean, these things have become incredibly costly to say, but saying them is our only hope of breaking that spell of lies.

When Rome saved itself,

did it have a

savior, if you will, somebody who stood up and could talk common sense to both sides of the room?

Because I don't see that on the horizon.

The way things are going politically, I don't see somebody that can unite everybody.

That is a huge problem for us.

I agree with you.

I mean, Rome did have these

heroes that would emerge throughout time, and they really rooted a lot of their history in these great men.

Some of them were from before the Republic, and then they carried on this tradition, people like Scipio Africanus, you know, that they could look up to and who was rooted not in his love of party, but in his love of Rome itself and in the service that he had given.

One really important way that they encouraged this was that they understood that Roman citizenship was not just a kind of goods, a goodie bag that you got born into.

It was also a series of responsibilities.

And so they encouraged and honored people who went above and beyond in fulfilling those responsibilities in showing bravery in wartime, showing wisdom in moments of political crisis.

One of our major problems in America is that we don't afford honor to people that do that sort of thing.

We don't afford honor to honest people.

We don't celebrate honesty, or indeed we don't celebrate bipartisanship.

All of these things are dishonorable in our public life.

And that's part of why you're seeing the failure of a lot of our leadership class.

It may be that this current class of leaders that is represented really by Joe Biden and even to a certain extent by Donald Trump, that this is an old guard passing away, that's taking a long time to pass away.

We may hope that, especially at the local level and the way the red states and governors of red states have succeeded, that there's a majority coalition growing who can find leaders from a slightly younger generation.

But I agree with you that it's not hopeful among the people currently in power.

We're talking to Spencer Clavin, who is a historian, a great writer, and

somebody who really just buckles down and studies it so the rest of us don't have to.

And Spencer,

I have read that

the society always starts to dis when it starts to dismantle itself, it goes into what used used to be called sexual perversions,

and men become much more effeminate,

and it's almost a

it's almost a loss of the sexes.

Is that true?

It's certainly a hallmark of this kind of dysfunction.

There's a guy called Rob Henderson who writes about what's called luxury beliefs.

And what I suspect is that this kind of extravagant, crazy, and totally unreality-based sexual psychosis that we're going through?

This is the kind of thing you can only indulge in when you're rich, fat, and happy.

Then you can sit around and say, well, men and women, they're really the same, and they can change into one another.

These things become incredibly difficult to maintain when the rubber meets the road.

And there's actually a story in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who was a great historian from the ancient world, who writes about a tyrant in a little island that was kind of obscure, but who, when he took control, one of the things this tyrant did to make sure that nobody would ever rise up against him is he ordered that all the boys should be taught like girls in school and that they should be made effeminate through their training.

And this is how he thought that he could stay secure in his tyranny is if he kind of sanded down the rough edges of masculinity.

There's a good argument to be made that a generation of weak and effeminate men is one of the best ways to put a tyranny in place, to encourage men to

abandon their aspirations to manhood and masculinity, to shame them for trying to take sovereignty over their own lives.

These sorts of things are an excellent way to keep a population docile, and they're also an excellent way to render yourself weak to invasion from outside, which is eventually what that tyrant succumbs to, is that people who had not been trained under his oppressive regime took up the call of manliness and

overthrew him.

So, yeah, I do think that when you're sort of easygoing, when everything is looking great, when you're on top of the world, you can sort of indulge in these obscure theories about masculinity and femininity.

But the less you have available to you, the less defense you have available to you, the more you're going to start to realize that actually men need to be men and women need to be women.

Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.

Is this, I mean, it's just, everything you're saying is playing out.

Is there a place in the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic's history that we haven't repeated yet that

you might say to yourself, when I see this,

I'll know.

Well, Appian, who is the historian of this kind of period when the Republic fell apart,

said that when it was really over is when Romans took up swords against one another.

Because he mentions, you know, before this, there were all of these different negotiations between the elites and the people, but it wasn't until civil bloodshed in the era of the Gracchi, when people started to kill their leaders in order to get rid of them, that things were destined to fall apart.

And whereas we have had violent riots, whereas we did, you know, have January 6th, and we have had

the riots of 2020 and all of this kind of political upheaval and uprest, formalized political violence, where you decide who's going to rule by killing people is when you really start to think things are falling apart.

So thank God we're not there yet.

Yes, we're not there.

Yes, I'm going to leave it at that.

We're not there yet.

So

I'd love to have you back on because a lot of people are talking about, you know, the glory days of the Roman.

I don't...

I'm not sure I know what the glory days of the Roman Empire really were,

but maybe we can explore that next time you're on.

We'll discuss it next time.

There's a good case to be made for Augustus, but we'll leave that for

another day.

All right.

Thanks a lot.

Appreciate it, man.

You bet.

Spencer Clavin,

this kid is amazing.

I say kid.

This guy is amazing.

The son of Andrew Clavin.

And his book, How to Save the West, is tremendous.

I was reading it, didn't even look at the author.

I was just reading it.

And, you know, Spencer Clavin and I didn't even put two and two together.

Get about halfway through, and I bring it into the producers, and I'm like, we got to get this Spencer Clavin on.

And they all looked at me and went,

this Spencer Clavin, you know who that is.

And I'm like,

yeah,

of course I do.

Who doesn't?

Yeah.

See, you think I'm a dummy?

No, no, no, no.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.