Fire, Trump's New, and The Temple to Artemis

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our Saturday edition where we do something a little bit different in the middle segment.
And today, Victor is gonna be looking at the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. So stay with us for that.
And we'll start with some new stories, a little bit on the continuation of the coverage of the fires in LA, and then we'll turn to lots of news about Trump. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
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So, Victor, we are looking at the fires, of course, and we've talked a lot about them, but it seems to me that they're starting to talk about those who have started these fires. And in fact, we have one story of one fire, and it wasn't the Palisades fire, but one fire that they found a homeless man with a propane torch, and the citizens were attempting to stop him.
And I was wondering your thoughts. It was a citizen citizens arrest where they put zip ties on him and he was riding a bicycle with a portable small propane torch allegedly lighting christmas trees but the point is a couple of things about the cause there are no storms in Los Angeles right now.
That's the problem.

So the question of causation pops up.

If you have about 200,000 homeless people,

and they are in the greater Los Angeles area,

and the temperatures are in the low to mid-30s at night,

and they light fires, that's not... When I would drive back from Pepperdine University on Malibu Canyon Road, on occasion I would see people on the side of the road who had fires.
So that is beyond dispute. And then when you have the mayor in 2018 stating when there was a fire and somebody alleged that a homeless, she said, don't even go there.
My point is that homelessness is lumped in with DEI and New Green Deal wokeness. It's one of those taboo subjects.
So when you have a mayor who's already ruled out the possibility and passed fires, and you find somebody today who was lighting fires, and the powers that be will not discuss causation or agents, you know that then you're bumping against this ideological firewall. and already the pushback has happened.
People are suggesting if you think that Mayor Bass was culpable by being told that the winds were reaching 100 mile an hour velocities and she went to Ghana, there was no reason to go to Ghana except for the D.I.E. performance art showboating, then they've already called the people who say that racist.
So you're bumping up to it. What's different this time? You're blasting through the D-I-E wall.
So now people are saying, I don't care what you said. Maybe that was a discussion you could have had prior to Los Angeles.
But when you lose 12,000 homes and 200,000 people are homeless and you've lost $100 billion and you've lost five to 10 lives, we don't care about niceties anymore according to what you call niceties. So we are going to discuss the fact that the assistant mayor was removed because he phoned in a death threat.
He should have never been appointed. We're going to talk about you going off to Ghana.
And then when people pressed you at the airport, not even replying to a journalist. And by the way, a journalist was an Australian, I think, which suggests that only a foreigner would have enough journalistic integrity to ask her a blunt question.
And when you have a $700,000 grandee as head of the utilities, and you're firing them about every year for either incompetence or bribery or both, and she can't explain why these 3 million gallon tanks are empty.

And then you have a governor who comes down and says,

the tyrants, this is a local matter.

It's not my problem.

Then you have a complete collapse of the authorities.

And people now, what's new about this fire,

as opposed to the campfire, the Paradise Fire, the Aspen Fire, is that people are fed up. They can't get insurance because of the regulatory climate and the inability to fight fires and the water situation.
So now they're saying, I have nothing to lose. I'm going to speak my mind and be intellectually honest.
And so this is the, not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning of the whole woke critique movement. And I think people are going to be very angry about this.
Yes, I agree with that. Well, let's turn then now to Trump, because there's so much news out on Trump.
It's interesting the way he seems to be able to dominate the news. So many things going on.
So let's start. I have three things and let's just start with the first.
He is being sentenced today in the case that Bragg brought against him, and I was wondering your reflections on this. It went out as exactly what Mershon said.
He should have thrown the case out. There was presidential immunity established by the Supreme Court, but it went ahead in the Supreme Court 5-4, whereas Justice Roberts and Barrett joined the liberal majority, of course.
So the sentencing went on. It was all performance art for one reason, so people on the left could say he's now a convicted felon, which he is.
And there's going to be a sort of Damocles over his head, so that he has to think, well, when I come out of the presidency at 82, they might sentence me.

But he gave a speech.

And Morshan asked for it.

He said, this is not about – this is only about the presidency that saves you basically from going to jail, not the occupant, you, the president.

You had gone to jail. And you want to say – and then Trump got angry and replied that this was a witch hunt.
And it is. And so Mershon has no defense on a number of counts.
Why didn't he recuse himself? A, he was a donor to the Biden campaign. But more importantly, his wife was making a very lucrative career servicing Democratic clients in a campaign cycle on the wink, nod idea that I am a stalwart whose dad is trying to put Donald Trump in jail, number one.
Number two, these are all coordinated. So Alvin Bragg was being helped by Mr.
Coangelo, and who basically wrote the writ over the objections of the federal prosecutors, which this was a federal case. So what did he do? He went right back to Merrick Garland's DOJ, occupied the number three spot, and then he reemerged, excuse me, he reemerged to Alvin Bragg.
He came from Latita James.

So he went from Latita James, helped her draft the crazy real estate charges collateral, went to Mr. Merrick Garland's DOJ, occupied the third spot, quit, went back over to help Alvin Bragg.
Meanwhile, Fannie Willis is over here in the south at Georgia, and she's got Nathan Wade talking with the Biden counsel, who that day is apparently part of the DOJ, the DOJ people, and the White House are talking about, why haven't you indicted Trump? And they appoint that day, DOJ does, Jack Smith. It's all coordinated.
The judge never addressed the idea that he should have accused himself. He never addressed the idea that Alvin Bragg took a federal offense, supposed campaign, federal campaign, and he created a new state law.
And he is acting as if he's a federal prosecutor when the federal prosecutors who are no fan of Trump's did not want to go ahead with the case. There is nothing wrong legally with asking someone that you've had a tryst with that you think will in the future blackmail you.
And by the way, she owes Donald Trump $500,000 for a court order to pay his legal expenses, which she lost that case of defamation. So she broke the non-disclosure contract.
And then Mr. Bragg said, well, it didn't have anything to do with protecting his family.
It had everything to do for protecting his campaign. And therefore, it was a campaign finance expense.
And therefore, he didn't put it on his record.

And therefore, everywhere the record appeared was a separate felony count. Only it was really only one count.
And therefore, we're going to charge him with a campaign finance. Everybody said, you're not a federal prosecutor.
You don't duplicate. And then there was this idea about you don't need a unanimous verdict to convict him, etc., etc.
They did all sorts of things. And I think that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back.
Nobody cares. And they're going to be very, there's going to be about 250 federal judges that are appointed by Trump.
And a lot of these people who think that it's cute and neat that you can call Donald Trump a felon, they're going to be surprised that if there is a special prosecutor that goes back and seeks coordination between Alvin Bragg and Latita James and Jack Smith and Eugene Carroll's suit, which was paid by Reid Hoffman, a big Biden donor, and Fannie Willis. They're going to look at racketeering charges or conspiracy.
Yes, well, they should, I think. Yeah, and they should.
And the judges, all of the judges except the Jack Smith judge, I mean, Judge Kaplan, he egregiously said that Donald Trump was de facto guilty of rape, even though the jury made the distinction it was sexual assault. Me doing this to you in today's climate can be sexual assault.
You can say that was an unwarranted. He touched me.
I was at Fresno once and we had a distinguished professor and he hugged a student and gave her a C at the end of the semester. I was on the board that investigated him.
They asked him one question, did you touch her? Not did you hug her? She says you touched her, you invaded her space. Yes, I did.
Okay, no more sabbaticalss for you you're out of the classroom for a year and so that's where we are and and the point i'm making is if that is sexual assault and joe biden is guilty i mean we see him on camera blowing in women's ears having women recoil tara reed coming out of nowhere and saying that he sexually assaulted her, turkey gobbling a little child's neck, everything that under their definition of sexual assault would qualify. And so Judge Kaplan called that rape, and of course it wasn't.
And then when George Stephanopoulos, I guess, got a cue from the judge, so he thought he would do an interview in which he just said, Donald Trump's a rapist, rapist, rapist, rapist. Donald Trump sued.
They settled, ABC, $16 million. And so that was Judge Kaplan.
This is Judge Mershon. I went through him.
And then we had Judge McAfee in Georgia. He was the one that had both Latita James and Nathan Wade lying, clearly lying under oath about, well, we didn't spend anything.
We have no records because it's a cultural black thing that we don't have to have records because we spend cash because of the history of race. He listened to all that.
They didn't remove them from the case. He didn't care.
And the appellate court overturned him. And then, of course, the worst of all was Judge Ingoron and the Latina James.
He was the guy that when the camera came and looked at him, he was smarting off to the camera. He was editorializing.
He ruled completely against Trump on every state. And finally, we get to the...
And he was even consulting people outside the courtroom, which you're not supposed to do, about the true value. So essentially, Mar-a-Lago was put up as capital for $17 million.
It's probably worth $700 million. And that was supposedly undervaluing a real estate case to get a loan from the Deutsche Bank, which was paid off on time with interest to the profit of the Deutsche Bank and to the delight of the Deutsche Bank, which when asked, they said they would lend him again.
And they convicted him on that and charged him initially $450 million. Well, let's take the next thing.
Trump has floated this week that he would like to meet with Vladimir Putin to solve this war that's devastating the Ukraine. Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin's in a bad spot. So is Ukraine.
I misspoke on it earlier. I said that I thought Ukraine had lost 10 million of its 40 million population.
It's down to about 14 million. It's a shrunken country of 36 million.
It's lost probably six to 800,000 dead, wounded or missing. Trump was right when he said it was underreported, the level of deaths and wounded in that war.
It's getting close to 2 million total. So they all want out of it.
The question is, what can Putin afford to stay in power? So he's going to have to go back and tell the Russian people and enforce his will. I mean, he has the power.
I mean, he'll do anything. He's a ruthless.
That's one thing that Joe Biden said that was not smart diplomatically, but it was true that he's a ruthless killer. But nevertheless, he's got to explain why there's a million dead Russians and wounded.
And what did he get out of it? So he wants to meet, and we know what he wants to do.

He wants to say, Crimea was already mine.

Donbass was already mine.

I'm not going back to my embarkation point on February 24th of 2022.

And then he'll say, Ukraine can't be in NATO.

And there's a basis for a negotiation. And he wants Trump to bail him out.
And so does Ukraine. The people who are most adamant for this war are grandee leftists in Europe and the United States who feel that Vladimir Putin's Russia is an existential enemy.
Of course, they didn't when Hillary Clinton pushed the jacuzzi button in Geneva in 2008. And that was all the rage.
I saw it at Stanford. Oh, this is so wonderful.
George W. Bush punished.
He just punished mercilessly Russia, Russia. And that's getting into that Cold War atmosphere.
We're not slaves to the Cold War. We're going to have reset.
It's going to be human rights. And then when he went in, of course, into Donbass and Crimea under Obama, then all of a sudden, oh my God, he's awful.
And he looked at our magnanimity and he interpreted his weakness to be exploited, not reciprocated in kind.

So we hate him.

And now Donald Trump and he are friends.

And he's trying to just throw the 2006.

We hate him, hate him, hate him, hate him, hate him.

And there we were.

But they were the ones that started reset. They are the ones when they're in power that Putin goes into Donbass, into Crimea, into Kiev.

And that's the question. So they want to punish Putin for a variety of reasons other than what is in the best interest of Ukraine right now.
Maybe geo-strategically we must defeat Putin. I get that.
But in the best interest of Ukraine, if they keep going, and the Europeans have pretty much had it with their ability to supply Ukraine, Germany especially, but if they keep going, Ukraine's going to get down to about 20 million people. They're leaving in droves.
Yeah. Well, the last thing that is on my list of Trump things this week is Trump's released what his first executive orders are going to be, the first hundred, and they're going to all concern border security and rebuilding the U.S.
energy sector. Well, he's got a big problem because Joe Biden knows that,

so he has put off limits invoking an archaic 1950s law that he can put, what, 600,000 acres off for all energy developed. Think of the mentality of that.
It's almost like, well, when I came in, I was a Green New Deal guy. And I stopped leasing.
I canceled Keystone. I stopped LGD import.
And then I had a midterm, and gas doubled, tripling up to $6. So what did I do? Oh, yes, I know what I did.
I drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I went over to Saudi Arabia and Iran, and I asked them to pimp more.
They wouldn't do it. So then I started telling the frackers, I didn't mean it.
You guys are wonderful. Keep fracking, please.
So they got up to Trump levels of production. And then he thinks, well, I don't have to run for re-election.
So now oil was good when I needed the midterms, and now it's bad. And by the way, where is Kamala Harris? Because during the campaign, she was asked specifically, they often showed a tape or they quoted her tape where she said, oh, fracking, I'm against it.
Don't worry. But she wanted Pennsylvania.
So they asked her when she was in Pennsylvania, are you still for a fracking ban? Oh, yeah. No.
Oh, no. I never said that.
I'm for fracking. Okay, you're for fracking.
Now we need to know what you're going to do with your boss says he's going to put all this land off for fracking. What do you think? Now she's against

fracking again. As I said that, I wrote an article and said that the only time that she would adhere

to a moderate position was for 100 days. And if she lost, she would revert to form, which she has

already. But if she won, she would do too, because she would just say, sorry, that was what I needed to win.
Now I'm president. But he's going to try to revoke that.
Lawyers are split whether he can. The other thing that's very weird about this is we're always told that Europhil's fellow Europeans are the left.
They love the socialist EU. So you want to help the left.
What would you do? Well, you would try to help their energy needs. So after the Nordstrom pipeline, which I think with a wink and a nod, the Europeans and maybe the Americans knew the Ukrainians blew up.
So you don't want them to have natural gas. There is very little going into Ukraine now.
So you'd want to help Ukraine and you would want to help the EU and you would want to help your left-wing socialist things. But what did Biden do? The first thing he did when he came into office, he canceled the East Med pipeline.
That was the ability of Israel through the agency of Cyprus and Greece to send millions of cubic feet of natural gas into Italy and therefore into Central Europe. He canceled it.
And then the only way you're going to get Europe out of its four times higher electricity rates than ours, is either burn natural gas or build nuclear plants.

And they're not going to build, other than France, they're not.

So he put on hold a lot of the liquefied natural gas terminals in the south.

So he basically said to Europe, sorry, I'm not going to help you.

And so Donald Trump is going to come in,

and he's going to immediately tell the Europeans,

I know you don't like me. It's just like the NATO thing.
I yelled and screamed at you. Half of you now pay 2%.
You're in better shape to resist Russian threats, but you hate me for helping you. I'm going to do the same thing.
I'm going to build liquefied natural gas export terminals. You should build them.
We'll supply you with raw product for your factories. You can go ahead and hate me and say that I'm desecrating the environment, but privately you can say you like me.
And that's what they're doing, by the way, all over Europe now. You can see that in the Notre Dame Cathedral.
They're basically saying, we hate Trump, we hate Trump, we hate Trump. Oh my God, thank God he's here.
Because now we have somebody that will protect us from Putin. And he's going to deal with the Chinese.
He's going to help NATO. He's going to open up the economies.
He's going to help conservatives in Europe have a chance to get back in power.

So it's a very strange thing. Yeah, it's the bizarre European bipolarism or something to that effect.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Stay with us and we'll be back.
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Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He has a website, victorhansen.com.
Please come join us there. It's called The Blade of Perseus, and he has a new element on that website.
He is doing short videos on Friday morning, and there is a current one placed there for ultra subscribers, so subscribers to the website. So, Victor, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, another of one of the seven wonders of the age of one.
Remember what we're doing? We've done two already. The two in the Greek domain, the Colossus of Rhodes, that Hellenistic huge statue that somewhere guided travelers into the harbor, the city of Rhodes on Rhodes.
And then we did the Chris Elfantine, that fancy word for gold and ivory statue, gigantic statue of Zeus that was in the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Olympia, in which you can still see the stylobate, some of the columns. Then we moved to two others in Turkey.
One was the Mausoleum for King Mausolus

of Caria. We talked about the grave.
The other one is a huge temple of Artemis. You know,

everybody knows her from mythology, is the Roman goddess Diana of the hunt,

sort of the masculine side of womanhood. Well, the temple was built by the proverbial rich Croesus.
And then in 550 BC, it was the first marble ever built in, a temple built in Ionia in marble. Maybe the first temple in the world built of marble.
But why is it in the Seven Wonders of the World?

Remember, the Seven Wonders of the World was after or during the expansion of the Greek-speaking peoples into Egypt, into Asia Minor, and all the way into Afghanistan. Hellenism, or the language, literature, art, science of Greece, spread.
and it opened up a new world of both foreign wonders of the world,

such as the Hanging Gardens at Babylon, which we'll talk about,

or the Pyramids at Giza, but also what Greeks were doing throughout the world.

And this was a period of what we call in archaeology gigantism,

that things were big. Colossus of Rhodes, the siege works of Demetrius, the besieger were larger, the catapults of anything ever seen.
Colossus of Rhodes was one of the largest statues, freestanding statues. So it was the idea in Alexander's age, bigger is better.
And so they decided to rebuild this temple that had burned down. And how does the temple burn down? It's out of stone.
People forget the interior roof is the joist that goes after. You have the stone base of the roof, and then you have to span the width of the temple with huge timber.
And that timber then has joist for the pediments. So the pediment is of stone, but all down the side of the roof you have rafters and joist.
And they are very flammable. And when they burn, then the roof collapses and the pediments can fall inward as well, and the temple as well.
It has oil and olive oil votives, and it's got drapery, and the interior can... If it gets hot enough, it'll actually melt the marble, which is used for lime.
One of the reasons we don't have Greek temples is in the Byzantine and more modern Greek period, villagers would go in and get a block, make a huge fire, put it in there, and then drain off the lime for whitewash on their stucco. So in any case, this was probably one of the three largest.
It's what we call a 400-foot temple.

Think about that.

A football field is 300 feet. So it's one and one-third football.
It's about 390 feet. And it was huge.
And there's only two other temples that are comparable in size. It's even bigger than the Olympian Zeus, the great temple in Rome, the Roman temple that sits near St.
Togma Square in Athens today.

There's a temple, and I've been there, of Apollo at Didyma near Miletus.

It's out in the middle of nowhere.

At least it was.

It's huge.

And then there's the Samaean, the Heraeum we call it in Samos, the Temple to Hera.

It's huge.

But this was one of the largest, if not the largest, temple in the world.

It was built during the Hellenistic period from about 330 onward. And it existed somewhere.
It's mentioned in literature, Christian literature, from about 200 A.D. to 400 A.
400 AD as being in decay.

And then the Goths came in

and Northern Raiders came in

and destroyed it,

whether they carried off the statuary,

I don't know,

but there's not much left.

So when you go there today,

there's the stylo bay,

which was the foundation.

And I was there in 1973 and 1974, and they had reconstructed one column they found. The British had gone in there earlier and found the site of the famous Temple of Artemis.
So if you go to Ephesus today, it's a huge site. It's almost in some ways like Herculaneum in Italy, the volcanic site.
And you can see the largest temple in the Greek world. And it was famous.
And we have a lot of contemporary Hellenistic inscriptions. Temples that are outside of Greece tending to be in the islands or on the coast of Asia Minor, even a little bit inward or ionic.
And the ionic order, it's a little different. It succeeds the Doric.
It doesn't have that Doric severity where there is a scroll for the capital rather than just an abacus like that. And in addition, the columns are not just put on the stylobate.
They have a base. And at Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, there's at least 34, 35 columns that were inscribed with beautiful, I shouldn't say inscribed, but they were carved with scenes from mythology on the basis of the columns.
And in addition to that, when the columns go up and they taper up, they don't have the points around them, but they have what we call not flutes, but fillets. In other words, they go around and then they're blunted.
So they have a flat space and they look a lot more elegant and they give off shadows better. And then there's a couple of other things.
It's what we call a dipteral column. Instead of just having an outside exterior colonnade, it has two.
Think of that. Two colonnades outside the temple that go around both sides and almost 400 feet in one direction.

So you have like 123 columns. It was just astounding.
It was built on a marsh. And so they kind of, it lasted for so long.
So then rather than like the earlier temple, just to try to excavate and push, make a firm foundation to have it sink when there would be flooding, or more importantly, when they were drawing water out from wells, and then it started to sink down. They kind of did what the Venetians did.
They made a spongy. They put in sheepskin and other materials, kind of like a garbage,

and they had it go like this. I'm exaggerating it like this, but it was flexible, and it probably would have survived.
It would have been like the Temple of Hephaestus in the Agora. It's intact today, but it was in the wrong place, and it was looted.
But you can see two great things at Ephesus, the Temple of Hadrian's Library and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. So it's worth seeing.
So those are the last two that are on the Turkish mainland, and then we only have three more, and two of those are in Egypt. So next time we'll be talking about the lighthouse of Pharaoh pharaohs in the harbor of Alexandria.
I've been to all of these places, and this one's a little strange, but we'll talk about it. And then the famous pyramids of the pharaohs at Giza, and then the hanging gardens of Babylon.
When I went there, somebody gave me a block from the U.S. Army.
I was embedded. And he rebuilt it, and it was a little, just like, you know, a baked brick or something.
And it had Saddam's image on it. As Saddam Hussein, every single one, he rebuilt the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
But anyway, it was a seventh wonder of the world. And it was mostly because of its gigantism.
It was so big. Big is better.
And I was thinking, what do we do in this country like the Colossus of Rose or the Mausoleum or the Temple of Artemis? We have the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, as I said, 600 feet high.
I've never walked inside it. I've talked to people who have.
We had the Statue of Liberty, I think with the base. If you count the base, it's 300 feet.
Don't they try for the tallest building, too, like the needle in Seattle, I believe it is? Yeah, we're trying to get a—I think a New York building is projected at maybe, or Chicago, is it?

1,600 feet. And we're trying to rival our Asian competitors on that, or the ones that are in the Middle East and Dubai or something.
But there is something about monumentalism that makes people want, we don't build these Lincoln Memorials or statuary anymore. One of the things that's weird, we had on our Mr.
Shubin, the classical art supporter in architecture. If he were to be appointed as the National Endowment for the Arts, he would encourage that.
It's very funny. I was noticing that after that conversation, Donald Trump has pledged that new federal buildings will reflect a classical heritage brecco roman heritage and the same thing about art and the left went crazy they said oh it's pseudo romantic schlock classic this is what trump does in his hotels and they don't understand he's he's waging a counter-revolution against something.
And the something is them. They went through all of the grants that the NEA and the NEH does.
And they systematically excluded traditional art, traditional architecture, and gave us modern art, Foucauldian art, whatever you want to call it, and these ugly buildings. And that was a revolution on their part.
So I don't know if they're mad that he's waging a revolution that's – they're calling him a malice. I've seen that.
Trump the malice. Trump the malice.
And I don't know. I'm thinking, well, you mean you were the malice and now he's doing what you did? He's a counterrevolution? Or he's doing what you did but he might win? Is that why you're mad or is it both? Yeah.
But this is funny because Trumpism or MAGA, whatever you call it, it's a 360-degree, 24-7 revolution. Nothing is too trivial.
Nothing is too important. So art, yes, he's going to change the way we fund art.
Jay Bachari had no DEI grants for health stuff. Architecture, maybe a building will look like those beautiful buildings built in Washington, Treasury Department, Supreme Court, who knows.
But it's going to encompass all of that. And he's inviting everybody, according to the station, to participate.
And I think the people, the voters of Los Angeles are going to participate and say no mas. And as far as the art goes, he with the better sense of beauty should win out, don't you think? Maybe.
But, you know, I have a question on that with the temples in Greece in general. Is it true, this is what I understand in terms of art appreciation or at least a classical view of art appreciation, that the Doric temples were simple and considered more elegant.
The Ionic were a little bit more decorative, and the Corinthian were, of course, the most decorative. And did the Romans prefer Corinthian temples, or did they? They did.
They did for some practical reasons. The problem with the Ionic order is when you have a scroll and you're going down the length of the building, and usually remember that it was a perfect proportion that the number of columns on the length would double the width.
So it would be either 12 by 7 or 13 by 6. It was one added to one of the dimensions, but it was usually double.
But when you turn the corner, what do you do? So that you have the corner ion. They tried to do a scroll here and then make it scroll like that on a corner piece.
It doesn't work because you lose the image. And so you don't want to go back to just the abacus, which had never caused that problem.
Because an abacus is an abacus is an abacus, whether it's on a corner or on the length. So they came up with a Corinthian leaf.
These are acanthus leaves that are sprouting, and you can put them anywhere on a corner and straight. That was one idea.
It gave a lot of opportunity for sculptors to make different types of foliage on the side. They had a base as well as the Ionic order did.
They had fluted columns. Corinthian, the first Corinthian capital, and somebody's going to correct me if I'm wrong.
We have a lot of classicists that listen, so I'm doing this by memory, but it's at the Temple of Basai in Arcadia, and that was built about 440, and actually they found a Corinthian column, but it wasn't a structural column. It was on like a little monument.
Somebody made it because it was a new idea. But as a general rule, Doric is from the Peloponnese South, although the Parthenon is a Doric temple.
And art historians or architectural students call it Doric severity. And the idea that the Doric culture is associated with Sparta and toughness and lack of money.
They don't have money. They have these crazy iron spits and severity.
And that temple then will not be ornate in the same way.

At least the columns won't.

And they often don't have a freeze course anometope like the Parthenon does. It's an ornate Doric temple.
So you look at it, it looks severe and majestic and not kind of... But the look of the ionic columns ratio between height and width is much thinner so a doric column is stubby and it has intasis where it kind of bulges so when you look down they don't look wavering the optical illusion is not there they look straight with the steidel bay.
They kind of have a high point in the middle so it looks straight when you look at it. But it's curved slightly.
It's actually curved. The ionic columns are much more elegant in the sense they're taller.
And the ionic temples for a variety of reasons were larger. Part of it was because they were in Asia Minor more, Ionia.

We get the name Ionic Order from Ionia.

And those early temples along the coast at Samos, as I said, at Ephesus,

the first temple of Ephesus was a very early Ionic temple, as I remember.

But they had more money.

Ionia is so much richer than mainland Greece as far as farmland. Did those temples, like the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, also have antacis, that slight bending to make it look natural to the environment? I don't think the point is that because the stylobates did, but in the case of the ionic order, you don't have to bulge out the columns.
It's just a term that goes like this. You have a hump, whether it's a stylobate or the column goes like this.
But you have to do that because the Doric columns are kind of short and stubby, but the long, elegant ones, that doesn't create an optical problem like that. But what was unusual about the Parthenon, it had an exterior freeze course and an interior one.
And it had metopes. The triglyphs represent the beams going across in stone.
And then between the triglyphs, there is a metope, a square. And they put a sculpture in those squares.
And then below that, and the architrave goes around, that's just a blank space. They with a freeze course so what was unusual about the parthenon you had this majestic sculpture in the east and the west at the pediment the triangle so you had two of those the fight over who poseidon and athena and then the Amazons.

And then you had a continuous freeze course about 500 feet all around.

And then above that you had metapes.

Very few temples ever did that.

Yeah.

It was too costly.

Yeah, sounds very expensive.

So, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about the news,

a little bit about the terrorist attack in New Orleans. Stay with us and we'll be back.
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This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. You can find Victor at X.
His handle is at VD Hanson. And at Facebook, Hanson's Morning Cup.
So please come join him there if that's your social media outlet. Victor, so Shamsu Din Jabbar is the terrorist in New Orleans, and the FBI has found that he had two IEDs that he tried to set off, and the unusual thing about them was that they had a chemical explosive called RDX, which is many times that of TNT, and something that's used commonly in the Middle East for IDFs.
And I was wondering if you thought that and the trip to Cairo had anything to do with each other, and that maybe he has some contacts and inspiration. It reminds me of Jon Stewart.
I'm not a big fan, but I kind of enjoy him once in a while. He was getting in an argument with somebody about Wuhan.
Was it Colbert? And then finally he got exasperated. He says, my God, are you nutty? There is the first patient is in Wuhan.
There is a lab in Wuhan. It is run by the PLA in Wuhan.
It is a level four.

They were doing gain of function. COVID is a gain of function.
The people who got it are gain of function. What in the blank is wrong with you? So in this case, wannabe real estate guy turns up killing 16 people by running over them and then has sophisticated explosive devices with a material that's not found in the United States, that's common in the Middle East, and he has a sophisticated detonator, and he's trying to get to his car to blow them up.
And it's pre-planned, and it follows one going on in Germany. And then people say, oh, he was in Cairo, too, not too long before.
Why would he go to Cairo? So the point is, there's more there. The problem with our investigatory agents is I don't mind that they keep an open mind.
They have to keep an open mind. I shouldn't even say I don't mind.
I like that. But they don't have an open mind.
They say they have an open mind, but they all start with the premise that if I suggest that I'm not saying, investigating an Islamic terrorist motive, I'm going to get this big wave of criticism. So I'm looking at Major Hassan at Fort Hood.
He yelled Allah Akbar. Hmm.
What do I do? Do I say he yelled Allah Akbar and murdered 13 and it was Islamic inspired? And I'm going to get all this criticism and I might be attacked or am I going to say it was workplace violence? And then some general is going to pat me on the head and say, you're absolutely right. And I don't understand it.

It's all over the Western world.

But that's the problem, that there's no upside in saying that we're going to investigate the idea that he acted with the aid and help of Islamic forces in the Middle East versus he just had a bad marriage, he was upset, he kind of stumbled on, he might have been just on the Internet, I want this type of experience. That, for them, is more politically correct.
It's another instance of the pernicious role of ideology. It warps empiricism.
Yeah, it sure does. And that's the problem.
Yeah. Well, what about the Honduras president who, it's a woman, she threatened that she would not let the U.S.
use their military bases in Honduras if they engaged in mass deportation plans. And I was wondering what your thoughts on that.
Yeah, well, I do not think in general it's a good policy for a very tiny country to threaten the United States.

And in particular, I wouldn't do it with Donald Trump as president. It's not like he's going to be Joe Biden.
He's not going to know what it is or Barack Obama. Please do it some more.
I enjoy it. So there's about a half.
There's 300,000 to 500,000 Hondurans here. And they send back, I don't know what it is, 30 or 40 billion dollars.
It's one third of all their foreign exchange. So let me get this straight.
And we have a U.S. base there.
And the U.S. base is to make sure that communism is not emboldened.

The Chinese or the Iranians helping local guerrilla forces to overthrow countries favorable to the United States. So we invested hundreds of millions of dollars and built this huge base.
And it's one of the few in Latin America that has ability for a C5, these huge 10,000-foot runways. And basically, we went in and built it at the request of the prior government for a stabilizing role.
And it adds enormous amounts of money into the local economy for food and gas and equipment. And we help infrastructure.
and when there is a flood or a fire or an earthquake, the first thing Hondurans do is ask for air support at this huge American base. Okay, that's a preface to it all.
So Donald Trump said, you have been sending your criminals, true, and people who are not audited, and we now have half a million, and they're starting to turn up among the Venezuela and the Guatemalan and all these gangs. So when we come, we're going to send them back.
And she is saying, if you do, what? We're going to get rid of your base. You don't pay for it.
Okay, that's fine with me. Please, please, promises, promises.
We're not going to send anymore. Promises, promises.
So it's kind of like Canada. The point is that Donald Trump, here was the way the world is.
It was like this, asymmetrical. Here's the United States, and everybody says it's 1946 after World War II, and you've got the biggest navy and all the money, and you're the only big major power now.
There's no China. There's no Russia.
Europe's flattened. Britain's broke.
So we can take stuff from you, and it's your duty to build us all back up. So we did.
And now it's 80 years later, and they're saying, you're in the United States. No, no, no.
We're $36 trillion broke and we're suffering a woke revolution and we have no borders and we have 50 million people who are not born in the United States and that's 16% of the population and we're tired of it. We have 100,000 in one year, 80,000, 70,000 killed by fentanyl by one neighbor.
The other neighbor is just sending people across the border that they don't like. So we're done, been there, done that.
From now on, the United States will be treated like any other country. If you're Panama, and we have a treaty, and it says you give us rite of passage first, and you give us a discount rate, because we built the whole thing that's enriching you, and you put China presence at the entry and exit, and you do not give us priority of usage, or you charge us the same, then we're going to look, but we're going to address that.
If you're Denmark, and you're a colonial power, and you've got this huge country that's closer to North New York than it is to Copenhagen, and it's part of North America. And in World War II, you were run over in what? Three days by the Nazis? And we had to go in to take your former colony and put bases there and develop it and stop the U-boat threat.
And it was very critical. And then what did we do after World War II? When you run over in four days, we took the country and handed it back, and you, being a postmodern, very impressive socialist country, are basically an imperialistic colonial power, and you have no power.
So then you get mad at Donald Trump, yeah, yeah, yeah. And what do you do? Oh, we're going to pay a billion dollars for you.

Oh, we're going to give you more autonomy. Oh, we're going to put Greenland on our coat of arms.
So they're not going to – it's the same thing. And as I said earlier, they don't understand Donald Trump.
Guatemala doesn't – anybody. What he does is he trolls to correct the disequilibrium, an asymmetrical situation that's been festering for years.

And he has an edge to it.

So in the case of Guatemala, okay.

Yankee go home.

Yankee go home.

And you know what?

When you say Yankee go home, they're going to do just what they did in the Philippines. Yankee go home andkee go home And you know what When you say Yankee go home They're going to do Just what they did in the Philippines Yankee go home and take me with you And so he tells Golf of Mexico You know what I like golf How dare you We're going to We have to Well let me see 1700 miles Coastline America 1700 miles Mexico Mexico, age of renaming things.

Left says everything has to change.

We have to change this name and topple statues.

So if you've had your 200, 300, 400 years, it'll be the Gulf of America for our turn.

It's the same length of the coastline.

How do you like that?

And what is the subtext?

Let's not get in an argument because this argument could escalate to questions of border security, our safety valve of dumping people in your country, 63 billion of remittances, we've been ripping you off. And same thing with Guatemala, same thing.
What's different is the national mood. The national mood is like, I don't know what it is.
I can't figure it out because it just amazes me with people I know on the left. And they're like, we had our DEI.
We had our Green New Deal. We had our revolution.
We had our Maoist thing. We had the post-George Floyd mania.
And we destroyed the country. And Joe Biden, we lied.
He really is senile. Please get him out.
Just, you can't take it anymore. I'm Elliot in true romance.
I can't take it anymore. I'm in a fetal position.
That's what the Democratic Party is. It's really funny because David Axelrod, he was the one that told everybody that Biden was senile because he got orders from his boss.

And so he was on television the other day talking about Jimmy Carter.

And he was like, Carter was a decent person.

Carter was a really, I know,

You're not supposed to speak ill of the dead. but he could be a really angry guy, Jimmy Carter, mean-spirited.
But I'll pass on that. But Axelrod was saying that basically Trump doesn't have his character and everything.
And I'm thinking, oh, so you worked for Chicago, was it Times or Tribune? And the Chicago newspapers, when you decided to become a political operative, you were Barack Obama's campaign manager for Senate, and there was no way in the world he was going to win the Democratic primary. I think his name was Claire Hall.
He was a very well-funded mainstream Democrat, I think Catholic. And all of a sudden, you leak that he hit his wife.
There was a sealed divorce record. And somehow reporters leaked that from a media franchise with connections to Axelrod.
So then all of a sudden, this nobody named Barack Obama who had run for Congress and completely got wiped out, a non-entity with no credibility among independents or conservatives, no credibility about the black community, only among white liberal elites, which wasn't enough to get him the nomination. So he gets the nomination.
And lightning strikes twice. Jack Ryan's running on the Republican side.
He's way ahead of him. And there had been a little spat in his divorce.
It was sealed to protect the children. And supposedly, in the whole case, supposedly his wife kicked him in the leg and he kicked his wife back and that was spousal.
And then she dropped it all and said, please, nothing happened, no matter. And then with a Jack Ryan, when they got a divorce, his wife said, he made me go to a porn club in Paris, something like that.
I remember that. And they leaked it.
And Obama says, hey, this is weird. It happened twice.
We destroyed the other candidate with false charges and leaking sealed divorce rights. And who was the architect of that? The man who just said that Donald Trump should emulate other people that are of higher moral standing.
That was funny when he was at the funeral of Jimmy Carter. Yeah, I was wondering about that.
There's so much talk. You know what just can I say something before you go into that? They're at a funeral, and then you listen to all these newscasts, opinion journalists, etc.
Well, they were not looking happy with each other. Harris and Jill Biden and stuff.
I'm thinking, well, they're at a funeral. What are they supposed to be? Yeah, and Bill Clinton started that when his transportation, I'm assuming this is my memory, Transportation Secretary Ron Braun got killed in a tragic accident in Serbia in an airplane crash.
And he was at the funeral, and he was doing the same thing. And he was laughing, and then somebody poked him and said the cameras were looking.
He was going, what? It was like that. It was, anyway, so they go there, and he's sitting next to Barack Obama.
Michelle suddenly mysteriously can't come, and she didn't want to come because she had to see the Trumps. So she split because she'd said all these things about he was a racist.
And nobody knew what Trump would say to her. And she's Michelle, who's de-wis Michelle, the deified goddess of America.
So she didn't want to come. So then Barack didn't want her to come because he wanted to talk.
You know how Barack Obama is. He thinks he can charm a snake or anything.
So he's there with Trump trying to flatter Trump so that Trump will give him little deals or, you know, I have a library and, you know, you brought up the archive stuff. And I might have a little.
In other words, you have a lot of power like I did to punish people and use the law. so please don't do it to me because I like you now.
So they were having a good time. And then I really liked George W.
Bush, but he was like the great stone face, that Hawthorne short story. And his wife looked very elegant, youthful, Laura Trump, but he was just – I don't know why he did that.
I know that Trump had attacked Jeb. He was on an occasion, oh, a few years ago that I was at.
And somebody said, why do you not want to endorse Trump? He attacked my brother Jeb. It's true.
I understand that. But I thought he would be a little bit warmer.
And then – He gave Obama a little nudge, like friendly one. Yeah.
And then there was... Hillary was like...
She thinks she's still part of their resistance. I'm part of their resistance.
It was illegitimate. And Bill just...
Why am I sitting over here at the end of the—I am more important. I feel your pain.

I should be over there next to Trump.

And then there was Mike Pence, who he and Trump had that big fight over January 6th,

and his wife, when he got near his wife, she wouldn't—she turned away.

It's hard.

Donald Trump is a scrapper. He likes that stuff.
But Melania Trump hasn't hurt any, no one. And there she was.
And she was very kind. And Mrs.
Pence just turned her cold shoulder to her. I didn't see that.
Yeah, that's not nice. These are all psychodramas that the average person doesn't care about.
But what's funny is I quoted that column about, we were talking about the Colossus of Rhodes and that Shakespearean quote out of Julius. He stroked above us like a colossus.
It was like the Notre Dame on steroids. He comes here and here's all of these two-term distinguished presidents, George W.
Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. and they were always sort of lorded over George H.W.
Bush and now Joe Biden. Joe Biden was not a two-term president.
I think somebody on Fox News pointed this out, one of my favorite commentators. He's on Trace Gallagher a lot.
He's a really good guy. And he said, two-term president, two-term president, two-term president.
Oh, my God. Trump, two-term president.
He's now in the Bush-Clinton-Obama club. And he's even at the front of the line now.
And he had an interruption like Glover-Cleaven with the greatest uh comeback in presidential history and he was just it's something about him i mean he just dominates we had that governor he had all the governors the republicans there and he was like a masterful master of ceremonies he was sober he was just he was. And they were all like wonderful.

They were competing to see how they could help his MAGA agenda.

I got an idea.

I got an idea.

And it was like, yes, go to it.

Go to it.

Go to it.

I'm your spiritual forefather.

And so it's an exciting time.

I know that the left is licking its wounds.

It went to their proverbial bear cave in our inside.

And they're just licking their wounds. They're going to come out.
And they already have. Elizabeth Warren is so angry.
She's trying to stop Pete Hexeth. I thought that was funny.
She said, this guy has a Jerusalem cloth on his stomach, and this is a theocrat, and he's got the four, you know, the little cross for Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, and then you're at this funeral, and they have the program for Jimmy Carter, and it's got the Jerusalem cross, and everybody on the internet said, well, what is it, Senator Warren? Was Jimmy Carter a white supremacist? So these people deserve criticism. Yeah.
Well, you were speaking of Melania, and recently in this week she apparently signed with Amazon for a $40 million contract. Now, this is a change from the first administration of Trump.
It was a woman, Wintour, she kind of bragged that she kept her off the pages of Vogue. And with all due respect, I'm not one to trash people's looks, but if you look at Michelle Obama, and you look at the former model, Melania Trump, and your standards are model-esque, I'm not saying that Michelle's not attractive, but what I'm saying is, if that's your view, that you want this certain glamorous look for your glamorous magazine, there is no more glamorous first lady in history than Melania Trump.
And to put Michelle again and again there and not her at all was, and I hope that they ask her to be on there and she says no. But so Jeff Bezos is he's you know he's thinking the whole european world's after amazon because it's a monopoly and it's destroyed you know it's destroyed small commerce it really has i i'm the worst one i have an amazon prime account i have it delivered out here to farm every day if i need i get everything from a circuit circuit breaker to a BB gun pellet to you name it, a saw, a crescent wrench, you name it.
I should just go to town, but I don't. Sometimes I do.
But my point is, he's vulnerable. Everybody doesn't like that.
And he was one of the co-conspirators with Apple and Google to destroy Parler. Or is it Parley? But any case, right after January 6th, they destroyed the wonderful Rebecca Mercer, her whole company.
They destroyed it. It was a conspiracy.
And he was the primary culprit. So he knows that he's culpable.
So now he's thinking, hmm, my pollsters tell me this crazy guy's going to win. And I keep saying this, and I know what I tried to do to him.
And if I was him and I knew what I did to me and not why I was powerful, I would go after me and he'll go after me. So let me think.
What can I do? Gets his advisor. Hey, no endorsement, Washington Post.
Cancel that. Don't endorse Harris.
Okay. And they said, well, what if the people don't like it? Well, you're losing $76 million.
Fire them. What do they care? Why do you want to subsidize them insulting you? They come in.
Hey, there's an op-ed making fun of you bending the knee to trump fire it don't don't run it well the person might quit good get rid of them and then the piece their resistance is can i go to more lago please please i'm the rich second richest man in the world elon gets to go but can too? Well, have you treated Melania well? Well, we'll give her a $40 million deal. So, and then we have Mark Zuckerberg, you know, spends $419 million to destroy Donald Trump, according to Molly Ball and that conspiracy cabal, liberal writer for the Time magazine at the time.
And now what is he doing?

He cuts a little video.

We're going to fire the fact checkers.

We're going to be true.

We're going to be honest, subtext.

Oh, man, I had the FBI and me conspired to press truth.

They hurt Donald Trump.

We canceled all of his supporters. We could.
And now we're under assault for antitrust legislation. And the Europeans are after me.
And that guy is my only hope. So he cuts the video.
I'm so sorry. I like that.
And we're going to hire a conservative. We're going to put conservatives on our board.
It's all down the line. And Google's director, I don't know.
We had the Applehead CO2, all of them. They're all going to Mar-a-Lago and they're all trying to say we didn't mean it because we know that you might do what we do to you.
Is that what we think? As you're talking, you make me think that the foundations of our politics and of our business world seem to be being the foundations that we didn't see, the face of the business world, the face of politics. Human nature.
But now we're seeing them all crumble with this Trump and this social media and Elon Musk. We're seeing the background.
Like a colossus he does stride above us. It's amazing.
I just feel like they're being secluded. I think they say to themselves, they get in a room, I'm just being metaphorical, they get in a room and they say, okay, you impeached him twice? Yes, I did.
Did you try him as a private citizen? Yes, I did. These are the figurative people who did this.
So you impeach him twice. Yes.
And you tried him as a private citizen. Yes.
And how about you? Well, we did 20 months and $40 million in the Mueller investigation. Well, how about you? What did you do? Well, I got the FBI to work on Twitter and Facebook and to smear him,

and I rounded up 51 intelligence authorities to lie to the American people on the eve of the debate to say that the laptop was cooked up by Donald J. Trump.
And what did you do? What was your part? Well, I organized 16 attorney generals in the states to get him off the ballot. and what did you do? Well, I was the one that helped Fannie Willis coordinate with the legal counsel and Jack Smith and Latita James and E.
Jean Carroll and Alvin Bragg. And what did you do? Well, I was the one that ramped up the Hitler vocabulary and fascia, and-da-da-da-da-da-da, and we got two assassination attempts out of that because we lowered the bar of the acceptable hate.
And then this deity says, and it didn't work, did it? And he said, no, everything we did to destroy this guy didn't work. No, it just made him bigger.
What you did, you, you, you, and he goes around the table and says, you made him bigger and stronger. He's a Nietzschean figure.
Anything that didn't kill him made him stronger. So what do we do? Get to Mar-a-Lago.
And then they come like this. Go to Mar-a-Lago, young son.
Trump says what he always says. I am Julius Caesar.
Clementia Caisaras on my coins, clemency of Caesar. So I will forgive you once and twice, but not three times.
And then he says to his aides, that SOB attacked me and tried to destroy me, and he will do it again, and I'll forgive him. And he'll do it again.
At that time, I won't.

And so that's what he's dealing with. And I really admire people who stayed with him,

like Susan Wiles and Stephen Chung, Stephen Miller,

Jason Miller, Devin Nunes.

Man, those were dark days.

I remember that.

They sure were.

God, I wrote a couple of articles on January 6th defending him. I walked into Hoover and someone said, you've got a big problem, Victor.
You're up on charges at the Faculty Senate. They're going to censor you.
You've got to sit down and we've got to go over every word you said on Fox News. I said, I didn't say anything wrong.
But that was a minor trivial thing. If you said, Stanford Faculty Senate tried to censor me, somebody would say promises, promises, right? But can you imagine what all those people endured? They were personae, not gratiae.
And yet they came back and they were loyal to him. I'm happy to see that DeSantis and even Nikki Haley are not, you know.
One of the tragic casualties was Mike Pompeo. I understand that for a moment he flirted with running for president, and unwisely he editorialized January 6th and also the Mar-a-Lago raid.
But if you juxtapose that, I understand that he was a little bit more, what's the word, interventionist, neoconish than the MAGA base. But if you put all that aside and look at his loyalty to Trump when they crafted foreign policy vis-a-vis North Korea, China, Russia, He was a pretty good Secretary of State.
And now he and the people around him are not going to play a role. That said, I really admire and like Marco Rubio, too.
Yeah, so we have great hopes for our Secretary of State. He has a big bench.
He's not going to be all these crazy cabinet appointments. There's not going to be Pete Buttigiegs and Mayorkas and people like that.
They think there are, but they're not. Hopefully they'll get business done.
The big difference is somebody like Christy Noem likes the United States, and she loves it, and she wants to protect it. She's not like Mayorkas and wants to destroy what he thinks is a historical aberration.
That's another thing on the left that's been exposed, which is good. Well, Victor, we're at the end of our podcast today.
Thank you for all your words of wisdom today and the discussion of the Temple of Artists. Thank everybody for listening.
These videos are kind of an experiment. Old Skeletor doesn't like to be seen.
You're not doing too bad, Skeletor. Thanks to our audience as well for listening.
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