Trump's Poll Lead and Kamala's Press Strategy

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is our weekend episode where we look at something a little cultural on our middle segment, but we'll start with some news and since Kamala and Waltz have a recent conversation together out, we'll start with that and Israel.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can come join him at his website, victorhanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and please come join us there.

So Victor, Kamala, I know that we promised our Friday crowd that we would start with Israel, but Kamala and Tim Waltz came out with a conversation and Kamala just had a speech where she went over her economic policy and seems to to think that it wouldn't be troublesome to manipulate the housing market or to try to stop corporations from what she said was price gouging on foodstuffs in particular.

And anybody who looks at that industry knows that the profit margin is not all that great.

But I was wondering your thoughts on the current talks between Waltz and Kamala and Kamala's speech.

Well, you know, she says she's going going to have one press conference in August.

And you've got to remember that

even the obsequious toadies in the media are angry, are getting angry because they're narcissists and they want to showcase their fealty to her.

In other words,

Rachel Maddow or the CNN anchors want her to come on so they can throw softballs up and then say they had a hard-hitting interview.

But she's not giving them a chance.

So now they're whining.

So in response to that whining and the fact that a lot of these polls,

as I'm speaking today

on the 16th of August, a lot of these polls come out, but they reflect polling a little earlier.

And there's some polls out today that Trump is ahead in the national poll.

I think two, and he's ahead in Pennsylvania.

So she knows that, and she has internal polls, and so now the pressure is getting so she thinks she's going to go out and be with the public.

But that does not mean, does not mean she's going to give an interview because that's a taboo, taboo topic.

She can't do it.

So she picked two venues and one of them was pathetic.

I'm going to have a little conversation with my running mate Tim Waltz and we're going to, I'm going to play the hip cool vibe black woman and he's going to play the white man can't jump idiot, fool, court gesture.

and that's what he did well I'm a white man and I don't have any I don't use sauce so it's kind of a white man taco and the funny thing is as everybody's pointed out he used to brag about all of this sophisticated hot sauce and he had it in his own menu and he entered it in a contest it's all staged and phony and he was supposed to be

every man's dad.

He's grandpa.

He's a nice little white guy.

And she's the sophisticated, hip, smart.

Kind of like some of the commercials that you see today, where it's kind of reverse racism.

In the 30s and 40s, when there was this white racist thing, stereotyping of black, there was step-and-fetch it.

Well, today, if you look at movie titles, you know, and you look at the white people in commercials, they're kind of step-and-fetch it.

And this is what he's playing.

It is.

It was pathetic.

It's not going to win her one vote.

And then she went out and

talked before a sympathetic audience with her proposals.

And

it doesn't make any sense because she says there's price gouging.

She called it gauging, I think.

Yeah.

Price gauging.

And that caused the inflation.

But they inherited 1.23 inflation.

And they went up to nine.

And they said it was due to corporate gouging.

So if that were true,

Let me get this straight.

So the timeline.

So when Trump is president for four years, the corporations say, we don't want to make too much money.

We don't like to be vultures.

So we're not going to gouge anybody.

But now that Joe Biden is there, we're going to start gouging.

And it has nothing to do with they printed $7 trillion at a time when Larry Summers and other liberal economists said, don't do it because there's pent-up demand, A, B, there's supply shortages, and now you're flooding everybody with cash.

And classical economics say, When people have too many dollars and there's too few goods, you have inflation.

But that doesn't seem to register.

We're going to go after the corporate vultures.

And as people pointed out, she wears jewelry like a $400 necklace around her neck.

I don't know.

It's like a big balloon and somebody's got to pop it.

Or maybe it'll just deflate because it's all fake.

It's as fake as Joe Biden was.

And then she wants to give everybody $25,000 for a down payment.

So it's kind of

a market, and you think, well, there's going to be 400,000 first-generation buyers, and they're going to all have 25,000, so maybe we should just take that tract house and jack it up by 25,000.

Exactly.

And it's not going to create any new homes.

It's again the same idea.

You're creating artificial

demand, and you have no supply.

And she just starts giving all this money to people, and it's never, I'm going to get, and I'm not saying Donald Trump is innocent of that.

You know tips on no tips but when you do something like that you you're to be a responsible leader you have to say where the money's coming well so where is the 25,000 coming higher taxes on greedy corporations you tell me but she doesn't no she's got that sing-song-y little voice and she just panders I'm gonna give you this I'm gonna give you that

it doesn't work and

I think that if Donald Trump, as we've said, ad nauseum, I know that people can say, Victor, just cool that we've heard it before.

I know.

Do not attack people who endorse you, and he hasn't yet, lately, and he should be on, and then second, ecumenicalism.

He should be on the stage, put his arm around Governor Kemp.

Governor, I was tough on you.

You don't like me sometimes, but now we're on the same page.

Same thing with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley's out there.

She's got a pretty good strategy.

She's going to be the most loyal of all of his prior opponents and then probably get a big cabinet post if he wins.

Yeah.

And then be a front-runner.

Ron DeSantis should do the same thing.

Get power to her.

Yes.

Get all three of them out there.

Have a solid front and then don't call people names.

If you think she's dumb and stupid, then show us how she is.

Just don't assert it.

He does that, and he sticks to the issues.

And what are the issues?

There's five or six issues.

There's the disaster in foreign policy and these wars that Biden has has caused.

It's the abandonment of Israel and the foreign policy, but most importantly, it's the non-existent border, the hyperinflation, the soaring crime, and this woke DEI crazy stuff.

And then you have a potpourri of peripheral issues, abortion, transgenderism, you name it.

But just stick to those and quote her.

Get every commercial and quote what she said.

You can't say Mary Quisbeth, how dare you?

You know, that's kind of, just do it, and he will win.

Just go back, and as I keep saying, Ed Nausim, go back and look at Lee Otwater's commercials in 1988, and they will win.

And they won big.

Wasn't that George H.W.

Bush closed a 17-point lead by Michael Dekakis right now in mid-August?

It was still.

He destroyed him, and he turned 17 points into almost an eight-point win landslide.

So

he made a 25-point difference.

And Michael de Kakis, as I said, was a much nicer person than she is.

And yet they destroyed him.

I'm not saying I like people to be destroyed, but that's the nature of politics.

I like the guy I saw on one commentator said, well, she keeps saying she's going to do things on day one, but

she's on day 1,000.

If you can do it on day one, why not start now, right?

Why don't you?

Yeah, I mean, Trump, I listened to a rally driving, and he made two good points.

He said she had three and a half years to do it.

So she's saying that I never did anything when I was vice president, second most powerful people, person.

And you know what?

I have another six months before I'm going to do anything because whether I win or lose the election, there's still five and a half months of my tenure, but I'm going to do nothing.

And

it's, it's, I don't know if they can't break the iron dome.

That's what I call it.

The media DNC Harris Iron Dome Protective.

And it's, it's just, she's so warm.

She's just so dynamic.

It's just, and before it was like, Joe Biden is at the top of his game.

He's

fit as a fiddle.

And sources tell us that there really isn't an alternative for doubters because everybody has a consensus that Kamala Harris is out of her league and she's just not capable.

That's what we heard.

Then the Orwellian narrative changed.

That's ancient history.

And another thing is Trump can't talk about Biden.

Who cares?

Can't say I beat him or Biden was seen.

Nobody cares.

It's irrelevant.

It's gone.

Biden's not running the country.

Nobody's running the country.

Hamra Harris is not running the country.

Biden's not running the country.

Jill's not running the country.

The Obamas are doing it with their surrogates.

And that's, so why talk about Biden?

All you want to talk about Biden is say that she not only was part of the Biden-Harris catastrophe, but

she was the last person in the room on Afghanistan.

She bragged about it.

Remember she said,

are you consulting with the president?

Yes.

And Joe Biden used to say that the last person in the room when he was fighting, yes, I was the last person in the room.

You were the last person in the room on Afghanistan.

And then just cut to all of that inventory.

And then that

Taliban

celebration day before yesterday.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that.

I couldn't believe it.

It was a copy of an American parade.

They had the heavy vehicles, and then they had the soldiers with all of our weapons.

And then they had our helicopters flying in three-dimensional fashion.

And it was like all this American weapons, you know, M4s, rhinos, Humvees,

brand new ram trucks.

What was the point?

The store is is open or something?

Because they're going to be selling a lot of it.

Yeah, the store is open and you think that we're backward and we've got all this stuff running.

We don't need your badges.

We don't need your parts.

Parts?

We don't need your parts.

They run.

And it was very embarrassing.

It was the anniversary, it was the real point of

the debacle.

So the Taliban was saying,

You thought you were going to coincide with your 9-11 and your invasion of Afghanistan, and we're going to have a little celebratory of our own commemorating

the two,

three-year anniversary of your defeat by us and your humiliation.

That's what it was about.

Remember that that's an issue that

should be exploited because up until

the mid-August debacle of 2021, Biden had never pulled below 50%.

After that, he'd never pulled above 50%.

That was what broke the back of Americans to watch that.

That was people falling off the airplane and Marines being blown up

and then people like Millie and Austin lying about it.

Yeah, those pictures were as bad as Saigon in 1975.

That was just disaster.

Yeah, it was.

That was...

I mean,

that was the end of Jerry Ford when you saw that stuff.

He was,

you know, they were pushing brand new aircraft off the carriers into the ocean so they could have room for helicopters.

And then there were these Vietnamese people hanging on the helicopters to get out.

And there was no planning.

And

it's the end of everything, you know.

And that was the end of everything in Afghanistan, the 20-year misadventure.

That's how it ended.

And

we left in humiliation, but we had our proud pride flag flying from the embassy, and the gender studies program was institutional-wise.

And they had a nice shot of a George Floyd angelic poster on the streets of Kabul.

So we were implanting our culture.

Notice how the left never says that we're imperialistic or culturally insensitive or neocolonialist when we try to push down transgenderism and gayness and DI down the throats of a traditional Islamic society.

No, no, that's not imperialism.

It is imperialism.

The only difference is the British had the wherewithal to force people to stop souti and cannibalism and all that stuff.

You don't.

You get the worst of both worlds.

You're weak and then you whine.

So we have another I don't know.

It's well speaking of Afghanistan, I just saw a

clip about Tim Waltz, who was not only introduced as the wrong rank at the end, but they also said, and went with his platoon to Afghanistan, and he did nothing to correct that.

So, just another question.

He said

he was on the dais looking at this performance or this celebration, and he had Afghanistan.

Then he found out at one time he said it was in Iraq, and the context was he was a soldier.

He didn't quite say that, but that was the context.

But he couldn't get the country.

He just makes up stuff.

So he said he took a weapon to war.

He said he was a command sergeant major.

Then it was a sergeant major, then it was a master sergeant.

And then he said

he don't dare question my behavior and my patriotism.

Oh, yeah, you served in the National Guard.

That's very commendable, but you shouldn't lie about it.

And then he took early retirement with rumors that he might have to go to Iraq after he bragged that if I have to go to Iraq, I'm going to deploy.

No matter what.

You know what it is?

I hate to say it.

He's an avuncular character.

That's what we're told.

Good old Uncle Tim.

But he let, he's a mean person, and he's a liar, and he can't tell the truth.

He can't tell the truth what he did in Minnesota.

He had this imam who was Hitlerian and used to praise Hitler, that he gave money to radical Islamic groups that were associated with ISIS, like $2 million in taxpayers' money in Minnesota.

He lied about his drunk driving.

96

comes out, I'm doing this podcast.

Hey, Victor, somebody said you went 96 miles an hour in a 45 or 55 mile an hour zone.

Wow.

Yeah, I did, but you know what happened?

I had tendinitis and I couldn't hear.

So I didn't know they had their siren, so I didn't hear it.

Well, were you drinking?

No, I wasn't drinking.

But we heard there was a report that they gave you an alcohol test and they put you, they made you go to the get tested.

I don't remember that.

No, the test came back that you were almost 0.12.

Was I?

That's what he's telling us.

He's a complete liar.

And after a while, it's going to be like a smelly albatross.

You want to cut it from your neck because he keeps being a liability and he's left-wing and he brings nothing to the ticket and he's a gift.

Again,

I have this hunch.

I know people are going to say, you're too optimistic.

Get real, Victor, be empirical.

Come on, you're not an analytical.

If Donald Trump

is ecumenical and gets the Republican Party people on the stage with him, if

he gets a Lee Otwater commercials, and Fox had a little show tonight on comparative commercials, they're pretty good.

They're starting to be Lee Otwater-like.

If he stops, you're stupid.

I don't even know what she's just cut that out.

And don't mention the word Joe Biden.

Do not mention the 2020 election.

You just say, these are the five things that she's here.

Here's her quotes.

This is what I did.

This is what they did for three and a half years.

This is what I'm going to do and this is what she's going to do.

And the result is you got $10,000 poor over that

three and a half year period and you made about $10,000 more under mine and she's going to do it again.

As soon as this is over, it's open border, it's abortion on demand in terms of trying to be be a federal advocate.

And they will go after states

that have,

you know, you can't have an abortion in the last trimester or whatever they do.

They're going to go after them.

They're going to go after assault weapons, assault weapons, semi-automatic, they call assault weapons.

They're going to do all of that, but not until the election's over.

And I don't mean whether she wins or not.

If she loses, she's going to be really spiteful.

That's November.

It's November 5th.

That's November, December, January.

It's another 90 days with

senile Joe and her, and they're going to do a lot of damage.

Yeah.

And they hate Israel.

They just despise Israel.

They do.

They do.

Oh, go ahead.

Well, here we are in 2024, and Iran is threatening existential destruction of Israel.

Hezbollah

has made the

100,000-person evacuation of northern Israel.

Hamas

is being encouraged by the United States to get traction against the Israelis.

The Houthis are still active now and then, and all we have to do is tell Iran, don't do it.

Do not do it.

If you retaliate at Israel and you try to unleash Hezbollah, you're not going to have any oil revenue.

We're going to embargo your oil.

We're going to embargo your coastline.

We don't want to have a war.

We really want to to avoid it, but you keep doing it, and you're going to lose your grid.

You're going to lose your nuclear facility.

Just tell them that.

They'll stop.

If you're credible,

you don't want a war, but this is leading to a war.

Yeah, doesn't Israel have to be

preemptive?

If you look at the history of the Six-Day War versus Yom Kippur, they're better off being preemptive than waiting on the Sun.

It's not even preemptive because everybody knew the Six-Day

War in 1967.

They were preparing to attack them.

Nasser was bragging that he was going to, he had shut down the Red Sea entrances to the port of Israel and the Suez, and everybody knew what he was going to do.

He said he was going to do it, and they just said, we're not going to sit here like a sitting duck.

So they took out his air force.

And then the same thing about they're just sitting here waiting for the Iranian attack.

They should just say, we're not going to live like this with the sword of Damocles over our head and take care of it.

And you know, why are they hesitating?

Because they're afraid.

They don't know what's going to happen.

They think, well, last time we sent 320

missiles and drones and none of them got through in the United States and maybe we have to go over Arab countries to reach Israel and they'll probably shoot some down.

But if we do it again, they're not just going to send three rockets, they're going to go crazy.

And maybe they'll take out our nuclear facilities.

We don't have the bomb yet.

So maybe they're waiting until they get the...

I don't know what they're doing, but they obviously are planning this, and they're hoping that they're looking at this election, they're trying to see what our attitude is going to be.

And

we'll see.

Do you find it odd that they say they're having ceasefire talks, but Hamas is not there?

So that sounds more like we're going to tell Israel what to do, talks.

Well,

the problem is they've got this Sinoar guy, and he's a mass murderer.

He's a cutthroat.

I think he's the guy that was in jail in the Israelis, and he had a brain tumor and he was going to die.

And the Israelis said, no, we can't let him die.

And they took his tumbler out and saved his life.

And he pays that magnanimity with his existential hatred.

But he's not presentable.

He's a thug.

He's a mass murderer.

He's a terrorist.

He's a killer.

Before October 7th, he was a killer.

So is the United States going to be in the same room of the architect of October 7th?

And he can't go anywhere because he knows the moment he sets foot out of his little burrow, he's like a squirrel that gets out of his hole.

And

the whole forest is full of owls and eagles, right?

They're just waiting for him to come out, to pick him off.

So for the rest of his life, he can't get out of that tunnel.

So how can he represent Hamas in anywhere?

It's a joke.

It's just a...

Yeah, it sure is.

Well, Victor, why don't we go ahead and take a break and come back?

And the topic for the cultural piece today is Edward Gibbons, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor on X.

His handle is at V D Hansen and on Facebook with

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So come join him there.

Well, Victor Edward Gibbons wrote the definitive volume of the fall of the Roman Empire, and he seems to find Christianity at one of the key issues that

drew Romans away from their civic duties and civic virtue and that's one thing and then the second thing that maybe you can answer is why did he takes the Roman Empire all the way up to 1453 so interesting

well you have to remember the word Byzantine was a very late word I mean Byzantium was just the word of the Greek city before Constantine re-founded the Roman city on top of it.

But the Greeks didn't very rarely call themselves, the Byzantines very rarely called themselves Byzantine.

They were called Romaioi.

They thought they were Romans.

They were Eastern Romans, and then they became Orthodox Christian Romans after the schism, but they were Romans.

And I think it came into common usage, the word Byzantine about

the 18th century, or or maybe the early 19th in Germany.

So

the point I'm making is that Gibbon, writing before this idea, didn't really see the Eastern Empire as a disconnect.

He saw it as a deterioration, and he was trying to explain the inexplicable, that you had this 70 million person, 1 million square mile empire.

And he picks an artificial date, really, 98, and it's the reign of Nerva.

So he's saying that the Augustan family is over with,

that

there's no more Augustus, there's no more Tiberius, there's no more Claudius, there's no more Caligula, there's no more Nero, and then

the residuals, Otho, Galba, Nerva, excuse me,

Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian.

So then he starts with the good emperors, and he says this is the most tranquil period, calm, best period to be alive, that hundred years, and that is the period of Nerva,

Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pius, and Marcus Aurelius.

That takes you up into

roughly, well, just for rough periods, 100 to 200, but it's not exact.

And

then he goes on to the fall of Rome.

And he's trying to explain how everything was working in the Republic, and he didn't write about the Republic.

But from 776, the foundational date of Rome, all the way

to the end of the Republic, that had been written about by other Europeans, more so than the Empire, for a variety of reasons.

One of them being that the sources for the Republic and the early Principate and Empire are much more known.

They're Livy,

Sallust,

Tacitus.

But when you get into the the Empire, you know, the Herodian and Diocat, they're very hard, they're very obscure.

And

the authors of what we call the Historia Augustae, they're anonymous authors, and it's very hard to work with the original sources.

And he was going to do something different, Gibbon.

I'm going to write a history of roughly

1,500 years.

He went beyond the fall of Constantinople in 1453 for about 100 years.

But he was using sources that nobody really knew about.

They had never been translated.

And some of that Greek is a little bit difficult, Romaic Greek.

And then he was reading Byzantine sources and Italian sources

in the case of Constantinople.

But what was so unique about it was he didn't use secondary sources.

And he was writing in English.

And most of the early history of Rome was was written by two great French Enlightenment thinkers, Monesquieu and Voltaire.

And they had essays on the Roman

history,

essays on Roman history and questions of moral decline, all that.

But he wrote in English, and he didn't really use them as much as the...

He just went right to the primary sources.

And he had certain themes.

And it is true he was suspicious of Christianity, but if you read very carefully, he felt that the affluence, he was the one that really was influenced by earlier Tacitus' comments, Suetonius' comments,

Petronius especially, that leisure, Luxus, Catullus, Luxus, luxury decadence had ruined civic virtue.

And then the other thing that he felt that when you spread the empire through all these different non-italic peoples, it was incumbent to have a unity, but when you had fragmentation over a large geographical area, you didn't just just get the breakup of the periphery, you got the breakup of the core.

That was, I think, as far as Christianity, very quickly,

he made two or three arguments that are, they're not accepted today, but his argument was that

the Romans,

their earlier pagan, you know, Jupiter and Juno and the Romanization of the Greek gods,

gave loyalty to the state.

You were going to be rewarded in the underworld to the degree you were virtuous, and that was defined by serving Rome.

And that inevitably was inextricable.

And it was just completely inseparable from military service.

And the early Christian church, he felt, had done two bad things.

One, they had created pacifism.

Turn the other cheek, Sermon on the Mount, and

fewer people were in the army because of that.

Christians, they wouldn't join.

They wouldn't defend their culture.

And second, and this was a famous argument picked up by the great classical scholar of the 1980s, Geoffrey Desenqua.

He wrote a brilliant book called The Origins of the Peloponnesian War, and then he wrote not a brilliant book, but a brilliantly researched book, the class struggle in the ancient world.

And it's not really the class struggle in the ancient world because there's very little about classical Greece.

It's the class struggle in the Roman world as identified by Greek sources mostly.

But his theory was, and he took it from Gibbon, and Gibbon had said that the church then took lands out of production and capital and very bright people, and they were attracted.

They would have been in commerce, they would have been in the military, but they were attracted in an unworldly sense.

So they became bishops, they became...

cardinals, and they lost talent.

And then you had millions of acres

that were being used by the church.

And what were they doing?

They were supporting an unproductive class, monks,

clerics that weren't building anything.

They were just feeding themselves.

And then they were inculcating the people with a doctrine that was not deterrent.

Modern people have looked at the sources again and they said, well, you know, if you actually look at some of the rituals of the pagans and the construction of Greek temples, and Roman temples, it was pretty expensive.

And

it served the same, to the same degree as Christianity, I understand.

And then Gibbon would say, well, yeah, but the temples and everything inculcated Roman values.

Well, this did too, in a way.

It was just, and the other key thing to do was

it didn't really hurt the Western Empire,

Christianity, as long as they didn't go excessively anti-pagan.

And what do I mean by that?

For the first two, probably up to around 400,

Christians did not join the military.

But pagans were not outlawed.

But after Constantine, he redefined Christianity as

you're going to have to have a heaven on earth to go to heaven up there, a celestial heaven, and therefore you have to fight to protect Christianity.

And therefore, Christians were encouraged.

But this is the key.

Pagans were finally outlawed from joining the Roman army, and so you lost a lot of manpower if you weren't Christian.

As long as it was inclusive, and you said anybody can join the army, but Christians, you know, we suggest you don't.

But when you said Christians do, but nobody else can,

then it was problematic.

The other big problem they had is no one can really explain you had this huge empire,

and

the capital was in the West in Rome and Latin was the official western language of the entire empire and then in the fifth century it falls apart and then guess what?

The Eastern Empire, the Eastern part, not only survives for 1100 years, it actually for 300 years absorbs part of the Western Empire in Italy and North Africa.

So people say, well,

what do they do differently?

How come Constantinople survived and Rome didn't?

How come you have Romans or Greek-speaking Christian Romans all the way to the Persian Gulf, but not in the Western Mediterranean?

And people have really tried to argue in a lot of different ways.

They've said, well, they had

the Bosphorus and the Hellespont protected the Eastern Empire from Europe.

in a much more sophisticated way.

And if you look at the tribes across in the Balkans, they were not as fierce or as numerous or as aggressive as the Germanic tribes, the Osgoths, the Viscoths, the Huns, except for the Vandals.

And then people have also argued that

the West was very naive, that a lot of these Germanic tribes had converted by 300, 350 into what they called Arianism, which was a form of Christianity.

And that form said that Jesus was just a human and he was not divine, that God had created him out of, I don't know what, clay or something.

He was artificially created by God, but he wasn't divine and he did die.

He came here as a servant, fulfilled his purpose, and then he, and that was a heresy.

But the point I'm making is that a lot of the

Roman establishment said, well, yes, they're barbarians, and they were always on the wrong side of the Danube and the Rhine, and they're deadly, and they're vicious, but now they're Christians.

And they thought that they would have the ability to welcome them in and then to convert them to Orthodox Christianity or what would become Catholic Christianity.

And the Eastern Empire didn't have that type of problem with that type of barbarian invasion.

They dealt mostly with Eastern people.

And they were, you know, Zoroastrians or Iranians or somebody, but they were

They were not as fierce, they were not as warlike, and they were not

what they would call heretical Christians.

They were clearly enemies and they were antithetical and the Byzantines were on their guard the entire time.

The other thing is the Byzantines,

there were not very many schisms in the Eastern Church after Constantine.

In other words, there were not all of these

liberians and Manichaeans and all the schisms that Augustine kind of stamped out and

All that fractionalism wasn't as true

in the East.

And then finally, you can make the argument that most of technology and science in the Roman Empire was originated in the Greek language.

So if you look at the centers of learning before the split between the empire, They were not in Paris, they were not in Carthage, they were not in Rome, they were in Antioch, they were in Tyre, they were in Alexandria, they were in Constantinople.

And so that part of the empire was always the place where everything from Greek fire to sophisticated architecture,

it wasn't an accident that Haggius Sophia was built by Justinian.

And he had, I don't think it would have been able to be built in the West.

It would have been part of a Roman project, but the architects and the engineers would have been knowledgeable of Greek.

Greek medicine, Greek engineering, Greek technology.

So when the empire broke apart, it was the Romanized Greek areas that were able to survive longer.

And continue it.

Do you think it was Gibbon's tacit way of saying the Catholic Church, since he's in a era of Protestant Reformation and he's in England where there are not very many Catholics,

a tacit way of saying that this Western Empire was worse and then by association Catholicism.

Because he actually converted when he was a student to Catholicism.

Oh, really?

Yes.

He flirted, and his dad said, if you do that, you're coming home from Oxford.

And I think he did.

And then he went back to Protestantism.

But then he was

an agnostic, a pagan.

I mean, when he published that, it came out in six volumes in 1776.

And he was in his early, late 40s, early 50s.

He died at 56.

You know, he was corpulent, and he never married, and he he had that disease where your scrotum doesn't descend, and they did all these.

All those guys were, it was very tragic, you know, when you look at the 18th century mind and the,

they were the most brilliant men in the world.

David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon.

I mean, there never anybody like them.

And they just were reading Latin and Greek at seven and eight.

And they spent their whole time reading, but they, in that period, there was no such thing, what we call holistic health.

So they just drank wine and they drank oily processed or dried meat, you know, and there was no refrigeration.

They didn't have very many vegetables.

They had terrible diets.

They didn't know about exercise.

And it was kind of fashionable to have a little gut, you know, and be stocky and healthy and ruddy.

And

they all had tragic lives and medicine was barbaric.

And they just, but they were brilliant.

They knew more, ten times more than we do.

They had no TV, they had no iPhone, they just read all the time.

And

Gibbon wrote in French as well.

Wow.

But he was damned when those books came out,

the six volumes, as a pagan.

And they hated him.

He made a lot of money on it.

I think he died with several thousand pounds of worth.

But the point I'm making is that

he was an Enlightenment thinker.

And the reason I'm saying that he didn't favor, he hated the Byzantines.

So the idea that today you use the word Byzantine in a pejorative form, oh, that's a Byzantine organization.

That was from Gibbon.

He was the one that maligned the Byzantines.

When I wrote The End of Everything, and I'd written about them earlier, when you go back and you actually look at some of Byzantine historians or

manuals like Maurice's Strategic Manual, they're very sophisticated.

And when you study what Justinian was doing, I mean, think about it.

He revised all of Roman law into the Justinian Code.

He had this idea of recapturing the, and he almost did it when he unleashed Belisaris.

They got all the way to what is almost Morocco, and they took Sicily and most of Italy and all the Balkans.

And then you look at the, today, you look at Haggia Sophia, you know, 530s, 540s.

They were very sophisticated people.

And they get a bad rap.

And that was Gibbon because he hated the medieval world and he said this was an extension in the Enlightenment.

In other words, he was trying to explain the inexplicable in his age.

And the inexplicable to finish was, okay, the Western Roman Latin-speaking empire collapsed.

By 476, it was officially over.

So yes, this Greek

portion of the empire survived for 1,100 years because of Greek science and Hellenism and favorable geography and different types of enemies that weren't as fierce and more unity in Christianity.

Okay.

However,

in extremists, as they were starting to decline in the 1300, 1400s, and then after they,

what was happening in the West?

It was reborn during the Renaissance, and they needed help from sophisticated gunpowder.

And so what he was saying was that the West,

the Renaissance, which would lead to the Enlightenment, was the real contribution of the classical world.

And the Byzantines were ossified, static, went old, and then had to be helped in their need by the Phoenix-like recreation of modern Europe after the end of Western Europe.

And what he was saying was, if you read carefully, as I interpreted it,

I haven't read parts of it in about five or six years, but what he's trying to say is it was good almost that the West

collapsed and then it got these various European peoples and it started afresh and

it started to rediscover classical learning but on different premises whereas the custodians in an 1100 year tradition got soft and rigid and corrupt and they needed an infusion to save them.

So if they were going to be saved in 1453 it was going to come from the Genovese and the Venetians and the Florentines and the Habsburgs and all of that.

Yeah.

Anyway, everybody should read it.

It's the most beautifully written English there is.

He's got this little, you know, when he says,

he was in the guards for a while, the military, militia, and he said, understanding Roman military, it was of some benefit to have served in the militia, the king's militia.

He talks like that all the time.

He's really pithy, kind of sarcastic.

It sounds wonderful.

It's so beautifully written.

Everybody wrote English in a way that will never be written again.

That's why it's so sad, you know, when you look at Britain today and you see all of these problems and the decline.

But my gosh, there was nothing, there'll never be anything like Britain from 1700 to 1900, that 200-year period.

Just World War II killed it off.

World War I killed it off.

But my gosh, the amount of talent and brilliance and order and science, all these societies, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Astronomy, all that, it's just amazing.

All the inventions they did, and then they created us.

You know, that's what's so frustrating to see all of these ignorant people trash the West and say that

European colonial.

They have no idea that we would be nothing without that tradition.

That we were created by Britain and that Enlightenment tradition of the British and to a lesser extent, you know, the French.

and the Scottish.

So, I don't know, it's very frustrating to see these universities go into an anti-enlightenment dark age and then blame people who created anything that was wonderful about the states.

Well, Victor, with that, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about UCLA itself and a district court ruling.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So, Victor, the

district court in California, I think his name is Judge Mark Scarzi,

ruled that UCLA has to allow, has to be proactive in being sure that Jewish students can make it to their classes, can move about the campus freely.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that ruling.

Yeah, he didn't say you have to, I'm not, he said, I'm not going to tell you how to do it.

And I'm not going to tell you to infringe free speech.

I'm just telling whatever do,

and other courts will adjudicate whether it's anti-First Amendment or not, or pro-First Amendment.

That's not my interest.

But I'm telling you, you're going to treat everybody the same.

So you're not going to have areas where Jews are attacked.

You're not going to have people demanding a passport, so to speak.

Say, you can come in here if you're not Zionist, et cetera, et cetera.

They call them, I guess, I saw these posters at Stanley, Zios.

You know, the kids call them.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

You mean the Jewish students who are,

Yeah, I mean, they say to them, they would say, are you a Zio?

Meaning, are you a good Jew or a bad Jew?

There was a really good lecture last night at Stanford that I listened about anti-Semitism, and that campus is rife with it, and they just issued a thousand-page report.

And it's endemic.

And most Jewish students who are in reduced numbers because of DEI admissions policies don't tell people they're Jewish.

Or if they do tell people they're Jewish, they overcompensate by artificially or maybe sincerely, but I doubt it, trying to trash Israel to show their fides that they're acceptable Jews.

This is something that's just unimaginable for years.

This is what DEI created and birthed.

It said, if you are of a particular you or superficial appearance, we're going to give you a complete exemption from hatred.

And you can hate anybody and you can be venomous and you can make up lies because you're a protector.

It's like the almost

parts of the early church.

You're a cleric and you can say anything and you're protected.

And that's what we did.

And the first thing that came out is the ancient hatred of Jews.

And that hatred of Jews is almost entirely now a DEI monopoly.

And you know it is, you know how you know it is?

Because every time somebody like Kamala Harris or Biden talks about it, the first word, or Corinne, John Pierre, the first word out of there is Islamophobia.

Because they know, oh man, we have greenlighted hating Jews, so we've got to cover and project and say they, it's Islamophobia and maybe a little anti-Semitism.

There is no Islamophobia.

If you look at the who's,

I walked for maybe 50 days across the campus during this four-month period and watched this.

And as I said earlier, it was a microcosm of the Middle East.

They said, take down the camps.

And the Middle East turned protest.

No, we're not going to do it.

I said,

please take it.

Well, Jewish kids, take it down, vanished.

And then you know what happened when they took theirs down?

They went over and took their space.

Oh, really?

Yes, it was like they had some kind.

We're colonizers now.

You know, they went over and stole their space.

And

the Jewish students didn't have hatred in their placards.

They were polite.

They picked up their trash.

They weren't sleeping overnight.

And the other students were.

And it was sort of...

What's wrong with the Middle East?

Yeah.

At some point, you know, I don't know.

When you push a civilization to a point, people say, you know what?

It's not going to happen anymore because if you keep doing this, we don't have a civilization.

If you don't defend Western thought and you don't defend constitutional government and you side with killers and Hamas,

we're not going to let you do it.

So you come over here and you're our guest and you're going to sit here and you're going to occupy our bridges, shut down our traffic,

write decree.

debase our cemeteries, write horrific things on university walls, chase students that you're not going to do anymore.

And if you do it, you're going to be expelled.

It's really funny what we're watching because we've lost five of those elite presidents now.

And they're all talking about, I don't know if you've been listening, but at Stanford and every place, they're issuing their little academic threats.

We want to apprise everybody that when you come into the fall, there will be no harassment of people based on their religion.

They always mention Islam, of course, as as well.

And there will be no shouting down speakers, and there will be no illegal occupation of buildings and encampments, because to do so will result in suspension and possible expulsion from the university.

And that may have visa.

They're doing that now.

But that's all, you know what I mean?

I keep going back to the Voltaire quote.

You know, they hang a general to encourage the others.

All they have to do is expel 100 students, but they let them off.

Yeah, you know, you're speaking, you were talking about presidents resigning.

The Columbia one just did this week.

She was the most pathetic.

Yeah.

She was, I felt bad for her.

She was so out of her league.

She was the one that had the three deans that were texting during the graduation about anti-Semitic stuff.

And a student went, you know, took a picture of their text and they were making fun of Jewish students that were speaking.

And they were deans of high authority.

And she was the one that said that she was going to stop the encampments.

They all were weak, but she was the weakest.

The most obnoxious was Claude, and the phoniest was gay at a Harvard.

And then the poor MIT woman was the one that

Pennsylvania went first.

And

you know, at Stanford, we had our president resign for other reasons.

And then we had an interim president that kept issuing threats.

He was a nice guy, but he just kept issuing threats.

Don't do this, you're not going to do it.

And then it was compromised.

And then it ended up with

him storming the president's office and defacing it and then taking those beautiful

Stanford has one of the most beautiful examples of Romanesque architecture in the world and it's sand it's porous stone and when you spray vulgarities and obscenities in it it soaks into the stand so you have poor many of them were Mexican-American working class people I saw with tweezers trying to pick out the paint If there's any justice in the world, they'd take all those snotty-nose kids and all those wealthy Middle East

visitors.

Snotty-nose kids.

Yes.

Snottier-nosed kids.

And they would give them tweezers and say, you're going to pick up every pigment out of that and force them to do that.

I don't know why they're so afraid of these kids.

It's not really that students,

it's this faculty they're afraid of.

You think so?

I think they're afraid of lawsuits.

When you were saying, talking right now, I was thinking, well, they don't really want to act.

They just want to threaten because

if they expel somebody, they're going to have a big old lawsuit on their side.

And they would win.

If they have rules and they break the rules, they would win.

And the alumni are all on the side of order.

That's one of the reasons they're issuing these new policies over the summer.

We're going to see what happens.

We're going to get a prelude at

Chicago.

Starting Monday, right?

Sunday night, Monday.

So the left-wing idea is that,

well, we got rid of Josh Shapiro

as a candidate, and we hinted, hint, hint, hint, wink, wink that we might consider maybe sorta, but we don't really want to, arms embargo.

And Camilla didn't go to the Netanyahu speech, and Biden is up to rhetoric that's basically pro-Hamas.

And therefore, we did this so with the convention, they're not going to riot.

And I'm thinking, no.

The more that you concede to these people, the more they say to themselves, well, we got them.

We got that Shapiro Jewish guy, he's not going to be vice president, we got him running, and we're going to really stick the knife into him now.

It encourages them.

So I would expect this coming week it's going to be violent.

Somebody said something on the news I was reading.

It was silly.

They said, well, you know, in the days of Mayor Daly, they weren't prepared and the Chicago police couldn't handle it.

And now...

And I thought, and now what?

Mayor Johnson?

A decimated police and demoralized peace where they kill

wound or shoot 100 people every three days on a three-day weekend?

You think they're better pursued than crazy old Mayor Daly, who just told them that, you know,

they said, the whole world is watching.

Remember that in 1968?

The whole world is watching.

And then the police said, yeah, watch this.

And

they beat them and dragged them out, and it was over with.

And when it was over with, so was you Humphrey.

That's not happening this time.

No, they will not do anything to them, and they know that.

They're going to have a lot of problems.

And they're thinking, oh my gosh,

we can't riot, we can't take over stuff, we can't yell hatred to Jews until the first day of school.

So this is kind of a warm-up camp.

We'll all go to Chicago and flex our muscles at what we're going to do all semester.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's it's kind of like burning many apples.

Gosh, if you're going to.

You know, I had a thought for a commercial.

I'm trying to give ideas about commercials.

So

I've always quoted that ad nauseum, that Camilla Harris quote after the June attack in Washington where they tried to storm Trump and they burned the St.

John's Episcopal Church.

Remember that big riot?

That's when Mark Milley said that he was used by Trump for the photo op and all that.

I think we had a lot of resignations.

I think General Mattis might have resigned.

And anyway, that tumult.

Remember Camilla Harris wanted to be vice president at the convention?

This is not going to stop.

She was with Colbert on CBS.

These protests are not going to stop.

No, they're going to keep going.

No, should they stop.

They're going to go on and on.

Beware, beware.

They're going to go to election day.

They're going to go beyond.

It was like an inciting riot.

Almost immediately, you knew it was because all these phony liberal Snopes, Polifac, they all went on and said she didn't mean violent protest.

Well, that was all there were the day before.

But I'm wondering if she's going to say that now.

She's going to go in the convention, she's going to hear them protesting and trying to storm the arena, and she's going to say, these protests should not stop, and they're going to go on till Election Day.

Somebody should have a commercial, and they should show her with those words, and then they should show a picture of Chicago outside.

All of these people swarming the DNC and then having her say, they should not stop, they're going to go on to election.

Yeah, Kamala,

you're right, right on.

Yeah.

Well, you know, maybe you can allay one of my fears because you've been just talking about this Tim Waltz and how he's Uncle Tim and he's sounding a lot like Billy Carter.

Yeah, he doesn't, but he acts and talks like that.

Yeah, a drunk with tall tales.

That's why.

You call them lies, but they're tall tales.

Anyway, my fear is this, that his record's so bad.

He issued a coin.

You know, you give coins for military service, people do.

Yeah.

And on the coin, it says Command Master Charge, which he never really had that rank.

It was just a temporary thing, and he'd retired at a different rank.

And he's printing it.

And then he sat there and was introduced to the Congress as the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer in history.

And that was not true.

And then he had Pelosi thanking him for his military service in war zones.

That was a lie.

And she called him a Command Master Charge.

And he just sat there beaming.

It'd be like if you know,

I said to you, Sammy, and here's Sammy Wing.

she's got a Harvard PhD, and she's been a Yale professor for years, and you just started smiling and said, Yeah, sure.

And then you said, well, I didn't say that.

He did.

But here's my fear, that he's so bad, and there's so much against him, and it seems like the vetting was not good, that what are the chances they just switch him up for Josh Shapiro?

They can't do it now.

Are they stuck with him?

Tell me they're stuck with him.

Yes, they're stuck with him.

They cannot switch switch him out.

Let me correct that.

There's about 48 hours till the convention starts.

So if he has a complete meltdown, they find something.

If there's a Lee Outwater out there and he's been holding the real Big Enchilada lie and he's going to release it right before the convention, yeah, then they can get rid of him at the convention.

After the convention, no.

They're going to be stuck with that.

It's going to be too messy.

And I was kind of just...

I like Ben Dominic, you know, I met him.

I really like him.

I think he wrote an essay that J.D.

Vance was bad and they should remove him.

Every day, J.D.

Vance is more proof of why he's on the ticket.

He's the best spokesman that is deliberately challenging these

Tody

reporters.

He just outthanks them on the spot.

He's extemporaneous.

He's genuine.

He's going to pay dividends in September and October.

He really is.

When he gets on that,

I think he will really do well against Waltz.

And so that was a good pick.

Yeah, I think it was an excellent pick.

And particularly for this year, because if he can deliver Michigan or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, they'll win.

Yeah.

If they can get Arizona.

If they get Arizona and Georgia and Nevada, and I think they can, they just need one of those three states.

Yeah.

Well, if Uncle Tim is on the ticket, I hope somebody issues an Uncle Tim beer.

Remember that Billy Carter bear?

Billy beer.

Billy bear.

That was kind of sad.

He died very young.

I think he and both his sister died of pancreatic cancer.

Oh, really?

They had it in the family, but

Jimmy Carter was a jogger and he was a fanatic health addict, and he's still alive.

Yeah, he probably didn't drink quite as much.

I don't think he drank at all.

Yeah.

All right, Victor, this is the end of the show.

Thank you very much, and thanks to our listeners.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.