The Debate and Dante's Inferno

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

This is the weekend edition in which we do something cultural, but we've also just had a debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

And so we would like to hear Victor's take initially on that first, and then we'll talk a a little bit about Dante's Inferno.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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So Victor,

Joe Biden and

Donald Trump have just debated and I wanted to hear your initial reflections.

I know that you and Jack will be talking about it for Tuesday, but let's listen to your initial reflections.

Well, I was up in the mountains.

I'm trying to get some fresh air and beat this scourge, plague, whatever I call long COVID and I watched it and

you know it wasn't really a debate it was

all the main issues were covered in 10 to 15 minutes and

you know

Trump didn't have to be Demosthenes or Cicero all he had to do was control himself like he did in his second presidential debate and he did and then he just basically said you did this to the border you did this to crime, you did this to energy, you did this in Afghanistan, you did this in Ukraine,

and we have all these illegal immigrants.

And then

that was it.

And

he essentially said, then

you're the worst president in history.

This is a disaster.

I didn't want to be president.

And then he just reacted to what was the strangest performance I've ever seen in a debate.

When Joe Biden came out,

he was frail, he was pale, he was inert, and he had,

they said he had a cold, but it was the same raspy voice, but to the nth degree and accentuated.

So he was, when you looked at him, you almost have empathy for him because

he seemed so frail.

And he,

you know, it was, I think in a tweet I said it was like the Tercio de Morte, you know, in the bullfight, they had the matadors and then the people come out with the lances and then they just finish off the bull.

And he was the next hour and 15 minutes were finishing off Joe Biden.

He didn't get stronger, he got worse.

And

what do I mean by that?

Well, he kept looking down, and I don't, I think there was rules prohibiting the use of notes.

By the way, you could create your own notes, but he just seemed like he was cribbing the whole time.

And then

I thought that if they had used the pharmaceuticals or or the neutral sils that was rumored before his State of the Union rant or the Phantom of the Opera outburst, that speech, remember that?

Semi-fascist, ultra-maga?

But it wasn't.

It was just nothing.

I mean,

he slept for a week, I guess, and then he had some stimulation, but it was unworldly.

And by that, I mean all of his sentences were jumbled.

They were incomprehensible.

You didn't know what he was saying.

Trump at one time said, because I don't know what he said.

He had a very strange

retort to Trump when Trump said, we're letting in all these awful people.

Kind of what Trump had predicted, by the way, in 2015 when he came down the escalator and said, we're not getting Mexico's best.

And when he mentioned all these terrible atrocities committed by illegal agents, Biden just said, well, you know, it happens in people's families and family members basically rape rape women.

And then he said, and sisters too, brothers and sisters.

I don't know what that meant.

It was.

Then he closes his eyes and he goes into this brain freeze.

And

it didn't make any sense, is what I'm trying to say.

And then when he looks down,

he takes a deep breath and he wants to go.

They've obviously said, now you do, on the border, you go one, first, second, third, first, second, third.

And so then he would try to remember them, and by the third point he was trying to make, it just

filtered off.

And

we were basically watching an 82-year-old man that was forced to stand for, what, an hour and a half and try to remember all the things they told him to say, and he couldn't do it.

And then

he

He obviously was told to incite Trump.

So he, but what could you, if you were going to incite Trump, you had to come up with some fresh

some fresh felonies.

He's called him a, you know, Stormy Daniels.

You were like an alley cat in your sexual

violence.

And then he said that he was a convicted felon.

And Trump, when Trump said, well, so is your son.

And only your son basically deserved it.

He would have got worse if they hadn't have rigged the statute of limitations in your own DOJ application.

And so it was almost like Biden said, Why did you say that?

Don't say that.

He just seemed baffled.

And Trump made a very good case that he was a victim of Biden's own DOJ when he said, you know, I didn't want to be president.

I didn't need all this.

If you just had been a mediocre president, I wouldn't have come in.

But you were so awful, I had to run.

I don't know if that was.

He was replying also to these slurs, you know, with Charlottesville.

You said there were good Nazis on one side.

side, and no, and everybody, even Snopes had, and Trump didn't mention Snopes, but he debunked that.

He said everybody's debunked that.

Trump said that there were extremists on both sides.

When he said there were good people on both sides, he meant the people who were opposed and for toppling the statues.

And he said specifically, I don't mean the white supremacists.

And yet he brought that out.

He brought out John Kelly's allegation that

Trump had used the word suckers and said that Kelly was fired for that,

for leaking that.

That wasn't why Kelly was fired.

It had nothing to do with that.

And there were the vast majority of people in the room who did not hear that.

I think even John Bolton said he didn't hear it.

And so

then

he has this term he uses, the idea that, the idea that you'd say that, the idea of you're a liar.

And so

it doesn't, I think the idea was rattle as cage.

It was very ironic that

they gave Biden the same advice that Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie had given Trump in the first debate.

Rattle his cage, call him names, and then he'll go crazy.

In that case, you know, lose his train of thought.

And so they probably said to Biden, rattle his cage, make him go crazy, and he'll go back to Trump 1.0 where he's a madman.

But it didn't work.

It just made Biden look small.

I think people kind of got tired after 45 minutes of

Biden's made-up stuff,

incoherence, and then Trump saying, you're the worst president in history.

You're an awful president.

That kind of got, then we degenerated into who could play golf.

But everybody knows Trump can play golf better, but why Biden said, you know, I have a handicap six and I carry my own bag.

Nobody believes that Biden could go out on the course now and play golf.

I don't know why he brought that up.

Well, you know that today, and I haven't watched television, but the post-debate commentary is brutal on Biden.

You just have to get six or seven

clips where he completely loses his train of thought.

He doesn't know what he's talking about.

He stutters.

He slurs.

And what does this mean?

You know, Sammy, what does it mean that now we see all this?

It means that for the last three years, anybody who said that he was challenged, I said on Fox and I got chastised for it, that he was reptilian, that he didn't look well, and that he was failing at a geometric rate, and everybody got very angry, some people at Fox.

But it means that all of the people, especially the media on the left, have been lying to us when they kept saying he's sharp.

Remember Corinne Jim Pierre said she can't keep up with his energy level?

It's absurd, unless she's herself herself cognitively challenged.

And

so I think the American people deserve an apology.

It was very strange to have the October surprise delivered in June, and that was the 16 economists.

Oh, Biden always does that.

Have you noticed that?

51 authorities say the laptop is retired, esteemed authorities said it's likely Russian disinformation.

They weren't even retired, Joe.

Some of them were still working for the CIA.

It was all cooked up by Mike Morral.

He testified under oath that Anthony Blinken had asked him to do this as a favor, and I asked him what would be the purpose of it.

And they said the purpose was to help Joe Biden get elected.

And yet, Joe Biden didn't apologize.

Instead, he did the same thing.

159 presidential historians say you're the worst.

Who cares what an academic who

is far left says who is bad and who's good?

They have no credibility.

And when he brought up the 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists, it didn't take long for Fox and other right-wing fact-checkers to show that the majority of them had given money to the Democratic Party in general, or Biden in particular.

And these were the same people that said Build Back Better and the Inflation Reduction Act was going to prevent

inflation.

Yellen said that.

They were all discredited.

And yet Joe always makes the argument by authority.

And the authority for him is a deep state.

And so

he owes an apology, he really does, for that 51

people who lied.

They owe an apology, and Joe Biden owns an apology.

I don't think it

worked to say Trump is a pervert or that he's a convicted felon.

Again, that didn't work.

You know what's really scary is that Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, maybe some of the

fence-sitting frenemies like Turkey.

You know, they're all wondering after last night,

wow, this guy is completely out of it.

He's not in control of the United States government.

Is this give us a window of July, August, September, October, November, maybe after the election,

December, January, to do something stupid, to try something, to pressure Taiwan, maybe try to take it,

to have a surprise new offensive in Ukraine,

to send a weapon into Israel,

to send a missile over Japanese airspace, for Turkey to carry through some of its threats to the Kurds, to the Armenians, to the Greeks, for Iran to threaten, or Hezbollah to threaten Cyprus,

on the supposition that the man they saw last night would not be able.

to react.

And then the question is, what deters them?

The deters them is that, well, somebody must be running the United States.

Who is it?

Is it the Obama third-termers?

Is it, you know, Ben Rhodes incognito somewhere, Samantha Power working for Biden, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, Michelle and Barack themselves?

Who does Jill, Jill, the Edith Wilson of our times, who does she enlist?

Nobody quite knows who is running the United States government.

And that is really, really scary, and it might not be anybody at all.

It might just be everybody is ad hoc.

So finally, this then raises the question that we've toyed along.

Everybody is doing.

What do the Democrats do?

Because they know that if Ben Shapiro

had been on the stage,

or if Gavin Newsom, we saw Gavin Newsom defeat,

excuse me, debate DeSantis.

DeSantis clearly defeated him, but it took him about 20 minutes to counteract all these slick Newsome lies about people leaving the numbers coming, going, etc., etc.

But to beat Newsome and a Shapiro, you would need, Trump would not, couldn't just wing it up.

Trump did no prep.

He didn't have any notes.

It was all impromptu, ad hoc.

at the moment.

He did pretty well, but if he were to debate one of their slicker represents, he would have to prepare.

And he had the data when pressed, but he, you know, he just was, you know, I shouldn't even be here.

This is a joke.

Why should I be here?

Well, if he was going to debate the substitute candidate, he might have to do a little bit more homework.

But that also then, again, begs a question, what do they do?

And I think what we're going to see is

an effort to go to Joe and say, you do not want to be like

Woodrow Wilson, non-composment, and Edith Wilson running the country.

He did that in his second term, and he didn't have to run for re-election.

You don't want to be like FDR in 44.

He almost lost that election.

He was clearly not going to live very long, and he did one good thing and removed Henry Wallace, or you would have had a communist at the head of United States Armed Forces in World War II.

But instead, he picked the obscure Harry Truman.

We've been in similar situations like this, so they're going to have to do something, and I guess that something means they go to Joe Biden and say, would you release now, the next week or two, your super all the delegates, and let's have an open convention, and then let's see carefully the

deadlines for for substituting a new candidate in all of these states and see if we can't substitute a candidate.

Should we move up the convention?

They can do that.

And then they have the Kamala Harris problem.

And she obviously thinks she's ready to step up.

She's already going to be on the ballot, but I don't think you want to go from

the frying pan to the fire.

She would be just as bad.

So what do you do?

I think what you do is you say we're going to have an open convention.

We hope everybody wins.

We'd like to see Amy Kobuchar.

We'd like to see Gretchen Whitmer.

We'd like to see Ben Shapiro.

We'd like to see Gavin Newsome.

We'll have a fiery, exciting debate.

We'll nominate one of them.

They'll nominate the runner-up for a unity ticket.

Maybe it'll be Camilla.

We wish you will, Camilla, but secretly and privately, they'll make sure that she does not win the delegate count.

And then they hope they'll come out with two fresh young faces and play the age card against Trump.

Anytime you do this, as we learned in 1972 when McGovern dropped Thomas Eagleton for the shock treatments, and then flailed around trying to find anybody who would join what was then going to be a losing ticket and ended up with Sergeant Schreiber that had never run for anything.

It was a disaster.

I don't know to what degree the Eagleton thing contributed to an already losing cause, but it may have.

And so I ended the night thinking the debate was

not worth watching after 20 minutes.

There was was Donald Trump trying to defend himself from Joe Biden's efforts to provoke him.

He was not provoked.

He didn't give a lot of detail.

He was repetitive, but he did enough.

It was much more impressive that he just looked at the camera.

He had no aides de memoir, and

therefore it was a stark contrast.

But after the debate was over, I turned to all the the usual suspects.

You didn't have to, since CNN was sponsor, they had a large large panel, and every single one said something to the effect that Joe Biden was a disaster.

They all did say, though, he was a disaster, but I want him to win.

Meaning, if we can't get him off the ticket, they're going to vote for him.

But I think where he's going to bleed the most is with minority candidates.

That was where he was bleeding the most, and they seem to have been pulling

the most strongly about his age and cognitive decline.

And that was going to be accentuated, I think, after that.

And Trump did very well on that issue.

He said that the illegal immigration was an elite issue, and it was flooding people into the major cities, causing crime.

They were staying at luxury hotels.

They were getting better treatment than American citizens.

They were crowding Americans out of the health care accessibility.

They were going to bankrupt Social Security

and Medicare.

And,

you know, if you think about it, putting 10 million people on some kind of public assistance, whether it's Medicare or Medicaid or Medi-Cal or whatever, it does bankrupt it.

And I can say, as someone who

had gone to the doctor recently,

it's just a different world than it was two years ago.

Two years ago, it was a different world than it was before Obamacare.

There was a time when I went up and saw my old doc and he said, hi, how you doing, Victor?

Come in for five minutes before we go in.

How are you doing?

How are you well?

What's the old problem with

your sinus?

Are we going to get it operated on this year or not?

How's the kidney stone?

And that kind of stuff.

And then he said, now what's the problem today?

And it was a good 10 to 15 minute reassuring visit.

And we all in America had those.

And

the waiting room was calibrated so there's three or four people in it and they were sequential.

Now you go to a doctor and there's 40 people.

And I waited two and a half hours at the last specialist that I went to.

And if you miss an appointment because you've got COVID, then you wait for another six months.

And as I said earlier, for two and a half years, I couldn't even get a PSA test.

So

Trump was absolutely on target on that, that they have swamped the healthcare Medicare system, and it's going to impact U.S.

citizens.

So final thoughts.

Trump will come out of here, not with a great meat jump, but two to three points stronger

we're still as I said earlier we're still

mimicking or copying or comparable to the 1980 race where

people got sick of Jimmy Carter's voice they got sick of his sanctimonious scolding they got sick of the hostage taking, the failed rescue, the stagflation, the inflation, the oil prices, gasoline pump prices.

They got sick of him saying that Reagan is going to start a nuclear war.

Reagan's crazy.

It was all down, down, down.

And

Trump is kind of like Reagan.

He's not trashing America.

He just said, we're in bad shape.

We're a third world country.

We have to have massive things.

And his...

His message was, I can do it.

We're going to pump oil.

We're going to close the border.

We're going to deport people.

We're going to break up these interstate crime gains.

We're going to go after the cartels.

We're not going to have fentanyl.

We're going to get a strong military, we're going to get an irondome.

He didn't quite say he's going to pay for it, but the impression was that I'm muscular, I'm debating without notes, and I'm telling you what America can do.

Whereas Biden was, oh, you've got to stop this, you've got to stop this, you're this, you're this.

And so I think to get back to the 1980 race, it'll be fairly close, three or four points.

Carter was ahead by seven or eight points two weeks before the final election, according to the Gallup poll.

And then after that debate,

the polls showed Reagan either even or one or two points, but that didn't reflect what people felt.

They just said, you know what?

I've had it.

I'm not going to vote for that sanctimonious sourpus, Carter, and all this mess we have and gas lines and stagflation.

I'm going to risk it and vote for this guy no matter what you say about him.

And I think in Trump's case, they're going to say, you know,

I don't want to have a guy like that as president again.

I'm tired of the people he represents.

I'm tired of an open border.

I'm tired of three sexes.

I'm tired of smashing, grab, and carjacking.

I'm tired of illegal aliens killing people.

I'm tired of them living in luxury hotels.

I'm tired of what happened in Afghanistan.

I want to help Israel,

that kind of stuff.

And they're just going to vote for Trump.

And I think he'll blow it up.

He'll blow it up wide open by seven or eight points.

But that's just, you know, you don't want to predict.

It's very iffy.

So, Sammy, that was my take on the debate.

Thank you for that.

Let's go ahead and have some messages and then come back to talk about Dante.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is our middle segment, and Victor usually does a little discussion on literature.

And we've made it all the way through the Middle Ages, and we're just at the end, and we're going to look at Dante's divine comedy, but in particular, the Inferno.

And Victor, I know that Dante admired Virgil very well.

And I was wondering if at some point you can give us an evaluation.

Do you think that he bested Virgil's work, either in the Aeneid ecologues or Georgics,

with this

divine comedy, the whole thing, or even just the Inferno itself.

But what are your thoughts on the Inferno?

Well,

it usually marks the transition from the Middle Ages to the early Renaissance, and

by that,

in a number of ways.

Number one is that it's the first major work written in the vernacular.

It's written in Italian and not Latin.

He lived around 1265

and he died somewhere, oh, I don't know, in the 520s, he died about in his mid-50s.

And this somewhere around

1305 to 1315 when he was exiled from Florence.

He was a player in politics.

He was pretty.

His father, he married into, or he was related to some very prominent Florentine families in that Guelph gibbertine

rivalry between the Guffs who were loyal to the papacy and the Gibbertines were

advocates of the Holy Roman Empire, secular, and they fought for control, exiled, killed, exiled, killed, control of the Florentine Republic.

So he was a man of action.

But in his pretty short life, you know, when he died 1320, 21, he wrote this monumental tripartite epic.

It's kind of based on the

Homer's Odyssey.

And remember that both in the Odyssey, Odysseus goes down to the underworld and meets people.

And I think that's the catalyst.

He picks, so it's,

somewhere in his 30s and 40s, he was exiled.

And he wrote this monumental poem.

in verse

about

in three parts.

The first part is on Good Friday, he is walking in these sinister woods and he sees this lion, I think there's a wolf and a leopard, and they represent the three classical sins that were mentioned in antiquity by Aristotle, but were

formulated in the medieval period.

And

mostly is

inability to contain your appetites.

So those are going to be the least of the worst.

These are going to be the first circles of hell.

You're going to go down nine of them until you meet Satan and a frozen lake.

And those are going to be people who were greedy or they ate too much or they were sexually indulgent,

but they were just, they slept too much.

It was just going too far.

They're not necessarily as sinister.

And then you get into the frauds or the people who,

what's the word for it?

Fraud.

Fraud.

But I think it's violence first.

So all the suicides, genocides

in the sense of

using artifice, I should say that.

Yeah, violent people.

These are the murderers, the assaulters, and the people who

use violence for personal advantage.

And then the final

is the final

lower rings are the people who were traitors, they

were forgers, they turned on their family, they turned on, and that supposedly is the worst of all sins.

And so he's going to be met by Virgil, and why Virgil?

Because

there was a messianic ode.

Remember, Virgil wrote three works, poems about farming and hexameter called the Georgics, the monumental Aeneid, and by the way, another reason he picked Aeneid, because there's an underworld scene that replicates the one in the Odyssey in the Aeneid.

And

in the ecologues, those ten ecologues, there's something called the Messianic

Ecologue.

And it's

It's a Latin poem, and it was written about 40, I don't know, 40 BC, and in it he predicts the birth of this young boy who's supposedly going to be the savior of his age.

And

apparently people thought, well, this was going to be the offspring of Mark Antony and Octavia, but it wasn't.

And then

in the Middle Ages, people said, you know, Virgil

had

pre-knowledge of Jesus Christ, even though he died before Christ was born.

And this messianic ode was not about

a young kid to be born from an aristocratic Roman union,

but it was a forecast of Jesus Christ.

So Virgil then became one of the few pagans that is considered divine.

So when he's in the forest and he's

in danger of these three

monsters, Virgil appears dead, though.

He's a shade.

And he says, you know, I've been sent here.

I think it's because of a poem of Beatrice.

He has a strange, courtly love relationship with this young girl he met when he was nine or ten, and he wasn't allowed to marry her.

So for the rest of his life, he idolized her as the perfect woman.

And she supposedly has prayed on his behalf that he may seek some type of purgatory on his way to heaven, even though he's a sinner.

And he says, I've got to show you what hell is like.

So he escorts him across the Styx River.

And by the way, all of the geography, the terms, 90% of it is classical.

So we have to know a little bit about classical mythology.

You need to know two things for the reference, classical mythology and the political figures of 14th century Genoa, Florence, and Venice.

But mostly Florence.

because all of his enemies are going to be in various rings of hell.

Anyway, he descends with Virgil.

And usually what happens is whatever sin a person committed, the punishment is the excess of that sin.

So if you're a, I guess if you're a sorcerer, you know, fortune teller and you look forward, then your head is backward.

You can never look forward.

You have to always look back.

If you're a glutton and you just eat and you just

ooze out food and you

you just defecate, you just gross.

If you're a slave to your appetite, you're just sex

And if you're violent, then you're going to be subject to various violences.

And then you get down to Satan at the very bottom.

And

he's on a frozen lake.

He has three colored head

representing, I think, the three races of man.

And then he's magically saved by Virgil, and he's transported to

the end of Good Friday, and so he's going to come out in Easter.

And then

the next title will be The Purgatory, where he sees people who had sinned, but they renounced their sin.

In other words, these people in the Inferno never said they did anything wrong or they were happy to do it or

they didn't believe in God or they thought they could get away with it.

Purgatory is people who, at the close of their life, realized that they had done wrong and they had prayed to be forgiven.

And those people are in purgatory and they have to do their time.

By the way, Limbo is in the inferno.

Those are people who,

they can either be,

they never got to know Christ or they refused him.

They're not necessarily evil, but they're just kind of floating around

without really a status at all, but they're not going to get into purgatory.

And then the final one is paradisio.

And those are the people who lived wonderful lives, moral lives, according to the protocols of the Catholic Church, early Christian church.

They're not as, I mean, they're not as,

it's not as

exciting because when you read the Inferno, it's kind of chilling.

If you're not a Christian, you probably would be after reading it.

And then, of course,

there was all these magnificent illustrations by Gustave Doré.

He was a Frenchman that lived in the 1840s and 50s.

And he illustrated the Bible, but he also did the Inferno.

And when you see those illustrations of what he did, they're pretty scary.

And so this marks the beginning of Italian literature, and he's going to be followed

in Italian by Petrarch and Bocasio.

And this is going to lead into the High Renaissance, where you have all of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli and everybody in this Florentine Renaissance.

of which he was the precursor.

And then,

so usually when you read, when you enroll in a course in Western Civ, or humanities of the Western world,

Dante is kind of the, you end up in the fall semester.

So you start with Homer, Iliad, or Odyssey, then Virgil, then you might read a classical historian, Herodotus or Thucydides, some poems, maybe Catullus or Horace, and then you read Tacitus and Cicero, maybe going to Boethius.

And then we've talked about the song of Roland, Beowulf.

You could read St.

Thomas Aquinas.

And then you kind of end with

the Inferno.

And then the second half will start with Renaissance literature, Bocasio or Petrarch

or Shakespeare.

And then you work your way to the modern era.

And that was kind of what was taught.

That doesn't exist anymore in most places.

There's maybe Hillsdale College, but the Columbia, now it's mostly authors are picked for

their ideology or their sins, I should say.

But everybody should read the Inferno.

It's a chilling work.

Can I ask you a couple of questions?

So he puts Odysseus in Canto 26 in the Inferno.

So he's down there among people.

I believe it's False Counsel.

But

this is our big hero from the Odyssey.

So it's kind of interesting.

That comes from...

Sophocles and Greek tragedy.

So

if you read Sophocles' Ajax, for example, Odysseus is sneaky.

And the element of it, it comes back to the Iliad and then the Odyssey.

In the Iliad, the characters that are the most esteemed are Achilles and Ajax.

And they're one-dimensional fighters.

They go out and fight, and they're truth-tellers.

but they're not,

they don't know how to take Troy, is what I'm saying.

The fall of Troy is not in the Iliad, but in the later Cypriot cycle, Odysseus is the one that thinks up the trick.

He's sneaky.

That's not necessarily good, but he creates the Trojan horse.

And then after the death of Achilles, he supposedly subverts the judicial process.

So even though he's considered third,

he wins the armor of Achilles through stealth.

Then when you meet him in classical tragedy, he's an ambiguous figure.

Part of that is drawn off the knowledge of the Trojan horse and the armor, the judgment

in favor of Odysseus to get the armor of Ajax.

And part of it is that he's a

polypragmount.

He can do anything, and that's embodied in the Odyssey that follows the Iliad.

And by that I mean

if you have to kill the Cyclops, he's going to figure out how to get him drunk and then just put this big spear in his eye.

He's the one who's who's going to have sex with Calypso and seriously can get out of there.

He's the one that warns his crew not to be

excessive, who lets out the bag of winds that was told not to.

He's the one that

can hear the sirens.

So he's sneaky, he's intelligent, and how that transmogrifies into the medieval period, he's not completely a good person.

He does what it takes.

He's not a one-dimensional heroic.

He's a modern hero.

Yeah.

And then also

it's a Christian epic, so it's an epic poem and it's written obviously with a Christian

assumption or a Christian cosmos.

It's written within that.

But he's also considered a humanist.

And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what does it mean for Dante?

How is he a humanist?

Well, I'll give you an example.

He believes in a constitutional state or state stability or

good relations.

And

all of these biblical sins are augmented with

when you get into fraud and violence.

He's talking about violence against a modern sophisticated society that's not necessarily religious.

So forging your signature.

I don't know why, for some reason, one of his heroes is Julius Caesar, and Brutus, who's considered

in classical times by some, a liberator who killed Caesar, who organized the assassination, he's down way down there as one of the violent

insurrectionists.

So

he glues onto biblical morality

modern notions of what makes a state work.

You have to tell the truth, you have to sign documents in good faith, you have to help your friends in politics, you don't murder political figures.

And that's part of the

Italian humanism that's exemplified by these, you know, these three famous republics in Venice, Genoa, and especially Florence.

Well, now that you brought up Brutus and Cassius, they're the two that are in the mouths of the heads of the three heads of the devil at the very bottom.

Just chewing on them.

Yes, and obviously the central head has Judas in it.

But the two sides are Brutus and Cassius.

So they're at the very bottom for having,

I'm assuming this, destroyed the Republic rather than Caesar destroying the Republic.

He thinks that Caesar was born in to Rome to save it from this half century of civil war.

And that remember on Caesar's coinage, it's always clementia caesaris, the clemency, the forgiveness.

And he forgave Brutus and Cassius when they were on the wrong side.

He's now, and nobody really knew what he wanted to do if he had lived the next 15 years.

There were people who said that he would have done what Augustus did.

There's people said he would have brought back the Republic.

People said he was going to be a dictator.

But the point again is that in Dante's mind, civic virtue, a humanistic virtue, good statesmanship,

reconciling different

competing and antithetical tribal groups,

stopping factionalism, uniting the state, these are all positive attributes that earn you everlasting either, I mean the everlasting salvation of your soul in addition to

the religious ones.

So the fact that Caesar himself killed,

I mean, he killed or enslaved a million people in Gaul, that doesn't enter into the medieval idea of sin, because he was doing that to create a modern Roman Republic-empire, which would eventually become Christian and spread this word.

So he was a builder of Western society and therefore his sins are, they're not seen as sins.

Well, Victor, thank you.

I just, one last thing is, do you have any reflection on the fact that the very bottom where the devil himself is is a frozen world rather than a burning in hell world?

People have written about that, and

I think it's the idea that

he's static, he's trapped, he's not going to be burned and reincarnated, and these people are it's it's cold and it's also people have said that in a Mediterranean climate people are and when they burned everybody to the stake, they never froze them.

So the way that people are

the the most awful punishment would be to be in a very, very icy climate, which is very foreign to the Mediterranean.

And then you're frozen solid, you can't move.

Yeah.

And forever.

And so,

and then, of course, if you're in hell, you have no sunlight.

And the deeper you go, the colder it is, supposedly, because you're cut off further and further from God and celestial light and warmth.

Darkness and cold are always associated with evil.

Yeah.

Okay, Victor, thank you for that.

Let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about a few current news stories.

The Saudi-Israeli peace deal and China and maybe if we have some time, Bolivia just recently had a coup.

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

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Victor, one of your friends, Lee Smith in Tablet Magazine had an excellent article called Biden's Phony Saudi-Israeli Peace Deal, and in which he wanted to talk about

the Saudis and the Israelis are considered by the Biden and then Obama administration as well on the wrong side of things for a progressive America America and that they want to make Iran and the Palestinians sort of center stage in restructuring the Middle East.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that.

I thought that was an interesting statement, especially that the Saudis are oil makers and polluters, so they offend climate agendas and the Israelis are now considered the oppressors of, I suppose they would say, people of color, and that's how

the Middle Eastern policy reflects the Obama-Biden policies.

Yeah,

Obama,

given his community organizing origins, always thinks, what he does, he looks at the world, he looked at the world always in binaries.

There always had to be an evil person and a good person.

And the evil person was the oppressor and the victimizer.

and the good people were the oppressed and the victimized.

And that was not adjudicated by actual circumstance, but by skin color or ethnic identity.

So he took the black-white binary, the 12-88% cutoff that America had been historically dealing with, and he said, no, no, no, if you come from India

and you're a multimillionaire, if you come from Brazil, if you look white, you're not.

You're not.

You're part of the non-white Anglo-Saxon

founding father tradition of Europe that screwed everybody up and had slaves slaves and was exploiting.

It was ridiculous.

But he applied that to almost everything.

And in that binary that he looked at the Middle East, then Israel becomes a bunch of white people who don't belong there.

And the Saudis are not only anti-green because they pump oil, but they represent the clients of white people in America.

And so the people who were poorer in the Middle East, the Shia, the Persians, the Palestinians, Hezbollah, the Houthis, then become the nobler people.

And then the role of the United States is to swing from traditional overdogs to underdogs and create this, as I said, this creative tension between Shia, Sunni, Persian, Arab,

radical, conservative.

And then the United States,

in the guise of Ben Rhodes or Valerie Jarrett or Barack Obama will intervene.

And it might be even good that Israel is checked by a nuclear Iran because they obviously knew that the Iran deal was going to lead to nuclear weapons, as it has.

And so they were going to play these off.

And in that

asymmetry, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Emirates, Jordan, they're not good.

They're not good people.

Even though they're pro-U.S.

and they don't kill people like the Iranians do to the same degree, or that Hamas does or Hezbollah does.

And it's almost a

vicarious fascination or satisfaction or delight with these radical groups because

they use violence and they're always talking about anti-American terms.

It's very ironic because the Obamas used all that to get very wealthy.

So when you talk about oppressed and oppressor, they're among the 0.001

percentage in terms of wealth and property in the United States.

But that's what Joe Biden is resurrecting.

It's not Joe Biden, it's the people.

The Susan Rice's that came with him,

the Ben Rhodes, who's, we know, contacting these people all the time.

The Clintons are still involved, Michelle and Brock themselves are involved.

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Bourne, Wing the squad.

And so it's used to check Israel and these Gulf states.

The irony is that we beg them to pump oil

before an election, and then we won't pump it, but we'll drain it from our own Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

And they know that we pump oil far more ecologically sound than anybody in the world.

And so they would say, we want your oil so we can keep in power by having cheap gas prices, and we know you desecrate the environment more than we do, but we don't want to pump it on our ground.

We just want to use it.

That's the theory.

Yeah.

What did you think about these 16 economists?

I know they did this before the debate, and

you've already talked about the debate, but that signed that public letter endorsing Biden's economic policies and criticizing Trump.

Is there any credence?

It's just so pathetic because it was just like clockwork.

We were talking with Jack, what's going to be the so-called October surprise?

Only it's going to be the June surprise because we know what they do.

They did the Access Hollywood before, the first debate, 2016.

2020, it was Hunter's Laptop, his Russian Disinformation, the 51 Liars.

And now, before the debate, they have to drop another letter.

And it's signed by 16 economists, and they all have two things

in common.

I should say most of them do.

That is, they told us in 2020 when they sent the last letter, Stigelitz from Harvard was the compiler of this letter,

that the Build Back Better regime and the

Inflation Reduction Acts, what would become those, would end

inflation and keep it down.

And what of course happened is we were, they got a low inflation, good GDP economy from Donald Trump that was roaring back from the national quarantine but there were certain things they were told not to do Larry Summers was very adamant about it everybody has money the government's dished out four trillion dollars under Trump to make sure we didn't have a depression And the supply chains are stretched because of COVID.

They haven't come back yet.

So we don't have enough consumer goods to be purchased by these people who are flush with dollars.

And so we're going to have a national recovery.

People have not been able to go to Disneyland.

They haven't been able to fly.

They haven't been able to go on trips.

They want to buy stuff.

And they got a lot of cash inflated.

So do not give them any more cash.

And that's exactly what he did.

He printed $4 trillion and then

they couldn't get what they wanted.

If they wanted to remodel their home, you know, they couldn't get Romex, so it went to $96 a roll.

They couldn't get plywood, so it went from $12 to $110.

They couldn't get nails, they couldn't get insulation, but everybody had money.

And so those economists are back again, and they're saying that Donald Trump will create inflation.

And you want to think, well, why would we believe you?

Because you were the ones that told us that Biden wouldn't, and he did.

The price of

steak, the price of vegetables, the price of fruits.

I just bought some grapes, $4 a pound.

I got the thinnest rib steak you could imagine, and it was, I think, $17 a pound.

The two steaks, it was almost $28,

and before COVID, you could have bought that for $12.

And then the worst thing about it, when you look at their political contributions, I think 10 or 11 of the 16 gave to Joe Biden.

So it's like he went out and bought a bunch of economists who have always been wrong.

Why would anybody listen to them?

And notice that the 51 intelligence authorities, as we said last time, many of them are still contractors working for the CIA, and they've never apologized.

Not one has apologized.

Not one of these economists will apologize.

And they wonder why we don't trust their technical experts.

They're always wrong.

If somebody says I'm a professor of economics at Yale or Harvard, who cares anymore?

It used to mean something.

But when they write stuff like that, that's like saying I'm the deputy director of the CIA.

Well, that means that, oh my God, you're a swamp creature.

Same thing.

I'm the director of the FBI.

Oh, which one?

Comey?

Mueller?

Andrew McCabe?

What do they all have in common?

Lies, lies, lies.

Lies.

McCabe lied four times of federal investigators.

Comey pled amnesia 245 times under oath.

Robert Mueller's.

Got him up in front of the House Intelligence Committee and they asked him the two catalysts of why he was even there, the steel dossier and fusion GPS.

I don't know anything about that.

I don't know anything about it.

You don't know anything about the steel dossier?

How do you think you were pointed?

So.

Yeah.

Well, let's turn to China then.

And again, Gordon Chang has an interesting article out in the Gatstone Institute called The World's Most Dangerous Delusion.

Biden thinks China Wants Stability, in which he illustrates that the Chinese Chinese want to dominate the world basically, bring down the international system and, quote, crack skulls and spill blood.

And other quotes, that's what's so interesting about Gordon Cheng's work is he always brings in quotes from the Chinese or the

the Communist Party itself of what they would like to do.

And so he makes it very clear that they don't have really any interest in anything anything but being the dominant power.

And yet we've got Biden who thinks that they might like to have a world of stability of some sort.

I was wondering what your thoughts were on China.

Well, he's right.

But it brings up the taboo question that nobody will ask, and that is, to what degree did the whole Biden family get compromised by China?

Because remember, he said they weren't rivals very early in his tenure.

He said, they're not rival.

They're just,

they're not enemies.

We can work with them.

But

we know that

Hunter went on a plane with him as vice president and met with some key members.

We know that people connected to the Chinese government called up when he was in a room.

So his family made a lot of money in China.

And I think that the Chinese, I think he's afraid that the Chinese feel they have information on him that they would release should he be bellicose to them.

I don't know.

That sounds a little conspiracy, but it shouldn't.

And so China wants to bully, bully, bully, bully.

It's kind of like Hitler or Stalin.

The idea is that

the West created the post-war rules and it's wedded to enforcing them and free commerce and free communication and free trade.

And you can sail up the Red Sea without being attacked.

You can go in the South China Sea without being attacked.

You can go in the Black Sea, and the United States guarantee that.

And China is just saying, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.

We are going to undermine that system, and

we're going to cause chaos.

I don't think it really wants to have a full-fledged war yet.

But some of you are going to say, well, Victor, you don't realize that we are already in a war.

We're in a war.

And you would say, we have a little squeak outside.

Yeah, we did.

You would say, well, how do you know we're in a war?

Well, they're sending enough fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans that they know will take it because the pills are disguised as other drugs.

We know they launder cartel money.

We know they run the drug trade in many parts of California, they being Chinese illegals.

We know there's 30,000 that have come through an open border.

We know they have bio labs like the one near me that have dangerous pathogens that are

loosely stored and could infect people.

We know that they birthed the China so-called Wuhan virus.

We know they're buying farmland.

We know they have a, at one point, they had over 350,000 students here.

all of whom were probably interrogated when they came home to see what they could find out about science and technology.

So I don't need to go on.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we've come to the end of our podcast.

I know that you have some work going on there.

And we'll come back to Bolivia sometime.

The coup, a coup just happened there yesterday.

So we'll take up that subject in a future podcast.

We'd like to thank everybody for listening to this weekend episode.

Thank you, everybody, for coming.

Thanks again.

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

And we're back live during a flex alert.

Dialed in on the thermostat.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

Clutch move by the home team.

What's the game plan from here on out?

Laundry?

Not today.

Dishwasher?

Sidelined.

What a performance by Team California.

The power truly is ours.

During a flex alert, pre-cool, power down, and let's beat the heat together.