Roman Historians and Modern Universities

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our weekend edition, and we look at things more cultural.

So this week, in the middle section, Victor will be talking about the late Roman imperial historians.

So we'll have a look at that.

But we'll look at some news stories first, things that we didn't get into our Friday news roundup and lots going on at the universities and with protests.

And we'll start with that when we come back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com, and it is called The Blade of Perseus.

So come join us there.

So, Victor, there's been a lot going on at the universities

on

diversity and on the issue of Israel and the protesters.

CSU Sonoma, the President Mike Lee, was put on leave for supporting an

boycott, an academic boycott of Israel and divestment.

And at the University of North Carolina,

they moved $2.3 million from DEI projects to police and safety measures.

So I thought those were two positive things going on in our universities.

And I was wondering if you have any take on that.

I'd like to quote Churchill.

He didn't say it's the beginning of the end, i.e.

of DEI.

It's the end.

it's not the beginning of the end, it's the end of the beginning.

It's its first phase, it tried to be institutionalized, and now it's at a critical turning point.

And there are some right news.

You mentioned North Carolina that they're going to use the money that's wasted on DEI commissariats to beef up security.

And a lot of schools have decided that

after three years of no SAT, that a lot of the angst on campus are students who, according to their own, as I said before,

standards would not have been admitted.

And yet the courses have not adjusted for that, and the faculty have not adjusted for that.

And so they're faced with the dilemma of either getting a reputation, as Yale is getting, of giving everybody A's,

or watering down courses, or introducing new gut courses to facilitate these students who don't feel happy because they feel that Stanford or Princeton or Yale, since they got into it and since everybody who gets into an elite school graduates, the hardest part they're told is getting in, that they should be given a pass.

And that universities know that if they keep doing it and employers look at the product, they're not going to be preeminent.

And so they're gradually under the radar starting to say, well, you know, maybe we have a little bit too much

DEI and maybe we should reintroduce the SAT.

SAT.

But the problem is it has been three, four years that this stuff's been institutionalized and there's thousands of these DEI people in the admissions, in the departments.

There's thousands of PhD theses that are going to have to be thrown away.

There's dozens of DEI.

Almost every day in MIT there were two more.

DEI people that were just caught up plagiarism.

And you looked at the thesis topics.

It was SISTA, this, and, you know, it was all race, race, race, 24-7, 300.

It's all,

as I said before, I gave you the examples when I was researching my dissertation.

There were some fascinating topics about land tenure and

the nature of the ancient countryside.

But anytime I read

an article, there was an Irene, it was a really good journal, but it was Eastern European Warsaw Block.

And the Soviet Union had something, I think it was called BDI, where summaries, you couldn't trust it because they could not write about anything other than large landowners were evil and caused the destruction of the ancient world and that the people who were in revolutions like Spartacus were the heroes.

Sometimes that was true, but it was always true with them.

So they were, and the same thing about,

you can't read anything about Sparta.

between 1932 and 1945 from in German, because it's basically the Spartans were the best

city-state of all because they recognized that even though most countries, city-states had slaves, they were the ones to predicate it on national ethnicity, the Messenians.

In other words, the Messenians were Helots.

And everywhere else, there were no serfs.

Well, there are the Paneste and others in Thessaly and other places in Crete.

But what I'm saying is you couldn't trust anything that's written in German.

It's all race, race, race, race, and Aryan superiority.

Well, that's what this

era of DEI is.

The PhD theses are worthless.

The

plagiarism is tantamount because they know there's no consequences.

And so the universities are in a quandary.

And then you add the force multiplier of these demonstrations.

These are not sympathetic people when they look at these protesters.

They talk about global warming and preserving the planet and that.

peripheral intersectional issue and then you see when they leave they leave trash and dumps.

They leave people of color color as maintenance people and janitors have to clean up the mess of these spoiled elites.

There's just nothing,

there's nothing positive about any of them.

They're spoiled.

And then you add that they're hypocritical.

The Middle East students are all hypocritical.

They're blasting their hosts that allowed them magnanimously to come in, and they're from illiberal regimes, and they're attacking the only democracy in the Middle East and championing a terrorist bunch of killers.

So

it's bad.

So, in the case of this California State University president, you know, I guess they suspended him for insubordination.

Yeah, that was the...

Yeah, because

you cannot, as a state official, use your position to boycott a foreign country

and Israel.

So basically, he was taking, as a steward of state monies and contracts, he was deciding that he was going to use ethnicity, the Jewish state,

or ideology, and he was going to say that this state agency, that's what he's ruling, he's running a state agency, is not going to

have any business with this entity, even though that was forbidden by the legislature to have, to get involved in anti-Israel boycotts and embargoes.

And I was surprised that they didn't fire him.

Yeah.

But they put him on suspension, usually in higher education.

They did that with the DEI coordinator that helped hijack Judge Duncan's talk at the Stanford Law School.

Everybody knows, should know how it works.

University people are cowardly.

They got to where they are by being Neville Chamberlain.

On the one hand, on the other hand, what we say in Greek is men and day.

That's who they are.

So what they do is when there's some egregious behavior, unless it's some right-wing guy, who says something about trans people or race, you get rid of him quick.

But when he's one of yours, and this guy is a DEI Asian American, and I think the chancellor is Hispanic, and so

what do you do?

They got to go.

You suspend them.

And then the news, he's suspended.

And usually give them full pay.

Yes.

And they're happy because they're lazy.

They just, everybody's lazy in academia.

You suspend them, they get their money, they stay home, and then they quietly ride off in the sunset, and people forget it.

No, yeah.

No, they go apply to other jobs.

He's applying right now to another job.

We'll have to take a little step down.

Yeah.

I beg to differ with you on that.

Four years, the last four years have been this DEI thing.

I think it's been a couple of decades,

if not more than that.

And that's why these universities are so destroyed.

I'm saying it really took off after George Floyd.

Yeah, that's true.

That's when people like the Pentagon really came over.

Yeah.

By the way, you know, the Pentagon, as I said before, Millie and Austin Austin gave us that horrendous testimony when they were going to root out white supremacy in the Pentagon and the ranks, they said.

And then they issued quietly, they started out with a bang and they ended up with a peep, a murmur when they last December issued their Pentagon report.

We didn't find any cabal of white supremacists like we'd warned.

But there was a black Marine that just threatened to kill mass murdering.

And it was funny.

His manifesto was how he hated white people and how he wanted to kill them.

And he had just been released by the Marine Corps.

And I'm thinking, do these people realize that when you run these bureaucracies and you institutionalize racial hatred and you say that white privilege, white privilege, white privilege, white supplement, white rage, that there's not going to be some unhinged people?

And they're going to conclude from that that the establishment says that this particular group is awful and satanic and demonized, therefore, in my unhinged mind, demented mind, if I were to attack them, they wouldn't really get angry at me.

And that's exactly the logic of the Jim Crow South.

They institutionalized racism and apartheid against blacks, and then they knew that every once in a while there'd be some poor, crazy person that would go out and lynch a black man or shoot him.

And he did that because he thought either he would be exempt, and he was was often, or that the authorities would find him a useful soldier in the phalanx.

And that's what they're doing.

They're teaching this hatred of a particular group.

We had Jeremy Carl on here about this anti-white bias, and they don't have any idea, or maybe they do, that the ripples are going to go into the brains of certain unhinged people.

It's going to get violent.

Yeah.

Well, there's an online publication called Chronicles.

I know it's very.

I've been attacked in it, so I have no little prejudice okay but they had an interesting along this line of argument article about and it's the title is abolishing diversity statements and they mean in hiring is an empty gesture at MIT and what the Paul

Duquoi I hope I said that right was arguing was that you can't just That's just not going to do very much because it's already all through the universities.

So he went into some of the departments and he said, look, you have DEI embedded in research grants and funds for underrepresented groups and diversity officers and diversity councils and recruiting for postdocs and interns and making annual reports on diversity, which he mentioned were not available to the public.

But do you see how deep it is?

I do, and I am worried about it because it's illegal now.

The Supreme Court said you can't do it for purposes of hiring an admission.

It cannot be race-based.

And I know academics, as I keep unfortunately admitting, I've been with them,

I'm 70 years old, and I started hanging out with them as an undergraduate when I was 18.

So 52 years I've studied the academic mind, and their academic mind works like this.

Well, these yokels in the Supreme Court and these stupid, reacting to the stupid idiot public opinion that doesn't have a PhD, these idiots, they think that they can stop us from our mission of social justice, but we're not going to listen to them.

And I remember the, I mentioned that in an earlier podcast.

I'm not being facetious, the law dean at Berkeley, Chairman Niske,

I don't want to mispronounce it, the poor fellow who is very left-wing, and then there were these atrocious anti-Semitic posters of him with little fangs.

And then

they came into his very generous dinners for his law students

and they hijacked it and tussled with his wife.

Well, he's on tape earlier saying, basically, in a class,

don't quote me.

But, you know, there's ways to get around using race-based, you just don't say it.

You do it, but don't admit it.

And that's the academic mind.

Yes.

They're morally superior, they think, to everybody and smarter.

So you're right.

Nothing can stop them except

one thing.

And that is when they go, they always destroy.

Everything the left touch has the on-mitas touch.

When they destroy an institution,

then the institution has to do something.

And look at Bud Light.

And look at even Disney.

they're backtracking.

And look at Target.

They're putting their little, what was it, the cod piece, children's clothes?

Yeah,

with the pocket.

Did you see what they just decided?

They're only going to put the cod testicle pocket for girls

in selected blue city stores.

Oh, wow.

So it won't be in Fresno.

It won't be in Fresno.

Yes, no, probably not.

So my point is that they understand that when people look at them, whether they're senators or House representatives that may get the majority and would like to tax the blank out of their endowment income, or whether they're alumni donors who are lied to and say, oh, yes,

we'd love you to give $5 million for our Western civilization track about the beauty of Western civilization.

And then they give it, and then they look in the catalog, and it's LGBT querying the text of

Shakespeare.

Yeah, exactly.

And they I didn't give my money for that.

Well, you know, we don't believe in censorship.

You can't come in and dictate.

We have freedom of speech.

That's how they work.

Yeah, I know.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about the historians of the late Roman Empire.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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Victor,

I confess I don't know much about late Roman imperial historians except Procopius.

And so I'm kind of excited to hear about that secret history of his and

how authentic you think it is.

But go ahead, let us.

Well, Greek and Roman historians had some sense of continuity and

comprehensive history.

So Herodotus wrote about the Persian Wars, but he wrote about a lot more.

Thucydides felt that he was the inheritor of that.

And so even though his war was 431 to 404, the Peloponnesian War, not 480 to 479, the Second Persian War, he took over where Herodotus left off and had a forward of 50 years of what created the Athenian Empire called the Pentacontentia.

Okay,

when he quit in mid-sentence in 411 BC, Book 8, Xenophon took that up in his Hellenica.

Well, Ammianus Marcellinus,

who was a Greek probably somewhere in the eastern province, maybe Syria, he lived somewhat between 330 and 400 AD.

So he wanted to write a comprehensive history, but he knew that Tacitus had ended his annals and histories,

the histories with Nerva,

roughly at the turn of the century, the first century AD.

So he wrote a monumental history of the Roman Empire from roughly 98 to 100 up until almost his death.

But he finished it officially at the tragic Battle of Adrianople, Adrianopolis,

where

The Roman Emperor, as you remember, Valens, had been kidnapped, taken prisoner.

And it was a catastrophic defeat that was iconic that this is really the end, even though the empire survived for another hundred years.

And it's a very, it's not like

later historians.

It's not like some, and he wrote in Latin, he was a Greek speaker, he says he's a Graecus,

but it's beautiful Latin prose.

And it doesn't have that

late imperial affectation of trying to be classical Latin and artificial academic Latin.

It's really well, it's almost Ciceronian,

maybe more like Sallust

than Livy, but nonetheless it's well written and it's very accurate.

We know that from inscriptions and other historians.

And

it covers, you know, almost three centuries.

The problem is it's been fragmented and lost in various places.

But it's a chronicle of battles, and he tries to follow a Thucydide.

Everybody says Thucydidean model.

That would be a historian like Ammianus Marcellinus and Polybius earlier.

And they looked at a scientific approach to phenomenon.

So in his case, just as Thucydides had looked at the Great Plague at Athens in 430, 429 and given you a clinical description, not just medical, but also ideological.

This is the symptoms.

These are the diagnoses.

This is the therapy.

this is the prognosis.

But he did that not just about the

disease itself, but these are the symptoms of mass panic, what happens to people.

And this is,

when they do this, you know you're in a fundamental existential crisis.

And here's what people try to do, but human nature being what it is, and this is the prognosis.

So, and that's what history, the scientific method was like for the nation historian.

So he's a practitioner, and he has

a similar description that's very famous of the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed Alexandria, the great center of learning in the late Moman world.

People should remember that

by 200 AD or 250, the nexus of power and intellectual life had shifted from the Western Empire to Constantinople, to Alexandria, to Pergamum, to Ephesus,

and the cities along the coast of Asia Minor and in the the interior, Antioch, etc.

And there was a more vibrant culture there.

So most of the scientific thought and the historical thought and great novels, Apuleius' Golden Ass, they come from the eastern part.

And that's why the eastern part survived.

It was wealthier and it was more Hellentic.

And Hellenism was absorbed by the Western Empire, but it turned out to be absorbing.

They always say that the West

Romans conquered Greeks and were conquered by Greeks, and there's something to that.

So it's a great...

He had a, there was one other great, his last historian, we talked about the philosophers, Bootheus, etc., but Boethius, I mean, and that was Procopius.

And he lived about 100 years after the death of Ammianus Marsilius, around 500.

And he wrote, that was his apex.

He wrote

three

great

treatises.

I've read them all.

I've read them actually two of them in Greek.

And

one was called The Wars.

It's a history of the Emperor Justinian unleashing his great genius, Belisarus, to conquer or at least get a peace on the eastern frontier with Persia and then free him up to...

It's about the destruction of the Bandal kingdom in North Africa in the 530s and then the the invasion of Sicily and Italy by the Byzantines and the effort in the 530s and 540s to reconstitute

the entire Roman Empire.

And they came within 70, 80%

of

finalizing.

All they didn't get was Spain and Gaul.

They got most of Italy, they got the

Dalmatia, they got the Balkans, they got North Africa, they got Egypt, they got almost everything.

But there was the great plague that he describes, Procopius, that took about a million people out of the empire and the urban cities of the Byzantines.

And then

eventually there was a rise of Islam in the 7th century that took away a lot of their provincial success in North Africa.

So that's what the natural,

and it's really that the stars of that are Justinian, who Procopius was really close to, and Belisarus.

At some point, he turned on both of them.

And he turned on Theodora, the ex-prostitute wife of Justinian, and Antonia, who may have had the same background, but was the wife of Belisarus.

Belisarus was relieved of command by Justinian, given no credit for his 20-year career of saving Justinian.

He talks about, he calls it the secret history.

It's one of the most graphic,

sex-filled, gross things you can imagine.

It's about the origies of the emperor.

It's really lurid, and it's even more lurid because this is a supporter of Justinian in the histories, the wars, history of the wars.

And now he's, it's a secret document, secret history that he wrote saying, well,

It was all a fraud.

This guy is corrupt.

And he hated the Emperor Theodore.

And he talks about her sex acts and her careers.

He also wrote something called the buildings about the building program and it's an architectural manual

and it's very important because during this period Hague Sofia, the greatest cathedral in Christendom for the next until I think till 1660, the cathedral in Seville, Spain, nothing was bigger.

Unfortunately, Mr.

Erdogan took away its United Nations sacred and

monumental status and turned turned it back into a mosque.

I shouldn't say turned it back.

It was originally a church for 1100 years.

Then Mehmet II, when he conquered Constantinople, turned it into a mosque and put minarets on.

He didn't, his successor put the minarets on.

And then

after the young Turks took over from the Sultanate in the 1920s, they were secular.

And so the League of Nations and the United Nations made it a national shrine,

a global shrine that was non-religious, just an architectural wonder.

And it is a wonder if you go see it.

I've seen it a number of times, and it's just stunning.

And now it's a mosque.

So those are two authors that are neglected, but they provide almost all we know about the reign of Justinian in the case of Procopius and

several dozen emperors in their reigns

from 100 AD to about 370 AD, 270 years of history.

And they're very good historians.

And when I say good, what does that mean?

They don't explain natural phenomenon through superstition or religion, or they don't write a diatribe about a particular person they like or dislike.

They try to be, as much as you can in those societies, they try to be empirical and disinterested.

And

they explain their methodology.

With the exception of the secret histories, which that's the secret histories.

A little bit over.

I know that

my parents, when I was a young kid, they enjoyed, they did an extension class at Cal State Fresno in great literature.

They had a very good professor at, I won't mention his name, he was kind of iconic at Fresno State, English Department, but he had a lurid side to him.

And he

assigned

He had a, it was sequential history of Western Civ.

You would think it would be Homer and Plato, Plato,

Sophocles, but he assigned Apuleius' golden ass,

which is lurid, and Petronius'

Siratyricon, which is more lurid, and Procopius' Secret History.

And so my parents had these old anchor paperback.

They put them way up in the...

So when I was like 12, I heard my dad saying, I don't think we should be reading these things.

And I climbed up there.

and I found them all and I read them.

I think that's what sparked my interest in classics.

Yeah.

I'm just kidding, but they were pretty lurid.

All right, let's take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about international things going on in the international world.

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen show.

And

so we have just a few things going on.

I noticed that the Biden administration has been accused of keeping intelligence info from Israel, and that was out of the Washington Post.

So that was surprising.

And then also a video of Anthony Blinken playing a guitar in Neil Young's Keep On Rockin' in the Free World.

That's a terrible song.

I know it was a single day.

It was Powder on the Sand or Heart of Gold or something.

That was the worst of all of his songs.

Yeah, it was.

And he looked stiff as a board when he was playing.

You know, they did John Kerry.

Do you remember he had James Taylor play when he was Secretary of State?

What is it with the left?

Didn't Bill Clinton play the saxophone or something?

That worked for him because he put on shades and he actually played as if he was almost like a famous black jazz.

and it was on Arsenio Hall as I remember.

That's right.

And it helped him.

But these guys are stiff and they,

I don't know, it's a joke.

And

it it's he also said something as I recall that was really troublesome.

He said that he didn't have to have an election until the war was over or he implied that.

Maybe you can correct me, but I'm pretty sure that I read that.

And my point is, if that's true, it's just part of this double standard.

If Netanyahu said well we had a

bipartisan cabinet just like you urged us to and we have my two opposition leaders are in there and we have a triad but you know what it's just too acrimonious and you guys are trying to unseat me and overthrow me and I'm an elected official of a sovereign nation and I'm not going to have an election until we destroy him all can you imagine the outrage

can you imagine the outrage of Zelensky

if if he said to the United States well the United States says to Israel, let's say tomorrow Zelensky wakes up and says, you know,

I'm a little worried that we're hitting some collateral targets.

So before we hit Russian-occupied areas in the Donbass and Crimea, we're going to drop leaflets and we're going to text everybody.

And then we're going to bring in convoys of food to make sure that they get aid.

Number two,

I just don't like the idea of trying to be disproportionate.

We're going to be proportionate.

So we're not going to use any more force than is used against us.

We're going to be proportionate.

And I think that I'm going to be continuing this dictatorship and canceling all elections, political parties, and habeas corpus until I see fit.

We're going to do that.

And you know what?

Maybe we should have ceasefires, because that's what everybody wants.

We'll have to have a ceasefire.

That's right.

The United States would say, what are you doing?

You don't win with

one-sided ceasefires.

You don't win by warning the enemy where you're going to come.

You don't win by being proportionate.

You're supposed to be disproportionate.

That's why we give you these instruments of death.

Right?

Yes.

So I don't understand the disconnect.

Yeah.

Well, I have two more stories, Victor, and you can tell me which one you want first.

Illustrious Mayor Adams of New York or King Charles III?

I'll try Eric Adams.

He's easier to caricature.

Okay, let's go to the door with Eric Adams.

He got up in front of an audience and said that he thought migrants could solve his lifeguard shortage problem because they must be good swimmers, given that they were illegally came across the border.

So he thinks if anybody can swim the Rio Grande, that they're good swimmers?

And they'd be able to save people as lifeguard shorts.

People actually swam and they usually wade across.

They found a ford and waded, or they had little rubber dinghy.

I know.

He is so insane, that mayor.

And then,

Eric, they are here illegally.

They broke the law.

They're residing illegally.

Just because Joe Biden is in campaign mode and he says, I'm going to let 4,000 illegal people enter the United States as my future constituents doesn't make it legal.

This is going to,

can you imagine the debate if Donald Trump said, why'd you open the border?

And

You guys didn't have bite bars.

He said, so you think 4,000, well, yeah,

4,000 is okay.

Anything other than that?

And I stopped it.

Why is 4,000 okay?

Why is anybody okay?

Do you say that you can have 16,

I don't know, assaults and the 17th is not okay?

Can you steal six cars and then not steal the seventh car?

Or, well, that's just felony.

Okay, can you walk across 10

red lights as a pedestrian?

The 11th is against the law.

Once you start to modulate that and say that you don't have to obey the law, and is that the kind of person you want to come in here?

The first act that they did was to break our laws, and the second was to

reside illegally, maybe that makes a pattern of behavior.

So Eric Adams, I don't know what he's talking about.

I really don't.

And then there's Prince Charles.

Are you talking about his portrait?

Yeah, his recent.

I liked it.

They were so critical of it, and I really liked it.

It was a beautiful palette that was

his face looked actually pretty good.

It made him look distinguished.

Yeah.

They kind of hid his protruding ears.

You know, he had sort of elephantine ears.

I do too.

That's why I'm making fun of him.

But he didn't have those big ears and angular face in the picture.

And the red made his cheeks look red and healthy.

But I don't understand.

I think they overdid a little bit the red background.

Yeah.

It just, the idea was to just blend it in as if he was in a red union suit and Satan or something.

Oh, I don't think so.

It was kind of a very pretty color of red, but I think they must have been taking the red from his Welsh guard, I think.

It was the Welsh Guards, and he was made a regimental colonel in 1975.

And so the red palette came from his uniform, I I believe.

And then they did an interesting thing, and they sort of blended him with the background.

And he was kind of coming out almost as a relief from this background.

It kind of reminded me, it was much better, but it reminded me when Jerry Brown was first elected

in

74, and he left in 82.

And there was traditional, and when you go up the steps of the Capitol in Sacramento, they have these distinguished portraits, you know, oil paintings of, you know, Leland Stanford, governor, Pat Brown Sr.,

Goody Knight, and all that.

Well, they had Jerry Brown.

He did a postmodern group.

You remember he

there's no framing.

He had this huge head at an angle.

It just looked like it was.

And everybody got really angry about it.

But that was postmodern.

This had classical lines to it.

So

it wasn't as bothersome.

I don't know why.

It's very tragic that he

no one really,

I mean, he and Kate both have these serious cancers.

I don't know why,

I don't want to, without being too intrusive, why don't just the crown say, look,

this is what they have, right?

When Ronald Reagan got, you know, colon cancer, they said he's got colon cancer.

When he got shot, they said the bullet went right through the chest cavity and collapsed

lung.

Yeah, yeah.

So, why don't

they just?

I don't know.

Does he have,

have we been told what type of cancer he has?

Is it prostate cancer?

Oh, I don't know.

I haven't heard.

I've heard, I've read everything that it's metastasized.

Yeah, but I think they're all speculating.

They don't know.

Yeah, and the same thing with her: it's ovarian cancer, it's stomach cancer, it's abdominal cancer, it's fallopian.

Who knows?

But I think just to quell all of the crazy rumors, they should just have a terse two-line

King Charles suffer is

fighting heroically, metastaside, fill in the blank, pancreas, Pusca, whatever it is,

and leave it at that.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, while you were talking about Mayor Adams, I was thinking,

can't New Yorkers elect somebody better?

And then I remembered that, but think about it.

Lori Lightfoot, who we thought was so bad, and like,

wouldn't Chicago, after having this horrible mayor, elect somebody much better and i don't think that brandon johnson is any better than lori lightfoot and i don't think if they got rid of eric

she's that who's the crazy mayor in the city outside of chicago

the african-american woman who spends all the money because oh yes i know you know they brought i think they're bringing lori lightfoot in as an outsider outsider yeah auditor for her and they i just don't think you know she's the one that was famous for saying i'm just not going to talk to white reporters anymore.

Can you imagine somebody just saying 70 years after the Civil War, I'm just not going to talk to black reporters.

I'm not going to talk to Latino reporters.

How long does it keep going like this before people get just,

I shouldn't say before they're tired of it.

Yeah, well, I think what the left is.

Brandon Johnson is destroying the city.

Yes.

I don't know why he's destroying the city.

Is it he's getting back at, he feels that there's all these wealthy people, all these wealthy white people, maybe, and he hates them.

And he thinks that the more he spends, the more they have to pay taxes.

But he's just destroying the middle class.

They're leaving

Illinois in droves.

I think Chicago is in a doom loop.

So funny because that was always the Midwestern value city under the corrupt dailies that worked.

And New York was incompetent.

Liberals didn't know how to win the city.

But whatever you say about Chicago, Carl Sandberg City, muscular arm city, that's where

the butchering is, and that's where the hogyards are, and that's the canned meat, and that's the smelly Chicago.

Remember Carl Sandberg's pay end to Chicago.

I think he'd roll over in his grave if he saw it.

Yeah.

Well, last thing for this podcast, Victor,

Steve Bannon, I noticed his appeal or his case to the appellate court was they upheld the contempt of Congress charge.

So the appellate court.

I don't understand that.

I don't understand the equality of the law.

Eric Holder, during the fast and furious scandal, when it was shown that the U.S.

government was sending sophisticated small arms, semi-automatic weapons to people in Mexico, supposedly to see where they would end up or to whom they would sell them.

Who knows what the reason was.

Some people have suggested it was a way to

embarrass the Second Amendment lobby and say, you know, look, all these guns in America, now they're in.

Who knows what it was, but he was subpoenaed to testify.

And remember, he didn't go.

He said he was Obama's wingman, and he just said, nope.

And they held him in contempt.

He was the first Attorney General.

I think he might be the only Attorney General that was held in contempt.

And that's a criminal referral.

And he didn't even, they didn't even, he was completely exempt.

And Peter Navarro is in jail right now.

The economic trade advisor to, senior advisor to Donald Trump, because he didn't show up for,

but they're criminalizing it.

Hunter Biden, you remember?

He didn't show up.

They offered him, they sent an appearance.

Remember he showed up with all of his videos, they were making a film of him, and he came in without warning on the wrong day just to show you that he could come to Congress, but he had refused to honor the subpoena.

And then I guess his dad talked to him and said, Look, we're putting as many Trump people in jail as we can.

And if you don't obey a subpoena from Congress, I'll have to pardon you, and that'll look bad in the election year.

It's just mind-boggling.

You either...

You either issue subpoenas and you show up, and if you don't, you go to jail, or you don't, or you do.

Either one.

Don't, do, do, don't.

But you don't just,

well, if you're one of the good anointed people, then you can skip it like Eric Holder, or you can fob it off like Hunter did for weeks.

But if you're a right-wing Neanderthal like Bannon and the bar, you've got to go to jail.

And the courts are implicit in the double standard.

Yeah, they sure are.

Well, Victor, we have a comment from

one of your listeners on Apple Podcasts.

And it's titled Circus of Corruption.

And you've got five stars from him, by the way.

But think of how many families and friendships could be restored if Friday's episode was required listening to every Democrat still watching mainstream news.

Thank you for confirming for us that we are not in the Twilight Zone.

And we pray more wake up from the haze of propaganda.

Americans don't deserve this manufactured chaos, lawlessness, and erasure of history.

And that is from Tim Sgall.

So thank you very much, Tim's Gall.

I guess

here's a very good point.

We're in the Berea Soviet KGB internal surveillance mode that we find the target and then we invent the crime, don't we?

We've got to get Donald Trump, so let's invent crimes.

And we have to invent crimes that have never been used before, otherwise we'll institutionalize the practice.

So,

you know, we have have to invent crimes and then it will be a one-time thing.

We're going to make up a crime that says if you

exaggerate, and he did not, but if you did exaggerate the value of your assets to get a loan which you paid timely and to the profit of the lending agency with no complaint after going through a bank audit of your resources and assets and collateral, you're guilty.

And if you call up a registrar and say, I know there's some votes there that you didn't count, you're guilty.

And if some woman comes forward and says, there's a now statute limitations, it's no longer applied because a left-wing friend, you know,

Solidarity, gave me a one-year exemption and maybe 30 years ago, can't remember.

I had a dress.

Oh, that wasn't the right dress.

Oh,

I'm going to sue you.

And you're going to pay me $73 million

for losing my what, my job, which the editor said I was fired for my incompetence nothing to do with you know the notoriety that i created myself and then you're alvin bragging said hmm federal attorneys said no prosecutor

no prosecution for a

basically a bureaucratic error that you can argue that if he said that the non-disclosure funds was a campaign expense, we would have gone after him for that.

And if he said it's illegal, we'll go.

So it's no offense, just drop it.

And then Alvin Bragg said, ah, but but it's used to hide,

to facilitate a greater crime.

But I don't have to tell you what the crime is, but it must have been used for something else.

And

we never have used this before, and we will never use it again.

And Jack Smith came in and said, I'm going to make a crime that says when you have a civil dispute or a bureaucratic dispute with the archives, over

documents

and you take them and they're under dispute.

I'm going to indict you for stealing them and something and I'm going to rearrange them too and lie about it.

So you take pictures of it and as a stage pictures of your archive just to make you look bad.

And then I'm going to

charge you with an insurrection.

Even though you said, you know, be sure to patriotically and peacefully walk to the Capitol.

So these have never been charged before.

They'll never be charged again.

They're all bills of attainder that were focused on Donald Trump.

Yeah.

And they're all in blue states except for maybe Jack Smith, but Miami's pretty blue itself.

Southern Florida traditionally has been blue.

And they're blue judges and blue juries and blue prosecutors and they're designed to destroy him before in election year.

And nobody knows how to react to it.

Nobody, every Republican you talk to, conservative, independent, fair-minded Democrat, goes, this is destroying the country.

And to stop it, we must do A,

the same thing to them to get the message.

B, take it like a man and not try to be tit for tat because if we do, we're no different than Peru or Colombia.

C, expose it and keep exposing it.

Yes.

And shame them.

They don't know any shame.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, thank you very much.

We're at the end of our podcast here, and thanks to our listeners as well.

We appreciate you.

Thank you for listening, everyone.

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

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