Early Christian Thinkers and Signs of the Changing Times

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

We are, this is our weekend edition, and we usually do something more cultural.

Victor's been having interviews lately, so we've left off on discussions of literature in Western civilization, and we're at

Boetheus and St.

Augustine for today, and that will be our middle segment.

But otherwise, we're going to look at some news stories that we needed to finish up on from Friday.

And that will be some good news coming from the college campuses and people related to the college campuses.

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

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We're back.

Again, this is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, and you can find Victor on X at VD Hansen, and he has a Facebook page called Hansen's Morning Cup, and you can join that as well.

Victor, there seems to be some good news coming down the pipe very slowly, a trickle.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's president, Sally Kornbluth,

has

banned diversity statements on applications for

faculty positions.

And then I'll tell you the second thing, and then you can give a commentary on either one.

There were 13 federal judges that wrote to Columbia, and they said they wouldn't be hiring the students from Columbia.

And I've heard other shows talk about it, but I was surprised that nobody said exactly what they said.

They said, if you do not identify these students and punish them so that we know who they are, all we have left is to assume all Columbia students coming out of your law school could be them, and we don't want these in our court.

So I thought it was

a very good letter that they wrote.

And I got so many people, oh, well, the nice Columbia students will be punished.

But

that may be true, but

it's necessary.

I'm sorry.

Oh, you believe in collective punishment?

I don't, but the way that they put it, we can't identify them, so we have to just assume that.

They can identify them.

Well, hopefully they will.

They have artificial intelligence-guided facial recognition.

Well, as long as Columbia goes about doing it, that's what they're saying.

Even Columbia, the access to pictures in the Columbia Registrar of Students is public information.

And if they allow them to have the security cameras, But there may be security cameras that were on the street near Columbia.

Who knows?

I'm sure the NYPD is looking at them.

But the point is,

it's kind of ironic because the Ivy League and the elite

promote their brand

on the principle of collectivism.

In other words, you come here and we don't really care about how you do or behave.

All you need is our cattle brand.

So when you leave with a Columbia BA,

it's very unlikely.

This is the insidious message, the implicit message that they give to potential applicants.

Come to Columbia, pay the $90,000 as if you were Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, da-da-da-da-da-da,

and you get a cattle brand.

It's kind of like saying in the old days, if you had a Cadillac, I know people say it's a piece of junk, but I'm not going to comment on that.

But the Cadillac didn't mean what particular model or whether it was a lemon or not, you know what I'm saying, or Mercedes.

It was just, it was a brand.

And

it didn't really matter how you did.

You just said, I am applying to a job and I have an MBA from Columbia or something.

So they're saying, okay, you guys traffic in collectivism, then until you can prove otherwise, we assume that people in the law school that are going to wish to clerk as

so-called careerists with trajectories that have no end because they're elites, that for us to help your trajectory and for us to, you have to ensure us that you were not part of this law-breaking

anti-Semitic crowd.

So that's what they're doing.

And that's a pushback.

And this Sefanik, is that her name, the Columbia president?

It was Cornbluth.

Oh, wait, no, no, no, I'm sorry.

Yeah, you know, that's MIT.

Yeah, that's MIT.

Yeah, but she's way over her head, and she said so many contradictory things.

I don't know why they always want to say that they always want to praise the, we really respect your right to pro we really, really,

I mean,

I'm out in a farm today and I'm looking out the window this morning and I saw two people working very hard in the almond orchard.

I've never seen them protest.

I never have.

So does everybody protest

while on their job?

And

I've been at the Hoover Institution for 21 years.

I've never said to one of the three directors, you know what, I'm not happy about the treatment of raisin farmers, so I'm going to go on a sit-down strike.

Or if you're saying, well, that's irrelevant, Victor, let's get more germane.

Okay, there's a lot of things that Stanford does that I don't agree with, so not in my name.

And what would happen to me if I did that?

I would be somewhere already fired.

So these people have, these protesters have this idea that because they're students and they're elites and they're wealthy and they've been privileged and pampered

and helicoptered their whole life, they feel that they have an exemption from the normal circumstances that most people are subject to.

And these judges are trying to say, you know what, you're in the real world.

I don't have to hire you.

I don't have to hire anybody.

But I'm surely, and I think they're saying I would trust a person from the University of Tennessee Law School before I trust you.

And so

this name is in free fall, the reputation of these universities.

As I said earlier, they're going full Bud light, CNN.

It's going to come,

unless they can take their medicine, which

in terms of Libby, they feel is worse than the disease, they're going to not stop this free-for-all.

You know what it would take.

A, reinstatement of the SAT.

B,

follow the Supreme Court directives of American hiring, admission, promotion, tenure, and not try to evade it.

By the way, the law dean at Berkeley, remember Chairman Niske, I think his name is, the one that has party hijacked by radical,

he was on a tape, I watched it the other day, where he was lecturing in his law class,

mechanisms how to get around

statutory prohibitions of using race.

And he actually said, now when you're in a hiring committee, we all know we're going to hire DEI, but the key is don't say it.

Please don't say it.

I thought, you know, getting back to nemesis and cosmic justice, when you did that in such a cynical fashion from a position of authority and teaching young minds to break the law and sort of

circumvent around it in a way that undermines it, when you know it's illegal, that you're just not supposed to say it, that you're supposed to violate the law, but don't leave incriminating, you know, evidence of it in your tracks.

Yeah.

And then somebody comes into your home and hijacks your very generous dinner and makes fun of you as an anti-Semite, which I mean, in an anti-Semitic fashion, makes fun of you as a Jewish dean,

this is part of the problem, that when you start to break the rules and you invite in students who, by your own admission, shouldn't meet meritocratic standards, then what do you expect?

You can't protect yourself.

your zip code, your money, your stature, your letters after your name.

So I'm glad that they did this, that the judges did this.

The DEI is

on fumes now.

It's just, in Libby's term,

medicine's worse than disease.

Right now, everybody knows it's bankrupt and it's racist.

But there's just a few people brave enough to say that it's racist, it's anti-white, it's anti-Western.

It's pro-tribal, it's destroying meritocracy, it'll undermine the whole United States, it's divisive.

But they can't quite say that, but you can see that it's falling by the weight of its contradiction.

So

you see judges saying no more.

And you can see that a lot of the Ivy League are quietly, they loudly dropped the SAT, and now they're quietly reinstating it.

And they're saying basically, we did this, been there for four years, hired by race, got the students, found out they couldn't do the work that we had formerly required, and they got angry because they didn't do it.

And rather than studying hard or going to

remedial classes,

they just blamed us as racist.

And they want the standards changed.

And if we do that, we're going to destroy our brand.

And we've already done it to someone, in the case of Yale.

Well,

I admire the Massachusetts Institute of Technology president.

However, since they've been hiring faculty based on DEI, even before it became clear to the broader masses what they were doing, they've been doing it for

decades, a decade or at least two decades.

And so their whole faculty is already oriented that way.

So dropping it might not do anything for these hiring faculty.

If they paid better, they would be fascist, because these are the same ideologues that talk about the horrendous McCarthy oath, you know, during the McCarthy period.

You had to say that I, before you, the famous classicist Moses Finley, for example, was a brilliant classicist.

He was also a Marxist and he was at Cornell and he refused to take an oath of loyalty to the United States.

And he said that that violated his First Amendment and he went to England and became a very famous ancient historian.

He was a very, you know, I heard him speak at the

Seder lectures once, but

that was the cry of the heart of the left all this period was that you can't have loyalty oaths to the United States, that somebody doesn't have to prove their loyalty to get a job.

And that was eventually thrown out of court.

And then what did they do when they got power?

They went right back to what the conservative traditionalists did.

They started having loyalty oaths.

But this was worse.

because it wasn't a loyalty to your own native soil that had born and nurtured you, it was loyalty to this abstract Marxist doctrine of DEI.

And, you know,

there's always stories in the media where some faculties who don't believe in it will write a DEI mandatory statement saying, I believe in diversity of thought as well.

Bingo, you're fired.

We're not going to look at you.

So everybody knows it.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so that's another sign that it's not workable because when you have a commissar system, the mediocre and the incompetent come out of the woodwork and then they boast whatever the acceptable ideology is.

That's what I meant by the paid better, they be fascist.

They're just doing this DEI stuff.

The more, the better, the more intense, the more vehement, the better, because they want a job and they want a career success.

And anybody who doesn't parrot their line doesn't get hired.

It's going to get a lot of people.

Yeah, this is in America.

SAT reinstated.

DI OS probably on the way out.

Missing news story.

Thousands of lives have been destroyed by people who were turned down because of their race or gender, who were very talented.

I'm talking about either a Federal Aviation Administration traffic controller, a United pilot,

a brilliant lieutenant colonel in the U.S.

Army, a brilliant linguist who should have been hired at an Ivy League campus,

a very

brilliant science teacher at a Cal State campus.

They're all been written off.

These people should apologize for all the damage they've done.

Because they're always, they're always,

because of Jim Crow and the prior, they're always saying, this is, you know, we're 60 years into the civil rights, 70 years into it, three generations.

And yet they're always saying that you and the fourth generations from segregation in the South have to pay.

But what do you pay for when here and now you're implementing segregation in a neo-Confederate fashion?

I mean that literally.

Separate graduation, separate dorms by race, separate safe spaces, all predicated on race, nullifying federal laws.

It's pretty Confederate to me.

Yeah, it sure is.

Well, I think that

it's going to come down to the board of trustees of these various institutions to hire presidents that are, and chancellors that are going to start demanding that they get the best people when the hiring committee comes together, because otherwise they're going to still be bringing in a lot of DEI candidates.

But they're sheep.

They're sheep.

I know.

So it's a board of trustees.

Yes, so what they only care about is their comparative prestige.

So if you're at University of Penn, you want to be better than MIT or Harvard, and vice versa.

So, these left-wing boards push it, and then the first defection they see,

oh, wait a minute, maybe Yale's going to have the SAT back.

Maybe they're going to go from 80% A's down to 50%.

Maybe they're going to get better students, and they're going to get a name in employers.

We better follow suit.

And somebody will say, Well, wait a minute, after George Floyd, you said you were DEI.

Yeah, that was then, then we never believed in anything.

We just did it because the mob said so, and we didn't want to have protests.

That's how they think.

They have no principles, really.

They're just always

whatever is acceptable to

in terms of what gives the greatest prestige, money, success, influence, they always gravitate to.

Well, there's some other things that are positive, and that is in the polls.

We have a generation lab poll of about 1,250 students, and it shows that the

issue of

conflagration in the Middle East is far down the list of their concerns.

Ninth on the list, and only 13% of the population they

surveyed said that it was of any importance.

And then there is the Gallup, not a Gallup poll, sorry, a Harvard-Harris poll that says approval ratings for Biden on the economy and on foreign affairs is only 42%

and on immigration 38%.

So lots of good news as far as people seeing what's going on these days.

Yes.

So we now know that the majority of students, as we always suspected, are sane, just like the majority of Americans are sane.

And Joe Biden is polling.

38% approval rating.

Most people see that his agendas on the border, foreign policy, crime, energy, they're all bankrupt.

And he's still there.

And he's still committing collective suicide, in my opinion, of the Western project, civilization, United States in particular.

Most students are against what's going on.

They had their graduations canceled.

They had their classes in person canceled.

They paid the money for it.

They weren't.

The only thing these people understand, again, is money.

So it doesn't really matter that the majority of students oppose these radical Palestinian students and Hamas supporters.

It won't change because

the administrative mind will always bend toward the side that pressures the most.

And their deepest fear is to walk into their office one day and see a bunch of students taking over and screaming and yelling and calling them fascistic names and then endangering their tenure.

So they're all overpaid.

They all have too many perks.

We all know that now.

So

my point is that until you have a way of really getting their attention, it won't matter.

What would get their attention if the students who had their graduation canceled and their classes canceled and they

have to go on Zoom or the teachers didn't turn in their grades,

if they sued.

And they said, we had a contractual de facto agreement with you, and you broke it because you let let a few students hijack and ruin our college experience.

And we'll see what that would happen.

That would get their attention.

In case of the Americans, they've had it with Joe Biden and they've had it with the left.

But they don't know what to do about it because when they turn on the T V, twenty-five million of them get their news from ABC, NBC, PBS, NPR, MSNBC,

and they watch popular entertainment, television.

The kids are from K through 12.

And

some kids are on the university campus.

They imbibe Disney stuff, Target stuff, Anheuser-Busch stuff, United stuff.

And all of the institutions are weighed against them.

And so it's very hard to buck Mark Zuckerberg and his $419 million Facebook use infusion of money into the 2020 campaign.

What I'm getting at is, yes, we have the people on campus and off, but we have to find a way to translate that people power into actual arresting this Jacobin project.

And it's very hard when they have the institutional power.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about Boethius and St.

Augustine.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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We're back.

Victor, so we're at the end of the Roman Empire with Augustine, a fifth century individual, and then Boethius is a sixth century philosopher.

And they both have tragic endings.

That's probably one of the interesting things about them.

But Augustine becomes one of the fathers of the Christian church.

And he writes two very important texts, the Confessions and the City of God.

And in both of them, he does some seminal work.

The Confessions is always said to be the first autobiography, but more importantly, he talks about how faith is, what faith is and where it comes from.

And it doesn't have a very specific origin, but that it's a feeling that you get at some point.

And so,

the later Protestants would pick up on that, that faith was just a gift.

It wasn't something that you could tangibly identify.

And then Boethius, of course, was

trying to reconcile

Christian principles and Neoplatonism.

And so I'm interested to hear about both.

You know, it's funny, I was in a graduate seminar as a young 21-year-old PhD student, and I said, Augustine, and my British professor said, what did you say?

And I said, I said, Augustine.

Where did you get that?

And I said, I listened to Joan Baez.

I dreamed I saw St.

Augustine.

And he said, it's Augustine.

It's Augustine.

Oh.

And I said, okay, so I went out and got, I think it was Webster's or Cassell's, and it said U.S.

permissible Augustine.

Oh, wow.

In the U.S.

And he got really angry at me.

And

I don't know, what is it?

St.

Augustine, Florida, or St.

Augustine, Florida.

It's Augustine, isn't it?

I don't know.

I don't know.

You just say.

I'm ignorant.

I plead ignorance.

But

everybody should read the seminal biography of Peter Brown, Augustine, Augustine of Hippo.

And it's a great biography.

And so why do we know who he is?

He lived to be a, you know, I guess he was born,

mid-450s, and he, excuse me, mid-350s, and he died in 430.

And he died in Hippo.

Hippo Rigias, and that's a city in Numidia, kind of where

Tunisia is.

It's about 150, I guess 100 miles from

Carthago, Noah, the Roman city.

And it was being attacked by the Vandal Kingdom.

And the Vandal Kingdom, remember, swept through,

came from probably eastern Germany or Poland, swept through the Empire,

sacked Rome, and then went through Iberia and then crossed into Morocco.

and then swept and took over Carthage.

And he was

during a siege, and he made the city, everybody was starving there.

People suggest that he was one of the people starved to death.

But you're right, he had two major works.

But the importance is that in this period between the death of Christ and the first four centuries, or the

early fourth century adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the empire,

there wasn't really much in the Bible as far as a blueprint of how to form a Christian church.

There were the testimonies of the four gospels, and then later there were the Acts of Paul and Revelations, etc.

But there's no canonical

Father, Son, Holy Ghost.

Is Jesus divine or is he human?

Is he the same as God or is he separate?

If you die,

Do you go to, and you haven't been baptized?

Do you go to heaven?

Do you go to hell?

Is there anything in between?

If you're a murderer or you're a rapist, which is worse?

Do you go to limbo?

There are all of these questions of a practical church.

And I know that in a pragmatic sense, they took the Roman blueprint of provincial

officials, legates and praetors and things like that.

And even the

clothing and the

emblems of the church came from the Roman Empire, you know, the pointed hats and the staff and everything else.

And the prefets were based on the organization of the Roman Empire, Roman Catholic.

But there were still all of these philosophical questions.

So, what happened in this collapsing, and remember it's collapsing, this is a terrible time to be alive, no matter what the new classic says.

Well, no, it isn't.

There was no such thing as a fall of Rome.

It was more an exciting reformation of a great new late antiquity.

No, I think archaeological evidence has sort of solved that.

That in terms of glass and everyday things, they disappeared very rapidly from the major urban centers,

and population declined.

But nonetheless, in this troubled period, there was all these interpretations

of Christianity, and somebody needed to codify them.

And so one of the practical works of Augustine is he went after them all.

The Manichaeans, that was an old mane,

kind of anti-humanistic, or it was more of a cosmic force between light and dark, good and evil, and it had been adopted onto Christianity.

He was a Manichaean himself, as young, as he says in the Confessions.

That's really a story of his early life, and his mother, Monica, and all of his.

He was,

for some reason, he was very influenced by the lost treatise of Cicero.

I think it was the Hortensius about rhetoric.

He thought that was critical in the confessions.

But nonetheless, he warred against the Manichaeans and kind of ostracized them.

He went after the Donatists, Donatus, Donatist, and they were kind of like the Liberists.

They were,

I don't know what the word would be, but they felt that people

who were Christians had to be pure of sin, especially the represent representatives in the church.

And that almost implied that you could find God in Christianity through mechanisms other than the church if it was corrupt.

And he warred against that.

He warred against

the Donatists, the Manichaeans,

and the Pelagians, I guess you call them.

And they were people who fought him on original sin.

In other words, it was kind of a fundamental,

why do we do bad things?

And

I'm not saying they were Rassoians, but they said that people were not born evil.

That

Garden of Eden and all of that, they had good in them, and then they would develop it, and then they would be tempted.

And he started with a negative proposition that we're born with original sin.

I think he was right, because human nature being what it is in the raw, is the Lord of a flies condition.

When the lights go out in New York, it takes about five hours to get expelled from the Garden of Eden.

Do you want me to tell you what Rousseau would say about that?

No idea.

Man was born into chains, and he was enchained by religion and community and law and tradition.

And it's so true.

And we were lucky to meet noble savages in the New World that were so happy and

they were free to behead and human sacrifice and cannibalism.

But nonetheless,

he codified the early church to what we call Roman Catholicism.

He re-established the Trinity of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost as parts of a divine entity.

And I mentioned original sin.

And so he was the father of what was a Christian church.

And he was able, the great schism with what would become Orthodoxy hadn't happened yet.

So he was kind of a codifier and healer.

Boethius was a generation, no, I'd say two or three generations later.

He,

I don't think we know when he was born, he died somewhere around 525, 530, so he was probably in his 60s.

But he was a Christian, but his great

contribution was that he, as a Roman

and a Latin speaker, even though it was after the Gothic

invasions and the the Gothic hijacking of Rome, the empire that fell and collapsed.

He went to Athens and actually learned Greek.

And so he brought to his learning, and because of the turmoil in the empire, Greece had been cut off.

And there were fewer and fewer people in Rome that had access to classical texts like Plato, Aristotle,

Epicurus, etc.

And he knew all of those texts.

But he was also a secularist in the sense that he became a senator and a high official under the Gothic king, Ostgoth,

Theodoric.

And he was very successful.

And of course, as a Christian, he took it seriously.

And

he opposed a lot of the corruption he saw at Rome, especially the barbarian.

And people had said, you know, as a native

Roman citizen, he was unduly, he was either conspiring with the center of internal Rome and Constantinople, because a lot of people in Italy and the West that had fallen to the

so-called barbarian invasions looked toward re-establishing ties with Constantinople that was a fortress of, and this was right, he's a contemporary, right when he died, was the ascendants of Belisarus, the brilliant general of Justinian.

So there was going to be a Byzantine effort that would succeed in taking back all of North Africa from the Vandals and then getting actually into Italy.

And

have you seen those churches in Mavenna, those Byzantine churches,

they occupied those for 300 years plus.

They took 75% of Italy back.

And so there was always suspicion that

even though the Goths and the Oscars had taken over Rome, that there were people conniving.

So he was...

When he was fighting corruption, he was also accused of disloyalty.

And we don't know how he was executed, but of all these treatises he wrote on mathematics and science that were trying to incorporate Greek learning to a Latin audience, he wrote something called The Consolation of Philosophy.

And again,

like the Confessions, I mean, there's two big works of Augustine, the Confessions, about his early life, and then The City of God.

And that's written in answer to the accusation

that

the advent of Christianity had been responsible for the sack of the Vandals in 410,

either in one of two ways, either that

it had not stopped the decadence.

The church itself had been decadent and it lent themselves vulnerable to a foreign invasion, or

it had created

It had rejected the classical virtues of paganism, the pagan gods, and the idea of if you want peace, prepare for war, martial readiness.

In other words, it was Turn the Other Cheek Sermon on the Mount, and that was disastrous.

So he wrote The City of God to try to explain that there's two worlds.

There's a world of the material and the political, and then there's the world of the spiritual.

And the spiritual is what matters, because empires come and go, but

you have an eternal soul.

And that's a

it's heavily influenced by Ciceronian rhetorical techniques when you read it.

Boethius wrote this constellation of philosophy and it's based on the Socratic idea of a dialogue.

I think it's somewhat influenced by the Crito when the hoi nomoi, the laws tell Socrates, well Socrates,

You don't, your friends want to break you out of jail and you don't have to drink the hemlock.

And he says, well, I didn't do anything wrong.

You introduced new gods and you corrupted the youth.

Well, you know, that's not true.

It doesn't matter whether that's true or not.

That is the law, and you have been condemned in a court of law.

And if you escape, you undermine the authority of the nomoi, us.

So they're an inanimate group of people who are personified.

And

so a millennium later,

Boethius has philosophia talk as a female.

And

he's kind of complaining, oh, wow, man, I had a great life.

My two kids were consuls.

And then, bam, here I am in jail.

I'm going to be executed.

And she instructs him about

the way to face

tragedy and misadventure and unforetold disaster with

philosophy.

And one of the things they come up with is the rota fortuna, the idea of wheel of a fortune, that all of us have these bouts with illness, health, success, failure, prosperity, poverty.

And if we fall victim to being high and low, then our life and our soul are damaged.

And the best way to do it is with fortitude and look at ourselves as a third person looking in and saying, oh, Victor, well, That book you wrote was trashed and sold no books.

But on the other hand, there'll be a book someday that will be highly praised and sell.

Oh, Victor,

you got long COVID.

Oh, poor Victor, you think you're special?

Oh, but you also had a year of good health.

That kind of, you know, you have to endure what's there.

It's kind of a predestination.

And that comes from Augustine, I should also note, the idea of predestination.

So those are two works.

I mean, there's a lot of them.

You can read Jerome.

He's got some really,

he translated

the Greek New Testament into the Vulgate Latin.

That is something in itself, the Latin translation of the four Gospels.

And also he wrote letters about the Sack of Rome that are really depressing but interesting.

Porphyry, Plotinus, there's a whole corpus of patristic literature that everybody should read.

But the two great, I think, that the two most likely to be assigned in a Western civilization survey of Western literature are Augustine and Boethius.

And so we're getting near the end of the classical world and next time we'll try to look at some things from the medieval world.

Yeah, you just reminded me of somebody, Cassiodorus.

Wasn't he a

grammar expert or something?

Yes, he was as well.

He was a contemporary of

Boethius.

Boethius, yeah.

I think he was an ally of Boethius.

I'm not sure.

But

this was a very interesting but troubled time.

It was, you know, when the whole world was crashing down on you, and it's funny because given the last two years, I don't know if it was getting COVID or what, but

when I was writing the chapter and the end of everything about Constantinople, I went into kind of a melancholy.

Because you know the story how it's going to end.

And then you see the Emperor Constantine begging people to come and help them.

And then all of these schemes, maybe we can unite the Western and Eastern Church.

And what happened?

There's grass growing inside the walls of Constantinople.

And the Golden Horn has been breached.

People are sailing it.

They shouldn't be there.

And the Bosphorus is cut off.

And then I had the same feeling when I read late antiquity literature that these brave people have just had the misfortune of

living and dying when the whole system is collapsing.

and I get that now almost as well because

you know when I go into town I see people I have no idea who they are and

they I don't know why they're here I don't they don't speak English they don't seem

and

I walk around the farm and I see trash everywhere and I saw some today

on my walk, another washing machine.

And, you know, I see dogs dumped off by people and just the whole coarsening of the culture.

I look at the campuses, I look at what happened to the United States abroad.

You get the impression that you're living in a very trying time, of 15th century Constantinople, or it's 500 AD in North Africa.

And you hope that that's incorrect, that you're really living in, I don't know, 11th century Constantinople

on the cusp of a big Reformation and Renaissance, or you're in Italy around 1500 as the Renaissance is starting to take off, or you're in North Africa when Belisars is on his way there to reclaim it.

But

so

all of these pathologies that we're suffering from, the border or fentanyl or the huge debt or the borrowing of a trillion dollars every 90 days, it's all correctable.

It's collective suicide.

We could stop it tomorrow if all of us just said, no, moss, we're not going to take it anymore.

We're going to stop it.

But I don't know how many there we are.

Today it was announced that this is the lowest fertility rate since the Great Depression.

It's dropped from 2.1 at the turn of the millennium to 1.6.

Wow.

It's really scary.

It's getting close to Japan's.

Yeah, or South Korea's, I think, is the worst.

Yeah, South Korea's 1.3 or something.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go to a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about the news of the day.

Stay with us.

We'll be back.

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Welcome back.

You can find Victor at X, and his handle is V D Hansen.

And he has a Facebook page.

Oh, Hansen's Morning Cup.

So join him there.

Victor, there's lots of things, actually, but

I thought the most interesting thing of the news we have left is

there's a pundit, or I shouldn't say pundit, a commentator, Mike Davis, and he's always really interesting.

And I hadn't heard this before, but he said Jim Jordan needs to start investigation, criminal investigations

for conspiracy in the cases against Trump.

Have you heard that?

That that is a possibility, that all these.

Yeah, I have.

And what would would be the basis for that investigation?

It would be calling in some aides of Joe Biden when he remarked, supposedly, that why hasn't Merrick Garland indicted

Donald Trump, which he did do in terms of the campaign on the horizon.

It might be the President of the United States saying stormy weather and laughing about a court case that is

that one of his DOJ top prosecutors has left this prestigious billet in the Department of Justice and for some reason gone to work with a scoundrel, Alvin Bragg.

Who told him to do that?

It might be because Nathan Wade

traveled to the White House to be prepped, apparently, although he billed them, as I said earlier, for the hours of his instruction.

But he came back, apparently.

What would he come back?

Why would he come back from the White House and say,

we got orders from the Dark Tower, the Tower of Sauruman, and we're supposed to time our,

we want to make sure that we don't time, isn't it kind of funny that all of these indictments, because let's just review it for a second.

Donald Trump is being prosecuted for activities that were over a decade old about his

real estate empire by Alvin Bragg.

I mean, Letita James.

Alvin Bragg is talking about a non-disclosure form in 2016 about a sexual act in 2006, 18 years ago.

Jack Smith is talking about

removing documents in January of 2020, four years ago, right?

Almost.

And

Fannie Willis is talking about things four years ago.

So

why are all these

near

these crimes that are at least three or four years old, and some of them going back a decade and a half, why are they all being synchronized to be tried during the election year, right, in succession?

Why didn't they have five, why didn't E.

Jean Carroll and

when Reid Hoffman offered to pay for her

trial, why

why is it all this all in succession?

Why didn't they just try him in 2020?

Why didn't they just say,

you took out Classify, we're going to indict you right now in 2020?

Why didn't Jack Smith do that?

Why didn't Fanny Willis say it's 2016?

2020, we're going to do it in January.

That's when you call in November.

Four months is a good enough time to prepare a case.

Why didn't Letita James say, we're going to do this a decade ago?

You've been doing it all your time, life.

And, you know,

why didn't Alvin Bragg said

this non-disclosure form was, you know, eight years ago?

So, yeah, they're coordinated.

There's no reason for Nathan Wade to be in the White House.

No.

Yeah, so maybe Jim Jordan will get something going.

I don't know.

It's very hard when you have a one-person de facto

margin of error in the House.

All right.

And then, well, you know, speaking of that, Mike Johnson seems to be weathering all of these Marjorie Taylor Greene call for him to,

for a vote to get him out, I guess is what she's threatening to do.

He just said the other day something to the effect of, well, it's just another day in the

House, right?

When he got asked by

a reporter about that.

He's got a certain style that he's developing that he's a constitutional lawyer.

He's pretty right-wing.

And he understands that he only has one or two margin of error and that he's working with

20 in the House that are rhino-Romneyites, right?

And he's dealing with 40 of them that are Matt Gates, right?

And he thinks he represents the majority, but it doesn't matter because he doesn't have a big enough margin for that majority to be

prominent.

So he understands that the Democrats are going to try to cause mischief.

They want money for Ukraine, and he's a Republican that wants Ukraine to.

He either wants Ukraine to defend itself or he thinks, even if I don't want them to have the money, I'd rather make a contingent on the border.

It will be disastrous for the Republicans in November, because if Ukraine blows up with a big, as soon as we cut off money to Ukraine, Putin's going to invade, really start invading, and then they're going to blame us, like who lost China in the 1940s.

So he just kind of, you know,

I'm just going to do my job.

I didn't ask for the job.

There's

certain attractions about that attitude.

Yeah.

Well, there's another image out there this week of Trump at the Miami Grand Prix to all the cheers of the crowd.

And I thought it was a very interesting contrast to Biden in his anti-Semitism speech where he is, you know, calling out against the anti-Semitism.

But everybody's looking at him that, wow, that was October 7th.

and it took you seven months to say that.

And those two images

is the first time

that he's ever said, condemned anti-Semitism without Mende, on the one hand, on the other.

However, we've got to be afraid of Islamophobia.

Remember Corinne Jim Pierre?

When are you going to address anti-Semitism?

We've addressed it, but we really are worried about Islamophobia.

And they can't, that was a tick.

They couldn't stop.

They couldn't mention that 99% of the violence on campus is directed at Jews and not Muslims.

And in fact, Muslims are taking advantage of what they feel is a protected status.

And we can see that from the MIT president, Kornbooth.

She said,

Well, why they asked her months ago, why are you allowing certain places on campus to be open season on Jewish students and just telling them to avoid it?

She said, well, if we suspended them, they would lose their student visa.

Yes.

Duh.

That's the point.

To encourage the others in Admiral Bing fashion, you know.

All right.

And then one more thing on Biden, since we're tying things up here.

I've heard

tale out there that they think May 30th, Memorial Day,

Joe Biden is going to no longer be

the candidate for the Democratic Party.

Have you been hearing that whisper?

I have.

I've heard it from a lot of of people.

I don't know why they get a specific date.

Is it because

they think that everybody's going to be partying at the lake and having beer on Memorial Day?

And all of a sudden, there's, you know, hey, by the way,

Biden's no longer a cannon.

Oh, hand me a beer.

I don't care.

That's part of it.

And maybe it's a clean slate as you go into.

getting near the official summer date.

I don't know.

But

it has something to do with their, not our perception.

We all are on the same page, all of our listeners, and we know what's going on.

But I don't want to pick on him for wearing his hoka

shoes because that's what you wear.

Because that's what I wear.

But in my defense, they're not that wide.

Okay.

And number two is he has that little phalanx so that you can't see how he puts his elbows out like little dolphin fins for balance.

Yeah.

And he goes really fast and the halting steps.

I wonder when I'm going to start doing that.

But anyway, um

there's a sense that he's declining and he's saying some crazy stuff and he's non-popular and they're afraid that he's going to get Donald Trump elected.

And,

most importantly, there's a closing window of opportunity because you can't junk a incumbent president in October, September.

Traditionally, the campaigns always start after Labor Day, but that's too late even then.

If you're going to do the deed, it's like if you can I use this metaphor without suggesting I'm into nihilist rhetoric.

If you're going to stab the king, you've got to finish the king.

You don't wound the king.

Yeah.

So if you're going to go after Joe Biden, you can't, you've got to marshal your forces and know that you have people who will release those delegates.

And you can plan.

And what would be the attractions of that?

You might not have a

furious Chicago mess on your hands.

You could prevent that, and then you could get a wishy-washy talk out of both sides of his mouth, Gavin Newsom, or maybe Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer, who would be younger, more dynamic, and more skilled at

talking out of both sides of your mouth, because they have to.

And

they would be slicker.

Gavin won't say anything.

I mean, for five minutes, Gavin Newsom looks dynamic, and then he runs out of ideas.

He has no ability to think of anything.

So he just starts

repeating platitudes.

Everybody knows that Florida's in worse shape than California.

I think it is.

And that's how he is after five minutes.

But he looks good and dynamic.

And so

maybe they would like something like that.

And then they...

They're also worrying about the unspeakable.

And that is, if they think think

he is declining at such a rate, geometrically, not arithmetically, and he is losing popularity because of that, and they will lose the election, they also, by

assumption, feel that he's maybe in danger of not making it as president.

i.e., through the as a presidential candidate, even.

And that would give us Kamala Harris.

So they think, oh my God, we'll nominate him.

He'll break a leg on Air Force One, and then we've got Camilla Harris, and we will get creamed at the

black vote, it will go against her.

So what are we going to do?

Ah,

we do it on the weekend.

We ask him to bow out.

We release the delegates, and then we say we had a mini little campaign.

We had June and July, and parts of August, and it was a lucha libre.

Everybody was free to run.

And poor Camela, we wanted her so much to win, but she didn't get enough delegates.

Free, open, transparent.

I think that's what people are thinking.

Oh, I see.

So if they get them out May 31st or whenever soon, then they can have a,

they would just open up all the delegates and they would have a free run for the summer for all.

No, they wouldn't open up all the delegates.

They would get the big donor class and Schumer,

all those people, and a token squad member, a token BLM, a token Antifa, a black coffee.

They get them all in a room, and they'd fight it out about who they want to anoint.

So they don't have a nasty, messy 88th ballot victory.

And then it would be one of, it would either be a go, it would probably be a governor that was young.

And the DEI people would try to get somebody who was black, and the women would try to get Gretchen Werrer, and that kind of typical tribalism in the Democratic Party.

But the point was

out of that,

they could come out of that convention with a new, fresh, younger candidate and no Camela Harris.

Or they could say, well, Camilla,

you can be vice president.

You can still run again for vice president.

We're just going to remove the head.

And then the idea is, well, the younger candidate is never going to get sick and they're going to be there for eight years if he wins or she wins.

So she'll be out of the picture and she'll just be the token and she can't do any more damage to our new candidate than she did to Biden

versus the damage of removing a black woman.

Well, on to the very last thing that I found interesting this week, which was that in Italy,

they are paving the way for the introduction of nuclear energy

via small reactors.

And I thought that was very interesting, like building a whole bunch of small reactors that

can give electricity to the people in Italy.

Sounded.

And of course their prime minister is right-wing, Giorgia Maloney.

Yeah, and the green people like it, at least the rational ones.

Most of them are crazy, but there's some rational ones.

And they say, you know what?

EV, if we're really going to have an EV future, we need electricity.

And we can't make enough electricity with wind and solar.

And we're bankrupting the economies of Europe by shutting down coal plants and natural gas.

So on the other hand, we don't want another Chernobyl or a Japanese type disaster.

So what we're doing is with this new technology, we're decentralizing these reactors.

So they're smaller.

They don't need these huge grids from a central power generation place.

We can place them in sort of protected places and they don't have

the same pressures and amounts of radioactive material.

So if one has an accident, it would be smaller.

And people have advocated that for a long time.

And it's clean energy.

And, you know,

it makes sense.

And they should find a consensus because anybody who wants to drive an electric car is going to have to have the power that's not there yet.

And the grid system is not, it's so archaic in Europe and the United States, the idea that you're going to make this huge, you know, big megawatt plant and you're going to have all these new feeding lines when you can just place them in strategically

areas that are underpowered, not just places where you have plentiful water for generation.

Yeah, I've heard them even talk about they're going to harness nuclear energy so it can run a watch and things like that, but that sounds a little precarious to put a watch on.

Well, there is a whole school remember of, I don't know what we would call it, cell senescence that believe that And I'm not making fun of you if you're one of them.

I know that physetin, the flavonoid, which I take sometimes, it's like quercetin, but the idea of these senescence flavioids, flavonoids, is that what they call them?

Yeah.

That you have all these dead cells that are wearing out and they're a drag on your system, right?

And you need to cleanse them.

And one of the ways you get a little bolt of radioactivity every once in a while.

I've read a couple of books on them and they have these statistics that the cancer rate, it turns out,

long-term cancer rate at Hiroshima or at Chernobyl wasn't any higher.

In fact, some people live longer because those bolts of,

you know, and they say people who fly a lot at high altitudes in commercial airlines, they get blasted with an x-ray every week.

They have no, look at Henry Kissinger.

He must have been blasted with all sorts of radiation from flying.

And he lived to be almost 100.

George Schultz lived to be almost 100.

100.

Yeah.

And so

maybe

they were very itinerant.

They were flying and traveling everywhere.

Speaking of people living to 100, didn't Jerry Followall live to be 100 as well?

I don't know.

Oh, I thought he had himself.

I don't think he did.

I think Billy Graham got close.

Oh, Billy Graham, that's who I was thinking.

Yeah, Billy Graham got close.

He got very close, if not 100.

Jacques Barzon lived to be, I think, 104, the greatest great French French American.

Well, Victor, I have one comment from your website.

Okay.

It says, it's a nice one.

It says, and we'll end our weekend episode with this.

Thank you for your continued defense of the truth.

Nothing you have said is even remotely debatable.

And this is the

article, End of Old Left-Wing Mythologies.

The protesters and the entire Democratic left are despicable individuals.

American citizens detest this Marxist assault.

Their actions confirm they are truly worthy of the label deplorable.

That's a very well-written letter.

You know, I have one little Parthian shot to your

mention about the guy from Portland.

that bounced off the cop

and my example of the Arizona State Union co-ed who had a meltdown that she couldn't believe this is happening to her, that she might not get her, oh, she didn't, I didn't get to graduate, I didn't, COVID, I didn't get to graduate my high school, and now I don't get to do it.

Well, there was one at Princeton, and she was kind of, as I remember I saw the clip, she was kind of stocky, and she went on a hunger strike.

And then she just said, we're not getting enough food from you, and we are going to be immunocompromised, and our immune systems are compromised because you're starving us.

That's the point of a hunger strike.

You're starving us.

I thought, wow, this is amazing.

You're starving us.

Don't,

you know, Cesar Chavez used to do it all the time.

Yeah.

And gosh, I thought, wow, these people.

are just incredible.

Didn't Gandhi do hunger strikes?

He never got up and said, you're starving me.

Wow, I mean, there's been a whole science on senescence.

And the more, less calories.

I have an in-law

who's 90, I think 97 or 98, it's incredible.

He has a full head of hair.

And

I knew him when he was

maybe

30, late 30s,

40s, when I was young, really young.

And he was kind of heavy, not heavy, but a little bit, you know, I think he's about 5'10 or 5'9.

He probably weighed about 200.

And he probably weighs now about 130.

And he doesn't eat very much at all.

And he takes supplements by the handful.

And so people have argued that when you get older and you start starving yourself

Because you don't eat or you lose your taste

but affinity for foods or something or starches and sugars, or whatever it is, or maybe it's the opposite.

That's the only one you do retain tastebuds.

But when people start to get really thin, they live longer.

The fewer calories they eat.

I always thought it was the other way.

You should have a big belly, like a dromedary hump, so when you get older, you can live off that fat.

And I've seen that so often, relatives that were really heavy, and then they just kind of melt.

Maybe that's happening.

I've lost 30 pounds, I think, from my heaviest weight.

Yeah.

They slowly float float away or you can't.

I think I'm slowly.

You can slim down, slimmer.

Yeah, I've read people say, you've lost weight, and I always say, I think I'm slowly starving.

I don't like food at all.

It's horrible.

But it's healthy, is what I'm trying to say.

Fasting, I can't, I have my last meal at

3.30 or 4 in the afternoon.

And then I go eight hours, and I don't eat till 7.

So 15 or 16 hours I don't eat.

And I don't know if that's good or not.

I read in Epoch Times that having those fasting hours is really good for you.

Yeah, it probably is.

And I think I take too many supplements.

But I do have this mass problem.

So anyway, that's enough.

That is the end of this episode.

Thanks to all of our...

Yeah, it's the end of everything.

Thanks to all of our listeners.

And please go out and get Victor's new book, The End of Everything.

And thank you, Victor, for a great weekend episode.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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