Stoicism and Nonsense: Roman Philosophers and Managing Modern War

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

Victor's the Martin and Eli 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.

For you who don't know Victor very well, you might want to come to his website.

He's got links to all of his books and his articles and his podcasts.

So he is a podcaster, a columnist, and he's written 27 readable books.

So I highly encourage you to come to the website and check it out.

The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus

and you can join it for $5 a month or $50 a year and we'd love to have you.

Stay with us.

This is the weekend edition and we are going to talk a little bit about, Victor keeps saying Roman

philosophers, the Stoics and the Epicureans, and I always thought they were Greek, but we'll get to the.

Could I interject that very quickly?

We don't have very much at all of

Zeno, of the Sto.

They just exist in fragments.

Oh, okay.

And the same thing is true of Epicurus.

However,

we do have the corpus of that philosophical tradition in Latin, and we're going to talk about the authors in Latin that,

and maybe Philodemus or others that carried that tradition, but the original corpus of Epicurean or Stoic thought, as exemplified by Zeno and Epicurus, they're not there.

Got it.

Okay, so we will be looking at that in the middle section, but we have a few news stories to continue from our news roundup on Friday.

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

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

And, you know, I said readable books.

We just got a readable book, or I just got a readable book from Encounter Press, and it is an anthology of David Price-Jones's essays.

And it's really a magnificent anthology.

He's a wonderful essayist, and his father was very notable in British politics.

And David, whom I've met and know somewhat, is a wonderful stylist.

He's written about, movingly, he had experience in North Africa with Islam, and he's a strong advocate of the British tradition and warning about the dangers of radical Islam.

But

he knew everybody.

His family knew everybody.

All the great English post-war essayists David Price-Jones knew.

And Jack Fowler knows him very well, and we'll talk about him maybe at some time with Jack, because he wrote extensively for National Review.

You seem to I read the first essay was about growing up in a Cisterian um monastery in northern France.

It was interesting.

He's a very interesting person.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I know that you wanted to give us an update on the Ukraine war and things that are going on there, so why don't we go ahead with that?

Well, you know

I uh I get criticisms a lot on both sides, but where are we right now?

We're into the third year

and Ukraine does not...

everybody forms the question is Ukraine needs all of these

F-15s, F-16s, Abrams, more tank.

They do, but their problem is fundamentally manpower.

The average age of Ukrainian soldiers the early 40s.

I guess for economic reasons or the fact that people have left or they're afraid of causing a stampede, because of the 44 million pre-war population, they've lost about 12 million people, but they're not drafting people 18, 19, 20.

I think they've, and somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but their problem is manpower.

And I know that the Russians are bleeding, the Russians are defecting, but a Verdun-Somme-Passchendaele

type of war favors the Russians, and that's what they want.

So they're grinding Ukraine down.

And we think if we give them them more weapons, and I've always supported giving them enough weapons to defend their territorial integrity, but I was very skeptical in the spring offensive that they would burst through like Rommel or Patton or Gwadarian and, you know, go through that maze of fortifications.

So they didn't.

So we're in a stalemate, and we're getting close, as I said in an earlier podcast, to the magic one million Ukrainian and Russian dead, wounded, and missing.

We're inching up there every day.

I don't know.

And then I said there's this asymmetry with the Gazan war, and I can't figure out if the policy of the United States is to

support

disproportionate or portionate war.

Is it to support wartime cabinets that are bipartisan or suspending martial law and just having one governor, one leader with no elections?

Is it all collateral damage is bad or some collateral damage is bad?

So is it you punish the, you side with

the party that was invaded

or you kind of side with the party that was invaded?

So it's what I'm getting, I'm trying to search for a coherent way of looking at Ukraine and Gaza and I can't find any.

So that's what is bothering me.

And

I'm a little,

I know what Russia is going to do.

It's trying to do what it did in Georgia and Ossetia, and what it's trying to do.

It's trying to carve, bit by bit, pieces out of the post-Soviet Empire and bring them back into Mother Russia.

And they will take all they can get, but I don't think they're going to have the wherewithal given NATO and NATO is rearming.

And some of our closest friends are in the Czech Republic and Poland and the Baltic states.

And they're aware.

And Sweden was a valuable addition, as was Finland.

And Putin's not a dynamic economic power.

But what I'm getting at is all these things that we were told there's never any I'm sorry, I was wrong about the sanctions, we were going to bankrupt the Russians.

No, the price of oil is at sky high and they're making more than they ever have.

I'm sorry, I said there wouldn't be a new axis of China, Russia,

North Korea, Iran, with toe-in-the-water participation by Ghatar, Turkey, India.

But there is.

I'm sorry, I said the spring offensive was going to crush Russia and end the war, and it didn't.

It just bled white Ukraine.

But nobody ever says, I'm sorry.

And so when I look at what our grandees and our elites say is going to happen, I don't believe them anymore.

I believe we're in a stalemate.

I favor Ukraine.

I don't like Vladimir Putin.

I detest him.

I like the Russian people.

There's a sense of tragedy because Russia was always our triangulating power that we used against China, and vice versa.

We've lost that.

And I don't have a.

There's this.

I guess it's this Russia, Russia, laptop, Russia, laptop, Russia, Russia, Russia, laptop, Russia P-tape, Russia, steel dossier, all this stuff, demonization of the Russian people.

It wasn't just Putin.

You can't turn on

an

equalizer or some type of Hollywood movie, and the villain is always a guy with an Orthodox cross tattooed to his back and a missing tooth and a shaved head and a Russian accent.

So I don't know what it is, but let's give the arms to Ukraine.

I support that.

But let's get realistic.

They're not going to be able militarily to take back the Donbass in Crimea, which neither Donald Trump nor Barack Obama nor Joe Biden said they should, at least until February 24th of 2022.

That was not the agenda of the United States.

But Obama's attitude was, oh my God,

I told Vladimir to give me some space.

And

I would dismantle missile defense.

He gave me space.

I got re-elected.

I got rid of the missile defense as the Russians wanted.

And then he,

why did he go in and take Donbass and Kleiman?

Well, they're gone.

Can't do anything about that.

Well, the way you talk about it, though, sounds like you feel like the president, for example, Obama, did not really care one way or the other in this central European place whether they're what happened there.

And so, why do we care so much about the Ukraine?

Is it important or is it not?

Well,

we care about it for two reasons.

We know that Russia is emasculated

and we don't know

and we know it's weakened, but we don't know what it will do if it swallows Ukraine for this reason.

It took the Donbass and it took Crimea, but its next move wasn't to take another hundred miles.

It was to do a thunder road, capture Kiev.

decapitate, execute the government, and take all of Ukraine back and then be right on the border of Russia and then tell Belarus and all of its allies, this is what we're going to do.

We're going to go in next.

That was clear.

So it was good to stop that.

And they did, due to the courage of the Ukrainians.

But somehow stopping that and pushing the Russians back to the Donbass and Crimea

and making them pay a terrible price has transmogrified that we're going to use the Ukraine as proxies to destroy the Russian military and take back the Crimea and Donbao.

And I don't see how that...

It's not that I wouldn't want that to happen.

Yeah, no, it's just...

I would prefer that to happen.

But I don't want to destroy all of the manhood and womanhood of Ukraine because we in the safe United States find them a useful proxy to weaken,

you know, to weaken Russia and to get back this territory.

And I get a little tired.

There's a long essay that's out about how Putin lied about all of these territorial histories with Tucker.

And he did.

He did lie.

But

when I read essayists like this, and they say, well,

Crimea

was dominated by Russia.

Yes, it was dominated by Russia since 1783.

And they were not going to be...

They declared their independence.

And yes, Russia was going to try to warp them into the Federation.

So Ukraine preempted Russia and then took independent Crimea.

They did.

And you can't just say these borders have been

pristine for decades.

No, they haven't.

1939, Stalin just changed the borders.

And after 1945, he said, I ain't going to give it back.

And sorry, Poland, you just lost a third of Poland.

Eastern Poland is now Ukraine and all you Catholic Polish speakers get out.

And now they're going to be Orthodox, Orthodox communist Russian-speaking Ukrainians so the but nobody talks about that that there's a it's like the Balkans it's a mess but what the left does and some on the right want to do they want to take a Balkan like

complex

age-old vendettas and they want to say these people are 100% good and noble and these people are evil and we're going to get the good people no matter what their resources and we're going to take defeat the evil evil people.

And when you try to tell people it's very complex, the borders are

fluid and have been since World War II

and we don't want to see Ukraine turn into a modern-day Verdun,

they call you names and they say you're pro-Putin, you're Putin puppet, or you're going to sell the Ukrainians out.

I don't want to see a million Ukrainians dead to try to get back the Donbass and and Crimea.

I would like to see Putin out of where he was before February 24.

And if anybody can make the argument to me, I will stand corrected.

If somebody will just call me or write me or text me and say, Victor, you're absolutely wrong.

It was the policy of us on the left and Barack Obama to get back Crimea.

and get back the Donbass by force of arms.

We just didn't have time.

But we were going to go take it.

We were going to give Ukraine.

We said, Ukraine, you invade Crimea, you get it back.

And if somebody on the right can say

that was Trump's idea, he wanted to get back the Donbass and he wanted to get back Crimea.

And you know, Biden wanted to, too.

That was what he ran on.

No, I don't believe any of them did.

They only redefined that mission once Russia tried to gobble up all of Ukraine.

Yeah.

Well, since we're on the topic, Mike Johnson is trying to get a bill passed for money to Ukraine, Israel, and Tehran.

And it totals $95 billion.

And he's having trouble doing it because he's got Republicans mad at him.

And

I don't know what the coalition of Democrats is, but these Republicans are threatening to, what is it called?

I threaten a motion to vacate, which I think means him.

What are your thoughts on that?

Like, what is going on in the Congress is what my question is.

The problem is this, that there's four distinct issues.

There is aid to Ukraine to defend itself.

There's aid to Israel to make sure that it can replenish its missile defense system and has enough offensive weaponry of the right type should it decide to strike back at the Houthis or Hezbollah or if they strike at them.

That's number two.

Number three, there is an Indo-Pacific Chinese that you're going to increase aid to Taiwan.

And then there's the border.

I mean, there's other things that evolve.

And so each of these issues does not have a clear 51%

house.

So people try to bundle them together.

So if they, in a perfect world, they would vote on, let's secure the U.S.

border first,

and they have the votes to do it overwhelmingly.

They might even win by seven or eight votes, and that would put people in the Senate in the hot seat.

A senator tester wouldn't know what to do with that because his party doesn't believe in that.

And then they would say, Let's take up help for Taiwan, separation.

That would pass.

And then they would, you know, they're the border, and then they would say Israel, and then they would say Taiwan, and then they would say Ukraine.

And

the right is happy to do that, and that would lose.

Probably lose.

It would lose in the House.

Because why?

Because I don't,

I'm not sure that

51%

of Democrats and Republicans would vote for Ukrainian aid.

There will be some Democrats who will vote for it, and there will be an overwhelming number of Republicans that will not vote for it.

So what happens is each person, each side tries to tie their particular issue.

So the left says, well, you want to give aid to Israel, then you have to pack it with Ukraine.

Or the right says, okay, you want Ukraine,

you're not going to get it until you vote for the border.

And so that's the problem.

In this

mess,

the once eight-person majority in the House has been

eroded.

Mike Gallagher hasn't resigned yet, but we had all Kevin McCarthy and these people, Buck and others, have quit.

And we've got the Matt Gates contingent, we've got the Rhino contingent, we've got the Neo.

They're not unified like the Democrats.

So there is a temptation for each faction within the Republican Party to accuse the other of trying to get a Democrat to come across the aisle and get your position by selling out to the Democrats.

They each accuse each other.

And then in the middle is Speaker Johnson, and he's saying to everybody,

wait a minute,

Kevin McCarthy wasn't in this position, and you got rid of him because he had a seven or eight majority, had to live in the real world.

I want to balance the budget.

I don't have the votes to do that.

I can't shut the government down when we're in two wars.

You want to shut the government down?

I can't do that.

We're going to lose in November if we shut the government down.

I

for me to get through this, I have to horse trade with the people who are one vote on most days short of getting me out of office.

And Marjorie Terrell-Green is saying, you're a rhino, you want to help the, you want to, you don't want to close the border, you want to help the Ukrainians, you don't want to balance budget.

So I'm going to vacate you.

And

that would mean

that

if he loses, Given the history of the Republican Party, I don't see a figure that can say, bring them all in a room and say, we have no margin of error.

You may not like me, but every single one has to shed your own pet projects and vote for me, or the Democrats are going to take over.

Because we have four or five completely untrustworthy Republicans, and they may flip and vote, and then they could get special deals from the Democrats, and they could take over and get the Speaker.

Yeah, they sure could.

And if that happens,

there won't be any impeachment.

There won't be any investigations of Hunter.

It's all over with.

We lost.

It's just dead.

And it seems to me that anybody could see that.

So, Marjorie Terry-Green, I have no problem with it.

I like her.

She's fine.

But she should just say, you know what?

Let's just take a deep breath, calm down, and let's just bury the hatchet and be unified.

And we'll sort this out after the November election.

And then nobody quits, nobody defects until January 21st of next year, and then do all hellbreaks because I don't care.

But why give up this only

shred of power they have?

Because they're squabbling back and forth.

Yeah, agreed.

I think everybody agrees with you, Victor.

Well, Victor, let's take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about

the Roman philosophers.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

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We're back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show and this is our segment where we look at something cultural and so Roman philosophers are on deck.

We've been promising them so I'm looking forward to hearing about the Stoics and Epicureans and

maybe you can answer one question I have about them both.

It seems to me, what limited reading I've done on each one, that they emphasize reason will bring you the happy life or lead you to the happy life.

But I don't know if that's a good summation of them or not.

Both of them, whether you're Epicurean or Stoic.

Well, they're the third and fourth philosophical schools.

We have Platonism

and Aristotelianism, and then we have Zeno's Stoicism, and then Epicurus's later Epicureanism.

And they're right.

They all have one thing in common.

They're deist in a way, in the sense that they understand the importance of

religious belief as a

perpetrator of customs and traditions and an enforcer of mores.

But they think it creates superstition and it's silly.

So they're trying to substitute for the traditional Olympic gods a philosophical system.

Ultimately, they're all based in some way from Plato.

By that, I mean a duality.

There is a soul, except Epicurus, and there's a body.

And the body is the violin, and the soul is the song.

And the song is imperishable, and it only is manifested when it has a body, and the song can be played on a violin, to use a Platonic metaphor.

Zeno was a classical Greek philosopher, and

we have the Academy of Plato, we have the Lyceum of Aristotle, and his school was in the Stoa, the porch.

That's where we get Stoicism, the porch people.

And

he was from Elea.

That's just the older original name of Syracuse.

So he was from that rich philosophical tradition of southern Italy near the Boot.

And we have nothing.

Everything that Zeno wrote about is in fragments.

We have some later people, Simplicius and others, who try to tell us what Stoicism is.

But essentially, we have to rely on Roman philosophers who had the text of Epicurus and interpreted it, translated it, adopted it, rejected parts.

And that is primarily

Seneca

and I guess you'd say the great populizer who wrote in Greek, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

And from them and others, I can't get through all of the Roman

Stoics, and Cicero has a lot, De Natura Deorum, the nature of God, he has a lot.

You get an idea of what Zeno wrote about.

And it's basically

that

one has to find equilibrium in his life.

And

wisdom, courage, moderation,

and

action on behalf of the Commonwealth.

So it worked, I think you could make the argument it was more conducive to Roman and Greek

political systems in the sense that there's 1,500 city-states and then there's this idea of a natio or a Roman nation that's cohesive.

So the Romans saw that no matter what your own individual maladies or pain,

don't just think

I'm going to be in a heaven and

it won't matter, my soul will go to heaven, or don't just think I should live it up, but try to put yourself in the situation of other people, other conditions, other extremes, and try to find you're not going to be hot, you're not going to be cold, you're going to be temperate, not going to be tall, you're not going to be short, you're going to be medium.

That the media, the golden mean,

has some

almost divine happiness that comes with it when you resolve and you understand that you're young, you age, you get old, and these things are not new and you don't get all excited about it.

And out of that comes good governance.

So stoicism is very important for Roman Republican leaders and it really becomes popular in a, I guess you'd say it's a philosophy of detachment as a lot of people look at Rome and they think, wow, the Rome of Cicero.

or the Rome of the Scipios.

It's become bread and circuses.

And one way way you deal with that is you in your own private life, you don't get upset, you kind of withdraw.

And you read the meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

And you know, it's don't when

tragedy befalls, don't be consumed by it.

Don't I mean they have a very ambiguous idea of suicide as well.

But it's if you're causing pain to your family because you're dying of cancer, maybe suicide's okay.

But otherwise, it's a

neglect of your public service obligation.

So

it really emphasizes public service and statesmanship, etc., and how to deal with this complicated world in a philosophical sense.

It's very different than Epicureanism,

partly because Epicureanism,

and

we have Epictetus, that was

a Roman writer in Greek, that we don't have any of the original work of Epicurus.

It's the same thing.

But Epicurus is different than Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoic.

It rejects a soul.

It rejects a duality.

It rejects a hereafter.

It says that the Olympic gods exist, but they don't care about us.

They're just big people,

and we shouldn't care about them.

And it's caricatured because in Roman times, we have the word Epicurean means you like good cooking and taste.

But

the

caricature of Epicureanism is

that if it feels good, there must be a reason why.

So

if being drunk feels kind of good, why is that?

If sex feels good, why is that?

If...

Any type of excess feel good, it's not excess.

It's not excess.

There's a reason that the senses and the nervous system are programmed divinely to reward things that feel good.

So the critics of Epicureanism, and it was a lot of the, whereas the Christians saw value in Platonism, especially Neoplatonism, and also Aristotelianism, and to some degree in Stoicism, they did not like Epicureanism because they felt that it would mar your soul if you were a sexual profligate or you were a drunkard.

But that's not really what Epicurus.

He was two generations after Zeno.

He's in the

late

4th century, early 3rd century, and he was from Samos, I think.

And then, as all philosophers did, he came to Athens.

Most of his writing, again, like Zeno's, Stoics' writing, are lost.

But

we have survivals in

Diogenus Laertes, who wrote about the great philosophers.

He gives us a compendium of what Epicureanism is.

We have some in the novel Satyricon reference to it.

There's this guy, Philodemus.

We don't know if he was famous or just a self-published wannabe, but at Herculaneum, some of the roles have been translated that survived the eruption.

of Vesuvius, and we have all of these Stoic writings by Philodemus, but we don't have a lot of references to him by other people that are contemporary.

So we don't know whether he was sort of Victor out in his farm writing and nobody reads,

or he was, you know, he was a syndicated Washington New York Times columnist.

But the main source of Epicureanism is a very strange De Natura Deorum.

Excuse me, I already mentioned that with Cicero, but this is called De Naturum Rerum, on the nature of things by a poet called Lucretius, first century BC, and he wrote it in um Dactylic Samura.

It's a long poem

that embodies the Epicurean philosophy.

And even the

Democritian,

I guess you call it, pre-Socratic idea of what it came from, and it came from Democritus, the atoms, so that we're all a

combination of atoms.

And when we die, the atoms just separate, and then they recombine when you're born.

And that's what the world is.

It's kind of an automatic atom creator and disintegrator.

And therefore, you know,

Lucretius in this poem, he says, when you walk by a statue and it's got a handshake, you touch it.

Why, after a lot of people touching it, does it look worn away?

That's because the atoms are being lost on the stone.

It's very advanced.

But

his poem is basically, do not worry about the superstitions of religion.

There are no Olympian gods.

There's no big Zeus.

There's no big Jupiter.

Do not worry about all of these superstitions, these cults.

When you die, you die.

There is no duality.

There is no soul.

But you might have some

consolation that your atoms are being recombined.

It was very popular in the 1960s when people would say, I know at UC Santa Cruz in the insane years, I would meet students and they'd say, oh, I'm an Epicurean.

When I die, I don't believe in coffins or being embalmed or burned.

I just want to be buried in my flesh beneath the big oak tree.

And then in two or three years, my friends will pick up an oat leaf and they'll say, there's Timmy.

Because his atoms were lost and they were sucked to the soil and through nutrients and they reformulated in the let, you know, and that was the cult.

Maybe they could be eaten by cannibals.

I don't know.

I had that class in Latin from

the famous Norman O'Brown and we read it in Latin and he gave us lectures about this and he was an agnostic-atheist.

It's the only major philosophical school where atheism or agnosticism is pretty clear, but it's designed to help people,

at least Lucretius' version of it, is to rid themselves of fear of the afterlife and punishment and hell and all that.

It doesn't exist, they say.

And of course, people today, when they say you're an Epicurean, it means you're a fine taste for food.

You read the Satyricon, and it's the character of Epicureanism, which leads to decadence.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Victor,

let's go ahead then and take a break and come back for some more news.

I know that you wanted to talk on the

Senate rejecting the whole case of of Maorcus and that impeachment.

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

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So Victor, the Senate has just said we refuse to even hear the case of Majorkis.

And they've used that to say we find nothing wrong with what he's done.

And as we all sit here with 10 million plus more people in our country that have not come here legally.

And sorry, let me say one more thing.

And Christopher Wray telling us that there is a terrible security risk now, you think, right?

Yes.

Well,

we've never had this.

We didn't have it with Andrew Johnson.

We didn't have it with Bill Clinton.

And we didn't have it two times with Donald Trump.

And by what

everybody followed the Constitution.

The Constitution says the House impeaches a president, high official in the cabinet, vice president, etc.

They hand the writ of impeachment.

So if you're impeached, it doesn't mean you're convicted, but you're impeached.

You go over to the Senate and they have a trial.

They have to have a two-thirds conviction.

And they have a trial and they did with Andrew Johnson.

He escaped by just one vote.

And then we had the impeachment of Bill Clinton and it was kind of a joke.

It was and it hurt the Republicans, but they did have a,

I mean they weren't in the majority in the Senate, so they couldn't convict him.

And then we had Donald Trump and they did not

control the Senate the first time, right?

So they had a trial and they acquitted him.

And the second time they had,

they were going to lose the Senate

and

they had a trial and he was a private citizen.

So now they come along and they control the Senate, the Democrats, and they do not want a trial.

So they just said, you know what?

Screw the Constitution, screw the trial.

We're just going to fold up shop.

So we're just going to take a vote.

How many people think these warrants warrants aren't even relevant?

We're not even gonna have a trial.

Oh, we do.

And we have a one-vote majority.

We've got Camela to break it anyway.

And I don't know if she can do that in impeachment.

I guess she can't.

But the point I'm making is

they once again violated the Constitution.

And you think they'd learn.

You think, hey, you guys, when you were in the majority and you didn't want to be filibustered and you got rid of the filibuster, did you ever think the Republicans would be in the majority and didn't want to be filibustered?

Yeah.

And that's how they got Gorsuch and that's how they got Kavanaugh and that's how they got

Comey.

That's how they do.

And hey you guys, do you ever think that getting rid of the,

if you were to get rid of the Electoral College, that might come back when you can't get 51% but you've got the blue wall and you never did it when you had the blue wall, it was fine.

Or

maybe if you think you're going to get two states and four senators by Puerto Rico and D.C., maybe we'll break up Montana or something.

They don't have any concept that these things boomerang.

So if Donald Trump is president and maybe he takes the House, let's say he loses the House.

He's elected in 2024, but they lose the House.

You know what the first thing they're going to do is impeach Donald Trump.

But if they win the Senate, I think they have now a better chance of the Senate than maybe even the House.

And

I don't know,

they're going to get a new Senate majority leader.

I don't know who it is.

But the Senate Republican says, oh, you impeached him in his first,

it'll be Dash's first second term again, whatever you call it, because it wasn't consecutive.

We're not even going to hear it.

Nah, it didn't mean anything.

And they're going to say, you can't do that.

That's in the Constitution.

They said, well, we'd like to do it, but you taught us the Constitution doesn't matter.

So all of these have tit-for-tat.

What comes around goes around, karma, nemesis, and they don't, they're so arrogant they think they're above all.

And they got burned on the filibuster, and they're going to get burned on this one, too, someday.

Yeah.

Well, Yuri Berliner has resigned from his job at NPR.

I think he, I got the impression he was being kind of forced to resign, although maybe not officially,

by the CEO, Catherine Mayer, who is a radical left-wing individual.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that case.

Yeah, I mean

he

he was an old time, Mr.

Berliner was an old-time liberal Democrat, and he looks around and he looks at this new wave of

Democrats and he looks at these hysterias, he looks at the COVID hysteria, that the lockdowns are wonderful, that COVID never dared originate in the lab.

And then he looks at the transgendered hysteria, he looks at the MeToo

hysteria, he looks at the laptop disinformation, hysteria.

He looks at the Russian collusion.

And he said they never apologize.

Adam Schiff comes on all the time and he lies and says he can't disclose all of the evidence that he's got as head of the House Intelligence Committee, but it's overwhelming.

And then we get the Mueller report and it's non-existent.

But he doesn't come on NPR anymore.

They just move on to the next one.

And he said the laptop disinformation, we ran with that.

We were told the Russians created the laptop and the contents.

Then we learned that the FBI had it under its own control, and even Hunter doesn't contest the authenticity, and they don't apologize.

So he writes us, I mean, he writes, he goes on Barry Weiss, and he writes an article, and I guess it was free press, and he's interviewed.

And

the new NPR person who has never been involved in journalism or in the media, she was a Wikipedia person, or a derivative of Wikipedia, and she decides to suspend him.

For what?

Telling the truth, because apparently everybody understood it was true.

Even people that were accused of that understood it was true.

And then the right goes after her and finds out, as they did with Claudine Gay, that she's a complete radical nut.

And by radical nut, I'm not being bombastic, that she has basically contextualized looting and said this is a a matter of social justice.

And she's tweeted all these things about Trump, and she's supposed to be the nonpartisan.

So then he resigns because he's going to get fired.

Because he won't retract that.

And they think he's hurt people.

They always say hurtful.

He was so hurtful.

Yeah, I know.

He told the truth, and he did something that I wish Mark Melley had done and some of the generals when they claim now that Afghanistan was a fiasco and they knew about it.

If they had just resigned before

the fiasco occurred, maybe it would have stopped it.

But he's done a great disservice.

He's told the whole world from the inside what they already suspected, that this is just

an auxiliary of the left-wing agenda and the Democratic Party.

And every time they go in,

Republicans, and they look at this, somebody says, but you're going to cancel Dallington Abbey.

You're going to cancel all the Ken Burns films.

You're going to, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

There's outlets they can be on.

They just don't want them to be in the news, commentary, propaganda business.

And they've come up with all sorts of, they've begged and begged, and the New York Times, Washington, the whole media goes against them.

At this point,

we've got 600 channels on TV.

We've got podcasts.

We've got so much information as this.

is a dinosaur.

It came of an age when there were three network stations and people wanted one without commercials.

You can go on DirecTV and find, I don't know, 100 of them without commercials easily.

And you can find documentary state.

You can do whatever you want.

But why are we subsidizing these people to be an arm of a left-wing agenda?

Yeah.

Agreed with you.

I'm sure all your listeners do too.

There was a conservative conference in Brussels, and the mayor shut it down for security reasons.

And they had big names there, like Victor Orban and Nigel Farage

and you would think that the mayor of Brussels could figure out a way to ensure security rather than shut it down but is this part of the agenda to just get rid of anybody who's conservative in in Europe the problem is

with the EU is the same problem with the Democratic Party They have this huge bureaucracy that exercises power through non-elected means.

That is the EU bureaucracy.

And they can do anything from declare a Cretan banana is not a banana because it doesn't fit their

definition.

And they don't have any public support.

They don't have any public support for open borders.

They don't have any public support for unlimited immigration.

They don't have any public support anymore for being dean-armed.

The people want to arm themselves again.

And

you can't let these people have fora and you can't let these people have redressive grievances because if you did and you had open

debates and you had referenda and you had elections, guess what?

You'd have Brexit repeated everywhere.

People are tired of the idea of the EU.

Not that it wasn't, there weren't some good elements,

but

the conservative movement in Europe is

very different.

I mean, it doesn't involve things like gun rights and

abortion, but in some ways it is more radically conservative because it's been much more suppressed.

And it was a UN party that created this EU project.

And now when it's on climate change, if you're a Dutch farmer and they want to outlaw a nitrogen fertilizer or you're a French taxicab driver and you've got to pay all this climate change additives expenses on your gas bill.

People are just tired of it.

They can't make it.

They just realize that they're ossified, they're calcified, that when the moment they get up, they're never going to be able to make a lot of money.

They're never going to be able to buy a nice home anymore.

They're never going to be able to do it.

There's no upward mobility.

It's the elite that are entrenched, that are connected to the government and have all the money.

And it's not a free, open market economy anymore.

And the elite find psychological penance by opening the borders and bringing all these people in.

And so Brussels is,

it really can't be, it can't clamp down on radical Islamic violence.

France can't.

Britain can't, even though it's not the EU.

And so they're just saying, we just would like to go back to a traditional Europe where we had free and open elections.

We had different points of view.

We were proud of being Dutch, we were proud of being Belgian, we were proud of being Polish.

The weird thing is that the more that they castigate Viktor Orban and Hungary, the more the people of Western Europe are starting to gravitate toward

championing your national sovereignty,

defending yourself by upping your defense budget, looking toward the United States maybe for closer relations,

and closing the border.

maybe building a wall or a fence,

and be very suspicious of radical Islam.

And that's an anathema to the EU hierarchy.

So

it's the same thing in a way that they control all the institutions, but they don't have popular opinion.

In the United States, they control all the institutions, but they don't have popular opinion.

And so here we do what?

We try to get candidates off the ballot.

We try to tie them up in court with 93 indictments.

We try to change the Constitution

by

the voter compact that will get around the Electoral College or we try to pack the court.

Europe does the same thing.

They use the administrative state, they cancel

anybody, cancel docs, deplatform, shadow ban, whatever term we use, people who would have popular support in dismantling the European Utopian project.

Do you think that the fact that they shut it down and

instead of providing security might indicate that they have so many

radical and violent people that could potentially, I guess, attack or assail this conference that they're not capable of maintaining security.

Or do you think it's just because they were conservative?

Just because they're conservative and they're afraid that it'll be a Tea Party-like, and I mean the original Tea Party,

event where people will be able to to vent and be there free, and out of that will grow

a sudden Canadian trucker strike or something like that, or the Tea Party 2.0 in the United States.

They're afraid that you can't let these people all get together

because they have popular support and they have the argument.

So we being very classically liberal and free and tolerant, we're going to be intolerant and unfree, because that's the nature of the left anyway.

Yeah, I hate to say that that sounds like a better scenario than the fact that they wouldn't have enough, wouldn't be able to defend against an overwhelming population of people that might attack conservatives.

That sounds more grim.

But I wanted to look then at the other side of the coin here.

Have you heard of this Bakersfield woman who's in your neck of the woods, Reedy Patel, who's from the Center on Race, Poverty, and Environment?

And she threatened the Bakersfield City Council with going to their house and killing them.

And I think she was a little surprised that they arrested her.

Well, you know, I had actually heard of that woman because that crazy group, she's been there before,

but

she had her little antenna up and she said,

well,

The radical pro-Hamas can take over the Golden Gate Bridge, the Bay Bridge.

They don't do anything.

They They can go into a law dean's private home at Berkeley and shout him down.

The trans people

drove out Judge Duncan.

If you're Jewish, you've got to hide in the library at Cooper Union.

They took over the Manhattan Bridge at one point.

They throw red paint on the Lincoln Memorial.

They deface the entry to the White House.

They do anything, and nothing happens.

So when they didn't listen to my little petition about Israel and Devasti Fund,

I just am going to tell them what I think.

And so we're going to, you're murders, and we're going to go to your house.

Well, that's a direct threat to a public official.

And, you know, she has all of the baggage of DEI, but the Asian woman, American, who was the chairwoman of the

Bakersfield City Council, to her everlasting credit, she just said, oh, that's a threat, get her.

And they arrested her.

And then she learned that going to a public meeting and saying that you were going to assemble at the public person's house and murder them is a multi-felonious act.

So now she's looking at what, 18 felonies, you said?

Yeah, for

each one of the council members, right?

So she put her on.

And that can be 30 or 40 years.

And she's 27.

So she's thinking, hmm, 77 years in a prison?

I think she's transgender, too.

And so all of a sudden, she's crying.

This isn't fair.

I can't believe you did this.

It's kind of like the Vanderbilt kids that went in and pushed and knocked somebody down and occupied the hall.

And then,

well, okay, you broke the law.

You're going to go to jail.

But somebody has to change their time pong.

We've got to hand that.

And so, and then the guys that chain themselves to a barrel or whatever, you can't do that.

Or the judge Duncan Stanford suits, you can't ruin my career.

So the point I'm making is all of these people are elites.

And for all of their protestations that they're social justice warriors, they're not.

They're careerists and grifters.

And they are terrified of getting a felony on their record or for those who have green cards of being deported as a felon or those who have student visas.

And it shows you, I think on an earlier podcast, I said it just takes one brave person to do that.

And the whole thing, it's a facade.

It'll crash.

And we're starting to see some at the Columbia present today, she testified and they thought they were going to embarrass her by having a huge anti-Semitic pro-Hamas demonstration.

And she said they're breaking the law.

Arrest them.

And they violated several statutes at Columbia.

And once that takes place, All of these people that get in your face when you walk across campus and they yell at you and they wear their costumes or their Antifa garb or their Palestinian garb, they're careerist.

They're upper, upper middle class kids or they're DEI kids and they feel they can say and do anything as a part of their left-wing cursus and orum or CV and that they'll find a left-wing employee.

And they're right.

And now all of a sudden, a few voices in the wilderness have said, no, you're threats to civilization and order.

You're enemies of civilization, and we're going to arrest you.

And you're going to get an arrest record.

And they're not like somebody who said, screw you, arrest me, I don't care.

They're fragile little hothouse plants, and she's one.

So she's reduced to tears.

Imagine that.

She goes up there.

What does she think those people in the council felt like when she got up there and said, as a party, a Parthian shot?

She said, and we're going to come to your house.

We're going to murder you.

Well, they didn't know what capabilities she had, if she had a gang, so they went home that night.

They didn't know that she.

And now all of a sudden we're supposed to think, oh, she's crying.

We're sorry.

We know you didn't mean it.

You get to go back to your nonprofit and call us names and do it again next week.

And maybe no.

Maybe no.

Maybe there's some sanity.

Maybe there's a little ray of sunlight in this fog of madness that we've seen.

Yeah.

What was that?

They used to always yell at Hillary when they didn't like her, put her behind bars or something like that.

Put her in jail.

Lock her up.

Lock her her up.

That's what needs to be done.

Well, the last topic here is the Supreme Court may take up a January 6th charge.

Over 350 people have been arrested and this charge has been put on them, which is obstructing an official proceeding.

And the Supreme Court seems to be toying with it as far as I can tell.

But there's a lot of people that want,

you know, that's a

basically what they're saying is they shouldn't have charged him with that because we can charge a lot of people with obstructing a fire.

And Gorsuch mentioned Bowman, Jamal Bowman.

Yes.

So if you're in the Congress and you let off the fire alarm to disrupt a session of Congress, if I'm not mistaken, you're putting these people in prison because they disrupted Congress.

They didn't just occupy, but did any of them let off a fire alarm?

No.

So why was Bowman let off with nothing?

Isn't there something called symmetry of the application of the law or equal justice under the law?

And the court members delineated a lot of things that go on.

Talib took over the rotunda during the Susan Blassey Ford

Me Too hysteria.

They popped up all during that hearing and disrupted it.

And they do it all the time.

And the Palestinians do it all the time.

And he's saying, let's just find out what the law is.

And these people can't answer it.

Yeah.

Because they know if they answer truthfully and transparently, then you've got a lot of people looking at 10-year prison sentence, what they did to the January 6th.

And what is the subtext?

The subtext is simply this.

We are elites, and we have determined that white, middle-class, lower-class people are the dregs of the earth.

These are the words we use for them.

Crazy hobbits, clingers, irredeemables,

chomps, quoting Obama, Biden, Hillary.

We don't like them.

So we're going to take this protest that got a little too out of hand, not like May, June, July, August 2020,

but a little out of hand, and we're going to throw the book at them and teach these SOBs never to get near the campus.

Now,

as far as the other people,

we think it's valuable for Tlaib and the anti-Israeli people to come into the rotunda.

We see that we don't want to stifle anybody who, you know, lets off a fire alarm and lets people know that he doesn't like what's going on.

And the justices are saying that's not tenable in a constitutional republic, and it's not.

Well, I hope they can get some of these people out of prison or jail, the 350 that were arrested for the January 6th.

I mean, that's where I was hoping the subtext might be for what Gorshit said.

I know.

I hope so, but

it's really weird when you read some of Julie

Kelly's wonderful essays in writing where they were denied medications, they were deliberately insulted by the guards and threatened by the guards.

They weren't allowed, they weren't even charged for months on end, if not years.

And it was like they were trying to be humiliated.

It was like a third world country.

And when you look at Trump and these things, I guess the best thing,

the best description of what's going on, it's the third worldization of the United States.

It's like Venezuela or Peru,

Guana, you know,

I don't know, Nigeria.

You start to go after your political opponents, you put them in jail, you try to take them off the ballot, their supporters, you try to put them in prison, and then you do the opposite with your team.

They don't ever have to go to jail like Joe Biden when he deliberately takes out classified files, commits a felony, and it's just, well, he's crazy.

And

put him on the stand.

They're going to say, poor Joe doesn't know where he is.

I can't convict him of the felony that he's guilty of.

Weird times.

It is a very weird time.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our

podcast, and I have some

another thing to read.

There is one person who says yes to the swag, so he wants swag.

And there is this

one on on Apple Podcast, Soul Soothing is the title.

Always look forward to hearing VDH's great insight on current affairs and also historical events.

Years ago, I would listen to G.

Gordon Liddy's show, and he would read Tom Soule's column and comment that Mr.

Soule was the smartest man in America.

I think VDH just might now be the smartest man in America.

Would love to hear Victor's thoughts on and opinion on the G-Man and maybe a refresher on Watergate, keep up the great work.

That was the G-Man was Gordon Liddy?

I think so.

Everybody said Gordon Liddy was kind of crazy, but

he wrote a book and he

went all of the Watergate supposed elites, he had a kind of a class thing.

And he tried to make a statement.

He basically said, the people that surrounded Donald, Richard Nixon got him in this trouble, that were lying and planned stuff,

they're all weasels and they're all careerists, the John Deans.

He really hated John Dean.

They all cut deals and they got off.

My attitude toward them is: screw them.

I have nothing but contempt for these people that are destroying the presidency, and they're going to indict me, and I'm not going to play ball.

I'm going to go to jail.

And he did, and he became a folk hero to a lot of people.

I had an admiration for him.

I don't agree that I didn't like the idea he may or may not.

He was found guilty of breaking the law.

That was wrong.

Remember, he had said something very famous.

I'm doing this by memory.

I didn't know you were going to bring this up.

He said, you know, I'm willing to be, tell me what sidewalk or corner you want me on, and then send out a hit team and get rid of me.

Well, on that note, let's go ahead and say goodbye to our audience today.

Thanks to all the audience listening and to you, Victor, for your insights into especially the Roman Stoics and Epicurans.

Thank you.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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

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