Roman Plays and Illegal Acts

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our weekend edition where we look at something cultural, usually in the middle section, and we look at some of the contemporary news in the beginning.

Stay with us, and we'll be talking about immigration and then also Roman theater.

So, it should be an interesting topic, and you'll like it.

We'll be right back.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, bowl and branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my bowl and branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights.

And they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So, join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bowlandbranch.com/slash Victor.

That's Bowl and Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D

B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply, and we'd like to thank Bolin Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So you just got back from summer vacation.

Maybe you might have even had to book two rooms because of your snoring.

Some vacation, huh?

Snoring can be an underlying cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even memory loss.

Here is my advice.

If you want every night to be a true vacation, you need to get yourself Zipa.

That's happy Z spelled backwards.

Zipa is a doctor-designed mouthpiece that not only moves your jaw forward, but is also the only device with a patented tongue seat belt to keep your airways open and the snoring away.

The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.

Zipa was proven in a 600-patient clinical trial and sold over half a million units.

From now until the end of October, show your family you actually care by purchasing a limited edition Pink Zipa.

Not only will you save $10,

but Zipa is on a mission to raise $50,000 for breast cancer research and they will donate another $10,000 to the Susan G.

Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Go to zyppah.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.

Put your snoring on a permanent vacation and help a worthy cause with the snoring device we trust by visiting ZYPPAH.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.

Remember, Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.

Text fees may apply, and we'd like to thank Zipa for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor is a Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, The Blade of Perseus.

The URL is victorhanson.com.

That's victorhanson.com.

So come join us on the Blade of Perseus.

There's lots of free stuff, and you can also join for a subscription to read the VDH Ultra material.

Victor, so

I wanted to ask you a broad kind of question just from anecdotal experience here in the Valley about immigration flooding our medical facilities.

I've had friends tell me that they are having a hard time getting appointments, and the one I'm thinking about in particular needed it with a heart doctor.

So it was, and it was very serious.

And it took them, she couldn't get in for a month and a half.

And that

the waiting rooms are overcrowded, emergency rooms have beds in hallways, and their waiting rooms are full.

So it just seems like California medical facilities are in havoc right now.

Yeah, they are.

Part of it is the COVID disruptions.

Part of it is the Obamacare where you go to a doctor and he doesn't even look at you.

He's just typing in the, you know, typing on a computer for your records.

But part of it, and then the Obamacare, everybody's there.

But I don't want to be specific because I have to swim in these waters, the fish in this San Joaquin Valley area, but I can tell you that I've gone to two specialists.

And whereas before there was five or six people in the waiting room, there was 30.

And I actually saw, I think I mentioned to Jack, there were two people almost fighting over a chair.

And then one person snuck in without being announced and went into one of the rooms like, oh, I'm the person that you're supposed to, and cut in front of the line.

And

when you have eight to 10 million people, and they're mostly coming to blue states now,

especially California, and the governor just allotted, what does it mean to say we're going to spend $500 million

on illegal alien care?

Does that mean we're going to go out and hire $500 million worth of new doctors?

No.

No.

It means we're going to reimburse a doctor who used to see five patients an hour, now he's going to say 20, right?

So it doesn't really do much good.

I was in an ER a year ago.

for that toxic beasting.

Nobody spoke English, and it was packed.

I go to a supermarket, I see a big health center, people are lined up, and

it's very weird because

the people coming across the border are not,

I mean, they've never seen health care, and they're coming from China, they're coming from Africa, so

there's no experience with the type of diseases or maladies that they have that are unique to their climate or their nation or their prior environment or their preventive health care.

So

it's just a blank slate, and that takes time.

And so I was going to a doctor that every six months gave me a particular type of test.

I didn't enjoy the test and a particular

type of test.

I went back not too long ago, and he said, you're irregular.

Your test is irregular.

And

this has gone up in six months.

I said, it has not gone up in six months.

It hasn't gone up in a year.

It hasn't gone up in a year and a half.

It hasn't gone up in two years.

It hasn't gone up.

I haven't had that test in two and a half years.

And he didn't, he was shocked until he looked at his records.

And I very politely said, you know, I come in and just, I got to get out.

I wait two hours and I'm out.

And this didn't used to happen.

And it's the same thing every other place.

When I was in an ambulance came out, when I went in this anaphylexis, one of the people, I won't mention the town or the city or the hospital, but said, do you really want to go to this hospital?

You can go to another one.

And

the point was you're going to go to somewhere.

There's people everywhere.

And so that's happening all over.

And the thing about it is the people who are the architects of this open border, I mean, when you're letting in every year to San Francisco and you're not hiring more doctors and you're not building more hospitals and you're not building, and you're already crowded, and COVID showed us we were, and you're going to socialized medicine where some of the people who want to go in there are not, and you're using DEI at the medical schools.

And can I make a diversion?

When I had a

former Stanford student that I got to know, and he was basically a straight-A student, he applied to 16 medical schools.

He didn't get into one.

Straight A student.

And you know why?

He was a white male trying to go to medical school.

So when you're using DEI at the medical schools, when you're letting in two San Francisco populations every year with no background or audit or anything, and you're not expanding the medical system that's already taxed, then yes.

And the people who are going to suffer are the middle class and the lower middle class and poor.

It's not going to be Nancy Pelosi

or Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden that gives soapbox speeches about how wonderful diversity is on the border because they have all concierge doctors.

And that's why, that's yet another reason that there's a very explosive thing going on.

They don't quite understand

that

the Latino population and the inner city black population don't like this because you talk to them.

They can't go to a doctor or they'll tell you.

I just had a conversation with a guy working and they will tell you that a member of their family is on dialysis and they can't get in like they used to.

And it's because of all of these people.

And then the left says, well, you're just...

picking on the most vulnerable people and you're stereotyped.

No, no, no, no, no.

You should come to southwest Fresno County and for your medical care, you should try to go to the ER when you're sick and see what, or try to get an appointment with a general practitioner or specialist in this area and just see how it goes and how much time they have to spend with you.

Or you should go in the drive window to the local pharmacy and see nine cars ahead of you, and each one takes 15 minutes because they don't speak English or they don't have the right card.

Try it sometime and tell me that

everything is a-okay.

It's not.

And there's a lot of studies showing that.

Waiting times at ERs and availability, doctor, the biggest thing you can do, just all you have to do is Google, and I haven't done that, but it would be obvious because I've read the articles, just say patient time with doctor and see what it says.

And the doctors will tell you they have less time for patients.

because they're either adhering to the Obamacare protocols of recording or seeing everybody.

Or they say that these are Medi-Cal patients and when they calibrate the cost of care, the Medi-Cal

reimbursement is two things.

It's late and it's insufficient to cover the cost.

So the only way they can be viable is if they cannot get a

profitable

compensation per patient according to the old protocols of 10 minutes or 15 or even 30 minutes, then they have to cram in more patients.

Makes sense.

And that means that people who used to have very good care, I used to have great care.

I had a doctor who delivered all my children.

He was my GP for 40 years.

I'd go there.

I'd make an appointment once a year.

He had certain things he knew would be wrong with me, kidney stones.

He would just go through the whole thing, call me in the middle of the week.

How'd it go?

Did that medicine work for you?

It was just wonderful.

It's no longer there.

All three of my children were delivered at the hospital

that doesn't bear any resemblance to what it was 40 years ago as far as waiting time and accessibility.

So it's just happening.

And they don't care.

It's what we talked about earlier, collateral damage.

They love humanity, they hate humans.

We're all eggs that have to be cracked for their omelets.

Aaron Powell.

Do you think their constituency of the poor classes that usually vote in the left because they're going to give them services for very low cost or for free are seeing the irony that this left wing they vote for is bringing in this massive immigrant population that's making it even worse for them in health care.

Do you think that

that is going to be evident?

I would say that when I go to the food market, I go to Walmart at certain times,

there couldn't be more than one or two non-Hispanics there.

And I had to rebuild a barn that collapsed, and I had another guy that was painting.

So I would say I've had long conversations with 10 or 12 Latino people.

I have neighbors I talk to that work on the orchards, and I talk to people I know I went to high school with.

At the food market, I bump into them.

And I can tell you the following.

I must have met 30 Latino males between ages 30 and 70.

None of them are working right now for the government.

None of them are going to college, so they're a different subset.

But when they got on to politics, they were not neutral.

They were not neutral.

They didn't say, I don't know who I'm going to vote for.

They're working for themselves, though.

Yes, most of them are.

Not all of them, but most of them.

But they weren't just saying things like,

I think I might vote for Trump, like an independent swing voter maybe in a big American city.

It's FFF,

blank Biden.

I can't afford gas.

We can't afford this.

We can't afford that.

And I was in the line the other day at the supermarket, and infant formula,

Similek, or whatever it's called.

I remember when I used to buy it.

It wasn't locked up in the shelves.

It was locked up in the office of the place.

Wow.

And we waited for five minutes where this woman wanted, she didn't speak English, she wanted like seven big vials, you know, big cartons of it.

They had to go all the way around the counter and unlock a closet or storeroom behind the sealed thing where they look at the, you know, they can see the surveillance and all that, and brought it out.

And I said to the guy next to me, well, what's going on?

And he said, they steal it in two seconds.

They can't afford it.

It's so expensive.

And that's what Biden doesn't understand.

So these people you talk to, because

they are adamantly going to vote for Donald Trump because they're not even shy about it.

Trump!

Gas was cheaper.

Two by fours were cheaper.

Roofing was cheaper.

My car repair was cheaper.

My insurance was peaked.

My house insurance was cheaper.

My car insurance was cheaper.

Everything.

Biden, he doesn't know where he is.

He's an idiot.

He ruined everything.

That's what they say.

Now, does that mean that their children who go to college?

No, they're not going to.

They'll probably vote for Biden because they're getting an indoctrinated.

And their wives, I don't know.

But I met a lot of Hispanic women that don't like Biden.

And my point is, does that mean it's a landslide in the Latino vote?

No.

It's going to be 45% Trump.

Is that unusual?

Yes.

Can Biden win if 17 or 16% of the population, 45% who do show up and vote, vote against him?

I don't think so.

Especially if the black vote is 17%, 18%.

Then he's done done his toast.

All the cheating in the world can't help him.

But we'll see, it's a long time.

So you expect now that what we're going to see is two things.

Trump is a racist, racist, racist, racist, racist, racist, racist.

He hates people who are not white.

That's what we're going to hear.

Trump, Trump, Trump.

And Biden's going to be giving stuff to people.

Drain the public, you know, he's going to cancel more student debt.

He's going to drain more oil from the strategic what's left.

And we'll see.

But I think people have had it with them because they get very angry.

I get angry.

And so

I think it's going to make a big difference.

I just talked to an insurance agent and I had a place in the mountains for 17 years

and the premium had almost tripled.

I have never filed a claim.

The fire came within, I don't know, 600 yards of it, but it didn't damage it.

I've had snow damage.

I fix myself.

I've had other structural damage, tree or something, I fixed myself.

I never dared to file a claim because I was worried to get a name that you file claims.

They canceled it.

Okay, so then there's something called the FAIR plan in California for uninsurable places, which is a synonym for anything with an elevation of 10 feet or something, foothills and mountains.

And

it's twice what the other one was, and it's less coverage.

And I talked to the insurance agent, and I've talked to people.

Do you think there's people who are not buying insurance?

Yes,

lots of them.

Thousands of them.

And I've noticed that when the fire was destroyed, about 80 places near me, only about 40 are rebuilt.

And that had started right then.

But now it's really accelerated.

So I have a feeling that,

and the same thing is true with car insurance.

California's got a terrible name.

Again, when you have half the accidents, they're hit and run in LA County, and it's really high here.

And I think I've told you I've had four hit-and-runs on my property, and I've been in one, two, where the person fled that hit me.

But my point is.

The insurers are not, they don't want to deal with California regulations and rules and the California mentality.

And so there's going to be more and more people in California that cannot afford car insurance and they can't afford to insure their home.

And they're going to blame Joe Biden.

I should blame, first of all, Gavin Newsom.

But Biden,

I don't want to,

you know, I don't want to sound like a broken record, but again, the phenomenon is just eerie how the white working Democratic class that I grew up with, and my parents were Democrats,

And my grandparents, who were poor farmers basically were Democrats.

But they were, you know, they have disappeared.

They don't vote Republican, I mean Democratic anymore.

They vote Republican.

Republicans are the class,

their class is the middle class.

That's their emphases.

And it's just remarkable that the Romney, McCain, Bush, aristocratic, golfing establishment wing is sort of, I'm stereotyping, of course, is kind of ossified, calcified, but it's now a middle-class party.

And that white working class will not go back to the Democrats in my lifetime because of these social cultural

and the same thing.

If you go to just to take this stereotypical East Palestine that Biden ignored and Budajig looked like a fool when he plodded around there, and you ask those people what they think of the bi-coastal white elite, they have nothing but disdain for them.

They're the ones that shut down factories, that

shut down energy, that tell them they're stupid and they have all these cultural issues they're supposed to toe the line.

The same thing's happening in the black and Latino communities.

They look at, I don't, I think when they look at Joy Reed and she keeps talking about white supremacy here and white this,

they're coming to the point where

this is a little tit-for-tat spat between wealthy white women, anchor women, and black anchor women who are wealthy, or OPA versus,

I don't know, OPA versus versus Prince Harry and Megan Markle or something

and or this professor of DEI or that professor of Africana studies fighting some white woman for the chairmanship or you know they're elites yeah and they don't care about the Latino or black community in a sense can I get dialysis from my mother can I afford baby formula?

Can I drive to the coast to the beach without having to pay $6 a gallon for gas gas or diesel in California.

Can I go when I have a damaged roof?

Can I go buy plywood for less than

$50 a sheet or something?

And the answer is, he did it.

Biden did it.

And the elites can't, I don't think they can win them.

It's just starting, so we don't know the effect of this phenomenon, but how it's going to evolve.

But for now, it's so eerily resembling the defection of the white middle class and lower middle class to conservatism away from the Democratic Party because of the elite out-of-touch, arrogant, snotty, snarky agenda.

And that's how Latino and black elites sound to their base.

And that's why they look at Donald Trump.

Yeah.

Well, one elite we have that has been doing a great job is in Texas.

Governor Abbott and his legislature passed a bill in Texas that would allow cops to arrest illegals.

Joe Biden tried to block that, and the Supreme Court just ruled that Biden doesn't have the right to block that law.

So that's a good thing.

Yeah, I didn't read the ruling.

I don't know if that is a principle in general that a state

There's two issues there, and one of them is in the Constitution that the federal government promises to provide for the national security of the states, right, from invasion and all that.

If you call that an invasion or a foreign threat, then it's absolutely constitutionally correct that a state in lieu of the federal government, I think federal government abdicates its responsibility.

Or there was special circumstances that a state border, which a state has a constitutional right to protect, happens to be also the national border shared.

But why in the world would he try to stop somebody from enforcing the law?

He should if he was smart politically, he'd say, well, well, you know, states' rights, I got some reservation.

But if they want to go enforce that border, pay for it.

That's okay with me.

It'll look good in the election year.

But he's stupid.

And

I don't know.

Governor Abbott was so,

everybody's calling him names.

He was so patient, almost plotting the first two years of the Biden.

He didn't send people to, you know, Chicago and New York.

He really tried to deal with it, and they just snubbed him and made fun of him.

And at some point, he exploded and said, okay, I'm done.

The only criticism I have of him is that

he put so much barbed wire that everybody's coming into California.

And Arizona.

And Arizona, yeah.

And Gavin Newsom is, he doesn't know what to do because 45% of the state is Latino and he doesn't understand because he doesn't know any Latinos.

He doesn't live among them.

He doesn't want to live among them unless they're his maids or gardeners or something.

But if he did live along,

he would be more empathetic to what they want, and that is they're Americans and they want the border closed.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about the Roman theater.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.

Well, I have found the secret serum.

And it's vibrant, super C serum.

The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers.

Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and aged spots with Vibriance.

I just began using Super C Serum last week and I love it.

My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh.

And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.

Give it a try and you'll love it too.

And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.

Go to vibrance.com/slash victor to save up to 37% off and free shipping.

That's Vibrance.

V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E.

Vibrance.com/slash slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

We're back.

You can find Victor at his social media X.

He is at V D Hansen.

And Facebook, you can find him at Hansen's Morning Cup.

So come join him there.

And on his website, of course.

Victor, so I don't know very much about Roman theater and

surely Plautus or Terence, I do have a small experience with the Steve Martin type humor that

at least in Plautus' plays.

Well, we're on this kind of crazy odyssey from the beginnings of Western civilization with the two Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and we're working our way chronologically through classical Greece, and we're in the Hellenistic period and we've done oratory.

We're going to finish out with

what we call new comedy.

We said that Aristophanes was sort of like Saturday Night Live where when you have a vibrant democracy, you make fun of people and you ridicule them on stage and you have contemporary political issues, the war.

But what happens when you have an autocracy?

So Mennoner is writing two generations after Aristophanes, 350s BC,

at the end of the city-state when Philip of Macedon is there and he's and then

his contemporaries, Diphilus and Philemon, we have the names.

We don't have very many of the comedy, but they're very different.

It's a sign of a discouraged society or an inert or not a politically vibrant that when you can't ridicule people,

political figures, and you can't argue on stage or make fun of people on the opposite end of the spectrum, what do you do?

You

revert back to Three's Company or Cheers,

where you have little jokes.

And so, when you read Plautus'

plays, Adelphi or Rudens, they're basically

somebody got the menectman, somebody got separated at birth, and these two identical twins are just walking around bumping, and everybody says, misidentifies them, and they'd have no idea there's somebody just like them.

Or

somebody falls in love with a prostitute, but he's married to, he's promised to an aristocratic girl, it doesn't turn him on, so what does he do?

And sneaks around, and there's always the wily slave, he's smarter than everybody.

And you're a slave, but the slave has got it all figured out.

And there's the parasitus, that's the Greek word for the parasite.

It just means psychus means food, para means on the side, you kind of get the crumbs or the food.

And he's always trying to cause trouble.

So it's psychodramas, household fun.

And we only have one extant Menander who wrote about a hundred plays.

And he has one called the only one we have is called the Deuscolos, the old curmudgeon.

And

it's about a guy who's really angry at everything.

And he lives up on Mount

Parnes near the Cave of Pan.

When I was a student in Greece, we hiked up there and actually went to where the play takes place.

I think you can still get to it.

It was a long hike, and it was kind of hard to find.

But there's the Cave of Pan, and there was where the Deuscalos live.

And that was a play about him, about how he softens.

He really hates every new thing.

He hates youth, and he's all by himself.

But that's the kind of topics.

So, when Roman literature starts, remember, as the Hellenistic period evolves and Rome in the Western Mediterranean starts to challenge, we could go on with all sorts of

the philosophical school, the Stoics, the skeptics, and maybe we will.

But the emphasis starts to change toward this new power, Italy.

But Italy has no literary tradition, so it has to start out by copying Greek models that they come in contact with them.

And so when

Greece in the 140s, 130s becomes Roman, it's a long process.

Corinth is wiped out in 146.

But the point I'm making is then Latin authors start to refine their grammar, their vocabulary in terms of Greek paradigms and models.

And so they, for every Iliad, we're going to see there's an Aeneid.

And an Odyssey and Iliad, there's an Aeneid.

For every Sappho or Alcius or Simonides, there's going to be a Catullus or Horus.

So there's a model, and then there's a Roman copy.

Same thing with sculpture.

But the earliest Greek Roman literature, I should should say, tends to be comedy.

We do have some historians that

we'll get into them when we get to Livy.

And we'll see that there are some great names and there's some people who were living among the Romans.

And we're going to talk about one, the greatest historian, I think, of antiquity, except for these cities, Polybius.

And we'll talk about him as a Roman historian, even though he was Greek.

He was captured and became a captive and stayed in Rome and wrote a history of the

Punic Wars.

It's a great history.

But when you look at the original Roman literature, it starts out with Plautus, who is a playwright writing around in the Second Punic War, around 200.

And he is copying either Menander or Diphyllus or Philemon.

These are names of Greek

new comic poets.

So there's not the theater.

They have a theater and there's a festival, but it's not sophisticated like the Greek model.

It's more literary.

But they copy these plays.

So even though we've lost the original, there's no such thing as plagiarism.

In truth, the word contamination

is when you don't plagiarize the Greek copy exactly and you contaminate it by putting things into it that are not there.

So they don't really have a lot of originality.

We have two playwrights, Plautus, who wrote around 200, and then I think the more sophisticated was Terence.

He wrote six comic plays that we have.

He was a Carthaginian.

I don't know, he was, I shouldn't say he was a Carthaginian, he was kidnapped.

Or

he came to Italy.

He left Italy as a hostage during the Hanabalic invasions.

So he was either, used to be that he was either a Berber, that is an indigenous person of North Africa, or he was Punic, that is the Punic culture that was superimposed on the Berbers somewhere around 800 BC.

But now I think people are saying, well, he was so sophisticated that he couldn't have just been a Berber slave that was somehow ended up in Italy and all of a sudden knew Greek models.

So he must have read Greek and

he's very clever with the use of language in his comic plays.

So now people are thinking he must have been a Roman and was kidnapped or brought in and then brought back.

Anyway, he has these same plays and they're very funny.

It's the same idea of mistaken identity, identity, somebody who falls in love with somebody who's actually related to them,

someone who's he falls in love with a young girl who was pregnant and he doesn't know if he wants to marry her, but he finds out that the girl he raped was actually her and the dark.

A lot of them have very

They're kind of hard to read because the idea of forcible sexual assault is one of the themes in all of these.

And so

that's what starts Roman literature.

And we're going to look next time, I think the great historians that we have of the Republic are Livy, and he has a long history called From the Founding of the City, 140-something books, not all of them extant.

So we're going to look at Livy, and then in addition to Livy, we'll get into the imperial historians Tacitus.

We're going to look at the Roman poets, especially Tabolus, Catullus, Horace,

and Propertius.

And then the greatest of them all, Virgil with Ecologues, Georgix, Aeneid.

And then we'll look at some of the,

I don't want to call, I guess we can call them philosophers, Seneca, who also wrote tragedy.

He's the only extant tragedian, but they were more written than to be seen on actual stage.

He wrote an Oedipus, and

Roman tragedy has the violence on stage, not offstage like Greek tragedy.

And then I want to get to my favorite Roman genre is the novel, which is two great works.

I think maybe the greatest works of Latin literature are Petronius' Satyricon and Apuleius' Golden Ass.

So we've got a lot to go before we get into the Dark Ages with Boethius and late antiquity and Augustine and

I should say late antiquity into into the Dark Ages, then we'll go into medieval literature and then we'll go into just example of the Renaissance Enlightenment and we're into the 19th century Romantics.

You were,

since we have just a moment here,

this might be a little bit esoteric, but you were talking last time about the transformation of

language.

And you made me wonder once you were talking about that, the difference between the Greek and the Latin is where you were at.

But doesn't Latin, and I don't, maybe you won't know this, doesn't Latin change from the Roman Latin to the later

Middle Ages Latin?

Is there a way of describing that change?

Could you describe it or is it too?

It's the same thing with classical Attic Greek dispersing in the Hellenistic times to Koine Greek, meaning the common Greek.

Anytime you have a language like British English, right, and that's dispersed through America, Canada, Australia, so you know that there's a whole new vocabulary that Americans have that

Australians don't have, and vice versa, and accentuation and patterns of grammar because of dispersion.

And so the same thing happens in Greek, for take that example.

So if you read the New Testament,

If you read the Gospel of John and you put it side by side by the narrative passage of Thucydides,

if you're

a classical, if say you're a professor of Greek, you can read the New Testament almost as fast as English, but not even the narrative of Thucydides, you can't.

So what is the difference?

First of all, people don't have the same, they don't have the same

size vocabulary, because it's

not their native language.

Or if there is their native language, they're not

educated, they're just common people.

So they probably have a fifth of the vocabulary.

So something that's a violation of classical style is variatio.

You have to vary your vocabulary.

They just repeat it and repeat it.

So if you're learning Greek, you can see the words again and again and again.

And then the word order is basically...

Not that Greek isn't, but Greek is kind of like English.

It's subject, verb, predicate.

But

great stylists do all sorts of things with subordinate clauses, or they reverse the...

order or they have things like chiasmus, etc.

They don't in a lot of the Hellenistic, unless it's the second sophisticate, deliberately trying to emulate classical Greek among intellectuals.

And then the same thing happens with Latin.

Classical Latin, when you

so

just to give you one word, if the word is equus for horse, equestrian, and so then the Iberian word is cabalis.

And by the medieval period, cabalis, caballo.

And that becomes common in the Pyrenees, for example.

So a lot of indigenous words then seep into Latin.

And what happens is you start to see the breakdown, you see it in Spanish and French and Italian, you see the breakdown in the case system.

So in inflected languages like Greek and Latin that are highly inflected, they change the spelling of nouns and adjectives depending how they're used in the sentence.

So if you want to say love

is good, you say,

I know that's not a stupid thing to say, but let's say the boy is pretty or good.

You say puer

est bonus, right?

If you say the boy's dog,

you say conus pueri, the possessive.

So every, depending how the word, the noun is used in a sentence, it changes its spelling.

If you don't have an inflected language, then how do you express that relationship of a noun or adjective grammatically to the rest of the sentence?

The only way you can do it is what we do in English.

You can either use an apostrophe in some cases, or you have to use of or for or by.

So prepositions make up for case endings.

And so when you start to look at these modern Romance languages, they don't have the nouns changing as much.

They're much more inflected than English.

You can say, the dog is good.

the

collar of the dog.

I give this to the dog.

I like the dog, so I've just used it in the nominative, the genitive, and the indirect object case, or the dative, and the accusative or direct object.

And guess what?

Dog didn't change its spelling, right?

But what did I use?

I use prepositions to express those relationships that are changing in the sentence.

So that's one thing that happens.

The other thing is the grammar in subordinate clauses starts to break down.

Latin and Greek, if you say, I went to the seashore in order that I collect shells,

in

Greek you changed what we call the mood.

You use a different type of verb in the subordinate clause depending on the tense of the main sentence.

So if you say, I went to the shore, that's past tense, in order that, then you use the optative mood to see shells.

If it's present,

You say, I go to the shore to see shells, then in the subordinate clause, you use the subjunctive.

Latin has something it doesn't have an optative mood so it doesn't have a sequence of mood has a sequence of tenses.

It's a little bit trickier.

Once you learn the optative it's pretty easy.

It's a very rare mood but

what I'm saying in Latin is you have to learn a sequence of tenses whether you use the pluperfect or imperfect or present subjunctive or perfect subjunctive, depending on the tense of the main verb.

Okay, so when you get into these dispersions in modern modern languages, that breaks down.

And it breaks down in Greek, and you start to see people using the subjunctive instead of the optative.

And the other thing that you start to see is

Latin is more difficult in a lot of ways because you don't have a definite article.

In other words, you don't know the gender by the article.

In Greek, you get two chances.

So if you say man,

and you want to know how to match the adjective with the noun, so it has to be correct in number, case, right?

Number, case, and gender.

So if you want to say the man is good, you say ho, the,

anthropos, man,

esti, kalos.

If you're in Latin, you just say

we're, est, bonus.

There's no the man, we're.

So when you see all those, that array of nouns in Latin, you have to memorize every single one of them.

You do in Greek, but when you see it on the page, you have an article to help you.

So what happens is, as Latin starts to disperse, the articles start to reappear.

And they use usually the demonstrative pronoun illi, like that,

that man in class so illi, we're

would be that man, and they would never say that in classical Latin, but in modern language it would be le,

hom,

for,

you know, homo, and that's the other word for man in Greek, in Latin.

So you'd say, are you in the case, le, ele, or ela, that comes from ille, the last two letters of the demonstrative pronoun.

So it's basically very easy to follow that as these classical languages

start to disperse not to a few million people speaking them, where they can control very carefully, and they have a very sophisticated guardians of language, you know, intellectuals, writers, people who are compiling lexica and everything.

And they start to go all over the empire of, what,

you know, there's 70 million people, and that's not their native language.

So they start to drop the cases, they start to drop the sequence of tenses, they start to add in their own words from their native vocabularies.

And then you start to see the thing to remember is when the empire breaks down and the road system breaks down and it's too dangerous to go across the Mediterranean from New Carthage to

Rome because of pirates, for example, then they're Balkanized.

And when they're Balkanized, there's no reinforcement of a common language.

And, you know, you look at the United States, and we used to, when you were, when I was growing up, there was a San Joaquin Valley accent, a very definite one.

And it doesn't exist anymore.

And when you go to the south, every time I go to the south, I'm just amazed how many people don't sound southern, especially in Atlanta or

Miami.

So we have national media and

TV, and we have a flat American accent.

It's kind of a northern, Midwestern mix.

And you don't have that

park your car in Harvard Square.

It's all disappearing.

But if we break down again and we're self-selecting and we're not going to have national fora anymore, then you'll start to see those regional accents reappear and you'll start to see the grammar reflect it.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and go to a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about the current news: Biden diplomacy, and maybe squatters in New York seem to have more rights than the residents of New York.

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

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hampson Show.

So, Victor, Biden's bad legacy in Afghanistan is

in hearings right now in the House.

And so, I was wondering your thoughts on those hearings going in.

Also, there are 11 embassies that have been evacuated during Biden's administration, which seems like a terrible lot to me.

But

what are your thoughts?

Before I go, I just want to say one thing.

Don't think that, as I said about English, it's immune.

I was just thinking the other day that

in the last

year, when you say the relative pronoun who, depending on the nominative, is supposed to be who and the accusative or direct object is whom, I never hear it.

I always hear people say, the woman that you like,

whom he likes, you know, whom he likes, it's always the woman you like, who he likes.

You just drop it.

Nobody knows that anymore.

And when you say whom,

to who are you speaking?

If I say to people out here, and I do once in a while just to get the reaction, I'll say to whom are you speaking?

And they go, What the F are you doing?

Who do you think you are, Victor?

Go back to Palo Alto.

You know what I mean?

I just try to do that once in a while to see, and you could just see which types of language are disappearing in the common dialect.

So, as far as Afghanistan, they had a hearing, hearing, what the hell went wrong?

And we had our friend Mark Milley, I say our friend, because he was the one that said he was reading Professor Kendi to find out the message.

And he was the one who said, you know, if Donald Trump,

I feel as, you know, did you know that I'm really doctor?

Mark Milley, professor of psychiatry.

And if I feel that Donald Trump's a little out there and he's talking about a tense situation maybe over Taiwan or something, and I hear the word nuclear, I'm going to call call up my commie buddy in the Beijing and say, you know what?

Be on your guard.

I'll tell you when he tells me something.

Well, he was testifying, along with General McKinsey from the Marine Corps.

And it's so typical of our leaders these days.

They're all saying it was a screw-up.

It was terrible.

Now, did they say that when they were in service?

No.

Did Mark Milley say this was a screw-up and I resigned?

No.

Did they say that before they retired?

No.

So now all of a sudden we learn

why we lost $50 billion in munitions and a billion-dollar embassy and a $400 million remodeled

air base at Bagram.

And we lost our $80 million investment in gender studies at the university.

We lost our pride flags on the embassy.

We lost everything.

And I shouldn't make light, we lost 13 Americans and we don't know how many, they said they didn't know how many people in the testimony had been killed.

And I just talked to a high-ranking officer, and I said, How many people

do you know have been killed?

He said, 12.

These were Afghan.

We don't even have a, we don't know about the American or foreign contractors that were non-Afghan.

So it was a disaster.

They were testifying to that effect.

The little thing that was weird, though, they kind of blamed Donald Trump

as well.

That was interesting because you could blame Donald Trump because he sent Pompeo over there, remember, to reduce radically.

But Donald Trump was right and he said that if you start killing Americans, this is what I'm going to do to you.

And he was going to bomb-bomb as he had with ISIS.

And from what I can gather, they had a plan, the Trump administration, to keep the Bagwam Air Force base and 3,500 troops or so to guard it and have the biggest base in

Central Asia, right?

Airbase.

It would have been a great thing to do, but it was out in the country, so to speak, so you weren't dealing with a traditional Islamic society.

And then Biden's decided that he wanted the 20th anniversary of 9-11, September 11th, right?

2021, 20 years after September 11th, 2001.

And he was going to be the saint who got us out of Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary.

So he rushed it.

That did come out of the testimony.

But, you know, when you get Trump's name and anything,

it's kind of like a devout Christian crossing himself.

They have to cross themselves and say Trump did it.

And then they're free and they feel they can continue to talk.

So that was kind of what the testimony was.

It was basically Biden screwed it up, but we're not going to get out of this testimony without blaming Trump, too.

And the embassies.

The embassies, yes.

Oh, man, they're everywhere.

Burma, Haiti,

Belarus, Ukraine.

And it's kind of the foreign policy equivalent of defunding the police, because they have the common theme of deterrence.

So, if you say we're going to defund the police and we're going to let these Soros-elected prosecutors in all the major cities, they're going to let out criminals, you're going to get crime, right?

There's no deterrence.

So, if you come in and you're the Biden administration and you trash everything that Donald Trump did,

then if you're an Iranian satellite or you're a general in the Russian army that Putin asked for advice, or you're a Chinese admiral, and Qi wants to know about Taiwan, or you're South Korean, North Korean inner circle, you say, hmm.

Well, let me think now.

Biden's coming in, and he's angry at Trump.

He's angry at Trump because he killed Soleimani.

He's angry at Trump because he got out of the Iran deal.

He's angry at Trump because he said, screw the climate change agreement.

He's angry at Trump because he was a strong ally of Israel.

He's angry at Trump because he was too hard on the Houthis.

He's angry at Trump because he killed the Wagner group, 200, 300 of them.

He's angry at Trump because he got out of the asymmetrical missile deal with Russia.

Wow.

He's angry at him for the same reason we are.

In other words, it's a whole new world now.

There's no consequences.

You can do whatever you want.

So Putin says, you know, he said, if I go in, it depends on whether it's a minor or major agreement.

I'm massing on the border, and he withholds

$100 million of aid to Ukraine so that I will, you know, I'll be, oh, wow, Joe Biden, he cut off my enemy's munitions.

That makes me so happy that I will pull back and thank Joe Biden and I won't invade.

People don't think like that.

And so the message was sent again and again that we've defunded the United States, basically,

not just materially, but psychologically.

We emasculated it.

And

it really gets back to two views of human nature and war.

Either you're a leftist and a therapeutic and you believe something like this.

The natural order of things is peace.

And every once in a while people because of poor upbringing, not enough education, unfairness in their early years, a parent who spanked them too much, whatever society did to them, they're not very nice people.

So they try to to cause trouble.

And while we do have a military, it's much more important to talk to them and try to explain this is not in your interest.

This is not who you are.

This is not who we are.

And usually that will work.

I.e.

Woodrow Wilson, make the world safe for democracy.

Da-da-da-da-da.

Jamie Carter gets elected.

I have no inordinate fear of communism.

And they go into Afghanistan and they get rid of the Shah, and suddenly we're hostages.

So this was analogous to that, that we broadcast.

And Jake Selhoon famously, remember he said, and I mentioned that before before the Gaza October 7th massacre, he said, when I'm looking at my portfolio, the Middle East is the quietest one at all.

And you're thinking, well, not because you did anything.

It's you inherited deterrence from Trump.

And since you won't do anything to nourish it and perpetuate it, it's not going to be peaceful for much longer, Jake.

And it wasn't.

And so these embassies are shutting down because people, bad, what the diplomatic community calls, I don't like the term, but they use the term bad actors.

They're like termites coming out of the woodwork.

And they think there is no US.

The Red Sea is open game.

The Houthis, these ragtag bunch of people, shut down 10% of the world's commerce because the U.S.

couldn't or wouldn't stop them.

The Black Sea is off limits.

Don't get near it.

The Russians, it's just a mess.

The Straits of Hormuz, you better be careful.

They'll mine it or the Iranians will do something.

You better get away from the eastern Mediterranean.

Don't go into Suez.

It's not going to work.

And so when you start in the South China Sea, they've got their bases out there and they've got 40% of the world's trade and the United States can do nothing.

And so that's the image that it's a luch libre, as I always say.

It's a free fight for everybody.

No law in the arena now.

And we're not the strongest power, apparently.

Power is psychological, too.

It's a combination of military power, national will, economic clout, social cohesion.

So let's just go through the social cohesion.

Nope.

Financial power, biggest economy, but $35 trillion in debt, running up $2 trillion deficit.

Nope.

Military, China is on schedule to replace us in terms of ships and total tonnage, aircraft, etc., it might already do it.

And it'll get close to us in 10 years with nuclear weapons.

So, nope.

Social concision, cohesion, nope.

Economic power, financial stability.

I don't see it.

Maybe constitutional history, fairness, rule of law?

I don't know.

I think the universities are getting rid of that.

Yeah, and you look at asymmetry.

I think Judge N.

Goron and Judge Cohen and the Eugene Carroll and the Fannie Willis, they've decided that there's no such thing as equality under the law.

It's who you know and what your ideology is.

So we are not the cop on the beat anymore and the left did that and we're going to reap, as Chuck Schumer said, we sowed the wind and we're going to reap the whirlwind.

I'm very worried because these embassies are not just, 11 of them are not just shutting down in these hot spots, but

people

are going to take risk and a cost-to-benefit analysis that they wouldn't otherwise do because they're stupid.

One of the things about a power, final thought on deterrence, if you are a strong power, and we are very strong still, even if we're not necessarily the strongest, but if you don't encourage deterrence and you don't strike back at challenges to your power and influence, your enemies think,

if I had that power,

I would surely deter people, but it's really pathetic when they have all of those ships and planes and guns and they won't do anything.

They won't deter anybody.

Maybe they're sick of Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya.

I don't know what it is.

But they get contempt and then they do something stupid, like go into Taiwan or try to bully South Korea or go into Latvia or something if you're Putin.

So it's very important that you convey an image that you are crazy, you're unpredictable, nobody knows what you're going to do if they're your enemy.

Your friends know that one thing you're going to do is protect their interest.

And neutrals know it's better to be a friend of the United States than to be an enemy of the United States.

And they're both important.

And when that's not true, then

we don't know the relative power of everybody.

And people make miscalculations and they go to war.

And that's what's happening now.

Yeah.

Wow.

Well, Victor, that's the end of the episode.

And I have a comment from Apple Podcasts.

Enjoy, he titles it News Cycle on Adderal 2 as well, right?

Enjoyed this episode, just funny or not.

By the time it was aired, one of our hostages will not make it home.

Bless his soul and family.

And the advertisement for barbecue needs to be changed as it has a whole new meaning after the evil in Haiti.

Thank you for what you do.

Truly enjoyed the critique of Biden's SOTU

and the commentary on Pennsylvania's speech had me belly laughing.

You have us belly laughing.

Thanks.

I like to read our comments because our readers are smarter than I am and they're snarkier than I am too.

Clever.

That's right.

Oh, wait a minute.

Wait, we had a letter.

We had a note about Marjorie Terry Greene.

Oh, yes.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, you had a correction because you said that the button,

that Joe Biden had a button, so he must must have been prepared for the Lake and Riley comment,

wasn't it?

Yeah.

I'm going to play Demosthenes as the barrister orator.

Not completely true.

He brought out a button, and I said, look, he must have been prepared.

He brought out a button with Lake and Riley, right?

And one of our listeners said, no,

very politely, he didn't say no, idiot, but he said that she confronted him and gave him that.

All he had to do do was leave it there, right?

He put it in his pocket.

Why did he put it in his pocket?

And why did he bring it out?

Because he knew it was in his pocket.

Because he knew that he was going to be prepared for her or anybody else who disrupted the speech, right?

So he looked at the button, so he was prepared, and he still didn't get the name right.

So I plead half.

Half guilty, half correct.

Yes.

There you go.

Yes.

He was prepared.

Maybe his speechwriter didn't do it an hour before the speech, but once she confronted him with it, he took that button and he looked at it and he thought he'd file it away and say, you know what?

When she disrupts me or somebody does, I'll just pull that little button out and I'll read the name.

And he couldn't read the name.

No.

He said, Lincoln Riley, who happens to be the USC football coach.

But he sure could say the next day that he apologized for calling Mr.

Barra her murderer and illegal.

That was so mean of him to say that a person who brutally killed an American citizen, robbed her of her whole future, destroyed her family, was unfairly called illegal because he was illegal.

That shows you the mentality of the left.

It does.

It's in a nutshell.

You know, think about it.

Three times

apprehended, thug, his brother's a thug, he's here illegally, he's violent, he's an animal, he destroyed that poor woman, and you're worried about calling him illegal because he's here illegally.

And you're not even going to remember her name after you've been given a button.

And this is in your pocket.

And think, too, she was becoming a nurse and would have done so much more good for so many more people than lots of the people coming across the border.

So that's...

You know what's going to happen?

Just final thoughts.

This thing, this whole DEI

is not going to end with a whimper.

It's going to end with a bang because people are sick of it.

It's like the Soviet Commissar.

All of a sudden, Stalin one day just got rid of it and he won the war.

And he would have lost it if he kept them.

And we're spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars hiring DEI

people who are spending millions of our precious hours, not on productivity, but on politically correct auditing of what we say, what we write, and what we think that that has nothing to do with improving our lives, with improving our productivity, with inventing better machines or more productive work habits.

It's just a drag.

It's an anchor.

And it's a sin of commission

that we're trying to hinder productivity and ease of life.

And it's a sin of omission that we're diverting millions of, trillions of dollars away from this.

And people are sick of it.

And I think it's going to blow up suddenly.

But somebody is going to say,

and

I get, was that Grimm's or Anderson's fairy tales about the emperor who has no clothes?

They're going to say, you know what?

The DEI czar is buck naked.

He's just there yelling and screaming at me and I don't have to listen to him anymore.

And he has nothing to say.

He's at the university and he's screaming and yelling.

He knows no math.

He can't teach history.

He can't teach literature.

What can he do?

Can he run the university?

No, he can't do anything.

All he can do is call people racist and sexist, and I don't have to listen to him anymore.

Bye.

And that's going to be collective suddenly at the corporate level, at the government level, at the university level.

And it's going to be...

Because there's nothing there to defend.

There's nothing defensible.

And we're getting now into its death row.

It's like a...

It reminds me of a jellyfish or...

a crab that you throw out in the pier and it's just thrashing around for air because they know it now.

And if you notice this late-stage DEI, like the Johns Hopkins one that we talked about, she's just talking openly about hating white people.

She gave categories of people who speak English as culpable, and they can't, and Joy Reed can't open her mouth without stereotyping white people.

It's now turned in from advocacy to people of color to visceral hatred of white people in the collective, not as individual, in the collective, which is the worst.

They have become the worst of what they were supposedly going to stop.

And there's nothing there anymore.

Anytime there's nothing there anymore, there's nothing there anymore.

And people know it now.

They know that these people are not educated.

They're not nice people.

They're not doing good.

They disrupt lectures at Stanford and chase federal judges out.

They discriminate on the basis of race and admissions and hiring and retention.

If you're not going to,

you know, you're going to be Riley Gaines, is that her name?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you're not really for men, biological men in sports, they're going to try to, what, seal you off in a room if you're going to, UC Berkeley and disrupt you, try to keep you hostage or something.

And if you're from the IDF and you're going to give a military account, then they're going to disrupt you.

And that's,

everybody's sick of it.

Yeah.

I think Trace Gallagher had a guy on his show the other night that was being hounded in his school school district, I think, and he had done something to it.

Was it Oklahoma?

And he just said, I'm not budging.

And he was exactly what you were describing.

They had a transgender person who tragically killed himself, and they were trying to say he was bullied into it.

And he said, no, he wasn't.

He had problems.

And

I don't know the particulars of the case, but my point is that

the majority of people want to treat people as individuals.

And for them, the race of the superficial appearance is incidental.

It's not essential who the person is.

And that's what they go by.

And these DEI people can't stand that.

They want to,

you know, reparation.

There was somebody today

talking about reparations again, that all the

they wanted free mortgages and all this stuff.

And when you go down that route, then you're going to invite a counter-argument that you're not going to like.

And one that the conservative movement uses is, what is it?

The Great Society costs $20 trillion in transfer payments.

That is a lot of money as far as reparations.

So somebody's going to say, listen, I tell you why, if you want a trillion dollars of reparations, we'll give you a trillion, then you owe $19 trillion if we find the percentage that went disproportionately to a particular group.

And you can find that.

Do you really want that?

Is that what we're going to do?

Is go back through American history and fight who got this and who got that?

Because that's what the left is doing.

You stole this, you did this, you did this, and I guess somebody's going to say, okay,

we took this Native American land, but we built this bridge.

Here's what it cost, you know.

And then when Joe Biden said that, what, illegals built the country,

what did he mean by that?

What did he mean?

He meant that he was insane, demented person.

So all these illegal aliens got in B-29s and they went over and they won the war.

They built the country.

They all landed on Okinawa and Ibojima and they fought and and won the war.

They were at Bella Wood,

Chattoo Thierry and they won.

All these illegals came and they won, they defeated the South.

I didn't know that.

They fought brilliantly at Shiloh and won the battle.

And I didn't know that Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, I had no idea they were illegal.

Yeah.

That's what he's saying.

That is what he's saying.

And they're trying to not study those events, Victor.

You always say, well, people don't know about these events anymore.

Well, that's why, because

I want you to stay.

I'll end in this little note, because I mentioned once before something like it in class.

I had a class I was teaching at Cal State, and do you remember this thing?

It was a documentary called A Day Without a Mexican.

No, I haven't.

Yeah, well, it was a day, and it was like a guy made a documentary to show the whole society, and there was some argument for it, because all of a sudden people

They didn't have somebody cleaning their homes.

That was the story.

And their lawns weren't marrowed, and there weren't people building, you know what I mean?

They had a good point.

Everybody's valuable in the society.

But the student said to me,

oh, professor, did you see it's day without a Mexican?

Did you realize you wouldn't be here?

And I said, well, I don't think that's very helpful that we look at one particular group and we try to value or disin comparison with other.

But I can tell you, this was when my mother was dying of a brain tumor.

And I said, you know,

I did not see a Mexican brain surgeon.

I saw an Armenian brain surgeon.

I saw a Scottish brain surgeon.

And then I went through all the people she saw.

So would you like to take all those people out?

Are you going to have a day without an Armenian American, a day without a Jewish American?

Because if you do, it's going to be pretty catastrophic.

And it's not going to be what you think it's going to be.

It's going to be your health or your science.

That's just the way it is.

But it's not helpful, I was trying to tell this young student, to take one particular group and make grandiose claims that they're essential society.

Everybody's essential.

But when you start doing it by race, it's going to boomerang back on you.

And she got, she's another person.

That was my second time that I sent, and she went to see my best friend, Luis Costa, the dean.

Victor, Victor, Victor, what did you do this time?

And so he was a wonderful guy, and I told him, he said, I'm glad you did it.

You should have said more.

People need to be reminded that race is incidental, not

the prerequisite for our identities.

Individuals are essential.

Victor Davis-Hansen, you are essential to the day.

So I hope that our listeners have enjoyed this today.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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