The Greek rhetoricians and Athletes Sue NCAA

Hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson's show.

This is our weekend edition and we look at some of the recent news that we didn't get into the Friday news roundup and then we're going to talk about ancient Greek rhetoric this week for the middle section.

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

Welcome back.

Victor can be found at his website, victorhanson.com, and it is called The Blade of Perseus.

Please come join us.

Just come onto the website and have a look.

There's lots of free stuff on it, of course, but there's also things that you can subscribe to, and those are the VDH Ultra articles at $5 a month or $50 a year, and we'd love to have you.

Victor, so first thing I wanted to talk about was California.

There's so many bills passing the California Senate.

It's just, I don't know whether it's infuriating or just absolutely insane, but here are some of them recently.

The proposal for allowing loans at zero interest and without any down payment to illegal aliens, health care for illegal aliens.

And then there's also a bill that's going to go through where electrical consumption will be based on income.

So if you have higher income, you pay a higher premium, I guess, or a a higher price for it.

I was wondering if you were

some ideas about the craziness of California.

I wouldn't mind it if they were honest.

So, instead of California, they should just say the California Socialist Republic.

It would be the California Socialist Republic of Communist Counties or something.

Just give us the truth.

Because

what's happening is this.

Two things are happening.

We got flooded

the last 25 years with people coming in, very bright,

and they created Silicon Valley.

And that became the world's siphon of cash, $9 trillion,

larger than most countries' net worth.

And it made about a couple of million people entirely

entirely independent of taxes.

They could care less.

All they care about is our cosmic issues that they can live to be 150.

Climate change, DEI, ESG.

And so they're behind spending all the money.

We're $76 billion.

Remember Gavin Newsom when we had a $30 billion deficit that was announced early last year, in the fiscal year, he said, oh, that's going to go down.

No, it went up.

Anything that Gavin Newsom says, just say the opposite and you'll know you hit the truth.

$76 billion.

And what is he doing?

Well, I just drove over this morning 200 miles and

152 on the Pacheco Pass had one lane construction.

Then I got to Manning Avenue where I come home and it was blocked.

So I went to the next one, Florida, and it was blocked.

Then I went to the next one, Nebraska, and it was blocked.

Then I went another mile in a a mountain view of my own.

It's blocked.

And then I thought, well, Connect.

And then it was blocked for high-speed rail in its 15th year.

So what I'm getting at is

you have all these people who have these utopian ideas, high-speed rail, climate change, and they just don't care because they have so much money.

And

a lot of the money they get is on capital gains anyway.

So it's going to go up to 14.2% income tax rate.

Joe Biden wants to go up to 39 or 40%.

They don't care.

As long as they get the utopian agenda that suggests, and you know what, if you want to give 500 million to illegal aliens for health care, you think they care?

No.

You go to where I go, where I live in rural Fresno County, and you go to an emergency room and you need immediate care or you go to a specialist, you can see the difference.

There's 30 people, 40 people in the waiting room.

Half don't speak English.

It's an enormous health crisis.

The people coming across the border are not all 14 in the grade of health.

They're some of the people with the greatest health issues in the world, but they don't care.

And so at the same time that came in, we let in California about 15 million people from different countries.

Fine, legal?

No.

Not all of them.

Most of them were not legal.

So we have 27% of the population was not born in the United States.

Is that good?

It could be if they were assimilated, integrated, intermarried, and nursed on civic education, but they're not.

They're told that this is a horrible place, and the moment they set in, they have grievances that have to be

repertory.

They have to be compensated by the guilty, victimizing, oppressor class.

And the result is it's just a joke.

So what do you have to do to make life work?

You've got to up the electricity rates, especially if you want to, I just drove by a solar farm.

You shut down nuclear power that's cheap.

You shut down natural gas, it's cheap, and you build these huge solar farms that don't do anything at night.

And then you have to subsidize that.

And the price of electricity is over 30 cents a kilowatt.

So what do you do?

Because you brought in all these people from all over the world that have no money.

And they're doing two things.

One, they're running a huge black market.

They buy and sell with cash.

And when they work for you, or anything, it's cash.

So they're not paying taxes they are on public support but they're not paying taxes and California is the biggest source of remittances of the 60 billion we contribute about 20 percent of that goes back to Latin America so basically a lot of people came here illegally they're working for cash they're on public support and they're sending billions back to their families and friends south of the border.

And the result is they need help.

So

they can't afford health care, so they get subsidized health.

They can't afford electricity, so they get subsidized electricity.

So then you say, well, who pays for it?

Well, who's the 10 million people who are the middle class?

You have the wealthy that are two or three million wealthiest people in the world, and they created the system, and they feel so good about themselves because they never have to see the poor or the homeless or the crime, and they feel their zip codes, their titles after their name, their money insulates them.

And most of the times they do.

Drive around the Stanford campus and see these two $3 million homes.

They have all sorts of rules and regulations that keep people out.

And

we just had, as I think I told Jack, we had the results from the California primary that very few people voted, but I think it was 550 to 12, 550 Biden, 12, 14 Trump voters.

Those are the people who run the state.

That's where Sam Bankman-Friedman's parents live.

That's where the Theranos people live.

That's where...

And so my point is that the very, very wealthy created a very oppressive and costly state.

And the very poor need subsidies because they can't afford it.

So they cry on their own by having a black market economy.

and being paid only in cash.

And the middle class, they're getting killed.

They can't afford afford 14, 12, 13% income tax.

They cannot afford the high valuation on their property.

Even though it's 1%,

it's now up to 1.5%.

It's $1,000 a square foot in some places for a home on assessment.

They can't afford the 10% sales tax.

They can't afford the highest

gasoline taxes.

So they leave.

They leave.

They say that I pay all this money and the schools are rated 47th in the country.

I want to send my kid to a university in California, but it's DEI, and they only took 21%

of the 2,000 students that entered at Stanford are white, and then only about 9% are white males, only 180 at Stanford University.

Same thing with Berkeley, UCL, other state CSU.

So they say these camps...

So they're leaving.

The old white working class.

who makes between $40,000 and $100,000 or maybe more,

or maybe the small business, they say, you know what, these people hate my guts, and I have no freedom here, and I can't get a gun, and the crime is soaring, and if I did shoot somebody, it broke in my house.

A jury would convict me of murder, so I don't want to do it anyway.

And

this transportation system is shot.

The 99 is the most deadly highway in the United freeway in the United States.

I was on I-5 today.

I really like truckers.

You know what their attitude is?

Well, if they're not going to enforce the law about looting or, you know, smash and grab, I'm just going to get in that old left lane and I'm going to put my pedal to the metal and I'm going to go 70 miles an hour and we're going to have a whole wagon train of 50 semis.

That's what I saw this morning.

Don't cry if you're a motorist.

Don't try to go zig and zag in between them because they will crush you like a bug.

But the point is, there's no third lane.

So we're spending $300 billion on high-speed rail that will never be built.

and we have I-5, 101, and 99 that look the same as

I was watching Mad Mad World, 1962, and there was a picture of the PCH and of the 101.

They haven't changed.

They have not changed.

That was when there was, what, 14 million, 15 million Americans.

So the whole state is in free fall, and people are leaving, and they're going to northern Georgia, they're going to Tennessee, they're going to Florida, they're going to Nevada.

Some of them are going to Arizona, some are to Oregon, some to Idaho, but they're getting out.

And each time we lose one of these productive taxpayers who does not get paid in cash, that is very honest and pays their full share, the 1% who used to pay 50% of all the income tax, that 1% is now paying 55%.

It's going to go up to 75.

And it's kind of like

everybody knows you should go,

but

the last people to go, or it's kind of like getting out of Germany or Italy or Japan when it was going fascist.

You know you should go, but people have properties you don't go, but the ones that don't go are gonna get the worst.

So all of us who are staying in California,

you know your taxes are gonna go up to pay for all this, and you know you're gonna be hated more and you're gonna have less freedom.

And the people got out, they feel like they've got out of prison.

I talk to them all the time.

They miss the weather, they miss the beauty, but they say, you you know what, I had a big target on my back, a bull's gut.

Like, I'm not going to do it anymore.

Yeah.

Is it going to change?

No.

You know who's going to change it if it does change?

Is the Latino, middle, and upper middle class because they are all working and salaried for the most part.

Not all, but a lot of them are government employees and they can't, they have to pay that.

That is withheld.

And they get very angry when they, you know, when somebody wants to clean their house or mow their lawn or fix their roof or do some electrical work and they have to pay cash, they say, I don't get paid in cash.

I have to pay 50% of my,

but you, you're going to get double if I do that.

And they're being taxed to death and their schools are no good and they're starting to wake up.

And I think

there's going to be, not in my lifetime, but eventually maybe they will be the saviors of California.

Maybe, let's hope.

But it seems to me that given that everything that you've talked about that's going wrong is the result of the California legislature, and given the law fare that we talked about on Friday,

the Friday news roundup about Trump and all of those cases, it seems to me that the whole picture here is the trouble with democracy.

That

all these people elected to represent, that's really great,

but you can be electing the worst people in the world, apparently.

They're not smart.

Just because given what you said, they should be thinking that at the legislature.

Are you suggesting to me that if Fannie Willis gets disqualified, and she will, she gets prosecuted, she will, and she gets disbarred, she'll be still re-elected as district attorney in Fulton County?

I do not know.

I think if it's possible for her to be, but they may throw her off the ballot, right?

You can't even be on this ballot.

I I think Gavin Newsom is,

he's been re-elected, so he's going to be there eight years.

And somebody voted twice for him for lieutenant governor, 16 years, and somebody voted twice as mayor, 16.

So

figure it out.

He's been here

for most of his life.

And he's got a dismal, everywhere he goes, he has the on-midas touch.

He touches something and gold turns to dross.

And so, yeah, I'm depressed about California.

I don't know what to do.

You feel like you want to stay here and save it, or your parents, you know, you want to keep a farm or a house, but you know that you're destroying your family by staying here

unless you can get on the other side.

And what I mean by that, if you can join the bi-coastal elite and make three or four million bucks, I guess, and be immune from madness.

Oh, yeah.

I'll say, hmm, Victor will try to make $6 million a year.

And I'll say, hmm, I really resent the idea they're still burning natural gas.

What are those peasants doing?

They're getting killed and crime's out of the way, but my security patrol up in Piedmont keeps me safe.

You know what I mean?

On Woodside, I'm safe.

Oh, my kids go to, my grandkids go to prep school.

I don't care about the public schools.

I guess that's what it is.

Yeah.

Well, when you said on the other side, I thought you meant on the other side of the California-Nevada line.

I'll just go into Nevada.

Well, my luck, it'll be I'll finally,

in my dottage, next year, I'll decide to move, and I'll move.

I'll spend all the time cashing out or whatever you do to get out of California, and I'll go to Nevada or somewhere and conk.

Yeah.

Well, let's look at another politician, or actually, she's a deep state person, Janet Yellen.

She has taken back her statement made three years ago that inflation is only transitory.

What is that about?

And so she takes it back.

I don't know.

I mean,

she basically,

Joe Biden came in with somewhere between $26

and $27 billion in national

debt.

And now

it's going to be $36.

You mean trillion, right?

Trillion, yes, excuse me.

Trillion in the national debt.

And he ran these $2 to $3 trillion deficits.

And people right away, you're on a trajectory to get up to 35, 36 trillion by the end of your first term.

And I remember Larry Summers laid it out.

He said, we have a perfect storm.

We have people who have been locked down without any

satisfaction of their consumer appetites.

And they haven't bought cars.

They haven't gone to the movies.

They have enormous cash.

They've been hoarding.

And they get all of these COVID subsidies.

If their business breaks, you know, can't hire, they get a subsidy.

So the government's printing money.

And then, in addition to that, the supply chains are interrupted because they're not, people haven't been making things.

They've been COVIDed.

And

so you have a natural appetite that will express itself as soon as the COVID lockdown ends, and it is ending.

And you're going to have a lot of government slush money, and they're all going to want to buy a car, and they're all going to want to buy a refrigerator, remodel their bedroom or bathroom.

Please don't point, print more money.

And what did they do?

They printed more money, and Larry Summer said, You just created an inflationary cycle.

Kevin Hassert, economist at Hoover, said,

You've created an inflationary.

John Taylor, John Cog, all of the people that I work with that are esteemed said, don't do it.

Please don't do it.

Don't print more money.

Just wait a minute because the economy is going to be hot.

And they did.

And Janet Yelens said, don't worry, just temporary, transitory inflation.

She knew she was lying.

Yeah.

I give her credit for saying that she was lying.

Yeah.

What I was noticing, though, that you see people on

whatever, pundits on shows, et cetera, and they say, well, we're handing it down to the young generation.

My thought about that is that may be true, but people should be careful.

The old generation should be careful because they talk about all the the time confiscating retirement funds and things like that.

So it may be on them as well as the older generation.

They've talked about it all the time.

All you have to do is pick up a left-wing journal and there will be somebody who says we can solve the Social Security problem right now.

All we have to do is go into people's 401ks and say, you know what?

We're going to take, I don't know, $100,000 out and we will give you credit per contribution.

Or we can confiscate it.

And

think about it.

If you go broke, you either have to print funny money, right?

Inflate your way out like the Germans did the Deutsche Mark, the old mark, the German imperial mark in the 1920s, after

the reparations.

They just paid off what they owed France and England in worthless money.

Or you have to confiscate stuff,

right?

Yeah.

You either have to confiscate it or you just,

have to renounce the debt.

The government can do that.

And I think they might do that.

I think the government would say, you know what?

I expect any day an AOC or Elizabeth Warren to say, well, we've done a study and we've found out that people who have government bonds and T-bills, they're mostly people of the affluent classes.

So I suggest, given that their money, they didn't build that.

They didn't build it.

The government built their business.

And since they've been preying on us and leeches, I suggest that people who have over $100,000 in government bonds, they have to, you know, sacrifice anything over $100,000.

So we're just going to renounce it.

So we're not going to honor it.

Sorry.

Scary thought, but probably true.

Well, Victor, let's go to a break and then come back and

talk about the ancient Greek rhetoricians.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back.

So, Victor, I'm interested in this.

I know that this is where the art of oratory began with the ancient Greeks.

And I know Demosthenes is absolutely famous for going down to the seaside and putting rocks in his mouth and then practicing his speeches in that fashion.

But that's about all I know about ancient rhetoric.

So, I'm looking forward to this.

Well,

there in the late fifth century, remember where we are, everybody.

We've gone through the epic poems, we've gone through Hesiod, we've gone through the pre-Socratic philosophers and our journey through Western literature.

I think someday, if I'm still alive, we'll get to modern literature.

But

we did the ancient tragedian, the comedy, the historians, Thucydides, Xenophon, Herodotus,

and

Aristotle.

And now we're getting into

fourth century oratory.

Why fourth century?

There was this idea that if you could, in the fifth century, persuade somebody,

as a sophist said, then it had to be true.

So if I can say to you, Jennifer

Hansen, my wife,

if I can say to Jennifer Hansen, my wife, you have a blue t-shirt on.

And she were to say to me, no, it's red.

I said, no, it's blue.

It's beautiful blue.

It's Azul blue.

It is bluey, bluey, bluey blue.

I had all, and she'd say, oh my God, you're right.

And then guess what?

You really did have a blue t-shirt.

So they got to the point of absurdity, the sophists did, that if they could frame an argument that was persuasive, then it had to be true.

Or a person wouldn't believe it.

They didn't have an idea that he could be duped.

And so they divided it up between what they call the Asiatic or the elaborate style, sort of like the Federalist Papers, or

any of you, I know a lot of you know a lot more about American novels than I do, but if you look at Faulkner or Thomas Woolf, those long sentences, long paragraphs, long subordinate clauses, long string of adjectives, that's the Asiatic style, like Socrates.

And if you like,

he opened the door.

The light was dim.

He grimaced.

He sat down, Hemingway.

That is the attic style.

You don't put anything in there unless it is absolutely necessary for the train of thought.

And so in the fourth century, after the great situation, that was the period where Athens was supposedly in decline.

And the great historians were gone, the great tragedians were gone, Pericles was dead, Socrates was dead.

But there became this

sophistic tradition,

it reached its zenith.

And in the Hellenistic period, like a couple of hundred years later, maybe the Alexandrian period, they went back and codified and said, this was the greatest period of oratory when people got, mostly in Athens, stood up on the Bima,

the dais, and the Ecclesia or the law courts, and made speeches.

And they had them.

forensic speeches.

Forensics, you know, there used to be a thing in high school called forensics.

It was was the art of debate in the forum.

It comes from the Latin word forum.

But the point is, we have some of the ten Attic orators.

And I think everybody knows Demosthenes, but there's Aeschynes.

He was the object of hatred.

My favorite line in the Dacoron of Demosthenes, he's attacking Aeschynes.

And

they have all of these great sophistic tricks.

One is

praetoretio.

You don't,

you say something that you say you're not saying.

As for my opponent, Eschines, it has nothing to do with this speech that his mother used to commit acts of prostitution in outhouses in the cemetery.

But that's just irrelevant.

Things like that you can pick up from the orators.

And Docides, he wrote a great mystery about the Eleusin Mysteries.

Antiphon, Thucydides said Antiphon was the greatest

speaker and statesman of his time, most brilliant man.

He was a right-wing orator.

He was killed by the democracy, put to death.

And we have a few speeches of him.

Demosthenes is the most famous.

And he spent, he had two personas.

One was forensics, where he had private laws.

He sued his caretakers that robbed all of his money.

He was an orphan.

It's a great speech.

And he also has his most famous defense of his life called De Corona on the crown.

He was given a little crown for his services, and Eschines attacked him and said, you don't deserve that crown.

And he reviews his entire life.

And his entire life, his adult life, was devoted to one

object, and that was to stop Philip of Macedon destroying Greek freedom.

And he knew he did not have the wherewithal, whether in manpower or spirit.

or willingness to resist Philip and then later Alexander.

But he gave these speech after speech, and he fought the Battle of Chaeronea, almost killed, he threw away his shield, he ran away.

So

orators are not good.

Speeches, we have an obscure Daenarchus, Hyperides, Isaiah.

The next great is Isocrates, and he wrote a really panellinic speech about why all of the Greek city-states, he was kind of pro-Macedonian, could unite.

And if they were united into a nation, there's no word for nation in the ancient Greek language, if they could could unite, they could resist

Persia under Macedonian leadership.

Kind of like a mouthpiece for Alexander in some ways.

Lycurgus and then Lysias.

Lysias is

one of the earliest of the Attic orators, and he's the person, if you're learning Greek, you start out, your first Greek author is Xenophon and Lysias.

And he's got a lot of private speeches.

He's got a great one on the cripple.

And the little cripple, I shouldn't say little cripple, The cripple,

I don't think it's even translated cripple, but it's now disabled.

But he goes into the speech.

He goes in, the beginning of the speech, he says how much he's suffered.

And the speech is about why the state has to give him a pension.

And he's been accused of fraudulent pension grabbing.

Just like, it's very modern, but in any case, all of these speeches teach you

the art of oratory.

It's what Abraham Lincoln read in English.

It's what Churchill read.

I think Churchill said Greek was like a piece of white lace.

It was an elaborate costume to your wardrobe.

But

it really enhances when you hear a person who knows something about oratory.

And what do I mean by these enhancements?

Well, there's rhetorical tricks.

I mentioned one.

You can,

there's repetition

for the people, by the people, of the people.

You say for the people, by the people, of the people.

Or you can, it depends on your

emphases.

For the people,

by the people, of the people.

Or you could say for the people,

by the people, of the people.

And so it depends on the emphasis on the noun, on the repetition of the word.

Sometimes repetition is a cardinal sin.

If you're grading a student's paper and it's on the Constitution, he uses Constitution 20 times.

But if he's clever, he can use it three or four times for effect in a sentence.

The Constitution of America, the Constitution tells us the Constitution.

And so you learn all of that.

And then there's also the change in the

elegance of a sentence.

If you're using polysyllabic Latin words and you string them together, at some point you might want to use an Anglo-Saxon word to break up the...

So, you know, it was a great past master of that was the historian John Keegan.

I remember he was talking about Klaus Witzian's strategy, and he was saying something like, Klaus Witz suggests that the concentration of force at a key point in the battle is essential.

And that's no small beer.

And he used an Anglo-Saxon.

Remember something about our languages?

We teach,

we speak two languages.

We are the inheritors of an Anglo-Saxon language, and that was the vernacular, and we're the inheritance of a Latinate Latin

via Latin via Greek.

So most of our legal documents have polysyllabic Latinate words, and our everyday speech doesn't.

I'll give you a few examples.

We always use Anglo-Saxon for the crude form of daily reference.

So if you want to talk about intercourse, that is a Latin word.

If you want to say the F word, that is an Anglo-Saxon word.

You P-I-S-S-S or you urinate.

You defecate or you S-H-I-T.

And that is the difference.

And when you understand the difference between the colloquial and the Latinate, you can use them for great

effect.

Because if you use too many polysyllabic Latinate words, you sound pretentious.

If you use too many Anglo-Saxon one or two syllable words, you sound vulgar.

So the art of persuasion in English is in part predicated on the ability to mix the two in the right formula, depending on the audience and the occasion.

But we haven't had a great orator since in the United States, since JFK and I think Ted Sorensen

and a few others wrote his speeches.

And we had, of course, FDR was a good

FDR, Teddy Reals were good orators.

Lincoln was the best.

Better Angels of Our Nature and all that.

Second Inaugural is probably the best speech in American history.

We had a lot of the Asiatic style.

You know, Stephen Douglas, when you get the Lincoln Douglas debates, he's so ornate, rhetorical, Asiatic in his style.

Yeah.

Well, I have some questions then, given that.

First, just because you mentioned that we use Latinate words, we use colloquial, we have Greek words that originate in ancient Greece, so the Greek words.

Do you find that the English language, that's one of the reasons it's usually considered,

you know, one of the better, it's so versatile, it has so much capacity for

beauty, for truth, you know, objectivity, expressing things as they are.

Is that part of its charm?

It is.

It's able to incorporate new words very easily.

It uses, it doesn't have a case system, so it uses prepositions.

What I mean by a case system is if you're in Latin and you have the word love, amor, depending how it's used grammatically in the sentence, it will change its spelling

in up to five

singular and five plural, ten.

So it's amor,

amor est bona, love is,

amoris,

or you know, it's good, is the subject.

If it's amores, it's the genitive or possessive.

Amor is the

amoris, the dative, ablative, and vocative.

So you have 10 different spellings of it.

But English, love is love is love.

Love is good.

Love, I don't like love.

I give myself to love.

It doesn't matter the...

grammatical use of that noun in a sentence, it will always be spelled the same.

And so, in some ways, it's less specific, but you can string these different prepositions.

That's why one of the problems in English is that so many prepositions mean the same thing.

You don't know whether to use from or of or by sometimes.

So, it's harder to learn, but it has a lot more variation

in some ways.

And because the nouns and the verbs do not conjugate or decline, or they don't, they're not inflected like Spanish Spanish or French.

It's more like German.

German can make

a lot of nouns.

The problem with Latinate is that

it has a very small vocabulary.

So Latin, for example, it's only, I think, a third the size of Greek.

And everybody says, well, small vocabulary would be very easy.

to learn, but the problem is there's words are words are words or concepts.

So you have two choices.

You either have a word for every idea or everything,

or you have one word for ten things.

So if you're talking about a general in Greek, it's stratagos.

If you talk about strategy, it's strategia.

You talk about a soldier, it's stratiotes.

And you can see how they're cognizant.

In Latin, they're not.

There's milles as soldier or dukes as leader, but you have something like dukes.

It can mean almost anything.

A political leader, a military leader, head of a household.

it can be pejorative, it can be positive.

And so Latin, a lot of these Latinate, these Romance languages have smaller vocabulary.

English has a huge vocabulary.

Yeah, I was going to say, and it's much more specific than, I mean, well used, it's much more specific than that.

The ambiguity in English words

is far less.

So when you have an English noun, It pretty much is confined to two or three things, whereas in a French or Spanish word, in Italian, it can be a lot more.

Yeah.

Well, let's go ahead and take a break, and I do have one more question from that, but let's listen to these messages first, and then we'll come back on Greek rhetoric.

Stay with us.

We're back.

So, Victor, just to conclude the Greek rhetoric, my other curiosity is,

does this oration, the art of oration, really rise and develop out because of the nature of democracy, because people are getting up and giving speeches?

So the oration starts to

be improved and get better and then die out, for example, in the Middle Ages when there's nothing to it.

That's part of it.

So when you have all of these

tricks, antitheses, or you have, on the one hand, on the other hand, or you have chiosmos where you say

art

is,

you say life is short, art is long.

Or you can say

long is, you can say short is life,

art is long.

You can put the nouns right next to each other.

That's chiosmus rather than keeping it.

And that is very, that gets people's attention.

You have a syndeton, you can have all sorts of ideas, oxymoron, zugma.

And these are all techniques to capture the attention of the audience.

And why would you need to do that?

Because you're making government.

You're a legislator or an executive or a judge.

And so you have to communicate and win 51% of approval.

And that means there's a great emphasis on language.

You can see it, and

that's the great strength of

democracies and constitutional systems, that people have to articulate out in the open what they're doing, but it also is very misleading.

So what do I mean by that?

Well, the problem is euphemism.

So we can't say illegal aliens.

So we're lied to and say they're undocumented immigrants.

And then we were said, well, undocumented is mean, so they're just immigrants.

Well, then immigrants means they're going one way.

That's prejudicial.

We'll just call them migrants.

And that doesn't really describe, and then you lose the meaning of words because of this censorship.

And you saw it in

the Biden speech when he wouldn't use the word illegal, which is illegal alien is an absolutely specific term.

But in a democracy, when you're using and changing the meaning of words for political purposes, then you lose accuracy as Orwell has, you know, English,

he has an entire essay on the abuses of the English language, and that comes out of

democracy and constitutionalism.

It's also what, it's a little bit easier in a totalitarian, because people just know they're lying.

So probably to to just tell, when you hear something, they know it's a lie.

But in a constitutional system, they try to persuade you.

So what was the Inflation Reduction Act?

The Inflation Reduction Act gave us, in key staples, 30% inflation over three years.

But we're told it's an inflation.

What did they just call it?

The necessary Jack Up the Price Act.

Yeah, but I mean,

that's not funny, but true.

Yeah, and you,

you know, when you,

so you got to be careful about oratory because a good rhetorician,

you should always, you know, it's laitotes is one of the most effective of all rhetorical terms.

I used to teach rhetoric in Greek.

And so if you have a great general, it's just taking somebody, and you're George Patton.

If Donald Trump knew about Laitotes, he would be very effective.

But when you're, say I have to give a speech on Patton, do I do A?

He was the greatest general there ever was in the American Army.

He was fantastic.

He was tremendous.

A Trumpian version.

Or I'd say

he had a very remarkable record.

He was no idiot.

That can be more effective that you're measured and calm if you describe him enough.

But when Trump says that everybody's tremendous, He's just,

you know, I remember one of my close friends when

H.R.

McMaster retired.

He's just a tremendous guy.

Outstanding.

I think he would have been more effective than

he said, you know,

H.R.

McMaster was very effective, and he's not without talent.

So sometimes you use the deliberate downplane to insult somebody, and sometimes you do it to praise it, depending on your intonation.

Yeah.

And

it's...

Invective is very important, too, that you

can...

Churchill was, when they said that about Stanley Baldwin you know he didn't build the P-50 he didn't build the Spitfire and he didn't build the hurricane when the prototypes when he could of conservative leader in the late 30s and when he died everybody was trying to

to find something good about him yeah he wasn't a bad person but he was much more harmful for what would become the the British war effort than was Chamberlain.

And I think they asked

Churchill what he thought about Baldwin.

He said it would have been better for everybody if he'd never been born.

Ouch.

I know.

Well, do you think that since Greece was a democracy and this art of rhetoric developed so well, and that the United States has been a democracy for 200 years and more, almost 250,

that have we made innovations and improved on the science at all?

No, because we're.

I think the visual has really hurt us.

Television, computers, cell phones, we don't value the spoken word or the written word.

And they had to communicate with written words.

So when you look...

I always...

I have...

My grandfather lived in this house, and he had his school books.

And he never went to college.

But if you look at his eighth grade little essays, they are much better than a Stanford senior.

And he was just from a rural high school.

And you look at his Latin, Amoamasamat, Amamo samata samat, all that when he did his conjugations, he was better than a college student.

So there's been a decline in education.

And I think part of it is just everybody watches television and it's been very good for American acting and motion pictures that we have this British tie because we bring over these British actors that are trained in classical drama and they're on the stage.

So you have Richard Burton.

or Laurence Olivier or

all of these great actors And they were even people, you know, we don't really associate

David Nibbon, John Gielgud, that weren't great actors.

I mean, weren't great Hollywood actors, but they were fantastic actors.

And they learned that skill.

And they've really, I think, improved American acting.

And so,

but, you know, not to say that Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen or John Wayne weren't great actors because they had presence.

Natural talent.

Natural presence.

They could go in a room and dominate the room just by the way they looked or stared or their size

or their attitude.

That's very rare as well.

All those great actors that we grew up with, my generation, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, even ones that weren't really great actors like Gary Cooper or Alan Ladd, they had presence.

So they just sucked up all the energy in a room.

You look at

High Noon, every time Gary Cooper's in that, he's the only character on the screen.

He's just,

you know, kind of like Elizabeth Taylor had.

She wasn't a great actress, maybe she was, or maybe she wasn't, but she had presence.

Yeah.

David Gardner, the same thing.

Presence, presence, presence.

Well, Victor, that's just a couple of more things in the news.

There are more than a dozen women athletes that are suing the National Collegiate Athletic Association over letting transgendered athletes compete and use the female locker room.

And so we got a case going on.

And the claim, of course,

the charge in the case is that

it violates Title IX, which is equal opportunity for women and men in sports.

I don't understand.

We've had all these cases of transgender

men that go into female prisons and they impregnate prisoners.

How could that be possible?

We have all of these situations in volleyball in

female sports that are semi-contact sports, basketball,

field hockey, soccer,

volleyball, where women have been injured by men with biological muscular skeletal frames and muscularity that are transitioned.

That's one issue.

And then we had these 50 years of efforts to create parity between female and male sports.

and we have all these records, and they're just falling.

What would you do if your daughter was 13?

I had two daughters, and

they were good athletes, but what if one had been a wonderful sprinter, and she was just faster than any girl in Fresno County, and then she went to high school, and a transitioning guy who was a mediocre athlete, but was 6'2 ⁇ , just beat her all the time and won the high school record.

And we're all scared to say anything because of

whom are we scared of?

We're scared of these thought-police people.

And so I think what's going to happen in America, when people go overboard, we're going to go back to the baseline.

And what is the baseline on transgendism?

The baseline is that about 0.0001 of the population, according to statistics that were pre-transgendered

prejudicial, that suffered from something medically known as gender dysphoria, that a person's persona was locked or trapped in the wrong physical body.

It happens, but it's very, very rare.

It's documented in some Aristotelian treatises.

And you can see it in Roman literature where certain people are attacked.

In Aristotle, there's even a suggestion that when a man has his eyes darting back and forth, he wears his beard a certain way,

I think they call it the

muscles in their hand are not,

they drip like their limp wrists.

In their wrists.

And then they have a lisp.

They're considered not just like a male who has no problems about being an active sexual partner in a male-male relationship, analogous to prison, I suppose.

But these people are

considered females and they're only passive receptive.

They only have sex in a passive fashion, and they're considered that they're women in men's body, and they're very, very rare.

So I think we'll get back to that.

But this idea that 30% of a college campus says they're transitioning, and what's weird about the

science is completely bastardized, weaponized, and politicized.

So they get money from the government, 50, 80, 100 billion dollars, and they will say whatever they have to do to get that money.

That is a matter of fact.

We saw that with Fauci.

They will say that there is no way that that Wuhan laboratory had anything to do with a bat or pangolin transmitter, even when they knew it was a lie.

Because if they said the truth, they had been cut off.

And they're saying the same thing about transgenderism.

And they know it.

They know it.

It's a very rare phenomenon.

And they know that men, and they know another thing they won't tell you, that if you take a 13-year-old child who is female and you start injecting them with mega-doses of testosterone and you start to give them other steroidal

medicines and then you go under the scalpel and you start to mutilate them and

you know cut if it's a male castrate them and then make an artificial there are some lifelong physical ramifications of that and yet the people who do those surgeries are canonized as heroic.

So we just lost our mind.

I think in about 10 years people will say, okay,

it's like me too.

We learned that there's a lot of women that were sexually

assaulted and we're sorry, we're going to make people pay, but we're not going to go back to everybody's life for 50 years and say that some person like Susan Blossy Ford that comes out when Brett Kavanaugh was 18 and says he sexually assaulted me when no one can remember it, she can't, or E.

Jean Carroll.

can't give me the date, can't tell me what happened.

That's going to pass and it's going to get back to where it should in the middle.

Yeah, I hope so.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show for this weekend, and I have a comment from a viewer who is on Apple Podcasts again.

I thought it was a nice one and a good weekend in because it's called A Gift from the Lord.

And so, anybody who's going to church tomorrow, we can end our podcast this way and whatever other

things you may be doing on this weekend.

So here it is.

So thankful that VDH has decided that now is the time to be heard.

Some of us still believe that the truth will set us free.

Special thanks to VDH for sharing the truth, even if it goes against the grain of the popular culture.

Sort of like a voice crying out in the wilderness.

Let's spread the word about VDH and share this with others, his wisdom and insight.

There you go.

So that's very nice.

I like the echoes from the Gospel of John, the first three sections, I think, of that gospel.

The truth will set you free, voice in the wilderness.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you, Victor.

And we'd like to thank our listeners as well.

You guys who see us through.

So thanks.

Thank you, everybody, for listening again.

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