Aristophanes' Comedy and Modern Secrets and Fantasies

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Hello, and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen's show.

This is our weekend edition, so we will have three segments, two of them on news, and the middle one we'll do on Aristophanes, who is a comedian in

the Greek tragic tradition, in the Greek theater tradition.

I would like to remind everybody first that Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Welcome to our weekend show.

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You're back, Victor.

So, lots of news before we go into Aristophanes.

I was wondering your thoughts.

The U.S.

apparently is having secret talks on the hostages with Hamas, and a little update there.

Well, I mean, we don't know how many hostages are still alive.

We know that many have died.

And they won't, I mean, this is the theater of tragic absurdity.

So here we have this murderous clique who went in on October 7th.

Now we're also,

since we've talked last, the UN finally came out with a report and guess what?

The Israeli claims that people were decapitating, mass raping, torturing, mutilating were not only true, but we find out they were engaging in necrophilia, forced rape of dead people.

What would they not do?

And then they took hostages.

They gave bounties for people.

And then we said, you know, nobody says in Ukraine

the Russian people are innocent and the Russian army is all worth it.

They just talk about Russians.

Gazans?

Gazans volunteered to go in there, 500 of them.

They brought back hostages and sold them.

There were bounties.

The Gazans are not like Hamas.

I'm sorry.

Every time there was a hostage, they spit on them, they cheered.

They were indistinguishable.

So

they want to call off the IDF.

The IDF is within four to six weeks of destroying Hamas.

They're destroying their tunnels, their billion-dollar investments in subterranean munitions, command and control.

We know the Gazans were sitting on top of them with civilian hospitals, mosques,

and schools to hide them.

And they're down to the last perimeter.

And so there's this cry, stop, stop, stop.

We want to,

we'll give up the hostages.

Well, okay, how many hostages are there?

What are their names?

Oh, we can't tell you.

You can't tell them because you've been engaged in mass rape of hostages and torture of them, and some of them have died.

And you don't want to tell us that.

or you want to blame the IDF for killing them.

You can't deal with these people.

You just, you can't.

You've got to destroy them.

And I know that

the only chance the hostages have to get out is to be rescued by the IDF or to inflict such pain that they give up.

But just remember, everybody, we're in an Orwellian situation.

When in the world did a belligerent go into another country, invade it, kill...

deliberately kill unarmed elderly women, children, infants, sweep back out with hostages, torture the hostages, and you consider them a legitimate interlocutor, as Joe Biden does.

And now

he wants to make a port on the Gaza coast.

Maybe it'll be a D-Day Mulberry type thing he'll tow in.

I don't know.

But he wants to bring in massive aid for the Gazan people because he wants to win Michigan.

And he feels that 150,000 Arab American voters who always vote straight Democratic because they understand that the Democratic Party is much more tolerant of controversial Islamic issues than the Republican is.

And as immigrants, they feel that entitlements more heavily go their way than others.

They are for them.

And now they might not be.

I doubt they're going to vote for Donald Trump.

Maybe some would sit out.

But he's pandering U.S.

foreign policy and leveraging it for that consideration.

So when you bring in UN aid or you drop it, guess what happens?

Hamas and its affiliates steal it.

And then they stage violent protests so that the IDF or whoever the UN looked bad.

And so now the idea is the Americans are going to get directly involved and they're going to land big ships and then they're going to guard it.

It's Afghanistan, Kabul, Redux.

What's going to happen when they start to

organize aid?

So they get the big ships, the cargo food comes off, and they start distributing it.

And people start massing them, they start throwing rocks at them, they start shooting.

If they shoot Marines, will they react?

Apparently, they didn't in Kabul when they killed 13 of them.

So it's a disaster.

And he's only doing it now.

I mean, it's since October 7th.

He's only doing it because of Michigan.

This president only does something out of the most raw, cynical political calculus.

He sat there

after issuing 90-plus executive orders to destroy every policy that protocol that Donald Trump had fought four years ago to shut the border.

And then he concocted this stupid little bipartisan immigration deal that, well, there's so many in here, maybe we can get

five, if you said 10 years ago, we're going to let in 5,000 illegals a day, you'd think you were nuts.

but compared to 12,000 Mitch McConnell hmm I can go for that especially give Ukraine aid it was it was totally designed to put Republican footprints and on a bill which they couldn't ever pass to the majority so that it would fail so then they're doing what they're doing now Chuck Schumer etc Eric Swallow you

you're just canceling this border bill because you want to make politics out of it.

No, because it's just a way of getting

control of the border to let in more people, not to let in less.

Anybody who signed on that is a nigger remote.

It's stupid.

And they know what's going to happen if Donald Trump, the border, will be closed and quickly, and they do not want that.

And so

this president only reacts to Hamas and when he's going to lose Michigan.

He only reacts to the border and he goes down there for, and he met the head of the border patrol for the first time because he thinks now it's the first issue.

It's the only time he does that.

He only talks about gas and oil as a good thing on the on the eve of the midterms when he lets out the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Yeah.

Victor, since you're talking about the border,

I just saw recently that they have secret flights that illegal immigrants are being given to cities all throughout the United States.

They can't even do things on the up and up.

No, I mean, you get snopes or all these fact checkers or see, this is a lie.

Well, if it's a lie, just do one thing.

Just do one thing.

Please tell the American people from what airports

all over the world people are flying in that do not have a green card and have not applied like most legal immigrants.

And two,

at what airports are they landing?

And three, how many there are.

And they won't do that.

Instead, they call names of the people who say that's what they're doing.

If that's not what you're doing, just give us the information.

And they won't.

They trash Governor Abbott, and he's very open and transparent.

Here's the border, it's open.

Here's Bobbed Wire, it will be closed.

They can't do that because it's indefensible.

Because the whole border thing thing can be reduced in a reductionist fashion down to one thing.

This is not laxity.

This is not incompetence.

This is a deliberate policy to import 10 million people into the United States from all over the world who are destitute, poor, need massive government assistance, and will have lifelong fealty to the Democratic Party and will, with their children, and under the auspices of these new post-COVID 70% people not voting on Election Day with very little rejection rates of mail-in and early balloting, they will vote.

And then that's, it just reveals a complete lack of confidence in the left-wing agenda that it doesn't poll 50%

and a complete lack of confidence in Joe Biden.

So get in a new demographic.

And by the way, if you say that, then you are for the great replacement theory.

You're just a white, like Jory Reid.

Oh, they're just so

worried that brown people are taking their place.

No, they're not.

They're 68% of the population.

And they're not worried at all.

They're worried, we don't care what color people are.

We're worried about people who are going to come here without means of support.

And if the first thing they do is illegally enter, and the second thing they do is illegally reside, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh thing will be illegal too.

And they're swamping social services.

We've never seen anything like it.

And somebody who, you know, if I go to the urologist or I go to the emergency room, it is swamped.

And I'm in a community impacted by this.

And it just,

they can't admit what they're doing.

And so when the people rise up and say, how dare you?

Okay,

okay, Joe, we'll go to the border.

That's That's what you want.

We'll get a phony bill and make the Republicans seem like they didn't want to do it.

Oh, midterm's coming up.

Let's cancel some more student loans.

Let's let some oil out of the reservoir, the strategic petroleum reserve.

Okay.

Worried about Michigan?

Let's send a ship to Gaza.

Act like we're going to help give some food.

But it's always a reaction to a political crisis that they created.

They created it.

Yeah.

Well, since we're talking about it, the border does reverberate everywhere.

And recently, Kathy Hochl has decided she needs to have the National Guard in New York subways to make them safe.

And

why is she doing that?

She's doing that because she once said that she welcomed in illegal immigrants.

Just like Eric Adams, who met the buses and handed them water.

Remember that?

It was kind of Angela Merkel, we can do it.

And they got all in the bag, but they thought, you know what?

George Floyd woke us here forever, and I am going to performance art, and I'm going to virtue signal best of all.

I'll virtue signal anyone.

And she was one of the ringleaders.

And then people said to her, I'm very left-wing, and I don't take the subway because they rape and kill and assault on it, and they don't get arrested.

I'm afraid to walk in New York after dark.

And I won't vote for you people.

And I'm happening to be Puerto Rican or black or Latino, and I'm your constituency.

And she said, Okay,

whatever you need.

We don't have any policemen.

We drove them all out.

We defunded it.

I was for that, but we'll get the National Guard.

I guess they're going to get guys with what, M4s or M16s or something in camouflage, and they're going to walk along.

And what are they going to do?

So, your typical

subway violator criminal is going to run at full speed and do do a high hurdle jump over to the turnstile.

And what's the guy going to do?

Take out his M16 and shoot him?

I know.

He doesn't know anything about policing.

He's an 18-year-old, 19-year-old enlistee.

And then he's going to be on the,

I don't know, he's going to be on the subway and he's going to see somebody beat the crop out of someone.

Is he going to put him in a headlock?

If he does, he'll be like the poor guy who saved everybody and they put him in jail for accidentally killing a thug.

Penny, wasn't his name Penny?

Yeah.

Nobody cared about him.

Is he in jail right now?

I never saw the job.

I think he's not out on bail, but he's looking at a manslaughter or second-degree murder, I shouldn't say, because I don't know the exact charge that they finally settled on.

But I mean, they're not going to be, they're going to be there for deterrence.

It doesn't.

work.

All that they need to do is hire 2,000 to 3,000 New York police officers and then take the cuffs off of them.

But what it shows is what we talked about earlier in San Francisco.

Now they want to hire police.

And now Oregon wants to have outlaw particular dangerous drugs.

And now,

as we see, they want to address the homeless problem.

And now she wants to put Governor Hochl, she wants to put...

Why are they, they're not doing this because they believe in it.

They're doing it because it got so bad that their constituencies say, I didn't mind it as long as it was down in Texas.

Because,

you know, they have to muss up their hair, as I said earlier.

So what?

Texas, Georgia, Arizona, we flip them blue, man.

Texas, it'll be blue.

Arizona, it will be blue.

Georgia will be blue.

That's what the point is.

Nevada's blue.

Colorado's blue.

We get a bunch of illegal aliens.

We just let them come in.

And now we're just going to swarm them.

And they turn blue.

There's never going to be a Reagan, a George Dick Mason, a Pete Wilson elected governor of California.

We flipped it blue with illegal immigration.

We're going to do the same thing.

That's their attitude.

But they never, never imagined that Abbott and Santis and others thought, okay.

You think we're going to be the only one to deal this?

We're going to send them to Martha's Vineyard, to New York, to Philadelphia, to LA, to all you blue sanctuary cities.

And then you can tell all the country how happy you are to have 8 million illegal aliens from all over the world that you welcomed in in your sanctuary city.

And it's so nice that they're exempt from, I don't know, being deported.

Here they are.

Yeah.

As soon as they did it, racist, racist.

I would think the Democrats would

transport them to cities that were not blue yet, that they wanted to, but they sent them to New York and Los Angeles and San Diego.

These states are just as blue as they can get.

So they're not doing a very good job at

changing the red states blue with this.

They sent them after 4 million had already been here.

Texas has, I think, a 2 million of them.

And here in California, Gavin Newsom likes them.

It's like, oh, wow, this is more left-wing people.

So funny about the left is they say, oh, you're just, you're racist, you're objecting, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, well, you're deliberately selecting people on on the basis of their race.

Because believe me, if all of a sudden we said we're going to airlift, I don't know, 10 million blonde, blue-eyed Ukrainians into the United States,

what would they do?

Racist.

Yeah.

The right didn't care what they look like.

They care the fact that they're not being audited.

There's no criminal background check.

They're not vaccinated.

They have no means of support.

They don't have a high school diploma.

They don't speak English.

They're not diverse.

You know what I mean?

Maybe they are now diverse, but.

And a large percentage of them are 16 to 35-year-old military-age males.

Jon Stewart, who said that the other day?

It was a guest

and he said, military age.

And he said, oh, you're gay.

You're looking at men.

I mean, gosh, can you imagine that?

Yeah.

So excuse me.

He's really bombed.

He came back like he was going to.

He's just the same old, same old.

He's like Napoleon

at

Waterloo.

He came in the old same way, and we dealt with him in the old way.

Well, let's, one last topic is you in California have your California Senate seat up, and there are three contenders for it now after the election.

Katie Porter, Steve Garvey, and Adam Schiff.

And I was wondering your thoughts on the California senatorial race.

That was really funny because

they were all in the corporate, all the left-wing progressive idealists were all in the Silicon Valley corporate trough.

So Adam Schiff raised $32 million.

He could raise a lot more, but he didn't need to.

It's a blue state.

And Katie Porter raised just almost the same amount, 28.

But because she raised less, you said, oh, you went out and you sold your soul to corporations.

And I sold my soul to corporations, but I didn't end as much.

So I can say you sold your soul more to them than I did.

But what was funny about it was they had Steve Garvey.

He's not a, I like him, but he's not a dynamic candidate.

He's never run for anything.

He's sort of like Larry Elder, a really good guy, and everybody gets all excited.

But you don't know how far California has sunk, and there is no red Republican conservative constituency that can stop it.

But

Adam Schiff was scared of her.

And I don't know why she's a very obnoxious person, And he's slimy.

They're really two unattractive candidates.

So he came up with this idea

that he was going to run safe anti-Garvey ads.

He knew Garvey had no chance of questioning his lead, but he was worried that it would be Porter and him.

And then,

you know, he's not a likable guy.

And maybe

she's supposedly one of the newcomers.

And

if that's a newcomer, that's pathetic.

But nevertheless, he came up with this idea he and his handlers they were going to spend all these ads ostensibly sliming steve garvey which is acceptable so they put these ads out and so for the last month we've watched them and it says they show people swarming the border and it says steve garvey wants to close the border yeah

and then

Then they show Donald Trump, Steve Garvey wants to vote for Donald Trump.

Well, Donald Trump is reading 48%.

He's even getting higher in California.

Not that he's going to win.

And then they said,

Steve Garvey wants to

cut services.

Well, we're $78 billion in debt.

And then they show Steve Garvey.

And usually when you show your candidate, they look decrepit or they had got a cigarette in their mouth.

They're all wrinkled.

But they show him and he looks vibrant.

He looks, it actually looks Photoshop.

So you look at it and you say, I mean, you hear it, I'm kind of caricaturing, but when you hear the ad, a normal person would say, I'll vote for that guy.

And he was being, and so even

Steve Garvey had $2 million.

He was outspent 16 to 1,

but he got about $8 or $9 million in free stuff from Adam Schiff, who had no fingerprints on it.

Did you do this app?

No, no.

It's like he's back at the Senate Intelligence Committee, House Intelligence Committee, lying his head off.

You remember that?

Yes, I do.

When he read into the record, this is what you, and he just made it up.

And then his majority report was a complete lie.

Everything he said, he worked with Benman, he said he never met him, and then he's a complete pathological liar.

But the point is,

it worked.

So he gave Garvey a push, and Garvey came in second.

So now being Adam Schiff, he's going to go back to KD Porter and say, look.

Let's let bygones be bygones and your supporters will go to me and we'll crush this little old baseball player, and they probably will.

Everybody who's listening to this who lives in California should vote for Steve Gardner, of course.

Anybody over Adam Schiff, he's the Prince of Darkness himself.

And

we'll see what happens.

But it was really funny.

I hadn't seen that in a while.

I confess that.

I confess I had seen that in a while.

In the 2018

and 2020

House primaries, the left ran commercials, remember, for MAGA candidates

to get rid of the moderates.

And it seemed to have worked.

Yeah.

I confess that I saw the ad when I first saw it.

I was thinking what exactly what you said.

Wow, this guy sounds like a good bet.

And then at the end, it was Adam Schiff.

You should vote for Adam Schiff.

I think everybody thought that.

No matter what they were, they thought, wow, get the homeless off the street.

Yeah.

Close the borders.

Wow, that sounds good.

Balance the budget.

Steve Garvey is too conservative for California.

Well, we just voted in San Francisco to get rid of a lot of left-wing things.

What would be really nice is if this thing got surreal and people saw those commercials and they said, oh my God, where have I been my whole life?

I realize that I'm a crazy, stupid progressive.

And I helped ruin San Francisco and LA.

And now the light turned on when I saw that commercial.

I'm going to go out and vote for him.

And then they vote out Adam Schiff and he commits political suicide.

That's a dream

I was having as well, but I don't think it's going to happen.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about Aristophanes.

Stay with us.

Welcome back.

You can find Victor at Victorhanson.com.

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All right, Victor, Aristophanes, I confess we read more often the tragedians, so the comedian

is

new to me, so I'm interested in hearing more about Aristophanes and his work.

Well, we don't, everybody remember that at the Dionysa, Dionysia, the spring festival, and the Linnaea, the winter festival, there were three plays presented, and a satyr play.

It's kind of a risque, three tragedies, and often they were trilogies in the sense that

they were interconnected.

So, for example, there was the Agamemnon,

the libation bearers, and the Eumenides or Furies, three parts.

They're about 1,100 to 1,800 lines.

It's about an hour, hour and a half, much shorter than Shakespearean plays.

But there was also a comic competition to make, and it's called old comedy because we have about

oh, a hundred names.

of comic playwrights, but we only have fragments,

except for one, Aristophanes, who wrote 40 plays, and we have 11 of them.

And he was considered by most the most successful.

There's something called middle and new comedy, and we don't have any complete play.

We have menander in middle comedy.

We have something called

old comedy, middle comedy, new comedy.

And new comedy survives in Latin with Plautus and Terence.

It's from lost playwrights like Diphilus, for example,

who we only have fragments.

And it was not considered plagiarism in Roman literature to almost copy word for word a Greek playwright.

But

middle and new comedy are sitcoms.

They're mistaken identity.

The menick me, two twins get separated and everybody thinks one twin's the other twin.

Or they're a grumpy old guy who nobody likes

and he's mean to his son.

Or it's

newlyweds are just about ready to get married and the wife gets captive, captured by pirates.

Or

it's misidentification.

It's kind of like slapstick, Charlie Chaplin kind of stuff.

But old comedy is unique to the 5th century and late.

the early 4th century BC.

And the predominance is in a democratic forum, especially in Athens.

And it's kind of like Saturday Night Live, where you make fun of contemporary politicians or contemporary issues.

About the same length, it's in meter, you have three characters.

And it's kind of funny, it's hard to follow.

It's kind of like Dante's Inferno.

If you read the Inferno, you see all these Italian names of the Renaissance, but you don't know who they are.

You don't know why they're in hell.

You need a name.

Well, he's constantly mentioning

characters, Nicias,

Alcibiades, Cleon, people that classicists know, but if you're just reading it, you think, why is he so

fixated on this particular person?

And that's the purpose of it.

So you get a, and it's not too mythological, it's more contemporary.

So you don't take a myth like the Bacchae or the Medea and we work it as the Trajans do.

You take a contemporary theme and then you make it absurd.

So what do I mean?

You take

the Lysistrata.

So you're in the Peloponnesian War and it's 4-11 and it's an endless, it's a Ukraine type war.

And you come up with the idea that maybe if all the women of the belligerence, the Theban women, the Spartan women, get together.

and go on a sex strike, then the men will be forced to give up because sex is all they care about.

So they all meet on the Acropolis and they make fun of the Spartan women.

So you lead that the Spartan women speak funny and the Theban women always eat eels and the Athenian women and Lysistrata,

whose name means unleash the army, you know, stop.

She outlines it and then the guys come and they all have phalluses that they have strings, you know, on the way the costume and they pull it up and they're so horny and they're trying to have sex and the women are even supposedly, male comedy hornier they sneak around but the point is they get peace or in the Acarnians

the hero

Dikiopolis the just city he wants to have a private peace treaty with the Spartans

and he says well they don't they haven't hurt me I don't I didn't cause war it's all these radical democrats inside the city.

Aristophanes is a cultural and social conservative.

So he thinks radical democracy, the sophists, Socratic

teaching have been subversive.

So most of the third generation, the great third generation, Socrates, Euripides, are objects of disdain.

The Frogs is a play about what happened to tragedy.

It's really bad.

I know what I'll do.

I will go back into the underworld and drag back Aeschylus.

And I'll have Aeschylus teach this rogue Euripides.

And so they go back and forth, and Aeschylus Aeschylus is very one-dimensional and majestic and solemn.

And Euripides makes, he quotes all the new words he made in his play and all the double entendre and

he wins, of course, because Aristophanes says you can't deal with these polypragmones.

That's a word for busy bodies, agua-loungers.

Or in the clouds, Socrates is up in a little cloud cuckoo land.

He's up there above the stage and it's like, I'm talking and nobody knows what the F he's talking about you know this is that and this is that and dialogue he's just making fun of his word confusion and so we have 11 of them and each one is devoted to

uh cleon is the most successful and dangerous demagogue and in the wasp there's two characters uh philo cleon and della cleon i hate cleon and i like cleon and they try to make fun of what he's

he's capable of and they always have a guy who is the champion and he's a national conservative natcon populist, sort of like the farmer DiCaiopoulos, or the sausage seller who can outsmart everybody.

And they go on

for about 1,200 to 1,500 lines.

By the birds, I don't know what it is.

It's an 1,800.

It's a very difficult play because you've got to learn the name of every species of Athenian bird.

And the vocabulary is very difficult.

But they're very funny because they have this thing, they have choruses that interrupt the dramatic flow as does tragedy, but they're different.

In the old comedy, they're called the parabossus,

a sideshow.

And in the parabossus, the playwright speaks directly to the audience.

Sometimes it's funny.

He says, you know, you guys didn't give me a prize last time, blank, blank, blank.

And that was unfair.

Or they attack another playwright.

Or in the Peloponnesian War, in one comedy, so this is what we have to do.

We've got to get a cloth, and just like you have a cloth of different colors, let's get all of Greece together and we'll be on the same page.

But it gets serious, it breaks the dramatic reality.

And suddenly, you just take a deep breath.

It's like intermission.

And you think, okay, now Aristophanes wants to make fun of something, but without characters or without

a suspension of reality.

This is reality.

And he's trying to tell it that.

And what he's writing in this period, unfortunately, in the middle of the Peloponnesian War, roughly from 425, 426 BC down to,

I think

one of the last ones is the Ekleiazusae, or the Thesmophoria.

They're in the 390s, 380s.

Oh, the Plutus, 380s, I think.

And it's about how he's living in a terrible time right after the plague.

He was born in the 440s.

He was a teenager during the plague.

He was a teenager when Sparta invaded.

He's been there.

He grew up with this non-ending

27-year war and most of it and then the

disruption and all the cultural ramifications.

And he's a traditional conservative.

So I'm not saying he's pro-Spartan, but he's pro-Greek city-state.

getting along with each other as they used to.

And he feels that one of the problems is radical Athenian democracy where people just meet twice a month in the the penins the outdoor theater and they just vote for whatever they want.

You know it's like a referendum.

Let's kill a popular court, let's kill Socrates, he introduce new laws.

Well he didn't really do anything.

Let's kill him anyway that spoke.

Let's cut the throat of the Middle Enians.

But

are you sure you want to do that?

There are subject

ah well today I'm not sure.

Let's send another boat and say don't kill the Middle Enians and give them a bonus so they row faster, so they get there before the first boat tells everybody to get their throats slit.

Kind of that stuff.

That's horrible, yeah.

That's horrible, yeah.

And

that's why a lot of people don't like Aristophanes, because he is a cultural conservative, and

he is one of the great critics of Athenian democracy, as is Socrates.

as is the so-called old oligarch, who has an early treatise, as is, I think you can make the argument, he respects the dynamism of democracy, but so is Thucydides.

So if you're a classical scholar, and many are who are very, very pro-Athenian democracy, because of the funeral oration, its echoes to the American founding,

you've got a task before yourself, because you basically have to say the sources didn't really mean what they say.

or there's other sources that are lost to the tradition that we don't have.

But if we had them,

they would be very favorable.

But boy, you read Aristotle's politics and his classification of consensual governments, and Athenian democracy is not up there.

It's a property qualification,

landed democracy where a person participates based on their success at keeping hold of, say, 10 acres or something, and they don't go into town very much.

Or if you read

Plato, the answer to is

autocracy or dictatorship.

Philosopher kings enlighten tyranny.

If you read

Thucydides, it's, well, they have a good government when they're in crisis, or it sounds great, Pericles, but it only works because he's first citizen again and again and again.

It's a democracy in name, Thucydides says, but fortunately it's Pericles, who's not democratic, is an aristocrat.

And he says at one time the greatest government was the

Constitution of 5000 in 411, even though it's hard to know if the government existed or if it existed for very long.

But Aristophanes is also one of the people who thinks that allowing people to vote without any qualifications basically other than their male citizenship,

possession of male citizenship, without really a constitutional restriction on their purview and without checks and balances or vetos, you get really crazy stuff.

You get the greatest sea battle victory in the history of Athens at Saint Salamis at Argonusai, and then a storm comes up, and you know, there's some damaged triremes of the victors, and then a lot of people die and they drown.

And then, all of a sudden, somebody goes into the Ecclesiastes and says, I make a motion that we kill all the generals because they didn't save the dead.

Well, wait a minute, they won the battle.

We can win the pattle.

I make a motion,

and they vote to to kill the generals.

And that's how they operate.

So Aristophanes belongs to that critical tradition of contemporaries.

And it's too bad we don't have Eupolis and other

names that we know were his rivals, but we don't.

We only have these 11 plays.

If you want to read a play, I would suggest you start with Elysistrata.

And then you, if you can only read three plays, I think the clouds about the mockery of Socrates and the frogs about bringing back Aeschylus and having him square off against Euripides are pretty funny.

Those are three good plays.

But there's other ones too.

I mean, The Wasps, The Knights, Pluto, they're all good.

Yeah.

Well, I'm kind of curious now about the clouds.

Why would a cultural conservative like Aristophanes criticize Socrates, who was also a cultural conservative.

I think if we're to accept Plato as representing him.

Xenophon gives us more or less the same picture.

Because,

and notice that

he has all of these, the Gorgias, the Protagoras, these are all dialogues with Sophists or rival philosophers, and they're dialectics.

And they're very much language.

There's a great attention to language and

there is some sophistry on the part of Socrates and he attacks the sophists but what Aristophanes is trying to say is he's part of this

back and forth, this academic game, this linguistic gymnastics and he's not just a plain speaker.

and he's trying to create an alternate form of morality that is not divinely inspired.

The charge that he was executed for were religious in nature.

He corrupted the youth, i.e.

he bought them a new morality, and he did not respect the gods of Athens, the traditional Olympians and their subordinate gods.

And that is something that Aristophanes tried to channel.

And he says that.

If you read that tetrad of the Phaido, the

Euthropo, and Crito and Apology.

Socrates says that he's been an object or the butt of ridicule of the comic poets.

And what they are making fun of him, he sets himself up as the moral arbiter of what's right or wrong by these dialectic.

Oh, how are you,

Mr.

Gorgias?

Let's just sit down and talk.

Can I ask you a question?

Oh, if that's true, this.

And then he leads him to the, and he makes, and he destroys the person.

But the theme of it is not necessarily you should honor traditional morals or you should honor the gods.

It's kind of a humanistic Renaissance.

And it's subject to the same criticism that the Italian Renaissance was by people of the church.

It's, you know, there was great Italian humanists that were advocates of Catholicism, but a lot of them were not.

Or the French Enlightenment, it's the same thing.

And these were enlightened thinkers that said that the power of reason would explain natural phenomena.

So around Socrates, it wasn't just Socrates, it was Democritus, the atomic philosopher, who said that our essence were atoms, very prescient, and they recombined in various things.

And we have Lucretius,

much of Democritus'

lost ideology

is found, at least politics.

You know,

for example, just give one, I'll shut up, but if you're walking by a statue and it has its hand out and it's good luck to touch it, why after a while were his fingers worn away and the statue gets polished to the point where you can't even recognize it as a hand anymore?

And Lucretius will say, according to Democritus, those are atoms.

when you touch them, your atoms collide with those atoms and can knock them away.

And

that's what he's trying to do is look at natural phenomenon.

And Socrates is very

much a part of that scientific method.

So that's what Aristophanes is making fun of.

You can always find, if you read the clouds and you go back, he can always find a reason to explain something.

And his explanation is silly and stupid, but it's always complicated and polysyllabic.

And

it could be explained by much better by a traditional Athenian who was religious in nature and

simple and just knew right and wrong,

good and bad.

It's sort of like,

say you have a very accomplished

philosopher at Stanford University.

And he's got a,

you know, he's very, say it's Jordan Peterson, let's say, I don't have to say he's liberal,

say Jordan Peterson is a professor at the University of Toronto, and he can be very opaque, and he has all these ideas, and then some guy who's a truck driver just comes in and starts to, you know, interrogate him and makes him look like an idiot.

And then there's Aristophanes who would record that and make the truck driver famous and

sympathetic and make him,

even though Jordan Peterson would not be advocating for amoral behavior.

It's just that he's a wordsmith and he's trying to use pure reason where pure reason always doesn't is not adequate.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, thank you for that.

I've always wondered about Aristophanes, and I did not realize he was a social cultural conservative.

Let me see now.

Yeah, we've done Herodotus, we've done Thucydides, we did Xenophon, and we've done

comedy now.

And I think we should look at, I can't do all of the ten Attic orders, but we need to look at this fourth century BC phenomenon of Demosthenes and Isocrates, Antiphon, and Docetes.

These were the great speakers in the Athenian Assembly, and we have a lot of their speeches, the so-called ten attic orders.

So I'll give you...

The next one will be a little bit on rhetoric and speech-making.

Oh, perfect.

All right, let's take a break and come back and talk a little bit more about Elon Musk and the Pope.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back.

So, Victor,

Elon's been in the news this week as well, and he met with Trump.

That was one thing.

We don't know what it was about, but nonetheless, he met with them.

And he had one of his

factories in Berlin.

Eco-terrorists sabotaged it and shut it down for, I think, several days.

It sounded like the electricity.

And Elon Musk wrote on his ex account that Das is extreme dumb,

and I guess that's supposed to be in German, and I'm not sure if it's appropriate or accurate German, but nonetheless, because his factory is an EV producing factories, and eco-terrorists should be pro-EVs.

It's hard to know when he tweets whether he's serious or he's just trying to troll someone.

But I can tell you that someone who works in Palo Alto and often goes to lunch,

often solitarily, in Menlo Park or Mountain View, at ground zero of the Silicon Valley.

culture.

Eight years ago, all people did, you would overhear was brag on their Tesla.

It was almost who had the most Teslas.

And little charging stations were always, they had little notes on the card, please don't, you know, now it's a penalty.

But it was Tesla, Tesla, Tesla.

And the left turned on him like you wouldn't believe.

And that was one of the reasons I think they have all these alternate EVs now, even though his is the best.

But it's just amazing that when he got in this money-losing but civic-minded takeover of Twitter and got rid of Jack Dorsey and the censorship machine, how much they hated him.

And so

anybody who attacks him or his products is considered a folk hero now.

So that's how the left works.

That's what's really dangerous.

And then he met with Donald Trump and he said he was not going to give money to either candidate.

He's not stupid.

He knows how the left works.

I have a feeling he's going to vote for Donald Trump, but he knows if he were to say that he

gave money to Donald Trump, mark my words, Letita James or someone like that, and they went after him in Delaware at the head of the company, they would go after him in two seconds.

I don't think everybody quite realizes that this is so insidious and so gradual.

And I don't want to use that Hemingway.

metaphor, but I will.

You know, how did you go bankrupt gradually then suddenly?

How did you lose your freedom gradually then suddenly?

And we've lost it because if you're a high-profile business person and you are considered at all conservative, much less sympathetic to a MAGA national conservative agenda, I don't know how you're going to do business because the left will use the powers of government to confiscate your wealth as they did with Donald Trump.

I mean, they just made up a law that had never been intended, made up a use of an existing law to take away $355 million, and with interest it'll be $450 million, just to steal it, all his hard-won cash.

And Elon knows that, so they will go after him anywhere he goes.

So he's smart to say he's not giving money to any candidate.

Yeah.

They've already gone after him.

He's got lots of lawsuits that they've brought against him.

I know they have.

And some of you are going to say, well, Victor, how are we ever going to change things?

You're just going to cede the field to the left.

And then everybody's, that's why we got outraised three and a half to one last election.

Yes.

I'm deploring it, but I don't have the moral statute to tell some business person,

you owe it to all of us conservatives that you have to go broke by saying that you're going to support a conservative traditional agenda and then suffer what the left does to you.

And that's what you're asking.

I mean,

just take one person, Rebecca Mercer and her family.

There's no nicer person in the world, anybody who knows her.

She's on the board of the Hoover Institution.

She's a Stanford graduate.

She was on the board of natural history in New York.

She's given to a lot of causes.

And what's her life like?

Once in 2016, it was known that her father contributed heavily to the Trump.

I don't think they did in 2020.

They just demonized her.

They tried to destroy her.

They destroyed, I shouldn't say try.

She had a very good product parlor.

All it said was it was going to make no restriction.

It was kind of the precursor to Twitter-X.

And all of a sudden, she woke up one morning and Google and Apple and Facebook, you couldn't get it.

There was no app.

There was no way to access it.

And it went completely kaput.

They destroyed her.

And

had she said,

I'm a very powerful leftist progressive, and I want to augment the wonderful world of Jack Dorsey, they would have loved her.

So

you can't blame him for that.

No, absolutely.

I know that he's controversial and he's erratic, but

all these people like that, Peter Thiel,

an Elon Musk, all those people are,

they're up against, you know,

they're up against the Orthodox the mass and they know it they know those people better than we do so they know that when they challenge those people they know what they're capable of

and so I admire them a great deal they they can let they can at any time lose anything yeah they've got to be very they've got to be very

you know they've got to be very

I don't know what the word, circumspect.

So you can't just expect, you know, I'm out and I'm 70 years old out in

an ancient farm with no money and I have nothing to lose, right?

So

I don't know.

It seems to me that it's pretty easy to be conservative.

Yeah.

But I don't employ 6,000 or 7,000, 20,000, 100,000 people.

You know,

and just so you know, how imbalanced, I was just going to read something that

a friend, a very close friend, I won't embarrass him by admitting, but he's a very brilliant guy.

And he's a statistician and an economist.

And he just sent me the Santa Clara County Register of Voters of the recent election based on the zip code 94305.

I have a campus apartment, so it's all my neighbors.

These are Stanford-affiliated faculty and staff, but mostly faculty.

And here were the results.

And it's very low because

so Biden got 520 votes in the zip code.

Haley got 25 and Trump got 14.

And all of those hundreds of households, he only got 14 votes.

What were the percentage of all of the votes of Republicans on the Stanford campus?

It's a huge community.

Well,

how many votes?

How many voted for Haley or Trump?

Oh, of Republican voters.

Yes.

I would say 70 Haley, 30 Trump.

No, I mean together, Republicans versus the Biden.

Oh, oh,

oh,

90 Biden, 10.

You're so jiggled.

No, no, no, no, no.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright said, no, no, no, no, no.

God,

America.

It was 93 to 7.

Oh, I got close.

So if you're wondering what is screwed up on the Stanford campus or the Harvard campus when you see these elections and you vote 93%

for Joe Biden, given the fact that it's in the public domain, that family is utterly corrupt and has taken 25 million, given the fact that he is no longer in control of his cognitive ability, given the fact that every single major issue, foreign policy, economy, border, crime, energy, he polls below 40% on his record, and you still would vote 93%.

I mean, it's just insane.

And these people are entrusted with educating our youth at the so-called premier institution or one of the three best or something like that.

And that's why I think a lot's why people say, no, I'll send, I want to send my kid to Hillsdale or St.

Thomas Aquinas or the University of Austin.

And actually get Austin College, a new college, just anywhere but these places because all I'll do is go into Hawk for a quarter quarter million dollars and they'll come out.

On the first semester, they come home from Thanksgiving and they're going to say to their parents, I didn't know you were a racist war criminal.

And I hate you.

I hate you.

And by the way, I need more, it's really expensive in Palo Alto.

I need more money.

Give me more money.

And I'm taking the Tesla.

I don't want that damn Honda Civic.

So that's what nobody, I think people will see that.

Keep it up and keep, they just have to do it a few more years.

And people will be, I think they'll disengage from them.

I hope so.

Well, our last topic then is Pope Francis, who has claimed that military disarmament is a moral obligation of nations.

World peace can be achieved by banning all weapons, and so our nations are morally

obligated to ban weapons and to

disarm,

according to the Pope in the Vatican.

Well, now, what in history would give him that idea that an international, globalist,

humane effort to ban all weapons?

Oh, we could have the Kellogg-Brian Act.

Didn't remember that little piece of legislation that outlawed war?

How'd that work?

Or we could have the Treaty of Versailles.

Or we could have the League of Nations.

Now, he's in a very good position because he's at the Vatican.

So we know

in Italy in 1923, they birthed fascism.

And for the next 20 years, they had Mussolini.

And he slaughtered the people of East Africa, mercilessly so.

And he slaughtered people in Tunisia.

and he slaughtered people in Albania.

And he killed his brown, his black shirts, killed their rivals, and he had a dictatorship.

And the only, how did he get,

Pope Francis, what happened to Mussolini?

How did he end up strung up naked with his girlfriend, Carla Petucci or whatever her name was, tortured in the main square?

Was it in Milan?

Yes, Milan.

I think it was because of the U.S.

Army and the British Army invaded Italy when they had tanks and guns and planes, and they forcibly

forced the Germans out of Italy or up the peninsula and then

the Italians were defeated with bullets.

Otherwise there would have been what?

Did the Catholic Church or any church stop Mussolini?

I don't think so.

I think some of the things they approved of what he was doing.

How did Hitler, how was he stopped?

Why didn't Stalin overrun

the Vatican?

Oh, he's at the Vatican, isn't he?

I just thought of something.

Think about this, Pope Francis.

In 1939, under the tenets of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to invade Poland on September 1, 1939, and dismember it and kill off people.

And one of the reasons was...

Not only did they say the bastard child of the Versailles Treaty, they wanted to end, they wanted to steal the territory and that was rich in Jews.

So, as soon as they went in, nobody in the church stopped them.

But here's my point:

after 1945, good old Uncle Joe, that remember FDR, said to Winston, Let me talk to Joe at Yalta.

I can get along with him a lot better.

Uncle Joe likes me, he hates you.

Yeah, that's true, FDR.

And that says a lot about you compared to Churchill.

So, anyway,

they said to Joe, Hey, we won, and you know what?

You

split up Poland

with Hitler, and Hitler's no longer there, so we're giving back the German half they stole to the Poles.

Now, could you just give back what you stole?

Oh, no, I'm not going to do that.

You're not going to do that, Joe?

You mean you're going to steal land?

Well, I was an ally of Hitler at the time.

Well, where are we going to get the land for Poland?

Well,

maybe

you can get it from Germany.

Well, what do you mean, Joe?

Well, maybe you can take 13 million Germans in East Prussia and make them walk back in the winter.

A couple of million will, you know, die, but just ethnically cleanse everybody from Poland.

And they said to him, but

parts of the thing that you stole has already been been incorporated into Western Ukraine and it's been Polish and Catholic for a thousand years.

It's not Russian-speaking.

It's not Orthodox.

It's not communist.

You know what Joe said?

How many divisions does the Pope have?

Hear that, Pope Francis?

How many divisions do you have to save Poland from Soviet annexation in 1945?

So you're asking all of us to disarm and deal with Mr.

Putin, Mr.

Chai, Chi,

King John-un,

the Iranian

theocracy.

You live in Vatican City that is in a constitutional republic, Italy, that is protected by a military alliance called NATO, which is 70% funded by the United States, which has 6,000 nukes that prevent your city from being incinerated.

You have no nukes, you have no military defenses, you have some pretty impressive Swiss guards through history, have been had noble service, but they're not going to stop anybody.

They're not going to stop radical Islam.

They're not going to stop the Russian army.

It's just ridiculous.

Yeah, it sure is.

And it's amoral.

He's saying that he's, I think in that diatribe he complained about the merchants of death, the arms industry.

And I mean, I have a lot of objections to them for the same reason Eisenhower did.

A lot of the weapons that they make are not practical.

We're spending too many, too much money on too few platforms.

I think we'd do a lot better instead of having

12 $14 billion carriers.

We had 700 ships and maybe

5,000 drone ships and 50,000 naval drones or 100,000 naval drones.

More, more, more, more, more, and less, less, less vulnerable.

But that's not what makes the big money, apparently.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the podcast for this weekend, and I have another comment from Apple Podcasts, and it's titled VDH Exclamation Point.

Five-star, I am a big fan of VDH and have a nice collection of his books.

I like the take on current events while referring to history.

Jack Fowler is also a really great host.

He asks very much

questions.

Yeah,

he asks really good questions, things I would ask.

Thank you, Giuseppe Campos.

Yes, I think so too.

And

he takes the podcast along in a direction that is...

it flows and it's really nice.

I think he does a great job with

his work and with the...

work.

He brings 30 years, 40 years of experience.

He knew William Buckley very well.

He knew all the original writers at National Review as a young guy.

So he has all that.

Yeah, and every time you forget a name, he always knows it.

Even in the movies, he knows all that stuff.

I'm like, way to go, Jeff.

It's a great person because we have the same interest of classic Westerns and war movies.

That's awesome.

All right.

Well, thanks for the weekend edition.

Loved it on Aristophanes.

Thank you, everybody, for listening and much appreciated.

Yeah, thanks to our listeners.

Keep up hope.

Yeah.

What was Dan Rather's thing when he always signed up?

It wasn't peace.

It was something like courage.

Courage.

Courage.

Yes.

They'll be like, Dan.

Courage, everybody.

Courage.

How about the Roman strength and honor?

Can we have that?

Yes.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

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

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