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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our weekend episode, and we're going to look at our

last tragedian, Euripides, in the middle section.

But

we will look at the Ukraine war, a retrospective, and a little bit more.

New things have come out about the Trump settlements in New York.

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

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

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Victor's, the Ukraine war as of today is at the two-year mark, and I was wondering if you could give us a retrospective on it.

I know that Russia has recently captured a new city, Avdivka, and so I was wondering if you had any thoughts on it.

Well, I mean, here we are, it's two years on the 24th of February, and

most of what we were told,

I'm speaking as someone who supports the army in Ukraine, but most of what we were told was not factual.

We were told that

Zelensky, who was a prior comedian, was a stalwart of democracy and he was being attacked by, and that part was not completely true.

He suspended habeas corpus.

He suspended elections.

He suspended most of his political parties that were in opposition to him.

And, you know, we didn't, as I said earlier, we didn't even do that.

We're doing World War II, and we wouldn't let Israel get away with that.

And then

I think on this broadcast, I've mentioned that when you have one-thirtieth of the territory and one-tenth of the GDP,

and

almost just one third to one-fourth of the population.

And you're dealing with Russia on its border, history suggests they're going to grind you down.

And yet, we were told that they were going to stage this brilliant offensive just about a year ago.

Do you remember that?

The spring offensive?

Challenger tanks, leopard tanks, Ablam's tanks, High Mars.

And you looked at that aerial view of

kind of a Maginal line

that Russia had built.

I mean, it had tank traps, it had ditches, it had barbed wire, it had drones, coverage, it had artillery emplacements, bunkers, pillboxes.

How could you break through that?

And the problem has always been manpower.

They only have, when the war started, 40 million people and 10 to 12 million have left.

And they probably lost 300,000 dead, wounded, and missing.

And it's going to be very hard for them to conduct offensive operations.

That's number one.

Very quickly, as we said, military strategy, doctrinaire orthodox military strategy says if you want to get somebody out of your territory, then you should attack their homeland.

And that would be sink the Black Sea fleet or hit supply and oil facilities inside Russia.

And that's very dangerous because you're dealing with a complete cutthroat dictator who has at his disposal 6,000 nuclear weapons.

And he's dealing with some maniacs who, I understand they want to sound like maniacs.

Medeved and all the rest of them in the parliament that says, you know, we're going to nuke London, New York, we're going to send a tactical nuclear weapon above Kiev.

I hear all that, but it doesn't say, doesn't mean it's not real.

And then we have the geostrategic problem is that in this, we were told that we were going to bankrupt Russia with oil sanctions.

And then what happened?

It wasn't just China that stepped in.

It was our

friends like India who's buying all the Russian oil they can.

And,

you know, Iran is supplying.

It's not just Iran that's supplying with drones.

Turkey, a NATO ally, is leaning toward Russia against us.

And Gutter, Gutter, we were all told, you know, this is, they not only are pro-Hamas, they're helping the Russians.

So

there has to be, I think, a negotiated settlement.

People say, well, how do you negotiate with a killer who wants to take all of Ukraine?

Well, you're going to have to

do some things, and that is to arm Ukraine.

I understand that, but not put them in NATO.

Not put them in NATO, because

if he goes into

Ukraine,

do you think that if Ukraine was in NATO, and if he goes into it once it's a member, do you think that people in Florence or Rotterdam, I don't know, or Athens are going to jump in and go over there and fight him?

I don't.

I just don't think it's going to happen.

And the more members you have in NATO doesn't make you stronger.

It makes you weaker because you have more vulnerabilities about Article 5.

So we've got all sorts of problems, and we can negotiate something to finish that says they're not going to be in NATO, but they're going to be very carefully armed to the teeth.

And

the Donbass and Crimea, they're never going to go back.

They've been the most hotly disputed areas in the world for the last 300 years.

And they're not going to back going back to Ukraine.

They're just not.

But maybe we can use that fact

and allow him to institutionalize it if he will go back to the February 24, 2022 embarkation point and get him back.

And then we can say that all the death and destruction that Ukraine suffered was worth it because you got Putin back to where he was when he invaded in February 24th of 2022.

And that's not, I'm not saying it's a good solution, but I get a little irritated with all of these Westerners that start this rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah.

And they give the weirdest arguments for this salmon Verdun.

It's a meat grinder.

It's destroying European manhood, Russian manhood.

And

they say things like, well,

it hasn't really cost us too much because they're buying U.S.

weapons.

So it's we give them money and they turn around and get yeah, and we have people who are selling U.S.

weapons on television and the media all day saying that this is a question of your moral certitude.

You get there for 100% for Zelensky.

Oh, by the way, I'm a lobbyist for this big defense consortium.

Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but I don't see what's so good about

fueling a Verdun or a Somme.

I really don't.

And without making at least some modicum effort of negotiating.

I know you can't negotiate with Putin because he's a liar, but you can assume he will cheat and you can get him

You can tell him to go back or you're going to continue the war, but you at at least have to get that option.

What he wants is he wants Crimea and he wants Donbass.

And he had them before the war

and he thought that he could get more of that and now he can't get more of that.

So now he wants to tell the Russian people, hey, 500,000 casualties were worth it because even the West says I have

what I started with.

And they're not going to ever take it away from it.

Well, they were never going to take it away anyway.

They stole it during Obama's administration.

I don't remember Barack Obama since 2014.

Maybe I'm wrong, but if anybody can cite where he said in the fall, the last 10 years, it's the position of the Obama administration at the time, and it is my position now that he has to get out of the dome bath.

No, it was tell Vladimir that if he gives me some space, I will dismantle.

That's what it was.

And then Donald Trump didn't tell Putin to get out.

He told him not to do anything.

But he didn't say, I'm going to arm the Ukrainians and get Crimea back.

He didn't.

And Joe Biden, of course, didn't.

He not only didn't, he invited him in by doing what?

By saying if he went into Ukraine to get more stuff, it would depend on our reaction, whether it was minor or major.

Or if he's

hacking our institutional

resources and areas in commerce and business and government in the United States, let's just make sure that I'll just don't, don't, you know, don't do the hospitals.

We have to have some stuff off his hacking list.

And the first week, it wasn't very resolute to say, hey, Zelensky, you want to get out?

We'll give you a flight to the United States.

So there's been a lot of historical revision down this two-year anniversary.

David Sachs had an interesting post on his ex

account, and

he was talking about all the lies about it, basically that

the Ukrainians are possibly going to be able to win.

There was a lot of them.

But he said towards the end, this war is going to go on until something happens in Kiev and Zelensky is toppled.

What do you think of that opinion?

I don't know, but there are...

Some very bright people in Ukraine that have been fighting and fighting and fighting, and they understand

whom they're fighting, and and they understand that you don't beat Russia on a land war on its border.

You just don't.

Maybe somebody can say, well, Napoleon almost did, or Hitler almost did.

Charles XII,

Sweden almost did it.

Yeah, almost, almost, almost.

They almost all do it.

Ukraine almost, but you don't.

Finland almost did it, but you don't.

And Poland almost did it.

It did it in 20 to 23, but they have so so many resources.

That's not an endorsement of this awful Putin.

It's just that the leadership in

Ukraine is basically saying,

I declared martial law, I suspended election, I outlawed political parties,

I'm the voice, and I am the father of Ukraine, and all of you are going to give us a blank check as far as weapons, and you're not going to question my leadership or strategy.

And everybody said, but

what is your strategy and what is the end game?

And

what is the liability of NATO and us getting in a land war, whether it's with Russia?

We're in a proxy war with a nuclear power.

This is not the

we've mentioned Cuba before.

1962,

we went to DEF CON, almost to DEF CON 5, just because we said that this is an area of long U.S.

relationships in Cuba, and the Caribbean is off-limits to nuclear weapons of our adversaries and to Russians in particular.

So, Mr.

Russia,

we're not going to deliver any more missiles to Cuba.

We're going to blockade it, and you're going to take them out.

And if you don't take them out,

we're going to take them out.

And that almost caused a nuclear war.

So

can I ask you about Putin's backyard?

There's been the Estonian prime minister that Russia has a warrant out for her arrest, and the Estonian foreign minister has just recently said, quote, Putin is a murderer, unquote.

So he has apparently a lot of people in his backyard that are not happy with him.

And I'm surprised by the fact that they're not.

Well, they're terrified, and they should be terrified.

And that's, we owe a great deal to Ukraine.

And we did, it was wise to stop them from taking Kiev because if Putin had taken Kiev that first week two years ago if he had taken it

he would have gone in and tried to take he would have said that there's persecuted Russian minorities in Latvia Lithuania Estonia he probably would have gone in there too and taken them

he failed and that was good so then we're into stage two now what

yeah it sounds like the Estonian prime minister and foreign minister are very aggressive against Putin, which is

they suffered for,

I don't, you know, since the 1930s, they've suffered terrible Soviet occupation, and they were only freed after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And they have a large number of transplanted Russians that came in during that period of Soviet occupation.

And they did terrible things to them.

They dumped nuclear waste in the Baltic countries.

They Russianized their school system.

And so what they're doing now is they're de-Russianizing.

And they're not probably doing it with a scalpel.

They're probably doing it with a hacksaw.

And Putin doesn't like that.

No.

Well, let's turn then to the Trump settlements and the civil fraud case, Letitia James.

A huge amount, but you had, there were more things that are going on in that.

And really the long-term view of business in New York, I think, is at stake, according to a party of

Jonathan.

And the governor Hokul had to come out and say something.

There's two issues in New York.

One,

if you're a business person

and you don't

have any dispute with any other business entity, opponent, ally, anything,

and you comply with a contract and you're in the wrong party, you can get a rogue Manhattan, or you can get a state attorney general to go after you.

And so you can say the people were injured by the principle that Donald Trump said there was 30,000 square feet rather than 10,000, that he counted garage space and all this.

And therefore, he got a loan at Deutsche Bank.

And she doesn't understand, they don't, that argument doesn't understand that the auditors for the Deutsche Bank are 10 times smarter than Letita James's staff.

They know exactly, and they don't care if they think they've probably looked at that and they say, This is Trump.

I know what he does, he adds 10%,

but this is what the value,

the basic value of the company, we know better than anybody.

And we're going to give him a loan and we're going to make millions of dollars in interest.

And they did.

So there's interest paid, principal paid, loan paid, all timely.

Bank says, no problem.

Mr.

Bartov, the forensic accountant, comes in and says, I looked at the Trump portfolio and the assets.

It's pretty much what he said it's worth.

And what does she do?

She goes after him.

So the message is:

you screw around with the Democratic left-wing agenda and you're a MAGA or any of these people, we're going to make it impossible for you to do business in New York.

If you were smart, and anybody who is identified with the MAGA movement or conservatives,

if you have a business in New York, you have two choices.

You better start giving as much money as you can to the governor, to Eric Adams, to Letitia James, or they're going to go after you.

Or two, and more wisely, you should get out.

Go to Florida and get out.

And so

that's one of the reasons.

The other is that they have bills of attainder, and that's outlawed in the Constitution.

The idea you pass a particular bill to post facto punish an individual for what he did in the past, when it was not illegal, or at least the law was contrary to what you're trying to do.

So E.

Gene Carroll, as we said, in 2017, they say, sorry, Gene, we want to get Trump too, but the statute of limitations have passed on whatever year you said that you were sexually assaulted.

94, 95, 96, but it's been been too far long.

So then the state legislator says, oh, wait a minute.

I'll pass a special bill in the New York legislature that says anybody who was sexually assaulted for one year gets a get out of jail card free.

You can go back and file.

And that same legislator did what?

Oh, you want to get Trump on the taxes at the federal level,

my close progressive friends.

Well, I'll help you out.

I'll write a bill that says anybody who is being subpoenaed for tax records at the federal level, if he's a state resident, he has to give up his confidentiality and turn over his state records to the federal entities, and they'll find from the state deductions or the information what his federal taxes were.

And so they're doing that.

And that means that anybody for any behavior, they can come after you 10 years after, 20 years after.

If you think you're protected by the statute of limitations, you're not.

They can pass a bill in the legislature anytime they want and says that for the next year, you can go back and file charges against this person, and that person will be somebody on the conservative side.

Yeah, it sounds though like the whole legislature then is also against Trump, right?

So it's more than just Letitia James.

She's working with the legislature to have them give

absolutely.

New York is a completely hostile legislation.

Well, that was Judge Kaplan and E.

Gene Carroll.

They were working with Reid.

I mean, look at E.

Jean Carroll's suit.

The judge Kaplan was left-wing,

and she was paid to sue Trump by Reid Hoffman, who was a billionaire from Silicon Valley, left-wing.

And she was only allowed to get away with it because the left-wing legislature changed the law just against Trump, as they had earlier.

And, you know,

if you add up the $83 million,

and then you add up

the, what, $353 million, and you add the interest on it,

and you add the $150 million, you're getting up to about $6 to $700 million.

And so they're saying that there's $700 million.

I want to find out

who the injured party is.

I don't believe it was Eugene Carroll.

I think any court in the world would throw that out.

She doesn't know the name.

She said she had a dress on.

She didn't.

She went on social media and started bragging about an app, how to destroy people's reputations through sex.

Her narrative is almost exactly like a narrative in a TV show in 2012.

She said her favorite TV show was Donald Trump 20 years after he supposedly.

I could go on, but you see, it's just crazy.

And you know, if you look at all this in the context of Bragg,

Alvin Bragg, who's going after him on a campaign,

bootstrapping a federal campaign, that's a federal law.

And he says that nondisclosure applies to the federal law, and I'm going to enforce federal law, even though

the feds didn't want to do it.

No federal attorney in the state of New York said that I'm going after Donald Trump on that non-disclosure.

Barack Obama was fined $375,000 for campaign violations, for deliberately hiding the identities of some of his biggest donors, and that was in 2008, and it didn't get out until 2012.

And then we've got to look at Hillary Clinton.

She was fined $113,000 for the secret payments to Christopher Steele that she didn't want to disclose.

You put Bragg together, you put James together, you put Willis, we went over Willis, Willis together, you put Jack Smith together, and you get Eugene Carroll, and what do you get?

You get a pattern.

They're all left-wing.

I know that you're going to say, well, Jack Smith's an independent know his wife is very closely tied with the Obama project.

And they all file their writs.

The cases all take place where?

They take place.

in a very unrepresentative part of America.

America is not just Atlanta, New York, and Washington with a liberal judge

and Gorgon or Kaplan.

It's just not.

And the jury polls are not representative of the United States.

And can't you have one conservative prosecutor?

What would the left do right now if five right-wing prosecutors in Wyoming and Utah and Alabama consulted with the Trump White House, and they did, Fannie Willis, for example, did, and then they went after the 2028 candidate on the Democratic side.

And they charged him with crimes that would be, what, applicable to other people.

So they're all overtly political.

And I mean that literally, Sammy.

Yeah.

Because Willis and Bragg and James also have one thing in common.

They either campaigned on the promise that if you elect me, I'll go get Donald Trump, or they raised money.

in their campaigns by bragging they were going to get Donald Trump, or they went to the media and bragged in interviews they were going to get Donald Trump.

And so did Eugene Carroll.

She said that again and again and again.

And when she

said she was defamed, they interviewed the LA editor where she worked.

They said she wasn't, we didn't, she didn't suffer any damages.

We fired her anyway.

75 years old, columnist talking about sex.

No, we wanted to get rid of her, had nothing to do with things with Trump.

And so they were, and Jack Smith, if he's not political, why doesn't he just follow the normal schedule of court hearings?

Time lags as he does with every other case.

No, he's trying to push it.

He's gone to court numerous times to speed up the trial.

Why?

Because he wants him tried during the campaign season so he can keep him occupied, broke.

distracted, and won't campaign against Joe Biden.

And you know, there's another thing.

If Donald Trump had not run for office or had

he been left-wing, he would have been completely,

I don't know,

he would have been completely innocent.

And in every one of these four cases.

Yeah, have you noticed that they're all, most of them are elected attorney generals?

So the people want these political prosecutions.

Let me ask you something.

If this was a,

I don't want to get into race, but if this was a

black liberal

candidate, let's say take Barack Obama, right?

And we now know that he was guilty of $375,000 worth of fines for improper campaign finance.

Let's say that was known to a prosecutor,

a white right-wing prosecutor in a county in Wyoming where maybe there was a donor there who lived and gave that, voted a check, right?

And Obama, he asked Obama to hide it, and Obama did, or his surrogates did.

And then there was another prosecutor in Utah.

They did the same.

And then there was another prosecutor, I don't know, we'll take your pick, we'll say Mississippi.

You think that the left wouldn't go crazy?

They would say, oh my God,

three

white right-wing prosecutors in rural counties where there's going to be a rural right-wing jury pool and rural judges are going after this powerful black man on a technicality.

That's what they would say.

And yet no one says that Alvin Bragg and Letita James and Fanny Willis are not left-wing partisan and they play the race card.

And we saw that with Fannie Willis's testimony.

Can't talk about Nathan Wade because she's not going to emasculate a proud black man.

Can't talk about the money that she used.

I don't think she ever used it, by the way, Sammy.

I don't think that she paid one dime.

That was the whole point to get free junkins with Wade.

She could have written a check.

She could have used a credit card, but she says she paid him back with cash.

There's no evidence that she ever did that.

And yet you think that because there would be some media exposure at some point, she would want to verify that she paid him back.

Well, the media is going to go after me, Nathan.

I got to make sure you have a receipt so they don't claim that you were paying for my presence after I massaged your appointment.

And she didn't.

And what did she say instead?

She did to the clotting gay.

Well, people don't understand the black community.

They just deal in cash.

My daddy told me to deal in cash.

That's what I do.

You're a racist, in other words, if you think otherwise.

The other thing is,

for every one of these cases, very quickly, there is a

counterpart exposure.

Look at Eugene Carroll.

Okay.

Tara Reed, 30 years ago, said that she was cornered by Senator Joe Biden and she was digitally penetrated and raped.

She told her mother that because on a Larry King call at the time, her mother called in and said, I have a daughter who works in Washington who has been sexually assaulted by a very powerful senator.

Okay.

And if you think, well, that was an isolated situation, no, you can round up all the women that Joe Biden has apologized to for touching their hair, touching them too long.

And he did, but when he was running.

And remember, I think it was Camilla Harris or it was Elizabeth Warren said they believed Tara Reed.

And so did anybody say, Tara, we're going to pass a bill and get the statute of limitations.

No, she couldn't.

It was beyond the statute of limitations.

But more importantly, what was the media's attitude toward?

She's a nut.

She's crazy.

She lies.

Not as much as E.

Gene Carroll lies and can be proven, but nobody says anything.

So if Jack, go to Jack Smith.

If he thinks there's not a parallel, then he should ask himself.

Joe Biden took out files and put them in four, not one place.

He did it for 30 years, not two years.

He had no statutory right to declassify them, either as a sinner, as a vice president, as Trump did.

And he did not come forward just like Trump did not come forward.

He did not come forward and said, I have classified material.

Would you please, oh, he did, but only two weeks before the appointment of Jack Smith, because he was worried.

And what did he do?

He said on a tape in 2017, I got classified.

And he kept quiet about it.

He knew that for six years.

And so why don't they apply that same standard?

And as far as insurrection,

I don't know what you would say.

He's never been charged with it.

He's going after him on insurrection.

Jack Smith,

I can tell you what's insurrection, not a one-day thing of buffoons, but at 120 days when you kill 35 people and you inflict $2 billion worth of damage, $2 billion.

and you destroy courthouses and police precincts and you torch and you loot and you maim.

And it goes on, as I said, for 100, you try to swarm the White White House grounds to get the president.

That's BLM and Antifa.

And if you say, well, Victor, nobody

egged them on.

If you say that, you've been reading these fact-checkers too long.

Kamala Harris said they're not going to stop right after the most violent one.

Oh, I didn't mean violent.

I just meant protein.

No, you did.

You said they're not going to stop.

They shouldn't stop.

They're going to go on all the way to, that's a threat.

Come on.

And so did anybody do that?

Did anybody say to Jack Smith, well, are you going to also look at the people like Camilla Harris that egged on an insurrection, maybe?

No,

it's not going to happen at all.

And as I said earlier, Bragg could have easily charged, bootstrapped a federal campaign finance violation on Clinton, who actually destroyed, subpoena,

subpoenaed emails and communications devices.

And finally, we have the election denialist.

Oh, yes, Stacey Abrams.

I know all this, right?

It wasn't just Stacey Abrams that I'm the real governor.

She sued.

She sued the state of Georgia.

And she said they and completely lied and said there was voter suppression, and therefore the 50,000 votes have to be recounted again, that she lost by.

The whole election had to be recounted.

And Barbara Boxer in 2004,

along with the chairman of the January 6th Committee, said that

they were not going to verify the electors from Ohio.

And they finally did.

Of course, Al Gore sued over the hanging Chads in Florida.

And of course, all those great, what, Z celebrities got on the TV every night in 2016.

Please, electors, please reject your constitutional prerogative and obligation to reflect the popular vote in your state and just swing your electoral votes to Hillary Clinton.

And nobody said a word.

So that's the whole problem.

The whole thing is a joke.

Yeah, that the

cases show and send a message to businesses in New York.

That's what I'm saying.

And that is get out, get out.

Well, it's telling everybody, if you add that to the Russian collusion hoax and the disinformation laptop farce, what's the message?

The message to you is there's a blue state law for a red state citizen or a red citizen.

If you're a conservative and you get prominent, they're going to find,

you know, Lavender A.

Berea,

find me the man and I'll find you the crime.

And they're going to find every one of these crimes that they've charged Trump with has never really been done before.

Nobody in the history of Georgia has charged anybody with federal or state racketeering charges over questioning whether the vote was conducted properly.

Nobody has ever, ever in the history of New York been prosecuted for paying a loan back on time

because the assets were of questionable, inflatable,

inflated value.

Nobody has ever done that.

Nobody.

Nobody's ever got $83 million in defamation over sexual assault that happened 30 years ago that she couldn't remember and it was only went to court because a partisan in the legislature made an exemption for Trump.

So that's,

it just tells all of us, be very careful, because they're going to go after you.

Yeah.

Because they don't.

And this sets up the,

if people know all this and they're going to continue to vote for it, then they're basically saying they're like the MSNBC seeing it.

They like this.

They think it's great.

And it sends a message.

Oh, you're scared, huh?

Wouldn't want to find some tax problems, would you?

Better be quiet.

Yeah.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and turn to Euripides, speaking of somebody who noticed absurdities in human nature.

So stay with us and we'll talk about the ancient Greek tragedian Euripides after these messages.

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Welcome back.

So, Victor, our last tragedian is Euripides, and I know that there's a lot to say about him.

He's got really interesting plays like the Bacchae, showing the strangeness and hypocrisy oftentimes in human nature.

So

might be a lot that we can relate to our current political environment.

But you don't have to do that.

I want to hear about Euripides.

Well, we talked about Aeschylus and Sophocles, the two of the three great tragedians that survived.

And as I mentioned earlier, there were over 200 names.

It's just that the three were supposedly the most prominent.

And

they gave three plays and a so-called semi-comic satir play, and then people voted on them, who was best.

It was like the Academy Awards.

Euripides of the three won the fewest.

Only four, I think, in his lifetime, won the Bacchae post-mortem.

And

he has the most plays.

Maybe that's why his reputation today is not as good.

Excuse me, it wasn't in antiquity.

We have 19 plays, and there was apparently in the Byzantine period or even earlier kind of a handbook of tragedians, selections, an anthology, and he has survived in a way, not because they were more popular than those of Aeschylus or Sophocles.

And he was almost a contemporary of Sophocles.

You know, the Germans always said, in your history of Greek literature, they'd always say,

Aeschylus, first generation, you know, man of marathon, Sophocles,

Periclean age, Euripides, Sicily and exposition.

You know, that's decline, decline.

And because he was less patriotic, but he's very different than Sophocles.

We talked about Sophocles and Aeschylus.

He's interested in psychology, the human mind for one reason.

And so he's not using these ancient myths to represent

necessarily major political issues, although he does.

The genocide on Melos when they killed all the adult Melians.

He produced the next fall,

the next spring,

the Trojan Women.

And it's all about the women at Troy who were, their husbands were killed.

It was horrible, and they were enslaved.

And it's a direct criticism of Athens, which people didn't like.

The other thing about him is he tends to be interested in slaves, messengers, shepherds, and especially women, in a way that people at the time, especially Aristophanes, said was

detracted from the noble male who ran the society.

So you look at Medea,

you've got the Trojan women, Heccaba, Helen.

You've got a lot of plays where a particular female character, our characters, is

the entitle.

titled epominous play itself.

And in those, I know that people said he didn't like women because they're all bloodthirsty, but he's trying to show you there that when you don't give women equal

opportunity, then you should not expect them to be rational.

That's the medea.

I think that was

in some ways one of his greatest plays.

The end is kind of weird and flat, but

the idea that Jason says to his wife, hey, you know, you're kind of getting old.

I know you helped me get the golden fleece, and that's ancient history, but we've got some kids, and you're just kind of a loser.

You're a foreigner, and we're back in Athens.

So, you know what?

I'm going to marry a really nice girl whose father's a king, and it's going to help me and our children.

You should be all for it.

She just stares at him on stage and then says,

okay,

that's a nice idea, why she plans to kill him and the children.

And she does.

And another great play is Alcestis.

And this is, it's a very simple play.

And

her father-in-law has been told that he can live

if he can find in a fixed time very quickly somebody who'll take his

place.

And of course, the sun won't do it.

Why?

That's that great line.

Do you think the sun doesn't feel good on my face, dad?

And yet she does, and she's volunteers.

Hippolytus is a great play, and that is about a man.

It's kind of

Susan Blassey Ford, or not Susan.

Is that her name, Susan Blassey Ford?

Yeah, he's unjustly criticized for

sexual assault, even but the truth is he didn't want to engage in with Phaedra.

And then he's damned and kills himself, and

etc., etc.

And the best of all, I think, is, well, the Trojan Women is very good, the Iphigeniodals is good, but the Bacchae is my favorite.

That was produced in 406, the year after,

406, 405, the year after he died.

And it's a weird play.

It's about the coming of Dionysus from the East and the wine and alcohol he brings to Greece in mythical times.

And he comes to Thebes.

It's kind of an uptight town.

And there's the old

King Emeritus Cadnus and the seer Tiresias.

And they're looking around thinking, this guy is nuts.

But he's able to make women go crazy.

So we're going to kind of dress up like we're bachants.

And that means, you know, you put on your fur and your cape and you get a thersis and you shake it.

And they go through, they're kind of like, I don't know, guys that are 70 that put on, you know,

laser shoots, look me along, young as they did in the 70s.

But the king, Pentheus, very young kid, is a teenager.

And he says, I'm going, he's like, he's a self-righteous, anal retentive, we're going going to, any idea that there's sex, that you take women and you let them run around bare-breasted up in the mountains and they get drunk and then they screw people.

I know that's what you're doing.

He says, no, no, no.

And Dionysus disguises himself as a stranger.

No, that's not what they do up there.

I'm sorry.

He goes, yes, they do, don't they?

No, they don't.

And so he lures him in.

And then

finally, you can see that this is all repression, that

Cain Pentheus is a horny dog, and he wants to see it, and he's kind of a voyeur.

So he says, well, to prove that they're doing these terrible things up on Mount Cathywon, would it be possible to dress me up like one of you guys?

And then I could go look, and I could find out exactly if they are naked and having sex?

And that's drawn out.

And of course, he doesn't know that this is a trap to kill him.

And so when he goes in there, he appears to the women who are frenzied Bacchans as an intruder and they kill him and Agawi, his mother, kills him and cuts off his head.

And then she brings it in and then everybody's shocked.

And then there's that very, one of the most famous lines in Greek tragedy that says, God should be better than men, i.e.

they're not.

You're Dionysus and you're

immortal god and you have to reduce yourself to this.

So that's what Euripides is trying to, that's what got him in trouble.

He questioned traditional Greek religion.

He elevated people who were not part of the movers and shakers of society.

He said what people say

is a pretext.

You have to look for their inner motivation.

That was very

popular among the sophists.

That comes right out of Thucydides when he says that you've got to be careful about the idea, the real reason somebody is speaking, versus the

prophosis, the pretext, that a sophist will say, do this or this, or I believe that.

But that's not true.

People lie.

They try to give you, there is a subtext to everything.

And so he's a part of the sophisticated late fifth century movement.

And he's very popular.

I think the French playwrights

were much more influenced by Euripides than almost anybody.

And today,

if you're in a history of Western civ class beginning with Greece and you got to your week where you're doing Greek tragedy, I think that you will probably,

they won't assign the Oristia.

They'll feel it's too opaque or it's too difficult.

Maybe the Prometheus bound, it's very short and simple, but mostly they'll look at one or two plays of Sophocles.

That will be Antigone, but most likely Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the king.

And then when you get to Euripides, you may, I think a lot of people assign the Medea.

Euripides' Medea, they are the Hippolytus or the Bacchae.

And

he's really, Aristophanes was, we'll talk about him next time in the old comedy at Athens, comic playwright.

And he, of course, was a right-winger, crotchety guy.

And he says that Euripides was like Socrates.

And if you read the clouds or the frogs, he attacks Euripides and the frogs and Socrates and the clouds as sophists,

wordmongers

that are trying to destroy the old morality.

And

he's, remember, he's writing during the Sicilian expedition and the

last decade of the war where Athens again and again could win the war, finally after all that death, and yet they'd blow it with a sophist And

you know, we're going to kill

all the generals who didn't save the sailors at Argonusai, even though they won the battle, that kind of stuff.

And anyway, so he's looking at an Athens that's been humbled and weakened after 30 years of war.

I should say, after 20 in the last 10 years, he's writing, about the last decade of the war.

So he has a very less exalted, less Periclean, less confident Sophoclean.

He's not like

that confidence that you see around 440.

I think his first play is 438.

Yeah.

And so he's more cynical of human nature and of Athens, citizenry in general.

Yeah, he doesn't think that as Aeschylus, we have to find the divine

the divine answer, what the gods would want.

What's the moral thing that we have natural law?

We're all imbibed with a natural sense and that requires consensus and religious ossity.

It's not like Sophocles either that

is

trying to uphold the aristocratic ethos in a radically democratic society.

He's saying that there are certain people who are better than other people and they come from old families and they have values.

And they're challenged and they're not appreciated and they're tragic heroes.

And that's sort of what Oedipus and sort of what Ajax and Philoctetes are all about.

And

irony.

He's Sophoclean irony.

Just when you think you're right and you're arrogant, eubrists strike.

So the idea that if you're eubristic, you suffer nemesis and then octae or destruction.

That's best outlined in Sophoclean plays.

We talked about that last time.

There is irony in Euripides, but it's kind of

Alfred Hitchcock irony.

So

when Pentheus says, I think it says Dionysus, he goes, well, what would you do to Dionysus when he's dressed up?

I'm going to chop off his head.

No,

Pentheus, you're going to lose your head.

And there's kind of things like that all through his plays.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the readoption of the SAT by universities and then some of the current

ideas about research and policy with our CDC and FDA.

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

Welcome back.

You can find Victor at X at V D Hansen, and his Facebook page is Hansen's Morning Cup.

So please come join us.

Victor, so we have some schools, and Dartmouth is the one that stands out here at the beginning of this, that are going to turn back to the SAT as an accurate predictor of potential student success, and

so for their admissions.

Yes.

And so I was wondering your thoughts.

Are they all going to go that way, or what's going on here?

I think to answer that question, we should all ask ourselves, where did the scholastic aptitude test come from?

Camouflage from the 1920s, and why did it come?

Because the elite universities that were turning out are movers and shakers in society were all class bound.

And they were, you know, gentlemen C.

Princeton and who you knew to get in Harvard.

And the idea was, especially against Jews, it was so prejudicial.

But if you could give a test

And it was applied to everybody across class, race, anything, gender, and a person did very well on that aptitude,

then it was a kind of an equal opportunity, egalitarian method.

And now over the years, people criticize the SAT because they said, well,

it's true.

And I said, you know, I went to Selma High School, and I can tell you that there was no SAT preps.

I didn't even know what it was when I applied.

I should have.

I think the night, it was a Friday night after a football game, and it was Saturday morning, and all of us stayed up to about four in the morning that were in the football.

football and the next thing I knew my dad woke me up and says you got 30 minutes to get to Fresno.

So that was the attitude a lot of people have about versus a guy who's very wealthy, his parents

are PhDs, da da da da da.

So I understand that bias, but still it was a useful tool to adjudicate GPAs because the same thing is true of 4.0s.

My high school 4.0, as I mentioned in an earlier podcast, is not Palo Alto or Palos Verde's high.

So it was kind of a noble, very American, very American idea.

So then we get into DEI and we say,

we don't have enough people who are non-white.

And then conservatives said, well, actually, we do, because you are limiting, as you did Jews,

Asian Americans.

These people are coming from the Holocaust in Cambodia, from the catastrophe in the Vietnam War, from

their parents went went through the Cultural Revolution in China.

They haven't had it easy.

So

and they're yet they're taking the SAT and showing us with their GPA.

So

the idea is that you got rid of two things to allow DEI, which is more, it's the next step beyond affirmative action.

It's kind of repertory admissions.

By that I mean it's reparations.

It's no longer we're just going to let in 12 people here from this group and 14 people here.

We're going to make up for past things.

So we're going to let in people know, regardless of their SAT scores, are their GPAs.

And maybe we'll just say,

University of California takes a 4% of your class.

You're guaranteed a slot.

I think it's at UCLA or UC Berkeley.

I can tell you it's a lot easier to get a 4.0 at Selma High School today than it would be for a big private public school in the Bay Area, for example.

Say, I don't know, Minlo Park.

So,

and I know that because I know people who have actually moved their children to schools in my area, so they can be valedictorian or at least the top 4%.

So, whatever rubric we use, and what is the rubric we use for diversity, it's the, if you don't want to go by comparative ranking of GPAs, and you don't want to correct that with the SAT,

then all you're left with is two things.

The race and gender of the applicant, you're just an utter racist then, because that's what you're doing.

Or

the third, community activities or personal statement, the abstract, intangibles, right?

And you can just say, well,

my gosh, he played the guitar at four.

Or he wrote an essay that talked about his grandfather being turned away at a lunch counter.

This is what we need.

That kind of stuff.

And so why is it, but Sammy, why is the question, why are people even considering bringing back the SAT?

Why do you think it is now?

What's the purpose?

Now, as opposed to a year ago or two years ago,

two years ago.

Why, say, two years ago, Stanford University was bragging, at least the San Jose Mercury and other Bay Area papers said, Stanford University got rid of the SAT.

And by the way, you brown-nosing overachievers, if you sent your SAT in,

65%

of you 1%ers who got a perfect math, analytical, and English score, they turned down.

Ha ha.

Their donors are becoming very vocal and disappearing because they are.

It's coming from two groups.

It's coming from the donor class because they looked at repertory admissions and they said, look, the Stanford class is 9%.

I'm just taking Stanford.

It could be Harvard, Yale.

I think

it's

look at the class they're giving A's.

80% of the grades at Yale are A's.

I think it's 60-something at Harvard.

Stanford's not much different.

And we don't know whether it's accurate or not, number one.

And then if you're only going to let in 9%,

white males, when they make up 35% of the nation, and you're a national university, and you're only going to let in

nine percent.

Where are you going to get them?

I mean, where that's that nine percent will be athletes, it'll be the ten million dollar donor gifts, it will be the dean of EEI, DEI's son, it will be the assistant provost's daughter, it will be the full professor nephew, right?

There's not enough slots for all the donors and supporters and alumni.

And they're angry because they said, my kid, from the moment he went to first grade wanted to go to Harvard or Yale or Stanford and he got a he went he worked so hard he got a perfect 4.5 with advanced placement courses he's a valedictorian he got 800 and they said sorry no room so that's they're going to say you go back to the SAT

and the other group of course is the faculty The faculty said,

well, it's very easy to virtue signal and showpote and performance art that you're more liberal than Harvard or Yale's more liberal than

Duke or whatever your little game is.

And you let in people on the basis of race or gender or sexual orientation.

But that's the beginning, that's not the end of the problem.

And then you turn them over to whom?

To us, the faculty.

And what do we do?

We try to get the poetics of gender and

the construct of race and every title.

We do that.

And we water down the courses and we no longer, if we're teaching a course in Shakespeare, it is race and gender in Shakespeare and it's maybe Macbeth, one play.

And yes, we've done that.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

And we brought in new courses, just, you know, as many race and grievance courses as we can.

But we're still stuck.

because we're letting students in that we have no idea what their SAT score would be or what their GPA means.

And we've seen them in the classroom and they're not doing the work that we broadcast and advertise and brag is being done at our university.

It's not just the humanities.

In fact, it's mostly not the humanities.

It's biology and math.

And now we're being called racist because we don't have enough STEM suits.

So

just stop it.

Just go back and do the affirmative action stuff or whatever, but stop it because I am not going to die on the altar of standards.

I'm either going to, you know, dilute the course or get a new course or inflate the grades.

Well, Victor,

in addition to that, we have our

CDC and the FDA who have said that they're going to start using quote indigenous wisdom and folk knowledge in future research and policy decisions.

And they are looking for non-traditional modes of science, quote, citizen science or participatory science and community-engaged research.

Like

that's just a bunch of verbiage to say what we all know.

I'll give you one example.

So, long COVID.

That means certain people's immune systems had problems getting over COVID.

And after six or eight weeks, if you still were fatigued, you had neuropathies, brain fog, muscle cramps, like the flu, or you had, in my case, eye problems in hearing,

you said you had long COVID.

So then the traditional medical societies said, what did they tell you?

Take Paxlavid before they even did any tests, because that's what they do.

They recommend pharmaceutical.

Or take a booster, another booster, and that will shock your system.

And maybe it did, maybe it didn't.

But there were other people, integrative doctors, who said, you know, we've done some off-label uses, and it turns out that singular helps.

And Pepsid is

an H2

antihistamine, and that helps.

And creatine, the supplement, will give you more energy.

Maybe carnitine will too.

So there was a whole alternate group of people that's saying

there's other ways to help your immune system to get over long COVID.

You know, go into a barometric,

is that what they are?

Oxygen,

where you get oxygen at so many pressures.

That can help.

Acupuncture, everybody understands that, that they're complementary to traditional pharmaceuticals.

Why not just say that?

But no, you don't get any credit in the DEI scorecard.

So then you have to say indigenous medicine or traditional folk healing

and put the idea that you're going to chant.

You know, I had a son who was a very good baseball player and he hurt his arm and there were parents that said, you know, because he was the, I think there were two non-Hispanics on his team, and they told me that none of the doctors would be able to

treat his sprained arm and that there was a brew haw nearby.

And would I take him to the brew haw and then she would sing incantations

over him and burn some fragrant incense type things and maybe maybe just maybe give him some folk herbs and he would get over it.

And I said,

well, maybe it's psychological.

If you think it works, maybe it's the placebo effect.

But who would ever think that you would say that that is a legitimate course of alternate medicine?

Acupuncture has demonstrable.

If they can show demonstrable results in blind studies, according to the scientific method, then all

that's what acupuncture does.

They have some areas where it really helps.

That's called science, though.

Yes.

Yes.

And they have supplements, the same thing.

I'll give you an example.

If you think that it's not safe to take three Zyrtec tablets a day or claritin or allegua because you have bad allergies and you want to take quercetin, a natural substance, that probably doesn't have the same side effects.

There's been studies that show that quercetin can be as anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic as some of the pharmaceutical.

But nobody dresses it up like quercetin is a citric-based Native American known to, you know what I mean, as an advocacy.

So we always have to go overboard and just take the obvious and the mundane and then dress it up with all of this nomenclature and tribalism and everything.

Yeah.

Well, they had a whole summit or conference on indigenous knowledge in Egypt.

And apparently, one of the people got up and said that her grandmother was better at predicting climate activity than the climatologists that we have.

And so, then that was proof that this folk knowledge was a lot better.

But instead of saying, we got a long way to go in science, we're not doing very well, they're like, oh, okay, well,

they have one good point, and that is the science is corrupt in many ways.

It's not completely corrupt, thank God.

But take the mandatory mask.

Remember how all of a sudden they said after George Floyd that 10,000 people could go out in the streets in Minneapolis because it was more important to their psychic health to break the quarantine that everybody else would be put in jail for if they broke?

Remember that?

All of a sudden?

Yeah.

It didn't matter.

And then we were told by Fauci, masks don't matter, one math, then two, and then ironclad result, the Pfizer, the mRNA vaccinations in general with Moderna.

You get that, don't worry about anything.

You're not going to be infected.

You're not going to be infectious.

And then it was, well,

one booster.

That's all we ask.

Just one, two, three,

four.

Why not combine it with a flu shot?

Just do it all in one.

And then

anybody who said, well, young men at the age of 18 have a very small percentage who are dying of COVID or having long long COVID or lasting effects, but

it's an increasing number of people that are having cardiomyopathies, swelling of the heart sac and things like that, pericarditis.

It's very dangerous.

The spike protein seems to gravitate from these

in some people and that causes an inflammatory response in the brain and the lungs and the gut and the heart.

No, no.

And so they lost a lot of their credibility.

Quarantines were scientifically demonstrable to cut down on the severity, not compared to the economic damage and locking 330 people up in cubicles.

No.

So,

and then the Lancet, remember the disinterested Lancet report?

Blind study or special experts that were going to go over to Wuhan and show us that

Peter Dosick was right, that the origins of COVID, as Fauci said, were from a bat or pangolin.

They came back and said, there's no conclusive evidence it came from the lab.

We were there.

And they said, Did you talk to the no, we didn't.

Did you get records?

No, we didn't.

And then all of a sudden, like a year later, they just said,

Been there, done that.

Don't read it.

It doesn't matter anymore.

We don't stand by it.

It's gone.

Isn't that sad?

The main scientific journals really left themselves open to question it.

Well, the worst thing was that you had an opportunity for Stanford University to be the

voice in the wilderness, the light and the dark, because on the same campus, when the lockdowns and the quarantines and all of this was taking place, there were four people independently.

There was Scott Atlas, who said, I'm very worried about a total lockdown.

There was Jay Bacharya, who said, I'm very worried about a total, here's what Scott had said, but here's some additional things to worry about.

And then there was Michael Lebette who said, I'm very worried about a total lockdown.

I'm very worried that these vaccinations are being sold.

And then there was Jean Yiannides, the demographic immunologist, who basically said,

in the past, lockdowns that shut down whole societies didn't work.

And yes, there is something called natural immunity, and it finally kicks in.

And what did they do to them?

They tried to destroy all their careers.

The Stanford faculty voted to censor them.

They wanted to take away their medical licenses.

They were damned by the provost and the president of the university.

The medical school turned on them.

And then after it's all over, the Swedish model was sort of, I don't know, confirmed as a superior way.

Not that it

had less infections, but it had about the same number, but it didn't destroy the economy.

And it didn't lead to the same degree of suicides, alcoholism, spousal, family abuse, missed cancer screenings, etc.

Total deaths per year was

a little better than the competitors.

And what did they do?

Did Stanford say,

Scott, we're really sorry.

Jay, we're really sorry.

John,

we're going to have a panel where you guys are going to get on.

We're going to give you a conform just to give your point of view, and we're going to apologize.

Because we try to not only disagree with you collectively, we try to demonize you personally, and we try to ruin you professionally.

And we don't believe in that.

That's not what university, no, they didn't do any of that.

No.

So it could easily happen again.

It will happen again.

It will happen again.

They didn't do, and the faculty synod, I went before those people.

They're just, they don't ever say, you know what, it's all, it was just a hysteria.

It was just a say-them witch trial hysteria.

It was sort of,

I don't know, a mix between cramming kids and phone booths in 1950 or hula hoops or pet rock fads.

That's what we just went into a complete hysteria, and we're sorry.

Oxbow incident.

We wanted to lynch three people without evidence, you know.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show here, and I have one comment from a listener on Apple Podcasts.

Wait, wait, wait.

You picked one comment, or you only have one topic?

Oh, I just chose one.

Sorry.

More imitations, he or she says.

I actually laughed out loud at VDH's imaginations of the Ivy League professors.

Hilarious.

Please do more.

Love you guys.

I think you were with Jack and you were imitating.

But that wasn't any skill.

That was just like...

50 years of listening to it.

I can tell you that I had

a graduate student, and

we came out of a Greek exam, and I'd done pretty well, but I was a kind of a rustic bunk buffoon, he thought, right?

Wow.

Technically, you may have got a higher score, but there were nuances that you didn't miss.

And I think the faculty should have paid more attention to

the nuance that I used.

And you just didn't know it.

That's what you do.

I mean, it's like MPR, right?

You listen to AM radio, and there's some guy who's a self-made, talented guy like Rush Limbaugh or somebody that talks normally, and then you go into NPR.

And I was going to tell you that

we're very, very worried about Donald J.

Trump and the threats, the existential threats he poses to democracy, which could die in darkness.

Why do they do that?

That voice.

I know.

I'm so sick of that.

I know.

They need somebody with

some stridentness.

If I had run NPR, I would have said

every Friday we're putting Rush on for 10 minutes, just so you guys can hear him get a difference.

And then Rush, in exchange for that, we're going to put one of these guys on for 10 minutes on your show.

All right.

Well, that was from Kim Ochka.

Oh, I appreciate that.

Yes.

All right.

Well, thank you, Victor, for everything today.

Loved the discussion of Euripides.

Seems very,

He seems a very apt playwright for our current conditions.

I wish he was alive today.

He was the most modern mind in antiquity.

All right.

Thanks to our listeners as well.

Thank you, everybody.

Appreciate it for listening.

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