Addled Biden and Xenophon Our First Polymath

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our weekend episode, so we will do a little bit of cultural things.

As Victor has said on the Friday news roundup, we'll be looking at Xenophon and his history, his philosophy.

He was a soldier as well.

So stay with us for that.

But we're going to look at a few news stories first.

So we'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody, and for those of you who are new, Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com.

The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus, and we hope to see everybody there.

So, Victor, before we get to Xenophon, I want to talk about the most recent news stories.

And we just had Biden give a news conference after

the investigation report was revealed about his

keeping secret, top secret documents in his garage and and various other places.

And I was wondering if you had some thoughts on that news conference.

Yes, this is Thursday night.

It was very short.

And

he went out because for 18 hours the special counsel report had been public.

In the special counsel report, and it's over 300 pages, I only skimmed it, but it said on numerous occasions that he had willfully, willfully and knowingly taken out classified materials.

However,

the prosecutor said that he did not think that a jury would convict him of that what the prosecutor felt after his investigation and analysis was an actual crime.

And he said that because He gave repeated examples of what he said was a demented state or a senelity or confusion or lack of memory.

He didn't know when his son died.

He didn't know what year he was vice president.

This comes upon, you know, he didn't know that Helmut Cole died.

He didn't know that, I mean, he thought he was still alive.

Same thing with Francois Mitterrand.

Okay, so that was damning, and it posed this question.

So here you have Mr.

Hurd, the special counsel appointed by Merrick Garland,

the bookend to Jack Smith.

Okay.

Jack Smith, remember, has a two-prong investigation, indictment by now, one January 6th and one removal of documents.

That removal of documents applied to Joe Biden, so

they were embarrassed.

So

the special counsel's report then made a dilemma for Joe Biden.

So they thought about it.

At first they were ebiant.

They said, well, it's all over.

We've been been cleared, exonerated, exempted.

Then they thought, Uh-oh, the special counsel said that we were only exempted

because he didn't know where he was and a jury would feel sorry for him.

Okay.

So, what did the Biden team?

They had a press conference.

But here was the problem:

there's two choices: either Joe Biden is, as Mr.

Hurr asserted, non compos mentes,

and therefore

he wasn't indicted.

And therefore, what?

He is so mentally incapacitated, unlike a prisoner in the Fresno County Jail that has to stand trial, but Joe Biden doesn't

because he's not fit to be president then, right?

In other words, if you're driving a semi, if you're wiring a house, if you're teaching a class, if you're taking an appendix out, and you break federal law, you're going to be tried.

But Joe Biden is not tried because he is less competent than all of you people.

But he's president of the United States.

Okay, so then you think, hmm, well, we can't be too happy that we escaped going to jail because now we are labeled or dubbed

unfit.

So maybe we should say that we're unfit and therefore we don't have to be indicted or going to jail.

So which is it?

You either not qualified to be president and therefore you escape penalty or you're qualified to be president and therefore you should go to jail because you knew what you were willfully doing.

Yes.

And that didn't dawn on them for about 18 hours.

And then they said, oh my God, we're going to have to have a press conference and explain this.

So they go out.

Apparently he was going to explain in the press conference by a turd of force that he was not mentally cognitively challenged.

So, one of the first things he said

was that he was so busy.

First of all, he's always done this.

He scapegoated his staff.

The staff did it.

They did it.

My people, I didn't know what it was.

And then it was, and then when they interviewed me, maybe I didn't,

I was working on the Gaza, the Hamas, the Gaza.

And,

you know, the

President Sisi of Mexico, when I was trying to work with that corridor, that corridor, well, apparently he thinks that the corridor from Gaza to Egypt is the corridor across Tijuana or something, and that President Sisi is President Obador.

And this was to show us that he's in control.

So everybody starts screaming and yelling.

And

here is the mentality of these psychophantic,

they're not journalists, they're just media con artists, but they're worried now because for the first time they thought, you know, this was really brilliant what we did on the left.

We got the media, Molly Ball, again, everybody, I'm going to refer you to the February 21st Time magazine article, Cabal, Conspiracy, she mentioned it, media, street people, protesting, corporate boardroom, politicos, administrative state.

You name it.

Lawyers, we all got together.

And what she meant was, we got this non-compostment non-compostment test guy, Joe Biden, and we sold him to the American public as, gee gosh, I'm old Joe Biden, a Catholic boy from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and

I'm just a moderate.

I'm not, I was the guy who stabilized the Biden administration.

I'm not Corey Bush.

I'm not Spartacus.

I'm not Julian Costro.

I'm not Pete Butterjig.

I'm not Elizabeth Warren.

I'm not Bernie Sanders.

I can win.

And they said, okay, Joe.

You've got to just keep quiet and stumble around and the Obamas and Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders wing and the squad, we will take control.

We'll get so much more radical agendas out of this because unlike the Obamas,

we don't have any fingerprints.

It's you.

So we can be as radical, radical, radical.

We can put every neo-socialist communist idea into your head and throw it out there to get it done.

And then if the things go bad, you did it.

That's the price you pay for being demented and you want to be president.

I think they're really really dealing with Dr.

Jill.

Okay, so that was the deal.

And now they're afraid that it didn't quite last long enough.

In other words, he degenerated, declined at a

geometric rate, not an arithmetic rate.

And now he's failing every single day.

I looked the other day at some speeches he gave in January.

of 2021.

It's like a different person.

Yeah.

Okay,

so

now all of a sudden the media goes to this press conference and they're like sharks.

And they're thinking,

they said this and you did this.

And he's shouting at them.

He is shouting at them.

And they said, you didn't know when you're son.

Oh, Bill, I had the rosary.

And he doesn't know what rosary he's talking about.

So in the process of showing everybody that he's cognizant, he showed us that he was not.

He lost his temper.

He blamed everybody but himself.

And then, of course, he did de-rigueur.

He started attacking Donald Trump.

Well, unlike Donald Trump, we cooperated.

We came forward.

No, you didn't, Joe.

That is a blank, blank lie.

You know why it's a lie?

Because on November 18th, they appointed special counsel Jack Smith.

I shouldn't say they.

You did.

You did through your vehicle, Merrick Garland.

And then lo and behold.

Lo and behold, just two weeks earlier, your attorney said, oh my God, Joe, did you know that after 15 years when you were a senator and vice president,

and then you sat out during the Trump period and made money, the four years of Trump, and now you're president, during all this time, you took out classified documents and they're in your garage and they're in your office and they're in this Washington

DC location and they're unsecured.

And we're going to go after Trump.

We've got to go after Trump.

And we're going to appoint a special counsel in two weeks, Jack Smith.

So what do we do?

Because they're going to find out about this.

What hypocrites.

Ah, I know what we'll do.

We'll have a conference that we

altruistically

and

with civic virtue decided, unlike Trump, to volunteer that we did this.

And that was just a complete fraud.

Then he couldn't square the circle.

He started attacking Trump.

And I thought, I was listening, I thought,

yes, the court cases are somewhat different.

You said they're very different.

They are different.

A,

Donald Trump took them for less than two years.

He left office on January 20th of 2021.

They raided his Mar-Lago estate on August of 2022.

You took them out for 15 years.

So maybe you could say that he was culpable for

a year and three quarters.

You were culpable and you knew it for 15 years.

Number two, how can you plead,

Mr.

Hur, how can you plead that this man is non-composmentas and therefore wouldn't make an effective

target?

Are you saying he's non-composmentus now?

Or when he was vice president?

He was vice president,

what, seven years ago?

Because that's when he took out some of the papers.

But maybe it was when he was senator.

So are you saying the man has always been that way?

Or are you saying the following?

He willfully took these things out knowing when he was perfectly cognizant as a senator and as a vice president, but now he just simply can't defend it because he's lost the ability to think.

You see what I'm saying, Sammy?

Yeah, I do.

They can't say that he didn't know what he was doing as senator and vice president.

No, absolutely not.

And that came out in the press conference.

And then there's another difference.

Marlaug, or anybody that drives, I've driven by there.

You look at this huge wall.

There's a guard tower, a guard place as you drive in, and you can pair it with that rickety garage.

It is so much more secure than Joe Biden's various locations.

Okay.

Okay, so it's more secure.

Joe Biden had it far longer.

And most importantly, putatively,

Donald Trump had the right to declassify any presidential classified file.

All he had to do was fill out a form.

He didn't do that.

And people said, well, he just waved his hand and said they're all, he probably did.

But in other words, his sin was pro forma.

Joe Biden is vice president, and president had no legal right to do that.

And so the special counsel just glossed over all that because his main problem is

I'm going to be completely discredited because the evidence is overwhelming that Joe Biden knew that he broke the law.

But if I indict a president, the left is going to go after me.

But if I don't, given this report that I have to report, the right is going to say, you blank, blank hypocrite, he is guilty as hell and you didn't indict him.

You're like James Comey.

Well, Hillary,

there were felony violations.

She violated confidentiality and she transmitted classified information over her server and she destroyed classified subpoenaed emails, probably 30,000 of them.

And she destroyed.

However, they don't rise to a level to eliminate a prime presidential candidate.

That's what Comey did.

Okay.

Lord and Savior, Comey.

Don't you think that they're trying to do something with this, that he's an adult old man?

Because that seems like the most weird thing to put into a court document or an investigative report at a government level.

How else were they going to save him?

How else were they going to save him?

They looked at all, they interviewed him,

they interviewed other people, they looked at the documents, and they know he had lied.

He said at the press conference it wasn't top.

Well, I have some things, some memos

about Afghanistan.

You know, they didn't have that real thing.

It says, I looked, it says right in the

special counsel's report that these Afghan materials were quote unquote top secret classified.

And so how is he going to get out of it?

Especially when he has sick a special counsel on his chief opponent in the upcoming election.

The only way he can do it is for this prosecutor to say that he didn't know what he was doing.

And then what you do, I think it's set up.

It was leaked.

Obviously, Garland knew about it.

He probably leaked.

So what you do is, Mr.

Hurr, you're not going to indict Joe Biden because Jack Smith is going to indict and did indict Donald Trump.

And if you indict him, then it's tit for tat.

But on the other hand, if you don't indict him, everybody's going to get angry about asymmetrical treatment.

So how do we get, oh, how about just saying that he doesn't know where the hell he is?

He's a poor, pathetic character.

And they said, okay,

that way he won't have to go to jail.

Trump can't say, well, Biden got off easy because Biden is more demented than Trump.

Maybe, but that's what they did.

And then all of a sudden, they did this for 18 hours.

And then all of a sudden, someone said, oh my God,

we just told the world for 18 hours that he doesn't know where he is.

We told Putin that.

We told Chi that.

We told the theocrats in Iran that.

We told crazy Kim Jong-un that.

They may nuke us.

I just don't think they were surprised after 18 hours.

I think they did it all.

This was a hasty.

I did a Fox News thing tonight.

Yeah.

And I commented.

And I went back into the house and I had my little leftovers dinner, little Victor and Gracie the dog and Spotty and Sport and Spike.

And all of a sudden I get a phone call that said, Victor, would you please go back out into your barn?

Well, why?

Because Joe Biden, I said, Joe Biden does not give press conferences.

Well, he is tonight.

We'd like you to comment.

Okay, so I took off my old clothes, put on my little shirt and coat, went back in there.

They didn't, my point of relating this, they didn't know that was going to happen.

They had all data to schedule that thing.

They just scheduled at the last moment.

Oh, no, I don't think Joe Biden necessarily knew, but I think the Democratic machine knew.

And they're trying to get, they knew that we're going to say he's an adult old man because we've got to start taking care of this and get somebody else in there.

But they didn't schedule the press conference.

Yeah, Joe did, yes.

Yes, and you know why they did?

Because they were surprised and stupid.

Stupid

they could have done this five hours earlier with a script.

All they had to do was,

uh-oh, this looks bad, but we always massage.

We have Tody reporters.

They always lie for us, but they didn't realize it was so bad because they didn't read the whole thing.

That those reporters said, not this pig, known hick porkus.

I've lied for you so damn much.

I have no credibility.

So I am leaving this sinking ship and I'm going to start criticizing Joe Biden.

And they said, uh-oh, we better.

And they just waited.

All they had to do was say, you know what?

We're going to have a 500-word teleprompt script with size 50 fonts.

And all he has to do is go out there and say it, and then we're going to say no question.

But they were perfectly.

They were completely off guard.

They just looked at this and, oh my God, hey, get him out there.

And you know, you never put Joe Biden out and let him go off script and then start blaming and turning red and then having questions.

It was Luce Libre.

It was just a chaos.

People were screaming and yelling, and he got angry.

And when he gets angry, he does two things.

He attacks Trump and he plays his dead son.

And that's what he's done.

Yeah, sure.

I think the Democratic machine is.

I want to say something.

You know, there is a small group of people who have lost children.

I lost a child at 26.

And I hope I have never evoked that when I get in trouble.

I have never done that.

Oh, I didn't know that because

that is unfair to the child to use that memory like that.

It really is.

And then he just went on and on about his grieving.

And he's done this in so many different ways.

He's said to military veterans who have lost people killed in combat that his son died in combat.

That's a complete lie.

He said his son was in Afghanistan.

He said his son got cancer.

He said cancer from the war.

His son died tragically seven years after he left the uniform.

You know what I mean?

It's just...

So anyway, this was an ungodly disaster.

And the big beneficiary who was the winner tonight and during this day was Donald J.

Trump.

I Donald J.

Trump might not think he's the winner because he was very angry and said, you got to drop this, and this is asymmetrical.

All true.

But people are going to look at this and they're going to say,

E.

Jean Carroll, $83 million for somebody who just mouthed a law and order episode, said, made up all this stuff about having a dress that

proves she was there in the dressing room when the dress didn't exist,

said their apprentice was her favorite show.

This is a complete farce to bring this up 20-something years, but she doesn't know 20 because she doesn't know the year.

So then you have that.

And then we learn about Fannie Willis.

And we talked last time about there is new developments in the Fanny Willis.

They bought a little safe love house.

And

it's so sorted and it's going to get sorted.

That thing is just a mess.

They really want to go after election denialism in Georgia.

They should go after Stacey Abrams.

And now you have have this, right?

This.

And this is coupled with the Supreme Court.

If you look at, everybody makes fun of Clarence Thomas, especially white liberals.

The guy is very, very bright.

He's brilliant.

And he just tore apart that representative from Colorado, that lawyer, because he said, can you give me some precedence?

And Clarence Thomas just knew that

Somebody who's supposedly a top-notch lawyer would know what he's talking about.

Can you give me some precedence that an individual state tries to take a national candidate off the ballot?

And the guy's, well, you know,

they've taken candidates off the ballot.

No, I'm talking about

a national candidate.

Well,

I'm talking about a national candidate.

Oh, you don't know any, do you?

Because there is none.

It was just, he just destroyed that whole case.

Yeah.

Because the guy was trying to say there's precedent for taking Trump off the ballot in Colorado because if you're a county coroner or a crazy state senator, they take you off the ballot.

But they have never done it for a president.

They have never done it for a vice president.

And that was what Thomas just quietly made the point.

And so they had a bad day, is what I'm trying to say today.

The Democrats.

Yes, because this big, this thing is over with that you're going to try to take him off ballots and deny the right, the constitutional right of people to vote for whom they please on Election Day or prior to it.

Well, even that Katanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan were against the whole idea of the matter.

And they're not only were against it, they sounded sane for a change.

They asked very legitimate analytical questions.

And I think they feel that they've been so partisan, this is a wonderful opportunity because this thing is so damn outrageous that they could get a unanimous verdict, 9-0.

And they think if they voted with the majority, they might have a chance to say, see, I'm disinterested.

I'm not a partisan.

It would be a wise move for both of them.

And you

correlate that with

these two other developments today.

Number one,

Mr.

Hurr's special counsel report and this disastrous Thursday night press conference that Biden gave.

And that's a trifecta.

And I think a lot of people now

are very empathetic to Donald Trump.

And they're saying, you know what, these cases are outrageous.

And if they're going to actually put him into a courtroom and try him for taking documents out to Mar-Lago, when they let this other guy get off for doing things much worse, 15 years less security, no prerogative to declassify them, only came forward when he was paranoid.

They'd find out.

You're going to let this guy get out because you claim he's crazy, nutty, demented, and he's president?

This is outrageous.

And I think when you you see Alan Dershowitz, did you see him tonight?

No, I didn't get him.

He said some things that were absolutely weird.

He said, I said, Sean Hannity asked him if he thought that the press conference showed that Joe Biden was non-complosmented.

And he basically said, yes, he didn't know who the president of Egypt was.

And he...

confused Rosary.

He mentioned the things that were supposed to show us that he's cognizant and he's not.

Okay, so then Sean said, does this bother you?

Yes, it does.

It bothers a lot of people.

It bothers a lot of people that some people might even think about voting for Donald Trump, including me.

That was John.

Did you say, oh, it was Alan Dershowitz?

Yes.

Hardcore left-wing Alan Dershowitz.

And so I think a lot of people are saying, you know,

I don't, this is so ridiculous that I think a lot of people don't want any part of it.

I mean, a lot of people, in the sense of an independent, a rhino-Republican, and even some Democrats are saying, you know, this is embarrassing.

They're just so paranoid.

They lie about Trump.

They try to get him off the ballot.

They have these indictments.

And now we put Joe Biden.

And now we've seen what they've been doing this whole time.

It was a complete fraud.

It was the greatest farce in American political history.

They really thought they could get away with putting this

empty suit, this puppet with strings attached to him with the Obama's somewhere in the upper eighth there, and they could pull it off.

And they almost did it for four years.

They did it for three years.

And now it's jumped the shark.

It's so flagrant and stupid that everybody sees what they were up to.

Now, the next question is:

It really depends on about what 28 Democratic politicos, the Obamas,

the old guard, and the big donor class want to do.

And how you get rid of,

I don't know, Camela Harris.

How do you get Gavin and Michelle in there?

Can't be Gavin number one.

It's got to be Michelle number one, Gavin number two.

Yeah, maybe that's really, I was thinking that today.

That's the only thing they can get rid of Camela is to, because people in the black community and the progressive community said, hmm, I'd rather have Michelle than come out.

Yeah, a lot of them.

And they would be willing to accept that exchange, but not Gavin Newsom for Kamala, probably, even if Michelle were.

Gavin Newsome is our Trudeau, you know.

Yeah.

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

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back.

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All right, Victor, so we are going to turn to Xenophon, and I know that he's among your historians, but also considered a philosopher and he was a soldier most of all.

He was a great polymath of the ancient world.

I mean,

he was

before the Renaissance, he was a true Renaissance man.

He was was born right about the time of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, 431, and he lived a long time, until 75, all the way down to 362.

And he was an Athenian, so he knew all the people of his age.

I know that he was only 15 or 16 when the Sicilian expedition happened,

and he was not of an age to know Pericles, but he did know Socrates intimately.

And so there were some things in his life that really changed

his outlook.

He was an Athenian aristocrat from a horse-owning family.

He wrote a treatise about how to raise and care for and train horses.

He wrote a treatise about

Hipparchus, about how to be a cavalry commander.

But at the age of 30, he decided to join this mercenary army of Cyrus the Younger.

He was a claimant to the throne that had been squeezed out by

Artaxerxes, the ruling king of Persia, and he got this idea that because he had dealt with in Asia Minor Spartans and the Peloponnesian War had just ended in 404, 403, there was what, a surplus of a lot of thugs in Greece, hoplites, really good soldiers, and they were better than Persians.

So he went through and he hired them, 10,000 of them, the 10,000, and probably more of them.

That 10,000 may refer just to the last group that survived, and they joined Cyrus, and they were going to stage a coup and take over the government of the empire at Persepolis.

And the idea was it was pre-Alexander the Great, but it might have been an ecumenical movement.

Thanks to Greeks, you have a philocentric Persian king.

And

they got all the way to Baghdad,

ancient Babylon, Tigris Tigris and Euphrates,

2,500 miles.

And guess what happened?

At the Battle of Kunaxa, they won and they killed Cyrus.

And then what happened?

There was no longer a claimant.

There was no reason to be.

And all of a sudden they looked around and all the Persian people and their army started to join the enemy.

And then they sent their

commander, Clerarchus, a good Spartan drill master, to go talk to them.

And they had an ambush where it was kind of like Game of Thrones, the Red Marriage.

They all went to go talk, and then they closed up the banquet and slit their throats.

And then all of a sudden, you've got these Greeks.

And instead of being on the winning side and almost to take over the Persian Empire, they're 360 degrees surrounded by their enemy, Persians, and their former friends that have turned on them.

And they have no command.

They were all wiped out.

And the Spartans were the brains of the, they were the tough guys.

And Xenophon then steps forward.

He's an Athenian.

And he says, Look, we're not beaten yet.

And what happens, you can read it, he wrote something called the Anabasis, the march up country, the march back up

into the Black Sea, where there were Greek settlements.

And so it's just a fascinating account of how you cross rivers, how you outsmart Persians,

what types of arrows are superior to the others, how you get food, whether, how do you get, and it's a moving democracy.

And how are all these decisions reached?

They go into an assembly, and it's like a little Athenian assembly that has wheels on it.

And so it serves for the next 2,500 years as sort of an advertisement for Western civilization in the sense that you put Westerners in the worst possible situation and they're surrounded by enemies.

They have a Western way of war.

They have a Western way of consensual government.

They have a Western way of equality under the law.

And they can get out of it.

And then finally, that great scene in the Anapasis where

they get near the Black Sea and they say, Thalata, Thalata, the sea, the sea.

We made it.

In addition to that, he finished Thucydides' history.

We said earlier that the greatest historian of antiquity was Thucydides, perhaps even better than Tacitus or Libius, but

he died, or he died at the end of the Peloponnesian War, but he may have died when he was trying to revise his long history.

So in 411, right in the middle of a sentence, the manuscript ends, and we don't know what happened.

So Xenophon came along and wrote the last seven years and called his book The Hellenica, the Greek-like things.

And it's a history of 44 years.

It's from 411.

43 years all the way down to 362 in the Battle of Mantinea, the great second battle of Mantinea, where he has that famous ending in the Hellenica.

And so the battle that was to decide things ended up basically a draw, and things were more confused after the battle than they were before.

But it's a,

he was exiled because in his Asia Minor career, he got to know the Spartan king Agisilaus, who was on the coast trying to fight Persians.

and was the supreme power in Greece having won the Peloponnesian War.

Crippled guy who is just an amazing guy.

He lived to be in his, I think, late 80s, early 90s.

And he became infatuated with Spartan culture.

And he moved down to the Peloponnese.

And he fought on the, probably fought on the side of the Spartans, either at the Battle of Nemea or Cornea, or both.

And he was exiled by Athens.

And then

he,

so in his retirement at his estate outside Sparta, he wrote.

He wrote the Anabasis, he wrote the Hellenica.

Those are what he's best known known for.

But he wrote also dialogues in emulation, or at least in advance.

He's older than Plato.

And Plato took that in part as a model.

He wrote an apology, he wrote a memorabilia, he wrote an Oeconomicus, where he has Socrates as an interlocutor, a teacher, a dialogue before Plato.

But it's not a philosophical exercise.

It's more historical and moral.

And it's fascinating.

He also wrote something called the Cyropaedia, the education of Cyrus.

It's kind of half fable and half based on real sources, but it thinks about the sixth centuries king Cyrus the Great.

Why was he so successful?

And why do we hate Persians?

And maybe we've been prejudicial about them, and maybe Cyrus was a good person.

He had to be a genius because he conquered the known Eastern world.

And it's a story about young Cyrus.

and how he was taught not to lie, how he was taught not to steal, how he judged character, how he

combined physical and mental acuity.

It's really a classical, it's very influential in the Renaissance as a model for young men to read.

And there's kind of a cult now, you know, all this new Generation X or whatever we call them, young kids,

they're reading about Rome and what made Rome fall and they're worried that their generation has been screwed up by my generation and they're going to be the last generation of the Roman.

Well, they're also reading the Cybruedias some of them.

How can we find virtue in physicality and mental exercise and intellectual pursuit?

It's a fascinating

dialogue.

He also wrote little, what they call scripta

menorah in Latin, minor treatises, how to do things.

One's a biography of Agisilaus, but there's one called The Ways and Means.

In Greek, it's poroi, De wectibulus in Latin.

And it's about how how to save Athens in the fourth century.

And maybe you could build walls and maybe you could

redo the mines and get income.

But it's kind of an economic, pragmatic guide to fix Athens, even though he's no longer an Athenian citizen.

And he's one of the few authors that he's extant.

Every single title that comes from antiquity that is attributed to the real Xenophon is in existence.

It's there.

So it's a huge body of work.

The second thing about him is

he writes in Attic.

That's a form of Greek that is centered in Attica, the area of the thousand square miles around Athens.

And it is beautiful Greek.

It's not opaque like Thucydides.

It's like Lysias.

You can just read it like English.

And it's well written.

The vocabulary is easy to comprehend.

It's got an irony into it.

It's what people start out with when you're learning classical Greek.

You read the Anavasis or maybe the Hellenica.

But what am I getting at?

If you pick up a text of Xenophon, you can read it about like you can read the English Federalist Papers, maybe.

If you pick up Herodotus, it's going to be 20% slower because of dialectical and vocabulary.

If you pick up a speech of Thucydides, it's going to be like deciphering something.

Maybe the narrative of Thucydides.

Even the narrative of Thucydides is not as transparent and easy to grasp as Xenophon.

So he was a beautiful stylist.

He was a general.

Did he have prejudice?

Yes, he hated the Athenian lower classes.

He felt they drove him out and they were dangerous and they didn't have virtue.

Did he have a prejudice against the Thebans?

He hated the Thebans.

Those were my favorite Greeks.

I wrote a book that really privileged them and the other Greeks.

And I've written, I think, a novel about Apamenondas,

The End of Sparta.

And I've written, I think, maybe eight or nine articles about Apaminondas and the Thebans.

Scholarly articles.

Nobody would want to read them.

They're peer-reviewed and obscure journals.

But

he was so prejudicial that even though the great Theban victory at Leuctra in 371, when they crushed an invading Sparta, he never mentioned Epaminondas by name.

You don't even know he was there.

Such was the dislike of Thebans and Epaminondas.

And

the overarching view of Xenophon, just to conclude, is

why

would this little tiny town in the southern Peloponnese without a sea, I mean it wasn't on the sea, it wasn't Athens.

It was landlocked.

It had a port at Githium about, I don't know, 19, 20 miles away.

But it wasn't a seaport.

And it was very small with only 10,000 citizens, maybe 20 or 30 what we call peri-oikoi, half Spartans, and then they had these hell lot slaves.

But why did it endure so long?

And why did it create such great soldiers?

And why did they lead Greece preeminently along with Athens for so many centuries?

And what happened to them?

And you know, you could say, well, they had a police state, they had a Gestapo, the cryptaria, they went out and they marshaled the labor of 150,000 serfs to provide food so they could train all day with war without having to work.

That's all true.

But what he's really saying, when you look at the constitution, he wrote something called the Politea

of the Constitution of the Lacedaemonian.

Lacedaemonian is just a word for the larger groups of people who lived around Sparta.

country and city.

And it's really fascinating to read that because it's really an outline of the first example in Western civilization of what we would call a mixed constitution.

I don't mean mixed in the Athenian sense where you try to get a concord of the orders, poor, rich, middle class, all working together, but I'm talking about in the modern sense, legislative, executive, judicial.

So you have the gerussia, that's where we get the Roman idea of a senate, gerusia, Garantology, old people, the senior group that sets the legislative agenda.

Then you have the Ecclesia, all of Spartan males that are over, I think it's 18, it might be 21 later on.

And that's the second part of this legislative body, very similar to the House and Senate in our own time.

And then you have your executives.

Just as you have two Roman consuls, that probably came from the idea of two Spartan kings, the Aegeids and the Eurypontids.

So you have two royal houses that balance each other out.

One king goes out, one stays home, they alternate, and therefore you balance and check power.

And then

they lead the army out and they execute the laws, as the Gerusia and the Ecclesia dictate.

And then you have sort of a judicial branch, the Ephers, they're very mysterious people, but they seem to have a veto power power both over the assembly and the senate and the monarchy, the kings.

In other words, they look for violations of virtue, violations of the law, but mostly

this strange culture is so suspicious of all things cosmopolitan or decadence induced by Athens that there's no money.

They have huge iron spits.

They're so big that you, if you're wealthy, you couldn't, personally, they're designed, you couldn't even put them in a storage chest or anything.

And you leave them outside of your house to show everybody how many spits you have.

But the point I'm making is

the cryptia is kind of a moral police.

And so you've got the whole system for Rome with the Roman Senate, the consuls, the tribunes, the Roman courts, and then you're all the way through the Renaissance to Monascue.

And the Cretan Constitution, according to Plato and philosophers, was derived from the Spartan.

They were mutually influential.

But the idea of a mixed constitution that's the basis of our own system comes out of the Peloponnese in Greece or

the Doric.

It's a Doric influence.

It's not like Athens, where you have a tyranny of the Ecclesia.

It's not checked.

Yeah.

Does one get a different sense of Socrates from Plato in Xenophon?

So Xenophon's Socrates seems a different person than Plato's Socrates.

Yes.

Socrates is

a more practical person,

and he's a more religious person, and he's a more patriotic person.

So when Xenophon wants to know whether he should go, just to give one example, join the 10,000.

you'd go to a philosopher.

The philosopher would tell you no.

Socrates says, that's a good idea, but you've got to find out

what is actually entailed so you can come back safely and which gods you pray to, and then you do the necessary

pre-journey rituals, and you're all set.

And more importantly, when you read his apology, it's a little different.

It's

in Plato, it's very sophisticated.

He's kind of

ironic in the sense that, well, I'll propose, oh, you convicted me because I speak the truth to you, and he argues back and forth.

He says, well,

it's kind of a shock.

And then there's Crito and Euthropo where people are shocked and they discuss in the related documents whether he should break out of jail.

And there's all of these philosophical questions.

When you're a victim of the state,

do you obey the state or try to undermine it because it tends to be, it turned out bad for yourself.

In Xenophon, it's more or less less that he just goes in there and says, you know what, I'm going to die.

And I don't want anything to.

It's almost like it's...

I'm not saying it's committing suicide, but there's a sense that

he's deliberately just going.

He's not going to argue with these people.

He knows exactly.

And it shows an aristocratic view that these people are radical Democrats, Jacobins, and they're crazy.

And they're always going to hate Socrates.

And they're always going to hate people like Xenophon.

And it's a less, I mean, not that, and Plato is similar.

People should remember that.

I can't think of one text, I know this is a controversial thing to say, of a contemporary Athenian from, let's say, 507,

the traditional founding of Athenian democracy, all the way to,

I don't know, whether you want to call it the Battle of Chaeronea, where Alexander and Philip destroy Greek freedom, or on the death of Alexander later in 423, there's a revolt.

Whenever you mark the end of democracy, I can't think of one writer, not Aeschylus, not Sophocles, not Thucydides, not Herodotus,

not Xenophon, not Plato, that was a defender of democracy as it played out in Athens.

The only two that I can think of, not Aristophanes, the great comic.

kind of like Saturday Night Live or Laugh-In comic.

It's really brutal.

Brutal 11.

He has 11 extant comedies.

You should all read the list of Strahd.

It's a great play, but my favorite was the Acarnians, The Knights.

They're very good.

But

the only two that I can think of that have a good thing to say about democracy, three,

is Aristotle's politics.

But he's very careful in defining democracy.

He says there's four types of oligarchy and democracy.

And democracy will work

when most of the citizens are rural and they're too busy and they're hardworking and they own property to go in town and lounge around the agar all day and get paid to vote and to participate on juries.

So it's kind of an anti-democratic support of democracy.

The other one is Euripides.

Euripides has, in the suppliants and other dialogues, he's got 19 plays.

He's the tragedian, the last of the three great tragedians.

He says some things that are, he has mythological figures like Jason and other people

who,

Theseus especially, Theseus, I should say, that have good things to say about contemporary democracy in Athens.

It's clear that he's talking about contemporary democracy in mythical terms.

And then there are some passages, just a few in Thucydides, where he's fair to democracy.

In other words, well, I shouldn't say that.

He doesn't like Athenian democracy.

They exile him.

But what he's saying is the idea of a constitutional state where everybody's involved gives a democracy momentum, influence, energy.

And if you have somebody like Pericles who in name is elected, but he gets elected every single year and he's anti-democratic, then he can check this mob.

So they don't just go vote one day to destroy the Middle Eastlinians the next day.

Say, oh, I'm sorry,

we won't go destroy them today.

Send on another trireme and catch the first one so they don't get all slaughtered.

Or they don't do what they did to the Melians.

So it's all worth reading, Xenophon.

And

he was probably, of all the Athenians, the most influential.

He and Plutarch were probably, who was much later, 100 AD, where they were probably the most influential writers on the.

the most influential authors

on the Greek side during the Renaissance.

When you look at Renaissance scholars and the Enlightenment, partly it's because a lot of these Greek texts were not known, because people in Italy in the early and middle Renaissance did not know Greek very well, if at all.

And what they knew Greek came from, their Latin texts.

And they didn't really know much about Thucydides.

They didn't have all of Aristotle until I don't know, after the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, there were people who were getting out of Constantinople for the next two centuries.

And they were teaching Italians classical Greek.

But Xenophon and Plutarch were very influential.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about Gina Carano, who was employed by Disney and currently is not.

And then maybe we'll talk a little bit about Mark Stein if we have some time.

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

Welcome back.

So Victor, Gina Carano is a mixed martial arts

competitor.

So she's quite talented in that.

And she's been employed by different movies, but Disney employed her for the Mandalorian.

And then

what happened was on her social media,

she seems, or she is very conservative.

And she

did things like compare being a Republican to being a Jew in the Holocaust.

So she was saying it's pretty difficult, probably especially in Hollywood, to be a Republican.

And Disney up and fired her, and Elon Musk is going to help her defend herself against this firing.

I was wondering what you know about it or your thoughts on that.

It's hard to be.

It's hard to be an iconoclast.

That is, and she's in a,

let's face it, if you're a conservative even if you're a female but especially if you're a white male and you want to go do found be in a major foundation you want to be at the pinnacle of corporate boardroom politics you want to be on a Silicon Valley board you want to go be a professor in academia you want to be an ESPN sports commentator you want to go into Hollywood

you're going to have a big problem if you're conservative you've got to be quiet about it apparently.

And she wasn't.

I think she thought that, was it The Mandalorian, that movie, that Disney?

I don't watch that stuff, but not big, I just don't have time or I don't know anything about her.

I'm too damn old.

But apparently, she was a very successful actress, and she felt that she had reached a level of

immunity, that she was so well-known and so successful and so talented that they wouldn't be so stupid to destroy her career over just a tweet or something.

And of course, they are that way.

They're petty.

So they went after now she's suing Disney.

And Disney is completely this bob iger.

And Elon Musk is going to help her, I should say.

And so

Disney has completely taken that wonderful name that we all grew up with, theme parks, Mickey Mao, all of that stuff, and destroyed it with this transgendered agenda and

Mr.

Mulvaney and all of this.

And now they're, you know, like,

excuse me, that's the Bud Light, but with all the transgender, and the same thing with Bud Light, same thing with Target, and I think people have had it with them.

Yeah.

You know,

there was a person,

working-class guy, that delivered some lumber the other day, and I was talking to him, and he was talking to me, very intelligent guy, and he said, people have had it.

I've had it.

This is what he said.

I've had it.

I'm done.

I said, what do you mean by that?

It's curious.

I just had it.

I'm done with the transgender stuff.

I'm done with the race stuff.

I'm done with all of this crazy border stuff.

I'm done with this stuff overseas.

I'm just done with it.

I said, well, you can't be done with it until we're done in this earth.

We've got to fight.

We have kids.

We have generations to come.

We're one chain and a link.

We're a link and one chain.

I said, and I just can't give up.

What if I know that I'm named after Victor Hansen?

His mother died in childbirth.

His father was blinded blinded in a sulfur accident trying to sulfur his vines.

He was raised by my great-grandfather, but especially my grandfather.

I mean,

he was

a straight-A student.

He went to University of Pacific.

He played for Alonso Stagg.

He joined the Marines with my father, and he got killed on Okinawa.

I mean, and I read his letters every once in a while.

I go back and read them.

He was only 21 years old.

And that story is replicated

hundreds of thousands of times over.

So you just don't give up on those people.

They didn't die for Smash and Grab and what San Francisco has become.

They died for something different.

So you have to go back and try to restore what they once created.

So you can't give up.

But I did sympathize with this guy a lot.

And

everything is going to hell.

And so this intolerance is just, and I can tell you as an academic,

it was very funny.

At one point I was up for a job that was supposed to be pretty good.

I won't mention the university.

And somebody wrote me who had been turned down for the job.

I wasn't especially fond of the fellow, but he wrote me and somehow he was angry.

at one of the people on the hiring committee and that somebody wrote him basically saying,

well,

at least you're not Victor Hansen.

And then he wrote me what a person on the hiring committee had written about me to other people.

And it was pretty, it was pretty, I mean, I was 36.

I had written warfare and agriculture.

I had edited hoplites.

I had written a Western Way of War that sold a hell of a lot of copies for a young guy.

And I had written this huge thing called The Other Greeks.

And this is what the person wrote.

And a farmer with an agricultural mentality who studies military history, which suggests to me he comes out of a conservative malu.

I didn't.

My mom and dad were Democrats.

Jerry Brown appointed my mom to a Superior Court, Appellate Court Justice.

And then he says, and he is limited in his worldview as being conservative.

And that was all.

It wasn't an analysis of your books.

I mean, I'm at the Hoover Institution, I'm on hiring committees, and when I see a person's name, I don't say,

oh, that person's left or that, even though we're a center-right institution, I read the entire thing.

I look at the quality of the book.

I try to read it.

I look at the pro style.

I look at the level of analysis.

I just did this just yesterday.

I wrote a long analysis.

And it was based on whether it was convincing or not based on the data that was produced.

So I know what she's saying, that there are people in these fields, these institutions, it's very hard to be conservative.

But I was very outspoken.

My attitude was,

I'm not going to change, you know what I mean?

I don't know.

I mean,

I had a great advantage over her, and that was I grew up on a farm, and I live on a farm, so I didn't want anything from them.

And the people I meet here are normal, and they have good judgment, and they're very bright.

Today, my barn is falling apart, 150 years old, built with eucalyptus poles by my great-great-grandmother.

And I grew up with it falling apart.

And now they're going to rebuild it.

You should see these guys do it.

They went into the rafters 30 feet above the floor and they're building scissor trusses.

I mean they're not having them pre-manufactured.

They're going up there and building the trusses in situ

and saving it.

And they've designed

flashing and it's just amazing to watch these people.

I can tell you the people I see at Stanford University could not do that.

And I can tell you that the people who are doing it, they're all citizens, but they're all Spanish speakers.

They're all legal, but I don't think any of them have an advanced degree.

But I can tell you that not one person could do what they're doing if you train them for 10 years.

How can you be 55 years old hammering

30 feet above the ground over a cement floor and then precisely making a scissor truss, and then taking something.

I didn't say, I want you guys to make scissor trusses, and then I want this interior wall to be reinforced, I want this

rafter here, and this joist there.

I need all of this done, and I want this time.

I just said, I need it completely rebuilt.

I want it to, and

do you want it to be like it was when it was built?

I said, Yes.

What year was that?

I said, 1871.

Oh my God, okay.

and then i'm just watching it out my window all day today all day as it's just turning into what

totally unphased people they're just like let's go do it well that sounds like how gina carano is actually i like people like that she's out there she's gonna fight them yeah i was very lucky i had the wonderful father his idea was you know it was like

We're going to go on the 41st mission.

I only got 40 missions over Tokyo in the B-29, Victor.

So we're going to do the next mission.

We need a shed.

So we built

our own packing shed.

I said, Dad, I got to.

No, you don't.

We're going to do it.

We built it from scratch.

It's still here.

And it's well built.

But I didn't know anything how to build it.

My dad said, just because you don't know anything or you're afraid, you learn.

And so we, you know, I got books on trusses and things, and we built it.

The neighbor helped us.

So I like that idea that I see these guys, and that's why I really do support legal immigration.

I like people who come in this country that have a can-do idea and they kind of shake us up.

I can't stand illegal immigration because it undermines legal immigration.

And everybody, you know,

I like that attitude.

I really do.

I was talking to a painter, you know, and I said, I need the job to be painted.

Yeah, I can do it.

I can do it.

And I said, well, you're just saying I can.

No, no.

And then he explained in detail exactly what he could do.

He did this in five minutes, just looking at the job.

This is the type of paint.

This is here.

This is there.

This is how many hours.

There's a lot of bright people, and somehow this country went well.

I understand why they wanted us all to be college educated.

But the idea you're going to get 50% of the population in debt for $2 trillion for an environmental studies degree or sociology or psychology or social science, and they're going to have prolonged adolescence into their 20s, No house, no kids, no wife, no family, with a whiny voice.

Well, you know,

when you can be out here doing it, living a real life,

it's just, and they make a lot of money, I can tell you.

It's going to cost me a fortune if I can

scrape up the money to finish.

Yeah.

Okay, what's left?

Well, we were going to talk about Mark Stein.

He's

suing, he's being sued by a climatologist, Michael Mann, for defamation because Mark Stein said one of his graphs was fraudulent.

I think they called it the hockey graph or something.

And I think he retweeted something that Sinberg has called,

another fellow had said he was the, because he was from Penn State.

So he said he was the Jerry Sandusky of

which was.

And that thing is,

when I was writing for National Review, that suit came out of something that Mark

posted.

And then I think the suit separated.

So for 10 to 12 years, Mark has labored under this defamation suit.

And it's got, I mean,

essentially, how do you win a suit against a

climate change radical in a big city in America?

It's impossible.

And that was in Washington.

I mean, New York, Washington, you're a dead duck.

And

Mark has had a lot of, I have a confession to make.

I really like Mark Stein.

I've met him.

He's one of the funniest people I've ever met.

He's bright.

He's eccentric.

I really admire him.

And

I know a lot of people think he's a controversial, but he's been ill.

So he defended himself from a wheelchair at a point.

I didn't see the trial, but I talked to people who sat there and watched it.

I think Jack is actually, we're going to talk about it in our next podcast.

And

I think they proved beyond a doubt that this Mr.

Mann,

I mean he said he was a Nobel Prize laureate and he wasn't.

They exposed all this stuff and they found

no compensatory damages.

One dollar they find Sindberg and one

Mark Stein.

In other words, he could not prove that his career suffered from what Mark or his co-defendant, and they had separate cases, or they were separated.

He couldn't find anything.

But this is what's so weird about the American punitive system.

They found punitive damages.

$1,000 against Sindber.

So he didn't suffer any real thing, but I guess psychologically you punished him and make him go through this.

So you have to pay him $1,000,

you know, $1,000 for the last 10 years or so.

But for Mark, they charged him $1 million,

punitive damages.

$1

real damages to compensate for what he said he lost, but $1 million for the punishing.

You're going to be punished.

And so that's...

So I guess he's got to come up with either go for another five years and appeal, but he has to come up.

That's what the jury found.

Yeah.

A million dollars.

Wow.

Where was this tried?

I think it was in Washington, D.C., but I may be wrong.

But my point is simply,

it may be New York.

Jack will correct me.

Yeah, find out.

Yeah, but find out on Tuesday or Thursday.

I don't.

I think it has a

all these defamation cases.

If you look at what we said about the Egyptian Carol, one thing I did not say, if somebody comes out of your past

and says,

30 years ago, we were in a dressing room together and you forced yourself upon me, but I can't remember the year or the dress or all this.

And you say, you're a whack job, you're crazy.

That's defamation.

Yeah.

If she's been, I don't know.

And there's something, I still can't quite understand it completely because I think all of our listeners are bewildered.

I hear that a lot when people call me or I see on the street or they write emails and there's things they, I guess what I'm trying to sum up maybe

the last two months, 50 or so of these inquiries from people that are listening, that type of.

And it's like this victory, what is going on?

How did we get to a place where

some person like E.

Gene Carroll would be awarded $83 million in defamation damages?

And how did we get a judge like Judge Kaplan that said he was virtually a rapist even though he was never convicted of rape, but rather an assault?

How did we get somebody like Fannie Willis

with this whole messy paramour and all?

Where did we get Alvin Bragg?

How did Letita James come up with the idea that

there's no victim, but you can't, you're going to have to pay $250 million in fine?

How did this happen?

How did we get Joe Biden?

How did we get this stuff?

How can you go after an ex-president?

How can you impeach a president twice?

How can you try him as a private citizen?

How can you raid his house?

How can you say that January 6th was a full-bledged insurrection when 120 days in 2020 was?

They really did some damage.

They killed a lot of people.

They destroyed a lot of iconic buildings.

They burned down a lot of things.

$2 billion.

How can you say that this was a Confederate?

How can you try to take a presidential candidate off the ballot?

We wouldn't have done that in 1965, 1955.

How do we go in reverse?

What's the cause of it?

Is it too much affluence?

Is it this whole generation of

they have nothing, no knowledge of the physical world, the rural life?

What is it with them?

Who convinced them just to be that the model that makes nationhood great throughout history is to

satisfy your appetites from the age of 18 to you're 35, not get married, have no children, and then be self-infatuated?

Then how, where do we get the snowflake idea that you're going to be aggrieved at every little thing?

Do they know anything about race?

Don't they understand what caused Rwanda or what caused the Balkans or what caused Iraq?

That anytime you identify by your tribe as your primary identification,

your prehistorical, your pre-civilization, how do we do all this?

And how did the people at Harvard and Yale and Prince and Stanford and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, how did all these our best and brightest names and people, how come they turned out to be the worst of us?

I wish we had the answers to that, but that's what's really confusing people.

And they're really scared because they think that they could be destroyed by the IRS or someone come out of their past, like Me Too type person.

or they feel somebody's going to call them a racist, or they're going to speak up in a meeting and people are going to whisper they're some Trump MAGA right-wing nut.

And all they're doing is

there's going to be some kind of accounting for this.

There has to be, either in the next world or this world, because this is really wrong what's happening to this country.

And I think there's going to be, I hope it's a political correction, and I hope it's a Thermidorian correction to

Jacobinism and not a Napoleonic correction.

I really do.

I hope it is.

And, you know, the only criticism I'm getting, you know, Donald Trump, he's really got to do the Iowa, Iowa, Iowa speech and not the New Hampshire, New Hampshire, because he doesn't have any margin of error.

He has no

great money friends.

He has no media.

He has no institution behind him.

He's got to hit, if he gets elected, he's got to hit the ground running.

I need every single appointment to be excellent, to be loyal, to be good.

We need to get the agenda done.

No crazy this or that, no Omar Rosso's, no mooches, none of that scaramucci.

It's got to be dung, dung, dung.

And I hope he can do it.

I hope he can break up the administrative state and get rid of a couple of cabinet divisions and really try to balance the budget and

reform things.

I don't know how anybody can do it,

but I don't want to be in his place because anybody who would try to

give medicine to a diseased country,

they're going to be considered worse than the disease, the medicine.

Libby said that.

Remember, we are at a point in Rome where we know what the medicine is and it's considered worse than the malady.

Okay.

All right.

Well, thanks to everybody for listening to us this weekend.

We hope you enjoyed it and please come back and join us Friday for the news roundup and Saturday for the weekend edition.

And Victor does two shows with Jack Fowler on Tuesday and Thursday.

So stay with us.

Thank you, everyone.

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