The Old, the Conservative, and the Crusades

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Nealey 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.

This is our weekend edition, and on the weekend we try to do things that are somewhat more cultural or historical.

And we've been on a pursuit of wars and battles in history, and we're moving forward and we've reached the Crusades.

So we will look at the Crusades, but we tend to bookend it by other cultural or historical things before and after so immediately after the break we're going to talk a little bit about the face of the Democratic Party so stay with us and we'll be right back

At a time when Americans are more divided than ever, Connecting America is a place where everyone can gather and express their opinions with no disrespect.

And what better place than a Jersey diner to host this show?

Because where else but a diner can you find a buffet of opinions, ideas, and real connections?

Connecting America, a brand new national program that aims to truly connect everyday people and is dedicated to showcasing ideas and embracing civil conversation.

We'll also include amazing ways to improve your fitness, health, and nutrition, revive your spiritual self, and give your home a makeover.

Connecting America streams live every weekday from 7 a.m.

to 9 a.m.

Eastern Time.

Our program is led by a group of award-winning journalists, including me, Jim Rosenfield, plus Allison Camerata and Dave Briggs.

We'll also hear from America's psychologist Dr.

Jeff Gardier and former Fox News senior foreign affairs correspondent Amy Kellogg.

Join us wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back and thank you for joining us.

Remember that Victor has a website called The Blade of Perseus and you can come to it.

The URL is victorhanson.com and join us either with a free subscription and get onto our mailing list for all the free stuff on the website or

subscribe to victorhanson.com and get the VDH ultra material.

And that is $5 a month or $50

a year.

So, Victor,

before we start, anything positive, a positive news story out there?

Positive.

How can I be positive in the age of Biden?

I mean,

Biden is going.

Okay, I got one.

Biden.

is going to release a video announcing he's going to seek re-election.

That's a gift, a gift for the Republican nominee, whoever he or she is.

Yes, you're right.

There we go.

That's positive.

Yes, he's failing geometrically, not arithmetically.

And so

as it

are many in the Democratic Party, according to a recent article you wrote.

Yes, I can.

And I was wondering if you could talk to us about that, because

it seems that the face of the Democratic Party is very, very old.

But what's surprising to me, and I know that your article doesn't really touch on this, but usually, don't we have a saying that

if you're not a socialist when you're young, you don't have a heart?

And did he?

And if you're not conservative when you're older, you don't have a brain.

Yes.

And so

even though these even though these are geriatrics, they apparently don't have a brain anyways, because not only are they liberal, they've gone super ultra-uber liberal.

But that aside, go ahead and talk about your article.

Well, I think

to set it up,

the main issues that we're struggling with, an open border of 6.5 million illegal entries since Biden took office,

a soaring crime rate in all of our major cities,

a deliberate restriction, at least restriction restriction of production or restriction of projected

production of oil and gas, no new leases on federal lands.

Anwar shut down, Keystone shut down, job-running frackers and horizontal drillers and their lending agencies added all up.

We did not increase as anticipated by 2 million barrels.

We actually decreased and we're draining the strategic petroleum reserve.

I don't think the transgender issue that biological males can go into girls' restrooms or in prisons or in sports is a winning issue.

So, what I'm saying, I could go on and on, but all of these issues do not get 50%

support.

And they were brought in with a new Democratic Party.

And that party is not in the mainstream of American politics.

They keep saying MAGA, MAGA, but if you look at the actual MAGA agenda, it's pretty traditional Americanism.

And this isn't.

This is a Jacobin, Eurocentric Green Socialist Party.

And it was hijacked by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the new iteration of the two Obamas who get more left-wing the more they're out of office,

the squad,

the Black Caucus, Antifa, BLM.

But nobody wants that.

So they needed a veneer.

So they enlisted first good old Joe Biden,

Joe from Scranton, the guy in the 70s that said it was a jungle out there, the guy who said he was never going to vote for abortions, that guy.

That was a myth, of course, but he was respectable and he appealed to the independents.

And what was the remnant or vestigial Reagan Democrat, blue dog Democrat, parole voter, whatever you can call them?

And so they enlisted this old

geriatric veneer, a polyester Democrat.

And Diane Feinstein was another one.

She was head of the Senate Judicial Intelligence Committee, one of the people with the most seniority.

She was 89.

She's 89 now.

And they got Nancy Pelosi, 82.

Diane Feinstein's been in politics for 45 years.

Joe Biden for 50.

And Pelosi, 82 years old.

And then they got Chuck Schumer, 73 years old, Jim Clyburn, 82 years old.

And they were all 90s people who came into their maturity and their full ascension to power under Bill Clinton.

And I went back, Sammy, when I was writing The Dying Citizen, and I read very carefully the 92 and 96 speeches.

at the Democratic Convention that nominated Clinton, who won against George H.W.

Bush, and Clinton, who won against Bob Dole.

And they were very, very interesting speeches.

They were cries to shut down the border and deport people and legal only immigration.

Yes, they were, and tough on crime, federal funds for more police officers, 100,000 of them to be exact, to quote Bill Clinton.

And they were for more production of affordable natural resources.

So the middle class would have their own destiny, as Bill Bill Clinton said.

They would have destiny in their own hands.

It was more strict, disciplinarian, tough schools.

Remember the school uniforms?

That's in there too.

Federal government's going to give school uniforms, you know, night basketball and all this crap.

So what I'm getting at is that those people were the veneer.

And then the party was hijacked, started under Obama, and it went hard left.

And nobody wants what they have to offer.

So they're doing two things.

A, they control the institutions.

That was the long march through our institutions.

And this is an old recital.

Everybody's saying, Victor, I don't want to hear again NBA, Major League Baseball, NFL, K-12, Academia, Court Boardroom,

Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, CNN, but that's the truth.

Silicon Valley.

And they control all of those institutions that promulgate thought and influence and money.

But they still needed a veneer so they didn't look like the squad, right?

AOC opens their mouth and nobody can believe that anybody be that dumb, or the squad is too radical, or the BLM people were grifters, or the Antifa people are nerdy, spaghetti-armed thugs, right?

And so.

They needed these guys, so they wheeled them out and they made a Faustian bargain with them.

And the bargain was this.

You guys get to stay in power.

We will not primary you.

We will not force you to retire.

They're kind of hedging on that, Dianne Feinstein, a little bit.

No retirements.

Joe can babble on.

Dianne Feinstein can be in her mansion in San Francisco recovering from an ailment.

Nancy Pelosi can, you know, can talk about, you know, you're guilty until proven innocent or tear up the state of the union.

Fine.

No embarrassment.

We will not primary you.

We will not ask you to retire.

But you have to buy into this agenda and you have to give it a nice, happy-face veneer.

In exchange for that, you ride out from the sunset, powerful, rich, and in power.

And then you turn it over to us, and that's where we are.

And so don't think that these people are the old Democrats.

It's just a complete sham.

All they're there for is to airbrush or Photoshop what is basically a socialist agenda.

Yes.

Wow.

That's very scary.

Can I ask you what you think about this Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., who has put,

I think he's entered himself into the race for the Democratic candidacy, and he has 14% of Biden's vote.

Is there any hope for him?

No.

No.

None whatsoever.

He doesn't have a presence yeah go ahead because the

the democratic party is mean and he's got a lot of baggage he his first wife i think committed suicide and he had the marriage uh annulled and they're going to go after him because they can't afford to have any defections so he's got 15 in the polls and they don't want him to

siphon off votes.

They remember what Ralph Nader did to Al Gore in 2000.

Probably cost him the election.

And so they're saying, you know, and they still blame Jill Stein in Ohio, you know.

Yeah.

And so they're going to go after him.

He's got a lot of

skeletons, both personal.

He used drugs.

He's got this.

And he's got some family problems.

And remember, I think it was 2008, the guy was in bed with Hugo Chavez.

Hugo Chavez was sending oil up to Boston and Robert F.

Kennedy Kennedy was

supposedly buying at cost and distributing and cutting out the middleman

with a socialist thug who was killing people.

Yeah, but that would be a

that would be a positive for the left because anybody doing business with Hugo Chavez.

But you're right, though, back to the real subject.

But

they'll put Gavin Newsom up before him, huh?

Yes.

And he,

you know, he had the first thing he did was attack Trump.

He blamed Trump for the shutdowns.

Well, you can say Trump did shut the country down, but he was whining and bitching as Fauci and Burks and Redfield, all those people took over.

He didn't want to.

He was just deluded into doing so.

Biden wanted to.

But that was the first thing as a Democrat he has to say.

All that, what I just said,

it doesn't nullify the fact that on a few issues, he's kind of libertarian.

He doesn't like the top-down transfer of wealth that happened during the quarantine.

And he's right about that.

I've written a lot about the Zoom class.

They just made off like bandits.

He doesn't like the bailout of the banks.

He doesn't like the Pentagon overhead.

And that's why he's on Tucker Carlson.

So he's a liberal Democrat,

kind of like, he's trying to be like recapture Bill Clinton, that type of centrist left of center Democrat.

And we'll see.

But

the thing about Biden is, he's kind of like a snowball at the apex.

He's about as good as he gets.

And if anybody kicks him,

he's going to go downhill fast on the other side of the slope.

So what I'm saying is, any of these people have the potential to hemorrhage him.

Yes.

Because he won't even come out and announce he's going to, he's going going to have a video because

you can't slur your re-announcement, you know, your announcement that your re-election announcement

because so they're going to have to choreograph it.

And you've heard him from Ireland, you've heard him more recently, he can't finish the sentence.

And,

you know, I was thinking the other day, I still have these traces of brain fog from long COVID.

I lose my voice sometimes, but I'm 69, but

I'm Socrates compared to Joe Biden, right?

So,

and I would never think of running.

I don't use notes when I lecture.

I just gave a lecture an hour ago to a group of almond growers and I had no notes, but it's, I used to think that's pretty clever.

But as I get older, I think, wow, it's kind of like walking a wire without a

net below you, you know what I mean?

Because you're up there and you're 69 and you have this little

deer in the headlights.

Well, he's in the headlights 24-7, and he's not a deer, he's like an elephant, and

he can't finish a sentence.

Yeah,

and to his credit, it's non compos mentas, he's not in control of his mind.

Camilla Harris, she is control of her mind, and it's very, very small.

She has a vocabulary of about 800 words.

She just repeats and repeats.

It's just spin and rinse, and spin or wash, spin and rinse, huh?

Or wash, rinse, and spin, whatever you call it.

That's all she does.

It's just, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so

it's going to be very interesting because if the Republicans can't beat these guys after this terrible two years,

And I'm not sure they can because I saw what they did in the midterms.

It was underwhelming.

But if they can't win the Senate and the presidency, then I don't know what you do.

Yeah.

Well, I I felt that way when Joe Biden was in his cellar the whole time and he still won.

So we'll see what happens.

I thought when

they had that juxtaposition, it was one day in August of 2020, Trump, I think he was in Pennsylvania.

He had 40,000 people there, right?

They were going haywire.

They were coming up the cameras and everybody in Pennsylvania is going for Trump.

Blow out.

And then they showed Joe Biden.

It was like a 1950s

motor in.

You know, I used to drive in movie.

There used to be one Fresno called The Motor Inn.

And all these cars were parked like they were watching a screen, right, from their cars.

And he was up on the podium in a screen.

And they were, when he got done, they honked for, remember that?

For applause?

Yes, I do.

And there was maybe 50 cars.

And everybody on the right said, this is a joke.

He's going to lose.

And I thought to myself, no, that's,

it has nothing to do with turnout because they control the money they control the message they control the institutions

and we just learned the other day that what mike morrell the ex-CIA director trying to get back into the CIA or is he was he FBI CIA he was the one that he communicated remember the Biden administration said we had no idea that 50 intelligence professionals in retirement would come come out and swear that this is Russian disinformation.

That was in the debate with Trump.

He said, listen, Trump,

you may think that this is Hunter's laptop, but 50, 50, count them, 50

experts have said on their own, independent autonomous, have said that this was Russian.

Well, we now know that, you know, I don't know, I think it was Jake Sullivan called it, Morales, or Morale called Jake or somebody and said, hey, get the guys, get them out of retirement and make them lie and say this is, we need that because we don't want that

laptop information coming out anymore.

The guy, you know, Tony Bobolinski is on CBS, not 60 minutes.

So, and they just squashed it.

Like, yeah, they did.

They did.

And so

I don't know.

It's going to be very difficult to beat.

Joe Biden will not campaign.

He will

stay in his, I guess this will be the White House basement

on Silicon Valley Money and the press.

And you'll hear Nicole Wallace and people like that say, Joe Biden is

platonic in his thought.

Or he's another Cicero.

He's more eloquent than Cicero.

You get a presidential historian,

one of those guys that'll come back in and Michael Beshoff, and he'll say, we haven't seen a man like this since Lincoln.

And so that's what we're going to get.

All right.

Well, Victor,

since you brought up up weaponizing the government institutions, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the recent revelation that

Schumer is asking Garland, Merrick Garland, to investigate the Tennessee legislature for racism this time.

Well, Chuck Schumer was bad, but he wasn't evil.

This is the guy that in March 2020 got out in front of the Supreme Court doors

with a mob behind him and said,

Gorsuch,

Kavanaugh,

you're going to reap the whirlwind.

You do not know what's going to hit you.

And that was a direct threat by name.

And then, as I said earlier, people within months were swarming the homes of those justices and Thomas

and

Barrett Cole.

It worked.

And they intimidate him.

And it was a a felony for a mob to go to a justice's home.

But they were whipped up earlier by Chuck Schumer.

And the left didn't say anything.

So now he comes out and says, hmm,

they

are doing the things that Jim Jordan is starting to do, the stuff that we're doing.

So,

what does he want to do?

He wants to go get Merritt Garland to do what?

To go after

the people in the Tennessee legislature?

Because three people went in and disrupted the legislature and embarrassed the Democrats because they said that democracy dies through insurrection, January 6th.

And you have these three guys that couldn't get their way about guns.

So they burst into the Tennessee legislature.

They were legislators.

And they rushed the podium and they took it over, kind of like the free zone in Seattle.

And then they started, two of them had bullhorns.

And then they said, you violated protocol, stop.

And they wouldn't stop.

So they voted to expel them.

And the two black guys had a bullhorn.

And they said, this is racist because you didn't expel the white woman, but she didn't have a bullhorn.

So now they want to be investigated

for what?

I mean, you can't do that.

I thought Chuck Schumer would applaud that because he said, you know what?

After January 6th, everybody's doing it.

We just can't do it.

It's insurrectionary.

This was insurrection.

No.

Problem with January 6th was they were conservative.

If they had been Antifa or BLM that day, and they did a lot more damage in 120 days, they were happy with it.

So he's sold his soul.

He's just a complete hack.

Yes.

They're getting very angry at Jim Jordan for two reasons.

One, he's doing exactly what they did, and you're not supposed to do that because they're morally superior.

But number two, he doesn't have the power to do anything.

All he can do, Jim Jordan, because they have a thin majority, is

subpoena them, investigate, maybe get a criminal referral to whom?

Merritt Garland?

So, unless they impeach Mayorkis, and they're never going to convict him or Biden.

So, it's all symbolic, and they get very angry because they say to themselves, They can't do anything, but they're embarrassing us.

And they're getting on their hind legs.

And

this is not what Paul Ryan did.

This is not what Mitch McConnell did.

Who are these people?

How dare they embarrass us?

And the more impotent the Republicans are, the angrier the Democrats get because it's just kind of like a mosquito that keeps biting you, you know, and you can't stop it.

But it's not going to

kill you because they don't have the Senate and they don't have the presidency.

But that makes them even angrier because like,

well, wait a minute.

minute, we got the presidency and we got the Senate and these guys are embarrassing us.

How can that be?

They only have one sixth of the tripartite government.

So that is, it's, it's anger that these

people are acting out of their rank, so to speak.

Yes, but doesn't the fact that they're willing to support these young men that interrupted the processes of the legislative, of the legislature just encourage more of their own

kind to do that even more so they're

amping up all the radicalism yeah yeah but it's very destructive to government even their own government so i well i don't want to beat a dead horse but i'll beat him again

yes and that is just go back to the february 2020 molly ball article in time magazine 21 excuse me where she gushed and was giddy that after trump lost she said I've been asked to write this.

I don't know if I should, but we had a conspiracy.

We had a cabal.

And she outlined all the money.

And at one point, she said,

and we were prepared to work with the protesters on the street and ramp it up when it was necessary and cool it down when it wasn't.

She said that.

And she got that source from DNC people.

They controlled that whole Antifa and BLM.

And you know

that right before the election in early October, that thing just petered out all the violence.

But as she pointed out, the deal was if Trump gets elected, you guys can start it right up and we're behind you.

So that's what they do.

They use the street

like it's like tap water.

They turn it on or off, depending on what the need is at the moment.

And so, yeah, they want people to do that.

And they brought, he invited him to the White House, Joe Biden.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know.

It's very, it's strange.

It's really strange how

they put 1,000 people on January 6th.

And we know that the whole field, according to Mr.

Rosenberg of the New York Times, who was there, was inundated with FBI informants.

We saw a lot of the videos.

There wasn't a lot of violence at all, but they put 1,000 of them in jail.

Some of them were in definite, they were not undetermined.

They were just sitting in solitary and they weren't charged with anything for months.

They did all of that and they had no apologies whatsoever because they were trying, they said, to make a point.

And now we have a clear example of people who did the same thing.

They just went into the legislature and they disrupted it and they desecrated it.

They were at the head of a mob.

And all of a sudden, that's good.

And they get invited to the White House.

And that asymmetry, you know, the poor African-American teen

who was

shot by this, what, elderly 85-year-old white guy.

So he shoots through the screen door really stupidly.

I mean, one thing you grow up with guns, one thing you don't do is fire a weapon unless you know exactly what you intend to do with it.

That means that when you ever point a gun at anybody, you don't think that you're going to wound him or it's not going to you're just going to assume he's dead.

So you don't do it unless you're willing to kill somebody.

You're only willing to kill somebody unless they're going to kill you or your family.

So, that was a stupid thing to do.

But

Joe Biden demagogued it, Camilla Harris demagogued it.

But we had the same incident with a woman, I think, Gillis named North or South Carolina.

She was

a basketball six-year-old.

She went under the lawn of an African-American guy and he went out and killed her.

He didn't wound her, he killed her, and he shot her parents, too.

And there's nothing, nothing, nothing.

And that's what gets me so angry about Biden is that

he doesn't know where he is or who he is, but he has people around him who scan the horizon every day.

Tennessee legislature, African-American boy shot, and we're going to demagogue this because we're going to count on an enormous African-American vote, central, and we're going to demagogue it.

And we're not going to be symmetrical.

So if a African-American guy does the same thing

and somebody gets in his yard, comes to his, you know, he's going to take a gun, he's going to kill a six-year-old, not 16-year-old, not a guy, a girl, six executor.

And nobody says a word.

And that's the same thing with the Tennessee legislature.

If they had been, if the white woman and the two guys had been white, because this killed me.

I turned on MSNBC and somebody said, what if they had been white?

Well, we know what happened when they were white.

They're in jail for a thousand of them are in jail.

But had all three of those people been white,

there would have been no difference, no difference whatsoever.

The Republicans would have still

thrown the book at them.

The only difference was that Biden wouldn't have invited him to the White House.

That's true.

It's true.

And

he's a racialist demagogue, and the people around him are racialist demagogues.

One thing that I think everybody has to be honest about is the left uses this word racist, racist.

That is a projectionist word.

They are racist.

I really mean that.

They have people surrounding Biden who do not like people because of the color of their skin and they stereotype them.

And until we get to the point where we say to them, like Don Lamon or whatever his name is, when you listen to him, he is a racist.

He really is.

And you should use that word.

He really is.

He judges people and calibrates them by the color of their skin.

Yeah, absolutely.

So does all of those people do.

And so does Camilla Harris.

She flies to Tennessee to rev up things.

She's now talking to this family that's 60.

She is a racialist.

Like I said, racialist because I don't know she's married to a white guy.

So she obviously doesn't hate him, but

she's a complete.

nenny and she stereotypes people.

So maybe it's just

political opportunism.

But it seems to me that her entire behavior is based on race.

She was the one in 2020.

Remember, she said of the BLMMT for riots: this should not stop.

It's not going to stop.

It's going to go all the way to the election.

And she helped bail out people who were charged with violent acts.

Yes.

Well, Victor, we have a break coming up, and we are going to then look at the crusade.

So let's go ahead and take the break and come right back.

Welcome back.

So, Victor, I think the way I'd like to start is one time I saw Robert Spencer, who is an Islamic scholar, and he was asked the question of,

I'm not sure exactly the question, but what the Crusades,

you know, what he thought about the Crusades.

And he was very short.

He said they were too late and too weak a response to Muslim conquest.

So if we could start there and what your thoughts are or your account of the Crusades is

either its origins or the nature of

well, you know, there were two centuries.

So when you say crusades, it's one, two, three, four, I guess five, six, seven.

There was eight and nine as well.

Yeah, children's cussate and all that stuff.

But 1095, I think the first, all the way to 1290, 1291.

So it was two centuries.

Yeah.

And they were in response.

Remember that they started right after the Byzantines were obliterated at the Battle of Manziker, right?

By the Seljuk Turks and Muslims.

So there was a sense, and the Byzantines had been begging for a Western crusade to come in and stop this new, the Turk, so to speak.

And the Seljuks would be

absorbed by the Ottomans, another tribe or inclusive tribe.

So they were saying that Islam,

as far back as the 700s, has eaten away the Byzantine Empire.

They came in and took Egypt.

They took Alexandria.

They took the Holy Land.

They worked their way up the coast and they took North Africa.

And remember, Justinian and Belisaris had reconquered that.

And so it was lost.

And among the losses was Jerusalem.

And then the Byzantines came in and said, we were holding up Christendom in the east and we're outmanned.

So we need to unite East and West.

So that was the impetus to get back to Jerusalem under pressure from the Byzantines to stop this hemorrhaging in the East.

And so the First Crusade, you know, was, I mean, they were all inept because there was no national unity.

There were Franks, there were Germans, there were Brits.

There was no common

planning, no central planning.

The Venetians, but the Venetians Venetians were the Venetians.

They were con artists and they were necessary to transport the Crusaders, you know, whether they left from Sicily or wherever, all the way to the Holy Land.

And they were opportunistic.

So the First Crusade, you know, forget

the catastrophic Children's Crusade.

They did go down through the Holy Land.

And they did take, I think they took Antioch.

And a lot of the part was the rust, you know, the relics as well.

They wanted to get the true cross and the,

and what was it, the Holy Lance that had pierced Jesus' side.

So they were, they felt that these were, the repositories were in the Holy Land.

And

they did, the First Crusade did one thing.

They did take Jerusalem.

And they kept it.

And they're going to keep it.

They had this something, you know, the kingdom of Jerusalem was a viable kingdom for what?

50 years?

Yes, at least, yeah.

Yeah, 50 years almost.

And so the First Crusade, as inept as it was

and as

haphazard as it was,

succeeded in the primary mission.

The problem was that when they left, they only had about 3,000 knights that were left.

And they were in the sea of Muslims.

and Celtic Turks to the north in Syria, and then Arabs in their immediate vicinity and Kurds and things and they were outmanned.

So they did take some of the Holy Crusader,

the Holy Land, they had at Acre and they had Jerusalem and Antioch, I think.

Antioch they took, yes.

And

so the first crusade worked, but the problem was that the Pope, to re-quote

Joseph Stalin again, how many divisions do you, does the Pope have?

The Pope has, the Papal States had small military art.

So they had to use papal bulls and threats of excommunication.

And the Second Crusade was, I guess you could say, it was an ungodly disaster, right?

It didn't, I mean,

they didn't do much of anything.

And they actually had detoured a little bit toward Constantinople, as I remember, and it didn't do anything.

And this was the most,

what we would say, the least impressive.

And

it failed, and they lost

the fall of Jerusalem.

That was one of the legacies of the Second Crusade.

I guess it was, I should say, there was an independent kingdom of Jerusalem till for over a half century.

It was actually all the way until that great siege, and I guess it was 1187.

And that

was

one of the problems of the Second Crusade was that it failed to take Tyre and the

holy city.

I mean, it was taken by Saladin in 1187,

which meant they needed a what?

A third crusade to start back from square one.

And that idea was this time they were going to do it right, and they were going to get the two most accomplished generals, King Richard, you know, Richard the Lionhearted, and Barbarossa, the red-headed redbeard.

Frederick.

Redbeard, yeah.

Yes.

And that started off well.

And

all of a sudden, they had two pincer moves.

And what happened?

Frederick Barbarossa drowned in his Germanic, Frankish Germanic army just dissipated.

And then you were left with Richard the Lionhearted.

And he was famous because of one great battle.

And and that was at the Battle of Arsof.

And that was sort of the opposite of the horns of Hatim.

That is when they understood one great

tactically, the wars were always between mobile light cavalry and light infantry and archers and heavy Frankish

Germanic English cavalrymen.

When we say heavy, we mean quilted protection for the horse, a knight in full armor, and a lance.

And nothing can stop them when you let go, but they have enormous needs of

feed, hay, barley, water.

And in the past at Hatin,

Hatton, I should say, they were trapped because they didn't understand that they got out in the desert and then they were harassed by pincer movements and sorties

and they were desperate for water and they lost.

But Richard was much

more careful, and they won the Battle of Arsouf.

And for a brief moment in the Third Crusade, Jerusalem was open.

And that's it's very controversial whether he could have taken it, but he was about 10 or 15 miles,

and he just stopped.

He had pressing business back in England, and the coalition was breaking up.

But

that was it.

So

I think they came right up to the walls almost, or at least they came within sight.

And then it petered out.

They never retook Jerusalem.

The Fourth Crusade

was an ungodly disaster.

And that was

the Venetians who were supposed to transport the Franks, they

had a deal where they were going to get

a claimant to the Byzantine throne.

And somehow they were going to be in cahoots with him.

And then he was going to pay them royally.

And instead of going to the Holy Land,

Alexius, you know, he bought them off.

And with the, I think,

the wink and nod of the Pope and the Doge

of Venice, and the rest is tragic because in 1204, they detoured and they surrounded Constantinople.

Nobody has ever taken the Theodesian walls, the land wall.

Remember, Constantinople is like a triangle.

And even though you could call the hypotenuse the land end, but there is the Golden Horn, the estuary you go up on the north, east,

and then on the south, the Sea of Marmora.

And then you can connect those two sea walls with a land wall.

And that wall was the greatest fortification in Europe.

Probably maybe

as far as just a municipal fort, the greatest in the world.

It had a 70-foot moat,

and then you had to go over about a 10-foot field wall.

Then you were in a paved pavilion, and you looked up

about 25 feet,

and that was the outer wall with turrets.

So it was a killing ground.

As you swam across the moat and you jumped over the mound, and you got your ladder, you were stuck between what was behind you and what was in front of you.

And that was a killing ground where the people on the walls had stones and oil, crossbows.

But even if you got over the 30-foot wall, which was about six feet thick, then you were into another diobolos, I think the Greek word is, another pavilion.

And then this wall was 40 or 50 with some of the towers and there were over 90 of them, 60 feet.

This thing went on for three and a half miles that connected the two sea walls, this hypotenuse.

And then the inner wall was even thicker and better fortified and higher.

And that was another killing ground.

So then, how do you get out?

You got over the first moat, then you got over the second moat, and your forces are attributed.

And then all of a sudden, you've got the greatest wall, and so nobody could do it.

And they finagled and got through a sea wall, probably with contrivance of the people inside, and they destroyed the city.

They looted, they killed more people than Mehmed II did in 1453.

And they just unleashed their hatred and they wanted concessions.

So the Venetians and the Franks then carved up the empire.

They went into Greece and the Morea, the so-called Peloponnese.

These crusaders carved out crusader kingdoms.

You can still go to places like Noplayon.

or Cyprus or Crete or Rhodes, and you see these beautiful castles.

You can always tell the difference when you go to the Mediterranean and see

ancient fortifications.

If it's solidly built, it's Byzantine.

If it's kind of haphazard with brick, it's Ottoman.

But if it's beautiful, stone, but classically designed, it's Venetian.

And they created these strongholds and they hijacked the empire, not only the city, and they did it for 50 years.

And then when finally the poor Byzantines came back, they had civil dissension.

They had to get rid of Alexis'

branch of the family.

And then they went into the third, you know, they were by 1340, they were hit with another plague that wiped out a fourth of the city.

And it took them

50 more years to get back their land.

And all of the

treasuries of the city, all the gold, all the silver, all the treasury had been ransacked.

The famous, you know,

the

four horsemen that are on St.

Mark's Cathedral were taken from Constantinople during this Fourth Crusade.

So then the rest of them in the 12, I don't know, 1215 to 1220, the Fifth Crusade, they

never had the impetus.

And what was starting to be clear is that now that they control Constantinople for at least, as I said, 50 years

there was no impetus from the Byzantines to say, you know what, we support these crusades because they're going to alleviate pressure on us from the Seljuk, from the Ottomans.

And the rest of them were just, I don't know what you would call them, but they were very ineffective.

And then by the 1240s and

beyond, it was just a question of would these crusader kings, I think the Seventh Crusade was in the 1250s.

And

it was taken over, I think, by the French.

But of course, they all got sick.

I think Louis got sick and died, or was very sick.

But the point is, then all of these

Crusader castles,

Kevin Andrews wrote a really good book about Crusader castles in Greece, but they were slowly lost to the

Muslims.

And what was

it's really strange today because if you go go to Lebanon, the Phalangist or the why are there Christians in Lebanon?

And why are there people from Lebanon that are blue-eyed and they look almost European?

And that they were the descendant, direct descendants of these crusader

people that were there for two centuries and then

never left.

Their descendants created Christian fortified communities once the Crusades ended.

One thing to remember, though, if you look at anything published after 2000, it's critical, right?

That this was a waste of time, that it was imperialism, that it was racism, that it was religious bigotry, and they had no business in the land of others.

But

the Seljuk and the Arab conquests were tribal people who came out of the Middle East or the East and appropriated lands that had either been Greek or Latinate, is what I'm saying.

So, in the mind of the Pope, this was not: we're taking Arab land or we're taking Ottoman land, we're taking land back that they stole from us.

And

we're not going into Mecca or Medina, but they did go into our holiest city of Jerusalem.

And in the medieval mind, they have the Holy True Cross, and they have the Holy Lands, etc.

And they have the most sacred relics and the Church of the Holy Holy Sepulchre, and they have all of the

belly button of the Christian world.

So that was the mindset.

And I don't think that comes across in later literature.

You read earlier accounts of the crusades and it's more neutral.

Yes.

And of course, it's a dirty word today in scholarship.

I think during

2003, I remember reading all of these

essays that George Bush was thought he was Richard the Lionheart or Frederick Barbarossa, and he was trying to lead a religious crusade into the Middle East and take back,

you know, or the British imperialists, etc., etc., etc.

It wasn't that way at all.

It's very funny to hear Erdogan, for example, talk about the Ottomans and

all the things that were lost to the Ottoman Empire by Western imperialism.

I'm thinking, you know what?

The city that is your capital,

de facto capital,

was created by a Latin-speaking emperor, Constantine, and it was 1100 years western under the Greek Byzantines.

And your ancestors took it.

There was no reason to take it.

You took all their land, but you took the city in 1453.

And then you occupied something that was built by other people.

It wasn't like...

Cortez raising Tenochet land and then making a new city or Alexander the Great raising Thebes and then making a Macedonian Thebes or the Romans raising Carthage and making, you know,

Nova Carthago, our new Roman city, it was they just took the DNA out, right?

Put in new DNA.

They just

slapped up some minarets and said that this is now the greatest mosque in the world in Haggiosophia.

It's very strange.

And then not much was made of it until

Ataturk, right, when he started to decide that going Western was probably the way to modernize his city and to

transform it.

Yeah,

there were these strange, bizarre Islamic dash Ottoman customs that were kind of eerie.

So the Janissaries were the crack troops, but they had something called

the

Derv Shirme, and that meant that they could go into Christian villages in the Balkans and, as I said earlier, take the the oldest child and put them in the janissaries, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, some of them.

And they were the most zealous and ferocious of all Islamic warriors.

They had the harem where they brought mostly people from Ukraine or southern Russia, but also the Balkans.

And those were the liaisons of the Sultan.

And so that almost always the Sultan's child was half European from his mother's side.

And they would liquidate all the other bastard children.

And, you know, it was kind of Russian roulette if you were one of the consorts of the sultan.

Yeah, sure.

And so

it was a very bizarre system.

So when, and it was in a weird way tolerant.

So there were concessions like Galata

across from the Golden Horn that they get.

that they had a long concession with the Byzantines that were continued by the

Ottomans that you could have a trading.

So inside Constantinople, because it was deserted basically when they

ravaged it and destroyed it in 1453, they brought in some Venetians, Genovese, Greeks, and they gave them concessions.

They were second-class citizens that had to pay the infidel tax.

But

I don't say it's a tolerance, but they were so intermeshed with Europe.

as I said, with the Janissaries and the harem and all of these institutions.

And they profited, they imported so much European goods, mostly luxury goods, but also firearms and stuff, that they weren't, I mean, they were more ecomenical.

They were the idea that we represent Islam, pan-Arabic, pan-Turkish Islam.

So when the

young Turks took over,

when they threw out the decrepit sultan, they kept saying, we're not Islamic.

So yes, you're right, they were modernizing.

Absolutely.

They changed the alphabet to use Western lettering.

They got rid of the Fez.

They got rid of bigamy.

They got rid of Hera.

They got rid of all of that.

But central to the young Turks' nationalism is we're Turkish.

We're not Muslim.

We're not Arabs.

We're not Kurds.

We're not.

anybody.

We are Turkish.

It was a racialist idea that was very popular after during and after World War I.

So, one of the unfortunate results was that all of these conquered Christians that had concessions under the Ottomans, like the Armenians or the Greeks,

they just went out and they had pomegranates and they started to ethnically cleanse them.

Now, you can say the Greeks were on the winning side of World War I and they had the megala idea or the idea that you're going to reform the Hellenic world, you know, Crete, Alexandria,

some of the places in the Holy Land and Constantinople, which was only 100 miles from the Greek border in Thrace.

But they were going to, and so they invaded to pay back the Turks for some atrocities.

And then they were pushed.

Remember, they were pushed all the way back to Smyrna.

They killed over a million Greeks, killed over a million Armenians.

So that young Turk movement under Ataturk

was a modernization with a lot of German help.

And the idea was that we are now a blood and soil nation.

We're not a corrupt, Islamic,

polyglot, polyracial

conglomerate anymore.

And we're going to be much tougher because it's Turkish racial essence.

And that meant that was just proved to be a disaster for Jews and

Greeks and Armenians and Italians and people who had lived there for centuries under kind of weird and bizarre

Islam as it was manifested.

Concessions, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you ever seen that movie, The Promise, where Christian Baal and I don't know the name of the actor, but he's a

he is an Armenian and it's about the Armenians there being

moved.

Yeah, that was the that was the young Turk movement.

And there's in that movie, as I remember,

there's some very prominent in Constantinople Armenians, and they're trying to tell them, kind of like the Jews in the 1930s in Germany, the actor tries to tell his uncle, they're going to go after you.

And he says, no, no, he is fabulously wealthy and he's refined and Western educated.

No, no, they need me.

And a lot of, that was a tradition under the Ottomans that the grand viziers that ran the country, about half of them were European, were born European.

That was what was so strange that

one of the Ottoman traditions was they trusted people who were converts because they had the fanaticism of a convert or they had been coerced into it.

So just think about that

you're fighting the Ottomans and their Secretary of State, so to speak, was probably born Hungarian or Serb or Ukrainian or something.

And the mother of

the Sultan is European Christian at one time.

And the Janissaries were European Christian.

That's kind of bizarre to see them all come at you.

What kind of religion should you do that?

And it was, that's why, and the young Turks looked at all that and they said, no, no, no, this is too cumbersome.

And

there was a scholar, he wrote a great article.

I need the citation that slips my memory, but he went through a hundred years

of the Sultanate, right?

I think from the

1350s to the, no, I think 1450s to the 1550s.

And he looked at the mother of the sultan, right?

And what, to what degree they were Christian versus some of them, a few of them were Turkish.

And then he looked at foreign policy, i.e., did the empire go after Eastern or Western aggrandizement?

And you know what he found out?

What?

When the sultan was Christian, a slave, right, had been enslaved.

Their sharmeid not only went in and got the janissaries, but they took beautiful women for the harem.

But so when they took these young girls from Europe and they put them in the harem, they trained them in the arts of lovemaking and all that stuff.

When that particular liaison actually married the sultan and that child by her male child became the sultan, and after the other half brothers and sisters were liquidated,

she had enormous influence.

She had a title.

And he looked back and said, to the degree that the sultans had European mothers, they ceased, they didn't cease, but their aggression into the Balkans, Hungary, was much less than their Eastern aggression, i.e.

on the Eastern Persian frontier, et cetera.

And that was due to the influence of the mother,

even though they hadn't been Christian in years.

Yeah.

Victor,

I just have a couple of questions as we get.

And I wanted to go back to actually the Crusades.

I was wondering, since you brought up the Muslim side of things, did you have any reflections on Saladin or, you know, his,

was he a great general, for example?

Was he an Alexander the Great?

He always is written up as such.

Yeah, I think what was the movie by Ridley Scott, Kingdom of Heaven?

Yes.

He's famous for two things.

Well, three things.

He was not an Arab.

He was a Kurd.

And he led a mostly

Arab army.

So that was unusual.

But

he did two things.

He took Jerusalem, right?

And he won the most decisive battle against the Crusaders at the Battle of the Horns of Hattin.

So if you go to the Sea of Galilee today, you can line up and you can see those two horns where the battlefield was.

And it was a brilliant battle because it was kind of an entrapment where he got

the army to go out.

I think in the movie, you remember that they're kind of fanatic men of the cross and et cetera, et cetera.

And

anyway, he's known as a great general that destroyed a Crusader army and even had

the true cross.

And he took Jerusalem and he was apparently given the morality of the time.

I mean, that was a

it was a disaster because, I don't know, two or three hundred of the most famous knights of the realm were captured.

But given the

morality of the times, he wasn't as cruel as other people were on the Muslim side.

So that's what he's known for.

Yeah.

And my second question is this.

You were mentioning archaeological sites in Greece.

And I was wondering if you could just, for all of us travelers, tell us some of what you would think would be the best archaeological sites to see the Frankish and

Phoenician and the either in Israel or in Greece.

Like, where would you go if you wanted to see that?

Well, the best example and one of the most beautiful cities in Greece is Noplion.

And if you go there today, you can go up the thousand steps of the Palmede, and that's a Venetian fort.

And that was very, it lasted for 200 years.

So when the Byzantines took back Constantinople and most of their empire, they didn't get it all.

So there were areas

in the eastern Mediterranean and in Greece that remain enclaves of Frankish power.

And so that was one of them.

And it's absolutely magnificent architecture, military architecture.

It's just stunning.

And then basically,

when you want to go, all of the so-called choke points, you know what I mean?

At the key places.

So if you want to go into the Peloponnese, you've got to go through Corinth, right?

Six mile,

it narrows down to the isthmus.

And there's Acro Corinth.

It's a huge, tall mountain.

You can see it for miles, and it has a beautiful crusader, Frankish castle castle on it.

I think it's Jeffrey Viordin.

He wrote off the end, supposedly a legend when he was trapped.

And then, when you look at the fingers of the Peloponnese at Monovasia, there's a beautiful place.

There's a Byzantine fortified city, it was the capital at Mistras, out of Sparta, and that's very

interesting.

And

out on the western tip at Methone, there's a huge crusader castle.

And also in the Bay of Navarino, where there was a great battle deliberate, there's at Romanos, there's a capital, I mean, a crusader capital, but they're mostly, not all, but they're mostly in the Peloponnese, because that was the area of the stronghold when they took, and the Fourth Crusade, when they took it in 1204, that was the areas that was closest to the Mediterranean.

So the Venetian Empire

was really took off after that period.

And if you want to go to Crete and Hanya, there's some really stunning Crusader fortifications.

That's the western city in Crete.

And then working your way over, there was the famous Venetian stronghold at Cyprus, at Falmagusta.

That's now in Turkish Cyprus.

I went there before the 74 war.

It was really stunning.

And I got a good friend, Max Nikias, who was the president of USC, and his family was from Falmagusta.

Of course, they can't go to their ancestral homes because it's now in this bastard state of Turkish-occupied Cyprus.

But that lasted, that was a very famous siege because it was right on the eve of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

And

Marc Antonio from that very famous Venetian family held out, and then they had terms.

with the sultan and they broke the terms and they thought he was too insolent and there were they had no idea how many Venetians were in there and how well stocked they were.

So when they surrender, they thought, oh, my God,

we made a deal where these guys could all go to Crete, and there's lots of them.

Why not just kill them?

And so

they killed him and they stuffed him with straw.

And it was really horrible.

But there's some very impressive

sites there.

You can go to the Knights Templar, remember, had for 75 years during the Crusades, they took over Rhodes, and then it became a Venetian, and then

it was taken by the Ottomans.

Eventually, the Ottomans took all of those, it took them from somewhere between

15,

they took Mistras in 146,

seven years after the fall.

They took all of the Crusaders' castles, I mean, the Byzantine

fortifications on the Black Sea, and then they turned to the Venetians.

Venetians were very hard to root out because they had superior fortifications.

They were light years ahead in galley construction.

Their metallurgy and cannons were better than the Ottomans.

They were rich, and they were heavily entrenched.

So when

they started to go in and get rid of the Byzantines, which they did pretty quickly, but they had to go into the Dodecanese Islands, and that's where they butted up against the Knights Templar in Rhodes.

There's some really beautiful castles on Rhodes, just stunning.

And there's some on places as weird as Siros.

One of the famous places, if you go, I'll just finish because I'm going on too long, but if you go to western Greece,

right across from

not right across, but if you cross the bridge at Patros, right, and you go into the northern part across the Bay of Corinth, the Gulf of Corinth, I should say, you can go out to

the edge

of

the edge that looks out on the Mediterranean.

And there's a beautiful town called Nafpatos, right?

And there's one of the best examples of Venetian architecture that's been remodeled with Turkish architecture.

But it's quite stunning.

And that's where the Turkish fleet uh harbored on the eve of that battle on October 6th of 1571.

And the battle actually was fought right off the coast.

So you can, if you take a ferry from a lot of places in Naufictos, you can actually see

where

you can actually see where the battle was fought of Lepanto.

A lot of people that survived, not very many survived on the Turkey.

It was the greatest victory of Christendom in history.

When you sail into the Gulf of Corinth, you know, if you're coming from the Mediterranean, Mediterranean, you're going to the Corinth Canal about 100 miles to the east, you go through those two,

they were Venetian and they became Turkish, but there's Rion

or Rio and Anti-Rio, and they're two castles that are almost identical and they had cannon and they controlled the entrance and exodus, sort of like the Turkish castles on the Bosphorus.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we need to take a break and then come back for, talk a little bit about English and history majors.

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

We're back, and I would like to just put a shout out for John Solomon's Just the News, who is, as Jack always calls it, our mother ship.

So, go have a look at Just the News.

John Solomon is a renowned investigative reporter.

So, So he's got the latest news, especially on the DC corridor.

So it's a great place to get your news from as well.

Victor, I was reading an article about history and English majors dropping or

many fewer students becoming history and English majors to the tune of about one-third less.

And that's what the article was about.

But it said something very interesting in the article.

It said that perhaps one of of the reasons that they're dropping out is or not taking up history and English is that given the current environment, and not that students are thinkers about that, but that these two disciplines are backward looking and conservative in nature.

And I don't think they meant backward looking in a

in a negative manner.

I think they meant that they literally look back to the ideas from past times

and that that is something that is

not acceptable but that's the definition of history yeah sure it's a it comes from the greek word historia inquiry it's an inquiry about the past and i suppose that this narcissistic generation feels that it's not worth studying because it's not about me me me me me right and all my struggles and victimization but it's

and history is not therapy it's tragedy that's what they don't like

because you don't go back in history and say, hmm, that's the good guy and that's the bad guy, and I'm going to make the evidence fit.

You know what I mean?

You try to look at the evidence, and then inductively

you see that most history is tragedy.

So, when you look at, let's just give one example very quickly.

So, if you look in

1521, the Spanish land in Veracru, what would become Veracruz, the true cross, okay,

And they hear about this majestic kingdom at Tenochtitlan.

And they go in there, right?

And it's an empire of four million people with a half a million people built on a lake.

It's kind of like Venice.

And they're just astonished.

And then they look at the monumental and then they start seeing things.

And they see human hearts being torn out on temporal major, you know,

and the great pyramid.

And they see

cannibalism and they see all sorts of bizarre things to the mind of a conquistador from Castile in 1520.

And so

they have the ability to get to the New World, and the Aztecs don't have the ability to go to Barcelona.

And the

conquistadors have what?

Horses?

Huge mastif dogs, war dogs.

They have Spanish Toledo steel, the best in the world.

So razor-sharp blades versus obsidian.

They have metallurgically superior breastplates that they don't have cloth, and they're covered from head to toe in it.

So you put one of these guys on a horse, and he's been fighting since he's 14, the Islamic wars of North Africa.

You give him a lance, you have superior diss, and you imbue him with a fanatical

Catholic missionary zeal.

And they're only

50 years before Don Juan at Lapanto.

And you can see what the Spanish did there.

They were indominable.

And then they were unleashed.

And then you find out that this empire that's full of indigenous people is not a happy place.

That the Tlaxcalans

hate the Aztecs, which are called the Mexica.

They're not called Aztecs.

But that was a European

importation, or there was an aspect of the Nahutu language, but they use it for everybody.

But nevertheless, the Toxcalans and others hated the Aztecs more than they did the Spanish.

And so he forms being versed in military strategy, Roman ideas of divide and conquer.

Hernan Cortez destroys the city thanks to what?

He never had more than 12.

He had aggregate maybe 3,500, but never at one time did he have more than 1,500 people.

And he destroyed an empire of 4 million.

He did it in less than two years.

He was a military genius.

He was ruthless, but he had a lot of people who wanted to help him.

So, my point is, that's a collision of two societies.

If you look at, we don't do it that way.

We always say, well, these people were evil.

They were European.

They shouldn't have been there.

Well, no, the Aztecs shouldn't have been there.

They came only about 150 years earlier and conquered and slaughtered everybody and took over.

It's the same thing with the Native Americans.

If you have one Native American per 200 miles, and you have people in Britain that are 70 people per mile living in density, and they're starving, and Europe is overpopulated, and they have the technological ability to get to this paradise, and they're going to go there.

And what's going to happen is going to be tragic.

But we don't do that.

And that's why they hate history, because

it doesn't make anybody

perfectly good or perfectly bad.

And they all want to, now it's if you're European,

then you're evil.

And if you're an indigenous person, then you.

And why is that?

So you can use history in the present as a tool to club somebody over the head with.

And yet, you know, the poor Zulus, well, the Zulus were some of the most ruthless killers in the history of Africa.

And they killed thousands of them their own.

Shaka Zulu was a maniac.

He was sort of Hitlerian.

And you can argue that

the priest at

Tenochetland were sort of Goebbels, I should say, Himmler-like,

if some of the contemporary inscriptions are true, that they killed thousands in a four-day period.

And I think it was 1487, right before the Cortez landed, you know, just 30 years prior.

And as far as English,

that's funny because what is a classic?

A classic is something over time and space that exists because people rediscover it and they find that the author in the plot,

the characterization, the language,

the statement or the message is superior to others of its generation and transcends time and space.

So, Shakespeare or Pope or Hardy, or in the American context,

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,

Joseph Conrad, Victory, Hemingway, Sun Also Rises,

Tender as the Night,

Grapes of Wrath, just to name off all these titles, the Can't Go Home Again, Thomas.

They're classics.

And today's people think, well, wait a minute, we rediscovered the world.

We're morally superior to everybody.

We're tolerant.

We're the first generation to have trans and we have BLM.

and you're trying to force these old white people.

No, these people are not all white people.

They just exist.

Their race or their gender is incidental.

The message is what counts.

And when you have Ralph Ellison or something

that writes a great invisible man, then it's a classic, right?

People think a few of Langston Hughes' poems are great.

Edith Wharton and the Bronte sister, there's all these great women on it, but it's incidental.

And they don't like that because they have to be identity politics.

They have to, the author has to fit a contemporary political agenda.

So they look at English and history and they theorize it and beat it to death with a, and guess what?

Nobody's taking these classes.

So the Stanford History Department has almost no majors.

The English department has almost no majors.

Nationwide, they have no more.

Over, I guess now it's been 25 years, a quarter century ago, a really brilliant guy, John Heath, and I wrote Who Killed Homer.

And it was predicting just what has happened now: that if you were professors of classics and you were custodians of this Western, wonderful heritage that began in Greece and Rome, and you told your students that it was racist and sexist and the start of all of our troubles rather than the foundation that gave us

democracy, tolerance,

introspection, self-criticism, rationalism, all antithetical anywhere else in the Mediterranean at the time.

But if you just trash that and the languages were difficult, and you had to sort of be a messianic figure to get people to spend 3,000 hours a year, which is what it takes to learn Latin or Greek, then why would anybody do it?

Why would anybody sit in a class?

in classical Greece and have somebody go, well, you know, that Socrates, it was Willie Black, as Mark Bernal showed us, quote unquote, that kind of stuff, right?

Nobody wants to listen to that.

So they walk.

They're on student loans.

They don't have a lot of money.

They need a vocational degree of some sort.

And you can make the argument, you get a

degree in classics.

You can be a lawyer.

You can be a doctor because you know how to read and write and think.

But if you don't teach them how to read, write, and think, you just lecture them how this was a toxic legacy.

It's kind of like stabbing yourself in the heart.

And that's what they did.

And now there's basically no classics.

Princeton doesn't even require the Greek, the Greek language.

And there's almost no,

there's almost no faculty positions.

And the ones that they are, they're all tainted by racial preferences and gender preferences.

So literally, if you were a white male and you love Greece and Rome, and you wanted to get a bachelor's degree in classics and you chose not to be a lawyer or doctor or a business person, which it's a great degree for, but you wanted to get a PhD, I guarantee you you are not going to get a job.

There's no students, and the degree these endowed professorships exist because of money, regardless of students, they're not going to hire you.

They're not going to hire you.

And that's what's tragic about it.

You know, Mark Zuckerberg's sister bought a classics journal called Eidolon, right?

And she did it for one purpose.

She had a PhD in classics to make it race, class, and gender.

And so she poured her money, she hired a staff, and she printed all of this stuff in there.

She attacked people like me, you know, as old, white, bad guys,

and she ran that into the ground.

And nobody wanted to read it.

It was boring.

You know, this guy's bad.

This person's good.

Just you line up everybody in history and literature and say Penelope's on the right side.

Odysseus is a philandering maverick

nut on the he's on the bad side.

Hera was good.

Zeus is bad.

The Attas poem is really about transgender.

It's the greatest thing in the ancient, that kind of stuff.

Nobody watched it.

And then you know what she did?

Been there, done it, you're all fired.

And she closed it down.

Retired to her billions.

She sent everybody else off to the job market.

She destroyed the journal.

She alienated and fired all of these people and put them out of work.

She didn't create one position for the field.

She didn't proselytize for one student to join.

And when she attacked me, I voted rejoined her and I just said, if you are really far left and you are a classicist and you believe in the mission.

of your discipline, I suggest you use your billion dollars and go down to Bakersfield, to Cal State Bakersfield, and go to UC Merced and start a classics department.

I did it at Cal State Fresno.

I had mostly all Mexican-American, Hmong, poor white, and African-American students, all poor or lower-middle class, and they were wonderful.

And we taught them Greek and Latin.

We said, we're going to teach you Greek composition, Latin composition.

If you want to go to

on, you're going to have to learn French and German.

You got to get an MA.

We're going to teach you archaeology,

you know, literature, history, everything.

And we had about 28 classes.

At one time, we we had six professors at Fresno State.

And we got, I think over that 20 years, 50 people went to the Ivy League.

50 in Class Looks, our law school.

And it was wonderful.

But why didn't she do that?

Well, you know what?

Who would want to live?

She would think, who would want to live in Bakersfield?

Who would want a bunch of kids lining up outside my office every day?

Who would want to teach for nine hours and walk out in the parking lot and some kid come up to you and say, hey, Professor Hansen, I'm moving.

Can I borrow your pickup?

Yeah, pick it.

I don't care.

Bring it back tomorrow.

Or, hey, Professor Hansen, my mom baked a big pie for you.

You want to have pie over at Starbucks with me?

And, you know, get home at nine o'clock at night.

Or, you know, you get up at six in the morning.

There's students outside your office.

They don't want to do that.

They're too dirty.

That's called work.

Well, it's called elitism.

The left is very elite.

People, we forget that.

We keep thinking that they're still inhaling the fumes of FDR, who's a limousine liberal himself, or JFK, did all that.

But they're not populists.

They're not progressives.

They're not anything but elitist.

They like to be around rich people, and they think that they're very, very liberal as long as they do not have to go out and meet.

and eat with and marry and live among the people they champion in the abstract.

Which I'll just end today.

Always a $64,000 question for me when I meet these very, very wealthy white liberal high coastal elites.

And that is, was the whole race

thing they're obsessed with, was it a psychological condition?

You know what I mean by that?

A kind of like a medieval penance?

Yes.

Or, I don't know, a contractual

concession, you know, that they took out

with the Pope or something, their rational, I guess, earthly pope, whoever he is.

I guess he's green.

I guess he's the Davos guy, Klaus Schwab.

Did they make a deal?

And they say, you know what?

I can still be really, really

a good liberal person

if I champion

all of these causes, like BLM and stuff.

You know, I always tell that tale when I parked at Stanford, and this guy pulled up in the BMW with flip-flops and cutoffs, convertible.

He had a BLM sticker and an $80,000 car.

But was the deal behind these people?

As long as I do not have to live with people of color who are poor, I'll live with Oprah and Megan Markle, but I don't want to live with the poor.

I don't want to live with the white poor, but especially the minority poor or the conservative minority.

And I understand that, that that's a sin.

So I'm going to create a contract, a penance, that I'll still get to go to rational heaven and I'll still be in some kind of electric car utopia when I'm dead.

But, but,

but

I don't want to be around those people, but I will champion to death.

I'll be for affirmative action.

I will be for quotas.

I'll be for reparations as long as my kid gets into Harvard or Yale, and as long as I get to live in a gated community or a big, beautiful home with servants.

And nobody will call me a racist.

Nobody will call me a racist because, and this is a true story.

I won't mention, I got to be very careful because a person might be listening, although they're very left-wing, so I doubt it.

A person was saying to me,

I didn't like Mexifornia.

It was one of the first things I gave at the Hoover Institution a talk on Mexifornia, which, if you read it, it's for integration, assimilation, intermarriage.

And

it's a tragedy, the open borders, I was saying.

But it was a call for legal immigration in limited numbers so we can assimilate people as happens

very, and Mexican Americans make some of the best citizens in the United States.

So this person read it

and didn't like it, or I guess because they thought conservatives like it.

Well, anyway, it won the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award.

And this person was furious.

She had a friend that book didn't win.

And so she came up to me after a talk and she said, this is a racist book, Mexico.

Where'd you make up that name?

I said, I got it from the penal system.

I didn't.

And I said, I can give you the link.

I didn't make up the word Mexico.

People in the prison system call it Mexifornia sometimes.

And she said, it's just horrible.

And then she said this.

Now, I get along with Mexican-American people.

Now, there's Juan, Nita, and Jose.

She was naming all the, and she was, I said, could you leave, please?

You know, I just want, she was so obnoxious, but she was telling about her housekeeper, her nanny, her cook, her gardener, and that she had done the following.

I gave them sheets, all my used sheets.

And, you know, my, my husband had a car and he had some problems with it.

So he gave it to them.

And so I don't need, she, it was so condescending, you know what I mean?

That I'm in this white enclave and I'm better than everybody.

And all my minority friends work for me as servants.

And therefore, I can criticize you for living in Salma with your kids in public school and your family intermarried with different, you know what I mean?

It was just.

Yeah.

If you needed a cookie cutter print for wokeism, there you have it.

That's who they are.

That's who they are.

You know, that's why, and that was, I give credit to Barack Obama.

He was a genius.

He, he shook those guys down.

He understood.

You remember when Joe Biden said,

God, can you beat it?

He's the first clean black presidential candidate and he can speak.

That was the most racist thing.

And then Harry Wheat said, you know, and he can go in and out of a black guy.

Like, how great is that?

You know, and that really showed you that white liberal.

And Obama knew that.

He knew that.

He thought, you know what?

I'm going to take these stupid idiots.

They're going to give me money.

They're going to assuage their guilt.

And I'm going to make them feel guilty.

I'm going to unleash Michelle on them, never been proud, raise the bar,

downright mean country, just enough to get god them.

And then I'm going to reassure them that I'm their black guy that they feel comfortable about.

And they're going to give me tons of money and elect me.

And that was the whole purpose of that.

And then I'm going to go to the bathroom.

It was.

And then he went off to his little lazy paradise and doesn't have to do anything now.

And he's got tons of money.

Think about Obama.

One thing about Obama, you got to give him credit.

He always confessed his innermost sick thoughts publicly.

He always did.

So he knew he was lazy and he didn't have to do anything at Occidental or Columbia to get into Harvard.

He knew that.

You know what I mean?

Yes, I do.

Yes.

So what did he do?

He said on public interview, what's your biggest fault?

I'm lazy.

And then when they ask him why he was running for president, remember what he said?

Well, if I'm going to run, I just,

I'm going to take it serious.

I'm not just going to run to be famous and then cash in.

And after I'm over, you know, become a millionaire or something.

That's exactly what he did.

That's exactly what he did.

Yes, he did that every time.

I admired that about him in a weird way.

He was so arrogant that he couldn't suppress his innermost

narcissistic thoughts.

So now he's sitting on $100 million with three mansions.

And the only regret he has, he thinks, hmm,

I compromised because

they told me to, but Joe Biden was a white guy and he was more radical than I am.

And he's going to to be more famous in Woke Heaven than I am.

You know, when we go to Woke Heaven, he's going to have bigger wings than I do because he was more radical.

And so now every once in a while he thinks, hmm, it's kind of boring out here golfing.

Or, you know, I don't want to be bothered with, you know, looking at the view from Martha's Vineyard or the waves are too loud at my estate in Hawaii.

So I'm going to venture out and hold a press conference.

And he does.

You know what I mean?

He and his wife.

Well, you know, this is a racist country.

And, you know, we never know when our daughters are going to come back alive.

And then he just zoomed.

Or, you know,

there's a there's a funeral of a civil rights activist who's dead.

You go, it's time we got rid of the racist filibuster and let in Puerto Rico.

And well, got to go.

It's, you know, he does that.

He always goes to, he just gives his little Marxist little junkie talk and then he gets his slippers on and he gets his smoking jacket and he goes back into his mansion.

It's so funny.

He's sort of like Ultra and Megan Markle, you know, from one monoceto mansion to the other, whining about all the microaggressions they've suffered.

Yeah.

You know, I, yeah,

we're being a little cynical here with Obama, but there is a woman quite on the opposite side of the spectrum here that they've been interviewing lately that was part of the Jim Jordan's House Judiciary Committee interview.

He's killed by force.

Yes.

And you know, you know what amazes me?

Because she's, she basically is from the hood.

I mean, she says that herself, and she wanted to point out that Hank Johnson was not one day.

But, but what I really admire about her is, you know, she comes from a poor, in, you know, lower income, you know, probably didn't have a whole lot of opportunity of education, et cetera.

But she's can still really articulate her position very well.

I mean, she's like she's a voice from the hood, but there's so few and so rare that are really from the hood.

I mean, they're not like,

you know,

the regular politicians.

She hated her guts, too.

Yeah.

Because her name was, wasn't her name, Madeline?

Madeline Brom, B-R-A-M.

She was very articulate.

It didn't matter.

She was very bright.

She was 10 times smarter than the Democrats on the meeting.

And they thought they were going to demagogue her.

That guy who's the heir to all that Levi Strauss money and Goldman Sachs.

He was pontificating, and she just shut them down.

And they said, Well, you know, two of your attackers of your son were sentenced to life.

And she said, There were four,

four that equally beat him to death.

And where's the other two?

And like Jerry Nattler, and these people didn't care, but they don't like people like that because they're brighter than they are and they don't need them.

And it's like the subtext of that is:

I am self-educated.

I went to school.

I am 10 times smarter than you people up here.

I'm better spoken.

And I don't need you.

So don't condescend to me and lie to me.

And they're thinking, well,

because we're getting back to projection now, Sammy.

Yeah.

Because they are racist and they're thinking, hmm,

who does this person think?

All the things we've done for you and you treat us this way, that's how their attitude.

They do that with Clarence Thomas, Tom Soule, Shelby Steele.

Every time you see an African-American independent thinker that's 10 times smarter than your bankrupt white elite guy or woman, they get furious about it.

They hate them because they want to pat them on the head and said, we did this for you.

And they said, no, you didn't.

You didn't do a damn thing.

I'm self-built.

I'm smarter than you anyway.

I don't need you.

And what I liked about her is,

what I liked about her is she said, and there are criminals in our neighborhood and you're not catching them anymore.

And what we want is for you to do your job.

And if you're not doing your job, you shouldn't shouldn't be paid.

I love that.

And she said about

it she just looks at the world.

She sees it.

She's empirical.

Here's A, their goals B, conclusion C.

And they think they don't think that way.

And how dare you do that?

I've watched that all the time.

I would meet people who had met Tom Soule, and they would say, well, he was rude.

Or who does he think he is?

And I said, who does he think he is?

He's 10 times smarter than you.

That's who he thinks he is.

He doesn't want to put up with you.

And

same thing with Shelby, you know.

And it just, that white liberal kind of and people who see it, and you know, when you read some of the chapters in Shelby's books on white guild,

he just analyzes it and tells the truth about what is behind that left-wing obsession with race among white liberal wealthy people.

And deep, deep down, you keep probing and probing and peel off layer of this sick onion.

You get down to the core, and it's a fear of and a dislike of people.

And it's all projection and layers of layers of layers of liberal piety and liberal guilt.

And it's kind of like, we're going to give you all this stuff, just go away.

And then you don't really quite understand it until somebody doesn't go away.

And they don't need that stuff.

It said, not this pig.

I don't need your stuff.

And then you think, oh my God,

he just canceled out my very existential racial view who does he think he is i can't be guilty and give people stuff that won't hurt me i can't self-segregate and call myself an integrationist who are these people

i i walk across the stanford campus and i think half of them are there on campus

and it's really

Boy, you talk to people like that and

they are, they get angry.

i uh

i'll just finish with one last anecdote i think i've mentioned it to you sammy i have given i don't know i've probably given a thousand lectures i have never ever

ever had as much hatred as i gave an interview on kqed or the radio station And I said in there, they asked me to comment on

a column I wrote, syndicated column.

And I said,

there's a housing shortage.

It was about

all the Mexican-American people who were coming from Salinas and driving 50 miles into Palo Alto, and they were living in buses, you know, along.

If you've been to El Camino, you see that.

And they all work for Google and

they're sort of colonizing the wealthy white people going into East Palo Alto and buying up land.

So I said, We have a housing shortage, and the people who are in the service economy for these these zillionaires should get affordable housings and they can't do it because the developers can't make a profit on it so i suggest that from woodside on 280 up to south san francisco

there is a 50 mile triangle to the ocean and it's some of the most beautiful land in california and guess what you've got a six-lane freeway 280 that's on your serve you have a what five-mile reservoir, Crystal Springs Reservoir, with California Water Project Water.

It would be very easy to extend the BART line down the 280, and you could put high-density

housing, and you could give

incentives for developers.

And instead of people living 10 people to a garage in Redwood City or having to drive all the way into Salinas, they could have it, they'd have a really good, you could charge them $150,000.

I went through it.

I could not believe it.

I got so much hate mail

that finally the public radio called and said, Mr.

Hansen, have you been getting a lot of hate mail?

And I said, yes.

And they said, well, we aired it.

We aired this and we're getting all this.

Would you come on and talk?

And I did.

And these people were incredible.

They would call up and say things like,

you're an idiot.

And I said, now, why am I an idiot?

And they said, we have a polo field.

And one of the nice things about our polo field is we have cypress trees and we don't have to see neighbors.

We're going to get all kinds of stuff in there.

I said, join the club.

And then

two weeks later, I had to give a talk in San Francisco to a group.

And guess what?

About four people showed up.

They were so angry.

They hated my guts.

They actually showed up for the talk and they disrupted it.

And I'm talking about wealthy, wealthy people disrupting.

I've never seen that before or since.

They said, you should just get back to Fresno.

You're disgusting.

I read your article, and I'm here to tell you you're an idiot.

The last thing we need in this pristine natural wildlife preserve is a bunch of high, ugly high-rises.

And you can just go back to Fresno where you belong.

And that's what they do down in Fresno.

We're not going to do it up here.

I could not believe it.

The only closest time when they wanted to make high-speed rail, all the people in the Bay Area thought it was great.

And then each city

in the proposed entry, remember?

Yeah.

San Jose, San Jose, Sunnyvale, get closer, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park.

In other words, the rail line was going to go right through Pacheco Pass into Silicon Valley.

And then it was going to go over the San Luis Reservoir, kind of mimic

152 and then kind of go between I-5 and 99.

And that would be the logical thing.

And you'd think you'd start it where there was the high-profile traffic.

So you'd start in San Francisco and you would build it near the Caltrans line, high-speed rail, and you would go.

And this is what they all voted for.

And guess what?

They all said, no,

no, no, no.

You go down there in the valley where those poor, stupid people are and give them a bunch of money and we'll try it and see if it worked, but don't try it on us.

So you go down to Madeira and Bakersfield, and you go through all that beautiful farmland.

You take the farmland.

You destroy those 200-acre oaks.

You go through the south part of Fresno and you destroy those small businesses.

That's what we need.

We need that experiment.

They need the money.

Go down there.

That's what they did.

Now we need to

100 miles of

high-speed to nowhere.

It'll never be built, but it's going to be Bakersfield to what, Merced?

Something like that.

Madera.

Completely useless.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm thinking, I got to go to the Bay Area.

Everybody's going, I got to go to the Bay Area.

So I'll drive all the way to Fresno and then take high-speed rail for 20 miles and then take a bus.

Yeah, exactly.

Anyway, all right, Victor.

Well, with that, I would like to thank you for a wonderful escape for the weekend that was really just absolutely fascinating.

So I appreciate that.

And I'm sure your listeners do too.

Thank you, everybody.

I much appreciate it.

We had a lot of topics today, so I hope I didn't get off topic too much.

No, we didn't.

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