Invasion, Migration? Some Thoughts

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Hello, you've joined the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is a commentator and analyst of current politics and past political and military affairs.

He is a trained classicist and philologist, and he's written much about both the ancient and modern worlds.

And today is our weekend episode, so we're going to

look into history.

And the topic today is going to be the barbarian invasions.

We'll do also some current political events along with it.

So stick with us, and we'll be right back to start the show.

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

Victor, I know that we're trying to start our shows these days, trying to look at something a little bit more optimistic or at least a little bit lighter.

And so, this today, I've noticed something in the papers about Don Lemon or Don Lemon.

I'm not sure how he likes it pronounced, but apparently, CNN is letting out all of the misogynistic episodes he's had in his career at CNN and maybe is looking to try to let him go in some way, shape, or form.

And I thought that that was kind of interesting.

If they do want to let him go, they're having a hard time doing it.

But boy, he's a real nasty piece of work when it comes to the women in his.

Yeah, he's a misogynist.

He was the one that was put on, I guess it was enforced leave for suggesting Nikki Hagey was over the hill and that women, therefore, in general, once they're not able to produce children or over the hill, I guess his analogy was that men can at any age and therefore they were somewhat superior in their maturity.

I don't know.

But the way that this society is warped, there is no more meritocracy.

So if you look, I mean, I remember when he was talking about the lost airliner in the Indonesian

sector of the Pacific when he said it was swallowed up by a black hole or something to that effect.

So

by any standard of journalistic ethics or expertise or knowledge, he wouldn't be where he is.

And that's not picking on him.

It's just that as a black gay man

who is, I guess, charismatic.

I don't find him charismatic, but I'm told that he is, that he's not going to be fired in the same way that others would be fired.

That's just a fact of life in certain professions, media,

academia,

Hollywood, etc.

So he knows that.

And then when a person knows that, then

all sorts of bad things happen.

It's sort of like in a small town that I grew up.

And there's a meritocracy in sports, but there were a lot of parents that had stellar athletic careers themselves and never forgot it in high school.

And they were in their 40s and they would come down and talk to the coach and they would volunteer to do what?

They would volunteer to tape the football games, to do the flags at the, you know, the first down markers at halftime, hand out towels, you name it.

And then their children were elevated.

into first string slots, and that really hurt the team and everybody understood it.

And,

you know, I guess one coach, I think I recall complaining, you know, he was kind of,

we saw him at a pizza parlor, just to take the example.

And he was had a couple of beers.

He said, yeah, we don't get the best people, but then it all evens out because all the small towns do that.

But my point is, anytime you substitute anything, anything, anything for meritocracy.

And it's very hard to have

a blind meritocracy, but when you do, good things happen.

But the media, especially MSNBC, when you see a person like Jory Reed on there who's an outright, I think she's a racist.

She can't open her mouth without going into a collective pejorative stereotype of white people, white, white, white.

And I don't know at what date that word became exclusively a pejorative.

Maybe it was 2002, 2001.

But people used to talk about if they were racialists, they would at least say black, brown, white.

And then they'd have to add adjectives to make them either enhanced or detract from them.

But in the case of white, you should say white, and it's supposed to be bad.

So, all these people

that

are in the identity politics movement feel that

they're substituting particular criteria other than meritocracy.

In some sense, all of this woke is a competition among elites, bicosto elites in the corporate world, in entertainment, in the professions, in the media,

even in sports, and where the meritocracy is not completely,

it's not used.

It's kind of been substituted for diversity, equity, inclusion.

And that's the problem.

And I don't know where

you're talking about Don Lamond, and who cares about...

CNN, but when you start talking to

about our future judges and lawyers, and you look at Stanford Law School, and all of a sudden they've gone from, what, a 4% flunk rate of the first taking of the bar to 14%.

And either one or two things are going to happen.

They're going to have to change their admissions back to Merocratic, or they're going to have to change the bar because you can't pay $100,000 in room board and tuition and then flunk 14% of the second-rated

law school in the country.

14% can't pass the bar.

You want my guess on what they're going to to do?

They're going to lower the standards of the ball.

Well, they already have once.

So that's that.

I did think one thing he said was that

went against him.

That was interesting.

He said that

men's soccer players should be paid more than women's soccer players, which would be a

evaluation based on how many viewers they bring in and ergo, the money they bring in, then they should be paid

according to that, right?

And

that did not get him any good mileage on a left-wing news media.

Yeah, I mean,

Don Lamon, remember, he was the one that was accused of putting his hand down his trousers and then sticking it in front of a stranger at a bar and asking him to smell it to distinguish his sexual preference.

He was sued.

I don't know how that was settled, but

he's not a, he just says crazy things on the

presumption that

he's exempt, that there's, he cannot be fired.

Yes.

And once that happens to anybody, whether it's because of race or sex or gender or money or contacts, then as I said, bad things happen.

That's what's wrong with the Saudi royal family.

That whole country is stocked with people that have tribal ties ties to the royal family.

They're part of the royal family, I should say.

And they're not, that's what's wrong with a country with all that money.

You'd think it would be the leader in brain surgery or something, but it can't because it doesn't work on meritocracy.

And trust me, if this country continues as it has the last three to five years,

there's no reason why we won't end up the same.

Whether it's trained derailings or near-misses and aircraft or flunking the bar or

medical

problems,

incompetent doctors, incompetent lawyers, and more Alvin brags.

It's going to,

there's no escaping an iron law of history that if you do not have a meritocracy, and that's what Western civilization's greatest contribution was, that it transcended identity and race.

And for all the talk about white, white, white, white, white, no, it had a system that was able to incorporate other people.

And that's why this country that was about 96% white at its founding

was able to incorporate people who did not look like the founders.

So we started out with a progression that you did not have to be British

to rise to the top.

And then you didn't have to be British Isles.

And then you didn't have to be Northern European.

And then you didn't have to be Southern European.

And then you didn't have to be European.

And to where we are at the present.

Tribalism is a much stronger tie than meritocracy.

And so you have to redouble the efforts to destroy it.

And yet, in our infinite insanity,

we're restoring tribalism.

Yeah.

Well,

I was wondering just a few things today before we turn to the barbarian invasions.

Did you have any reflections, further reflections?

I know we talked just briefly about it in the last episode that we did, that the Chicago mayorial race went to the teacher union-backed progressive Democratic candidate rather than the police union-backed Democratic candidate.

Does it say anything about our country, the state of our country right now, do you think?

Or is that just

Chicago?

Yeah, it's the same thing about the Milwaukee, excuse me, me, the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.

We're not at ground, we haven't bottomed out yet.

So there's more people in Chicago that want free things and they want a racialized spoil system analogous to the Irish or something in New York or the

ethnic, Polish, ethnic lobby in Chicago at one time.

They would prefer that.

Still, it gives more benefits to the majority, they feel, than it does

endanger them by greenlighting gang warfare, basically.

And so, at some point, that will stop.

But it's hard because candidates are not candid what they say they're going to do and what they do.

I mean, look at Eric Adams in New York.

He was the heartthrob of all of these liberal people.

He said, We've got a liberal who really is going to keep our city safe.

No, anybody knew he wouldn't because he'd said before, as a police

grandee in the police union, he said, you know, I'm the guy who takes on the crackers.

That was a racist thing to say.

And everything he's said since then makes sense in that vein.

So it's very hard for people to be able to distinguish what a candidate's actually going to do.

But

and then the other thing is we talked before, their constituencies are leaving the big cities that would vote for something that's sober.

And, you know, for law and order or fiscal responsibility or infrastructure renewal and repair, those people have gone.

They've said, you know what?

I pay a lot of taxes and I get nothing in return.

I'm going to Tennessee.

I'm going to Florida.

I'm going to Arizona.

I'm going to Texas or Nevada, where there's either no or very little income tax.

And they leave me alone.

I'm not going to sit here and pay, you know, 12% city and state taxes, California, or 8%, 9%, and

Minnesota, and then get these schools and get this crime.

I'm too old, Sammy.

I feel this because

I look at the Fresno Bee, I look at KMPH website every morning, and it's just a litany in Fresno of gang banger shoot somebody, person kill, hit and run accident, person Maine, person shoots at police,

7-Eleven rob every single day.

And

we get to the point where what do you do about it?

You just keep arresting and incarcerating.

You'd have to put 10% of the population in jail.

And three strikes worked because in California, because it was very safe in the 90s, excuse me, in the early 2000s, it was.

But we had a lot of people incarcerated.

And you just,

you know, you...

you have to get these people,

these people who have criminal profiles, you have to get them, you have to do something with them.

And a lot of it is the broken home.

A lot of it is the dysfunctional economy.

I'm not trying to excuse their behavior, but when you're in California, a young couple, and you are in Fresno or Stockton or Bakersfield, much less, you know, Monterey or Santa Cruz, and you want to get a 1,500 square foot home and it's $400,000 or $500,000 at 8% or 7%, what do you do?

You just rent and then you get crowded conditions and then you're in a bad neighborhood and then and then

all sorts of things are, and then you know the police don't enforce the law or if they do enforce the law, they're racist.

And people get what they, what they, they want, I suppose, in a way, but this society can't come out and say, I'm for the middle class, I'm for affordable housing, I'm for affordable gasoline, I'm for affordable power, I'm for disciplined schools.

It's much easier to say, I'll do what I want, and then it's as Heidi owes me this, and it's racist or sad, all that stuff.

And that's where we are.

Yeah.

Well, we're also at an open border.

And so I thought maybe some news from the border would be appropriate here.

In the last 48 hours, borderreport.com has reported that 10,000 illegal immigrants have been apprehended.

And among them are five sex offenders, four wanted individuals, one gang member, 52 pounds of fentanyl, 38 pounds of ecstasy, 11 pounds of meth, and 11 pounds of cocaine.

And I was wondering if you had any reflections on our border situation.

I know that partly what I'm trying to do is everything is Donald Trump out there right now.

And so this episode is about getting away from that and looking at other things that are important to us.

But did you have any reflections on the border?

Yeah, I mean, every time

Jo Mayorkas is called in to testify and account for what he's doing, he says the border is secure, that's a tip-off that it's not.

He just said it was secure.

Joe Biden's people have said it was secure.

Their definition of secure is open to get constituents in on the expectation there's going to be the type of people coming in as well, as you mentioned, but they're not going to be at one of Barack Obama's three homes or Joe Biden's three homes or Nancy Pelosi's three homes or the mansion that Dianne Feinstein lives in or Gavin Newsom's.

They're just not going to be around there.

Although we did have a, you know, we had a tech mogul, a very young, successful guy, be stabbed to death in San Francisco yesterday.

And so right on the street.

I think it was in the Russian Hill area.

Yeah, that's sad.

Yeah, so the point is that you can't escape it.

But when you're letting people in for the cheap political advantage of getting future constituents, and you don't audit them.

And if you're in Mexico and you've created a crime or you're engaged in pornography or drugs, what would you do?

Would you say, I'm going to just wait till the authorities find me or I have to pay them off?

Or would you go to the United States anonymously where there's a bunch of sheep and you're the wolf?

So that's what happens.

We'll talk at the end of the broadcast about the invasions of the fifth and fourth century AD at Rome, but somewhat similar, what's happened.

Well, let's go ahead and take a break and we have a few commercials and then we'll be back to talk about the barbarian invasions.

You are listening to the Victor Davis Hansen show.

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So Victor, let's go ahead then and talk about the barbarian invasions.

And I thought, you know, like I always do, why don't I let you go ahead and give us an account of the barbarian invasions?

And then I have some questions.

And I think that there's a lot that's very pertinent to today, but go ahead.

Well,

for a variety of reasons in the fifth and sixth, excuse me, fifth and sixth centuries, that's in the 400s and 500s, but especially in the fifth century, the traditional borders of Rome broke down.

the Danube and the Rhine rivers.

And the operating principle had been that in a cost-benefit analysis, it was not worth, as you read in Caesar's Gallic Wars, it was not worth, or Tacitus' Germania, it's not worth going into Germany and dealing with very fierce tribes given the climate and the lack of

benefits versus the dangers.

So there were firm borders.

But, you know, by the 400s, the central...

The central city was breaking down.

The capital was being moved away from those borders.

So the capital would go to Milan, it would go to Constantinople,

go to Ravenna, and then finally, you know, when the empire was divided,

it was in Constantinople.

And so there was an inability to deal with an open border.

And what happened, the Vandals, for example,

they came into Rome in 410 and sacked the city.

At that point,

I mean, where are you?

Sort of like San Francisco is being sacked.

It was gone.

And then it recovered.

And then we had Gothic, Osgoth, Viscoth invasion.

The Huns were stopped in the 450s in northern Italy.

They didn't get in.

They were the most fierce.

And they were part of the reason that Vandals and Goths and Viscoth, Osgoths came in because they were under pressure from a much more,

a much more, even a fiercer group of tribal migrations.

And

anyway, when you,

you know, when you had the Osgoths and Theodoric and all of these barbarians, then the effort was to try to,

there was still enough people that were Christian and Roman to try to

assimilate them.

And you could argue that they had some success.

But all of North Africa was lost.

It was under the Vandal kingdom for about 100 years.

These were a Polish-Germanic tribe.

We use the word Vandal.

They were very fierce and they looted.

And when Belisars, the Byzantine general, took back in the 530s North Africa, he found a lot of the treasures of Sicily and Rome that had been carried off all the way to Carthage.

But these series of attacks in the West then toppled the government.

And this is the great mystery of ancient history.

And it's something like this.

Why did the Eastern Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, remember at this time, was

Asia Minor,

Eastern Europe, what would be now the Balkans, and Thrace, and Syria, today's Syria, and parts of Iraq, and all the way down to Egypt.

Why did they sustain these attacks?

And they were in the fourth century, Valens was defeated at Adrianople.

That's that became, remember, Adrianopolis.

That became the Turkish Ottoman capital before the capture of Constantinople.

So people can't figure out why the East was able to hold off these invasions.

And classical scholars say, well, Constantinople had the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmora and the Bosphorus, and it had the walls, the Theodician walls of Constantinople with the greatest fortifications.

And the ancient world was harder for the barbarians to cross

these types of impediments than it was the Rhine and Danube.

Some people say, well, the Eastern orthodoxy, which wasn't orthodox yet, but there were fewer schisms, if I could use that term, among Eastern Christianity than there was Western.

The Greek part of the empire was much wealthier, so that Constantinople, in terms of miles, was much closer to Alexandria, much closer to Antioch, much closer to Thessaloniki, Nicopolis, all the sources of commercial wealth than was Rome.

I don't know how you adjudicate all that, but the mystery is so that the empire essentially by 500 was gone in the West.

I don't know what you mean by gone, but the central government.

So, if you start to read earlier letters or testimonials by Augustine or Jerome

or Gregory of Tours much later, you see,

or you can read Procopius, fountains are clogged up, aqueducts don't work, there's not glass manufacturer, the roads are not kept up, kind of like California.

And everything started to unwind, and people migrated to fortified farms or monasteries.

And that was pretty much the situation from in the West in the so-called Dark Ages from 500 to 800 AD, but not in Constantinople.

Latin started to be displaced by Greek.

You had a University of Constantinople under the Emperor Justinian, 520s and 530s, even to the 540s.

You had the 537,

the founding of the greatest church in Christendom for a thousand years, Hagia Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, the Justinian law code.

The

cisterns had about two years' supply of water, aqueducts from over 100 miles to feed the city.

And that empire was vast and it got bigger.

So there was an effort in Justinian's crazy mind that he was going to reclaim all of what had been lost to the barbarians.

And a series of brilliant invasions by two brilliant generals, the eunuch Narsus and Belisarius, they took all of North Africa back.

They took Sicily back.

They took Eastern Europe,

Eastern Europe back, they took Dalmatia.

They took almost two-thirds of Italy back, and they kept it for over 150 years.

And until the Arab invasions of North Africa, and then later the Lombards, et cetera, and Franks.

But my point is, why did the East do that?

And there's a lot of explanations, as I said.

But the second question about all of these invasions and rise and fall is

a very existential one.

So think a minute.

The West is in decline.

It's fragmented.

The empire has now broken up into petty kingdoms and tribal territories.

So we're starting to see, not not until about 800 Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire, but we're talking about Germans and Franks and

Lombards and Viscos, and they're all becoming slowly

settled.

And they all have been converted to Christianity.

And there's all, you know, there's the Donatists and the Manichaeans and all of these schisms.

But in

In the East, these people are calling themselves still Romanoi, the Romans.

They feel that they are the Romans, even though they speak Greek.

And

that has, you know, eddies, ups and downs.

But under some emperors, like Heraclius, it booms.

Leo, it booms.

And it goes on, Sammy, from

the founding of the city by Constantine in 336,

7.

It goes on for 1,100 years.

But this is what I don't understand.

A lot of people can understand it.

So with this continuity of civilization, the West is a mess.

But then,

in the 13 and 14 and 1500s,

there's starting to be the pre-Renaissance, which doesn't quite happen to the same degree in Constantinople.

They keep alive Hellenism, and the threat of the Ottomans in the 15th century will bring hundreds of scholars.

But why, to take an arbitrary date on May 29th, 1453, why is Constantinople, that's been in existence for 1,100 years, hoping beyond hope that Venetians

and people from Spain and Crete and the Genovese and

all of these Italians, why are they hoping that they come over with sophisticated crossbows and galleys?

Not that

the Byzantines weren't sophisticated to help them.

And people say, well, the Fourth Crusade in 1204 leveled and they never recovered.

But what I'm getting at is that this dynamic Western civilization was disrupted in the West, where it wasn't in the East, but in a challenge, response, breaking apart, conglomerating back together.

There was a dynamism there.

And by the early Renaissance in the 15th century Renaissance, you had the making of what would become modern Europe.

And

the East was a continuous static civilization that had, you know, the walls of Constantinople were never,

never broached, the land wall at least, until 1453.

The Crusaders came through or the maritime, and they were pretty much let in by a claimant to the throne.

So

it's one of the sadnesses that this Roman Western civilization was completely continuous all the way into the 15th century.

And I don't know if it could have continued, but it had fought off the Rus,

the Huns,

you name it.

It had been able to survive all of those invasions in a way the West hadn't and could collapse.

And yet, when the West recalibrated and was reborn, it was as dynamic or more dynamic.

If you look at the Venetian Empire or the Genovese or the people from Genoa or the exploration of the New World.

And

if they had just hung on a little longer, everybody says Constantinople was doomed.

Come on, they only have 50,000 people in the walls.

They used to have a million.

Yes, their whole empire had shrunken just to the Peloponnese, the Morea in Greece, and a little bit of kingdoms on the Black Sea, and not much beyond Constantinople.

Yes, but things were happening in the 15th century.

The tumult of the Ottomans and the Seljuk Turks and the disruption of the silk routes had panicked people in the West.

And they felt there has to be a way to trade with the East, India, China, spices, silk, etc.

And they were beginning in the 15th century, they were all the way down, almost down the coast of Africa.

They were out in the Canary Islands, and they were developing seagoing galleons in a way the Ottomans weren't, even the Byzantines weren't.

So had they hung on, there was going to be a radical shift again

to Western Europe because they were going to, within 1492, just 40 years later, they were going to be in the New World.

And they alone had the navigational skills, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, to

extrapolate the wealth of the New World and then the wealth of China and India by going around the Cape of Good Hope.

and that was pretty much the story hereafter and the ottomans sunk into

uh you know they were no they were stopped at the gates of vienna twice but uh after le panto in 1571 they were done with their expansionary phase and i think you could say from 1650 on it was declined while there was this robust western europe And I think

the Byzantines, had they survived a little longer, and I think they could have, they would have been, you would have seen in Asia Minor a renaissance of Western,

excuse me, Christian Roman culture was not extant.

Roman meaning Greek-speaking Hellenic, as they called themselves.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have a question on the Roman, how somebody's going to recognize when they have

exited one culture and entered another.

And

I'm partly inspired by what you said on, I think you were on Tucker and you said, we're in a revolution and we don't know it.

And I was wondering, the person on the ground, how do they know that it's no longer the Roman Empire?

We're now in a warlord West.

Is it the law, for example?

It was Salek law now.

And it's a good interpretation.

There's about six or seven telltale signs that all our listeners can determine

to the degree of which civilization is collapsing.

Number one is safety.

That's what destroyed life in Western Europe in the 5th century.

People were not safe.

That meant, what do I mean by that?

That meant if you had a farm in Tuscany,

you were going to be subject, your grandfather was going to be subject to being killed, or your grandmother destroyed by a Vandal invasion.

or you were going to be attacked by Huns, or you were going to be ended by Viscoth or Oscars.

And if you were out in the Eastern Empire and you were on the wrong side, the European side of the Darnales, you were going to be in big trouble

by Huns.

So my point is, that's one thing.

Number two is the infrastructure.

You start to see the aqueducts do not work.

The cisterns are not kept up.

The Great Cistern at Constantinople, for example.

The walls, the fortifications, the defenses of the country start to erode.

So let's look at that, just those two, and we'll just pause.

Is it safer now in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Washington and Baltimore than it was, say, in 1990?

I don't think so.

I've walked in New York and Times Square at midnight in 1995, and I wouldn't do it today.

Is the infrastructure better?

Is

California aqueducts and reservoirs and high-speed

and the 101 and the I-5 and the 99.

Is all that superior to what we had 20 years ago?

Is it safer now to drive from Fresno to Bakersfield and the 99?

They're expanding the lanes, or was it safer 30 years ago?

And I think you can say that is in decline.

And then you go into the educational system.

And people, there were not private tutors, or there were not academies, or the library at

Alexandria or

the libraries in Athens, but library, there were dysfunctional or they were gone.

Are universities better?

If you got a BA, if you were an employer, if you're an employer listening, would you rather hire

a Stanford student with a degree in electrical engineering five years ago or today?

Would you rather hire an English major 40 years ago, say, I don't know, 1983 or today?

Would you rather have, if if you were going to be,

I don't know, you needed an archivist, would you hire a Stanford history major 30 years ago or today?

And so if you were going to listen to the news, would you feel that an Eric Severide, a John Chancellor, Walter Cronkite,

Frank Reynolds, all of these reporters, all on the left side, would they be more informed and more professional than what we see today?

And so I think you can see educationally we're in decline, safety-wise we're in decline, infrastructure we're on decline.

You have more confidence in the U.S.

military to do what?

Protect us.

And is the border more secure today or 30 years ago or 50 years ago?

Are people more likely to attack the United States or to question it today or 30 years ago?

And that's what I try to do.

I just try to look at history and then get a disinterested group series collectives of criteria and then apply them to the present if I can without being prejudicial.

When you look at the legal system, that was very important.

That's why Justinian, one of the first things he thought was to have a flourishing civilization and reclaim the empire, we have to have a codified system of law.

Theodasius had started it, but he finished it, the Justinian code.

And that was the basic basis for all European law.

It's the basis for the Napoleonic Napoleonic quote.

And ask yourself today,

if a person commits a crime, will he be more likely arrested, indicted, convicted, and incarcerated today or 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, 60 years ago?

Is the law more equitable today?

Or 30 years ago?

Is it more biased, asymmetrical, politicized, weaponized today?

Is the FBI a more professional organization, more adept at what it does?

How about the FFA, the Federal Aviation Administration?

Do you feel safer in a plane and travel leaving LAX today or 10 years ago, even though we have enormous advances in technology?

Some of this can be mitigated because, of course,

When you go to an emergency room like I did, the doctor,

whatever their particular training, is going to get a protocol right on the computer from some brilliant research center, right?

And that will tell them exactly what to do.

But

that's not a substitute for expertise.

So when I look at all those criteria of education, medicines, defense, security, infrastructure,

you can see how it started to unwind.

People were aware of that in Rome.

And you can read the confessions and the letters

of Augustine.

He was at Hippo when it was being, what, surrounded by vandals and he starved to death, apparently.

And it would have been very tragic to live in North Africa in the

four or you know, the 480s or under the vandals.

And the tragedy is once it was liberated and it was only in Byzantine or Daesh Roman hands again for about 100 years and then the Arab conquest came and it was back where it would be, and the Berbers and the indigenous people were conquered by Arabs.

So I guess that's what everybody should ask themselves, is are things getting better and will they get better?

Are they getting worse?

And if they're getting worse, why are they getting worse?

And what's happening?

And I think it's kind of like your house.

You have a house.

Let's say your parents give you a house and it looks pretty good.

And you're just sitting there and you're never thinking that you have an obligation to the house.

So the roof looks good at 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and then one day at 40 years, it starts leaking.

You think,

what's happening to me?

I don't have any money.

I bought a new car.

I went on a vacation.

I went to Vegas.

I don't know.

Why do I have to fix a roof?

You know, the gutter, the plumbing, the sewage.

And so these

systems have to be constantly repaired and reinvested in.

And if you don't do that, maintenance, and that maintenance can be abstract or concrete.

So,

anyway, that's, I think that's people are aware, we're aware of things were falling apart.

And people are aware when things are going good.

They can't believe things are going good.

For just a brief moment,

I don't know where that moment we would, just a brief moment, somewhere, I don't know, in mid-2019,

we we started to see things right on the right before COVID, you know what I mean?

Right around

July to November, we started to see record low minority unemployment.

We had low crime, we had 2% GDP, we had 1.6% inflation, the military had been bolstered, the NATO alliance had reinvested

$100 million

and

excuse me, $100 billion

equivalent in Euros.

And there was a sense that even though people,

Donald Trump was not popular, he didn't get 51%,

things were working well.

And he had reached out to people of different races, and the whole race thing was starting to subside.

And then it all fell apart, I think, with COVID and then the weaponization, politicalization, the lockdowns, the rioting, et cetera.

Yeah, if I can get back to the barbarian invasions, how significant do you think they are to the end of the Roman Empire?

Because when you were talking, I was thinking, okay, the military was having struggles for a good hundred, 200 years before the fifth century, as were the replacement of emperors, et cetera.

So the government was in a struggle or

falling and in a struggle.

And that's the old question.

You know, I think there was a German scholar wrote a book, an essay about causes of the Roman Empire, and he tried to collate all of the published causes.

I think there was 200 of them, everything from inflation to lead in the pipes and everything else.

But

it wasn't just abrupt in 476.

It had been going on for a century of people,

the

productive classes.

There was high taxation.

There was religious disunity.

There were coups and disruptions in the succession.

There were renaissance in the third century.

There was a renaissance.

There was a renaissance at the end of the first century AD that went all the way into the early

second century for 100 years.

Gibbons said the five good emperors was the best time to be alive in the history of civilization.

But

there was, I think you could say by 350,

What do I mean by that?

I'll give you one example.

You have legions.

There were certain protocols.

Legionnaires couldn't marry.

They were not local.

They were transferred.

But by 350,

you were short.

The fertility rate had gone down and you were starting to incorporate Germans and Germanic-speaking peoples that had come across the Danube and Rhine.

And you were Latinizing them, Christianizing them, say, by 300,

350.

They were localized, but that means that their first loyalties were to their tribe and to their locale.

You couldn't say to a legion on the Rhine, we need you in Carthage or we must go to Alexandria.

You couldn't.

They just, a lot of them we know from letters didn't read or write Latin very well at all.

There was literature, we think

illiteracy was on

the climb again.

So

it's very important to make sure that you have a unity.

When you start to see a civilization unravel as Rome did, then you start to see the tribal or ethnic element assert itself.

So when they say barbarians, we don't mean that every single person south

and east of the Rhine and Danube was Roman and spoke Latin, and everybody on the other side were shaggy barbarians with blue eyes and sunburned skins.

No, what we mean was that there was a larger and larger number of people that, if they were in the province of Iberia, they were starting to speak a Latin

that reflected medieval Spanish in the same way as Latin was starting to resemble elements of what would become Italian in the same way that

and what do I mean by that?

I mean the Latin case endings on declensions or the conjugations were not fully adopted.

Kind of like today people say who and whom interchange.

I don't hear anybody say whom anymore.

I try to, but it sounds pretentious when you do.

And if you look at the dialect of English, it's ungrammatical now.

In fact, it's taught that way.

But the language is starting to reflect the idea,

the reality that there's a lot of people who are unable to speak.

It's either their second or third language, or they're not educated.

And so the language has to adopt.

And that's what happened with Latin.

And that you can see linguistically or philologically, you can see that as early as 400.

And starting words.

Yeah.

I mean,

if you're in Iberia and

let's say,

oh,

after the put down of Satorius, let's say by the, I don't know, 20,

50, 100 AD, BC, it was pretty much Latinized, at least well beyond the Ebro River.

And people, when they wanted to say horse, they said equus.

Okay, they were native Iberians.

But I would say if you were in there at 400 AD, they were using the word cabalis,

you know, caballo for pony or something.

They were not using the proper Latin word.

And you can see that distinction.

in a lot of the provincial dialects and the vocabulary.

You can see it in the vocabulary and the grammar.

And you can see it here as well with certain words.

And

when you saw the trial of Trayvon Martin and one of the, I think his girlfriend was asked if she knew what this, did she write this or did she know a document and they handed it to her?

She couldn't read it, remember?

And she said, I don't know what cursive is.

I remember that.

She said, I have no idea what cursive is.

And then, of course, a lot of people on the conservative side said, this is a

sign of our education.

Then the left said, oh, how dare you?

You don't need to know how to write cursive.

Well, you do, because cursive at the end of the medieval period was a great minuscule writing.

Cursive was a great step forward from unctual capitals.

It's very hard to write capitals.

And people have argued that the Greeks themselves,

the classical Greeks, never really got a minuscule.

ability to write fluently like the Byzantines did,

because it's so much easier to have a cursive script.

And when she was saying she never was taught that, that was kind of a sign of a breakdown in society.

The literacy rate,

just ask yourself, is the S, we threw out the SAT, but before we threw out the SAT, was it going up or down scores?

And when it was going down, did it have to be recalibrated to be made easier?

And our missions,

if you want to go to Yale or Harvard Law School, did Alan Bragg really get, did he really get a very high SAT, LSAT and a perfect competitive GPA to get into law school?

Did Michelle Obama?

I don't think, I'm not saying that because they're African American.

I just, based on what they've said since they graduated from law school, they don't reflect the type of learning that you would think comes from admitting one out of 200 people.

And

that's,

and I'm sure there's a lot of very wealthy people who are white or Asian that had connections that are

the same would be true of them.

But the meritocracy is not there as it was.

No, it sure isn't.

We're listening to Victor Davis Hansen, and he's talking to us about the barbarian invasions and some of the reflections we see in modern history.

We're going to take a break and come right back to finish off that conversation and then maybe look at a few more news stories.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

And Victor, you were just finishing on the barbarian invasions.

And,

you know, I always bring questions, and I think you've answered everything.

My one that I think you were just answering was,

how did it transform culture, the barbarian invasions?

And I think

maybe what you didn't emphasize that I think is important is that When we say barbarian invasions, it's not just invasions, but migration as well.

And so lots of, probably even more Germans came across the Danube and the Rhine

just to live in Rome because it offered a lot more material well-being.

That's a good point.

There were the military,

the military migrations, and then they're the type of migrations that Caesar in the 50s BC outlined and they continue.

And these were familial.

Not completely, but a lot of it was the pressure of the Hans Attila.

As they swept into Eastern Europe, they pressed the Eastern Europeans like the Vandals.

They pressed on the Goths and Viscos.

And then in succession, these people started to go where there was a lot of opulence and wealth.

And they figured that it was much easier for a tribal group to go across the Danube or Rhine, much less risk, than to stay where they were and fight the intruder.

And this...

The same thing happened to the Byzantine Empire.

Oh, in the 14th, 13th century, if you were in Asia Minor or in the Syrian border and the Seljuk Turks were starting to swarm toward you, then it was easier to, if you were an indigenous tribe, to go

westward and appropriate Byzantine lands than it would be to fight the Seljuks,

which became the Ottomans.

And so, yeah, they were family migrations.

And

I think a lot of people,

if I could be reductionist, a lot of the wealth

ceased to be created at the same level, say in the third, second, or first century AD, by the fifth century.

By that I mean you didn't have regular food importation from Egypt, from Alexandria to Ostia at Rome.

You didn't have the same level of glass manufacture.

So if you look at, if you're excavating Corinth, you'll see less glass in

450 AD than you will in 200 AD.

And so

that's a barometer that materially you can't find things.

And I think that's kind of true today.

Last year when I was trying to rebuild this old ancient house, I couldn't get Romex.

I couldn't and everybody said, well, Victor, that's unfair.

That was just a shortage because of the supply chain.

No, it wasn't.

Today, when I go into Home Depot, I find two things in my community.

I can't find the product, or the clerk says, have you checked the knobs on this

blower you bought?

Or did you open the package and make sure?

Because people steal things right off the package that doesn't have a barcode on.

And when I go in there, I don't know when I can check out because the automatic check lanes would have a big breezeway right out the door.

Sometimes without prediction, without any predictability, they're shut down to stop shoplifting.

And I guess the Home Depot realizes that shoplifters will not be prosecuted.

But so it is, it's hard to get things in a way that it wasn't just two years ago.

And that's kind of really scary, you know what I mean?

And you see barter, as I said, I think the big story about California is I know we have homelessness.

I know we're not, their taxes are driving people out.

I know we have crime, but one of the things is we have an enormous black market.

A lot of it's in the immigrant communities, but

my gosh, I think 50% of all transactions in the San Joaquin Valley and rural San Joaquin Valley are conducted in cash and they're off the books.

Because you can buy anything, Sammy, anything.

And they swap me two miles from my home.

If you want to go get a new rake, you can get it.

If you want to get a bicycle, you can get it.

If you want to get a mattress and sheets, you can get it.

If you want, you're hot today and you want to go get a fruit drink, you can go to the corner.

For Easter, why go to Ride Aid when you can buy flowers right on any rural corner almost that has heavy traffic?

If you want a shirt or a t-shirt, you can buy it, but there's no tax on it, none.

And that's exempt.

There's no tax inspector.

There's no guy with with thick glasses and, you know, a state car with no white wall tires, just

a GI government-issue car who's going around and stopping people periodically and said, I want to see your tax receipts.

So that whole area, that multi-billion area is exempt.

It's exempt.

I don't know whether it's because a lot of it is Hispanic community or the Asian community or

white community.

I don't know what it is, but but the California Tax Franchise Board has determined that they're not going to go after the underground community.

They're just not going to do it.

That economic community.

I have a question on that.

Let me be left-wing for a second.

Wouldn't they say that, well, it's really just a redistribution of income, the fact that

most of them are poor people, maybe not all, but for the most part, the people that are going to these markets are poor, and the ones that are selling are poor there.

And so, whether you have hot items being sold or just

any sort of item that a poor person may grow in his own yard, et cetera, and they don't have to be taxed on it,

that is effectively working to redistribute money to the poor.

So it's a good thing.

And why bother with the

black market assets?

Yeah, no, that's what people are saying.

That's an indirect subsidy that

the government allows by not enforcing the law.

The problem is it undermines the law.

So maybe the ends may be noble that you're redistributing.

If you believe in redistribution, I don't.

But if you do, maybe that's a noble thing to allow people to have access to capital without taxation.

But what it does is it

destroys the budget of the state.

So the state is now $45 billion in a hole.

The pension system is bankrupt.

It's insolvent.

And there's not enough tax revenue.

And these rural communities and many of the large municipalities in California are broke.

And when you go in, they look broke.

And

there's no ability to tax commerce.

And that's one of the things that the state,

the sales tax, if you put everything on it, the state rate and the local rate and then the add-ons, it can be up to 10 to 12% in California.

And that's that's with a state income tax that's 13.3.

And so,

and you add a federal rate of effective rate, you know, of 39 percent.

And if you're up in that $200,000 income blacket, you're going to

you could easily pay along the property tax 60 percent of your income.

And the problem, Sammy, is that California's got 41 million people, but 1% of the households pay 53% of all the income tax.

And Silicon Valley's corporate tax and capital gains tax is essentially what's keeping the state solvent.

But if you start losing these corporations to different cities and states, and you start losing 500,000 people,

And California has one of the most generous, even though it's got the highest poverty rate because the costs are so high, it has one of the most generous

safety nets.

Then you can see the calculus.

More people come who need help and more people are leaving that we count on to give help.

And so, and it's been very radical, very radical.

And the only thing that people can't figure out is that so many people are leaving that the housing market hasn't crashed yet.

I think it is going to crash, but a lot of it's because

there's almost no new building.

It's so hard to build a new home in California that developers have kind of vacated the state.

So, to sum up, when you have that high tax rate and you get little in return, you get 500,000 people fleeing the state at an increased rate.

And you can ask people to pay taxes that are high.

You can ask a guy in Atherton or La Jolla

to pay, you know, 13% because you can say you have the Pacific Ocean or you have this wonderful Stanford, Caltech, USC,

or

you get to go to beautiful downtown San Francisco or you've got

beautiful restaurants in San Francisco or LA, et cetera.

But you can't ask them to do it when they have to step in feces in San Francisco or they're going to get mugged at night in Los Angeles.

or they're going to drive down the 101 and get killed because a drunk driver is going the opposite opposite way and there's no enforcement or somebody's going to break in their home or they're going to pick up the paper and they're alumni of stanford and they see that the dean is basically hijacking a lecture to drive out an invited federal judge to speak leading in some metaphorical sense the pack of barbarians that are screaming and yelling and saying they hope that the federal judges daughters are going to be raped.

You put all that together and with the high taxes and they're saying, you know what, I ain't going to do this anymore.

And of course, that's a fluid number because if you're older, I'm 69 and I'm had some health problems.

I'm here in California, stuck on a farm.

I just can't, okay, I'm done and leave and my children are here, et cetera.

So a lot of people are in that situation.

But trust me, if I was 30

and just married or single, I'd be out of here.

I would have gone either up to the foothills or I would have gone to another state because it's complete insanity.

Even where I am in rural San Joaquin Valley, it is insanity from what the things that I see.

I just drove yesterday into town and on the corner of, I'll just name the names, on DeWoof and Saginaw,

there is a trash pile that is permanent.

People are just driving out there and they're just throwing their garbage right on the corner.

I've never seen anything like it.

It just grows.

Every single standpipe has graffiti on it.

The road has, I don't mean potholes, but I mean things that you'll break your axle if you hit.

I never, I've been here my entire life.

Believe me, in 1963, that wasn't like that.

And so,

and there's no effort on the part of the state organization, the government, to stop it.

I don't see crews out there regularly patching holes.

I don't see

sheriffs ticketing people.

I don't see people, sheriffs pulling over in the side of the road and looking at all that garbage to see if they can find an address or to trace the person who did it.

There's none of that.

So it's every man for themselves.

Well, Victor, we're coming to the end of the show.

So I thought that at the end, maybe we could have some things that were news, but still maybe a little bit amusing.

There was the Country Music Awards recently, and one of the acts at the Country Music Award was

Kelsia Ballerini, who is a country music star.

And her particular show had her and her backup team were four drag queens.

And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on all this alternative culture.

For example, not just that, but also Dylan Mulvaney, who has surprisingly, I think through TikTok, made his

mark on entertainment as a recently trans

into a girl.

He was a young man, and now he's even partnered with Bud Light.

And it seems to me, those two things seem to me appeals to the younger generation.

And

I think my question is, go ahead.

I'm not going to be judgmental, quote unquote, but I'll just be historical.

How's that?

So I just thought of a passage in Aelius Aristides.

He was a sophist, second, third century AD.

He wrote in Greek, and he wrote some good things, you know, that the universe, that each city in the empire is competing with the other one in wealth.

But he also said that

that word in Latin, which he has another Greek word for, luxus, luxury or decadence, was endemic.

And And he to his metaphor was: in the old days, Roman soldiers combed the mane of their horse with their brushes, and today they comb their pubic hairs and their anus.

And it's a very gross thing.

But what he was saying is the effeminacy.

We don't use that word, it's not, we can't use that word.

But historically,

every society has marked a decline in the blurring of the genders or sexes and the effeminacy of men.

And that seems to be,

gosh, you know, I notice it all the time.

I turn on the television and I just get addicted to Westerns, partly because of the accent and the way they speak.

If you look at Bill Holden, the way he speaks in The Wild Bunch, you know, or Henry Fonda.

in 12 Angry Men, the jury movie, or you listen to Alan Ladd and Shane, whatever it is, and you listen to today's actor, it's higher pitched and more nasal.

And I don't understand the infatuation with this whole, I understand that we have to be tolerant and not persecute people for their sexual orientation.

And we have been tolerant in the past, actually, of transvestites.

But this is a

hula ho, Duncan Yo-Yo fad that the percentages of people who are

embracing gender dysphoria is much higher than it has ever been, the data shows, biologically.

So it is

something that's either a top-down fad or the universities or the school system, or the government's encouraging it, but there's no rhyme reason why we would be so fixated on it.

And I don't understand why,

as I said on an earlier podcast, the left that has been so

happy, so confident, so arrogant about

bragging that they're responsible for protecting children and they are the ones that are going after pedophiles and all of it.

That's what they claim.

And yet, these drag shows, as I said, they have simulated sex acts in front of children.

You can go on TikTok and see

it's raw pornography, and no one says a word because it's disguised as some kind of political protest movement as transgender.

And I think, you know, these institutions, Country Western awards or whatever,

they're all doing that.

When you look at the Super Bowl, you don't see a person singing anymore.

We had Rihanna, is that who we had this year

at the Super Bowl?

And what was she doing?

She was pregnant and she, at one point, she put her forefingers on her genitalia and was masturbating.

I mean, pseudo-masturbating.

If you said to somebody in 19, I don't know, 70, we're going to have a Super Bowl show and a singer who's pregnant in a rather revealing gown is going to put two of her fingers on her vagina and simulate masturbation on national TV, what would they say?

I don't know.

It's something that

is bizarre.

What's going on?

And

when Jill Biden, it was kind of...

She got what she deserves because she is a panderer.

But when you had the women's basketball championship, I guess it was Iowa, is that right?

Iowa State or against Louisiana State, and the Louisiana State won, and that tended to be more of a black woman's team, and the Iowa people were white.

And one of the players kind of insulted the white woman player, and she, people had argued that she had done that to someone else, tit for tat.

But then Jill,

who, you know, I don't know whether she was showing her inner Joe Biden racial white solventism or not, but you traditionally asked the winning team to go to the White House.

She said, well, they both tried so hard.

We'll ask both of them.

A member of the other team, I guess more people said, we don't want to go to your White House.

We want to go to Michelle Obama's house.

I guess everybody would want to go to Michelle Obama's house.

It's big, right?

It's 40 acres on

Martha's Vineyard.

Or you can go, she should have said, we want to go to Michelle Obama's houses.

We want to go, they should have a fight.

Say, I want to go to the Hawaii house.

No, I want to go to Calorama and Washington.

No, I want to go to Martha's Vineyard.

But the point is that you can see these institutions are starting to erode in these sects or tribal sects and SECTS.

And what I mean is that they're breaking down and the central authority or the central code or the protocol that unifies it is broken down.

And so that no, Rihanna did that when she said that, because if somebody had said, I'm sorry, the NFL is not going to have a routine where an entertainer simulates masturbatory activity on national TV.

She would have said, you're racist.

And so they know that, so they don't do it.

And if somebody had said to Budweiser, we do not want somebody mimicking a person of the opposite sex in a very ostentatious way to buy, we're not going to, they would have said, that would have been an outcry.

And so, and the same thing if somebody said,

look,

the rule is

we don't, you could have said to Joe Biden, they could have said to Joe Biden, the Louisiana state, but why didn't they just say, look, we feel offended because you're supposed to ask only the winning team.

And if you can find a precedent where you ask the losing team, we'll be happy to go to your home.

But you didn't.

But instead, the first reaction was to racialize it.

And it was to racialize it because they understood something

that brings either dividends or it brings

a shrug.

And nobody wants to contest that.

And, you know, speaking to someone who, you know, I was pretty blunt about the election, but I never questioned the election, never once.

But when you're brought up on charges of at Stanford's Faculty Senate, along with my colleagues Neil Ferguson and Scott Atlas, and the allegation is that on Tucker, you're saying things that are not conducive to ratifying the election, such as I think the voting laws were altered in March and April, but no, I don't think the count is an exact.

I think the process was changed, often semi-legally, against the will of the legislature that has constitutional responsibility.

For that, if you're brought up, then

you really see the power of silencing people.

And that's just a minor example.

So

this is not going to end.

We're not going to restore the popular culture and the government until people speak out.

And they're going to have to speak out like they've never spoken out before.

So they're going to have to call it.

They're going to have to refuse to be silenced.

They're going to have to refuse.

So

if you're out protesting the Trump

verdict, no matter what your particular views, and some people are saying F you, F you, or one person's humping the ground, or another person

in a very very racist fashion goes up to another person and says, I'm going to kill you, mother, blank, blank, don't ever, then you're going to have to call it out.

Just call it out.

And

Jill Biden, what if Jill Biden said, I resent the fact that you're calling me a racist?

That's shame on you.

I'm not a racist.

I was trying to be symmetrical.

Maybe that was wrong, but I was trying to, I did it good naturedly.

Why doesn't she say that?

Because she's scared.

And

if everybody did it, if everybody did it, sort of like they did with the vaccination, if Anthony Fauci today comes out of retirement and says, guess what?

You've got to get that fourth booster.

It will stop you from getting infected and being infected.

What are people going to say?

They're going to say, shut up.

I don't listen to you anymore.

You lied to me one too many times.

I'm not questioning that vaccinations are important.

Maybe the boosters, but your booster does not stop me from being infectious.

or infected because I got infected.

People will say that.

So he's lost credibility.

I think think if people will do the same thing with all of this woke stuff about the trans, if somebody said, we're not,

we are not going to allow biological males to get in a 100-meter dash and destroy what women have achieved for 50 years of achieving parity in sports or swimming, it would stop tomorrow.

And if the popular culture said,

If you have a transgender desire to transition, that's fine.

And you're going to have all of the constitutional protections.

But biologically, you are a different person than a person born a female.

And you are going to be competing against people born female.

And your skeletal and your muscular structure is going to give you advantage.

And that's not right.

And we're not going to let you do it.

I'm sorry.

We're going to have a special category for transgendered sports.

It can be very popular.

And what we are saying to the transgendered community, do what the women did.

Try to fight for equity.

Why don't they do that?

Why don't men and women that transition just say, you know what?

We believe we're in the great civil rights movement of our time and we're going to have a transgendered sports league, basketball, football, everything.

Because our numbers are, they claim it's 20% of young people want to transition.

So if that's true, go ahead.

That's the American way.

But we don't do that.

And then because we don't do that,

we get afraid and we get coward and we don't speak out.

So people have to speak out.

All of everybody that's listening has to speak out.

Don't take it any longer.

Don't let people bully you.

If that dean at Stanford, Ginny Martinez, had just said to herself, I'm not going to take this, I have a dean that I hired of equity, excuse me, diversity, equity, inclusion, and she created a prepared statement on the anticipation that the students that she was in contact would disrupt a federal judge from speaking and deny him.

And she had a pre-planned idea to take over that lecture and lecture that judge about that he brought it on himself.

That's intolerable.

And she's dismissed by gone.

And then if she had said, we have an official video, we haven't released it to the public, but we see three, two, one, five, I don't know, people who were very, very vulgar and shouting and disrupted when they were asked to cease.

And those people are going to be either suspended for a semester or expelled from a law school.

You know what would happen, Sammy?

You'd have a big argument and a stink.

And if they stuck to their guns, people would not do it ever again.

Because these people are careerists and they do not want that to be, they don't want on their record that they were expelled from Stanford Law School.

And they would behave.

They would, they would just be, they can protest, but they wouldn't do that with a speaker and disrupt him.

And so deterrence makes the world go round.

We need it.

And we, you cannot have deterrence unless people people speak out.

Yes.

And that's

what Forrest Gump said.

That's all I'm going to say about that.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, thank you very much.

We're at the end of the show, and I would like to thank the listeners as well.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

We'll see you next time.

Yeah.

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