Civil War and Civility

When empires debase their currency, citizens who hold gold survive the transition.

That's not opinion, it's documented fact.

Trump's economic warning isn't speculation, it's pattern recognition.

The same signals that preceded every major currency crisis are flashing now.

Unsustainable debt, foreign nations dumping our bonds, and central banks hoarding gold.

But Trump's also revealing the solution.

The IRS strategy he's used for decades is available to every American.

It's how the wealthy preserve their fortunes when paper currencies fail.

American Alternative Assets has documented this strategy in their free 2025 wealth protection guide.

It shows exactly how to position yourself before the turbulence Trump's warning about arrives.

Call 888-615-8047 for your free guide.

That's 888-615-8047 or visit victorlovesgold.com.

The patterns are clear.

Make sure you're on the right side of them.

Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hampston Show.

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

This is our Saturday edition, so, or the weekend edition, and we usually talk about things cultural.

And right now, Victor and I have a discussion on wars going on, and we will get to the Roman Civil Wars.

But we have a few other cultural topics to address today, so welcome.

And it is either Saturday or Sunday for you, most likely.

And we'll be right back after these messages.

Like you, when I bought my last pair of shoes, I looked for stylish comfort and beautiful engineering.

And that might make you think Italian, but if you're buying sheets, it should make you think bowl and branch.

The colors, the fabric, the design.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with long-lasting quality, offering extraordinary softness to start and getting softer and softer for years to come.

Bowl and branch sheets are made with the finest, 100% organic cotton in a soft, breathable, durable weave.

Their products have a quality you can feel immediately and become even softer with every wash.

Plus, Bowl and Branch comes with a 30-night worry-free guarantee.

I've been sleeping like a baby in my Bowl and Branch sheets, which keep me cool on those hot summer nights, and they're the perfect place for sunrise and morning coffee.

So, join me.

Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Bowl and Branch.

Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at Bullenbranch.com/slash Victor.

That's Bull and Branch.

B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com

slash Victor to save 15% off and unlock free shipping.

Exclusions may apply and we'd like to thank Bowl and Branch for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So you just got back from summer vacation.

Maybe you might have even had to book two rooms because of your snoring.

Some vacation, huh?

Snoring can be an underlying cause of high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, and even memory loss.

Here is my advice.

If you want every night to be a true vacation, you need to get yourself Zipa.

That's happy Z spelled backwards.

Zipa is a doctor-designed mouthpiece that not only moves your jaw forward, but is also the only device with a patented tongue seat belt to keep your airways open and the snoring away.

The snoring can stop as soon as the first night.

Zipa was proven in a 600-patient clinical trial and sold over half a million units.

From now until the end of October, show your family you actually care by purchasing a limited edition pink Zipa.

Not only will you save $10,

but Zipa is on a mission to raise $50,000 for breast cancer research and they will donate another $10,000 to the Susan G.

Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Go to zyppah.com and use the code PINK

or text VICTOR2511-511.

Put your snoring on a permanent vacation and help a worthy cause with the snoring device we trust by visiting zyppah.com and use the code PINK or text Victor to 511-511.

Remember, Zipa is happy Z spelled backwards.

Text fees may apply and we'd like to thank Zipa for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody everybody Victor has a website, victorhanson.com.

It is called The Blade of Perseus, and you can join it for $5

a month or $50 a year.

Or you can come and get a free subscription or just come onto the website and lurk, as we say, but get a free subscription and get on our mailing list for all the free stuff that comes out as well at Victor's website.

So, Victor, before we get into the Roman civil wars, I thought we would talk a little bit because we talk a lot on this show about blame, angst, anger against white and supposed

white culture in the current environment that we're in.

And

I was wondering, where do we go from here with, if you're a white guy and

or not in on the essential racism of it all, what are you doing?

Where are you going with this?

Well, it's very hard to talk about these collectives because you're talking about 67, 68% of the population when we use the word white.

I just came back yesterday from the grocery store in my community and I would say

that I was the only person by surname that was white,

but I was darker than 30%

of the Mexican-American people in that audience, in that

arena, that huge warehouse supermarket.

And I was about the same you as the others.

I don't have that much hair anymore, but

there were people with light-colored hair.

So my point is, I don't know what these rubrics mean anymore, but if the university thinks they do, and they usually follow the one-drop of the old Confederacy because they're very Confederate in many ways.

but we're with you have to talk semi about the class element what's going on in this country is that the wealthy white elite

maybe 15 to 20 percent of the so-called whites these are people in academia these are people in the media these are people in politics these are people in corporations these are people in silicon valley entertainment These people

are privileged and they have connections.

They have connections everywhere.

I can tell you, I watch them in action.

So we can't really talk about a collective because we're talking about class as well as race.

And the wealthy, as I said, the wealthy professional classes to virtue signal or performance art or to gain constituencies in the political sense tell people who are considered quote unquote non-white that white people should check their privilege, Beverly DiAngelo, that they're fragile, that they're racist.

And they're talking about the middle classes and the lower middle classes, which they have lost.

That was the old

center of the Democratic Party, the lunchbucket blue-collar whites.

They've lost them.

And they only have these elites.

And these elites know that they have to keep demonizing this group.

to marginalize them, to make them feel guilty, and to increase their other non-white constituencies, which now have gone from about 8% to 30%

in the demographic of the United States.

So

that's the group that's, and how does that play out, Sammy?

And

so you look at Stanford just a minute, and you look at their website, and they are boasting that they're basically compensatory admissions.

So there's 22% white.

I can tell you that

every person who is white

who is at Stanford, admitted in that 22% is an elite.

Because out of that 22%,

you've got to get legacies, you've got to get donors, you've got to get athletes.

And the 52% are women.

There's about 9% white male.

There is no meritocratic white male without contacts or money in that group.

And they don't care.

Just like they don't care about East Palestine.

As far as they're concerned, these people are losers.

They've missed out on the global agenda.

Look at them.

They've got all kinds of problems.

They don't care about the

109,000 fentanyl deaths or opiate overdoses.

They don't care about the open border.

So

it's a class thing as well as a racial thing.

And for those people

that let's say that there's 340 million Americans, right?

And so

I don't know what the,

let's say it's 270,000 whites.

And let's say out of that 240,

270 million, excuse me.

So out of that 270 million, there's 250 million.

Maybe, I don't know, 55 or 60% of the country.

They don't get anything because they get damned by

the elite, the John Kerrys of the world, the Biden Crooks, all those people, as if they have white privilege when they don't.

And the white people who do have white privilege use that as a way to virtue signal their leftist fides.

And they didn't grow up, most of them, under Jim Crow.

By that, I mean if you say to them, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then subsequent acts gave us affirmative action.

I'm 69 69 years old.

52 years ago, I applied to UC Santa Cruz, and I was told I had a 3.94.

I had a pretty high SAT score.

I had a whole year of AP.

This was UC Santa Cruz and Stanford.

And I was told at UC Santa Cruz I was on a waiting list.

And when I called, I asked why.

And in those days, they told you, they said, because we're not going to hire anybody.

We're not going to admit anybody who's, you know, white.

We can't.

And I didn't have a connection.

And I waited and I got in on the waiting list.

And when I went there, I could not believe it because there were people there that I had known from my high school and other regional high schools that had very poor grades and SAT scores that were it, but they were minority.

So this idea that's recent, it's been going on for a half century.

And I was lucky I was from the middle class, not the lower middle class.

And so it's a war on those.

And when I think you can really see it if you look at the demography of white working class boys between the ages of 18 and 35, and maybe even upper middle class, they're not marrying.

They're not buying homes.

They're not having children.

They're not joining the military.

There's 16,000 soldiers short this year in the Army.

That's an entire division, Sammy.

So they have retreated.

And there's a lot of other people that are older that are retreating and

what do i mean by retreat well they turn on the oscars to the extent they even would want to watch it and they hear white privilege and all of this anger they turn on the view and that you're just you got a a blank check to just categorize a whole people by the word white

nobody agrees with what maybe

Scott Adams, the Delbert cartoonist, said.

That was probably when he said people should self-segregate and I'm going to keep away from blacks.

But he was destroyed.

But Beverly D'Angelo, the white fragility, said the same thing.

She said it from the other point of view.

She said, blacks could keep away from all whites.

Nothing's going to happen to her.

Al Sharpton is on TV every day lecturing people.

This is a man who concocted the Tawana Brawley

farce.

He was at Freddie's market where people were killed.

He said, put on your yarmocks and come and get me.

He's an anti-Semite.

He tried to destroy the district attorney, Steve Pagones, in New York.

He was a visitor, the most frequent visitor of the civil rights movement in the Obama White House.

So people look at all this and they look at Colin Kaepernick and they're just constant,

constant that

this country was flawed at its beginning, it got worse, and it's toxic because of white racism and privilege.

And then they think, well, wait a minute.

This is the point of entry for every would-be immigrant in the world.

They all want to come here.

What were those 7 million people thinking that crossed illegally in the United States and left their beloved homes in Honduras and Salvador and Guatemala and Mexico?

Were they thinking,

I hate those white-dominated country, and I just hate what they've done to it.

I to join them.

Is that what it is?

It doesn't make any sense.

And then

you tear statues, Jefferson owns slaves, we're going to have to change this name, we're going to Woodrow Wilson Center.

And then you look at these other icons.

That's human nature.

Cesar Chavez organized, Sammy, a bunch of UFW activists to go down on the border and club people from getting in.

His whole family was intimately involved in the corruption of the Robert F.

Kennedy UFW Health Fund.

He outsourced Synanon, that cult, as a way of mind control of members.

He was

an important labor leader.

But if you applied the same standards to him as other people,

Malcolm X,

to the degree that the autobiography of

Malcolm X is accurate, and there's been people that challenge it.

Even there, you can see the types of crimes that he committed.

And I'm a big fan of Martin Luther King.

I think he was one of the greatest leaders we've had.

But you listen to what Robert Abernathy said in the recent biography of Martin Luther King.

He was a serial abuser of women.

He was promiscuous.

He plagiarized his PhD thesis.

Is that going to negate all the good things he did?

No.

But

why does that apply in reverse to all these other people who don't seem to be on the left?

So what is the reaction of all this?

Well, the reaction is young people are not participating in the project.

They feel that if they go to school, they're going to be lectured.

It's left-wing.

I don't want to go to college.

I don't want to participate anymore.

I do not want to join the military anymore.

And

there's been this entire,

I don't watch the Oscars, I don't watch the Tony's, I don't watch the Emmys, I don't watch the Grammys, I do not watch the NBA, I do not watch the Super Bowl halftime show, I do not watch network news, I do not read the New York Times, I do not go to Hollywood movies, I have never listened to a rap

musician in my life.

I do not, and are they racist?

No.

They've just tuned it off because they feel that they're going to be open season.

And some of you are going to say, well, poor little people, they're so fragile.

We're not talking about people who grew up in the South under Jim Crow or his segregation.

Hello, this is 2023.

They are people who were born at the beginning of affirmative action, that were born at the beginning of affirmative action that are in their late 50s right now.

They have known nothing else but affirmative action.

And

so

I think

it's a complete monastery of the mind.

They don't participate.

They feel, you know, they're just used to

certain things.

Right now as we speak, Fresno is in a big fight.

It's the biggest town next to my farm because they want to keep renaming more streets.

And they want to,

King's Canyon, they had tried to do Cesar Chavez.

Now they want to have three streets, Cesar Chavez.

And who's opposing it?

The white mayor?

No.

The white community is a minority community in Fresno.

It's the African-American community.

They're angry because they feel that one of the streets, they don't want to concede to the Hispanic population because they've had Martin Luther King and they feel that they don't want to give up anything comparable to the Hispanic population.

And we're...

I think we're more like $40 billion in state debt, and we're talking about reparations in California.

So

if you want to go tribal as we're going, we know where it leads.

It leads to Rwanda, it leads to Yugoslavia, it leads to Iraq.

And a lot of people don't want to go there.

And so they're fleeing.

It reminds me so much

of what happened in the fifth century in Rome when the government could not protect the Rhine and the Danube,

and

the entire

populace felt unsafe and the whole country was falling apart and they started to flee up into the mountains or the Greeks with the Ottomans after the collapse of Mistra, you know, right seven years after the fall of Constantinople.

If you go to Greece today, you say to yourself, there's these rich, fertile plains in Thessaly and Macedonia.

and in the Peloponnese or some

and the Boeotian plain, but all the villages are up in the mountains.

This doesn't make any sense.

Why are they so

perched on cliffsides

near Delphi or in

Arcadia?

And the answer is they were fleeing.

They were fleeing Ottoman tax, but they didn't feel that they had a part of the system.

And I think that's happening.

This whole subtext of this red state is, I'm tired of crime because I know that particular groups are inordinately represented.

I can't say that because I will be called a racist if I do, and yet I don't want my family to be in danger, and I can't complain about anything.

And a professor, Sammy, just the other day tweeted that if the African-American community

would emulate the crime statistics, and per capita income of Asian immigrants who've come here just recently, then they wouldn't face the same degrees of

single parent problems or inner city violence or to the degree there's racism.

And he was fired for that.

That's exactly what

people have said.

Jesse Jackson said that.

He said, I get scared when I turn around if the person is African-American walking behind me.

And so I guess what I'm saying is they see the problems in the country, but they feel that the medicine is worse than the disease, that they're not able to state that 55%

of all violent crime, the most violent crime, are committed by 12%, maybe 5% of the population, if you'd think African-American males.

And they say...

They say to themselves, I don't want to stereotype a whole group, but I am being stereotyped as white.

So they don't want to even get there.

They don't want to discuss it.

They don't want to talk about it.

They're just going to vote with their feet and they're looking to flee.

And that's the problem.

They don't participate.

They don't participate.

They know certain rules.

That if you

have a history department at

Stanford, and it's 75% white and white is 67% of the population, then you're racist.

If it's the NBA and it's 68% black and it's 12% of the population, or it's the NFL and it's 74% black, that's not racist.

There are just these rules that you have to accept.

And you have to accept not in everybody's happy that the N-word is excise from the vocabulary, but they understand that it's frequent, it's ubiquitous in rap music.

And to say, that that use of that awful word lowers the bar,

that is racist in itself, to criticize criticize somebody who uses that word who happens to be black.

And so there's all these intricacies and paradoxes and hypocrisies that they understand and they don't want to deal with it anymore.

So they have, they fled, whether it's mentally or physically.

And as I said, when I was writing about the

fleeing

California, I put a hitch at U-Haul.

So when I was there, I just said, could you please tell me what the ratio of U-Haul trailers going to Texas is versus coming from Texas?

They said 10 to 1.

And then the next thing he said is,

are you going to go to Texas?

If you want to bring back that trailer,

we'll give it to you free.

If you're going to be, are you from Texas?

If you drive from Texas to Fresno and you're going to bring back a U-doll, you can do it for free.

Wow.

And then we have this ignoramus governor who, what is Gavin Newsom?

His whole life has been privileged.

His father was attorney for Getty Oil.

The Getty family created him.

He never abides by any of his own ideological consequences.

He eats without a mask with lobbyists at the French laundry.

He doesn't wear a mask down with celebrities in Los Angeles.

He keeps lecturing everybody about

fires and fires, and he takes off during a fire to Montana.

But you can't go to Montana because it's an illiberal state.

So if you're a state employee and you're going to business and you happen to go to Montana to get a contract for state, they're not going to reimburse you because it's, I guess it's an anti-transition state or something.

You know, I don't know what it is.

But he goes there.

His in-laws are there.

So all of these very, very wealthy white people are hypocrites and they never suffer all of these utopian bromides.

And how does this all end?

The The only thing I can think that ends is a reformulation of class solidarity.

That means that the 44% of Hispanics in California start to understand that these very, very left-wing people are destroying the middle class, and that's them now.

And they should unite with the white middle class.

and the black middle class and all of the African Americans you see on television and in the black caucus and ditto the Hispanics are

Nancy Pelosis.

I don't think that the radical transgender agenda or the radical green agenda or the radical racial segregation agenda is shared by most middle-class people of any race.

And until they develop that solidarity, I don't see how you stop it.

In the meantime, everybody's disconnected.

They've checked out.

And I know this because if if I go on a plane or if I was at a funeral today and very sad, that's what people tell me.

They just come up and say, I don't know what happened in the country, but count me out.

It's very scary that people would say that.

Count me out.

My movie.

It sure is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Victor, well, we need to take a break for some messages and come back.

And we're going to talk a little bit about the Roman civil wars.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

If you're like me, you have a lot of product on your bathroom counter.

Well, I have found the Secret Serum.

And it's vibrant Super C Serum.

The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and even dark spot reducers.

Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients, including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Simplify your skincare skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and age spots with Vibrance.

I just began using Super C Serum last week and I love it.

My skin feels so much better, soft, moist, and fresh.

And by the way, it smells beautiful like the orange blossoms outside my kitchen door.

Give it a try, and you'll love it too.

And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund.

Go to vibrance.com slash Victor to save up to 37% off and free shipping.

That's Vibrance.

V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E,

vibrance.com slash Victor.

And we'd like to thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We are a

subsidiary, I guess, of the John Solomon Just the News organization.

And so, just give a little plug.

John is an investigative reporter, so it's always a good idea to check out his site.

Victor, so the Roman civil wars is our topic, and this is a huge topic, and it's been written on over and over and over again.

So,

it's a,

you know, well,

ironed out.

So, this is going to be tough in the sense of a 20-minute discussion of it.

So

I was thinking that maybe you could go ahead and explain to us how part, I don't know if you want to talk about how they got into the wars.

I think we want to talk about how they fought them and how they ended.

And that would be my fascination, but I'll let you go.

Well, it was very similar.

The Republic had had a civil war under Sulla and Marius in the early 80s, and it has survived that.

But the problem was was that a Republican government, kind of like our Congress, became a world global power.

And what did that mean?

That

meant if you were a prefect or you were assigned the province of Syria or North Africa or Asia or Greece, you would have more money, more population, more power.

You would have more control than the Senate would in Italy.

And so there were a lot of these freelancing upper middle class Roman diplomatic dash military commanders that

had

many fiefdoms.

And that when you were expanding the Italian Republic, when you were expanding it into Gaul and into Spain and into North Africa and into Greece and into Asia Minor, you were also diluting the ties of solidarity.

And so Julius Caesar in 59 was assigned Gaul, but Gaul was richer than Italy as it is today.

And so

he had a bigger army and more money, and the Senate was jealous.

So they were always trying to do some inadequate but provocative

mechanism for going after one of his legates or tribune of the people.

So he made the first triumvirate, and that was Pompey, Crassus,

and Caesar.

And they basically said, you know what?

You take Crassus, Syria, and Pompey, you take Spain, and I'll take Gaul, and then we'll each get our guys in the Senate to vote for all three of us.

And it worked pretty well until Crassus was killed in 53 in Parthia.

I think they've made him drink liquid gold down his throat.

And Caesar's daughter, Julia, was married to old man Pompey, and she died.

And so

that started to break up.

And then Pompey, there was no third triangulating party with Crassus gone, so they were squaring off.

They had been friends.

And

they tried to stop Caesar from having, what, another consulship or to come into Italy with the same type of legionary power that Pompey did.

So he crossed the Rubicon in 49.

It was technically illegal, but it was illegal in the sense that things are illegal today.

It's very similar to today

with our strife.

That's what's really scary about it.

And

Pompey,

he had the status quo.

He was kind of like a Romney figure.

He had all of the establishment, but he didn't have the talent.

And Caesar appealed to the lower classes, but more importantly, he had a different propaganda.

If you were not against Caesar, you were for him.

were, but if you didn't swear you were for Pompey, you were against him.

So Caesar allowed people to be neutral

because he had confidence he was going to win, and they could, you know, look and see where the momentum was.

Pompey didn't.

And then the second thing is he had legions, the 10th Legion and two legions that had been fighting for 10 years.

They were the toughest men in the world.

Pompey's were

not so accomplished or veteran.

So he

fled to Asia, and then Caesar was there.

But what did he do?

He didn't kill anybody.

He didn't loot.

He was very popular, but he had to get rid of Pompey because the Republic was the figurehead now.

The Senate was impotent.

So he goes over to what is now Albania near Darachium, which is, I guess it's Epidalmus, Apollonia, and they have a big draw

in

448 BC, just a year after Caesar had crossed the Rubicon.

And then they go into the plains of Arsalus.

That's in Macedonia.

And they have a climatic fight, and Pompey lost.

At that point, Caesar now has ended ostensibly the civil war.

It's 48.

Pompey flees, and

he's trying to go out to the provinces where his son Gnaeus and Sextus are, and Cato, and Labinus, a lieutenant of Caesar who figures very prominently in the galley.

And guess what?

He can't get an opposition to Caesar.

He's been discredited.

He lost this major battle, the terrible battle at Pharsalus.

And when he gets to Egypt, they killed him and decapitated him.

So when Caesar was chasing them, they give him the head of Pompey.

And he's very upset about it.

He didn't want that to happen.

So he goes back and he has all these grand expeditions planned.

He's going to

go make the Parthians pay.

He's going to drain the swamps.

And then in 44,

he's only been in power two, three full years from 48 to 44, into 48, he's assassinated by the Senate.

And so this civil war is going to round two.

They're called the Liberators War.

And the Liberators are, this is even weirder, is Cassius, who was a friend of his, and Brutus, whose mom he was, quote unquote, excuse the language, banging.

And they flee

over to

Asia Minor.

They go over to Greece and they go up into Thrace.

And you can see that you can go there today.

I've been to Pharsalis and Durakia, but you can go walk the battlefield at Philippi.

And they have a battle, two of them, in October of 48, just a few months after

they've arrived.

And now we have round two two is

Caesar's dead, so there's a new second triumvirate.

And this is Lepidus, Octavian, the adopted great-nephew, great-nephew, adopted heir of Caesar, who will be Augustus,

and Mark Anthony, the most accomplished soldier on the scene.

And these three emulate what Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar had.

That is, they're going to control power by divving it up.

Lepidus will stay and keep an eye on things in Rome.

And then in 48,

they go out, excuse me, in 40, right after Caesar's killed in 44, then they go out

to hunt down the Tyrannicides.

And they find Brutus and Cassius at the plain of Philippi and Thres, and they have two battles.

And the result is that Brutus and Cassius kill themselves.

And at that point,

you would think that the second triumvirate is in power, except they're not, because some of the Tyrannicides and the Liberators have fled to Africa.

So then Octavian and Anthony divvy up the chores.

They've got to go down there and get rid of Cato.

They have a battle at Thapsis.

They do that.

And then guess what?

The sons of Pompey go to Spain.

And that's some of, and they have the Battle of Munda,

and they are still fighting them.

And they're going to fight Sextus all the way into the 30s.

He's got a whole kingdom in Sicily.

So you're in now from essentially 49 when Caesar crossed the Rubicon,

you're all the way down

to

the 40s

and into the 30s, and they're still fighting.

And who's fighting?

The second triumvirate is cleaning up the remnants of both the Pompeians and also the Tyrannicites.

And they win.

And then guess what?

Mark Anthony has been married in the same fashion that Pompey was married to Julia, the daughter of Julius Caesar.

He's been married to Octavia, the sister of Octavia.

And that breaks apart because he goes down to Egypt.

He's given the, remember, the Asia part of the second triumvirate, and he's infatuated by Cleopatra.

And she has a son, Caesarean, by Julius Caesar.

And he declares that

he is now going to be the

man of the Republic, i.e., what Caesar, he's the only Caesarean left.

And Octavian is just a young teenager.

He's in his 20s now.

He doesn't quite know what to do.

So he goes back and says, second civil war is over.

I'm the only thing you have.

They find a, I don't know if it's phony, people argue, they find Mark Anthony's will where he's cut out

his earlier roman uh

octavian sister and kids and he said he's going to leave his legacy his estate to his child by cleopatra and caesarean caesar's child and there's all these rumors he's going to move the senate to egypt and the point is that octavian then makes it into a very successful propaganda of east versus west and they go back over to greece seems to be the the

in all three of these cycles: the Caesar-Pompey cycle at Durachium and Pharsalis, the Tyrannicides versus the Second Triumvirate at Philippi, and now they're back in Greece again at Actium.

You can go there.

It's called Nicopolis.

There's an inscription there.

I had a fellow student at the American School, Bill Murray, published it and did a great job in reconstructing some things.

And it's an Acarnania.

Barry Strauss's book on the battle is very good at Actium.

And it's one of the biggest battles in history.

It's 200,000 versus 180,000 on Cleopatra.

She's got not only Roman soldiers loyal to Anthony, and he's the better commander, supposedly.

Octavian doesn't know anything.

Every time he's at the field of battle, he gets stomach cramps.

and everybody makes fun of him, but he has a genius fighting with him, Agrippa.

And it's a sea battle, and they blockade Anthony and Cleopatra.

They're running out of supplies.

They're having defections.

And they break out with their massive navy.

They're defeated, but they escape.

And just as Pompey had to go escape to

Egypt, and why does everybody go to Egypt?

Because it's the wealthiest province.

It's the wealthiest place in the world.

It's got the Nile Delta wheat fields.

It's not part of Rome officially yet, but at 31 BC, the Battle of Actium, they're defeated.

Augustus-Octavian goes down there and they commit suicide, and he then makes that an imperial province.

And that is now considered, at this point, it's considered the end of the Hellenistic world.

I would say 146 might have been a better date when Carthage and Corinth were both destroyed.

But traditionally, historians look at 31 with the incorporation of the last successor kingdom, the Ptolemaic kingdom, is over with.

It's part of Rome.

There is no longer anybody left.

The children of Pompey are being eliminated.

As I said, the Tyrannicides are all eliminated.

And the Caesareans that split apart and fought among themselves in the third cycle is over with.

And at 30, Augustus is the last man standing, and they have been at war since 49, 18 and a half years of 250,000, 350,000 Romans were killed.

And then what happens, if you read, he has a huge propaganda effort.

Virgil writes the Aeneid, and it's very, you know, dash

Augustus Aeneas, and you have Horace's triumphal odes in book three.

And he involves an enormous amount of brilliant Roman writers, poets, et cetera, intellectuals.

And you're going to have from 30,

basically, and it's very hard to get rid of the Republic.

You've got to do it legally, right?

So in 27 BC, they have reforms, but he's going to be elected first citizen or consul

all the way

for

basically 44 years.

And he'll die at 14 AD at the age of 75.

And he brings this peace.

And everybody, and that's why they called him the Augustus.

He was the revered one.

And this young kid that everybody thought was incompetent was the smartest of them all.

And he survived three iterations of civil war, ended up on top, clung to power, but tried to do what his adopted great uncle, I mean, his adopted heir, patron and great uncle Caesar had done by having clementia.

So when he looked at this destruction, this canvas of 19 years, 18, 19 years, the whole

upper class of the aristocracy had been wiped out.

And so he had a Roman revolution, as Ronald Syme did.

He took all of these ancient families and brought them back into the body politic, no matter whether they had been earlier Crassus, Pompey, their grandparents, or Caesars, or their parents had been Cassus Brutus versus Mark Anthony and Octavian, or whether they themselves had fought on Mark Anthony's side against Octavian.

They were all united, and he tried to create a new Roman imperial,

as I said, body politic.

It worked pretty well, but he got rid of the freewheeling liberty and freedom of the Republic.

And then, unfortunately, the Julio-Claudian family

gave us, after his death, they gave us Tiberius,

and then we got Caligula, and we had kind of an epileptic but not nefarious emperor and Claudius.

Then we had Nero, and then we had the year of the four emperors.

And if you want to read about it, it reads the great historian Suetonius's 12th Caesar or Tacitus's Annals.

It's pretty depressing reading.

And that won't stop, that mess, until Vespasian comes in with Titus.

And then we're going to get into the period that Gibbon said was the greatest period in human history when

you had the so-called five good emperors.

And

so

it was a terrible period as Republican government is no longer able to handle a global empire with huge amounts of slaves, Latifundia corporate agriculture, the end of the agrarian

Italian ethos that had created the Republican standard of virtue and protocol and behavior.

It's all gone.

And it's very much exciting.

You can see it in the literature.

You don't get Virgil or Horace

or Livy,

but you get Suetonius and Tacitus

and Petronius, the novelist, and later Apuleius.

They're very brilliant, but there's a level of modernism in a sense of cynicism, sarcasm,

you know what I mean?

Sort of like today.

It's very similar to

what was

before and right after World War II, that upbeat confidence, the government is better than the alternative.

We don't have to be perfect.

That was what Rome was.

And then after this constant bickering and fighting brought on by globalization.

That's why, just to make an anecdote, in 2000, I went on a series of tours of Greece after John Heath and I published Who Killed Homer, which was a bestseller in Greece.

And I was really railing against globalization because I said to the Greeks it was going to so dislocate

American agrarian values and the unity of the population and enrich the coast that I was very worried about because it was very Roman-like, where you would see people with a level.

I never in my right mind thought that Jeff Bezos would be worth $175 billion.

or that Mark Zuckerberg would inject 419 million in an election, think it's just spare change.

But it's the same type of disruption that caused the end of Republican government.

And now you can really see that what Mr.

Bragg is doing

or what the January 6th Committee was doing or what people are saying on cable, it's very similar to the Milo and Claudius thuggery and the

Pompey-Caesar Crossus rivalries.

and then what followed after the death of Caesar.

I think it's really a scary precedent.

Yeah, it sure is.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll finish up with if you have more to say on the Roman civil wars and then we'll look at, I think, universities and your

you wrote an article on Stanford, but what I want to talk about is beyond the Stanford example.

So

hang in there and we'll be right back with

the universities in the United States.

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

Welcome back.

And Victor, so I'm switching subjects a little bit abruptly, but we wanted to talk a little bit.

I know that Stanford, you went in an article over a lot of the

sort of disastrous either people or policies that we see at Stanford these days.

And

it looks pretty grim.

So my question to you is, if we look beyond Stanford,

what do we see?

Is it the model or are people going to address these things and are we going to change?

Well,

I'm worried for two reasons.

I don't approve of what these universities are doing.

and they're committing collective suicide.

But that said, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford,

Berkeley, Duke,

the great UC system, Texas, Michigan, all of those universities are what gave us our edge.

In other words, by edge, I mean they were meritocracies.

So they brought people from all over the world and they were brilliant people in medical research, in the business schools, in

the law schools.

in engineering, in computer science.

They created Silicon Valley, right between Berkeley and Stanford.

Stanford created.

And when they are systematically destroying meritocracy, and you can see what the law school is, the subtext of that law school debacle two weeks ago was that one of the people was screaming, as I said earlier, that he couldn't get into law school, Judge Duncan, which I think he could.

But they have 14%

flunked the bar at Stanford.

And that's just the first year after this repertory compensatory admissions.

So

we are basing scientific research on ideology and race and ethnic fides.

And you can see that as well with Fauci.

He was on a documentary the other day.

You saw that, Sammy.

I know you did.

And he said flat out to an African-American couple that if you are vaccinated,

you will not either not get COVID or you'll get a mild dose.

That was a flat out lie.

He's been lying about the Wuhan, and he's called that the science.

So

he controls $50 billion

in research money.

So he's been warping the meritocracy and scientific research.

And that's what's very scary.

It's politicized, it's racialized, and we're not getting the top people to help us in a disinterested fashion.

And it's now trickling down.

I'm looking out to the west right now out of the window, and just six miles down is a $100 billion high-speed rail fiasco which is going to end up 300 billion and go from nowhere in Bakersfield and I can say that as a resident of the San Joaquin Valley to nowhere in Merced while the 99 and the 101 and the five are death traps that's what happens when you have incompetence guided by ideology in this case it's green ideology that's not empirical the other thing is that

these universities served as the civic common education for millions of Americans of the middle class.

You went to UC Irvine, you went to Michigan State, you went to Texas Tech, you went to Purdue, and you met people, you went to Cal State Fresno and you met all different kinds of people, but you were united.

in a certain shared experience.

You took a GE class, General Education and History of the United States and the history of Western culture and in romance languages,

And you were turned out as a very well-educated person that could do almost anything.

You could work at the DMV.

You could be an administrator at

HS.

You could work as

a trucking company could hire you.

It's not true anymore because two things are happening.

You're not being taught that because they don't have time because they are trying to warp people with ideology.

And the big secret about that is it's easy to do.

If you're a professor and you can say, I haven't published because I am woke, I am a marginalized person and

I've been a victim, then you don't have to publish.

Or if you go in and you don't prepare and you just rant about your what, personal story?

And that's what they're doing.

They're not teaching rigorous.

education and to the degree that they actually have a coherent syllabus, it's politicized.

And you can see that in my little esoteric field of classics, you can be a classics major at Princeton and not know Greek.

And the truth that this hidden is you can be a classics major at most of these elite universities and be taught by recent PhDs that have not eliminated the requirement, but they might as well have because they don't know Greek and Latin.

And that's the basis.

If you don't know Greek and Latin, you'll never be able to teach classics.

You'll never understand ancient history.

You'll never understand numismatics.

you'll never understand epigraphy, archaeology, all these different subfields that tell us what our ancestors were in the West.

So I don't know the answer.

15%

down enrollment from 10 years ago, because not just demographically are we shrinking, but people are choosing to apprenticeships.

They've just

increased 10 times over the last six or seven years.

And I guess the answer is: if you're a working-class white male and somebody says to you,

hey, you can go to UC Santa Barbara and with room, board, and tuition for four years, and you probably won't get the classes you want.

So say five,

you'll owe $350,000.

And you probably have to borrow with, you can get work, you can get grants, but you'll probably have to borrow $200,000 and you'll pay 7% of it.

And you'll be paying that the rest of your life.

And then you're going to have a UC Santa Barbara degree in environmental studies, sociology, gender study.

Who knows?

And or you can go at 18, you can go join the local plumbers union, the electricians union.

You can make $28, $30 an hour.

You can make $50,000, $60,000.

You'll have no loans.

A lot of people are opting for that.

I don't know what the eventual result of that will be because a lot of statistics suggest that people who do get college, even bad college, college, make more.

But I think this generation says, I don't care.

I don't want to sit there and be insulted for four years and pay people to insult me.

So this could be a real turning point,

a real turning point.

I think the Stanford thing, to finish, is an iconic moment.

Really do, because some of us have been saying, ad nauseum, that this is a top-down revolution.

It's not a bottom-up 60s.

The dean is

inaugurating the revolution.

Students are not marching on the dean.

The dean of diversity, equity, inclusion was the one who was the real revolutionary at that law school.

The Pentagon people are demanding that, as Mark Milley, they hunt out white rage.

They're not being marched on the Pentagon.

The Biden administration had this revolutionary act of destroying the border in the South.

It wasn't a popular grassroots.

The poor Hispanic populations of the Rio Grande Valley are not demonstrating to get rid of the border.

This was very wealthy, mostly white people.

And so what I'm getting at is this is a top-down revolution.

And

it starts in the university and people don't want to go be insulted by it.

And that's what I think

we're watching and that's what the Stanford thing taught us.

There was no adult, I mean, there were four administrators there and three watched the diversity administrator hijack the podium and attack the speaker and blame him for the violence she obviously anticipated or she wouldn't have had a set speech.

She was all ready to speak.

She planned it.

She knew they were going to violate her own university canons and protocols.

And yet she allowed that to happen.

Then when she was speaking and insulting the judge, the other three did nothing.

And then when that was over, the dean of the law school didn't punish anybody, but she gave an anemic apology.

And the next day they went after her.

And

she was traumatized.

They just walked out of her class.

They made her do, as I said, the Game of Thrones shame walk.

And then

the president gave an anemic, and he can't say anything because they've already been going after him.

So all the adults were there, but they were ineffectual, basically.

And that would be a good thing.

Inmates are in the assignment.

They either believed it.

I think they're the agents of the revolution, but they're being cannibalized by the revolution.

Because revolutionaries are always

yesterday, today's revolutionary is tomorrow's reactionary.

So there's always going to be somebody who says that

Trotsky is a sellout, right?

And I'm the true radical Stalinist inheritor of the Lenin pedigree.

So that's what's happening.

I think it's cannibalizing itself, but in the meantime,

everybody's scared of being called a reactionary.

So they're going to allow these kids to happen.

And what's the toll is they've destroyed Stanford Law School.

It's obviously they didn't, none of these students got any instruction, moral, ethical, because if I played that entire tape and not one person asked, there was a question and answer.

They couldn't even ask an intelligent question.

To the degree they ask a legal question, he just shredded them.

And then

they, you know, they were,

how can you have a law school when somebody says to a federal judge who's a visitor at your law school, I hope your daughter's raped?

You're scum.

You're scum.

You won't, you couldn't get into my law school.

That kind of stuff.

And where did they learn it?

They learned it from the professors, the woman, as I said earlier, that said Johnny Depp, the law professor who said Johnny Depp should be killed and his body eaten by rats.

The other law professor that attacked a 13-year-old kid, Baron Trump, before Congress.

The two law professors that

are involved with their son, Sam Bankman, agreed, and were $16 million transferred in their name of assets.

These are the models.

And so

I don't know.

This whole American

university idea that we're going to train people on the basis of merit, we forgot what it was for.

It was an attack on the aristocracy.

It was a good thing.

It said, we're going to have SAT scores and we're going to have GPAs and it's going to allow anybody of any race or any background to have a fair shot.

You don't have to have your daddy give money.

And what do we end up with?

Your daddy's got to give money.

If you're going to be

in a non-marginal, if you're the 22% of white people that are allowed to go to Stanford, you're going to be 22% wealthy.

They're all going to be wealthy.

And so it's anti-merocratic.

You know, what's really weird is

we're well in this whole time Stanford was doing all this, and on their webpage, they published to great self-congratulations about the incoming class of 2026.

What was very strange about it was they were in this self-confessional that they had been anti-Semitic.

And in the 1930s and 40s, they had systematically discriminated against a particular group based on their ethnic background.

Jews, as well as religion.

And that would never happen again as it was happening as they spoke.

And so I think all of us, each according to our station, has to speak up because it's a great university.

I didn't like it when I was there because I had Austrians and Germans and British philologists and half the people plunked out of the PhD program in classics.

But it was, and I was only 21 years old when I started.

But my God, they taught me how to read Latin and Greek pretty much like English.

I could write it.

I could read.

These people were experts.

They weren't necessarily great teachers, but when you went in there,

I can still remember them.

I mean, Anthony Robichek.

Mr.

Hansen, would you please give a report on the Battle of Leuctra?

Yes.

Go ahead, Mr.

Hansen.

Well, Pamanondas was on the left wing.

Who is Apanamanondas?

I said he was the general.

What is the word in Greek for?

And how do you know he was a general?

Where's the citation?

Okay, it's in Zenhuan Selenika.

He was stratagos.

And what happened?

You said left wing.

What do you you mean, left-wing?

Is that your term?

Or is that properly substantiated by the text?

I said, the word is Keros in Greek.

It's in the text of Xenophon and Diodorus.

Okay, you can continue.

At the time,

as I said, I was a smart ass.

I said, Mr.

Robichek, Professor Robichek, Professor Robichek, gravity existed before the word gravity was invented.

So this is ridiculous.

He said, you let me determine what is ridiculous.

When you're my age, you can say what is ridiculous.

Now you get back to the text.

And then we had Lionel Pearson, the British aristocrat, and he would give us, I don't know, 50 pages of almost undecipherable Greek papyrus.

And then he would start to lecture.

Well, on document number 550, Mr.

Hansen, will you just give us a synopsis?

I mean, these were esoteric Greek measurements and everything.

And you had to do that.

And it was marvelous training.

Everything to the degree I know anything, I learned it from them.

And then my undergraduate was the same.

I had wonderful teachers, John Lynch and Mary Kay Gamel and Gary Miles and others, but that's gone.

It's gone, gone, gone.

It's considered too discriminatory or too merocratic or

too.

It's Western civilization, so it's

assumed that it's a bunch of white men, but I don't know how you say that about Italians and the Greeks.

It's very funny i had hd kiddo the great classes as an undergraduate and he came up once to me and says so you know greek

and i said yes and i was only 19 and he said what's that and he points to the ground and i said

thawn earth no that's earth i want to know what the word for floor is i said potoma no that's more of a byzantine word keep going He just did that.

And I said, my problem, Professor Kiddo, is I can't understand your English.

You You know, we had to do dictation where he'd come in and

just start talking off the top of his head at Kipling.

And same with Lionel Pearson in graduate school.

You had to write out

what he was saying in English and then immediately translate it into

Greek.

I think he had prostate problems, so he kept going out to urinate.

When he came in, you only had about three minutes.

I remember a guy said to him, I hope he drinks a lot of water.

So we have at least 15 minutes to decipher what that crazy English accent.

But boy, they were really good teachers.

And that's all dead.

It's sad.

Yeah, yeah, it does.

And who took it over?

The people who said they were going to reform it, the people who were going to bring us equity and fairness and equality.

And all they did is they had these litmus tests and this racialized hatred.

And boy, they were not classical civil libertarian.

All the people I just mentioned,

I don't want to suggest that they were autocratic.

They were left-wing, all of them.

They were European socialists or American liberals, but they were not like today's left.

And I came from a very rural, you know, I came from a Democratic family, but I was really conservative.

And they never used that against me.

Not until I

all these schools are bringing in people who have this idea that they know some theory called critical race theory.

I know it.

I didn't really understand.

And

every time you use theory, you have to know the act for example in history you have to know the history better than anybody else to actually make it fit into the theory or to criticize it you have to know the history better than anybody else and and so theoretically it doesn't really work for historians to be a be a theory to be a Marxist or to be I mean we do have those categories in history.

I think you should be allowed to do theory till you're 40 because because you'd have to know something.

They don't know anything.

And

they don't know anything.

And I never understood all was going on until

I went through very quickly.

And I was done at 24, 25, and I applied for a job.

I went to the U.S.

Naval Academy.

I was a visiting professor years later.

I wanted to see if I remembered anybody in 1979 I interviewed.

And I did a really good interview.

I did it on my thesis, and they were very interested in having a classicist that knew military history.

I thought I did very well.

And I walked out and I had a little bounce in my step because I just signed a piece of paper at Stanford, and the chairman was a wonderful guy, Mark Edwards.

He says, you know, just to preclude a lawsuit, I'd like you to say that you're not going to get a job.

We have no expectation that this PhD that you paid for, I didn't pay for it.

They gave us scholarships if you

could do the work, but

that you won't sue us because of affirmative action because you three white males are not going to get a job.

That's what he said.

So anyway, my point was after I did this, this very kind officer-faculty member followed me out in the hall.

I can never forget it.

It was in Boston.

And he said, Mr.

Hansen, that was an excellent interview, but you're not going to get a job.

And I think it's very cruel that you left thinking that that interview and your dossier should earn you a job.

They should, but you're not going to get it.

We're going to hire a woman, no matter what you say, you do.

And I will be in trouble and I will deny that I told you that, but you're not going to get a job.

And I said to him, well, you're a white male.

So it's one generation of white males then tells the other generation that they have the wrong skin and gender.

Is that it, how it goes?

If you really believed in

your

ideology or your benevolence or your tokenism, why don't you resign?

Because there's other people.

You could just give your job to somebody.

You know what he said?

That's nihilistic.

Sorry, I told you that.

And so I came back home and

I remember my dad and mom said, well, what are you going to do?

I said, I think I'm going to be farming.

And that's what I did.

And a whole generation did that.

So when I hear, oh, this has been so much discrimination, there's no parody.

No, it's not.

That was 1979, and that was in the 14th year of it.

And

I was, as I said earlier, I went to high school when people in my high school were admitted that did, I would say they would be lucky to be in the 60th percentile of the SAT and they had B averages.

And that was an effort to tell one generation, you're going to take a hit

because my generation has been sinful.

but we're not going to resign.

You're going to take the hit.

And to have all of that since 1965, and then to read, as I did yesterday, that San Francisco says that we're going to give reparations for all of the discrimination of the last, not the slavery, because we were never a slave state, but of the discrimination of the last 50 or 60 years.

I can say, well, I'm sure there was discrimination against African Americans and housing and stuff, but there was a lot of discrimination against white males and more recently against Asian.

And so rather than fight all these wars, we should just get rid of it.

And I think the Supreme Court will do that.

But as you know, Sammy, because you're a professor and you know what's going to happen, it will mean nothing because the academic mind always feels that it's morally superior to jurisprudence.

It'll find a way to subvert the law.

And they'll do it all for us because they're such moral.

That sounds like Damien Omen 2 or Omen 1.

I'm doing this all for you, Damien.

And that's who they are, aren't they?

I guess.

Exactly.

Yes, I do know what it is inside of academia, and it's not a pretty picture.

And to finish off this topic, which I asked, is Stanford the model or

is something going to change?

I think Stanford as the model is going to be the path forward, unfortunately.

That's my grim.

assessment.

It'll either cause what there's been so many people that are outraged.

I had so many nice letters when I wrote about it from Stanford alumni.

It won't change until all of the people who graduated from Stanford Law School write a letter to the dean and said,

I am not giving you one penny for the next year or two, and you're on probation with me, and then see what happens.

And then they're going to put, you know what they're going to say?

Oh, please give us money.

And then private, hey, idiot, we have a $35 billion

endowment.

We don't need your money.

That's what the university has.

Again,

to find out what's going on with you.

People have not diagnosed, I think, the problem.

The problem is after the age of globalization and the changing nature of money and politics, the left, the left, the Fortune 400 are left.

The Zuckerbergs, the Bill Gates.

the Michael Bloombergs, the Jeff, they're all left-wing.

And all of that money has poured into favorite left-wing places like universities.

They're just flush with money.

And we've got to address that issue.

We've got to tax the endowment, and we've got to stop having the federal government subsidize student loans and get rid of the student loans.

Let them go to a private lender, and then the university might have to compete with another to lower tuition to gain a dwindling supply of students.

rather than a student being indebted for the rest of their life as the university jacks up the rate of tuition higher higher than inflation because he's got a guaranteed sucker

yeah all right anyway that's enough yeah yeah i think uh that's the end of it here today uh we're we're at the end of the show and so thank you very much that discussion of the roman civil wars was absolutely fascinating so i really appreciate that and i appreciate all our listeners too so thanks to everyone for joining us on this weekend edition thank you thank you for listening I think we'll talk about the barbarian invasions of the Western Empire and why the West fell and the Eastern Empire at Constantinople survived for 1,100 years.

Next time.

All right.

Next time.

Thanks.

Bye-bye, everybody.

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