Capitol Videos and Punic Wars

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Welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ily 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.

He is found at his website, victorhanson.com, and it is named The Blade of Perseus.

Please come join us there, either for a free subscription and get on our mailing list, or $5 a month or $50 a year for a subscription so that you can read the plentiful vdh ultra articles um victor i hope all things are going well today i know that you're very busy you've got wonderful weather out in california although it's a new storm is coming

wait wait wait wait wait wonderful

In the state of global warming, this is the, and I'm 69 years old.

I'm sitting in the house where I grew up.

And this is the coldest spring.

It's not even officially spring yet, late winter, I should say, that I've ever experienced, the wettest.

Yes.

I know that we're statistically, we're not quite at the wettest year, but

I am very religious.

I'm praying that my poor little house up at Huntington Lake, which is, you can't see it.

It's in a cocoon, apparently, but you can't get up there.

And we had removed, I think, 15 feet prior, and now it's buried under another 15, and that's supposed to get another four or five.

I hope all these homes survive.

Yeah, I sure do.

And then I also hear biblical warm rain is supposed to come.

Is that going to make it better or worse?

Flood?

I don't know.

But

I've been very worried about it.

Yeah.

And they go get an army of snow plowers or snow blowers and go up there.

Yeah.

Coldest winter ever.

I hear that PG ⁇ E is complaining to you that you might be using too much electricity in this coldest winter ever ever because they don't have enough electricity, but we're all going to be on EV cars in the future, nonetheless.

I think it's my wife's hot blanket, warm blanket, electronic blanket, whatever you call it for four Queenslands.

And I don't know why they don't tough it out like they did in Australia and their boroughs, but they have to have heated blankets as well as.

I don't know, little suits that they wear.

I don't know.

But

that's part of it.

That's part of it.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll give your wife a break and we'll turn to the show.

This is the weekend edition, and so we take a closer look often at something historical.

And we're on a pursuit of wars, and I believe we're on the Punic Wars.

But

hang in there, we'll do the news, you know, some news first because there's so much news going on today.

But we'll have a break first and then we'll come right back.

Welcome back.

So, Victor, I'd like to just ask you what I usually think is a short news story, but if it turns out long, it's just as well.

This is sad.

There were four people that were kidnapped at the border, just over the border, and two of them were killed.

And they appeared to have been kidnapped by a cartel.

I think the other two have come back alive and have been returned.

But I thought, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.

You know, we don't have a lot of information.

I think they were,

as many Americans do,

they were going to

go to Mexico for a medical procedure or some type of, I don't know if it was cancer treatment or what it was, but they were innocent bystanders.

And one story had them caught in a crossfire

between

gang members.

I don't know if it's the Serenios whose operative in that particular area of Mexico, but two were killed, one was kidnapped, and one was, I guess, okay as well, or maybe two were kidnapped.

But

it's pretty scary to tell you the truth.

And I think Americans, because have you noticed that Joe Biden suddenly, after letting in six to seven million, million people,

which cost in New York alone $5 million a day to put them in hotels and deprive our poor American citizens of easy access to social services in these impacted areas and the cartels have made a fortune under the biden administration he's the best friend they ever had

and remember he got very angry when people reminded him that there had been a hundred thousand plus fentanyl deaths this year and almost that the year before

his administration spiking that horrendous toll and he said

that was Tom and he chuckled chuckled over it.

That was a bad week, by the way, for Biden last week.

He said,

I may be a white boy, but I'm not stupid.

As if all white people are stupid, as he was performing scoring to his audience, and then he had a bad spill on the stairway.

And

he tells these whoppers that he was in the civil rights movement, you know, and he's already been caught on that.

And then he just, the thing about Biden is he says a lie and then some, not the left, but some conservative fact checker points that out to the media.

Then his handlers get worried.

So they kind of say he misremembered.

And then he thinks that's the exemption.

Once you get caught lying, it's not the natural response, never lie again.

It's well, I got caught lying.

So now I can say it

wherever I want.

I've already paid the price of being revealed as a liar.

So what's the problem?

And that's what he does.

And, you know, that trip on the stairwell,

staircase to stairwell, stairway steps to his

Air Force One, that's a third time.

And for somebody who grew up taking care of an elder, I grew up, you know, with my grandparents.

And then my 90-year-old grandmother lived with us.

And I was

one of two caregivers.

And once you fall once or twice, that's a warning that that's going to happen again because of dizziness and lack of muscularity in the legs and balance and so

i i don't want to be alarmist but i think that people should realize that if he's fallen three times he's going to fall again unless people take steps i don't know whether that be to carry him up or what or other areas but i do not think joe biden is going to be the nominee in 2024 for the Democratic Party.

I think he's going to have, unfortunately, some kind of

incident, health incident, and it may be breaking his hip or something if he's not careful.

But that's pretty shocking that the president of the United States three times has fallen while trying to mount the steps to his airplane.

And remember, the left thought that was hilarious when Jerry Ford fell.

Saturday Night Live created a whole Chevy Chase persona 40 years ago, you know.

Yes.

About how Jerry Ford fell down on his own.

Oh, he can't.

He's so clumsy.

So it's not as if they're, you know, they're a sensitive group of people and they don't say anything about this.

And so it's

anyway, the other thing about Mexico is

at some point, and I don't know where we are, Biden has understood that that is a losing issue and that the Republicans now own the House.

If they were to impeach Alexandro Mallorcas or Joe Biden, they would get very close.

I don't know if they have quite the margin

party solidarity and loyalty to do that, but that would be a stinging rebuke for Joe Biden to be impeached.

And it would be a very easy impeachment because it's not political like the Trump impeachments or even the Clinton impeachment.

It's not about sex.

It's not about a phone call.

It's about the president of the United States taking an oath to uphold and execute the laws and not doing it deliberately and knowingly so.

He destroyed the corpus of federal immigration law.

And at some point, you know, he greenlighted it.

And then once he did that in January from his first act of stopping the wall, inviting people in, and I mean that literally, they said, come on in.

Then six, seven million people did come in.

And think of all the disconnects that

were not allowing athletes to come in the United States who are foreign nationals without vaccinations.

I don't know why.

Vaccinations do not prevent infectiousness or being infected, but we did let 6 million people just cross into the country without a passport, without audit, without a COVID test, without a COVID vaccination.

So they were actually treated better than those people who tried to come in legally.

And then when you look at Obadar,

I mean, what would be an enemy of the United States?

Some country that knowingly allowed people on its soil to kill more people in one year than all the Americans that have died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, 57,000,

38,000, Korea, more than that in one year.

And this was

about 2011.

This is almost a half a million.

We're getting, I think you could make the argument that opiate ODs in the last decade have killed more Americans than were lost in World War II.

What would a country have to do to be called an enemy

after that?

And this is besides the idea that they are sending people up here deliberately who will send them back out of the U.S.

economy $60, $60,

$60 billion.

And that money will be freed up for illegal aliens by state and federal subsidies for housing, education, health care, and food.

The American taxpayer is paying basically for that money to be freed up to send at $300 or $400 a month back per person back to Mexico.

And then, in addition to that, they have an expatriate community that the longer that they're distant from Mexico, the more nostalgic Mexico seems.

They become a potent lobbying force for Mexico.

And don't believe me, Sammy.

It's what Obadar said.

This is, it's wonderful.

There's 40 million people

that are people in Mexico.

And then this is beside,

you know, it's a Frederick Jackson-Turner safety valve issue for Mexico.

Would you rather have

7 million people going to the United States and being a very

secure source of foreign exchange, the largest source of foreign exchange is remittances for Mexico.

Or would you like them to march on Mexico City to air their grievances that they are the victims of a racist, corrupt government in Mexico City?

I say that without bombast because Mexico's top drug enforcement officer, I think his name is Mr.

Luna, he's now been convicted in a courtroom in New York.

The top drug fighter in Mexico was working with the cartels that tip them off.

Wow.

At some point,

what do you say to Mexico?

And this is my polite suggestion.

I would say to Mexico, we don't want any people coming into our country illegally.

We want you to shut down the drug manufacturing sites in Mexico that are deliberately making fentanyl pills look like other opiates so that they can be,

I guess, kill people or get them addicted.

And we want it stopped because it's killing 100,000 Americans.

And if you don't want to do it, that's your business.

But here's what's going to happen.

A, we're going to finish the wall immediately.

B,

we're going to start deporting any Mexican national who's here illegally.

C,

we're going to

put a 10% tax on any money sent by anybody to Mexico.

And that's going to raise $6 billion to pay for the wall.

Trump finally will pay for his wall, that kind of thinking.

And

D,

D, we're going to declare the cartels a terrorist organization, and anybody, anybody who has any commercial transactions with them will be barred from the international banking system.

Now, do you want that or not?

If you don't want that, then go after the cartels and shut it down, and we will help you.

We will give you the word.

If you don't, but you want to play this wink and nod, sort of kind of maybe, then we're done with you.

And the same thing should be applied to China, because after all, China gives them the raw product, and China is good in the Chinese thinking of the Communist Party in Beijing, it's a win-win situation.

Win?

Ah, we're killing 100,000 of young Americans.

This is wonderful.

And two, we're making a lot of money sending this to the cartels.

And we should tell the Chinese the same thing.

If you want to do that, and you want to wage war through proxy against the United States, that's fine.

But here's what we're going to do.

You have 350,000 students,

and one or 2% of them are espionage agents for the Beijing government.

We know that.

But all of them, to the degree that the Chinese can access them, have to report back to the Chinese government what they have learned in strategic terms of value to China.

They're all going to leave.

They're all going to leave unless you stop killing 100,000 Americans.

And if that's not enough, we can look at trade policy and we're going to investigate the Wuhan order.

we can do a lot of things, but not with this president, Joe Biden.

And remember one thing, people say, well, Victor, that's so provocative.

That's belly cost.

That could be war.

No, no, it's not.

What is going to cause a war, what makes us vulnerable is a perceived weakness because that will be exploited and treated

with contempt.

It's not going to be treated in like kind.

People are not going to be magnanimous because we are.

That's dangerous.

What we're doing now is very dangerous because it's going to give China and Mexico the idea that they can continue and accelerate this.

And at some point, Americans are going to say, no, Moss, we're not going to do it anymore.

I'm sorry.

Let's hope.

It should be at that point already.

I think it is.

And that's why Joe Biden is suddenly looking at the border.

Tucker, I think the other day had a series of clips, or maybe it was Laura, that it was the border is secure.

Did you see that?

Majorca's.

Oh, I saw some of them.

Yeah.

Harris, yeah, border is secure.

Well,

would you explain how it's well, it's secure.

Yeah.

And

it's just surreal.

It's Orwellian.

There is no secure in it.

They destroyed it.

And they did it for what reason?

For a future constituency to flip.

finish flipping Nevada and Arizona

blue?

Is that it?

Or to create more constituents for the welfare big government state or part of the woke industry?

I don't know what it is.

They keep attacking people who say,

oh, you guys are white racists because you believe in the great replacements.

theory.

And then they go and confirm that theory that nobody else but them have created because they do believe in the great replacements theory, only they call it another name.

They call it quote-unquote demography is destiny, and they brag about it.

And so, anyway, it's an until situation.

It sure is, and very sad for those four that went over

very unsuspecting, looking for some probably cheaper, of course, medical treatment.

But speaking of leaving and causing messes caused by the left, recently we learned that Walmart is

its last two stores out of Portland because of historic historic theft.

And that was another story I was wondering if you had any thoughts on.

Well, I mean,

Portland is this supposedly liberal utopian city, and it has no, it's lost its civilization.

It has no deterrence left.

So if you were Walmart and you petitioned the mayor to give us police response,

it's worse than doing nothing.

They have set the standard that if you're a Walmart security person and somebody walks out with a dress or a hammer or, I don't know, food, you can't do anything because if you detain them, they may sue you or they may feel they were maltreated.

If you think that's an exaggeration, there were some very, very striking tapes of sort of miss ideal citizen.

It was a woman apparently who had had a background in security, decided that she'd had enough and she went to a store.

I don't know if she was employed by that store any longer or ever was employed, although it was something that she knew obviously something about.

And she stops on tape, a couple of shoplifters, just confronts them and says, stop it.

We know,

you know, and they start arguing with her.

And then when she says, dump it, and they dump it, out comes a whole bonanza of packaged goods.

And then they have their purse and they said, said, no, that too.

And oh, no, no, no no how can you do this to me you're awful you're you're insulting and they become the victim and then they finally pour out the second bag and it's full of stuff and it's the in other words we have reached such a nadir in civilizational terms that the miscreant the criminal can when confronted claim victimhood and that it's okay to steal.

But that would be, if that were true, it would unwind civilization.

And you're going to say, well, it did, victor that's why i asked you the question that's exactly what i was thinking yeah exactly yeah there is no civilization there is no civilization and it doesn't start from the bottom it starts from the top when you have a nicole hannah jones a 1619 character when she says right in the

the heat of 120 days of rioting, arson, looting, assault, murder, and she says, oh, looting is not really a crime.

Looting's not.

And so that's what the left feel.

They feel it's a redistributionist project

unless it happens to them.

And then they become paranoid.

And so these cities, the subtext of what happened to Los Angeles and what happened to San Francisco and what happened to Chicago and what happened to Baltimore and what happened to Washington, D.C.

is not just homelessness.

and crime.

It was that, but it was this particular idea that you had a right to go in after the George Floyd

killing, death, whatever we term it, that you had a right to take something and the people who owned that something had no right to stop you.

And once that was tolerated or even encouraged by laxity, then it became epidemic.

Yeah, it sure did.

It's very hard to stop because you'd have to really clamp down on it.

And I just don't think that this society is up to it.

There is no such deterrence makes the world go round.

It's a good Latin word, de terio, to scare somebody from doing something.

And without it, you have no society.

You don't have any deterrence on the border.

Mexico is not afraid of us.

The cartels are not afraid of us.

China is not afraid of us.

And the criminal is not afraid of us, the collective American people.

And as we always say, it's very hard to acquire, but it's easily given up.

Well, Victor, the big thing I wanted to ask you about was Tucker Carlson has been given access by Kevin McCarthy to the Capitol videos of January of the day of January 6th.

So he had lots of footage and I was, and he got lots of critique.

I especially noted that Mitch McConnell criticized Tucker for putting out

an alternate view to what the January 6th had set forth to us.

But I was wondering your thoughts on that.

Well,

I watched it very carefully the first two nights, that is Monday and Tuesday.

And I'm going to watch it tonight.

And there were two January 6th.

There were

a few, I don't know how many dozen that were

clearly violent.

They took on the police.

They pushed.

They were like the

May, June, July, August, September, 2020, Antifa BLM people.

Not quite as bad.

I mean, they didn't throw Molotov cocktails.

They didn't kill people.

They didn't kill 35 people.

They didn't do $2 billion worth of damage.

They didn't try to firebomb a police car.

But they were guilty of illegal trespass and probably some class three felony.

Okay.

But there were other people that once the thing was open,

they just wandered around.

They wanted to see the Capitol.

And

they weren't criminals at all.

So there were two different scenes.

But what the left did was, when we had the January 6th, they took the latter and censored it and then claimed that for security purposes, they wanted to suppress all of the tape so you wouldn't see that.

So then when Kevin McCarthy allowed Tucker to have access, and he'll allow other people to have it.

What did they do?

They went crazy and they started attacking Tucker.

And I mean, Michael Steele called him some kind of demonic fallen angel or something.

He was the former head of the the Republican Party.

Mitch McConnell, as you said, attacked him.

But he didn't say that everybody was peaceful.

He said the majority of the people were peaceful.

And what was very stunning and tragic was we were told by the New York Times, I think they did retract it after they got as much mileage they could after

about someone's death,

which was really eerie and gruesome.

But Officer Sicknick.

It may have been related to the stress or tension, but he did not die violently at the hands of a Trump person by being bashed with a fire extinguisher.

That's what we were told.

That was just reverberated through the usual talking points on the left.

And at the time that happened, that was when he was out on the lines confronting the violent protesters.

Right after that, he walked into the Capitol.

He's on tape.

He's fine.

So that was a narrative that was central.

Remember that his cremated remains were laid in state, and they had an entire

celebratory session of Congress on his behalf.

And it was proof that the Law and Order Wright had murdered him.

It was a complete lie.

And then that fed into the larger lie that Joe Biden and

Hakeem Jeffries and Kamel Harris said on the anniversary that five people had died, five police officers.

Well,

none of them were killed.

One of them either had a stroke or an allergic reaction to something, Mr.

Sicknick, the next day, tragically so.

The other four, at various periods, up to months, committed suicide.

We don't know in any of the cases that whether they committed suicide because they were traumatized over their duty.

They've seen a lot of things policemen do.

The suicide rate of policemen is right up there with farmers.

And I had a neighbor who shot himself.

I had talked to him just two days prior, a renter that was renting a place, and he shot him, killed himself.

I don't know why he did,

but people do that.

But to go back and then be play doctor and say that all of these deaths were attributed to the stress, it's just

bankrupt to do that.

And so

they knew that, and they knew that they did not call witnesses they should have.

And Lynn Cheney and Kissinger and the rest of them, they understood that they did not want any, they hired a Hollywood person

to make a collage of the January 6 videos that we were not allowed to look at.

So when Tucker did this, it destroyed the narrative.

And the man with the cowhorns that we were told was a dangerous felon and was the architect of the entire thing nearly is in prison now.

He's a Navy veteran.

He's in prison for four years, and yet he's there.

in a buffoonish fashion walking peacefully around the rotunda and inside the capitol and he says a prayer for the welfare of the policeman and

thanks them for being

polite to him.

And so he doesn't, what I'm saying, Sammy, it doesn't fit the narrative of a 2020 summer Antifa-BLM violent insurrection.

And for the left to

manufacture that is just despicable.

And then when Tucker does this, to have Schumer

go on the floor, Chuck Schumer, senator from New York, senate

majority leader, to say that he doesn't have a right to do that and Fox should stop him.

And

I thought to myself, you, you, you, the man who got in front of a mob of angry pro-abortion protesters that would hit their hands on the on the doors of the Supreme Court, and you said to them, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch,

you sowed the wind.

You're going to reap the whirlwind.

You don't know what will will hit you my god and then people

a few months later massed at the at the homes illegally so

to effect a supreme court ruling it's a felony to do that to protest and get on the property of a of a justice to influence an impending court decision and merit garland did nothing and then finally an assassin out of the woodwork comes out and he's there right there and he this man is lecturing anybody on proper behavior and decorum he should be ashamed of himself and so he was also the one person who told donald trump when he got in a rift with the cia they have seven ways from sunday to come and get you ha ha

he was that wasn't a warning and heartfelt admonition it was hey you idiot we've got some pretty good guys in the cia and fbi and now they're going to go after you and that's going to be fun to watch that was the attitude in which it was delivered so this guy is really i mean

the this January 6th is such a, it's there with the Wuhan, you know, lab.

Lies, yeah, all the lies.

We're all the subject.

We all are subjects, as I said, with Cleta Mitchell.

And we live in the empire of lies.

And all of the major events of our lives, the last two years, have been an utter and complete lie.

May,

July, 2020 were not peaceful.

They were not peaceful.

They were one of the biggest insurrectionary riots in American history, as calibrated by $2 billion worth of damage.

35 to 40 people killed violently, and 1,500 police officers struck, arson, federal courthouse torch, police precincts torch, historic church across from the White House torch, White House grounds stormed, an attempt to get to the president, all of this stuff.

And

though we were told that the Wuhan lab,

we all knew from the very beginning that you don't find a gain of function manufactured virus in a wet market right next to a level four biology lab controlled by the Chinese government with funding routed from Anthony Fauci to engage in gain of function research and not find one animal or any other organism before a human was detected with it.

It was detected, I should say, in a human.

No No other previous animal example, and then try to pass that lie off onto us.

The Mueller investigation, Donald Trump called up Vladimir and colluded to throw the 2000 complete lie, or worse yet, it was a projection because that's precisely what Hillary Clinton did to Three Paywalls, the laptop, that it was Russian dissipation, complete lie.

Those four things, right?

Voter suppression,

racism at the polls, therefore we have to go from 70% showing up on election day to 30%.

All of those were lies, and they were very effective.

They changed our lives.

They still do.

And how about the other lies, that mass would give you absolute protection, that the mRNA vaccinations were not only without side effects, but essential.

to give you lasting immunity from infectiousness and from being infected, and quarantines were the only viable method to stop the epidemic.

Boil all that down, and there's one common denominator: Fauci and Burks, and the media, and

the left wanted to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump, and they succeeded beyond their wildest imagination.

Yes, but if I can move back to the videotapes, it seems to me, I know you're talking about, well, they manufacture a view of things and use evidence

sparingly or specifically or dishonestly.

But what I noticed with Tucker's presentation of the videotapes is that, and I might make some of your listeners angry, but it seems to me he overemphasized the peacefulness because there were things, two things.

One, those people that went into the Capitol had broken a law.

And we say that all the time, we say that all the time about the border.

Like, okay, they're very nice people, but nonetheless, they broke a law.

I've never done if i in my lifetime i have never done that so if i go to fresno right

and let's say that i want to go i don't know let's just say that i've always wanted to go

to the fresno metropolitan museum right

and i go there and there's a protest about its failings and someone has opened the door.

And in this case, it was a secure, it was the security guards.

I mean, Ashley Babbitt and others went through a broken, but the

broken windows and stuff.

Yes, there was.

That was an entry for the violent people.

But at some point, somebody in the Capitol police decided that to avert confrontation, maybe you should just allow people to visit.

So they did.

And maybe if you were a protester and you didn't know what had followed before you arrived, and you saw a policeman with a door open, you might have thought it was open on Saturday.

That's plausible.

But

if you knew that you were not supposed to be there and that the Capitol was closed and you entered the Capitol and you walked around the Capitol, it would be as if my mythical museum, if there was a protest and everybody thought, okay, we're going to go after these people, but they opened the door.

I still wouldn't go in because you're not supposed to go in there.

It's closed on Saturday.

That's my point.

Yeah, that's a good point, but that's called

illegally parading.

It's not an violent insurrection.

At one point, we were told a violent armed insurrection, although no one has been found inside the Capitol with a firearm.

Nobody's been charged with insurrection either.

Conspiracy, you know, racketeering, all that.

But

convicted, I should say, of insurrection.

violent insurrection.

So your point is that all these people that Tucker was narrating

that were peaceful and walking around were not authorized, even though some of them may have been invited in by the police, but they should have known that the police were inviting them in to avert a more violent confrontation, not because it was legal to do so.

That's your point.

Yes.

Yes, that's well taken.

I agree with you.

Okay.

And I think they should be charged the ones that did that.

It's legitimate to charge them with misdemeanors.

And a misdemeanor is in today's America is they write a ticket out.

It's not for four years in prison.

It's not a year of indefinite sentence.

Imprisonment.

Yeah, sure.

It's not solitary confinement.

It's not being put at the mercy of jailers that are prejudicial.

So

that's something that the left has manufactured.

I mean, if you think about it,

those people in the crowd were mostly law-abiding, the vast majority, but they are despised by the left.

They're despised to such a degree that when you juxtapose that to what we saw with the deaths and the destruction and the looting and the arson that they contextualized, or they said it's mostly peaceful, that MSNBC reporter said it's mostly peaceful white flames shot up in the sky behind him.

And that's what all, that's the, that's what gets people angry.

Just have it symmetrical.

That's all people are asking.

If January, if the summer of love,

if that was considered not reaching a point

that would warrant mass arrest, then January 6th wasn't either.

And I just say that post facto.

Just put in the left ledger number of dead, number of policemen injured, amount of property damage,

incidents of arson and torching federal buildings.

On the right, put in number of people breaking the law, number of people injured, number of police officers attacked, killed, whatever, and property damage.

And I think you'll see that your left-hand column dwarfs the right, but in terms of penalty and government reaction,

the right dwarfs elect.

And by the way,

if a listener says, yes, Victor, but this was the iconic Capitol,

then I said, is the federal courthouse iconic?

Is a police precinct iconic?

Is the St.

John's Episcopal Church, everybody knows where it is.

It's right near the White House.

That's iconic.

How about the White House grounds that they tried to storm and sent the president into a bunker?

So

it's two laws, two systems of jurisprudence.

Yes, and

the problem of not executing the laws for the people that they have arrested.

Victor, we need to take a break and come back.

And if you have any more words on this, we'll come back to that.

But otherwise, we're going to turn to the Punic Wars and hear a little bit about that on this weekend episode.

Stay with us.

We're back.

Victor, I didn't know if you were quite finished with Tucker's video representation or not.

Do you have anything else to

well, I just would finish with a final observation that

they despise Tucker Carlson, they, and no more than the Never Trump people, some of his old colleagues at the Weekly Standard.

And they do because

he has an ability to point out the hypocrisies and the cruelty and the sheer meanness of this elite, elite left.

And he's also very critical.

And you mentioned Mitch McConnell and other Mitt Romney's of the Republican Party.

And his argument, if you follow it and it resonates, is that there are people who have been in politics so long and they have such lucrative past, present, and future business contacts that they're multi-millionaires.

And they love to be in the center of media attention, that they don't really care who's in power.

If you say to Mitch McConnell, is your life fundamentally different

as majority leader or minority leader?

If you say to Mitt Romney, does it really matter to you whether the Democrats or the Republicans in power?

They wouldn't, I don't, I don't, whatever they say, I don't think they believe that.

It's for them, it's just being a fixture, you know what I mean?

an artifact.

And it's just a nice lifestyle.

You get a lot of attention.

You don't need the money because you're fabulously rich.

And

you don't represent the person out there in nowhere land that

says,

you know, my son wants to join the Marines, but they're going after people.

It's woke, and they're trying to indoctrinate her.

My daughter's going to school, and they're teaching her that because she's white, she's part of a pernicious, terrible racist legacy.

She's only six.

My other daughter came home at 13, and they're asking her if she's considered transitioning in the school.

Or I have a small business and people walk out with stuff.

Or I have to commute to Euron every day and I can't afford out here in the San Joaquin, I can't afford $5.60

for diesel fuel for my work truck.

They don't care about that.

No, they sure don't.

Well, let's go ahead then and turn to the Punic Wars.

And boy, lots of questions.

There are three Punic Wars.

I think most of our listeners probably understand that.

But I don't think we often hear

how the word Punic is used for wars between Carthage and Rome itself.

And I have lots of other questions, but oftentimes, in the process of you describing and analyzing something, you answer those questions.

So I thought maybe I'd just let you go and talk about the Punic Wars for us.

Yes, well, Punic is a

Latin corruption of

poinus in Greek, and that means Phoenician, right?

So mythically, if you look at

the founding mythologies of Carthage, it was, you could see it in the book four of Virgil's Aeneid, that Dido, the mythical queen, left Phoenicia somewhere around, I don't know,

815 BC, and she brought Phoenicians over to what is now Tunisia

and by extension, parts of Algeria, maybe even all the way back to the Gulf of Sirte and Libya.

Okay.

And that

word then, Phoenix, was the Phoenicians that the classical Greeks and Romans came in contact with.

So Punic became

divorced from Phoenicians, i.e.

Lebanese, and it was a word for Phoenicians inside on settled in North Africa.

And over the centuries,

it was directly affected by Hellenic culture and civilization.

So Maggo wrote treatises in the Hellenic spirit on agriculture, or many Spartan drill masters came and trained Carthaginian warriors.

Anybody's seen the harbor at Carthage, you can go there today.

It's about 20 miles from Tunis.

It's very 70 miles, 80 miles from Palermo.

But my point is that

across the Mediterranean, that it became very powerful and it had a constitutional system.

According to Polybius and Aristotle,

that mixed system of government, which is our own judicial, executive, legislative, that provides checks and balances, that system was the key to the Roman Republic's success.

in a way that the other systems of autocracy, monarchy, dictatorship, didn't work.

And Carthage had the same type of government.

They had an upper and lower house.

They had tribunes or magistrates that were acted as judges.

And they had

an elected or an appointed by the Senate

supreme executive.

Okay.

So here you have two countries separated, you know, by

about 100 miles at the most.

And that famous passage in Plutarch's life of the elder Cato, where Cato, who just hates Carthage, is saying Carthago de Linda S.

Supposedly, he said that.

I'm not sure he did, but using the Gerundic, Carthage must be destroyed.

That was after two Carthaginian-Roman wars.

Okay, and then to be very dramatic, he put some figs.

He claimed, he claimed they were picked at Carthage.

And he got in front of the Senate and he did his toga and they rolled out and said, see, they're fresh.

They're fresh.

This is how close these minutes are.

So there was an existential hatred,

and they were different ethnically.

I mean, these were Phoenician, Semitic peoples, and then you had Italians that were very different.

But culturally, they weren't that different, except there were certain things about the god Baal versus the Olympians

of Rome.

And then one big

divisive point, according to Roman sources, was of child sacrifice.

The Romans had removed that, at least rhetorically, to their ancient past, and that was ongoing in Carthage.

Nevertheless, they were of about equal size, and by the third century, about two million people, and they could each put into the field about a quarter million soldiers under duress.

Carthage was a huge sea power.

Rome was a land power, and Rome had united the Italian peninsula and started to move up toward what was now the Swiss border and even making inroads down into Sicily.

Okay.

And so they were

in strict competition.

And so they had a series of wars over 117 years, essentially.

We don't really know too much about the first one,

what we call the First Punic War.

And that was 264 BC.

The first one was 264.

And that would start the whole whole ball rolling.

And then, of course, it went on for 23 years to 241, and it would finally end with the third in 146.

But that was fought mostly over

who would own Sicily

and Carthaginian European possessions in southern Spain.

Of course, Corsica and

what is now Sardinia.

And there was a Carthaginian empire.

If you were to look at a map, you would see that prior to the First Punic War, what is now the fertile coast of Libya, much more fertile in antiquity, and then Tunisia, and then the coastal seaboard of Algeria and Morocco, Gibraltar, and then I think half of southern, half of Spain, the southern part, was Carthaginian, and parts of Sicily were as

well.

But in comparison to the so-called Roman Republic, it was much bigger.

And they were in the ascendance.

And they didn't have a navy, the Italians.

So most people at the time, I think, thought probably that Carthage was going to win that war.

But after 23 years, as we know, Rome built a navy.

Early on, they had a very

good luck.

I should say they defeated them at Akragas.

and the Romans learned how to deal with elephants.

That was sort of the tank of the ancient world.

They were a very volatile weapon.

The Carthaginians had a monopoly on, point them in the right direction.

But if some Roman ran up and stuck in his anus a javelin or something or a spear, who knows where this tank would go?

It's often on its own men.

But there was a series of battles.

Rome then, at the Battle of Echnomus, learned how the corvus, the so-called hook and boarding, where they could take a huge board with a gigantic spike in it, I shouldn't say hook, attach to the

Carthaginian ship, and then

force it either to be unstable at sea or to be boarded.

The thing about it was that these things are very deadly.

So after the victory at Echnomus,

The invasion force that actually landed on Carthage and which would eventually end the war with an armistice and a payment that Carthage was bound to give and the surrender of a lot of its European colonies.

The Romans on the way back lost 100,000 sailors off Sicily.

That was the largest single loss at sea in the history of maritime fighting, if you could call that aftermath fighting, because it was the trip back from Carthage.

And And that

was very important because that showed you how existential these wars were.

When you get down to 146, there's probably 350,000 Romans that died.

So there's going to be an existential hatred.

And then we go from

number two.

And number two is what everybody listening knows about because that is,

I guess we would call it Hannibal's War.

That's the one 218 to 201.

And that was a very different campaign.

After defeats in Spain, Hannibal crosses the Alps with, you know,

maybe 40,000 Gauls, Iberians, and mercenaries, Carthage.

He descends into Italy with an army of only 20,000.

But he's sort of, I don't know what you would say, he's at the rearguard of the Italian Republic.

And in a dramatic series of battles at the river Ticinias, the Trebia,

Lake Trassemane, and Canai, all within 24 months, he kills, kills, kills, or wounds, or scatters about a quarter million people.

Canai alone, somewhere between, depending on the source, Livy or Lutarch or Polybius, to 40,000 people, maybe 35 at Trashimone.

And then you talk about the people who are wounded or were left scattered about.

And at that point, Rome is unable to continue classical warfare against the invader.

And so they turn to

one man restored, you know, one man restored the Republic.

And that's Fabius Maximus and the delayer.

That is, he tried to wage a war of hit and run.

And Hannibal is in Italy for 18 years.

trying to stir up rebellion among the city-states of Italy to break their allegiance

to

Italy.

And they don't, at first it starts to work, and then they feel that the Carthaginians are a little bit too different from the Italians, even though they're not really comfortable with the Roman unification

decisions.

And then

in classic fashion,

a genius comes out of nowhere, Scipio Africanus.

He invades North Africa, sends Hannibal back, and at the famous Battle of Zama, he crushes.

It's a long story, but

he should have lost that battle.

It was slightly outnumbered.

He was on Carthaginian territory.

They were fighting, but not too far from the walls, you know, 20 miles from the walls of Carthage.

They had a military genius in Hannibal, and yet he won.

And at that point,

you would think that he would besiege a city, but they had lost so many people in those two wars.

that there was an armistice.

Okay, 201, you got to have.

Go ahead.

Can I ask something something about that?

You sound like, because

when we think about these wars,

I usually assume that the Romans were stronger, but in two cases here, you've said they were lucky

in the first war, and then also that they didn't seem to do anything.

Why did they let Hannibal rage about the peninsula for so many?

I mean,

why is that?

Why did they let him?

Because they were exhausted.

They had no manpower reserves.

They had had created three consular armies.

The consuls had been killed.

So at Tychinis was a modern, but when he came down into northern Italy, at the Trebia River, they lost, I think, 10,000 people.

At Trissemane, they were surrounded and annihilated.

At Canai, that was the most costly battle probably in Roman history.

you know some sources say 60 000 were killed alone so cannibal was just a better general than any roman general that they had Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I mean, it's very rare in military history for the inferior force to create, and I should say to attempt and pull off a double envelopment.

That means that

you could argue that the Athenians almost did it at the Battle of Marathon, but to weaken your center to such a degree, to get enough troops to go around the larger enemy mass and seal the envelope before you're, you know, it's like a balloon bursting before your center collapses.

And you read those descriptions in Livia.

Gosh, I mean, it's, it's, I don't know if anybody remembers Games of Throne.

Remember the Battle of the Bastards where they go out,

Jon Snow, and they think they're winning, and then suddenly they're surrounded by the other bastards and they're almost, they're completely cut off.

That I think.

either the novel or I didn't read the novel, but the screenwriters are trying to emulate what's something about

canai, because in the descriptions of canai,

it's clear that they're such a mass they're not able to use their pila and they don't have room to maneuver because they're completely surrounded and extinguished.

At that point,

Hannibal at the gates at Portis, there should have been a march on Rome.

He probably could have taken it, but he thought he was in the driver's seat, and then he would ravage and destroy the cropland of Italy.

When I was 26, I wrote a book called

Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece.

And

I had looked at the great historian Arnold Toynbee.

He wrote a book called Hannibal's Legacy, and I didn't agree with it, and I cited it, but in his view, that that 18-year period destroyed

small farming, agrarianism, and led to

the destruction of the family farm.

And then, coupled with the victory victory in the Second Punic War and the loot and the slaves that poured in really changed the nature of the Republic.

I think there was something to that, but his suggestion that he, you know, it's easy to cut down olive trees or tear out vineyards, it's not.

But anyway,

that was a seminal moment.

And then in 2000, excuse me, in 201

there's an armistice, and it's a very strict, they have to pay a huge 200 talent indemnity,

and they have to give up all their European and Mediterranean possessions,

and they cannot make war unless they ask the permission of the Roman Senate,

and they can only have defensive weapons.

But the problem is that even after giving up all of those possessions, the city has never been breached.

It had the largest

municipal fortifications in the ancient world, except for Constantinople.

It didn't quite have anything like the Theod

Wall in Constantinople, which was the most impressive fortifications for a thousand years.

But

it was almost impossible to breach those fortifications of Carthage.

So at the end of the first and second and exhausted Rome didn't try.

But

this

period,

what Rome did was to

shackle Carthage by making them pay this indemnity, by stripping them of their tribute income from its colonies,

and breaking away their Punic allies and Numidians-Berbers.

Those are the indigenous people that spoke a different language and were of a

different ethnic background than the Phoenician interlopers, even though they were partially intermingled.

Today, when you go to Libya or Morocco, you'll meet an aristocrat sometimes.

Say, oh, I'm not an Arab.

And they'll either say, I'm Numidian, or I'm a Berber or I'm Phoenician.

And what they mean is that

they are from the original inhabitants, which were either Numidians or Berbers with a different language, or

after 800 BC, part of the mixture between those two cultures, Punic and indigenous North African, well before the Arabs arrived in the seventh century, Muslims.

In any case, they had to have permission, Carthage, to reply to Numidian attacks on their farmland.

And Massanissa, who was 80, died, I think he was at 90.

All he did for 15 or 20 years was carve away the

inland empire and which Carthage depended upon.

So finally,

the elder Cato, he's in his 80s, he says, we've got to destroy Carthage.

And Carthage had sympathizers in the Senate.

They said, this is crazy.

Why would we have a preemptive war against

a former enemy that's friendly and they have no wherewithal?

They can't make war.

And he said, well, they paid their money off.

Now they're going to have money and they'll always do it.

No, that's in their DNA.

No matter what they do, they hate us.

This can't be resolved.

Scipio Naskia from another branch of the Scipio family was not pro-Carthage.

There were a lot of people, I suppose, that had the same view that a lot of conservatives do about Ukraine.

Why are we getting involved in this overseas nightmare?

Just let the Carthaginians be.

We have a long history.

The

playwright Plautus was a Carthaginian, apparently.

There were a lot of Italian traitors.

Okay.

149, the Romans decide to follow the elder Cato's advice.

They send the largest amphibious army in their history, 80,000, and they flip Utica, the harbor, the big harbor, 10 miles, 15 miles away, and they land and they have orders from the Senate to give ultimata.

So they give the orders to the Carthaginian envoys.

This is what you're supposed to do.

You're supposed to

renounce all warmaking with any of your indigenous enemies.

Even if they start it, you can't reply.

And you've got to give up all your weapons.

If you do that, we'll have an armistice.

So they give up all their

cavalry.

They turn in all of their elephants.

They destroy their fleet.

They give up their swords, their catapults.

And it has the opposite effect.

They thought, wow, they lost the Second Punic War.

We've been

coercing them for where the hell did they get all these weapons?

So they just bring them in in droves and all of a sudden

they send back envoys.

And the Senate said, hmm, we were, you know, Cato.

I told you those sneaky little bastards,

they're not weak.

They've got this huge city.

They've got this huge fleet.

So then the envoy,

the Romans send an envoy and say, come on back.

We have to negotiate.

It's a fluid situation.

And the envoys go, we gave you everything we wanted.

Come on, let's live in peace.

Can't we, you know, Rodney, can't we all get along?

And they said, no, no, no, no.

We got a new final ultimatum.

You've got to destroy your whole city.

And you've got to, if you want to stay here alive, you can go back at least 10 miles from the ocean.

We're more than 10 miles from Austria, our harbor, no big deal.

They said, wait, you want to destroy our city, the crown jewel of our empire, such as it is.

It was founded

hundreds of years ago.

It's huge.

We're not going to do that.

Well, then we're going to attack you.

And then the envoys come back and say, that's the ultimatum.

And they start attacking the envoys.

How dare you even insult us with that message?

And all the people who said, you have to deal with the Romans are too powerful, they kill or stone.

And all the firebrands, one of them by the name of Hannibal, the...

Hasublebul, the bow-shaped boetar, he says, only reason I'm going on, because nobody cares about the third Punic War, it seems to me.

It's the most fascinating in some ways.

And he says, you put me in jail for warning you about, you said I was a firebrand, I'd start a war.

Appeasement started the war.

And now you better turn over the control of the government to me because I will fight these guys.

And they do.

And there is no Third Punic War to speak of.

There's skirmishing outside the walls.

There's commando attacks to burn the siege crap, but it's basically a three-year-long siege where the Romans try to cut off

the harbor and so that the fleet, which is being rebuilt with old materials, they can't get out and they're cut off from food from the interior.

That takes them two years and they have two consuls in 49 and another consul and they're completely incompetent, just like the Romans were.

prior to Scipio Africanus.

Now, unfortunately for the

Carthaginians, what happens in war, if you are dealing with a consensual society, often, somebody,

somebody turns up.

1861, the Confederacy thought, you know what, all these guys were flunkies at West Point.

We've got Stonewall Jackson from VMI, we got Robert E.

Lee.

We've got Longstreet.

They've got Halleck.

They've got McClellan.

They've got Burnside.

They've got,

you know, Hooker,

Pope, a bunch of mediocrity.

No.

Eventually, you'll find a Sherman and a Grant and a Sheridan and a Tom.

And they did.

Eventually in Korea, you will find a Matthew Ridgway.

Eventually in World War II, a guy that everybody thought was kind of crazy, whether it's a Curtis LeMay or a George Patton, comes to the fore.

And that's what happened.

There's a legate named Scipio Aemilianus.

He's not related by blood to Africanus.

But in the Roman world, when you had a large family, you would adopt, let a famous family give your grandson or son his name, and they would be kind of like a co-parent.

And he's adopted by the Scipios.

And so he's renamed Scipio Aemilianus.

And he's the son of Aemilius Paulus, who is one of the most brilliant generals in Roman Republican history.

And unfortunately, he's more talented even than his more famous step-adopted grandfather.

And when they put him in charge on the last year and a half, things change, unfortunately.

And he is able to

completely

cut the isthmus off so they have no connection with their food.

He destroys their second fleet.

And

Hasdrabul starts going berserk,

torturing and killing Roman captives on the wall.

And finally, they burst into one section of the wall, and they get in.

And then

once the Romans are in, they go up to the city, the second interior wall to Bursa, and they destroy them.

And what do they do this time?

You know,

well, you can argue there's a first Peloponnesian War, there's a Second Peloponnesian War, there's no third Peloponnesian War.

There's a First Persian War under Darius.

There's a second Persian War under, there's no third one.

That happens so often in history.

There's World War I, there's World War II so far.

What I'm getting at is the victors, when they win, at some point, if this happens again,

they say, no, we're not going to go do this again.

We're not going to talk about Germany and stab in the back and not

occupy it in Versailles.

No, no, no, no.

We're going to occupy the country, split it in two, no nuclear war.

That's what they did, and it gave us peace.

So this time,

they're not going to allow Carthage to exist.

So

they completely leveled the city.

And there were 500,000 people who had flocked into the city.

They're all dead except 50,000.

So they killed,

I don't know, they killed 450,000.

90% of the population, they murdered or killed.

The 50,000 that survived, they enslaved and sent them back to Italy as slaves.

Then they destroyed systematically.

And Scipio is getting, you know, hey, what do you want me to do?

I'm here.

They said, we want you to

do what we told.

And we want nothing.

It's not true that they sowed the ground with salt.

That's a modern mythology.

I don't think you can do that in farming.

Salt's too expensive.

But they did make the site prohibitive.

It was a curse to settle on it.

Gracchus, the oldest one, I think 20 years later, he tried to make a Roman settlement there, but it didn't work.

They cut off the funding.

But then Caesar, 100 years later, founded

Nova Carthago, and that became very,

very, very successful.

It was, I think, by 100 AD, it was the third largest city in the Roman Empire.

It was over 500,000 people.

What you see today,

when you go there, the ruins are Novo Carthago, the new Carthage, the Roman city founded in 46 or something, 45 by Julius Caesar.

And that was the end of, that was the end of everything.

That was the end of it.

There was no more.

Nothing.

That was the end of Punic culture.

And people say, well, there's Punic inscriptions.

Yeah,

there's always a remnant, but a cohesive, identifiable culture that no, that was the end of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we need to take our last break and then come back and we can finish up with Carthage if you have more to say.

Or I have a

story about the University of North Carolina creating a new school of civic life on their campus and some dispute about that.

So stick with us and come back after these messages.

We're back.

Victor, so I don't know if you were finished with Carthage.

It sounded like, I always wondered about that lore that they had spread salt.

I know that in the

not one ancient passage that says that?

No,

it was created in the 18th century.

Oh, wow.

And maybe out of a Renaissance source.

And somebody had misinterpreted the idea of a ritual pollution of the soil, pollution in the metaphorical sense.

And they thought that that

became just everybody had said that there's a whole series of articles I remember written 20 years ago back and forth about it.

They do have salt mines in North Africa, though.

I know that in the Middle Ages,

you know, if anybody has driven on the west side of California, you can see what happens when soil becomes selenized.

Yeah.

It's worthless.

And but that was not true.

And,

you know, it's it's a very iconic idea because at the end of Carthage in 146, it was simultaneous with the destruction of Corinth.

As I said earlier, when you're excavating, I said that with Jack, we were talking about an article I wrote, when you're excavating in Corinth and you go through these levels of, you know, modern Greece, Byzantine Greece, Roman Greece, Republic,

Empire, then you get down to the Republic, you get to Corinth and right around what would be, if you were more exact, 146, you can see a burn level.

It's black.

It's about four inches wide.

And that was the destruction by Gaius Mummius.

So in that same year, Carthage and Corinth were destroyed.

I don't mean defeated.

I mean wiped out the buildings level of the people.

And that was new for Rome.

You know, Philip of Macedon had done it.

Alexander had done it.

But that was...

considered then the end, the official end

in some Europeans of the Hellenistic period.

Most Most people say it was the destruction, you know, the Battle of Actium and the end of Egypt and the end of a Greek ptalmate culture in the eastern Mediterranean.

But whether you believe that it was the final death knell of the Hellenistic world, 146 marked a radical change, at least symbolically in Roman Republican

policies and agendas.

From now on, they're going to be an imperialistic power and they're going to divide and conquer.

And then when they take over a country, they're going to allow it to have its own customs, to pay tribute.

But if they cross Rome, they're not going to defeat them.

They're going to wipe them out like they did.

Think about it in Jewish.

So after the Punic Wars, all the momentum was on Rome's side as far as conquest.

They have the ability now to do two things.

They don't have to worry about the Western Mediterranean and any enemy fleet.

So they're going in the Western Mediterranean.

So they're going to turn their attention to Asia Mithridates

and the Ptolemies in Egypt, number one,

and Greece itself after the destruction of the Macedonian kingdoms, which they've accomplished.

And with Corinth and the Achaean League out of the way, the whole Eastern Mediterranean will get their full attention.

And now they will have the resources.

through all of this tribute,

huge fertile lands come under their control in North Africa from Carthage, and they're going to go into Spain and Gaul in the next century.

And so that, it's, and it's not going to, I mean, Julius Caesar, we were told that he killed a million Gauls, French people, and he killed, he enslaved, killed a million, enslaved a million.

So it's, it's, they take the gloves off is what I'm saying.

And it's no longer the republic of, you know, the Gracchi or, and you get certain people who don't want to buy into it, it, like Satorius, who becomes an outlaw, but it's different.

It's the beginning, at least in Polybius' view, the great historian who was at Carthage in the Thirteen War, he felt that it marked the beginning of Roman imperialism.

There's a lot of rhetorical,

you know, and

historians like Appian, they have a lot of warnings about what Rome has become after Carthage.

And, you know, it's kind of a type scene that when a Roman commander destroys something, because they're magnanimous, wonderful people, they have to shed crocodile tears.

So here's Scipio saying, you know, torch the damn city, kill everybody, enslave the rest, level it.

Oh, I'm looking at it in smoke now, and I'm, it's so sad.

It's all a race.

I remember that line in the Iliad about Troy.

And one day, when Hector, remember, he's confronting Achilles, said, One day,

you know, you're going to be shot.

And then earlier, one day Ilium will fall,

will fall.

And Scipio goes, I just wonder whether that line of Homer that one day Ilium will fall is when it was spoke, you know, one day,

you know, payback, karma, payback's a bitch, karma, nemesis.

I wonder if this, what I'm watching is going to presage the end of us.

He's so bad about it.

So bad.

He's a man of letters.

That's what's so so funny about.

That's why I like Roman literature.

It's so predictably,

I don't know what it is, imperialism.

Utilitarian is.

Yeah, but

it's with this veneer that

we're enslaving you for your own good.

We enslave you and you become part.

of us and we give you purple togas you have your own little and we give you habeas corpus some aqueducts a nice little coliseum and you're part of the team and the bathhouse Yeah.

And who would not want that?

Now, if you don't want it,

you're free to say no, but we're going to kill every one of you and put your wives and everybody enslaves.

It's up to you.

And that's sort of, and most people opt out.

That brilliant Scott, is he a Scott or what is he?

He's kind of a northern Englishman, Calgagus.

Calicas, it's in Tassus'

Agricola, I think.

He says, they make it a desert and call it peace.

That's the Roman way of war.

There we go.

And that's the end of our Punic wars.

So let's turn it on.

Carthaginian is a nice adjective.

You know, after the end of World War II, the Secretary of Treasury, Morgenthau,

everybody didn't know what to do with Germany.

And they had discussed it at Potsdam.

He said, I got a really good idea.

We've got to go full Carthaginian.

And what full Carthaginian was destroying the entire Ruhr Rally industrial quarter, giving all the stuff, the machines and the factories to the French and the Russians who had suffered, and then making, destroying the German government, i.e.

unified Germany, to go back pre-1871 and make it an agrarian pastoral people where they had no municipalities or industry.

That was the idea.

He was Secretary of the Treasury.

And then, you know, everybody was outraged.

Roosevelt kind of bought into it for a while.

And then Churchill said, this is a crime.

You can't do this.

Come on.

It's funny.

You're reminding me of that movie Patton when they have Patton in Northern Africa and he goes out to those Carthaginian ruins.

What is that?

And he has some idea.

Yeah, he has some idea.

That's what he says.

Yeah.

He said, I need to show it.

He goes, you don't have to show me.

I was here.

I don't know whether he meant he was a Roman

prefect or he was on Hannibal's general staff or he was Hannibal or he was Scipio.

I don't know.

But he did, you know, you can read Martin Blumenson's, the

patent papers, or parts of that little

after he died, his wife kind of made a collage of some of his sayings, the war as I knew it.

There's a, Martin Blumenson also wrote a very good biography, as did Ladislock, Farago.

And there's been a lot.

There's only been one, I won't get into it, one bad biography.

But in all of those, there's enough evidence to show you, I think, that Patton really did believe in reincarnation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He wrote a poem about it.

Well, Victor, we're right at the end.

And I think what I'll do is save for our next podcast because it's not going anywhere, the story of this new school for civic life at the University of North America.

You mentioned to me, is it last time, or did you email me that you had an angry reader that was angry at something I said?

But we'll do that next time.

I, you know, yeah, let's do that next time.

Yes, it was a reader who was wondering if you could, because of your statistics about black crime.

Yes, well, I mean, this is what they let's do it actually, because it'll probably be short.

Okay, um, your statistics about black crime were for

uh murder and um trying to think.

He said another thing you said, but if you take those two

out,

that

uh the statistics show that whites have more commit more crimes

than

blacks do.

And that I'm trying to think what his point was, was that you're

misrepresenting, you're misrepresenting.

He saw it as misrepresenting.

So my reader, whoever you are, if you're listening,

Sammy didn't tell me all.

That's all I need to know.

You haven't told me about this.

I just knew you said I had an angry reader.

Okay.

White collar crime.

What does that mean?

Yeah, that's right.

He said.

Yes.

If white collar crime, because you say the statistics, there's other criminals that are overrepresented.

Are you talking about stock fraud?

Are you talking about a massive, as in California fraud to steal COVID relief funds?

Are you talking about a master plan to abscond with Social Security payments?

Well, I think white collar means any type of crime that's not physical and involves some clerical, secretarial, administrative,

legal knowledge, right?

How to beat the system without strong-arming somebody.

But if you look at it and you look at, because I looked at this very carefully, I was very careful of what I wrote.

And believe it or not,

so-called white, it is true that males are overrepresented clearly in most categories of white crime, but whites are not.

In fact, they're slightly underrepresented, about 65, 60 to 65%, depending on the category, are committed by white males.

And I think if you look at massive welfare fraud schemes or what we saw in Minnesota with these Somalis about

the COVID relief or what you've seen here in California with $100 million,

you can see that it's an equal opportunity, okay?

So when somebody says, well, you're concentrating on African-American males being overly represented, but you don't look at white people.

No, they're not overrepresented in white collar climate.

That is a stereotype racist attitude.

Just because you think, and it's a kind of reverse rate, I mean, you think that white people are not capable of committing violent crime or only they have the ability to outsmart the system.

Is that what your racist implication is?

No, but

they are not overrepresented.

It's right near their demographic, slightly underrepresented.

When you go to the most important cases of assault, that is strong-armed robbery, assault, murder manslaughter african americans commit somewhere between 50 and it's gone up in the case of murder to 60 percent of those and so you're talking

uh and these are a little bit different than white collar crime demography in the sense that these are not committed very much if at all statistically by women or by people who are older.

White collar crime, you have people in their 70s and 80s do it.

Female real estate agents do it.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

But in these categories of violent crime, they are overwhelmingly

overrepresented.

African American males between the ages of 15 and 40 make up somewhere between 3 and 4 percent of the population.

In other words, 12 to 13 percent are African Americans.

Roughly half of that is six to seven.

Roughly half of that is in that age group.

Yes.

You might even want to go down to 14.

And

so 3% or 4% of the population are committing 50% of the violent crime in major categories.

And when you look at hate crimes,

and this is very controversial because the Asian community, at least that votes typically about 65 to 70% Democratic, has not been forthcoming about this when one asks about it.

Its spokesman, that overwhelmingly uh

Asians themselves are underrepresented in hate crimes whites are underrepresented in hate crimes or especially toward Asians overwhelmingly Asians that are involved as victims in hate crimes are attacked by African Americans overwhelmingly I mean in this sense that that three to five percent

Rubik is three to six to eight times more likely to have committed it.

And when you talk about about interracial crimes, which must be noted is only about 5 or 6%

of all violent crimes.

But when they are between races, African Americans and that rubric, not women, not older African Americans, but 14 to 40 commit

about six times

more, they're six times more likely to attack somebody outside their race than to be attacked by somebody from a different race.

That, your readers, should know is the facts.

I have no dog in that fight.

I don't really care what the implications are.

I'm just saying to you that empirically, if you want to stop crime in America and reduce it, then it seems very logical that one of the people that you would look at, and maybe it would be great, more education or more two-parent families or more,

whatever.

from

tough to therapeutic, whatever your approach is, you wouldn't solve the problem unless you looked at 3% to 5% of the population that was responsible for 40, 50, 60 in some cases of murder and manslaughter.

You wouldn't have a policy that would be effective unless you address that.

And yet you can't talk about it.

In fact, what I just said,

I know that I will have someone that's a Stanford alumnus

listening to this who will write and say, how come this university hires this man working when he's a racist?

Just for

it happens to a good friend of mine, Heather McDonald.

Every time she writes and produces data, she's called a racist.

Racism being defined in the following: yes, that statistic may be true, but the fact that you bring it up means that you wanted to use it to intimidate people for racist purposes.

So you're supposed to forget it.

And yet, if you forget it, then you end up with the Orwellian situation that we're in now.

And everybody listening to this knows that this is a very dangerous trend.

That when you go online, I'm not talking about a right-wing blog, I'm talking about a major Reuters, AP,

you name it story.

To the degree that they allow comments, some of them don't, but to the degree they do it, and you read the comments, and these are not exclusively conservative readers.

Conservative readers are more apt to, but they're not exclusive in these cases.

When they report violent crimes and African Americans, the people will comment and they will say things like, you didn't identify, you didn't show a picture or you didn't identify the names or something like that.

But my point is that you're encouraging this extremism in the comments because you're not being reasonable and empirical and data-driven in the story.

So it enrages people and all you do is further radicalize people and say, wow.

we're not going to tell the truth about this.

And then they get angrier and angrier.

You'd be much better off by saying, this is the data, this is the truth.

Let's argue about it.

Let's just say it's a legacy of Jim Crow.

It's a legacy of racism if you want.

It's a legacy of one-parent households.

It's a legacy of the great society.

We can bring in

Professor Kindy if you want.

You can quote Todd Nahese Coates, Shelby Steele, Tom, but let's have that discussion if you want to reduce crime.

And they won't.

And they won't.

So what you do is radicalize people.

And then we have the talk.

You know, every

African-American, Jack and I gives the talk about how racist white America is and how you have to be careful of the police.

And, you know, there is a talk that other people say too, and that is: do not go into particular neighborhoods that have high crime rates, whether or not they're black.

And so that's where we're headed.

And I think, according to polls, I shouldn't say I think, I just saw one that showed: do you think racial relations are good, getting better, or worse?

About 33%

think they're good.

And it's about equal between blacks and whites and it's down below that for getting better.

And the graph goes downward when that question's been asked each year.

And so whatever we're doing right now,

we're polarizing America into two racial groups.

And I have a feeling it's due not to anything other than race, race, race, race, race.

Separate, separate, separate.

Plessy versus Ferguson in liberal clothes.

Separate graduations, separate theme houses, separate safe spaces,

you name it.

And higher by race, higher by appearance, bring up, and then two asymmetrical forms of tolerance.

So go on the view and say, you know, Trump voters

are voting for him is like bugs going to be sprayed by rape, stuff like that.

Yes.

And then the other fact is that when there is patently racist rhetoric, there's no consequences for it.

Joe Biden, put you all back in change.

Hey, junkie.

Hey, junkie.

Hey, you ain't black.

Hey, boy.

Hey, boy.

That's what he says.

Yeah, I know.

Born Pak.

Oh, little black kids looked at my golden hair or my tan legs and wanted to touch it.

Cute little, you know, or hey, Barack Obama's the first clean, articulate black.

Can you imagine that?

Absolutely, patently racist.

Nobody says anything in the left-wing black community about that.

And then if you really want to stop the N-word, which is a racist, terrible word, then just stop it.

Don't say it's a term of endearment or chiding or it's used jocular, but only among African Americans.

Because if that were true, then

the rap hip-hop singer would say, I think this song should only be heard by African Americans who are in on the proper use of this word by members of the community.

But since I want to make a lot of money and I want to sell it to 200 million young people,

I'm going to regularize or normalize the use of that word because there's going to be some people out there that says Jay-Z said it, Kendrick Lamar said it, Daniel Wes said it.

you know they all said yes of course

snoop dog says if he says it and he's black i can say it.

But this whole thing is in need of some honest talk that tries to be ecumenical and bring people together rather than just to take the left's divide and conquer, divide and conquer, divide and conquer.

Yes.

Yes.

And that's all, as they say,

and that's all there is.

That was that.

And that was that.

And that kind of brings us back to what I felt was, I think Tucker needed to somehow

not make his so opposite of the January to somehow acknowledge that yeah there could be some violence done I don't think he did let me interpret what you're saying because I can

we're going to get our listeners mad I'm not in the same I'm not in the same room with you so I can't see you I'm not watching the video of you so I assume you're saying something like the following

you can't the capital is an iconic place.

It has value that supersedes its government function.

It has to be sacrosanct.

Everything is sacrosanct, but it is specially.

So even if the doors are open and even if the police are welcoming people in during hours that are otherwise prohibited, and I don't know that for a fact, but I assume that they were at that time.

But they might not.

Somebody's going to listen and say, Victor, it was visitors' hour.

All they did was go in.

Okay, then I stand corrected.

But what you're saying is that people should say,

if you were one of the peaceful assemblers and you went in there, then you should have understood that there was a potential for misuse of that privilege.

There were too many people in there at once.

They were going into places that are restricted.

And even though they were a fine outstanding citizen, that's a misdemeanor.

So Tucker should have said, these are people who committed a misdemeanor, if that was true.

And so is that your argument?

Yeah, that there should be some acknowledgement that once, or maybe

you seem to be saying you might be wrong, Sammy, because

it might be that this was no misdemeanor to walk into

the capital.

I don't know what it is.

I know that they have a thing called illegal parading.

I never heard of it, but they have charged people with illegally parading.

I don't know if that means parading as a violation of entering a building that is not usually open during those hours, or it means that there were too many people in the area at once.

But

if illegal parading is a charge that Merrick Garland's going to use, then what is that stuff at going on during the

Kavanaugh hearings when you saw people burst into those hallways and follow individual senators into elevators, what was that all about?

Or pop up during the hearings and shout and disrupt them?

I don't think they were ever prosecuted by, and that was during the Trump era.

So

I think it's just symmetrical.

And so we'll see.

That's besides the question.

When you say there was no irregularities, if anybody were to say that, in 2020,

the question is not: were there enough irregularities to change the outcome of the vote?

I mean, in Georgia, 11,000, that was a notorious phone call, supposedly.

I don't know that.

But to say there were no irregularities when California has announced that they cannot account for 10 million ballots that were mailed out to various residencies and they don't know what happened, whether they were used or they were lost or they were, who knows, duplicated.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there's no authentic.

And then to also say, well, wait a minute.

There was a concerted effort in February, March, April, May, June of 2020 under the COVID lockdown veneer, using that as an excuse, to change voting laws, either by judicial decision, by cherry-picking liberal judges, by these hugely funded,

what?

true the vote integrity project, that kind of stuff, to say, or you've got sympathetic governors, or you've got sympathetic bureaucrats, just do things such as,

oh, felons should be really, that law is

wrong.

Felons should be able to vote.

Or

third-party harvesting is fine, even though this particular statute in this particular state outlaws it.

Or your name doesn't really have to be matched by the register's name, or you can turn in the ballot 10 days late, or you can only have your first name, or the address doesn't have to be your residence.

I think

Cleta Mitchell's group,

I talked to her this morning, 18,000 voter registrations did not list their required home residence as the place where they resided,

and that was illegal.

So there were legitimate worries that need to be corrected in the next election.

And that might warrant a peaceful demonstration.

But

I think Donald Trump, when he said

you now can go to the Capitol and let your representative know and do it peacefully and patriotically, was naive,

naive, because it was going to send a message to some of his supporters that he might not have really meant that, or it wasn't emphatic enough.

He should have said the following.

We need to show that we believe there was

irregularities in the election.

However, we're of such large number.

If you want to demonstrate, do not under any circumstances break the law or enter grounds that are normally off-limits to the public.

He just said that.

I think we wouldn't be in this situation right now, but he didn't.

Yes.

But then again,

who can foresee all that?

And somebody's listening and say, well, Victor, you just gave the case where there were irregularities in a very close election.

So what the F was he supposed to do?

And I can see that too.

But the problem with the left is that they keep pushing it.

If you keep telling people that, yes, your state legislature has a law that says you have to have an ID, but, but we know in our superior morality that that's racist and we're going to sue, sue, sue, sue to get it thrown out.

And then you're going to get a reaction to people

because they know it's not racist.

And we know that because African Americans poll just like anybody else, that they think an ID would be valuable and necessary to vote.

If you have to cash a check, is voting so much

more unimportant than cashing a check or going to a baseball game sometimes

and

show an ID to get into the Hoover Senior Commons.

You're telling me that at my own institution, when I want to go have coffee, I have to pull out my ID and swipe it.

Or if somebody sees me swiping it and it doesn't work, then I show them the ID who I am for them to let me into a coffee house.

But I don't have to do that to vote.

It's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous.

And yes, the mail imbalances are not going to be able to get people to

because they don't.

I think they wish that

given what happened was January 6th, given the January 6th, how much ammunition and distortion and propaganda that event was used by the left, they wish it had not happened.

Yeah.

Because all you did was hand the left a weapon.

And somebody's going to say, well, they handed us a weapon because they rioted for 120 days and that didn't work, did it?

So maybe they should seek get that's the other attitude.

But it's such a weird thing to listen to Chuck Schumer

about January 6th and Tucker Carlson when 120 days of riot, murder, mayhem, arson, looting, and he doesn't say one word.

And he knows that those people, 14,000 arrests, I think it was 1 or 2% were convicted of anything.

Tried to burn down a

police precinct and there were police in it.

Yeah, that was in Minneapolis, I think.

Yeah,

well, how about the two quote-unquote law students that threw a firebomb on a police car with the police in it?

So, I mean, come on.

Or what was it called?

Chaz, the free zone in Seattle.

Three people were killed.

Just imagine, what if during that whole protest on January 6th, Mr.

Epps, the mysterious guy who says, we're all going to go to the Capitol and he was everywhere and the thing and he was for a while.

He was on the FBI.

And then mysteriously, he just was exonerated,

i.e., he probably was an informant, but we'll never learn that.

My point is that what if he or some self-appointed leader said, you know what?

We're carving out this area right here.

This is a free America zone, and we want it, and we're going to camp out here.

And what if they had done that?

How long do you think the Capitol Police would have allowed that to happen?

They would have shut it down in minutes.

Yep.

And yet you go, that's exactly what happened in many major cities of the United States.

People just appropriated public land.

And it did a lot of damage to America.

Because you go to downtown, yeah,

I've gone to Seattle twice since that happened.

And when you go down to the downtown

and you go down to downtown Portland, it doesn't look the same.

No, it's just.

I don't think it's ever going to recover.

Oh, we'll certainly see.

Well, Victor, thank you so much for

the look back into the Punic Wars.

I really enjoyed that.

And these videos with Tucker Carlson,

as we are podcasting, hasn't finished.

So we'll see what he does in his next few shows

videos.

Our next war?

We'll talk about the Roman civil wars, round one, round two, round three.

Yeah.

Because we're looking at very fundamental wars that change history and were very costly.

So we've done now the Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars, the campaigns of Alexander the Great, and the Punic Wars.

And we'll do

the first triumvirate, the second triumvirate, and the falling out between Anthony and Augustus or Octavian, I should say.

Yeah, yeah, great.

Well, thank you very much, and thanks to our listeners.

We're always happy, of course, that we've got lots of listeners, and we hope that you appreciated the show today.

I know that I did, Victor, so thank you.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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