Civil Wars and All That

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Hello there.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We'd like to welcome all of our listeners.

This is the weekend edition where we take a little more time to look at things in depth, sometimes cultural, sometimes military.

This weekend, we're going to look at the civil wars.

We've had so much banter out there about

people addressing our current condition as similar to the civil war.

We just had a, as we talked about in our Friday news roundup, Liz Cheney's concession speech referenced the Seoul War.

Both Ulysses S.

Grant and Abraham Lincoln, who apparently she is like, but nonetheless, we hear a lot about that.

So we're going to look at that today.

But first, let's take a break.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that 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.

Welcome to the show.

Victor, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well.

My long COVID report is

three steps forward, two steps back.

Very good.

For something like a little tiny engineered virus i'm using my whole arsenal of optimism to crush it yeah without mercy and i'm going to do a show on it because i've been reading i shouldn't be doing this but i've been reading maybe two hours a day scientific papers already read about a hundred of them now and it's fascinating this long covid and the number of people who have it especially people who got over it and unlike myself, didn't just continue with the symptoms, you know,

at a lesser rate without a fever, but they got over it.

And then two or three months later, bam, it triggered something.

And if you remember, Sammy, our interview with Stephen Quay at one point, I didn't pick up on it as I should, but he said

something to the effect, and I can go back and look at the manuscript, that This was an engineered virus that had a propensity to distort the immune system.

I don't know if he was referring to the ferrin that was in the brain or the stomach or the spike protein, but what his point was that

normal post-viral fatigue that you see with mostly viral illnesses is a little different with

COVID in the sense that it's not just the fatigue of the mitochondria that are robbed of oxygenation where the immune system runs amok, but rather

it can center

neuroinflammation, gastroinflammation, damage to the kidneys, hair falling out, etc., etc.

Very bizarre symptoms.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I'm going to do you a favor and be my reductionist self and ignore the math and say that, well, you're one step forward today.

So I'm really happy with that.

And I'm going to reserve for a Saturday edition the new thing you've proposed on COVID.

I'll just say one thing else.

There's a really bizarre thing called neuroplasticity.

And it doesn't mean that when you have angina, you ignore it, obviously.

But when you have a chronic disease that has bizarre symptoms that are brought on by inflammation, I think, you know, when you're all of a sudden, you just lose all your energy when you think you're getting better, or all of a sudden your vision field is covered with floaters, or you have a horrible migraine that came out of nowhere.

You've got your feet on fire.

All these bizarre things, you don't go, oh my God,

I'm getting really ill.

And that just reinforces the fact that your immune system is like a locomotive, I said, that jumped off the track and is spinning and wearing you out, where you want to sort of use your cognitive ability to get it back on by saying, okay,

so what?

I have a pain.

Just ignore it.

Don't let your brain take over and start flooding you with psychotins or leucatrines.

Just calm down.

And for me, that's something that I would like to develop develop that has nothing to do with long COVID because

my entire life, I've been kind of reckless, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

And

didn't meditate, didn't take naps, slept five to six hours.

I know one time Rush Limbaugh, we used to communicate, and he said, Do you do the following?

Do you do the following?

And he and I, it was kind of not that I would compare myself to him, but because he was a great, a great communicator.

But my point was that he was trying to warn me after he got ill that

you have to be very careful about just being glued to you know you don't realize that when you're reading reading reading you're not sitting right or you're not taking a break or you're working on a device that'll disrupt your sleep at 10 o'clock at night that kind of stuff yeah so i think it's it's I think it's important that everybody's listening that we're not just victims of COVID, that we can, it's a disease that attacks attacks our systems, but we can change our systems or fortify them so that these besiegers outside the keep can be kept out.

Yeah, maybe there is some room for mind over body in this

illness world.

For me to say that, who's a hyper-rationalist, is pretty, but

it's learning, you know, a pathé mathos at Aeschylus said, learning through pain.

Poor Prometheus said that.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm right there with you.

I tend to be a rationalist and go

you can't see or you can't see it or you can't see

study it empirical proof then you say it doesn't exist but it doesn't mean that you have no control over the your immune response and your immune response is making you ill you can tone it down by various methods i don't know if that's acupuncture or massage or meditation or lifestyle or diet or supplements, but you have some role in that.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's turn to our subject then, the civil wars.

And I think maybe we could talk a little bit about the current environment, but I was hoping to go back in history and look at a few civil wars and we'll do that after.

But my observation in the current environment is that if you're talking somebody's causing civil war and it's Donald Trump, it's okay.

And the mainstream media thinks it's okay.

But if you're talking that the Democrats are destroying this country and causing a lot of hostility against themselves and dividing everybody everybody up.

That's not okay to suggest that that's civil war.

What are your thoughts on the current information?

You start with a premise, Sammy, that the modern left-wing mind embraces projection.

Everybody should remember that.

If they are doing something,

they project that wrongdoing on someone else.

So what are they doing right now?

They have no confidence in the voters of Wyoming.

They, you know, they'll flood that state with dark money.

They will try to get crossovers, but there's no way in hell Liz Cheney was going to win that.

So they understand that.

They understand that they're looking at a wipeout in the midterms.

So they don't trust the people.

So they try to alter the system.

That's the modern left wing.

And how do they do that?

They do it in a violent and a quiet way.

Let's look at the violence.

So they unleash 120 days, and they do.

They unleash the BLM and and Antifa from May of 2020 all the way till September of 2020, right during the critical part of the 2020 campaign.

While Joe Biden is in his basement and not campaigning, the media takes over as surrogates and they show pictures of flames and they say it's essentially nonviolent.

But the point is they want to advance the narrative that people hate Donald Trump and he can't control it.

And if you had Joe Biden, Biden, who was a uniter, the riots would cease.

And so you get 35 people killed, 1,500 officers injured, $2 billion in damage, 14,000 arrests that are going to be released, a torch courthouse, a torch precinct, a torch iconic church, an effort to get into the White House ground that sends Donald Trump into a secure bunker with a Secret Service.

And then, you know, the snarky New York Times, Trump retreats.

But the point I'm making is that is designed.

And I'm not saying this as Victor Hansen or even a conservative.

I'm saying this as Molly Ball, a left-wing essayist who in February 2020 wrote about her words, not mine, the conspiracy, in which she said corporate America, the media, big tech, Democratic activists, and the Joe Biden campaign conspired, her word, not mine, to get a lot of money.

I don't mean millions, I mean hundreds of millions, half a billion dollars plus, to sue in the courts and change the law so that 70%

of the electorate would not vote on electorate date, on election day, under the guise of COVID.

And the error rate would go from 2% to 3% per state down to 0.1 or 0.2.

In other words,

flood the ballots in the mail and early voting and make sure the normal rejection rate when you have more, it should go up, it goes down.

So she outlined the whole thing.

And then she even said they modulated the demonstration so they wouldn't appear to embarrass Joe Biden.

Okay, and they disappeared, didn't they?

As soon as he was elected, guess what?

George Floyd wasn't initiated anymore.

Well, George Floyd is the crisis of our age.

November 4th, been there, done that, it's over with.

So that's one way.

Another way is systemically to get rid of the filibuster, 180 years, to get rid of 50 states, 60 years, so you can bring in Puerto Rico and D.C.,

to pack the court to 15 judges, get rid of 150-year tradition, to have a national voting law that requires ID everywhere that overturns basically the intent of

the Constitution, giving states preeminent authority to set their own balloting laws, to get rid of the 233-year-old electoral call.

They've tried all that and they will continue to try it.

So that's another method that these revolutionaries act.

There's others.

The other is to take the administrative state and use it as a revolutionary weapon.

And that would mean the FBI

pays Christopher Steele

to get dirt from Dashenko and the Bookings Institute and Mr.

Charles Dolan, a Hillary Clinton operative in Russia, to break federal law and have a foreign national participate in an election who was paid by Hillary Clinton through three firewalls, paywalls.

And then you would try to leak that to the media.

And if you're James Comey, you would leak it to the New York Times so you can get his friend.

Robert Mueller's a special counsel, and then you're off to the races with 20 months.

And that did a lot of damage.

And that was fused with the media.

Of course, bombshells, walls are closing in, lies that were released from leaks from

Andrew Wiseman and the Mueller dream team.

Okay, so that's another method, whether it's Lois Lerner or Andrew McCabe or John Brennan or James Clapper, lie under oath, forge a document like Clinton Smith did.

Just do what you have to do.

And there are other ways to conduct a revolution.

And one of the ways is

you get experts and you get them all together and you say, listen, you former FBI, CIA, intelligence officer, you get together, Clapper, Brennan, Hayden, Hayden.

We can go on all day about Michael Hayden, the person who just said that basically Trump should be executed on no evidence because he was a Rosenberg-like figure.

But nonetheless, then they swear that the laptop was rushing disinformation when they knew it wasn't.

And the FBI, we know now, according to Senator Grassley's investigations, had people in there that were deliberately leaking that it was Russian disinformation.

Or you can have 17 Nobel Prize winners who suggest that Build Back Better will not increase inflation.

Okay, you can do that.

Or you can round up 1,200 health care professionals who swear that you don't have to wear a mask.

You can violate the quarantine if if you're protesting with BLM in May of 2020.

Or a hundred renowned Stanford doctors who will sign something that Scott Atlas is a threat and he should be, you know, da da da.

So they have these people that they round up.

And then finally, they deny it all.

And how do they deny it all?

They say the Republicans are doing it or the right is doing it.

And so how do they do that systematically?

They do it in a lot of ways.

They say that Governor Gretchen Wickner in Michigan was the object of a right-wing plot.

Well, there were 12 FBI informants who were coaching these four nuts.

Two of the nuts were acquitted by a jury, and the other two got off to a mistrial.

So nobody was convicted, but the 12, they outnumbered three to one, the people who were supposed to kidnap her.

Or you can have Michael Rosenberg saying, hey, man,

I'm the expert on January 6th.

It was a joke.

All these people took it too seriously.

I walked around.

There's no violence.

It was just a joke, a bunch of buffoons.

And I spotted FBI informants everywhere.

So you can do that.

You can use this weapon to suggest there's an insurrection.

Or you can beat Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley, and you can say, hmm, we're going to try to find out what white rage is.

We're going to read Professor Kendi and we're going to go through the ranks and ferret them out.

Is there any data?

Would you please, Secretary Austin, show me the data?

How many people were under suspicion of being racist in the military?

In is the so-called white soldier who dies twice his demographic in your wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is there any evidence that he shows more racist tendencies than, say, Hispanic or Asian or black soldiers?

We just need data.

No data.

Or you can do this.

You can write an article in the New Republic or The Nation, and you can talk about succession.

You can say there's succession in the air.

There is succession in the air.

People want to break up this glorious, but you know, if they do, that wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Wow, we'd have California.

We wouldn't have those Neanderthals in Wyoming that suck all of our resources.

We'd have more homeless.

That'd be great.

We'd have open borders.

That would be great.

We'd have 40 cents a kilowatt of electricity, $10 gas.

We'd get rid of all of those Neanderthal riffraft

middle class people.

Let them go to Nevada.

Same thing with New York and Illinois.

We've had a trifecta of blue states.

They write this.

You can go read it.

And then finally, we have something called civil war porn.

So you do all this, Sammy.

So you riot, you protest, you write about succession, you use the administrative state, you try to change the system.

In other words, you're hardcore revolutionaries.

And then you say,

if we lose the midterms, we're going to lose democracy.

There's going to be a civil war.

These people, these white, crazy people are nuts.

They're taking over.

And how do we know that?

Let's consult presidential historian Michael Beschloss.

Michael, what do you think?

Well, you know, this is what Donald Trump is doing.

And then, you know, he's the one that starts the Rosenbergs, that Trump is a

revolutionary cell, I guess.

sort of like the Rosenbergs.

He tweets out a picture of them that they were executed for what Trump did.

Doesn't really tell us he has any evidence that Donald Trump took nuclear secrets.

And then he's off to the races as a talking head talking about the next civil war.

In other words, once you inflame the civil war by suggesting a former president should not have his house sacrosanct because he was hiding nuclear secrets.

And then based on no evidence that he did so, you say that he probably should be executed.

And that's what he was saying through his pictograph.

And then you're interviewed to comment on civil wars as if you're not an inciter yourself.

And then you say it's going to be different than the last Civil War.

We're not, you know, i.e., we're not going to have Grant and Sherman.

These people are going to be selled, that kind of stuff.

And they incite it.

And then they say, there's a civil war.

So I wrote an article about this called Civil War Porn that came out yesterday.

And that's what they're doing.

And the right, I'll just end by saying,

I know the Republicans are talking about a 1938, 1994, 2010 blowout in the House election.

And they have good grounds to do that.

Crime is out of control.

Gas prices are exorbitant.

Inflation is crushing people.

There is no foreign policy.

There is no southern border, et cetera, et cetera.

But they're not making a national election out of this.

They're getting into the woods with individual camps.

Oh, Oz, you know, Oz bought some, he didn't even know the name of this person, or he used a French word for a salad, or this kind of stuff.

They should have a contract with America like Genrich did in 1994 and says, if you elect us, we are going to get 16 million barrels pumping or 17 million barrels.

There will be a Keystone pipeline.

There will be a deterrent foreign policy.

We're going to address the homeless issue.

There is going to be a wall in two years across the entire southern border.

There's going to be no more, that kind of stuff, and make it a national election.

And then they should not,

they should not let, Donald Trump should not rehash the past or even the raid.

He should do what?

He should try to do the exact opposite of what he did in 2020.

He should have gone down to Georgia

and won those two Senate seats.

So what Donald Trump should be doing right now is not bragging how his pre-selected primary candidates won, but they did, most of them.

But he should be touring the country and saying, join us, everybody together.

It's not about me.

It's not about the terrible things they've done to me.

And they have been terrible.

It's about you.

And we're going to lose this election unless we all unite around whatever primary candidate.

If David Valdeo, whom I'm going to vote for in the California congressional election, if he voted to impeach Donald Trump, he's one of 10.

He's the only one that I think is now viable.

I was so angry at that.

But I wasn't angry enough to vote for some left-wing nut is my point.

And when the primary is over, he's the candidate I'm going to vote for.

because he will be a good representative.

But if you say, he voted to vote for Trump, we can't have, well, you're going to lose that seat.

If you lose that seat, you're one seat less stopping this revolution.

So everybody's got to come together and unite as they never have.

And they have to get their mind off all of the shenanigans the left is doing.

They're not only revolutionaries, but they have one strategy.

And we know what it is.

Merrick Garland for the next 85 days is going to say,

this is just the beginning.

I'm in inning one about this raid.

And then he's going to leak.

And they're going to leak, leak, leak to the DOJ.

And we're going to see one day nuclear secrets the next.

He was trying to massage the January 6th investigation.

He was stealing mementos to sell that kind of stuff every week, just like they did during Mueller, just like they did during the Ukrainian phone call

farcical impeachment.

And that's going to be one.

bookend and the other is going to be the January 6th.

And it's going to do the same thing and it's going to try to divert attention.

And they're going to try to inflame Trump.

And he's going to get angry.

And all of a sudden, we're going to believe that if you have 9.1 inflation over a year ago, and now you have 8.5 inflation over a year ago, you have zero inflation.

It's like being in a sinkhole 10 feet deep.

And you rise up one foot.

The mud rises up and you say, I'm not.

worried I'm nine feet below the surface, but I came up a foot.

That's what their strategy is.

And if the Inflation Reduction Act is not going to reduce inflation and they know it, suddenly you blink your eyes and it's the climate change bill.

And that's what they're going to do.

And

then finally, and I'll shut up.

We know what Mark Zuckerberg is going to do.

We know what big tech is going to do.

We know that what Molly Ball and the Time magazine outlined is going to happen again in the midterms and again.

And it's going to go like this.

Mr.

Zuckerberg,

do you think you're going to put another four?

Oh, no, that was a one-time thing.

We're not going to interfere.

That kind of boomerang, you know, and we're not going to absorb the registrars.

Come on, we're not going to select pre, you know, congressional lessons and pour dark money in.

We're just not going to do that.

That's kind of went over, and that means he's going to do it and big time.

Yeah.

Not four, but eight.

Yes,

800 million.

And when they say,

well, you know, it was was COVID, so we had to change the laws here and there in particular states and overvote the state legislatures.

And, you know, we didn't know that 70% of the voters would not vote on election day, that they would vote either through early voting or through mail-in ballots.

And we didn't know that by a magnitude of seven to 10, the rejection rate would dip.

Who would know that?

So we're just not going to get into that.

That means they've already planned their whole operation, believe me.

And if there's going to be demonstrations in the fall, it's going to be calibrated.

They're going to be coordinated.

And they're going to deny, deny, deny why they pour dark money in to affect the way people voting.

And the Republicans think,

well, let them do it.

This time, we've got the crime issue, the border issue.

the inflation issue, the energy issue, the foreign policy issue.

They're not going to hear about any of that.

They're going to censor, censor, censor on Facebook and Twitter.

They will, and they'll claim they're not doing it, but they will do it more than they did in 2020.

And they won't talk about any of the issues.

The media won't.

And it will be Donald Trump's latest bombshell about why he stole nuclear secrets.

He had the codes.

He was talking to Putin, something like that.

And that'll be the same thing with the Liz Cheney.

committee.

They better be prepared for it or they will lose.

They will lose.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come right back.

And I was hoping to get a little bit of discussion on historical civil wars and observations on civil wars.

So we'll be right back.

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Welcome back and I would like to remind everybody that you can find Victor's work at victorhanson.com and you can subscribe for $5 a month or for $50 or even for free if you want to get the free stuff and be on our mailing list.

So please come and join us at victorhanson.com.

The name of the site is The Blade of Perseus.

And we were looking at civil wars and I don't know if you have anything more to add, but I think that your message is clear that what the Republicans need to do is get on to a message of how we're going to change this country and get out of the rut we're in and

be ready for all of the fire also that the Democrats are going to unload on them during the midterm elections.

I hope I got that right, Victor.

Yeah.

All right.

So I would like to turn to Thucydides first.

And I know you're one of of our experts in Thucydides, but when I read, and I'll confess I've read parts, a lot of parts of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, but this one part always struck me the strongest as far as his just brilliance in analysis.

And he's analyzing a revolution in Corsaira.

And he has, and I'm just going to read a few things that he has to say.

So if people can bear with us, and not even all of it, but it's just some brilliant observations about what happens when you get into revolution.

He says this,

words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take on new signification.

Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally.

Prudent hesitation, an excuse for cowardice.

Moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness.

Ability to see all sides of a question was inability to act on any.

The more extreme a man's schemes, the more valuable an ally he seemed.

Anyone who opposed extremism was suspected of treachery.

To succeed in plot was to have a shrewd head.

To divine a plot, a still shrewder.

But to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries.

Blood became a weaker tie than party because those united by party loyalty were bound to dare everything without reserve.

Oaths of reconciliation, being only pro-offered on either side to meet an immediate difficulty, only held good so long as no other weapon was at hand.

But when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it and to take his enemy off guard, thought this treacherous vengeance sweeter than an open reprisal, since such success by treasury indicated superior intelligence.

Indeed, it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are as ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.

And

there's lots more in that, and I did skip parts in that reading from Thucydides, but I thought, boy, what an analysis of how things turn out when you get into a civil war.

And I was wondering about your reflections on that passage in the discussion at Corsaira by Thucydides.

Well, Thucydides, who was an exiled Athenian general, for 20 years traveled around the Greek world and he had sources.

And he tried to write why this war broke out, when it did, how it evolved, and how it ended.

He didn't end.

He stopped in 411.

But at a very key point in third book, sections, I think it was 69,

he magnifies certain events that he thinks are iconic or emblematic of the extremism of the war.

And he says that on this island of Corsair, which is modern-day Corfu, beautiful island.

It's one of the nicest places in Greece in the northwest coastline off the northwest coast, not too far from the battle, later battle in 1571 of Lepanto.

That was near Napikos.

But in any case, he says that Corsaira,

it was being used by both sides.

And ostensibly, it is Corinth, who was the mother city of Corsair, and visented its power and its new alliance with its enemy, Athens,

in a rivalry with Athens.

I mean, Sparta on the side of Corinth.

So what

he is saying is that in a stable society where people had family connections and friends, that suddenly it was

you're either a democratic Athenian sympathizer or you're an oligarchic Corinthian Spartan sympathizers.

And that heated up and heated up.

And the first toll was language.

If you said, no, I'm a moderate, oh, you're a sellout.

And if you said, okay, I'm a real revolutionary.

No, you're a counter-revolutionary.

You're not revolutionary enough.

So the logic of civil war is innately extremist.

And it...

gets more advanced and more advanced.

So today's revolutionary is tomorrow's counter-revolutionary.

In the process, all the language changes.

It doesn't mean anything.

Words don't represent reality.

They represent political agendas.

And this is exactly what Orwell told us.

And so

he says this case history, it's 20 sections, and it's about extremism.

So it's brutal.

People kill each other.

They kill their fathers, kill sons.

And he says when you get into this cauldron,

the circumspect, the the reflective, the educated, the calm, they can't handle it.

It's the quote, he used this word blunter wits.

It's the Robespierre.

It's the Mao Zedong.

It's the bank robber Joseph Stalin.

It's the firebrand Lenin who come to the fore.

And they are the people who say, no mercy, no mercy.

And you can see it in the Democratic.

They say it's the Republican Party, Donald Trump, but you could say it much more accurately of the Democratic Party.

It's the squad.

It's Elizabeth Warren.

It's not, we disagree with the Supreme Court.

We've got to make sure we take the presidency and the Congress to get more progressive justices.

It's rather, of course, H, Kavanaugh, you're not going to know what hit you.

You sow the whirlwind, you're going to win, you're going to sweep the whirlwind.

or people showing up outside a justice home to threaten them or an assassin coming near Kavanaugh's house.

So there's going to be an escalation.

And that paradigm that he focused on, and I don't know, and I don't think anybody knows actually in that long 27-year war to what degree that minor revolution on Corsaira was a window in the human nature.

But that's how he writes his history, whether it's at Milos and the Melian dialogues.

or whether it's at the Middle Enian debate.

The point I'm making is that this was a window into human nature, and it served ever since as a guide to tell us what happens in things like the Bolshevik, in our modern era, the Bolshevik Revolution or the French Revolution.

And what's unique about it, the American Revolution didn't quite follow that

plot.

And I think, in one sense, the founders were very acquainted with classical literature.

And they, you know, Jefferson claimed that he could read Greek and he read a page of Thucydides a day.

So they had some guidance to be very careful in the American Revolution and stick to the basic agenda that they wanted liberty, but they didn't want to go execute everybody who didn't agree with them.

And they didn't get into that cycle that you saw in France.

And when you get into the next level, not liberty, not freedom, not constitutional government, but equality or egalitarianism.

That's the key word.

And that means that you're willing to kill people to make everybody equal at the back end rather than the front end of opportunity.

Yeah, yeah, very scary.

What about the Roman civil wars?

Do they resonate with the modern conditions today that we're seeing?

They do, because

when you read Sallust or you read Caesar's Civil Wars, you get this impression that

at certain points when people take extra legal

activity is that marked the civil war.

For example, take Caesar.

The Republic was essentially ended when they had the first triumvirate of

Caesar and Crassus and Pompey, who basically split up the empire with spheres of influence.

But after the death of Crassus, Pompey allied himself more so with the constitutional, so-called constitution, the Ciceronians, people, Cato, Brutus, etc.

And they started to say that Caesar had too much power.

He did.

He'd taken all of northwestern Europe.

He had more fertile lands than Italy.

He had more population than Italy.

He had the 10th Legion and people who had fought 20,000 soldiers, two or three legions who had been fighting for 10 years.

They were not soft people.

They could cut through any Pompeian legion in minutes.

And they were coming back after his tenure was over, and they were going to come into Italy.

And Caesar knew it was against the law to cross the Rubicon with an army, the iconic boundary of northern Italy.

But he knew that if he did what?

Put away his legions, they'd probably execute him.

And they'd probably do it extra-legally under the guise of being legal.

So he kept it.

And that's that triggered up what happened from 49

for the next 18 years.

There were three cycles of revolution.

The difference was that there wasn't a popular cause.

It wasn't the optimates versus the populares.

It wasn't the oligarchs versus the democrats.

It was personalities.

Either we are

some who posed as protectors of the republic and some who said that the republic needed revision, the Caesareans.

But it was so complex because you had Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey.

and they were related by marriages and then Crassus dies in Parthe and then all of a sudden Caesar's daughter dies.

Pompey doesn't have a blood relationship with Caesar.

He crosses the Rubicon, and then you have Caesar versus Pompey.

And then Caesar wins.

Pompey is executed in Egypt.

It should be over with.

So from 49 to 44, you've got calm.

I shouldn't say 49.

At the end, 48, 47, Caesar's going all over the, you know, he's going up to the Black Sea.

He's going to Spain.

He's going to North Africa and stamping out the sons of Pompey.

But the point is, when he is killed, it's calm.

And he has a dictatorship.

And whether he would have restored the Republic, I doubt it.

But some people who are, you know, a lot of German scholars, Geltzer and those people had suggested maybe that he might in a different fashion.

But, and then we start in with his adherents, i.e.

Mark Anthony suddenly is joined with the 18-year-old Octavian, the grandnephew of Caesar, and they are representing the Caesareans, i.e., you did a wrong to my great uncle, or you did a wrong to my friend Caesar.

You were going to execute him.

He had no choice.

He won the civil war.

He was uniting us, Clementia, Caesarus on the coins, the clemency of Caesar.

And then you started this second round.

So the second round was Brutus and Cassius and Cato.

I shouldn't say Cato, but Brutus and Cassius.

And then Anthony and Octavian are, you know, they're successful.

and they defeat them.

Okay, round two is over.

And then guess what?

We have round three where Anthony and Octavian turn on each other.

And now the third cycle, iteration is, and Barry Strauss wrote eloquently about that in our last podcast.

We discussed it.

Suddenly, it's not about these internal matters, but Anthony has allied himself with a foreign bitch named Cleopatra who wants to orientalize Asiatic customs throughout the empire.

And Octavian is a stern Italian yeoman who represents rural traditional values.

And that ends at Actium.

And then you've got five centuries of the imperial dictatorship.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, if we could turn then to the English Civil War, it seems to me that we see a lot that caused that English Civil War, similar to what we're seeing today, in the sense that the kings were trying to have something that was going to be very expensive, and that is to quell rebellions in Scotland and Ireland and wars with France.

And so they raised taxes and then they tried to start, they tried to start controlling the parliament when it met, when it didn't met, by dissolving them.

And that pretty much set the parliament off and parliamentarians against the royal military.

And I was wondering your thoughts on anything that resonates with the modern from that English Civil War?

Well, that was a very strange,

I guess it went on longer, but I guess you're referring to Oliver Cromwell in that five-year period where

he was, I don't know, a noble in a sense, or he was from a wealthy family, but he, you're right.

He finally said, you know, that the parliamentarians, I guess they called them the roundheads, they are being exploited by the monarchy and the foreign policy is not in their interest.

And he was going to defeat the royalists and then have sort of a populist takeover of Northern Ireland, of Ireland, I should say.

And he would have the new model army.

So it was a holistic revolution, kind of like the Napoleonic Revolution.

You know, he was sort of a, I guess you called him a regicite.

Yeah.

And a dictator, but he became the model in English literature of someone who wanted to make an abrupt transition to parliamentary government versus absolute divine rule of kings.

And, you know, the conservative parties in Britain for years

tended to consider him an existential threat, whereas liberals, intellectuals, artists, et cetera, the Romantic people adopted him, however cruel he was.

because he was pretty cruel in Ireland.

But the point I'm making is that that was a process that had some

benefit because

it took away in a permanent sense the absolute right of

the king and it led to a parliamentary check by the 18th century that you had a parliamentary check on divine right of kings in Britain.

And so when Charles II came back in, I think 1661, 1660,

It was under different auspices and it eventually led to what we saw in the 19th century with prime minister.

So it was a successful revolution, even though the Cromwellians were stamped out after

his death.

And he was hated,

but it was different, as I said, than the French Revolution.

Yeah,

absolutely.

The French Revolution...

It was like the Bolshevik Revolution.

It was not a political revolution alone.

It was a cultural, social, economic, military revolution.

It was trying to change the very nature of man.

It wanted to change the days of the week.

It wanted to rename the months.

It wanted to worship a new God, Vatio, Reason.

It wanted to destroy the Catholic Church.

It wanted to redistribute property.

And what's eerie about it, it was run, as our revolutions are here,

by the upper, upper left-wing professional classes like Robespierre and his brother, or St.

Just.

And the same thing is true of the Bolsheviks.

They were upper-middle class.

Some of them were aristocrats.

Some of them were landed aristocrats that threw their lot in.

And they had Corsaira elements.

So the Robespierre and the Jacobins were just like the people, you know, all of the people who, Danton, and all the people who had thrown out the monarchy were sellouts.

And they were, most of them ended up guillotined or killed in some fashion.

Yeah, they revolutionate their own.

That's good.

Same thing with the Bolsheviks, Trotsky, et cetera.

And same thing with Mao.

And they ended up.

So that lesson is true that when you get into these, and the same thing in Yugoslavia, when you get into these revolutionary cycles, it brings out the Michael Avenetti type person that is a complete thug because they're the ones that have the blunter wits.

They look at the world as.

I'm going to win and you're going to lose.

I'm not going to be nuanced about it.

And when you get into that cycle, that's the type of person who has the skills, the scary skills to prevail.

So what we want to stop in this country is that when you have a Michael Betchloss and he creates another career about the pundit commenting on the next civil war and how it will be different, at the same time, he's tweeting

that Donald Trump is analogous to the executed.

Rosenberg, the man that half the country almost voted for, or you have Michael Hayden, the CIA director, suggesting that's a good idea, or saying that the Republican Party is the most existential threat, as Blizz Cheney.

Well, they're revolutionary.

They don't, we don't say they are, but they are.

What they're trying to do is up the ante.

And that's going to bring, and they want a counter-response.

And all I'm suggesting is, in my earlier rant, that the Republican Party shouldn't fall for that.

Yeah.

He should be stressing people to get out to vote, vote on the issues which are in their favor, and don't get tit for tat about the raid and all of this.

We understand what the raid was about.

The raid was to provoke Donald Trump into getting obsessed and screaming and yelling, and then we wouldn't hear about the issues for the next 80 days.

Yeah, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come right back, and maybe we'll address the American Civil War in all of this as well.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back, Victor.

We hear so many references to the American Civil War.

So I was wondering if we could just talk a little about so we can get it straight on the various ideas of

those who are on the side of the North now and those who are being always accused of being like the South.

The Civil War was fought over slavery.

You can say anything you want about internal improvements or states' rights.

It was fought over slavery.

They take slavery out of the equation, there would not have been a war.

So it was just a simple question, were people in the North going to tolerate chattel slavery under their name in the United States?

Did they have a right to say that every member of every state that is a member of the United States represents the United States?

And so that issue was fought over from the very beginning of the Revolution.

They knew the founding fathers knew that it was not sustainable, but they didn't want to have a revolution revolution immediately after winning a revolution against a foreign power.

We would have never had a United States.

And

that's the background to the Three-Fifth Clause, that compromise, which everybody misinterprets and say, well, they were racist because they counted African Americans three-fifths.

No, they wanted every single African American to be counted as a free person.

But since the South wouldn't do it, They said, we're not going to let you enhance slavery by counting a slave as a full citizen when he's not.

So they came up with a three-fifth clause.

It was supposed to help weaken slavery rather than give them full representation, but we never hear that, of course, from these ignorantes.

But nevertheless, from the moment the Constitution was ratified, we were on a trajectory for the Civil War.

And the best minds in America tried to prevent it.

The Missouri Compromise, the Great Compromise, bring in another state.

So there was a subtext to this division: the South did not have the population and industry of the North, but most of the new territory that might come into the Union, whether it was California that had a lot of southern territory, or what we would now call New Mexico or Arizona, or all of these areas could come in as a southern block with slavery.

And the North knew that, and they were not going to allow that, even though one state for one state, one free, it was not going to work.

So

it was another problem.

And the issues are still here today, Sammy, because what do you do with Yosemite National Park?

Is it California's or is it Donald Trump's?

Can Gavin Newsom say, we're going to do this in Yosemite?

Can he go into a federal post office?

No, that's federal property.

It's an atoll.

And it's not an ideological question.

Both sides do it.

Look at Elizabeth Warren.

She wants to get abortions on federal bases in red states and and says this is federal property and we can pass a federal law that will supersede state law, at least on our territory.

And that's the same kind of stuff that happened.

That's what a sanctuary city jurisdiction is.

It's a nullification as South Carolina did in 1832 and again in 1860.

So

it's always going to be there.

The federal system is the best system that works, but there's going to be this tension between states' rights and federal rights.

And just when you think states' rights is a conservative racist issue, George Wallace, segregation today, tomorrow, forever, and we had to use federal troops to go in there and force him to open.

Yes, yes.

But who is now the real secessionist or who are now the states' right?

It's the left.

We can overturn federal immigration law in Fresno, California.

We have municipal or California states' rights.

And you can't do it in Virginia.

You cannot say that federal handgun registration is null and void in your state.

So

it's something that we've got to be very careful about because it can lead to civil war.

There's one other thing to be very careful about, and that is the American Civil War's false force multiplier was slavery,

right?

Yeah.

And slavery was a geographical phenomenon.

My point being that given the nature of climate and agriculture and cotton,

you weren't going to have, I'm not saying the northerners were intrinsically better people, but they were not going to have the avenues to have large cotton plantations in Minnesota or Michigan.

It was more homesteads, broken up farming.

And you can argue, too, that

there was fewer Scotch-Irish immigration.

It was more mixed.

And Tom Soule's written eloquently about the Scotch-Irish influence on Sonnered Manhood and martial gallantry and all of that that enhanced the pushback from the South.

But nonetheless, what I'm suggesting is there was a geographical element to slavery.

Yes.

And that made it very easy to break away.

All these states are in one geographical area.

They have slaves or they support slavery.

And these states don't.

And then there were a few border states.

But look at what we're doing now.

We have a civil war divide between, I guess you would call it conservatism or traditionalism and progressivism or leftism.

And guess what?

Under our federal system, people can self-select, especially in an affluent postmodern society.

So we're starting to get red state versus blue state.

And

it's starting to cluster a little bit if you look at it.

You look at a map on every election.

And it's bright blue from Seattle to La Jolla

and from Maine almost down to Miami, and no, to the Florida border, maybe, or Georgia border.

And population-wise, it's half the population with a blue concentric circle around Austin and the Great Lakes area.

Okay.

And then everything else is red, but it's only half the population.

And when you readjust that red-blue map for population, you've seen those with the balloons that

represent population density.

Suddenly, the blue balloons come out of those little thin scripts and they overshadow the red.

So it's a 50-50 population split, but it's got a geographical enhancement.

And I can start to feel it.

When I first went to

San Francisco as a child, or when I went my first time to New York at 18,

or I first went to Chicago, I think I was 28.

I didn't feel like I was in a different world versus the San Joaquin Valley or had been to places like Nevada at that time.

But now it is.

Everything is different.

The people are different.

The values are different.

I drive up from this very conservative atoll in Blue, California.

And by the way, 60% of the geography of California is hardcore red, maybe 70%.

The Inland Empire, the San Joaquin Valley, and then everything above Napa, but it only represents about 25 or 30% of the population.

But when you go from those areas and you go into Palo Alto or San Francisco or Menlo Park, it's a different world.

You know, I'll be driving out here and I'll see one Tesla a week.

I go to downtown Menlo Park, I'll see 50 in an hour.

I will pay for a hamburger $12 with fries here.

I'll pay $30.

there.

I will, you know, it's just different.

And the people are different.

They just

matter of factly say things to you that you cannot believe.

You don't even, you know, they'll say, didn't you have a raisin orchard?

I said, no, there is no such thing.

Oh, I thought you grew raisin trees.

No, I don't.

Raisins come from grapes.

They're vines.

Oh, okay.

Well, don't almonds suck up all the water?

No, they take three acre feet per year, just about like cotton or tomato.

No, no, they don't.

They're stealing all of our water.

You know, you just have these pronouncements on high from these intellectuals or professional classes.

But we have these tensions too, and we have to laugh about them rather than hate people who are different than we are.

But when you have 50 million people, there's one third, there's a third force multiplier of civil dissension, and that's having 50 million people who are not born in the United States at a time when we've given up on assimilation, integration, intermarriage.

And so so we have people that have not been fully assimilated.

Are there immigrants that come across a border and they come across, as we said last time, with complaints against their newly adopted country?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, that's

what you've got to watch.

Yeah.

Well, we're at the end of our hour, and I, at the risk of having our podcasts exercised from mainstream media, I have to say, you've convinced me that we do seem to be in a civil war period or era and we can back out of it if everybody just realizes you have to keep calm do not take the leftist bait the more a leftist says that the right is agitating for succession and a civil war the more that they want them to

and remember january 6th was a one-day buffoon riot Anybody who went in that capitol and desecrated the chamber should be arrested, but not put in solitary confinement and not weaponize Washington with Bob Wire and 30,000 troops in a way that we hadn't seen since Jubal early in 1864 was on the outskirts of Washington with a Confederate army.

That's what they did.

So, my point is that be very careful and not fall for that bay.

Don't talk about civil war.

Don't talk about insurrection.

Talk about compromise.

And don't, it's the left, it's the left, it's the left that wants you to talk about succession, and that's what they want.

Yeah,

so I hope our listeners enjoyed this discussion of civil war.

And I, I just have one thing, Victor, that you said to me in our last podcast: you said that I t-balled you, you didn't even give me the softball range, you said I t-balled you.

Well, you were leading up to a,

you know, sometimes

well, well-established understanding of things.

Well, I mean, it would be like asking me now,

don't you think that

on January 6,

there might have been a little bit of overreaction?

So, yeah.

Okay.

So, thank you.

I mean, that's all right.

I'm not on CNN, right?

Don't you think that you listen to MSNBC and CNN and the host says, Do you think that Donald Trump is a Nazi or is he Mussolini?

When they comment on that, that's what

they do.

Fair enough.

All right.

We'll say goodbye to our audience.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Yeah, thank you.

And this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson.

We're signing off.