History and the Bible

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

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and the namesake is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Everything Victor writes and most of his appearances, links to them can be found at victorhanson.com.

Hey, today's a special podcast.

This is one of four that we are pre-recording to take up the time when Victor is away and Victor will be in Israel leading a group of friendly folk through that great country.

But we did not want to abandon the podcast airwave.

So we determined to take your questions and many folks have sent them in.

And these are the things that are going to populate four special episodes so this is podcast one of the victors away series and the first thing we're going to talk about is religion and we're going to get to that right after these important messages

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works.

Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to home titlelock.com/slash Victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple arc protection.

That's 24/7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home titlelock.com/slash victor.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

Victor, so, hey, our listeners, many of them sent in questions.

I've tried to combine a few of them when need be, but appreciate those that did.

Here's one question.

As a historian, Victor often refers to historic figures from ancient Greece and Rome.

How does he gauge the historical veracity of the gospel accounts specifically and the New Testament generally?

Do they match or exceed that of historic figures who preceded Christ?

Of course, we remind our listeners that Victor is a classics historian.

So, Victor, what do you make of the New Testament and the Bible as a piece of history?

Well, the New Testament is a selection.

of writings that was institutionalized as the New Testament after Christ's death in the ensuing two or three centuries.

And there were other so-called gospels, the Gnostic Gospels, etc.

They're extant, but they don't have the authority of the four Gospels.

And there's a big argument over why that was.

But the four Gospels are supposedly the canonical description of Jesus' birth, life, and death, although with very different emphases among Mark, Matthew, Luther, Luke, and John.

And then there's the charge by historians: well, the people who are writing about them are Christians and zealots and therefore critical traditions.

And there was a tradition or didn't survive.

There's also arguments, you know, what was the book by Mr.

Mortimer Smith, I think, or Jesus the Magician, that argued that in that time frame at the

right before the destruction of the Second Temple, there were magicians in the Jewish tradition that were doing miracles, and Jesus just happened to be one of them.

But we do have some isolated mentions in places like Tacitus.

I think there's a linence with Tonius, but somebody can correct me about Christus.

And he's portrayed in Christian literature as a troublemaker that had to be put down.

And then, of course, with the conversion of Constantine, then the whole framework of Roman imperial, late imperial literature, is put in service of Christianity and the whole provincial system.

So when you look at a pope or a pontiff or a cardinal, that can I say get up without offending you, Jack?

That costume or that dress is really its direct antecedents or Roman provincial.

Right.

Jack, when did the word Roman Catholic, Roman Catholic drop out and just Catholic?

Does anybody still use that term in the Catholicism?

Yes, yeah.

Roman Catholic?

They still use it.

Roman Catholic.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

I'm a Roman Catholic.

That's how I would describe myself.

Okay, well, good.

I don't know what a non-Roman Catholic is.

Do you?

A Jew?

A Muslim?

Catholic is united.

A Swedish Lutheran, maybe?

It was the work of Augustine to try to unite these, you know, factions, schisms, liberalists, Manichaeans, donatists, et cetera, et cetera, into one orthodoxy, canonical, Catholic,

unified doctrine, which worked pretty well until Martin Luther and the Reformation.

So, yeah, but there's not as much, what I'm trying to tell you is there's not as much classical references from secular writers about Christ at this period of his life than one would expect from the importance that the religious literature suggests.

Victor, this leads me to spitball here a little bit.

And of course, I'm no biblical scholar.

I'm no any scholar except old baseball, but is there some Greek?

version of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So Dead Sea Scrolls are,

I think it was 70 years ago or thereabouts, they're found ancient documents that are considered, they're not concocted.

Has there been any finds relating to ancient Greece?

Any documents have been found in the last century that have really blown the doors off of historians?

You know, I don't think so, but there are some in Aramaic, you know, of course, Hebrew-Aramaic, and there's some in Greek as well.

But I'm not a biblical scholar with enough knowledge to.

Oh, I didn't mean, yeah, I didn't mean biblical, I just meant like just Greek history, Greek documents, ancient Greek documents.

Have there been any poetry?

You mean in my field of classics, has there been?

Correct.

Yeah.

Yeah, there has been.

When I was a graduate student not too long ago, they found a very long fragment of Archilicus, one of the great lyric poets that had not been known.

There is a place in Egypt called Oxyrhynchus, and Oxyrhynchus means long-nose fish.

And And anyway, there was a trash pile, and given the arid climate there and the sand, people,

when they would find books, I mean, these papyrus scrolls were used like plastic, I don't know.

They were used to wrap stuff, fish.

You know, you get a scroll or a cheap book or something, then you wouldn't just throw it away.

You'd write on the back, et cetera.

So they found a dump, they archaeologists, in the late 19th century, and they're still working on it.

And we got Aristotle.

Aristotle's Constitution of Athens survives only from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus.

And they still find new fragments.

And there's a lot of things in the ancient world that we know existed into the Renaissance.

And it's gone.

And there are some things that we'd like, really like to know.

We would like to have Aristotle's treatise on comedy rather than just, you know, the poetics and tragedy.

And we would like the book on comedy.

We would like to have, I think all of us would like to have Plutarch.

And that was written 100 a d but his famous life of a paminondas was lost and apparently was really important and influential in the renaissance and it may explain why such a enormously important person in antiquity the great general that liberated the messenian helots was very little known i mean cicero said he was princeps grecii the most important man in greece as you look back So there are these gaps.

Euripides, we have 19 plays.

We know he wrote over 100.

We have seven of Sophocles, seven of Aeschylus, respectively.

We know they wrote almost, I think Aeschylus wrote almost 100, but we don't have a lot of very, you know, very famous plays.

We know that Thucydides stopped writing, apparently, in the eighth book of his history in Medius Rebus, right in the middle of it.

Some of them we have almost everything.

I don't think there's very much.

of Xenophon's writing we don't have.

His minor works and then the Anabasis and the Hellenica, we have almost all of it, have all of all of Herodotus, to my knowledge.

We're really fragmented of the lyric poets.

And I wish we had this, the Petronius the Satyricon, a massive novel.

I have an article in this new criterion that Sammy Wink and I discussed, but we only have parts of the 14th, 15th, and 16th book.

Well, we will pray to the patron saint of the garbage diggers that they find these

elsewhere in the video.

They'll find more.

Well, Victor, let's keep on the religion topic.

And we have another question here.

This is not about ancient, but it's about current.

The decline in religious observance seems to play a significant role in the devolution of traditional American values, writes one of our listeners.

I'd be interested to hear Victor's thoughts on this.

And if he can, point out some key factors relating to this decline.

Victor?

Let me think about that.

There's two ways to answer that.

One is generic and one is specific to Christianity, the dominant religion in America.

But let's just say religion.

It was the view of the founders, the deists.

It was the view of ancient philosophers, many of whom, like the Pythagoreans, were probably agnostics or they believed in a Lagos or not an Olympian god, put it that way.

But if you were to sum up some of the Enlightenment and Renaissance thinkers, they felt that if you did not, it was very important for society to believe in a religion and a hereafter.

Plato has a long discussion of the transmigration of souls in the Republic, the myth of Earth, all that.

But what I'm getting at is if people don't believe in transcendence, then the philosophical tradition says they live for the moment, the gratification of the appetites, because this is all you have.

So if this is all you have, why would you worry about your soul?

And what you did here would be judged by other humans, humanists.

And why would you, you know, why would you not sin?

Maybe you could have a humanist doctrine that said it would create disorder in your lifetime or something.

But that was a great contribution of classical literature to Christianity, that it provided a framework in which explanations that were not in sacred texts, New or Old Testament, for example, could be explained by using classical reference.

And one of them is that.

your soul is according to socrates is like a song and just because you don't have a violin or a lyra or something to or to manifest it doesn't mean it doesn't doesn't exist, but it can exist when it has an instrument, i.e.

a body.

When the body, the piano blows up or somebody smashes your clarinet, it doesn't mean old Lang Tzai is dead.

You just can't hear it.

So your soul is like that.

It's trapped.

It comes alive in a body and then it moves on.

In the classical tradition, it sort of goes through a Pythagorean tradition, it comes back again.

But in the Christian tradition, it goes to a better place and people are cognizant of that.

And they want to live a life in accordance with that transcendence and that has an effect on society at large and you know it was unfortunately mostly in the french enlightenment that said that we were all born in chains to our family and our religion and in rousseau and everybody you take off these chains and you're liberated i think we're all born wild and savage and we need some chains

before we don't become cannibals and devour each other So that's the argument that a society without a God is amoral and is unsustainable.

And then in the Christian sense, there is something different about Christianity in comparison to the other major religions, specifically, you know, Islam, the Judeo-Christian, I could say, this idea of turn the other cheek or the Sermon on the Mount, blessed shall be the meek.

or it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven.

All of those homilies, they have this idea that the noble poor, that the noble ethical people, that there's going to be some, the race goes not to the swift, there's some equality or justice in the world.

And you save your own soul, not by being rich or powerful necessarily, although that can help in some cases, but by showing compassion.

This was a great criticism of Edward Gibbon.

that he felt the adoption officially of that religion then destroyed the classical martial ethos of the Roman Empire.

He didn't quite explain how it strengthened the Byzantine Empire that survived for another thousand years because he had such a deep hatred of Byzantine culture.

Victor, thanks for that.

We're going to move on to some questions related to something you know a lot about, and that's farming.

And we'll get to those questions right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show again.

This is a special recording, one of four.

This is the first of four that we're doing while Victor will be away in Israel.

Victor, can you give us like a half a minute description of what that Israel trip is going to be like?

Yes, this is the 17th, and I think it'll be the last trip that I've taken.

And they were military historical romps through through Europe.

And I've never gone outside of Europe with these groups.

So this time we are.

And it's called Eternal Israel.

Everyone has a theme.

And the subtitle was Three Millennia of Jewish War, Peace, and Achievement.

And we're going to go, of course, we go to Tel Aviv, land there, and then we're going to look at ancient and ancient in the sense of Jewish and Greek and Roman sites, Caesarea, Megadio.

We're going to go to Masada, Haifa, Haifa, Capernaum, Capernaum, Magdala,

Golan Heights.

And what we're trying to do is talk about things like Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, the siege of Jerusalem, the destruction of Jerusalem, or the Six-Day War, or the Yom Kippur War, the 47 or the War, the history of military conquest and fighting or the crusades that took place on soil now that is the state of Israel, as well as studying the history of Israel.

They're military history groups, and that's the emphases, but really it turns to be historical.

So very quickly, what we do every morning, we get a group, one-third is new every year, one-third is repeating from the year prior, and one-third has been on one of the 17 trips.

And then every morning, about eight, we have a lecture, and usually it's by a professor that I bring with me.

and an expert in that particular country.

And then I give some lectures, and then we bring bring in people from the host country so this time in israel we'll have somebody come from the idf we'll have an observer like carolyn glick that writes for the jerusalem post and other venues i hope somebody maybe from the mossad and then i'll give a lecture i think i'm giving a lecture on the 73 young kipper war in the 67

and a professor at hillsdale that will be coming and talking about jewish history and biblical history and then we have question and answers and then

the speakers meet with all of this time, it's over 100, it'll be difficult, but we meet with every single person for one meal of the three meals time, 10, 30 meals.

So if you have a staff of four and they're spread out or a group of four speakers, everybody gets to meet one.

And we try to stay at five-star hotels,

the top hotels in the world, and King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

You know, I try to do it just top food, local, and they're very, people are very confident and experienced travelers so when we bring people to we have debates too so we'll bring a person in and say this is you know this is the israeli view or we've had people in the past say this is the nato view or this is the eu view and our group can be very boisterous you know especially when the nato guy says you know america is not fair to us in nato i thought we were going to have a riot but yeah it's very nationalistic patriotic successful nice people yeah i can't imagine any weenies euro weenies traveling with you so well victor thanks for that description explanation so let's talk about farm matters so two questions one is gentleman asks why is bill gates buying up so much farmland now you may or not know the reason for that victor and it may or may not be true but i'll rephrase it too in another way if you victor a farmer had the wealth of bill gates would you be buying up farmland is farmland a worthwhile investment?

Maybe it's a nefarious thing that Gates is up to.

So that's one farm topic that our listeners have asked you to talk about.

And here's another question that somebody has asked, and this has to do with the Ukraine and current events.

Given the Ukraine's contribution to the world's food supply, right, it is, wasn't it, the breadbasket of Europe, will most likely be hindered because of the ongoing war.

Would Victor think that this may finally be a year where America's farmers will plant wall to wall and reap the benefits of this market and possibly solve the expected food crisis?

So, you know, Victor, I just know how easily when just the farming community in America just decides to plant wall to wall, as this gentleman asks.

Of course, you know the vagaries of farming and expected returns and how unexpected things can happen and dreams get dashed.

So, Victor, the current problem with the food supply in Ukraine, can America help solve that?

And the Gates question of buying farmland, could you answer those?

Well, Bill Gates is part of a larger trend, Jack, that the number of people farming continue.

And I don't, I mean, there are people with two or three acres that teach school and then they,

I'm not

talking about that type of farming, but being completely supported.

by a farm, that number of people who can do that is radically declining.

And And so we have, in general, well beyond Bill Gates or the Chinese too, Jack, they're buying enormous amounts of farm.

I think Bill Gates, and I know somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, is buying about 250,000, has bought 250,000 acres.

And I don't know what it's getting close to, I don't know what it is.

Is it 690 million?

It's getting close to a billion dollars.

And I guess the idea is one of three things.

Number one, he feels that he wants to have a secure, safe food supply and he will then implement non-rational, I mean, market, they're not rationally according to the market, new types of organic farming maybe.

Or B, he feels that with more and more people on the planet and less and less water and aeritable soil, that this is a great investment.

Or three, he feels, this is the conspiratorial Mojack, that he will have a stranglehold on a large amount of food supply.

I don't think that's going to work because everybody that I've known in my life that didn't know anything about farming and then bought land as an absentee didn't owner.

I mean, you remember Ted Turner, Jack?

He was his largest.

Right.

Montana, right?

Yes.

Buffalo.

I think he's still the second largest now.

He's got like 200.

And they haven't, people who don't know anything about farming have not done well because it's such a difficult, it's not like Michael Bloomberg drop a seed in.

It's very difficult to be financially profitable.

And there's about, I don't know what it is, three,

300 million acres that can be farmed in the United States.

So you talk about 250 when they say he's buying up all the farm that's just a it's so huge that he can't ever do that.

He doesn't have the resources.

And I have a feeling on every acre he farms.

I mean, put it this way, Jack.

If you were a guy and you were struggling to make a farm on 500 acres and a guy came up to you and said, I will buy that for 20% more than the market value.

And then you want to, okay, and then somebody like you would farm it for him.

Would you farm with the same care for him than for yourself?

I don't think so.

So there's a renter factor in all of this.

And if our listeners, noble people though they are, if they were renting an apartment versus owning that apartment, they would have a different aspect about maintenance and uptake.

Absolutely.

I've been a landlord.

I feel the pain.

And that's what it is with farming.

And so the other thing is that land, we're all just custodians of the land.

We're all going to die and the land is going to endure.

I mean, I'm looking out my window right now and I can look at all this land and out the window and I can tell you that I knew every one of those farmers.

They're all dead and every single one of their heirs is sold out.

And yet when you talked to them 60 years ago, that was the most important thing in their life.

Victor, I I'm doing this for my grandkid, I'm doing this for my great, I'm doing this, but the land is still there.

It's always going to be there.

It outlasts all of us.

And so I don't think all of us are renters.

That's what I'm trying to say.

We don't own anything.

We die and then we just pass on and somebody else occupies the land for a while, but it endures.

And so I'm not too worried because the amounts of individual farmland that are in control of the Chinese or Gates or Ted Turner are large, but in comparison to the total amount of farmland in the United States, they're very small and they're not going to be as profitable.

And then very quickly, the second question, more power to farmers.

They're always at the bottom of the food chain.

Every inflationary increase in machinery and nitrogen and labor, there's nobody they can pass that on to.

They get hit, hit, hit.

The only way they have is

a commodity price and they have no control over it unless they're vertically integrated.

And very, you know, some are, but they have to have a huge packing shed distribution brokers, and they're not.

So the farmer always is the last guy down, and all the price increases get passed down to him.

And then he says, I want to raise.

And it depends entirely on the market.

Right now, prices are good, but they're very volatile.

And that assumes that nitrogen hasn't gone up four times like it has, or tractors haven't doubled in price, or you're not paying twice what you are

for some types of labor.

You know, when I planted almonds

eight years ago, the price was about 420 a pound.

Took about $1.60.

And by the time they came into production three years later, it was about $2.40.

It's $1.50 now below the cost of production.

And

I don't know what it will be tomorrow.

And that was for a variety of reasons I don't want to get into, but it's a very volatile.

very volatile discipline.

I only have empathy for farmers.

It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

And I wish them the highest prices in the world because they work like crazy and they have no control over their product.

They have no control.

The people who buy and sell in the commodity markets make so much more money than they do, and yet they do all the work.

And I'm not criticizing the system because it's very efficient, but boy, to be a farmer today and try to make your entire living off that farm.

I would just walk around this farm when I did that and I'd say, Ting,

$500 going out there today.

Ting, $1,000 there today.

ting two thousand there i think of overhead on insurance or interest payments or fertilizer being delivered or thinning peaches or picking plum and ting and then i'd say where's the money coming in and then you get a call from the broker well we we just love

love those santa rosa plum they were just wonderful they were almost as good as your black beauties but guess what safeway just said they just couldn't pay what they said they were going to pay.

So we had to sell them.

So instead of $1,250 a box, you're going to get $3.

That's just the way it goes.

Or, you know, we weren't going to sell those persimmons and good Christmas market.

We told you to pick, but you know what?

We never sold them.

We got to charge you 50 cents a crate to come and get them.

We're going to throw them out.

I've taken packed persimmons and packed grapes that I packed myself and my family, and I've gone back to the cold storage broker, taken them all, put them back on a big truck, trucked them all the way back home, and then spend hours taking the boxes and dumping them in a big pit in February or March.

Wow.

I'm going to ask you another farming question as our last question, and we're trying to get in as many questions as possible.

So I'll ask one more farming question right after this important message.

We're back back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the Victors in Israel series.

Thanks for those of you who send in questions.

So, Victor, this was a small little question somebody was asking, and it has to do with farming, and it has to do with the physicality of farming.

You've just told us some depressing things about how it impacts.

packs the wallet and the psyche.

And I know I'm making assumptions because I'm not a farmer.

Farming grapes is different than farming wheat.

But as a farmer, what was the thing physically that was most wearying about the job?

Yeah, I think two things were.

One was rote.

And by that, I mean when you're pruning a vine, I used to prune to establish what the piece rate would be.

So I'd say to me, I'm going to work really fast to prune 100 vines.

I'm going to work very slow.

I'm going to work pretty.

average.

And then whatever I made in those days to correlate to seven or eight dollars an hour, I would then charge that much per vine.

But when you do 10 or 12 vines, you look down that row and there's like 90 more, or you're thinning plums and you're in a 12-foot ladder and you're up there and then you look around and there's 116 trees per acre, it's just, you're going to have to do that again and again.

And then the other thing that's very dangerous about road is you can make a mistake.

And so one day when I didn't know anything, I didn't have enough money to buy ammonium nitrate.

And so I said, just give me ammonium sulfate.

The nitrogen is much cheaper.

And the old guy who was a farmer who on the side sold chemicals said, well, be very careful about sulfate.

You know, it's very hot.

And I said, yes, I know that.

And he said, don't put it on sandy soil.

And we had just planted 500 new trees, not a lot, you know, for small farming, three acres.

And I was in a hurry.

So I went down each row, each row, spreading this, and it got too close.

And then three days later, it was like dominoes.

One died, the next died, the next died, the next died, the next die.

They were burned up by the fertilizer.

And I thought, wow, don't try to save a tree on bad soil by giving it fertilizer.

What an idiot to use ammonium sulfate.

So if you calibrate a spray rig, Jack.

Yeah.

And let's say you set the pressure.

It's very hard to do.

Everybody thinks farming.

That's why I got so mad with Michael Bloomberg.

You put a thousand gallons of water and then you put so many gallons, say, of fungicide, and then you have to spray it.

This is before computers, and that depends on the pressure of the nozzle, how many nozzles, how fast you're going, whether the soil is

wet or muddy, and you're spinning out.

And then you get to get that, it takes a lot of talent.

And if you screw up and you put too much or too little, and you do it again and again, rote, you can do a lot of damage.

And I've done that.

And so that was one big thing.

The other thing is that your day doesn't end.

So you're going to pick, let's say, you got the night before you picked 100 bins of apricots, or you've got 50 bins of nectarines, you've got to pack them.

So, the packing crews are coming at eight o'clock.

You've got to be out there at 5:30 to make sure it's all trucked, it's all ready for them, it's waiting.

So, you're not paying 30 people to stand around.

And then, when you're packing, you don't eat lunch, you eat on your feet, and then they go home.

And what do you have to do?

You got to truck the whole thing to a cold storage.

Sometimes it'd be 30 miles away in an old truck.

I mean, you should see the old truck we had.

I mean, it was like, I thought I was doing well if I could get over 50 miles an hour.

And then, you know, you're back, then you clean up the packing shed or you're irrigating.

You know, I used to have a timer at night when I would turn on the water, furrow irrigation.

It would go ding, two o'clock, get up and go look at it.

Ding, four o'clock, or when we were drying raisins every hour.

And yet everybody lives by eight to five.

I used to see my poor brother.

I had a twin brother that worked like a dog.

I mean, my God, he would go out there with a forklift.

He did this, he did that.

And it would be eight and nine at night, and he'd have 50 pallets out there.

And that guy was still doing it and doing it and doing it until midnight.

So the reason I'm saying all this, I look back, I know that I'm very critical of academics, but my God, when I went into academics, I was doing this five years, another 10 years, both.

And then, but when I would hear these people say, oh,

oh,

they're making me teach three classes.

I'm going to be in the classroom nine hours, nine hours this week.

And then they would say, I was going to go to Tuscany and they didn't give me a raise.

I'm going to have to go, you know, I don't know where I'm, maybe Portugal.

Or they would say, you know, I would be teaching and I'd have all these students swarm me afterwards asking questions and I would try to clean the and then somebody would go, Professor Hansen, I use the room after you, and I saw some letters that seemed to me Greek.

I said, I'm sorry, what's the point?

I like a clean chalkboard, and you did not leave it clean in the manner that I'm accustomed to.

It was that kind of stuff all the time.

So, when I hear about all these academics, or I hear about LeBron, or I hear about Oprah, or I hear about Johnny Depp and his psychodramas hurt, I just feel like, you know, there's so many people that are feeding you, and they're dying out there working to death, and they have no idea what a salary is or a particular lifestyle that you enjoy.

Anyway, that's a long round, but I have enormous respect.

You're entitled to it, my friend.

You're entitled to it.

Hey, Victor, we've run out of time for this episode.

I want to encourage our listeners, the audience continues to grow dramatically.

I'd like to encourage them to visit victorhandsome.com, subscribe.

Again, everything you eat is found there, but a lot of what you write is exclusive and it can only be read by subscribers.

Very reasonable, $5 a month, $50 for the year.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I work for the Center for Civil Society.

We try to strengthen civil society.

If that interests you, visit our website, centerforcivilsociety.com.

And I also write a weekly.

free email newsletter called Civil Thoughts.

And you can subscribe to that at civil thoughts.com.

Thanks all for listening.

Thanks, those who go to iTunes and rate us and leave comments.

We do read them.

So that's about it.

Victor will be back in a couple of days with yet another episode that's predicated on the questions sent in by our listeners for the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thanks very much.

Thank you, everybody.