The Culturalist: A New Age Is Born?

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Hello, and welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the culturalist, where we dedicate ourselves to events and people of the past that have influenced the way we live.

This is Sammy Wink with The Weekend Edition.

Victor is a classicist, philologist, military historian, historian, commentator, and I'm sure a slew of other things.

His supporters find him sober and judicious.

His critics, well, they get angry, and we have the angry reader to allow them to express their own opinions on things and for Victor to answer them.

So we welcome everybody to Victor's website.

How are you doing today, Victor?

Very well.

Very well, Sammy.

Website is victorhanson.com, remind everybody.

Okay, thank you.

Victorhanson.com.

We have a few things on the agenda today, Theodore Roosevelt and then Virgil's Eclogue 4.

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Welcome back.

And we have a full agenda today.

And I was hoping I was told that it was the crackpot idea, just so your listeners know, but we're going to still look at it today.

Theodore Roosevelt, I've always been curious about him because he seems so overshadowed by FDR, and yet I think he was one of the great presidents that the United States has ever had at the turn of the century.

I know that sometimes, given the age that he's in, that things he might have said might offend in particular women.

And I'm saying that because I want to read a little quote from him before we talk about the importance of the American individual, I think.

He was actually referring to ranchers here when he said that ranchers possess few of the emasculated milk and water moralities admired by the pseudo-philanthropists, but he does possess to a very high degree the stern manly qualities that are valuable to a nation.

And I found that quote very interesting from his book, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail that he authored.

And I know I don't want to offend the women of our podcast here, and I don't think it should, because I don't think that these qualities that he's talking about and the ones that he feels that we shouldn't have, those milk and water moralities, I love that reference there, are equally applied to women as men.

But I find that he had a unique outlook on life.

And I'd really really like to talk and have your thoughts on Theodore Roosevelt as a, not just as a president, but as a conservationist and a founder of the Progressive Party.

And I find,

I mean, I don't know if today he would be part of the Progressive Party.

So it'd be an interesting thing.

I don't know if you want to do it, Victor, to look at the difference between progressivism then and now, or however you want to look at Theodore Roosevelt.

Well, I'll answer that latter question first.

He was a progressive, but he wasn't a Wilsonian progressive.

Now, what does that mean?

That means that he created this idea that the Republican Party of laissez-faire capitalism would not appeal to most Americans, given the excesses of Carnegie, even though he was friends with all these people, you know, Mellon and Carnegie and J.P.

Morgan and

Standard Oil.

Rockefellers, et cetera, et cetera.

So he kind of, he was kind of a Trumpian figure in that way.

He was a nationalist populist.

And by that, I mean he believed in expansionism of the United States imprint abroad.

So he was the one that gave us the canal zone, even though he criticized how other people sort of imperialistically crafted it.

But he gave us the Panama Canal.

He was a big promoter of the liberation of the Philippines and war with Spain.

He didn't really approve of going into the Philippines and occupying it, though.

And he built his assistant secretary of the navy of course he built the great white wheat fleet the big battleships or the early battle dreadnoughts that were painted white and cruised the entire world he was very active in the russo-japanese war in finding a so-called peace and you know when you look at all these liberal and i say liberal i don't mean that pejoratively but all the presidential ratings of our presidents are all done by liberals because that's who academics are He's usually in the top five to seven and I think he's getting a little more as they stress race, class, and gender.

Oddly, you know, he was a great man was Booker T.

Washington, you know, the founder of Tuskegee, up from slavery, etc.

And he had him to the White House, not just for a meeting, but for dinner, and that caused a lot of outrage.

So what I'm getting at is that modern progressives look at him and they

feel that he was ahead of his time on racial matters.

And

I mean, they prefer Franklin Roosevelt.

He was there 12 years, not seven and a half, as president.

But, you know, he interned the Japanese and there were some things there.

So Roosevelt's actually incrementally gone up in favor.

But like the Roosevelt gene, he was a megalomaniac.

And so just as Franklin Roosevelt, his distant cousin would have four terms, you know, he was not happy with what was de facto two terms because McKinley was, I think, assassinated six months into it, 1901.

And then he filled out three and a half years.

And then another four years he was re-elected.

And then, you know, he was, gosh, he was the youngest man ever to be president.

So he was only, 1908, he was only 50 years old.

And then what do you do?

And so he went out into retirement.

And then he let William Howard Taft, who was kind of a functionary, but competent.

And then he ran as a third party candidate, tried to get the nomination, he couldn't do it.

And he destroyed the Republican Party.

And he gave the nation, I mean, if you look at the Bull Moose Party of 1912, he got more votes than the incumbent Republican did.

But the two of them together would have had a landslide victory over Woodrow Wilson.

And people had been very skeptical of the Democratic Party for a variety of reasons.

It was not just...

the Civil War and the stain of slavery on the Democrats, but it was nominating William Jennings Bryant, you know, again and again and again, and this kind of silver, getting rid of the gold standard, inflation, populism, and they didn't trust him.

But Roosevelt, in some ways, destroyed the Republican Party for a long time.

He weakened it.

I mean, they came back after Wilson because Wilson was, for all the liberal gushing about it, he was an incompetent.

Really, I'm sorry.

Could you explain that, Wilson, the incompetent?

Well, he was an abject racist.

So all of the progress that Roosevelt had done, this very liberal president of Princeton University, who became president, he re-segregated the civil service.

He kicked blacks out or made them ineligible for promotion.

He stopped all efforts to gradually integrate the services.

He was an egomaniac, not that Roosevelt wasn't, but he was an internationalist globalist and felt that, you know,

there was going to be a world government, the League of Nations, his idea.

And we talked about last week, Clemenceo, you know, said that God had 10 amendments, couldn't Wilson settle for Chen rather than 14 points, because he had this naive idea that Germany, nobody is culpable in war.

So you don't occupy Germany, you don't make them pay a price.

But you do humiliate them in the sense that, oh, you've been a bad boy and Woodrow Wilson's going to

say you're bad, but we're not going to punish you.

It's like telling your child, you really get me mad.

You get me mad.

You get me mad.

You get me mad and make the child hate you, but you never punish them.

So then they equate your weakness with guilt.

And that's what they did.

So Wilson was a bad president.

Roosevelt was responsible.

But largely, when you mentioned why he's relevant today.

Theodore Roosevelt, yes.

Yes.

He was a very sickly guy, and he looked at his own life in terms of the United States.

So he came out of this multi-million dollar, privileged New York family of Dutch,

I don't know, going back to before the revolution.

And they were very wealthy.

And he inherited, I don't know, what it was, today's dollars, maybe a million or two.

And he was sick.

He had asthma.

He was sickly.

He had glasses.

People picked on him.

So he found out by accident that when he, he had a wonderful father, actually, he loved his father, but father was a great man, died early.

But he built himself up.

And it turns out some people realize with histamine that you can exercise and endorphins and sort of diverting the immune system, whether from an autoimmune response to physicality, that he got over it.

And not over it, but he did it.

But he always was excessive.

So, you know, and things happened to him in excess.

His first wife died of kidney failure right after his daughter was born.

His mother died, I think, within 12 hours.

He lost his mother.

He had lost his father earlier.

He lost his wife.

He married very quickly, kind of, and had, I think, four or five other children right after his work within two years.

And then, you know, he lost his son in World War I.

He went down to the Amazon.

He went to Africa.

I don't know.

They shot thousands of animals.

And this is before the age of vaccinations and things.

And then he went down to the Amazon, almost killed himself.

He got a wound, got tropical diseases.

He almost died.

And he was, you know, and he was in his mid-50s.

And then he was shot when he was running for office in 1912.

I mean, they shot him at point blank range.

And the bullet went through his steel glass case and then went through, I don't know, a folded, thick folded speech and went into his chest cavity, but it didn't get into the lung.

And they left the bullet there.

And that turned out to be a weakening process.

I don't know if it was the lead or whatever it was, but that wound never really could heal.

The tissues couldn't.

And so that weakened him.

And then he died at 60.

But he was a very impressive guy.

When you look back at him, I mean, he created a lot of what we would call the Antitrust Acts.

He created a lot of the Anti-Monopoly Acts.

the food and drug, Yosemite National Park, Yellowstone.

Can I ask you about that?

You know, he was a lifelong lover of zoology.

And so basically the lead of the conservationist movement.

What do you think of that vision of America and America's natural resources?

You got to remember what he was, though.

He was the archetype conservationist.

He wasn't an environmentalist.

And by that, I mean, he felt that the American was a new breed, a new type of person, and he was masculine and tough.

And what made them different from the Europeans was his frontier, this vast frontier.

And it had made him different because remember, the guy had been assistant secretary of the Navy.

He would be assistant secretary of the Navy, but he had been the player in New York politics in his late 20s.

And he was very powerful.

And then he was kept getting passed over because of his outsized ego and people were afraid of him.

And he wasn't going to be governor.

He only was governor, you know, in his late 30s, and that's how he got to be vice president.

But my point is, he got angry and went out to the Dakotas with his fortune and he bought a cattle ranch and he dressed up as a cowboy, but he kind of won the respect, kind of not, but he learned how to ride and he learned how to shoot from riding.

And this was going to be the prerequisites for the rough riders at San Juan Hill and the Spanish-American War in Cuba.

And you remember during World War I, when he was in his, you know, 56, sick, overweight, he wanted to get four divisions and take them over to Europe with no knowledge about the modern artillery and machine gun and even armor dominance of the new battlefield didn't matter.

He's a very courageous guy, but he felt that this frontier was a gift of God to Americans because it allowed them to have Frederick Jackson-Turner release factor, you know, that when there was social tensions and anarchy, people tried to shoot him, you could go out west and make it.

And so we never really had a revolution because there was all this free land and rich.

natural resource and you did not want to screw it up.

You wanted to preserve it for each generation because they would need it.

So if you're you're bored in 2021, you're in your apartment, you feel crammed, gym's not it, you can go up to Yosemite and camp out and hike.

And he envisioned that, that people, it was kind of a Jeffersonian vision, that they needed these things protected.

That was a great thing to do.

They needed to be able to buy food that wouldn't poison.

They needed to understand that Rockefeller, Carnegie, and the Mellons and the Morgan didn't run the country, that they had done a lot of great things.

He was a free market capitalist in some ways, but they didn't run the country.

So you apply Rooseveltism today, what would it be like?

It would be like, let's break up Facebook and Twitter and Google because they have 90% of the market and let other, not...

take the government, take it over, but let other companies come in by not allowing them to be vertically integrated, by swallowing up all the company.

And then he would probably say, you know, let's drill on federal land, but do it very carefully.

And his attitude would be about oil.

A Roosevelt attitude was, why in the world on planet Earth would you want the Soviet, excuse me, former Soviets, the Russians, the Saudis, why would you beg them to pump more oil when we can do it so much more cleanly and ecologically sound here in the United States?

And then we would be independent and blah, blah, bully, bully, bully America.

We wouldn't have to go to the Middle East.

We'd be in control.

That's the kind of manifest destiny, America first.

A lot of Trumpian people will get angry hearing this, but there was a lot of Trumpian echoes that Trump, I think, must have known or his advisors, because this idea of America first,

and we're going to get back, we're going to lead the world in steel production and oil, and we're not going to go out looking for trouble.

Like Roosevelt was against the occupation of the Philippines.

But when trouble knocks on our door, we're going to hit back hard.

And that kind of combination that bothered the Republicans, the Republicans of today,

the

Bush family,

W and Jeb, and I think you could, the Romney faction, the McCain faction, all of them would say that they were sort of like the Republican establishment, the Taft establishment, the Hughes establishment that looked at Roosevelt and said, you know what, this guy is not a doctrinaire Republican laissez-faire guy.

There's elements in him, but he's got too much worry about the effect of capitalism on this people in the way that Trump did.

And, you know, Trump was for Social Security.

He wasn't nut like we're seeing now.

He bothered the Club for Growth and Chamber of Commerce and those groups.

So they were very similar.

And he was a reactionist, a Jacksonian.

Roosevelt was like Trump.

In other words, don't tread on me.

He was not a interventionist,

you know, conservative.

So there were a lot of things that were similar.

Yeah, he had so many things to respect about him.

And I always lament that FDR takes the stage over him.

I think he should be ranked as one of our best presidents.

Well, he is.

He's one of our, he's getting, as I said earlier, he's getting, because he's bipartisan and the Democrat left-wing mind loves that.

You know, they never want left-wing people or Democrats to reach across the aisle, but when a Republican does it, like Roosevelt,

they really honor that.

And then personally, as a person, he, like Roosevelt, was a child of privilege.

And he had, as I said earlier, he was a narcissist, but he wasn't as mean-spirited as FDR.

And he didn't want to nationalize everything like FDR did.

And he wasn't surrounded by socialists or communists.

or he wouldn't have gotten so close in with the Soviets in 44, 45, that led to, you know, the algae hiss, all that backlash.

So he had a lot more judgment, although he was impulsive, like Rosenbrold.

All right, let's turn then to our writer for this week.

I just want to say writer, he's a poet and a Roman writer

to Virgil.

And I wanted to look at, I know that his most famous piece is the Aeneid, but he wrote two collections of poems, the Georgics and the Ecologues.

And probably the most famous of the Ecologues is Ecologue IV.

And i wanted to look a little bit of his vision of a new age coming that he has partly because

and i don't know if your listeners feel this way but sometimes it gets a little bit tough with you know the problems that we're experiencing today and i think people need a moment to at least consider the vision of a new age.

And here is where Virgil does that.

And again, it's one of the most well-known pieces.

And I'll just read part of the poem.

It's really absolutely beautiful.

And I was hoping we could talk about Virgil, the artist, first, and then take seriously his idea of cycles of time here.

But here he writes on the cycles of time and he's claiming that a new age is going to be born.

And he says, and we're in the midst of the poem, justice returns, returns old Saturn's reign with a new breed of men sent down from heaven.

Only do you at the boy's birth, in whom the iron shall cease, the golden race arise, befriend him, chaste Lucina.

It is your own Apollo who reigns within your consulate.

This glorious age, O polio, shall begin, and the months enter into their mighty march.

Under your guidance, whatso tracks remain of our old wickedness, once done away, shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear.

And so,

his idea that a new age is going to be born and he's seeing this empire as leading into a whole great age is my interpretation of that.

But let's have a talk about Virgil and then also about our own time, if there's anything that we should be optimistic about.

I first read that poem when I was 19.

in Latin at UC Santa Cruz, and I had a professor, Gary Miles, that taught it.

And then I taught it four or five times, the eclogues.

But let's work back.

So Virgil is largely considered the greatest poet that Rome produced.

And it's on the basis of three great works.

We all know the Aeneid, the foundational myth, how Aeneas founds Rome, that hexameter poem in 12 books.

And then we know, some of us know this hexameter poem, the in-between one, called the Georgics.

Georgia, we got the state of Georgia is named after it means farming.

And it's a very brilliant poem.

It's trying to remind people that there's lessons from farming.

And best be things like bees that have social networks and cooperation, but you can look out in the natural world and you can learn lessons.

And so it's a beautiful poem, and it's written by an urban person, but we're working back now to his first poem.

And that's called the Eclogues or the Selections or the from Eclogue.

it's from the greek word eclogoi and it means that virgil wrote 10 poems and it's not quite farming it's more pastoral poem about the italian countryside and why he's writing this around 40 bc okay

and remember caesar's been killed just three and a half years earlier so it's a period of civil war and The civil war is Caesar's followers, and there's two of them, the young Octavian, who will be Augustus, and his partner, Mark Anthony.

And right when the poem is being written, the third part of what they call the second triumvirate, Lepidus, and they are going to fight the Tyrannicides, Cassius and Brutus, and they will win.

And

the point that I'm making is that he envisions this terrible period of three years of war as over with.

And he's confident that this treaty of Rhamdesium, I think there's a lot of controversy when you have to teach it, you got to go through all these esoteric arguments.

But the point I'm making is these three men will restore the Republic, sort of.

And to cement the alliance, Mark Anthony will marry Octavia, Octavian's sister.

And that young child to come, that's at least the traditional interpretation.

Some people talk about another birth or a metaphorical birth, but nevertheless, that child will will then will represent a new order, what he called the Magnus Order Seclorum, the great order of the ages.

And the point is, again, that just as there was an Italian countryside and all of the other eclogues, all the other nine are about the beauties.

of the countryside and the tragedies that happen when people have to leave their farms or they lose title to them or urbanization.

It's a romantic, vicarious, sort of like the romantic movement in 19th century, late 18th century Britain.

Okay, Byron or Keats, that romantic idea of the countryside, pastoral poetry, we call it.

But

four is different.

It's more of a call that we can restore the ancient Republican values of hard work, rural physicality, back to the land because we no longer have a civil war.

And from now on, all competition will be sports or, you know, political political riot, but we'll never ever do this again.

And the tragedy of it is when this thing is published in 39, we've got another, we've got to go all the way to 31

to the battle of actium, because it never happens.

Anthony and Octavian turn on each other, then you have the second round of the civil war, and it's more brutal than the first round.

And it will end at 31 with Actium, with the utter defeat of Cleopatra and Anthony and the so-called foreign Ursuper from the east.

And then Virgil becomes in the next two works, as this plays out, he becomes an akominist, a praiser of Augustus, because he wins, he brings back Roman virtues, and he's a stellar person.

He's not the conniving young man anymore.

He's a father, but we're not there yet.

So this is a very naive.

forecast.

Now, why do we read it?

Why are we talking about it?

Because it's kind of relevant that what was America, what was Rome at that time, there was for the first time, there was an inkling that at their pinnacle of greatest strength, material, economic, social, cultural, something was wrong.

The country was at each other's throat.

And if they continued to do that, they would be destroyed.

And he was looking for some hope.

And he thought, wow, Anthony is not going to fight Octavian.

And they're going to bring back Caesareanism, but with the Republic and the Senate.

And this is going to be great.

And it's sort of as if you said, you know, blue state and red state are not going to fight anymore.

And we're going to have some kind of consensus, and we'll have leaders that don't try to pull it.

And that was the sense.

It became famous, and I guess that's the reason you're asking me.

I haven't asked you in detail, Sammy, but for two things.

In the poem, he has a phrase, Magnus Ordo.

in the nominative seclorum, a great order of the ages.

And the American founders and the Great Seal, you know, the one in the pyramid that we see on the dollar bill, they changed that slightly to nous, a new order, genitive plural of the ages, meaning just as Virgil had imagined that

new chance for Rome in that transitional period, so we transitioned from an English-speaking European colony to a English-speaking independent free nation.

And so that was one phrase.

There's another thing there.

He has one deo favente, meaning with God willing, that, i.e., with God favoring us, I said, or willing us to succeed.

That's an ablative absence I remember.

But my point is that in the Aeneid, I think in the Georgik's II, he has this variation of Anuit Coeptus, which is also on the seal.

He smiles on our undertakings.

And so, and then you could even argue e pluribus unum does not come from Heraclitus, you know, ek ponton hen

out of many one, but comes from a lost or some kind of scolius remark on Virgil's Aeneid.

So what I'm getting at is that poem was mined by the founders to say, America is a new order of the ages and God smiles on what we've undertaken.

And it became famous then.

The fourth ecologue was the American eclogue, at least in the idea of the founders.

And then there's the second half very quickly.

So Virgil, as everybody reads the Inferno, remember the guide to Dante as he goes into the lower Netherlands.

Into hell.

The Inferno is he needs a guide.

And the guide is the pagan Virgil.

But Virgil was born before Christ.

So he's going to go to hell, supposedly.

But maybe not.

Maybe he can go to purgatory because he had a vision of Christianity before Christ was born.

And the Christian church mined the ecologues, the Aeneid, and tried, as they did all Neoplatonism, Aristotle, you name it, but they found a specific resonance in the fourth ecologue because they said,

this is not the forecast child between

Anthony and Octavian's sister Octavia.

This

written, you know, almost 40 years before the birth of christ the new order of the ages was virgil's brilliant gift from god that he was allowed to prophesize the birth of christ and that became the messianic eclogue and so throughout you know you'd read augustine or the early church fathers they all give Virgil a place in the Christian pantheon that they do not accord to other pagans.

And so that's why Dante is part of the early Renaissance, was in that tradition.

Virgil's a a good person.

He just happened to be born at the wrong time, but he's going to have to spend a little time doing, you know, penance and purgatory.

And then he might make it up to Paradisio because he understood.

the message from God and he wrote this poem to warn everybody in Rome or to celebrate that don't worry.

It's a very naive poem.

If we had time to read the whole thing, it's everything is going to be perfect.

Everybody's going to be happy.

All the old Italian virtues are going to be spread throughout the whole world.

Rome did this.

It's not going to be imperial.

It's going to be wonderful.

There's a lot of pessimism in the Aeneid that it's not in the ecologues when he was very young.

And so it's famous for two reasons.

One, our seal and our mottos and our, it's a national American eclogue, but it's also what's considered the Christian ecologue.

by looking at the same passages, interpreting them very different, not that they forecast America, but that they forecast a Christianity that Virgil had an insight about.

Yeah, well, so you seem to be telling me that what he wrote it for in the changing of the wheel of fortune didn't actually happen with Caesar and his lot, but that the Christians picked it up and it did show a change in the fortunes of the world.

He underestimated.

what

man could do.

Well, he felt that if Augustus was this young kid and Anthony was this seasoned hand, that they made a natural fit and the Republic was now an empire and there was such huge territory and riches involved that they would find a workable situation since they had one, two, three things in common.

They had loved Caesar, that was Anthony's mentor, and he was the adopted grandnephew of Octavian was of Caesar.

So they were angry about his death.

And two, they had cemented that partnership with a marriage.

And from what everybody had said, that Octavia was in love with Mark Anthony and vice versa, as much as you can understand that term in the context of the time.

Cleopatra wasn't in the scene, in the situation or the landscape yet.

And then third, they were going to have a child, and that child will be the product of these factions.

And then they had put down the enemy.

And so that was very optimistic.

And it would never have a civil war.

And unfortunately for Virgil, they had a greater civil war than the first civil war that was brought on by the first triumvirate.

Oh, okay.

Okay, well, maybe by 2024, America will find its natural fit of a elderly statesman helping out with a younger,

naive, and idealistic.

Yeah, it's hard to see that right now.

I think more likely we're self-selecting in the sense that I don't think that's fortunate.

I think if you're on the conservative side, And I understand why people move, but everybody's moving to Tennessee or Florida or Texas from places like New York and California,

these uninhabitable blue states.

But

why cede your state over to the blue paradigm?

And you can see what I mean in Virginia in this week.

These mothers said, I'm not leaving this crazy place just because a bunch of neo-Marxists have hijacked my school board, just because they have redefined white people as evil monsters, just as they redefined three genders rather than two, just as they'd lie to us and cover up things like a rape in a bathroom.

I don't care.

I'm going to fight it out.

Even if Virginia is supposed to be a blue state, I have no chance whatsoever.

And the federal government and its tentacles now are strangling all of northern Virginia.

I don't care.

And they won.

And they almost won in New Jersey.

They won in some issues.

You could argue that.

You know, the mayor of New York is not Bill de Blasio now, will be the mayor of New York.

You can argue that in Minneapolis, people weren't completely crazy.

You can argue that in Texas there was a congressional election where the Republican won, the Latino, heavily Latino district.

So what I'm getting at is that maybe what will bring us together is a conservative renaissance that will say, you know what, we were never against change, but it had to be within the constitutional framework.

And we have in the amendment process, we just don't junk the Electoral College on one vote.

I'm sorry.

We just don't junk 150-year Supreme Court on one vote.

We just don't ram through another $5 trillion when we owe $30 trillion.

We just don't subtly in this year of the Republic say we're going to have something called critical race theory that rejects the entire premise of the Martin Luther King Jr.

paradigm.

We're not going to do that.

And then you can win people over to that vision, kind of like Reagan did.

But I don't think you can compromise because there's a third to a fourth of the country, mostly on the coast, culturally, economically, socially, politically, have a different view of America.

It's a toxic view.

They don't feel it's a positive force.

They don't feel that it was a positive force.

They don't think it was founded on positive ideas.

And they feel that they, in their globalist visions, and their professional degrees and their wealth and their success and their superior morality and their Ivy League or Stanford or wherever brand on their backs, that they are platonic guardians and they can lead us there.

But if we're not going to listen to them about mandated vaccinations for everybody to stop this, and we're not going to listen to them on getting rid of all nuclear power and all natural gas and all gasoline, if we don't, if we're going to reject the brilliance of AOC and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, then they're going to crush you.

And so you got to be very careful because we have,

I don't know, I don't want to be too dramatic, we got 12 or 13 generations of Americans that are dead that did not die for this vision.

They died at Gettysburg and they died at Iwo Jima and they died at Bella Wood and they died in Okinawa for a different vision of what these people want to turn this country into.

So you have an obligation to those generations to say, I'm sorry, I can't compromise.

Thomas Jefferson was a flawed person, but he was a great man.

Lincoln was a flawed person, but he was a great man.

As long as you vote to get rid of the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, we have no problem.

Memphis wants to do that, do it in daytime.

No problem.

He was not a great man.

And you can argue about Robert E.

Lee, but if you have a vote of the city council, or you do it democratically rather than a bunch of people you know doing it at night we have no problem with that if it's done but you're not going to destroy this country's customs and traditions.

And then on what premise?

And who are you going to replace them with?

Who are your icons?

Who are your people?

Because I apply or we apply or America applies your standards to yourself in every single case.

Do you notice something, Sammy, that we have something now called iconoclism, tearing down statues, but we don't build any.

So what I'm waiting is, where's all the statues of Marx?

Why aren't they putting up Lenin?

Where's Malcolm X, the wonderful moral exemplar that had such a wonderful life?

And where is Caesar Chavez, who never did one thing wrong?

He never went after his own people with synonyms.

He never went down the border and had people clubbed trying to cross, or he never had a corrupt Robert F.

Kennedy.

medical fund that was looted and people were not paid.

So they don't replace their fallen heroes with real heroes because they can't.

Because like all Jacobins, once you make up these rules then you can't meet them yourself and so they sometimes they look ridiculous and they they take out a name and they there's no name and so look at san francisco we're going to get rid of all the school names and what are we going to rename them with che guyira a murderous thug homophobe racist castro spoiled brat that killed 20 000 people to take power i don't think so yeah well i think just to encourage you i think americans and especially our middle, those independents, politically independents, are very independent thinkers.

And Americans are very different.

So they may surprise you that they will vote in a new age eventually, Victor.

So I just want to encourage you, because you sometimes seem a little bit

worried about the fact.

I write that for Eeyore's cabinet on the webpage.

Yes, I don't want to be too I like I love the fourth eclogue.

It's one of the most beautiful poems in Latin there is, and it is very upbeat, and it is very naive as a young Virgil was, but it's enthusiastic.

It's just that I've heard this before, and I remember Barack Obama, how did he come on the scene?

He came on the scene.

sort of like Winsom Sears did with a brilliant speech.

She was brilliant after the election.

Nobody knew who she was in Virginia, the lieutenant governor.

And she just was so enthusiastic, but she was, I think, much better than Obama.

But he gave a great speech in 2004.

There will be no more blue states.

There will be no more red states.

America is not black or it's white.

It's America.

There's unity.

Everybody believed it.

He was so cynical.

Remember, he went to the funeral of John McCain and started yelling about getting rid of the filibuster and letting in Puerto Rico.

So he'd never miss an occasion to, you know, get in their face or take a gun to a knife fight or punish our enemies or Trayvon's a son that I I never had.

So we've got to be very careful about these false prophets.

But I hope that we can unite.

I hope more communities unite.

And one of the things I think we try to do in this podcast is speak with moderate voices.

We don't yell and scream.

And I know that I've had criticism when I go on Fox.

Some people have called me and said, you don't have fire in the belly.

You got to interrupt.

You got to.

you know, terror into it.

And I try not to do that because I know that offends people.

And I like to hear opposite arguments and I don't carry grudges or things.

But by the same time, you have a obligation or a loyalty to your views.

And if you're not going to advance them with reason and force, then you shouldn't get into the arena.

And I think that was what created Donald Trump.

He might have had excesses, but he was in reaction to Romneyism.

that said, you know, we play by the Marcus of Queensbury rules, and it's much more important to lose nobly than to win.

All right.

The problem with losing nobly is you a lot of people go down.

Yeah, that's true.

And you're going to let a lot of people down on top of that.

So, well, Victor, time is up and we need to close today.

Thanks so much for talking to us about Theodore Roosevelt.

And I think one of the presidents that has been given less credit than he deserves.

And your expertise on Virgil was enlightening.

And I would like to remind people that they can find Victor at parlor at Victor Davis Hansen and at Twitter at VD Hansen.

And his Facebook handle is at VD Hansen's Cup.

And he also has a fan club on Facebook, which we are not a part of the organization of it, but there's a lot of people that join that club and lots of good Victor Davis Hansen videos and interviews and lectures and et cetera on it.

So thanks so much again, Victor.

Thank you for having me and thanks everybody again for listening.

All right, and this is the end of our weekend edition.

And Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink are signing off.

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