The Real Odyssey, Andrew Jackson's America, and Reagan's Conservative Revival | Victor Davis Hanson

It was an extravaganza spectacular movie, but it was not the Odyssey, but something else. Then said, "Maybe I want to make sure that when the awards come out, the left wing woke," award-winning Oscar committee sees it on Woke 2. So he takes her a black actress, and he makes her as Helen. So I would say it's 50% Homer and 50% Christopher Nolan, and he would have benefited if it was 90% Homer and 10% Chris. Hello, and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. This is our Saturday edition, and we're doing a double special edition. This Saturday Victor has seen the movie, the Odyssey, and so he is going to talk to us about the book, as it was written down by the Greeks in 750BC, and then in comparison to or reflection of what he saw in the movie. So I'm excited about that. We also have iconic presidents that he is talking about this week, Andrew Jackson, and then Ronald Reagan. So those are going to be very interesting topics, so stay with us for those things, and we'll be right back from these messages. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. I have a new book out on September 8th of this year, and I think you're going to enjoy it. It's called "Counter Revolution," the fall and rise of Donald Trump, and the MAGA movement. It starts right after January 6, and it details the lack of popularity of Donald Trump, the invective that he endured, the five civil and criminal trials, the effort to get him off the ballot, the raid on Marlago, the two impeachments earlier, one in which he was tried as a private citizen, and yet he came back. How did he come back? And why did he come back? I explain in the book how he defeated his primary opponents, how he was outspent. He had a hostile media, and he defeated the Democratic machine and Camela Harris. It starts on January 6. It ends pretty much now in May of 2026. What's the title about? Donald Trump is not a revolutionary. He's not a revisionist. He's a counter-revolutionary. This time around, he is not addressing just the symptoms of the progressive project of the last 50 years. He's talking about the causes, not just an open border, but how to stop illegal immigration entirely, not just crime, but sending the National Garden to make sure cities are safe, not just an Iranian nuclear threat, but ending that threat that seven other presidents had identified but did not act on, not just addressing the transgender issue or the Green New Deal and all of those issues that are so dear to the Democratic Party, but ending them, defunding NPR and PBS. So it is a counter-revolution to unwind and to roll back the entire progressive project of the last 50 years. I think you're going to like it. It's pretty interesting. It chronicles the greatest political comeback in our recent political history. Thank you very much. I'm Victor Davis-Hansen for the Daily Scene. Welcome back. Victor Davis-Hansen in his own words. Victor is the Martin A. Neil Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Cossacks at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhansen.com. Foley new revamped website by a company of the name Dreamco, Dreamco Designs. They did a wonderful job and they have been wonderful to work with, so we highly recommend if you got a website you're trying to redesign. We have two sponsors this week, so we'll talk to you about var watches and pure health research. So Victor, let's talk a little bit about the the Odyssey and as it was and as it now is. Well, I've read about 30 reviews of the Odyssey and some of them are very good, but they all make a lot of, I don't, I'm not criticizing popular reviews because that's not their venue to be scholarly correct. But sometimes there's a lot of pretentious reviews and I'll say things like this was a Bronze Age poem and they didn't have Bronze Age armor. So let me explain the historicity of the Odyssey very quickly. Homer composed orally around 750 BC. This was about the time that 16, 17, 2000 city states reappeared after a long dark age. Now the dark age has started around 1150 BC. So imagine about 400 years in which oral Bards poets through recitation and memory in an illiterate society where there was mostly a depopulated demography because of a catastrophic destruction of an earlier Greek society that we call Bronze Age or Mycenaean. So if you go to Greece today and you see these monumental foloid tombs at Mycenae, at Blah, if you see the Lions Gate at Mycenae or the Cyclopean walls at Tyrannes, there was a Greek-speaking monumental culture in the mainland and the islands and it destroyed the Kanasos Minoans. Either they destroyed them or they occupied and took over their culture after severe volcanic eruptions on Thera around 1550 or 1600 BC. So what am I getting out? We know that in the Iliad and in the Odyssey there are a lot of names Achilles, Arrestes, Agamemnon that appear on linear B tablets. Let me say that again. Someone composed something after the fall of the Mycenaean era. So it's kind of like Westworld or any apocalyptic TV show. Civilization vanishes. It's destroyed. We don't know why. The sea people, the Dorians, climate, all these different exegesis. And then in 400 years oral poets exaggerate what this culture was like that they never saw. They spoke the same language. Later they would introduce a new alphabet, the Phoenician Greek alphabet, not linear B. So what does that mean? It's pretty wild if you think about it. So every 20 or 30 years a school of Bards would make tales about this lost civilization. Now how do they know anything about it? They knew it from the last generation before the destruction. And we know by dating that these Mycenaean Greeks did attack, we think, Troy, which was a Semitic people, maybe a Hittite offshoot. I don't think it was over trade routes, but we don't know. And during this dark age people would walk around Greece and they'd see these monumental ruins or they'd fall into a hundred-foottholostune or they'd see weird little markings on mud brick in the soil, tablets. So they created Greek mythology. Once upon a time there were great strong people and they were like Heracles or they were like Achilles and they did a lot of amazing things. They were like gods, they were big, they were strong, they went all the way over to Troy and destroyed them. There was a civil war about Thebes, a seven against Thebes, Jason and his Argonauts, Perseus, and these were all based on exaggerated stories that these bards made up. I shouldn't say there was a kernel of truth. And then over probably somewhere around at least 20 generations, these tales became bigger and more numerous. And two of them were the Odyssey and the Iliad. Now the Odyssey and the Iliad, the Iliad's only four days in a 10-year war at Troy. It doesn't talk about how they got there. It doesn't talk about how the war ends. It alludes to them. But it's about the wrath of Achilles. Why he gets angry that he feels slided for legitimate reasons. The Odyssey is part of a larger scope of oral poems called The Nostroid, The Returns, The Return of Ajax, The Return of Agamimnon, the return of Diomedes. And one of them, the return of Odysseus, therefore the word Odyssey, survived, and one tale about Troy, not the sacking of Troy, not the coming of the Ethiopians, not the coming of the Amazon survived. More importantly, they survived, be cut. Now why did they survive in the others' banish? They were probably better written, or better composed, and they happened to be co-temperanias with the rise of literacy again. So people started writing down what they heard, and that's why the Iliad and the Odyssey transformed themselves from 400 years of oral composition and elaboration and expansion into an authoritative written text around 750 to 700. Co-temperanias, when we know that the Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet, added vowels, and could write it down. Now, so what does that mean when we read the Iliad or the Odyssey? Take the Odyssey. Well, what society is it describing? Is it describing the far off Mycenaean society of 500 years ago? No, not really. It's too far. It's long. It's been exaggerated. We have certain things that we call Mycenaean artifacts. It's about 2% linguistically, philosophically, historically. What do I mean by that? You read the Odyssey in Greek, and there are words in a dialect that are not early Ionic, which are Ionic, Daesh, Aeolic, that was, that Homer composed on. Homer probably lives somewhere along the coast of what is now Western Turkey or on the islands, but it's not in the same dialect, and they are known as Cyprio Arcadian. Now, why is that important? Because when you look at the linear B tablets, the closest type of case endings, conjugations, and spelling forms that those pictographs might represent if they were in a syllabic form, come from Cyprus or Arcadia in classical time. Because we know when the Mycenaean civilization blew up, people fled to two places, Cyprus and Arcadia. So, what am I getting at? There were elements of Mycenae in Greek within that poem, 400 years. But that's only about 2%. Another thing. In the second book of the Iliad, he has a catalog of ships and he names all the place names where all the Greeks came from in the coalition to attack Troy. A large percentage of those place names we know did not exist when Homer composed the Odyssey in 750. So, he was listening to names that he had no idea where they were, but he knew they were integral to the story for some reason, and they sounded neat or old. The other thing to remember is there are what we call physical artifacts. He talks in the Iliad about a helmet made of borst teeth. Everybody laughed that off. Homer just created it. And then in the 1950s and earlier they had found borst teeth helmets in Mycenaean graves. Silver's just studied swords and Mycenaean graves. So, there is a little bit of an element that survived from the original story pattern. What was the original story pattern? Probably some Mycenaean lords said, you know, I don't think the movie says trade routes. I doubt that. That they said we have a punitive expedition to raid the coast of Asia Minor. And that coincided with the destruction of their palaces, probably a generation later. We don't know if they were connected or not. And that is why mythologically, the dark age boards who heard that story from their ancestors and magnified it, made everybody end up badly. So, this just took 10 years to get home. I remember I was killed when they got home, blah, blah, blah, Ajax never got home. And that is a dark age representation of the Mycenaean's face catastrophe after they sacked Troy. So, 2% Mycenaean, but much of, much, not the majority of the story are things in the dark ages that we know of. Most people in the dark ages could not write. In the Iliad, there is a story about somebody that has magic tablets with signs on them. And that shows you that every once in a while they probably picked up linear bead tablets and didn't know what they were, but they knew they were communicative. More importantly, as you know, in the audience, we get flashbacks to know what's going on. And when he gets to the fayations, we have people who sing. And they're seeing the story of what Odysseus had already done when he's in the audience. Femius and Dematica. So, they represent dark age boards. Finally, the majority of the poem, if you're writing about a far off past and you have a tradition of stuff's been padded over 500 years of Mycenaean lore and dark age padding in Homer's own time, that would be the majority of things that he would add. And so, if you look at the second book of the Odyssey, he goes up to lairity's farm on as we turn his fathers. That farm has a type of agriculture that was not common in that arc age. It's a what we call the Mediterranean triad of olive trees, vines, and grains. He has a personal slave. We don't think that there were personal slaves that were attached individual households in the Mycenaean period. It was a polatial feronic Egyptian type of organization, pyramidal. There's intensive irrigation, etc. It really shows you the city-states, robustness, and agriculture. And there's councils where people get together and they say, "The suitors get together and discuss things and the fiatians do as well." So, there's a lot of his contemporary world. We know that when people fight in Homer, they fight in massed ranks. They talk about going out in a chariot, but the chariots are like taxi service. They just take the heros out and they get out. The Mycenaeans use chariots. The dark ages, that's probably where the supremacy of arrows and the bow and skirmishing and things. But when he talks, and actually the word is phalanches in Greek phalanxes, that comes from rows of wheat phalanches. So, it's a mishmash of all three periods. It's not Bronze Age, it's not Dark Age, it's mostly contemporaneous early city-state, but not all. So, every historian of those periods, if I'm a historian, I wrote a book on the early Greek city-state. So, I look very carefully lined by line in Greek of the Ilya and the Odyssey to see if there were things in there that were contemporaneous. Or, I thought they were. People of the Dark Ages, like Moses Finley wrote, "The world of Odysseus," he claimed it was all around 900 gift-giving and livestock raising and nomadic. And then Dennis Page, famous classicist, he wrote a book history, the history and the Homeric Iliad. And he tried to argue there was a lot in there about Mycenaean. But I think the consensus that's mostly the physical world, the topic comes from the Mycenaeans. It was exaggerating the Dark Ages and it's filled out with contemporary things. That's number one. Number two, remember, it's not written down. It is a person made in a day, a day, Polymethe's Odysseus. It's written in Dactylic hexameters, 12,000 lines. 30% of the Odyssey and roughly the same of the Iliad are repeated. And they're repeated at the agiative noun level. Swift-footed Achilles. Swift-footed Hector. But sometimes people get chased down and they still recall Swift-footed and you think, "Well, why is he Swift-footed? He lost the race." He fell down and his armor plutted upon him. But some people fall down and they didn't have armor. So sometimes the poet gets it wrong, but what they are at devices. So I've had a LeBectomy and I'm kind of out of breast still. So I want to pause. Well, if I was an oral bard and I had this 1,200 line monumental poem that takes a day and a half or two days of recite, I need some filler. So I think what's the next chapter? Is that Cyclops or Circeiro? What did I do last week? Did I have Clipso in there? Every time they recited, it was different. Slightly. So then you just plug in. Well, I know what I'll do. I'll put the campfires. The Kien's circle around the fire. They broke the Kien-ling data. It's all the same, building a raft, all the same. And when modern scholars of the 19th century and Germanic PhD program started to look at the two, they said, I'm sorry, but the NIA had written around 30 BC, 700 years later, drawing on all of the epics, which we have lost now, which has a description of the fall of Troy. It's much better because it doesn't repeat. And then Albert Lord and Millman pair me in the 20s, went over to Serbia, Croatia, and they saw Oral Bards, and they said, "Sing me a song about a European guy coming." And they could do it. And they had all of these Oral poems. And they discovered exactly how they created Oral poetry in the contemporary world. And then they saw that that's probably how Homer did it, himself. And then it just changed. It said, "You know what? Rather than being repetitive and boring and monotonous, it's really brilliant how a person can do that." It's much harder than to write things down. Why do we have Homer's version and not the one at 800 BC, 900 BC, or 500 BC? Because when you have white scale literacy, it destroys Oral poetry. And so what happened? People were taking notes about Homer, and then they had a codified text, and then they art of Oral poetry. Transmission was no longer needed, and it died out. And why didn't we have an earlier version, because there was no contemporary writing or city state to codify it at that time? Well, Victor, before you go on to the movie, I'd like to welcome back a sponsor, Var Watches. We tend to forget that civilizations are remembered less by their politics than by what they made. The tools, the objects, the things built well enough to outlast the people who built them. For most of the last century, America made things. Then, like much of the old productive economy, watchmaking pecked up and moved overseas. Today's sponsor is trying to bring a piece of it back. Var, that's V-A-E-R, is a Los Angeles watch company whose goal is pretty straightforward. Bring America Watchmaking back. 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I made the mistake of going to IMAX, it said be there at three. It didn't start at almost four. I think I saw 24/4 coming ads, and then I got out at seven, so it was three hours long. I don't know how to say this. It was an extravaganza, spectacular movie, but it was not the Odyssey, it was something else. It's kind of like Dunkirk, if anybody saw that. There were brilliant scenes about the ships coming across to pick up the stranded soldiers at Dunkirk, and then that flyer, who they rescue, and he kills somebody, and that tragedy. And then they get in there. Remember that scene in Dunkirk, where they're in that hall of an iron ship, and they get bullets? That's kind of, he uses the same thing when he does the horse. So what I'm getting at is his style in Batman, even in Inception, and Dunkirk is not to give you an idea of what's going on. He could have, he could have early had a barge saying this Odysseus did this and this, but he never does that. It's episodic, and so you can watch Dunkirk, and you would have no idea what's going on. There's rescuing some people, but there's no, you could have had a Navy guy saying, pretty not a map, and say, here's the problem. Here's the Third Panzer Division, or here's with Ariane, and here's Rommel, and here's we, and then we, and here's what we're trying to do. It doesn't happen that way. And you don't get a sense of when the battle is cresting or ebbing or who's winning. But there are brilliant little scenes, and that's what the Odyssey, I was going to go through some of them. He has a lot of insertions, and he has a lot of omissions. I don't understand that. Why you would omit key scenes that would be relevant to a movie maker, and then insert your own take, which detracts from the narrative. Give you an example. He omitted when they're in the Cyclops scene. And by the way, the Cyclops is really scary, but he doesn't look like Cyclops. We have vase paintings of him as a big Greek with a beard, and it looks like other Greeks. If anybody's seen the 19, 55 version called Ulysses made in Italy with Kirk Douglas starring Anthony Quinn as Antenna was the evil suitor. That was a really big, big, monstrous person. Polyphemus, the Cyclops can talk well. So he talks back and forth. It's really scary. And he said, aren't you going to respect guest friendship? He said, yeah, I'll eat you last. And so it's an ongoing, and they get him drunk, and they do that. They have elements of that, pointing his eye out, but they don't really get him drunk in that. Actually, the Kirk Douglas movie was better where they all have to stomp the grapes and make wine and get him drunk. But key to that whole thing is how smart Odysseus is. So then he said, who did this to my eye? Who are you? And he said, I'm Engricky would say, "Ego aimi utis." Well, utis is the word for nobody. So he knows that there's a bunch of wandering Cyclops. So in the pome, Polyphemus, dear Cyclops, who did this to you, utis, utis, utis? Nobody? Okay. We can't help you. That's all lost. He doesn't say that at all. So that was a mistake. And then the shape of him, he looks like a naked Rodan statue. He really does. I mean, he's got this weird eye that sideways. It's not just like a normal eye. And then he's completely naked and he's kind of imposing and he can't talk. They say, well, he can talk, but he never really talks much. He should be a very conversant monster. So I don't know why he admitted something key to the story that shows you how widely and brilliant Odysseus is. And then he puts all this extraneous material in. The thing he does, he got a lot of flak for having Lupita de Longo. She is an African Mexican actor. I think she grew up in Mexico, but she has tripart citizenship, British, American, Mexican. And Helen, we know not all the characters are described how they look, but she is described of fair arms, lovely, and all of the adjectives that she's described, and as you would expect, she's on base painting. She's white. Okay. So Christopher Nolan thinks I want to be kind of edgy and contemporaneous, and maybe some people have suggested there's no evidence that maybe I want to make sure that when the awards come out, the left-wing, woke award-winning Oscar committee sees that I'm woke too. Helen has a tiny little part, telemicus when his father hasn't come home and the suitors want to kill him, he's kind of, I don't know what I should do, I'll go down and talk to them in Laos in Sparta, and then in Laos when the Greek Sack Troy, they get Helen, they don't kill her, they bring her back, and she's back with her husband in Laos, kind of about zero. But what's interesting is he makes her the twin of Clyde Amestra, so there's a flashback, same actress plays Clyde Amestra, but Clyde Amestra is not in the Odyssey whatsoever, and the reason that Agamemnon was killed when he got home by Clyde Amestra, his treacherous, unfaithful, adulterous, promiscuous wife, is because she thinks Agamemnon is a dud, and she's been fooling around with this cousin, I guess, who's really an awful guy. So she wants to go out with another guy, so she kills her husband as soon as he comes. The Ifageniah story is a later addition in the 5th 6th century. But he makes that the whole thing, and then he--I think the reason that he made--and Clayton Mastery is the sister of Helen, but they're not identical. So I think what he did is I'm going to put a black character in a role that's not central to the thing. So the purist won't get angry at me because it won't alter the dramatic narrative, but it will satisfy the woke crowd, but she's only got about five lines. So I'll have a flashback and make her two characters. That's been done before. I remember in Ulysses, the Italian actress that played Penelope, also played, I think, Cersei as well. So that was something--another couple of things that were really--I really bothered in the--there's double-its in Homer. So the oral poetry--the oral poem poet can probably only handles a certain number of characters in his brain. So he often does double-its. There's mental aeos, the imitation of Agamemnon, or there's Patroclus, the imitation of Achilles, but they're often described somewhat in the same way. So he has two islands. The last one is Calypso, the magic nymph that seduces him and keeps him there for seven years, and she's played by the Australian actress, Blonde. But even she-- I think that's Charlize Theron. Yes, Theron. She's pretty good, but she doesn't say much, and they--you don't see her island, just the beach. And supposedly, I guess he's--well, he does have memory laws, but that's him lotus-eating, the lotus-eaters, and then when he gets to the fayations, he's in chromatic--you know, he's been washed up. But in this, he's kind of like--he doesn't know where he is. But in the poem, he cries every night after a certain point. But the other double-its, Cersei, she's a also an immortal, but she's a witch, sorceress. It's pretty good to see him about turning him into pigs. I thought he did a great job with that, but when you read--and then the tigers and the leopards, that's in the poem that she's got a magical--but in the poem, she's beautiful. And that's why it's so scary, because they go to her little hut on the forest, and she's not just screaming in middle age, like in her almost 60, as she is on the--she's stunning, and that she's like calypso. So you don't get--and this one, because they've taken an--a middle age actor, about 55 or 56, who may have been beautiful when she's young, but like all people age, it's hard to see why he would be attracted to her. So he's not. But that's part of the key that he's able to resist her charms. And by the way, I'll get to it in a second. The gods are not gods in the--his version. And the poem's Hermes is a little messenger god. He's really good. He gives her a anecdote, gives Odysseus and Andos, and she's going to try to poison you. Here, take this elixir, it won't affect you, and then--but just don't kill her, grab her, and then make her turn your men back in, and she turns them into being better-looking, and they stay there a year while he has sex with her for a year. And you can see why in the poem she's beautiful. And here, she's kind of a matrily bitter old woman. She's forced to help him, and there's no Hermes. And even Athena, his patron goddess, she appears as mentees or mentor in the Odyssey. She doesn't appear as--she takes the shape of a male wise man. But here she's this exotic woman, and she doesn't offer anything useful. She's kind of his alter ego or subconscious. I'm imagining something in my mind. She appears. Yeah, you did. It's me. But she doesn't help him anything. She doesn't make him younger. She doesn't make him stronger. There's no--and when all these bad things happen, you're always told one thing. It's the law of Zeus. They broke the hospital. That's mentioned in Homer. It's a Dark Age custom, but no, they've offended Poseidon. So Paul Femus is the son of Poseidon, and Helios is the son of Poseidon. And he's the God of the sea, and that's why they have all those problems. That's never in there as well. I had a couple of other things that were--I think the worst part of the movie is--and I'm not attacking the acting of Matt Damon. You just miscast, I think. Gary Omen would have been better, you know what I mean? He would have been a lot better. Gary Omen is always good, though. Yeah. He would have. But what I'm getting at is, in the poem and the later tradition, Odysseus is a trickster. He's a multifaceted mind. He's physically strong. He's imaginative. He can speak well. He knows how to deceive people. He wants to get home at any cost, and it represents the rise of the city-state. He's not a one-dimensional battlefield, Ajax or Achilles. He's the thinker. He gets the horse, okay? So when you see him, he's robust. He's powerful. He has no self-doubt. He gets totally bad luck, and he's torn apart by all--but he never is on--this might damage is kind of like--I don't know. He's under surveillance by a psychiatrist, or he's in therapy. I don't. I don't. I don't know. I got a flashback. A lot of people got killed on it. You know what I mean? Yeah. It seemed like he spent too much time with Calypso in the psychotherapy. Psychotherapists? He just clisped blows the psychotherapist. I understand everybody wants to reinvent the story, but there was no need in this thing. You should have had a powerful guy that, when he gets on that chip, everybody's afraid of him. And when he's the one that outsmits, smarts the cyclops in a much more robust fashion, because the cyclops talk, and--but he's just--I don't know. He's just kind of lazy. He's like, "Well, what's going on? I don't eat those cattle, you know, you're not supposed to eat them." You know, the real, just, "What have you done, you idiots? I told you not to. Pat, you're going to die." And that kind of stuff. He said, "Dynamic, Kirk Douglas character." Yeah. The only time that they got to that it was at the very end when he takes down the suitors, and then they had to bring him out. Yeah. But then the other thing, too, is--I lived three years almost in Greece, and I've probably been there 20 times in my 72 years. I've taken cruises all--it is a beautiful, sunny, bright--when you go to Santorini and by June, the sunlight's overpowering. If you go to Perils, Naxos, Salmos, Lesbos. And the sea is just overwhelming. And it's not murky at all. You can see forever. And it's enlightening. It's refreshing. It's invigorating. This thing, look, after I got home, I said, "This must have been filmed in Ireland." And a lot was. It was kind of like dreary game of thrown stuff. But even Game of Thrones, you know, Dubrovnik was different. I thought, "Why would you--everything was--it was kind of like Batman. You don't it's gloomy and dark. And there's no just burst of sunlight. Everything's clear. So it's hard to distinguish the characters." So he's doing Batman as a--but it doesn't work with a Mediterranean. And then he used Emily Walsh's translation. I'm not attacking her. It was an attempt to make Odysseus less toxic masculine and more feminist, but more contemporary. And people have quoted what she said, you know, long-suffering Odysseus becomes problematic Odysseus. The therapeutic translation, and it really hurt. Everybody has an American accent, and let's go, you know, it's just--there's no--I understand what he's trying to say. If you look at the--the diction of vocabulary, there's a lot of hapox, legamara, and maybe three or four hundred words. Those are--that's a Greek term for they only appear one time in Greek literature, spoken one time. And that suggests either that there are archaic words that came from mycini, or they're so rare that nobody would use them, but there's an elevated speech. If I'm Agamemnon, and I'm talking to Achilles, the equivalent of the Homeric dialogue would be something like this. Now listen, Lord, I have given a command to you, and your duty is to obey me, and you're now not obeying me. and may the gods show their venges upon you for your lack of kingly respect. It's not, "Hey, man, I talk to you. Don't do that." And there is no colloquial dialogue in Homer. So that's another thing. And a couple final ones, and I'll shut up. I thought the telemicus character, the thing about telemicus is he has a large part of the first four books that tell him Machia. It's called that an antiquity. And it's about a coming-of-age story. He's 10 years in Troy and 10 years wandering. So by the time he gets back he's 20, but he hasn't haven't a father. But for the last few years he's been surrounded by 108 creepy guys. And they want to kill him. That was there. That was good. But he gets stronger over the period because of the trials. And when his father comes, it's the last needed incentive. And he's almost as equal. He can bend the bow, but don't do that. They'll give you a way. And this way he's kind of insipid. Like, "What am I going to do?" And he, you know, he goes up and fights one. But in the real thing, he's side-by-side with his father. And he's a full man. And the actor, Tom Holland, not to be confused, by the way, with the wonderful historian, Tom Holland, that, you know, translated the Iliad, and he's written Persian Fire. I've never met him, but he's a brilliant historian. He writes in moving prose. He's a classical scholar. I'm sure he'd be improvement because he's a very magnanimous person. But this Tom Holland, the actor, is too hesitant. And it just doesn't convey any presence on the stage. And then the final thing, it was kind of like a game of thrones thing where they're going to get an explore the West at the end. Like, what's your name did? I, uh, in the game of thrones. And that story, it ends with the suitors family. They said, wow, he wiped out 108 of the top families in Ithaca. We got to go get him. And then mentor Athena said, no, no, no. It's time to tit for tat. It's over. There is a little prophecy by Tyrusus. You're going to travel until you find, and I'm doing this by memory, a person who thinks an or is a threshing blade, meaning they have no knowledge of the sea. And I guess that little line is why Odysseus and Penelope turn over the kingdom and they scoot. That's not in there. There's not any in the Odyssey nor the Iliad is their sign on the Greek who leads the Trojans on and then signals the Greeks to come back that Billy, I don't know what's Ellie, whatever name was. She was really good in that she, when she was a she was, she was very good in that roller derby show. I really liked her in that young like 13 or 14. Blow it or something or yeah, it was good. She was really now, she's a man. She's still a good actress. But they create what I'm getting at is they create special roles for a trans actor or a black actor. And then they, they don't want them to have a, they don't want them to be on screen too long because somebody say you change the whole narrative. So it's not, it's not Odysseus it's not Homer. I mean, Penelope it's not Telemachus, but it's just enough to get in there. But her, she, I didn't have any objection to her playing that role. She's a good actress, but the role is not in the Odyssey. It was created for her. Just like the Clyde Amestra role was created for Lupita Delango. And so what is it everybody? If you want to see a, a dazzling work of special effects, I thought the sirens were really scary. I mean, the, the skill it was scary. The sirens weren't done well though because again, it's Christopher Nolan thinking I have a better idea than Homer did. So in his way, they sail by the island of the siren. There's the shoals. But they're screaming and yelling because he's making him think a bad thing. The songs are, but you don't really hear the songs. You just hear their reaction. But that's not how it works. When you say your siren song and it's their seductive. The music is beautiful. Come here. Me with us. Don't worry about the rocks below you. Come here and then the sailors crash on the rocks and kill themselves. But that was exactly the, he did the exactly the opposite of what you would do. So I would say it's 50% Homer and 50% Christopher Nolan. And he would have benefited if it was 90% Homer and 10% Christopher Nolan. Thank you. That is fascinating. So we're going to turn to Ronald Reagan and Andrew Jackson. But first, I want to welcome back our second sponsor here on this Saturday show. If you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels or reduce swelling in your legs and feet. This message is for you. Pure health research is on a mission to make at America healthy again. And two of their best-selling health supplements are leading the way. First is liver health formula. Over 100 million Americans have a sluggish liver riddled with fatty deposits. This can kill your metabolism, pile on the pounds and make you feel tired. Liver health formula takes care of all of that. 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I thought that the another really crazy scene where it was just startling was the lystrogonians that ran after. The lystrogonians were never called lystrogonians. So it's a minor passage where they land supposedly off the coast of it, southern Italy. And they see this, I think in the novel, it's a wife, not a little kid, which is kind of big for and then they're all of a sudden outstorm these large people, but you get the impression that they're kind of shepherds or something. They're not in full armor. Like these were, these were full armoured people. And they do destroy all the ships except the main one. And that's that's accurate. It was kind of scary. It was scary too. But again, I understand that a director has to improvise and put his brand and change things. But the lystrogonians were, they were scary, but they looked like big hotplights. We don't know who they were. I'm just recalling from memory, from classes and things I wrote about early Greece. But there was an area of Sicily where a prehistoric pre-classical civilization had these huge totems, heads, and they've excavated a lot of them. They don't really know who they were. They were pre-italian, pre-Greek. And people think the Greeks saw them in an antiquity and created these as if they were living people. And they called them the lystrogonians. But that was fascinating. I was also disappointed with Athena, as you say, because she's supposed to be the wise goddess. And she just sits there and stares at him as he talks for the most part. She does the most powerful of, she's one of the 12 Olympians, but in some ways she's the most stable, intelligent, and powerful of all the gods. And that's why she's the patron of the most powerful city in Greece. Athens. But she's just off in the distance and she is not a so-called Greek-looking actress. She's exotic. And then she doesn't have any role at all. None of the gods have any role. All they just, it gets banana, Zeus's law, Zeus's law, Zeus's law. Well, what is Zeus's law? What doesn't somebody just say, "You violated the laws of mutual hospitality on the part of the host?" But no gods ever make an entrance, or Hermes would have been a really good addition. He flights around and does stuff, and then you may as is not, he's old, but they almost made him into a blind beggar, you know, that he's not. He's a very powerful man. The actress I had mentioned an earlier in Lupita, she had not read the Odyssey till she was 42 and she had degrees from Hampshire and Yale, which I thought was a con. I got a very nice note from Jerry Brown, our ex-governor yesterday, and I know he was liberal on Democrats. He's a very good guy. He's 89, and he reads classical literature. So we occasionally change things, but it's always on classics. He was a jessewood. He used to call me once in a while about Greek and Thucydides, and he just wrote a note lamenting. He said, "I heard you in a broadcast say that she did not read the Odyssey, and you were commenting that few people do anymore, and he was writing how sad that was." It's a beautiful piece of literature. It's really the first, even though it's an even though it is an hexameter version, it's an epic poem. It almost serves as the first novel because the landscape is so vast, not like the Iliad. It's so much easier to make an exciting adventure movie, and that's what I thought they would do, you know. But I thought it was interesting, too, because my memory of the Odyssey is that it's very clear who is an aristocrat just by how they look. They always said, "Oh, Odysseus comes in. He looks like, and the other classes," and they, you don't get any sense that it's a society that I understand. You don't think they do that? They make Agamemnon as portrayed negatively in the Iliad. He's the most kingly, but not the strongest or wisest. Your sympathies are with the killings. And he's kind of, I guess he's the figure when they break down Troy, there's this large shadowy guy that walks in, kind of like a sinister general. That's supposed to be him. I assume it is. Agamemnon. They try to do a little weird quirky things, so the horse is on his back legs. You know, it's not as you mostly see it, and I just think it was part. It was 25%, the mood was Batman, dark and gloomy, 25%, the episodic nature that are making things weird or unpredictable or surreal comes from a dunker, and then the rest was his attempt to make the Odyssey, but I see Elon Musk said he would give $100 million to Mel Gibson to make a historical version. Yeah. Elon Musk says he's making an AI version, he might need to consult you, Victor, on what would be good. I consulted one time, the 300, and that was an impressionistic. And all I said to Zach, in the CD, I talk about it, is that you have to tell people, this is an impressionistic, it's like a base painting version of, because it wasn't historical. It was a graphic, I mean, it was a comic book, a graphic novel. Yeah. What do you think about Christopher Nolan? You were mentioning how he jumps around from scene to scene, and it's hard to do the plot, but doesn't that recreate Homer's, he does a series of flashbacks, does he? Yeah. He has a demodicus and femius barred sing, and Odysseus then comes in and they say, "Tell us at the fiat, and tell us what you did, you're Odysseus, and he does." And that's true. And it's kind of like a Quentin Tarantino movie at the beginning, it's the end. It's Telemachus, the first four books. What's going on? And then you hear, he's at the way all this is going on, he's stuck at Calypso. So everything that happened from years 11, 12, and 13, you don't hear until the middle of the poem, through a flashback, and he basically says, "I got washed up on Calypso's island because my stupid crew ate the cattle and Poseidon wrecked every bar ship, and I was washed ashore and saved by, I think it was Athena, it's not in the movie, but I'll tell you about what happened in my first and second and third year, and then the book, The Siconics, The Listergonians, Psyclops, then Cersei, the pig Cersei, and then they go down to the underworld. That is in there." That's kind of a spooky scene. I thought he did it kind of well. It was more Tokyo than Homer. I think they should have gone in the ground. He should have gone under the ground in the Sticks River or the Acheron. But, and I don't know, why were the dead chasing them? They were angry because that's another thing I didn't like. It was almost one theme as Odysseus, who wins the Trojan War, saves the Keyens through his brilliance of the Trojan Wars. It's like, "Oh my gosh, I don't know what I was doing. I tricked those poor people, poor little Sinai. I kind of used him to mislead everybody, and then we went in the wall and there was all that killing and everything. I just, what were we doing? We destroyed the city, and then the gods got mad at us, and then everything. I lost my crew." That might be a subtext in the poem with the subtextes, "I'm a man of Greece, and we won this war, and I'm going to get home no matter what, and don't stand in my way. I don't care if you're going to seduce me, you're trying to kill me, I don't care what you're going to do. I'm going to get home and get my kingdom back from my family." End of story, period, full stop. That didn't come across as decisive. I wouldn't want to be in a ship, I think, "Man, this guy's a loser. He's going to get me killed. Not that Odysseus didn't get you killed, but he was so apologetic, and they really magnified this sign on character. It's not even in the Odyssey." Yeah. But anyway, let's turn now to our presidents, anxious to hear they're both the most iconic presidents. I think in the whole panoply of presidents, Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan. Andrew Jackson was the first Democratic, what do they call it, the era of good feelings up until his election in 1829? Yeah, he started as president. I guess the 1828 was the election, but 1828 was the election. And then he was a president until 1837, I think, or 1837. He was the first westerner, he was a populist, and his family came from Ireland. He almost couldn't have been president because he was the first person in that family born in the United States. They were English Protestants that had gone into Ireland and then faced pushback, came to the United States. He fought in the Revolutionary War, even when he was a young man. He almost died. The British almost killed him, killed his brother in captivity, he had smallpox. And then in one of the battles, he got shot in the shoulder, almost died. And he had a lifelong hatred of the British. He really did. And so when he moved, he was an orphan, and his older brother died. So he came westward, I guess what we would call now Nashville or somewhere in Tennessee. And his whole life was full of scandalous activity. He had a boarding house and he met the daughters, the head mistress of the boarding house daughter, but she was married to somebody who was in absentia, so they carried on in a fair. And then they had kind of a, I don't know what you call it, live in marriage and then the husband came back, the cuckold houseman and then asked for a divorce. But the timing wasn't right. So he was having conjugal relations with a woman who was married, which is an apple. And then he did start to buy slaves, he was a land speculator. He was a house representative, he tried being senator, but he made a name as a lawyer, taught himself law. He didn't have to go to university, then, probably better lawyers. And then he started speculating, he lost his fortune, and then he bought the hermitage [BLANK_AUDIO] Tennessee, and he ran for president against John Quincy Adams, and that was the crooked deal, crooked bargain, where John Quincy, as I said, agreed to make Henry Clay Secretary of State because the electoral college, nobody got the requisite number, so went into the House of Representatives. It was a crooked deal. John Quincy Adams was president that 26, 27, 28, 29, 18, 29, and he was probably the first really unpopular president. He was a pedant, he was very brilliant, he knew a lot of languages, but he was very unpopular, and he shouldn't have won the election because it wasn't, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, there were three candidates, he didn't get a majority, but he won the popular vote, and he would have won the, there was some question about the electoral college, but he surely should have won the House of Representatives, that was, they robbed him, so that's what he ran on, and when he was, when he was finally elected, it was the first non aristocratic president we had, and the first partisan, and he had two or three agendas. I'm going to get rid of the, I don't want a government bank, I don't want a bank that favors rich people by giving them cheap interest loans of taxpayers' expense, and he got rid of it or stopped the renewal of it, and then he said there's a whole, we were talking about the Louisiana purchase, but there's a whole area in Alabama and Georgia and Florida along the coast, and that's ours, but it's under Spain and the British now have armed the Cherokee and Choctaw and Seminole Indians, and he advocated taking all of that land, and that was reified when he was president, he got legislation passed, and they displaced him, they so-called trail of tears where they had to walk all the way out to Oklahoma, a lot of them died, but he was a, a Martin Van Buren, his protégés were Martin Van Buren and James Polk, they were expansionist, manifest destiny people, and he created the Southern United States, Andrew Jackson did. He became famous because of the Battle of New Orleans when he got his own militia, 2500, and he got some people flocked to him, and they defeated a British army, really defeated it, annihilated it, and he was an anti-British, he was also famous because you would think as a southerner, he would be for states' rights, he had slaves, he had over 100 slaves, and maybe more as he got wealthy at the Hermitage I think was five or six, maybe is a thousand acres, but he was very famous for 1832, the nullification acts, where South Carolina said, "You impose tariffs, we can't get sophisticated equipment from England now, because Yankees up there to protect their expensive stuff, they don't want to sell us, because we have slaves, we can't get it from England, it's too expensive." And they're retaliating against agricultural, so they're putting tariffs on our cotton tobacco, and so we are not going to honor it, and Jackson said, "You are going to honor it." And I'll put federal troops in there and declare war on all of you, and that was hard to do because John C. Calhoun was a southerner, very famous, he'd been Secretary of War, and he and Jackson clashed and Jackson won, and that was very important because he established the right until recently, with Sanctuary Cities, with this California other say, "We're not going to follow federal law, we're not working with federal immigration, we're going to try to defy it," but Jackson would have put him in jail. He was a very Trumpian character. He had two duels, three duels, and one of the people shot him, and he hit his respawn and didn't penetrate, and he killed the person. He took the second shot, the other two they fired up in the air. He almost died three times. Once in a duel, once in battle, he got a shoulder wound, it was right near the artery, and then he got smallpox, when he was in captivity by the British during the Revolutionary War. Yet he lived to be 78 years old. They called him Old Hickory because he had a march during the war right through a Hickory forest. Until the Wulke period, he was considered the age of Jackson, the populist, this was a sharp break, and if you were a Democrat, most of the liberal historians favored him. All the books written before 1975 are pro-Jacksonian democracy, strong national defense, kind of like Henry Jackson, that 1970s politician from Washington who was a distinguished senator. Now he's hated because he had slagged, and then we go to Ronald Reagan. Maybe we should take a quick break before we go to Ronald Reagan, and come back after these messages. We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately. They knew that this would be regarded by the king and parliament as an act of treason. So the people who signed that were basically saying we're evolving against the most powerful country in the world. The Declaration of Independence reminds Americans who they are. It's words are ingrained in our memory. It's virtues are etched into our character. Its principles are impressed upon our destiny. It's signers carved out a new nation in the new world. For 250 years, the Declaration of Independence has inspired their descendants to defend their liberties. Liberty doesn't want paths from one generation to the next, through the bloodstream and has to be fought for, defended, won with every generation. But there's nothing more important for which we would give our lives. But history has a way of making the unthinkable, seem inevitable. But the Declaration of Independence was never inevitable. The Declaration of Independence is the culmination of one of the greatest political traumas in history. As ideas clashed, as armies gathered, as the fate of a consument hung in the balance, the hopes of millions wanting independence rested with a small group of statesmen willing to risk everything they have, their lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor. This is the story behind America's Declaration of Independence. The story of how a Declaration became a nation. Sacred honor, the Declaration that defines a nation, available now on the Daily Signals YouTube channel. Welcome back. Before Victor talks about Ronald Reagan, just like to remind you, Victor has a presence on X. His handle is @BDHansen. And you can find him on Facebook @Hansen's morning cup. So come join us there. He also has a new book out, The Counter-Revolution Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the Maga Movement. And so with that, let's turn to Ronald Reagan. I was talking to my family that year, 1980, and they were all Democrats. They didn't like Jimmy Carter, but they were gonna vote for him. And they all knew about Reagan. Think about Reagan as people don't realize that conservative Democrats attacked Reagan for being too liberal. He signed the biggest tax increase in California history to balance the budget. He started California with holding tax. We didn't have it before. So everybody saw their checks. He signed the most liberal abortion bill that we'd seen. He saw the Black Panthers on television and said, "I'm gonna try to outlaw people, period and public with a gun." So there was a lot of people that were Democrats that voted against him and Republicans that voted again. He won in the landslide as governor in 1966. But my point is this, that so my parents had seen him and they were gonna go over Carter and when I was sitting there, I said, "I'm not gonna vote for Carter." They said, "Why not?" I said, "Well, look what he did. He humiliated us with the hostages. We have all this." And they said, "Please don't vote for Reagan." So I'll make a deal with you. I'll vote for John Anderson, the third party candidates. And they said, "That's even worse. You're gonna throw your vote away." I said, "I'm not voting for Jimmy Carter." whether it's had a big argument with my siblings and parents. But nobody in our family ever took politics as of until Trump. My parents never took it as up. They disagreed. They didn't care. But they were. But Reagan had a very successful governor ship. He slaughtered Pat Brown's third term. He was trying to get a third term. Pat Brown was a good governor. Everybody should remember Pat Brown, those Democrats like Jesse Unru and Pat Brown and Bob Moria, they were not woke crazy people like today. Pat Brown was a attorney general of California and he sued the Sierra Club to have the California water project. That's what he did. He's really responsible for building it. It was the best thing that ever happened to California. And so my point is that Reagan came out of that governorship and in '76 to '74 he was reelected overwhelmingly. And Nixon, the thing was after he'd only been there two years and Nixon, poor Nixon had run for governor and Pat Brown had handedly beat him in '62 after he'd lost that close election in '60. He said, "You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore." I always liked Nixon, but people said he's over with. But he wasn't. He went out and he campaigned in '64 for gold water. He made all these connections. He had all these IOUs to candidates in '66. And '68 he sold up the nomination. But Reagan came in at the last moment. He was younger then. I think he was '58. He looked great. He could speak much better in Nixon. And just this is the last moment. He got a surge and then it failed. And then you couldn't do much because Nixon got reelected. So that eight-year period Jerry Ford took over. So in '76 Reagan was, now he was '66. It's going to be '67. That was the pretty old everybody said. So he had a late run. Not late, but he was campaigning. And he did pretty well. He got very close. But Ford was Mr. Republican and he'd sold up all the convention delegates. So Reagan lost by a few delegates. He came very close. But he gave this speech. It was a brilliant speech at the convention in '76. And people came out and saying, "Oh my God, I should have voted for him." Because he was so manipulous. And then Ford didn't really do much. So Reagan then they said in 1980, well he was 70 years old, you know what I mean? '69. So they said, "Oh, he'll be '77. You can't be that old." But he was very good. The greatest tragedy of Ronald Reagan has hanky shot him the next year, his first year. And it really debilitated him. Almost died. It's terrible. And I think it took a lot of his strength away. And then he had open heart surgery. And we said, "I'm hope you're Republican." He said to the Cardio of Askers. And then he said, "I forgot to duck. I'm sorry." He had a good sense of humor. And then he had the biggest tax cut in history. The Kim Proth, tax cut, economy, 80, going with Paul Volker from that hyperinflation under Carter was, as I said, I've said that to once. I got a loan from the production credit association. I think it was 14%. Bank of America was loaning at 17%, farm loan. And on my cousin came home with a used Mazda and he said, "Hey, man, I got a great deal. I got a car loan for 17%. My parents bought a redevelopment condo, a redevelopment, kind of a rough area of Fresno. They were trying to entice people to go there." And they said, "Oh, man, we could buy it. It's 9%. That was considered a low interest." So Reagan broke inflation, but, you know, all these farmers went broken. The recession of 82 and 83. The price of raisins went from $1400 to 400. And price of a Thompson Vineyard went from 15,000 to 3500. It was just a wipe out. As I said before, the ditch tender killed himself. My friend Gary, I won't make mentions last name, put a noose around his neck, took an OD, turned on the car, carbon monoxide, and then shot himself, four different ways to kill himself. And it was terrible. And then everything clicked. 84, they nominated Mondale. Mondale was actually ahead in a poll. And then the economy in the second half ended up for the year growing 7.4% GDP. And Reagan just blew them away. And I think it was the third-gradest landslide victory. And what was he famous for? He got all of these neo-conservatives had been all left-wing. That was the start of the neo-conservative. Many of them Jewish Americans, so Norman Port Horowitz, his wife, mid-dector, Irving Crystal, Bill Crystal, all of those guys, they flipped. And there's not going to be any containment anymore. They were very angry at Kissinger for containment. We're going to roll back the Soviet Union. If they put missiles in the Warsaw pack, we're going to put pushing missiles with nuclear tips in Germany. If they're going to cheat on the armed limitation, then we're going to build up. And they had a huge, a defensive buildup. And he picked George W. Bush, H.W. Bush, who was as close as competitor in 1980, was vice president. So we had a very successful tragedy too, as he finished in '88. 1988 was this last, well, 89 in January. He was born in 11, so he's 78. And he said he was going to be a very active president. But he got Alzheimer's, what, three years later. So by '82, he had Alzheimer's. And then he died at 93. So the last 10 years, he wasn't an active. He would have been a great active ex-president. All the left. I think Trump, you know, it's funny, when Trump gave the White House correspondence, they were all angry on. But he had moments that were funny. And he said we're going to have load kill from Bobby. But on the menu, but he has, he should, he should try to emulate Reagan. Reagan was very hard to dislike Reagan. The left called him all sorts of names. Of course, they call him a Nazi, a fascist, a racist. But he was a very attractive guy. I mean, as far as his personality went. Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show. And we have some comments. I have some questions for you, but I think we'll save that for another show. Except the one that's on Homer. Let's actually look at that. This is from David Duros. He says, I have a question on King Agamemnon. The story that he sacrificed his daughter, if a janaya, to please the gods. I understand this is a later variation of the tradition in that in Homer's original text. The Iliad Homer does not state that Agamemnon killed or sacrificed his daughter. Is that correct? Yes. Yes. I mentioned that. I mentioned that because I noted that right away in the movie Lupita del Longo has these marks on her face as if they've been spousal abuse. And she's screaming when she kills him as if because he killed their daughter. There's a play. The effigina at Taurus and the effigina at Alice. Alice is a coastal town. You can go there today. It's on the island of Greek pronunciation. Modern Greek is Evia, but it's Eubia in Placicle. Eubia in English. That's where she was sacrificed. That's where the Greek fleet left to go to Troy. But that doesn't come in until Greek tragedy in the fifth century. She's killed. She kills her husband because she's no good. She wants to cheat with his cousin, Agustus, and that is in Escalus's great triad of Agamemnon, the furies and the libation bearers or rest he's killed her because she's killed his dad. Then he's pursued by the furies. All right. And then two comments from your listeners. Please, this one's interesting. Please note that Tulu Vang, the pedophile pardoned by Tim Walls, is a mong from Laos and has been deported to Laos. He is not from Thailand and my Thai wife would like to add "Bang's behavior is not our culture." I'm gonna keep up the good work. - And that's not the first time I air, I'm very sorry about that. And I'm not suggesting I don't know the difference in some kind of racist fashion between the South Eastern pupils. I taught a lot of Hmong students. Fresno has one of the largest Hmong communities. They were wonderful people. Good students. I had one child who was a very brilliant good student. Very, and her husband I had him, he was very good too. But I discovered there's a hierarchy there. Between, I would say Southeast Asian and students wouldn't come up and say, "No, no, no, I'm not Hmong, I'm Thai." I'm saying, "I'm very sorry." And then if I said somebody was Thai, "No, no, no, no, I'm Vietnamese." Or, and I don't know what the hierarchy was, but it was something like Thai Vietnamese, Leotian, Cambodian, Hmong. Not mine, just that I noticed that the people who objected if I wasn't specific enough, if I said something like, "My Southeast Asian students," somebody would say, "No, no, I'm Vietnamese, I'm not, I'm not Leotian." And Thai was also the same. I think I had something to do with the degree of Westernization. - Yeah, perhaps. - I don't know what it was. I don't even know if they're parents. I think I don't even know. I know that candidates who feel they're going to run in local elections and appeal to a particular community and they lump the people together as Southeast Asian, it's problematic because they don't vote as a solid blog. - No. And that was from Joel Holiwa. - He said he's been a dedicated listener from Bangkok for years. - Well, I apologize 'cause that was a mistake. - Okay, and this is from Kenneth Walsh, Mr. Hanson. I just watched you on Laura Ingram tonight and I would love to inform you that you spoke about the Democrats tonight. I am a Republican that is surrounded by liberals at my work in New York City. You provide an info on our mayor from New York City and his family. You also gave information about Hassan Piker. It all had to do with their wealth and their families. I would love to have the information. So when I need to defend my beliefs, keep up the fight. My family loves you and how educated you are, my wife, and I have five children and they all know who you are. Love to see you on Fox, thank you. It's one of, and see there've been a great advantage or misfortune that for most of my life, I was surrounded by people who had opposing political views. Selma was a, it was a mixture of the Oklahoma diaspora and farmers who were conservative and then a large Hispanic population was liberal, not crazy liberal. And then I was in academia. Four years at Nutty UC Santa Cruz. Five, four years at Stanford. And then 21 years at Cal State Fresno. And then another 23 years at Stanford. Hoover, Hoover's not as conservatives that was, but more conservative than academic. But in that whole period, I must have had a lot of, and then I spoke. Everybody, when they get something like cancer wants to know what you did wrong, did you smoke? Did you drink, did you take drugs? No, no, no. Did you have bad air, maybe, maybe? Did you farm with pesticides without an inhaler, respirator, maybe? But one of the things you say is I flew once a week for 30 years, 50 times a year with jet lag, bad air in the plane. But all of those, I would say half of those trips were universities. In the early days, and they were all hostile. So you have to be, the thing about it is they take you out for dinner sometime. And if you're in part of the university lecture series, they all want free meals because they're academics. But they want to attack you before. You said something. I know I spoke at the University of Northern Alabama. And somebody said, you wrote in you, who's a classicist, I think. You wrote in your book The Other Greeks on page 492, something. And I think that's wrong. And I said, I don't think it was wrong. But that was the kind of question you got. So I don't know. People on the right are living, let live. You want to go yell at somebody, go ahead. I don't care, but I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to partake in it with you. It's 24, 7, 360 degrees with those guys. People on the right is I got more things to worry about than debating the leftist. But they get in your face. I don't think I've ever lost my temper. And I've done about 20 debates. And I can tell you, I have had a lot of people lose their temper. I did one with-- shouldn't say that, but I won't disclose a location. But I did one with Chris Matthews. He got steaming. He was talking about election denialism on Trump's part, and that Democrats didn't do that. So I said, well, what was Sacy Abrams doing for two years, saying that she was a real governor? And what was Jimmy Carter doing and saying that Trump wasn't president? He was illegitimate. And what was Hillary Clinton doing with the dossier and claiming that he still wasn't president and that the election had been thrown? And what was the chairman of the January 6 committee doing in 2004 when he and, well, 40 or other house people didn't want to certify the Ohio count? He got really angry at me. He did. And I liked him. I had no problem with him. Didn't Al Gore do his version of that, too, after the-- Yeah, I hope he did, and he said that he was robbed. And everybody said today, well, he was so generally. He wasn't like Trump. You know, he wasn't. He called Trump a digital brown shirt or all the people, you know, he was calling him Nazis, and then they sued, and they ran that narrative. And then the New York Times thought they were going to be really clever and have an in-depth investigation. And they did. And they kind of had a little mouse peep. It's done. We found no fraud. Push one. It's-- that was-- and then the poor George W. Bush, for the first two years, they said George Bush was selected, not elected. Do you see those signs selected, not elected? And they hated him. And now they like George Bush, because he didn't like Trump. All right, all things come around. So we are at the end of the show. Thank you so much, Victor, for everything that was really fascinating on the Odyssey. And thanks for our audience for joining us on this Saturday edition. Thank you for watching and listening, everybody. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson, and we're signing off.