00:00:30.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:38.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:11.000And Blake, we have a lot of questions here, but I thought it was just a perfect question to have you join when a young lady says, how often do you think about the Roman Empire?
00:01:24.000Now, so Blake, fill our audience in on this internet phenomenon.
00:01:27.000Okay, so we talked about this on Thought Crime, which if you guys don't watch ThoughtCrime on Rumble, definitely check it out every Thursday at 8 p.m. Eastern.
00:01:42.000Instagram, all the other places, where some woman basically discovered, she's like, you know, I asked my husband, like, how often he thinks about the Roman Empire, and he replied, like, every week or so.
00:02:11.000Now it's just, we're, I can't escape the Roman Empire.
00:02:14.000Well, so first, you know more about Roman Empire than like the Roman Empire than like professional historians, which I think we should riff a little bit.
00:02:21.000Can you name all the emperors in order?
00:02:43.000Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Tetus, Domitian, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, Pius, Marcus Aurelius, also with the last of the good emperors, Commodus.
00:05:18.000If you go to D.C., it's basically little Rome.
00:05:20.000Yeah, like, and like what created what drove the Enlightenment, a huge proportion of it is essentially aspiring to what these ancient Romans and ancient Greeks wrote about and did.
00:05:33.000The Renaissance, the rebirth, was the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman learning.
00:05:37.000And then the Enlightenment was sort of a continuation of that.
00:05:41.000All of these guys would say, you know, like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, all of these guys would read these ancient Roman political thinkers.
00:05:48.000Cicero, for example, one-year Roman Council had a huge impact on the founders.
00:07:24.000And because they were just to a Middle Ages person, they were like, this is Rome restored.
00:07:29.000We are the Roman Emperor in their bad, pale understanding of it.
00:07:33.000And, you know, even when they're found in the United States, a lot of them would view this as like, oh, this is our, you know, our restoration of the ancient republican principles of Rome.
00:07:44.000Like, that's always the goal, is to create a state and society that can be as robust and enduring as what happened 2,000 years ago.
00:07:56.000Like, they fight all these wars, and there's all these inspirational, like, moral fables that you get from Rome, which we mostly get because all of their history gets burned up, and we have like one book left, and it's like Roman propaganda and stuff.
00:08:11.000But, like, you know, they fight this war against Hannibal.
00:08:13.000And there's a battle where the Romans lose the Battle of Cannai, where 60,000 Romans die in one day, which would be like, imagine if we fought a war with, you know, Britain or Germany and, you know, 2 million U.S. troops get killed in one day with the president and a third of Congress in like North Carolina and he's like marching on Washington.
00:08:32.000And like, that is what happens to Rome.
00:09:02.000It is the standard still of architecture.
00:09:04.000The famous thing is the Duomo in Florence, Brunelleschi's Dome.
00:09:09.000It was the first dome they made in 1,500 years that was bigger than the dome of the Pantheon.
00:09:16.000And when the Ottoman, when the Muslims take over Istanbul, their big thing is we want to be able to build a dome that is as large as the one in Aja Sophia, which had been built a thousand years before then.
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00:15:00.000Byzantium is a city that is in Eastern Rome, and he, Constantine, builds a new city, Constantinople, on modern-day Turkey, which is now Turkey.
00:15:54.000And kind of what's very compelling and I think noteworthy is Christianity takes a very long time to really entrench itself in the in among the masses.
00:16:04.000The word pagan actually comes from a word for like rustic farmer because those were the people who remained pagan for so long in Rome.
00:16:12.000Whereas it's like it's elites actually who adopt Christianity, like the imperial class, the people around the imperial family, the people becoming bishops.
00:16:21.000And it's kind of, I read a book on it earlier this year called The Barbarian Conversion.
00:16:26.000I can't remember who wrote it off the top of my head, but that's the name of the book if anyone wants to look it up.
00:16:30.000And it's just these, you know, these elites in the Mediterranean world just think Christianity is the coolest thing ever.
00:16:37.000And they spend a thousand years pushing it everywhere they can.
00:16:41.000Like, why does Ireland become Christian?
00:16:43.000Well, this guy in the falling Roman Empire, Patrick, he's kind of, you know, it's still Roman Britain at the time.
00:16:50.000He's a Christian, and he's like, I have to go spread Christianity to Ireland where I was enslaved for a bit.
00:16:55.000And they're doing this all over the place.
00:16:57.000And so Rome, you know, it is unfortunate it's falling.
00:17:00.000But it is actually, they adopt Christianity as like this unifying measure as the empire is sort of fraying apart at the seams.
00:17:08.000And this becomes like their state ideology, even as Rome is crumbling apart.
00:17:13.000And that's actually what makes Rome kind of so enduring for us is even after Rome is gone, this, you know, the faith that they adopted Christianity is still what binds these very different groups together.
00:17:24.000So, you know, Rome still matters today.
00:18:04.000Kind of the big moment, actually, if you want to really compare it to today, in I think 409 or 410, there's a civil war in Rome, and they pull the legions along the Rhine, like they're the troops who guard the border of the empire.
00:18:16.000They get pulled back to fight in this civil war.
00:18:18.000And these Germans just bust the border and they just run into France.
00:18:22.000And after that, it takes 50 years for it to really fall.
00:18:24.000But after that, that's when it's kind of all over for Rome.
00:18:27.000You know, they've let too many people loose in the interior.
00:18:30.000For 400 years, the Rhine River was like the border between civilization and barbarism.
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00:20:14.000So, Blake, I want to go to other topics here, but I just want to make sure I what are the major lessons then from the fall of the Roman Empire?
00:20:21.000I mean, you say enforce your borders, the inflation, the other one.
00:20:24.000So, the sexual degeneracy is not a strong argument, you don't think that's it would actually be the opposite.
00:20:28.000Like, they're super degenerate in like the early Roman Empire, you know, like Tiberius does live on this island with all these.
00:20:34.000Caligula was super sick, and then, you know, they had 400 years of, they had a good run after that.
00:20:38.000Yeah, so they're actually far more pious.
00:20:40.000But what about this idea that there were the Roman bathhouses and like young boys being raped a lot?
00:20:45.000I mean, is that just like mythology of it?
00:20:50.000I mean, you know, this is a period, it is before Christian morality.
00:20:52.000Christian morality definitely is more like sexually pagan for sure.
00:20:58.000It is sometimes overblown where, like, you know, like everyone, it'll be like everyone was like gay by default unless, you know, they would only have women for babies, that sort of thing.
00:21:11.000Like, even the ancient Greeks, there's actually a split where you have the people who are like okay with it, and you have a lot of Greeks who are like, this is gross.
00:21:17.000And they would write these things attacking it.
00:21:20.000You mean like that boys are for pleasure and women are?
00:21:22.000Yeah, and you know, because they would discuss, it's actually, a lot of it is actually kind of like the groomer stuff today, where like, you know, they'd be like, this person's a famous teacher, but, you know, like, they basically, you know, say the ancient Greek equivalent of like, well, but he like molests his students, so he's like not looking out for the good of them.
00:21:36.000And you'd have other guys writing defenses.
00:21:37.000Like, that's just a, you know, that's a lie.
00:21:39.000Like, we don't actually do all of that.
00:21:55.000And figure out how to run your government and don't have a civil war every 10 minutes.
00:21:59.000Was there something also, so the other comparison is Bread and Circuses, this idea of the Coliseum games being a distraction, comparing that to like NFL football or that comparison?
00:22:14.000I think that's, I mean, at the, you know, as the Roman Empire is falling apart in the 300s, like the biggest thing everyone cares about is their stupid chariot races in the amphitheater.
00:22:30.000He does very well, but an early blow that almost knocks him out of power is there is a chariot.
00:22:35.000Like there's two factions, like the kind of two big sports teams of ancient Rome, is the blues and the greens.
00:22:40.000And like their riots cause all these problems.
00:22:42.000And eventually they team up and launch a huge riot.
00:22:44.000And he finally puts it down by just sending in the army and killing everybody.
00:22:48.000So imagine if you just had like a Washington, they're the commanders now, the Washington Redskins have a game and they decided to like overthrow.
00:22:57.000It'd be like if the Washington Redskins decided to like do a January 6th and then they had to kill everyone and like pretty, pretty hardcore.
00:23:04.000And so you look historically, you know, the people in the academy will say, but there's other ancient civilizations that don't get as much attention as Rome.
00:24:56.000From when we have Roman history to when the Republic falls, Rome is almost permanently at war because that was how you gained status in Rome.
00:25:04.000It was like you'd have to lead a successful military campaign.
00:25:07.000And very importantly, you could only get the really cool things, like a triumph, where they would basically give you a parade and talk about how awesome you were if you like gained territory for Rome from like off an enemy.
00:25:17.000And so if you've ever seen the HBO show Rome, they have a triumph for Caesar where they take these the Gauls, the ancient Frenchmen that he captured and they parade them and they strangle them and do all this like messed up stuff.
00:25:28.000But that was how you gained all the respect, the dignitas in Rome.
00:26:16.000And I think the way you maybe have an equivalent today is like you gained status in Rome by serving the state and also like offering things up to the state.
00:26:23.000Like they didn't have this massive budget, you know, where you didn't take other people's money and use it to do things.
00:26:30.000You gained status in Rome by I, a rich citizen, pay for these things.
00:26:34.000Like what was the start of Bread and Circuses?
00:26:36.000A rich citizen would put on these games in the amphitheater for everyone to show how awesome they were.
00:26:43.000Or they would pay for the graindole that they would hand out to people to show like I care for the poor.
00:26:50.000It was kind of like an ancient equivalent of Bill Gates giving away his money, but he would imagine if Bill Gates spent all of his money on Americans instead of on, you know, I don't need to go into what Bill Gates does.
00:27:31.000You were quoted back in July saying you look forward to buying a union-made electric vehicle, but you buy, but you currently have a non-union-made Tesla.
00:27:40.000UAW already makes some electric vehicles.
00:27:50.000No, our car was purchased during the pandemic when travel before a vaccine had come out.
00:27:57.000So travel between New York and Washington, the safest way that we had determined was an EV, but that was prior to some of the new models coming out on the market that had the range available.
00:28:08.000But we're actually looking into trading in our car now.
00:28:12.000So she's funding Twitter X. I'm very grateful for that, I'll say.
00:28:20.000I want to talk about Elon with you because this is a good segue.
00:28:22.000I'm more pro Elon than most people on the right because he pursues excellence and he produces actual value.
00:28:30.000What I love about that clip is AOC's little, she's ideological, but the market will always win in the sense that even the most ideological person wants excellence.
00:29:24.000That there's kind of, we live in kind of this almost kleptocracy where like five or six people control like everything.
00:29:31.000But in his case, it's like it's so deserved personality-wise.
00:29:34.000Like it'd be one thing if he got lucky off one company and you're like, okay, he's a smart businessman, but we can't categorically say he's smarter than some other businessman.
00:29:43.000But this is a guy who got rich off PayPal and then he got richer off Tesla and even richer off SpaceX.
00:29:49.000And he also is one of the first investors in one of the big AI companies.
00:29:53.000And now he's buying Twitter and making this like the, he's like the most, as you said, the most important like private sector purchase in American history.
00:30:01.000And when you said it, I was like, oh, that kind of sounds crazy.
00:30:04.000And then I was like, what's more important?
00:30:06.000Like Jerry Jones buying the Dallas Cowboys?
00:30:09.000But no, I mean, and he's kind of going to make, he's going to make Twitter X a success.
00:30:15.000And he really, it's like there's an entire industry of trying to explain like, why is Musk successful?
00:30:20.000Kind of like with Trump again, where like, because he breaks all these rules.
00:30:23.000And you're like, there's so many things that Musk does where you're like, okay, objectively, that seems not smart or like that was a mistake.
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00:32:28.000So many questions here, Blake, that we are kind of pouring through here.
00:32:32.000Let me try to find one that pertains here.
00:33:03.000That's for the companies and the unions to do.
00:33:05.000But what the president is making clear is that he is leading an economy where people need to, as he says, where the economy needs to grow from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down.
00:33:14.000Okay, so you know, gay jet GPT aside, right?
00:33:40.000And then, but then the other ones are off.
00:33:42.000Yeah, I would, I think I would prefer that.
00:33:43.000I think a lot of people would prefer that because there's like such a sunk cost to any day that's a workday in terms of like psychological like, you know, effort you need to put into it.
00:33:54.000You know, the more times you have to commute, the more time you put into that.
00:33:58.000But it's very telling to me because it's just obvious, like a lot of jobs just can't as easily work that way.
00:34:04.000Like anything that requires the ability to just handle so many people coming in, like a medical office or something, like is going to need to be open more often.
00:34:22.000Like the idea of like, oh, I'd rather have only four days of work rather than five probably appeals the most to people who kind of really only have one day of work a week.
00:34:30.000And then they're also just physically present in an office the rest of the week.
00:34:34.000I'm open-minded to it, but I just, I don't know.
00:34:37.000What I'm not open-minded to is just further making America a lazy country.
00:34:41.000That's what I, that, for six days you shall work, one day you shall rest, is what the scriptures say.
00:35:02.000They're definitely not so far not succeeding in the objective where, you know, we've talked that, okay, we can't make Joe Biden be removed from office.
00:35:09.000The Senate will not convict him, even if we impeach him.
00:35:11.000So the value of this is not looking like it's PR.
00:35:16.000It is that we force people to talk about what Joe Biden has done, what Hunter Biden has done, what Hunter Biden has done on behalf of the big guy, Joe Biden.
00:35:24.000And we force people to just know about this by making it a big story.
00:35:27.000And, well, so far, they've been blacked out by the media, which that's difficult to engage with.
00:35:31.000But they've even looked silly while doing it.
00:35:34.000You know, they've had witnesses who are just like, well, I don't really think impeachment is warranted yet.
00:36:12.000Make it very, I mean, but yeah, you're right.
00:36:14.000So if it is, if it is something that we think we're running against Joe Biden, wouldn't we want this to crescendo in like June or July of next year?
00:36:38.000And I think the cases against him are weak, but they spent that two years making sure it was as strong as they could make it.
00:36:44.000So, you know, if you're Jack Smith, they put in the effort to make it look very bad for Trump on January 6th or whatever.
00:36:53.000And, you know, and then they got it out so that this trial and everything about it will crescendo at the exact right moment, early next spring, into the summer, possibly into the fall.
00:37:04.000And we need to think that same way with our stuff.
00:37:06.000You can't just pop off and not be ready to roll.