A former Guantanamo Bay detainee claims that Ron DeSantis was a force feeder to a hunger striker, and he laughed as the New York Times reported it. Glenn explains why this is not only true, but also why it s actually a good idea.
00:24:24.260I said, put me in, coach. You know, I'm ready.
00:24:27.000Yeah. Okay. All right. So are we are we repeating the pattern of the Roman Empire?
00:24:36.100Well, there's a good case to be made that the pattern we're actually repeating is the pattern of the Roman Republic at its very end, right when it became an empire.
00:24:47.480We in America are a republic. That's how our nation was founded. That's the regime our founders put in place.
00:24:54.540And they put it in place for a very specific reason, because they had studied ancient history as well as more recent history.
00:25:01.220And they knew that all sorts of forms of tyranny can come into place with all different kinds of government.
00:25:08.600You can even have a tyranny of the mob under democracy.
00:25:11.680You can, of course, have the tyranny of a monarchy, which they had just escaped from.
00:25:15.540And in order to preserve American liberty against those forms of tyranny, they created this threefold government.
00:25:23.500The three different branches of our government are meant to balance the different powers that compete against one another so that individual Americans can be free.
00:25:33.120The only way that you can destroy that kind of system is from within.
00:25:37.180And republics die by suicide. And in Rome, what happened is a very small coterie of elites, of well-heeled, rich, well-to-do people got together among their cronies and conspired to deprive large masses of the citizenry from their birthright, from the lands that they were supposed to have access to after their military service.
00:25:57.780I know. Imagine that. And it's impossible, of course, for us to think about this happening in America, you know, a small group of elites getting together and rewarding it over the people.
00:26:10.200But of course, that's exactly what we're starting to look at.
00:26:14.540And it's part of why guys like me, and I think you as well, you know, are so concerned about the way that the Davos crowd and these, you know, sort of hoity-toity upper crust elites are trying effectively to take control away from the people.
00:26:28.220So what caused the downfall of the republic? What was it besides the elites? The people had to be probably like we are now.
00:26:40.000That's right. Well, this is part of why elite capture is so poisonous for republics.
00:26:47.380You know, Machiavelli, the great Renaissance-era thinker in political philosophy, looked back on the Roman Republic, and he said, were the elites or the people worse?
00:26:58.720It's kind of hard to tell who was more to blame.
00:27:02.300But ultimately, he said it was the elites who failed most because in their failure, they not only discredited themselves, but the entire system that they were supposed to represent.
00:27:12.800And that is also what happened in Rome, that public trust started to drain, to hemorrhage out of these republican institutions.
00:27:22.540And by the time the era of Julius Caesar came along, Plutarch, one of the great essayists of antiquity, said there were many observers who thought there would be lucky if nothing worse than a tyranny emerged from this situation.
00:27:35.680You start to get populist rulers who agitate the crowd. It becomes very, very easy for one person or one group of people to effectively promise the people that they'll give them everything they want.
00:27:49.080They'll give them all their land and all their money back. They'll just take it out of the hands of the elite.
00:27:52.460And then you have a populist uprising, which eventually turns into a monarchy or a tyranny, which is what you got after many, many years of civil war in Rome.
00:28:01.500Yeah, I can kind of relate to all of that. Where are we on this cycle?
00:28:09.860Well, one thing I think it's important to bear in mind so that we don't despair here is that this is not an ironclad prophecy.
00:28:19.360These things don't always happen exactly the same way. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
00:28:23.820And so I would propose that in many ways at home, what we're looking at is this kind of decay of a republic at the point at which the people begin to become fed up.
00:28:38.040There is an enormous mass of populist energy, not just on the right, also on the left, with people feeling that both political parties have completely failed to serve their interests
00:28:48.440or even to offer them a solution to the problems that they refuse to acknowledge and in many cases undertake to make worse.
00:28:56.640And so that populist energy is now, I think, brewing in our country in some very dangerous ways.
00:29:02.880We've seen the way that, you know, when people take to the streets, as in 2020, for example, things can get really hairy really quickly.
00:29:09.700It doesn't mean that we are doomed, I don't think, to tear our government down to the studs and institute a monarchy.
00:29:17.760But it does mean that very careful and serious engagement with the legitimate concerns of those people that feel underserved by the government
00:29:25.760is the only way for anybody to take serious political power in this country right now.
00:29:30.160And I think that explains a lot of what you're seeing in the presidential race as well.
00:29:34.600Has anyone gotten to this point and turned it around?
00:34:22.900I mean, Rome did have these heroes that would emerge throughout time, and they really rooted a lot of their history in these great men.
00:34:32.040Some of them were from before the Republic, and then they carried on this tradition.
00:34:36.300People like Scipio Africanus, you know, that they could look up to and who was rooted not in his love of party, but in his love of Rome itself and in the service that he had given.
00:34:46.820And one really important way that they encouraged this was that they understood that Roman citizenship was not just a kind of good, a goodie bag that you got born into.
00:34:58.940It was also a series of responsibilities.
00:35:00.880And so they encouraged and honored people who went above and beyond in fulfilling those responsibilities, in showing bravery in wartime, showing wisdom in moments of political crisis.
00:35:11.480One of our major problems in America is that we don't afford honor to people that do that sort of thing.
00:35:17.360We don't afford honor to honest people.
00:35:20.780Or indeed, we don't celebrate bipartisanship.
00:35:23.860All of these things are dishonorable in our public life.
00:35:27.520And that's part of why you're seeing the failure of a lot of our leadership class.
00:35:32.260It may be that this current class of leaders that is represented really by Joe Biden and even to a certain extent by Donald Trump, that, you know, this is an old guard passing away.
00:35:47.460We may hope that, especially at the local level, in the way that red states and governors of red states have succeeded, that there's a majority coalition growing who can find leaders from a slightly younger generation.
00:35:59.660But I agree with you that it's not hopeful among the people currently in power.
00:36:04.260We're talking to Spencer Clavin, who is a historian, a great writer, and somebody who really just buckles down and studies it so the rest of us don't have to.
00:36:14.100And Spencer, I have read that the society always starts to, when it starts to dismantle itself, it goes into what used to be called sexual perversions, and men become much more effeminate, and it's almost a loss of the sexes.
00:36:44.100It's certainly a hallmark of this kind of dysfunction.
00:36:49.100There's a guy called Rob Henderson who writes about what's called luxury beliefs.
00:36:53.400And what I suspect is that this kind of extravagant, crazy, and totally unreality-based sexual psychosis that we're going through, this is the kind of thing you can only indulge in when you're rich, fat, and happy.
00:37:07.780Then you can sit around and say, well, men and women, they're really the same, and they can change into one another.
00:37:12.540These things become incredibly difficult to maintain when the rubber meets the road.
00:37:18.280And there's actually a story in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who was a great historian from the ancient world, who writes about a tyrant in a little island that was kind of obscure, but who, when he took control, one of the things this tyrant did to make sure that nobody would ever rise up against him is he ordered that all the boys should be taught like girls in school, and that they should be made effeminate through their training.
00:37:46.960And this is how he thought that he could stay secure in his tyranny, as if he kind of sanded down the rough edges of masculinity.
00:37:54.860There's a good argument to be made that a generation of weak and effeminate men is one of the best ways to put a tyranny in place, to encourage men to abandon their aspirations to manhood and masculinity, to shame them for trying to take sovereignty over their own lives.
00:38:14.120These sorts of things are an excellent way to keep a population docile, and they're also an excellent way to render yourself weak to invasion from outside, which is eventually what that tyrant succumbs to, is that people who had not been trained under his oppressive regime took up the call of manliness and overthrew him.
00:38:33.160So, yeah, I do think that when you're sort of easygoing, when everything is looking great, when you're on top of the world, you can sort of indulge in these obscure theories about masculinity and femininity.
00:38:46.740But the less you have available to you, the less defense you have available to you, the more you're going to start to realize that actually men need to be men and women need to be women.
00:38:56.060Boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, is this not, I mean, it's just, everything you're saying is playing out.
00:39:00.600Is there a place in the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic's history that we haven't repeated yet, that you might say to yourself, when I see this, I'll know?
00:39:14.140Well, Appian, who is the historian of this kind of period when the Republic fell apart, said that when it was really over is when Romans took up swords against one another, because he mentions, you know, before this, there were all of these different negotiations between the elites and the people.
00:39:33.060But it wasn't until civil bloodshed in the era of the Iraqi, when people started to kill their leaders in order to get rid of them, that things were destined to fall apart.
00:39:45.660And whereas we have had violent riots, whereas we did, you know, have January 6th and we have had the riots of 2020 and all of this kind of political upheaval and uprest, formalized political violence where you decide who's going to rule by killing people is when you really start to think things are falling apart.