Ep. 127 dissects Mohamed Haitu’s provocative comedy—praised by the NYT—mocking refugee integration while elite figures like Lord Blithering Surrender dismiss opposition as bigotry, mirroring Europe’s cultural surrender. Meanwhile, U.S. conservatives fracture: Shapiro calls Breitbart’s attacks Nazi-like, Trump consolidates the GOP with NRA backing, and Carlson vs. Beck exposes Facebook’s bias wars amid despair over elections. On the left, superdelegates anoint Clinton despite Sanders’ momentum, while Austria’s far-left vs. far-right deadlock reveals global elite disdain for Western values—echoing ancient Greece’s post-Peloponnesian collapse, where nativism and demagoguery (like Trump’s "America first") eroded alliances. Pericles’ Funeral Oration, celebrating Athens’ unapologetic greatness, contrasts with modern leaders’ lack of civic pride, leaving societies ripe for division. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, some people say Muslims don't have a sense of humor, but a group of Tunisian refugees proved them wrong last week by entering an Italian refugee welcome center and burning it down.
The improvisational act of comic performance art was the brainchild of Muslim comedian Mohamed Haitu, who said, quote, we just thought it would be funny to start destroying the country the minute we arrived, instead of waiting until we'd been graciously accepted into the local culture and only then destroying it.
The rambunctious Tunisian funny man pulled off the mischievous hijinks on the Italian island of Lampedusa after being informed some refugees were going to be sent home to their own country.
Home to our own country, Mo Haitu Wisecracked.
We don't want to go back to that crappy place.
We want to come here and make this place crappy.
Mr. Haitu is part of the comical performing trio Mo, Larry, and Death to Western Civilization.
The slapstick improv group has won the praise of many cultural elites in the West.
A review in the New York Times, a former newspaper, said, quote, this genial prankster trio has raised performance art to the level of mass murder, and vice versa, unquote.
Mo Haitu recently explained his thought process to admirers, saying, quote, less creative refugees would have followed the normal procedure of entering a country, growing accustomed to the culture, molesting a few of the local women, stabbing some innocent bystanders, and maybe then blowing up a train or two for the big finale.
The ironic punchline comes when the refugees then accuse anyone who opposes them of lacking a kind of tolerance we Muslims never even heard of before we came to the Christian West.
And sure, all that is funny enough, but it's been done to death, literally.
As an improv group, it's our job to come up with something new, so we just played it by ear and set the place ablaze almost the minute we arrived.
You should have seen the word welcome going up in flames.
It was both hilarious and oddly profound, unquote.
Though the arson was intended as pure comic entertainment, it did have its serious themes as well.
One European Parliament member, Lord Blithering Surrender, commented, quote, some of my fellow Europeans have objected to having thousands of people from a hostile culture sweep into their nations and destroy them.
But this kind of performance art reminds them that small-minded bigotry like that will not be tolerated.
And if they don't lie down and die like decent citizens, they could find themselves in trouble with the law.
As for Mo Haitu and his wacky trio, they plan to continue their uproarious comedy tour in all the major capitals of Europe, saying, we've brought our A material.
It killed them in Tunisia, and it'll slaughter them here.
You'll explode with laughter.
Or not with laughter.
What's the difference?
As long as you explode.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
The comedy stylings of Muslim immigrants in the West.
Who comes to a welcome center and burns it down?
It's like, thank you for letting us into your country.
Anyway, we're back.
This place is next, I think the Daily Wire is next.
The Clavenless Weekend, the darkness of Clavenless Weekend is ending, and we can now see the future, or if you don't subscribe, you can only hear the future, which isn't as much fun.
NRA Endorses Trump Early00:06:22
But if you subscribe, you can see us and you can participate in our Wednesday mailbag, which is very exciting.
And it's free for 30 days.
And then we come and take your firstborn child.
So it's a win-win.
You get 30 days free, and then we get your kid off your hands.
So it's great.
Anyway, subscribe and support us, and you can also watch the show.
So everybody's fighting, right?
I go away and I come back.
Everybody is at each other's throats, right and left.
Everybody's tearing each other apart.
In Austria, which we'll maybe get back to a little later, in Austria, they are fighting so badly that the left and right, far left and far right are now locked in an election, a deadlocked election, which will only be decided by the mail-in votes.
And it's kind of, that's kind of the European version.
Everything in Europe is kind of extreme usually to what we're doing here, where we're all fighting kind of among each other, and we're sort of our far left and our far right are kind of coming into a major battle for the presidency, basically.
First of all, on the right, you have this huge, huge, vicious, vicious battle going on between the never Trumpers and the Trumpers.
And of course, the center of all that is right here.
It was like Ben who was just being attacked.
I mean, I could not believe last week.
I don't know if you saw, did you see this Breitbart thing that they did?
You know, Ben wrote this great piece for National Review, Anti-Semitism on the Right, which was, I thought it was absolutely terrific.
And in it, the only mention of Breitbart that I found or remembered was he mentioned that Milo Yiannopoulos was calling him something like an ironic fascist, which I think is a pretty good description of where Milo is now standing.
Although I think Milo just does what is entertaining to him at the moment, so I'm not sure where he'll end up.
But that was the only mention of Breitbart that I saw in the whole thing.
And Breitbart responded by leading off.
Their lead story was just this kind of little boy throwing a tantrum, and they said, oh, here's Ben Shapiro throwing a tantrum.
I mean, you know, not to say they're getting childish and low or anything, but this is a fair, you know, this is a fair argument that has come up between conservatives and Trumpers.
I mean, there was a division on the right that I don't think we really knew was there.
We thought that there were conservatives and then kind of moderates.
We thought that was the big division, the conservatives and then the people who wanted to get along to go along.
The old joke was that the Democrats would come along and say, we're going to destroy the country in six months.
And the joke was that the Republicans would say, no, no, we'll compromise.
We'll destroy the country in three months.
And we thought that that was the basic division that we were dealing with.
But instead, there was this division between people of principle who wanted, you know, conservatism, wanted small government, wanted the Constitution reinstated.
The three stool, what are the three legs of the stool of conservatism was the strong military, small government, and social conservatism.
There were varying degrees of social conservatism always on the left.
But now we found out that there is, in fact, this other division.
There is this division of nationalist, what can we call them, nationalist, populist people, and those of us who actually wanted small government.
And it's a really serious division.
And people we thought that we trusted were conservative turned out not so much, not so much.
They really just wanted to pound their fist and say, America, American, build a wall and keep out the Mexicans and all this stuff.
So that's one argument that's coming on.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is uniting the GOP.
I mean, this is the thing that's happening all over.
He got the endorsement of the NRA.
I loved CNN's story about this.
Trump went before the NRA.
Here's the CNN story.
Donald Trump on Friday told the National Rifle Association that Hillary Clinton would take away the right to bear arms.
This isn't in the lead, a position the Democratic frontrunner has never taken and immediately denounced the CNN.
They're honest thing.
Moments after the gun group endorsed Trump, which, by the way, really, they really endorsed him early.
They usually don't endorse this early in the process.
After the gun group endorsed Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee dove right into attacking Clinton, saying she, quote, wants to abolish the Second Amendment.
We're not going to let that happen, Trump said.
We're going to preserve it.
We're going to cherish it.
Clinton, who swiftly rebutted Trump's remarks, has called for universal background checks and stricter controls on firearms, but has never called for the abolition of the Second Amendment.
In fact, on her website, in fact, says CNN, arguing with us, in fact, on our website, on her website, she calls gun ownership part of the fabric of many law-abiding communities.
Except she's lying.
Is there anybody on earth who doesn't think the left wants to get rid of the Second Amendment?
I mean, you know, the left only has two modes.
They have one mode, oh, we'll never do this.
And the second mode is, oh, we've done it already.
The toothpaste is out of the tube.
That's the only thing they ever said.
You know, we'll never support gay marriage.
Gay marriage is here.
The toothpaste is out of the tube.
Get on the train.
That's the left, all over.
We'll never get rid of the Second Amendment.
It's gone.
It's gone.
There's no in-between.
There's no part where they say, well, we're going to slowly get rid of it.
Listen, everybody knows, and this is why Trump is so successful.
Everybody knows that Trump is telling the truth.
So here is John Roberts, who was at the NRA, talking to Britt Hume about what all this means.
I was there at the NRA meeting, Britt, and there was a crowd.
It was supposed to be 7,000.
That's how many tickets they sold.
But they let another thousand people at least in.
Very enthusiastic crowd for Trump there.
So you got a couple of things.
You got the NRA very enthusiastic about him and the NRA endorsing five months before they've endorsed anybody else.
What's going on?
I think it's one of a number of signs that Donald Trump is well on his way to pulling nearly all of the Republican Party behind him.
There will be holdouts and there will be conservatives who are conservatives first and Republicans second who will not be reconciled to him.
But the Supreme Court list that he put out, the meeting with Paul Ryan, all these things are pointing in the same direction.
That Republicans and most conservatives are increasingly ready, particularly because they so fear the alternative, to back him.
And I think that's where we're going.
And, you know, this is a done thing because the GOP is an organization, and an organization is an organism, and an organism's first duty is to preserve itself.
The GOP has no choice but to either unite behind Trump or go spiraling down the drain.
Conservatives Back Trump00:14:08
I mean, those are the only things.
He won.
He is the presumptive Trump.
He has presumptively won the nomination.
The GOP will get behind him.
They are leaving behind conservatives and conservatives like Ben, and that is why Breitbart and others are just like trouncing Ben.
And personally, by the way, Ben is a big boy and well, well able to fight his corner.
And when Breitbart goes after him in that childish way, but my thought went back to that line in the movie Casablanca where the Nazi says to Humphrey Bogart, you know, we're going to invade New York.
And Bogart says there are streets in New York I wouldn't invade if I were you.
You know, I feel like this, like, you want to be careful before you go after Shapiro.
You know, there may be just little letters of, you know, B-R-E-I-T just spread out all over the grass by the time he's through with you.
So maybe just a little less childish might be nice.
But that's so that's one division.
But the other division that is, I find, even more disturbing is the division between the conservatives, the backbiting that's going on between the conservatives who have been left behind.
So Mark Zuckerberg accused, Facebook was accused of being slanted toward the left, of censoring material that was coming from right-wingers.
And Zuckerberg, to his credit, I think, you know, I think you can be cynical about it, but basically to his credit, said, come and talk to me and let's discuss this.
And, you know, that's good business practice.
That is what businessmen do.
They bring in people and they talk to them, and maybe they'll do some of the stuff they say.
Maybe they won't, but at least you get the feeling that you're heard and you're not being excluded.
So that was a good thing.
And the people who went were guys like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck were there.
So now Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck are fighting with each other.
Beck came away from this feeling that there was no prejudice, really.
It was just the mathematics of it all.
Here he is talking about it on his own, the blaze.
Facebook provides a lot of traffic if you can learn how to game the algorithm.
It's all about the algorithm.
And they change it all the time to stop people from gaming it.
Because you don't want Glenn Beck, all of Glenn Beck's stuff in your news feed all the time.
You want the stuff mainly from family and friends.
So they were concerned about, and I'm not going to ask you to name names because you can't.
So one group was, they were publishers and they were like, hey, look, you changed your algorithm and it hurt our business.
Their personal interests.
Correct.
Their business, yeah.
And they said, you know, what's the deal here?
Now, one of them said, I did my homework and I found out that Huffington Post, we lost 50% of our traffic, but Huffington Post lost 70% of their Facebook traffic.
Well, that explains it there.
And I know it because I've seen it.
I can watch our traffic and I can see, oh, they changed their algorithm.
And they do that as policy.
That's not conservative.
That's everybody.
So that's Beck, strong, strong Ted Cruz supporter, very devastated when Cruz didn't take it, you know, very upset by Trump.
I don't know if he's come out as a never-Trumper, but he certainly sounded like one.
Tucker Carlson comes out and basically just rips him.
Now, he doesn't name him in this interview, but he's referring to Beck when he talks about people sucking up to the billionaire Zuckerberg.
Here's Tucker Carlson on fire.
It was interesting.
They're really worried that conservatives don't trust them.
Part of the reason conservatives don't is because Mark Zuckerberg's talking about his personal liberal politics in public, and I think it taints the image of the company in people's minds.
We talked to them.
I talked to them about the people who worked there.
And if everyone in your office has the same background and the same cultural assumptions, it's going to affect your news coverage.
And they seem to think that was reasonable.
Some of the conservatives there asked tough questions.
Others sucked up, basically.
Like who?
You know, well-known talk show hosts who you think would be asking tough questions, but have said things like, you're such an innovator, you're such an impressive guy.
Who said that?
Come on.
You can imagine.
But the point is, they are conducting an investigation.
don't want to be seen as biased of course to their subjective judgments or they're going to change anything Yeah, I mean, I think they're going to try to move as much as they can over to the algorithm and take the human element out to the extent possible.
But I think, you know, in the end, there's always a lot of people.
Because the curators are going to be able to do that.
No, they did not admit that intentional bias occurred.
They did admit that Silicon Valley is very liberal and the people who work there by definition are probably mostly liberal.
And I said, why don't you hire a bunch of Mormons?
You know, like, make it, bring people in with a different cultural background and you will get a greater diversity of views and you'll make wiser decisions.
And they said, you know, it's a pretty good idea.
I don't know if they'll do it right.
So Beck attacked Carlson without naming him.
And Carlson, I think he did come out later and say it was Beck who was sucking up to this billionaire to save his failing blaze or something like this.
And I just think, you know, Carlson is making a good point, which is that just like the mainstream media, when you surround yourself, when you only hire left-wingers, you get more and more left-wing, and you get sequestered from any other form of opinion.
You don't even know those opinions are there.
Your bias becomes worse and worse because you don't even know it's bias.
You just become, all you think is there's a division between people on the far left and people in the middle left because you never see a right-winger except when he delivers food to your offices.
You know, the delivery boy comes in and he may be a right-winger, but that's the only right-winger who's getting in to Facebook or any of these places.
So he made a good suggestion.
I made the suggestion many years ago in an article to the LA Times saying you want to solve your bias problem, hire conservatives, not one conservative to speak for conservatives, but 50% of conservatives in your newsrooms to represent the country because that would be closer to what the country looks like than your newsrooms are now.
So he's making a good point.
But that's a rip on Glenn.
You know, he really said he was sucking up to him and kind of saying, oh, how innovative he was and all this stuff.
And this is what's called what Freud called the narcissism of small differences.
Okay, and we're going to see this more and more as this election comes out.
Conservatives are going to start to rip on each other.
I mean, it's one thing for Breitbart and Shapiro to fight because they really are standing for different things.
But Tucker Carlson and Beck are really more kind of in the same ballpark.
And you're going to see more and more of those guys, a fight in the conservative wing of the party.
And that's because we lost.
And I say we, meaning me too.
We lost this election.
We have no one in this election.
We're not going to have anyone in this election.
No outcome of this election can serve us, can serve conservatism.
We lost.
And when people lose, they try to mitigate, you know, they don't want to accept that there's no good answer.
It's like people fighting at funerals.
It happens all the time.
Families fight at funerals.
You know why?
Because they don't want to accept that there is no good outcome.
You know, this guy is dead.
That's it.
That's the end of the story.
It's not a good story.
If it has a happy ending, it has that happy ending somewhere other than here.
That's this election for conservatives.
Our happy ending is not going to come in this election.
And you're going to start to see people fighting in the conservative movement because of that, because they can't accept that simple and tragic fact.
And it is really sad.
Then you have guys like Bill Crystal who's still saying, let's bring in Mitt Romney and he's going to save the day.
Here he is with Stephanopoulos.
The Republican National Committee and the Trump and Clinton campaigns are trying to sort of strangle it in its infancy because they're scared of it.
I mean, look at that poll.
When you throw Mitt Romney's name in, someone who hasn't run in four years probably isn't the ideal in a way for the third party candidate, though an impressive man, and I think would be a good alternative up to Clinton and Trump.
He right away is a 2022 37, 35, 22.
He hasn't, I mean, he hasn't done anything.
In other polls, the independent, generic independent candidates around 20 or 21.
And as Andre Koki was saying, and Matthew 2, I mean, half of the Clinton voters and half of the Trump voters don't want to be for Clinton or Trump.
against the other person they had an alternative the way the country you know bill crystal is a smart guy who's always wrong i can't he's He's always wrong.
He's always on the wrong side.
You know, he says Mitt Romney is polling well in spite of the fact that he hasn't done anything yet.
Mitt Romney is polling well because he hasn't done anything yet.
We've seen this in every single primary that some politician, some candidate will rise to the top because no one knows what he stands for or who he is.
And the minute the media signs a spotlight on him, and it's always hostile on the right, but even if it's not hostile, the minute we see who he is, suddenly he falls out of the running completely.
So Mitt Romney would last for about five minutes.
This is not his election.
There is one third party candidate that I am supporting, Lord Darthos, who announced here a few weeks ago and has now even gone further in explaining his policies.
Good evening.
I am Lord Darthos, candidate for president.
Now, some people have recently taken to questioning my integrity.
And so I want to tell you right here and right now, I will never sell my soul to the special interest groups in Washington, D.C., because I am a vampire.
I have no soul to sell.
I'm Lord Darthos, and I approve this position.
I totally get behind that guy.
He's like, honest, he has no soul to sell.
That's true of all the candidates, but he's the only one who admits it.
So I'm in favor.
I'm voting for the vampire.
Any other third party candidate is going nowhere, in my humble opinion.
He just cannot unite the disparate forces because the forces that oppose Hillary are so distant from the forces that oppose Trump that I don't think anybody can bring them together.
And Mitt Romney is in Bill Crystal's mind because he's got that bland face.
Everybody thinks that people are just going to fall into that emptiness, you know, but it's just not going to happen.
They're not going to support him.
Anyway, the same fight is happening on the left in a different way because they're still battling over this thing.
Saturday Night Live did a wonderful version of it as Hillary closes down the bar.
As I hear, there are rumors that she does quite a lot in real life.
But here she is doing it on Saturday Night Live.
Well, bartender, I've done it.
I've won the nomination.
I mean, no, I haven't.
I keep losing states, but mathematically, I've done it.
To math.
All right.
I think I better head home.
Don't you work too late now.
Oh, I won't, Mrs. Clinton.
I'm actually closing up the bar right now.
So everybody's got to go.
That means you too, sir.
No freaking way!
I'm not going anywhere!
I can stay here as long as I want.
Senator Sanders, I'm sorry, but the night is over.
No, no, it's not over.
It's not over till I say it's over.
Oh, hello, Bernie.
I didn't see you sitting behind me.
So far behind me, you can never catch him.
Has anybody seen Larry David and Bernie Sanders together at the same time?
I mean, that's uncanny.
It is uncanny.
Like, I guess maybe all querulous old Jews start to look alike.
I don't know.
It's like Larry David and Bernie Sanders have become the same person.
He really is like a Seinfeld character now.
Why Bernie Sanders should leave this race when he is winning everything and people are listening to him for the first time in his life?
I mean, I don't think anybody has paid attention to a crazy word that has come out of Bernie Sanders' mouth before.
Suddenly, all these people are cheering Bernie Bernie.
Why on earth would he leave?
Why on earth would he leave?
Hillary basically has come out and said, well, I've already won.
It's over.
It's over.
And I love that line.
Here's the math because the math really is the math of the superdelegates.
Actually, it's probably not.
She'd probably win it anyway.
I mean, this machine has got this so locked down that there's just no way for Bernie Sanders to translate even his support into a victory.
The Democrat Party doesn't want them, want him.
I suspect they're right.
I suspect the polls now, the polls now do show that Sanders would beat Trump by a larger margin than Hillary, who, according to the most recent poll, is only three percentage points ahead.
And this is before people have gotten a real look at Hillary, you know.
I mean, they've seen Trump every day, but they haven't really, you know, the mainstream of people are not paying attention like we are paying attention.
So Hillary was asked about this because it's exactly the same situation that she was in with Barack Obama when she was arguing, like, why should I step down?
I'm winning all these states because she won, remember, in the ends of the primary.
She won all those primaries.
So here's her answer to why she shouldn't step down.
You made an electability case seven days before the final day of the primary season to superdelegates back in 2008.
Why shouldn't superdelegates, you wanted them to listen to your argument eight years ago.
Why shouldn't superdelegates listen to the Bernie Sanders argument and say, you know what?
Maybe he is more likely.
Well, first of all, people have voted for me overwhelmingly in the Democratic primary process, and that is absolutely clear and very different from where we were in 2008.
I could make the case, which I did, that I was actually slightly ahead in the popular vote when we ended that primary, but I was behind in the pledge delegates.
It's also fair to say that I have been vetted and tested, and I think that that puts me in a very strong position.
You don't think Bernie Sanders has been vetted?
You don't think this one long year of campaign, your campaign against him, has vetted him?
Let me say that I don't think he's had a single negative ad ever run against him.
And that's fine.
But we know what we're going into, and we understand what it's going to take to win in the fall.
You know, I always love she laughs when anybody asks her a reasonable question.
She's losing her voice so badly.
I mean, I think she's passing from the stage even as we watch, but she's losing her voice.
She can't even get that old wicked cackle, witch's cackle that she does so well.
But anytime you ask her a question like, why are you holding that bleeding knife and standing over the body of a dead man?
You know, she always laughs.
What's she laughing about?
You know, he's making a perfectly, Todd is asking her a perfectly reasonable question.
You made the same argument before.
Why is it different now?
And she has no answer.
I mean, basically, she says she's been vetted and tested.
Every time she's vetted and tested, she gets beat every time she is out there against a candidate.
Every time people see her, they hate her.
She's a terrible, terrible candidate and should be a she's a terrible candidate.
She's earned her terribleness.
Athenian Demagoguery00:09:29
She's not just terrible like Ted Cruz was terrible because he looks funny.
She's terrible because she's corrupt and lies and changes her opinion with the weather and the wind.
So anyway, this is a more civilized version of what's happening in Austria right now.
In Austria, since 1945, they have had essentially this grand coalition, center-right, center-left, has been governing the country 1945, 70 years since the war.
This is the way they have run the country.
And now, suddenly, both those parties are sidelined, and a far left and a far-right winger are locked absolutely in a tie which will be broken by the right in votes.
And of course, the right-winger, who is more charming than most of these guys are.
Remember, the European right is to the right of our right.
The European right is very nationalistic, is basically the Trump right.
I mean, that's who they are, very nationalistic, very bombastic.
And this guy's apparently pretty charming, and he could win.
And what nobody, you know, it's all about the immigration thing, as it is here.
It's about immigration.
It's about the fact that we have a debate which is encouraged by both the process of democracy and the media to be extreme.
Either let everybody in because they're all dreamers, it's an act of love, it's an act of Christian charity to let the, you know, the people in from Tunisia and Syria, even if they rape your women, it's just, you know, how dare you say anything.
That's the one side.
And the other side is build a wall, kill them all, ship them out.
You know, I mean, that's the other side.
And, you know, a debate like that is absurd, is absurd.
You know, the West has always lived in immigration, with immigration.
It has always welcomed immigrants.
And yet, at the same time, we have to defend ourselves.
We have to defend ourselves from hostile philosophies.
We have to defend ourselves from terrorists.
We have to defend ourselves from too many workers coming in.
You can't say, you know, I am not of the party who thinks that Mexicans, if they come over here, are going to vote Democratic forever.
I think that that's absurd.
Of course we can make them into Americans.
And if they're Americans, they'll be Republicans and Democrats.
Of course we can.
But they have to, the fact that they violate our laws and make fun of our laws and make fun of this country and say it should be part of Mexico, those people shouldn't get in.
That's the thing.
When we're talking about immigration, we're not really talking about immigration.
What we're talking about is the fact that our elites have lost faith in our civilization.
That's what we're really talking about.
We're talking about the fact that no civilized elite leader will get up and say, we have a civilization, this is what it is.
It works better than other civilizations.
Even if it didn't work better, it would be more moral than other civilizations because it makes its people free.
It makes its women equal.
Those are better things than other people have.
We have to insist on those things.
And in Germany, they're trying to teach immigrants how to have sex.
Immigrants know plenty well how to have sex.
That pretty well comes naturally.
What they don't know is how to pay respect to people who have a different sex than you do.
That's what they don't understand because they come from a hostile culture.
Now, if you let some of these people in and you train them into being Westerners, it can work.
You can assimilate people.
You can assimilate a certain number of people.
Not all of them, but you can assimilate.
But nobody's making that argument.
Nobody is standing up.
And so what we're really saying, what all these people are saying, you know, when the people speak, the people sometimes speak chaotically and it's hard to make out what they're saying.
But what I think they're saying is have some faith in this thing that gave us everything we have.
We're richer than everybody.
We're stronger than everybody.
We're safer than everybody because of our values.
Stand up for our values.
That's what they're saying to both the left and the right.
And that's why Trump is succeeding so well because he is selling the basest, most vulgar form of that philosophy.
But the philosophy itself is not wrong.
The idea that we should be patriots as opposed to nationalists is not wrong.
Which brings me to stuff I like.
Because what I want to do about stuff I like this week is I want to talk about a couple of pieces of classical literature that are formative in the development of the West, okay?
Because people don't read the Greeks and Romans anymore.
They're afraid of them.
They think they're too complicated.
So I tried to pick things that are very approachable and very presentable.
Today in the Wall Street Journal, my friend Barry Strauss, who is a professor of classics at Cornell University, had a piece about the similarities between what happened in Greece after the Peloponnesian War and what is happening here.
And he says, you know, the Athenian League, the Delian League, was, they call it an empire, but it was really a loose conglomeration of city-states that was the Freedom Party, basically.
And it was the Greek empire.
It's what they call the Greek empire, but he says it's not really that.
And it was doing very well, allowing people in.
People wanted to come in.
They were free.
And he says, then three disturbing developments took place.
And I'm reading this.
I don't have time to read the whole piece, of course, but please look at it in the Wall Street Journal.
It's a really intelligent, learned piece.
He says, the three developments that took place were nativism, Athens, old landed elite disliked democracy and despised the immigrants.
So when extreme conservatives seized power in a coup d'état after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, they evicted immigrants from the city limits and targeted the wealthiest for murder and property confiscation.
They evicted the immigrants.
The next thing was demagoguery.
In Athens, for the first time in history, demagogues emerged.
And although they were wealthy and well-educated, they spoke in populist accents and criticized the establishment.
And finally, there was endless conflict.
There were all these battles.
Athenian foreign policy should have built an international order that shared prosperity and encouraged allies to stay loyal.
Instead, it chose Athens first.
So obviously, Barry is making this case.
This is Barry Strauss writing in the Wall Street Journal.
He's making the case that what's happening, that what happened in Greece and ultimately destroyed the Delian League is happening here.
And you can tell that he's thinking of Donald Trump when he's talking about demagogues and he's talking about Athens first as we're now having America first.
So the piece that I want to recommend first is a fairly short piece in Thucydides' history.
It's basically a history of the Peloponnesian War.
Thucydides' long book, you know, some people find it hard to read, but in there, the Greek historians would write the speeches of the famous people.
You know, they weren't supposed to be the speeches.
And one of the speeches is called Pericles' Funeral Oration.
Pericles was the great Greek leader who was the leader during the period that we think of as the high point of Greece.
And when the Peloponnesian War started, the Peloponnesian War kind of destroyed, ultimately destroyed Athens, but it happened in three stages.
And the first stage, before Pericles died, was almost a defensive war.
It was a war against Sparta, the other parts of the other kind of government in Greece, less democratic, not democratic, and very militaristic.
And so Athens was kind of fighting Sparta, and Pericles was very conservative about this.
He was not, he did not go out and go out and fight on different fronts and all this stuff.
And he did very well, but then he died, and that's when Greece lost its stuff.
But at first, when the dead came back from the Peloponnesian War, he gave a famous funeral oration in which he talked about what was wonderful about their point of view.
He reminded Athenians what they were fighting for.
And he said, I'm just going to read a very small piece of it.
He said, let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors.
It is more the case of our being a model to others than of our imitating anyone else.
Just notice the confidence that the leader has in what he's representing.
He says, our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority, but of the whole people.
When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law.
When it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses.
No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty.
These guys were inventing this stuff.
No one knows, no one knows why suddenly this little tribe of people in the Peloponnese developed this idea, this incredible idea.
But here was Pericles at the moment of great peril and at the moment of great triumph of a culture telling people that their culture was better.
It was not an imitation.
It was a model to other people.
When has Barack Obama said that ever?
I mean, when has Hillary Clinton represented that?
She makes noise about that, but you know, there was a little bit of a controversy the other day when a girl walked around with a hat that looked like Donald Trump's hat, but it said America was never great.
Who doubts that Obama thinks that?
I don't doubt it.
Obama thinks America is a great idea.
The America in his mind is great, but he does not think this America was ever great, Hillary Clinton the same way.
And as long as that happens, then we're going to be open to demagoguery.
We're going to be open to America firstism, which is nativism, not patriotism.
And that's, you know, so go back and read this Pericles' funeral oration in Thucydides.
It's about, I don't know, three, four pages long and not that long, but it's just to hear what it sounds like when a leader stands up for what he believes and what his culture believes and what has made his culture great.
And part of what makes this culture great is us standing here talking about this culture.
So come back again tomorrow and we will do it some more.