Welcome Caribbean rhythms episode 152 number one worldwide Calypso show I talk on this episode as a revival of pagan antiquity in Italian Renaissance this big subject it can but this is actually casual entertainment show Okay, but this matter can be study of lifetime not just one book but several book not show So on this episode, I only give general outline of this matter extreme important to me and maybe to you too I think actually in some way more important than antiquity itself Because in Italian Renaissance as also in German Hellenism of 19th century culminating in nature you have something that's much closer to my desires as The study of antiquity isn't just for historical interest, but if your heart is set on resurrecting it It's better for you if you start from what's closer

What's more familiar and also then if you learn from examples of people who try to do the same thing you're doing, right? and they too were inspired by examples of ancient Greek and Roman greatness and So to revive it as a tonic against what they saw as the corruption or more precisely the dull mediocrity and stagnation of their world and you can learn from that how they tried what their opposition was was, how they succeeded and what they failed. But that's for later segment of this episode. For a moment, let me discuss weeks news and weeks controversies. There is this method of the Houthis, right, the Houthi rebels. And I'm suddenly supposed to be a clapping seal, either for the foreign policy blunders

and aims of the Obongo administration, yes, excuse me, supposedly the Biden administration, but everyone knows who's OK. So I'm supposed to either cheer that on or on the other hand to join the brain trust of the dissident right and dissident left that will be clapping seals for every group apparently that State Department or United States government designates as terrorist organizations. No thank you very much. This all losing game to get into. Of course the hooties are going to get destroyed, they pose no actual threat to American worldwide hegemony, however, problems will probably happen along the way. And this just more symptom of decline of mental capacity, American ruling class, because they should have let Trump stay in. Today is day of Iowa primary.

It's very clear by now that the gentleman Vivek is there to split the vote and to try to take Trump voters away from him. Regardless, if Trump was in power, I don't think any of these stupid wars would have happened. Trump was unique among American presidents in foreign policy, especially keeping America out of wars. He's the only president in decades who did not start another stupid war. He was going perhaps even to withdraw American troops from Europe. I know it's controversial, but his orders were disobeyed in that regard. But I don't think that, for example, Ukraine would have tried to join NATO and provoked Russia in such a way if Trump had been president. So I don't think the Ukraine war would have happened. Maybe Putin would have also been hesitant to try provoke himself.

And I'm wondering if all of these things are happening, especially because world feels that Biden administration doesn't really exist. It might be proxy for Obongo or some other hidden hands that don't have full control of situation because technically you have the senile old man and maybe they think this is our time. Let's take this opportunity. I don't think that Ukraine would have happened. I don't think that Hamas attack Hamas. I don't think that their attacks would have happened on October 7. I don't think the Houthis would have gotten involved. I think all of these things are happening now because world feels perhaps feeding frenzy coming on. Let's take our chances now in what could be possibly last year of administration more mentally hobbled than Carter.

Although I actually think Carter administration was stronger than people believe. So there is no real comparison between Obongo, Sinal, third term under Biden. And well, Carter was actually very strong. Maybe I have old United States, old military establishment person sometime in future to make the case for that, that Carter was not as weak as people think. But regardless, I don't want to get involved in cheerleading of one side or other. I think you know what's going to happen. Progressive civility of American establishment, they should have just stayed with Trump, but now they are getting what they signed up for. There is also a matter of human biodiversity, which I'll discuss now for a moment. From now on, I will abbreviate human biodiversity as HBD.

But both are really phrases for, let's say, race realism, so-called, or scientific study of racial differences, I would say, or opponents would call it scientific racism, on which I had a long thread on Twitter, and it's not my intention here to repeat arguments in detail because that would be boring for those of you who have read what I had to say. But I'll say this here, for the longest time, I've thought the signature advance of frogs was the scientific term, specifically not the focus on tradition or religion, and not the nostalgic and sentimental focus on mysticism, tradition, religion, the sacred assertions of moral purity or such things, of being a serious fag. But the focus on scientific studies and the fact that the left has abandoned actually

science and reason for their own religious incantations regarding human equality, which they embrace in a dogmatic and moralistic way. And they're basically religious fanatics. And so we live in a modern time of where all over serious religious fanaticism, moralism is easy to lampoon. This part is what left took advantage of, let's say in fifties or sixties, but it still remain spirit of the time. And so the left have turned themselves into a authoritarian stuffed shirt bunch of school arms who lectured you that you must not see reason and facts, but must embrace moral dogmatism and therefore they are very easy to mock. And however much they may want to rebrand the word morality or moralism as something else, for example, humanitarianism, human rights, ethics, empathy, and so on, whatever

words they use, they cannot escape the image of what they've become, establishment school and very concretely what distinguished me and my friends in 2015 and before from other parts of the so-called right was our focus on science on one hand and humor on the other and I've said many times that without humor we are nothing but to that you can also add cheerful science the companion of good humor and this isn't strictly by the way reducible to HPD or human biodiversity which is itself a concern on certain parts of old internet going back even to late 1990s. I think it was called Usenet if I'm not wrong but other parts of the old internet in which people like Steve Saylor they were a long time ago talking about inconvenient truths for example those expounded by men like Charles

Murray in the bell curve in his book from the 1990s and these are men mostly coming out of the tech or computing worlds that they are parallel and friendly to us but they are not quite us because while they had some focus on science and statistics I think they are wrong historically for reasons I may talk about on future episode I have long criticized the views of Mr. Steve Saylor who I respect as a journalist or others like Peter Frost who you may remember this name from old race science discussions on forums but they are not the only two ones. I believe they have a false view of what led to the rise of European societies, let's say plainly European supremacy in the world. They don't understand what make European

society run. They think it's this thing having to do with, well, what used to get called the shopkeeper, but what is really a docile beta engineer. And so they believe the virtues or let's say the personal qualities of the docile beta engineer, is what Western greatness can be attributed to and what must be defended. And I think they're very wrong about that, but that's a bigger subject, which I've written about at length in the past and also mentioned in the book, but I'll discuss it perhaps in more detail on future episodes. They also, these gentlemen who discuss, let's say, evolutionary biology in these terms, missed the frog brutish humor which really is indispensable because the science isn't enough you need humor why because you need to break through moral

categories that are dearly held and which would cancel out actually any scientific fact or realization that you could make your interlocutor that you put in his mind their moral categories would actually cancel that out and humor melts constipated moral fagging if not for those who are moral fags themselves which is often impossible at least for those observing but without the shock humor of the frogs I am telling you the science itself ends up being mostly powerless and I'm not talking here in the everyday political sense necessarily but in the much more important spiritual sense where in the longer term you could force a turn of spirit in smart men at least to see the truth that they were taught for many years maybe since their childhood they

were taught to see that it's wrong to see and talk this truth, the truth about differences between men and women by nature, differences between human groups, not just races by the way, but other human groups also by nature. But why I tell you all this? Because now you have all these kinds of what I call face fags. A face fag isn't just someone who uses their face in the public sphere, for example Ann Coulter is not a face fag, Michael Savage not a face fag, Pat Buchanan not a face fag. A face fag specifically refers to someone who didn't really have a reputation before the anonymous online movement of the mid 2010s or if they did it was a very small and derivative public presence that had to do with something else but who around that time saw media attention on our

great success bringing these ideas to public and they got a little glint in their eye and they say, I'm going to be the face of the anonymous movement. I'm going to essentially, well, what it comes out to unfortunately is do a minstrel show for media, mainly leftist media in which they claim to be our face and the real meaning of what we say. And on one hand, I want our ideas to spread and through certain men like Tucker Carlson, You could say they may be spread in a good way, although I know frogs who dispute that. I'm sorry, Tucker. But in almost all other cases, face fags are cancer because they completely distort our ideas and they actually also try to, if not get anonymous people banned, they try to swipe

under the rug their debt to anonymous posters online and they miss, again, our humor. They turn it into something pedantic that falls flat when it hits the public sphere. It corrupts both political process actually to try to talk about frog ideas openly and directly, and it corrupts our search for the truth and our speaking truth, which we can only really do in this shock way as, let's say, anonymous account. Let me put it that way. It corrupts both. It does not work in public when you try to do directly. And they are not only promoting HPDO race science knowledge, which would maybe be fine. I like the account Kremu, for example. He's not a face fag, but there's nothing especially untoward that Mr. Kremu, if you know this

account on Twitter, who posts very much like old frogs used to statistical studies about race and many other things. He makes no political promises, and he's also not a face fag. But I'm telling you, there are face fags who have latched onto these ideas, believing that that they are edgy, that they contain energy and shock value, which they do. And then they latch onto them and they make political promises based on them. And it doesn't work is what I'm telling you and what I try to say online. I can name them. I don't like to name them because it boosts their profile. But you know some of them, Banania, this guy Banania, or I slash O, whatever he or she she's called on Twitter, or the staff of magazine Aporia, Bo Weingart, Noah Carr, quite a few

others like Nathan Softness, who is a friend, by the way, like I was, of David Sidorsky, who was a great and misunderstood man. But all of these make you a promise that embracing race realism will somehow get rid of wokeness. And this is what I find horribly naive. In this regard, actually, they're no different from the old white nationalists who believed you could put on a bellhop outfit and go march in the street and pretend it's 1920s and have a rally movement to bring about ethno-state, horribly naive. Neither side has the numbers to bring these ideas into the public, and when you try to translate them into public sphere, it doesn't quite work. And this was my point, that you can't get rid of wokeness this way because real-life

politic doesn't proceed according to the logic of online debates or forums arguments, speaking now strictly about the figures I mentioned who want to use race science, let's say, to counter the claims of the woke or of those who favor an especially accelerated form of affirmative action. Because the cause of wokeness is not in fact just the belief in racial equality. I think my friend the Second City Bureaucrat has a right understanding of what wokeness And I leave it for him to explain this, I know he's writing about it. But leave it to say it existed almost same form as it does today in the Roman Empire even before Christianity took over. And it's more a product of a multi-ethnic imperial necessity than it is of any moral

code or certainly any belief in racial equality or inequality one way or the other. But just think how ridiculous the claim that if politicians, or if you don't want to say elected politicians, think public figures of some kind, started to talk about how joggers are dumb by nature, to make the claim that this is why they are poor or whatever, that this would get rid of wokeness. And I think you have to be very foolish to think that. If that were the case, they could have just pointed to Charles Murray's book from the 1990s or brought up IQ graphs and yet that's not done. Why? through all the arguments I made on Twitter in detail, but I will summarize some here. If for example, your concern is migration, which is quite a separate matter from wokeness

or what's really wokeness is accelerated affirmative action, you are triply wrong if your concern is migration. First of all, because the politicians who have had some success in limiting migrants, for example, Orban in Hungary, they never invoked race science in any way. They didn't bring up IQ charts, genetic distance charts, anything of the sort relating to what's called HBD. They appealed rather to traditional and historical, political, cultural identity. And when the moron Richard Spencer went to Budapest to hold a so-called conference, in real life, people like Spencer cannot fill a room with 15 people, right? But he is sent by, I don't know who, but he was sent there to embarrass Orban. To tie Orban's attempt to resurrect Hungarian historical identity and to protect it from

migration flows, to tie that to these notions that I'm talking about here of human biodiversity, so-called, which normal facts simply recognize as the name scientific racism. In their mind, it is tied with Nazis and Hitler and so forth, and they're very unpopular ideas. And Orban saw that and kicked those phonies Spencer and the group sent to embarrass Orban, kick them right out of Budapest, you see. But Orban, who has had some relative success compared to other Western leaders in stopping migration, never invoked race science in any way, I tell you again. And Trump, by the way, in 2016, although you can quibble about whether Trump was successful in limiting migration. But if he was not successful, it had nothing to do with his failure to invoke IQ charts or genetic distance charts.

But in 2016, and by the way, Trump did cut refugee flows by much, historically cut refugee flows. But again, he never appealed to race science either. And in fact, unfortunately, Mr. Trump support affirmative action. But again, never brought out race graphs or anything like that. If you want to talk about face fags, Trump is the ultimate face fag in a good way. The only one, in fact, who is worthwhile as a face fag. And that's because he's not a face fag. He was a fixture in American life with his own public position from long before anything having to do with online frogs. And in fact, he didn't truly channel our ideas to the public. He channeled his own. But he always had this kind of wink-wink nod-nod, they call it dog whistling way.

But he knew exactly how to walk that line with humor and to give normal fags the belief, somehow the self-belief that they were not being fully racist, which people need to have that in their mind, unfortunately. I wish they didn't. I wish this course could return to what it was in the Anglo-American individualist pre-Ellis Island, let's say, United States from before 1920, when race science could be openly talked. But that's not the case today. But in any case, he just made, again, kind of dog whistle, you can say, about particular populations of Muslims and Mexicans. But again, it was all done, I'm talking about Trump now, how he succeeded as a very charming demagogue. It was all done in cultural terms with no call for his audience to accept or not accept

the claim of racial nature of any type. So I don't know of a case anywhere in the world where let's say a politician elected or not has successfully restrained or reversed migration with calls regarding racial science. That would actually be a weird overkill. You don't need that. Denmark is actually an interesting case. I talked it online, but it's so interesting. I'll talk it now and I may bring it again in future. Maybe I invite Danish friend to discuss this from the Danish right. I long have friends on the Danish right. It's the only country where there has been sink tank activity of public and in political importance, producing scientific statistical studies and many such things, dealing with migration and its problems caused by mass migration. I mean, which has had public import.

In Denmark, these things have mattered. But none of these studies were about race at all. They had to do with common sense, economic and other realities. And the government that put these to use is a social democrat government, which is to say a cock anti-racist government. The reason the Danish government, social democrat as it is, has adopted migration restriction policies up to a point is because of the success of the far right in that country. The far right so-called. And that country has proportional representation unlike the United States. And when you have a party reach organically, let's say 10 to 15% mark, and they were looking to make more gains, by the way, AFD look to make big gains in Germany soon, let's hope. But the Social Democrats wanted to stop the advance

of the far right politically and to co-opt that successful rhetoric of migration restriction. But the far right let this happen. In other words, the far right chose for the good of the country to be co-opted. And in order to allow themselves to be co-opted safely, they with great discipline excluded anyone who seemed crazy, vaguely seemed racist, or who might invoke things like race science. In other words, the far right in Denmark cucked bigly, and that's what led to the success of migration restriction so far as it can go in that country. They embraced something like race-blind meritocratic language as a cover to allow the social democrats to pick up their program of migration restriction. The social democrats again being the dominant party, maybe not just in Denmark but of the age.

So you see how it goes. There's no one anywhere in the world who has stopped migration with open appeals to race unless maybe you want to consider the mad monk Viratul from Burma, who I have long celebrated but whose case isn't bloody well applicable to the developed and modern world you see. I don't know of any statesman anywhere in the world, in fact, who has invoked race science or made any appeal regarding the essential inequality of the races, which is really what we're talking about. And yet the people jumping at my throat for saying that maybe it's stupid to make frog ideas public politically in this direct way. But if that position is so popular, why isn't there any politician or even any public figure who has promoted it? Some of these people claim to be running movements.

We run the movement. It's been eight years since Trump ran in 2016, you have not found a single congressional district in the, what is it, 430 United States, where you could contest an election based on these ideas. No one even in Europe under proportional representation has even tried. No public figure elected or not has made decisions based on such ideas. So what exactly do you think would be gained by publicizing them in the way again in which these face facts that I mentioned want to of course we as frogs should continue to speak them I have and I will that goes without saying we should speak the truth but it's false hope to tell people that simply speaking this truth will in the short run get rid of anything like wokeness the purpose of speaking this

truth is in my opinion again to cause a long-term spiritual change in the hearts of some men who hopefully in the future can supplant let's say a Mary Kwan regime and so forth but can you think of any figure by the way who has promoted these ideas in the past or the recent past I can think of Lee Kuan Yew. Thank you very much for mentioning Lee Kuan Yew. A couple of people brought him up in my replies. It's true that Lee Kuan Yew decades ago made statements regarding the essential inequality of man and man and of groups but that was after he had consolidated power and would have already been a dictator and his successors in today's Singapore, in fact, despite having almost dictatorial power, they wouldn't be able to say the same thing today that he did then. Leaving

aside, of course, the very different situation of Singapore and the fact that the minorities there are not quite the minorities in question in Europe and United States. Which brings me to the next question, the problem of ending wokeness, or let's be more modest, how about ending affirmative action, you know? Because, again, I think wokeness is just affirmative action accelerated. But I can think of any politician or public figure who has successfully argued against affirmative action by pointing to the essential inequality of the races and the way science proves this inequality. And yet I'm supposed, again, to be a great demon for pointing this out, that it's foolish to expect this to be a politically effective truth in this direct way. I know the reasoning very well, thank you.

I've mentioned it on this show before, if you listen. The woke point to racial disparities and claims that they're caused by discrimination or really by whites stealing shite from minorities, right? The white men be stealing my shit, man. You know, this discrepancy in wealth between the countries of the global north versus the countries of the global south are attributed to the same thing, by the way, to theft through colonialism. It's a dogma of leftist Marxism and global Negro communism that Africa, for example, is poorer than the rest of the world because colonialism robbed it of its natural development. Otherwise they say it could be the same as Europe today. I've argued against this for some time in this show and in writing and in real life

Korea after World War II was at the level of development equal to Africa and yet look at it today. Why is that? was the premise of a discussion some years ago on NPR and immediately they discarded oh no no obviously that can't have anything to do with race we all know that you know I mean that by the way I think they know it does but it's funny the way they try to go around it but Singapore and Korea in this connection were colonized also and Hong Kong oh it's very much a colony and yet it look quite different from Tanzania or God forbid Kinshasa so what gives but these These things are known to all. Haiti has been free of colonialism since 1800 and has had the most modern constitutions since the early 19th century. I'm one of the very few people

who's promoted the views of Count Gobineau on this show and elsewhere for years, to the point where I have conspiratard, conservacucks in my mentions saying that I'm a Russian ploy to increase racial dissensions and racial strife in the United States for teaching Gopinow, you see. But Gopinow, one of great natural experiments, he points out the differences between black Haiti and mulatto Dominican Republic sharing the same island. And you can actually see the difference from space between these two countries. But why am I saying all this? Because I'm not so stupid to think as the face fags I named earlier are claiming that that pointing out things like this will solve wokeness or the demand for racial redistribution whether within or between countries.

By the way, I hope they're not stupid enough to believe it themselves either. I hope they're just doing it because they want funding from certain moneyed people let's say who are interested in ending wokeness and so they see these guys and they say, oh, they're trying to do it with this new kind of argument even though it's not new so we will fund them. In my opinion, these gentlemen, many of whom are fired academics or disaffected academics who will not be able to find position in academia, they shouldn't have to make these promises. A lot of them do interesting research and should be funded based just on that because they study the truth. But to claim it's politically effective, I bristle at such political stupidity.

The belief in racial equality is a small part of those demands and it's just not true as some of these claim that there was ever a case where a conservative politician or let's say an anti-woke liberal, I dislike the term classical liberal but let's say someone who conceives of themselves that way, but there's never been a case where such a person has somehow gone to the public where affirmative action or wokeness was being debated and he He was bested in an argument publicly by a leftist claiming racial disparities are due to discrimination, and where the conservative or the liberal so-called lost the argument by refusing to claim in public that actually joggers are dumb by nature. And here are the graphs and the studies and such, that's absurd.

That's never happened in real life, that's something that may have happened on an online forum or on Twitter, not real life. I'll give you this weird example, you know. The world has just gone through a pandemic, you see. Old people are generally acknowledged to be disabled in some ways. No one denies this, especially regarding their weaker health, weaker immune systems. This is socially acknowledged and it's also legally, even their minds are weaker and acknowledged as such. There is no shame, social shame generally in agreeing to that. And legally they are exempt from all kinds of things and entitled to all kinds of things. The most expensive transfer program in history from youth to old, from able to disabled was just put in place during the pandemic.

The lives and futures of the youth were sacrificed for the old. Most of the prominent HBD, race realist, scientific race, whatever, bloggers, pundits, posters that I've mentioned and others as well, I think all of the ones I've mentioned if I'm not wrong, they all supported the lockdowns as well as the coercive vaccine policies, by the way. it was clear by April 2020 at the latest that the only people seriously at risk were the not even the old but the very old and very infirm. All to take away from the young and healthy and to benefit the group everyone acknowledges as essentially disabled. By the way a bigger transfer program probably in in just if you want to go by trillions of dollars worldwide then welfare from

Which is transferred from whites to blacks and Hispanics in the United States And I think it's bigger than that's ever been and that's of course huge. It's the equivalent of several Marshall plans since The Lyndon Johnson Great Society and so on so I don't know. What does this mean? I don't know. What do you think it means you can quibble of course and say all you want Yes, but these people only becomes that way in old age as all old people do but in their youth they were not that so it's not quite the same as racial disability which would be a constant throughout lifetime but so what how does this change actually what would happen how does it change the moral calculus that still leads to redistribution and in fact in the case of the old oppression and imprisonment

again on a scale which racial walkness has not ever really it helps to clarify things when you think this way when you realize that actually it is disability itself that is worshipped, and that if you promote race science under the current circumstances and current democratic arrangement, if you promote it to normal fags, without also an accompanying spiritual or political revolution, you will actually give them grounds for a more thorough wokeness. In other words, they will just redefine the truths you feed them as a disability, as some kind of criplet status that needs to be also redressed. And then what will you do? Have you heard of Malaysia? Malaysia is a nation that is majority melee and yet has affirmative action-wokeness for the melee majority against the Chinese minority.

And I don't think they're even claiming that the Chinese get more or get what they have by theft, but maybe they even agree that it's by merit, whether that should be hard work or inborn talent or whatever. And yet they still have quotas on Chinese ownership and such. Why? Because these matters are ultimately a consequence of ethnic competition and ethnic lobbying, not of opinions of racial worth and merit and such, which are always tailored to fit the situation. In fact, the stupid conservative who genuinely believes that it's all a consequence of culture, right, because that's, let's say, the conservative argument that is claimed by the human biodiversity people to be ineffective. The conservative will agree that there are disparities, but they'll say it's due to culture,

to family structure, and so on. But in what ways is that practically different from claiming it's a consequence of in-board racial inequality? Because the conservative view of culture actually amounts to the same thing in the end. It's not something, in other words, that you could change overnight. It's something that would take centuries to change in any case, right? Tocqueville and Burke, they don't need to make appeals to race science, and in fact Tocqueville disagreed with Gobineau on this matter of at least of publicizing race science and so on. I'm on Gobineau's side. make that clear as you know from listening to this show. But Tocqueville's argument is perfectly reasonable for doing away with wokeness and doing away

with affirmative action and many other things that are playing now on civil rights act and so on. And he doesn't need to appeal to race science, you know, that would at least allow people the pretense that they're not racist, which unfortunately is important to normal facts now. actually do that. The whole claim of you're born stupid and lousy and you're fated to be so unto the generations as long as you breed within your own race. It's a very depressing truth about human nature, you know, and most people won't want to accept that. It's something that not only blacks or whatever don't want to hear, but the majority of whites also don't want to hear that either. Most people, to go on quite a different moral tangent, most

Most people want to hear that they have what they have by their own hard work and such and not because that they're born, their blood is part of a race, they will reject your claims in part for that reason as well. But the conservative dumb who says wrongly that it's all a matter of culture, but it amounts to the same thing practically and politically anyway, right? Because no one is making the claim or will make the claim that you need to remove children from their parents before the age of five. I know Steve Saylor jokes about that, he says libtards are on the way to saying that to right racial disparities and racial wrongs you need to bring blacks up to par with whites, you need to remove their children from black homes in infancy. But that is a joke, everyone knows it won't happen.

Yet as long as it won't happen, what's the difference between the normie conservative argument? Conservatives did not lose because of the weakness of the rhetoric or the argument, they lost because they are weak politically for all kinds of reasons. In fact, I think the conservative dumb ends up being smarter than the human biodiversity or race realist nerd who says you should publicize from all channels that actually blacks and indios, you know, native, I don't want to say Hispanics because that includes a German from Argentina, but let's say that they're born dumb or something. If you claim that, it won't solve anything. And the pandemic, in my view, proves it. It's a society that worships disability and decrepitude, and redefines that as a disability

that needs to be redressed by political action, and a broad swathe of society will agree with it. Note also Calvin Klein adds, with obese, wail women, or more generally the push for fat acceptance, body positivity, and such. What is going on with that? It seems in the online favela, the telephone game retard bubble, there was some kind of attempt to claim that for example Calvin Klein having fat hog girls in their ads that this was a result of hyper-sexualization. This is what traditionalists and social conservatives claim. Can anyone explain that? How does that work? Are they admitting or claiming there is an innate uncontrollable drive to copulate with fat hog females with stinky pussy and that it's only social

norms of fascistic Western beauty that stops that from happening and that's why they weren't depicted in photographs that's actually what some of the left believes but what evidence is there for that no the reason you see ever more ads and models who are plus-size and even disabled isn't because of hypersexualization but because of spiritual Marxism which is not just an over compassionate emphasis on equality but the resentment of what is well turned out a hatred Titanic hatred of what is in fact beautiful and superior by nature. You see, just when I'm about to say this, they attack my throat. But yes, it's an attack on what is superior by nature, very much so. That's what leftism is. And that alone, the extolling of fat models should prove to you that publicizing race science

or the scientific basis for the inequality of the races to normal fags, it's not going to have the moral and political effects that these intellectuals are promising you. And If race science, which has anonymous posters and others, if it will have an effect in public, it will be indirect. I'm saying if as anonymous posters and others talk about it, which they should, but the effect will be long term and indirect. The public cover, however, as things stand now, if you want to work within the political system of the Western democracies, which I have no desire to, but some people want, but it's obvious that the public cover will have to remain some type of race blind meritocracy or something that gives normal fags, and I'm saying even smart, educated normal fags, not

just the masses, but preserves their illusion that they are nice, polite, non-racist beings. It's just hypocrisy is something people have to live with in political world, unfortunately. And no, you do not have to solve in their brains the argument for, well, what is it that explains racial disparities then? You know, people have a remarkable ability to hold contradictory ideas in their minds and often in the real world you have to let them. Let me give you an unsavory example. It is often said, this is not family show, put your children, take your children out of room. It is often said that Mediterranean sexuality allows a man to penetrate another man and not think of himself as gay and that that's not considered gay in the Mediterranean so

called world. It's not really true. There are gay activists who claim that and then there are people who casually also believe that. But it happens not exactly to be true. Actually perhaps on future episode I will talk in more detail because this was very popular thread I did, the mores, the sexual behavior of the third world which is now sold to you by Tate and others who I assume are being paid by nations like Qatar to promote the superior virtue of the third-world teaming working man, right, they stand against the Western gay movement and Western corruption and look you Western sluts are dressing in these skimpy outfits and we are the Muslim and other third-world man of virtue it's complete bullshit. English perverts used to go to

Morocco for boy sex because it was available there and not in England in ready to go so to speak and also that's true if you know anything about the Gulf, the morality of the Gulf states and actually of much of the Middle East anyone who's been to Iraq will tell you the rapey vibes you get from everyday men there and so on. But I actually I want to make a substantive point about the meaning of that morality because it's not quite as claimed by again some Some gay activists and on the other hand claim by others casually that in the Mediterranean world they claim being on top is not considered gay. That's not quite true. You go to a place like Brazil, for example, where I lived in the past and where such activities, let's say, are widespread.

In fact, transsexual culture exists in places like Brazil and Thailand long before wokeness and transsexual gender identity ideology arrived formally in the West or in Scandinavia or such. And that's an interesting subject of itself to see why traditionalist Buddhist and traditionalist Catholic Brazil, Buddhist of course referring to Thailand, they had tranny widespread transsexualism. I'm curious to know why. But in Brazil, it was considered maybe unsavory, but a relatively common occurrence for, let's say, a group of straight, drunk, working-class men to pick up a transsexual prostitute and fuck her or him, whatever you want to call it, in a taxi cab. I've heard of many such events, and not just with trannies, but with passive homosexuals and such.

That's a relatively frequent occurrence, but it's not the case that there was any conscious belief that being on top isn't gay. In fact, if you, say, would go to a normal Brazilian man and ask him that question of is that gay, they would readily tell you of course that's gay, that's homo, only homos do that. On the other hand, that same guy may also engage in that practice himself and not think of himself as gay as a consequence of it. And so how does that work? It works because again real life does not proceed according to any logical rigor, not even the rigor of an online forum debate. And people can, I'm sorry I gave you this unsavory example, but it's to make it very clear to you that people can hold on the most personal matters contradictory ideas in their

heads between what they are and what they do and so on and so forth. And so, no, actually, you don't have to take the bait of Mr. like Ibram Kendi, who claims that racial disparities being an organic development of freedom means that you're saying whites are superior to blacks. Of course, that's true. And of course, people will actually maybe even implicitly believe that. But you don't need to make that argument openly to best Mr. Kendi. You see, you don't need to. But this is what I'm saying. But this isn't my preference, I'm not a public figure actually, and I have no desire to run political movement or be in public. But I will also not go to men who do want to be in public or actually let me be equal,

women who want to be in public either and make them a promise, oh yeah you take my ideas, you talk these things, you talk, go be known in public and next thing you know you'll be a hero, you will win, you will stop wokeness. day now, they mentioned Charles Murray and they stopped wokeness. Yeah, Carl Benjamin disproved Mr. Hobbes. He disproved individualism and wokeness ended. Please, this is ridiculous, you know. But in any case, conversely, you may want to promote these ideas in public in a politically effective way, but that will have to be done under a political system quite different from our own, again, under a kind of dictatorship. And the only man who has thought through it all what the transition to dictatorship might look like is me.

I wrote my book for the main purpose to try to persuade well-placed military or political elites to reach for the gold ring and try to overthrow states in other countries. Excuse me, I'm a loyal citizen. But none of you are ready for that talk at all. None of you, in fact, are ready for any kind of political forethought of any kind. It's all about emoting in public, in Twitter. What do you stand for? What do you support? Do you denounce? Anyway. So now I turn to talk about a time that is more congenial to my tastes, where men who sought in ambitious ways were plentiful and some even ran state Renaissance Italy. I will be right back. And welcome back to show. By the way, the gentlemen's who I mentioned on a previous segment, the face fags, so-called

who discuss scientific racism, if you want to put it that way, or the scientific basis of group differences, human population genetics and such. I didn't mean to imply that they are, for example, against immigration to United States or Europe. There may be some of them, I don't know them, but some of them certainly are not. I know Mr. Banania is for immigration and I think actually the other ones that I mentioned are also for immigration. They may not be for immigration from let's say low IQ nations, but they are for let's say the status of what you'd call model minorities and for the continued migration of model minorities at least to the United States. I hope I'm not misrepresenting the views of anyone and I apologize if I am, I don't mean

to do that. I actually have not studied their writings closely on this matter. But as far as I know, their main focus is in ending wokeness or at least their main political claim is that they would end wokeness if these matters are discussed publicly or in other words end accelerated affirmative action. The relationship of so-called race science to migration restriction is more complicated and as I indicated from example of Orban and others, there's actually no real relationship between the two. You can have migration restriction as in Denmark that's not even based on nationalist considerations. You can have one that is based on nationalist and identitarian considerations, but from a traditional historical political point of view as in Hungary.

But the relationship between this last and graphs and charts regarding race and genetics is not clear at all. So you have many people who promote so-called HBD who are anti-nationalist and who stand against identitarianism and vice versa. So it's quite complicated matter. It's just that it's somewhat confused by online debates and people who jumble up ideas and and so forth, but regardless, to turn to more congenial matter, the Renaissance, as return of antiquity, sometimes is explained in this insipid word, humanism. And I want to make vivid for you what it mean really, which vividness becomes clear at the extremes. In the Renaissance, attempt was made, I mean, look, it's broad time phenomenon covered more than a century, often feuding figures who did not agree on everything.

I'd say the Renaissance really ended with the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno. But at its extreme, which it may not be on the average, but it's very revealing, at its extreme the Renaissance was full effort to get rid of medieval world, to reform it entirely, to get rid of even biblical religion and to replace it with a revived ancient paganism. There I said it, up to and including things like role-playing ancient pagan superstitions and prayers and such, which I will discuss these on a future episode. But more important, a spiritual turn toward a pagan, Greco-Roman form of life that extolled historical greatness and the individual, egotistic search for everlasting fame and self-distinction and such.

I'll give you some examples on this episode, which I think will be beginning of several on the Renaissance, maybe in a row. I remember in the beginning of Caribbean Rhythms, I promised you an episode on this figure, Marsilio Ficino, who is a man credited with reviving Plato and Platonism for the modern age and resurrecting him for Western Europe, Latin-speaking Europe, when he had fallen into obscurity. And he deserves his own episode, maybe. He made a kind of syncretism of Platonism and Christianity that was very influential for history of Europe thereafter and interesting in and of itself. But I'll discuss all these other crucial matters on this episode because, again, the matter of what it means to resurrect antiquity is in some ways more crucial to us, faced with

the same task, than antiquity itself is as an objective historical matter, I mean. Which in any case, if you are serious to go down this path, you will be forced to do, I mean, to consider antiquity in all its fullness in a way a mere historian could not do. To try maybe to understand the time of the Renaissance as the people living within it did. his ultimate task, I think of historical recreation for anyone. But the Renaissance was not a mere antiquarian or scholarly project to find out, well, isn't it interesting what those ancient Greeks thought? But through example of the ancient Greeks, nature itself was understood to be revealed again after it had been obscured by medieval barbarism and false teachings, and of Europe's

emerging free from Asiatic Jewish mythology into the light of day again. Let me read for you from Schopenhauer. Related matter. But if it comes to this, if the spirit of the ancients tied to their languages disappears from a literary and scientific education, then coarseness, incipidity and vulgarity will take possession of all literature. For the works of the ancients are the pole star for every artistic or literary effort. If it sets, you are lost. Even now, in the pitiable and puerile style of most writers, we notice that they have never written in Latin. Devotion to the authors of antiquity is very appropriately called the study of humanity. Remember I mentioned humanism, a kind of insipid word, but he makes

it not insipid here. Devotion to the authors of antiquity is very appropriately called the study of humanity. For through it the student above all becomes a human being again, since he enters into the world that was still free from all the buffoonery and absurdities of the Middle Ages and of Romanticism. Afterwards, mankind in Europe was so deeply infected with these that even now everyone comes into the world covered with them and is first to strip them off merely in order to become a human being again. Think not that your modern wisdom can ever take the place of that initiation into being a human being. You are not, like the Greeks and Romans, born free, unprejudiced sons of nature. In the first place, you are the sons of heirs of the crude Middle Ages and their folly and

nonsense, of infamous priestcraft, and of half-brutal, half-idiotic chivalry. Although both are now gradually coming to an end, you are still unable, for that reason, to stand on your own feet. Without the school of the ancients, your literature will degenerate into vulgar gossip and flat philistinesim. Therefore, for all these reasons, it is my well-meant advice that we put to an end, without delay, the Germanizing mania censured above." He says all this in the context of deploring the use of national languages, in this case German for petty nationalist reasons instead of using a universal language of scholarship and science like Latin which made communication easy between investigators of different nations

and also which Schopenhauer recognized along with Greek as a superior language compared to what he calls modern patois or peasant dialects, the modern European languages. Of course the German of our own time is so much poorer than the German Schopenhauer writes in and the English used and the other European languages used now same, much dumbed down. But you can say maybe English has now taken this role of a universal language for science, which would be a good thing maybe, because in the realm of the mind, of science and philosophy at least, I mean if not, let's say, if not of literature and novels and poetry, I believe it's important for different European nations to speak the same language for ease of communication.

But also it's not sufficient, which is why scholars now at high levels are expected to know at least three languages, French and German and such, or German and Italian and so on, because so much scholarship since 19th century is national for dumb reasons. So it was written in one of these national languages. So you have to learn them all, you know, although, you know, my experience with professors, they say they know these languages, but actually they don't, you know, they are, they claim, It's funny, they claim to be cosmopolitans, but they are in fact national chauvinists and they don't really learn other languages. Very rarely do they have any more than a rudimentary knowledge of Greek, for example, even when

they're classicists, not to speak of those in philosophy departments and such. That's not the result of vogue, that's a long-standing decline in standards. Anyway, in Schopenhauer's reasoning, where he talks about how and why contact with the ancients re-humanizes you, it's because, well, it's much the same point Winkelmann you know, I had shown an episode on Winkelmann before, that the Greeks compared to us had access to nature, but we, after the barbarization of the Middle Ages and the rule of priests with their stupid dogmas that warped not only the minds of men but also eventually their bodies in multiple ways, our only way back to nature is through the study and emulation of the Greeks. The principle, by the way, that Schopenhauer takes farther in regards to religion in a

different way when he attacks Islam, and it's an analogous point he makes. I might as well read on this episode for you, his attack on Islam. It's very interesting. One moment. I am reading now from world as will and representation, temples and churches, pagodas and mosques in all countries and ages, in their splendor and spaciousness testify to man's need for metaphysics, a need strong and ineradicable which follows close on the physical. The men of a satirical frame of mind could of course add that this need for metaphysics is a modest fellow content with meager fare. Sometimes it lets itself be satisfied with clumsy fables and absurd fairy tales. If only they are imprinted early enough they are for men adequate explanations of his

existence and supports for his morality. Consider the Quran for example. This This wretched book was sufficient to start a world religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for 1200 years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value. Such things show that the capacity for metaphysics does not go hand in hand with the need for it. Yet it will appear that, in the early ages of the present surface of the earth, things

were different, and those who stood considerably nearer to the beginning of the human race and to the original source of organic nature than do we, also possessed both greater energy of the intuitive faculty of knowledge and a more genuine disposition of mind. They were thus capable of a purer and more direct comprehension of the inner essence of nature, and were thus in a position to satisfy the need for metaphysics in a more estimable manner. Thus were originated in those primitive ancestors of the Brahmins, the Rishis, the almost superhuman conceptions recorded in the Upanishads of the Vedas. Yes, uh, yes, isn't that nice? It caused huge commotion on Twitter when I posted that last week, I think. And so far, for whatever reason, Schopenhauer is undefeated for causing insane chimpouts,

Whether it's this or his opinions on Gothic architecture, or on women, or many things you can look into his writings, I think would cause similar reaction. Is it the clarity of his style and aggression of the ideas? I don't know. But nothing causes such rage except my own words and book maybe, which in any case are inspired by Schopenhauer as well. But anyway, yes, the full apprehension of nature in all its light was available maybe to certain ancient peoples, relative to us maybe, but not to us for sure. And it is for this reason that study of them, not just for antiquarian interest. And so when you read what I just read, you can compare it in your mind to what is said by Winkelmann regarding the same individual arts. And then also to Machiavelli

when he says at the beginning of book discourses, Machiavelli discourses, I might as well just read it for you. He says the same thing. This is from Machiavelli discourses. On the attack throw, god damn it! Ah, okay. When we consider the general respect for antiquity and how often to say nothing of other examples, a great price is paid for some fragments of an antique statue, which we are anxious to possess to ornament our houses with, or to give to artists who strive to imitate them in their own works. And when we see, on the other hand, the wonderful examples which the history of ancient kingdoms and republics presents to us. The prodigies of virtue and of wisdom displayed by the kings, captains, citizens and legislators who have sacrificed themselves for their

country. When we see these I say more admired than imitated or so much neglected that not the least trace of this ancient virtue remains. We cannot but at the same time as much be surprised as afflicted. The more so as in the differences which arise between citizens or in the maladies to which they are subjected we see these same people have recourse to the judgments remedies prescribed by the ancients. The civil laws are in fact nothing but decisions given by their jury consults in which, reduced to a system, direct our modern jurists in their decisions. And what is the science of medicine but the experience of ancient physicians, which their successors have taken for their guide? And yet to fund a republic,

maintain states, to govern the kingdom, organize an army, conduct a war, dispense justice, and extend empires you will find neither prince nor republic nor captain nor citizen who has recourse to the examples of antiquity. This neglect I am persuaded is due less to the weakness to which the vices of our education have reduced the world than to the evils caused by the proud indolence which prevails in most of the Christian states and to the lack of real knowledge of history the true sense of which is not known or the spirit of which they do not comprehend. Thus, the majority of those who read it take pleasure only in the variety of events which history relates, without ever thinking of imitating the noble actions, deeming that not only difficult, but impossible.

As though heaven, the sun, the elements, and men had changed the order of their motions and power, and were different from what they were in ancient times. Wishing therefore, so far as in me lies, to draw mankind from this error, I have thought it proper to write upon those books of Titus Livius, that have come to us, and tired, despite the malice of time, touching upon all those matters which, after a comparison between the ancient and modern events, may seem to me necessary to facilitate their proper understanding. In this way, those who read my remarks may derive those advantages, which may be the aim of all study of history." And although the undertaking is difficult, and so, OK, he goes on, and you, if you still

want another parallel example of this same, you read Vasari, Lives of the Artist, not the whole book because it's long, you won't start that way, but in the preface of Vasari's Life of the Artists, I mean, which isn't very long at all, you can probably read it in about half an hour, preface to Vasari's Life of Artists you can find online. I will not read it on this episode because it's slight long. But it's actually pretty nice history of Italian peninsula from ancient Roman to, from ancient Roman times to the times of his days, Renaissance times. From the point of view, of course, of visual arts, but he deals also with historical political events, how the visual arts were lost in later Rome, even before it was sacked by the barbarians and robbed later by the Byzantine Greeks.

And then how the arts were slowly reintroduced and recovered, not really so much from Byzantine styles, which Vasari considers primitive, but from improving on these by simultaneously going back to nature and back to antiquity. actually let me read for you just very short passage from Vasari from his life of Giotto this isn't from the preface but it's actually constructed the way that Plutarch parallel lives is or Diogenes Lertius lives of the philosophers is where he gives short biographies of each of the great Renaissance masters but I'm reading now from his life of Giotto there in a little time by the aid of nature and the teaching of Cimabue the boy Giotto not only equalled his master, Cimabue, but freed himself from the rude manner of the Greeks,

he means the Byzantines, and brought back to life the true art of painting, introducing the drawing from nature of living persons which had not been practiced for 200 years, or at least if some had tried it they had not succeeded very happily. Giotto painted among others, as may be seen to this day in the chapel of the Podestales palace at Florence, Dante Alighieri, his contemporary and great friend and no less famous a poet than Giotto was a painter. Okay and I would recommend you read if you are interested yes as a preface to Vasari which is of general interest even for someone not too curious about the visual arts as such but who wants no history and then you may want to follow it up if this interests you. Read the life of

Cimabu and Giotto because they're very short and near the beginning but you can just look up the lives of individual artists whose work you may have liked, who interest and excite you. For example, I may have read on this show, or certainly on my Twitter account, I've posted from the life of Paolo Uccello, who was a genuine artist, not just artist, but he seems actually to have been autistic in the real sense, not the internet sense. He was obsessed with the problem of perspective and of drawing animal, but especially of perspective. And and you can look up his paintings online first to see what I mean, Paolo Uccello. Or just read Vasari's most involved biography, that of Michelangelo, and then compare what he says to Winkelmann's words on Michelangelo, where both have the same reasoning.

They want to recover the spirit of antiquity, and that's why they're looking into the details of Michelangelo's genius, and it can get quite technical in discussing the details of art production, if you're interested in that. But in those very details at the micro level, you see the way modern genius resurrected Greek fullness of nature and improved on it. But anyway, how did this happen? Why? Is there a common thread that unites the reintroduction of Greek antiquity in the arts, in politics, in thought and spirit more generally? I believe there is, although it's hard to find the origin or common thread of why all this happened. but I will try to explain a few main very interesting strains on this introductory episode

when I come back from break, meaning how and why through what people did Greek vision was introduced to modern Europe through Italian Renaissance. I will be right back. paganism and ancient power in modern times by which I mean also renaissance time Italy take place especially, you know, 1400s Florence in very showy way, where legend goes Cosimo de' Medici, head of Florence and banking financial family that took over Florence government for quite a while, I will comment more on this in a moment, but the legend goes that he refounded Plato's Academy, and I'll read now from article by James Hankins, the most famous of all stories about the Platonic Academy of Florence is the story of its founding. According to the traditional account Cosimo

de' Medici, during the Council of Florence in 1439, repeatedly heard the neo-pagan philosopher Genestus Pletho, delivering lectures on Plato and was inspired by his contact with the Byzantine to refound the Platonic Academy in his own city, Florence, the new Athens of Italy. Recognizing, however, that the time was not yet ripe for such an undertaking, he bided his time for almost a quarter of a century until he recognized in the young Marsilio Ficino the instrument through which his design might be accomplished. Noticing his attraction to Platonic philosophy, Cosimo arranged for the young man to learn Greek. course Cosimo gave Ficino a manuscript of the complete works of Plato, a house in Florence and a house in some versions a villa, his own villa at Carreggi, which

was to be the center of the new Platonic Academy. These gifts were bestowed in 1462, the year which is usually taken to be the precise foundation date of the Florentine Academy. Under Cosimo's patronage, continued by his descendants Piero di Cosimo Lorenzo and Piero di Lorenzo, the Academia Carreggiana flourished and became the spiritual home of the Florentine Renaissance in the later Quattrocento, numbering among its memberships such luminaries as Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola, Cristoforo Landino, and Lorenzo il Magnifico himself. This is clearly... Anyway, okay, so Hankins goes on, but he doesn't think this story is true, by the way. He thinks mostly it's a fabulation of history, as well as part of Ficino's own self-promotion. And if you want

to read his debunking of this myth as well as the history of the debates surrounding whether or not an actual Platonic academy was refounded from antiquity in Florence, you can read Hankins' articles on these matters. Hankins, by the way, is a portly man, really a very fat man, an obese man. I don't attack him. He's a very good scholar on Ficino and on Renaissance Italy and many other things. I ran into him once. He was fat man with moustache. And he, according not to me, I don't know these things. He was not my friend, I didn't know him. My friends, in a way, was Harvey Mansfield. He told me about him that he was only one of two conservatives on Harvard's faculty, the other being Harvey Mansfield himself, which I don't care who

really knows it now. I like Harvey Mansfield and actually the day we ran into Hankins, you will say I name drop now, but it's somewhat funny story. We were having lunch someplace called Grafton Street, which is pop type thing, pub, and Mansfield scream at waitress because she didn't bring right size Guinness. And this took me aback because he seems such nice but he snapped at her hard and maybe this took me out of my polite outwardness too. So I start to tell him, I start spurring out about South Africa and about apartheid, you see. And he looks around uncomfortably and it turns out that the man sitting next to me at the next table over was a Congo gentleman. And Harvey Mansfield just politely stopped me and says,

you know, you have to distinguish between natural right as such and what's possible in the modern world. I hope I'm not being indiscreet, but actually relatively few people listen to this show and fewer still to the later parts of it. So I can tell you sometimes personal anecdote like this, but I didn't know Hankins at all. He just told me that fat man, he didn't say, okay, maybe he is a fat man, but good man. But a lot of the older conservatives, I mean, the really older ones, not those of the age, say, of full boomers, who are often genuinely delusional, like Bill Gates' age, usually delusional. But, and okay, he doesn't pretend to be conservative, but the older conservatives, many of them are very much aware of the truth, but they think it's prudent in a limited world.

They think discretion is best, which I actually disagree with them because if they are not running for office or being in politic or something like this, I think the purpose of scholars and even of having tenure, as well as thinkers in general, is to speak the plain unvarnished truth without concern for its political significance, but I think maybe some are right in so far as its political potential in the immediate sense anyway goes. And again, it's not true that wokeness or any of its predecessors is born out of a genuine belief in the natural equality of races, although this is a lie that has to be opposed, again and not if you're a politician, but it has to be a poll, but again, the naiveté is to expect that opposing this lie will cure wokeness

or that the consequences of wokeness in public life, whereas the public as a whole, the masses, and also so-called elites, will most likely need an anti-racist fig leaf to do away with wokeness and affirmative action. But that's for others to concern themselves. Anyway, to go back to the reintroduction of Platonism and actually paganism to modern world from antiquity. Although Hankins denies that the Academy was refounded in Florence in any full and direct sense of the term, he thinks there was some very informal group around Ficino that wasn't really important for the propagation of his thought, which he thought Ficino did mainly through his writings, but he thinks the word Academy, as used in Ficino's letters for example, refers

to simply the study of the Platonic dialogues and commentary on them, that that's a metaphorical use of the word academy, which it's important to note that the biggest gift that Cosimo de' Medici, the Florentine statesman made to Ficino, was actually not a house to hold meetings in or as a recreation of the ancient academy, and it was not any formal institution or organization, but actually the physical copy of Plato, the complete collection of Plato's works in Greek, which at the time was exceedingly rare, almost no one owned such a thing, not even the Vatican possessed such a thing. And it's very possible it was brought from Byzantium and maybe brought over by the man I mentioned in the paragraph I read, Gemistos Plethon, which okay, who was he?

Because very striking character in history, Plethon, he was the court philosopher of the last Byzantine kings. And although born in Constantinople, he lived in the Peloponnese. And it's in a place where you might least expect this kind of crazy thing, right? you think the Orthodox Church, very dogmatic, the Byzantines, they don't really have, excuse me, you might not think they do, you might, excuse me, you might not think they have a philosophical, rational theology tradition. You might expect it to have been an obscurantist oriental despotism where any deviation from theological rightness was punished harshly. And indeed, Platon's books were later burned by the patriarch of Constantinople, but during his life, he was backed and supported by the Byzantine court, even though Platon openly

rejected Christianity. He wanted full revival of pagan antiquity, pagan polytheism, a total reorganization of the Greek state according to Platonic doctrines, which is this result of his own eccentricity or of the fact that the Byzantine state was at this point on its last legs and in such a critical position that, well, why it matter anymore? We might as well go full crazy. Plethon attended Council of Florence in what I just read for you in 1439. This was a kind of ecclesiastical meeting to discuss whether Eastern and Western churches should reunite. He voted against it because although he hated the Eastern Church, he hated the Latin Church even more. But that's just 14 years or so before the fall of Constantinople.

So really Byzantium actually was on its last legs and it had been a rump state at this moment for some time, maybe even the kings were willing to entertain them, the most radical last-ditch measures. By the way, the real fall of Constantinople was in 1204, during the Fourth Crusade, when it was sacked by the West. Although a Byzantine state was re-established after that, it was not the same one that had existed from before 1204. It was much more Greek in character, whereas before 1204, they more openly called themselves Roman, and it was more ecumenical in character and universalist. Its very Greek character, Hellenic character, became much more pronounced after its re-establishment. And its fall to the Ottomans in 1453 was, it was a miracle I'm saying it stuck on for that long even.

It was just never what it had been before, it's sacked by the West in 1204. It was a very weak regional power. And what I will read for you now from Steven Runciman's book, The Last Byzantine Renaissance, which is really a collection of lectures by Runciman that I can't recommend because it's not that interesting. Not only his presentation, but also he's always a good writer, but the figures he discusses are not that exciting. But it is remarkable that even after the destruction by the so-called Franks in 1204, Constantinople managed to have its own mini-renaissance of scholarship and so on before its final end. And I shouldn't say it's completely powerless, I think even on the last episode or the most

recent episode, the one before that, I may have mentioned to you is that it was the Constantinople after this date that was responsible for the destruction of the empire of Charles of Anjou through this conspiracy of the Sicilian Vespers, and that it's certainly a book by Ransyman that I do recommend. But by the way, as to blaming the West for the fall of Constantinople, its sacking in 1204, I don't know that you can apportion moral blame in history. That's a very hard thing to do. There's blame to go around because before 1204, the Genoan merchants who resided in Constantinople were massacred, you see, with possibly the blessing of the emperor. So there was bad blood going around on all sides, maybe blame on all sides.

Anyway, it's important to remember that unlike in the West, where Plato certainly had almost been forgotten and was no longer read at this point, many other ancient Greek authors also say forgotten in the West. But this was not the case in Byzantium, where they had been read continuously since antiquity. And most of the scholars that Runciman talks about, especially in this last flowering, in, let's say, 1300s, 1400s, they considered themselves Hellenic full heirs of Homer, excuse me, of Plato and so on, despite being Christians. But no one of them went as far as Plethon, who wanted a full return to pagan Hellenism. Here let me read for you, okay? But while he journeyed from the Peloponnese to Constantinople, here Ransyman's talking to about another Byzantine scholar.

George Gemistos, self-surnamed Plethon, who had been born in Constantinople, traveled in the opposite direction to Mistra in the Peloponnese on the advice of the Emperor Manuel to carry on his teaching as far away from the watchful eyes of the great church of the imperial city, excuse me, as far away as possible from the watchful eyes of the church. Plethon was born in about 1355. It was in about 1393 that he moved to Mistra in the Peloponnese where he enjoyed the protection of the enlightened despot Manuel's second son, Theodore, and his charming Italian wife, Cleopi Malatesta. Platon was the one scholar of the time who saw no difference between the inner and the outer learning, and was quite ready to jettison established Christian doctrine in favor of his own philosophical system.

He particularly disliked apophatic theology. God gave us reason, he said, in order that we should understand everything. He had little use for Constantinople and none for the Roman tradition of empire. We are Hellenes by race and culture, he wrote. His reason was dominated by his devotion to Plato. He loathed Aristotle and held him responsible for the wrongheadedness of Christian doctrine. His aim was to save the Greek world by reforming it along Platonic lines. He sent his proposals, worked out in considerable detail in memoranda to the Emperor. They dealt with the structure of society, with finance and taxation, with the armed forces, with agricultural policy and with education, all planned in a superb disregard to actual political conditions and to probable human reactions.

Had his schemes been practicable, they would have created an unpleasantly fascist state. But at least they showed the workings of a courageously independent and original intellect. His religious views were even more startling, considering the times. George of Trebizond, who disliked him, declared that he openly advocated a religion which he declared to be neither Christian nor Muslim, but akin to the old paganism, which he hopefully foresaw the whole world would soon adopt. His book, On the Lords, in which he expressed what he really thought on religion, was never published. Only a few extracts have survived. The full text was discovered after his death by the despot of the Morea, Demetrius, shortly after the Turkish capture of Constantinople.

Demetrius sent it to George Scholarius, who was now the patriarch Gennadius. The patriarch, as he read pages in which God was usually called Zeus and the Trinity consisted of a supra-essential creator, the mind of the world and the soul of the world, and maybe in which doctrines more shocking still were aired, decided rather reluctantly, but not surprisingly that the manuscript must be burned. Platon, though he had many friends even among the scholars whom his views appalled, had little influence on his fellow countrymen. Had the Empire survived, he might have had disciples to carry on his message. But Constantinople fell only two years after his death. It was on the west that he left his mark. The Emperor John VIII nominated him as one of the delegates to the Council of Ferrara-Florence.

It was an inappropriate choice. Platon had no use for the religious debates. Much as he disliked the Greek Church, he disliked the Latin Church even more and somehow avoided signing the Act of Union. But he greatly enjoyed himself in Florence, where he gave lectures on Plato to enraptured audiences. It was in Italy, not in Greece, that his memory was to be honored. Isn't that interesting, by the way? He read Plato and wanted to found in the 1400s a state that would look according to Ransim and very much like modern fascism. I didn't read to you the details. It has to do with total reorganization of society in a similar tripartite way I believe as in Plato is complete something new, complete discarding of all tradition. And Mussolini was also a reader of Plato's Republic by the way.

It's really odd you know. I guess these men did not get to note that Plato was just joking and that he didn't really mean what he said and that the Republic or the laws were just a set of books to show the impossibility of political solution to the problem of life and of the wise man's role in political life or whatever other distortions like this are traded now by some, you may have heard Plato didn't mean or so. But maybe I do episode on just that later. It's interesting matter of what did Plato mean by the crazy ideas of the republic and the laws? Was Khomeini, for example, wrong or misguided to found the Iranian Islamic Republic according to the ideas gathered from Plato's laws, such as the night council, and many such things.

That aside anyway, Plathon, amazing character in history, he's like a man coming to continent Atlantis, meeting savages, teaching natives to build electricity. His influence on the development of Renaissance and of European history, very great I think and underappreciated. Whether or not he met Cosimo de' Medici himself directly, he met many Italian minds of time interested in Greek learning. I think he met Leonardo Bruni, he's a great historian, also a translator of Greek, who, by the way, I think it was Bruni who translated one of Plato's letters but did not want to translate the Republic, considering it's something like, I quote, Bruni said it's something abominable and abhorrent to our customs. It was a dangerous

book, Plato's Republic, and it was perceived as such by people at the time as a politically effective book or corpus of books. Let me try to give you example. It's not just a game. It's not seen as just a game of intellectual fiddling at the time. In Florence, there was conspiracy. This is much later than what I'm talking now. Not much later, a few decades after the events I'm talking when Plathon came. In Florence, there was conspiracies called pazzi conspiracy, pazzi. As such, there was not necessarily intellectual content of interest in genesis of this conspiracy. It was just typical mad godfather type thing. One mafia family, in this case the Pazzi, trying to remove the Medici from power in Florence and to replace them.

1478 against Lorenzo de' Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and his brother actually ended up being assassinated, Lorenzo escaped. It failed, and the description of what happened then is very hot, very godfather-like. Here's what happened to the Pazzi. Francesco Salviati, with a number of Jacopo Pazzi's men, went to the Palazzo della Signoria and attempted to take control of it, but were unsuccessful. You see, the New World Order is making me stutter while I try to read for you interesting things. This, what I'm reading for you, is nothing special, just the Wikipedia entry for the the Pazzi conspiracy is interesting enough for a recounting of events of what happened, the vengeance of the Medici. The Florentines did not rise against the Medici as the Pazzi had hoped they would.

He captured, he was captured and with Francesco de Pazzi and several others was hanged from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria. Many of the conspirators as well as many people accused of being conspirators were killed. More than 30 died on the day of the attack. Most were soon caught and summarily executed. and executed. Renato de Pazzi was lynched and hanged. Jacopo de Pazzi, head of the family, escaped from Florence but was caught and brought back. He was tortured then hanged from the Palazzo della Signoria next to the decomposing corpse of Salviati. He was buried at Santa Croce but the body was dug up and thrown into a ditch. It was then dragged through the streets and propped up at the door of the Palazzo Pazzi where the rotting head was mockingly used as a door knocker. From

From there it was thrown into the Arno. Children fished it out and hung it from a willow tree, flogged it and threw it back into the river. Lorenzo managed to save the nephew of Sixtus IV, that's the pope who was involved in the plot by the way, but you know, and he ended up actually excommunicating the Medici for this godfather treatment they did on their opponents, but I continue reading. Lorenzo managed to save the nephew of Sixtus IV, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, who was almost certainly an innocent pawn of the conspirators, as well as two relatives of the conspirators. The main conspirators were hunted down throughout Italy between 26 April, the day of the attack, and 20 October, 1478, a total of 80 people were arrested and executed.

Bandini dei Baroncelli, who had escaped to Constantinople, was arrested and returned in fetters by the Sultan Mehmed II. And still in Turkish clothing he was hanged from a window of the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo on 29th December 1479. There were three further executions. The Pazzi were banished from Florence and their lands confiscated. All their property confiscated. Their name and their coat of arms were suppressed perpetually. The name was erased from public registers and all buildings and streets carrying it were renamed. Their shield with its dolphins was everywhere obliterated. Anyone named Pazzi was to take a new name. married to a posse was barred from public office, okay? Now that is a real genocide,

literally the extirpation of a whole family line, in this case to show Godfather's style what happens when you mess with the mafia Medici. Anyway, unfortunately quite a few of Piccino's Platonist students, they were mixed up in this conspiracy. I'm not saying there was necessarily as such anything platonic about the conspiracy itself, but it is very telling to me that both in the Renaissance and in antiquity, Platonists and academicians were attracted to this type of thing, the scheming, and were recognized by their opponents always as such and blamed for it. In ancient times, Athenaeus, the writer, goes on at length about all the tyrannical and mafia activities of the men in Plato's Academy and how many tried to take over the states.

succeeded he says in one particular case Chiron of Pelin ended up redistributing the wives of the great men to the slaves and that he had learned these from Plato's writings very interesting but many others were unsuccessful and were hung as outlaws and such and I'm saying even in the Renaissance it was recognized as an essential and not incidental connection whether it was fair to make that judgment or not but it was recognized by people at the time, so much so that in the aftermath of the failure of this conspiracy, and Ficino went to great lengths to erase the names of his students from his own records who had taken part in this conspiracy, he wanted to deny that they were his students and so on. In the same way that Plato's followers too, but Socrates, some of his followers like Plato

and Xenophon tried to deny that he was the teacher of men like Critias and so on. But it was too late in the case of Ficino, it was well known. And some of the most noted Italian scholars and humanists of the time, who history has since claimed were part of this Platonic academy, for example, Poliziano, who is a very famous man, he translated Catullus and many such things. Actually he offered the Portuguese king to write a modern epic based on the Portuguese conquests and discoveries of new worlds, of their time in India and other parts of new worlds by sea, saying that these achievements in Africa, you know, saying that these achievements are rivaled those of Alexander and of ancient kings, which didn't end up happening in the hands of Poliziano.

It was Louis the Camouge who would later write that epic, The Lusiad. But the Europeans of the time, you see, understood the revival of antiquity as this, primarily what I said just now, and I'll cover this in quite some detail on future episodes, but They understood it to be the resurrection of great drive for fame and self-distinction in the style of Alexander and Caesar, the search for eternal fame and glory, which is why this is the birthplace of the individual in the modern world and of his egotism as a self-confident genius type. It's not, as you might hear from post-Marxist bunglers, in the thought of Locke or such, John Locke and so on. But I will discuss this on next episode. I'm just tired of this tedious discussion you see now. Is it individualism or is it collectivism?

Which team are you on, reader? It's a dumb discussion without content and not relevant to any problems today, I think. Arguing from first principle is just a waste. I can make an individualist or collectivist so-called case for any matter today one way or another, you know. You can't start from these fake categories. And the individual is not a bad thing, not as conceived in the Renaissance revival of ancient Greek drive for greatness. It's only actually I think constipated priestly types who react against that what I just said and want to refrain problems in those, you know, they like the kind of what they've called the mama's polenta type religious traditionalism. It's you know the image of the longhouse from my book which is somewhat misinterpreted but

I'll talk this some other episode like I say. My point is, take just this one Italian humanist, Poliziano, who is quite well-known, well-studied still by scholars today, and he turned away after the Pazzi conspiracy, not only he turned away from Ficino because of unsavory connections, but also he turned away from the study of Platonism as such, which again, what I'm telling you, it was felt at the time by people involved in these events that something was off about Platonism, specifically suspicious about. But this is all very interesting. It's possible that both the Platonic arguments were used by the Medicis to justify their own rule in the beginning of their time as leaders of Florence, but also that later the

latent radicalism of Platonism burst out in unexpected ways even against their own rule. And Lorenzo de' Medici, by the way, supported not only Platonists but also Aristotelians and in general wholesale revival of ancient wisdom and glory of wherever it was possible. It's just I think Hankins is right that it's mostly a matter of branding and of history by Ficino and some of his followers that the Medicis came down to us as special patrons of Platonism. That said, anyway, I think there is something to be said for their special relation to Platonism, I'll tell you why. An argument he could make that I don't fully accept, but that is interesting to consider. I'll tell you why. Let's go back to Cosimo de' Medici. This, you can say, founder of Medici dynasty in Florence, in a way.

He was interested in Platonism specifically as a way to buttress or justify his own type of rule. That's true, I think. So in this sense, it's very nice that Cosimo de' Medici was most of all keen on Ficino translating Plato's laws. That's the first book he wanted Ficino to translate. That's one of Plato's most political and radical works. And it's interesting to look for a moment into why he may have wanted to do this, not only regarding my matter in this episode, what means a resurrection of antiquity, but also I think it has direct parallels to our very day, not just our time in general, but right now. Cosimo de' Medici's interest, why was this? What were the Medicis? They were merchant banking family.

They came to power Florence as a result of their wealth and their brains and had no traditional sources of legitimacy in the Florentine state, nothing like what, say, for example, a local king might have or a noble. They had no such title. They had no ecclesiastical authority. They didn't even have as much, let's say, prestige and glamour as the condottieri or or the mercenary leaders who set up states in North Italy. Those at least had military glory on their side, whereas these were just merchants. In Plato's ranking, the merchant class, much like in India, is one of the lowest-case in fact. And this prejudice against merchant activity is an old aristocratic prejudice across many cultures actually.

So although in Italy it was not quite as bad as in some other parts of Europe you can say, That certainly in a place like Florence, unlike Venice, it wouldn't have been very legitimate thing to be a merchant lord, especially, you know, the Medici came to power by giving usurious and other such loans to church and nobility and kings and such, they became fabulously wealthy in that way. On a side note, I should say Mr. Bukele of El Salvador, who just posted that if you don't give the power to kings, it goes to merchants, and that is a bad thing. And in our context, he may be right. But as a historical matter, I don't know, there were merchant states that were very well run. Venice, for example, was a patrician merchant republic.

The big merchants were also the local urban patricians, the aristors, and so was the Dutch Republic at its height. I think the Hanseatic League was also run by merchant families and very well run states. And then, of course, there's the case of the Medici, where a merchant family or a banking family became king-like in its power, you could say tyrannical, and actually became renowned throughout history for its glory in supporting the arts. But how did this happen? Is it because Cosimo de' Medici and later Lorenzo de' Magnificent de' Medici, they reformed the Florentine state from what it had been in medieval times? I think there's good evidence to believe that their interest in Plato was because they saw

Platonic philosophy as giving legitimacy to these radical reforms that put power in their hands. It also gave them good ideas for how to do it. It wasn't even that the Medici had no legitimacy really as rulers, but that, I mean, they didn't. But it's even worse than that. Florence was not even technically sovereign. It was subject technically to the emperor, but it's just that the emperor, Holy Roman emperor, no longer visited to enforce his claims. But the attempt to reform Florence's medieval constitution involved very plainly doing away with statutory and customary law and with the class of lawyers and priests who interpreted and knew that kind of medieval law and to replace them with a vision of law as fluid to the circumstance.

In other words, a leader who embodied the law and who ruled by his worldly wisdom and was able to adapt the law to necessity and circumstance and to this end, who could reform the state along irrational grounds, replacing traditional authority and mixed government with its kind of medieval commune revolving positions, replacing this with specialized candor of experts who ruled by their claim to ability or wisdom or such things. And so although at times in Florence, as also later in Europe of 1500s and so on, Plato was dismissed as too much of a utopian and idealist, on the other hand, platonic ideas regarding the kingship of wisdom and the necessity of reform of medieval customary and statutory law and its embodiment instead in a ruler who could proceed according to reason and

nature whose claim to rule was in combining power and wisdom. This was very much a thing. And in the case of the Medicis, very much so indeed, if you look at the descriptions of Cosimo de' Medici throughout his life, his claim to wisdom was constantly propagated and recognized not only in his state, throughout other European countries, and not only by artists and scholars who Cosimo founded, but this fame for wisdom and intelligence spread to other leaders of other states at the time, so they can't stop praising this guy Cosimo, super smart, even culminate with outright claims that he was Plato's philosopher king reborn, marrying again power and wisdom and using that alone as a claim to rule, since he had actually no other claim to rule. And for example, in Argyropoulos,

John Argyropoulos was another Byzantine refugee who ended up teaching in Florence. He became well-known scholar in Italy. You can look him up, but he translated Aristotle's politics. And in the preface to that, he called Cosimo de' Medici, called him Plato's philosopher king. And this is actually stated quite plainly, this case in an article that I will read from now so you can see I'm not making such things up. Anyway, actually I think I want to take quick music breaks. I love to listen musics. Do you enjoy musics on this episode? I will be right back. Then I read to you from this article. I'm back to show and in the meantime I saw that Iran carried out some attacks. I don't know if multiple attacks. They are saying ballistic missile including the murder

of a major Kurdish politician in North Iraq and possibly other attacks and this no surprise if it actually happened I don't know if it happened you see reports like this all the time on Twitter who knows if true but again if it is why should it be surprised Iran sees a senile administration why would it not try to push its luck I wouldn't be surprised if China and others do also Also, when you see doddering old, they say, well, you know, weakness, or even the image of weakness is provocative, whereas Trump had psycho-unpredictable strength. And I think maybe even some people in American establishment miss him, miss the fact that things were not such a mess under Trump, that he was only one of last few decades presidents to not start a new war. I think you can't take that away from him.

Now I hear he won the Iowa caucus, which is happening today in the United States, the first primary of Republicans. Let's see. That's not too much of a surprise. Anyway, I told you I would read from before break, and I will now. I'm reading from an article, a very basic article, not that interesting, but ideas expressed very plainly historical situation in Florence and why Cosimo de' Medici and the House of Medici in general was interested in the promotion of Platonism in particular in Florence, even beyond let's say the general glory that came to a statesman at the time if they supported the learning of ancient Greek and Latin and the resurrection of antiquity in general. But in the interest of Plato in particular, the claim is made here, and I don't believe

it completely myself, by the way, but it's an interesting idea. But the claim is made that the Medici had special interest in Plato because it helped legitimize their otherwise illegitimate rule in Florence and also gave them particular ideas for how to enact, let's say, a despotic, an enlightened despotism. They thought they saw that maybe in Plato. So I read now, Jean Bodin made a penetrating comment on these changes in stating that Florence in the time of Lorenzo de' Medici resembled Athens in the time of Pericles. By the way, if I stumble on this reading sometimes, they scrambled, they're doing something to my text as I look at it, they scramble it. You see the way they try sabotage, but I keep reading.

Anyway, that Florence under Lorenzo de' Medici resembled Athens in the time of Pericles. For then, as in Athens, the commonwealth in show was popular, but in effect a mere tyranny. For that Lawrence, Lorenzo, governed all alone. Baudouin also helps to show why Plato was so relevant to 15th century Florence when he says that Plato thought the best kind of state is a mixture of monarchy and democracy, In contrast to the aristocracy preferred by Aristotle and himself. Hobbes too noted that Thucydides preferred Athens under the rule of Peisistratus or when it was democratic in name but in effect monarchical under Pericles to the period when it was mixed of the few and the many. I'm not sure if that's true, but I go back to reading now.

This combination of monarchy and democracy has no place in Aristotle's popular classification of constitutions, but in fact provides the model for our early modern state that concentrates power in one man or assembly of man, ruling with the consent so-called of all the rest. The paradox whereby Plato helped to justify post-1494 republicanism is a clue to understanding his role in early modern Europe. Outwardly rejected, as he had been in Florence for his idealism, Plato's ideas nevertheless remained relevant as intellectual underpinning to the growing elitism and professionalism of government. For although the specific situation of Florence in the 15th century was not repeated elsewhere, other states experienced similar political and administrative problems and similar social unrest.

This was also the period when Plato's writings became more familiar thanks to the numerous editions of his works in Latin that followed the Florence Edizio Princeps of 1484-85. Here the Florentine experience may be useful in suggesting an approach to the problem of evaluating his political influence in the early modern period. I continue reading from same article. Paradoxically, it was Plato who was more relevant to the new situation in Florence despite being a stern critic of riches and the rule of the appetitive class. In other words, the merchants were the lowest in the Platonic scheme, but the Medici used Plato as a merchant family to gain power. I keep reading, he offered three vital arguments to defend the secular power of the new rulers

like the Medici and the social changes that accompanied their rise to power. That power is justified when combined with knowledge, that rule by a good man or judge is preferable to rigid law codes or entrenched customs, and that functions should be distributed according to ability rather than hereditary caste or guild status. From the 1460s on, public orations and writings contributed to a widespread diffusion of Platonic concepts that served to justify the political developments of the time. The article goes on to mention specific examples of Platonism and Platonic language being used in the public oratory at Florence, which happened frequently, there were mass gatherings every two months or so, and being used specifically to justify just such ideas and the rule of the Medici.

And I say it's related to our time, I think in a way it is, because whatever the pretenses of the old progressive and New Deal elites to something like what you've just heard, because the modern age moves so fast, by our time, nobody believes that anymore about themselves, maybe even them, they are actually more akin to medieval moralists and the jurists who rule a moribund state according to outdated customs, the liberal world order, the rules-based order. Well, what are the rules, you know, the rules are, you know, where the law and structure of the state, in other words, is rigid and can't respond to circumstance in the way you are seeing, for example, with Bukele-do, for example, you know. And so I wonder, I mean, I see the reason in mold bugs focus on the tech elite in America,

you know, I don't know if I agree with it. I myself would prefer a takeover by a mercenary ruler or a military coup, which has happened many times in history. And I wrote my book in part to inspire in some great nation in the world to do that to serve. And then they could serve as a copycat example to others. But in America, where there isn't really a long tradition of military-cased independence or leadership, but the situation is much more congenial to a commercial business technological elite. So, you know, Hoover was famous engineer and magnate and he came to the presidency that way. But I can see the thinking here, even if I don't fully agree with it, if some tech overlord like Elon, and yes, I know he's born abroad, but if he was serious and then they could

try to acquire more of a fame and reputation for wisdom and genius, for competence, you know, genius perhaps, because wisdom is kind of outmoded word now like virtue. But the progression to kingship, let's say, from merchant case like Medici or tech merchants, tech elite case, that would be interesting. I wonder if it could be done in United States for this person. I think someone imaginative should write history of the Medici with a view precisely to this angle and of how they justified and solidified their rule, starting as a merchant class illegitimate, but how they justify their rule by power of wisdom, a reputation of wisdom and genius, as well as funding the arts and so on. But using especially Platonic and other, I think they also used other Greek reasonings

actually in public, not just platonic as you heard from this article, but other ancient reasonings to do away with the entrenched customary rule of medieval times. But obviously any pedantic copying of that example is out of the question. It's more that whoever wrote this history should have a feeling for the year by year particular turns and detail of that time and render it for a modern reader, let's say a modern potential Medici, in a way comprehensible and inspiring to them. Of course, there are two immediate obstacles that the Medici actually sought and had some kind of political power to start with, which they then tried to consolidate. But the tech class, stupidly, shuns explicitly this in the United States. They don't fund things that gives them political influence and power.

And second, although I haven't done the numbers, and I don't know anyone who has, I'm curious, I suspect actually that the Medici were far wealthier in relation to their time than even Elon or any billionaires in relation to its peers or society in our time. Despite all the braying about hyper capitalism and neoliberalism and those people, actually I believe the very rich of today are considerably less rich, for example, than the so-called robber barons of the late 19th century like Carnegie and so on. But that aside, I don't see why in principle such a transformation isn't possible in America as well. And Bukele can be great inspiration also, by the way. The Platonic rule isn't just a managerial elite. It's also a ruler ruling at the head of such elite of professionals, let's say.

It's much more something like you find in the military dictatorships of South America in the 1960s and 70s, where I know what their reputation is now. If I say those words, military dictatorship in Brazil or Chile or Colombia or such in the 60s, 70s, et cetera, immediately you've been trained to think by Hollywood and such. It must be something backward. But in fact, they came to power as the most professional and progressive element of those countries. And there was one leader who could break through the kind of entrenched indolent customs of the time. And he was ruling at the head of a military elite in that case. But they were highly and really in those nations, the only professional progressive class, let's say, you know.

But anyway, well also people forget another thing when I say Bukele, serving as an example. In Latin America, the executive is much stronger than in the United States. So let's see again what Millet does. If he fails, which I think he might by the way because what he's doing is so revolutionary that the pain, this is the danger with Millet that maybe I, see I'm going on another tangent, but maybe I talk again on future episode. If Millet has the spine of steel to push ahead with his reforms, which it's looking so far like he has, and he has the power to, by the way, he can rule constitutionally by edict, whereas the United States president can be stopped by all kinds of interests. But if Millet pushes with this, there will be tremendous pain in Argentina for a year

or two as the economy refines its footing. The same thing, by the way, would happen in the United States if the power of the financial bloodsuckers, let's say, was broken, and if the United States had to move to an actually productive economy as opposed to what it does now. Men like Peter Schiff do not hide this, or Ron Paul for that matter. They say the reforms would be very painful for a year or two. But the danger is that in the middle of that year or two, something happens, it gets so bad that there is a revolution or something like this, and then the reforms don't take place and he gets blamed, let's say, for bringing a very bad year and the other side of the tunnel never gets seen. But I think he may be psychotic enough to push it through and the young people in that

country in particular are so tired of the old faggots who ran it into the ground precisely was this kind of, again, this kind of state rigidity clientele system that maybe they will follow him. They'll follow him through. We'll see. I should say that what I've told you now about Plato and the role of how the Medici house consolidated power and how perhaps this article hints that other princes and kings in Europe ended up consolidating absolutist power. I don't know if you can fully make that case. It's not really opinion. I hold. I like here, as on Twitter, I like to consider a variety of interesting rumors and opinions even when I don't hold them myself. But I really believe that the origin of modern state, as more or less accurately described

in the paragraphs I just read from this scholarly article about how absolutist entrenched legalistic or natural law thinking in the hands of a jurist class, how that is replaced by an executive king of wisdom and energy responding to the circumstance, embodying the law himself and ruling by necessity. I think actually that the source of this is Frederick II Hohenstaufen, one of the nicest titanic men, he calls one of the enigmatic men of history like Alcibiades and Caesar, of whom a great biography was written by Ernst Kantorowicz, one of Stefan Gheorghe's circle. I posted on Kantorowicz, he's a funny example. His father ran the vodka company that would become Viborova Vodka now. It's quite good vodka still, by the way. I think it was bought by a multinational.

Are they all bought by DLJO now? I don't know. Is that how you pronounce? But anyway, it's that company, but he ended up becoming a Freikorps fighter after World War I and then wrote this book that made a big splash about Frederick II Hohenstaufen. It was liked by, this is a polite show, and by certain men in late 1930s Germany who also liked Schopenhauer, let me put it that way, liked this book too. But anyway, he makes precisely this point that it was Frederick Hohenstaufen's theory of state that created the modern nation actually, the modern prince or king, with first the Renaissance lords in Italy copying his example, that of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, and then it spread to other parts of Europe from there.

And while I may talk that on a future episode all of its own, dedicated just to that book on Frederick Hohenstaufen, I will read now for you so you get maybe flavor of the time, very vivid some passages from Burkhart, who thinks the same thing actually, that it was Frederick Hohenstaufen's state, he had a personal state, he was Holy Roman Emperor, but he also had a personal kingdom in Sicily and Southern Italy, and that served as the example template for the modern nation. I will read now. The internal condition of the despotically governed states had a memorable counterpart in the Norman Empire of Lower Italy and Sicily, as it had been transformed by Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Bred amid treason and peril among Saracens, Frederick had early accustomed himself

to a thoroughly objective treatment of affairs, the first modern man to sit upon a throne. His acquaintance with the internal condition and administration of the Saracenic, that means the Muslim states, was close and intimate, and the mortal struggle in which he was engaged with the papacy compelled him, no less than his adversaries, to bring into the field all the resources at his command. Frederick's measures, especially after the year 1231, aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal state, at the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of will and of means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree to the treasury. He centralized in a manner either too unknown in the West the whole judicial and political administration.

No office was henceforth to be filled by popular election under penalty of the devastation of the offending district and the enslavement of its inhabitants. Taxes, based on a comprehensive assessment and an accordance with Mohammedan practice, were collected by those cruel and vexatious methods without which it is true it is impossible to obtain any money from orientals. Here, in short, we find not a people, but simply a disciplined multitude of subjects who were forbidden, for example, to marry out of the country without special permission, and under no circumstances were allowed to study abroad. The University of Naples was the first we know of to restrict the freedom of study, whereas the East, in these respects at least, left its youth unfettered.

But it was after genuine Mohammedan fashion that Frederick traded on his own account in all parts of the Mediterranean, reserving to himself the monopoly of many commodities and restricting the commerce of his subjects. The Fatimid caliphs, these are the rulers of Egypt, but they held to a different kind of Islam. They were Ismailis, much like the assassins were, or the Aga Khan, of course, pacified today. But they have a highly esoteric version of Islam. But the Fatimid caliphs, with all their esoteric unbelief, were, at least in their earlier history, tolerant of the religious differences of their subjects. Frederick, on the other hand, crowned this system of government by a religious inquisition that appears even more reprehensible when we remember that in the persons of the heretics

he was persecuting the representatives of a free municipal life. Lastly, the internal police and the core of the army for foreign service were composed of Saracens, who had been brought over from Sicily to Noceira and Lucera, men who were deaf to the cry of misery and indifferent to the ban of the church. At a later period, the subjects, who had long forgotten the use of weapons, were passive witnesses of the fall of Manfred and of the seizure of government by Charles of Anjou, who continued to use the existing system. Mount Fred was one of Frederick's successors, but he failed and so forth. Child of Anjou later was overthrown by the house of Aragon and the Byzantine emperor, as I keep repeating from time to time and you find in this book, the Sicilian Vespers.

I continue to read from Burkhard. By the side of the centralizing emperor appeared a usurper of the most individual kind, his vicar and son-in-law, Ezellino da Romano. He does not represent any system of government or administration for all his activity was spent in struggles for supremacy in the eastern part of Upper Italy. But as a political type he was a figure of no less importance for the future than his imperial protector. The conquests and usurpations which had either too taken place in the Middle Ages rested on real or pretended inheritance and other such claims, or else were affected against unbelievers and excommunicated persons. Here for the first time the attempt was openly made to found a throne by wholesale murder

and endless barbarities by the adoption in short of any means of the view to nothing but the end pursued. None of his successors, not even Cesare Borgia, rivaled the magnitude of Ezellino's crimes. But the example once set was not forgotten and his fall led to no return of justice and served as no warning to future transgressors. It was in vain at such a time that Saint Thomas Aquinas, a born subject of Frederick, developed the theory of a constitutional monarchy in which the prince would be assisted by an upper house named by himself and a representative body elected by the people. Such theories remained in the lecture room, and Frederick and Edzilino were, and remain for Italy, the greatest political phenomena of the thirteenth century.

Their personality is already half-legendary from the most important subject of lecento novella Antique, The Hundred Old Tales, whose original composition certainly falls within this century. Inzen Ezellino is spoken of with the awe that almighty impressions leave behind them. His person became the center of a whole literature, from the chronicle of eyewitnesses to the half-mythical tragedy of later poets. The despotisms, great and small, of the fourteenth century afford constant proof that such examples were not ignored. Their flagrant crimes have been reported in detail by historians, but as states Depending for their existence on themselves alone and scientifically organized through the view to this object

They hold a higher interest the deliberate adaptation of means to ends of which no prince of that time outside Italy had any idea Joined to almost absolute power within the limits of the state produced men and modes of life of a peculiar character I end reading but this is all very nice I think, you know, but the sources of such new modern state would by the way maybe also have been in revived Greek antiquity although by a different path because Frederick Hohenstaufen in his court and Most of the reforms that Burckhardt talked about were very much influenced by other rowist philosophy Which is to say Arabic philosopher who revived Aristotle and whereas in Europe proper Aristotle was made synthesized with Christianity

especially by Aquinas in the manner you just heard, but this particular other strain, Averroism, was actually atheistic disdainful of priestly authority and very much in the practical or political sense very much about replacing of customary or statutory law by the mind of an emperor who could rule according to necessity, who could be in a way that law embodied. The law would change according to the necessity of this world and it is introduction of this concept of necessity in the political life of the west through which Frederick Hohenstaufen is said by Kantorowicz to have inaugurated renaissance type leadership of wisdom or kingship of the type I have hinted in this episode but with roots I say in Averroes in Aristotle and not in Plato although I don't

see why later incarnations of this as in case of the Medici couldn't opportunistically use Plato as a justification to you know it's not necessarily ideas from books that cause states and social conditions often they can begin as just well instrumental and temporary tools but that's a big matter for another time and I will talk more on full meaning of a revival of antiquity on next episode but I say let's make this a series I will leave you with amazing claim from Burkhart as a teaser as to what this really means. I read from Borchardt now resuscitated antiquity affected religion most powerfully however not through any doctrines or philosophical system but through a general tendency which it fostered. The men and in some respects the institutions of antiquity were

preferred to those of the Middle Ages and in the eager attempt to imitate and reproduce them religious differences became a matter of indifference. The The admiration for historical greatness absorbed everything. How important is this insight? I think above all to see just this, yes, not through any doctrines, not through any so-called teachings or principles, but the admiration for historical greatness. This absorbed everything. The resuscitated drive to personal and individual glory and fame as a replacement for the barbarism of self-effacing moralism and the fake humbleness of the Asiatic. It is compatible at once with any so-called doctrine or religion, but also cancels out their substantive and noxious claims.

But in any case, this matter of much interest, the rebirth of the genius and the egotistic individual seeking fame, I will talk this next time and until then, Bap out!