It Could Happen Here - The History of Right Wingers Lying About Rome Ft. Mike Duncan

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Robert and Mia are joined by History of Rome's Mike Duncan to discuss Mike Johnson's recent claim that Rome was destroyed by queerness and how the right projects their politics onto Roman historySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is now happening here. I could have done something with ear, but we'll do that next time. Just forget that I said that. And welcome Mia to the program. Mia, how are you doing today? Not bad, not bad. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, yeah. We're going to be talking about a subject that's near and dear to all of our hearts, by which I mean the Roman Empire, with a guest who is near and dear to our hearts, Mike Duncan. Mike, how are you doing?

Hello. Thank you, including me. And you also you've had some interesting interactions online with people as regards the Roman Empire recently. recently yeah well anytime the roman empire shows up on the cultural radar i am tagged into it by roughly 10 000 people yeah then i come in and i do my bits or or if you know if if something comes through you know it gets shared at me you know not shared with me but shared at me and then um and then i take a look at it and i get aggravated and then, you know, fire off a few salvos and retreat back out of the social media ecosystem, which is kind of the strategy these days. Yeah. Yeah. We all have to, like, fight like an insurgent when it comes to that sort of thing. Because the alternative is to just get constantly stuck in this escalating world of beefs with strangers on the internet who are making money

off of the beef. Yeah, but there are certain things that will get me to come out of my little hibernation, which I think we're about to talk about. Yeah. Yeah, Mia, do you want to take it away? Yeah. So one of the things that's been happening recently is that, so on October 25th, the Republicans finally, after an enormous amount

of time, finally managed to elect a speaker of the House. And they picked this fairly unknown rep named Mike Johnson, who's this guy from Louisiana. And they picked him effectively because nobody knew who he was. Yeah. And so they picked this guy and they're like, OK. And Mike Johnson gets elected. And immediately everyone starts trying to figure out who this guy is. And they very quickly realize this guy is just a absolute, incredible Christian fundamentalist weirdo.

He doesn't have a bank account, which is like wild. That's classic fundamentalism, too. That's some of that old school stuff. Yeah. I'd love to see it. It's classic fundamentalism too. That's some of that old school stuff. Yeah. I'd love to see it. It's really silly. I mean, he's really sort of like, he's like, he's really a blast from the past with Christian fundamentalists. I mean, he was a lawyer that represented like a bunch of young earth creationist museums. He's really going into that old school stuff. And one of the other things that some people dug up is a podcast interview where he is talking about how gay people caused the fall of Rome. So, Mike Duncan, I want to ask you the question that I think all of our listeners are wondering.

Can we as queer people take responsibility? Can we take any credit for the fall of Rome or are we stealing Visigoth valor if we do that? You're stealing valor here. But I, but I do, but I do, I do agree that several of the gays in my life are like, don't take this from us. It's one of our proudest accomplishments that we brought down the Roman empire. And I was like, but unfortunately it's just, it's not the case. It's not even close to the case. It's, you know, you could,

you could draw random words out of a hat um and produce a sentence that was literally nonsensical and that would be a better read of the end of the roman empire than saying gay people or homosexuality like because it's all wrapped up in this sort of like it was decadence that caused the fall of the roman empire they were too like uh you know they were just too licentious and they just throw up some some vocabulary words um and it just it just doesn't land at all um it doesn't land on the specifics it doesn't land on the general it doesn't land chronologically it doesn't land in any way shape or form it's just something they've decided is true and repeat to each other and that's the, that's the long and short of it. Yeah.

Yeah. I think there's some interesting stuff there too, of like the stuff people talk about when they, when they, like, I remember I was reading someone like writing about this and they started talking about Nero. And I was like,

do you know, like in what century the Roman empire like collapsed? Like what, why are you talking about Nero? I don't know. It seems like there's this real i don't know it seems like you know the the fall of rome is one of these things that's become central to a lot of very weird right wing politics i remember like a few years ago the big thing was

like the rome was caught the fall of rome was caused by immigration yeah which and that's also as well yeah yeah and so i don't know what what is it about, like, Rome, these people, the fall of Rome, these people are, like, so drawn to in a way that causes them not to think about what actually happened at all? Well, I mean, just to go back a second, it's like, Rome in general in their heads is not a sort of temporally dependent series of events that unfolded over a thousand years it's just this kind of like one eternal place um that's like a pastiche in their mind so like nero can exist alongside attila can exist alongside you know scipio africanus and all of these people and events like just sort of are near each other in time, the same way that they believe that like, you know, dinosaurs and humans cohabitated the earth. Like it's that kind of same thing. And so if they think about somebody like Caligula or Nero running this, like running these courts of decadence, like it doesn't click to them that this is like in the first century and that the Roman Empire doesn't fall for 400 years, 500 years, and then the East keeps going for another thousand years.

That's a huge part of it. It is interesting to me. You kind of made the statement there about in these guys' heads, Rome being this kind of eternal, like continuing thing. And that's interesting to me because that conception of Rome goes back so far. I mean, very famously, when Russia became an organized political entity, there was this widespread attitude that it was the third Rome, right? That still plays into a lot of Russian imperial politics to this day. So it is kind of fascinating how far that idea goes back. It says something about the success of Roman propaganda, that it still has this place in so many people's minds. Yeah, so do I. So do many of us. And I don't think that the crime here is thinking negative thing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But organizing your worldview around utterly historically illiterate version of the Roman Empire that is really just a vehicle for your own special bigotry. That's where they're really running afoul of me and my temper. Yeah. And there's a lot that's really interesting about how they sort of choose to interpret the causes of the fall. I think probably the least sensible argument they have is this idea that it had something to do with like degeneracy. Um, but because like you can find Romans in like the, the, the middle Republic period saying the same thing that like, we've become too degenerate, too lazy, um, because of like all of the, you know, slaves automating, you know, the, the ruling classes tasks people have, uh, you know, Romans are not like the Romans of our forefathers and stuff anymore. And like, you know, the empire continued, or the republic and then the empire

still had centuries in the tank at that point. Yeah, very famously, the Romans started complaining about how it's not like the good old days. Round about the second century BC, which is like 300 years before they hit what we all acknowledge to be the peak of roman civilization uh and this is like this is when cato the elder gets into it and the big thing that those guys were griping about at the time and there are there are little you know little connections here just doesn't none of it shapes up is that what

cato the elder and people like him were complaining about way back in the second century was this is when the romans come in contact with the greeks and there was there was a kind of like a a split between traditional latin roman-ness and then this like new eastern uh greeceness which like they've got new ideas and like they sounds like they have sex with each other all the time you know they don't care if they're men or women. And so that's what they were pushing back against. And so that kind of language does, this is where it kind of distills over the centuries and then over the millennia into this idea that the Roman empire collapsed and was ruined by this kind of degeneracy without being able to really define what degeneracy means or how it could possibly impact the long-term health of a large empire. Or the fact that very bluntly,

when you're saying this in 186 BC, you can't say that contact with Greek ideas brought the Roman empire down. You just can't because it just didn't get crushed by this. It didn't fall apart. Yeah. I mean, if I have to make an argument as to what thing that I can connect to modernity killed the modern empire, I tend to claim that it's the concept of a reboot, right? Because no sooner did Augustus have Virgil reboot the story of the Trojan War, then the inevitable path to the collapse of the Roman Empire began, right? The real sign that we're heading towards collapse is all these movie reboots. Okay, great. Well, the rule is, whatever your modern preoccupation is, that's what you use to explain the fall of the Roman empire.

So of course I have my preoccupations and that's what I say caused the fall of the Roman empire, which is that the Roman empire in fact never fell and we're all living in a hologram. And we know, and we know this because if a woman visits me and brings me and brings me groceries and she's wearing a Jesus fish necklace, it can pop into my brain and I can know that we're living in fantasy. We're still in the Roman Empire. The empire never ended, folks. Yeah. Yeah.

Every politician is still Cato. Yeah. I mean, look, you could also tell this because it's like in the same way that everything tastes like chicken, they haven't invented a new moral panic in 2000 years. So pretty clearly, we're just recycling through exactly the same content over and over again. It does. different Roman politicians were complaining about, you know, 2000 years ago, and stuff that's in our media today, I think does suggest part of why it's almost impossible to not keep bringing Rome up, which is that, like, there are, and I think that it's a mix of like, there are some legitimate similarities between our cultures, and also our concept of Rome, which is often ahistorical, but is based

on generations of misconceptions, makes it seem even closer. Yeah. And we are a post-Roman society and they are our forebearers, whether we like it or not. Like any civilization that exists today that went through the Mediterranean world, you world, it had a Roman period. And the Romans made a strong imprint on all of us in terms of our laws and how we think about money and how we think about family relationships. All of these things are... We're living in a post-Roman world, and that's why it's important to study the Roman empire as an entity, but do it with some degree of rigor, uh, rather than just using it as a prop in the culture wars.

Yeah. That was a great, that was a great point I just made. And so it absolutely brought the conversation to a complete standstill as everybody just chewed on this nugget of wisdom that I had brought to the table. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series,

The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire,

join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. as part of Michael Duda Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley

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though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. like listen to the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan. That's right. Is that Rome isn't going to stop being brought up by these people in increasingly unhinged and inaccurate ways.

And it's just like it's helpful to have an actual understanding of who the Spartans were and what they did and did not do for the sake of these arguments. It's helpful to have a meaningful understanding of the Roman Empire. And I'm kind of wondering, when you come into misconceptions about Rome, what are some of like the top ones on your list that that that your brain just forces you to go in and correct? Well, I mean, this is a big one because this one I feel like is deeply homophobic and principally used to attack the queer community rather than anything else. And just to give your listeners some specifics here, it's like sexuality in the Roman world was very different than it was today. And there weren't even the kind of binary conceptions of gender or sexual relations that we have today. A lot of these things are very

modern inventions. I'm sure a lot of people know this um but we can also point very specifically to like uh you know hadrian who is broadly considered and cited to be one of the greatest of the emperors who lived at the height of the golden age was gay like that's like that's a full stop thing. And so it's just like there's no compatibility between these two ideas or really any way. If you ask them to take this argument more than 25 words deep, they're not going to have a way to explain how it is that somebody engaged in gay sex in the 400s could have possibly been the reason why the goths won a certain battle or why attila the hun was able to do what he did um all of it is just complete and utter ahistorical nonsense and so i consider it i consider it my duty as some kind of voice of authority on roman history to not let people get away with this um the last the last time I saw this pop up was actually, uh, uh, Ben Carson, which is a little bit of a blast from the past at this point. But, um, he, he, he wrote a book at one point where he dropped this stuff in there and it,

and the way they always couch it too, it's like, as we all know, you know, it was homosexuality that really led to the degeneracy of the lady. Like, I'm so sick of you people. Um, but the other, the other big one that really grinds my gears that really emerged this this was not a preconception that i had going into doing the history of rome but something that i came away um from after doing it and studying you know the year by year history of the empire is that this notion that like sort of the romans this like a nationality that then went forth and conquered the Mediterranean, that Romans were Romans as like an ethnic stock thing. And that it was when

these other ethnicities started sort of pressing at the empire's borders, or as we said a little bit earlier, that it was immigration, right? that destroys the Roman Empire, that there was this kind of like pure noble Roman thing that is essentially functioning as the white person in the white people are civilized and all of these other like mongrel races are, um, are uncivilized and they were either civilized by the Romans or they were killed by the Romans or enslaved by the Romans. But this is all for the good because the Romans themselves were, um, were like this, were this, this superior stock of DNA somehow. And really when you go through the empire, the, the, the, the history of, um, the Roman empire, you find that there is that kind of conservative strain inside of like the patrician class and inside of the senatorial class that they're like, we want this to be a closely held thing. Like the original Republic was a closely

held oligarchy of Latin families who lived on the Palatine Hill. And that's what they wanted for themselves. And so when other people tried to push into the Republic, they tried to resist it. And so that is a running conflict that happens in Roman history. But any time that that tendency is overcome, and a second prevailing force that says like, actually, Roman-ness is just an idea. Roman-ness is just a set of beliefs and practices and sort of daily habits of life and ideology that can really be held by anybody at any time. And if we let in, say, non-Roman Italians, which is the first people who were considered non-Roman who then came into the empire, which then we look back and we're like, there was a time that Romans didn't think that people from what is today like Florence or Milan were not Italian or not Roman. Yeah,

yeah. They were not considered Roman until the very late stages of the Republic. I mean, I wrote a book about the later stages of the Republic and the social war is when this gets wrapped up. Yeah. After hundreds of years of being treated as second class citizens, there was a civil war that nearly destroyed the Republic before Caesar even came along that was resolved by giving citizenship to the Italians, making them full members of the polity, and then having that just be a boon to Rome's fortunes. This happens in Gaul. This happens in Spain. This happens in Illyria.

This happens in the Far East. Romans encounter, and yes, do conquer because it's a very violent world of conquest and mutual conquest, that Romans in Gaul were as much Romans as Romans in Rome. And anytime I find Roman leaders resisting that idea, I find the empire starting to falter and commit missteps. And anytime they're like, nah, let's just throw it open. If you're good, if you're dedicated, if you're loyal, you can be a part of this project that we have. Then I find the Romans doing very, very well. And I'm about to start, not to just monologue here, but I'm about to start working on another book that is about the crisis of the third century. And by this time, we have emperors who are coming from North Africa. We have

emperors who are tagged as being Arabian. We have the set of emperors who really help Rome emerge from this thing that is called the crisis of the third century when the empire very nearly collapsed in the mid 200s is a bunch of guys from Illyria, which is today the Balkans. I mean, we're talking about guys who are coming from like Serbia and Croatia or the emperors who are continuing the Roman legacy and keeping the empire intact. So this notion that like Rome wasn't a multicultural empire or that the arrival of new peoples was somehow bad for them is just disproven over and over and over again by the realities of Roman history. So that's the other over and over again by the realities of roman history so that's the other one is this immigration caused the fall of the roman empire is just flat out incorrect

one of the arguments that i've heard sort of against that and i i want to ask how true this is but one of the things that i hear people sort of responding to this with is this argument that like part of what causes like the sack of rome that the Romans get into one of these xenophobic streaks and they don't want to sort of try to absorb the Visigoths. Okay. So that, that, that is, that's, that's a, that's essentially my position. Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to bring up, um, a guy who, a historian, uh, who has to come up anytime you talk about the way the right likes to use the image of Rome, particularly the collapse of Rome, Victor Davis Hanson.

Yeah. Yeah. He is a guy you're going, I mean, he's my dad's favorite historian. I come from a very conservative family. And he wrote a book not all that long ago. No, actually, it was 2010. Sorry, that's still like five years ago to me, but it's not five years ago. It's much further away.

Called Why Did Rome Fall and Why Does It Matter Now? And there's a quote I found from a little article he wrote plugging it that I want to bring up here so we can chew over. In short, what ruined Rome in the West? Rome in the West. Lots of things, but clearly the pernicious effects of affluence and laxity warped Roman sensibility and created a culture of entitlement that was not justified by revenues or the creation of actual commensurate

wealth and the resulting debits, inflation, debased currency, and gradual state impoverishment gave the far more vulnerable Western Empire far less margin when the barbarians arrived. It's all bullshit. I know, it's nonsense. It's fucking trash. it's so it's so it's so frustrating because this culture of dependence that can i swear on this podcast

oh absa fucking lutely for sure fucking these motherfuckers um the this entitled this entitlement thing that they have because they don't like welfare because they're pricks you know um and you know victor dav Hanson, you know, this is a guy who wrote a book called like Mexifornia, which is like, Oh my God. Yeah, absolutely. This is where it comes from the nineties where he's like, he's like,

California is going to be destroyed by all these Hispanic people. Like it's just loathsome shit that he writes. Anyway, this culture of entitlement, right? Like, Oh, it was just bread and circuses. And like the empire had to give all this money to like, how many, like, okay, great. The Roman Rome, the city was like a million people. Yeah. Right. And there were a couple of large urban hubs that did have like grain doles because you needed to be able to feed the people in these cities. And this is, you know, smart policy by the emperors. It's actually not bad on a humanitarian level um and then they also threw games because this is what people do rich people throw parties to make

themselves loved like this is a very this happens today this happens all the time this happened during the medieval period happens all the time um the number of people who are like benefiting from this like imperial largesse who have this like entitlement mentality is such a fraction such a fraction of the total number of people who live in this empire where we're talking about 60 65 million people maybe maybe give or take a little bit not that many people were on the dole in rome uh it was usually just the male head of the household got some grain. It was a little bit of supplemental. It's basically the equivalent of supplemental income.

It was absolutely not just they're rolling out banquets for these people every single day, nor is it the case that that entitlement of Romans living in Rome in the 200s AD or something is the reason why they couldn't sustain their border defenses, right? This is the same arguments we get when it's like, you know, we can't afford social security because the, you know, the national endowment for the sciences paid somebody $250,000 to look into the, you know, bee keeping habits. Uh, like it's like, people just don't have a way to compare a million dollars to a billion dollars to a trillion dollars because it's just a lot of money in our heads. So like this, none of, none of that is

true. None of that is true. It's, um, it it's it's fascinating to me, especially when you hear like this is like really popular amongst the Joe Rogan set. This idea that like, oh, you know, when an empire is at the end, that's when you get all the bread and circuses to distract people. When the empire like the Roman Empire, the entire period during which it was expanding like wildfire, was doing nothing but throwing giant fucking parties in the capital. That's all they did. That's all they did. You couldn't be in politics without going broke throwing parties. Like that was the that's why a lot of the conquest happened is because you have to throw these parties when you were earlier up on the on the cursus honorum. And then you would have to, like, go conquer someplace to pay for it.

Yep. And that was why, actually, when you get right down to it, one of my little side opinions is that if you were a provincial inside of these conquests, conquered lands, life was much better under the empire than it was under the republic, because there actually was some tightening and normalization of the bureaucratic regime under the empire, like after Augustus comes along, rather than what was going on in the Republic, which is every single year, a province was getting a new governor who was there to extract as much money for himself as possible because he had taken out tons and tons of loans to throw the biggest games that he possibly could to build the biggest act to build the biggest thing now when you get into the later empire like are there

financial difficulties of course right you don't get the kind of monument building and even aqueduct building and infrastructure projects you get in the later empire but like there are larger economic and structural reasons why they were suffering financial difficulties at the end of the empire that have nothing to do with these couple of grain doles that were going to a few major urban areas. Most of the population is rural subsistent peasants. Those people were not feeling entitled to shit. Which I think is really funny because if you look at – I am very confident if you actually did the math, the.s spends more money agricultural subsidies every year than like than the romans did like on the entire grain dole i mean there's

almost no way that's not true like yeah like we i mean in part not just like because who knows what the romans would have done with a higher level of technology just wasn't possible to do that kind of thing outside of the major urban hubs like you can't you can't you couldn't do it that's the thing yeah um this is the same thing where you get into like when people like to slip in the whole like oh there was lead in the in the in the pipes um and like there was lead in the pipes and you know maybe some of the leadership was a bit over lead exposed like who knows like maybe maybe But like, the vast majority of the population is not living in downtown Rome, where this might be a problem or in, you know, one of the other, you know, regional capitals. That's just not where any of this is taking place. fact that one of their major sweeteners included a lot of lead is always interesting to bring up.

But the thing that, I mean, and this is also pure speculation, but that I always wonder more about, not just with Rome, but with most postmodern societies and even early modern societies is what about mild head injuries? Because we know so much more now about how a bunch of little head injuries can permanently alter your behavior. And like that's a big thing when I think about like the World War I generation is you've got millions of men who wind up becoming very influential in politics who are under artillery barrages and who are – there's almost no way they're not walking away with some kind of CTE based on what we know now about what being near artillery does to your brain. What does that do to your brain. You know, what does that do to, yeah. The ancient world was full of trauma.

Yeah. And that's, and that's a real thing. All of these guys were deeply, deeply traumatized. But like one of the other points about the, the whole like bread dole thing is this gets back to, this is sneaky backdoor racism because the argument, the argument is that rome was great

when it was the romans doing it like these actual like latins who were coming from the environs of rome in particular and that it all started to go bad once non-romans were in charge of things because the romans themselves had had decayed into this like oh well we just want our bread and circuses and we're not going to join the legions. We'll just have Germans do our fighting for us or Goths do our fighting for us, which that is simply sneaky backdoor racism because it's a way of saying that the reason why the Roman Empire was successful was because of this small population group. And once they go away, other groups, these mongrel races will never be able to live up to or sustain civilization in the way that Romans did, the pure Romans did. And so that's also a big reason why we need to push back

on these things is because the Roman empire was not just sustained, but thrived and expanded by people who were not Romans. And the idea that, you know, their civilization required this like little tiny speck of a DNA spark to keep it going is just, you know, this is the kind of person who finishes writing that book and then immediately turns their attention to modern California politics and says the big problem here is Hispanics. Yeah. Which is also not true, by the way, in case I need to clear that up. No, no. The big problem with California politics is California politicians. Right. It's not Latinos.

It's certainly not Latinos. Hey, guys. I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their

journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura

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Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, I wanted to sort of circle back around to this sort of degeneracy stuff, because I think there's an interesting through line there too, with not just sort of modern politics, but the politics of the period of the original rise of fascism. Because, you know, you look at these arguments and they're like, well, okay, it was like cultural decadence. And then they start talking about degeneracy and how homosexuality was this like degenerate thing that brought down the empire. And like you go back and you like read the nazis and they are also absolutely obsessed with like you know with this notion of like degenerate art and like cultural degeneracy is this force that's this internal force of subverting the empire and you know and like this is also i think another like reason to be reason to be interested in a better way about rome was also the way that like the original italian fascists are i mean like the word

fascism is like derived you know like from from roman symbol symbols right and like you know this is like mussolini's entire thing is about turning the Mediterranean into the Roman Lake, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the fascist is great not to get, you know, not to derail your point. Keep talking. Just going to cut that line out of the podcast. Mike Duncan says fashion is great. The fascist is great.

It's a great symbol. Go, go. Like a lot of people don't actually even notice this. Maybe they do at this point. This is no longer a fun fact, but you go, you go to the link. No. Well, I mean, not just Congress, but go to Lincoln Memorial. Look at the Lincoln Memorial. What are his hands resting on to a couple of fashies? It just is because you know what a bundle of sticks is stronger together. And that is a symbol of solidarity. And it is a symbol of group action

being superior to individual attempts to do anything. And that the one, the one bow is going to break, but all of them together is good. Like none of this is like inherently bad. It's action being superior to individual attempts to do anything and that the one the one bow is going to break but all of them together is good like none of this is like inherently bad it's just a bunch of um fascists claimed it for their own yeah well and my memory of this is that i'm pretty sure there was a group of people who were like calling themselves fascists like in in early like late 1800s early 1900s italy who weren't fascists, who were basically left-wingers. And then, well, sorry, not the Nazis. Well, I don't know if you know this, but Nazis are actually socialists.

They're national socialists. And so a lot of people think that they're right-wing, but actually they're left-wing. And that's what it is. Hitler was an Oberlin grad. This is where we cue my 30 30 minute digression about stressorism but i think too i i think to the point that you were trying to make or that you were making there though is that they were you know the nazis did and then we hear this repeated today that like that degeneracy is like a thing that is a force, like a physical force that can

maybe even be measured. And if you don't have enough of it, or if you have too much of it, then your society is going to start to break apart or decay. It's just an idea. That's it. It's just sort of a way of thinking about something or a way of describing something. It's not actually a really real thing that is out there in the world. Like if you have a society that suddenly can't grow grain and you have a famine, like that's a real thing that will actually affect your society and bring it down. You have this other thing that is just like moral degeneracy. This is just like you listing things you don't like and saying that this is the reason why things are falling apart, because degeneracy can be anything to anybody. But really, you know, like people smoking cigarettes at four o'clock in the morning,

cause they've been up all night, you know, doing drugs. Like that's what kids do. What people have that people are always going to do this. This is always on the backgrounds and margins of any society. So like, and rich people, like they've always partied. They always will party. Like those kinds of things, you can't really then say like, oh, well, we've accumulated too much degeneracy now. And our society is going to start

to break apart. And this, you know, the things that we see today in terms of our own sort of faltering democratic republic, this is not because of degeneracy. This isn't because the kids are doing too many drugs

or like we legalize gay marriage. Like that's not, that's not why any of this is not because of degeneracy this isn't because the kids are doing too many drugs or like we legalize gay marriage like that's not that's not why any of this is happening it's happening for other reasons it's happening because of greed it's happening uh because of sociopathic indifference to other people's lives those are the things that actually matter not whether you stayed up all night uh drinking and partying No, no, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's the, like I tend to think like talking about the Latifundia is a lot more relevant to talking about like what happened to the elites under Rome and what's happened in our own society

than bringing up like the parties and shit. Like it's this, the centralization of wealth and power in a tinier and tinier number of men was responsible for a number of the problems that Rome encountered as it aged. And they don't want to have that conversation. No. So they want us to have this other conversation, which flatters their bigotry. Well, and this, I think, comes back to the thing you were, you know, the joke you're making about like all these, these are all the same people who are like, well the nazis were socialists it's like yeah you know like the point of like these arguments is so that you don't go back into

the historical record and realize how much all the things you're saying are wrong and how much they're making precisely the same arguments that you know the nazis were making or that all of these sort of like you know all all of the sort of past people who broadly is acknowledged did a bunch of terrible stuff had the same opinions that they do yeah well i i don't know i think that's what i've got to talk about today um i i mean this is like uh we could go go on to the way in which like Sparta gets remembered and stuff and the cultural like right wing. But I think that's kind of moving sort of far afield. Although there's similarities, right? There's always this idea that like at this certain point when everybody looked the same, like that's when this historic empire was at their best and

when you know uh degeneracy got entered into it when immigrants got entered into it that's when it sort of fell apart um i i guess some of that's mixed in with sort of like frank miller as opposed to any sort of real history but that's always the case right i think a lot of yeah i mean and frank miller's working in a tradition that is very standard you know the you know the kind of racist orientalizing orientalizing yeah of um you know of anybody from the east like that that was all current like you know the romans had those ideas i mean we get the word barb like the word like one of the points that i'm going to make um probably in my book is that like so the word barbarian just means non-Greek, like that's it, because the Greeks had a, you know, a very sort of self-centered view of the

world as we all do. But that meant that the Romans are barbarians, you know, and that word is coined and we're thinking about who the Romans are, like they were the civilized ones. And then, and then there are all these barbarians who are bad. But like from the Greek perspective, the Romans were as barbaric as the Scythians were. And, you know, probably and certainly less civilized than the Persians were when the Romans when the Romans first appeared on the scene in Greece, they were like, who are these? These are just a bunch of guys who are obsessed with war and they have no culture. They have no ideas of their own. They just march around in squares and kill people like that.

That was their interpretation of what the Romans were originally, which is not a terrible interpretation of early Roman history. But yeah, this sort of dividing between civilized peoples and barbaric peoples is something that then has been around for thousands of years. And we're still doing it today. Like everything that we're seeing, you know, and I look at Israel and Palestine, there's a lot of this mapping of civilized versus uncivilized people onto this conflict that I see is rooted in a lot in these sort of Western traditions that inform 19th century racist ideas about how things, you know, about how societies organize themselves, all of which needs to be deconstructed and thrown away. Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. Um, yeah, I always love it when people try to bring up like these sort of racial theories within the context of the Roman empire who had absolutely nothing that would be considered like a modern understanding of whiteness or race, like was completely absent. No, they all had group identity notions. Yeah, they were chauvinists, but of a totally different era. Yeah, exactly, right?

There's us and then there's everybody else. Yeah. And the Romans differentiated a little bit between like there were Egyptians. The Romans differentiated a little bit between there were Egyptians. They were curious about how the Jews worked because the Jews were very old civilization. And so the Romans kind of took special note of that. And they really admired the Greeks. And so there are these sort of groupings that they all understood.

But it's all just sort of that very self-centered. If you go through anthropological history of any group of people, their word for themselves is just the word for person. You know, we find this a lot. And the Romans were that way, too, but not in this way, not sitting down and making like hierarchies of, you know, who can do what and who should be on top and who should be on bottom. Because, you know, a traditional ancient chauvinist you're like well my people should be on top and that you know is self-explanatory and then we will we will fight for that but it's not because of yeah these these racial hierarchies yeah um well i think that's about all i had to get into mia you have anything else you wanted to sort of touch on today? I think we've about covered it. We've established that it's wrong

to think that gays made the Roman Empire fall. No, no. Although you can, yeah. There's a million more things to say about that. But yeah, I think we've hit on the basics. Mike, you are a podcaster. Your Revolutions podcast is one of the best things on the internet. You are also an author of a whole bunch of books, The Storm Before the Storm, which is about a lot of the stuff we've been talking about today, Hero of Two Worlds, The History of Rome. Yeah. Mike, you have anything else you want to plug? Well, I am just about, as I said earlier, about to start working on a third book, which will be The Crisis of the Third Century. So if anybody out there who's listening to this has

been like, I wonder if Mike's ever going to write a book about the crisis of the third century, I will, and I am. Excellent. Well, thank you for being on the show, Mike. And yeah, listeners, until next time, if somebody brings up the Roman Empire in an attempt to attack various special interests in our modern political system, buy a Gladius, you know? That still works the same way it did in the past.

Just start swinging a Gladius. But remember, it's got a blade on both sides, so you've got to be careful when you swing a Gladius. Easy to hit yourself. Satire. Legally not actionable. Satire. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.

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