Basically, if somebody on the right is invoking the Roman Republic or the Roman Empire to justify something that they're doing or make us afraid of something, there's a 99.9% chance that they are wrong about what they are saying.

And especially these days, you know, we're talking about immigration into the United States and how, you know, they're being described, these floods of people.

There's an invasion. And they invoke the Goths. They invoke the Huns. Like, none of this is even

remotely analogous to what we are doing today. And throughout Roman history, anytime you find

the Romans being expansive in their ideas about citizenship, you find them stronger and growing.

And anytime they get really closed up and close-minded and try to resist these things like they will eventually do with the Goths, that's when things start to fall apart.

When they integrate the Italians, that's when they get stronger.

When they integrate a part of the Mediterranean world and allow them to participate fully and benefit fully from the system that they are in, that's when the Roman Empire gets stronger.

When they resist those things, that's when the Roman Empire gets weaker. And conservatives always say,

well, the great thing about the United States is we're not an empire. We're not really an empire.

And it's like, of course we're an empire. You know, people talk about immigrants being drawn to the

United States as if it's this invasion for no reason.

They just want what we have. And it's like, well, yeah, we draw the wealth of the world

into our political boundaries. Like, this is where all the money in the world is. So, yes, you're

going to get people from the places that we have sucked all their wealth out. That's going to draw

them up to us. And I think if you become a close-minded,

xenophobic bigot who is hostile to the idea of new peoples coming into the empire because, like,

oh, they're not going to be true Americans. They're not going to speak the language. It's like,

they're not, but their kids will. Like, this is how it works. Like, this is how it's always worked. And then you have people like Reagan saying like, oh, it wasn't the true Romans anymore. That's why it fell apart. The guys who

put the Roman Empire back together in the 260s, 270s, 280s, was a bunch of dudes from the Balkans,

man. It's a bunch of like guys from Croatia. You know, the best emperors, like Trajan and Hadrian, they're both, they both come from Spain, Septimius Severus is from North Africa, right? The idea that like people who aren't true Romans were

the reason why the empire fell. No, they are the reason the Roman Empire was sustained for as long

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