Victor Davis Hanson is pretty much on the money with everything he says this is when you hit a health guru…
with truth… it also exposes our indoctrination system some call education…
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Millions of Americans get their news from celebrity podcasts these days.
One interview just revealed a disturbing gap in what many Americans know about history.
And Victor Davis Hanson exposed one shocking truth about Jesus that left this fitness guru speechless.
America’s knowledge crisis runs deeper than anyone realized.
Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson appeared on Jillian Michaels’ podcast for what should have been a straightforward conversation about Roman history and Christianity.
What happened instead stopped everyone in their tracks.
Michaels, the 50-year-old fitness influencer with millions of followers, admitted she had no idea Jesus Christ actually existed as a documented person in history outside the Bible.
“I thought we didn’t even know this guy… this is going to infuriate people and I’m so sorry and I stay out of it, but I thought we weren’t even really sure whether or not Jesus existed and the apostles wrote this stuff hundreds of years ago,” Michaels confessed.
Rome documented everything about the revolutionary from Nazareth
Hanson, one of America’s most respected military historians, set the record straight with facts that shocked his host.
“The Romans knew, we have Roman documents completely separate from religion, that he was a magnetic, he was a romantic, wonderful person to the people who knew him and he had staged a revolution and that presented a problem in this troublesome province,” Hanson explained.¹
The historian walked Michaels through exactly why Jesus posed such a threat to the empire that authorities had to get rid of him.
Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea, saw Jesus as a political powder keg waiting to explode.
“He’s got a new religion and unfortunately it’s turned the other cheek, brotherhood of man, blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor, that’s not Roman,” Hanson stated.¹
The empire built its power on military might and the belief that the strong inherit the earth.
Jesus preached the exact opposite message to massive crowds of common people — and that terrified authorities in Jerusalem and beyond.
The political calculation behind history’s most famous execution
Hanson revealed the cynical power play behind the Crucifixion that most Americans never learned in school.
Pilate faced a dilemma.
The Jewish religious establishment wanted Jesus dead for religious reasons.
Imperial authorities wanted him dead for political reasons.
So they worked out a deal where everyone got what they wanted.
“They did not like Jesus and what he represented was anti-Roman,” Hanson explained. "So they said basically, well, in Judaism, in Judea, the Jewish establishment, the religious establishment doesn’t like him any more than we do. So we can get rid of him and then say the Pharisees basically did it."²
The Romans executed Jesus but blamed it on Jewish leaders to keep the peace in a volatile province.
This historical reality contradicts centuries of false claims that “the Jews killed Jesus.”
Hanson made clear the Romans were calling the shots and saw Christianity as their real enemy.
Constantine flipped an empire 300 years later
The historian then explained Christianity’s remarkable transformation from persecuted sect to state religion.
For three centuries after Christ’s death, Roman emperors systematically executed Christians because the religion threatened their power structure.
“Christianity said that anybody could get to heaven through the combination of what would become the New Testament and the Old Testament,” Hanson explained. "And so the Romans said, you know what, this has an ability to be, it’s kind of like what Islam would do later. This can infect everybody because it’s not ethnic or anything. It’s very dangerous."¹
Then Emperor Constantine had a vision at the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD that changed everything.
He converted to Christianity and transformed the Roman Empire overnight.
The structures Romans used to oppress Christians became tools to spread Christianity worldwide.
“When you see a cardinal with a purple and the pointed hat, that’s all from the Roman legate and provincial system,” Hanson noted. "And when you look even today, the organization of the Roman Catholic Church, it mimics the divisions in the empire, they took the whole administrative system that the empire had and they flipped it over to advance and institutionalize Christianity."¹
Michaels sat stunned as these basic historical facts — taught in any decent college Western Civilization course — landed like bombshells on her audience of millions.
She represents a growing segment of Americans who graduated from the education system knowing almost nothing about the religious and cultural foundations of Western civilization.
That vacuum gets filled with ignorance, conspiracy theories, and hostility toward Christianity.
Hanson’s patient explanation showed what’s been lost as universities abandoned teaching the classics and Western history in favor of trendy ideological courses attacking American culture.
The fitness guru’s genuine shock demonstrates the price Americans pay when the left successfully purges Christianity and classical education from schools.
Millions walk around with the same massive blind spots Michaels revealed on her podcast.
They have no idea that Christ’s existence is backed by Roman documentation — that His revolutionary message terrified the most powerful empire on earth enough to execute Him.
That basic ignorance makes it easier for the radical left to attack Christianity and dismiss believers as superstitious rubes.
Conservatives better wake up to the knowledge crisis gripping the country.
When popular podcasters with millions of followers don’t know Christianity’s most basic historical facts, the culture war isn’t going well.
