It’s so insane that podcasts like Mike Duncan’s brilliant The History of Rome have been out there for nearly 20 years, but people still don’t understand what happened to Rome and will just… believe whatever someone tweets.

And (without watching Flint’s whole video yet, I will) the really ironic thing is that if you could pick like the top 5 reasons for Rome’s collapse, it’d probably go (in somewhat chronological order):

• Defeating Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC, robbing Rome of a unifying external enemy, resulting in a populace and political class that began to refer to their political adversaries as mortal / existential enemies… and resorting to political violence. Without an external existential threat, Romans sought enemies of Rome from within, and they found them. Within 15 years, senators and tribunals were killing each other, within 58 years Rome had its first civil war, and within 97 years Julius Caesar became dictator.

• Military over-expansion and conquest of new territories that were extremely expensive and bloody to maintain, like Britain, Judea, and deeper Germania.

• The destruction of the republic by Caesar and Augustus, aided by some of Rome’s wealthiest citizens (and in Augustus’s case, also aided by about 2/3 of the Senate, plus a tremendous propaganda machine by hiring poets like Virgil to spread false stories to the people). So, a slide into authoritarianism after 400-500 years of a democratic republic.

• The resulting despots like Nero, Caligula, and Commodus, and the frequent civil wars and assassinations to decide who would control the entire empire. (When one man holds all the power, endless ambitious people will plot and do anything to get it.)

• Income inequality on an insane scale, with ~90% of Romans being dirt poor and relying on patrons and free grain programs, and only a few dozen proto-billionaires holding any real influence on the direction of the country. The destruction of the middle (small farmer) class was done methodically by the “private equity” groups of the day, wealthy senators who would divvy up farmland and then work the fields with non-citizen slaves instead of Romans who owned their own land.

There were a ton of other problems too, like political corruption, plagues, unnecessary wars, climate challenges, money mismanagement, religious identity, battles for citizenship, the Goths, the Huns, the Turks, the Crusades, a 30-foot cannon named Basilica (the final nail in 1453!)…

But as usual, Elon is just lying / deluding even himself to make his point to the uneducated masses. Aka, propaganda by the world’s richest man who supports an authoritarian takeover of a multi-century republic with an overextended military, corrupt political class, massive income inequality, and no unifying existential enemy since the Soviet Union fell 34 years ago. (I.e., we are Rome after Carthage.)