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July 5, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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THE CHALLENGER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep364
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Now, today I'm going to talk about Trump versus DeSantis.
Who's it going to be for the GOP nomination in 2024?
The Democrats hold a July 4th anti-party.
I want to ask, what does the left cherish most about America?
I'll examine the fallout of the Supreme Court's climate and abortion decisions.
Political scientist Richard Samuelson, actually, former research assistant of mine, is going to join me.
We're going to talk about what's most unique and admirable about the American founders, and I'll introduce the plot of the Trojan War.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Who is going to be the Republican nominee in 2024?
It seems early to be able to answer that question now, but it's pretty clear how the question would be answered if we were deciding the question today.
You know, I think it's pretty obvious that Trump would be the nominee.
It's quite likely that DeSantis would be his pick.
It's not going to be Pence, we can be sure of that, for vice president.
And that seems to me to be a ticket that would make probably a lot of sense.
Why? Because Trump is the most popular figure in the Republican Party.
DeSantis would be second.
And all of this is confirmed in a Harvard-Harris poll just came out, which had Trump at 56%, DeSantis at 16%, and then everybody else is very low.
Pence is at 7%, Nikki Haley at 4%, Rubio at 2%, Tim Scott at 2%, Ted Cruz at 1%, Pompeo at 1%.
So Trump is obviously the dominant figure.
I think, you know, everyone knows that.
And so what makes us strange is there's an article in The Hill, and if you read the article, the headline is this, DeSantis leads 2024 GOP PAC. What?
This is a flat-out misstatement of what the poll shows.
In fact, DeSantis is in the low double digits.
He's at 16% compared to Trump's 56%.
But of course, as you read the article, you realize that The Hill is trying to play a little bit of a sleight of hand.
Their headline is, if Trump is not the nominee.
And see, all these leftists wish that Trump is not the nominee.
It's the point of the whole January 6th proceedings.
Let's try to make sure Trump is not the nominee.
Let's try to prevent him from running again.
And that wishful thinking is reflected in this headline.
Now, it's true that if Trump is removed from the list...
And now you do the poll, which the Harvard people did.
DeSantis now leads, 36%.
Pence jumps to 17%, Cruz is at 8%.
Haley and Pompeo are basically between 3% and 5%.
So DeSantis is a popular figure, and he has shown, I think, in many ways that he's a very effective governor.
He's taken a state that was very evenly balanced, in other words, between Republican and Democrat, and tilted it sharply to the right.
He has had a consistent set of effective policies, and he has been very savvy In dealing with the media, a major problem for Republicans is they tend to run for the hills when the media shows up, ready to, you know, scorch them.
But not DeSantis.
He stands up to them, and he doesn't have the sort of Trumpian tendency to Take on the media, you know, with the fisticuffs and the mud wrestling and blast them by name, you know, Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd and so on.
DeSantis is, in a sense, more measured, but he's also really effective.
And I think people like that about him.
DeSantis is himself a Trumpster.
And so while he is cultivating his own image and also his own candidacy, I think he knows it would be a fatal mistake to run against Trump.
In other words, not only would it not work, but it would probably isolate the two men from each other, make it more unlikely that Trump would pick DeSantis.
So if I were DeSantis, I wouldn't do any of this.
There's no need to.
DeSantis has time on his side and the smart move for DeSantis is simply to run alongside Trump, with Trump, support Trump, hope and expect that Trump might pick him as the number two, which would then give him the inside track, kind of the way the Democrats tried, I think they now regret it, to give Kamala Harris the inside track with Biden to kind of put her next in line.
So DeSantis has a bright future, in my view, in the Republican Party.
In fact, he's showing all the other guys.
The other guys are all faltering and fumbling, and they're probably wondering why they're at such low percentages.
Why am I at two?
Why am I at three? Well, the reason you're at two and three is you're acting more like the kind of traditional frozen Republican, where you're frightened of stepping forward, you duck issues that you should be dealing with.
DeSantis doesn't do that.
Whether it's COVID, whether it's the elections, this is a guy who's like, listen, we can defend our position for it rightly because we're smart and more important, we're right.
This cancel culture is really out of hand.
Recently, I told you Walmart has canceled MyPillow.
They won't be selling Mike Lindell's products at their stores.
Well, one of these retailers is gonna stop letting the left bully them into submission.
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The philosopher Edmund Burke once said to love our country, our country should be lovely.
Now, I think what Burke is getting at is he was making the point that while we love our country in part because it is ours, I mean, we love our country sort of for the same reason we love our kids.
They are ours.
But at the same time, our kids can be sometimes unlovable.
And the same can be true of one's country.
And I was thinking about all this in the wake of the July 4th holiday.
The Democrats were promoting an event in Arizona, which was literally called F the Fourth.
F the Fourth. And the event was evidently put on by some women's group, the Tucson Women's March.
But it was being promoted by the Pima County Democratic Party.
And then when Republicans got a hold of it and said basically, look how anti-American these people are.
They won't even celebrate a national holiday.
In fact, they are using all these obscenities in connection with it.
The Pima County people deleted the tweet, but they said, listen, we're deleting the tweet because we think the name of the event is in poor taste.
The meme is in poor taste, but we support the event.
And interestingly, in the event, the Women's March people said, in effect, bring your shoes, water, lawn chairs, posters, and your anger.
And your anger. So this appears to be in part over the Supreme Court overturning the Roe decision.
And in a strange way, it's also a grudging acknowledgement that the Supreme Court in doing this was affirming the principles of the founding.
Because why else would you say F the Fourth?
You say F the Fourth because you think the founding principles themselves are bad.
After all, if you thought that the court was usurping its authority, and if you thought that the court was misreading the Constitution and misreading the Declaration of Independence, then you would affirm the Fourth and accuse the Supreme Court of betraying the true principles of the founding.
But no, I think the left realizes they don't like those principles.
And this anti-Americanism, I think, was given a big boost by Obama.
The anti-colonialism of Obama, the idea that somehow America as a nation is bad.
It's had a bad influence in the world.
Its wealth and power are bad.
It needs to be scaled back.
These currents were in the Democratic Party.
Obama didn't invent them, but he highlighted them and he helped to exacerbate divisions that were already there, but he made them a lot worse.
Now, very interestingly, I've seen some surveys that show that pride in America has gone down.
And I suspect that Pride in America has gone down not only on the left, but also on the right.
Why? Because we too are wedded, or we too are committed to a certain view of America.
In fact, we want an America in which the founding principles are alive and well.
So to the degree that we move away from that America, and let's think about the America that we live in now.
We want to celebrate, let's say, July 4th.
And we say, well, let's sing the national anthem.
Well, we don't really have a national anthem, do we?
Lots of people on the left don't want to sing it.
They refuse to.
They want to take a knee. They want to make a protest against it.
So it's not their anthem.
They have voluntarily, you may say, jettisoned it.
It's our anthem. We want to, you know, we want to take a pledge to the flag.
The American flag. Well, we have an American flag, but it's not really an American flag because there are lots of people in America who would rather burn the flag.
They don't identify with the flag.
In fact, to them, the flag is a symbol of injustice and oppression.
So it's our flag, not their flag.
And all of this is a way of saying that we have really our America and they have their America.
Now, they're loyal and patriotic to that America.
If they had their way and there was sort of not just abortion rights but abortion subsidies, if essentially the gender differences are completely abolished, if the state controlled ultimately all the assets in the country and parceled it out the way that they wish, If you had, in a sense, the socialist paradise that the left is pushing for, they would be patriotic to that America.
In fact, they would support the cops in that America.
Why? Because the cops would essentially be gangsters with badges doing their bidding the way Hugo Chavez's cops and Maduro's cops do in Venezuela.
So, the point I'm trying to make is that in their America, we would lose our patriotism.
Why? Because it would still be, quote, our country, but it would no longer be a place worth living in.
It would no longer be a country that was exceptional.
It would be actually, it's possible for a country not just to be exceptionally good, but it's possible for a country to become exceptionally bad.
It's possible for a country to betray its founding ideals.
And the question then becomes, why would you want to be a good citizen in a bad country?
In fact, this is a question that goes all the way back to Aristotle.
Aristotle basically says that you can't be a good citizen in a bad country.
Why? Because the laws and mores of that country are actually making you bad.
And so being a good citizen in a bad country is a little bit of a contradiction in terms.
you're actually better off at that point rejecting your patriotism, perhaps moving away from that kind of a country and certainly moving away spiritually from a country that not only no longer reflects your ideals but now represents a repudiation of them.
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What's happening in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to overrule Roe v.
Wade? Well, the first thing to notice is that no cataclysm has occurred.
And for people who warned that this decision would produce a kind of social catastrophe, that people would be going nuts, our social fabric itself would be rended, And to be honest, I myself expected a more stormy reaction when the group called Jane's Revenge said, you know, there's going to be a night of rage.
I thought, well, there could be, you know, a week of rage, two weeks of rage.
As it turns out, there was nothing.
Well, I mean, there were a few protests.
And there are some protests.
Even now, the left is trying to, you know, intimidate these justices.
Let's go protest right outside their homes.
By the way, I'm happy to say Congress has passed a law.
Biden signed it. We're good to go.
In Texas, a lower court, oddly enough, responded to the Supreme Court's decision by saying to abortion providers that they could resume offering abortions.
Now, the reason that the court said this is they took a recent Texas law, which is a heartbeat bill, a bill that in a sense says that after six weeks or so, you can't do abortions.
And the court said, well, it follows from that law that you can do abortions before that.
And so the lower court decision authorized abortion clinics to resume operations in Texas, but offer these abortions only up to six weeks.
Now, Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General who's been on this podcast, went to the Texas Supreme Court and challenged this.
And he argued, in effect, that there is an older Texas law.
This is not a law recently passed.
In fact, it's a law that predates Roe v.
Wade. In fact, goes back to the earlier part of the 20th century that outlawed all abortions in Texas.
And, says Paxton, that law is still in effect.
It's in effect. Why?
Because it had been suspended because of Roe v.
Wade. Roe v. Wade, in a sense, invalidated that law.
But now that Roe v.
Wade itself has been invalidated by the Supreme Court, that law kicks back into effect.
And the law was never repealed by the Texas legislature.
They never said, we don't need this law anymore.
They wanted to have the law, but the law was against their will, put on the shelf because of Roe v.
Wade. So, the Supreme Court agreed with Paxton and has overturned the lower court ruling, which means that abortions, in effect, are not happening right now in Texas.
Now, the Biden administration...
It appears to have its own solution, or at least a temporary solution.
Their real solution is they want to try to pass a federal law making abortion a kind of federal right.
Now, if they did that, it would go straight to the Supreme Court, which will have to decide whether the federal government can pass a law that overturns the ability of states to regulate abortion.
This now becomes a federalism question.
It becomes a question in which, yes, the abortion decision is no longer with the court.
It's now moved to the legislature.
But which legislature? The state legislature at the local level or the federal legislature, which is to say Congress?
And if Congress passes a law on this subject, does it override state laws?
In general, the answer to that question is yes.
Congressional laws do override state laws, but they override state laws only on matters where Congress has the jurisdictional authority.
So for example, on immigration, a congressional law overrides a state law.
But the point is if abortion is a state matter, then federal law doesn't even belong in the sphere.
States have the final say on what abortion is, what abortion laws are going to be in that state.
And that's what the Supreme Court seemed clearly to say.
Another issue that the Biden administration is pushing is the idea that the abortion pill cannot be regulated by the states.
And the Biden position on this is that because the abortion pill was declared safe by the FDA, The Food and Drug Administration, states don't have a right to outlaw it.
But this, of course, is nonsense.
Of course, the abortion pill was declared safe for the person taking it.
It's obviously not safe for a new life being created in the womb.
In fact, it's designed to be unsafe for that life.
So again, if the abortion decision is in the hand of the states, it's hard for me to see the Supreme Court saying, well, yeah, but...
When it comes to the abortion pill, you know, states can't pass laws about it because the FDA says so.
We just have a ruling from the court on the climate issue where the court basically says these regulatory agencies have far exceeded their authority.
They don't have the right to sort of, in a sense, make up laws and arrogate to themselves authority that has not been clearly given to them by Congress.
I think that we're going to have some confusion and some chaos in the abortion area for some time.
But on balance, we are moving in a direction away from Roe and the predicted catastrophe that was supposed to happen has not.
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After issuing a series of landmark rulings on a whole bunch of issues from guns to abortion, religious freedom, the Supreme Court is now in recess until October.
And so they have decamped.
I won't say they're all out of town, but they're, in a sense, not working.
And it got me thinking, what about that abortion leak?
What happened to the leaker?
How come we don't know the identity of the leaker?
Well, as it turns out, it doesn't look like we...
And this is really strange.
I mean, first of all, is it that hard to find the leaker?
Were they able to find the leaker but are now concealing the identity of the leaker for some reason?
And then in some ways the intriguing question, did the leak come from the left or from the right?
Now, a word about the leak itself.
Roberts had directed the marshal of the court to try to, quote, find the leaker, launch an investigation into the source of the leak.
The marshal is not particularly an expert in doing this.
Now, the FBI presumably, I say presumably because the FBI has its own agenda, but the marshal has not been able to do it.
We've heard about some steps about getting people to turn in their phones.
But no update, no disclosure.
And this all at a time when, by the way, conservative justices have been getting threats.
They've had protests outside their homes.
We know about the death threat that was faced by Justice Kavanaugh, by the guy, Nicholas Roski, who was arrested after he claimed that he was carrying out a kind of murder-suicide plot against Kavanaugh in his Maryland, outside his Maryland home.
And so all of this may seem to suggest that obviously the leak came from the left.
It was designed to instigate a public fury against these justices, and we've seen some evidence of left-wing protesters doing that.
But I'm also thinking about the effect of the leak.
If it came from the left, it completely blew up in the left's face.
And I say that because the leak turned out, in my view, in retrospect, to be a good thing.
It turned out to be a good thing because it blunted the force of social shock experienced in the immediate aftermath of the court's ruling.
See, if the court had come out of nowhere, Roe vs.
Wade is overruled. There would be a sort of sense of catastrophe.
Oh my gosh! And the immediacy of the outrage is similar to anything that you hear that comes out of nowhere that's going to create a big change that you didn't anticipate.
The reaction is always more explosive and it's always more emotional.
But on the other hand, when something is expected, and by the way, this is not just true of a court ruling, it's true of anything.
If someone has been sick for a long time, and you expect that this is a terminal illness, they're not going to make it, they're going to die at some point, and then they die.
You knew it was coming. You were told beforehand.
It is to be expected.
And so even though you may not have expected it at that exact time, it was expected.
And so the level of shock is less.
Why? Because you knew about the eventuality beforehand.
And the same thing happened with the leak.
There was a leak. People were shocked by the leak.
But there was a lot of focus on the leak itself.
Who put out the leak?
Who's responsible? And as a result, people got a preview of what was coming.
Then, of course, a lot of speculation.
Will the final decision be that way?
Will the justices change their mind?
But when the final decision came, no one could profess...
Oh my gosh, the Supreme Court has overruled Roe versus Wade.
Why? Because there was a leak.
You already knew the Supreme Court was overruling Roe versus Wade.
You read the majority opinion for the most part in advance.
The opinion was slightly modified to take into account some of the objections, but it was the same opinion.
So any shock that occurred or any professed outrage when the court made its final decision Would appear to be sort of feigned because, again, you already knew.
You had sort of fair notice.
You had fair warning.
All of this would suggest, is it possible?
I mean, this is a little bit of a heretical idea that the leak came from the right, that one of the...
I don't think so. I was talking about this with Debbie, and she's like, our side doesn't do stuff like this.
And it's true. Our side doesn't think about things like, how do we leak?
We wouldn't even know who to leak to.
And the fact that this was leaked to the left-wing media...
Suggest to me that the original supposition that this leak came from the left, probably out of the offices of Kagan or Sotomayor, is probably the correct one.
But in that case, the left miscalculated because the leak, as I mentioned, turned out to be beneficial to our side.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code BALANCE. Guys, we have a new guest today, well, new to you, not new to me, Richard Samuelson, actually an old friend of mine.
We'll talk about our old days at the American Enterprise Institute.
But he's an associate professor of history at Cal State University in San Bernardino.
He's soon going to be joining Hillsdale College at their setup in Washington, D.C. He specializes in American political thought with a focus on the American Revolution.
Richard, great to see you.
We saw each other, as you mentioned briefly, at one of my premieres.
But we really go back to our days at the American Enterprise Institute.
When did you come to AEI? That was, well, before I had gray hair, that was the fall of 1990.
Oh my gosh.
Undergraduate in the Washington Semester Program at American University.
So I was actually probably...
Yeah, I actually published, I think, in Liberal Education, the first book in 91.
So I must have been putting the finishing touches on it at that time.
Wow. Time really passes.
Well, Richard, you have gone on to get your PhD.
And study the American founding.
Here we are the day after July 4th.
And as you know, there is on the left a lot of hostility to the founders and to the founding.
Let me begin by asking you, the founders saw themselves as creating a new type of society, a kind of society that had never existed before, and perhaps even a new kind of citizen, a new kind of human being, perhaps, the Novus Ordo Seclorum, so-called society. Welcome to my show!
Well, I mean, the American Revolution, what's so interesting about it, what does make America exceptional, is that it was putting anti-slavery on the map.
We go from 13 states with slavery to no states with slavery.
Inequality of the sexes, that's the norm throughout history, moving towards much more equal treatment of male and female.
That across the board, society where the equality of all human beings is recognized and acknowledged in the sense they're equal.
We're all capable of working our way in the world.
We're capable of reasoning. And that's what makes human beings different from other animals, and our regime is based on that principle.
And there's a direct line in the Declaration, you read the whole first two paragraphs, right?
That we're all created equal and that our creators are the rights, and we institute governments for this reason.
That's a direct link to the Constitution, because ratification of the Constitution by the people is directly connected to our equality and our right to make and unmade governments.
So you have to read the Constitution in light of those principles and setting up that whole regime in equality.
And it's funny in terms of favorite founders.
I worked on John Adams and his projects in my dissertation many years ago.
But for some reason, when I went to Cal State, I needed to start a class.
I started teaching an Age of Washington class, which is just great.
The more I learn about Washington, the more respect I have for him.
He really was the first among equals.
Without him, it may not have happened at all, or it may have fallen apart.
It would not have happened as it did.
He was so good.
And he was good because he understood the principles, not the way the intellectuals were, but he was very bright and understood them.
He understood how to make them happen in politics.
The other thing that set the American Revolution apart from so many other revolutions that set the American colonies apart from the Spanish and French colonies in the Americas was we had legislators.
The people were used to politics.
Washington had been a white colonel and had been a legislator.
He had both those roles.
So we understood how to win the war and how to have civilian government that is superior to military and have self-government to a maximal degree, whereas the French Revolution and other revolutions boil over and you wind up getting an emperor and then a king.
Washington was the key person in making that not happen.
Yeah. You know, as you describe the founding, it's almost as if the founders anticipated developments.
For example, the kind of march of equality that they didn't achieve fully in their own day.
But they saw them as coming later.
I think Lincoln put it very well when he says the founders, in a sense, created...
The founders recognized the rights whose enforcement would follow when the circumstances permitted.
Is this why you have the left-wing sort of rage at the founding?
The kind of utopian idea, why didn't the founders outlaw slavery immediately?
Why didn't they install men and women with equal rights in the founding itself?
What does the left get wrong in this idea?
If you believe it, why didn't you do it?
Well, the line I like to use is a fine line that separates idealism from misanthropy, right?
They want a different creature than humans to be doing this.
Cultures are very slow to change.
Now, the seed of equality was planted.
That's why slavery was ended in the North for the next 25 years, or laws ending slavery were ended throughout the North.
The whole Northwest was prohibited.
And there was some movement in the South.
You get the cotton gin, the cotton revolution.
Slavery digs in for a while.
But as an historian, I wonder in historical time, When we look back another couple hundred years, what is it, 90 years from, 89 years from the Declaration of Independence to the end of the Civil War, ending slavery, that's not that long in historical, geological times, so to speak. It's accepting human beings are human.
The other element the left increasingly doesn't understand is democracy.
That is, it's one thing to get rid of slavery by a tyrant, but then you're all under tyrant, you're all slaves, congratulations.
To end slavery through a democratic process, through the constitutional process, is the challenge.
And of course, the South dug in, and they declared secession, and so you declared to end slavery by force, under military Under the law of military rule, the powers of war, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, only in areas where slaves were.
So we just have this new holiday Juneteenth, which is when the last slaves in Texas found out there's no more slavery.
Slavery actually ended last in, well, Joe Biden's home state of Delaware, because that was a state in the Union.
And so slavery didn't end there by force, as police had to go in, basically, when the 13th Amendment was ratified.
So that was done through a constitutional process.
And so it's one thing to move towards a more free and equal society.
It's another thing to do it in a democratic process that will sustain it in the long term.
And the left has a lot of problem with the democratic political process.
Let's take a pause, Richard.
When we come back, I'd like to explore further the implications of the founding for today.
Right now, and especially with some decisions not going the way of the left and the Democrats, court packing is their solution.
And that's the real danger to our democracy.
Make no mistake, court packing is a coup.
And the usual suspects, Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, are working overtime on new radical plans to pack the Supreme Court.
Well, if we don't stop them from installing four more justices so they can rig the system in their favor, it's going to be catastrophic for our court, our country, our way of life.
We can't let that happen not on our watch.
That's why First Liberty needs you to join us.
They're gathering a coalition of 1 million patriots to say no to court backing, no to the liberal agenda, no to the Supreme Court coup.
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So go ahead, please sign your name now.
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go to SupremeCoup.com to sign First Liberty's letter.
That's SupremeCoup.com, and God bless America.
I'm back with that, an old friend of mine, Richard Samuelson, a former colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, now an associate professor of history at Cal State San Bernardino, moving to the Hillsdale campus in Washington, D.C. Richard, let's talk a little bit about where we are now, because When Franklin was asked if he was, you know, were the founders given us a monarchy or what kind of government?
He goes, a republic if you can keep it.
And my question is, how good a job have we been doing of keeping it?
It seems to me, at least thinking back, for example, to our days at AEI, where we took so many of our civil liberties, in any case, for granted, and now suddenly it appears, you know...
Our right to free speech has been put somewhat into question.
Our right to assembly, to equal treatment under the law, the idea that political majorities wouldn't use the weapons of the state against political opponents.
So, is it the case that the founders...
Is it being gradually unwound?
Did the founders not put sufficient sort of ballast in the founding to protect against the things that are happening now?
What would they say if they were here to survey the landscape in 2022?
Well, from the start, you get from Washington's farewell address.
And even before that, there's concern the history of republics arise and decline.
And they try to have a new kind of republic and all human beings, all human things perhaps are temporary.
But there are certain things they were worried about.
As usual, I reread the Declaration of Independence.
I stumbled on the bit about putting the legislators in a place far from their records.
And that's about transparency.
Increasingly, the government doesn't want us to know what they're doing.
So we, the people, can monitor what they're doing.
And that's related to cracking down on free speech, going after people the government considers enemies, because they're not letting us rule.
We seem to be working for them more and more.
And interestingly, you almost see this, interestingly, in our change in property rights.
You own your property. You can do what you want with it.
Nowadays, you don't own your phone.
Soon you won't own your car.
You can't just modify it, tweak it, play with it.
They own it, and you can kind of...
So it's more like feudal property, which is a concern, because our republic is based on you owning stuff, and each of us can do with it and tweak it as we want.
That's what it means to be free, to have your realm of privacy under your vine and fig tree, as Washington said.
There's no Bureau of Fig Tree Management in Washington's day.
And the other thing I think they'd be concerned about is, I think they worry about the family.
They know the history of the rise and fall of Rome.
They are very much concerned not to do that.
They see some chaos in our social relations, I think.
And even Franklin, who is a little more funky in some ways, I think, you look at his writings closely, I think they'd be worried about how we are treating each other on a daily basis, particularly in the relationship between the number of people having kids out of wedlock, number of kids raised without fathers. I think they'd worry about all that as a sign that's alarm going on.
I mean, as you say, Franklin was, you know, himself considered a little bit of a kind of a dandy and a kind of a nonconformist.
But nevertheless, he was very concerned, you see this in the autobiography, with the idea of self-improvement.
Of enumerating a list of the virtues and kind of working on them kind of one a week to become better in frugality and better in honesty and better in industry.
It almost seems like those concepts have become foreign to our vocabulary.
It's more today about expressing yourself, it seems, rather than improving yourself.
Yeah. Well, I was thinking about this in terms of some people left, they think the abortion issue.
They think, well, a woman's not free.
Forget if there's a tragic situation or a rape, but, you know, just she has a boyfriend and something.
They didn't expect to get pregnant and she's pregnant, right?
Yeah. And that's slavery.
So in that definition of slavery, having to work for your bread, I think Genesis 3, that's slavery.
That is, the world imposes obligations on you by nature.
That's an attack on human life in the classic sense.
There's the utopian, but it's also anti-human increasingly, the understanding of what it is to be human, what it is to be equal.
So the attack on equality comes from a discomfort with being human, it seems, with the constraints, the tragic constraints of human life.
Well, this is a very profound idea.
I'd just like you to say a word about it.
It seems like the founders were not trying to remake human nature, but were trying to create a society in which human nature, given what it is, could nevertheless flourish.
Would that be an accurate description?
And what is the left trying to do to human nature now?
Well, the left...
Left resents human nature because it puts constraints on us.
As you said before, left's definition of liberty is self-expression.
After your bills are paid for, after you have food on the table and you have health care, etc., then freedom is do whatever you want in your lifestyle.
In some ways, you could say Franklin Roosevelt is saying, necessitous men are not free men.
If you're rich like he was by inheritance, then you're free.
Otherwise, you're not really free.
And there's a sense that that's what freedom means, increasing to the left.
And that, frankly, irony is it's not going to make people happy.
We are happy when we have occupations that keep us busy, that we like, that help us do good in the world.
And so left's temper tantrum is because their notion of freedom is a baby's notion of freedom, and they're upset like a baby is because it's an impossible goal.
You're not going to be happy until you get to work alone.
Get disciplined, and do the classic things that make most people happy.
Have a family, be responsible, etc.
I mean, you're helping us understand why this kind of tantrum and rage and discontent is almost a defining feature of the left today.
Hey, Richard, love to have you back.
Hope you have a smooth transition to D.C. All the best with your work on Adams and Washington, and let's do it again.
Thank you very much. Great to see you.
Thanks for having me. For more information,
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The Iliad and the Odyssey, the two great epics that are at the root of Western civilization, both begin, as they say, in media's race, in the middle of the action.
The story doesn't begin at the beginning.
It begins in the middle, and then it sort of flashes back to an earlier spot, and then it moves the narrative forward.
And that's true of both epics.
The phrase in Medias Res was used by the poet later, Horace, to talk about why he thought this is the way to begin a story.
In other words, that the bard doesn't feel obliged.
You have to start with at a certain point.
Let's remember that Homer, as the ancient...
Bards working in traditional material, in the oral tradition, they expected their audience to already know the story.
So the suspense doesn't come from what's going to happen next.
Are the Greeks or the Trojans going to win the war?
No, the Greeks are going to win the war.
Troy is going to be sacked.
Troy is going to fall.
and the audience already knows that.
The audience also knows a lot of things.
Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes, will kill Hector, the greatest of the Trojan heroes, and Hector's death will be, in a sense, the climax.
Hector's death and the aftermath will be the end of the story of the Iliad.
But beyond the Iliad, the audience will know that Achilles himself, the killer, the slayer of Hector, will himself be killed.
So since the audience knows all these things, and you might know some of them, but not all of them, I think it is important for me to begin by just giving a brief sketch of the Trojan War.
Because both epics are based upon that war, picking at different parts of the story.
So the story of the Trojan War begins when the Trojan Prince Paris abducts the wife of a Greek warlord, a guy named Menelaus. His wife is Helen of Troy, the famous Helen of Troy. She's the most beautiful woman in the world, the daughter of the Greek god Zeus. And Paris abducts her and
takes her back to Troy.
And Menelaus goes to his brother, a guy named Agamemnon.
Now, Greece is not a single country, but many kingdoms, each with their own king.
So, Menelaus is a king, Agamemnon is a king, Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey...
Is a king. And Agamemnon assembles a coalition of Greek forces, an expeditionary force of a thousand ships, to sail to Troy.
And what's their motive?
Well, it's revenge.
It is to bring Helen back and it's to teach the Trojans a lesson for this shocking violation on the part of Paris.
The war lasts ten years.
It's evenly fought.
The Trojans are assisted by a number of allies in nearby cities.
The Trojans by themselves could not have resisted the Greeks.
But aided by a bunch of Trojan allies and cities, it's roughly evenly matched.
Also, the Greeks, let's remember, are the attackers.
Troy is on a kind of high mountain, and the Greek ships are all parked at the shore.
And so, the battle goes back and forth.
Until, at the end of the Iliad, we'll see the great Greek hero, Achilles, kills Hector.
Now, this shifts the balance of power away from the Greeks.
I'm sorry, away from the Trojans.
And you can almost think that Troy is destined to fall once their great defender, Hector, has been killed.
But nevertheless, Troy, as it turns out, does not fall.
Troy hangs in there and continues the fight, and it's only through deceit.
The famous story of the Trojan horse, the idea of Odysseus, who is the wiliest, the most cunning of the Greeks.
Odysseus comes up with the idea of gifting the Trojans with a huge wooden horse embedded in which are all the Greek soldiers.
The Trojans foolishly accept the, quote, gift.
They pull the horse into their city.
At night, the Now, once the Greeks have sacked Troy, they commit a series of great outrages.
One of them is they murder the Trojan king Priam at his sacred altar.
Now, it's not a violation to kill him, but it is a violation to kill him at the altar.
They also grab Hector's son, the baby Astyonyx, and fling him from the battlements.
Again, this is a bit too much.
And finally, Priam's daughter, Cassandra, a virgin, is raped in the temple of a virgin goddess, Athena.
Again, this goes beyond the accepted norms of war.
The gods, we'll talk more about the gods later, but the gods are enraged at the Greeks, and so the Greeks have all kinds of troubles in their effort to get home from Troy.
Agamemnon gets home, but he discovers that his wife, Clytemnestra, is having an affair with another man, and she and the other guy murder him.
This becomes the plot of Greek tragedy later.
Odysseus is essentially lost at sea.
He's roaming for about 10 years, and this becomes the plot of the Odyssey.
Menelaus and Helen eventually get back to Troy, but not after a long time.
So this is the taken-for-granted story that Homer assumed that his audience knew.
And now you know it. And once you know the basics, we'll fill in details as we kind of go along.
You're ready now to plow, as I am, into the text of the Iliad.
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