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Aug. 1, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:06
A THIRD PARTY? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep383
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
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Now coming up, I'm going to talk about the effort on the part of Andrew Yang, Christine, Todd Whitman, and others to start a new third party in America called the Forward Party.
I'll argue that what's happening to German cities in the wake of the energy crisis might be coming to America.
I'll review what Wyoming primary voters are saying about Liz Cheney.
It's not good. Code of Vets founder Gretchen Schmidt joins me.
We're going to talk about how to help struggling veterans.
And I'll continue my discussion of the Iliad's longest day.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division and lies.
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We all know that there's a good deal of political polarization in America and it's often deplored as a bad thing.
Wouldn't it be great if Americans It turns out that there's a group of people, one or two on the Democratic side and two or three on the Republican side, and they've decided that the solution is a new party, a third party, a centrist party that they call the Forward Political Party.
Well, it's kind of a weird name, first of all.
And... It sounds like...
Socialist to me. Debbie doesn't like it.
She goes, it sounds... Well, I mean, forward sounds a little bit like progressive.
It sounds a little bit like...
But I suppose what they would say is we're trying to find a way forward out of the polarization.
Now, who's involved? Andrew Yang.
Now, Andrew Yang is the tech nerd who ran for office.
I think he ran for New York.
And then he...
He ran for mayor in 2021, and then he said, that's it, I'm out of the Democratic Party.
Now, that by itself is a good thing, but evidently Yang thinks that there is space for a new party, and he's joined by some Republicans, although these are kind of, has-been, former, old-establishment type of Republicans who are part of the George H.W. Bush administration or the George W. Bush administration.
So, there is one guy who was part of the Trump administration, Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official.
Whoa. And then David Jolly, a former Republican congressman.
Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor.
Notice the common theme here.
It's former. These are basically people who have lost office, can't really gain much traction.
It seems like time has passed them by.
They have no real constituency.
So I think they kind of feel like...
If you put a bunch of losers together, you might get a winner by loser plus loser plus loser equals winner, but generally loser plus loser plus loser equals three losers.
So it generally doesn't really work that way.
I think the deeper point is really this, and that is that When you have a situation in the country where the two parties are pulling in opposite directions in terms of their destination.
I mean, very simply, one party is for restricting and limiting abortion.
The other party is for celebrating and promoting it.
So, is there really kind of a, quote, middle ground?
Isn't the middle ground precisely what we have now, which is to say, let states decide for themselves how they want to handle the issue?
That is the middle ground.
That's allowing local values to determine how each state deals with the issues.
And I think there's a certain part of Americans that thinks like this.
Well, it's just a pity that the sides are so much at loggerheads.
I just wish that they would all sit down and figure out what's best for the country.
Well, this kind of boilerplate kind of repels me because, of course, the underlying assumption is that there is a single thing that's best for the country, whereas the problem is that the two sides radically disagree over what is best for the country.
The Democrats want a very different America than we do.
So if we're the party, let's just say, of moral principles, and they're the party of moral degeneracy, what's the centrist's position?
Let's have some degeneracy, but just not as much as the Democrats want.
Or if we're the party of the founding and the Democrats are the party of, let's say, ripping up the Constitution and throwing it aside for essentially what they want to do right now, what's the centrist position?
Well, let's have a kind of moderate respect for the Constitution and in some cases show fidelity to it, but in other cases it's totally fine to rip it up.
I mean, part of what we have is we have a new idea for a party.
We don't even have a new party yet, but it doesn't have any platform.
It's not spelled out what this party even wants.
My guess is there will be an effort to sort of We're good to go.
But it was replaced by the Republican Party.
Notice that the Republican Party was not a third party.
The Republican Party supplanted the Whig Party, which went away.
And then we were back to a two-party system.
And the same thing happened earlier with Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party.
It essentially split into two parties, originally the Democrats and the Whigs, and then later, of course, the Democrats and the Whigs.
It was Abraham Lincoln, I think, who made the very deep point that you compromise as much as you can, and then you don't compromise any further.
Lincoln compromised.
He said, look, we're not going to try to stop slavery in the States.
We recognize that the founders made a kind of constitutional pact, and we're going to abide by that pact.
We're going to restrict slavery from spreading to the territories.
But on that issue, we are inflexible.
We are going to tolerate no effort to dilute or deprive us of the platform that we ran on and won on.
And so I think this is a pretty good approach for the Republican Party.
You compromise on things in order to get things done.
You're pragmatic in that sense, but you're pragmatic up to a point.
On the core principle that explains why you're a conservative, why you're a Republican, you don't compromise at all.
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The Germans are major smartasses.
Now, I catch myself, of course, because I'm making a generalization.
But the point I want to make is that the German political class, by the way, no different here than the French political class, has a certain arrogance both about itself and And also about America.
By the way, you see a little glimpse of this, just a metaphor for it, if you will, is in the film Casablanca, where, of course, the German officer who's in Casablanca talks about the Americans.
He goes, those bungling Americans!
And the idea here is that the Americans are naive, they're unsophisticated, they're fools.
And then, of course, the French policeman goes, well, if you remember the last time the Americans bungled Bungled into Berlin at the end of World War I. And, of course, that happened again at the end of World War II. The point being that the Germans are not quite as smart as they think, and yet they're always snickering at America.
And of course, when Trump told the Germans, he said in effect to the Angela Merkel team, look, you know, the problem with the Nord Stream isn't just that you're making a deal with the Russians, but what comes with the deal is a dependency on Russia.
You're now going to be dependent on them at their permission, if you will, to get your oil through the Nord Stream pipeline.
And the Germans were like... That's Trump.
He's such a fool. You know, all he knows is how to build a building.
What does he know about geopolitics or the relations between Europe and Russia?
And of course, what's happening now is exactly what Trump predicted.
Namely, the Russians are squeezing the Germans.
How are they doing it? Well, they basically decided to choke the Nord Stream pipeline to send a tiny portion of the oil through the pipeline.
And the net effect of it is, and now reading from a headline, quote, German cities are going dark, shutting off hot water to conserve energy.
Well, let's just say that this is a big I told you so from Trump because situations change.
Suddenly the Russians are not so friendly and suddenly the Russians decide we're going to teach you a lesson.
So it's the Russian gas corporation called Gazprom.
They're like, we're going to restrict deliveries of natural gas to Germany to 20% capacity.
So what's the effect? Across Germany.
Here we go. In the northwestern city of Hanover, hot water has been shut off in the municipal buildings for hand washing, showers, and other purposes.
In addition, these buildings will only be heated from October through March, and mobile air conditioning units and fan heaters will be banned.
So you're not allowed to try to make up for the absence of central heat by doing your own heat.
The German economic minister, Robert Hebeck, says that energy prices are going to go up and the Germans are really going to feel the squeeze, especially as winter comes around.
Quote, we can't say yet how much gas will cost in November, but the bad news is it's definitely a few hundred euros per household.
Other municipal measures include Nuremberg, Nuremberg's closure of three out of its four indoor public swimming pools, and Munich's move to shut off the public fountains and the city hall spotlight at night.
Again, these are signs that geopolitical sanctions cut both ways.
When you say to the Russians, we won't buy your oil, or we're going to teach you a lesson, the Russians go, well, we'll stop selling you oil, and we're going to teach you a lesson.
And so the pain is felt, you might say, both ways.
Now, of course, the tragedy for Germany is that in their climate frenzy they have shut off nuclear power plants, which would be a source of energy.
The Germans don't have the kind of oil and natural gas that we have, for example, in the United States.
So what makes the United States plight, and of course, whenever you read something like cities are going dark, the question then becomes, when is Biden going to bring all that here?
When are American cities going to go dark?
When is it that we're going to have to turn off the lights and shut down the, turn off the heat and impose restrictions on what people can use and wattage requirements and so on?
Debbie talks about how those were imposed in Venezuela.
And again, the tragedy of it was Venezuela has oil.
And so for an oil-rich country to do this is just downright nonsensical.
And similarly for the United States, we're not in the position of Germany.
We have our oil. We have our natural gas.
We are able to develop it if we want to.
So to restrict it on the one hand and then to start facing the kind of blight that Germany is facing now is really to give Russia a much bigger victory than the Russians deserve.
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Feel the difference. I've talked before on the podcast about the plight of Guy Refit, one of the January 6th defendants.
In fact, this is a guy who...
Today will be the first January 6th trial defendant to be sentenced.
And that was the first guy who took his case to trial.
Now, did he win his case?
No. He was in front of a completely unsympathetic judge, an equally unsympathetic jury.
I've raised before, and others have, the question of whether this is even a jury of your peers.
It just seems like a show trial with an almost foreordained outcome.
Now, not only has Raffet been found guilty on a series of the familiar charges like obstruction of justice, parading, and so on.
Remember, this is a guy, by the way, who did not enter the Capitol.
But what he did do was engage in bombastic and hyperbolic speech.
I'm going to do this. I'm going to drag Nancy Pelosi bouncing with her head on the pavement and so on.
And his family has said, his wife and daughters have said, look, this guy's a blowhard.
He says stuff like this.
He doesn't do any of it.
He didn't do any of it.
And yet, his own teenage son, Jackson, testified against him, and now the government wants a, quote, terrorism enhancement on his sentence.
Now, this is really creepy because they're accusing him of being, well, they're saying, in effect, that because he made, quote, terroristic threats, even though threats he never carried out.
He was plotting terrorism, and they should give him an enhanced sentence.
Now, they didn't charge him with terrorism.
If they charged him with terrorism, there'd be no way to convict him because he didn't do it.
So what they're trying to do here is use his state of mind.
He's in a terrorist. I mean, this is just outrageous because it carries years and years in prison.
In other words, this guy could get 20, 40 years in prison because of the, quote, terrorism enhancement.
So I see this as an absolute, you know, kind of fascist tactic.
By the DOJ. And it's clearly, well, they claim it's intended to deter others from plotting, and again, this guy wasn't plotting anything, but from plotting this kind of action.
But in reality, what they're trying to do...
And I think this is the insidious goal of the government, is to prevent people like Guy from going to trial.
They're basically saying, if you go to trial, we're going to teach you a lesson by adding all these enhancements.
So make a deal with us.
You know, take five years or take seven years.
Unjust though that is, and utterly disproportionate as that is to anything that this guy did, what he did was essentially nothing.
The actual fair penalty for what Guy Raffa did is like one day in jail.
But the government wants these plea bargains, and they don't even have to take the case to trial.
Remember, there's a little bit of a risk for the government in taking the case to trial, not even so much in the outcome, but in what might come out, what the defense might obtain in terms of discoveries.
They don't want these January 6th defendants to go to trial.
Now, Guy Refitt has written a letter to the judge.
This is Judge Dabney Friedrich.
And it's a good letter.
It's a letter appealing to...
It's a letter actually addressed to Biden.
But it's, in a sense, an attempt to appeal to our better selves.
It's asking...
As I read the letter, I had mixed feelings.
I'm thinking, this is sort of like writing the mafia and telling the...
I'm telling them, you know, listen, guys, you know, don't be hard-hearted.
Don't be cruel.
Don't abuse the system.
Don't engage in crime.
Think of what this will never end.
Where is it going to end?
It can end well.
So Guy Refit's letter is full of these legitimate and sensible points.
But I fear that he is speaking to cruel and deaf ears.
So I'm going to read a few lines from the letter, which give you a flavor of what he says.
It's addressed President Biden.
Despite what you may read, I did not engage in any violence that day and came to D.C. with no intention to do so.
That is a true statement.
He then goes on to say, I am to be punished for a crime I was never convicted of, terrorism.
So the DOJ is asking for a 15-year sentence.
And the only way they can get to such a ridiculous number is by throwing the terrorism on top of the rest of it, which is what?
This blowhardism, standing outside the Capitol, making threats that you never carried out or even showed any intention of carrying out.
Your actions, in other words, were not consistent with that.
Guy Raffet goes on to say, quote, this same tactic can be used against protesters and those on the left.
When the power pendulum inevitably swings.
Now, this is a really important point, but I think the reason it's not going to carry through to the judge is because they don't think the Republicans will do the same thing.
Now, I think it's really important for the Republicans to do the same thing.
Not because we believe in disproportionate punishment, but because the only way to stop it on the other side is to give them a taste of their own medicine.
Persuasion, appeals to civility, and that's really where Guy Refitt is going.
You know, he's appealing to logic.
For the court to blame me for the actions of others and attempt to make an example of me to strike fear in others is the opposite of what we stand for as the shining city on the hill.
Well, we're not a shining city on the hill right now.
Biden doesn't want us to be a shining city on the hill.
And then Refit concludes, the time has come to cast aside the political division and embrace those fundamental principles that should unite every single American.
And of course the key word here is should.
This is the way things should be.
This is the way things ought to be.
But I'm sorry to say that this is not the way that things right now are.
Inflation is real.
The CPI is at another 40-year high.
Now, Biden and his team keep denying it.
But look, inflation doesn't go away because you deny or minimize it.
The recession is real.
Again they're denying it and again a recession doesn't stop being a recession if you stop calling it a recession.
If all your money is in the market or tied to the US dollar, you're taking a risk.
You're messing with fire.
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Here we are, August 1st.
Where did the July go?
Debbie and I were just saying, man, somehow time just...
I don't know, is this because we're older, honey, that time goes faster when you're younger?
Remember thinking about our summers when we were kids?
It lasted forever.
It never seemed to end.
In fact, the day never seemed to end.
I don't know what's going on, but every single day, I think this may be what Einstein means by the principle of relativity.
In other words, time is related to your perception of time, and it depends on your perspective.
It depends on where you are.
Anyway, here we are in August, and August is also the month in which we have the Wyoming Republican primary.
And that means, it looks like...
Ciao, adieu to Liz Cheney.
She is on her way out, and everybody kind of knows it.
CNN knows it.
ABC News knows it, based on a recent report.
The Federalist knows it based on a recent article.
These are conversations that these media outlets are having with people in Wyoming, and they're stopping random people at like, well, in the case of The Federalist, it was the Midsummer Cowboy Festival.
Liz Cheney, by the way, made a kind of cameo appearance and then rushed off to do her, quote, important January 6th committee work.
But the woman who hung out and spent a lot of time at the festival was her opponent.
This is...
This is...
Harriet Hageman, who is leading Liz Cheney by, let's see, 25 points, 25 to 30 points, depending on which poll you consult.
And even Liz Cheney seems to kind of recognize that she's done because she said recently on CNN, quote, if I have to choose between maintaining a seat in the House of Representatives or protecting the Constitutional Republic, Look at this woman's grand illusions or delusions.
And ensuring the American people know the truth about Donald Trump, I'm going to choose the Constitution and truth every single day.
So this is basically a politician who has, well...
It's not just that she's lost her political marbles.
I think what's happened is she has alienated herself so completely that her career move now is to seek opportunities in a completely different direction.
She's looking to see, you know, what can the Democrats offer me?
What can the liberal billionaires offer me?
Is there a presidency of a college that's open that I could move into as the kind of voice of truth?
So Liz Cheney, I think, is going to make a departure from Republican politics.
Now, for a while, she'll still be useful to the left because she'll still have the kind of tag Republican next to her name, even though the vast, vast majority of Republicans nationwide, but also in Wyoming, consider her.
Well, what do they consider her?
When you look at the... One, she's a hypocrite.
And two, she's a fraud.
And three, she's a traitor.
So, she's a hypocrite because she's pretending to be motivated by nobler things.
And in fact, what is she doing?
She's selling out her own district.
So, in other words, she's been elected.
Let's think about it. She's a representative.
It's a house of representatives.
You're supposed to represent the values and interests of...
Is Liz Cheney doing that manifestly?
No. In fact, she almost now has a kind of hidden loathing for her constituency, like, you buffoons, you don't understand that I'm your enlightened Pied Piper leading you.
Why aren't you following me?
And people have no intention of doing that.
The way that Wyomingites put it is that they basically say that she's lost touch with Wyoming.
She's become a creature of D.C. And that's one way to put it.
This guy, Maria Lemke, an accountant, 25-year resident of Cheyenne, It says about Harriet Hageman, Liz Cheney's opponent, she's from Wyoming.
Obviously, Liz Cheney is also from Wyoming, but I think the point is that Harriet Hageman lives in Wyoming and represents Wyoming.
She grew up on a ranch a hundred miles from Cheyenne.
She now lives in the capital.
So she is a creature of Wyoming.
Now, Liz Cheney has a residence in Jackson, but she also has a residence in Northern Virginia, and that's really where she seems to spend her time, and that's where she seems to take her political cues.
Harriet Hageman has been essentially combing the state.
She's traveled 36,000 miles Liz Cheney, when she shows up in Wyoming, she generally meets with reporters, by and large the media.
She knows she can count on a kind of friendly media, but she doesn't face her own constituents.
And you can see why. George Hoff, a 22-year resident of Cheyenne, says the January 6th committee is, quote, a farce and a waste of taxpayer money.
Quote, I think they beat that drum until it died.
And then, of course, he repeats when she goes over to the Potomac, she forgets about...
Wyoming. Interestingly, Cheney has also been booted.
She's lost her seat on the House Natural Resources Committee.
I mean, think about it. This is Wyoming.
It's all about natural resources.
And House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has said, Or either way, if Hageman replaces Cheney, he will back her request to be on the Natural Resources Committee.
So it looks like Wyoming doesn't really have a representative right now.
At least one of their representatives, Liz Cheney, has sort of fled the coop, as they say, flown the coop.
But let's hope that with the primary coming up this month, Liz Cheney will have a replacement who will do more to represent her In this case, Hageman's constituents.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Gretchen Smith.
She's the founder of the organization called Code of Vets.
So you can find Code of Vets at codeofvets.com.
Gretchen is an Air Force veteran herself.
And this organization has raised over $6 million, assisting over 5,000 veterans.
And here's the best part, on a 2% operating budget.
This is awesome. An organization that really puts the money to help the veterans.
Hey, Gretchen, welcome to the podcast.
I gotta say, I feel like I know you, but only through social media, because...
It seems like every day you post, and it's very effective because you'll post a particular case of a particular veteran family that's been evicted or that needs medical care, and you have a dollar amount associated with that.
And so I guess it enables people to feel like they're helping particular individuals who are in need, and I really can't think of a better cause.
So say a word about why you founded Code of Vets and how the organization operates.
Absolutely. Thanks, Sinesh, for having me on.
Code of Vets actually is a very unique organization.
We operate purely on social media platforms, raising awareness about the veterans' issues throughout the country, and right now they're staggering.
The inspiration for Code of Vets is my dad, Sergeant Danny Smiley.
He was a Vietnam combat vet, airborne infantry, and he lost his battle with PTSD. So I wanted to do something to honor my dad's life and his service.
His life mattered. And so I started a Twitter page and I started talking about dad's journey from a daughter's perspective, but also as a veteran as well.
And it just really resonated with the veteran community and it took off right away.
And it just organically evolved into a 501c3.
So we operate in real time.
That's what makes us unique.
My partner, Dr. Cindy Walter, is vetting the vets and their needs behind the scenes.
And then when they're ready, she sends them to me and I post them one at a time out on the platforms and we raise money.
And as the funds are flowing in, and again, it's been over $6 million, I am all day, every day sending that money out to veterans that are in crisis.
Veterans who are homeless sitting in their car in a motel, couch surfing, veterans with eviction notices, you name it.
We're assisting veterans in every state across the country.
And it's just a great way, a unique way to assist veterans and to let them know that, hey, we've got your back in the moment that you need it the most.
Gretchen, you mentioned a moment ago, right before we went on the air, that this has been an escalating need.
Is that because of just the Biden economy, the fact that there's more economic stress, inflation, or are there other factors that are putting vets in a especially vulnerable position?
Right now, it is the inflation.
It is just crushing our veterans, especially our at-risk veterans and their families who are already on VASH HUD vouchers.
You can imagine that they are already living paycheck to paycheck, penny to penny, and this inflation is crippling for them.
Our numbers, we had a record month in the month of July.
I just got the numbers in this morning.
I've never seen anything like it.
I'm still processing. We had 1,610 veterans apply for help in the month of July, Dinesh.
Last July, we had roughly 600.
So that tells you what this economy is looking like right now.
I'm floored by these numbers.
We cannot wrap around each one and every of these vets.
We just don't have that kind of funding.
So we're just going to continue to focus on one at a time.
Assist as many as we can.
And right now we're narrowing the scope to our homeless and our eviction cases because there's so many of them.
We have 463 veterans in the month of July who are either being evicted or are already homeless.
Those numbers are just, I'm floored by these numbers, Dinesh.
And it is, it's Biden's economy, 100%.
I mean, does this mean in a sense that although we keep hearing politicians and the U.S. government in effect say, we owe a duty to our veterans, we will never let them down, but it appears like they are not, as a country, we're not doing enough for our vets.
And is that why private organizations like yours have to kind of step into the breach?
Absolutely. Our veterans are being failed on multiple levels.
And again, I want to go back to these vouchers.
The rent across the country has exploded because of inflation.
And the vouchers, and DC is aware of these rental increases, and they are not doing anything to increase the vouchers themselves.
So therefore, the veteran is responsible for that rent gap.
They cannot absorb these level of increases on their limited budgets.
And we have elderly veterans who are being evicted.
They are on limited permanent income.
It's just unbelievable what our veterans are going through right now, Dinesh.
I've never seen anything at this level.
We are creating a whole new level of homelessness right now because of the inflation, because of this push for clean energy.
We're pushing veterans out on the street by thousands and thousands.
And you said, Gretchen, that you have a system where veterans kind of apply for aid, but you're able to sort of verify which ones that they really need it, so you're able to deploy funds where it's most needed, correct?
Yes, we're triaging our cases.
Code of Vets.com is the place for our veterans to go and apply for help.
And again, we're making sure we go through all of these cases.
We're pulling out the most severe, the ones who are being evicted within 30 days, or veterans and families who are already sitting in their cars or in a motel.
It's a real problem right now.
And we're just doing the best that we can and touching as many lives as we can right now, Dinesh.
I think I saw on social media, Gretchen, you mentioned that you obviously can help to a particular veteran and a particular family, and that's what your posts do.
They highlight individual cases.
But did you also say somewhere that you can contribute like $1,000 a month, and then on a regular basis, we're able to help in a little more systematic way?
Oh, absolutely. Go to Codavex.com.
If you can afford to donate $100 a month, $1,000 a month, that would be fantastic.
We operate on that 2%.
And it would allow us to push more of these homeless vets and eviction cases through our system and get them secured and taken care of.
We give them wraparound support behind the scenes.
So we're not just giving them money.
We're not an ATM machine.
We are actually stabilizing them and making sure that moving forward that the family is going to be self-sufficient.
Get on pedivets.com.
Even if it's a $5 one-time gift or if you can set it up for auto-pay every month, we would absolutely appreciate it.
Our veterans are so grateful.
And we do vet them.
And these are the men and women who are worthy, who have always had jobs.
It's just this inflation route right now coming out of the two-year pandemic into historic 40-year high inflation.
It's just crushing them.
We need all of the support we can get right now, Dinesh.
Alright guys, so I want to urge you to help.
It's codeofvets.com.
That's the website. And I never ask people to help if we don't help.
So Gretchen, Debbie and I will send you $5,000 right now.
And we'll also sign up to do $1,000 a month going forward.
And the only reason I mention these things, I could tell you this privately, is I want to encourage people to do the same.
I want people within their means to help vets and to help a good cause, especially when we know that 98 cents on the dollar is going straight to the cause itself.
So thank you, Gretchen, for coming on the show.
I really appreciate it. We're glad to do our little part to help, but I urge others to do it as well.
Go to Code of Vets.
You can also follow Gretchen Smith at at Code of Vets.
That's her Twitter handle.
Codavets.com is the site.
Gretchen, it's a real pleasure to have you.
And thank you for the good work you're doing for a great cause.
Thank you, Dinesh and Debbie.
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Use discount Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm continuing my discussion of the longest day in the Iliad, a day that continues for multiple books, really all the way till about book 14.
And the way that the day begins, Zeus comes to Hector and he says to the Trojan warrior Hector that I'm going to put strength into you, but what I want you to do is wait for Agamemnon to be wounded and to fall back from the battle and then I want you to
rush in and you will have in a sense uninterrupted glory.
So...
So this is exactly what Hector does.
Hector heeds the advice of Zeus.
He hangs back a little bit.
And then we see the Aristeia, the kind of glorious display of the fighting prowess of Agamemnon.
Agamemnon is out there.
He's performing valiantly.
He's doing really well.
And then sure enough, just as Zeus predicted, he gets wounded.
And here is how Homer describes this.
Agamemnon continued his killing rampage with spear, sword, and chunks of rock.
This is basically how they fight.
Spear, sword, and pick up a rock.
As long as blood flowed warm from the wound...
Now, here's Agamemnon.
Even though he's wounded, he's fighting on.
He doesn't stop. He keeps going.
And Homer says, as long as blood flowed warm from the wound, Agamemnon persists.
But... Now quoting, But when the wound dried and the blood caked, the pain set in needling and sharp.
And then we get one of Homer's analogies or similes.
Homer has beautiful similes all the way through the Iliad, as if he were a woman in labor struggling with the stabbing pain.
So, Homer compares the agony of Agamemnon as the wound dries with labor pains.
And what does Agamemnon do now?
Now he's not fatally wounded, but what he does is he has to retreat from battle.
And as he retreats, Hector is now seizing his opportunity and he's going to jump into battle.
Now, interestingly, Homer compounds the difficulties faced by the Greeks by showing that two of the other great Greek warriors, namely Diomedes and Odysseus, also get wounded.
So here's Odysseus, and he is fighting bravely, but he gets stabbed, and so he has to pull It's not a fatal wound.
In fact, Homer makes the observation that a god...
Athena deflects the wound so it doesn't get through to Odysseus' vital organs.
It does hurt him, and so he's unable to continue.
But again, he's not so fatally wounded.
I mentioned earlier on that somehow wounds in the Iliad tend to be mild or they kill you.
Homer doesn't really go in the middle.
And then as for Diomedes, he is shot through the ankle, through the foot by Paris.
When Paris drew the arrowhead back to the grip, released the shaft and scored a hit, the arrow passing through the instep of Diomedes' right foot and sticking in the ground.
And then Paris laughs and taunts Diomedes, basically saying, Hey, I gotcha!
And then Diomedes has a very interesting response.
He basically taunts back.
He says to Paris...
You sissy, curly-haired pimp!
So, this is Diomedes' contempt for Paris.
And it's not just contempt, because Paris is a kind of pretty boy and a kind of a womanizer.
He goes, this is Diomedes, Why don't you come down and fight me man to man and see how far your bow and arrow gets you?
So here's Diomedes implying that a bow and arrow is kind of an effeminate weapon.
It's for girly boys.
The bow and arrow is something you use when you're far away and you fire an arrow into somebody as opposed to meeting them hand-to-hand combat and taking a risk yourself.
And then, says Diomedes, you're boasting because you scratched my foot.
And Diomedes then sits down and he pulls the arrow out of his foot.
But, of course, that creates an intense pain and Diomedes is unable to walk.
So it says, Homer says, he limped onto his chariot and told the driver to head for the ship.
So notice now that not only has Agamemnon, the leader of the expedition, been wounded, but also Odysseus and also Diomedes, the Greeks, in a sense, have lost or temporarily lost three of their best fighters.
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I was talking in the last segment about how the Greeks were disabled of three of their best fighters, Agamemnon and Odysseus and also Diomedes.
And this really leaves only two prominent fighters on the Greek side, not counting, of course, Achilles, who is still The two are Menelaus, the husband of Helen, but then most prominently Ajax or Ios.
This is the second best fighter for the Greeks.
And essentially, the way Homer describes it, Ajax is almost single-handedly holding off the Trojans.
He's not fighting alone, but he's the most prominent fighter.
At one point, Hector comes face to face with Ios, and they exchange taunts and insults with each other, but they don't actually engage.
So, the fight between Hector and Ios is postponed to a later book in the Iliad.
The Greeks are taking a beating, and so a suitsayer named Talchus, recognizing the desperation of the situation, begins to sort of egg on the Greeks.
Now, this is Talchus, kind of a forecaster or a sort of prophet, but...
But Homer tells us that although Talchus is walking around egging on the Greeks, that in reality it is the god Poseidon.
So Poseidon is now, in a sense, disguised as Calchus or putting the words into Talchus' mouth.
And so this is firing up the Greeks.
And so the Greeks are able to counter-attack, and they're able to push the Trojans back momentarily.
The Trojans, who are right now at the wall, and I'll say a word about the wall in a second, the Trojans are at the wall, but they regroup.
They pull back to sort of regroup for a moment.
And interestingly, Agamemnon, who is watching this action, is very demoralized.
Interestingly, Agamemnon doesn't know that the Greeks have had a sort of second wind and the Greeks are pushing the Trojans back.
Agamemnon thinks, in fact, he's told by a messenger that the Trojans are at the wall.
And he's even told that the Trojans have made a breach in the wall.
I'll point out in a moment how this breach is done by Sarpedon.
And interestingly, Agamemnon, for the third time in the Iliad, basically says, that's it.
We've got to quit. We're out of here.
Tonight, we've got to get on our ships and go home.
And Agamemnon now is besieged, both by Diomedes and Odysseus.
By the way, wounded themselves.
And they go, you can go if you want, but we haven't come all this way.
We haven't fought all this hard to quit now.
And so Agamemnon is talked out of it, talked out of retreat and quitting by both Odysseus and Diomedes.
Now, let's talk about the wall.
There's the Trojan Wall, which is the wall that protects Troy, the kind of on-a-hill Troy, protected from the ascent of Greek fighters.
Very difficult to get to Troy because of the wall.
But the Greeks have built their own wall near the sea, and the wall is aimed at protecting the Greek ships.
And the wall is so high that it's actually impossible for a human being to climb over it.
The only way to get through the wall is to smash it or to make a hole in it or to break through the wall.
Hector knows this.
And so does Hector's one of his main fighters, Sarpidon.
As we'll see, Sarpidon makes the breach in the wall.
Hector ultimately smashes the wall and the Trojans come right through and begin the dreaded process of burning the wall.
Of burning the Greek ships.
Now, before you get to the Greek wall, there is a moat.
So the Greeks have taken a lot of precautions.
They've dug a deep ditch and there's water in it.
So you have to cross the moat, then climb the wall.
So this is no easy task.
But Sarpedon, a valiant fighter, not from Troy, but one of the adjoining cities, is able to create the first breach.
And then, says Homer, Hector picks up a rock.
And Homer says something very interesting about this rock.
He basically says...
He says that this is a rock.
So here's Homer kind of implying that in the current day, which is Homer's own day, the 8th century, men are not as strong as they used to be in the time when men interacted with gods.
In the heroic age, Homer implies, you know, here's Hector.
He's able to pick up a rock easily and smash the wall, and two men today in Homer's own day wouldn't be able to do that.
They wouldn't even be able to pick the rock up and put it on a cart.
So this is Homer, again, appealing to the kind of not the good old days so much as the days when human beings were, you may almost say, slightly more than human.
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