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Aug. 4, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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MANCHIN’S TAP DANCE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep386
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Coming up, I'll talk about Joe Manchin and how he's joining the Democrats in promoting the moronic, or perhaps I should say, Oxymoronic Inflation Reduction Act.
My daughter Danielle D'Souza Gill will join me.
me we'll talk about abortion and Batgirl. I'm also going to be joined by Brandon Tatum to talk about a new film called Uncle Tom 2 and I'll examine conflicts within the Elon Musk family to help answer the question, who is Elon Musk?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to address the gobbledygook that runs through the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
This is kind of a scam that Congress does and Democrats in particular do.
They assign these sort of names.
It's the Inflation Reduction Act.
The idea here is to give you a goal that they have, even though their actions have nothing to do with the goal.
And in fact, far from advancing the goal, subvert the goal.
But the underlying premise appears to be the American people are really dumb.
The media are on our side and they will continue to trumpet whatever we say, however preposterous.
We can count on Time magazine.
We can count on the New York Times.
These people are not really independent assessors of anything.
They're not even honest arbiters of words.
So, let's look at this Inflation Reduction Act to $433 billion.
A lot of it going to various kind of climate provisions.
And it's government spending.
And it's government spending that is going to, it would seem, by using normal logic, Advance inflation because this is not a time.
In fact, Joe Manchin, who is the man who's making this possible, has even said before that when you have inflation galloping ahead, it's not exactly time to do a big spending bill.
But here's Manchin, who has admittedly tamed this bill.
He has brought it down.
But this is how Manchin is.
He maintains a moderate reputation by saying things like, I'm going to stand up against the Democrats.
And he does slow them down.
And he does moderate their objectives.
But then he gives in.
This is a pattern that we've now seen again and again and again.
It kind of tells us really this is who Manchin is.
And a big question for West Virginia is, you're a conservative state, and it so happens that your senator is holding the balance between the two parties.
So, in a sense, it's the West Virginia voters that are giving us the Democratic majority.
And I would, you know, this is something that they need to really think about.
Do they want Manchin representing them?
When this is his MO. Now, Biden said when he ran for office, I'm not going to raise taxes on anybody making $400,000 a year or less.
This was the Biden pledge.
Now, this bill does that.
It actually has taxes on people that are making a lot less than $400,000.
And what's interesting is the sort of dishonesty of the administration's response to this.
What they say is, in a sense, yeah, but we don't consider it a tax increase because we're going to be lowering the price of prescription drugs and we're going to be, and this is very dubious, lowering the price of energy and, as a result, our net People will save money.
Now, first of all, this may or may not be true.
I think it's not true. But nevertheless, when you tell someone, I'm not going to raise your taxes, and then you go, well, I'm going to raise your taxes, but you see I've got this federal benefit over here which will offset that, That's not really not raising someone's taxes.
You are raising their taxes contrary to your pledge.
The other thing is that the White House has been suggesting, and this is Jason Furman writing in the Wall Street Journal, that, yeah, we are raising taxes, but that's a good thing to do in a recession.
And the underlying argument appears to be something like this.
In a recession, people have money and they're spending money.
And so inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods.
So Jason Furman's point appears to be if Americans have less money, they're going to spend less.
And if they spend less, then obviously the demand for goods is less.
And then the demand for goods...
The lower demand and the lower supply of goods come into harmony with each other as a kind of equilibrium, and so we're not going to have as much inflation as we have had over the last several months.
There's an economic fallacy here, and the fallacy here is this, and that is by the government taking money away from Americans.
They're reducing sort of aggregate demand.
No, they're not. Why? Because what's the government going to do with that money?
They're going to spend it.
So what you have is money moving from one group of people, the American people, to another group of people, Congress, and the money is being spent in any case.
So, very often when Democrats do their math, they ignore the fact that the money that is taken from the American people doesn't vanish into thin air.
It goes somewhere else.
It's spent a different way.
It's kind of like saying, well, listen, if I was about to use my money to buy a car, I'm now going to use my money to buy a boat or do something else with it.
Well, in both cases, I'm spending money.
In both cases, I'm creating, you may say, aggregate demand for goods and services.
So, The point being here that this bill that is being presented and portrayed as a mechanism to fight inflation is certainly not going to do that if it's not going to have an inflationary effect itself.
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Please order now. Guys, I'm delighted as always to welcome my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill.
She is the author of the book, The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America.
In fact, you can see the book, well, actually matching her outfit right behind her.
And she also has a store.
Danielle, what's your store?
Tell people how they can find out about your merchandise.
Oh, it's called Americana by Danielle.com.
And you can get copies of my signed book or other products there.
It's fun. Cool.
All right. A big...
Big development in Kansas, which some people who are focused solely on the election primaries have not emphasized.
But there was a referendum in Kansas.
The point of the referendum was to modify a provision in the Kansas state constitution that would return the abortion issue to the legislature.
And this was up before the people of Kansas, and they voted the amendment down, which is to say they voted to keep the Constitution as it is, and you might say protect abortion rights, abortion rights so-called, in Kansas.
Now, Kansas is a moderately conservative state, and so the left is celebrating this.
Wow, the abortion issue has so much political traction for us.
It's going to help us to promote Democrats in the midterms.
So I kind of wanted to get your take on what's happened in Kansas and is this a message to the pro-life movement to gear up?
It is because the left is going to stoop to any level to do any kind of disinformation campaign to really scare people into thinking that things are much worse than they are.
In reality, Kansas is a conservative state.
They're a solidly pro-life state.
And even in Kansas, they only actually have in the whole state a couple abortion clinics.
And of course, that is a couple too many clinics.
But in reality, this state, they're saying, is becoming this mecca of abortion now.
People around other states can come to Kansas for abortion, but we're really talking about really just very few people who I think are these very radical pro-abortion advocates, and they were the ones who turned up who really got other people to show up by, I think, scaring them.
And the thinking that perhaps the laws were different than they were.
And I think the pro-life side probably thought, oh, you know, Roe v.
Wade's overturned. So we're good to go now.
And we can just rely on the states to, you know, be conservative and pro-life and they will pass the laws we want.
But the other side really showed up.
And unfortunately, our side didn't.
I mean, it seems like another factor here is money.
The left put a lot of money into this campaign.
And the left also realizes the symbolic importance of stuff like this.
In other words, if you can take on the issue of life in a conservative state and register a victory, then you can claim a mandate nationwide for the issue.
So this is a case where it seems to me that the pro-life movement, as you say, kind of We're exultant over the court decision, probably thought, listen, we got this taken care of.
And then we're a little surprised by the vigor and also the funding that the left can put into these kinds of issues.
So it seems like the message to the pro-life movement is, listen, gear up now.
The landscape of the battle has shifted.
The battle isn't over.
It's just been relocated now from one place, the Supreme Court, to 50 places.
Right, and I think that a lot of people on our side think that Things are going to go our way because, again, most people do agree with us.
Our side is much more of a common sense view and most people are not, you know, these very much pro-abortion zealots.
But at the same time, we can't just rely on that.
We have to put a lot more effort into reaching people and getting them to show up because sometimes people are pro-life and they just say, you know, I just don't know if that's, maybe they didn't know there was this primary happening.
Maybe they just, they didn't show up to vote for this.
And even though they would have voted, They didn't, but they just were not unfortunately mobilized to care enough to show up.
And I think their side is very radicalized and our side oftentimes tries to hit the middle and isn't so much radicalized, but we need to be more radicalized because otherwise we end up with these kinds of situations where a very conservative state like Kansas has, you know, abortion enshrined in its constitution.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like where people could have been confused is that they're faced with a referendum, and the referendum is actually empowering the people themselves.
Because what it's saying is that the abortion right, instead of being absolute in the Constitution, is now up to the people to decide through their elected representatives.
So it seems odd that people would vote against turning over this decision to them.
And yet the left was able to frame this basically, I think, as a right is being taken away from you.
And so if you vote on this referendum, you are protecting your rights.
It comes down a lot of times, I think, to political framing.
Right. And I don't even think that that is necessarily a strong way to frame it for our side to turn up.
Because then it's kind of like, oh, well, people will decide and so it's okay and stuff.
And it's like, no, this is bad.
This is abortion enshrined in the Constitution.
More babies are going to die because of this.
And unfortunately, that's just the reality of the situation.
And so our side has to wake up to the realities of what happens if we don't show up and if we don't do more.
Even if we do have less funding, I think that we could still have one.
Because we just have more people that agree with our side.
And so their side, I think, really goes to the map because they know this comes down to their core values.
And so our side has to see, you know, what are our core values?
Is our core value to, you know, just kind of see what happens and let bygones be bygones?
No, I mean, I think that we have to be more active.
Yeah, I think you're making a very subtle point here, which is that the abortion debate is not one on a procedural argument about who decides.
It's one on the substance of the issue itself.
Alright, let's take a pause. When we come back, I want to change to a different topic, the cancellation of a big movie called Batgirl.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill, author of the book, The Choice, and also a merchandise store.
And we were talking about abortion.
We want to now talk about Hollywood.
And I was kind of chuckling because I'm reading in The Wrap, which is a website that covers entertainment.
It says, Warner Bros.
Discovery has no plans to release a nearly finished $90 million film.
So evidently, they thought, we have Batman, we gotta do Batgirl.
And so they commissioned this filmmaking duo, one guy named Arby and another guy named Fala, to make this Batgirl.
And these guys seem to be like your classic woke producers.
And so they make this Batgirl, evidently they look at it and they just go, this is super boring.
Not only can we not put this in the theater, but they're saying we can't even put it on HBO Max.
So So, they were initially thinking, if we don't do theatrical, we can at least do home box office.
They've decided to just basically throw the movie into the trash.
Now, some leftists are a little up in arms because I think they see this as like, it's sending a negative message to marginalized groups that, you know, Batgirl is being taken off the shelf.
What's your reading on this as a kind of, well, both in and of itself, but as a metaphor for woke Hollywood?
I don't know what marginalized groups would be offended other than bats because, I mean, I don't know who else this would possibly offend.
But I would just say that I think the movie, I haven't seen it because they're not releasing it, but it's probably much worse than we even think.
It's probably not just boring because then, yeah, why wouldn't you sell it and put it on a streaming platform if it's just a boring movie?
Maybe you can make something.
But probably they're worried about lawsuits or that it's going to offend people or even cause like a bigger uproar than they would have thought maybe cost them more money because they've had other films come out that they've been sued over and have issues like that.
And so they're probably saying this is just a loss for us because it's just not even worth it.
Even if the movie doesn't have much popularity, it's just not worth it because of some kind of Maybe pushback they're worried about.
I don't know what else that they could possibly leave them to throw away the 90 million dollar film.
But I do think it shows that these studios, the left of Hollywood, they don't have a good grasp on what kind of films people even want to watch.
They don't have a good sense of what people want to see.
Because even movies like Top Gun that were so successful, that one was rare.
That was the only one like that in a long time.
And I'm sure that only got that revival because it had It was kind of a sequel and because of Tom Cruise and things like that, but they would never take an original movie similar to that, like a script, and say, let's just make that because it doesn't go along with their ideology.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like now they actually have a set of criteria that says things like every plot has to include a certain number of black actors, and the ratio of men to women has to be this, and, you know, there has to be an illegal migrant swimming across the Rio Grande.
I mean, I'm being a little facetious, but I think you know what I mean.
So... And you make the point which I think is interesting that, you know, boring has never stopped Hollywood.
They're releasing boring movies all the time.
So boring can't be by itself the reason to cancel Batgirl.
There's got to be something more.
But I guess what this means to me is that I guess we're not going to be seeing gay Batman and trans Batman and so on.
Maybe those are now on the shelf.
And maybe this is what the left is worried about.
The left thinks that movies should not be about entertainment and should not be about making money.
They should be about affirming marginalized identities.
This is their actual program, and Hollywood is kind of on board with it.
So I see this as a broader recipe for major disaster in Hollywood, which to me is excellent news.
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny because they're really just canceling themselves.
And we don't know why. We don't know if it's because something happened on that set.
We don't know if people are sexist or racist or who knows why.
But they're just canceling themselves in their own movies.
So if they want to throw away their $90 million that they put into that film, then that's fine.
And hopefully people don't see movies like that anyways, because I don't think that that movie was likely to be one that we'd say, oh, people should go watch it.
So I think, you know, no loss there, and I don't think anyone's going to miss out on seeing it.
I mean, it looks like what they've also been doing is they've been hounding conservatives out of Hollywood.
And there's a group called Friends of Abe in Los Angeles, and this is like a secret conservative group.
So think of it. You have an industry where people who are screenwriters, actors, have to come in disguise to meetings.
So you got a few conservatives still in Hollywood, but they can't be open about their beliefs, even if they're not playing conservative roles in the movie.
They can't just be known as conservatives.
And so what you have is an industry that's removing the values of one half of the American people.
Obviously it's going to be lopsided the other way.
Do you think, what do you think the solution is to all this?
Is it simply for our side to make our own movies?
Well, it would be great if people like Clint Eastwood or other Hollywood conservatives took the lead to stand up to cancel culture.
And I mean, I understand he's quite old, but other people who are conservative could stand up to it, but band together because I think when one sticks their neck out, they're like, oh, I'm going to be canceled.
And it's like, yeah, you might be canceled.
But, you know, maybe if more of you all did that together, that could help.
Or maybe you guys can then start your own I think that means that, yeah, we do have to do the work ourselves.
People who don't come from Hollywood, people who normally aren't You know, in that industry have to do it because I think entertainment is important and people do like to, you know, watch these things.
Of course, it'd be great if we could go back to the pre-digital age, but unfortunately it's unleashed.
So we have to make our own content because otherwise people are going to be watching their content.
I mean, one movie that meets this criterion that fulfills what you just said would be Father Stew.
Debbie and I just watched it a couple of weeks ago.
We mentioned it to you guys.
It's a terrific movie.
Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg doing exactly what you said, coming together, making a kind of anti-Hollywood movie.
And if you look at the audience rating, it's close to 100%.
Danielle, thanks for joining me and look forward to talking soon.
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For the past several decades, we have thought of the United States as the world's sole superpower.
But one way you can tell if you're a superpower is by acting like a superpower.
And I think it's fair to say, looking at the actions of the Biden administration around the world, that we are not doing that.
We are acting in ridiculous ways around the world.
We show very little broad-minded vision.
We don't pursue our own national self-interest.
We meddle where we shouldn't.
We don't meddle where we should.
And I want to contrast our behavior with the ruthless, relentless, single-minded pursuit of national interest which the Chinese are engaged in.
In other words, the Chinese are acting far more like a superpower than we are.
And, of course, it is their intention to become Not only a rival superpower, which they almost are, but the world's sole superpower, displacing us rather than joining us, you may say, at the front of the line.
Now, how are the Chinese doing this?
Well, let's just look at the area of mineral acquisition, which is to say the Chinese know that their economy has been growing very fast.
They are, by the way, themselves the largest producers of mining, the largest miners in the world.
The Chinese are. But they still don't have enough.
And they don't have all the raw materials they need.
And so they're like, let's have a plan to go get them.
And they're getting them from all over the world.
And the Chinese are doing this both through state-owned companies and private companies.
But their focus is on Africa.
Why on Africa? Because Africa has a giant amount of natural resources.
To give you a few examples, South Africa produces about a half of the world's chromium.
It's the world leader in the production of manganese.
It's also, by the way, a huge producer of gold.
It's got a significant amount of diamonds.
Some people think South Africa has the most diamonds, but that's not the case.
Botswana is the world's leader in diamond production.
But then the Democratic Republic of the Congo has about half of the world's cobalt and is also a huge producer of copper.
Zimbabwe is a large producer of lithium.
There's Guinea. There's Morocco.
There's Mozambique. There's Rwanda.
And the Chinese are in all these places.
And what the Chinese do, and if you think back now 20 years, the Chinese had like two or three mineral projects in Africa.
They were like just getting started.
But now they've got over a hundred massive projects going on.
To give you an idea of the kind of projects they do, in 2012, The Chinese Nuclear Power Corporation acquired a huge nuclear plant in Namibia.
And by nuclear plant, I mean this is mining of uranium that is used for nuclear purposes.
And there's a construction of a giant uranium mine in Namibia.
And the Chinese have sort of acquired the rights to that uranium.
It's going to be the third largest uranium mine in the world.
Here's another example.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Chinese have a massive copper operation going.
So the Zijin Mining Group in China, a private company, but obviously under the thumb of the Chinese government, a half a billion dollar deal with a conglomerate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that allows the Chinese to control this giant project.
And again, what happens with these projects is they need money, and the Chinese go, yep, we got the money.
So what the Chinese are doing here is they've got kind of a variety of strategies that are being deployed.
What they do in some cases, they go, okay, we'll make the direct investment.
We'll put all the money in. In some cases, they go, we will build the infrastructure.
In some cases, they go, we will do a joint venture.
You put up half, we put up half.
In some cases, they buy options.
An option is the right to purchase the minerals at a future date for a stated price.
So give us the option to buy, which we may or may not exercise.
And of course, the Africans are like, wow, we can't do all of this by ourselves.
So they're happy to partner with the Chinese.
And so what I'm getting at is that while the United States does a lot of Posturing around the world in Ukraine and elsewhere.
What the Chinese are basically saying is the world operates not according to these kind of grandiose ideals.
The world operates according to self-interest.
And the self-interest largely resides in economic projects.
And the Chinese even understand that the way to achieve the self-interest is in some cases to bribe politicians or they'll say to an African government, hey, listen, we'll build this beautiful parliamentary building so all of you have air conditioning, all of you have luxury couches, we'll even supply the food.
And so these African politicians are, there's something in it for us!
And so the Chinese at every level are sort of, quote, meeting the needs, not exactly keeping a Careful line between corruption and keeping things legal.
What the Chinese are doing is putting money in so that in the end they can take money, but also minerals, out.
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Feel the difference. And he's part of a new documentary that is being released by Salem Media.
It's not out yet, but you can pre-order it at SalemNow.com.
SalemNow.com. It's called Uncle Tom 2.
It's kind of a follow-up.
I don't know if sequel is the right word to the earlier and very successful documentary called Uncle Tom, which Debbie and I have seen.
Hey, Brandon, great to have you on the podcast today.
Talk a little bit about this new film, Uncle Tom 2.
Debbie and I loved Uncle Tom, beautifully done, just vivid profiles of people who are doing constructive work, but also great analysts of what's wrong with the country.
Is the message of Uncle Tom 2 the same as Uncle Tom 1 or does it push in a somewhat different direction?
Well, I want to say first, thanks, Dinesh, for having me on.
And Uncle Tom 2 does push the envelope a lot more.
If you thought that Uncle Tom, the first Uncle Tom, was aggressive and it portrayed images of black conservatives that people normally don't have an opportunity to see, Uncle Tom 2 pushes the envelope and shows how the left and they push Marxism and they're trying to attempt to cause African American people in this country to hate this country,
to create fake division through racism, and it just dives into a deeper perspective of the bigger issue that we're facing in America, not just Black Americans, but Americans in general.
But, you know, a lot of great people, the God factor is brought into Uncle Tom, too, a lot more prevalent with Votie Bauckham, which is he's a prominent Christian pastor who has an eloquent speech and how the Marxism in this country now is trying to remove us away from God and how the black community used to be a lot more in tune with belief and faith and attendance at church. And now with the removal of that or
the fading away of Christian faith, it has gone down the wayside. I mean, when I do just a quick kind of survey of the great black Americans of our history.
You think of figures like Frederick Douglass or Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King.
I mean, there's only one figure, W.E.B. Du Bois.
And toward the end of his life, he did become embittered against America.
I think he moved to Ghana and died there in his 90s.
But by and large, the trajectory of black history has been for...
Black leaders to say, we want to be part of America.
We want to be included in the American experiment and the American dream.
So it's a pro-American thrust.
But this new movement of Marxism is cutting completely the other way, isn't it?
A thousand percent, Dinesh, it's very sad.
When you see some of the prominent leaders today, I don't consider them to be leaders for somehow they've been propped up as leaders, like Al Sharpton and Reverend Jesse Jackson and many others.
Mark Laurent Hill is a young emerging person who's coming up in the ranks and is being viewed in the black community as somehow prominent.
Even Sean King, who is, if you look at his birth certificate, he's actually a white man, but he's posing as a black man.
And he's considered to some to be a leader in the community.
LeBron James and some of these other people who have a lot of incredible influence, somehow they've gotten to the point where they hate America, and it's almost like they want a divorce from America, but they don't know where to go.
There's no solutions to where you go after you leave America.
And we all know that the truth is they don't want to really leave America.
They've been built to be bitter towards America and hate this country.
And I wish that it would change and turn around.
Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, I don't hear a rhetoric from any of them saying that they want to leave America.
They just want America to live up to the Constitution and live up to the hopes of what America is supposed to be.
That's all that they wanted.
And Frederick Douglass specifically, and I think Booker T. Washington was on the same page, that they didn't want handouts for Black people.
They wanted Black people to earn their keep in America and just to be given an opportunity to show their worth and for the government to get out of the way and let that process happen naturally.
And so to see our ancestors in a way We used to be, and I say we used to be the way the Black culture used to be and how it has evolved to what we see in some cases today is what the film digests and gives solutions to how we change and how our, I guess our path to success would be going back to the roots of the foundation of this country and our forefathers and really being a pro-American group of people that understand
our values and work together with others to make this country a better place.
It does seem that the Trump-oriented MAGA agenda is more appealing to blacks than the kind of traditional button-down Republican pitch.
And that's why Trump did decently well.
In other words, he made inroads.
But it's still a long way to go.
While it appears like it's possible Republicans might even get close to now getting a majority of the Hispanic vote, it still seems an uphill battle with black Americans to get the message of self-help through.
Are you hopeful that this will in fact happen?
Yeah, Dinesh, I'm really hopeful.
And I think that, you know, Donald Trump, and I think some people see MAGA or they see, I call them Trumplicans or the new Republican Trump movement as exclusively attached to Trump.
But I just think Trump spearheaded it.
You know, I compare it like the SWAT team.
when I was on the SWAT team, you have the ram or the entry team, they bust the door open for everybody else to go through in a very smooth and methodical fashion.
And I think that's what Trump did.
So it's not necessarily just about Trump, but it's about the idea of loving this country, putting our country first, being patriots, observing the second amendment, the first amendment, understanding that we have a great country, we have a lot to look forward to, and we should put and prioritize that and put it first.
And our Judeo-Christian values that we came up with, we should observe those moving forward to, I guess, I'm gonna say validate good morale in this country.
And I think that the MAGA movement presents that.
And the only problem that is stopping, I believe, a majority of Americans of African descent from going over to the conservative movement or the Republican Party is the Trump derangement syndrome.
And I really do believe that there's a such thing as Trump derangement syndrome.
There's so many people that can't get past Trump himself We're good to go.
As a person and be able to look at his policies and look at how America has made a political movement from Donald Trump, I think that we'll see a big change in minority voices being at least more so aligned with Republicans.
Hey guys, you got to check out the Brandon Tatum podcast.
Also check out Uncle Tom 2.
Now Brandon told me that Uncle Tom 1, the original Uncle Tom, is now free and it's on YouTube.
So you can watch Uncle Tom 1.
Sets you up to watch Uncle Tom 2.
You can pre-order that now on SalemNow.com.
It's coming out shortly this month.
Hey Brandon, thanks for being on the podcast.
Really appreciate it. Dinesh, God bless you.
Thank you for having me. As the richest man in the world, Elon Musk has a huge influence, and he's doing hugely important things, and he's doing hugely important things also to advance free speech in the world.
So, I'm intrigued by the guy, and I'm intrigued by his background, and so I had to sort of...
I don't know my reaction to this strange interview with his dad.
His dad is Errol Musk, age 76, who was being interviewed on an Australian show and was asked, I think, rather innocently by the presenter, someone named Jackie O. She says, your offspring is a genius.
He's worth so much money.
He's created so many things.
Are you proud of him?
And Elon Musk's dad goes, no!
No! What?
And then he goes on to say, you know we are a family that have been doing a lot of things for a long time.
It's not as if we suddenly started doing something.
So right here you see the...
Rather startling phenomenon of parental envy.
The dad is like, what are you saying?
The Musk family has just shown up on the world scene?
Not at all. Now remember, Elon Musk's dad is himself a very successful entrepreneur.
And he also is a weird guy.
I mean, number one, he goes on to tell the interviewer that his favorite son is not Elon, but his other son named Kimball.
Whom he says is, quote, his pride and joy.
Now, what is Kimball's achievements?
Well, it turns out Kimball is actually a distinguished guy.
He started out as a chef and restaurateur, but he now has a kind of global chain of restaurants.
It's called The Kitchen Group in the U.S. He's worth $700 million, but that's poor compared to Elon Musk, who's worth, get this, $270 billion.
So, Elon Musk is worth, by the way, about ten times as much as George Soros.
And it turns out this Errol Musk character, he's had multiple wives.
He, in fact, had two kids by his stepdaughter.
He was actually asked about this in the interview, and he says it is, quote, completely normal.
Completely normal to have two kids with your stepdaughter.
And then they ask him, they point out that Elon Musk once said he was a little frustrated because there were things he wanted to do and he's not far enough along in doing them.
And Errol Musk says, I know it sounds crazy, but we tend to think like that as a family.
He's 50 now.
He's talking about Elon. And I think of him as a little boy.
But he's 50?
I mean, that's an old man.
So, he thinks of Elon.
Elon's getting really old.
He goes on to say, and this is to be a little bit insulting, he sees this picture of Elon Musk.
A picture, by the way, where Elon is reclining on a boat and having a drink.
And Errol Musk says that Elon Musk is looking somewhat overweight and he needs to start taking diet pills.
This is the dad weighing in on an interview about Elon's physique.
And the final thing I found interesting, well, really two things.
One is he was asked if he drives a Tesla.
And he goes, no, I have a Bentley, a Rolls Royce and a Mercedes.
I don't drive a Tesla. And then he's also asked about the fact that Elon does not support handouts.
And then Errol Musk says, and this I think is interesting because it reflects the way a lot of very rich people are, he goes, quote, we are a very frugal, stingy family.
He goes, if I want to spend anything, I've got to answer a hundred questions of why.
And I'm sure that what he means is not that he has to answer to somebody else.
But he has to answer to himself.
Why is it necessary to spend this money?
And so what you see is these people who have vast accumulations of wealth, they're motivated not really by the desire to spend more.
They don't spend a lot more.
But rather they think of money as in some way either an end in itself or just a measure of status.
We are in Book 16 of the Iliad.
I call it the turning point, because this is the point at which Patroclus enters the battle, distinguishes himself valiantly, kills the Trojan fighter Sarpedon, and then is in turn killed by Hector.
And these are the events that bring Achilles back onto the field of battle.
Now, the death of Sarpedon is, in a way, prefigures a lot of the other deaths that are to come.
Sarpedon is the Trojan.
Well, he comes from one of the allied cities of Troy, and he's the one who makes the first breach in the Greek Wall.
And Patroclus kills Sarpedon.
And as Sarpedon is dying, there is a kind of fight over Sarpedon's body.
The Greeks would love to have it, but Zeus protects the body and spirits Sarpedon off to his home city where he's cremated there.
Now, this kind of pattern where you have an important fighter killed by someone on the other side, then their armor is stripped, then there's a fierce fight over the body, then in a sense the gods intervene and rescue the body.
This is going to happen now.
Three more times.
Three times in the Iliad and then a fourth time beyond the Iliad.
So it happens to Sarpedon first.
And then we see it happen almost identically, the same sequence for Patroclus when he's killed by Hector.
Then we see the same thing happen when Hector is killed by Achilles.
The fight over the body, as we'll see, King Priam essentially comes to plead for his son Hector's body and is granted that plea by Achilles.
So, in that sense...
Hector is returned to the Trojans, and then, of course, outside the Iliad and beyond the Iliad, but Homer's aware of it, and he's sort of, it continues to haunt the narrative, the death of Achilles, and Achilles' own body, and the funeral for Achilles, which occurs, as I say, not in the Iliad, but But beyond it.
Now, remember that Patroclus has been warned by Achilles, fight the Trojans and push them back, but do not pursue them back to Troy.
But Patroclus is doing so well in the fighting.
This is Patroclus' Aristeia, his kind of display of prowess, his glory, if you will, that he forgets so he doesn't heed Achilles' advice.
He pursues the Trojans back to the Trojan wall.
And Apollo, the god Apollo, who's on the side of the Trojans, speaks aloud.
Now, he doesn't speak to Patroclus so much, but speaks in the Iliad and says,"'Get back, Patroclus!' Almost as if addressing Patroclus.
"'Get back, Patroclus! Back to where you belong,' says Apollo.
"'Troy is fated to fall, but not to you.'" Nor even to Achilles, a better man by far.
So Apollo is, again now here, reminding the audience, well, you know that Troy is going to fall.
But is he going to fall to Patroclus?
No. Not even to Achilles.
Yes, Achilles will kill Hector, but the battle is going to go on for one more year.
In fact, it's going to take Odysseus and the Trojan horse to create the kind of cataclysmic final scenes in which Troy itself falls and Troy itself is sort of burned to the ground.
Thank you. Now, the way that Patroclus is killed is very interesting.
He is speared in the belly by Hector, and he falls to the ground.
But as he falls to the ground, a very interesting exchange occurs between Hector and Patroclus.
Hector basically goes, he goes, Patroclus, the vultures will eat you on this very spot.
So here is Hector taunting Patroclus and basically saying, you thought you could get us?
You didn't count on Hector.
I have now gotten you, so to speak.
I'm obviously speaking colloquially.
But Patroclus now says this, Kind of a strange thing for Patroclus to say, but we see what he means by it.
What Patroclus is saying is that, and Homer tells us this in the moments leading up to this scene, that in the thick of the battle, Apollo, who is sort of fighting on the Trojan side, comes up behind Patroclus and basically punches him, hits him in the back between the shoulder blades.
And Homer says Patroclus' helmet is dislodged and falls to the ground and, quote, rolls in the dust, that little detail.
And it says that Hector grabs the helmet and pulls it away from Patroclus.
And then his breastplate also splits loose from him.
Now, when all this happens, a young fellow named Euphorbus, fighting on the Trojan side, jumps up in front of Patroclus and stabs him, spears him, and that's the first blow.
So what Patroclus is saying to Hector is, you know what?
You didn't kill me. First of all, Apollo got behind me and punched me.
I lost my helmet.
I lost my breastplate.
Then this other kid, Euphorbus, came in and stabbed me.
And then you were just number three.
Yeah, you did administer the coup de grace, so to speak, the final blow.
But I'm not going to really be giving you credit.
And then, says Patroclus, you are not going to live long.
I see death standing at your shoulder.
And you will go down under the hands of Peleus' perfect son.
Peleus' perfect son is Achilles.
So here is Patroclus on his deathbed predicting, prophesying the death of the man who killed him, namely the death of Hector.
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