All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 25, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:09
PAY MY DEBTS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep400
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com.
Coming up, I'll discuss Biden's student loan forgiveness program.
It is redistributionist, but it redistributes from the poor to the rich.
I'll reveal how a Texas judge has foiled, has blocked the Biden administration's scheme to protect abortion in contravention of state law.
I'll argue that Google's partnership with universities and a race-based scholarship scheme might expose the company to a serious violation of civil rights laws.
And I'll begin my exposition of Homer's great epic, The Odyssey.
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.
Joe Biden seems very pleased with himself.
Normally, he's pleased with himself when he's lining his own pockets.
But in this case, he seems very...
I'm pleased with himself because he's announced a college loan forgiveness program.
And of course, there's something inherently disgusting about all this because you have a guy who's like, I am forgiving student debt.
I mean, Debbie's shaking her head here, cheering from the balcony, talking about pandering.
But the first thing that I find repulsive is these politicians act like they're doing it.
They're not doing it.
When they quote, there's no such thing really as forgiving or cancelling debt.
What this really means is I'm going to transfer the obligation to someone else.
So this guy's not going to pay.
I'm going to make some other guy pay.
It's really a matter of moving money from one guy's pocket to another and using your political authority to do that.
And generally, when you do it, you want the beneficiary to be grateful to you because you're the one who facilitated the transaction.
And you don't want the guy who's paying the bill to notice.
You want to make it sound like it's free.
You're canceling debt.
And of course, media reports make it sound like, wow, this is unbelievable generosity from Biden.
This is an expensive program, $300 billion.
And essentially, if you get Pell Grants, you're going to get $20,000 of debt forgiveness.
And for everybody else, $10,000, as long as the family income is under $125,000 a year.
And the other thing that Biden did is he extended the student loan repayment pause.
So supposedly because of COVID, there was a pause.
You don't have to pay right now.
There's a kind of a deferred payment scheme.
And Biden goes with us one final deferment through the basically to the end of this year, December 31st, 2022.
Now, right away, when you have people who have loans, who are seeing their loans being deferred or being forgiven, you have to ask, what about the people who kept paying?
What about the people who have...
And I would fall on this camp.
I mean, I... Parents couldn't afford to send me to Dartmouth.
I got some grants, but a lot of loans and then, of course, work-study.
And it took me several years to pay back that debt.
It never crossed my mind that somebody else would pay it off for me.
There was no one else to do that.
And it probably was a good thing to, when you take money, and you're obviously borrowing money in the expectation that, hey, I'm going to be using it to get an education.
An education is an investment in my career.
I wouldn't do this if I didn't think my career would be better as a result of this education.
So I can expect enhanced earnings as a consequence of taking these loans and going to college in this way.
And so I should be in a position to be able to Pay back these loans, if anything, with the kind of extra income that I earn as a result of the benefit of the college education I've received.
So this is the kind of commonsensical logic behind the idea that it's okay to finance, at least in part, a college education because a college education pays you back in terms of future income.
Now, as I say, there are people who decide, you know what?
College education really isn't worth it.
It takes, you know, two years in case of an associate degree of four years of my life.
I don't really have normal income in those years.
A college graduate is going to have to catch up to someone who goes straight to work.
So there are people who have actually made a living, in some cases a good living, not having gone to college.
There are other people who have gone to college and, over time, paid off their loans.
In other words, acted responsibly.
And now, all the people who haven't, who have loans, outstanding, and either haven't paid, in some cases have no intention of paying, now see their loans forgiven, or at least forgiven in considerable part.
This reminds me a little bit by analogy also about amnesty for illegals.
You've got legal immigrants who have waited in line, sometimes taken years, cost money.
You hire immigration lawyers.
You've got to go through the process.
And even once you get a green card, it's five years of naturalization.
Again, I can speak from experience.
I mean, I came to the United States in 1978.
I didn't become a citizen until 1991.
So even then, it took time, and it was probably easier then than it is now.
The illegal just basically shows up, goes around the system, and then if you get amnesty, you're like...
Well, you're rewarded for breaking the rules.
You're moved to the front of the line.
And it's kind of a slap in the face to people who have played by the rules.
And so I see this step by Biden on the college front as being very similar.
It rewards irresponsibility.
It penalizes responsibility.
And it has all kinds of other effects that I will take up in the next segment.
Hello, I'm Mike Lindell and due to your incredible support, the original MySlippers are almost completely sold out.
As a special thank you, I am launching my brand new all season slippers, slides and sandals for as low as $29.98.
This is a limited time offer, so go to MyPillow.com or call the number on your screen.
Use your promo code and you'll get all my new footwear for as low as $29.98.
My all-season slippers are made with my exclusive four-layer design that you won't find in any other slipper.
They're finished with a breathable fabric so you can wear them all year round.
And my new slides and sandals are made with patented impact gel, making them ultra comfortable and extremely durable.
I guarantee they'll be the most comfortable footwear you'll ever own.
So go to MyPillar.com or call the number on your screen now to get your very own all-season slippers, slides, and sandals for as low as $29.98 with your promo code.
This is an introductory offer and it won't last long, so order now!
Joe Biden's college loan forgiveness scheme is a pandering scheme.
And as Debbie was just commenting, it's pandering to the one constituency the Democrats can still count on.
They can't count on working class people.
They can't count on Hispanics.
But they can count on the predominantly white A college student population.
And in fact, they can count on the irresponsible segment of that population to be leaning democratic.
And so they're like, listen, we're going to help you out.
We're going to take some money out of the pockets of some plumbers and some foremen and some truck drivers and put it in your pocket.
So this is a redistributionist scheme, but it's redistributing from the working class to the irresponsible non-working class.
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal several months ago.
I actually covered it on the podcast.
It was talking about the film graduates of Columbia University.
So film graduates at Columbia University took out federal student loans and they had a median debt.
The median, of course, is the midpoint.
The middle student, if you have 100 students, the student in the middle had a median debt of $181,000.
By the way, this means that half of the students at Columbia who took on loans had debt even more than that.
So they have this huge debt, and two years after earning their master's degrees, half of these borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year.
So these people were taking on this debt that they have no reasonable prospect to pay off.
Why? Because their degrees turn out to be largely worthless.
Obviously, they go into a field that they think is interesting, amusing, entertaining.
Well, I'm one to speak.
I'm in that field as well.
But again, I didn't go into that field to, quote, make a living.
I was making a very good living when I started making documentary films.
In fact, I almost stumbled backward into the first one.
I didn't anticipate it would make a penny.
It actually turns out it did very well.
But the point being here that people do not hesitate to borrow large amounts of money to get degrees that offer no prospect of paying back that money.
I'm going to get a degree in sociology.
I'm going to get a degree in gender studies.
I'm going to get a degree in women's studies.
I'm going to study discrimination, the sex roles among the ancient Greeks.
Look, I'm not saying that there's anything inherently unworthwhile about those pursuits.
I'm just looking at it as an economic investment.
If you're going to borrow money, what is your expectation of paying them back?
And it turns out some of these students have no expectation of paying them back, and they're now being rewarded for that irresponsibility.
Now, I tweeted the following out.
I said, I worked hard over several years to pay off my college loans.
Now Biden wants me and others like me to help pay the loans of a generation of deadbeats who took on debt that they can't or won't Repay.
This is a regime that punishes responsibility and rewards irresponsibility.
Now what's funny is that a whole bunch of people on the left thought that they could get me by saying, wait a minute, when you were in confinement, we the taxpayers had to pay for you.
So here's a sample tweet.
Dinesh D'Souza, didn't taxpayers have to cover you while you were in jail?
I didn't want to pay for that.
This is a guy named Dan Connors who makes this comment on Twitter.
And I only mentioned him, but there were maybe two dozen of these comments in my Twitter feed.
And I was pretty much laughing as I read them because, first of all, the taxpayer didn't pay for my confinement.
If these guys, none of them really do any digging.
They don't do any research.
They don't check any facts.
But if you simply go back and look at the judge's sentence in my case, not only did he order me to eight months of overnight confinement, but he ordered me to pay for it.
And in fact, Debbie at the time was like, wait, you paying for your own confinement?
I'm like, it's $3,000 a month.
And $3,000 a month for what?
I was in a dorm.
By the way, I wasn't there during the day, so I didn't eat any meals.
I would check in at 7 p.m.
about 8 or 8.30.
Well, usually I would go work out.
And then I would climb into a bunk bed.
By the way, there were 60 bunk beds in the floor I was on, and there was another floor.
So about 120 in the whole facility.
So essentially, they were providing me with a building in a dorm with a bunk bed.
I eventually had the lower bunk.
For $3,000 a month.
So in what way is the taxpayer subsidizing me?
In fact, I would argue I was subsidizing the taxpayer because it couldn't have cost the federal government anything more than probably a few hundred dollars to put me up for per month.
And so this was just complete nonsense.
By the way, it's also worth noting that when...
When we had the debate over Obamacare, a lot of people on the left were like, you know, the government is making all this money collecting interest on student loans.
And this money is going to provide a wonderful stash of capital that can be used to fund Obamacare.
Of course, now it's all turned around.
The student debt is a massive drain on the government.
So the government operates like this.
This is actually the normal functioning of the government.
It's incompetent.
It's inefficient. It is unfair.
Its redistribution makes no sense.
It doesn't reward the deserving.
It doesn't take money from those who should be paying.
And Biden himself was asked about this yesterday.
And it was very interesting because What Biden basically said is, wait a minute, aren't there some tax breaks that go to rich people?
So Biden wasn't even defending this as just.
What Biden was basically saying is, there's a lot of injustice in the world.
There may be some rich guys who get some undeserved tax breaks, so what about if these guys get some undeserved college benefits?
Essentially, the idea of what is the world is an unfair place, and so I, Joe Biden, certainly don't mind adding to the unfairness.
Inflation is real.
The CPI, the Consumer Price Index, is at another 40-year high.
Biden and his team keep denying it, but inflation doesn't go away because you deny or minimize it.
The recession, too, is real.
Again, they're denying it, but again, a recession doesn't stop being a recession if you stop calling it that.
If all your money is in the market or tied to the US dollar, you're taking a risk.
You're messing with fire.
Now, thankfully, I'm diversified into gold with Birch Gold.
And it's not too late for you to take action, too.
Text Dinesh to 989898.
Get a free information kit on how to diversify and protect your savings with precious metals.
Now, with an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, countless five-star reviews, thousands of satisfied customers.
Birch Gold is the place to be.
Debbie and I trust Birch Gold.
That's why we're happy customers.
Join us and secure your future with gold from Birch Gold.
How do you do that? Text Dinesh to 989898.
Get real help from Birch Gold today.
You can get your free no-obligation kit on how to protect your hard-earned savings with gold.
Text Dinesh to 989898.
One of the cherished dreams of the left is to figure out a way To get illegals and non-citizens to vote.
Now, illegals and non-citizens can't vote according to the Constitution, and they can't vote according to the Constitution of most states, and they can't vote in federal or state elections.
The Democrats know that.
I think their long-term plan for illegals is to figure out ways to get those illegals to have amnesty, to try to find a way to get non-citizens to be citizens with Democratic help.
And then out of a sense of obligation, the Democrats assume that these new citizens are going to be voting for the Democrats, the party that enabled their citizenship.
It's a scheme that the Democrats have been hatching and working on.
This is, by the way, why the borders are open.
It's like, let's bring those people here.
They're not going to be legal now, but they're going to change the complexion, change the makeup of the geographical boundaries of the United States.
And then over time, we'll figure out how to make them citizens so that they can be indebted and beholden to us.
But the way the Democrats operate is they like to test their schemes.
And so San Francisco in 2016, the leftist forces that run the city, proposed an amendment that would allow certain non-citizens to vote in school board elections.
Now by non-citizens we mean both illegals as well as legal elections.
People who are here legally, for example, with a green card or even on a student visa, they're here legally, but they're not eligible to vote.
But San Francisco decided basically, in a school board election, let them vote.
And they made some pious statements about the fact that they too were stakeholders in society, they too had their kids in the school, so why shouldn't they be able to vote?
And the citizens of San Francisco approved this measure to have non-citizens voting in local elections.
By the way, there was a similar rule adopted in New York.
But now a judge in California, a federal judge, has struck this down and said, quite reasonably, this is Superior Court Judge Richard Ulmer, said that no can do.
Ulmer says that the Non-citizens cannot vote in local elections, and he said that a permanent injunction has been issued to stop this from occurring,
and a group of conservatives, by the way, who filed a lawsuit against the The city of San Francisco, to challenge this allowance, they are now going to have their legal fees paid.
Quote, when non-citizens vote in an election, the voting rights of citizens are wrongly diluted.
This is the judge speaking.
And, of course, it's true.
Whenever you have, well, let's call it...
Fraudulent votes or votes by ineligible people are fraudulent votes.
When fraudulent votes are mixed in with honest votes or eligible votes, they cancel each other out.
That's the point the judge is trying to make.
And so this is the second decision that has come down like this.
And the same thing happened in New York.
They allowed limited voting of undocumented voters.
Immigrants, as they call them.
I mean, think about it. Illegals aren't really undocumented.
They are flouting the law.
The problem isn't one of documentation.
But New York allowed these people to vote, again, in local elections.
The idea is to sort of, you know, get your head into the tent.
Once you're allowed to vote in local elections, maybe you can vote in state elections, and then maybe it'll pave the way for federal elections.
And so it's a good thing to see these sneaky schemes being stopped, at least in these two cases, in their tracks.
Some of us wish we could rewind the clock when it comes to our health.
Exercising, climbing stairs, all the things young people take for granted, these aren't things that have to stop just because you age.
Neither do you have to suffer or endure the normal aging aches and pains.
Now there's a 100% drug-free solution.
It's called Relief Factor.
Relief Factor supports your body's fight against inflammation.
That's the source of aches and pains.
The vast majority of people who try Relief Factor love it.
They order more. Because it works for them.
Debbie's excited. It works for her.
She finally gets to do her bar exercise class now that she's alleviated her frozen shoulder thanks to Relief Factor.
Debbie can even do planks, push-ups.
She's like, wow, I never want to be without Relief Factor again.
You too can benefit. Try it for yourself.
Order the three-week quick start for the discounted price of only $19.95.
Go to relieffactor.com or call 833-690-7246 to find out more.
That number again, 833-690-7246.
So go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. Racial preferences have become a depressing feature of our society.
And by the way, racial and gender preferences.
We see them in college admissions.
We see them in job hiring.
We see them in federal contracting.
And most of this is done in the name of diversity.
We need a diverse student body.
We need a diverse workforce.
We need to have federal contracts, contractors who look like America.
So under the pretext of creating diversity, what you have is more eligible people are turned away and less eligible people get the position.
They're admitted to a school, a selective school, or they are hired.
And all of this runs afoul of our civil rights laws.
It runs afoul of the clear language, not just of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is of course the kind of the landmark document here.
Not just of the clear language, the equal protection language of the Constitution, but a whole series of other Civil rights laws, some of which, by the way, go back to the 19th century, go back to laws that Republicans enacted in the aftermath of the Civil War.
There's, for example, something called the 1886 Civil Rights Act.
This is a law that bars or bans contracting on the basis of race.
You can't make a contract and say this contract only applies to white people or only applies to black people.
That kind of discrimination is forbidden.
And this goes all the way back to the 1880s.
Now, that law may have been flouted in practice, but with the civil rights laws of the 1960s, well, 50s and 60s, starting with the Brown decision, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Fair Housing Bill...
The idea here of non-discrimination becomes embedded in our law, and yet the very left that pushed for some of those laws then has now turned around and now promotes discrimination.
Sort of benign discrimination, as they sometimes call it, on the basis of race.
Now, Google has a prestigious fellowship program that it funds, and it looks for participating universities.
And there's a whole bunch of universities that are participating in this program.
They include Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania.
UNC Chapel Hill, Berkeley, New York University.
And the way this works is that The universities nominate four students annually for a PhD.
These are PhD students.
And Google gives them $100,000 in a kind of fellowship, which includes mentoring at Google.
And of course, Google is looking at the possibility of maybe hiring these people.
But here's the key point.
If a university chooses to nominate more than two students, this is the rule that Google has set up, the third and fourth nominees must self-identify as a woman, black, African descent, Hispanic, Latino, Latinx, indigenous, or a person with a disability.
By the way, what does it mean to identify as a person with a disability?
Can I identify as a person with a disability?
I mean, I can throw an epileptic fit every now and then on the podcast if I need to substantiate my identification.
Or is it that I merely imaginatively identify as a disabled person?
You know, every now and then I make some wheelchair motions.
And then do I qualify for this Google fellowship?
Well... The point here is that Is that we might be seeing a violation of law here at two separate levels.
Google violating the law.
How? Well, it's violating the Civil Rights Act of 1886, for starters, because, think about it, that's a law that bans contracting on the basis of race.
What is Google doing? It's entering into a contract, and arguably an employment contract, because why?
It involves mentoring at Google.
Students, they are in a fellowship at Google, but they remain in the PhD program, and then eventually they have the possibility of being hired at Google.
So the court is probably going to look at that as Google entering into a contract that imposes reciprocal.
There are some obligations on the beneficiary of the fellowship.
It's not just a one-sided, I'll give you something in exchange for nothing.
But the universities, for their part, could be violating all kinds of rules by setting up, by engaging in a relationship with Google in which they have essentially, are bound by a strict quota system.
And the quota system is that if you happen to have two, let's just say, white males who have been chosen, you now have to assign the other two to either a woman or someone who identifies as a woman or a member of one of these ethnic groups.
Racial preferences are driven not just by the Biden administration, not just by university faculty and administrations, but also here by woke corporations like Google.
So the pressure to move away from a colorblind system or a merit-based system is coming from multiple directions.
If you want to know how our culture has sort of yielded to so much of this woke nonsense, it's because...
It's because multiple actors, actors in media, actors in entertainment, actors in the corporate sector, in the academic sector, they're all pulling in the same direction.
They're establishing networks sometimes with each other.
And so what you have is ultimately the resistance.
Even if there's someone who fights back at the university level, they're undermined by somebody at the corporate level.
Or somebody in the corporate level says, let's not do this, then the universities are doing it, the government is pressuring them to do it.
So this is how we get a surrender Of our cultural institutions to this woke ideology.
By the way, corporations that have tried this kind of racial preference have frequently been defeated.
They've been defeated by people suing them who say, listen, I was disadvantaged by this rule.
A small example is Uber Eats.
Uber Eats said, we're not going to charge any delivery fees to black-owned restaurants.
Immediately, lawsuit.
And Uber Eats goes, uh-oh, well, no, we discontinue the policy.
And so I would recommend that students at these universities sue Google and...
And sue the university for violating their civil rights because if these students are white and they're being passed over in order for the universities to nominate only a woman or only a racial minority, this very likely violates our civil rights laws and this is one way to bring these universities,
as well as Google, Back into line with the concept of hiring people based on their capacities, based on their talents, not based, as Martin Luther King reminded us a long time ago, not based on the color of our skin.
I'm not a fan of the AARP and their rallying behind this new Biden tax and spend bill, promising members it will reduce inflation, bring relief from big pharma.
No, in reality, it's going to really devastate the 65 plus crowd financially and medically.
AMAC knows the truth.
I'm talking about AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens.
It advocates for its members.
You'll never find them in anyone's back pocket.
I trust AMAC. They're honest.
They fight for conservative values.
Join AMAC today like Debbie and I have.
AMAC offers special discounts and benefits.
Plus, they provide access to financial and insurance counseling services.
It's just $16 a year.
You can join AMAC. Go to amac.us.
Start enjoying your benefits.
Anyone can join. But if you're a senior, what are you waiting for?
Don't let the AARP misrepresent and mislead you.
Join AMAC today. AMAC serves its members with integrity and compassion.
Join or renew today at amac.us.
That's amac.us.
There was a kind of a surprise announcement from California Governor Gavin Newsom recently.
The announcement was that after pushing for years to shut down a nuclear power plant in California called the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor, So now Gavin Newsom wants to keep the plant open until 2035.
So he wants the nuclear power plant to continue to function really for another 15 years.
And honestly, for people who watch California Politics, this is almost a little bit of a shock as to why would he do that?
The left has been pushing for a long time to shut these nuclear power plants down.
And environmental groups have been pushing to shut them down.
And interestingly, conservatives haven't really come to the defense of nuclear power.
By and large, conservatives have taken the view that because the United States has a lot of natural gas, the natural gas can supply our energy needs.
We don't really need nuclear.
So, the nuclear industry has been kind of lonely here and, in fact, has been so attacked going all the way back to the Three Mile Island incident of the 1980s and then, of course, the Chernobyl incident that occurred abroad, of course, involving in Russia.
Nuclear power has been, you may almost say, on its way out.
Nuclear power plants in other parts of the country have been shut down.
In New York, for example, Andrew Cuomo was able to shut down the Hudson Valley nuclear power plant in 2021.
In California, earlier 2013, I believe, Senator Barbara Boxer was active in shutting down the San Onofre nuclear plant.
So it really looked like this Diablo Canyon plant was doomed.
But interestingly, the writer and activist Michael Schellenberger...
began to meet with people who worked at the plant.
And he convinced two of the moms who worked there to start a group.
Essentially, it was a group of moms for nuclear power.
It's called Mothers for Nuclear, Mothers for Nuclear.
And this group began to meet with politicians and argue, hey, you don't want to burn fossil fuels, and all you want to do is have wind power and solar power.
Well, that's not going to be enough.
If you really want to reduce the dependency of fossil fuels, we need to consider the nuclear option.
Nuclear power is plentiful, and it's safe, and it creates jobs, and we work there.
It's our livelihood, and so we're coming to the public defense of the idea of nuclear power.
And the politicians were...
We recognize that there was a lot of merit.
So here you had guys like Schellenberger, and by the way, there were others, the Whole Earth Catalog founder named Stuart Brand, the climate scientist James Hansen.
They were making the intellectual case for nuclear power.
And then activists like the Moms group, the Mothers for Nuclear, were...
We're doing the sort of citizen activism that was aimed at not only changing the minds of politicians, but changing public opinion.
And remarkably, a recent poll in California was people were asked, do you favor keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open?
58% yes.
So it looks like the combination of intellectual activism and civic activism has sort of gotten through to the politicians.
And so what's happened now is that Newsom says, all right, Let's extend the life of this power plant.
Let's keep it operating until 2035.
Now, the plant does have to be renewed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, I believe in 2025, so in a few years.
So, there are some steps to be taken before this nuclear power plant can stay open for another 15 years.
But it seems remarkable that there has been this turnaround in public opinion, This turnaround in the political winds even in the liberal state of California.
And it may well be that the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor, which looked like it was on its way out, may have some more life left in it.
It's pretty colorful at the grocery store in the produce section, all those vibrant colors of fruits and veggies.
Our friend Dr. Howard at Balance of Nature explains that all those colors you see represent nutritional variety.
Now, I don't eat anywhere near the 10 daily servings of fruits and veggies I need, so Balance of Nature is the way I give my body what it needs to stay healthy.
This is why Debbie and I take these six little fruits and veggie capsules every day.
Each daily dose is made up of a blend of 31 different fruits and veggies.
31. So variety equals vitality.
Give your body what it needs with Balance of Nature.
Invest in your health. Join me and experience the Balance of Nature difference for years to come.
For a limited time, all new preferred customers get an additional 35% discount and free shipping on your first Balance of Nature order.
Use discount code America.
Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I now begin my discussion of the second great Homeric epic.
This is the one that is called The Odyssey.
And the Iliad and the Odyssey together have had an almost incalculable impact on Western culture.
First of all, they completely shaped the educational program, but also the kind of general literacy, the general understanding of ancient Greek civilization.
This is the civilization that goes back to the 5th and 4th century BC.
It's a civilization that invented, really invented philosophy, invented the theater, invented democracy, and is really a foundation stone of Western civilization.
And the Greeks of the 5th and 4th century got their ideas of what is honor?
What is glory?
What is truth? How should you live your life?
Who should you emulate? What are lessons that you can learn, positive and negative?
And the Greeks learned these in their schools, but also in their society, by consulting these two great epics that were known, recited, performed in a Bardic tradition.
These were oral epics originally, eventually written down on papyrus or on parchment.
And eventually consolidated into books.
Homer didn't think of them as books.
But the Iliad and the Odyssey are about the same length.
Now 24 books each.
And they are both very different from each other, but there's also kind of a deep connection between the two.
Of course, over the centuries, people have preferred one over the other, and individual readers today, I prefer the Iliad, I prefer the Odyssey.
It's frankly hard for me to choose.
One is a war story.
And one is an adventure story.
And I mean, what an adventure story.
It's an adventure story to end all adventure stories.
It navigates you through worlds that Homer has either observed or imagined.
Some of the places he's talking about in the Odyssey appear to be real islands in the Mediterranean, although islands that he populates with monsters and dragons and cyclopes.
Cyclopes is a plural of the word cyclops.
One of the most famous scenes in the Odyssey.
And so there are real places and there are also imaginary lands.
And I say imaginary because at one point Odysseus takes a journey to the underworld.
The underworld called Hades, a place that supposedly has access from the earth.
Odysseus sails to an island, Persephone's Island, and there he's told that there's an entry point to kind of go to the underworld.
And there are some other great Greek heroes that have done that.
And so Odysseus joins them in traveling to the underworld in the Odyssey.
Now, before we begin the text of the Odyssey, we need a little bit of background.
And the reason we need a little background is because of what Homer assumed that his listeners, and later his readers, would already know.
The Greeks who listened to the Odyssey, first of all, knew all about the Iliad.
And you now, if you've been following my series on the podcast, you know all about the Iliad.
But Homer assumed more than that.
Homer assumed that people would also know, not necessarily the story of the Odyssey already, but rather the intervening events that occurred after the Iliad, but before the Odyssey begins.
So again, Remember, I said that the Iliad begins in Medias Race in the middle of the action, and it leaves off in Medias Race.
It leaves off with the funeral of Hector, and then Homer picks it up, but he doesn't pick it up right there.
He picks it up later.
In fact, he picks it up, we'll see, at a point where Odysseus, trying to make his way home, is actually a prisoner, is a captive by a sea goddess, a nymph, named Calypso, and Odysseus is trapped.
So that's where the Odyssey begins.
But how did Odysseus get there?
In fact, last we left off at the Iliad, Hector had been killed by Achilles.
Priam recovered his body.
There were the funeral games of Hector.
Well, not really games, but the funeral commemoration and ultimately even celebration of Hector.
And then the Iliad ends.
This was the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses.
Now, interestingly, in ancient Greece, the ancient Greeks were familiar with some more minor epics.
In fact, four of them that were available to them.
These epics have been lost to us.
We don't have them. We have descriptions of them, and we know the names of these epics.
By the way, these epics are not of the same range, depth, texture, richness, or quality either of the Iliad or the Odyssey.
Those are the far and away masterpieces of ancient Greek literature.
But the epics relay important incidents that we need to know about before we begin the Odyssey.
And so starting in the next segment, I'm going to pick up what these minor epics are.
and what they tell us that we need to know before we jump into line one of Homer's Odyssey.
Imagine the lifelong impact of a journey to the Holy Land.
Surrounded by like-minded travelers, picture yourself stepping foot in iconic locations right out of scripture.
Join Dr. Sebastian Gorka and Dinesh D'Souza on this life-enriching Israel tour, November 30th through December 9th, 2022.
For more information, call 855-565-5519 or visit StandWithIsraelTour.com.
Before we begin our reading of the Odyssey, we need to know about some critical events that happened after the Iliad, but before the Odyssey begins.
Homer assumes that we know these events, and they set us up for the Odyssey's great beginning.
Now, the first work, a minor epic that we need to know about, is called the Aethiopis.
Sounds a bit like Ethiopia.
It's the Aethiopis, and five books long, and it actually talks about the death of Achilles.
Remember, the death of Achilles is something that we were aware of, constantly kind of hovering over the Iliad, but it's not in the Iliad.
Homer looks...
Forward, not forward to it, but looks ahead to it.
He anticipates it. Achilles, of course, is aware of it.
But the actual death of Achilles is described in the Aethiopis.
And what happens is that Achilles is...
So think of it.
It's kind of a revenge of Paris, if you will.
And here's Paris, not known to be a great fighter, but nevertheless a pretty good archer.
And Paris spots Achilles and he shoots him with an arrow through the heel.
Now, that shooting of Achilles through the heel is probably the source of a later idea, which is that somehow Achilles was invulnerable.
He could not die except if he was shot through the heel.
If he was shot anywhere else, he would not die.
This idea is nowhere present either in the Iliad or the Odyssey.
As I mentioned before, it somewhat contradicts the Iliad, because in no way does Achilles assume.
Achilles actually puts on this elaborate armor carved for him by the god Hephaestus.
Obviously, he wouldn't need it.
He'd only need a little anklet if he felt, I'm only vulnerable on my heel.
No. Nevertheless, the death of Achilles, the funeral of Achilles, described in the Aethiopis.
Now, Then we go to the Little Iliad.
And the Little Iliad describes two important events, the suicide of Ajax, or Ios the Elder.
Notice that Ios the Elder was the second greatest fighter after Achilles.
But what happened is, after Achilles' death, the Greeks decided to give Achilles armor to someone.
And everybody wanted it, because it's fantastic armor.
It was carved by a god himself.
And the main finalists, if you will, for the armor were Ajax or Ios on the one hand and Odysseus on the other.
And the Greeks decided by vote to give the armor to Odysseus.
And by doing so, they seem to have...
They concluded that they valued Odysseus' cunning and wiliness over Eos' prowess in battle.
Eos was unmistakably the second greatest man in combat, but Odysseus is known to be kind of a strategist and a thinker, and we're going to see this character of Odysseus developed very well.
In the Odyssey. But Ajax or Ios was so insulted, so degraded, so angry that the Greeks gave the armor to Odysseus that he committed suicide.
That's described in the Little Iliad.
The other incident that's described in the Little Iliad is the actual fall of Troy.
And the fall of Troy, of course, was the result of none other than Odysseus' crafty scheme.
This is the famous scheme of the Trojan horse, a sort of pretend gift for the Trojans.
They think that it's some kind of omen, almost a gift from the gods.
They drag the horse into the city.
The horse, of course, is pregnant or full with armed Greeks who come out of the horse at night, They're now on the inside of Troy.
They can open the gates to Troy.
They let in the Greek troops.
And this is really how the sack of Troy occurs.
So, you have the sack of Troy described in the Little Iliad and the fall of Troy.
And then we have another epic called the Ilium Perseus.
And this describes the outrages.
That the Greeks committed during the sack of Troy.
Now this is very important because the Greeks did things that go beyond the normal course of battle.
Of course you're allowed to fight, you're allowed to kill your enemy, but still there are conditions and there are circumstances.
So Achilles' son, a guy named Neoptolemus, kills King Priam at his family altar.
Now it's one thing to kill King Priam, but to kill him at the family altar where he is in a sense seeking protection from a god, This is a little bit out of bounds.
The Greeks also grab Hector's son, Astyonyx, and fling him from the battlements of Troy to his death.
This is exceptionally brutal.
The Greeks also rape Cassandra, who is Priam's daughter.
The rape is conducted by another Ayas.
Now, not Ayas the elder, but Ayas the younger.
And what he does is he rapes Cassandra in the temple of the virgin goddess Athena.
This is a sacrilege on all kinds of levels.
Athena is a virgin goddess.
The rape occurs in the temple.
And so the gods are angered by these offenses by the Greeks.
And their punishment that they decree is that the Greeks are going to have a lot of trouble on their way home.
And sure enough, they do.
Agamemnon gets home.
He does make it home. It takes him years to get home.
But once he gets home, he is murdered by his own wife, Clytemnestra, and a man that she has taken up with named Augustus.
This, by the way, is described in famous Greek tragedies.
But Menelaus and Helen get home, but it takes them seven years of wandering.
They get lost. They go to Egypt.
They finally make it home, but only in the eighth year after the war.
Now... Ios the Lesser, this is the guy who rapes Cassandra.
He doesn't make it home.
He gets killed at sea.
And for the gods, this is an appropriate recompense for his sacrilegious rape in the Temple of Athena.
So, as the Odyssey begins, Homer wants you to know that all these Greek heroes have had a lot of trouble.
Some of them have not made it home.
Some of them have. But as the Odyssey begins, only Odysseus is still missing.
Only Odysseus is still out there somewhere.
And his hometown of Ithaca is, as we will find out, in a real mess because of the absence of its lawful ruler.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
▲
Export Selection