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Aug. 30, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:14
DONKEY FASCISM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep403
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Coming up, we're going to talk about fascism.
I'm going to go a little more in depth, and I'm going to reveal the phenomenon that Debbie and I call donkey fascism.
It's a way of saying that fascism really belongs on the left and with the Democratic Party.
I'll unpack the leftist historian Nicole Hemmer's argument that somehow Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, me, and a few others were responsible for undoing the Reaganite formula.
Actor and director Isaiah Washington joins me.
We're going to talk about his new movie, Corsicana, but also about making movies that Hollywood won't and can't make anymore.
And I'll begin to discuss the opening scene of Homer's Odyssey and how it delays the entrance of Odysseus into the action.
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 talk a little more in depth about fascism.
Of course, I am in a sense responding to Biden, making the allegation that Trumpsters, advocates of make America great again, patriots are quote, semi-fascists or semi-fascistic.
And the reality is that it is the Biden Democrats who are closer to fascism than Trump or the Trumpsters or the patriots.
Before I go there, though, I want to make a short announcement, and that is that my book, 2,000 Mules, has been pushed back.
It was due to come out the, well, right about now, the end of August, the beginning of September.
Turns out that, you know, publishing is a sausage-making business, and so by a complicated set of circumstances, we don't need to get into.
A significant error crept into the book.
book it was caught sort of too late and so the early print copies are recalled and the book is being released at the end of October. So this sometimes happens, it's obviously a little disruptive. I was actually gearing up for a sort of massive round of publicity to promote the book and now I have an interval till well close to the election.
The book is really powerful, and it has new information.
It puts it all together.
Obviously, in a book, you can do things that you can't do in a movie, and it has a thorough refutation of the critics, so it's an explosive book, and I think it'll be very well worth the wait.
I'm glad, actually, Regnery's doing it right, but I wanted to let you know.
All right. Fascism.
Now, where do we get the word fascism?
Where does that come from?
Well, it comes from an Italian term that really refers to a bunch of sticks, a bunch of twigs.
And when the twigs are all held together by a sort of single cord, That's the root of the term fascism.
So fascism here, in a sense, is a direct image that appeals to collectivism.
The idea is that each individual in a society is more like a stick.
And the stick or the twig is weak by itself.
But when you put all the twigs together and you tie them...
And what is the cord that binds them?
Well, it's nothing other than the state.
So this is the core meaning of fascism.
And you can see right away, what does this have to do with Trump?
Is Trump basically saying that we are not individuals, that we are part of a collective, that the state is more powerful than the individual, that rights are true to us only through the state?
None of that. In fact, that sounds like the Democrats.
And we can probe a little more deeply by looking at the key philosopher of fascism.
This is the Italian thinker named Giovanni Gentile.
I think the reason, by the way, that Gentile is not more widely studied today, he was an impressive thinker in his own right.
And I will add that he was also not an evil man.
Sometimes what we do when we think about things like fascism is we look at the later crimes of fascism, or more specifically, of Nazism.
And we work our way backwards and somehow believe that those crimes were latent, even in the early thinkers of fascism.
This is not necessarily the best way to operate.
There could have been all kinds of factors that caused fascism to move into that direction.
Obviously, when you're dealing with Hitler, you're not even dealing with fascism per se.
You're dealing with Nazism.
And Nazism includes fascism.
Hitler was in that sense a fascist.
But he had elements that the other fascists didn't have.
Mussolini, for example, was not strictly speaking a racist.
He was not an anti-Semite.
In fact, Italy did a lot to save Jews and support Jews in World War II. Anti-Semitism was the key to Hitler.
Hitler's obsession was with the Jews, and so Nazism has this anti-Semitic coloration that original fascism did not have.
But this guy, Giovanni Gentile, laid out the full-blown philosophy of fascism.
And if you study Gentile, by the way, I made a PragerU video on him.
He talks about how fascism is a kind of newer and better form of democracy.
He says the problem with democracy, liberal democracy, democracy of the sort of The kind that the American founders put together is he says it's too based on individual rights.
It's based on the idea that the individual is the starting point of society.
And says Gentile, that's not true.
The true starting point of society is the state.
It is the collective. It is the people as a whole.
And the state is the natural instrument of those people.
And Gentile goes on to say, I'm not quoting him, The authority of the state is not subject to negotiation.
It is entirely unconditioned.
By unconditioned, he means there can be no limits on what the state can do.
It could not depend on the people.
In fact, the people depend on the state.
Morality and religion must be subordinated to the laws of the state.
And, in fact, Gentile goes on to say that fascism is, quote, a total conception of life.
One cannot be a fascist in politics and not a fascist in school, not a fascist in one's family, not a fascist in one's workplace.
So, Gentile is talking about a fascist or statist consciousness.
Everything is politicized under the rubric of fascism.
And, And then he goes on to talk about how fascism involves ideological indoctrination in the schools.
It involves the mobilization of a collective consciousness at the workplace.
And all the private institutions of society and all the private individuals in society have to be, in the end, not just subordinate to, but at the behest of, ready to act when the state calls.
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I'm continuing my discussion of fascism as a way of responding to Joe Biden's allegation that patriots and Trumpsters and Make America Great Again types are somehow semi-fascist.
I talked in the last segment about Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher of fascism.
Gentile was kind of the mentor for Mussolini.
And Mussolini says, I'm quoting, by the way, from my book, The Big Lie, which is kind of the authoritative work on this subject.
Worth reading if you haven't read it yet.
Quote, it was Gentile, this is Mussolini, who prepared the road for those like me who wished to take it.
By the way, both Mussolini and Gentile come from the far left.
They were both prominent socialists and Marxists.
But now I want to turn to the sort of totemic figure of fascism, perhaps the figure better known than Mussolini.
This is, of course, Adolf Hitler.
Here's Hitler in a 1927 speech.
We are socialists.
This is worth pausing on for a second because it is amazing how many people to this day deny that Hitler was a socialist or that Hitler's movement was a socialist movement.
It doesn't matter that they call themselves national socialists.
The idea that we hear from the left, well, they didn't mean it.
They just used the term socialist as if to say this was just a kind of a marketing or labeling technique.
But here's Hitler. We are socialists.
We are the enemies of today's capitalist system of exploitation today.
And we are determined to destroy the system under all conditions.
Later, Goebbels, the chief propaganda minister for Hitler, was asked, when you talk about national socialism, which is more important?
The national part, which is nationalism, or the socialism part?
And Goebbels was very candid.
He goes, the most important part is socialism.
Here I'm quoting Goebbels.
What has priority and what comes second?
First, socialism, and then national liberation.
So even though fascism and national socialism is a marriage between two distinct ideas, nationalism on the one hand, socialism on the other, it's very clear that the Nazis gave priority to the socialism.
And Now, you can see all of this in the Nazi party's 25-point program.
They had to campaign, and this puts the light of the nonsense that they were just using this as a marketing slogan, because after all, if you are campaigning in a national election and you put this forward as your platform, that's what the people are sort of electing you to do.
That is your face to the German people.
And so it's interesting that when you look at the Nazi 25-point program, and it's worth going down the list and just keeping in mind, does this sound more like the Biden Democrats?
Does this sound more like the left?
Or does this sound more like the Trump agenda, the MAGA agenda, the right?
So let's go through some of the Nazi 25-point program.
Nationalization of large corporations and trusts.
We know which side of the aisle that falls on.
Government control of banking and credit.
The seizure of land without compensation for public use.
All of this sounds very collectivist and no surprise.
This is the essence of what the fascist ideology is.
The splitting of large land holdings into smaller units, confiscation of so-called war profits, prosecution of bankers and other lenders on the grounds of usury.
The Nazis had their own venom directed at their own version of Wall Street.
They were kind of Occupy Wall Street types.
Abolition of incomes unearned by work.
Profit sharing for workers in all large companies, a broader pension system paying higher benefits, universal free healthcare and education.
Really, when you go down this list, and admittedly, there are some sort of antique words on the list.
For example, the Nazis don't talk about exploitative rates of interest or greed.
They talk about usury.
Usury is really the old word for exorbitantly high, Shylockian, if you will, rates of interest.
So, you'd have to make some appropriate or sort of modernizing substitutions.
But when you do, the whole Nazi platform reads like the Democratic Party platform.
In fact, it's kind of like, oh, you take the Nazi 25-point program, and let's say you were to just cross out the word Nazi.
Just write in the word Democrat.
And then you just go to college campuses around America and you say, let me read you the Democratic Party platform.
But in fact, of course, you're reading the Nazi platform.
And you just go down the list.
I bet you that leftist students would be absolutely cheering and applauding.
They'd be like, yeah, this is awesome.
This is great. You know, who came up with this?
Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders?
Was it the Obama people around?
Joe Biden? Well, of course, the correct answer is none of the above.
The people who came up with this were the young Adolf Hitler.
At least, he may not have originally drafted it, but he signed off on it.
And it was all the key Nazi theoreticians and activists and goons that put this platform together.
And so you begin to see here how the word fascism, a term that describes the left, that describes the collectivism, and sure, there's an authoritarian strain in fascism, but it is collectivist or statist authoritarianism.
And this is really what the left tries to hide today.
It's like after World War II, they have done a work that has now lasted two generations of hiding the leftist ideological roots Of both fascism and Nazism.
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It's from executive producer Larry Elder and director Justin Malone, Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University.
She has a new book coming out, or actually just out.
It's called Partisans, the Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.
She's referring to Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and a couple of others, and me.
And Nicole Hemmer, who's kind of a, she positions herself as a student of the right, frequently writing articles on the subject.
And I'm actually going off, not her book itself, which I have not yet read, but off a detailed interview with Politico in which she talks about the ideas in the book.
And her thesis seems to be that Trumpism or the Trump phenomenon was created before Trump and was created not even really by a MAGA movement, but by some radicals in the Republican Party who moved the Republican Party away from Reaganism.
Moved it away from Reagan's sunny optimism.
Moved it away from Reagan's kind of big tent approach.
Moved it from Reagan's kind of engagement with the world.
Now I think for any of you who listen to this podcast, you can see the absurdity of what she's saying.
If I am to be blamed among others for doing this, you have to ask, well, is Dinesh somebody who doesn't like to be engaged in the world?
This podcast itself is very cosmopolitan.
I'm often frequently talking about things in other countries.
In no way would I want to see America somehow detached or removed from the world.
It's a completely different matter to say we don't want to engage in worthless, expensive foreign wars that bring us no national benefit and in fact cause a lot of loss of blood and treasure.
You also know that I emphasize the issue of the big tent on this podcast.
This is really why Debbie and I are excited about the Mayra Flores candidacy in the Rio Grande Valley.
We see it as a way of bringing Hispanics in large numbers into the Republican Party.
And so for Debbie and me, this is almost like a personal mission.
And And then also, finally, the idea of a sunny and optimistic disposition.
Well, I mean, we're living through somewhat dark times, and there's very bad stuff that's being done by the Biden regime.
So the idea that a Reaganite should always be sunny, even if there's someone like gnawing at your testicles, well, I mean, that's something that's likely to reduce your sunny disposition a little bit.
But that being said, there are podcasts out there that are just always angry and always, you know, in a gloomy apocalyptic end-of-the-world frame of mind.
I think it's fair to say that my podcast is very different from those in that it doesn't shy away from talking about things that are dark and that are troubling and that do put our liberties in peril.
But at the same time, I try to keep a kind of wider consciousness, try to also look at things that are positive.
I'm always trying to highlight good news that is occurring in the world, despite Bidenism, if you will, or the Obamaism that seems to envelop Bidenism.
Now, all this idea that Reagan was somehow the, you know, the kind of Republican establishment, and then you have these radicals like Gingrich and Rush and me that sort of pulled the Republican Party in a different direction.
Let's remember Reagan himself was an outsider.
Reagan himself was a rebel.
Reagan himself was viewed as a kind of radical.
And you can see the degree to which this is true by simply contrasting Reagan with the earlier Republicans, like Eisenhower.
Whose republicanism basically amounted to having a kind of solid golf game and maintaining a certain kind of irenic disposition.
Or Gerald Ford.
I mean, imagine producing Gerald Ford today at a republican convention.
The guy would be a misfit.
Just an absolute...
I mean, the word rhino applies to Gerald Ford with a vengeance.
This was a guy, by the way, I got to meet at an AEI conference many, many years ago.
A singularly unimpressive man.
Now, Nixon was more intriguing, more sort of, certainly a highly intelligent and somewhat of an enigmatic figure.
But I remember a vignette in Pat Buchanan's One of his autobiographies where he's talking about Nixon, and Nixon turns to Buchanan and says something like this.
You know, Pat, the conservatives, who are they?
What do they really believe?
Think about this. You've got the leader of the Republican Party, eventually the Republican nominee, Republican president for two terms until the second term was interrupted by Watergate.
It's not only that he's not a conservative.
He doesn't even know what conservatism is.
He doesn't know what conservatives believe.
He has to ask his aide, Pat Buchanan, tell me about these people, as if he's on a journey and has encountered the people from You know, Papua New Guinea or the Bedouins.
And he's like, who are the Bedouins?
Tell me a little bit about them.
So you begin to see the way in which Reagan consolidated a certain kind of self-conscious conservatism.
And all that Rush and Newt and me and the rest of us have been trying to do is take those Reaganite principles from the 1980s and apply them to the new situation that we face in the 21st century.
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The leftist historian, Nicole Hemmer, teaches at Vanderbilt University.
has a new book called Partisans, which makes the argument that there's a group of Republican radicals, and I'm evidently included in this gang, and we supposedly are to blame for pulling the Republican Party away from Reaganism and laying the kind of intellectual and political groundwork For Trumpism, for Trump. So the idea here is that Trump didn't sort of create us.
We created the movement that led to bringing Trump to the forefront.
And one of the key exhibits in this case is a quotation attributed to me, in fact, said by me.
I take full credit for it.
It's evidently in Nicole Hemmer's book, and it's brought up in an interview that Nicole Hemmer does with Politico.
Here's the quote. Conservatives need to be, quote, philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical.
And Nicole Hemmer uses this to say that here's Dinesh, he's not a real, well, he might be conservative in a sense, but he is radicalizing conservatism.
Now, if Nicole Hemmer paid more attention to my speeches and books in which I talk about this, she would know that And this is kind of a mark of the sloppiness of leftist scholarship these days.
She would know that this idea of being philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical actually comes from William F. Buckley.
I was a student at Dartmouth in which Buckley came to speak, and Buckley raised a very interesting conundrum, an interesting puzzle.
He said, That conservatism is about conserving, hanging on, holding on to things that are good and true and beautiful, and in a sense, protecting and perpetuating the best things about a society.
But Buckley said, what if you are on a campus, and I think he was thinking of Dartmouth, but he could apply it to his own alma mater, Yale, where the prevailing ethos, the prevailing principles, the ruling authorities, the whole culture is left-wing, is liberal.
What do you do then?
The old conservative could just look at society and go, I like the way things are going.
I'm going to try to make sure they continue going this way for as long as possible.
But when things are going very badly and the whole structure of society is awry, Buckley's point is, what is the conservative to do?
And Buckley's solution was, well, you have to stop being conservative in a sense.
His point was, you don't stop being philosophically conservative.
You continue to uphold right against wrong.
You continue to uphold eternal principles of justice and truth and beauty.
You still stand for the great ideas of Western civilization.
But since those ideas are not motivating or guiding your environment...
You have to work to disrupt that environment.
You have to become, in that sense, an outsider, a radical, a gorilla.
You have to change the old, let's call it the toothbrush, mustache, umbrella, conservative style.
And you've got to figure out ways that you can turn the apple cart, if you will, upside down.
You can challenge the prevailing orthodoxies.
And quite frankly, that is what Buckley saw himself as doing, not only at Yale, where he was a student, But even with the National Review.
Think about the National Review's original motto attributed to Buckley.
We're going to stand athwart history yelling stop.
So this is clearly a kind of resounding no to the prevailing intellectual liberalism of Buckley's day.
And of course that liberalism, that leftism is far worse today.
So the point I'm trying to make is that in talking about the need to be philosophically conservative or temperamentally radical, all I'm saying is that this is even more urgently needed today than it was in Buckley's day.
The campuses are in far worse condition.
The indoctrination in our schools is much more serious, is much more damaging and destructive to our children.
The takeover of the culture by the left is far more complete.
And so far from us sitting around passively and saying things like things will turn themselves around.
No, things will not turn themselves around.
We have to turn them around.
And some of the kind of placid, inactive, inert, invertebrate conservatism of an older day doesn't really work today.
I think if Buckley were alive today, he would recognize us.
I think if Buckley were alive today...
He would be on board with the new Make America Great conservatism.
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Feel the difference. Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a buddy of Debbie's and mine.
This is Isaiah Washington, the writer, the director, the actor.
He's been an actor and producer now for nearly three decades.
Television, film, the stage.
He's a veteran of a bunch of Spike Lee films.
He's probably best known for playing the role of Dr.
Burke on the ABC drama Grey's Anatomy.
His new film, Corsicana.
And the website is corsicanamovie.net.
Corsicanamovie.net.
Isaiah, it's a real pleasure, as always.
And I know that this film has been kind of a dream of yours to launch from the ground up.
Talk a little bit about what makes this film different from perhaps the kind of routine fare that Hollywood puts out.
Why are you excited about this film?
Why I'm excited about the film is that it actually, for me, and I don't shy away from this, it actually is a godsend.
I did not go into Corsicana originally prepared to direct this movie, although for my entire career I always knew that the producer The anonymous one was the one that was actually building a house that actually followed the blueprint and built a house from the ground up and actually would actually participate in net profit participations indefinitely.
So my goal was always to be a producer, never to be a director.
And here's why. I thought that I wasn't worthy.
I had already worked with Spike Lee.
He was my god at the time.
You know, he gave me my career four times and set me up in Hollywood.
We got the attention of Clint Eastwood, who was also considered to me, I'm a huge fan, was my god.
Michael Apton, Steven Soderbergh, Warren Beatty.
I got spoiled early on in my career watching these men called directors and their great DPs, but unbeknownst to me, I was sitting at the table of greatness and got the chance to be a student of directing.
So apparently, with my love of foreign films, my love of films, I never wanted to watch a film before I got into film and television unless it had subtitles.
So now, cut to the pandemic.
It's at its all-time high in 2020.
I get a call from Robert Davi.
I think you know who that is.
Yeah, sure. On my birthday.
And I didn't return his call on my birthday, obviously, but the next day I still have a voicemail, August 4th.
He called and I called him back and he talked for 20 minutes about the script he had called Corsicana, the director that he had at the time.
And I listened for 20 minutes and I was disturbed, Dinesh, that I didn't know who Bass Reeves was and I didn't know who or where Corsicana was in the state of Texas after growing up in Texas.
So for me, I take roles on as an actor if they scare me or I feel like I have to educate myself in the world.
I've always considered myself an educator.
I always wanted to be a part of movies that would spark conversations, much like Spike Lee.
And that's what this movie does.
When I got to Corsicana, I did something that I had never done in 30 years.
I took half of my fee at the time as an actor.
And just jumped on the plane without reading the script.
I'd never do that.
I just got so excited about after 22 days of doing a deep dive on Bass Reeves and Corsicana, I just became pregnant with that story and that information.
Sat there for an additional five days and found out that the director, through creative differences, had departed.
But the problem was it was two days before we were supposed to start shooting.
I only had 48 hours.
But literally, I was struck by the charm of the people of the Chili's and Applebee's and Corsicana.
I was struck. They all knew me.
They knew me as Dr.
Burke. They knew me as Chancellor Jaha, five seasons on the 100.
I was completely charmed by the people of Corsicana.
So this movie is a gift.
It's my love letter to Corsicana because I did not go there intending on directing, but I didn't want 40 people to lose their jobs.
Okay, I've been on the project for four months, you know, other producers and stuff.
So I said I would direct it.
And I was literally led by the spirit of Basteries and God.
I really believe that. I mean, it seems that this is a story that is old school in the sense that it appeals to the basic human emotions of justice and fighting back against the bad guys.
It has a plot. It has characters.
It has a hero. And it seems like Hollywood has moved away from some of those almost classic elements of telling a good story.
You know, that is absolutely correct.
The great patriot and great human being John Walsh at Star Grills Cinema.
This man hadn't even asked to watch the movie, Tinesh.
He has 11 theaters he's operating.
Three in Illinois, eight in Texas.
That's a great state of Texas.
This man never for two months.
I was introduced to him by a young lady who works in the mayor's office in Houston, Hiawatha Henry, who reached out to me on Facebook.
She looked at the trailer and she felt the same sentiment.
Family, rule of law, outlaws.
And one person that's going to find justice.
That's exactly the theme.
Also, I'm a big fan of bonsai, so I shoot the trees really, really beautifully there in Texas.
The landscape of Texas is very unique.
This is a true detective western film.
I'm merging both genres because, you know, we usually see a traditional western, they're what we call peopled up, which you have a lot of prostitutes in saloons, card games, a lot of people smoking cigars, you have delivery shot with a blacksmith, you have people walking down the dirt road, tumbleweed blowing, mountainous area that's usually very dark-like.
You know, dusty like Wyoming, Montana during the summer, or New Mexico, Arizona.
You don't get that. You see lush green territory.
We tried to do color correction and make it fit into that brown, old, western.
Then, you know, Amber McNutt and Josh, my wonderful DP, we decided we voted our DP out.
And he was the only time I had to disagree with him.
I said, you know what? This landscape here in Corsicana and being in Corsicana, a shadowing location of Corsicana, Texas, is a character unto itself, as well as the soundtrack.
So we're going to leave it. And it worked.
Let's take a pause, Isaiah.
When we come back, I want to pull back, talk a little bit about the beginning of your career, and then talk some more about this movie.
We'll be right back. Inflation is real.
The CPI is at another 40 or high.
Biden and his team keep denying it.
But inflation doesn't go away just because you deny or minimize it.
The recession, too, is real.
Again, they're trying to minimize it.
Again, recessions don't stop being a recession if you stop calling it that.
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I'm back with actor and producer and director Isaiah Washington, his new film Corsicana.
You can check it out at corsicanamovie.net, corsicanamovie.net.
Isaiah, you were saying in the last segment, I mean, I think very tantalizing how you got to Hollywood and you found yourself with these great mentors, Spike Lee, you met Clint Eastwood, Steve Soderbergh.
Talk a little bit about the journey of your life that took you into that orbit, into that environment.
How did you get there? You know, I have a podcast because Isaiah Washington speaks again on Spotify.
And I'm still 19 years old telling my life story.
I thought that's the best way to do it as opposed to trying to get it published in a book.
That's a very good question, Dinesh.
I had a chance to really think about it in our break from the first segment.
You know, my life seems to be Be pretty much on par with what I commit myself every 10 years to a thing.
And not knowing how I'm going to get there, but know how I'm going to get there.
In 1976, I was watching Good Times with John Amos, and I was pretending he was my father.
And I actually heard the name on Channel 13 News in Houston, where I just left.
And Marvin Zentler was talking about, the little teaser was that a man named Isaiah Washington was murdered on Lucky Street in Baker's home.
That's in 1976. I was stunned because that's my father's name.
That's my name. I pledged then, after my stepfather came out of the bedroom and confirmed what I had thought, I pledged that if you ever hear the name Isaiah Washington on television again, it's going to be in a powerful way, in an impactful way, an inspirational way.
My room was covered at the time from rawhide to every single movie, posters of Clint Eastwood.
It was Clint Eastwood and football.
Clint Eastwood and football.
He was my hero. Well, 1981 came around during the Reagan administration, the worst recession that hit Houston, Texas.
People were fleeing their homes.
I had my whole neighborhood turned into a ghost town.
I couldn't afford to go to the college I wanted to go to because I was given a one-year degree.
I rebelled against that.
They didn't get a full ride. I joined the military, came back to Houston and found out that my coach had betrayed me and didn't show me the letter of interest to the Pack 8 schools, Ohio State, Texas Tech, Texas A&M, Grambling, Southern.
So I got over that scandal, but I couldn't get out of the military.
Saw some things I didn't like in the military.
Did some things I didn't want to do that I wasn't proud of in the military.
Decided I'm not going to become General Washington in 20 years in the Air Force.
I got out of that.
Found myself working in Washington, D.C., the private sector.
Saw some things I didn't like working for this company.
Rebelled against that. Saw some things my first wife wasn't doing.
I didn't like that. Got separated, ended up homeless, ended up on the campus in 1986, and I ran into a wonderful woman who's my Jewish mother today named Vera Katz.
Still gives me notes.
She taught Chadwick Boseman, Debbie Allen, and all those people from Houston, right?
And now we go to 10 years there.
I decided through colorism at HBCU and this wonderful Jewish woman who was being treated poorly by African Americans for being Jewish, I didn't like that.
So I decided that I'm going to do something about it.
I'm going to take this nappy head, broaden those full lips, and become a leading man.
Did exactly that, and followed my spirit, was invited to New York, started at the ground floor, started in commercials, TV, Saw this movie in 1986 with Spike Lee and decided in 1986 I'm going to work with him, have my masters, and by 1996 I will be working with him.
By 1996, I was working on the fourth film with Spike Lee through my will and what I believe through the grace of God.
And then I said, well, DeZell can't be the only leading man that's talented.
I've been following him. He has my last name, so it must be a God's will.
And by 2006, I had already been Dr.
Burke, 10 years after that, in 1996.
Now we cut to 2016.
Now I'm on a hit show, playing the leader of the last remaining human race, Chancellor Jaha for five seasons.
One of the best hit sci-fis that dominated Comic-Con.
And then now people say, well, what are you going to, what do you got planned for 2026?
I don't know. Maybe I can work with Dinesh D'Souza again on major motion picture while we're working on our own studios, because of course the camera is going to do so well, not because it's a political film, because it's just spiritually anointed.
I really believe that I was anointed to direct this movie.
I had no plans to become a director, even though John Amos, I watched on television, became my mentor, Diane Carroll, okay, Novella Nelsons, all the women from the original Color Purple cast have all guided me and laid hands on me, prayed for me.
Even Sidney Poitier and Clint Eastwood, I have a signature.
They tried to get me into the academy, but at the time, Tom Hanks was the president.
Couldn't see if I could be in the academy because I hadn't made enough millions of dollars for box officers.
So I've been rejected so many times that I've also been picked up, through the grace of God.
And here we are in 2022, man.
I mean, Isaiah, it's fantastic to see someone with your creativity or talent, but it seems really the guiding quality is determination because you've been able to push into areas that are...
I mean, it's really tough to make a feature film, and it's really tough to get it distributed outside the studio system, and yet you've done it, and this becomes an example to other people.
I mean, I'm always thrilled when I hear people who are, you know, cooking up documentaries because they go, I saw Hillary's America or I saw Trump Card, the movie that you were in.
And so, boy, Isaiah, I want to recommend to people, check this out, CorsicanaMovie.net, featuring as a producer, director, but also as the lead actor, the great Isaiah Washington.
Thanks very much, Isaiah, for coming on the podcast.
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I'd like to talk about the opening scene of the Odyssey.
After the opening lines itself, which introduced us to Odysseus, he is finally mentioned by name, and we hear that he is trapped, held prisoner on an island by a nymph, a sea god, named Calypso.
We are transported to Mount Olympus, where there is an argument going on among the gods.
Homer tells us that this argument is taking place while one of the important gods, namely Poseidon, is away.
Poseidon is, in fact, in Ethiopia.
He's there to get some tributes from the Ethiopians.
So it's kind of amusing because Poseidon hates Odysseus.
And Athena wants to petition Zeus to demand that Calypso free Odysseus.
But she can't do it while Poseidon is there because Poseidon would get angry.
Poseidon would promise to shipwreck Odysseus if he ever leaves Calypso's island.
And so Athena takes advantage of the fact that Poseidon is kind of away, out of town.
And remember, these gods, although they're very powerful and they know a lot, they're not omniscient.
So you can actually get something done while one of the gods' back is turned, so to speak, and that's what's going on here.
Poseidon is attending to something else.
And so Athena goes to Zeus and basically says, we gotta get this guy.
We've got to free Odysseus.
And Zeus agrees.
Zeus relents and says that he will send the messenger god to go and demand that Calypso release Odysseus.
Now, Odysseus, as described by Athena...
Is sitting alone.
This is really the first time we see him, so to speak.
Odysseus is sitting by the beach, looking at the ocean, and weeping.
And this is a way of conveying to us the deep longing on the part of Odysseus for homecoming.
He wants to get home, and in a beautiful and memorable line that's repeated much later and very tellingly in the story, Homer writes...
He longs to see even just the smoke that rises from his own homeland, and he wants to die.
He wants to die because he is so desperate to get home.
He's in so much despair that this will never happen.
He will be a prisoner forever, you might say.
And so Zeus finally sends Hermes, the messenger god, and says, I agree.
I'm going to send Hermes to go see Calypso and free Odysseus.
Tell her, tell Calypso that she has to let Odysseus go.
And we might expect now to follow Hermes to Calypso's Island.
This is where the narrative seems to be going.
But Homer, like the driver of a very fast car, kind of swerves and takes the narrative in a different direction unexpectedly.
And part of what I'll be talking about, not just today, but the next time also, is the very interesting structure of the Odyssey.
It doesn't happen in a simple kind of chronological pattern.
You think you're going here, and Homer moves you to someplace else, and it turns out that there is a very well-thought-out rationale for why things are going that way.
So, as a sort of throwaway line, Athena says, while Hermes is going to see Calypso, I, Athena, will go and visit Ithaca, and I will see Telemachus.
Telemachus is the name of Odysseus' son.
And I will kind of instruct him in what to do.
And this is where the story picks up.
It picks up not with Hermes going to Calypso's Island.
In fact, we don't see Odysseus again.
Well, we haven't really seen him except in this description by Athena.
But Odysseus doesn't enter the narrative until Book 5.
So what you have here is the famous Homeric delay.
Where the first four books of the Odyssey, named after Odysseus, are not about Odysseus at all.
He is absent.
And in fact, what happens is, we go to Ithaca with Athena, so to speak, and we see the kind of chaos that is happening in Ithaca.
We see Telemachus, Odysseus' son, who is...
Not young. In fact, he has to be at least 20 years old.
Why? Because Odysseus has been away for 20 years.
So if Telemachus is his son, and he was conceived before Odysseus left, Telemachus has to be in his early 20s.
Maybe 20, maybe 21, maybe 22.
But he can't be any younger than that.
And yet, Telemachus, as we see him, appears very young.
He appears almost like he's 14.
He's a teenager. He is surrounded by hostile, well, Homer calls them suitors.
S-U-I-T-O-R-S. What are they doing?
They are harassing and petitioning Penelope, Odysseus' wife.
By the way, Penelope doesn't know if Odysseus is alive and dead, and what the suitors are saying is, Odysseus is dead.
He's gone. Don't keep waiting for him.
This is ridiculous. He's been away for, really, 20 years.
Marry one of us.
We want to take over Odysseus' estate.
We will subdue Telemachus to So the suitors have very bad intentions.
And there are a lot of them.
In fact, 108 to be precise.
And they are all over Odysseus' house.
They are eating his flocks.
They are drinking his wine.
They are ruining his estate.
This is the chaos that is occurring in Ithaca.
And Homer develops this because the theme he wants to get at here is that it is beyond time.
It is extremely necessary.
Odysseus is desperately needed back home.
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