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Sept. 1, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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ARE YOU READY? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep405
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Coming up, are you ready for 87,000 new IRS agents?
I'm going to describe the shakedown operation that is sometimes called an audit.
Public trust in the FBI is plummeting, and I'm going to argue that that's a very good thing.
I'll reveal how diversity has become a well-paying racket at the University of Michigan.
And author and attorney Mark Paoletto is joining me.
We're going to talk about the unique qualities of Justice Clarence Thomas.
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.
Thanks to the Democrats, we are going to get 87,000 new IRS agents.
And what this means is, well, hundreds of thousands of additional IRS audits.
Now, the Democrats would like us to believe, Biden would like us to believe, that these IRS agents are really focused on rich people, people who are multimillionaires or billionaires, but there aren't enough of those people to warrant 87,000 new agents.
You could probably have 5,000 new agents and make sure that every rich person in the country I had oversight in terms of their tax returns.
The 87,000 agents, the Democrats really went overboard here.
And in a way, they're sending a message.
And we have to be attentive to these messages because if we're too dumb to realize what they're doing, what they're basically saying is that the IRS is the collection agency for the socialist or quasi-socialist state.
The IRS is the enforcer Well, I'm going to argue the shakedown artist, the ransom collector.
And now, admittedly, I'm going to get some pushback from people who go, wait a minute, how was an audit really a shakedown?
Aren't these guys merely making sure that you follow the law?
Again, as with the criminal justice system, in practice, it doesn't really work that way.
In practice, audits are not sort of fair assessments of what you owe.
And part of this, and the same applies by the way with the criminal law, is the unbelievable complexity of the tax code.
And what that means is that there's enormous amounts of discretion to hound people, harass them, subject them to all kinds of delays and expenses, and then make them pay just to make the process come to an end.
There's also, of course, the political machinations that go into this.
I don't know if you've ever seen, if not, it's worth looking it up, just kind of search it on the internet, Catherine Engelbrecht's testimony in 2014 of the way in which she was harassed by the IRS, primarily by the IRS, but also by a whole alphabet soup of other government agencies.
And what they do is they sort of demand to know everything.
Oh, you've got this income into your non-profit group.
Okay, well, give us a list of your donors.
Do you do speaking events?
Give us a list of all your speaking events, where you went, and what were the travel costs, and how many people attended each event, and who were the names of all the organizers.
Think about this. What does this really have to do with anything?
This is the IRS essentially engaging in a kind of hazing to break down your resistance so you kind of succumb to them.
And what they're trying to do in this case, in Catherine's case, is scare her away from the issue of voter integrity.
That was their... In a sense, I would say assigned task by the Obama administration.
I've only been subject to...
I've only been audited once, Debbie and I, for our 2016.
This is actually the year we got married.
And it was a ridiculous process because essentially what they did is they got copies of all our bank accounts.
They found every deposit.
Including transfers from one account to another.
And they treat it as income.
And then they put the burden on you to sort of collect all the resources and all the documentation to explain why it's not income.
You have to show this.
And then they go, we calculate that you owe us X dollars.
And so I talked to my accountant and he's like, listen, if you are able to and you pay this amount, The whole thing just ends because this is really a shakedown operation.
Their job is to try to extract money out of you.
And so that's the game.
Now, you can play the game, but it's a little bit of a losing game because they can always extend the process.
Let's remember, they have almost infinite resources.
By and large, if you take the matter to tax court, you've got judges who themselves have come up through the IRS system, if you will.
They're captive to the...
To the mechanism of collecting money for the state.
And so by and large, they tend to defer to the IRS. So it is a process that is not transparent or fair, in my opinion.
And here's an article. This is actually...
A fellow named Steve Martini, and he's describing his audit from just a couple of years ago.
He says basically he had a best-selling book.
He went out and bought a boat, and it was the boat that was, he says, the red flag to the IRS. So they start harassing him.
He says, I didn't take the boat as a business expense, but the boat to the IRS symbolized luxury.
And so they began to badger him about his income.
And when he provides his income, they go, well, let's look at the previous year.
Let's look at the year before that.
So when they don't get you on something, they kind of continue the search.
You can see how this is happening in other areas with Trump.
Can't get him on Russia collusion.
Let's get him on something else.
And similarly, this Martini fellow talks to his attorney and he goes, listen, do I fight them?
This is so crazy. And I'm not quoting the attorney.
The attorney goes, no, absolutely not.
Don't fight them. Basically goes, if you hire a lawyer, the IRS will now start looking for reasons to go after you criminally for tax fraud.
Even if there's no evidence, they will chase you for two years.
Then they might drop the matter, but then you're going to owe $200,000 to the accountant.
And the attorney.
And so, in a sense, you will have paid your ransom that way.
So why not pay the ransom to them, let the matter go away, and then try to avoid their scrutiny in the future.
This is how audits actually take place.
This kind of new horde of IRS agents is not good news.
It's not about Americans paying their fair share or even their lawful share of taxes.
It's about an aggressive agency with not just prosecutorial power, but militarized forces that they now have at their disposal basically shaking you down for whatever they can get out of you.
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I want to talk about public trust in the FBI. And on this score, there is a small piece of bad news and then also a piece of encouraging news.
So the bad news is the result of the trial in Michigan.
I'm talking about the trial of...
Let's remember that two of the other defendants Brandon Caserta and Daniel Harris We're acquitted on the charge of kidnapping Governor Whitmer.
And the reason they were acquitted is the jury saw right away that this was a FBI setup.
The FBI moved this plot along.
The FBI made it happen.
It would not have happened without the FBI. Unfortunately, in the retrial of the two guys who got a hung jury, What the government did was, first of all, they had a kind of a multicultural jury, so they tried to make sure that they had the kind of jury where they'd get a more sympathetic hearing,
the government would. Second of all, they got a judge who seemed to be determined to prejudice the jury in favor of a conviction.
In fact, instructed the jury that it doesn't really matter if the FBI sort of set this up or even moved the plot along as long as there is a willingness on the part of these guys to do it.
As long as they talked about doing it, and as long as they expected to do it, and as long as they were in on it, that's enough to secure a conviction.
Now again, you're hoping that there's one member of the jury who goes, no, I'm not going for this.
This is basically nonsense.
We have the government here orchestrating the crimes that they then turn around and bust.
But unfortunately, there wasn't such a person on the jury.
And so these two guys got convicted.
They're gonna get very severe sentences for something that the FBI, in effect, made happen.
But I see from Rasmussen, and the Rasmussen survey here is supported by other surveys, that all the rhetoric we hear from Merrick Garland about the FBI is above politics.
The FBI is without fear or favor.
The FBI is no one is above the law.
We're very even-handed.
The American people are not buying it.
And not only are the American people not buying it, independents and Democrats are not buying it either.
Do you agree or disagree with this statement?
There is a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI who are using the FBI as Joe Biden's personal Gestapo.
I mean, this is framing the question in the most extreme way.
Not just, do you think that the FBI is somewhat prejudiced?
No! Do you think that the FBI is like the KGB? Do you think they're like the Nazis?
Here's the agree.
GOP, not all that surprising.
64% agree.
So, a substantial majority.
Let's remember, though, you know, honey, I think the GOP, I'm actually surprised at 64 because for decades, you know, we're the party of law and order.
And so, by and large, we're deferential to the FBI. So, getting this number over 50, I think, is an accomplishment.
Anyway, independence forever.
47% a near majority agree and Democrats 30% this to me is really telling almost one in three Democrats agree that the FBI is now a thug operation so now the FBI doesn't help itself because instead of trying to come back to the middle recognize that it needs agents who have different types of political views it needs to stop this kind of combat operation against conservatives against Republicans I think the reason independents and Democrats even have decent numbers here is not just because they're observing the situation,
but they also realize when you have a rogue agency, everybody's vulnerable.
Once you have rogue cops that are essentially with badges, thugs with badges, I've called them before and I repeat it now, then they can go after you on other reasons as well.
They can frame you for crimes that you haven't committed.
They can arrest you without cause.
And they're relying really on what is now more obvious, a fairly corrupted judicial system.
I don't know if it's corrupted everywhere, but it's corrupted in key places, including the nation's capital.
If you look at the FBI manual which talks about how you recognize violent extremists and militia enemies of the state, they give you several indications of how you can find these guys.
First, Number two, they could be sporting the Gadsden flag, which is an historical flag representing really limited government and gun rights.
They use revolutionary war imagery.
By the way, I've used revolutionary war imagery in at least two, if not more, of my films.
Use revolutionary war imagery.
You're obviously a potential enemy of the state.
They display the Liberty Tree, which, by the way, was a famous elm tree in Boston.
In 1765, American colonists staged their first act of defiance against the British at that tree.
So these symbols of the American Revolution Or the Betsy Ross flag, which again is Revolutionary War imagery going back to the 13 colonies and the original calls for revolution.
And so these symbols of the very creation of America are now being used by the FBI to identify people who, in their view, are anti-American, un-American, enemies of the state.
Of course, the real enemy of the state today is the FBI itself.
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Feel the difference. Diversity racket on the campus and I want to talk about really two institutions.
An update on the Oberlin case.
You might remember that the Gibson's Bakery won a judicial verdict against Oberlin College because the college was actively participating in falsely accusing this bakery of racism.
In fact, This goes back to where a black student was stealing from the bakery.
He was caught.
Then his friends show up and they start screaming at the bakery, blaming the bakery really for bigotry.
There are all kinds of activist organizations at Oberlin who go, the bakery is racist, the dean at Berkeley, senior officials at Berkeley, one of the vice presidents is actively handing out flyers, participating in this kind of demonization of this local business.
And it was all untrue.
It was completely false. So the business won a verdict that once you put in the interest and you add all the payments due is now, I believe, $31 million.
A great number.
I actually wish it was higher, but it's high enough.
This is bad for Oberlin because they are going to have to pay.
Now, of course, Oberlin has insurance, but their insurance rates go through the roof.
So Oberlin has been doing its best to avoid paying.
They keep appealing.
They appeal higher and higher to higher courts.
And they went all the way up to the Ohio Supreme Court, but the Ohio Supreme Court just recently said, no dice, we're not taking the case, which basically means that the full damage award, which includes, by the way, punitive damages, entitles the bakery to collect, well, it's apparently now up to $36 million.
Fantastic stuff. And I'm really glad that this...
The college, Oberlin, by the way, a left-wing institution, had a good reputation in the past, has now become essentially an indoctrination factory.
I wouldn't send my daughter to Oberlin today.
I actually got into Oberlin, by the way.
It was one of the handful of schools I got into.
And I liked the catalog.
I was actually going to go to Oberlin.
And in fact, kind of amusingly, someone told me in Arizona when I was an exchange student, you can't go to Oberlin, it's a music school.
And I was like, a music school?
Oh my gosh, I made a horrible mistake.
Turns out Oberlin is not a music school.
They have a very good conservatory program, but they were, I won't say are, a fine liberal arts college.
And now they've essentially, I think, eroded their reputation.
Now, yesterday on the podcast, we had Kim Johnson, the sociologist, and she sent Debbie, and Debbie showed it to me, a remarkable listing of the diversity staff at the University of Michigan.
I mean, this is dozens and dozens of people.
I mean, you've got deans and associate deans, and you've got deanlets, you've got bureaucrats galore.
And so you think to yourself, you know, how do we get all this craziness on the campus?
And the answer is, hundreds of people are paid to promote it.
It's coming from this sort of diversity racket.
And by the way, these are not people who are, you know, who are underpaid.
When you look at the compensation, there's a vice provost for diversity salary, $410,000.
There's a special advisor to the president who makes $240,000.
Program director, $196,000.
And down the list you go, you have research fellows, So there are all these people for whom diversity is a full-time job.
They're not about education.
They're basically in the diversity racket.
And this is what they care about.
Education is not their business.
It reminds me of years ago, someone was talking about how horrible the public schools are in D.C. And one of the bureaucrats says, oh, that doesn't really matter.
Lots of people work here.
And so from the point of view of the bureaucrat, it doesn't matter.
We're not really doing education.
It's like an employment operation.
And so if we can get lots of people to work at taxpayer expense, the schools have actually achieved their goal.
And their goal is not education, but essentially to help people to collect salaries and pay their mortgages and so on.
Now, diversity rackets are all around us and have been going on for years.
Jesse Jackson sort of began this with a shakedown of Wall Street.
His operation was really simple.
I'll accuse you of racism unless you pay me, in which case I'll champion your company as being a marvelous embodiment of diversity.
And so he got all kinds of companies to funnel money into his operation, give him use of the corporate jet, and so on.
We've all heard about the BLM racket in which the founder of BLM is buying homes, moving out of our old kind of horrible neighborhood.
And also collecting money and also funneling money from BLM to the father of her child and her best friend and her roommate.
And so all of this is going on.
And then this is the collegiate version of it.
And the collegiate version of it, it's not so much a kind of illegal operation, but you can almost call it legalized corruption.
Because the college, what you do is they apply political pressure, they make sure that large budgets are assigned to the diversity racket, and then they populate the university with sort of diversity cops, diversity policemen, diversity hounds, and these are the people who are systematically almost like a bunch of termites destroying higher education from within.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast attorney Mark Paoletta.
He is the author of a remarkable book on Clarence Thomas.
It's called Created Equal.
Now, Mark Paoletta served in the White House.
He was assistant counsel to President George H.W. Bush.
And in fact, he played a key role in the Thomas confirmation hearing.
He also served as general counsel for the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, in the Trump administration.
He's now a partner at a law firm.
Mark, we happen to go back to the Reagan-Bush days, although we've lost touch.
I was actually joking that time has been very kind to you.
You're looking great. Delighted, of course, to have you on the podcast.
We've had the opportunity, me a little bit, you more, to get to know this remarkable man, Clarence Thomas.
And I'd like to begin by just asking you how you got to know Thomas and a little bit about, did you recognize even at the beginning that this is a guy who would really go on to achieve greatness even in his own lifetime?
Yeah, Dinesh, great to see you.
Time's been very kind to you and love everything you're doing out there, your books and your movies and Advancing Truth.
So thanks for having me on.
I met Clarence Thomas, one of these fortunate episodes in 1983.
I was a senior in college.
I was interning in DC and Vice President Bush was going up to campaign of all things for my uncle.
Who was the Republican mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
He was a conservative. It was five to one Democrat registration in Bridgeport.
The Democrats kept running the loser in the primary as the independent.
In any event, George Bush was going up there.
I was invited to fly up in Air Force Two to go to the event.
And up in Bridgeport was Clarence Thomas, who was at another event.
He was the EEOC chairman at the time.
And my mentor was this gentleman by the name of Tom Milady, who became the ambassador of the Vatican under Bush 41.
But he was hosting Clarence Thomas.
And after those two events, we met at a hotel lobby with Ambassador Milady and one of Justice Thomas's, Clarence Thomas's aides, and talked for about an hour.
And he was electrifying, right?
He was just full of energy, full of ideas.
The nicest guy, just, you know him, Dinesh.
Yes. So he made an impact on me.
And that was the only time I met him at that time, but it made an impact.
Flash forward to 1989.
I'm in the Bush 41 White House.
I'm working on judicial selection.
And being young, I think I was 26, volunteering when we were looking at Clarence Thomas for the D.C. Circuit.
And so I offered to reach out to him.
And other people had talked to him informally, but this was kind of the first time the Judicial Selection Committee in, I think, February of 89 met to decide, okay, what are we doing about the D.C. Circuit?
I reached out to Justice Thomas, young aide, right, in the White House.
He's the chairman of the EOC. Couldn't have been nicer.
We ended up talking for an hour.
I told him I wanted to get him to send me all of his speeches, articles, all that kind of stuff, so we could do that due diligence, right?
Long before the internet, right?
Get stuff in paper.
So he sent over everything.
I still have the letter. It's dated March of 89, somewhere in there.
And that became or began our friendship, where I, you know, loved reading his stuff, right?
So when you talk about, did I recognize?
Yes. This guy was principled, a fighter.
At that time, he was calling out Congress for their hypocrisy and their craziness.
He had been a chairman of the EEOC. They had something like 60 oversight hearings, right?
And then you had the black leadership continually pounding Clarence Thomas.
And you see him standing up And not bending, right?
And then you combine that with that great love of America or that, you know, that positive outlook, right?
That big laugh. All that stuff just made it, I love this guy, right?
And he'd be a great nominee.
And of course, the president picked him for the D.C. Circuit.
And then he actually offered me a clerkship to the D.C. Circuit.
But Lee Liverman, I talked to her boy, Boyden Gray, and I went into the White House Counsel's Office and stayed there instead.
And that was fortunate because I ended up working on Justice Thomas' Supreme Court confirmation, where I became his closest aide as a White House aide that went through that terrible ordeal.
I mean, Mark, as you know, that was a trial by fire.
They realized they couldn't stop the nomination.
And so, wow, they unfurled, you know, Anita Hill.
This was almost a preview for people who don't remember that far back of what we saw with Kavanaugh in a little different way more recently.
But And as I remember, that nomination looked like it was going down.
Even Republicans were starting to run for the exits.
And then it's almost like Clarence Thomas himself took charge of it and began to hit back and in a sense was able to push back effectively and begin this long and distinguished era that he's now had on the court.
Talk for a moment though about, because I mean you were obviously seeing all that up close and I know it must have been wrenching for this man because he's a very proud man and dignity is very important to him and they were trying to break his dignity, weren't they?
He said, you robbed me of, he was 43 years old, you've robbed me of my name and I'll never get it back.
He was really upset, right?
But you're exactly right, Dennis, you got this down.
You know, Justice Thomas, from the day he was nominated on July 1st, the left went after him with smear after smear after smear.
Lies, smears, distortions.
That was my job. You had the Justice Department kind of getting him ready, those lawyers, you know, and kind of going through all the constitutional law cases and all that kind of stuff.
I was the guy that was dealing with the incoming and figuring out what we're going to go back out with and working with the teams there and working with Justice Thomas.
But by the end of the summer, despite all of those attacks, including, right, the despicable act of the NAACP opposing Justice Thomas, right?
I think it was August 1st, July 31st of 1991.
But by September, it looked like Clarence Thomas, and through those hearings, was going to get confirmed.
He was going to have over 60 votes, right?
And remember, this is astonishing.
I think this is he's the last justice to be confirmed with an other party in control Senate.
There were 57 Democrats in the Senate at the time.
Justice Thomas had just basically defeated their attempts at smear.
And as he said, and I know in one of your previous podcasts you read from some of the book and the interview, but Justice Thomas said, this is not an information exchange.
This is not a way to get at the truth.
This is a gotcha exercise.
So those 60 hearings where they had smeared him or attacked him when he was at EOC were good training for this Supreme Court.
But he comes through That looks like he's going to be confirmed.
And there's this 11th hour allegation that I think is a complete lie by Anita Hill that's lodged.
And in fact, when the Senate looked at it, including Joe Biden, who was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, they didn't think it was credible.
We had the FBI look into it.
They did a private, not public, they went and interviewed a number of people when the allegation came in.
And determine there was nothing there.
This was not credible. Every single Democrat senator on that Judiciary Committee looked at those allegations and said, including Joe Biden, this is not credible.
But what happens? It looks like Thomas is going to get confirmed.
So they leak. The Democrat staff and a senator, I believe, leaked those allegations to NPR, to Nina Totenberg, and to Newsday, Tim Phelps.
Those are the two reporters who broke that story.
And then, as you know, Just as Thomas says in the book, all heck broke loose.
Yeah, let's take a pause, Mark.
When we come right back, let's pick up the story and then go on to talk also about Thomas' tenure on the court.
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Now go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with attorney Mark Paoletta.
We're talking about this remarkable book about Clarence Thomas.
It's called Created Equal.
Mark, you know, we've heard a lot over the years about various judicial philosophies, the philosophy of original intent.
In other words, fidelity to the original intention of the framers.
We've heard about the Scalia approach, which is more of a fidelity to the actual text.
What does the document itself say?
Clarence Thomas has sometimes been linked with the sort of natural law philosophy, which I take to mean a philosophy of a kind of external code of right and wrong written into human nature itself that becomes part of the way that you read the Constitution.
So you've got these different philosophies Can you talk about what you think makes Clarence Thomas tick as a justice?
And also, is there a single guiding philosophy that drives the way that he looks at the Constitution?
I think, again, I think the book and the interview goes through this period in his career when he's chairman of the EEOC, where he really does this deep dive into natural law, right, and making sense of the Declaration of Independence, which he thinks informs the Constitution.
And it's really a really interesting section of the book and who he's talking with and the folks he has that he's discussing this with.
But at the end of the day, it's originalism, right?
I think he thinks that the Declaration informs the Constitution, but it's originalism, the faithfulness to that text, to the original meaning of the Constitution.
And I think he's been our most fearless And committed originalists in history, certainly in the modern times.
And the guiding principle is humility.
I mean, Justice Thomas talks about this.
And again, what's neat about this book is Justice Thomas has his memoirs, which were wonderful, nothing like that, right?
You can't replace that.
Really add to it. This takes us to the current time that interviews were in 2017, 2018.
So he talks about his time on the court and his approach to judging.
And it really is humility and faithfulness to the Constitution and the text and really not substituting your own policy preferences for what you think Because he thinks that's an undermining of our structure of government and our democracy, which is that things are left to the people, not to unelected judges.
And I think Justice Thomas, in his opinions, and I think he's been our most influential and greatest justice of the modern time.
And it started right away when he went on the court with the very first conference in 1991, where he brings Scalia and Rehnquist over to his side.
In a case.
So that's, I think, in a word, it's humility and faithfulness and fearlessness as a justice applying the Constitution and statutes.
I mean, it almost seems, Mark, like it's a double humility, right?
Because on the one hand, it's a deference to the architecture created by the founders.
It's like it's their structure and I'm going to defer to them.
And then the second part of it is that where the founders are silent, we defer to the people.
Because we live under a constitutional democracy.
The people make the rules under which they live.
And so the judge's job is to relinquish, on the one hand, power to the founders and let them speak primarily, but where they're silent, to defer to the American people themselves.
100%. You said it perfectly.
I mean, it's a humility and a humility.
That's what it is.
And he has, as you may know, it's in the back.
The last part of the book is Appendix B, is the litany of humility, which is a prayer that hangs in his office, in his chambers.
And it's so important to him, and he repeats it a lot, that we put it in the back of the book.
This is awesome. Folks, you've got to check out the book.
It's called Created Equal.
I've been talking to the author, Mark Paoletta.
Mark, great to see you after all these years.
Love to have you back sometime to talk about the law on the podcast.
Great. Dinesh, thanks for having me on.
forward to being back on.
Uncle Tom 2 is the eye-opening documentary everyone in America should see. It offers a compelling and brave analysis of the true history of Black America, the cultural shift from prosperity, integrity, and faith to its current perceived state of anger, discontent, and victimhood. Uncle Tom 2 offers historical footage, photos, correspondence, and data to reveal the genuine strides of Black America in the 20th century, the deliberate Marxist
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I've been following a couple of sports.
the world.
Lately. Well, one of them, chess, I follow kind of constantly, at least when there's big tournaments going on, like the Candidates Tournament, which is the tournament that selects the guy who plays for the world title.
I say guy because it's always a guy.
But the other sport I've been following is, well, these days, tennis.
And partly it's because I get up early in the morning, I get on the treadmill, and it's fun for me to watch tennis because it's a pretty good motivator while I'm on the treadmill.
And of course what we see now is the beginning rounds of the U.S. Open.
But I've been kind of taking note, both in chess and tennis, of who are the players in the top ranks.
And I think we can see, even in sport, a kind of interesting reflection of how the world is changing around us.
Sometimes it's the small indicators that are as revealing as anything else.
We're tempted to look for big indicators like there's China invading Taiwan.
Things that show global superiority or military prowess, who's winning the Ukraine war, that kind of thing.
But let's look at something very simple.
Let's look at chess.
Now, if I think back a generation ago when I first came to America, or a little before, even in India, I followed chess.
And the chess world was really dominated by the Russians.
And then you had, of course, the American superstar, Bobby Fischer.
And so the World Chess Championship 1972, Fischer versus Spassky.
It was kind of a Cold War event with Fischer representing the United States, Spassky representing the Soviet Union.
In the candidates tournament leading up to that, Fischer had to play largely a bunch of Russians to get to the final.
So it was the Russians and the Americans, and that reflected really the state of the world.
Now, if you look at the chess world, it's completely different.
The world champion, Magnus Carlsen, is from Sweden.
Interestingly, he's decided not to play for the title.
So the two guys playing for the new chess championship of the world, one of them is Jan Nepomnić, a Russian, and the other, Ding Loren, a Chinese.
So right there, you begin to see emerging powers.
Russia is still in there, a real force in chess, but China finally has a world-class player who could actually be the next world champion.
The world champion before Magnus Carlsen was an Indian guy, Vishwanathan Vishy Anand.
And India is now becoming kind of a chess superpower.
If you look at the younger players, you've got this guy Pragnananda, you've got Gukesh, you've got a guy named Hare Krishna.
These are all teenagers or guys in their early 20s and they are playing in a way that makes them contenders for the world title.
There's no Bobby Fischer on the horizon anymore.
Now, the United States has some world-class players who are in the top group, the top group of, let's say, the top 10 or the top 15.
There's a guy named Wesley So, but as his name suggests, Wesley So is a Filipino, not an American.
He was brought to America by the lure of playing for more money in the United States.
There's a guy named Fabiano Caruana.
This guy was born in Italy.
He's Italian. But again, he was lured to America to play on the American team.
And the third guy, the top American, is a guy named Nakamura.
Now, this guy is an Asian American.
But isn't it interesting here that what you see is you've got the three top players from the United States are all, you may say, Oriental.
They're all respectively.
Well, not all Oriental.
One from the Philippines, one Asian American, and the third guy from Italy.
If you turn to tennis, I'm noticing that on the men's side, hey, where's Jimmy Connors?
Where's Sampras?
Where is Agassi?
Where is McEnroe?
America no longer dominates the men's game.
In fact, there's one American currently in the top 25.
That's Isner. And the other handful of Americans are all in the...
But that's a long way from number one.
With Serena Williams now exiting the stage after this U.S. Open, you notice that the top players are mainly Europeans.
There are one or two important Chinese players.
There are very good Russian players and Eastern European players.
And so what I'm getting at is that you can see in sport And you've got to look at sports that everybody plays.
You can't just say, well, let's look at basketball.
If we're the only country that's playing basketball, then obviously the top players are going to be Americans.
But you're beginning to see in sports that everybody plays that we are moving from a...
Unipolar or bipolar world which was the world of the late 20th century to now a multipolar world in which countries like China, like India, like Russia are moving alongside and in some cases eclipsing the United States in the very forefront.
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Surrounded by like-minded travelers, picture yourself stepping foot in iconic locations right out of Scripture.
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We are in the opening section of Homer's marvelous epic.
The Odyssey. And we're following the exploits, not of Odysseus, but of Telemachus, Odysseus' son, and also his wife Penelope, who is sitting virtually helpless as these suitors beleaguer and besiege her also, trying to force her to marry one of them.
Before I push forward with the narrative itself, though, I thought I would talk a little bit about the unusual structure of the Iliad, because it is told in a kind of unusual way.
As I've mentioned, for the first four books, no Odysseus at all.
We are in Ithaca.
We can see the chaos created by the absence of Odysseus.
He's needed home right now, but we know, because Homer tells us in the beginning, that Odysseus is captive.
He's held by a sea goddess, a nymph named Calypso.
It's only in Book 5 that we will see Odysseus released by Calypso, and then he's tossed and turned on the ocean, and he lands up in a place called Scyria, where he is rescued by a group of people called the Phaeacians.
Not the Scyrians, but the Phaeacians.
They actually extend to Odysseus a kind of marvelous hospitality, and they agree to provide him with ships and escorts, and they will take him back home to Ithaca.
So Odysseus is extremely lucky to find himself in a place where there are essentially nice people who are ready to help him.
And the story of the Phaeacians, which is in itself fascinating and very powerful intellectually, emotionally, this takes up books 5 through 8 of the Iliad, and it may seem that Odysseus is now ready at the end of book 8 to go to Ithaca.
But remarkably, what happens is that Odysseus, while he's with the Phaeacians, is implored by them, tell us the story of your journeys.
How is it that you're alone?
How is it that you have become separated from your men?
Are your men all dead? What happened to you?
And so now that the Phaeacians know that Odysseus is Odysseus, the famous hero of the Trojan War, or one of the famous heroes of the Trojan War, They demand that Odysseus spill the beans.
And so he does.
So what you have now, and this is books 9 through 12, perhaps the most famous section of the Odyssey, a lengthy flashback in which Odysseus goes now to the end of the Trojan War and he begins the story of his journeys and what a story it is.
Odysseus goes to both places that today we would consider both real and fictional.
He makes a journey to the underworld.
He encounters all kinds of...
He encounters some gods and goddesses, but he also encounters the Cyclops.
He encounters a group of giants.
So this is the adventures of Odysseus and his men, books 9 through 12, a flashback.
And then at the end of book 12, we're right back with the Phaeacians, and now Homer picks up the narrative chronologically.
Odysseus now returns home to Ithaca, And he has to deal with this very serious problem of over a hundred aggressive and violent suitors who are essentially trying to displace him and take his place as the rightful king of Ithaca.
So this is Homer's kind of remarkable unfurling of this narrative.
If you were to do the narrative chronologically, you would really begin with books 9 through 12, because after all, the story really begins at the end of the Trojan War, and so you would have Odysseus narrating the story that begins at the end of the Trojan War.
That's books 9 through 12, bringing you to Calypso's Island.
Then you would pick it up in books 5 through 8, And then you would jump on to books 13 through 24, which is the last part of the second half.
Now some scholars looking at this kind of arrangement that Homer has done with the beginning of the story really coming in the middle of the Odyssey as a flashback, they think that somehow in the oral or bardic tradition there was a certain kind of looseness or sloppiness and so Homer or the bard who put together the story was not too attentive to the chronological But I don't think so,
and most classical scholars don't think so either.
I think, and I think this is the mainstream view, that it is part of the genius of the Odyssey to tell the story this way.
We begin in Ithaca.
We see the chaos of things.
We then see Odysseus released from the island.
We see him encounter the Feachians.
Then we have the remarkable flashback.
Which tells us the kind of the pre-story.
It's almost like making a prequel.
And then we're right back with the Phaeacians and then the remarkable and astonishing conclusion of the Iliad where Odysseus has to make his way and come essentially as a stranger into his own country, figure out who he can trust and who he can't trust, and deal with these suitors in the manner that is fitting and appropriate.
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