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Sept. 6, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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THE DICTATOR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep407
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Coming up, we're going to talk about some of Biden's recent statements.
Is this guy going full dictator on us or what?
I'll review the judge's decision appointing a special master, an independent expert, to review the Mar-a-Lago materials.
It's a big win for Trump.
Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort joins me.
We're going to talk about his new book, Political Prisoner.
And I'll predict who's next to get the axe at CNN.
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 appears to be, at least in his rhetoric, going full dictator on us, so complete with the optics of dictatorship and all.
Let's start with the image, which I'm sure you've seen.
This is Biden kind of holding both his arms up, very much fascist style.
You have all kinds of imagery of Mussolini doing this.
You have Adolf Hitler. One of Hitler's standard postures was not the two-handed, but the one-handed fist.
Where he'd be kind of putting his fist up here.
And so Biden had a almost a blood red background and he had soldiers, two Marines standing on either side in a kind of creepy nocturnal imagery that was downright chilling, downright scary.
And even people who aren't all that political, like the bar stool guy, he's like, hey, I'm watching sports, I was flipping the channels and I see Biden and he goes, I'm not even gonna talk about the content of his speech, I'm just talking about, he goes, the guy looks like Hitler.
And then of course liberals were like, wait a minute, George Bush posed with the military behind him.
It's a completely different, if you look at the two pictures, George Bush is standing there and he's got Marines behind him.
It's a daytime address.
And the point is not that having the U.S. military makes you a dictator.
Of course not. But it is the imagery of, the fascist imagery of the blood red, the fists, and the military used in such a way that it's essentially a warning to you, warning to the citizens.
Look at the force I've got behind me.
Now, this is, again, this is not mere imagery because Biden, of course, He has blasted Americans who support gun rights by basically saying, hey, listen, what's the point of having gun rights?
He goes, if you really want to take on the government, you want to fight government tyranny, he goes, you need an F-15.
Your gun is not going to do it.
And this has been a standard line of Biden.
And of course, what makes all of this so bitterly ironic is that Biden is the one who left F-15s for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
There are some commentators who pointed that out.
What I found even more alarming was basically the idea of a president in a democracy threatening his own citizens by saying, in effect, we got the F-15s, we got the fighter planes, we got the nuclear weapons, and you don't.
So, in other words, we are able to overpower you if we want to.
And for this reason, you need to grovel and cower before Big Brother, before, you may say, the Biden-run regime.
Biden has been implying that anyone who disagrees with him, anyone who didn't vote for him, at one point his spokesman even said, listen, if you're not in the majority, you're an extremist.
And they're trying to make anyone who supports Trump, anyone who's part of the MAGA movement, anyone who's part of the, well, really the mainstream of the Republican parties.
It'd be one thing if the people who supported Trump were 1% of the Republicans, and then Biden could say, well, listen, I'm not against an honest Republican opposition.
I'm not against the mainstream of the Republican Party.
I'm just against a few of these extremists.
But no, Biden is trying to classify the mainstream of the Republican Party as beyond the pale.
Apparently, the only Republicans he likes are people like Liz Cheney, who are ultimately doing the bidding of the Biden regime itself.
So it's a one-party state.
That's the underlying philosophy that Biden is...
Is pushing.
One of the themes that Biden, but also other leftists have taken up, is this idea that it is a mark of fascism to be an election denier.
Now, first of all, putting aside the kind of comicality of the term election denier...
Remember, the Democrats questioned the 2016 election.
They questioned the 2004 election.
They questioned the 2000 election.
Were they election deniers?
No, they were arguing about whether or not the votes were being legitimately counted.
They raised issues of fraud.
Ultimately, those issues were dealt with.
So, questioning an election doesn't make you an election denier.
You're not against elections.
You don't deny elections.
You're trying to make sure that elections are carried out properly.
But here's the point. What does this have to do with fascism?
As far as I know, there is no fascist movement that can be identified as questioning the results of an election.
First of all, if you take Nazi Germany, for starters, the Nazis were the largest political party in Germany at the time that Hitler was made the chancellor.
They didn't have to question elections.
They actually won the election.
They were the largest party.
Similarly, Mussolini was constitutionally assigned his position by the king.
So, Mussolini had led this kind of march on Rome, and this led to a recognition that the fascists had become very powerful inside and outside the government.
Mussolini was offered a position.
Again, this was done by legitimate constitutional authority, admittedly by the strange system that they have in Italy.
So, the point being that That denying elections is not a fascist move, but manipulating and stealing elections, overriding the will of the people, trampling on their rights, yeah, these are actually hallmarks of fascism, and those are coming really from the Biden regime itself.
What to me is even scarier than Biden is all the little Nazis who are cheering him on.
I literally think, and this may seem a little bit harsh, but I don't think it is, That if Biden proposed a kind of final solution, Biden says, listen, you know what?
These Trump people have got to go.
Let's try to segregate them.
Let's try to incarcerate them.
And quite frankly, if we need to, we might have to get rid of them altogether.
You'd have a lot of people going, yeah, I think that's necessary.
But that's necessary to save democracy.
So think about this. They're trying to save democracy from the voters.
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Promo code DINESH. In an important victory for Donald Trump, a federal judge in Florida, federal judge Eileen Cannon, has ordered the appointment of a special master.
What's a special master?
Kind of an independent adjudicator.
To go through the materials that were seized at Mar-a-Lago and determine which of them are outside the scope of the warrant, have nothing to do with the confidential and classified materials being sought by the government, and have those materials separated out and, if necessary, returned to Mar-a-Lago and returned to Trump.
The Biden DOJ vigorously fought this.
The Biden DOJ basically said, hey, listen, we've got an elaborate procedure to separate out the classified materials from the non-classified materials.
And this was called a filter team.
The Justice Department, they said that we have a filter team and the filter team can be trusted.
The key word is trusted to make this...
Separation. Now, first of all, the judge noted, your filter team is not really an independent filter team.
You just went to the same division of the Biden DOJ that is trying to prosecute Trump, picked out a few of the people in there and said, you get to be on the filter team.
It's kind of like taking the prosecution in a murder case and saying...
Picking up two prosecutors and saying, you're supposed to play the independent role of sorting out the material that is turned over the defense, and then you can also decide what material shouldn't be turned over.
And so you're basically talking about people who are working hand-in-glove with each other, pretending to have created a kind of wall of separation between the two.
So the whole thing is bogus from the start.
But even more important, the judge says, I notice that on more than one occasion, on at least two occasions, the investigators have identified materials that are protected by attorney-client privilege that were not flagged by the filter team.
In other words, the filter team, such as it is, is not doing a good job and has clearly itself failed on at least two occasions.
So the judge goes, this is really not gonna work.
The judge is basically saying, and this was the unspoken subtext of this whole ruling, I don't have confidence in the Biden DOJ. I mean, that's the message loud and clear.
The media is trying to camouflage it by getting into some of the rigmarole of it.
But the bottom line is it's a vote of no confidence in the Biden DOJ.
And so there's now going to be the whole process is on hold.
The Justice Department cannot proceed with any kind of criminal inquiry or investigation.
The special master is gonna look through all the materials.
And the judge noted that what's interesting about these decisions is they reveal new information that very often is not highlighted in the media.
So one piece of new information is that Biden was clearly lying when he said he had nothing to do with this.
Biden goes, I don't know anything about this.
I'm not involved. Well, it turns out that it was Biden who essentially authorized the National Archives and Records Administration, the so-called NARA. It's Biden who told them, turn over your requests for classified documents. Don't just deal with the Trump people, turn it over to the FBI. That authorization came from Biden, and that is in the Department of Justice's own filings in the case. The judge also points
out that inside of all these boxes, now that there's a kind of inventory that's being provided of what's in the documents, we find, quote, medical documents, Trump's medical documents, correspondence related to taxes, Accounting information and 500 pages of attorney-client privilege documents.
So now you can see really what the Biden DOJ is doing.
It turns out, I think, that they don't actually have anything on Trump.
But their idea is if we can get a warrant, grab a whole bunch of boxes, we might be able to find damaging information on us that is now in our possession, not Trump's.
But second of all, we can fish around, fish through his medical records, We're good to go.
That may or may not be an offense, depending on whether or not Trump has the power to declassify the documents, then he's not in possession of classified documents.
But nevertheless, that was not an issue here.
What's an issue here is quite simply this, and that is that the DOJ says, you need to defer to us.
We're doing a really good job.
You can trust us to separate out what goes back to Trump and what we need to keep.
And the federal judges has decided that's not enough.
So the judge goes, quote, the court temporarily enjoins the government from reviewing and using the seized materials for investigative purposes pending completion of the special master review or further court order.
This is a big blow to the left because they were salivating over the chance to get Trump on something, really on anything.
In fact, quite honestly, I think these guys would be happy.
And I'm talking really not just about the DOJ, but also leftists.
In the media and so on.
If you were to tell them, honestly, just between you and us, let's plant some evidence on Trump and let's frame him and let's get him.
Even if he didn't do something, let's get him on something anyway.
They'd be like, yeah, we'd be okay with doing that because after all, this man is a threat to democracy.
So these are people, and we've seen this, by the way, from the Russia collusion narrative.
They are not above trying to frame Trump because he scares them.
More than anybody else.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast for the first time, really a legend in the field of political consulting campaigns.
This is Paul Manafort.
He was campaign chairman for Donald Trump in 2016, but he has a long and distinguished career.
Before that, he worked for Ford.
He worked for Reagan. This is going back to the 70s and 80s.
and he also founded the firm Black Manafort and Stone.
He was targeted by the government and that's what we're gonna talk about.
His new book is called Political Prisoner.
Political Prisoner.
Paul, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
You have had quite a career and yet this did not stop The DOJ, the FBI, from going after you.
This was supposedly part of the Mueller investigation, an investigation that ended up saying that there was no Russia collusion, but nevertheless it seems to me like they wanted some casualties, and you became one of those.
I want you to kind of walk us through how all this played out, because I want people to understand the way in which an ostensibly neutral and fair system can be manipulated to very unjust results.
So I want you to tell your story.
Thank you, Dinesh. I appreciate that.
And the reason I wrote my book was really twofold.
One was to tell the story, as you just said, because when I was going through the crucible, I had a gag order on me.
I was put in solitary confinement for 11 months, and the government continued to leak out a bunch of negative stories, all of which were untrue, basically, to convict me in the court of public opinion way before I ever had my trial.
And so I wanted to get the truth out, but I also wanted to make a broader point than myself, which was that I finished this book at the end of last year, so I had the full first year of the Biden administration covered in the book, because my concern was and my warning in the book was, I was a target, but I wasn't the real target.
The real target at that time was Donald Trump.
They were coming after me to try and give them Donald Trump, which I would have had to lie to give them what they wanted, and I wasn't going to do that.
But I also felt, and talk about in the book, that the really people are going after, and we saw this in Biden's speech last week, is the American people, anybody who doesn't agree with them.
And the system of justice will treat them one way versus how they will treat their own in several circumstances.
And that's really the overarching part of my book.
And in the book, I walk through all the politics of the campaign, all of the issues of how Russia collusion was a fake canard from the beginning.
But I make the point that when they came after me, they came after me for things that I'd already resolved with the government.
Weissman indicted me first on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violation.
He said, I didn't file. I didn't think I needed to file.
But when the Russian collusion stuff got into the campaign, the fair unit reached out to me and I put them in touch with my lawyers.
Over three or four months, I explained why I didn't think I needed to file because I was doing campaign work overseas, not lobbying overseas.
And I had actually hired lobbyists in the United States for anything overseas.
And so after three or four months, I came to a resolution with the fair unit.
No criminality, no civil penalties, no civil accusations, no fines.
I just had to file for a very limited period of time.
Well, after Weissman was appointed by Mueller, he called the fair unit up and said to the director, what's the story with the Manafort case?
And she said, well, there is no case.
I mean, we've resolved the matter.
He said, well, we haven't resolved it.
I'm taking it over and I'm throwing out whatever you think you've resolved.
And then he proceeded to indict me on something the government already resolved with me.
Paul, let's pause for a moment because I want to clarify a couple of things.
One is, I want to ask you why, under what pretext could they justify putting you in solitary confinement?
That's one thing I want you to address.
And the other is, Just to clarify, what they're saying is that you were a foreign agent because you were doing some consulting with the former president of Ukraine, this Viktor Yakinovich guy.
And what you're saying is that you did some campaign work for the guy, but you weren't...
So it's an argument over technicality.
Are you or are you not eligible to file as a foreign agent?
And you're saying even though this matter had been amicably resolved, they decided to up the ante on you.
Right. It was amicably resolved with the unit, with the director of the unit, who has jurisdiction and broad experience in the area.
And she was totally comfortable with the resolution that she came to.
But again, Weissman needed a connection to Russia.
And even though all of my work in Ukraine was bringing Ukraine into the European Union, And it was all public.
He didn't care because it was just, you know, they have their program.
You've seen it now with Mar-a-Lago where they put out the big lie, they leak anonymously, they convict you with the public, they make it, you know, and then the squeeze comes.
And in my case...
You know, the motor squeeze came very quickly because they needed some connection to Russia and there was none in the campaign other than my work in Ukraine, which isn't Russia, of course.
So it was all a pretense.
And, you know, we now know, thanks to the Durham investigation, and I talk about this in my book, not only was it a pretense, but Clinton's own campaign manager is admitted under oath that in early July of 2016, she told him to put a fake narrative into the public arena on Russian collusion between Trump and Putin because she was trying to deflect from her server issues that were dominating the campaign.
And we also know from John Brennan, the director of the CIA's own notes, handwritten notes, thanks to Durham, that he briefed Obama on this shortly thereafter.
Yet two weeks later, the FBI opens up an investigation across by a hurricane to try and find proof of collusion between Trump and Putin, which the White House knew was not true.
The CIA knew was not true.
The Justice Department knew was not true.
But they still came after us because they needed to keep the lie alive.
And the book goes through all of those details, which is one of the reasons why I was concerned then, that they're not going to ever stop until everybody is quieted down and the American people are right now in the bullseye.
Since I've written the book, we have 87,000 more IRS agents now armed coming after Americans.
You know, we've had the...
District attorneys coming after the victims of crimes instead of the criminals themselves.
And really, Biden now, in this most incredible speech I've ever heard from a president in my lifetime, saying that anybody who disagrees with him is anti-American and they're coming after him.
Paul, let's take a pause.
When we come back, I'll pick up these themes.
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I'm back with the legendary political consultant, campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
Paul, we're talking about your new book, Political Prisoner.
And you did some consulting for the former president of Ukraine, this guy named Yankovich.
And what the government tried to do, and it was leaking to the media, was that somehow you are an asset, not of Ukraine, but of Vladimir Putin.
So, walk us through the twisted way in which a narrative can catch facts that are even on the opposite side of the narrative, but incorporate them into the narrative.
My work in Ukraine was, as I said, I elected several governments there, the last one being the Yanukovych presidency.
All of the work was focused on getting Ukraine into Europe, very publicly.
I was working with the U.S. Embassy, the German Embassy, I was going back and forth to Brussels, and I was the visible face linking the work that Ukraine was doing to comport its laws and its economic policies to European standards.
So there was no doubt where I stood in Ukraine.
And there was no doubt that Putin was 100% against Yanukovych bringing Ukraine into Europe and threatened Yanukovych, which is why Yanukovych had to take a pause, which led to the civil unrest in Ukraine.
When he was about to sign what they call trade association agreement, Putin said publicly, if you sign that, I will stop the next day all the trade with Ukraine, which is 70% of Ukraine's foreign trade.
So Yanukovych didn't say he wouldn't sign it, but he said he needed to pause and start work with the Europeans to try and work a bridge kind of sort of blown out to help him get over that what was going to be big gap.
All of this is public information.
There was no doubt that Putin was fighting everything I was doing there.
So to then say I was the link from Trump.
To Putin would be like I was saying that I was the link from the Trump campaign to Hillary Clinton.
It could have been the same thing.
But it didn't matter because the way Weissman and the special counsel handles all these things, they just layer publicly these lies and put it into the system anonymously.
Interestingly, to the same reporters who are now getting these anonymous, you know, leaks from the DOJ on the Mar-a-Lago raid.
Literally the same reporters were the ones getting the leaks on me in 2017 and 18.
Paul, I also noticed as I look through the case that a very familiar tactic emerges, which I have some experience with, but most people are not aware of.
And that is what the government will do, is they will layer on charges.
Money laundering, bank fraud, because, hey, you took your money out of your bank account.
Mail fraud, yeah, because you put something in the mail.
And it makes it...
Seem like you're this master criminal, but the real goal is to bludgeon you into taking a plea.
So they don't even have to prove their case in trial.
Whether you're innocent or guilty makes no difference.
You succumb to their will and you essentially plead guilty even perhaps to something you didn't even do.
So talk about how that process plays out because that's what led to your conviction and then of course later in 2020 your pardon.
Yeah, I mean, remember the Trump campaign was from 2015 to 2016.
I got involved in February of 2016.
All of my fairer violations that I was indicted on under the Russian collusion investigation by Mueller occurred, according to Weisman, in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013.
Way before Trump was a candidate, way before I was ever thinking of being for Trump.
And then on top of the fair charge that they invited me on, they put forfeiture and money laundering charges in, and they tried to reach back 25 years of my life for all assets and money that I'd earned Anywhere in the world.
So this narrow period of time of Russian collusion and the Trump campaign in 2016 ended up encompassing my whole life, over 25 years in business.
And on matters that had nothing to do with Ukraine, nothing to do with Trump, nothing to do with Russia.
And when I challenged Weissman with a motion, saying that the special counsel was way out of bounds on his jurisdiction because he had a very limited mandate.
They ignored it, and that led them to doing a secret letter from Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, to Mueller, expanding his investigation to anything he wanted on me.
Why? How do you justify that?
You can't justify that.
This is not an independent counsel.
This was a special counsel, which has the authority of just a U.S. attorney, not what the old independent counsel law did, which gave him unfettered authority, which Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, disagreed with and therefore didn't renew the independent counsel law.
Well, with me, they kept it secret.
They didn't ever tell us why Mueller was coming after me.
And they expanded it into a full-fledged investigation.
And again, on charges that, frankly, either I had resolved or they just made up.
I mean, the really striking thing is that if you did not have an association with Trump, it's really obvious none of this would have happened to you.
So they went back into your past and tried to figure out, find things to get you on.
And that's obvious.
Folks, this is all in the book.
It's called Political Prisoner by Paul Manafort.
Paul, thanks very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it. Thank you for the time.
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I'm following the goings-on at CNN pretty closely, but I'm really doing it for two reasons.
It may seem like the sole reason is schadenfreude, pleasure in other people's misery, watching these horrible characters at CNN go down one by one, with perhaps more to come.
I mean, this is admittedly kind of an amusing and enjoyable, very entertaining to watch.
And the dismay at CNN, you know, where's the axe going to fall next, is palpable and is also long overdue.
But there is another reason that I'm following CNN, and that is that there is an outside chance.
I don't give this a high probability, but there is a possibility that CNN actually is going to move to the center.
And is going to have genuine debate.
It would be too much to expect that we would get the old CNN back with crossfire, with essentially arguments coming from both sides.
But there clearly is an effort on the part of CNN, at least in the nascent or early stage, to see if CNN can right the course of the ship, bring it a little bit more, if you will, to the straight path.
This appears to be the task being undertaken by the new CNN boss, a guy named Chris Licht.
And it interests me because, quite honestly, if CNN does this, I think that there's a huge market opportunity for CNN. Why?
Because Fox has lost its way, at least lost its way in part.
If CNN were going up against the old Fox, it would be no contest.
CNN would be like, do whatever you want, CNN. I mean, Fox is the place to be.
But Fox has become like the Politburo.
The internal goings on at Fox are so dubious.
They issue arbitrary edicts.
So Fox is essentially a network in its own kind of crisis.
It may not be immediately obvious from the ratings, but the ratings are kind of a lagging indicator.
If the bottom is falling out, we'll know eventually that Fox has become a shell of its old self.
So there's an opportunity for CNN. CNN could attract a large audience, center-left and center-right, if it were to engage in real debate.
Because real debate is not, I won't say not happening at all, but it's extremely rare in America today.
Imagine, for example, a discussion of 2,000 mules in which you have different points of view and all the kind of things that people try to zing me on on social media.
Hey, Dinesh, why haven't you shown this?
Why haven't you shown that? Answer me this, answer me that.
Well, I'm able to answer those questions.
It'd be interesting if they were put to me in a media format where I could engage with my critics.
That actually has not happened, but in a reformed CNN, it could.
Now, His second big name at CNN has gotten the boot.
This is John Harwood.
And John Harwood is a guy who's supposed to be a reporter, not even really a pundit, not a Rachel Maddow type, not a Joy Reid type, but really someone who's on the ground, supposed to be telling you what's going on at the White House.
And yet John Harwood would do these leftist diatribes, and he proved how right Chris Licht was to fire him by launching a diatribe literally minutes before he was taken off the air permanently.
He basically went on to say that, you know, Biden's speech blasting the MAGA Republicans is long overdue.
The debate in America is not between two parties.
It's basically between the people who love democracy and the people who hate democracy.
And so this clown, this intellectual dud, this null set has been happily removed from CNN. And the question becomes, who's next?
I mean, is it Acosta? Is it Tapper?
Is... Is it Anderson Cooper?
Is it Oliver Darcy?
Who is going to be next to get the axe?
I ran a little poll on Twitter listing these names and then going all of the above, and of course all of the above won decisively.
I think that CNN would do well to clean house, to remove all these people and to start rebuilding the network from scratch.
I think if they did that, they'd be surprised at the kind of audience that CNN would begin to draw.
And the leftists, of course, are grumbling.
What's happening to CNN? CNN isn't really quite the same as it used to be.
And this grumbling is only because the left thinks that they own CNN, just like they think that they own NPR. So the slightest voice that goes against CNN What they believe is heresy.
How can we be hearing this on CNN? We're being triggered and so on.
Well, Chris Licht, what you need to do is non-stop triggering for these clowns.
There's an audience out there waiting for CNN. Go out and get it.
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Asian Americans have the reputation of being kind of smart, but I sometimes wonder, who is the stupidest Asian American in America?
And over the years, I've had my own candidate.
It hasn't really always been the same person.
And several years ago, I was debating an Asian-American sociologist named Ron Takaki on race relations, and he would make the most obtuse statements that I would be just thinking in my mind.
You know, Ron, are you the stupidest Asian-American in America?
And... Well, I have a new candidate for that post, and it's Dr.
Bandy Lee. This is a...
Well, she's been passing herself off as a Yale psychiatrist.
You might remember this woman.
She surfaced more than once in the last several years.
Basically, she's the one who said that Trump is psychologically unfit for office.
And she got a lot of media coverage and...
And they kept presenting her again as somebody who has sort of Yale credentials.
It almost implied that she's a sort of a tenured professor at Yale.
Well, it turns out this woman, Bandy Lee, had an unpaid position at Yale.
She's not a professor.
She's certainly not a tenured professor.
And she wasn't receiving any kind of a salary.
But what she was able to do is leverage her Yale connection Honorary though it was, or just sort of a connection in name as it was, in two ways.
One, she was able to leverage it into getting all kinds of consulting and speaking contracts that, again, played on her Yale credentials.
So she was able to leverage it for money, not money coming from Yale, but money obtained using the Yale name.
And second of all, she was able to leverage it with the media.
I'm a Yale psychiatrist.
I know what I'm talking about.
Trump is unfit for office.
Well, it turns out... That by her constantly going in the media doing this, the actual psychiatric community, the psychologists who teach at Yale, were like, wait a minute.
It is a fundamental rule of the American Psychiatric Association that you don't make psychiatric diagnoses without...
Examining the patient.
If you haven't conducted any kind of a direct examination yourself, if you're merely, like, quote, watching them on TV or viewing their speeches, you can't, on the basis of that alone, conclude, this person is deranged.
This person is suffering from some deep psychoses.
Let me tell you what kind of medication this person needs.
You haven't even done an individual examination of that person.
So, turns out that...
That one of the, well, the department head, John Crystal, sent Lee a letter basically saying, quote, So translation, what he's saying to her is, you hate Trump.
And And probably this guy does too.
Probably most of the faculty at Yale do.
But his point is, you're abusing your professional position, or at least your supposed professional position, to do something that you're really not in a position to do.
And so finally, Yale decided, you know what, we've had enough.
And they basically gave Dr.
Bandy Lee the boot. Now, this occurred two years ago.
But she sued Yale, claiming wrongful termination.
That's kind of funny. She's demanding a job back for which she is not paid.
But as I mentioned a moment ago, she was able to leverage that job into cash.
And so she claimed to be damaged by the fact that Yale let her go.
And she said that the reason that she made this diagnosis...
she was morally required to do it. I'm not quoting Trump's presidency represents an emergency, represented an emergency which not only allowed but required psychiatrists in the United States to sound the alarms. She says that she had a quote professional responsibility to protect society. Well you're obviously dealing here with somebody who is themselves it seems and Of course, I'm using this term not in the professional sense.
I'm not trying to play psychiatrist, but in a kind of normal, generic sense, she's delusional.
She's delusional because she thinks that it is her job, Dr.
Bandy Lee, you know, unpaid affiliate of Yale, to warn the country and the world that she's dealing with a deranged individual in the White House.
Of course, The immediate impact of all this is not any kind of professional care.
It is to play to the hasanas and the cheers and the genuflections and the jumping up and down of leftists in the media who go, wow, we found a psychiatrist really who essentially confirms our own Trump derangement syndrome.
In fact, what's good about her is that she is able to trot around the Yale banner and Ironically, If there's one person you could call deranged or demented, it is Joe Biden.
And again, I'm not trying to use the term in a psychiatric sense, only in a general sense.
You've got a person who seems unhinged, who doesn't seem to connect one idea to another, who ultimately displays a certain kind of fanaticism, untethered to balanced judgment, that makes you wonder if you're dealing with somebody who's even all there.
And yet on this subject, which is to say the qualifications of Biden to hold office, Dr.
Bandy Lee is silent.
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I introduced late last week the central concept of the Odyssey, which is the notion of Zenia.
Zenia translated as hospitality.
But hospitality, as we understand it, has to do with kindness.
It has to do with feelings.
It has to do with a voluntary decision on the part of a host to take in a guest.
By and large, you're going to take someone in because either you know them or you'll take someone in because you sympathize.
Interestingly, the Greek concept of zania does not involve feelings at all.
Very often, someone showing up at your door is someone you don't know anything about.
And the protocol of zania is that you don't try to find out anything about them before you...
Give them a meal, give them a bath, give them, if they needed, a bed for the night, and only after all those basic, you can say, human services are provided, then you sit them down and say, well, essentially, who are you?
Now, why is Zania fundamental in the Odyssey?
Well, kind of for the obvious reason.
You have Odysseus.
He's on a long journey.
He's making his way home.
He's going to have to stop in various places on the way, and he's going to deal with the people, or in some cases, the creatures in those areas.
And how they treat him, what kind of hospitality, or let's call it anti-hospitality, they extend to him becomes critical.
So this is why Zania is so important.
We, of course, encounter Zania not with Odysseus initially, but with his son Telemachus.
This is in the first four books.
The concept of Zania is introduced in a very fundamental way.
Now, One thing to know about Zania is that it is upheld by the gods themselves.
In fact, it's upheld by, you may say, the king of the gods, and that is Zeus.
Zeus has a number of names that describe his roles and attributes, but one of them is Zeus Zaneos.
He is, in a sense, the god of Zania.
And so, to repudiate Zania, to violate its protocols, is to kind of go against the gods themselves.
Now, when we first meet Telemachus in the Odyssey, we see him extending Zenia, and we also see him with the suitors, where the suitors are violating Zenia.
So, Zenia is a key theme.
By the way, Zenia is an important theme also in the Iliad, but not as central.
In a sense, you could almost say that the violation of Zenia causes Zenia The Trojan War itself.
This is preceding, of course, the Iliad.
How? Because here's Paris.
He is visiting...
The Trojan Prince Paris is visiting the Spartan king Menelaus.
While he is there, he takes up with Menelaus' wife, Helen, and then either abducts her or perhaps she goes voluntarily.
Well, either way, he spirits her away back to Troy.
Well, you can see this is a—of course, this is outrageous on many levels, but one level is it's a violation of Zania.
Menelaus took in Paris, treated him as a guest, extended to him hospitality, and Zania is reciprocal— There are obligations not only on the host, but also on the guest.
A, the guest is certainly expected to be respectful toward the host.
The guest is expected, if possible, to provide a gift to the host.
The guest is required not to overstay his.
And I say his because in almost every case, Zania applies to males.
Only males could travel independently in those days.
So women, by and large, did not do that.
And then certainly Zania requires that you don't spirit off your host's wife.
So this was a flagrant violation of Zania, and of course met with the anger of the gods, but also met with the anger of the Greeks, who mobilized a whole expedition to go to Troy, not just to get Helen back, but in a sense to teach the Trojans a lesson, and second, burn the whole city of Troy.
In the Telemachy, the opening books of the Odyssey, we see Zania both in its good and bad manifestations.
The good manifestations are the way that Telemachus acts.
And also, by the way, we'll see in the next couple of books the way that Zania is extended to Telemachus.
Telemachus visits both the wise old Greek Nestor and then also Menelaus, who has now returned with Helen after the Trojan War, And Telemachus is treated very well by both those hosts.
We see this is how Xenia ought to be, how it ought to operate.
By contrast, you have the suitors, uninvited.
They have occupied, essentially, Odysseus and Telemachus' home.
They are harassing Telemachus' mom, Odysseus' wife.
They are demanding that she forget about Odysseus and marry one of them.
They are eating Telemachus' flocks.
They're drinking his wine.
They're wearing the clothing on the estate.
And so this is a kind of gross violation of Zenia.
And that's how it's presented in the Odyssey.
It's not presented that the...
The suitors are just rude or just that they are acting badly.
It is that they are violating this fundamental concept of hospitality, a concept that isn't just a matter of kindness or voluntarism.
It is obligations that are imposed and enforced, ultimately by divine sanction.
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