All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 9, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:45
THE TRIFECTA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep410
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com.
Coming up, I'm going to talk about collusion between the Biden administration on the one hand and the trifecta of social media platforms, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter.
This is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment.
I want to focus on the left's demonization of Judge Eileen Cannon to make the point that when they talk about rule of law, it only matters when it goes their way.
Debbie's going to join me. We're going to talk about Chile's close call, about Beto's troubling rise in Texas and a gruesome murder in Memphis.
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.
There is an important ongoing lawsuit and investigation that is being conducted by the Attorney Generals of both Missouri And Louisiana.
The Missouri Attorney General, by the way, is Eric Schmidt, who has been on this podcast The Louisiana Attorney General is Jeff Landry.
The two of them have come together in a very important enterprise.
What's the enterprise? It is to fully expose the unconstitutional collusion between figures in the Biden administration strewn through many different departments and agencies, including the White House, and a trifecta of social media companies.
We're speaking here specifically about Twitter, about Google slash YouTube, and about Facebook slash Meta.
Now, really, ever since Biden took office, the Biden administration has been pressuring, cajoling, conspiring with Social media companies to ban people, to ban what they call disinformation or misinformation, but it's merely information they don't agree with.
Misinformation here has a kind of ideological definition.
It is what our side says goes, what your side says is automatically classified as out of bounds.
So this is a naked exercise of political power.
I mean, think of it. It's not only a violation of It's a violation of democracy itself which relies upon a multi-party system, a diversity of ideas, people having forums in which they can put their ideas forward.
Now, for some time, groups like Facebook And YouTube would say, we're private organizations.
We can have our own guidelines.
We can have our own rules. You don't like it.
You form your own platform.
First of all, when Parler was formed as an independent platform, they all came together, including Amazon and Apple, to take it down.
But it's a whole different matter when the government is working hand-in-hand with these platforms.
So-called private companies in order to suppress speech.
And this is really what Eric Schmidt and Jeff Landry are exposing.
Now, they have gotten a whole bunch of discovery.
And this discovery is extremely eye-opening.
They have all kinds of communications from people in different agencies Emails, directives, apparently teleconferences back and forth in which these agencies are working with these social media companies about banning people, deplatforming, restricting them.
So, in a sense, they're well on their way to proving their case.
But alarmed by what they're finding out, the Biden administration has been suppressing the communications of people higher up.
So, for example, people like high up at the White House.
Or people high up at the various agencies.
Or even Dr. Fauci.
Or, for example, the White House Press Secretary, Corinne Jean-Pierre.
These are people who have also been active with these social media companies.
And yet, the Biden administration is saying, we can't reveal these communications.
These reflect the internal workings of the White House.
And so they have been blocking the release of these documents.
So Eric Schmidt and Jeff Landry went to a judge in Louisiana who just issued a ruling, very good ruling, where he basically says, and he's referring specifically to Fauci and specifically to Corinne Jean-Pierre, the judge.
The press secretary. And he says, look, any communications that you have with social media companies are part of a legitimate lawsuit and a legitimate discovery process.
Turn them over. He expresses appropriate derision and contempt for the position that, no, these are internal documents.
He goes, no, I'm not talking about documents that are internal to the White House or documents that are internal to I'm talking about external communications between the Biden administration on the one hand and these external social media companies.
That is the information being sought.
But that is the information that needs to be turned over.
Now in his own press release, the Eric Schmidt, whom I should get back on the podcast to talk about this, this is such an important story.
He says that we've gotten information from Meta, from Facebook, saying that at least 32 federal officials are constantly involved with us.
telling us who to censor and what to do.
Moreover, YouTube disclosed that 11 federal officials are in regular communication with YouTube about who and what to ban.
And so Schmidt says that this is a, he calls it a censorship enterprise, which I think is a good way to put it because he's talking about not one agency.
They're not just censoring COVID. They're censoring a whole bunch of stuff.
And according to Schmidt, these are some of the agencies involved.
The White House. HHS, which is Health and Human Services, DHS, Department of Homeland Security, CISA, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency, the CDC, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Census Bureau, the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department.
So, all of them, or most of them, they're all in on it.
And so, this it seems to me is something that really desperately needs to go up to the Supreme Court because if the First Amendment means anything, it means that the agencies of the government cannot fascist style direct private organizations to censor people.
In other words, they cannot do through private instruments, through this trifecta of social media companies, what it would be unconstitutional for them to do if they were to do it themselves.
Thanks for watching.
MyPillow is having their biggest sheet sale of the year.
You have all helped build MyPillow into the amazing company it is today, and Mike Lindell, inventor and CEO, wants to give back exclusively to his supporters.
That's you. The Precale and Giza Dream Bed Sheets are available in a variety of colors and sizes.
All on sale for as low as $29.98 with promo code Dinesh.
Order now because when they're gone, they're gone.
The Percale and Giza Dream Sheets, they're breathable.
They have a cool, crisp feel.
They come with a 10-year warranty, 60-day money-back guarantee.
Don't miss out on this incredible offer.
Limited supplies will be ordered.
Be sure to order now. Call 800-876-0227.
That's 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com either way.
To get the discounts, you need to use promo code DINESHDINESH. The left is all for the rule of law, as long as it goes their way.
They're all for the democratic processes of our society, except when they produce a result or an outcome that they don't like.
And recently, a federal judge, Eileen Cannon, shot down or struck down the Biden DOJ by saying, we need to have a special master, an independent authority, review the Mar-a-Lago documents to see which of them appropriately belong to the search and which of them do not, which is to say, which of them need to be isolated or returned to Mar-a-Lago
because they were seized inappropriately.
And the Biden DOJ is shrieking, oh, this is going to jeopardize national security.
This is going to cause the end of the world.
And the judge is like, it's not going to jeopardize national security.
The documents are going to stay.
The special master is going to be operating on behalf of the government.
So the documents are staying with the government.
They're not going to be distributed or publicized in any way.
But here's the point.
Aileen Cannon is a respected judge.
She's of Cuban origin.
Her mom fled the dictatorship of Fidel Castro.
She graduated from Duke.
She went to the University of Michigan Law School.
She worked at the Justice Department as a prosecutor.
She also was with a leading law firm.
She served as an appellate judicial clerk.
Ron DeSantis recently pointed out that when she was confirmed as a federal judge, the vote in Florida was 56-21, 12 Democratic state senators joined Republicans to confirm her to the bench.
And yet...
If you look at the commentary on her now coming from, well, some of it's coming from lawyers, law professors, media types, they're acting as though this woman is unqualified, a complete buffoon, and corrupt to boot.
So suddenly the legal system...
Which the rule of law becomes questionable.
Why? Because it's producing a result that these people don't like.
Here is Ellie Mistal on MSNBC. This is one of NBC's stupider, and that's really saying something.
Regular guests, he says, quote, she's biased and she's corrupt.
Corrupt. Here's Norman Ornstein, my former colleague at AEI. Now, Ornstein was always a Democrat and always recognized at AEI to be one of the stupider guys among the scholars there.
But they kind of kept him on because he had the reputation then of being more of a centrist Democrat.
He's not anymore. He's one of the worst today.
And he too, he implies that Judge Cannon is engaging in obstruction of justice.
The judge, a federal judge, is obstructing justice.
Why? Because according to him, the Biden DOJ should be able to proceed unimpeded, unsupervised, without any kind of judicial oversight and any judicial obstacles put in their way.
This is his definition of obstruction.
Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe, who can usually be counted to make the most extreme statement that you could possibly make, basically compares the judge's decision to, quote, Dred Scott Okoramatsu.
Now, Dred Scott, most of you know, this was the notorious Supreme Court decision, I believe 1857, that essentially affirmed slavery.
It said that black people don't have any rights that whites need to respect.
This is the infamous decision by Judge Taney.
Korematsu is the case, which essentially resulted in the internment of Japanese Americans into camps during World War II. So these are extreme cases.
And yet, here is a Harvard law professor...
Linking a judge who, by and large, let's notice here, what is Judge Eileen Cannon doing?
She is putting a check on governmental power.
If you look at Dred Scott and you look at Korematsu, those were promiscuous exercises of government power.
On the one hand, government supporting the whole regime of slavery in the South.
On the other hand, The government actively grabbing these Japanese-American families, sticking them into camps.
Here's Judge Cannon basically saying the government needs to have some oversight.
We need a special master to look over what the government is doing to make sure that it's legit, that people's rights, the individual in this case, Trump's rights, are not being violated.
So, the point here is that what we're seeing from the left is a complete...
It's abrogation of the basic respect due to a federal judge.
Now, this is not to say that you can't disagree with the judge's decision, that you can't say that, listen, if you're on the left, you probably think, well, the Biden administration can be trusted to exercise a kind of responsible sway over these documents.
They can certainly distinguish what's a Classified document for what's not.
A document that is covered by the search to some stuff.
Let's say Trump's medical records or tax records that may just inadvertently have been picked up as part of that search.
We can trust the government.
This is sort of...
You could make that argument, but that's a whole different matter from saying the judge is a crook, the judge is corrupt, the judge is basically just like the judges of old that affirm the...
Extension of slavery into the territories, struck down the Missouri Compromise.
This, of course, is Dred Scott.
Or the judges who dispatched Japanese Americans into internment camps.
We see here rhetoric that has become pulled away from, detached from, any responsible relationship to common sense or balanced judgment.
In other words, what I'm saying is that the left has gotten unhinged, something that's not entirely surprising to What we see once again in this case.
Homeowners, beware.
You could already be the victim of home title theft and not have a clue.
Some cyber thief may have already forged his name onto the title to your home.
Here's how you find out.
My partners at Home Title Lock have a special free offer for my listeners.
Go to HomeTitleLock.com and simply enter your address for your free, no obligation, home title scan.
This is how you discover if a cyber thief is already camping on your home's title.
Look, the title to your home is the only document that proves you own it.
And once he forges your title, he can take out loans on your home or forge your name stating that he's the true owner.
First things first, let's make sure your home title is securely in your name.
You can do that now by going to hometitlelock.com, use my promo code RADIO, then enter your address for your free, no-obligation home title scan.
That's $100 value free.
Again, That's HometitleLock.com, code radio.
HometitleLock.com, code radio.
This is our Debbie and my Friday roundup where we like to tackle some of the issues going on and also throw in some personal stuff.
And we were talking this morning about the kind of near miss in Chile.
I think the reason I'm interested in Chile is because this is a prosperous country in South America.
And it's prosperous because of markets.
It's prosperous because of an explicit commitment to free market principles.
And for this reason, the election of this Gabriel Boric, this leftist, actually a communist in his youth, very bad guy, very disturbing because I suppose what it could be is that because Chile is prosperous, They feel like they can take a chance.
Well, and I have to say, in Chilean society, this whole notion of this wokeness has reared its ugly head down there.
And so when he campaigned, he made the right-wing candidate, I can't remember his name right now, Appear as a hateful, you know, xenophobic, didn't like indigenous people, didn't like, you know, people of color.
Oh, Jose Antonio cast.
Right, cast.
That's right. And so anyway, so that was kind of his...
Oh, and immigrants.
Immigrants. He hated immigrants.
That was another thing. Very, very similar to the way that the Democrats behave in America.
So he was testing the viability of this kind of woke politics.
And I think one thing we have to say, and this is a little surprising perhaps, you know, you might think that wokeness is an American phenomenon.
We've had slavery in America.
But there hasn't been slavery, for example, throughout Europe.
Or at least, even if we go back historically, there were very few slaves in Europe today.
There are other countries that have been untouched by slavery, or at least the same type of...
South America did, though. South America did have slavery, of course.
But interestingly, the same American politics, your transphobic, your homo...
It's exactly the same.
It's the same. Exactly the same.
And that's the reason why even Hugo Chavez was knocking down the Columbus statue.
Exactly for the same reasons.
And it puts people, interestingly, good people who don't know how to think about all this, are put on the defensive because I think they're encountering these things for the first time and they're a little bit...
thrown off because let's think about there are a lot of people who have reservations about homosexuality. They don't fear, they're not homophobic but when they're stung by that accusation, they immediately are up against the wall.
And a lot of people are biblical about it, too.
Yeah.
And that's why they say no to those things.
Not so much because they don't like, you know, gays or whatever.
As people? No, I realize that.
Now, the thing about this, though, is that it looks like what happened with the Chileans is they went for this Boric guy, but then, of course, as the left does, he went too far.
He essentially rewrote the whole constitution, making it a leftist document.
This is like a dream document for Bernie Sanders, which is why Bernie Sanders endorsed it, but the Chileans voted it down.
Right. Yeah, but you know, I don't, I really don't put this guy, I mean, I don't doubt that the Chilean people rejected it, but the way things go down there, it wouldn't surprise me.
You know, if he was like, oh yeah, he goes to Hugo Chavez Road, yes, and starts to rig all the elections.
Because again, this was kind of a surprise, and he may think to himself, hey, my agenda is not going to go through if I allow these people to actually vote for this agenda.
And so that's what ends up happening, is that the people don't actually vote for this agenda.
They might fall for it initially, but then when they wake up and realize, hey, this is really bad for our country, this is going to create all kinds of issues with finances, with poverty, with crime issues, They wake up and then it's too late.
I mean, the thing about, you have to realize that communists and Marxists don't really believe in elections.
Marx didn't believe in elections.
Their idea is to use elections as a mechanism to come to power.
But once they do, and we see this, of course, in Venezuela, they do not hesitate to rig elections or even just to shut them down altogether.
Most socialist countries don't have elections.
Or if they have elections, they put on a staged election, they pick all the candidates, they've got the whole outcome already prejudged and predetermined.
So you're saying that because they lost, they might intensify their efforts to...
Yeah, I'm saying he's probably thinking, what was I thinking?
I actually did a real election?
No. Never again.
Never again. I think that's unfortunately what's going to happen in Chile.
In other words, we might be seeing some mules in Santiago.
Burros. Dos mil burros.
Wow. Yes.
Have you seen Uncle Tom 2 yet?
You need to.
To reveal the genuine strides of black America in the 20th century, the deliberate Marxist strategy to create racial tension and replace God with government, the NAACP sinister agenda, the fall of Black Harlem, the truth behind Black Lives Matter, and the demoralization of America for political power.
Don't miss Uncle Tom 2 from executive producer Larry Elder and director Justin Malone with Brandon Tatum, Vodie Bauckham and Chad O. Jackson.
Watch the movie on demand or buy the DVD now at salemnow.com.
That's Salem, S-A-L-E-M, now, dot com.
We are going in this segment to talk about the race between Beto O'Rourke and Governor Now, according to the latest poll...
Reported in Bloomberg, Abbott continues to lead a fairly steady lead, 7 percentage points, 49 to 42.
This is a poll done by the University of Houston and Texas Southern University.
It's, I guess, a little bit of a closer race that makes you or me feel comfortable.
It's frightening. I mean, the idea that this guy's even a viable candidate, this absurd man-boy.
It's absurd. Well, I mean, look, forget the man-boy.
This guy is a socialist.
I mean, he's a far left Democrat.
And what he wants to do to Texas, and I was making some notes because I went to his website and I was looking at some things of what he has planned for the border, for non-discrimination, for people that discriminate against trans or whatever.
He wants to legalize marijuana.
He wants to legalize abortion again.
He definitely wants to take away the AR-15s, the AK-47s.
He actually loves mail-in ballots.
He wants to do same-day voter registration.
This guy is bad news.
He wants to raise the minimum wage.
Quite high, you know.
And so basically what he wants to do to Texas is what the Democrats did to California.
And so I was looking at this crazy woman, Mothers Against Greg Abbott.
She actually, I forget her name here, but anyway, Nancy Thompson.
She's an Austin mother.
Probably Hispanic. She looks Hispanic to me.
I know Hispanics because I'm one.
So, anyway. Well, it's funny.
I don't think you are recognizably Hispanic, but when we're at the airport, people come up to you all the time.
Actually, there was a woman that was waiting in line to get her ticket, and she was, you know how you're boarding group one, two, three, whatever, she was boarding group five.
And she wanted to get in the line of boarding group one, and the attendant, you know, the worker, she was like, no, this is boarding group one, you're boarding group five.
And she was looking at her like she had no idea what she was saying.
So she looks around, and of course, you know, we are 1K. So we get to board first, or not first, but you know, pre-board.
And she looks at me and comes over to me, as you know, and she goes, what in Spanish?
What is this woman telling me?
Like, she didn't even ask, do you speak Spanish?
No, she actually started speaking Spanish with me.
Anyway, all that to say is that everybody knows I speak Spanish.
By my looks, apparently.
But anyway. Back to the mothers and young.
This is a mothers group that's for Beto.
Yeah. And so, you know, oh yes, because she is so worried about her children and about other women's children and all of this.
And I'm like, have you read what Mr.
Beto wrote when he was a teenager?
I mean, I know, listen, I know that people change, right?
But... I don't think this guy has changed.
And by the way, my favorite name for him is fake Mexican, because he's not Beto.
I mean, you are reading to me some of his poems, and they're just downright pathological.
It's a murder fantasy about running over children, okay, Miss Thompson.
You want to vote for a creep like this because your children...
Oh my goodness. Okay, so as I neared the young ones...
This is Beto, okay?
I put all my weight on my right foot, keeping the accelerator pedal on the floor until I heard the crashing of the two children on the hood and then the sharp cry of pain from one of the two.
What a weirdo!
What a sicko. And then let's talk about policy.
Let's look at the border.
Open border.
He wants to make it easy for these people to come through.
He's not saying close the border.
He's not even really saying, let's adhere to the federal statutes of border security.
Let's execute the law.
Let's execute the law. He's not even doing that.
But again, he's a Democrat.
And look at Biden's border.
This would be Beto's border.
So now we would have, we have cartels.
Beto and Biden. We have coyotes.
We have fentanyl. And fentanyl.
And that's another thing, Ms.
MAGA, Ms. Mothers Against Greg Abbott.
What about the fentanyl issue that affects children in Texas?
Are you not concerned about that?
The crime.
I mean, in a little bit, we're going to talk about a crime-ridden city.
And do we really want to make Texas cities...
Now, the Texas cities that have the worst crime are the Democrat-run.
But, I mean, you want to get the whole state run like that?
Oh, boy. Well, I predicted that Abbott will win by 10 plus points.
Well, I hope so. I can't imagine.
My mother, every morning, my mom goes, I, Debbie, look at Beto.
He's catching up. She gets real upset.
My real Mexican mother gets very upset about the fake Mexican.
I mean, there is a liberal contingent in Texas.
Look, because it's a red state doesn't mean we don't have blue cities inside the red state.
Houston, increasingly Dallas, San Antonio.
And he wants to expand Medicare.
Do you know that that will bankrupt Texas?
That will bankrupt Texas.
But apparently he doesn't really care.
Most of these guys, I mean, their entitlements are a way that they solidify their political support.
Beto's no different. He's a left-winger.
He'd be a perfectly ordinary politician if he was in Rhode Island or in California, but he's a very dangerous figure to be doing as well as he is in Texas.
And he's a muy peligroso Texan.
It's pretty colorful at the grocery store in the produce section, all the vibrant colors of fruits and veggies.
Well, a friend Dr.
Howard at Balance of Nature, he explains that all the colors you see represent nutritional variety.
I don't eat anywhere near the 10 daily servings of fruits and veggies I need.
So balance of nature is the way I give my body what it needs to stay healthy.
Debbie and I take these six little fruits and veggie capsules every day.
Each daily dose is made up of a blend of 31 different fruits and veggies.
31.
So variety equals vitality.
Give your body everything it needs with balance of nature.
Invest in your health.
Join me and experience the balance of nature difference for years to come.
For a limited time, all new preferred customers get an additional 35% discount and free shipping on your first balance of nature order.
Use discount code AMERICA.
Call 800-246-8751.
That's 800-246-8751.
or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA.
There's a gruesome murder in Memphis that is making the news.
And this to me is interesting in itself because, first of all, it is a black male perpetrator and it is a white female victim.
Now normally the media is like, let's not touch that one.
Interestingly, in this case, I think the only reason they're covering it is that the woman is a billionaire.
She's from an extremely rich family.
And so as a result, there is some coverage of what's going on.
But you've been getting into some of the details and it's a gory...
It's really gory. So this woman, she's a runner.
She's not just a jogger. She qualified for the Boston Marathon.
She's a very good runner.
Eliza Fletcher. Eliza Fletcher.
And she's a kindergarten teacher.
She teaches at a Christian school, kindergarten, and mother of two boys, 34 years old.
She goes jogging at four in the morning.
In Memphis. In Memphis.
Now, sometimes when you work outside the home, that's the only time you can go jogging, right?
And especially in the heat and all of that.
But you know, we went to Memphis a couple of months ago because you spoke for an event there.
And my uncle, who lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, said, oh wait, you're going to Memphis?
Yeah, you might want to think twice.
It's a really bad city.
I mean, the funny thing is, I told Debbie, let's go eat some of the famous Memphis barbecue.
Oh, yeah. We concluded it was not at the level of Texas barbecue, but that's a different story.
The point is, even though the restaurant was like two blocks...
Well, that was Nashville. We went to Nashville to eat barbecue.
We thought we were going to Memphis to eat barbecue, but they didn't have any barbecue.
Oh, right. We ended up at a... But that's all to say that we were staying at the Westin, and we were going to go to some restaurant down the block.
Beale Street. It was just like three blocks away.
Down the street. And I was petrified.
Number one, I didn't even want to take my purse with me.
I really was very afraid to even go there.
And I'm not usually that squeamish, I don't think, but I was afraid.
Well, it's a democratic city.
It does have a bad crime rate.
You were warned about it.
I was warned about it. Apparently Eliza Fletcher probably was taking a chance.
4am, 4.30am.
And the thing is, she was only 20 minutes from where we stayed in the hotel.
That's where she got kidnapped.
But apparently this man was lying in wait.
He's a sexual predator, first of all.
He started his crime wave when he was 11 years old.
He raped somebody at age 14.
And then when he was 16, he kidnapped somebody.
And that person escaped because they happened to see a police officer or a security guard.
And so the kids, him and another guy, But they would have probably killed him because they were taking him to all the ATMs to rob him.
But anyway, so because he's a sexual predator, I'm sure he saw this woman jogging and thought, you know what?
She's easy prey. Nobody's looking.
What he didn't know was that there was a camera that caught the whole thing.
And basically, it caught him getting out of his SUV, running towards her.
They struggle.
He puts her in the passenger seat of the SUV, and for about four minutes, he's there and then takes off, right?
So they already have...
You know, him at the scene kidnapping.
So they didn't actually find her body until Monday in a vacant home, like right outside of the house, near his brother's house.
So then there's other video of him washing his SUV. So this guy, I mean, he has no chance.
They got him. They got him.
They have his DNA at the scene.
They have his cell phone tracking Which, by the way, I thought they didn't do that, but they have it.
So they have him at the scene.
Now, I'll be curious to see what the cause of death was, if she was raped.
I'm sure she was.
I think the message here that I get out of this is that you've got...
Don't go to Memphis. Well, not don't go to Memphis.
It's rather that you've got one political party that's on the side of the criminals.
Yeah. And that's why in democratic cities this kind of mayhem is occurring.
We see it in San Francisco.
We see it in Chicago. There's so many murders in Chicago.
I actually saw something on social media.
They were saying that over the Labor Day weekend there were only 55 murders.
Oh my goodness. They were actually celebrating the fact that the number of murders was like just around 50.
Not our usual number.
So these cities have become habituated and accustomed to this is what democratic policies get you.
Yeah. And just a couple of nights ago, there was this guy in Memphis running around shooting people.
And, you know, he was just...
So, anyway.
Yeah, it's very scary.
It's scary for, really, our society.
Because it's just getting...
Even in Houston...
I mean, since we're two months from the midterms, the Democrats have changed their tune on the crime issue.
I noticed that a number of them, including Fetterman in Pennsylvania, said, well, he wasn't really for defunding the police.
He was merely for reducing their budget and bringing them into line, and so on.
So Democrats are pivoting now, and Republicans should not let them get away with this.
It's very important to emphasize and play back what they said right after George Floyd That they wanted to dismantle these police departments.
They wanted community workers to take the place of policemen.
This was a mainstream position in the Democratic Party.
They need to be held accountable for it.
Some of us wish we could rewind the clock when it comes to our health.
Exercising, climbing stairs, all the things young people take for granted, these aren't things that have to stop just because you age.
Neither do you have to endure the normal aging aches and pains.
Now there's a 100% drug-free solution.
It's called Relief Factor.
Relief Factor supports your body's fight against inflammation that's the source of aches and pains.
The vast majority of people who try Relief Factor order more because it works for them.
Debbie is excited. She finally gets to do her bar exercise class now that she's alleviated her frozen shoulder thanks to Relief Factor.
Debbie can even do planks, push-ups.
She's like, wow, I never want to be without this again.
You too can benefit. Try it for yourself.
Order the three-week quick start for the discounted price of just $19.95.
Go to relieffactor.com or call 833-690-7246 to find out more.
That number again, 833-690-7246.
So go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. When we left off in Homer's Odyssey, the young Telemachus had just visited the old warrior Nestor.
But Nestor was one of the first people to come back from the Trojan War, and he did not know anything about Odysseus.
Odysseus, let's remember, is the one guy still missing.
No one knows if he's alive or if he's dead, or at least no one seems to know.
Now, Nestor tells Telemachus, look, the last man that we know who did come back is Menelaus.
Menelaus, let's remember, the husband of Helen of Troy.
Menelaus is the guy who was, in a sense, betrayed by the Trojan prince Paris, who spirited away his wife Helen.
This is what started the war.
And Nestor tells Telemachus, I'll send my son with you.
And remember, this is also Zania.
You do what you can to help your guest.
And Nestor shows excellent Zania to Telemachus.
And Telemachus arrives in Sparta.
Menelaus is the king of Sparta, where he and Helen rule.
And again, Telemachus is treated really magnificently well.
Reading from Homer.
Your Majesty, there are two men outside, strangers who seem like sons of Zeus.
What should we do? And Menelaus replies, untack their horses, lead them in to dine.
So they are then served a feast.
And after that, quote, they were taken, they went to take a bath in polished tubs.
The slave girls helped them wash and rubbed them down in olive oil, then dressed them in wool cloaks and tunics and seated them beside the son of Atreus, king Menelaus.
The carvers carried platters with every kind of meat and set before them cups made of gold.
So, notice how all of this treatment of the body, which is to say the bath, the meal, the clothing, is provided before Menelaus even gets into, hey, why are you guys here?
What are you looking for?
How can I help you? That only comes afterward.
And Telemachus asks Menelaus, do you have news?
What is your story to tell me?
And Menelaus actually begins with a kind of a broken-hearted story.
He says...
First of all, while I wandered, this is after the Trojan War.
By the way, Menelaus was buffeted by winds.
He ended up in Egypt.
In fact, he and his wife Helen spent years in Egypt.
Seven years, to be precise, returning only in the eighth year after the war.
Remember, the Trojan War lasted ten years.
So, 18 years Menelaus has been away.
And he says, Now, this is, again, notice that it came up in the previous book.
Nestor referred to the murder of Agamemnon.
Here's Menelaus talking about the murder of his own brother.
So, Homer is keeping in our minds, the listeners, the readers, you may almost call it the alternative Odyssey.
So in the Odyssey, Penelope, Odysseus' wife, is completely faithful.
But what if she hadn't been?
What if she had taken up with one of the suitors and the two of them plotted to kill Odysseus?
That is a kind of possibility, a very real possibility.
It happened in Agamemnon's case.
That's why these sections are here.
And then Menelaus says, I sit here in my palace mourning all who died and often weeping.
And I miss all these men, but one man most, when I remember him I cannot eat or sleep, since no one labored like him.
Wow, so Menelaus is now saying, you know, the guy who's been away the longest, the guy I miss the most, Odysseus, meaning Telemachus' own father.
And Telemachus grieves with Menelaus.
The two of them sit together basically and cry.
They're crying for somewhat different reasons.
The Telemachus, of course, is crying because of his two reasons, really.
One is the absence of his father, but the other is his plight in Ithaca.
The fact that he is, you know, surrounded, besieged by these suitors who wish him ill.
They want to get rid of him, and they want to sort of ruin his estate, and one of them marry his mom.
And so Telemachus is facing a lot of difficulties.
He's crying over his own predicament.
And Menelaus is just crying over the great loss of the Trojan War.
And although he has his wife back, their relationship is uncertain, not surprisingly, after what happened.
Helen shows up, a very interesting scene, a kind of a cameo appearance by Helen, who's a minor figure both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, although she is, in some ways, the triggering force of all the events of both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
And it says that Helen sort of takes pity on these two men who are kind of grieving together.
She decides to mix some wine with drugs.
By drugs, she's using a drug from Egypt.
It's called nepenthe.
It's a drug that sort of dulls pain, takes away the pain.
In fact, it's so effective that it says that you can actually experience the death of your own family, and even though you're Full of intense grief.
This is a drug that will take that grief away.
So Helen administers this drug both to Menelaus and to Telemachus to temporarily alleviate their pain before they can sort of get to the business at hand.
The business at hand, of course, being, does Menelaus know anything concrete, anything specific about where Odysseus is now?
Music Imagine the lifelong impact of a journey to the Holy Land.
Surrounded by like-minded travelers, picture yourself stepping foot in iconic locations right out of Scripture.
Join Dr. Sebastian Gorka and Dinesh D'Souza on this life-enriching Israel Tour, November 30th through December 9th, 2022.
For more information, call 855-565-5519 or visit StandWithIsraelTour.com.
We are in Sparta, and Menelaus, the king of Sparta, is describing to Telemachus what he may or may not know about the fate of Odysseus.
But he doesn't start by getting right to the business at hand.
I'm sure he hears Telemachus like, what news of my dad?
And Menelaus is sort of like, well, let me tell you about my journeys.
Now, his journeys are extremely interesting.
But nevertheless, you can imagine from Telemachus' point of view, he wants to get to the specific question on his mind.
But here's Menelaus.
He talks about the fact that he's being buffeted by winds.
And it finally turns out that he encounters a sea god named Proteus.
And Proteus, well, the word protean in English means changing.
And we get that meaning from the qualities of the Greek sea god Proteus who can constantly change his form.
He can change into an animal.
He can change from one animal to another animal.
And he is very difficult to pin down.
And it turns out That Menelaus, in order to talk to Proteus, to get something out of him, and in fact to get Proteus' help in making his, meaning Menelaus' journey, a home, he's got to sort of pin down this sea god.
In fact, he's instructed, listen, if you want to get information, you have to catch this sea god Proteus, and he's going to try to get away from you because he's Proteus.
He changes forms. And sure enough, here's Menelaus saying, The old god still remembered all his tricks.
He first became a lion with a mane, then a snake, then a leopard, then a mighty boar, then flowing water, then a leafy tree.
But we kept holding on.
So Menelaus kind of hangs on for dear life to this guy.
Finally forcing Proteus to relent and to help Menelaus, but also to give valuable information to Menelaus.
Let's remember that after the Trojan War, you've got all these Greeks, and they're all on their own.
They're going different places.
They don't know what's happening to each other.
Now, one of the things that Menelaus learns is that Ajax, also called Ios, was drowned.
His ships were sunk.
Poseidon drove him to the rocks of Gyre, then rescued him from the sea.
He would have lived... But he made a crazy boast that he survived the waves against the wishes of the gods.
Poseidon heard his rash words, seized his trident in mighty hands, hit the gyron rock.
One half remained, the other on which Ajax sat as he boasted, cracked right off and fell into the sea and carried him deep down.
Now Ajax, or Ios, this is Ios the younger.
Let's remember that the older Ios, or Ajax, committed suicide after he was denied the highest honors of the Greeks.
They gave Achilles armor to Odysseus, not to Ajax.
And so Ajax, out of shame and disgust, committed suicide.
This is the younger Ajax.
He is the one who raped Cassandra in the temple.
A great sacrilegious violation.
And the idea here is that he's being punished for it.
He's never going to get home to Greece.
He's going to die at sea.
But he almost lived.
It's almost like the gods, he had some gods on his side who took pity on him, and they were helping him out until he started boasting.
Hey, listen, some of the gods are trying to get me, but you know what?
They're not going to get me. And this kind of...
Second sacrilege, you might say.
This taunting of the gods causes Poseidon, essentially the god of the sea, to take his stride and smash a rock, and down goes Ajax to the bottom of the sea.
But the important information from the point of view of Telemachus comes at the end of this narrative, where Proteus, the sea god, says that he saw...
He saw Odysseus trapped in Calypso's island.
Quote, And so all of this occurred a couple of years earlier.
So as Menelaus is now telling it to Telemachus, he doesn't know for sure if Odysseus is alive now.
But he's saying, listen, I do have valuable information, in fact, more information than anybody else, because the sea god named Proteus told me that your father, your dad, Odysseus, is trapped on Calypso's island.
So think about this from Homer's point of view.
This is a Kind of a clever narrative device to let Telemachus know that his father is still alive.
Telemachus would have no other way of knowing.
And Menelaus, as I say, doesn't know for sure, but he at least is able to give a kind of last known location of Odysseus.
And as it turns out at this point of the narrative, sure enough, Odysseus, as far as we know, is on Calypso's island.
So this is a way of kind of bringing Telemachus...
Up to speed, Telemachus now knows what's going on, and now the narrative for Homer can shift as it starts to shift in Book 5, where Odysseus himself makes his entrance, and the story picks up now with Odysseus on Calypso's island.
▲
Export Selection