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Sept. 19, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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EYE ON THE BORDER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep416
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Coming up! I'm going to talk to Dean Fitz, a border control veteran, who details how the Biden regime has systematically dismantled our immigration laws to create a dangerously chaotic situation.
I'll do a detailed review of a landmark appellate court decision upholding a Texas law that outlaws censorship from social media companies.
Very good news. And then I'll continue my discussion of Odysseus in the land of the Phaeacians.
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.
A very important ruling has just come down from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
This is the Court of Appeals, by the way, is the court just under the Supreme Court.
So if there's a decision at the Court of Appeals, you don't like the decision, there's only really one place to go, and that's the Supreme Court.
Now, the case is Involves social media censorship.
So it involves you and me.
It involves Twitter.
It involves YouTube.
It involves Facebook.
And I have a special interest in all this because, for example, as we speak, I have a strike against me at YouTube.
Why? Because supposedly I violated their guidelines.
Now, several weeks ago, in the primary election season, I had on a candidate for the Missouri Senate, Eric Greitens.
You may have seen the interview.
In the course of the interview, he brought up election fraud.
He talked about it.
Not at length, but he did discuss it.
And YouTube basically concluded, after the fact, they tend to review these things a week later or several days later.
And they notify me, this is a violation of the guidelines, not necessarily because of anything you said, but just by featuring this content on YouTube, strike.
And what the strike means, essentially it's a kind of a three strikes and you're out policy, but the strike means that you're kicked off YouTube for a week, and so for a week I was not able to post any content, couldn't post the podcast, couldn't post clips from the podcast, nothing.
For a week. And then the strike kind of stays for, on your record, a kind of a black mark for, what is it, honey?
90 days? 90 days.
If you get a second strike, you get a longer, you're kicked off for a longer period of time.
And third strike, basically, your channel is shut down.
You're essentially kicked off of YouTube.
Now... Think about this.
On YouTube, I have over many years built a substantial following.
I don't know the exact number of followers on my YouTube channel, but it's something like 700,000 or 800,000.
It's approaching a million.
So all of this...
All of this following painstakingly built up over a long period of time, and poof, it's gone.
So this not only has the effect of restricting your reach, you can't communicate, but in many cases and for many people, it is sort of their livelihood.
And it's because there are people who compose music on YouTube and they make money on YouTube.
There are people who monetize their content on YouTube, as I do.
And Facebook has the same kind of policies and the same kind of power.
Twitter, in my opinion, as a practical matter, is doing less censorship than the other two platforms, which is not to say that Twitter is doing no censorship at all.
It's just doing less.
The state of Texas passed a law.
It was called House Bill 20.
And the law says this.
It says that social media platforms are not permitted to censor people based upon viewpoint.
They cannot decide that you have the wrong views of climate change, you have the wrong views of COVID, you have the wrong views on the election, and censor you.
They are only allowed to censor content That is illegal.
So yes, they can censor you if you are conspiring to do something violent.
They can censor you if you are using the platform for illegal drug trafficking or sex trafficking.
So there are those limited cases where they can de-platform you or ban you, but not just because they disagree with you.
And it's no defense. According to the Texas law that you or I are violating their guidelines, Texas's point is that their guidelines on this score, on this issue, are unlawful, unlawful in the state of Texas.
And so what that means is that anybody in Texas Who is not just banned, but is blocked, banned, removed, deplatformed, demonetized, deboosted, restricted, or denied equal access to these platforms can sue.
And if you sue and you win, which you're likely to win because if you are banned, they have to show that you are a sex trafficker or engaging in some sort of illegal content.
If not, They can't ban you.
They have to restore your account and they have to pay all your legal fees.
So that's what the Texas law says.
By the way, there's no provision in the Texas law for damages.
It's not as if they're going to give you millions of dollars in damages.
But they have to restore your account, give you full access, equal access, the same access given to everyone else.
And second of all, they...
They have to pay your fees.
So this is a nightmare for these social media platforms because, of course, if the Texas law is constitutional, you can be pretty sure that pretty much every red state is going to have a law of this kind.
And this, by the way, offers a way around trying to change federal laws or withdraw the Section 230 protection from these platforms.
Politically speaking, that would seem to be impossible.
But it's not impossible.
To attack this problem on the state level.
By the way, Florida too has a law dealing with this issue.
But what is at stake here and what went before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, is the Texas law.
And the court, in a stunning and wide-ranging decision, basically declared that the social media platforms are in violation of the law.
The law is constitutional.
Even though a lower court had struck down the law, the appellate court has vacated that decision, and the law now is in effect.
Obviously, the social media platforms are freaking out.
They're going to probably appeal to the Supreme Court, but my message to them on that score is good luck.
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The social media platforms came together under a group called NetChoice.
And collectively they sued...
Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of the State of Texas.
And at issue is a Texas law recently passed that outlaws social media censorship, digital censorship, in the state of Texas.
Now, what I'd like to do is read from the Sweeping ruling of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals because it gets into the arguments at a level of detail that you rarely see in the media.
Normally, you'll see things like, oh, Dinesh, these are private companies and they can do whatever they want.
That is flat-out nonsense on a whole bunch of counts.
I mean, first of all, private companies cannot do whatever they want.
Could social media platforms, for example, decide we're going to prevent blacks from using YouTube?
No, they can't do that.
That would violate all kinds of civil rights laws.
And so the simple proclamation that these are private companies and they have a carte blanche to make their own rules and enforce them, we're beginning to see through careful reasoning why this is nonsense on stilts.
This is nonsense in a wide range of ways.
Now, here's the court.
The platforms offer a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment.
This is in their own defense, the platforms.
Here's the court. That amendment, the First Amendment, of course, protects every person's right to freedom of speech.
But the platforms argue that buried somewhere in the person's enumerated right to free speech lies a corporation's unenumerated right to muzzle speech.
I mean, what a brilliant and telling formulation.
First of all, it picks up on something that the left has been telling us really now for years.
Corporations are not people.
And the court goes, yeah, that's actually right.
Corporations are not people.
And therefore, if you have individual rights in the Constitution, those rights don't automatically or to the same extent, extend to corporations.
It doesn't mean corporations have no rights, but it does mean that if an individual has a right to free speech and Congress can pass no law, Restricting freedom of speech, it doesn't follow that that applies to every corporation.
So it doesn't automatically transfer from the individual to the corporation.
And second of all, the court makes a very subtle point.
It's one thing to say you have a right to free speech, which is a right to speak.
What the platforms are saying is that they have a right not to speak, because that right is not being affected.
The court goes into whether or not Twitter can speak.
What we're talking about here is whether or not Twitter can muzzle other individuals from speaking.
So in a kind of Orwellian inversion, these companies are using the First Amendment not to promote free speech, but to shut down free speech.
And the court is very aware of this.
It's probably an understatement to call it an irony.
It's actually a flagrant violation of First Amendment principles.
Let me continue. This is the court.
The implications of the platform's argument are staggering.
On the platform's view, email providers, mobile phone companies and banks could cancel the accounts of anyone who sends an email, makes a phone call or spends money in support of a disfavored political party, candidate or business.
What is worse? The platforms argue that a business can acquire a dominant market position by holding itself out as open to everyone, as Twitter did, by championing itself as, quote, the free speech wing of the free speech party, and then, having cemented itself as the monopolist of the modern public square, Twitter unapologetically argues it could turn around and ban any kind of speech it wants for no other reason than its employees want to pick on members of that community.
Wow. This is fantastic stuff.
The court is saying, making two separate points, and I want to kind of go into them.
The first one is this.
Twitter claims to be sort of like a newspaper.
Twitter claims to say, well, we are a newspaper.
We can decide what content we want to feature on our platform.
But the court says, no, you're not a newspaper because you don't exercise editorial judgment over everything that appears on Twitter or YouTube or Facebook slash Meta.
You don't operate like that.
You're more like a platform.
You're like a bank. You're like a ferry that is offering a platform for people to, let's say, cross the river.
You're more like AT&T, a telephone provider offering, if you will, a forum for people to make calls and communicate with one another.
And so, do you have the right?
Could AT&T decide, for example, listen, you know, we don't like people, for example, who are libertarians.
We're just going to interrupt their phone service, ban them, even Even if they are following the rules, they pay their bill, they're not doing anything illegal.
Nevertheless, we're AT&T. It's our platform.
We're a private company. We should be able to do whatever we want.
And the court goes, no, you don't have a right to do whatever you want.
And so this notion that you have laissez-faire, carte blanche...
Is nonsensical.
Now, the second point the court is making is that, wait a minute, you, Twitter, you, Facebook, you, YouTube, received federal subsidies and protections, including the Section 230 protection, by going to the government And proclaiming yourself to be a forum for the community, a way for people to communicate in an open and uninhibited manner, a kind of new public square.
You said all this. You claimed that you were champions of open communication and free speech.
And then the moment people signed on to your platform, because this is not just something you told the government.
You also told the public that you were going to offer this.
And the moment that you got a monopoly, you turn around and go, well, wait a minute, it's my platform.
I own it. And so I get to kick anybody off I don't really want to have on the platform.
And the court basically says you can't have it both ways.
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I'm reviewing the fantastic and eloquent decision by the Court of Appeals of the Fifth Circuit, striking down the arguments of these social media companies, their justifications for censorship, and upholding the Texas law that restricts this kind of censorship.
Here's the court. Section 7, they're talking about Section 7 of this law, does not chill speech.
If anything, it chills censorship.
The court goes on to say, it does not regulate the platform's speech at all.
It protects other people's speech and regulates the platform's conduct.
Now, in a very sneaky way, these platforms basically say, well, this would chill our right to free speech.
We have a right. Doesn't Twitter have a right to free speech?
And essentially, the court argues, sure you do.
If someone, let's just say, Debbie D'Souza posts on Twitter and you don't like it, Twitter can post something saying the opposite.
Twitter can post something criticizing Debbie.
Twitter's free speech is not restricted.
It's not as if Twitter has limited space.
Oh, Debbie's taking up space.
There's no space for Twitter to respond.
Twitter has all the space it wants to respond.
Twitter has all the space it wants to exercise its own editorial judgment.
The court says we're not stopping Twitter from saying anything.
We're merely saying that Debbie, as a resident of the state of Texas, has the free speech right to post on Twitter, post on YouTube, post on Facebook without being kicked off if she's not saying anything unlawful.
Now, the other point here is the court is drawing a distinction between speech and conduct.
The court is saying that the act of censoring someone, kicking them off the platform, is not speech.
In fact, what is it? It is conduct that restricts other people's speech.
So the court is distinguishing between Twitter's right to free speech, which is unaffected, and Twitter's conduct in taking people off of Twitter, banning them, removing them from the platform.
Now, no surprise, the social media platforms pull out, well, let's call it the Nazi card.
And here, looking at their brief, they talk about, quote, This is the good old, let's call it the appeal to extremes.
Hey, listen, if we're not allowed to kick people off for what they say about the vaccine, and we aren't allowed to kick people off because they deny that the temperature is changing due to some kind of human action, then we won't be able to stop the Nazis.
What did the Nazis want to get on Twitter?
And the court basically says, first of all, you're not censoring Nazis.
You're censoring all kinds of people who are far from being Nazis just because they disagree with you.
The court actually gives an example.
You've censored athletes.
You've censored celebrities.
You've censored people in the...
You've censored elected representatives.
You've censored congressional hearings.
You've censored state hearings.
So the court is totally unconvinced by this kind of, you know, let's call it the Nazi song and dance routine, which the court calls, quote, an endless stream of fanciful hypotheticals.
In other words, this isn't Nazis who are claiming the right to free speech.
This is ordinary citizens all over the state of Texas.
The court basically says that the First Amendment goes through a kind of history of the First Amendment.
And the basic idea here is it's the freedom of citizens to make well-intentioned statements of their thoughts on any matter of public concern.
By the way, it should be really clear, and Debbie and I were talking about this over our coffee this morning.
Debbie was like, you know, when people are talking about COVID or talking about climate change, they're not making statements of misinformation.
It's just that the left doesn't agree, so they call it misinformation.
So, in other words, the left is saying, you're stating matters that are not facts.
You're stating matters that are not facts about the 2020 election, Dinesh.
But the point is that the First Amendment, by the way, draws no distinction between facts and values.
The First Amendment doesn't say, well, Dinesh, you're entitled to state erroneous opinions, but you're not entitled to state erroneous facts.
The fact is, you are entitled to state erroneous facts.
The First Amendment protects erroneous statements of fact.
It's really important to realize the First Amendment protects Makes no such distinction between factual statements on the one hand and you may say statements of opinion or preference on the other.
The First Amendment protects both.
And so what the court is doing here is just ripping out the ground from censorship.
All these kind of bogus rationales.
Let's even say that someone was stating flat-out misinformation.
Oh, I'm looking outside my window and the sky is green.
In fact, the sky is blue.
That is protected fully under the First Amendment.
I should be able to go on Twitter and say that the sky is green or the sky is yellow or the sky is whatever.
I have a First Amendment right to say that.
I could be wrong. I am wrong.
But it doesn't matter.
I still have the right to say it.
So this is really the meaning of free speech.
And... And the court is ruthless in slamming these guys for trying to violate it.
The court basically says, listen...
We reject the platform's efforts to reframe their censorship as a form of speech.
It is undisputed that the platforms want to eliminate speech, not promote or protect it.
No amount of doctrinal gymnastics can turn the First Amendment's protection of free speech into a protection of censorship.
Boom! So this decision resonates like this.
I'm not even done with my analysis of it.
I'm going to pick up The important theme tomorrow of whether these platforms are, quote, common carriers.
I'll discuss that in more detail tomorrow.
But you get a sense here the sort of thunderous way in which the court is smacking down these social media platforms.
And I suspect that if they go to the Supreme Court, they will get another resounding smackdown.
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Feel the difference. Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Dean Fitz.
Now, Dean is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran.
He spent 30 years with U.S. Customs and Homeland Security investigations, almost a decade on the southwest border.
He's an expert investigator of smuggling and trafficking of humans, narcotics, weapons, currency.
By the way, the website questforperspective.com, you can follow Dean Fitz at Twitter and Dean, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you. It seems like we have a serious problem that has developed at the border.
This seems to have started with Biden.
It's been going on now for the better part of two years.
We're not at the border.
We hear about it.
But you not only have been there, but you have a close knowledge of what's happening.
Tell us what's really going on at the border.
Well, what I think we're seeing is the effects of a whole-of-government approach to increasing the number of illegal aliens coming into the United States.
This is absolutely intentional by the Biden administration.
You're right. I did spend a decade down, almost a decade there in Eagle Pass where most of the larger groups are coming across.
I know how the border operates.
I know how the smuggling operates.
I know what goes on down there.
And I still go back there from time to time.
I have friends that are still in service in the court system and Border Patrol and different agencies like that.
Dean, let's just begin with absolute basics.
I mean, I'm assuming we have immigration laws that set out a procedure for how you can come into the United States.
I mean, I'm a first-generation immigrant myself.
I started out by coming as an exchange student.
I then got a student visa to go to college, then a practical training visa in order to work temporarily in the country.
I applied for and got a green card.
And then over time, I naturalized and became a U.S. citizen.
So that is a pathway, not the only pathway, but kind of a standard pathway.
What is the Biden administration's stated rationale for allowing people into this country who have not been given a visa, not been granted asylum, but nevertheless, they're letting them in?
How can they justify openly flouting existing immigration laws?
Well, Vice President Harris gave an interview pretty recently stating that their goal, the goal of all of this, is to provide a pathway to citizenship for all of these illegal aliens.
That's one of their goals.
And I think there's another ulterior motive, but it's part of a long-term strategy.
And that strategy, to me, involves the 2030 Census.
So if you can increase the number of aliens that are coming into these blue cities, Then you're talking about the redistribution or reapportionment of U.S. representatives and electors to the Electoral College.
That's their long-term goal.
Plus, you get the base of voters, you know, more U.S. citizens that are from these countries, and they will be voting, of course, Democrat.
You're saying something very interesting.
You're actually saying that quite apart from the illegals themselves being granted amnesty, citizenship, the right to vote, which may take longer and is not all that easy to do, you're saying the simple presence of people, even if illegal,
In blue states is going to, in the census, create a larger number of, a larger head count of people in those states, and therefore they're going to have more congressmen, more representatives, and so it increases relatively the political power of the blue states.
Is that a correct understanding of what you just said?
And it's not always just blue states.
You're talking about the blue cities and the blue communities We're in the major metropolitan areas, and that's where you're going to get more representation in those areas, those blue cities.
So, even blue parts of red states are going to get more representation, increasing their relative strength even in the red state?
Within the Democratic base, yes.
Okay, now let's talk about the actual scene at the border.
I mean, I see on social media clips of what appears to be trails of people who kind of come through.
When you look closely at them, you know, in democratic sort of talking points, it's like, oh, well, these are children, these are unaccompanied minors.
It looks to me like you've got a large number of males who are coming in.
The Biden administration, I'm assuming, has full knowledge of what's going on.
Is it fair to say that the Biden administration is working hand-in-hand with the cartels?
I don't mean in direct collaboration, but they know that the cartels are the ones bringing people from all over Central and South America and beyond to the U.S. border.
I don't know about the working hand-in-hand with the cartels.
I know that the U.S. government Biden administration is facilitating The illegal aliens arriving here is, I call it an illegal alien superhighway.
They worked with the Panamanian government to have a bilateral agreement, whereas the Panamanians will actually allow the smugglers, allow the smugglers to go further up their coast to drop off the aliens that they're smuggling into Panama, and then they'll make their way further up and into the United States.
But that's the facilitation.
Let's take a pause, Dean.
When we come back, I want to explore this process of how people are able to move through other countries over dozens, hundreds of miles in some cases to get to the U.S. border.
Who is making that happen?
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with Dean Fitz, U.S. Marine Corps veteran, 30 years with the U.S. Customs and Homeland Security investigations, almost a decade on the southwest border.
You can follow him on Twitter, at Dean Fitz, D-E-A-N-F-I-T-T-Z. Also, deanfitz.substack.com for his writing.
Dean, we were talking about these...
This remarkable kind of migration to the southern border, and it's not just the people who live on the other side of the border.
These are people who are coming, in some cases, from China, from Venezuela, from the far-flung regions of South America, or even further.
What is the mechanism for bringing someone across such a large distance to the border?
It has to be an organized operation, doesn't it?
There are a lot of non-governmental organizations, NGOs, that are assisting down in South America, Central America, and especially through Mexico.
The government of Mexico is actually issuing them transit visas so that when they arrive in Mexico, the government is saying, go right ahead.
You've got a week to two weeks to get to the U.S. border, and then you need to leave.
I found documentation in Eagle Pass from a large group of like 300 to 400 aliens that they So basically, Dean, what you're saying is the Mexicans don't really want them, but the Mexicans are happy to be the transmission belt or the conduit.
It's sort of like if the Americans are stupid enough to do this, we're happy to give you essentially a highway to get through Mexico, but you can't stay in Mexico even if you want to.
Correct. The Mexican National Guard is actually helping them, escorting them, so they're providing safe passage for them up to the border.
Now, Dean, let's take stock, because if it is true that the Biden administration, in a cynical effort to manipulate domestic politics, is essentially flouting the law and flooding the country with illegals, I mean, I don't very often and very rarely on this podcast use the word treason, but I mean, isn't this a Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I mean, you can begin impeachment proceedings with just the House, right?
I mean, you obviously can't remove the president if you don't get 60 votes in the Senate, but putting Biden under the impeachment scrutiny will paralyze the administration across a whole bunch of areas and extract a heavy penalty for what they're doing in this area, won't it?
It definitely would.
That's something that the incoming Congress is going to have to do in order to push back against this flood of aliens.
Dean, talk about your field of expertise, which is smuggling, trafficking, human trafficking, narcotics trafficking, weapons, currency.
I'm assuming that there are some people who come across the border who are basically looking for a better life.
Now, it's still illegal.
I don't think they should be let through.
But presumably, those are not the people we worry about the most.
We worry about more than People who are going to be a danger to American society, people who are going to be gang members, drug smugglers, and so on.
So talk a little bit about the magnitude of that problem, which is to say, not just illegal aliens, but very bad guys coming through as illegal aliens.
Well, it kind of goes back to the Kate Steinle case, whereas you had...
An illegal alien who killed Kate Steinle out in California, he should have already been deported.
But because of the policies in the sanctuary cities, he was never deported because they wouldn't cooperate with immigration officials.
That happens. Now, what do you think?
I mean, the media describes this as a stunt, and it may be a stunt, but I think it's a very good stunt.
What do you think about this idea that Abbott is doing and DeSantis is doing and others should be doing as well, which is, look, you know, if you want to flood our areas with illegals, we're going to be dispatching them to Aspen, Colorado, and Martha's Vineyard, and Cape Cod, and Kennebunkport, Maine.
So your favorite hotspots...
Your chic areas are going to start getting to deal with this problem as well.
And it's funny to see how the left shrieks with horror when these people show up in their neighborhoods.
The hypocrisy of the left knows no bounds with regards to this case.
Within 48 hours, they had the National Guard escorting the aliens out of Martha's Vineyards.
And I mean, in some ways, I guess we can even think about the word hypocrisy because it's hypocritical if they subscribe to one standard but then violate it.
But it's quite possible that they, as you say, if their motives are purely political, they don't actually care about the aliens.
They don't care about these people.
These people are pawns in a political game.
And so, sure, why would they want them to show up in their neighborhood?
Their whole idea is to bring them in the country and And then exploit them for political purposes.
I mean, the Democrats have actually been doing something like this in one form or the other for a couple of centuries.
Right. And they don't care about, they only care about what happens in their backyard when it affects them directly.
They don't care about the people on the border.
Look at these small towns, 34,000-35,000 people in these border towns, and they're being overrun by thousands and thousands every day.
And the human cost of it, the people that are being killed in the high-speed chases, nobody's caring, nobody cares about the border towns and their populations.
Even Representative Cuellar, a Democrat, has been, you know, He's been talking loudly about it to the administration saying this is wrong and he's a Democrat.
Well, I certainly hope, Dean, that the Hispanics in those areas, like the south part of Texas, really hit back at the Democratic Party and send a message loud and clear in November.
Hey, thank you very much for joining me with your perspective.
I really appreciate it. QuestforPerspective.com, that's the website.
Or you can follow Dean's writings, DeanFitz, F-I-T-T-Z, at Substack.com.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you for having me, Dinesh.
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We are in Book 8 of the Odyssey, and Odysseus is being entertained by the hospitable people called the Phaeachians.
And they do it in part by having these impressive games.
But they also do it by bringing in a bard named Demodocus, who sings three songs.
We are talking about his second song, which is a little bit of a risque song.
It's about this kind of adulterous affair between a goddess, Aphrodite, in fact, the goddess of love, and the god of war, a guy named Ares.
Now, Ares is unmarried, but Aphrodite is married, at least married within the community of the gods of Olympus.
She's married to a fellow named Hephaestus.
Hephaestus is the blacksmith god, the god who makes armor.
And Hephaestus surprises Ares and Aphrodite, and he's very angry, so he essentially takes—I mean, he's a blacksmith—he takes his chains and he hammers them and essentially makes a sort of handcuffs, if you will— And he creates a trap and he handcuffs them together so they actually can't get away.
And then he goes to the gods and makes a complaint.
But the gods don't seem to be all that interested.
In fact, they congratulate Hephaestus.
Like, man, you really surprised him.
You really taught him a lesson.
But they think the whole thing is kind of funny.
And now the question becomes, why are we hearing this song and why are we hearing it here?
Now, interestingly, Demodocus does not perform this song...
In the palace. Because in the palace you have the king, you have the queen.
It appears to be kind of a, you know, men and women are present in the audience.
Demodocus sings this song kind of on the athletic field.
And although scholars aren't entirely sure, it may be that this was kind of a male-only audience.
So perhaps the material is a little bit inappropriate, if you will, for women.
At least, perhaps this is what's going on.
The larger significance, however, is that we're talking here about the consequences of adultery, and it's not...
Insignificant here that we think back to Paris abducting Helen.
That's really what got the Trojan War started in the first place, right?
The adultery of Helen and Paris, and then the Greeks sort of sending this expedition to get Helen back.
We also think about what's going on in Ithaca, where Penelope, Odysseus' wife, is being What if she didn't?
What if she was like Agamemnon's wife?
Clytemnestra, who took up with another guy, in fact, a relative of hers called Augustus, and the two of them conspired and plotted together to kill Agamemnon when he got back.
That could potentially happen to Odysseus.
His safety relies in part on the fidelity of Penelope.
So I think this is really what Homer is putting in the minds of his audience, the audience listening to the recitation of the Of the Odyssey, but also in our minds.
And then Demodocus sings his third song, but his third song is At the Request of Odysseus himself.
Odysseus cuts a piece of meat, kind of a choice portion of the pig, Homer tells us.
And the plate of meat was sent to Demodocus, and it says, basically, Odysseus is saying, please sing a song about Odysseus and about the Trojan horse.
So this is a very interesting situation.
Odysseus, who has not told the Phaeacians who he is, is asking the bard to sing about that great man, Odysseus, and his scheme of the wooden horse, the Trojan horse. And so Demodocus does this.
And as he does this, Odysseus weeps.
Odysseus was melting into tears.
And now here is Homer's analogy or simile.
Odysseus was melting into tears as a woman weeps as she falls to wrap her arms around her husband, fallen, fighting for his home and children.
She is watching as he gasps and dies.
She shrieks. Clear high wail collapsing upon his corpse.
The men are right behind.
They hit her shoulders with spears and lead her to slavery, hard labor, and a life of pain.
Her face is marked with her despair.
In that same desperate way, Odysseus was crying.
Now we have here a remarkable simile by Homer, which I'll unpack in the next segment.
So I'm going to look at the meaning of Homer's simile, but I'm also going to look at the question of why is Odysseus crying at all?
After all, the Trojan horse was a great scheme.
He came up with it. It led the Greeks to victory.
What's there to cry about?
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We are talking about a song in Book 8 of The Odyssey.
Demodocus the Bard is singing about...
An episode all too familiar to anyone who knows the story of the Trojan War, and that is that Odysseus devised the brilliant idea of gifting the Trojans with a large horse.
The horse, however, was cunningly packed with Greek soldiers.
The Trojans sort of naively or foolishly pulled the horse into their city.
At night, The sides of the horse are busted open.
Out come the soldiers. They open the gates.
A massive army of Greeks is waiting outside.
They come in and thus is accomplished the sack of Troy.
Now, we're talking about Odysseus as he hears the song, he starts kind of weeping.
And the first question I want to ask is, why is that?
It doesn't seem, on the face of it, to make sense why Odysseus would be weeping.
I think there's really only one answer, and that is, Odysseus is weeping really out of just relief.
Relief that his, not just that his scheme worked, he knows it worked.
But see, Odysseus has been at sea, essentially buffeted from place to place, For now 10 years.
So he doesn't know if anybody even knows about how the sack of Troy was accomplished.
Presumably people know that it happened.
But how it happened?
Who came up with the idea?
Imagine if Odysseus had said to Demodocus, hey, I'd like you to sing a song about the Trojan horse.
And Demodocus said, what Trojan horse?
Well, then Odysseus would know that these people, they don't even know about the Trojan horse.
They don't know. They know that Troy fell, but they don't know how it fell.
They don't know. Or if Demodicus had said, oh yeah, there was the scheme of the Trojan horse, but some other Greek came up with that, not Odysseus, then Odysseus would know that he, Odysseus, is not getting the credit, by which we mean the kleos, the glory, the reputation.
Notice I said earlier that kleos in the Odyssey is not about the next life.
It's not about what people say about you after you die.
It's about what people say about you even while you are alive.
Do they record and notice your exploits?
Do you sort of get the reputational value of the things you did?
So Odysseus now realizes that yes...
His name is not going to be forgotten.
People, even the far-flung Phaeacians, know that it was he, Odysseus, who came up with the idea of the Trojan horse.
So hence, Odysseus weeping.
But now let's turn to Homer's simile because Homer's simile is very odd.
Odysseus is weeping as a woman weeps whose husband has just been killed on the battlefield and she's being dragged into slavery.
Now who do we think about here Well, we actually think about the Trojans, because their city was sacked.
Their women are weeping.
Their women see their husbands dying and then are beaten on their backs by Greek soldiers who are like, come on, come on, come on, it's time for you to basically leave.
It's time to go into slavery.
Basically, your life, in terms of your life in prosperous Troy, is over.
The rest of your life, you're going to be a slave.
And in this society, being a slave means also being a sexual slave of some Greek master.
So, incredibly, Homer is comparing the Greek Odysseus' weeping to the weeping of a Trojan woman, or possibly Aphrodite, the wife of Hector.
Seeing her husband dragged around the walls of Troy knowing that her fate is one of slavery.
Knowing in some sense that their son, their little baby son's life is doomed.
So what Homer's doing is he's kind of reminding you that the victory Achieved on the Greek side was not a victory for the other side.
Odysseus may be weeping for one reason.
He's obviously not weeping because Troy fell.
He wanted Troy to fall.
He devised the scheme for Troy to fall.
But even though Odysseus' perspective is in a sense narrow, it's the perspective of the winner, Homer's perspective is much larger.
Homer recognizes both sides of the conflict.
And so in a kind of beautiful analogy or simile, He compares Odysseus' weeping with the weeping of a lamenting Trojan wife.
And this sort of blows Odysseus' cover, because when Odysseus starts weeping, immediately the The Phaechaeans go, what's wrong?
Why are you weeping? You've got to tell us about what you're weeping about.
In fact, you can imagine that by this time, Odysseus, remember earlier, already gave the hint that he was the second best archer among the Greeks, second only to a guy named Philoctetes.
And maybe some of the more knowledgeable Phaechaeans at that time began to go, wait a minute, could this be Odysseus?
Has he kind of blurted out unwittingly or by implication who he is?
But now, given that he is sort of having a breakdown over the story of his own exploits, essentially the cat is out of the bag and Odysseus confesses and says in effect, I am Odysseus.
And the moment he says that, the Phaeacians are like, oh my gosh, you're Odysseus.
Well, you've got to now tell us your story.
About how you got here.
What happened to all your men?
What happened to you after the Trojan War ended?
And we now go into really four books, books 9, 10, 11, and 12 of the Odyssey, which is a flashback.
Odysseus telling to the Phaeacians his own story.
And let's remember that he's going to do this in a very careful way.
Remember his goal.
His goal is to convince the Phaeacians to give him the best possible Zania to go home.
So Odysseus is going to tell his story, but in a manner maximally calculated, if you will, to win the favor of his hosts, the Phaeacians.
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