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Sept. 20, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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BUSTING CENSORSHIP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep417
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Coming up, I'm going to talk about the Fifth Circuit appeals court decision affirming a Texas law that strikes down censorship by social media platforms.
I'll reveal how Facebook has been spying on conservative users and turning over their information to the FBI. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller joins me.
We're going to talk about his new book called Crisis of Command.
This is the guy who was kicked out of the military because he criticized the U.S. failure in Afghanistan.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I introduced yesterday a very important decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upholding the Texas law that outlaws social media censorship.
This is a law, by the way, with large implications for what other states might do.
It has direct implications for someone like me, since Debbie and I live in Texas.
And as a consequence of this law, if someone like me is banned by Google or banned by, which is to say Google owns YouTube or Facebook, we can sue.
And I want to put these social media platforms on notice.
We will sue in the state of Texas because they're not allowed to engage in viewpoint discrimination in this state.
They will be forced to put...
The person that they ban back on, and they're going to have to pay their legal fees.
And frankly, I anticipate that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people will be filing these suits if this law, this Texas law stands at the Supreme Court level, which I think it will.
The only recourse for the social media platforms is to appeal to the Supreme Court.
They may not even take the case.
But if they take the case, I think it's likely that they will affirm the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in part because of just the sheer clarity and even beauty of the reasoning of this case.
Andrew Oldham is the judge who writes the opinion.
And he begins by just blasting this idea that these platforms are somehow like newspapers, exercising editorial judgment over everything that they put out.
He says, quote, He goes, unlike newspapers, platforms exercise virtually no editorial content or judgment.
The platforms use algorithms to screen out certain types of content.
Virtually everything else is posted to the platform with, this in italics, zero editorial content or judgment.
And think about it. You post on Facebook.
By and large, that's what you think.
It's not what Facebook thinks.
And so right away, the judge just ridicules this idea that Facebook is like the New York Times.
Second of all, the judge basically goes on to say that these platforms all went to Congress and said over and over again, quote, that they serve as conduits for other parties' speech, that they cannot take responsibility and do not endorse the content on their own platforms, and on this basis, they got a special legal protection.
This is section 230 saying they can't be sued for the content on their platform.
Why? Precisely because they're not like a newspaper.
They don't exercise editorial control.
They let people post whatever they want.
So it's the poster's responsibility, not YouTube's responsibility or Facebook's responsibility.
and the judge goes, see, they are admitting themselves that they are not like newspapers.
They are admitting themselves that they are platforms, not publishers, and so they can't then turn around and say, well, listen, we have the right to exercise editorial control, because after all, we are like the New York Times.
In fact, interestingly, the social media platforms appeal to cases involving newspapers and say, look, the newspapers allowed their private company.
They can publish whatever they want.
And the judge goes, yeah, but you're not a newspaper.
So those rules don't apply.
Now, Texas has designated these social media platforms to be, quote, common carriers.
This is a very important idea.
A common carrier is a business that engages in a certain type of conduct that affects the general public.
And in some cases, is the only way for the general public to be able to engage in a certain type of commerce.
Let's take, for example, the idea of a company that by itself has a contract, let's say, to run a ferry across a river.
Now, this is the only company that runs the ferry.
Can that company decide, arbitrarily, that it's going to not allow certain people to cross, even though they're willing to buy a ticket to the ferry, because they don't like them?
They decide, we're not going to let anybody from Ohio use this ferry.
We're not going to let blacks use the ferry.
The ferry is only going to be limited to people who are born in the United States.
The answer is they can't do that.
Why? Because they are common carriers.
They have an obligation.
And by obligation, I don't just mean a moral duty.
They have a legal obligation to serve everybody.
There's a long line of cases on common carriers.
They have a, quote, duty to serve.
By the way, this concept was imported to America from British law going back centuries ago.
It applies to stagecoaches, barges, innkeepers.
Later, it applied also to the telephone and the telegraph.
Think about it. Can the telephone company decide, are we going to exclude people from service because we just don't like the kind of things they say?
Yeah, we're not going to offer service in West Virginia.
Those people use a lot of obscene language on the phone.
Can't do it. They're common carriers.
Interestingly, and I didn't know this history, In the opinion, we see that a number of these telegraph companies were using the telegraph to discriminate against ideas they didn't like.
In fact, even to sort of limit candidates that they didn't like.
And all of this led to many states passing laws basically saying that there can be no discrimination on the telegraphs.
These telegraph companies cannot use their muscle to tip the scales politically, to ban certain people, to restrict certain people, and so on.
And all of this law is now imported here and is being applied by Texas, by the appellate court, the Fifth Circuit, to say that Texas has every right to designate these platforms as common carriers.
Why?
Because they are.
They are the public square.
In that sense, the platforms are no different than Verizon or AT&T, which means that they are held to the same standards.
And so the conclusion here is very simple, that these platforms are trying to take the individual right to free speech from the First Amendment.
And transmute it into a corporate, remember the left has itself told us, corporations aren't individuals, into a corporate right, not to affirm free speech, but to suppress it.
And in a marvelous decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has said, not just that that's not nice, but that's against the law.
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To get the discounts, you need to use promo code DINESHDINESH. I've been talking about the...
The sins of the social media platforms.
And I want to zoom into Facebook.
Very interesting article by an outstanding journalist, Miranda Devine of the New York Post.
She has sources at the Department of Justice, the Biden Department of Justice.
And these sources have told her that Facebook has been spying on the private messages and data of American users, So, think about this.
There's no question that if the FBI serves a subpoena on Facebook, Facebook needs to comply with the subpoena.
But that's not what Miranda Devine is saying.
What Miranda Devine is saying is that Facebook has established a relationship with the Unsolicited, or at least not specifically solicited.
The FBI isn't saying, show me this particular person's content or data.
Facebook has essentially turned itself into an instrument of government spying, and is feeding or shoveling information from its own platform.
So think of how terrible this is for any company to do.
They're taking their own customers in a relationship that you would think would be based on trust.
You shop somewhere. Imagine if you went to shop somewhere and you realize that that vendor is taking your data, such as it is, for whatever purpose, and sending it over to the IRS or sending it over to the FBI.
Because that way they can see if, you know, could this guy really afford to buy a Rolex?
Well, how much did he pay in taxes last year?
This would be outrageous, and yet this exact outrageous conduct is what these platforms are doing.
transmitted this document in redacted form to the Domestic Terrorism Operational Unit at the FBI, quote, without a subpoena.
It was done outside the legal process and without probable cause, one of Miranda Divine's sources tells her.
Now, the source is not named and that should be taken into account.
Facebook provides the FBI with private conversations protected by the First Amendment without a Now, Facebook apparently frames these reports as, quote, leads.
So they're the starting point of an investigation.
The FBI reviews these and goes, well, this is suspicious.
Let's look into this guy. Let's look into that guy.
But the point is, and I think this is the significant point, is this is not initiated in these cases.
It's initiated by Facebook.
So Facebook has a domestic spying team.
Its target is not Americans, because they're not finding leftist Antifa types, BLM types, oh, we're planning a riot in Portland, let's turn this over to the FBI. They're not doing that.
This is targeted at conservatives.
Reading from the article, the Facebook users whose private communications Facebook has red-flagged as domestic terrorism for the FBI were all, quote, conservative right-wing individuals.
Now, I think Facebook or Meta realizes this is very damaging, and so they're doing some pirouetting and some backward somersaults to say that they're not really doing this.
But very interestingly, They first responded to Miranda Devine claiming that her report was false.
And then they updated their statement saying it's not false, it's wrong.
Now, wrong has a different meaning than false.
Wrong means we don't like the fact that you're doing it.
It's wrong for you to be publicizing this kind of information.
Or you, Miranda, have a wrong understanding of what's really going on.
But wrong is also another way of saying that the report is true.
You are doing this. You may have a different interpretation or a different motive or think you're doing it for different reasons.
We're just trying to comply with the law.
We're just taking preemptive steps to make sure that we're not stepping outside the bounds of the law.
But again, this is conduct that is being done by Facebook without, apparently, at least according to the article, a subpoena.
Now, Facebook has apparently a woman who is a, quote, crisis response expert, who puts out a bunch of, you know, she basically says that we respond to legal requests for information in accordance with applicable law in our terms, and we provide notice to users whenever permitted.
So this, again, seems to me to be a kind of sly avoidance of the issue.
Yeah, they do that, but the question is, are they also doing this?
And on that apparently, the crisis counselor at Facebook is tellingly silent.
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How are they going to pay for it?
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The Fed chair is freaked out about inflation.
The leftist government is clearly ignoring him.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the misdoings and malfeasance of various social media platforms.
And now I want to talk about Google.
Now what I'm saying about Google, to some degree, also applies to IBM. Apparently Google and IBM I talked about this on the podcast, I think about a week or two ago, established race-based scholarship programs and established them in coordination with many elite universities.
The Google program alone was called the Google Fellowship.
And Google was carrying out this program with Harvard, Princeton, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Duke, NYU, UNC Chapel Hill, Johns Hopkins, and Carnegie Mellon.
So this is a Google Fellowship.
And basically, under the Google Fellowship, if the selection process Google produced more than two nominees for this fellowship.
Google required that the next two nominees, quote, self-identify as a woman, black, African descent, You know, the whole gamut.
Trans, Latinx, or person with a disability.
But it was essentially a kind of mandatory quota.
You have to do this.
So these colleges entered into contracts with Google as a requirement.
Now, this, as it turns out, flatly violates not only the...
Well, it flatly violates the civil rights law that goes all the way back to 1866, Which completely bans racial discrimination in contracting.
And let's notice that these are contracts between Google and these universities.
And then there's also Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans racial discrimination at federally funded schools.
And all these schools, some of them, of course, private, some of them public, but nevertheless, they all have massive contracts with the federal government, and so they fall under the federally funded contract.
Now, the Washington Free Beacon did an article, which I talked about here on the podcast, about this policy on the part of Google.
And they also mentioned that IBM has a similar policy.
IBM had a fellowship program, and it required, it mandated that half the nominees of this PhD fellowship program be, quote, diversity candidates.
Now, Google talked, I'm sorry, the Washington Free Beacon talked to a bunch of civil rights lawyers, and they go, well...
These programs are illegal.
And people can sue, and in fact have sued, by the way.
And other companies that have similar mandatory quotas are vulnerable to lawsuits.
Coca-Cola, by the way, had a lawsuit that was filed against Coca-Cola, and Coca-Cola was forced to...
It's a race-conscious policy because there were legal threats coming from shareholders to file lawsuits.
Amazon and American Express, as we speak, have been hit by class action lawsuits alleging anti-white discrimination.
In some cases, the discrimination is against not just whites, but also Asian Americans.
So, in a piece of good news, but it's good news not produced by Google or IBM rethinking their policies, not produced by these companies having a better understanding that what they're doing is immoral and illegal.
Well, it's simply fear.
It's the fact that they've been busted, that a publication has put out the fact that they are violating the civil rights laws.
These companies, of course, don't want to lose lawsuits for violating any law, let alone civil rights laws.
And so the good news is that Google and IBM are now backpedaling, let's call it.
So Google has now changed its scholarship criterion, and it basically says that they, quote, strongly encourage that these campuses put forward diversity candidates.
And similarly, IBM has taken out its mandatory half the nominees must be diversity candidates.
And it just says that schools, quote, consider a diverse slate of candidates.
So these actions probably now bring diversity.
The actions of Google and IBM within the law, but it's very interesting that it takes public exposure to cause these companies to see the light.
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I'd like to talk about the results just out of the Swedish election, which are important in and of themselves, important for Europe, and also important in a larger sense for what's happening in the United States, and I think to some degree around the world.
Now, Sweden, as you probably know, a very progressive country in the progressive continent of Europe.
And for many years, Sweden has had kind of a, let's call it a center-left government, but a center-left by Swedish or European standards is left by our standards.
So Sweden has been a left-wing country, and no surprise, they had a left-wing prime minister.
She was the first female prime minister, in fact, and apparently had come to power just a...
Just a year prior.
And then Sweden has a national election.
Now, the national election is mainly fought between the center-left, the Social Democrats, that's the party of the Prime Minister Andersson, and a center-right party.
And the center-right party is run by Ulf Christensen.
It calls itself the center-right moderate.
So even though moderation is kind of a virtue in Sweden and probably throughout Scandinavia, calling ourselves the moderates is a positive.
Nevertheless, it's seen as center-right.
And when the election results come in, the center-right wins and is going to be forming the new government.
The prime minister has already resigned, and there is a new government in the process of being formed.
But the key point here is this, that the reason that the right wins the election is because of the surge of Of a party called the Sweden Democrats.
Now, the Sweden Democrats are not like the Democrats in the United States.
The Sweden Democrats, in fact, are described in the U.S. media and, in fact, much of the European media as, quote, far-right.
In fact, it's really funny to see all these articles, you know, the far-right extreme Sweden Democrats, the fringe Sweden Democrats.
And in fairness to this kind of commentary, For a number of years, the other political parties in Sweden did treat the newly emerging Sweden Democrats as kind of a fringe party.
It was sort of like, we're not going to really allow them to be part of mainstream politics in Sweden.
And then they realized that this is really untenable.
First of all, the Sweden Democrats honed their own political message.
And really focused on two key issues.
The first is immigration, and specifically sanctuary policies, illegal immigration, but also legal immigration.
Sweden took a large number of refugees, a large number of legal, they took them legally, immigrants from Islamic countries.
And this has led to a disruption of cultural and social life in Sweden, but it's also led to, and this is the second issue, An upsurge of crime.
Interestingly, in Sweden, they've recently had a number of grenade fire bombings.
I mean, something that we haven't even seen in America.
We've had, you know, violence that's come from Antifa BLM types, but this is not grenade bombings.
And Sweden, a small country, has actually seen several dozen grenade bombings in Sweden.
In recent years. And by and large, the mainstream political parties really try to stay away from all this.
They don't want to be seen as anti-immigrant.
They don't want to be seen as Islamophobic.
They recognize there's a connection between immigration and crime.
And many of the crimes are committed by these communities.
And so they don't want to touch the crime issue.
And so they... They talk kind of the normal politician talk.
And so the Sweden Democrats have been hitting these issues hard.
And so the Sweden Democrats have surged basically from 1%, 2%, 3%, and 4% to now 20%.
And the significance of this politically is that the center-right party, the so-called moderates, wouldn't even be able to form a government if they didn't make an alliance with the Sweden Democrats.
In fact, there's a guy... In one of these articles from the center-right party, the moderates, and he goes, listen, it's a simple matter of electoral math.
If we want to be the government, we've got to bring in the Sweden Democrats.
Not necessarily give them positions in parliament or in the government per se, but we have to include them.
Why? Because without them, we don't have a majority.
And so this is a case where...
You almost have a kind of, just as here we have a Republican establishment, which is kind of grumpily acceding to importing a MAGA movement to create a winning coalition.
Similarly here, the so-called center-right moderates are now, perhaps a little reluctantly, doing business with the Sweden Democrats, and together they're creating what is a kind of a political revolution in Sweden, because you now have a very progressive or left-wing country.
With a, at least, leaning right government, with the energy in that, in the winning coalition coming from people who are in their own way, well, let's just call them Swedish-style drumsters.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller, the author of a new book called Crisis of Command.
You might remember Lieutenant Colonel Scheller.
He spoke out against the Biden administration after the disaster in Afghanistan.
They went after him for that.
But now he's back, and I'm delighted to say with an opportunity to tell his own story in the book.
Stuart, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
And let me start by talking a little bit about foreign policy.
We are little more than a year away from the debacle in Afghanistan.
Let's look back at Afghanistan first.
And with the benefit of hindsight, let me ask you, do you still feel that that was as disastrously botched as it seemed at the time?
Yeah, I do. In fact, the military investigation, the one which President Biden said he rejected without any other logical explanation as to why he rejected it, illustrated a lot more problems than even I knew when I made that first video.
In April of 21, we decided to pull all military troops out of Afghanistan before evacuating American citizens.
We decided to do it from April to September because of a PR date of September 11th.
But everyone knows the Taliban's peak fighting season is in the spring and summer.
They go into the mountains of Pakistan and hide during the winter.
And so the PR date of September 11th was more important than American lives and treasure.
We then abandoned Bagram Air Base, the key piece of infrastructure that we needed.
We left 5,000 to 7,000 prisoners, which the Taliban released, instantly swallowed their force to larger than the entire military force that responded to Kabul.
We got into firefights with the Taliban on 15 August, killed multiple Taliban fighters, and then forced Marines to stand post with them.
And then the Taliban sent a suicide bomber through the checkpoint that probably came from the prison, killed 13 service members, injured dozens of other service members, killed hundreds.
And then we called it an overwhelming success.
And in response to the suicide attack, you know, we conducted a drone strike, killed nothing but women and children.
I mean, there's no better example through and through of just a list of mistakes.
It was a comedy of errors and still no one's really been held accountable for it.
How do you make sense of the fact that But presumably the sensible thing to do at that point would have been to make an alliance with the anti-Taliban guys.
I don't see any reason why we stayed for 20 years, but the purpose of staying was to train, in part, a kind of Afghan force that could itself deal with the Taliban.
Why do you think that that force melted away in direct conflict with the Taliban?
Why was it so easy for the Taliban to beat these guys up?
Well, first of all, we never went there to destroy the Taliban or establish a new government.
We went there to destroy al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization per the definition.
And so we turned the Taliban into terrorists somewhat by dislocating them into Pakistan.
I mean, they were a conventional force and they were the military or the government.
And so for us to displace them, we created a new problem and then our mission evolved there.
And that's why we ended up being there for 20 years.
I completely agree on September 11th.
We needed and required military action to go in there and inflict violence on the people that conducted attacks on us.
But I disagree with the sentiment that we needed to stay there to emplace a new government.
If I was conducting foreign diplomacy, if there was an attack like September 11th, I would go into that country.
I would hold accountable through violence anyone that assisted or allowed that to happen.
And then I would let them to pick up the pieces.
And when I was telling them, you're picking up the pieces, I would very strongly remind them that all it takes is them to allow that to come back in and we'll be right back.
And I can just keep running that play until they realize that they shouldn't be allowing terrorist actors to conduct attacks from their country.
I mean, I think going back, I have to blame people like, I don't know if he was the original author of this doctrine, but I heard Colin Powell once say that basically, if you break it, you own it.
Almost like the policy that you have in a store, where if you drop something and break it, you own it.
But he was applying this to countries and And so, the massive commitment of the United States, almost as if we were going to now reorganize Afghanistan, and some people naively thought, as a liberal democratic society, I mean, it looks like there's a lot of blame to go around.
I mean, a lot of it belongs to Biden, but it is sort of a bipartisan disaster, if you take the full perspective.
It's 100% a bipartisan disaster.
I mean, George Bush Jr.
made a ton of mistakes I mean, through and through, I mean, every president that has touched these things has made mistakes, and that's the bottom line.
I mean, no one has been very effective.
Now, George Bush is the one that really set a lot of this in motion and the rest of them, I think, were in a crippled position because they were dealing with the decisions that George Bush made.
And so if anyone's to blame, it's his ambition.
George Bush clearly stated for Iraq that he wanted to install a democracy.
He didn't clearly state that for Afghanistan, but he allowed it to evolve into that.
And then each president since then was struggling with how do I validate the sacrifices of the service member that has done so much when I'm already in this position and they were reacting to this foreign policy disaster.
And so, you know, you got people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice that were also, I think, indicted in these initial decisions to allow us to go and just get entrenched in these installing governments.
And to your point, exactly right. If you break it, you own it.
That thought process might apply to a European nation that is similar to us.
But when you go into a country like Afghanistan and you think you're going to just install a system that is similar to ours, it's flawed logic and it is consistently played out that way.
And it just seems like all these people with the Ivy League degrees just fail to understand how a different culture doesn't necessarily assimilate into the belief system and the structure that we as Americans think is what's effective.
We'll be right back with Lt.
Col. Stuart Scheller, author of Crisis of Command.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Schiller, who joined the Marine Corps in 2005, 17 years of service.
Most recently, he was commander of the Advanced Infantry Training Battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
Thank you.
You did something that is not appreciated in the military, and that is you spoke out.
You recognized, I mean, there was a disaster for the whole country, if not the whole world, the sea.
In a sense, I think you did nothing more than say what tons of people were thinking, but you were in the hierarchy and the structure of the military.
And did you know at the time that by doing that, you were going to essentially create a permanent rupture or with the military.
Did you know that you were taking that risk at the very least?
I did. Yeah, if you go back and watch that first video, I mean, I articulate that I was risking my career, my retirement, my family stability.
It wasn't something that I didn't think through, but I thought the potential gain outweighed the risk for the greater institution.
So it was done out of love for the military, not Anger.
I mean, you did pay a high price, right?
I mean, talk a little bit, and I'm sure you outlined this in the book in a very vivid way.
Talk about both the personal price that you paid, but also talk a little bit about, walk us through what happened.
So you make the video, you post it on social media, then what happens?
So I made that video and my assumption was that I would ultimately be relieved, but that there would be an investigation, there would be a discussion.
And my thought process is, in any organization, any business you work in, if a mid-level manager makes a comment against senior leaders, against company policy, but it taps into the sentiment of almost your entire organization, you would be smart enough as a leader to reprimand that employee But then take them around the organization and discuss the discontent and try and eliminate that cancer in your organization.
They did not do that.
They still never really addressed it.
Instead, they decided they wanted to quickly silence me and really attack me and my character rather than addressing the content of my statement.
They fired me the next day.
People started attacking my honor, demanding my resignation.
I had a choice.
I had a choice where I could We're good to go.
Stand by my statements and continue to apply pressure on them.
And I believed in what I said.
And so I decided to continue to make statements very publicly.
I resigned. And then it just became this series of escalating events that resulted in me getting imprisoned.
So I eventually violated, they put a gag order on me, I violated it, and they put me in solitary confinement for nine days.
And then I agreed to a legal deal for a special court martial to be released from jail.
I pled guilty to five charges, you know, conduct, unbecoming a gentleman, violating the social media policy, all kind of like I did break those rules, so I pled guilty to all that.
Then they discharged me from the Marine Corps on Christmas Eve of 21.
I lost my retirement.
Going through everything that I went through, it took a toll on my family as well.
I ended up going through a divorce.
Nothing but good things to say about her.
She was still the mother of my children.
We realized going through this that we were on different paths.
And so yeah, my whole life was upended, right?
So it was a very challenging situation.
I mean, that's by any account a high price to pay.
I mean, you have your family, you have your career.
Those are probably two of the most important things.
Do you still think, looking back, you did the right thing?
And are you sort of taking that as a launching pad to now write the book and continue to speak out?
How do you see your role going forward from here?
Yeah, I want to be clear. I'm not a victim.
Everything I did was by choice.
I understood the rules and what I was breaking and what I was risking.
I didn't forecast some of those things.
I didn't think I'd end up in jail and I didn't think my marriage would fall apart, but that's how it played out, right?
Do I regret it? You know, I don't.
I think I did the right thing.
And would it have been easier for me to remain quiet, enjoy my retirement, and my stability with my wife and three kids?
Yes, absolutely. It would have been easier.
But the whole reason I joined the military was to leave a better America for my children.
And the military has drifted so far from its designed purpose That I don't know if we're going to fix this unless people start speaking out and taking action.
So I did what I did so that I could leave a better America for my children.
And I think it's starting to have an impact.
Now, have we held anyone accountable?
No. But are people starting to open their eyes to the problem?
Yes. And that's step one.
Step two is starting to implement some of the changes that I outlined in my book.
But we didn't get to this mess overnight, and we're not going to change it overnight.
But I think there are ways to change it, and I think it's worth fighting for.
The book is called Crisis of Command by Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller.
This is a remarkable story.
And I'm reading all over the place about the recruitment and other problems the military is having.
So you are clearly addressing something very relevant that goes beyond your story.
But thank you so much for joining me to tell the story.
And I wish you all the best with the book.
Thanks, Anesh. Thanks for having me on.
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We are now in Book 9 of the Odyssey.
Odysseus is in the company and under the hospitality, the Zinnea of the Phaeacians, and they have now begged him, starting with the king and the queen, please tell us your story.
And Odysseus now begins his first-person narrative, which is not only riveting perhaps the most famous part of the Odyssey, by the way, the next three books, 9 through 12, they're told in the form of a flashback, and they're told also in first-person narrative.
Now, it's a real tour de force for Homer, because when you move from the omniscient narrator, which is Homer himself, Homer knows the story.
He knows everything. So he can move back and forth from the gods down to earth, so to speak.
He can tell you what is going on up there.
He can tell you what's going on down here.
And it all makes sense because you're getting the omniscient sort of god's eye view or the bard's eye view, if you will.
But now that Homer is telling the story from Odysseus' point of view, he can only relay information that Odysseus would know.
So let's take, for example, here's Odysseus.
He has been 10 years away with the Trojan War.
He has been another 10 years trying to make his way home.
He's been away for 20 years.
He doesn't know anything about what's happening at home in Ithaca.
Now, as we will see in the narrative toward the end of this section of the narrative in Book 12, Obviously, Odysseus finds out what's going on in Ithaca, but he only finds out because he runs into someone who is in a position to tell him.
What I'm getting at here is that Homer never loses sight of the fact that at this stage of the narrative, inside of what Odysseus is saying, Odysseus can only know what Odysseus knows.
Debbie and I were watching a film just a few days ago.
And the premise of the film was actually fantastic.
It was about a young couple that decides to kind of fortify their relationship.
They're going to go to a cabin in the woods.
They book this kind of cabin in the middle of nowhere.
They're driving. They get there at night.
They pull up at the cabin and to their astonishment, the door opens and there's a guy there.
There's evidently a couple already in the cabin.
They now can't retreat.
It's too far for them to try to make their way back home.
But this promising beginning to a thriller of a feature film completely disintegrates when it starts doing flashbacks.
And it starts in the flashbacks giving you information that the person having the flashback would be in no position to know.
They weren't there at the time.
And so essentially the omniscient narrator is creeping into the flashback and Debbie's like, what's going on?
I thought it was a flashback.
I'm like, yeah, they have violated the rules of filmmaking because inside of the flashback, a flashback can only be what the person having the flashback knows and remembers.
And so, but Homer does not fall for this.
He never... Loses perspective, so to speak.
He always remembers that this is Odysseus' story, limited by what Odysseus knows.
Now, the other thing about Odysseus that's very interesting is that both Odysseus and Homer in introducing him are kind of aware of the somewhat ambiguous nature of Odysseus' heroism.
Let's look at the opening line of Book 9.
Wily Odysseus, the lord of lies...
So, this is Odysseus answering the Phaeacians and beginning his narrative.
But look, Homer right away describes him as wily, which is a way of saying he's cunning.
And what I get out of that is that means he's going to craft his narrative.
To his audience. He's a very sly character.
Wiley is not entirely a positive term.
It's positive, but it's got a kind of hint that this is someone not entirely to be trusted.
And then Homer reinforces that.
The lord of lies.
Remember that Odysseus is most famous for what?
A kind of deceit, which was, let's make a Trojan horse.
Let's present it as a kind of gift almost from the gods.
The naive Trojans won't know.
They won't think it's from the Greeks, so they'll wonder, what's this?
We need to investigate further.
They pull it into their city.
So who is responsible for that devious strategy, which is in some senses, I won't call it unmanly, but from the ancient point of view, you can see, and you see this in the Iliad as well, the idea that fighting someone in one-to-one combat, that's kind of the honorable manly thing to do.
There are even insinuations in the Iliad that if you use a bow and arrow, you're shooting someone from a distance, you're not making yourself vulnerable to counterattack, and that is kind of a low, deceitful way to fight.
So, Odysseus comes out of that, you may call it, deceitful camp.
He relies on cunning stratagems.
He relies on fooling the other guy.
He's not necessarily telling you the whole truth, at least that's the implication here.
And so as this narrative gets going, and we'll see that as it begins, there are also ambiguous implications about some of the things that not just the Greeks, but Odysseus himself does in Troy.
Let me just read a line here.
I sacked the town and killed the men.
This is Odysseus talking now not about Troy, but one of the nearby towns, an ally of Troy.
I sacked the town and killed the men.
We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us.
So here is Odysseus basically saying, and of course this is not a big surprise here, let's remember that in the Iliad, it begins with the fact that these Greek soldiers away do not hesitate to take concubines, and their concubines are none other than the wives and daughters of the groups that they have subdued.
So the Trojans, in this case they're talking about a group...
called the Sikonis.
They kill the man, or they subdue the man, and then they basically steal their wives and daughters.
And Odysseus basically narrates this as if it's perfectly normal.
Now, as I say, it is perfectly normal.
We've seen it as perfectly normal.
It's treated perfectly normally in the Iliad, but it It makes you wonder.
Odysseus will talk about civilization and barbarism, and he'll talk about how bad some of the characters he runs into.
Let's keep in mind that Odysseus himself is a somewhat ambiguous character, and that's not something that a modern-day reader is injecting into the narrative.
It's right there in the narrative itself.
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