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Sept. 26, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:46
CRITICAL STATE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep421
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Coming up, I'll show why Trump's crime, so-called, is actually completely bogus.
Everyone evaluates their assets differently depending on the purpose.
Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano joins me.
He's going to talk about himself and also talk about the stakes in this critical state.
And I'm going to explore, did a fascist really win the Italian election?
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.
Donald Trump is under multiple investigations and attacks from the left.
As I've said before, it's almost overkill.
And when you have overkill, you begin to suspect that the guys who are flinging multiple arrows are flinging so many arrows because they don't have a single arrow that's sure to find its target.
There's a kind of searching here for something that they can get him on.
And the latest comes from Letitia James, who is the New York Attorney General.
And she is trying to get Trump really for his business dealings that long precede his ascent to the presidency.
So this is not about colluding with Russia.
This is not about taking classified documents.
Those, of course, are supposedly offenses.
I think they're fictional offenses, but they're offenses, nevertheless, that are timed within Trump's tenure in the presidency.
Or at least in the campaign leading up to the presidency, in the case of Russia collusion, Trump was colluding with Putin, and all of that turned out to be nonsense.
But here what Letitia James is saying is that Trump's business, the Trump Organization, overvalued its assets in applying for loans from large financial institutions.
Wow. Wow.
First of all, it should be said that all these loans that Letitia James is talking about have been fully paid back.
So this is not a case where Trump took loans, he couldn't pay them back, he somehow refused to pay people back, he owes them money, none of that.
The argument is simply this, that in order to get the loans in the first place, Trump exaggerated the value of his assets.
He gave them, if you will, a higher appraisal than they would truly do.
And the point I want to make is, as I think about it, This whole business of appraisal is a very elastic business, and it's recognized to be so.
People are often appraising things according to the purpose of the appraisal.
So, my son-in-law, Justin, for example, recently bought a house.
In order to buy the house, my stepson, what did I say?
My son-in-law. My son-in-law.
I'm sorry. My stepson, Justin, recently bought a house.
Well, to buy a house, you have to get an appraisal.
And if you're buying the house for a certain amount of money, the appraised value of the house must at least equal what you're paying for it.
Otherwise, you basically have a problem.
So the appraisal in that case is tailored to the purchase of the house.
In divorce settlements, when people fight over assets, typically, let's say, for example, the husband and the wife are fighting over the value of the house that's going to go to the wife.
Typically, each of them will hire an appraiser, and the husband's appraisal will come in high.
Why? Because it's tailored to the interests of the husband.
It attaches a greater value to the house, so more is being assigned to the wife and the husband will be compensated in cash or in retirement assets.
And the wife will typically hire an appraiser who appraises the value lower.
Why? Because she wants to show that she's getting less.
When you have...
In estate cases, typically when heirs inherit property, they hire appraisers, and the appraisers tend to value the property low.
Why are they valuing it low?
Because first of all, the heirs want to pay less in taxes.
Second of all, they actually want to show, particularly when there's a division of assets that's going to multiple people, that the thing I got, whether it's a piece of jewelry, or whether it's a physical asset, or whether it's a car, I'm getting less In terms of that particular car, so that ultimately, if there's a true division of assets, I need to also receive the balance in cash.
The IRS, when they appraise property and they appraise assets and when they do audits or when they conduct assessments of the value of businesses, again, use a variety of different techniques to appraise the value of something and the very presence of multiple mechanisms of appraisal.
Shows that there is no single straight-line rule that your property, your hotel, is worth X. Well, your hotel may be worth X or Y or Z, depending not only on current conditions, but the expectation of future conditions.
Are more people moving into Atlantic City?
Is Vegas growing or is it shrinking?
And so the idea that Trump overvalued his assets to get a loan...
Remember, it is the job of these financial companies to decide if that appraisal is worth giving Trump a loan on.
All we're dealing with here are the normal subjective practices of business, and Letitia James is trying to criminalize them.
This gives you an idea of how pathetic the case is against Trump on this count, and the other cases, the other errors, if you will, seem to me not likely to fare any better.
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As the battle between us and the left escalates on so many different issues and so many different fronts, it's important for our side to respond with originality, creativity, and bravery.
And I want to talk about one guy who is doing that.
This is in Arizona. He's doing it on the pro-life issue.
Now, Arizona has been in the news lately because a judge in Arizona has upheld a law, an abortion ban in the state that goes back to 1864.
Wow. Well, let's remember that there were lots of these laws on the books, some of them dating back many decades, in this case, really a century and more than a century.
But Roe vs. Wade invalidated all these laws.
But now that Roe vs. Wade is overturned, the laws kind of spring back into action.
In other words, the laws are automatically now valid again until the legislature decides we're going to sort of make a new law or override the old law.
The old law still remains because now the obstacle to that law has been removed.
So, very interesting. Abortion is largely illegal now in the state of Arizona.
I want to talk about a case involving a woman who had an abortion, turns out to be four years ago, and her ex-husband, a guy named Mario Villegas, has found an ingenious way to sort of hit back, not at the wife, but really at the medical establishment, at the abortionist, at the abortion clinic.
So what did he do? He couldn't really sue as the husband because in an era where the woman has choice, it's her decision, It's her decision alone.
Now, interestingly, if she has the child, the husband is responsible for supporting the child and becomes a sort of partner in paying up.
But in the decision about whether to have the child, the woman sort of reigns supreme.
It's her choice. So the husband, in a sense, could not...
Make a case and say, I'm an aggrieved husband.
I want her to have the child.
So what he did, ingeniously, was he created an estate for the unborn and now, of course, deceased child.
The child was, in fact, aborted.
So he creates an estate, and then on behalf of the estate, he sues not the ex-wife, but he sues the doctors and the clinic that provided the abortion.
Basically, Arizona has had, and this is even while Roe v.
Wade was in effect, Arizona has had a kind of law that requires the state, that requires people providing an abortion to provide a whole bunch of information to the woman.
Medical information, like all the risks associated with the procedure, legal information, and there's also a 24-hour waiting period.
So basically, what this man, Mario Villegas, charges is that the clinic failed to do these things in a precise way with his now ex-wife.
They failed to provide her with proper information.
They did not tell her all the risks.
And therefore, the clinic, by going ahead with the abortion in violation of Arizona's informed consent law, has, in a sense, wrongfully killed We're good to go.
And the judge said, that's not true.
The unborn child can sue.
The unborn child does have standing.
And think about it. Standing basically means that this case concerns you.
You have a direct stake in the outcome.
So can you imagine? You're an unborn infant.
You're an embryo. You actually have your whole life or death is riding on this outcome.
So to maintain that you're not affected, you have no standing, is preposterous.
And yet, in case after case, courts have thrown these cases out because of the idea that somehow the unborn are, quote, not a person, don't have any rights, therefore have no standing to sue.
And all of this, by the way, is in the language of Roe v.
Wade. In fact, here, turning to Roe v.
Wade for a second, Harry Blackmun, writing the majority decision, said this, He goes, if this suggestion of personhood is established, Then Roe's case, meaning the case that's brought forward by Roe, collapses.
For the fetus's right to life would then be guaranteed.
So basically, Harry Blackmun is saying everything hinges on whether or not, not just whether or not the embryo is alive, is a human life.
It obviously is alive.
It obviously is a human life.
But if it is considered a person...
Then it has the same rights that other persons have under the Constitution.
And so you can't say at that point that it's your choice as to whether or not you can kill another person.
And so the ingenuity of these...
Of these laws, these cases that are filed on behalf of the unborn themselves, these wrongful death cases, is that they create liability or potential liability for the abortionist and for the clinic.
If this goes to trial, and it's not clear it will go to trial, but if it goes to trial and a jury finds for the plaintiff, for the ex-husband, first of all, it'll be the first time that a jury has done that.
And second of all, this could...
It could lead to attorney's fees, financial damages, it could lead to the doctor, the abortionist being disbarred, or his medical license suspended.
So this to me is a new front in the pro-life fight and represents, if you will, some very creative and ingenious ways of thinking about the problem and a very creative and ingenious way of striking back at the other side.
With the consumer price index, the CPI increasing yet again, the stock market has been in absolute turmoil.
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Guys, I'm really pleased to welcome to the podcast Doug Mastriano.
Doug is running for Pennsylvania governor.
He's the GOP nominee.
He's currently serving as a state senator for Pennsylvania's 33rd District.
Doug retired from the U.S. Army as a colonel in 2017 after 30 years of service.
He saw tours of duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, Doug, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you. Boy, you are running in a tough election in a critical state, but I... Your first time on the podcast, I'd like to introduce you to my audience, and I see you've done all kinds of things in a very interesting life, so tell a little bit about your story so people can get to know you better.
I was raised in a lower middle class family.
My dad was a high school dropout.
And at 17, he got in trouble for drag racing his car too much.
And a kindly judge said, you're either going to jail or joining the Navy.
And so my dad joined the Navy.
And it completely radically turned his life around.
My dad used to say, Doug, I was a punk until I joined the Navy.
And it gave him discipline and focus.
And he went on to become one of the most hardest working men I ever knew.
He went from, you know, working menial jobs all the way up to being a senior manager in an air products plant.
And, you know, he did quite well in life.
Talk about yourself.
It seems like you've been a paperboy, a janitor, a security guard, a short order cook, a pizza delivery guy, a dishwasher.
So it looks like you've really worked your way up before you embarked on your military career.
Yeah, and I think, Dinesh, that keeps me grounded.
You know, when I was a janitor cleaning 100 toilets a night, you know, and you can imagine that that was not always fun.
And then the guys in the suits kind of looking at you like you'll never mouth anything, you know, and God has a sense of humor, clearly.
So here I am, a state senator, and Fix it on being an ex-governor of Pennsylvania.
But all I ever wanted to do in life was to serve my country in the Army.
My dad is a Navy man, of course, a couple of brothers in the Marines, many, many uncles in the Army fighting against the Japanese and Germans in World War II. And I had a stark impact, a positive impact upon my life, just wanting to give back.
And so when I retired from the Army after a lifetime of service, my heart was broken that after so much sacrifice, you know, So much horror and the stench of war that the country was worse off, considerably worse off than how I got it from my dad's generation.
And so that was the dilemma I had that spurned me or prompted me to get into politics.
Talk a little bit about your academic career, because what you've been able to do is combine a military career with four master's degrees, a PhD, and a PhD in history.
Talk a little bit about how that gives you a sense of perspective.
I saw you recently tweeted out The famous, well, a meme of the famous statement by Ben Franklin, you know, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?
And Franklin replies famously, a republic if you can keep it.
Would you agree that we are at a point where...
Where our republic hangs in the balance perhaps more than at any time in your lifetime or mine.
Spell out, if you will, the nature of this crisis and what you think we need to do to solve it.
We really are at a crossroads in America.
And, you know, Dinesh, you've been doing this for many years, and each election cycle is critical and potentially the most significant in our lifetime.
But, honestly, this is 2022.
This is a flex point in American history.
And why I say that is because, of course, the chilling, dark speech in Philadelphia by Biden last month, the raid of a pro-life counselor on the sidewalk of his house, It was, you know, something we'd do in Afghanistan against somebody who was, you know, a known insurgent that had killed people, you know, guns drawn.
It was similar to what we did in Afghanistan, aside from they didn't break the door down.
Probably would have kicked the door in if he got an answer so quickly, I imagine.
And so we're seeing that we have the one side under Joe Biden and his administration demonizing with the Department of Justice an entire group of people they disagree with politically.
So if you have questions It's about an election.
Now you're an election denier.
If you have a Gadsden flag, don't tread on me.
Now that's a flag for perhaps somebody who's a terrorist or what have you.
And so a governor can do a lot of good.
We saw during the shutdown how governors could stand for good or evil with their executive powers.
We saw great examples with DeSantis in Texas and also Babbitt in Texas.
And of course, Chris Christy Noem in South Dakota.
And then we saw awful examples in California and Pennsylvania and New York.
And so the governors can stand in a gap against this overreach and these tyrannical powers we're seeing come out of Washington, D.C. in many ways.
What do you think, Doug, of the left has tried to portray the actions of Abbott and DeSantis in dispatching illegals to progressive hotspots as being a stunt, as being something that's really in some ways a form of oppression to these poor people?
I mean, it's funny that the media has finally discovered these migrants only when they show up in, you know, perhaps Martha's Vineyard or the Hamptons.
Is that the kind of thing that makes you uncomfortable?
Or as governor, would you say, hey, you know what?
I like that because it's our side fighting back.
It's only okay when their side drops off busloads or plane loads of illegals in our city and state.
In Pennsylvania, we've had plane loads of these ghost flights show up in hours of darkness in Scranton, in Harrisburg, in Lehigh Valley by Allentown.
And one plane, Dinesh, had 120 passengers, 113 of which were kids.
And, you know, I demanded answers from Governor Wolf, and he refused to tell me where those 113 kids are.
Are you kidding me? What's going on here?
So it's okay when one side does it, but it's not okay, you know, when other governors—and my plan is on day one, 17 January, when I'm sworn in, well, no longer a sanctuary state— And when these ghost flights come to Pennsylvania and they get off the planes and hop on the buses, Pennsylvania State Police, under my orders, will escort those buses down to Joe Biden's house in Delaware and he can deal with them.
Excellent. Hey, let's take a break.
When we come back more with State Senator Doug Mastriano, candidate for Pennsylvania governor.
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I'm back with Doug Mastriano, who's running as a GOP candidate for governor in Pennsylvania.
Doug, there was a, I don't know if you'd call it a controversy or a scandal, but the left tried to go after you some time ago because they found some old photograph, apparently, of you evidently wearing a Confederate outfit, and they were like...
This shows that Doug Mastriano has Confederate sympathies, and I'm thinking, wait a minute, this guy's from Pennsylvania, the site of the Gettysburg battle.
I really doubt he has Confederate sympathies.
Talk a little bit about that incident, because I want to then go to a broader discussion of the Civil War and our moment in America today.
And I represent the Gettysburg area that's in my district, by the way.
It's just so hilarious, Dinesh.
That's the best they can do.
They want to criticize me on the one day that I dress up like a Democrat.
Really, guys? What can I say?
I mean, first of all, you know, as people know, lots of people dress up in both Union and Confederate.
They do Civil War reenactments, which occur all over Pennsylvania and Maryland in old Civil War battlefields and so on.
And you're a student of history, right?
I mean, leaving aside the incident itself, talk a little bit about, are we at a stage where America today is as divided as it was in the 1850s?
I'm not saying we're at the point of a civil war, but I'm saying, are we at the point where there's been a sort of secession of the American mind?
I'm torn on that.
This is probably the most divisive moment since the Civil War.
I do believe that we are in a far worse way in the 1850s and 1860s in the midst of the Civil War.
We had an incident on the floor of the Congress where one Democrat beat down to death with his cane, a Republican congressman.
We haven't gone that far, but we are seeing chilling We're good to go.
You know, extreme people on his side of the aisle to actually view people who they disagree with as some kind of danger.
You know, the irony that, you know, in my case here, somebody who actually physically defended the country and the Constitution for 30 years with my life, unlike all these critics, you know, in the media, would be a danger to the Republic.
And it's the same old playbook.
We're seeing two things that's interesting to me.
This cycle. All Republicans that are a threat to the Democrat agenda or a danger to democracy are too radical and too extreme.
I guess in some ways, I'm extreme on the Constitution, so much so I was willing to lay down my life for it.
I'm extreme on our American way of life and our American people that I defended it with my body, you know, in faraway places.
So, okay. But on the other side here...
We're seeing them also run away from debates.
You know, Katie Hobbs does not want to debate Carrie Lake in Arizona.
My friend Dan Cox in Maryland, his opponent does not want to debate him.
And now my opponent, Josh Shapiro, our failed Attorney General, he's running so far from a debate that I can't even keep up where he is now on that issue.
I even offer that he can have Donna Brazile give him the answers and the questions, and then I'll take them on even in an open forum if they prefer.
And he refuses any format other than a format where he has a far left-wing media person standing in the way of me debating him.
Well, in some ways, let's talk about the media because I think the reason that these guys act in this way is they want the media to do the work for them.
And the media itself is coming from such a position on the far left that anything right of center is described as far right.
What do you think?
Is there a solution to this kind of lopsidedness of the media or is it something that as a Republican we just have to live with?
Thank God, Dinesh, there is a way around them.
Now we can talk directly to the people, you know, through various social media platforms.
We can talk to the people, you know, through you.
We also have alternative media sites that aren't extreme left, that are moderate or center right.
And so thank God we can take the message around that far left wing media.
It's ironic. We have media outlets.
I think we're good to go.
I was number one on our list, according to the Salon article.
And their goal was to hit us hard with a coordinated attack from the media, you know, from the New York Times, from the Atlantic, from LA Times, from the Washington Post, and CNN and MSNBC with the same messaging, you know, too dangerous, too radical.
And I wondered why, Dinesh, this time last year that I was hearing the same thing from all these outlets.
I was like, this is bizarre. And it was not a pleasant Well, Doug, I certainly wish you well.
Pennsylvania is a critically important state and you're running a great campaign, so I wish you all the best.
Thank you very much for joining the podcast.
Thanks for having me on.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I have been, in the last day or so, just elated at the result of the Italian election.
And I keep showing Debbie, you know, social media segments of the winner of that election.
This is Georgia Maloney.
And Debbie goes, man, Dinesh, you're really obsessed with Italy.
Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, I am a little bit, but the significance of the Italian election.
Now, the media is saying, well, it's this far-right candidate, Georgia Maloney, very disturbing because there are echoes of Mussolini.
She's the new Mussolini.
Well, she's not the new Mussolini.
She is, in fact, the first Italian woman who is going to become the prime minister in And she actually is a conservative.
She's center-right. And I suppose the only thing she has in common with Mussolini is that they were both nationalists.
Well, this hardly proves that she is Mussolini or that she's some sort of a fascist.
Why? Because nationalism is a very common label embraced by people all over the world.
Pretty much every leader of every country today, as in the past, is a nationalist.
Nationalism comes from the left and from the right.
Let's think about it. Fidel Castro was a nationalist.
Stalin was a nationalist.
Mandela was a nationalist.
Gandhi was a nationalist in India.
So being a nationalist hardly makes you right wing.
It hardly makes you a fascist.
People who say such things are uttering complete nonsense.
Now, in Italy... Georgia Maloney is described as centro-destra.
Centro-destra means centro-center, destra-right.
So center-right.
And her slogan, in fact her slogan reminded me a little bit of Mayra Flores in the Rio Grande Valley.
It's essentially God, family, and country.
And I told Debbie, we'll play a couple of clips or a clip from Georgia Maloney tomorrow on the podcast.
She basically talks about the fact, well, let me quote her.
I am Georgia.
She starts with her name.
I'm an individual. This is who I am.
I'm Georgia. I am a woman.
Not I identify as a woman.
I am a woman. I am a mother.
I am Italian.
I am Christian.
You will not take that away from me.
Think about this. What is fascist about saying any of this?
And yet, this is the rhetoric that has unnerved the Western media.
By the way, the Western media is so left-wing that, think of it this way, even though Georgia Maloney is centrodestra, slightly to the right, right of center, if you are on the far left as NPR is, as the New York Times is, as the BBC is, then from your perspective, somebody else who's center-right appears to be far-right.
And so, what I'm getting at is that the media's portrait of Georgia Maloney is more reflective of the media's position on the ideological spectrum than it is about Georgia Maloney.
Now, if Georgia Maloney was a true fascist, if she really was Mussolini, the left would be praising her to the sky.
Why? Because Mussolini came up as a Marxist.
He never, in fact, renounced fully his Marxism.
In fact, he remained a lifelong socialist.
He called himself, of course, a national socialist.
And in fact, in this sense, Mussolini's ideology is very similar to most of the people in the Western media.
Georgia Maloney, of course, is anti-socialist.
Now, she's not a rabid capitalist.
In fact, she attacks woke big business.
And she basically says that part of the strategy of destroying our individuality, destroying our patriotism, destroying our family values, destroying our Christianity, is to reduce us to becoming what she calls il numero, a number.
And if you're a number, think about it.
You're vulnerable to big business, which just treats you as a consumer, and you're also vulnerable to the state, which treats you as a pawn.
And so, Georgia Maloney says, we refuse to be a number for anybody.
We refuse to be a number for the state, but we also refuse to be a number for big business.
What's interesting in all these evocations of Mussolini, and as I looked on Twitter, I guess it was last night, Mussolini was trending.
And it occurred to me, very few people know, and in fact very few American textbooks say, that Mussolini...
I had a kind of mutual admiration society with FDR. FDR called Mussolini, quote, that admirable Italian gentleman.
Mussolini reviews FDR's book.
I think it was called Looking Forward in an Italian magazine.
And Mussolini goes, this book is fantastic.
I'm paraphrasing now. This guy's one of us.
He's a fascist. So this is all, of course, prior to World War II when the collision of national interests made Mussolini and FDR into enemies.
But my point is in the 1930s, in the late 20s and early 30s, when FDR first came to power, In 1932, he was a massive, he was a kind of a super fan of Mussolini.
In fact, he sent members of his brain trust, like Rexford Tugwell, to fascist Rome to study Italian fascism, which those men believed was more progressive than the New Deal.
Here's Rexford Tugwell, one of FDR's top advisors, talking about fascism.
It is the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen.
It makes me envious.
You had leftist intellectuals praising Mussolini as a left-winger.
Fascism was understood to be a phenomenon of the left.
And so the point I'm trying to make is all of this is now swept under the rug and hidden.
Mussolini is portrayed solely as a nationalist.
And the other part of Mussolini, which is that he was a socialist...
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Feel the difference. One of the things that we see from fashion brands, I'm thinking of brands like Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Eddie Bauer, Michael Kors, Victoria's Secret, is that these brands tend to identify with the woke left.
They tend to be on board with regard to diversity.
They have ads that look, they are very much multicultural, and in fact, traditional values are nowhere to be seen.
They also are completely on board with the climate agenda.
They're socially progressive.
This is the vibe.
This is the image that they put out for their products.
And therefore, I found it very interesting to read an article in, of all places, Vox, talking about a common practice that I didn't really realize was occurring, at least not to this extent.
Fashion brands regularly destroy hundreds of millions of dollars of their own products, unused.
Now, this came to light in Britain recently when the British luxury brand Burberry Acknowledged that it had destroyed $37 million worth of its own merchandise.
And the question is, why would Burberry do that?
And the answer is, to preserve its own exclusivity.
In other words, Burberry, if there was too much Burberry going around, Burberry scarves, Burberry shirts, then Burberry would be sort of cheapened in the mind of Burberry by the fact that lots of people are wearing Burberry.
Big deal! So in order to maintain Burberry as rare, they take their own shirts and destroy them.
They take their own scarves and burn them.
So shredding and burning are the two mechanisms by which Burberry gets rid of Burberry products.
It turns out this is common.
Louis Vuitton destroys Louis Vuitton luggage.
Nike destroys Nike shoes.
Eddie Bauer, Michael Kors destroy their own products.
This is amazing. And the thing to note about it is they're not destroying products that have been used, that have become scraps, or products that are defective in any way.
They're taking perfectly new, usable products and destroying them.
So this kind of conduct, first of all, is shocking at one level because there are poor people in the world who could certainly use another pair of Nikes.
These are clothes that other people can wear, that people need, and yet these companies are so indifferent To true human needs, that they go, in order to maintain the high retail price of these products, we've got to keep them scarce.
And so if we have overproduced them, and I think part of what's going on here is also that fashions change so rapidly.
So these guys make a bunch of products, And then they are required to come up with new products a few months later.
So what do you do with all the old products?
With the turnover in fashion, fashion these days is no longer just, you know, the fall season, the summer season, the winter season.
There's a kind of pressure on these companies to come up with new products every couple or three weeks.
And so they have large quantities of merchandise that they just go, get rid of it.
Just basically bury it, burn it, shred it, And try to compare the destructive behavior of these companies with their false image of conservation, of recycling, of paying attention to human needs, of watching out for the planet.
They don't care about the planet.
They don't care about human needs.
They care about their own price.
It may seem that if you have all these products and you haven't sold them, why don't you discount them?
You can't sell, let's say, for example, a Chanel bag for $3,000.
Well, maybe someone would buy it at $1,500 or $800.
Why doesn't Chanel do that?
And the answer is, from Chanel's point of view, they would be devaluing their brand.
If people suddenly realized they could buy Chanel bags for 50%, 40%, 30% of the full price of a bag, Chanel would lose some of its chic.
And so the insight that we derive from this is that luxury products have nothing to do with their actual value.
When you look at the, let's say a Chanel bag, and it's selling for $3,000, you might think, well, they're using the finest ingredients, the finest leather, the most sophisticated technology.
Nonsense.
The cost of that bag may be $100.
So when Chanel destroys a $3000 bag, they're not actually burning $3000.
They're burning $100.
And the reason they're burning $100 is to keep the price of the bag at $3,000.
They don't want people buying Chanel bags at $2,700 or $2,200 or $1,500 for that matter.
So these companies, what I'm saying is, are ruthlessly devoted to their own bottom line and their own exclusivity.
And their public image as somehow socially conscious, as being woke, is a mirage.
It's a charade.
We shouldn't fall for it.
We shouldn't believe a word of it.
To that degree, they're fakers who are putting on a kind of pretense of social virtue, even as they attentively pay attention to the one thing that truly matters to them, their own bottom line.
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Text to Nesht 91999.
I'm discussing the famous episode between Odysseus and the Cyclops.
And as you can imagine, over the years, and particularly in recent years and decades, left-wing scholars have tried to read this episode in a kind of anti-colonial way.
And this is no less true of my edition, which is translated by Emily Wilson, a progressive scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, in her introduction.
She talks about the fact that Odysseus is a sort of, she doesn't use this direct analogy, but a sort of a Columbus.
And he is out there trying to conquer strange lands, and he shows up uninvited at the island of the Cyclopes.
And then, of course, he puts out the eye of Polyphemus, and he takes off.
And Emily Wilson seems to suggest that this is, for the modern day reader, disturbing.
And she says that the Cyclopes are portrayed in a kind of negative light as if they're barbarians.
They don't live a normal, civilized lifestyle.
In fact, Odysseus does say that these are not civilized people.
And so she gives a sardonic reading that appears to blame Odysseus.
For mistreating, in the fashion of Columbus and then more generally Western civilization, the kind of native people who are falsely portrayed as primitive and barbarian.
There are some things I'd like to say about this before continuing our narrative.
One of them, first, is that while Odysseus does in fact show up uninvited, he shows up by chance.
He's not there to conquer anyone.
In fact, the Odyssey is a survival story.
Odysseus is just trying to get home.
Now, Columbus deliberately set out to explore.
I don't know if Columbus had the idea of settling the Americas.
That idea, of course, came to people after Columbus.
But there is some kind of analogy between Odysseus and Columbus, and I think the analogy actually works against Emily Wilson and against the anti-colonial reading.
First of all, Columbus initially was very well disposed toward the Native Americans.
In fact, the first people, the first natives he encountered, he described with extravagant praise.
And similarly, Odysseus, when he first lands, he actually prays a kind of a familiar prayer in the Odyssey.
He basically says, he prays to the gods that the people of this island will be favorable and that instead of treating him badly, they will give him good zanea.
They will give him gifts. And Odysseus approaches the Cyclopes that way.
It's only when the Cyclopes grabs two of Odysseus' men, slams their head against the ground, basically kills them and eats them, then Odysseus goes, well, you know what?
These people aren't quite as friendly as I had hoped.
And by the way, Columbus had the same experience.
When Columbus encountered initially the hospitable and friendly native peoples, he literally thought he was in the Garden of Eden.
He was, this place is beautiful, these people are wonderful, they're gentle, they're kind.
Later Columbus, and of course subsequent explorers, encountered the Caribs, who in fact were at least partially cannibals, who were much more mean-spirited, much more vicious, much more warlike than the original natives that Columbus encountered.
And so Columbus then began to respond more harshly.
This is when the Spaniards essentially began to draw their swords, and the kind of colonial enterprise, if you will, began...
I guess at that point.
Now, the Greeks, of course, haven't colonized Sicily, the so-called land of the Cyclopes.
Let's notice that in their dealings between Odysseus and the Cyclops, who has all the power?
The answer is the Cyclops.
The Cyclops is much bigger and stronger than Odysseus and his men combined.
The Cyclops brings a big stone in front of the cave and not all of Odysseus' men together can move it.
That's why Odysseus has to come up with a clever scheme Of blinding the cyclops and then the scheme of tricking him with the idea that my name is no man, no man is harming me.
I mean, Odysseus devises all that, but again, this is not a strategy of conquest.
It's a strategy of how can I get out of the cave so me and my men can get out of there.
Remember, Odysseus' sole goal is to escape.
So, since the Cyclops has all the power, Odysseus is really lucky to get out alive.
And for these reasons, I think that the anti-colonial reading of this episode is at best inadequate.
Yes, there are some interesting historical echoes, as I've tried to bring out myself.
But as a kind of trope for really understanding this episode, it falls short.
And this is a warning against us when we read ancient books.
We should actually try to put ourselves in their place instead of trying to put them in ours.
This is really, I think, the fallacy, the fallacy of projecting contemporary ideas onto ancient texts and trying to read them in our light instead of, the more, I think, sophisticated thing to do, to read ourselves in their light.
This is how we can truly learn from people and cultures and ideas that are different from our own.
Now, I'll talk about this in more detail next time.
But essentially, when Odysseus is leaving, he and his men are back on the ship.
And now I'm reading from Homer.
When I had gone as far as shouts can carry, I jeered.
The Cyclops is shouting at Odysseus in rage.
And Odysseus replies as follows.
Hey, you Cyclops!
Idiot! And Odysseus' men...
Basically tell him, don't tell the Cyclops who you are.
But Odysseus cannot contain himself, and Odysseus says this, Cyclops, if any mortal asks you how your eye was mutilated and made blind, tell them that Odysseus, the city sacker, Laertes' son, who lives in Ithaca, destroyed your sight.
Odysseus cannot resist his moment of kleos here.
He cannot resist a kind of gloating, and as we'll see, he immediately pays for it, because the Cyclops, as we'll find out next time, utters a terrible curse on Odysseus that actually turns out to be the reason why Poseidon, the god Poseidon, hates Odysseus, and turns out to be the reason for a lot of Odysseus' subsequent troubles.
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