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Sept. 28, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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PARTY POOPER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep423
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Coming up, I'm going to show how Liz Cheney has become a major party pooper, but in the end, her career is likely to end in a pile of poop.
In preparation for the midterms, the Republican leadership has come up with a commitment to America.
I'm going to tell you whether there's anything good in it.
Eric Metaxas is joining me.
We're going to talk about his call to action for American churches.
And I'll talk about Odysseus and his encounter with a sorceress named Circe.
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.
Liz Cheney has become, well, let's call her a real party pooper.
And what I mean by this is that she is now pooping not just over Trump, but all over the Republican Party in general.
She is pooping over Carrie Lake and Republican nominees all over the country.
And she doesn't seem to have a kind of enduring commitment to being a Republican at all.
In fact, she said recently that, quote, if he is the nominee, namely Trump, I won't be a Republican.
Now, let's think about why somebody would say that.
And you believe that Mr.
X would be the perfect person to be, let's say, head of the Southern Baptist Convention or be even the Pope if you're Catholic.
Would it make sense to say, well, if they decide to choose Francis as the Pope, I'm no longer going to be a Catholic?
Well... That really shows that your Catholicism is not really rooted in a kind of fidelity to Catholic principles, Catholic tradition, Catholic history.
Because if it were, you'd be like, well, it's unfortunate that we got this pope.
We could certainly do better.
But the church has been around for 2,000 years.
It's got enduring principles. My point is, the very fact that Cheney is talking like this suggests that something is up.
Now, if you listen to Cheney, She says things like, we have to step back from the abyss.
She says that there's a shift going on in our politics, the tectonic plates are shifting, and that means we all have a responsibility to say to ourselves, what are we going to do to make sure that our kids, you know, what it means to have a peaceful transfer of power.
Now, I think what she's coming back to here is the 2020 election to January 6th.
It seems that this woman has fixated on this.
But I think that the fixation itself needs an explanation.
Why be so fixated on something that was not, in a sense, a real thing?
The military strategist Edward Lutwak wrote an essay This is now several years ago, where he basically said that insurrections in the modern era don't really work.
In fact, he talks about the insurrection in Paris in 1968, where really there were hundreds of thousands, perhaps a couple of million, Frenchmen.
An insurrection from the left, by the way, to overthrow the French government.
And it just literally went nowhere.
And this was an effort to really do it.
And Ludwig's point is that in the modern era where the state has the kind of weaponry at its disposal that it does, ordinary citizens cannot by themselves overthrow the government.
It's not going to happen that way.
And that's worth kind of keeping in mind to give us some perspective because what it really shows is that...
Nobody with any sense thought, for one minute, the left is pretending when they act like this was an attempt to overthrow the government.
It actually wasn't.
Not only did no one going into the Capitol think that they were overthrowing the government, but nobody on the left even really believes that they were either.
And so, our rhetoric has taken on a kind of fictional quality.
Now, for... For Liz Cheney to essentially not only accept what the Biden administration is doing, the chaos they're perpetrating on every front, but to actually promote it by campaigning for more Democrats to secure the Biden hold on power, why would anybody who is a real Republican—and I don't just mean a rhino.
Liz Cheney, through most of her career, has not been a rhino—is it just the lesser evil?
And a lesser evil to what?
I think what's going on here is a twisted revenge plot on the part of the Cheney family.
They're like a mafia family.
Or to put it differently, they're like the Montagues and the Capulets.
And what gives the Montagues pleasure is to harm the Capulets and vice versa.
Debbie and I watch these kind of murder stories sometimes on television.
It's really a very...
I was going to say for entertainment or for distraction maybe is a better term.
But you discover that when people commit murder, their motives are really only three.
Money, sex, and a third, often overlooked, revenge.
What's interesting about revenge is that you don't seem to get anything out of it directly.
But what you do is you get the pleasure of hitting back.
And it turns out to be a very powerful motive.
And I think it's the motive that's driving the...
Driving Liz Cheney and the Cheney family.
And the effect of it, I think, interestingly enough, and this often happens with revenge, is you're trying to destroy somebody else and you end up destroying yourself.
So what happens is that here's Liz Cheney.
She's trying to poop over Trump.
She's trying to poop all over the Republican Party.
But I think it's her own career that's going to end up in a pile of poop.
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I want to comment on the House Republican leadership.
This is McCarthy and Steve Scalise, who's been on this podcast, and Elise Stefanik of New York.
And they have put forward...
One may say belatedly because this probably should have come a lot earlier, but nevertheless, it's coming in time for the midterms.
Something called the commitment to America.
Commitment to America. Now, if you have...
The sense of perspective here, you'll recognize as a kind of a similarity to something that Gingrich did in the period leading up to the 1994 midterm election.
Remember, Clinton was elected in 92.
And this was an anti-Clinton wave that the Republicans were able to ride.
Brilliantly, Gingrich was able to nationalize the midterm election.
Not something that's that easy to do with the contract with America.
I would say looking back on it, the contract with America was a mixed success.
It got some things accomplished.
In fact, to some degree, it put welfare reform at the front of its agenda.
It It even got Clinton kicking and screaming to sign welfare reform, and then later Clinton took credit for the effects of welfare reform.
But it was the Republicans who made him do it, and they did it themselves.
There were other things that the contract with America tried to do, a line item veto, a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, and those things ultimately faded.
They didn't work.
But it was a brilliant maneuver, and of course Gingrich was a marvelous articulator of it And I think with that in mind, we have this new crew, which is basically McCarthy, who apparently thinks he's a little bit of the new Gingrich.
Now, unfortunately, McCarthy doesn't have the charisma of Gingrich.
He doesn't have the intellectual firepower of Gingrich, who actually was an intellectual.
Gingrich was a college professor before he got into politics.
And With McCarthy, you know, I approach this with kind of a, well, I'm going to call it, you know, one cheer for the GOP plan.
The plan itself is not bad and has some key elements that are obviously very important.
One idea that they seem to have lifted right from this podcast, maybe I'm not saying I'm the only person who was saying this, is that use the power of the purse to defund the 87,000 IRS agents.
What's good about this is that not only is it a pledge to do it, but it's also a deterrent to people signing up for the IRS. Because think about it, I'm thinking of applying for a job with the IRS. Oh dear, you may want to think about that because if the GOP gets its way, they're not going to be paying your salary anymore.
Oh, well maybe I shouldn't apply.
Maybe I'll go do something else instead.
So this is a very important specific measure.
Now much of this commitment with America is not specifics.
There are some other specifics, and one of them that I approve of.
House Republicans will immediately ensure we hire 200,000 more police officers around the country.
In other words, far from defunding the police, we're going to refund the police.
This, of course, a direct response to a crime wave.
But by the way, it hasn't just swept Democratic cities.
We've seen a crime wave even in rural areas, even in Republican areas, not as bad as We're good to go.
They call it the kind of government accountability project.
They're going to put Merrick Garland on the hotspot.
I assume they're going to put Mayorkas on the hotspot.
They're going to put all these Biden officials on the hotspot, and they're not going to let them get away with it.
Again, this for me is a little bit vague, which is to say, and the one sort of elephant in the room, I should call it, elephant in the elephant's room, which is no mention about impeaching Biden, no mention about impeaching anybody.
Why not?
Why not? Why not?
There are plenty of ground.
It's not as if you're like, let's impeach him and then we'll have to think about why.
I could give you off the top of my head at least three separate grounds to impeach Biden.
What about just a direct pledge of an in-depth investigation into the corruption of the Biden crime family?
Let's just go into it.
Let's just look at it. Number two, what about an in-depth investigation of the 2020 election?
Let's just look at it.
Let's just go into it.
Third, what about an in-depth investigation into the border?
Because if you're openly flouting immigration laws, you deserve to be impeached from that.
You're destroying the boundaries of the United States.
Debbie was talking to me today, and we'll talk probably later this week on the podcast, about the fact other countries are just opening up their prisons, releasing all kinds of bad guys.
And those bad guys are being, where is their destination?
Destination America! So this is a horrific situation being willfully perpetrated by the Biden regime.
So the Republicans are like, you know, what worries me is that this is a posture, it's late in the game, it's a sort of elect us so we can, we seem to be sounding the right noises right before the election so we can do pretty much nothing if you put us in power.
So I can't say that I've got high hopes for this cast of characters.
I think we need a real reckoning inside of the GOP to fix this party, this slumbering, lazy, intellectually do-nothing, half-hearted, unimaginative, uncreative party that is unfortunately our only alternative to a kind of actively, conspiratorially, seditiously, destructively evil party that does have the one virtue on its own side that
it seems to know what it's doing.
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Feel the difference. I've been continuing to follow the shift of power that is now occurring in Italy, in part because I'm interested in Italy, but also because I see this happening throughout Europe.
We're seeing the rise of, essentially, the philosophy that Georgia Maloney represents, a philosophy that emphasizes fidelity to country, nationalism, patriotism.
A philosophy that emphasizes individualism, but individualism not seen as a kind of naked individualism, the individual, the state, that's all.
This is typically how some, not all, libertarians see it.
You've got to be for the individual and for libertarians any kind of collective, and they see They'll see the family as a collective.
They will see the local government as a collective.
They see states as collective.
They see even fidelity to a country as sort of subordinating your individuality.
But this is not the trend that we're seeing.
What Georgia Maloney represents is the idea that our individualism is nested in a series of other associations, some of which are chosen, but some of which are given.
Just as your genetic code is given, you didn't choose it.
Your parents are given.
Even your early social upbringing is given.
You didn't choose it. You had really very little control over it.
Your religious background is given.
Now, you can choose to reject it, but that's the religious culture in which you're raised.
And so your family is a given.
Your town is a given.
You were born there with those affiliations and those associations.
And your country is to a large degree a given.
Again, you can be as I am, as Debbie is.
We are immigrants. We've come from one country to another.
That can happen. But most Americans, of course, are born in America.
And they, in a sense, inherit a country.
Now, the left has tried to demonize all this, not just Georgia Maloney, but the broad movement behind it, a movement that, by the way, we see with Trump in America as somehow being fascist.
And the term fascism here is, you have to ask, well, where does it get its intellectual support?
How can people with a straight face, and remember, this is coming from Reuters, it's coming from the BBC, it's coming from Al Jazeera, it's coming from AAP, it's coming from the New York Times.
So it's not as if it's coming actually from all over the world, from the left, across the world.
And so they must think it's somewhat believable.
I think they think it's believable.
Not even so much because fascism is equated with nationalism.
I've talked previously on the podcast about why that's silly.
Nationalism comes in all stripes.
Nationalism comes from the left and from the right.
So it really can't be that.
But I think there's a wrong belief that fascism somehow inherently incorporates racism.
It does not. This may seem surprising.
Fascism, in fact, has nothing to do with racism.
And early fascism, and you can look here at Mussolini's Italy, let's remember Mussolini was the sort of inaugurator of the fascists, the father of modern fascism.
He came to power really nine years, or was it ten years, just about, before Hitler.
So Hitler was a kind of latecomer, if you will, to fascist rule.
And Mussolini was. I mean, he had some of the conventional prejudices of his own day.
But his fascism was not either racist, and it wasn't even anti-Semitic.
There were Jews in Mussolini's intellectual circle.
There were Jews in Mussolini's regime.
Mussolini later worked to save Jews in World War II. So the idea that somehow fascism is automatically racist is not true.
And then people think, well, obviously, you know, Dinesh, Georgia Maloney is anti-immigrant.
There's a lot of troubling rhetoric about immigrants.
Isn't that a hallmark of fascism?
And the answer is absolutely not.
Fascism has nothing to do with immigration.
Mussolini didn't deal with illegal immigrants.
That wasn't a problem in Italy in the 1920s or even the early 30s.
All these immigrants are showing up.
Not at all. Even with Hitler.
Immigration, per se, wasn't a problem.
Hitler had a big problem with the Jews.
But let's remember the Jews were Germans.
They lived in Germany. They weren't trying to sneak into Germany from some other place.
They were born in Germany.
What Hitler was trying to do is take people born in Germany...
Who by all accounts would be German citizens and get them out, segregate them, expel them, ultimately get rid of them.
So you may say that Hitler's rhetoric was not aimed at people from the outside.
Now Hitler had a plan for people on the outside.
His plan was basically to conquer their lands and incorporate them into Greater Germany.
So, if Hitler had an immigration policy, it was called, I'm going to conquer your country and make you a slave of the Germans.
But this had nothing to do, Hitler didn't build a wall, he wasn't trying to keep people out that way.
So, again, you have people talking today who think that simply by chanting fascism, racism, anti-immigration, they're making some kind of a historical point.
They're not. They're ignoramuses, they don't know anything about history, and what they're doing is using the kind of fake associations that have become a hallmark of the uneducated or the partially educated to try to score points, when in reality they're scoring no points at all.
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Guys, I'm always happy to welcome back to the podcast our friend, my friend, Eric Metaxas.
He's a fellow Salem radio and podcast host of the nationally syndicated daily radio show, The Eric Metaxas Show.
He's the number one New York Times bestselling author of Is Atheism Dead?
The new book, Letter to the American Church.
That's what we're going to talk about.
By the way, you can find him at ericmetaxas.com or metaxastalk.com.
Eric, welcome to the podcast.
You are a prolific guy.
I think we had you on, what, six weeks ago to talk about your last book.
But this is an urgent enterprise that you've undertaken, the new book, Letter to the American Church.
Talk first about why you felt this sense of urgency and what is it that you're trying to say here.
Thanks, Dinesh. There's really nobody who gets the urgency of where we are better than you do, so it's a joy to speak to you and to your audience.
We are in a battle.
We are in a war, an ideological war, but at its heart, a spiritual war.
And my contention in this book, I've never written a shorter book.
I've never written a book that I felt greater urgency about.
I've never written a book that I felt was more important than And I rushed this to publication because it's my contention, my horrible contention, that the silence of the American church is precisely the same as the silence of the German church in the early to mid-30s,
When the Nazis were on the rise, and it is precisely because of the silence of the German church, which I know from my research in my Bonhoeffer book, it is the silence of the church in Germany that led To the rise of evil and to horrors unimaginable to the people at that time.
So what I'm saying, genuinely, with no hyperbole, I cannot overstate it, is the silence of the church today on all of the issues surrounding us, cultural, political, is scandalous.
It is sinful.
It is leading to things evil.
It's genuinely similar, if not worse, than what the silence of the German church led to.
So this is a cry from the heart to beg my fellow Christians to take this very seriously.
The German church did not heed the voice of Bonhoeffer, and we saw what happened.
What I'm saying is the voice of Bonhoeffer speaks to the American church.
Today, will we hear what he has to say?
Eric, when people think about Nazism and the rise of Nazism, they tend to automatically start with the Holocaust.
They start with the 6 million, the gassing of the Jews, Dachau, Treblinka, and so on.
That, of course, did occur in the latter part of the war, the so-called Final Solution.
But I take it that the parallels that you're drawing, you're not saying that we're gassing Jews or anybody en masse in this country right now.
Not yet. That's kind of the point.
Nobody could conceive of that.
But what they did in the early 30s led directly to those horrors.
We don't know where they'll lead, but I guarantee you that they're leading to similar kinds of things if we don't speak up now.
But that's the point. They couldn't imagine it.
And that's why they were silent, because they thought, this can't happen here.
This could never happen here.
Many American Christians, if not most, think the same thing.
And worse than that, pastors and prominent Christian leaders are being silent, some of them even advocating silence.
Andy Stanley wrote a horrible book where he's advocating that the church not be political, Not understanding that that is not biblical.
We are called to speak truth under any circumstances, and if your enemies call it political, you wave it away.
You say what God tells you to say.
So we are in a tremendously similar situation.
Let's probe those similarities, if you will, because people forget, when we think about Jack Booting and we think about Nazis and the sort of guttural slogans and so on, we forget that Germany was the most civilized nation in Europe.
It had had a kind of renaissance from the late 19th century to the early 20th century.
Great scientists, great music, great philosophers were I mean, Germany was kind of making the rest of the world look stupid for about 50 years.
And the point is that the Nazis, far from claiming to be barbarians, claimed to be the true inheritors of this great tradition.
And this is part of what made Germans think, man, we have developed all the sophistication and education and knowledge and culture.
Surely this kind of thing can't happen here.
That's precisely the point.
It's hubris. It's arrogance.
It's blindness. It is our sin nature that says, we're different.
That could never happen here.
Let those hotheads get thrown into concentration camp.
Let them get arrested by the Gestapo and held for questioning.
I'm just going to keep my nose down, and I'm just going to profit off of whatever I can profit off of.
I just don't want to get in trouble.
I don't want to lose members of my church.
The fact of the matter is that There are people today who refuse to speak out because they say, well, that's not a gospel-related issue in the church.
They say, we're just going to talk about evangelism.
That's complete baloney.
There's no such thing. If you don't speak up when tremendous injustice is being perpetrated, when the FBI is raiding pro-life people, you don't even have to be pro-life.
You have to say, is this how we behave in America?
We're seeing everywhere we look examples of horrors But people are thinking, well, if it doesn't happen to me, maybe I'll keep my nose down and this will pass.
That's precisely what led to the nightmare of the rise of the Nazis and all that followed, and we are doing it here today.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, Eric, I want to ask you whether this problem that you are diagnosing very accurately, is it the function of just human cowardice, or is it the function of some kind of theological error, or both?
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Again, that's hometitlelock.com, code RADIO. hometitlelock.com, code RADIO. I'm back with my friend Eric Metaxas, author of a very important new book that I urge you to check out.
It's called Letter to the American Church.
You can find out more at ericmetaxas.com or metaxastalk.com.
Eric, we're talking about the fact that you've got pastors who not only abstain From engaging the issues of today, the very important moral issues of today, but they have now come up with a kind of apologia for abstinence, and their apologia is that we cannot contaminate the Christian message by getting it into the sort of muck and mire of politics.
We have to be above that.
We've got to focus on the gospel and not on ideology.
And of course, there has also been a specific critique of Christian nationalism.
I've seen a bunch of memes.
Christian nationalism is not Christian.
And I know my mind flashes back to, wait a minute, if nationalism is somehow an unbiblical principle...
I mean, doesn't the Old Testament talk about the Israelites as a nation, as a people?
The idea of attachment to one's own tribe is really what modern nationalism is all about.
So talk a little bit about what is motivating this abstinence on the part of the pastors, and second of all, what specifically do you say about the Christian nationalism bugaboo?
Right. Well, first of all, yes.
Why are people being silent?
Bonhoeffer, I quote him in the book, he was disgusted.
He saw horrors happening and he saw the church having quote unquote, theologically based objections.
He said, which is nothing but fear.
That was his gracious way of saying nothing but cowardice because the theologically based objections were garbage.
They were poor theology.
They were wrong theology.
He exegetes it in many of the sermons he gave, and specifically in his book, A Cost of Discipleship.
And I do the same in this book, try to explain what are the errors, what are the lies or the half-truths that people have bought into, for example, that it's all about faith.
Well, you say, well, is the devil speaking?
What do you mean faith? Cheap faith, foolish faith, or actual faith?
Because the scripture says, faith without works is dead.
So this idea that you can toss out a term, oh, it's just about what I believe.
I don't need to act. I don't need to get involved.
That's precisely the opposite of what the scripture says from the beginning to the end.
Bonhoeffer talks about the term cheap Grace.
So there are all these terms that Christians, just as the Pharisees did when they criticized Jesus, they throw out these theological terms.
God is not fooled.
He sees our hearts.
He sees our lack of...
There's a scripture, obedience is better than sacrifice.
When God calls you to do something and you say, well, I'm not going to do that, but I'll do this, or I'm just going to preach the gospel.
And the question is, is that what I'm asking you to do?
What am I asking you to do?
Because the Lord cares more about souls than any evangelist ever could.
So this idea that we're supposed to just stick to these religious things, just as preaching the gospel, when people are suffering horrors, whether in Germany, whether today in America, whether they are in the future going to suffer horrors because of my silence, God says, do not be silent, speak up.
You know that if you care about blacks in America, you will openly condemn Black Lives Matter and critical race theory.
Why? Because you love your fellow Americans who are Black.
If you care about the poor and you say, well, I don't want to talk about socialism or don't want to Don't want to be political and talk about that versus this.
God says, I'm calling you to speak truth.
And by the way, you're not in first century.
You're not living in the first century.
You're in America where you've been given this gift of freedom and liberty and self-government.
This is a gift which you must exercise.
It's your duty to exercise this and to have some flimsy theological objection that, well, we're members of the kingdom of God.
And that, you know, my citizenship in America is secondary.
You can chew gum and walk at the same time.
And it is an offense to God to suggest that I can only do this.
I can only speak on these issues.
Evil is evil. Bonhoeffer spoke against evil.
Wilberforce spoke against the slave trade.
We have Christians throughout history condemning evil And people in their day said the same thing that some of these pious Christian leaders are saying today.
Well, that's not a gospel related issue.
Don't bring up slavery. You may have some slave traders in your audience who may be offended and you just want to draw them to the gospel.
Well, what dead gospel are you drawing them toward if you're not willing to speak up for the Jews?
For the enslaved Africans.
Today, the transgender madness is destroying young lives.
If you don't speak up from this, from the pulpit or wherever you have it, you think God will not hold you accountable?
Are you not your brother's keeper and your sister's keeper who are suffering because of this?
And because of the innumerable evils around us, are you not willing to speak up?
So when people say Christian nationalism, Dinesh, you have to understand and I have to understand everyone has to know They have no argument.
They use these words, you're a racist, you're this, you're a Christian nationalist, you're a Trumpist.
Why? They simply want to silence these voices of truth.
And I have to say, the church has participated, has allowed itself to be silenced by saying, oh, I don't want to be political, sorry.
Oh, I don't want to be a Christian nationalist, sorry.
We have to push back with everything we have and we have to ignore all of this preposterous name calling.
I'd laugh and walk away when somebody brings up Christian nationalism.
They reveal their ignorance to me instantly when they bring that up as if that's the problem.
I think what you're saying, Eric, is that this is an urgent message for a precarious time.
I mean, I'm assuming that if Bonhoeffer lived, let's just say, in 1890, his message would not be as important as it would be in the early 1930s.
And I think what you're saying is this is not a normal time in America.
So although pastors should engage with the culture...
Always, there's a particular urgency now for them to do it.
It's great, Eric. I'm really looking forward to reading this book, Letter to the American Church.
Guys, check it out at ericmetaxas.com.
Eric, thanks, as always, for being on the podcast.
My privilege. Thanks, Dinesh.
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In recent years, we've heard from the left about the term Latinx.
And this is a term that did not develop in the Hispanic or Latino community at all.
It is a term that was coined by the gay and LGBTQ activists.
Who decided that that is what the Latino and Hispanic people need to be called from here on.
So let's digest that for a moment.
You have an understanding in modern American society that every group has a right to name itself.
Certainly that's been true.
Let's take the example of blacks.
If I look at just the time that I've been in the United States over 40 years, blacks have, you can almost say, changed their name about four times.
In the 50s and early 60s, it was not uncommon to refer to blacks as, quote, colored, colored people.
And amusingly, about 30 years later, I saw the term, and I saw blacks using the term, people of color.
So colored people, now it's the other way around.
It's not colored people, it's people of color.
In between, we're African American.
No, no, no, we're Afro-American.
No, we don't like the African connection.
We're black. We're black Americans.
Call us blacks. And so, but throughout this metamorphosis from one name to the other, it was understood that it's blacks who get to decide how they want to be called, and the rest of us will call them that.
It's kind of like an individual with a name.
Don't call me Karen, my name is Karen.
Or I spell it C-A-R-Y-N. And so I just want to ponder for a moment the strangeness of LGBTQ activists deciding we're going to rename the Hispanic community.
We don't like the fact that their name seems to be gendered.
Latino, Latina.
We want gender fluidity, so you know what, guys?
You're now Latinx.
Now, interestingly, there's an article by...
A left-winger, Melissa Ochoa, Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at St.
Louis University. And I think she's realized that this name is very damaging to the left.
And that it's actually contributing to the exodus of Hispanics from the left and from the Democratic Party.
And so she has this article in Salon.
Salon, which, by the way, had an article...
Gosh, several months ago now, talking about the fact that we must use Latinx.
And now they go in the opposite direction with this article.
Stop using Latinx if you want to really be inclusive.
Now, interestingly, this progressive professor, Melissa Ochoa, doesn't really hammer the point home.
She doesn't basically make the point, the obvious point.
Listen, where does one group get the chutzpah?
Where do you get off telling another whole ethnic group...
That this is going to be your name that we have come up with, whether you like it or not.
Rather, she plants her argument on kind of, I would call it safer ground, duller ground.
She basically says, listen, let's just look around and see how many people want to use the name Latinx.
And she says, she talks about the, she goes, even though Academics use it all the time.
Of course, in deference to the woke sensibilities of the left.
Even though Merriam-Webster added it to the dictionary in 2018, she goes the Pew Research study and a bunch of other sources show...
That only a very small percentage of Latinos and Latinas want to use Latinx.
And then she goes on to point out something actually I didn't know, and that is in other countries, particularly Spanish-speaking countries, The term Latinx has been not only not accepted, it's been roundly rejected.
In fact, she says Argentina and Spain have both issued public statements from their government banning the use of Latinx or any gender-neutral variant.
These governments have basically said the Spanish language is gendered.
And so, this notion of coming up with a sort of non-gender, or let's call it transgender, transgender here meaning transcending gender, is nonsense, and we have no tolerance for it.
And so, Melissa Ochoa goes on to argue that, look, when you really look at the way Latinos and Latinas are, They don't use this term.
They prefer Hispanic, some prefer Latino, Latina.
She goes, actually, in a lot of other countries, people prefer the national label.
They prefer, I'm Mexicano, I'm Argentino.
But they're not Mexican-ex or Argentin-ex.
And... And so basically, Melissa Ochoa is making an appeal from the left to the left to start moving away.
She's basically saying this project of renaming the Hispanics has failed.
And, you know, part of what she seems to be saying is we can keep doing it, but the practical effects will be destructive for us.
More and more people are going to shy away from us.
And so she's calling for an abandonment of Latinx and calling for The left to stop pushing this alien term on people who really don't want it.
You know, we have hurricanes in this country, but we have the resources to cope with them.
In many other places, they don't.
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Odysseus escapes from the land of the giants called the Lestragonians, but the giants are able to pummel the ships with boulders, kill a lot of Odysseus' men.
Basically, Odysseus escapes just with one ship, so he's down to one ship.
And this is where, disoriented, battered by the winds and by the sea, He lands, the ship lands at an island, which turns out to be the island of the sorceress, the witch, the enchantress named Circe.
Now, this is perhaps the second most famous episode in Odysseus' adventures after the episode with the Cyclops and the Cyclopes.
So, what happens here is that Odysseus I think?
And another guy named Eurylochus takes the rest of Odysseus' men and they go to the palace.
Now Eurylochus, fortunately for him, decides to hide outside and watch while the men go into the palace.
But as soon as Circe sees them, She does what Circe is capable of doing.
She has a kind of ability to cast a spell on you, to enchant you in such a way that she turns human beings into animals.
And so what she does is she just turns Odysseus' men, the ones that enter the palace, into pigs.
And so Eurylochus comes running back horrified to the ship, reports to Odysseus, hey, this is what happened.
What can we do?
And Odysseus is like, wow, I better go myself and see if I can fix the situation.
Well, how's he going to fix the situation?
So Odysseus is cautiously approaching the palace, trying to think of what he can do.
And remember, when a human being goes up against some kind of a goddess, a being with spiritual powers, there's a great limit, even for a crafty character like Odysseus.
Now, Odysseus is approached by the god Hermes on his way to Circe's palace, and Hermes says to Odysseus, It's a kind of a plant with magical properties, and it will protect you from Hermes' spells.
So, in other words, this is a kind of plant that works as a counterspell.
And so, as long as Odysseus is in possession of the plant, Hermes can't So, in goes Odysseus into the palace, and sure enough, Circe immediately tries to enchant him, tries to put a spell on him, tries to convert him into a pig.
But Odysseus has the plant that provides protection.
And so Circe, to her great frustration and disappointment, realizes that this is not going to work.
She's not going to be able to turn Odysseus into an animal.
And so she basically says to Odysseus, Okay, well, now it's time for us to go to bed.
And so Odysseus obliges.
And not only does he oblige, but as we will discover...
Odysseus stays seemingly quite happily with Circe in her palace on that island for one year.
In fact, he stays there for so long that at the end of the year, Odysseus' men have got to tell him, Hey, Odysseus, enough!
You know, it's time for us to get home.
That's why we're on our way home, remember?
And so you have this remarkable episode in Circe's island, which raises all kinds of interesting questions.
And I... I think I'm going to address tomorrow the remarkable sexual double standard that we see in the Odyssey, and by the way, also in the Iliad, where women are expected to be faithful, men are fighting over their concubines, crusades. And now coming to the Odyssey, here's Odysseus.
He takes up with Circe.
He takes up with Calypso.
And yet, Penelope is expected to be unwaveringly faithful to him.
So what's going on here?
I'll discuss this next time.
But for now, what I want to say is that the different kind of attractive, appealing, seductive women that we're seeing one after the other, certainly Circe, later Calypso.
Now we've already been introduced to Calypso, but in the chronology of the narrative, Calypso comes later.
And then even in her own way, Nausicaa.
Nausicaa, the princess of the Fae Aekeans, is not an enchantress.
She is not kind of, quote, making the moves on Odysseus in the way that Calypso and Circe both do.
By the way, they are both the kind of, you could say, sexual initiators.
They're the ones who propose Odysseus complies.
And in the case of Calypso, he is somewhat, you can say, forced to do it because he's a captive of On the island.
But nevertheless, I think what Homer's getting at here is that in the narrative, all these women are temptations.
They are distractions.
They are ways of keeping Odysseus from doing what he should be doing, which is getting home to Ithaca, getting home to his own family, getting back to his legitimate wife.
And so, you have Calypso, who tries to get Odysseus to stay Circe here, who tries to get him to stay.
Nausicaa, who tries to get him to marry her, or at least harbors that intention, or that thought crosses her mind.
And all of these represent obstacles for Odysseus in his act of Nostos.
Nostos here meaning homecoming, which is the great theme of the Odyssey.
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