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Sept. 29, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:28
AFFIRMATIVE INJUSTICE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep424
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
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Coming up, I'm gonna look at the important cases coming up before the Supreme Court, including one on voting rights and another on affirmative action.
I'll explore the possibility that Elon Musk could partner with the video platform Rumble or even buy Rumble.
An FBI whistleblower?
A rare thing these days.
No wonder the FBI is trying to stamp out these truth-tellers.
And taking a cue from the newly elected Italian Prime Minister, Giorgio Maloney, I'm going to introduce the whimsical, very interesting philosophy of G.K. Chesterton.
and this is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
At a time when things are going, well, very badly because of the Biden regime, And, or as Debbie calls him, President Biden.
Using, of course, her fingers to put quotation marks.
This guy is a wrecking ball.
He's a human disaster.
And he might be comatose and he might be out of it.
But certainly the ring of people around him, together, they're causing a lot of carnage.
And so we look around for things that are going well, things that are going better, things that we can be hopeful about.
And one of those things is the Supreme Court.
The court has come into its own.
It is now, it seems, a solid conservative majority at the court.
And a majority with a certain comfortable margin.
Now, the court was precariously balanced in the middle with Roberts as the swing justice.
And while Roberts does have conservative leanings, I think that's the key word, leanings.
And so let's just say that out of 10 cases, we could count on Roberts, maybe 6 out of 10, which means that the court was slightly tipped in a rightward direction, but only slightly.
And this, by the way, after conservatives have had the bulk of nominees to the court over the past 30 years.
So this has been a project long in the making, frustratingly slow in the realization, but I'm happy to say that now we do have a conservative court.
Not to say we don't have a swing justice, but who's the swing justice?
Believe it or not, it's none other than Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh is the swing justice.
And Kavanaugh, by the way, has been reliably conservative.
What he does, he does seem to give a little bit of rhetorical comfort to the liberals.
And his rhetorical comfort is basically saying, we, the right-wing court, have decided to go this far, but not any further.
So he always takes the trouble to point out what the court did not decide, giving a certain amount of at least very modest solace to the liberals.
And here in a recent article is the legal scholar Adam Feldman.
Adam Feldman is not happy about this, but he's describing it in a kind of a funny way.
He goes, Kavanaugh is the weak link, but he goes, even the weakest link on the right is still pretty far to the right.
Case in point is in the abortion decision, Dobbs' decision, where Kavanaugh basically votes with the majority.
Goodbye, Roe v. Wade.
But in his opinion, he writes kind of his own concurring opinion, and he says, look, you know, we're dispatching the abortion decision to the states, but...
We're not telling you that you can't travel out of state and get an abortion.
So he's stating something that is actually obvious.
But he goes out of his way to say it as if almost in a reassuring tone.
Like, look, we're not outlawing abortion nationwide.
Even people in red states or in states that restrict or outlaw abortion will be able to get an abortion.
Of course, in order to do that, they're going to have to go to a state that permits it.
All right. I want to talk about a couple of really big cases that are coming up this fall.
Cases that are, well, I don't know if they're of comparable significance to Dobbs.
In some ways, they are. They're in other areas.
The first one is voting rights.
And now, the Supreme Court appeared to be moving against us when North Carolina Republicans made an emergency appeal to the court and basically said that, look, judges in North Carolina and at the appellate level are blocking us from being able to redistrict in North Carolina.
And they're just declaring that our redistricting is a disadvantage as Democrats, so they're not going to stand for it.
But since it is within the legislative authority at the state level to draw these districts, what's the big deal?
We're doing what we are constitutionally empowered to do.
We can draw districts. The Democrats draw districts in blue states.
And the Supreme Court refused that emergency request.
The court did take the case for a full hearing coming up this fall.
And the reason that's significant is if they granted the emergency request, it would only apply to North Carolina.
But by taking the case, in some ways, they're setting us up for a much bigger win.
And a bigger win is a nationwide declaration or interpretation of the Constitution that basically says that the Authority for determining local elections.
The authority for conducting an election, drawing the district, setting up the rules that govern the election.
By the way, we're not just talking about local elections or state elections.
We're also talking about all elections, including presidential elections at the national level as well.
This authority resides with the legislature of the states.
Now, the left is trying to...
It's warning that this is dangerous and so undangerous.
This is actually in the Constitution and the way that it was originally done.
So this would be nothing more than a restoration.
The other important case, which I'm just going to touch upon, is the affirmative action case.
We have had racial preferences embedded in our law really going back now 40 years.
It's reached a terrible point where even though the 14th Amendment talks about equal rights under the law, even though the Civil Rights Acts, and we're talking about the Civil Rights Act and then supplemented by the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Bill, all of these laws are written in non-discriminatory language.
You cannot discriminate based on race.
Weirdly, they have been interpreted to mean that you can and must discriminate based upon race.
And this is not simply some kind of intellectual interpretation.
You have practices throughout the country at the level of schools, at the level of university admissions, at the level of graduate schools.
In the assignment of scholarships and awards, in job hiring, sometimes in job promotion, in government contracting.
So racial preferences have become omnipresent in our society, and they need to be rooted out.
And so these important cases, there really are two, a Harvard case, a University of North Carolina case, before the Supreme Court, offer an opportunity to take on affirmative action, To recognize that affirmative action is actually affirmative injustice.
And perhaps, let us hope to get rid of it.
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I want to talk about a possible, potential partnership between the world's richest man, Elon Musk, and the terrific video platform, the alternative to YouTube, called Rumble.
Now full disclosure, Debbie and I love Rumble.
The people at Rumble came to me early on as they went to Bongino and a couple of others and they basically said help us to build out this platform.
And we did.
Rumble began to grow rapidly.
We began to post content on Rumble.
Subsequently, we were invited to invest in Rumble, which we had.
So I'm kind of letting you know that I have a stake.
Or an interest in Rumble.
It's not going to affect anything I'm about to say, which is just descriptive.
But nevertheless, Rumble has grown from a relatively small platform, created, by the way, by a Canadian named Chris Pavlovsky.
And Chris's original idea was to create a platform that would help small content creators, as opposed to the Big content creators that get enormous preferences at YouTube.
And so it wasn't set up ideologically, but Chris is a free speech guy, and it's a real free speech platform.
By the way, if you're not on Rumble, you should be.
Set up a Rumble account.
Rumble is going places, and you can find a lot of my content on Rumble.
Now, there was recently a very interesting exchange.
It all started when the commentator, Russell Brand, was kicked off of, censored on YouTube.
And he was furious.
It was over COVID and over the vaccines.
And basically, Russell Brand says, I'm moving to Rumble.
I'm going to put all my content up on Rumble.
And so Elon Musk kind of weighed in and basically said that, you know, it was very interesting.
He was endorsing the free speech approach of Russell Brand.
And then Dan Bongino waited and basically said, hey Elon, it would be great if you and Rumble got together.
It would be, as Bongino puts it, a force multiplier, because Rumble is a real free speech platform.
And of course, Elon Musk has the resources to essentially take Rumble and make it into a kind of rocket, perhaps one that could even soar past YouTube.
Now Elon Musk somewhat understatedly replies to Bongino, I'm a little preoccupied RN.
RN, I guess, is short for right now.
And I think Elon Musk is referring, of course, to the ongoing litigation between him and Twitter.
But Chris Pavlovsky weighs in.
And says, hey, I founded Rumble and I'd love to work with you, Elon Musk.
And Elon Musk basically says, maybe worth talking at some point.
So Elon Musk here signaling his willingness to have a conversation.
So, look, I'm not implying that there is an impending marriage between Elon Musk and Rumble.
All I'm saying is that they have sort of...
Connected on Tinder, if you will.
They're trying to set up their first date.
So not much has happened.
But the prospect, to me, is really exciting.
Why? Because right now, all of us who are trying to put content out there widely, we have to live with these horrific censorship platforms.
And the worst are YouTube, by the way, owned by Google.
And Facebook.
Twitter is really not as bad.
And I mean, Twitter has been known to restrict people and ban them, and they haven't stopped.
It's not that they're out of the censorship business.
But by contrast with YouTube and Facebook, which are huge, the new platforms are relatively small.
They're going to grow, but it's going to take time to grow.
It took time for Twitter and YouTube and Facebook to grow.
But Rumble is the fastest growing of all the platforms.
In fact, my understanding right now, I think last I'd heard from several months ago, Rumble was at 44 million users.
I saw recently in an article, they're up to 70 some million users.
So this is very good news.
Again, there's a distance to go before they catch up with YouTube.
But think of what Elon Musk could do with a platform like Rumble.
And I guess the point that Bongino is making and Pavlovsky, too, is, hey, listen, you know, if Twitter is sort of going to be misleading you and populating its numbers with bots and giving false information, and you don't, you really don't want to go in the Twitter direction, well, you know what?
You might consider going in the rumble direction.
You might find that to be more hospitable ground, ground where you can work along with Pawlowski to build something that is truly lasting and important.
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You know you're in a living in a weird time and a distorted phase of the culture when you can see in the media all kinds of people bashing FBI whistleblowers.
I mean did you think you'd live to see this?
You'd have FBI whistleblowers who are telling what's going on on the inside of this top police agency, and the media is beating up, not on the FBI, but on the whistleblowers.
Wow. So we've come a long way since the 1960s when there were all these left-wing investigations of the FBI, of the CIA. Whistleblowers were hailed as heroes.
They were brought forward.
They were treated as truth-tellers, which in many cases, of course, they are.
And I want to focus on one of those FBI, a real hero, but someone who's not getting the hero's treatment.
So this is a guy named Steve Friend.
He's an FBI special agent.
And this guy noticed that something funny was going on in the FBI. I mean, he could see it in the cases that he dealt with directly.
He's a 12-year veteran of the FBI. He's a SWAT team member.
And he has been suspended, stripped of his gun and badge, escorted out of the FBI office in Daytona Beach for what?
Basically for blowing the whistle on the FBI. Now...
Let's look at why Steve Friend is taking such a risk.
He's taking a risk of basically blowing up his career, a career that has meant a lot to him.
He's the father of two small children.
And as I mentioned, he's been over a decade with the FBI. So why would he do that?
Well, the reason he's doing it is because he is showing Giving direct, first-hand information about how this agency has gone rogue.
How the agency has become part of the bad guys, if you will, and not to be trusted.
This is very important.
Not to be trusted. Now, this fellow friend makes the point that he didn't vote for Trump.
He's not speaking out as a Trump supporter, but he's speaking out as somebody who has seen what the FBI has become and what it's doing.
Multiple violations, as he puts it, of FBI policy.
First of all, he says he has been removed from a number of active investigations into child sex trafficking and human trafficking to work on January 6th.
He says that he was told by the higher-ups, we're not so worried about the child trafficking and the human trafficking.
Domestic terrorism is a bigger priority January 6th.
So think about it. Guys, many of them peaceful, who went into the Capitol because the door was open and nobody said anything otherwise, these have become the real threat, not the human traffickers.
So Steve Friend is blowing the whistle on this.
Think of how huge this is and how important this information is to Republicans, particularly if Republicans take the House and or the Senate.
They can and need to go nuts over all this.
Number two, Steve Friend points out that the FBI is playing games in order to try to show that domestic terrorism is a problem nationwide.
They're not treating the 800 January 6 cases as all in D.C. Because if they're all in D.C., People will think, well, whatever you think of January 6th, that was one event.
That was an event that occurred, well, as it turns out now, a year and a half ago, in one place, maybe motivated by the passion of the time.
But no, what the FBI is doing is they are decentralizing all the cases to make it look like some guy who was involved in January 6th from Ohio.
Oh, domestic terrorism in Ohio.
Some other guy was involved in January 6th from Montana.
Domestic terrorism in Montana.
They're trying to make it look like there is an upsurge of domestic terrorism all over the country because there are, you know, insurgents over here and insurgents over there, even though they're talking all about the same singular event.
So this is a kind of FBI disguise of the way that their cases are organized to make it look, to give the false impression to the public, and to also plant in the media, which is all too willing to brazenly lie, that this is somehow a nationwide problem that they're dealing with.
He also points out, Steve Friend does, that the FBI has ordered its officials to go and visit, which is to say bang on the doors of, people who were in Washington, D.C. on January 6th.
But didn't go into the Capitol.
We're not in any restricted property.
In other words, we're acting completely lawfully and within their First Amendment rights.
And the idea is not that the FBI has the authority to arrest them, because arrest them for what?
But harass them.
Go to their homes, start asking them questions, scare them, scare their wives, scare their kids.
And so there is underway, on the part of the FBI, according to Steve Friend, an active operation to sort of bully Trump supporters.
And again, I want to make it clear, these aren't even Trump supporters that entered the restricted precincts of the Capitol.
We're talking about people who are merely in D.C. And finally, Steve Friend points out that the FBI, in a very sneaky move, has taken an area of the Capitol that was not previously considered to be restricted and And extended the boundary of, quote, restricted space.
So anyone who's in that area, who's actually lawful, is nevertheless now counted as someone who was in restricted areas.
So this is the point. The FBI is trying to widen the net.
It's almost like, you know, you have a bank...
And you have an area that is considered the property of the bank.
You're not supposed to be within that property.
Somebody is not in that property.
But you know what? Let's draw a wider circumference and include them so it now seems like they are on restricted terra.
So this is just very bad stuff.
And this is also, by the way, retroactively changing what is said to be restricted so you can go after people who are actually not acting unlawfully at all.
So these whistleblowers are vital to getting information on the FBI, but getting information is only the first step.
The Republican goal should be really clear, and that is not reform, but dismantle, Take down, bring to the ground the FBI as an institution.
If it needs to be rebuilt, if is the question, it can be rebuilt separately from the ground up.
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In her viral video talking about what she believes and stands for and why she's running and really on what basis she was elected the new Prime Minister of Italy, Georgia Maloney quoted G.K. Chesterton.
This in itself is interesting.
She didn't, you know, quote Mussolini or any of the early fascists.
She quoted a British essayist and thinker and writer and in fact a Christian, specifically Catholic, apologist and a kind of literary and art critic.
Actually, marvelous personality.
And I thought I would use the occasion to, well, start with Georgia Maloney's quote.
She quotes Chesterton saying this,"...fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four.
Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer." So what is Georgia Maloney doing here?
Why is she quoting this?
Well, she's quoting Chesterton to say that we are living in such a strange time.
And by the way, Chesterton predicts this writing, as it turns out, close to 100 years ago, in which the everyday reality that everybody knows to be true will be called into question.
Suddenly, the simple distinction between male and female, a distinction that is not, of course, confined to the human species, but occurs throughout the animal kingdom, this distinction will somehow be erased, obliterated, treated as something of a, quote, social construct, as if to say that boys and girls are different just because doctors started labeling them differently.
So that's why Georgia Maloney invokes Chesterton.
But I thought, wow, G.K. Chesterton, that's a voice, in a sense, from my past.
And what I mean is, this is a writer and a thinker that I read pretty avidly when I was in my 20s.
And was quite influenced by Chesterton.
And of course, Chesterton is not a systematic thinker or a systematic philosopher.
But what he is is a brilliant essayist with a flair for...
The insightful, pungent observation that is so true that it makes you gasp.
I mean, it makes you catch yourself and really think about it.
And we need that today.
We need this kind of pungent observation that makes you go, wow, that is so true, and makes you, in a sense, work to excavate the full meaning of what Chesterton is able to so beautifully capture, very often in just a line or two.
Chesterton, here he's talking about, he's making the point that I think we we would do well to think about.
A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense has really become very uncommon.
It's supposed to be common sense but it's become uncommon.
Straightforward ideas appear strange or unfamiliar and any thought that does not follow the conventional curve or twist is supposed to be a sort of joke.
Let's think about that for a moment.
Here's Chesterton on writing about tradition.
And look at the originality of how he puts it.
Tradition is only democracy extended through time.
It is the democracy of the dead.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
I mean, this is writing of a very high order because it is, first of all, it contains wry English-style witticism.
In other words, think of all the people alive today.
It seems like a lot of people.
But... How much is it compared to all the people who have ever lived?
Well, it turns out that in any given town, for example, the 100,000 or 300,000 or even a million people in that town are much fewer than the number of people who have ever lived in that town.
And so what you have here is Chesterton basically saying that when people are traditional, when people are following an established Let's call it old way of doing things.
He goes, you know, you treat them as if they're somehow living in the past.
They're sort of, they don't understand modernity.
They don't understand we now live in a democratic society.
And Chesterton is like, well, let's think of tradition as democracy extended through the ages.
Because the accumulated wisdom of people through many decades and even centuries is likely to be greater than the opinion of a bunch of people who happen to be just in a particular place or a particular room at a given time.
Now, Chesterton, of course, is aware When he defends tradition, that there are good and bad traditions.
Not all traditions are good.
So Chesterton is in no way saying that just because something is traditional, we should follow it.
But what he is saying is that there are a lot of things that have become established as traditions.
That are valuable because of the embedded and encoded knowledge that has the practical knowledge that is now part of those institutions and those practices and they are deserving of a certain kind of legitimate human respect.
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I'm continuing my, well, all too brief introduction to the writing and the witticisms and the insight of the British essayist and writer of the early part of the first half of the 20th century, G.K. Chesterton.
Chesterton He's best known both for his literary essays and his Christian apologetics.
He has a very interesting book called Orthodoxy.
He also wrote a very short book on Thomas Aquinas that I read a long time ago.
But here all I want to do is talk about some of Chesterton's lines and how they make us think about things that are important to us now.
Here's Chesterton. Hell once rebelled against heaven.
But in this world, heaven is rebelling against hell.
So, what's Chesterton saying here?
He's like, well, if you look at the beginning of things, there was a kind of revolt of Satan and his angels in heaven.
But see, heaven is the good place.
And so the revolt comes from the bad guys.
And But then Chesterton adds, and this is the surprising turn of the way he writes, but in this world, Heaven is rebelling against hell.
In other words, but in this world, the bad guys have an extraordinary amount of sway and power.
I mean, we can look at that politically in terms of Biden, but I think he's talking more broadly that there's just an awful lot of evil in the world.
And the good people seem to be embattled in the mind.
The good people have to mount the revolt against the evil that has become consolidated in the world.
Chesterton was on to the feminists.
The feminists of his time were the early feminists, and they were all about marching out of the home and going to work.
And of course, many of the jobs available in those days were secretarial.
And so here's Chesterton.
10 million young women in England rose to their feet with the cry, we will not be dictated to, and proceeded to become stenographers.
So that's Chesterton making an almost wry, admittedly sarcastic, but also kind of telling.
Because what Chesterton is basically saying is you're getting out of your family Which involves your own kids, your own home, your own, the immediate circle of your life.
And for what?
I mean, you're now basically sitting in an office with a typewriter and banging out what some guy is, you know, dictating a letter or talking about a contract or some sort of a deal.
And so Chesterton is just raising the question, what sort of liberation is that?
Here is Chesterton on a different occasion.
An open mind like an open mouth exists for one purpose.
To close it on something solid.
Wow, what an interesting observation.
Chesterton is saying, if he's taking on something that we are all taught when we show up in liberal arts colleges, you've got to have an open mind.
You don't want to make up your mind finally.
You want to make up your mind only provisionally, because you always want to be open to new types of evidence that come in.
And Chesterton is saying, well, yes, but...
Isn't it true that open-mindedness itself is a kind of technique?
It's a procedure.
It is a means to an end.
Well, what is the end? Is the end open-mindedness by itself?
He almost gives you the idea that an open mind, because he compares it to an open mouth, I mean, when you have an open mouth, the food basically falls out.
And similarly with an open mind, a kind of, you may say, dogmatic commitment to perpetual open-mindedness means that you never actually come to any sort of conclusion.
And Chesterton says, no, the goal here is to have a conclusion, but a conclusion firmly anchored in the evidence.
Open-mindedness is the way to get from uncertainty to certainty, but certainty is, in fact, the goal.
Now, sometimes certainty can't be had.
For example, if someone were to say...
You know, based on reason alone, what comes after death, it's difficult to have certainty.
I'm not talking about through faith, but through reason alone about that.
But here's Chesterton making a very, I think, interesting and sharp critique.
Of a certain doctrinal open-mindedness.
So this is Chesterton. He was a big, burly guy, by the way.
I think I would only have to estimate his weight, but it's somewhere in the range of like 300 pounds.
So you had this giant of a man who nevertheless was good-natured, was cheerful.
I had a really deep understanding of what makes a society wholesome.
And maybe in subsequent episodes, I'll talk a little bit more about Chesterton's philosophy, which by the way, interestingly, was not socialist.
But it wasn't capitalist either.
Chesterton thought that socialism and capitalism were sort of twin evils.
What an interesting notion, twin evils.
And that there's another way to look at things that avoids the common problem with both socialism and capitalism.
But that's a topic I'm gonna have to save for another time.
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Feel the difference. I intend today to complete my discussion of Odysseus on the island of Circe and then talk about Odysseus' next journey, something even more remarkable.
Odysseus now journeying into the land of the dead, into Hades, which is the, in Greek philosophy, it's the underworld.
It's the place where souls and shades, as they call it, go when they When people die.
Now, At first glance, it appears like Odysseus' sojourn on the island of Circe is very similar to something that we have.
Well, that's not been encountered yet chronologically in the narrative, but we've encountered it narratively because of the way Homer sets up the story.
It seems, in a sense, that Circe is very similar to Calypso, but they both are sort of enchantresses.
They both are goddesses of a sort.
You may say superhuman power.
In the case of Calypso, she's able to keep a seasoned warrior like Odysseus captive.
In the case of Circe, she has the magical power to turn people into animals.
And they also both have this sort of seductive side.
They both have their eye on Odysseus.
They both want to keep Odysseus with them if they can.
And yet, there are also a couple of important contrasts between Circe and Calypso.
Well, let's look at what those might be.
First of all, Circe is initially very hostile to Odysseus and his men.
In fact, as we saw last time, she turned a bunch of Odysseus' men into pigs She wanted to turn Odysseus into a pig.
It's only when she realized, I can't do it, when that mission failed, that she, Cersei, became accommodating, became, if you will, nice, and then kind of makes the moves on Odysseus.
Even though she begins in a hostile manner, Circe, in the end, turns out to be really helpful to Odysseus.
She says to him, first of all, you can go when you want.
And after a year of apparently quite contentedly staying on the island, Odysseus' men prevail upon Odysseus, say essentially, we've got to get going.
Odysseus tells Circe, and she helps him.
She not only provides provisions for Odysseus and his men to go, but she tells them exactly what they should do next.
And I'll come back to what instruction she gives or what advice she gives Odysseus.
Let me turn for a moment to Calypso.
Where you find that Calypso is the opposite of Circe in the sense that she's really nice in the beginning.
When Odysseus lands, we see this actually chronologically later.
We're in Book 10 now, but we see this in Book 12.
Odysseus washes up on Calypso's island.
He's completely distraught, battered by the waves and the wind.
He's in some ways disabled.
And immediately, Calypso rushes to his help, makes him better, gives him food, restores him to health, and then...
So, as I mentioned, Cersei starts threateningly and ends up being accommodating and helpful.
Calypso starts out being helpful and then turns not just threatening, she actually ensnares Odysseus and keeps him from leaving for seven years, seven years during which things are actually going from bad to worse in Odysseus' home country of Ithaca.
Now eventually of course even Calypso is forced to let Odysseus go, but the key word is forced.
Like Circe who's like willing to help, Calypso has to receive direct orders from Zeus as transmitted by Hermes and then she accedes and lets Odysseus go.
So even though it seems that Homer is doing the same thing all over again, you have Calypso, you have Circe, they both serve a kind of identical function of being temptresses in the Odyssey.
As I've described, they're Odysseus' sojourn in the two places is not identical, and the reaction of these two enchantresses is not only not the same, but can be compared in some respect, but also can be contrasted.
In a different respect.
And the episode with Circe ends with Circe telling Odysseus that your next project, you want to get home, I'm going to help you get home, but you can't kind of go home straight.
First, you have to make this journey through the underworld.
And this is actually, as we will see, an amazing section of the Odyssey.
In which Odysseus does, in fact, go to the underworld, he meets a range of characters, some of them his own family members who are dead, others actually heroes of the Iliad, and this part of Odysseus' journey is called the Nequia from the Greek word for death or dead.
The Nequia is Odysseus' journey to the underworld.
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The enchantress named Circe lets Odysseus go.
She is helpful to him on his onward journey, and she kind of gives him instructions about what he needs to do next.
He needs to go to the underworld.
But wait, how do you, as a living person, go to the underworld?
Well, Circe tells Odysseus, what you have to do is you have to sail out of the Mediterranean.
Now, the Mediterranean, as the ancient Greeks thought of it, Think about even the name Mediterranean.
Mediterranean means in the middle.
The sea in the middle.
Medi meaning, of course, middle.
And Terranian being land.
So the land in the middle.
You sail out of the Mediterranean.
And the ancient Greeks believed that there was a kind of massive river Which they named ocean.
So an ocean, if you will, that goes all the way around the earth, which was understood to be circular, but circular not so much as a ball, but circular like a disc with an ocean running all the way around it and a kind of forever flowing ocean.
Generally, it was believed that if you got into that ocean, you'd never come back.
You were kind of gone. But what Cersei tells Odysseus is, you sail out to that ocean and let the wind blow you to Persephone's Island.
Persephone's Island. And in Persephone's Island, there is a, you may say, a secret entryway to Hades.
Hades, of course, being the underworld.
Now, in... In the Greek understanding, there's no heaven or hell.
There's no separation of the good guys from the bad guys.
Everybody who dies goes to the same place.
And sort of has the same fate.
And this is really why you can see in the Iliad and the Odyssey, your achievements in this life become important.
How you are remembered and talked about even after you die is important on earth, here.
Why? Because the fate in the underworld seems to be a kind of bleak, dreary fate.
And uniform. Everyone, as I say, has the same experience.
Now, Persephone's Island, where exactly is that?
Well, Homer doesn't really say.
He allows it to be indeterminate, indistinct.
But there is such a place in the geography of the Odyssey.
And Circe tells Odysseus, when you get to Persephone's Island, now Persephone is the wife of Of Hades, who is essentially the god, the king of the underworld.
So, Persephone's island is going to be the portal to get to the underworld, but Cersei tells Odysseus when you get there, you will see a big pit.
You need to sacrifice some rams, some animals, and spread their blood in the pit.
Why? Because when the ghosts and shades show up from the underworld, they will need to drink that blood.
So here we're moving now into Homer's underworld, and in the underworld basically you have these almost shimmering ghosts or shades, and they can't speak.
It's not even clear that they're aware of their surroundings.
They just seem to kind of move around almost aimlessly.
But the idea is that blood is the life giver.
When they drink blood, it brings them to temporary consciousness and they're able to speak at least for a little bit.
And so the idea here is that Odysseus will get to talk to people in the underworld.
And as we'll see, he meets quite a range of characters there.
But Circe says, the guy you want to talk to is the prophet Tiresias.
The prophet Tiresias has been given the gift of prophecy or knowledge.
And so he's going to tell you what is happening in your home country of Ithaca.
Now... Think about what a sort of ingenious device this is for Homer, the narrator.
Let's start with this.
Here you have Odysseus.
He's at sea. You know, and I know, and Homer as the omniscient narrator knows, that there's big trouble in Ithaca.
But how can Odysseus know that?
Well, he can't.
He left the Trojan War.
He's been at sea. He's been going from one island to the other.
He has no way of getting information about what is happening in Ithaca.
But Homer wants him to know, before he gets to Ithaca, that there is big trouble in Ithaca.
There are suitors who are not only trying to court his wife, but kill his son.
And there are a lot of them, over a hundred of them.
He, Odysseus, is going to have to devise some scheme to fight back or deal with the suitors.
But how can Odysseus possibly have any of this kind of information?
It would be a complete violation of the plot for Homer, just to presume that he somehow knew it.
There's no way for him to know it.
But here is a way.
And the way is...
In the underworld, you've got this guy, Tiresias, who happens to know what is going on in the world out there.
And Tiresias, because of his clairvoyance, because of his prophetic power, can tell Odysseus.
So this is how Odysseus knows, even before he lands back in Ithaca.
What's going on in the home country and the difficulties that are facing him there.
So I just want to point out that sort of as a narrative device, it's a very nice way for Homer to be able, plausibly within the narrative, to have Odysseus know the fate that awaits him if he's not careful when he lands back home.
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