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Oct. 3, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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OOPS! SORRY! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep426
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Coming up, I'll talk about how Biden offered millions of Americans forgiveness for their college debt and then quietly took it back.
I'll review a novel defense advance by the Oath Keepers in their sedition case related to January 6th.
I'm going to argue that Putin's latest tirade offers a valuable clue to a new anti-American strategy that our adversaries are employing.
And I'll examine the tragedy of white farmers in South Africa who are facing land seizures and violence from the black majority government.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
America needs this voice.
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.
The Biden administration with great fanfare announced its college debt forgiveness program.
And the program applies to people who have loans that they're unable to pay back.
You have to be making less than $125,000 a year now to qualify for this debt forgiveness.
And it's normally a debt forgiveness of $10,000 in student loan debt.
But if you are a Pell Grant recipient, you can typically get another $10,000 in debt forgiven.
Now, this is a bad idea on three levels.
First of all, it's expensive.
It costs the federal government, at least according to the Congressional Budget Office, about $400 billion over the next three decades.
This is money we don't have.
The country is deeply in debt.
So this is a ridiculous thing to do from the government's point of view.
It's also bad for the actual person who's supposedly being benefited.
Now, obviously, they're being helped in the sense they don't have to pay.
But they're being heard in the sense that they're getting a message from the government, and in fact, from society generally, of irresponsibility.
You can take loans, and you're not going to have to pay them.
It's kind of like telling people who come over to the country illegally, you can come over illegally, but we're going to make you citizens anyway.
So this is an encouragement, an inducement to irresponsible behavior.
And by the way, many of the people who have taken this debt, some of them, of course, have been conned into it.
Conned into it, by the way, by very cunning universities that basically say, hey, listen, it's no problem.
Don't worry about it.
Pay later. So universities are very complicit in this debt scheme.
But of course, a lot of people went into, became majors in women's studies and black studies and sociology and education.
And they essentially made basket weaving.
They majored in things where they should have known, if they didn't know, that this is not going to be easy for you to take on this kind of debt and pay it back.
And yet they did it. So now they're being sort of released of their own obligations, legal obligations they voluntarily undertook.
And third... It's unfair, of course, to people who play by the rules.
It's unfair not only to people who have taken the trouble and the effort to pay off their debts, but it's unfair to the people, in many cases, working class people.
You have plumbers and people who went to high school or community college.
They deliberately went to community college because it's cheaper.
They went to trade school so they can work hard and make money.
And now those guys, through taxation, are going to have to pay to release irresponsible, you know, We're good to go.
So if there's no epidemic now, how can you claim to use emergency powers when the emergency no longer exists?
Apparently, the Biden administration realized that there's one very problematic feature of their student loan forgiveness program, and that is that they were purporting to forgive loans that were not even coming from the federal government.
In other words, you have students who had loans that might have had a federal backing.
They're guaranteed by the federal government, but the loans are taken out from private banks.
And apparently the Biden administration thought they can forgive those loans.
And the banks were like, what?
Wait a minute. Are you saying that students don't owe us that money even when they are now earning money?
So, the Biden administration realized that they have no power as a federal institution to relieve private institutions, private lending institutions, and basically tell people who hold them money, you don't have to pay.
So, Biden has very quietly, in fact, without much fanfare, and the media is happy to go along, we're not going to write a whole lot about this.
There have been some articles, I'm not saying there have been none, but this has not been made a big deal of because the administration would seem to be backtracking here.
Essentially, what they've done is they've excluded 4 million people who thought that they were covered under this debt forgiveness program, but really aren't.
The reason they aren't, as I mentioned, is because they took their loans out from private borrowers.
So I'm glad that they've scaled back the program.
But what I hope courts do is strike the program down completely.
Why? Because there's no legitimate authority to do it.
We're not in an emergency.
And therefore, if anyone is going to forgive student debt, it is possible to forgive student debt.
But the people who should be doing that are the people who make the laws, which is to say Congress.
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Wow! The trial has begun for Stuart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers.
Who is charged remarkably with seditious conspiracy.
Seditious conspiracy to do what?
Well, to overthrow the government on January 6th.
Now, on the face of it, this charge is preposterous.
Not only because there was no effort to overthrow the government.
There was no way to overthrow the government.
Not even someone, you know, in a kind of fantasy could believe that they were really overthrowing the American government.
What, by walking to the Capitol for a couple of hours and walking back out?
The whole thing is laughable.
Moreover, in the case of Stuart Rhodes, it is even more problematic because Rhodes was not in the Capitol.
He didn't go in.
And not only did he not go in, he didn't tell anybody to go in.
So Rhodes is not charged.
In fact, none of the Oath Keepers are charged with possessing any kind of weapons.
They own weapons, but they had left those weapons in hotels in Northern Virginia, where evidently it is legal to possess a weapon.
And, as I say, Rhodes gave no order to the Oath Keepers, go in the Capitol, not at all.
So, where is the conspiracy?
Well, as it turns out, the government, this is a very serious charge, by the way, almost never brought against anybody, and carrying very severe penalties, seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government, you could spend years, if not decades, In prison for that.
It could take the rest of your life, or at least a big chunk of it.
And so what's the basis for this conspiracy charge?
Well, the basis is that evidently there was chatter among the Oath Keepers about having a, quote, quick reaction force about...
About moving to the defense of the country.
And all of this is being interpreted by the federal government to mean that there was some seditious conspiracy at work.
But it turns out that the Oath Keepers are making a very interesting defense that's worth considering.
And the Oath Keepers defense is that they were planning and waiting for Trump to invoke the Insurrectionary Act.
Now, the Insurrection Act combines a series of laws that were passed, some of them going back to the 18th century, 1792, all the way through the 19th century, the aftermath of the Civil War.
Basically, in the case of a serious civil disturbance, the president can invoke the Insurrectionary Act, and he can, in fact, call upon militias around the country to rally to his defense And the defense of civic order in the country.
And all of this is legal.
And I say legal because we're talking about a law that was passed called the Insurrectionary Act.
The president does have this kind of authority.
And so what Stuart Rhodes is saying is, hey, listen, far from trying to overthrow the government, I actually am trying to support the legitimate government.
Far from trying to overthrow the United States and act contrary to the Constitution and contravention of law, far from trying to catch any kind of conspiracy, I was waiting and hoping that President Trump would use his legal authority To invoke the Insurrectionary Act.
And then we, the Oath Keepers militia, would rally to his side and rally to the side of law in protecting the United States against lawbreakers and others who would be trying in some ways to disrupt...
Civil order in the country.
So, remarkably, what Stuart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers are saying is that far from being against the law, we were for the law.
And far from us being in a seditionist posture, we were actually setting ourselves up to be acting in defense of the legally...
Now, Trump did not, in fact, invoke the Insurrectionary Act.
And Stuart Rhodes' point is, therefore, we didn't take any real action.
In other words, we didn't carry out...
Our contingency plan, which was based upon Trump doing that.
And when Trump didn't do that, well, okay, we wish he did.
We were calling on him to do that.
In fact, Rhodes had done that.
Now, there are some legal scholars who go, well, that's a misreading of the Insurrectionary Act.
That's not really what the act is all about.
But that does seem to be what the act says, that the president can, in fact, do this.
And so, it's a novel...
Well, I mean, the whole thing is novel.
The charge is novel.
The idea of rounding up a bunch of protesters because they went into the Capitol.
Rhodes didn't, but some of the other Oath Keepers did.
They went in the Capitol unarmed and charging them with seditious conspiracy.
I think that this case should be flung right out of court.
The reason it's not likely to be is because you've got a highly biased and prejudiced jury in Washington, D.C. But a highly biased and prejudiced judge, the Obama appointee Amit Mehta, a fellow Asian Indian, I'm sorry to say.
And so I'm not really expecting this trial to produce justice.
But at least we should keep an eye on what justice means in this case.
I think the Oath Keepers are making an interesting novel and, to me, largely persuasive defense.
But it's a defense and a charge that, quite honestly, should never have been brought.
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Feel the difference. The war continues to rage in Ukraine between Russia and Ukraine.
And it seems that the Ukrainians are making some advances.
They have liberated some territory that was under Russian, under Putin's control.
Putin has, I read, called upon a kind of draft reserve of Russians, which means he needs more troops.
But it's not easy to say what's really going on because the Western media accounts are typically propagandistic.
They reflect a party line.
They reflect leaks that are coming out of the deep state in this country.
And so they are not wholly to be trusted.
Nevertheless, Putin recently gave a speech.
And this was a speech that was far more...
Apocalyptic and anti-American than what we've heard from Putin.
Putin has had an anti-American thrust, no question about it.
But this escalates things and gives us a window into...
How Putin is thinking.
And so I'd like to go through a few key points in Putin's speech and kind of comment on them.
So the first point that Putin makes is that after the fall of the Soviet Union, he says, a whole bunch of Russians or people of Russian heritage We're separated from their Russian roots.
I think what he's talking about here are the breakaway republics, places like Ukraine, which do have people of Russian origin and obviously people who are part of Russia historically, people who are part of Russia culturally, and in some cases people who think of themselves as Russian but are nevertheless physically in Ukraine.
And Putin's point is that these breakaway republics, he says, quote, That these people have never voted for this breakup.
They never voted, in other words, to be separated from Russia.
He says they have expressed their will.
They are now our citizens forever.
So it's a way of Putin basically reclaiming these republics and claiming that they are somehow still part of Russia.
Reminds me of Putin's famous statement going back several years now that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest disaster to befall Russia in all of its history.
So there's a certain kind of effort here, obviously not under the same type of Soviet communism, but nevertheless to reassemble the Russian Empire of the 20th century.
Putin goes on to say that elite circles in the West never thought Russia would come back, meaning after the Cold War.
And he says they are not happy with our resource-rich country that refuses to give up our culture.
Then he says they are hostile to traditional values and cultures.
And here we have a hint of what Putin is doing.
He is trying, and by the way, Xi and China the same, to assemble a coalition of traditional cultures around the world against the West.
The West is portrayed here.
Remember, the Islamic radicals portray the West as the great Satan.
And this is the same thing.
The West stands for atheism.
It stands for moral depravity.
It stands for corrupting traditional cultures.
And Putin goes on to say,"...in the United States model, all countries must surrender their sovereignty to the United States." He says the United States is having a hybrid war against us.
They're fighting through surrogates.
So there's no open declaration of war between the United States and Russia.
But the United States is supplying weaponry.
And so the fight is going on, but it's going on indirectly.
He goes on to say Japan, Germany, and South Korea are militarily occupied by the U.S. They pretend to be partners, but they are vassal states.
The United States spies on and intimidates their leaders.
He goes on to even imply America is engineering the destruction of Europe.
He says, without quite saying it, he says that America has, quote, attacked Europe's infrastructure.
Now, implying here that it's the Biden administration that has torpedoed the Nord Stream pipeline.
The United States is accusing Russia of doing it, and the Russians are accusing Biden of doing it.
And he goes on to say, Putin does, U.S. dollar hegemony plunders the world's riches, propping up its racket economy at everybody else's expense.
The United States is using the fact that it's the reserve currency of the world to control the world.
And we can see that Putin, and we know Putin and China have been conspiring to do this, create a rival currency, maybe even a basket of currencies that removes the dollar from this enviable status of being the world's sole reserve currency.
But listen to this. We're good to go.
It's not dissimilar.
The accusations begin to all fade one into the other.
And so we're seeing here the emergence of an anti-Western alliance.
But they're not against us because we're for freedom.
They're not against us because we are a democracy.
It's true, Putin is an autocracy.
It's true that China is an autocracy.
But hey, the United States is becoming increasingly autocratic in our own way.
Many of the civil liberties that so many of us took for granted are now jeopardized.
So this line between the free world and the non-free world is not as clear as it once was.
But I think it's important to understand our adversaries to see what they're saying about us.
And unfortunately, it seems in many ways the Biden administration is playing right into their hands.
With the consumer price index increasing yet again, the stock market has been in absolute turmoil.
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Oh yeah, spending more money and adding to the burden.
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I don't know if the name E. Jean Carroll is familiar to you.
It might be.
This is a columnist.
This is the woman who accused Donald Trump of raping her.
Now, the alleged rape, if you can believe it, was supposedly in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman Department Store.
So... How Trump, what, grabbed her, dragged her into the dressing room with Bergdorf, raped her there.
I mean, just the idea is, to me, absurd.
But nevertheless, she alleges that this happened to her, when?
In the mid-1990s.
So, the allegation is based upon conduct that evidently occurred, well...
27 years ago.
And as far as I know, this is an incident that was not...
Witnessed by anybody.
The two of them were supposedly alone in the dressing room.
Trump, of course, claims this is ridiculous.
This is absurd.
This is preposterous.
And this woman, Jean Carroll, has been on a kind of militant crusade to get this.
Well, she tried to get it at criminal charges filed against Trump.
That didn't happen.
She then sued Trump.
Now her lawsuit is for defamation.
Why? Because evidently when Trump was asked about this, he made some derogatory comments.
I mean, hardly surprising when you accuse somebody of rape, but here's what Trump goes.
He goes, quote, I'll say it with great respect.
Number one, she's not my type.
This is very Trumpian.
She's not my type. Number two, it never happened.
Now, probably it would have been better just to stick with number two, but Trump couldn't resist throwing in number one.
But nevertheless, there's no defamation here.
To say that she's not my type is something that people are entitled to say.
You're not exactly maligning someone by saying what is or isn't your type.
And number two, of course, Trump is merely denying the incident.
But nevertheless...
E. Jean Carroll wants to have a trial for whether or not Trump defamed her.
Now, the DC Court of Appeals was asked to consider this and to weigh in on whether or not Trump has got to face this lawsuit.
And in a two-to-one decision, a panel on the Second Court of Appeals ruled that, no, this lawsuit cannot go forward.
Why not? Because when Trump made the statement about...
I'll say it with great respect, etc.
Trump was the president at that time.
That statement was made in 2019.
So Trump was obviously still serving out his term.
He was acting in his capacity as the president.
And so this is the point.
You cannot sue the president for conduct undertaken as part of his presidential duties.
And this, of course, was the question before the court.
Was a statement like this part of Trump's presidential duties?
And the court basically said, yeah, it is.
Why? Because here is a man who's trying to carry out his duties of office.
He is being, you can say, distracted or being challenged by this woman who says, you know, you've got to go to court and fight over the issue of whether or not You raped me.
And Trump is like, I didn't rape you.
You're not my type. So Trump was, in a sense, burying an accusation that came to him while he was president and to that degree was acting within the scope of his presidential duties, basically saying, let's get this off the table.
I'm going to put my denial out there so I can move on and do the stuff that I was elected to do, carry out my presidential duties.
Now, The majority opinion, written, by the way, by a very good judge, Guido Calabresi, he said, look, quote, we do not pass judgment or express any view as to whether Trump's public statements were indeed defamatory or whether the sexual assault allegations had in fact occurred.
Basically, the court is saying this is not about whether Trump did it.
It's not even about whether he defamed her.
It's just about can you sue for defamation a man who Who is acting in his capacity as president during his tenure as president.
And the court basically goes, no, you can't.
Now, the dissenting judge is a guy named Denny Chin.
It was a two-to-one ruling.
And he goes, well, he goes, yeah, but he goes, these statements that Trump made weren't really part of his official duties.
He goes on to say, and you can tell that he was unhappy with what Trump said, This is the judge.
He goes, in the context of an accusation, the comment, she's not my type, is surely not something one would expect the President of the United States to say, blah, blah, blah.
So the judge is basically saying it was inappropriate for Trump to say that.
And I can see why reasonable people might think that Trump should have abstained from doing that.
But... It doesn't change the fact that Trump's statement was made in the context of his official duties.
Anyway, it looks like all of this is finally and happily, you can call it, down the tubes.
In other words, going nowhere.
This woman is sort of relentless, and by that I mean she...
Wants to keep this going.
I guess it's her claim to fame.
I guess it's also the case that she's somebody who appears in the media, talks about it.
And she seems to be motivated by a kind of anti-Trump animus.
Whether the animus is personal, whether it's ideological, very difficult to say.
but it looks like this particular case seems to be going precisely nowhere.
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I'd like to report a small piece of good news at Cornell University.
This is Cornell in Ithaca, New York.
And a Lincoln bust, a bust of Abraham Lincoln that was in the library that had been removed last year from the library after some activist students subjected to it.
This was in the aftermath of the whole George Floyd business.
Everybody was on edge.
And so literally on getting a few protests, a few objections, a few, quote, concerns...
The people at Cornell, in typical cowardly and disgraceful fashion, removed the Lincoln bust.
The Lincoln bust that was sitting in the library.
And it was sitting, by the way, in front of a plaque of the Gettysburg Address.
And it had been there since 2013.
Now, when Cornell removed the Lincoln bus, Cornell said that this bus was never intended to remain in the library.
It was only temporarily there.
But hey, it had been there for eight years.
So this wasn't exactly all that temporary, and it was very clear that the university was responding to, as it turns out, very isolated protests that were coming from a couple of activist groups.
Activists on the campus, whether all students or whether faculty, I don't know.
Anyway, a Cornell University biology professor named Randy Wayne noticed that the Lincoln bust was missing.
And this is what I want to now follow, that Randy Wayne, in a very measured but responsible way, went about getting to the bottom of it.
He contacted the library.
And the library told him that this was a bust that was originally...
It was created right before Lincoln's assassination in April of 1865.
It was created by a sculptor named Vinnie Ream, a woman actually, the first woman to be granted a federal commission by the U.S. was purchased and donated to the campus by Ezra Cornell, the founder of Cornell University.
When the bust was removed, Randy Wayne contacted some Cornell alumni and some of the big donors to the university.
And the big donors who, you know, remember the golden rule, he who supplies the gold makes the rules.
And these alumni began to voice their displeasure to Cornell and say, in effect, hey, listen, really?
Abraham Lincoln...
If you want to fight racism, you know, you're on board with cancel culture, but you want to start by canceling the man who freed the slaves.
I mean, what a reflection on Cornell.
What a reflection on our society that Lincoln, of all people, is being canceled.
And I think Cornell realized that this was bad.
Not only did it look bad, but it was bad.
And so the librarian, and you've got to give some credit where it's due, the librarian is a guy named Westbrook.
And so the librarian...
I'm sorry, it's Elaine Westbrooks.
The librarian said, look, I'm going to actually put this bus back.
And she decided, look, it's going to go back in the library, just where it was, and...
And it's going to go back because it belongs there.
So this is the case where I simply want to make the point that when, in this case a professor, a biology professor, so not even somebody in history or in political science, just took it upon himself to...
Contact the library, get the facts, then communicate the facts to people, in this case alumni, who were influential with the university.
Now, Cornell is a very rich university, as are most of the Ivy League universities.
They're not going to respond just because a donor...
says so. I think what happened here is that a number of donors contacted them.
The donors themselves, as far as I know, didn't threaten not to give money to Cornell. They just basically go, this is insane. Why would you do this? And then Cornell, in perhaps trying to explain and defend their actions to the donors, realized there's really no good defense here. First of all, there was not even an organized movement to do this. No one ever supplied a rationale for doing it.
Basically, this is a case where somebody shouted and the administrators bolted for cover. Yeah, let's take the bust out of here.
Let's quickly get it out of here. So this is a behavior driven, I think, by a combination of ideological sympathy for the activists and fear. So the university realized, okay, well, listen, you know, we are now in 2022.
Some of the feverish emotions of the post-George Floyd protests have cooled, and it's time to put the bust back.
And as far as I know, there's no objection to doing that.
The voices that once objected are now kind of I'm happy to say that thanks to the intervention of a couple of people who decided to use their influence, this is the point, that we all have a lot of influence.
We have to think about how we use it, but how we use it not just in a manner of striking a posture, but using it in a way that actually changes behavior.
And you can see right here, we're talking about a small incident.
It's just one bust.
It's one campus. It's one library.
But this is how victories are achieved.
You achieve them one at a time, and then they add up one on top of the other.
And this is how you reverse, you make changes ultimately in larger cultural movements.
So I'm really glad to say that the bust of Lincoln is back in the library at Cornell University.
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I don't know if you've been following what's been going on in the last, well now, several years in South Africa.
South Africa, a now-black-majority country, ruled really by the party that was The party that fought apartheid for decades, the party of the African National Congress, sometimes known as the ANC. And now South Africa has a multi-party system.
There are a number of parties. The ANC party is the majority party.
And it controls the National Assembly.
And what's been going on in South Africa, really quite alarming, disturbing in many ways, two things.
One is the forfeiture and confiscation of the land.
of white people, particularly white farmers.
Now, some of this is unquestionably a legacy of apartheid.
But nevertheless, what you have is you've got black gangs showing up at white farmhouses.
And the second point is not just the confiscation of land, but horrific assaults, attacks, and murders.
There have been murders of whole families in some cases.
And so the white farmers are living, well, let's just call it on the edge.
And let's remember that they are also in a black majority society.
Sometimes it's tempting to make a kind of easy comparison between the situation in the United States, let's say the situation in the United States, going back to the days of segregation.
Because in some ways there is an analogy between the segregationists And the segregationists here would be the Democrats in the South.
And the Afrikaners, who were the ruling party, the Afrikaner government in South Africa imposing segregation on the blacks in South Africa.
But of course, the key difference was that in the South, blacks were a minority.
It was the white majority.
Run by the Democrats who imposed segregation, whereas in South Africa, it was a white minority of Afrikaners.
The Afrikaners originally descended from the Dutch, who migrated to South Africa going back now a couple of centuries or a century and a half.
And so when apartheid was overturned, you now had a very unstable and dangerous situation because in some ways what the black majority wanted, and it's understandable why this impulse would be there, is revenge.
The black majority was like, it's our turn.
You exploited us for a long time.
You took over the land.
You put us into these so-called Bantustans, which were overcrowded settlements where the blacks were forced to live.
So there was an imposed segregation and an enforced state-sponsored oppression.
And so ever since South Africa became a democracy, obviously the black majority was able to install its chosen government, which in this case was the government set up by the African National Congress, the ANC. And now there is a bill that is going through the Congress, through the National Assembly.
It's called the Expropriation Bill.
And the Expropriation Bill, by and large, says that under certain circumstances, the government, so not just private gangs, but the government can come to you and confiscate your land without compensation.
And this is now...
Why? Because the constitution of South Africa would seem to prohibit that.
Now, by the way, in constitutions, and this is true also in the laws of the United States and the laws of other Western countries, the government is allowed eminent domain.
Eminent domain means the government has some We're good to go.
Now it has to do so lawfully and it has to pay compensation to the person who owns that land.
You can't just seize their land and give them nothing in return.
But this is exactly what the South African government is trying to do.
They're trying to pass a law that not under all conditions but under some conditions would allow the government itself to take your land and give you nothing in return.
Now, the minority parties in South Africa, and by the way, South Africa isn't just a black and white society.
There are so-called colored people in South Africa, as indeed in other parts of Africa.
Now, the colored people are typically Asians.
There's a fair number of Asian Indians who are in South Africa.
Now, some of them have left after apartheid because they realize that they themselves might become targets of the black majority government.
So, many Indians have left South Africa, but some of course remain, some are in the government.
And so, the minority parties are protesting and saying in effect that this law is unconstitutional.
That yeah, the South African constitution can be changed, but like the American constitution it's not that easy to change and it would need most likely the consent of the minority parties.
So, instead of trying to change the constitution, what's going on is the ruling government is doing kind of what the left likes to do in this country sometimes, which is to try to achieve a constitutional result without taking the trouble to try to amend the constitution.
By using either, by just passing a law with a simple majority, and acting as if by passing a law you have de facto amended the Constitution.
Well, things don't really work that way.
And so I'm kind of hoping that what happens is that the South African High Court steps in, strikes down this law.
The law hasn't actually fully passed.
It hasn't gone through all the stages.
It's apparently now being reviewed.
by the so-called National Council of Provinces.
But the minority parties are right.
This A will lead to capital flight, people leaving South Africa.
By the way, some people have already left.
Sometimes I wonder why these white farmers even stay.
Things are not looking good for them in that country.
I'm assuming it's because they have nowhere to go.
Let's remember that the Dutch immigrated to South Africa a long, long time ago.
So it's not as if these are recent immigrants who can basically decide, oh, we made a mistake by coming here.
Let's go back to where we came from.
There is no going back.
Their roots have been severed from their original home country.
And so South Africa is going to have to deal with its problems.
But if so far it appears that it's not dealing with them very well.
We've left Circe's island with Odysseus and moved on to his journey to the underworld, but I promised to talk about something in Circe's island that I forgot to talk about completely, and so I'm going to sort of pick it up in this segment, talk about it, and essentially it is the very interesting sexual double standard that runs throughout the Odyssey
and well, runs throughout the Iliad as well.
What am I talking about?
Well, what I'm talking about is the fact that...
Well, let's go to the Iliad for a moment.
You'll notice that in the Iliad, there are fights that are going on over concubines.
There is the concubine Briseis, Achilles' concubine.
Agamemnon takes her away.
Achilles is mad. There's the other concubine, Chryseis, Agamemnon's concubine.
He's forced to give her back. So, all these Greek soldiers apparently have concubines, and the question isn't even raised.
Well, aren't some of these Greek soldiers married men?
Don't they have wives at home?
And what's this business with taking up with the concubines?
It is kind of assumed that this is evidently okay.
Then we come to the Odyssey, and the whole Odyssey is premised on the idea that Penelope, Odysseus' wife, is being...
Sort of besieged by all these suitors, but it is her absolute moral duty to stay completely faithful to Odysseus.
Now, obviously, if she knows that Odysseus is dead, then she is, in fact, not only entitled but obliged to marry again and to turn over Odysseus' estate to her son Telemachus, who is now at least 20 years old, maybe 20 or 21 or 22.
But, contrast the demand that Penelope remain faithful without even a single lapse.
And Odysseus, by contrast, who is out there.
Now, Odysseus is not, I wouldn't call him a philanderer.
That's actually not an accurate description.
But he does have two...
You would call them long-term affairs.
One of them with a goddess named Calypso, an enchantress, who has him captive.
So that is arguably Odysseus is under some duress because he can't leave the island, although it's not clear that he's being somehow forced to To be involved with Calypso.
He seems to do that, at least, willingly.
And also, Circe.
She seduces Odysseus.
He's evidently quite willing.
And he stays with her voluntarily for a year.
In fact, his men have to sort of grab him and say, Okay, Odysseus, remember we were on our journey home.
Let's go. So, how do you explain this blatant, at least to our eyes, double standard, Now, the kind of modern way to do it is influenced, of course, by feminism.
And it's basically to look back at the Iliad and the Odyssey and say, well, listen, those are written from the male point of view.
And so, obviously, they have this double standard because all these men wish that they could be philanderers.
And so, you've got this kind of wish fulfillment of men living in a fantasy world in which they can do whatever they want, but their wives, of course, can't.
And so, The one-sidedness of these stories is explained by the fact that they are reflecting not the female but the male point of view.
The problem with this analysis is really simple.
And that is that at the end of the Odyssey, we hear this.
We hear Odysseus. He's finally reconciled with his wife Penelope.
And we hear that the two of them sat down and Odysseus told her the whole story.
And Odysseus goes through the story.
Homer lets us have some of the detail of it.
He didn't leave anything out.
He told her about Calypso.
He told her about Circe.
And Homer tells us that Penelope listened with delight.
In fact, it says, quote, she loved to listen and she did not fall asleep until he told it all.
In other words, tell me more.
Tell me more.
And so why would, if it is the case, that we're dealing here with a male fantasy, the male point of view, why would Penelope kind of go along with it and be happy to hear all this stuff and evidently raise no objection against her husband?
What's going on here?
Well... I think to understand this better, we have to realize that in the culture depicted in the Odyssey, in the Homeric culture, the purpose of marriage is really simple, and it is for a single reason.
Marriage exists to produce legitimate male heirs, and for no other purpose.
That's the purpose. Now, think about it.
If that's the purpose, to produce legitimate male heirs, then if women are unfaithful, the Then the paternity of the children becomes confused.
If Penelope is unfaithful, who knows if Telemachus is really Odysseus' son?
Who knows if Telemachus is entitled to inherit Odysseus' estate, not to mention become king after Odysseus?
But if Odysseus is unfaithful, Let's just say Odysseus on the high seas takes up with this concubine or that concubine.
That is not considered a problem.
Why? Because Odysseus is not violating, at least not in the culture of the Homeric society, any kind of marital precept.
Remember, Odysseus is not going around seducing the wives of other wives.
If he was doing that, that would in fact be adultery.
If we think, for example, about what happens when Agamemnon is away, his wife Clytemnestra takes up with a man named Aegisthus.
Now she is in fact committing adultery, as is he.
Why is he committing adultery?
Because he is actually seducing the married wife of Agamemnon.
Odysseus is not quite in the same situation.
So, the idea here is that male infidelity does not disrupt the purpose of marriage.
Not the purpose of marriage is understood in Christianity, where marriage is not only procreative but also unitive.
In other words, it's based on the trust of the two married partners.
We're dealing with a pre-Christian society.
In fact, a society that is predating Christianity by some 800 years.
In which marriage does not exist as an outlet for feelings or as a type of egalitarian camaraderie between male and female, marriage exists for the purpose of legitimate children, and therefore Odysseus is not committing adultery, not only in a sense that Odysseus would understand, but even in a sense that Penelope would understand.
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