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Oct. 20, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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DREAM TEAM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep439
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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 going to talk about why the four Republican candidates in Arizona, including Blake Masters and Carrie Lake, are a kind of dream team that the GOP needs to win and govern effectively.
I'll expose the letter from Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich's office as a sorry excuse for Brnovich's failures.
Producer and director John Gruters joins me.
We're going to talk about his inspiring new film.
It's called The Frontier Boys.
It's available this weekend.
Well, actually starting today on my Locals channel.
This is the Danish 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 midterms are right around the corner.
I'm not... Not many weeks away, really.
And at this point, things are looking really good for the GOP. Really good on the House, and I would say pretty good for the Senate.
Now, one of the themes that the left has been stressing is election deniers are on the ballot.
There have been various attempts to count the number of so-called election deniers on the ballot.
I think the website FiveThirtyEight said 60% of Republicans who are running are election denies.
I mean, all this means is that the themes of 2000 Mules and concerns about the 2020 election have become...
Quite mainstream in the Republican Party, and not only in the Republican Party.
If you've seen surveys by Rasmussen and others, you've seen that there are a fair number of independents and Democrats who have doubts, questions, and in some cases outright skepticism about the 2020 election.
Now, Arizona in particular has been excoriated by the left for rampant election denialism, which is to say that all the four main candidates, Blake Masters for the Senate, Carrie Lake for governor, Abe Hamadé for Attorney General and Mark Fincham for Secretary of State have all been, you may say, skeptics about 2020.
In general, champions of the movie 2,000 Mules.
In the case of Kerry, of course, attends the screening of 2,000 Mules, has been speaking outspokenly about it.
So, by the way, has Hamadé and Fincham recently, when there was a controversy involving Brnovich, the existing and outgoing Attorney General, Fincham weighed in and basically goes, listen, I side with True the Vote over Brnovich on this one.
So you have, at least from my point of view, a kind of dream team in Arizona.
And what I want to stress about this dream team, because I think it's kind of a model for the GOP. First of all, very attractive candidates.
Candidates who have done things with their life.
Think of it. Blake Masters has been kind of an internet pioneer and guru.
He's been very close to Peter Thiel, who's the founder of PayPal.
And then you have Carrie Lake, who was a newscaster and uses that kind of, you may call it, subdued eloquence to be able to really smack We're good to go.
He is non-white.
He is well-spoken, well-educated, talks about the importance of drawing young people over to the Republican Party.
He's cool. So think of this is not the norm for the GOP. And what I like about these candidates is, one, they know how to win the nomination.
Two, they know how to campaign effectively, and they all have a good chance to win.
I think we're going to see, really, four out of four.
Probably, maybe even three out of four, but three out of four is good, too.
And then...
Also important, when you win, they know how to govern effectively.
Why? Because they've put forward a clear and definite agenda.
An agenda on the border, an agenda involving inflation and taxes, an agenda involving election integrity.
So they're not just campaigning, get me in there and then I'm just going to sit and basically warm the seat for two or four years.
No, they're running so that they can do something.
They're running for a purpose.
And so this is really, I think, the model that GOP should strive for.
Win the nomination, win the election, and then do something with it.
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You need to use promo code DINESHDINESH. I want to talk in this segment about the controversy involving True the Vote and the Office of Outgoing Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.
So... A letter was drafted called To Whom It May Concern.
So sort of an open letter, a letter released really to the media.
And it comes out of the attorney general's office, criminal division.
It's signed by a guy named Reginald, quote, Reggie Grigsby, who calls himself the chief special agent.
And basically what the letter says is that True the Vote has had meetings with the authorities, in this case the Attorney General's office in Arizona, and the letter says the True the Vote promised to provide geolocation data, video evidence to the Attorney General's office, but hasn't done so, despite, according to the letter, repeated requests.
And then the letter takes a strange turn and basically says, TTV, through the vote, has raised considerable sums of money, alleging that they had this evidence.
And they said that they have not provided it to us.
and then quote, given TTV status as a non-profit organization, it would appear that further review of its financials may be warranted.
So this appears to be aimed at the IRS, maybe even the FBI, to sort of investigate through the vote.
But stop for a moment and think about it.
Let's say that True the Vote said we're going to give you this stuff and they didn't.
Is that automatic grounds for an FBI investigation?
Is that automatic grounds for an IRS investigation?
No. So clearly this is a kind of strike at True the Vote.
And I want to talk about what is motivating it.
Now, let's turn to True the Vote side of the matter because True the Vote posts...
First of all, they wrote a letter, a public letter, to the attorney generals of Arizona.
And they say, first of all, yes, we met with you on June 3rd, 2021.
And then they said, we got absolutely no feedback, so we filed an official complaint with the state of Arizona and had multiple meetings with state investigators.
And they said, during these meetings, we learned that these investigators were violating the confidentiality that we had insisted upon.
And it was true the vote has whistleblowers, it was giving information to the authorities on a confidential basis, and the authorities were then basically violating that confidentiality.
The AG's office releasing to the media the identity of private citizens who had provided information.
It was clear the intent was to chill the investigation and send a warning to those who believed that law enforcement would protect them.
And so True the Vote then alerts the Attorney General's office saying, listen, don't do this.
You're actually scaring away our informants who are the people who can actually help you with your investigation.
So very soon what happens is True the Vote loses trust in In the ability of the AG's office to A, protect confidentiality, or B, do anything to actually follow up on this investigation.
Then, says True the Vote, as was stated, the data used by True the Vote is available to any law enforcement agency which issues a lawful subpoena for the data.
They say, here is a photo of a copy of the hard drive with Greg Phillips.
This is actually Greg Phillips taking the hard drive to provide it.
True the Vote has documentary records of correspondence with the state of Arizona and the FBI detailing the evidence.
So the point here is that the Arizona Attorney General's office is playing games.
And I want to ask why.
Why are they doing this? Why don't they just follow up with this information?
Well, I think I know the answer.
And that is that Brnovich was given multiple opportunities to Not only to review this evidence, but to see 2,000 mules.
I know for a fact that he was offered the opportunity to see the movie on more than one occasion, and he essentially refused.
He didn't want to see the movie.
Now, let's think about if you're the chief law enforcement official, wouldn't you want to just see the movie, make up your own mind, decide if it's credible, decide if it requires any follow-up?
No.
Brnovich made a political calculation that he didn't really want to get into this issue.
Maybe he thought he would be accused of election denialism.
Maybe he didn't want to be lumped with people that he thought, not me, but others who he thought were extreme or thought were kooks.
Who knows?
Bottom line of it is he decided to pass on this issue.
And I believe this cost him the nomination for the Senate.
He could have ridden this issue all the way to the Senate.
He would be in the U.S. Senate after November, or actually after January, when he would take office.
Instead, he's a has-been.
He's on his way out.
He's, I guess, going to go into the private sector, maybe do some law enforcement consulting, who knows what.
So the guy's a loser.
He's a loser, and he's somebody who sort of missed his opportunity, and now he's mad.
He's bitter, and so he's lashing out at True the Vote.
He's trying to blame True the Vote for failing to provide him with information when he was the one who failed to act on the information provided.
Look, the problem here is not a lack of information.
True the Vote has done what True the Vote can.
True the Vote is not a law enforcement agency, and so let's say that True the Vote has, for example, cell phone IDs of mules.
But doesn't have names of mules.
Why? Because Brnovich needs to get them.
Brnovich is the guy who can go get a subpoena.
He can get a warrant.
He can go to the cell phone authorities and go, give me the names of all these guys.
Let me send investigators to go interview them.
Did he do that? No, he didn't do any of it.
So what he's doing now, I think...
He's humiliated, he's trying to cover his tracks, and so he's put up this clown, Reggie Grigsby.
By the way, true to the vote, I've never heard of this dude before, but suddenly he emerges as the main figure here, lashing out a true to the vote really for the failures of one Mark Brnovich.
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Feel the difference. The left is reeling over the arrest of Connick CEO Eugene Yu and And the left is trying in various ways to minimize this.
Oh, this is not a big deal.
It's really a small software company.
Well, if it's a small software company, why did the New York Times write a big long article about how this company is being targeted by conspiracy theorists and true the vote?
So, Conic is an election software company.
It does election software management and it has access to vast troves of election data across the country.
It has consulting agreements with multiple jurisdictions.
And so, in fact, one of the guys on social media who was responding to me when I was sharing information about the conic arrest, he goes, Dinesh, you've got to remember that this is only in Los Angeles.
This involves one county.
No, it's not only in Los Angeles.
It's all over the country.
It's true that when the Los Angeles DA files charges, those charges pertain to LA. Why?
Because that's the criminal jurisdiction that George Gascon's office covers.
And so when Eric Neff, the Deputy Attorney General, filed a complaint, he had to file a complaint relevant to LA. But that doesn't mean that the activities of CONIC are limited to Los Angeles.
On the contrary, CONIC has ties with Texas.
It has ties with other states.
This guy, Eugene Yu, has apparently farmed out access to this data, the sensitive election data, to servers and contractors in China.
In fact, to servers and contractors who have what are called super administration privileges, which means they have complete access, not only to the data, but to change the data, manipulate the data, and cover their tracks.
So think of what a serious data breach this is.
It's been described as the most serious data breach in U.S. history.
And this guy, Eugene Yu, has deep ties to China and to the Chinese communists.
His real name is Jian Weiyu.
And he graduated from Zhejiang University.
He lived in China until 1986.
And he's been offering his services to, quote, the China National People's Congress, which is to say to the Chinese government.
Now, China, of course, runs all kinds of elections.
You wouldn't really call them elections because they're elections for...
There are elections among pre-selected candidates for various Communist Party offices.
But this guy, Yu, who's, by the way, on board with the tyranny and totalitarianism of China, he's in no way a dissident.
He works in concert with the Chinese.
And he's like, listen, why don't I run your elections in China?
I'm very qualified to do this.
He has ties, his company does, Connick does, with Chinese election software firm.
It's called Xinhua Hangzheng Technology.
And it is known to be the company that provides premier voting technology for the China National People's Congress, i.e., in a sense, the Chinese government.
So what is the...
What is the bottom line of all this?
The bottom line of all this is we have Chinese, aka Communist Party, infiltration of the U.S. election system.
There's really no other way to look at it.
U.S. election data in a kind of real-time basis is now being observed.
Probably recorded, stored, potentially downloaded, and who knows, potentially manipulated by people in China.
And finally, and really, True the Vote deserves the credit for busting this operation.
True the Vote are the ones who talked about it.
They had public meetings about it, the so-called pit where they discussed it.
And this is what caused the The New York Times and others to do all these hits on them, as if to say, yeah, these are people, you know, their conspiracies have gone beyond 2,000 mules.
They're now making allegations about the security of software.
Well, it turns out these allegations have a lot of merit, and the merit has been seen even by one of the most progressive DAs in the country, George Gascon, who, by the way, whose recall I supported, and yet who nevertheless survived the recall, is still in office, and for some reason...
Is willing to push the issue of election integrity to his credit.
You got to give the guy credit where credit is due.
So we'll see where this case goes.
But based upon the complaint, there's been a serious breach of U.S. election security.
And thanks to the vote, the potential criminals, the alleged criminals behind this scheme are being held to account.
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One of the signature features of socialist regimes is the disappearing person.
And what I mean is that it was not unusual in the Soviet Union under Stalin, even in China under Mao, for people to be reported or investigated by the government and then they would just poof, disappear.
They would never be seen again, never be heard from again.
They would literally become a non-person.
And moreover, their names would be erased.
Suddenly you look at the high school yearbook or the equivalent of the yearbook, they're not in there.
Suddenly you look at the sports contest that the guy who supposedly won, there's no record of him ever having won.
And so this kind of vanishing act is something that socialist regimes specialize in.
And this was all brought to my mind because of an article in Of All Places Rolling Stone.
It just came out. I mentioned actually, I think on yesterday's podcast, an article from Esquire magazine, which was a surprise to me because of how good the article was.
That was about the Whitmer kidnapping.
Well, This is a very interesting article in Rolling Stone, which normally publishes pure rubbish.
But the article is about an ABC News producer named James Gordon Meek.
And this is a guy who, since April 27th, has vanished off the face of the earth, apparently.
And let's go through what's going on.
This is a well-known reporter working for a major network.
By the way, we don't know anything about his politics.
His politics appear to have been centrist, maybe centrist progressive or center-left.
But he's a guy who apparently liked the military.
He did a lot of reporting on the military.
He reported on foiled terrorist plots in New York City.
So he's reported on the government.
He used to be an investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee.
He's an Emmy Award winning TV producer.
And for reasons unknown, the FBI raided his apartment in Virginia.
He lives just outside Arlington, Virginia.
And his neighbors saw black utility vehicles, and they saw the FBI unit with a bunch of FBI agents supposedly looking for something, investigating something.
According to some leaks or reports that Rolling Stone got from the FBI, they were looking for some classified information that might have been on his computer.
Remember, reporters often do stories.
They get access to information.
They may or may not know what's classified.
Anyway, the issue is, or at least the allegation is, that there may have been classified information on his computer.
And then the guy vanishes.
And by vanishes, I don't mean that he was taken by the FBI and is being charged by some offense, because he hasn't been charged with anything.
There are no charges involved.
The FBI denies that they have him.
Apparently, the guy sent in a resignation to ABC News and basically said that he didn't want to work there anymore.
And someone from ABC is quoted saying, he fell off the face of the earth and people asked, but no one knew the answer.
Let's think about it. ABC is made up of people who do reporting, who are in a position to find out information like whatever happened to this guy, Meek.
And then Meek's lawyer says that although he's being accused of having classified information, no such charges have been filed against him.
He knows nothing about it.
And he doesn't know where this guy Meek is.
Now, interestingly, Meek was supposed to be the co-author of a book.
That was going to come out in the last few months.
And on the book jacket, there was Meek and his co-author, a guy named Scott Mann, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann.
They wrote the book together.
And then suddenly, and this is amazing, Meek's name was removed from the book jacket.
So suddenly the book, even though it was announced as coming from both two authors, and And the description of the book jacket began like this.
In April, ABC News correspondent James Gordon Meek got an urgent call from a special forces operator serving overseas.
That's the text. And then Simon& Schuster changed it to, in April, an urgent call was placed from a special forces operator serving overseas.
So they've erased this guy, James Gordon Meek, completely with no explanation.
And his co-author, this guy named Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, goes, I don't know where the guy is.
He basically says, listen, Meek basically called him, claimed he was under some sort of stress or strain, maybe related to the FBI raid, I'm not sure.
And then Mann goes, I've never heard from him since.
And these two guys wrote this book together.
So this is not actually normal.
This is not normalcy in America.
And so when I read the article, again, knowing nothing about Meek's politics, think of it.
We're talking here, by the way, not even about, you know, a January 6th protest or so-called insurrection.
We're talking about a mainstream, credentialed, Emmy-winning ABC reporter.
And ABC doesn't know where he is.
His neighbors say his apartment is now empty.
He's not there.
Evidently, his co-author doesn't know where he is.
The guy has fallen off the face of the earth.
And if you ask me, it is the FBI and the Biden administration that need to come up with some explanation for this.
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There's an article in Slate, the online magazine, about the freakout that is going on in the left-wing law schools over the recent decisions of the Supreme Court.
And I gotta say, I was reading the article and smiling and chuckling throughout the whole thing.
why because it is just fun to see these nutty professors go berserk over the Supreme Court. The great thing is there's nothing they can do about it but of course they are taking their academic revenge which is what are they doing?
They're basically trying their best to propagandize their students about how horrible the Supreme Court is. Well this doesn't actually work because if you think about it what does every law school student want to be?
A Supreme Court justice!
That's the pinnacle of the profession.
So to basically say the Supreme Court is awful and so on is going to create, I think, a little bit of confusion and trauma among these students because they're going to think, well, what should I then aspire to be?
A criminal defense attorney?
Should I get out of law and become a law school pedagogue and loser like you, Professor Finkelstein?
So I think what's going on here is we're seeing nothing more than a left-wing cabal in these law schools.
And the law schools are, you know, they've cleared out all the conservatives.
So it's now essentially a...
A left-wing factory, a madrasa of sorts.
And so, no surprise.
They don't like, well, they certainly don't like the Dobbs decision.
That's probably what put them all over the top.
So, the article goes, at law schools across the country, thousands of professors of constitutional law are facing a court...
That is, let the mask of neutrality fall off completely.
So, they're complaining the court has become ideological.
Let's stop for a second.
The court is not reading the Constitution for what it says.
The court is not respecting precedent.
Well, first of all, it is the left that has taught us for a hundred years, starting with the legal realism school going back to the early 20th century, that law is really nothing but a disguise for politics.
That's the meaning of legal realism.
That you can't trust what people really say.
They'll make their argument by invoking principles.
But what it really is, is an assertion of political power.
And the left would teach legal realism to basically embrace it.
To say, yeah, that's what we should be doing.
We should be using the law as a mechanism of political power.
Think of Obama. Obama was big into all this stuff.
The left also taught us that the Constitution shouldn't be taken seriously.
Don't really worry too much about what it says.
Get the result you want and then look for some justification in the Constitution.
And if you can't find it, kind of put it there.
Just say, well, you know, this provision can be read in a way that includes what I want to say or the result that I want.
And the left has always emphasized that precedents don't really count for much.
Think of it. When they overturn precedents, precedents, for example, that said that the First Amendment, although it allows political speech, doesn't protect obscenity.
And the left goes, well, who cares about that precedent?
Of course it protects obscenity.
So going back to the 1960s, one precedent after the other was tossed aside by liberal justices.
So let's...
Let's even set aside whether or not the contemporary Supreme Court, the 6-3 majority that we have, is following the Constitution.
We can debate that on another day.
I think they are. But let's say that they weren't.
Even if they weren't, they're doing exactly what the left has been doing and what the left has been advocating and teaching in these very law schools.
And so when I see things like Serena Mayeria, professor at UPenn, she says she basically crossed over into Canada for a holiday and never wanted to come back.
And I wish she had actually followed through with that and never come back.
But she goes now, I'm going to be teaching decisions like Dobbs in the broader context.
Quote, she's talking about the convergence of anti-democratic forces that enable the court to thwart majority will.
Think of the sheer kind of idiocy of this individual, because what is the Dobbs decision but a return of the abortion issue to democratic control?
States can, through the democratic majorities, pass whatever laws they want about this issue.
So far from subverting democracy, the court in Dobbs was affirming it.
And then we go on to other...
It's hard to think about your own profession, the things you were taught, the things you believed in, abruptly coming to an end in rapid succession.
This is apparently a nitwit named Tiffany Jeffers, a professor at Georgetown University who claims that recent Supreme Court rulings have caused her to have, quote, her own personal grieving period.
So I hope, you know, I hope these personal grieving periods keep going.
Because I think that these law professors are out of control.
They have essentially despoiled their own profession.
And law school teaching, which used to rely and needs to rely on different points of view, an adversarial system, real debate, that's really not happening in our law schools today.
So our law schools have become a joke.
It's not the Supreme Court that here is the problem.
It's the law school profession that is the problem.
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A man that Debbie and I think is one of the best filmmakers making films today.
His name is John Gruters.
We were really introduced to his work with his great film called Sabina, a powerful Christian film that just overwhelmed both Debbie and me.
And more recently, we've seen a marvelous film that John has made called The Frontier Boys.
The Frontier Boys. It's going to go up on my Locals channel.
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So you can watch this film.
Certainly, if you want, you can watch it today or watch it over the weekend.
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But you won't be sorry.
This is not like roaming through Netflix and watching the usual rubbish that's up there.
So John Grutas, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
And talk to people a little bit because filmmaking is to many people such a kind of a magical art.
You've been involved with it a long time.
And you are also, I mean, you're a writer, you're a director, you're a producer, so you kind of do it all.
Talk a little bit about your story.
How did you get into filmmaking and acquaint yourself with this magical art?
How did I? Yeah, that's a good way to put it, a magical art, because it's a lot of components, it's a lot of nuts and bolts, but just like putting a robot together, that wouldn't mean it would work.
So we learn about all the pieces and parts of filmmaking, as you know, from what a good story is translated into a good script.
They're not the same thing.
A good screenplay has particular nuances to it that make for a good film.
And the pre-production phases of a film are just everything.
I mean, really, casting.
You just pray you get the right cast and the right characters to bring that script to life and locations and crew.
Filming days themselves, they're mostly about efficiency, It's a magical art that costs a lot per day, and so being organized and getting as much done per day as you can without creating mutiny on the crew is kind of the art of that.
And even if all that goes right, again, as a filmmaker yourself, in the edit room is when that sort of becomes magic or dies on the vine.
And they often have said to me, you know, your film is never as good as you think it is when you finish production, and it's never as bad as you think it is after the first edit.
Wow, John. I'm laughing as I listen to you because it's all so familiar.
And I think you're also outlining why the filmmaking art is difficult because it combines, there's financial aspects to it, There are creative aspects to it, but then there's just the simple grind of getting it done.
And very often I find people have one skill or the other, but putting this sort of ensemble of skills together is where the challenge lies.
Grind is a really good word.
When we are hiring people at our company to move into production, we're very honest with you.
It's work. You've got to be a hard worker and you've got to embrace that the way a farmer has to.
A farmer isn't told by anybody when to do the different tasks that it takes to plant and harvest and distribute and sell.
No one tells the filmmaker usually either.
You have to be self-employed.
Self-motivated, self-organized, because it doesn't come to you with an operator's manual.
You have to generate it.
A grind is a good word.
I love the grind, though.
At the same time, I'm not complaining at all.
The chance to work with colleagues, the chance to work with actors, even the dozens and hundreds of hours I spend right here behind me when I'm editing a film together, I mean, I appreciate that there's so much variety.
I would be bored if I was just a single aspect of filming all the time, if I was just a DP. So for me, Dinesh, man, I love the variety.
At the end of the day though, really my only job as I see it is to be the representative of the audience in the project.
It's not about the filmmakers.
It's not about the actors. It's not about the lenses.
It's about the audience. And it's easy to lose sight of them.
That's a very important point.
I mean, in Sabina, you took the audience, you took Debbie and me into Romania in the Nazi years.
And we felt we were right there.
And then here you make...
The Frontier Boys.
And we're in a high school gym and we're playing basketball.
And the ability that you have to kind of capture that ambience.
I mean, Debbie was a high school cheerleader.
So she's like... This guy knows what he's talking about.
This is exactly the way it is.
This is the mood. This is the feel of it.
Talk a little bit about the story of The Frontier Boys, because it's a story I didn't expect to fully identify with, but I found myself drawn into it.
And it's a very powerful movie, just like Sabina.
Different than Sabina, but it has that same...
It engages you emotionally, and at the end, it's a very moving and inspiring film.
Yeah, it's about four guys and it's a friend movie.
It's a buddy movie in a way.
And these guys are high school sophomores and that's the most awkward phase just about of our lives.
Anything from seventh to tenth grade for a boy, your body is not quite what you wanted it to be.
It's not quite what it was.
Your personality is kind of emerging.
If there's a faith to be forged up to this point, more than likely it's kind of been not imposed on you, but introduced from family, and now all of a sudden maybe you have a driver's license, you have a car for the first time, you have choices, and the world is your oyster.
This story is really personal for me, which wouldn't matter to the audience, but my personal story, I grew up in the Phoenix, Arizona area, and then my family moved when I was a high school freshman.
And they moved from the desert of the southwest to the waters of northern Michigan to the town of Charlevoix.
Massive change from big city to small town, from 120 in the summer to the seasons and the lakes.
And I remember at that time, even as I was driving across the country with a guy to get to our new life, thinking, I have a chance to reinvent myself.
I'm not sure I want to just live on this person that was growing up with all my buddies who had started to turn some very self-destructive ways.
You have a reputation that I just love to change.
I'm going to start over. I want to live a little bit differently.
I want to decide who I'm going to be in a slightly different way.
And for me personally, this little northern town on the shorelines of Lake Michigan was so cathartic.
I can see it more clearly, I think, in retrospect decades later than at the time.
But I know at the time I embraced it fully.
And one of the things I did was play basketball at this little high school.
And it's now been turned into the middle schools, not even the high school anymore, but I got to go back and film in this, I think it's a beautiful, iconic gym.
And basketball, it's not a basketball movie per se, but again, since it's sort of personal for me, the basketball scenes, I wanted them to feel very authentic to anybody who played or loves the game.
Not that we watch it from the distant camera like a broadcaster does, but like it felt to me when I was on that court in those days.
I couldn't see 360 degrees around me.
I couldn't see from a 45 degree angle at the top.
I could only see any player.
You're eye level with your opponent.
My desire was to capture that feeling even though that's really a peripheral piece of the broader story of these four boys and how they get in this terrible mess.
And one of them has a terrible secret that is just eating him up from the inside.
In the movie itself, if you get the chance to see it, I hope that everybody can sort of identify with our main character and recognize when you've got a secret and it can destroy you, but you don't always recognize that, I mean, it's not a cliché, it's a Bible verse, the truth will set you free.
But that's a hard thing to come to when the truth might cost you something.
And that's the nature of the story.
And then the other thing that's interesting to me is the whole motivation for this movie was when my son was about 12 or about this age, I remember thinking, I can't find a single movie that I want to go to with him.
He'd outgrown the kids' movies.
It wasn't at that time like we were going to go see some of the younger kids' movies.
I didn't want to bring him into the movie theater for what was available really at the time because there was always...
We just were on different pages of what I was trying to inspire him to be.
I wanted to find a film I could take my boy to that he would like, he would identify with.
It wouldn't feel like it was trying to feed him vegetables, you know, watch your vegetables television.
It wasn't that. It was a cool movie with guys that were just a teeny bit older than him, and he would sort of see in them some characteristics that he found appealing and he might want to emulate.
And that was the whole point of the movie, a movie that dads could take their boys to and like it, that they would both like it.
I mean, it's... It's a fun movie and it starts off in a disarmingly simple way and then it draws you in.
And it's really about moral choices and it's about coming to terms with decisions that you make.
Very powerful. Guys, the movie is called The Frontier Boys.
You've got to see it today or this weekend.
The website, frontierboys.locals.com.
You'll be able to just buy the movie, stream it, watch it.
Or you can join my Locals channel.
Buy an annual subscription.
You'll get the movie for free.
Don't miss it. It's John Gruters.
John, thank you for joining me.
And this is a great movie that you've made.
I'm very honored and delighted to feature it on my Locals channel.
Thank you so much, Dinesh.
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That's amac.us.dinesh.
We are now in Book 13 of The Odyssey, and this is the sort of latter part of The Odyssey, clearly very different from what we've seen before.
So far, for a number of books, we've seen the narrative, we've heard the narrative of Odysseus talking to the Phaeacians, and he's telling about his adventures.
And Homer goes through those sections actually with startling rapidity.
He talks about, for example, Odysseus' adventures among the Cyclopes.
And this is a fast-moving section which is covered in just maybe three or four pages, so in a recitation time, just a few minutes.
But here, once Odysseus is back in Ithaca, Homer slows down the narrative and slows it down to such a point that we're now going to be covering books 13 through 24, so 11 books, or 12 books, counting 13, of the Odyssey, but covering a relatively short amount of action.
In other words, the action described now between books 13 and 24 is essentially coming down to this. Odysseus comes back to Ithaca. He's in grave danger because the suitors would, if they knew about him, want to kill him and kill his son Telemachus. One of them will then marry Penelope. They will usurp his estate, and Odysseus has to figure out a plan, and he does, for how to disguise himself, disguise his motives, trust nobody, not
even his wife, not even his son, and figure out a way to get the suitors out of there, in fact, to kill them, get rid of them.
and resume lawful authority, lawful control over his country, namely Egypt.
And Odysseus does this.
And again, if Homer were to be following his usual pace, he'd cover this in like five pages, maybe one book.
That's it. The Odyssey would end with book 13.
But what Homer does is he goes into slow motion so that each action taken from now on is described in considerable detail.
So we now get Homer...
The kind of Homer's texture in being able to spell out things very slowly, very descriptively.
Homer goes into the way people think and feel about things.
But I'm not going to do that.
So I'm going to do sort of the opposite of what I've been doing.
What I've been doing is taking episodes from Odysseus' adventures and I'm going to take Homer's very detailed account of the next 12 books of the Odyssey and compress it.
I'm going to really just focus on snapshots of the action and move the narrative very quickly to its conclusion.
I'm probably four or five days from completing the Odyssey.
I thought I would also lay out my plan beyond the Odyssey.
I want to do a little detour.
I've discovered a Russian writer named Zoshenko.
Not, by the way, somebody that people know.
Not someone whose name would come up if you're listing great Russian writers.
This is not Pasternak, and it's not Dostoevsky, and it's not even the poet Yev Tushenko, and it's not Solzhenitsyn.
But this guy was a comic writer, a satirist.
And what's interesting is that he wrote in the time of the Soviet Union.
He didn't want to fall afoul of the authorities.
He didn't want to, like Solzhenitsyn, end up in prison.
So what he did was he created these fictional stories, and he always pretended like he's joking.
It's satire. So if the Soviet authorities ever came to him and go, what do you mean by saying this?
He'd be like, that's just a joke.
Don't you get it? But he was able to poke fun at this kind of closed story.
Socialist, authoritarian regime exposed the gap between its preposterous, between its rhetoric and its reality.
And in reading him today, Zoshenko, there are kind of eerie parallels with the Biden regime.
There are eerie parallels between the Soviet system of the 20th century and modern-day America.
And for this reason, I think...
Zoshenko is interesting.
He's amusing. His stories, as you'll see, are kind of imaginatively crafted.
And so I'm going to do a few days focusing.
He writes short stories, so I'm going to do one a day for maybe a week.
And then I'm going to pivot and pivot from the topics of literature, which I've been covering for a while.
I mean, I did, of course, Dante and And now we're doing the Iliad and the Odyssey, and then we'll do Zoshenko.
So it's literature, literature, literature, but I'm going to pivot to political philosophy and also to philosophy proper.
And you're going to really find this stimulating and challenging.
I'm going to... Focus on a book by the great living philosopher.
He's Canadian, but taught at Oxford for most of his career.
His name is Charles Taylor.
His masterpiece, a recognized masterpiece, is called Sources of the Self.
But in the course of making an argument, it's a kind of a grand tour through Western philosophy.
And so it's a wonderful way In passing, to focus on Taylor's argument, but learn a lot about Plato and Aristotle and Augustine, and all the way through Locke and Hobbes and Machiavelli, all the way to the present.
So it's my way of creating a kind of window into Western philosophy in a way that we can all learn from and enjoy.
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