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Oct. 31, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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HAMMERED D’Souza Podcast Ep446
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Coming up, I'm going to try to make sense of the weird Paul Pelosi incident to try to provide a plausible explanation for something that's being blamed on the MAGA movement.
Twitter's become fun again.
It almost feels to me like how Eastern Europeans felt when the Berlin Wall came down.
I'll talk about that. I'll review a judge's order that Katherine Engelbrecht and Greg Phillips should go to jail today until they reveal the name of a confidential source in the Connick case.
And movie producer Kathy Aylin joins me.
We're going to talk about her film Roe v.
Wade. This is the Dimash Tzuzza 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.
The incident involving Paul Pelosi gets weirder and weirder, and it's also an incident in which the facts appear to change, or at least the reporting of facts, both from the police and from the media.
It seems to alter based upon whether or not the facts fit a kind of given narrative.
Now, let's start with the facts as initially presented.
You have a guy who shows up to attack Paul Pelosi.
Evidently in his underwear.
So not only is Paul Pelosi in his underwear, no surprise, it's his own house.
It's two in the morning.
But the assailant is reportedly in his underwear.
Wow. Then when the police show up, supposedly, the two men both have a hammer.
Not one hammer, but two hammers.
And the assailant attacks Paul Pelosi, not before, he's not lying on the floor, but while the police are there.
That's odd. How did the police know to get there?
Paul Pelosi made a phone call.
And the phone call was, he said, from his bathroom.
So according to Paul Pelosi, he went to the bathroom.
He took a, quote, bathroom break from the assailant.
He's under assault.
He goes, hold on, I got to go to the bathroom.
The guy lets him, evidently.
Paul Pelosi says his phone was charging in the bathroom.
And in the bathroom, he's able to make a phone call.
Now, that makes no sense.
But, granted that maybe this happened that way, Paul Pelosi then tells the police, and we can hear this on the police recording, the police is summarizing what Paul Pelosi told him, and what he said is, the guy's name is David.
He names him. And then he says he is, quote, a friend, a friend.
Now, this is on the recording.
You can go listen to it.
And so, put those facts together and ask, how does this square with the left and the media and the democratic narrative that this is some kind of a violent Trumpster, a right-winger, a MAGA type, who has been radicalized by MAGA rhetoric and is engaging in political violence?
It doesn't square at all.
And so it appears that having now realized that, having realized that the more plausible explanation given the facts I just outlined is that Paul Pelosi arranged a meeting with this guy.
He knew him in any event.
The guy shows up.
Who knows what was going on and how the two men ended up in their underpants.
But Paul Pelosi then calls the police, reveals the guy's name, so clearly he had some familiarity with him.
And so all of this would appear to imply that this might have been some kind of tryst, some kind of rendezvous that went sideways or went wrong.
Now, the San Francisco police have subsequently come out and tried to, quote, clear the matter up by introducing new facts.
So, new fact number one is that, no, there was a mistake, there was misreporting, and they both were not in their underwear.
Only Paul Pelosi was.
Number two, I think more significantly, Paul Pelosi supposedly did not know his attacker.
But this fact number two is now problematic because there's a police recording in which Paul Pelosi reveals the guy's name is David and the attacker turns out to be David DePape, age 42.
So Pelosi clearly did know his name and Pelosi also described him as a friend.
Now, part of the reports I'm reading say that, well, Pelosi was just being unbelievably cunning.
He tricked the assailant into allowing him to go to the bathroom.
He was, in a sense, putting on the idea that the guy was a friend.
But I'm thinking to myself, that doesn't make any sense because the man wasn't with Pelosi in the bathroom.
Pelosi was alone.
That's how he was able to make the phone call.
He was not under any rhetorical pressure.
It wasn't like the guy had a gun to his head or he was trying to appease the guy and talking to the police in his presence, in which case he might describe the guy as a friend so as to reassure the guy.
But no, quite clearly Pelosi was by himself volunteering that he knew the guy, knew his name and that he was a friend.
So how do you square that with the sort of new edited version of the facts that we're now getting?
It looks to me like this is a cover-up job and that the San Francisco police, the sort Let's call it, you know, Pelosi's militia are covering up for the most influential family in San Francisco, namely the Pelosi's.
They release facts, and the facts are very incriminating, incriminating toward Pelosi.
And so they go, it's time to revise the facts.
It's time to come up with new facts so we can blame the guy who really needs to be blamed, who is, guess who, Trump.
So, evidently, Trump, who's not on the scene, knows nothing about this, is dealing with other issues in Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere.
He's the real culprit.
So, you can see what's going on here.
This is really what the left does.
They come up with a narrative.
It's aimed at, obviously, influencing the election.
Just as we've been warning you about violence coming, political violence coming from those domestic terrorists, here is a gruesome example of it.
Uh-oh, that doesn't fit.
Uh-oh, this doesn't match.
Uh-oh, this makes no sense.
Okay, let's trot out some new facts.
And of course, the media will obligingly amplify them to create a kind of new narrative.
So this is a case where it's not that the narrative is developed from the facts, but But the facts are constantly revised and changed to fit the narrative.
My advice to you is basically caveat emptor.
Let the buyer beware.
Don't believe a word of it until we see the body cam, until we see the videotape.
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And the landmark event here has been Elon Musk's takeover.
Not just his offer to buy, but his purchase and then his hit-the-ground-running approach to this very important platform.
Let's remember there has been, for the past year and a half, huge censorship going on and huge manipulation of results, manipulation of the exposure going on on the three biggest platforms, namely Twitter and Facebook and YouTube.
Now, Facebook and YouTube are unrepentant.
They are the same.
Debbie thinks that they're actually gonna get worse now that Twitter has become a free speech platform, although it could go the opposite way.
It could be that when you have censorship, you need a coordinated regime of censorship, a kind of censorship across all major platforms for the censorship to really work, and that once one platform breaks loose, you have a sort of a, let's Using the phrase that was used by Gorbachev to describe the kind of opening up of the old Soviet Union.
Glasnost and perestroika were Gorbachev's two terms.
So it could be that Glasnost will extend from Twitter to YouTube and we'll see a kind of thaw occur even there.
We will see. Now, I want to outline some of Elon Musk's steps.
He comes into Twitter.
First of all, he's labeled himself Chief Twit, which is kind of amusing.
Shows that he has a wry approach to Twitter.
And he comes in carrying a sink, and he goes, let that sink in.
So that, to me, is a little zany.
But nevertheless, he's in the building.
He brings with him his Tesla engineers.
I think this is really important because part of what Elon is saying is, I don't trust the engineers at Twitter.
And I want them to explain the code to my Tesla engineers.
They will sort of take it from here.
And he locked the Twitter engineers out so that they couldn't alter the code.
They couldn't basically fool with the company kind of on their way out the door.
A bunch of these engineers were let go.
And most importantly, the top brass at Twitter were all Fired.
Including Parag Agarwal, the CEO, and Vijaya Gade.
Basically, I call her the, you know, she's the memsaheb of censorship.
She was the one running the so-called content moderation.
She's the one who played a key role in banning Trump off the platform.
She's the one who played a key role in suppressing the Hunter Biden story.
This is absolutely a horrible person, a kind of apparatchik who would be at home in any kind of Maoist or Stalinist or Castroite regime.
They look for these kinds of people.
And Vijaya Ghade is also a notorious liar.
You might remember, this is going back, I think, last year.
She spun some fantastic yarn about how she grew up under racist conditions and her father lived in a town or a city that was controlled by the Ku Klux Klan.
Think about this. We're talking about a city that around 1980 was being, quote, run by the Klan.
Now, there are some rural pockets of Alabama and so on where you could say, well, the Klan is still a real presence even as late as the 1970s.
But we're talking here about a city, it's Beaumont, Texas, that's really quite diverse.
It was quite diverse even in 1980, and today the black population is over 50%.
So, I actually challenged Vijaya Ghadi, okay, listen, why don't you give me the name of this clan leader that was running Beaumont, and that your dad had to sort of get his permission in order to just carry on his business.
Of course, dead silence from Vijaya Ghadi.
In my opinion, the whole thing has been essentially concocted.
Why? To advance her career.
Because these days, we all need a sort of victimhood credential, and this is a perfect one for Vijaya Ghadi.
But I'm really glad Vijaya Ghadi is now on the street, along with Parag Agarwal.
I think they need to get together with the other Indian, which is Preet Bharara, and the three of them need to start an Indian restaurant.
I envision basically Preet Bharara as Indian head waiter.
That's my nickname for him.
Parag Agarwal in the kitchen.
And then Vijaya Gade, who seems to be the toughest of the three.
She could be the bartender and chief bouncer.
And this way, there'll be gainful employment for all three.
We Indians like to support other Indians, so we will patronize this restaurant as long as the food is halfway decent.
Now, the left is freaking out about Elon Musk at Twitter, and they're freaking out not because of hate speech.
They keep warning, hate speech will be back on the platform.
And in fact, you know, this is kind of funny because they keep ransacking Twitter, looking up and down and saying, oh, look, there's a racist epithet over here.
There's a racist epithet over there.
To give the impression that this is now normal at Twitter.
Nonsense. I never see it.
Nobody sees it. I bet you don't either.
Obviously, in any platform, if you search high and wide, you're going to find some examples of it.
But their point is not that they really even care so much about the hate speech.
Because think about it. Most of the censorship has nothing to do with hate speech.
What does the Hunter Biden story have to do with hate speech?
What is censoring information on COVID or debates about climate change or debates about...
The abortion. What do those have to do with hate speech per se?
The left's real goal is to censor not hate speech, but political speech.
Their real goal is to shut down their opponents and one Elon Musk right now stands very strongly in the way.
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I want to talk about the results of the Brazilian election.
The election was yesterday, Sunday, and it was a very close election.
Now, interestingly and tellingly, they were able to tabulate the results immediately.
None of this will tell you three days later or two weeks later the result was out.
And it was a win for the leftist, the socialist, Lula da Silva over the incumbent, J. Bolsonaro.
And it was...
Just a hair over 50% for Lula and 49 point something for Bolsonaro.
So this election was a tie, but tilted slightly to Lula da Silva.
And yet with, even though the election is so close...
Clearly, Brazil is divided as America is, as apparently other societies are, right down the middle.
But this is not a case, as you see in Scandinavian countries, where a country may be divided right down the middle, but you've got a party that is Four inches to the right and another party that's four inches to the left.
The two parties agree on a lot.
And by and large, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference whether it's this guy or that guy, this party or that party.
But here it does, because Bolsonaro is more in the Trumpian mode, and Lula da Silva is really in the far-left mode. Now, the media doesn't see it that way. They keep calling Bolsonaro far-right, and Lula just sort of a firebrand, an activist. They avoid the word socialist. But I think it's fair to say that Brazil is now in socialist hands. And of course, the question is,
what kind of a socialism are we going to be seeing.
Is it going to take Brazil over the next several years down, let's say, the Venezuelan road?
That would be That would be disastrous for Brazil.
And let's remember, Brazil is one of the big players in the world and certainly the biggest country in the region.
So very influential for all of Latin and South America.
Now, in this election, there was a kind of an earlier version of round one of the election, and Bolsonaro came close enough.
That was also, Lula was slightly ahead, but the polls had Lula winning hands down.
He's 10 points ahead of Bolsonaro, but the runoff was forced by the fact that the candidates came very close together, so obviously the other candidates were eliminated.
It was a straight-off runoff between the two, and Lula seems to Now, I'm not sure that this means that Brazil is finished, that Brazil is down for the count, that we're going to see tyrannical socialism in Brazil.
But I think I'd have to say that is a real possibility.
And it's a possibility that would be particularly tragic.
As I think about the result, I mean, I feel really bad, not so much for Bolsonaro, but I feel bad for the Brazilians who are trying to stop the country's slide toward a destructive socialism.
So if we get there, if Brazil does become a big Venezuela, these are the people who will have desperately tried to avert that outcome, but would not have been successful in doing that.
We see in Brazil a lot of similarities to the American situation.
By and large, the urban vote goes for the socialists, the leftists.
The media is heavily left-wing.
The academic class is very much in bed with the socialists.
The pollsters are on the left, and therefore the polls tend to magnify the support of the left.
Again, when you look at Brazil as a country and you, let's just say, color it red and blue using, of course, the American kind of coloring system, you see that most of the country went for Bolsonaro.
And there's just pockets, urban pockets, and particularly one large pocket.
And that pocket, as it turns out, is run by narco-terrorist gangs.
So there's a lot of suspicion in Brazil.
I don't know if this will actually become an issue, but that there was an awful lot of shenanigans and fraud and intimidation going on in that part of Brazil.
Why? Because the narco-terrorists had a candidate.
That candidate was Lula.
Now, how do we know that?
I've actually posted a thread of videos on Twitter showing these narco-terrorists who basically run this place...
I'm celebrating the victory of Lula.
Their guy won, and he won because of their region.
And I don't think it's all that hard to believe that these narco-terrorist thugs are capable of intimidating people, pressuring them to vote a certain way, maybe even engaging in election fraud.
So the left is like...
Bolsonaro won't accept the results of the election, just like Trump never did.
But it looks like there is legitimate cause to doubt the results in this particular region.
So we'll see what happens, not just in terms of, quote, questioning the election, but I think more significantly in terms of what is the direction for Brazil over the next several years.
Let's just hope that the Brazilians haven't made a horrific mistake because sometimes these mistakes are hard to recover from, hard to come back from.
Look at Venezuela. Once it began to slide, it was very difficult to get back its footing.
And now it's unclear if it ever will, or at least if it ever will without some kind of foreign intervention, some kind of foreign rescue attempt that comes from the outside.
So we'll We'll watch Brazil with interest and a little bit of well-deserved trepidation.
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That's 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. Very disturbing developments in a Texas courtroom where a judge has ordered,
this is U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt, Has ordered Catherine Engelbrecht and Greg Phillips to show up today, and if they don't reveal the FBI confidential source in the so-called conic matter, they will be jailed.
He says, the marshals will be here.
If you don't comply with what the marshals, with what I've ordered you to do, you are going to go to jail, and you're going to stay in jail until you do.
Wow. Wow. Now, let's look at what's going on here, because all of this started when Catherine and Greg had some public presentations in the forum that they called the PIT. They talked about their so-called Tiger Project,
and they talked about the fact that there was US election data, valuable, critical, confidential data, That was being collected by this election software company named Connick, run by a guy named Eugene Yu, who has, by the way, deep ties to China and to the Chinese Communist Party.
He's in fact offered his company, Connick, to run Chinese elections with the Communist Party, presumably among rival Communist Party candidates.
And so this guy is evidently involved in U.S. elections, and he has made agreements to keep the election data confidential.
And True the Vote said that he had been violating those commitments and storing data in a manner that made it accessible to Chinese sources, Chinese officials, and, of course, the Chinese government.
Now, Connick sued True the Vote and said that True the Vote has sort of broken into our data system.
True the Vote is racist because Eugene Yu just has a Chinese name and he's being accused of being a kind of a Chinese agent.
And so this is the lawsuit that U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt is dealing with.
But right as this lawsuit was filed, Eugene Yu, the CEO of Connick, was arrested.
He was arrested by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office.
This is the office of George Gascon.
And he was arrested for exactly what true the vote had In fact, Greg Phillips went out to California and testified before the grand jury.
He was one of the sources that made the case to the grand jury, and the grand jury found that there was probable cause, there was sufficient evidence to proceed with the case and, in fact, to make the case.
And so, what I find odd about this whole thing is you've got here a case in Houston, and you would think that the judge in Houston would say, hey listen, we've got a criminal case going on in California that is looking at Connick's involvement in very serious data breaches and very serious offenses.
By the way, Eugene Yu is also accused of embezzling a big chunk of money that was provided by the city of Los Angeles for election contracts, purloining that money, apparently, to his own personal use.
So there are two separate lines of accusation, if you will, in the complaint filed in Los Angeles.
And you would think that the Texas judge would be like, listen, It's silly for us here to be trying to adjudicate whether True the Vote did something wrong with regard to Connick.
Why don't we let the case in Los Angeles play out?
Let's see what happens. Let's see what the culpability is of Connick.
And then if necessary, we can take up the matter here.
But no, the judge appears to think that he is going to adjudicate the case himself.
And so what he's been doing is pressing True the Vote To reveal, you know, in a case you have discovery and the two sides provide information to each other, but in the case of True the Vote, they have confidential informants, one of whom is evidently a source that is at the FBI. So True the Vote has said, listen, we will give you information, but we are not going to reveal the name of this confidential FBI source.
So the judge apparently demands to know the name.
He says, why won't you give the name?
And Truth of Vote has said, I'm now quoting Catherine Engelbrecht, every name I give you gets doxed and harassed.
In other words, once the name is revealed, it becomes public, and then the source becomes themselves kind of a target.
So... So, apparently, Catherine and Greg are eager to protect the identity of this confidential source.
Greg Phillips on Truth Social, he truthed out, doing the right thing isn't always easy, but it's always right.
I've been texting over the weekend back and forth with Catherine and Greg, just basically saying, how's it going?
They're like, man, the judge is threatening to jail us on Monday.
We're talking to our attorneys.
We'll see how it all plays out.
You won't believe Dinesh the transcript, which, of course...
I feel very bad for Catherine and Greg, but I also feel that this is a very heroic action on their part in being able, in being willing to stand up for their principles and stand up for this confidential source.
You cannot conduct research of a certain kind.
This is obviously very sensitive research if you can't protect your own sources.
Because nobody's going to come forward and give you information if they can't trust you to do that.
So it seems like Catherine and Greg are taking a very brave stance.
And quite honestly, I think that if they are jailed and they spend some days or even weeks in jail, it will show the American public and it will show conservatives.
That these are guys who are made of steel.
These are guys who not only have very good research skills, they provided the research foundation for 2,000 Mules, the book and the movie.
The book, by the way, out now.
And you can pick up a copy.
It goes really well with the film.
But Catherine and Greg deserve the credit for not only having done the legwork, but now protecting the mechanism of getting this kind of information.
I mean, to me, the real issue is not, you know, which was the source that provided you with the initial lead, but simply is this information accurate, yes or no?
Does this guy have this data in China, yes or no?
Is he violating his contracts with Los Angeles and other cities, yes or no?
Did he or not, did he or did he not embezzle the money, yes or no?
And so the idea of you gotta reveal your sources or I'll throw you in jail seems to me a foolish and petty distraction.
Inflation continues to be a real plague on our economy, our families and our savings.
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Do it today. Obama is back, and he is back by popular demand, not popular demand from the American people, and certainly not from me, but popular demand from the Democrats.
And you can kind of see why they're turning to Obama.
The alternative is Biden.
Normally in a midterm, the president, Biden, would be out there stomping for these candidates.
But they don't want him, particularly in the swing districts.
But they think that Obama has got perhaps some of his old juice, his old mojo, if you will.
And so here's Obama showing up in Georgia to try to save Stacey Abrams in the gubernatorial contest with Brian Kemp, trying to boost Warnock in his race against Herschel Walker.
And then off Obama goes to Wisconsin where he's trying to help Mandela Barnes in his race against Ron Johnson. And so Obama is doing what Obama does. And I can't deny that he is a, well, like you can't say compared to Biden because there's no comparison. There's no point doing a comparison, but he's a skilled rhetorician.
And he has a kind of relaxed style where he seems to be an aw shucks, jovial kind of guy, just talking regular talk with regular people.
But we have to just remember that this is the Obama routine.
This is how Obama conned the American people in 2008.
He was less successful in conning them in 2012 because some of them, quite a few actually, figured him out.
And by 2016, many of us had figured him out.
And in fact, of course, Hillary's defeat was obviously partly in 2016, partly a measure of Hillary herself as a horrible individual, corrupt, and the Clintons.
But it was also a referendum on the Obama presidency.
Obama had had two terms, and if people were really thrilled with Obama, Hillary would probably have made it in the same way that George H.W. Bush made it really on the strength of Reagan's successful two-term presidency.
But what Obama's trying to do is sort of come in at a time where Democrats appear to be increasingly anxious and perhaps even a little desperate about the midterms, which are only eight days away.
And they're looking for Obama to sort of give us a message, define the message for us.
And Obama's message appears to be that, number one, the Republicans are nuts coming up with one crazy theory after another.
Of course, he doesn't specify what these theories are.
He just acts like we kind of all know that they're crazy.
And Obama, in effect, says something like, well, you know, they accused me of not being born in America, and now that wouldn't even make the top 10 list of crazy.
And Obama also goes right to the issue of abortion and gays, where he goes, is it Republican politicians and judges who should get to decide when you start a family?
Or how many children you should have?
Or who you marry?
Or who you love? And the left cheers wildly because they think, oh man, what a way to put it.
And this is a case where the media, the chattering class, the democratic establishment likes this kind of thing and thinks it is the magic bullet for the midterms.
I don't think so.
I think that if Democrats really wanted to make a case, they would engage on inflation, they would engage on gas prices, they would engage on the economy, they would engage on crime.
They really can't do that.
They're making implausible denial with Stacey Abrams.
I was really never for defunding the police.
Let's play the videotape.
You actually were on multiple occasions.
Or the Democrats go, well, we're not causing the inflation.
I saw the press secretary talking about how Biden inherited a complete mess, utter economic ruins when he came into office.
And you don't have to have that good of a memory to realize that's really not true.
So Obama is putting on his usual rhetorical finery and he's trying to be cool.
And I understand that that's impressive to a certain media types who have always had a certain kind of Obama fetish.
But I don't think it's going to make much of a difference when it comes to people voting now through next Tuesday.
Seems to be no question America is in decline.
Crime and inflation are skyrocketing.
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Guys, I'm really thrilled to welcome to the podcast a friend of mine, Cathy Alin.
She's the writer and director of the film Roe v.
Wade. By the way, the film is at roevwademovie.com.
Now, Kathy's an independent film producer, writer.
She's served as head of production for Big Picture.
And she's produced all these cool films.
Alien Abduction, a sci-fi thriller with Lawrence Bender.
The Experiment, starring Adrian Brody and Forrest Whitaker and Stephen T.K.'s thriller, Isolation.
Kathy, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks so much for joining me.
Talk to me a little bit about the importance of doing films that convey stories, but stories that deal with current events.
Why did you make the Roe v.
Wade movie? Well, thank you so much for having me today, Dinesh.
And it is an important conversation.
You know, mainstream films at the moment are driven mostly by a very liberal agenda.
And so to me, it's very important to make narrative films, as well as documentaries like yours, that showcase topics that are relevant to today's news.
So for example, my film Roe v.
Wade goes Along with the history of how that law, that legalized abortion in the United States, was passed in 1973.
So we tell the true story of exactly how that case came to the Supreme Court, how it passed, and all of the manipulations and conspiracies and fake news that went along with it back in the 70s.
And that's super important because as we all know, history repeats itself.
And what happened in the 70s is not much different than what happened today in so many ways.
Thank you. Debbie and I saw the film and we found it riveting because, well, it's a feature film, as you say, but it's revealing all this true new information that people don't have.
And you could have made it as a documentary in which you interview sources, but you chose to do it as a story, a feature film.
Is that because the medium of the feature film, in some cases, is a better way to reveal history We're good to go.
There's characters that you could follow along with, some familiar faces like Jon Voight and Stacey Dash and Robert Davi that people can be fans of.
And when you're hearing a story told by such prolific actors that you love, sometimes it sinks in a little bit better.
And then maybe you get so interested in the topic that you'll then dig deeper and watch a great documentary that'll interview the real sources.
I've certainly found a lot of people that have seen our film then go and look up interviews with the different Supreme Court justices and the different key players at the time.
And that was the whole point of making the movie.
All of this information that we showcased It's all available to the public.
It's not hidden information.
I mean, Margaret Sanger, for example, who is the founder of Planned Parenthood, wrote in her own autobiography that her goal in forming Planned Parenthood was to, quote, quote, reduce Negro populations.
That's a quote from Margaret Sanger's own autobiography, which is On print, on Amazon, available for everyone to buy.
This is all accessible information.
We were able to condense it into one place, into a story that you can watch in two hours, that maybe would spark your attention to say, hey, let me look into that a little bit further.
And so we did actually make a website at Roe v. Wade movie.com with all of the sources that were used for the film, similar to how you would do in a documentary, because we wanted people to be able to fact check us. So there's a whole fact check page on our website where everyone could see for themselves what those sources are. And I do find that at least my generation, the millennials and below me, Gen Z, we want to know for ourselves that something is true.
When someone tells us something, we want to Google it.
We want to say, I don't know if I trust you.
I want to see for myself.
And that's really important.
So we just wanted to spark the idea and then let people run with it once they saw the story.
I mean, part of the story that is revealed in the film is that the justices who were considering the Roe B. Wade matter as a legal matter were leaning one way, and then there was a sort of We're good to go.
So talk a little bit about how the film brings this to light and shows that, you know, what many people think, the Supreme Court looked at the Constitution, they identified a fundamental right, and what you show is, well, that's not really what happened.
Well, I'll start by saying that, you know, when researching this film, we were told that there was a symposium at Stanford, a law symposium hosted by the Federalist Society, where it was agreed upon by this symposium of lawyers on both sides of the argument that Roe v.
Wade was one of the worst legal decisions in Supreme Court history.
Not because they were pro or against abortion, but legally how was decided.
Now, tying that into what you're asking, you know, Supreme Court justices are not robots.
They are humans. And we are all affected by the media, our families, things that are going on in our own homes.
In this specific case, we had Supreme Court justices with wives and daughters who were volunteering at Planned Parenthood, who were influenced by this huge feminist movement that was sweeping the nation in the late 60s and 70s.
So it's almost to say, you know, if you're talking about the George Floyd case, for example, against Derek Chauvin.
How could you say that the judges in that case wouldn't be influenced by what's going on in the media or what's going on in their own homes?
That environment that we all experienced in the summer of 2020 during the ALM movement is very similar to what you could picture the environment that the justices were experiencing during the Back in the 70s when this case was decided.
And not only that, on top of the family pressure that they all saw right in their own homes, there was a leak.
Just like there was a leak right before the new Roe v Wade decision got overturned, there was a leak where one of the justices leaked the internal vote.
You know, there's internal votes that happens before the justices decide something.
They have this big case coming up, and while they're in their meetings, they're deciding, hey, what are we looking at now?
How many are for it? How many are against it?
These are confidential internal votes that take place in the Supreme Court.
One of the justices was very unhappy that the vote was swaying towards continuing to make abortion illegal.
So he then leaked that internal vote to the Washington Post.
And there was a huge story in the Washington Post about how Chief Justice Warren Burger, who in our film was played by Jon Voight, was leaning towards keeping abortion illegal.
Now, you can only imagine the death threats The family pressure, what he would then receive once the country knew that he was voting against legalizing abortion.
Remember what happened to Justice Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett or our current justices once the new Roe v.
Wade decision was leaked. People showed up at their homes.
There were protests. There were death threats.
History is simply repeating itself.
I mean, what's so fascinating with all this, Cathy, is that there are some people who think, and maybe this is just a distorting effect of memory, that, you know, going back to the 70s and 80s and 90s, this sort of thing didn't happen.
That we lived in a kinder, gentler America and all this sort of journalistic terrorism and putting ideological pressure or threats against justices.
And I think what you're saying is that it did happen.
And particularly on this exact same issue.
So this is a fascinating film, guys.
You need to see it. Go to rovwademovie.com.
Is that the best place, Kathy, for people to check out the film?
Absolutely. You'll find links to all your favorite streaming providers on that site, whether you want to watch it on iTunes or Amazon or whichever you prefer.
That's the hub where you can find the film.
Great stuff. Kathy and Lynn, thank you so much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Dinesh. I want to talk about a recognition scene in the Odyssey.
This is in Book 19. And it has to do with Odysseus trying to conceal himself, but nevertheless being recognized.
Now, recognition is an important theme in all of Greek literature.
We see this not just in Homer, but also in Greek tragedy.
And the recognition can be self-recognition.
So, for example, the idea...
That in Greek tragedy, you killed your father, you married your mother, one of the most powerful tropes, the Oedipus tragedy.
And Oedipus comes to a sense of recognition about what he did and also who he is.
But recognition in Greek literature is also used in the ordinary sense, where you simply have somebody who is in camouflage and disguise, and you figure out who they are.
Now, Odysseus here is trying to conceal himself.
From everyone. He has revealed himself to his son, Telemachus, because he actually needs to partner up with Telemachus to get rid of the suitors.
But he didn't tell the swineherd Eumaeus who he is.
He hasn't told his wife, Penelope, who he is.
And there's also an old slave woman in the household.
Her name is Eurycleia.
And he certainly hasn't told her who he is.
Now, in this scene, Odysseus has arranged a meeting with Penelope.
And it's a very interesting meeting because, first of all, Odysseus is disguised, but he is her husband.
You would think that she would figure out who he is.
And maybe she does.
But in the scene, she doesn't give any obvious indication of it.
She asks Odysseus, well, who are you?
What's your story?
And Odysseus, whom Homer at this point in the narrative calls the father of lies, basically spins out this big story about how he's a stranger.
But in the narrative, he goes on to say that he knew Odysseus.
That he was familiar with Odysseus and he's able to prove it because Penelope is like, well, what do you mean you knew Odysseus?
What kind of clothing was he wearing and what did he look like?
And the stranger, of course, is able to answer those questions effectively and say, well, yeah, he was dressed like this, he looked like that.
And Penelope realizes, wow, this guy must have really known Odysseus because he has information that I know about my husband, but an ordinary person who didn't know Odysseus would certainly not know.
Now, why is Odysseus doing this?
Is it like a pointless...
No. Odysseus is trying to confirm for himself for sure that Penelope is completely loyal to him.
Remember, he's been away for 20 years.
10 years fighting the Trojan War, 10 years getting back home.
And so...
And he's heard when he was away about all kinds of other Greeks who had major problems when they got home, notably the king Agamemnon.
He got home. His wife Clytemnestra had taken up with another man.
The two of them plotted to kill Agamemnon and did.
So Odysseus knows that could happen to him.
It could be that Penelope is in league with the suitors.
He doesn't think so. She's not like her.
But nevertheless, he doesn't know for sure.
So Penelope here is able to talk to this so-called stranger and say things like, well, stranger, the deathless gods destroyed my strength and my beauty the day the Greeks went marching off to Troy and my Odysseus went off with them.
If he came back and cared for me again, I would regain my beauty and my status.
So here's Penelope sort of disclosing that she is very much loyal to Odysseus.
She's very much, you may say, on his side.
And she weeps when she hears about the stranger talking about her husband in this way.
Homer, of course, picks up the irony right away.
Quote, she wept for her own husband, who was right next to her.
So Odysseus is, of course, right there, but she doesn't really know it.
Now, interestingly...
Penelope calls for the slave woman Eurycleia to give Odysseus a bath to wash his hands and his feet.
And Eurycleia begins to do this.
And while she's washing Odysseus' feet, as she reaches out and touches his feet, she feels a scar.
And she immediately knows that this is Odysseus.
Why? This is actually the woman who has raised Odysseus.
She's bathed him every day.
She knows that he has a scar at a particular spot on his ankle or on his foot.
And so as she's washing the feet of this stranger, she feels the scar and a kind of Immediate recognition.
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