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Nov. 3, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
46:53
DESPERATION D’Souza Podcast Ep449
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Coming up, it's desperation time.
I've got my swimsuit on.
I'm ready for the red wave, but Biden is making a last-minute appeal.
I'll provide a report from jail revealing the latest news about Catherine Engelbrecht and Greg Phillips of True the Vote.
I want to commend Rumble today for refusing to submit to the censorship demands of France, and I'll conclude my study of Homer's Odyssey.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to talk about Biden's speech last night, a last minute pugnacious and, to many people, desperate last minute attempt to save the Democrats in the midterms.
And how do you save the Democrats in the midterms?
Well, you can't save the Democrats now by pointing to issues.
Biden has no record to run on.
He can't say, well, listen, I've done a great job on gas prices.
I've done a great job on food prices and on inflation.
I've done an excellent job with the economy.
He tried some of that, but it was sheer misinformation.
At one point, he goes, Gauss prices were $5 when I came in.
No, they weren't.
And by the way, Twitter has started running some fact checks on Biden.
Debbie laughs because it's a first.
Normally, these guys get away with the most outrageous lies, and they're never fact checked.
So it's kind of a reminder of the Democrats that they want content moderation.
This kind of cuts both ways.
Now, Biden's speech, even before the speech, they were putting out the word, the White House was, we're going to be defending democracy.
And the press secretary was asked about this.
And she said, yeah, he's going to call this out.
We're seeing an attack on our democracy.
And the president has been very clear.
We need to protect our democracy.
We need to strengthen our democracy.
And then someone, one of the reporters asked, well, are you saying that it is against our democracy to vote for a Republican?
And this, you know, this press secretary is unbelievably dumb.
So she was like frozen, like the deer in the headlights.
But then she goes, we're talking about MAGA Republicans, MAGA Republican officials who have been...
Then she goes on to talk about the big lie and so on.
Well, wait a minute. The MAGA phenomenon is now the mainstream part of the Republican Party.
This is well-known. People who Trump endorse are more likely to win the primaries.
So... In a sense, her answer to the question is yes, because who are the non-MAGA Republicans?
Well, I guess you could say Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney.
So basically what the Democrats are saying is we want a controlled opposition.
The only legitimate Republicans are the ones that we say are legitimate.
They don't actually have the support of the Republican base, but that's all right.
Those are the only legitimate Republicans here.
Now, Biden goes on to say in his speech, there's no election in our history that we can be more certain of its results.
And look, I've addressed this ad nauseum in the movie, in the book.
I just want to say this.
If Democrats really want to assuage people in the future that votes are being properly counted, elections are fair, why not support the reasonable common sense reforms to get there?
Voter ID, which we have ID in every other sphere of life.
Surveillance of all the drop boxes, proper observation of the counting of the ballots, audits where necessary.
So in other words, these are just kind of steps that you would think could be advanced in a bipartisan way to address the actual concerns that people have instead of just calling everybody who disagrees names.
Now, let's pursue Biden's sort of logic about democracy.
This is what he seems to be saying.
There are two parties in America, a Democratic Party and a Republican Party.
But one of the two parties is, at least in terms of its mainstream, in terms of its most visible leader, which is Trump, and the mainstream of the members of that party, it is an illegitimate party.
It's got isolated people who are kind of okay, some of whom, by the way, have endorsed Democrats like Liz Cheney.
So... Biden's view is that we have a two-party system, but only one party is legitimate and the other party is not.
Why? Because only one party is committed to democracy and the other party is not.
And therefore, there's kind of only one legitimate party on the ballot in the midterms.
There's only one legitimate party that people who support democracy can, in this exercise of democracy, vote for.
And what Biden is saying also is that it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with the Democratic Party.
You can think the Democratic Party is horrible.
You can think that it has a racist history.
It has a history of election fraud.
It's done a horrible job on the economy, massive disasters in foreign policy, bringing us to the brink of a nuclear war, choking off energy supplies that are available domestically in this country.
you can think all this about the Democratic Party and you should still vote Democrat.
Why? Because after all, there's only one legitimate party, and if you vote for the other party, you're voting essentially against democracy.
So in other words, Biden is saying that in this upcoming exercise of democracy in the midterms, you have to acknowledge that democracy is already finished.
Why? Because America has only one party.
We're a one-party state.
And this is really, I think, the goal of the Democrats.
Their view is you save democracy by creating in this country a one-party state with a sort of a token opposition.
The opposition is always regulated by the Democratic Party and its allies in the media.
In other words, what they want is Venezuela.
What they actually want is what Mussolini wanted.
And anyone else did not speak for the people.
So this is the essence of Biden's speech.
It has echoes of Venezuelan socialism, echoes of Italian fascism, nothing in fact.
When you really think about the threats to democracy, I can think of two.
One is efforts to subvert a free election.
Those are obviously anti-democratic.
And two, the collusion between the Biden regime and high-tech companies to, not to go after hate speech, but to regulate and restrict debate, democratic debate on a whole bunch of political issues from COVID to the elections, to suppress all this and to do it covertly behind the scenes.
This is the true danger, the true attack on democracy, and it's coming from Biden.
He's the problem. He's not the solution.
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You need to use promo code DINESHDINESH. I want to cover this next story really in a descriptive way.
I'm describing a very important article in Just the News.
Just the News is a journalistic site that is run by John Solomon, a well-respected reporter and journalist.
And here he is reporting on a Democratic whistleblower in Orlando who has filed an official complaint I'm not quoting a long-running widespread ballot harvesting operation in the African-American communities in politically important Central Florida.
Now, as this woman's name is Cynthia Harris, she's African-American herself.
She's the former Orange County Commissioner, and she's filed a sworn affidavit.
What is she saying?
She's saying the Democrats have an organized operation in Central Florida to collect third-party ballots and influence, if not determine, who those ballots are voted for.
She also says that in this scheme, The activists are paid $10, you'll remember that number from 2,000 Mules, $10 for every ballot that they collect.
She goes on to say that a lot of people don't believe that this is going on because it typically doesn't go on in affluent suburban communities.
So the way she describes it, and by the way, John Sullivan also has a video interview with her, which you can see at justthenews.com.
She, in a very credible way, says, listen, you know, if you don't think this is going on, it's because it's in your type of community.
It may not be happening.
But in my type of community in the inner city, this has been going on for a long time.
And she goes on to say, she goes into the details of how this occurs.
She says, by and large, I'm not quoting her, ballot brokers typically work up to a year in advance.
She says they visit individuals in their residences, they assist the individual in filling out a request for the mail-in ballot.
So in other words, this is not a case where people get their mail-in ballots and someone just shows up to collect them.
The ballot harvester is involved at the beginning of the process, listen, let me help you fill out the application, but you know what?
When the ballot comes in, you don't fill it out.
Don't do anything with it.
Hang on to it.
Don't seal the envelope.
She goes on to say that in some cases where people ignore those instructions and seal the envelope, she says, quote, the ballot broker will take the ballot and steam open the sealed envelope and will, quote, correct the votes if necessary that were not voted according to their wishes or just throw them out.
You get a ballot you don't want, it's for the wrong guy, whoops, into the trash can it goes.
So, this is a remarkable confirmation.
And guess who it's coming from?
A black Democrat describing something happening in the inner city.
Now, you may say, well, how do we know she's telling me?
How do we know she's credible? Well, it turns out that the Florida authorities have looked at her complaint, have deemed it credible, believable, and so they've opened an official investigation.
She says that she tried to go to the Orange County Board of Supervisors earlier, but the guy who's run that office for 26 years, she goes, he just basically brushed her off and said, I'm not interested in any of this.
Quote, it happens all over the nation, but we are the ones that suffer from it because we are the most Disenfranchise.
We don't have the resources to fight back.
So here you have a black woman basically saying that blacks are the most vulnerable members of our society.
They have the right to be able to vote their own ballots, and this right is in a sense being taken away from them.
So there you go.
Here we have a, in an area not covered by the movie, an independent person, credible, coming from the Democratic Party and describing a democratic scheme.
Obviously, the Florida authorities are going to dig into this some more.
Very interestingly, you have, of course, a Republican administration.
Now, you don't have a Republican administration all over Central Florida, but you, of course, have a Republican governor.
And so I think that you have a balance of forces here to pay genuine attention.
And that's really kind of what this...
Film and book we're aimed at doing is getting the right people who have subpoena power and who can actually go and talk to the relevant people to explore further what exactly is being done here, who's doing it, who's organizing it.
So what I'm hopeful is that this independent whistleblower will be the start of an honest investigation into what really has been happening, not just in Florida, but around the country.
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Feel the difference. I want to give you an update on Katherine Engelbrecht and Greg Phillips of True the Vote.
It appears that they are still, day two, in jail.
And they have been thrown in jail by a Texas judge.
Because they are unwilling to provide the name of a confidential informant that put them on the trail of the election software company, Conic.
Which is run by a Chinese-American named Eugene Yu.
Now, if you go on Truth Social, and I hope all of you have accounts at Truth Social, it's important for us to help build up alternative platforms.
I realize that Twitter is, you know, the Berlin Wall is coming down at Twitter, which is a very good thing.
But we want insurance.
We want to make sure we have safe platforms where we can speak our mind.
And now on Truth Social, Catherine and Greg have accounts.
Truth The Vote has an account there.
Follow them. And Catherine has a recorded message, which I listened to this morning.
It's a very poignant and strong message, basically saying, number one, we're okay.
Number two, don't take your eye off the ball.
Don't worry about us right now.
We're going to be fine. Really focus on getting the word out before the election.
So kind of a last-minute appeal to be involved and to spread the message and to vote.
Don't miss out on this critical opportunity to change the direction of the country.
And And then, through the vote, also sent out a kind of an email to its friends and supporters, who obviously were included.
Debbie's on the list.
And I want to go through that briefly.
It says, number one, that...
That True the Vote became aware that two million election workers had their private data.
And by private data, we mean poll worker names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, bank account numbers.
All of this is in a database.
And that Eugene Yu and Connick were allegedly storing this on Chinese servers.
For 15 months, Catherine and Greg worked with FBI field agents in Texas on this kind of operation.
And then, one of their FBI informants told them, listen, the FBI office in Washington, a.k.a.
the whole corrupt shebang in Washington, knows about this now, and they're turning the operation against you.
In other words, they're making you into being the villain and not Connick.
So what you need to do is kind of go public with this information so at least people know about it.
That's why Catherine and Greg held their public forum called The Pit, and they kind of outed Connick, and they described this illicit storage of data.
And then they were approached by the Los Angeles DA's office because Los Angeles has contracts with Connick.
And they presented their information to the LADA's office.
And the LADA has their own investigators.
So they were able to look into this, dig into it, corroborate it, verify that it's accurate.
And that's when they arrested Eugene Yu.
And that's when they have a criminal complaint ongoing in Los Angeles.
Now, you would think that when Connick...
Files a civil suit against Catherine and Greg, oh, you broke into our servers, oh, you're racist because Eugene Yu has the last name of Yu, that a Texas judge would say, okay, guys, let's hit the pause button.
The issue here is not how Catherine and Greg, quote, got this information, who told them about it, who was their whistleblower.
By the way, Catherine and Greg have cooperated with the judge.
The judge basically said, listen, I need to find out who was the individual who gave you access to the data about Connick.
And Catherine and Greg told the judge, this is the guy.
They named him. But then the judge went further and said, in effect...
I want to know the name of your FBI informant.
Now, Catherine and Greg have said, and they say in this letter, we're not going to tell that guy's name because that guy would become an immediate target, not only for being fired by the FBI, because, of course, we know how corrupt the Washington, D.C. operation of the FBI is, going all the way to the top, Christopher Wray, but this guy might also be in personal danger.
And so we assured him that we would protect his confidentiality and we are not going to be I'm not quoting from the letter.
Again, in a gesture of cooperation with the judge, they said, In confidence or in private sessions so that you know that we have a genuine informant.
And if you want to know his identity, we're willing to disclose it to you.
We're just not willing to disclose it in public.
And the judge is like, that's not enough.
You have to do this. So something really weird is going on here.
This seems to me to be very...
Strange and outrageous behavior, really, by this judge.
Why? Well, research organizations and journalists regularly use confidential information.
The confidential information is not expected to stand on its own merits.
It's expected to be checked out, to be verified.
But that has happened in this case.
That's what the LADA's office has done.
And so... By the way, 2000 Mules began with a confidential informant who came forward in Atlanta, obviously a different guy, and said, this is what's happening.
I'm part of a larger operation.
In fact, that's what convinced Catherine and Greg to go buy the geo-tracking data.
Why? Because since the confidential informant wasn't going to give his name, they were like, we have to prove it some other way.
We have to have some irrefutable way to document what's going on on the largest And that was the investigation that later led to the film.
So I want to commend Catherine and Greg for hanging tough and being brave in what is obviously a difficult situation.
I think the good news, the silver lining, is that they will come out stronger than ever, tougher than ever, their profile will be larger than ever, and let's hope that Connick and Eugene Yu, if they are guilty of these offenses, will get their ultimate comeuppance.
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The video platform Rumble is really proving its reliability as a free speech platform.
And by a free speech platform, what I mean is it genuinely is open to all kinds of different viewpoints so that the kind of open debate that is essential to self-governing societies can move forward.
Now, full disclosure, Debbie and I are close to Rumble.
We helped to build up Rumble.
We actually are investors in Rumble because we wanted to encourage the growth and proliferation of an alternative platform.
Now, the latest news is the following.
Rumble apparently was being pressured by the French government to ban certain foreign sources, particularly Russian, a source called RT France and also Sputnik.
Basically, the idea is the French were saying, these are adversaries and you have to ban them.
Rumble said, no, we don't actually ban foreign news sources, even though there are foreign sources that are hostile, that have their own accounts.
By the way, there are foreign sources that have their accounts on Twitter.
Twitter and YouTube and Facebook.
And they are not banned. They just happen to be the adversaries that the left doesn't want to ban.
So, for example, the Iranian government and various Iranian authorities have accounts on Twitter.
They have accounts on YouTube.
They have accounts on Facebook.
And none of these platforms have banned them.
So, think about what's really going on with France coming to rumble and saying, ban these Russian sites.
In a sense, what they're telling Rumble is, we get to decide which kind of foreign bad guys are allowed and which are not allowed.
So, for example, China, you can have China, no problem.
Iran, you can have Iran, no problem.
Russia, no, you've got to ban the Russian news sites.
And Rumble is like, it's not our job to be succumbing to this kind of governmental pressure to do this.
And so, Rumble said, we're out of France.
We're going to disable our accessibility in France, but we're going to fight this in court.
We're going to fight for free speech in the French courts and see where that goes.
Now, by the way, Rumble in this sense is following an earlier example set by none other than Elon Musk.
The A number of governments, Elon Musk tweeted out on March 5th, So that's, again, Musk saying, Refusing to succumb to pressure.
Now, he agrees that if you basically have your foot on his neck or you have a gun to his head, well, then it doesn't become your choice at all, right?
You're basically submitting to duress, and that's a whole different situation.
But Chris Pawlowski, the CEO of Rumble, he says, users with unpopular views are free to access our platform on the same terms as our millions of other users.
Great. I mean, this is what we want.
This is the smell of freedom.
And Glenn Greenwald, who, by the way, he has a show on Rumble, he also weighed in, and with a very interesting quote,"...if Rumble obeyed France's censorship order, like big tech firms often do, it means Americans could only access voices and views which foreign governments—EU,
China, Iran, etc.—permitted to be aired." So what we're seeing now emerging, and Greenwald is part of it, Musk is part of it, Rumble is part of it, the free speech team is kind of getting its troops in line.
And this is not just a team of pundits, because this is a team that now has a big platform.
Rumble, by the way, has something like 80 million users or more.
And has a fairly giant market value since it went public.
You've got influential journalists like Glenn Greenwald.
But you also have the richest man in the world who spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter but still has over $200 billion in his back pocket.
So this is a guy, by the way, who could actually buy Facebook and YouTube and still not run out of money.
I'm not saying that he should do that.
I'm not sure. Well, Debbie goes, why not?
Why aren't you saying that?
Well, I mean, yes, if it comes down to who do you trust, Elon Musk or the whole constellation of censorship forces, I'll go with Elon Musk.
I realize that Elon Musk might make some quirky and arbitrary decisions, but his heart's in the right place.
The guy believes in free speech.
He's doing the right thing.
And in a situation where free speech itself has become precarious in our so-called free society, it's safer to bet on Musk.
and on Greenwald and on Rumble.
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As the investigation, the January 6th investigation continues, The question that is now being discussed on the left is, if we charge Trump in connection with January 6th, what can he be charged with?
Now, initially, the Harvard Law professor, Lawrence Tribe, produced the most outrageous suggestion of all.
He was like, let's charge Trump with the attempted murder of Mike Pence.
As if Trump had concocted a scheme to assassinate Pence.
So this was, even the left found this to be too laughable to pursue.
And so poor Larry Tribe has been stewing about it on his own.
But here comes Barbara McQuaid, who is a Michigan law professor.
She was on MSNBC a few days ago.
And she thinks that she's come up with a more credible theory, and that is, let's go after Trump for manslaughter.
Now, let me quote from Barbara McQuaid.
She's being interviewed by Nicole Wallace, and she says, There's actually an interesting legal theory here.
I stop you right there because you see how these people are fishing.
It's not as if, you know, not a clear case where somebody robbed the bank.
We're going after the bank robbery.
Here's the robber and so on.
Here's an interesting theory. You might want to try this one.
See if it, you know, maybe catches some steam.
There's an interesting legal theory here for manslaughter.
And she says basically that refers to a, quote, reckless mindset or gross negligence.
And she says Trump had not only a duty not to do something bad, but an affirmative duty to take action to protect people.
And then, quote, I think you could possibly...
Put together a theory based on the facts that Liz Cheney just described to make Donald Trump responsible for the deaths that occurred that day.
First of all, let's think about this.
Brian Sicknick died of natural causes.
Trump can't be responsible for that death.
There were other Capitol Police officers who, for whatever reason, there were a few cases of guys who took their life later.
Who knows what led to all that?
The stress of being a policeman maybe added to the stress of January 6th, but it's very difficult to blame that on Trump.
Jonathan Turley The political scientist, who's kind of an authority on these things, reviews all this and he goes, what kind of nonsense is this?
He says, first of all, okay, duty to protect.
Yes, Trump had a duty as the president to protect people, but didn't Nancy Pelosi have the same duty?
Don't the leaders on Congress have a duty to protect not only the Capitol, but to protect people who are coming to the Capitol or into the Capitol?
How does that do?
So can Nancy Pelosi be charged with manslaughter on exactly the same grounds that she was negligent?
She had an affirmative duty to protect people, which she didn't do.
And Turley goes on to review the Supreme Court cases on incitement.
And he says, listen, the Supreme Court could not be more clear, even if you call for violence.
And by the way, let's remember, Trump did not call for violence.
He did not call for people to enter the Capitol.
He talked about people marching peacefully and patriotically.
But... The point is that even if you call for violence, you are not responsible for the violence that occurs unless there is a threat of imminent lawless action and what you do is likely to incite or produce such action.
In other words, if you generically say, there needs to be a revolution, and then the next day there is a revolution, that doesn't mean you caused it.
It doesn't mean that your words were the direct insider or instigator.
So there has to be not only a call for violence that is very explicit, not generic, but explicit.
Go to the Capitol and commit violence over there.
And second, there has to be an immediate...
And direct sort of an unbreakable chain of causality that links your call for action with the action that does in fact occur.
Now, again, this is setting a standard, a bar so high that the facts of this case don't even come remotely close to it.
And so what you have here is...
Is the left giving vent not to genuinely provable theories or even plausible theories, but this is a psychological window into the left.
This is how they think.
We've got our criminal, Trump.
Let's go in search of a theory that might work.
And then let's go in search of a court that might open the door.
And then let's go in search of a jury that's not really going to consider the facts but is kind of on our side and knows that it's kind of our goal to get this guy one way or the other.
So this is lawlessness.
It's lawlessness that I think the left rationalizes to itself by, you know, this guy is Hitler circa 1933.
I mean, this guy is an authoritarian.
So they normally, anyone with a conscience would not be able to do this.
It's kind of like, you know, would the ordinary leftist be willing to frame someone for a crime they didn't commit?
And the answer is no, unless his name happens to be Trump.
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Make sure you use the promo code DINESH. I notice it's not getting a lot of media coverage, but there are massive demonstrations going on right now in Brazil.
A giant assembly of people.
It looked like hundreds of thousands of people showing up in the capital, really at the Center of the Armed Forces.
And apparently part of the objective of this demonstration is to solicit the intervention of the Brazilian military on the basis that this was not a fair election.
When you look at what's going on, you see a situation that has some We're good to go.
More than 10 points ahead.
Oh, he's going to sweep this.
He's going to get over 51%.
He didn't. He got 48 or so, and then Bolsonaro got about 43.
So there was a runoff. And they thought, okay, well, you know, Lula's five points ahead.
There were a couple of other candidates that dropped out and endorsed Lula.
So this is going to be easy the second time around.
Instead of it being easy, it became more difficult.
Bolsonaro closed the gap.
The final result was something like...
You know, 48.9 or 49.2 versus 40.
It was essentially a hair that separated the two candidates.
Also telling, Bolsonaro won almost the whole country.
Lula won one area, but it happens to be the area around Rio de Janeiro, densely populated, the most populous part of Brazil.
So, wow, this sort of resembles the way that in the United States, the Democrats take the urban areas, Or even within a state, somehow most of Pennsylvania votes for the Republican, but hey, votes come in in Philadelphia that tipped the election.
Philadelphia by itself is enough to deliver Pennsylvania to the Democrats.
Now, the other thing that's interesting, and to me somewhat encouraging, is that although Bolsonaro lost, Bolsonaro's party has the most seats in both houses of Congress, in other words, of the Parliament.
And Bolsonaro's party is called the Liberal Party, a liberal in the classical sense.
99 seats in the Brazilian Congress and in the Senate, where about a third of the seats were in play.
Bolsonaro's bloc is also the largest party.
So what this means is that Lula can come in as this kind of raging socialist.
And by the way, all the other leftists and socialists in South America and Latin America are jubilant.
The former guerrilla and leftist who won the presidency in Colombia.
This is Gustavo Petro.
Viva Lula!
Cuba, Cuban dictator Miguel Diaz-Canel.
Cuba congratulates you, comrade.
So, you know, here in America, the progressive media didn't want to call Lula socialist.
They merely called him left-leaning or left of center.
This guy is a Castroite, and he's basically a very bad guy.
Now, but he's a bad guy who's going to have to deal with a conservative legislature.
And that means that Bolsonaro is hardly out of the game.
I don't really know where all these mass demonstrations are going to go.
It could well be.
It looks like Bolsonaro's position is that he doesn't concede.
But he's going to cooperate with the transfer of power.
So in other words, he's not calling for, at least not as far as I can see, any kind of broader disruption.
But there's disruption on the street, and you can actually see it.
There are videos all over social media about this.
And in some cases, fracases and showdowns that are becoming violent, as is to be expected, unfortunately, in these circumstances.
I've said in earlier segments, I'd be very sad to see Brazil fall because it would suggest, first of all, it would suggest a tilt for the whole continent of South America with large implications.
But it looks like we're not there yet.
It looks like what we have is a really bad guy who won by a hair.
But the other guy still holds the Congress.
So in other words, kind of what we're trying to achieve in the midterms, which was if we're successful next week, Republicans will have the House, Republicans will have the Senate, but of course there'll be Biden in the White House, but it'll be a standoff.
Certainly, legislatively, Biden will have his hands tied.
What I'm hoping is the Republicans don't just play obstruction, but they play offense.
And they're willing to use their power, including their subpoena power, their investigative power, to really blow the lid off of the Biden administration and And expose the full degree of their censorship, their mobilization of the deep state against opponents, all this bad stuff that has been hidden while Democrats had the House and the Senate and the White House.
We want it all to come out now.
Guys, I plan to close out the Odyssey today.
I hope you've enjoyed it.
For me, this is a riveting, up-and-down, topsy-turvy, vividly imagined and beautifully executed story, an adventure story.
And so I hope you've enjoyed it, and I've got a lot more good stuff to come after we're done with the Odyssey.
As always, I try to use these As an introduction to a great work, not exhaustively covering it but inviting you to learn more, pursue it on your own, as with Dante's Divine Comedy, which is what I covered earlier.
Now, the way the Odyssey closes is there's a kind of revolt on the part of the angry parents who hear about what Homer calls the, quote, dreadful murder of their sons by Odysseus and Telemachus.
They rush to the palace.
And here is the father of Antinous.
This is the first guy who was killed by Odysseus.
This scheming man, meaning Odysseus, my friends, has done us all monstrous wrongs.
First, he took good men off to sail with him and lost the ships and killed the men.
So this is a guy who's blaming Odysseus for the loss of his men.
Now he has come and murdered.
All the best. Come on before he sneaks away to Pylos or Elis.
We have to act.
We will be shamed forever unless we take revenge.
So... Here you see that even though Odysseus is king, he's not a king without dissent, without enemies, without people who want to get him, and a kind of battle erupts.
Halithyrs, he's an old warrior, tries to dissuade these angry fathers, but they can't be held behind.
They can't be held back, and so they charge at Odysseus, And he kills a bunch of them.
So this is actually now getting out of hand because it's one thing for Odysseus to be killing the suitors who were directly invading his house.
It was really a home invasion, if you think about it.
They were tormenting his wife.
They were plotting to kill his son.
Odysseus had every right.
Here, it's a little more...
I mean, again, Odysseus is defending himself.
They're the ones who assaulted him, but to some degree, their rage is also understandable.
You can see Homer has this exquisite balance where, you know, throughout the Odyssey, Odysseus has been telling us, oh, my men did this.
That's how I lost them. I tried really hard to save them.
But, of course, the fathers of these suitors don't see it that way.
Odysseus went off with these men and He came back.
They didn't. What kind of a leader is he?
He's the one who's responsible for their debts.
So this is a fracas that is really getting out of hand when essentially there's divine intervention.
And this is really how the Odyssey closes.
Athena kind of jumps in the middle.
And she says, first of all, to the fathers of the suitors, back off.
Ithacen, stop this destructive war.
Shed no more blood.
Go your separate ways.
And her visage, her appearance, is so terrifying that they all kind of cower and back up in terror.
Now, interestingly, Homer says, unwavering, Odysseus let out a dreadful roar and swooped upon them.
So Odysseus, he's not scared.
He wants to fight on.
But essentially Athena turns around and in a somewhat gentler voice says, Odysseus, you are adaptable.
You always find solutions.
Stop this war or Zeus himself will be enraged.
So here is Athena appealing to Odysseus' well-known good judgment and his craftiness.
I think what she's saying to him here, and this is the way in which Homer, he never just makes a divine command, like, oh, Zeus is telling you that's why you should do it.
Essentially, what Athena is saying to him is, listen, Odysseus, you're the king of this country.
This is the aristocracy of your society.
Now, yes, their sons went out of hand.
They tried to usurp your throne.
you have dealt with them in a just fashion, but you're still going to have to rule Ithaca after this.
You don't need more bloodshed.
In fact, what you need now is some form of reconciliation with these families, because they have, after all, lost their own sons here.
And so the best course of action is to call a halt to the bloodshed.
Enough.
There's been enough bloodshed abroad.
There's been enough bloodshed at home.
And so in the closing lines of the Odyssey, we see Odysseus turn to Athena.
Essentially, he kind of gets his bearings.
You can kind of imagine him swallowing as Adam's apple kind of goes up and down.
And Homer tells us he was glad to obey.
In other words, he saw the wisdom of what she was saying.
He was able to exercise a kind of rational control over his anger.
And then Athena makes everybody present swear a solemn oath.
That they will continue with basically goodwill and openness to each other and they're willing to work together.
And so we have these two magnificent epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, both taking Segments of the Trojan War story.
And even though these are segments in which the bard kind of starts where he wants and ends where he wants, they're remarkably self-contained unto themselves.
And yet, when you read them together, they make a perfect complement, the one to the other.
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