A lush translation of this late-discovered lesbian poet added to the legacy of Sappho, but there was a trickster at work
In 1894, a German archaeologist named Herr G Heim made a groundbreaking discovery. On the island of Cyprus, he excavated a tomb that belonged to a hitherto unknown ancient female poet by the name of Bilitis. Carved on the walls surrounding her sarcophagus were more than 150 ancient Greek poems in which Bilitis recounted her life, from her childhood in Pamphylia in present-day Turkey to her adventures on the islands of Lesbos and Cyprus, where she would eventually come to rest. Heim diligently copied down this treasure trove of poems, which had not seen the light of day for more than two millennia. They would have remained little known – accessible only to a small, scholarly audience who could decipher ancient Greek – had a Frenchman named Pierre Louÿs not taken it upon himself to hunt down Heim’s Greek edition, hot off the press, and translated Bilitis’s poetry into French for a broader reading public that same year (published as Les Chansons de Bilitis or TheSongs of Bilitis). Bilitis might have been an obscure historical figure – no other ancient author mentions encountering her or her poetry – but the cultural and literary significance of Heim’s discovery was not lost on Louÿs. For, in several of her poems, Bilitis revealed that she crossed paths with classical antiquity’s most renowned and controversial female poet: Sappho.
From The Songs of Bilitis (1922) by Pierre Louÿs, illustrated by Georges Barbier. Courtesy the BnF, Paris
Sappho (c630-c570 BCE) lived in the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, where she composed lyric poetry – songs performed to the accompaniment of the lyre. Her poetry was widely admired throughout antiquity. Plato dubbed her ‘the tenth Muse’. In the 1st century CE, the Greek philosopher Plutarch recalled listening to Sappho’s poetry performed at symposia – wine-drinking parties – remarking that her words were so beautiful, he was moved to put his wine cup down while he listened.
A 3rd-century Egyptian fragment of Sappho’s poetry from papyri found at Oxyrhynchus (modern-day Al-Bahnasa in Egypt). Courtesy the Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK
Sappho was significant enough to have her work copied by scholars at the Library of Alexandria a few hundred years after she lived – the same scholars who first systematised Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into the books we are familiar with today. Of the nine book rolls of Sappho’s work these scholars produced, only a sliver survives. There is one complete poem, the so-called ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’, in which Sappho prays to the goddess of love to bring a female lover back into her good graces. The rest are scraps. Our knowledge of her poetry relies largely on papyrus fragments and partial quotations from later authors. As the classicist Emily Wilson put it in the London Review of Books: ‘Reconstructing Sappho from what remains is like trying to get a sense of a whole Tyrannosaurus rex from one claw.’
Among these precious fragments, we find some of the most stirring and exceptional representations of desire in all ancient Greek literature. In fragment 31, for example, Sappho sees a man sitting across from a woman and listening to her sweet voice and lovely laugh. She compares him to a god, but then this man, ‘whoever he is’, quickly fades to the background, and Sappho spends the rest of the fragment expressing in hair-raising detail the effects that beholding this woman has on her:
… oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead – or almost I seem to me …
(All translations of Sappho by Anne Carson)
Passionate desire, what the Greeks called eros, is no trifling matter for Sappho. In fragment 130 , Sappho calls eros the ‘melter of limbs’ who habitually stirs her, a ‘sweetbitter [glukupikron] unmanageable creature who steals in …’ If we are accustomed to think of love as bittersweet, Sappho inverts this: eros starts off sweet (gluku) but turns bitter (pikron), as some distance or barrier often comes between Sappho and her female loves, as in fragment 31 above.
We find expressions of the devastating stakes of erosamong male lyric poets, too, but in those contexts, the poets sing of desire for beautiful male youths or ‘beloveds’. In classical Greek culture, this form of male homoeroticism, known as pederasty, is elevated as the most admired, virtuous, manly form of love, even superior to heterosexual relations. From our earliest Greek literary sources onwards, women’s desires and bodies are problematic. According to the poet Hesiod, Zeus invented the first woman – Pandora, a ‘beautiful evil thing’ – as a punishment for men. Her opening of the jar – not a box but rather a pithos, a giant storage jug as big as the human body – symbolises the misogynist view of women as leaky containers whose insatiable appetites, whether for food or for sex, must be controlled and regulated by men.
A hydria (water jar) possibly depicting Sappho reading and surrounded by attendants. Greek, c450 BCE. Courtesy the British Museum, London
poem titled ‘Types of Women’, by Sappho’s contemporary Semonides of Amorgos, showcases this strain of misogyny on steroids. The poem attacks women through the form of a catalogue, listing different types of women and the animal-antecedents to whom they owe their shameful, negative traits. The only acceptable type of woman Semonides describes is the bee-woman, the ideal wife who directs her desire entirely towards enriching her husband’s household by bearing him legitimate children. This ideal woman never so much as mentions sex when in conversation with other women.
In comparison with this misogynist tradition, Sappho’s representation of women and desire could not be more different. Take fragment 16, which opens thus:
Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is what you love.
In these lines, Sappho articulates an expansive vision of beauty. She lists the different kinds of armies that men find the most beautiful, using the form of the catalogue to invoke Homer’s Iliad, a war story whose plot and heroic values are underpinned by the violent exchange of women as property between men. Sappho does not tell us whether or not she thinks armies are beautiful. She simply says that the most beautiful thing is what(ever) we love (and therefore subtly claims that men think armies beautiful because they love war).
Sappho recreates through memory a single person who is beautiful because she is loved
She then explains her point by citing the example of Helen, the wife of Menelaus, on behalf of whom the Greeks fight the Trojan War. Accounts differ as to whether Helen sailed to Troy willingly to be with the Trojan prince Paris or was forcibly taken. Rather than castigate Helen as the epitome of evil – female desire – as most traditions do, Sappho simply states that she left behind her husband, children and parents, and sailed to Troy, because something (the poem is fragmentary; perhaps desire itself?) led her astray.
From The Songs of Bilitis (1922) by Pierre Louÿs, illustrated by Georges Barbier. Courtesy the BnF, Paris
The point is this: even she who ‘overcame everyone in beauty’ pursued what she found the most beautiful thing on earth, what(ever) she loved. And this, Sappho says, reminds her of a woman named Anaktoria, who is gone. Sappho says:
I would rather see her lovely step and the motion of light on her face than chariots of Lydians or ranks of footsoldiers in arms.
For Sappho, the beauty of armies pales in comparison with the beauty of Anaktoria because Sappho loves Anaktoria. ‘Ranks of footsoldiers’ behold women as exchangeable, dehumanised objects of beauty, not love. Sappho recreates through memory a single person, Anaktoria, who is beautiful because she is loved. What makes Sappho’s articulation of eros so exceptional, then, is how she challenges the dominating, misogynist attitudes about women and their desire as expressed by the male-authored Greek literary tradition. As the classicist Ella Haselswerdt writes in ‘Re-Queering Sappho’ (2016):
Sappho’s fragments show us eros and pleasure for their own sake, not as an exchange of property, the exploitation of one for the sake of the other, or in order to achieve virtue in the eyes of a moralising philosopher like Plato or Aristotle.
From antiquity onwards, however, Sappho’s expressions of lesbian eros attracted a medley of misogynistic and homophobic responses. In the 5th century BCE, following the tradition of pathologising women’s desires (whether homo or hetero), Athenian comic playwrights transformed Sappho into the stock character of a sex-crazed woman, insatiably hungry for men. In his Heroides, a collection of literary letters in which female heroines express their grievances to the men who have mistreated them, the Roman poet Ovid composed a letter in Sappho’s voice. His version of Sappho claims that her love for a young boatman named Phaon surpasses the thousands of loves she has had with girls on Lesbos. The ancient biographical tradition performs the ultimate act of heterosexualising Sappho by claiming that she leapt to her death from the cliffs of Leucas because Phaon would not reciprocate her love. Flash-forward to the late 19th century, when archaeologists were beginning to find papyrus fragments in Egypt containing new bits of Sappho: as Miriam Kamil writes in ‘I Shall — #$% You And *@$# You’ (2019), many English translators censored Sappho’s lesbianism by changing female pronouns to male.
Given this history, it is difficult to overstate the significance of Heim’s discovery of Bilitis’s poetry: here, at last, was the material evidence and textual perspective of a female contemporary to Sappho and her lovers.
The catch? ‘Bilitis’ was fake.
Bilitis’s poetry and the story of its discovery were all the invention of Pierre Louÿs, the man who purported to have translated her poems for the first time. We might be tempted to classify Louÿs’s concoction as a forgery, a text created by a person who intends to deceive an audience by passing it off as something other than what it is. However, upon closer inspection, TheSongs of Bilitis is a thinly veiled literary hoax, a creation that is more of a literary game than a genuine attempt at deception.
Louÿs was no stranger to the contemporary literary scene as both a translator and an imitator of (authentic) ancient texts. He also happened to be close friends with Oscar Wilde, sharing with him literary interests in art’s power to imitate and deceive, as well as erotic interests in sexual tourism in French-colonised Algeria. Only one year before releasing The Songs of Bilitis, Louÿs had published a French translation of epigrams by the 1st-century BCE poet Meleager of Gadara (now the city of Umm Qais in Jordan). It is likely that Louÿs found inspiration for fabricating Bilitis in the genre of the epigram itself. Epigrams are short poems originally written upon objects such as pots, walls or tombs – the site of Bilitis’s discovery. As a ‘lower’ literary genre, epigrams are often sexually explicit. Louÿs lifted some of Bilitis’s songs wholesale (with minor tweaks) from the erotic Book 5 of the Greek Anthology, a collection of thousands of Greek poems. Finally, by composing epigrams under the name of Bilitis, Louÿs took his cue from an ancient authorial move associated with the epigram: some epigram authors, remaining anonymous themselves, composed epigrams pseudonymously, that is, by attaching someone else’s name (often that of a dead author) to their epigram. Some of the epigrams in the Greek Anthology purport to be composed by Sappho herself, something Louÿs no doubt had in mind as he chose ‘Bilitis’ for his authorial mask.
The book was published amidst intense cultural debates about the quality and nature of Sappho’s lesbian desire
Louÿs ‘plays’ the forger and wants his readers to appreciate the cleverness of his performance. One clear example of this lies in the fiction Louÿs creates around the poems’ provenance. In The Songs of Bilitis, Louÿs inserts a prefatory ‘Life of Bilitis’, in which he narrates how Herr G Heim excavated Bilitis’s tomb and brought her poetry to light. The choice of this name encodes a clever joke: when read with a German pronunciation, Herr G Heim becomes Herr Geheim, aka ‘Sir Secret’. The real origin of Bilitis’s poetry – not Herr G Heim’s pickaxe but Pierre Louÿs’s pen – is a secret lying in plain sight for clever readers to detect. We also learn from this preface that Bilitis had a Greek father and a Phoenician mother, but that she might have never known her father, given that he is nowhere mentioned in her poetry. It is tempting to see Bilitis’s dubious paternity as another place where Louÿs tips his hat as Bilitis’s literary progenitor.
From The Songs of Bilitis (1922) by Pierre Louÿs, illustrated by Georges Barbier. Courtesy the BnF, Paris
Another playful way that Louÿs generates an aura of mystery around Bilitis’s poetry is the inclusion of a table of contents that labels some of the poems ‘untranslated’. Readers who are taken in by the ruse might believe that, given the sexual nature of many of the songs, some of them were too explicit to translate for a popular audience. But for readers who get the game Louÿs is playing, this performance of self-censorship puts Bilitis in the same category as actual ancient writers such as Catullus, Martial or Juvenal, whose sexual obscenities were handled in 19th-century translations by leaving them in untranslated Latin.
Even if The Songs of Bilitis was more of a literary hoax than a forgery, Louÿs nonetheless followed the forger’s playbook in targeting the desires of his contemporary audience. Not only did his ‘discovery’ hit the shelves as new papyrus fragments of Sappho’s poetry were being excavated in Egypt, but the book was also published amid intense cultural debates about the quality and nature of Sappho’s lesbian desire. For Natalie Barney and Renée Vivien – two prominent lesbian intellectuals (and close friends of Louÿs’s) – it was irrelevant that Bilitis was fake: they praised Louÿs for representing an unequivocally lesbian Sappho, and they went on to publish their own translations and imitations of Sappho’s poetry.
The greatest badge of honour for Louÿs’s literary creation, however, came from its most incendiary critic: the German philologist giant Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. In 1896, Wilamowitz published a scathing 16-page review of The Songs of Bilitis. His ire did not mellow as time passed, for he reprinted this same review as the centrepiece to his monograph Sappho und Simonides (1913). The opening of the review is worth quoting in full (my translation from German):
A volume of French poetry, some of which is disgustingly lewd, may seem unsuitable for review in this place: but I find it worthy of consideration, and seize this opportunity to address matters long dear to my heart. I’m concerned with the purity of a great woman: I’m not afraid to put my hands in shit.
The ‘great woman’ Wilamowitz refers to here is not Bilitis, of course, but Sappho. Bilitis is the filth that has corrupted her ‘purity’, by which Wilamowitz means Sappho’s (hetero)sexual chastity. In this regard, Wilamowitz used his review of contemporary French poetry to rekindle an argument made about Sappho in the early 19th century by the scholar Friedrich Welcker. Welcker wrote a book called Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurtheil befreyt (1816), or ‘Sappho: Freed from a Prevailing Prejudice’, in which he argued that Sappho was not, in the lingo of the time, a ‘tribade’, but rather a schoolteacher preparing girls for society and marriage with men. Wilamowitz follows the path paved by Welcker, claiming that it is later readers such as Louÿs who bring their own ‘unnaturalness’ (Unnatur) to Sappho’s poetry.
Wilamowitz’s fiery takedown did not succeed in quashing the hype
The motive of Wilamowitz’s review is to purify Sappho of lesbian eroticism via her association with Bilitis (whose primary female lover is not, in fact, Sappho, but rather someone called Mnasidika, whose beauty Sappho herself praises in fragment 82a: ‘Mnasidika more finely shaped than soft Gyrinno …’). Curiously, however, most of his review is spent criticising various poetic and linguistic aspects of Louÿs’s poetry. Wilamowitz plays the philological critic in unveiling the many anachronistic details littered throughout the poems, observing that they suit more the literature of the later Hellenistic and imperial period (when Greece was under Roman control) rather than the ‘true Hellenic’ (ie, classical) spirit of Sappho’s time. Wilamowitz is as upset at Louÿs’s anachronistic mixing of literary genres and language as he is by Sappho’s sexual mixing with Bilitis. For him, The Songs of Bilitis presents both a moral and textual threat to a supposedly pure Sappho. Wilamowitz’s review promulgates a misogynist, homophobic theory about Sappho, and it cloaks this mission in the seemingly objective rhetoric of classical philology.
Wilamowitz’s fiery takedown did not succeed in quashing the hype around The Songs of Bilitis. In fact, the opposite occurred. Louÿs himself cited Wilamowitz’s review in the bibliography to the expanded 1898 edition of The Songs of Bilitis. Why would Louÿs draw attention to such negative reception? Wilamowitz’s eye as a philologist laid bare for readers all the potential sources that Louÿs imitated as he composed his fake ancient poems, thus highlighting the scholarly work that went into making Bilitis. Wilamowitz takes Louÿs’s poems so seriously as imitations that he treats them as if they actually were translations of authentic ancient Greek poems. The critic’s takedown becomes the forger’s badge of pride.
Professor Dr Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, c1917. Courtesy Wikipedia
Still, Louÿs’s bold citation of Wilamowitz’s homophobic review should give us pause. If Wilamowitz was concerned to carry Welcker’s torch and purify Sappho from the taint of female homoeroticism, Louÿs did not exactly free Sappho from male-centred, misogynist approaches to her poetry, a tradition that, as we’ve seen, was underway already in classical antiquity.
Although he represented a homoerotic Sappho – and received praise from contemporary lesbian readers for doing so – Louÿs in fact had drawn inspiration for the character of Bilitis from his sexual involvement with a 16-year-old Algerian girl. Louÿs invented a literary fiction that fit squarely in a 19th-century French literary tradition of male-authored, voyeuristic, orientalising portrayals of lesbian desire, a tradition grounded in the material conditions and power dynamics of European colonialism and sexual tourism. In this regard, Sappho and Bilitis were simply springboards for Louÿs to cater to a European readership hungry for images of the exoticised lesbian other.
These lesbians took the licence that they, too, could participate in the contested afterlife of Sappho
But this is not the end of Bilitis’s story. Some 60 years after the ‘discovery’ of Bilitis, a remarkable coincidence occurred, igniting a new legacy for Bilitis that Louÿs could never have predicted. In 1955, The Songs of Bilitis, previously available only through limited, expensive and privately printed editions, was republished by Avon, a press that sought to rival Pocket Books (the first mass-market paperback publisher in the United States) by making a wider range of literature – from science fiction to smut – accessible to a popular audience in the form of cheap paperbacks. That same autumn, four lesbian couples gathered in San Francisco to form a secret club. They desired a space where lesbians could socialise beyond the surveillance of their parents, families and employers, and outside of gay bars, which were frequently subject to police raids.
When it came time to make a name for their group, they had to be careful not to pick anything that could put their members at risk, given the intense homophobia of the McCarthy era. Nancy, a factory worker whose last name we don’t know, suggested ‘Daughters of Bilitis’. She was met with blank stares. Nancy explained: she had encountered a translation of Bilitis’s poetry in a volume by Pierre Louÿs. She had brought that very volume with her to the meeting. What intrigued Nancy was that this Bilitis was a contemporary of the ancient Greek poet Sappho on the island of Lesbos in the late 7th century BCE. Nancy’s partner Priscilla chimed in: ‘“Bilitis” would mean something to us, but not to any outsider. If anyone asked us, we could always say we belong to a poetry club.’ The women agreed to name themselves after this obscure figure. Thus was born the ‘Daughters of Bilitis’ (or DOB), a group that would become the first lesbian social-political organisation in the US, active until 1995.
It is easy to take a cynical view of these lesbians’ decision to name themselves after a fictive ancient lesbian. The women were cognisant of the fact that Louÿs had invented Bilitis, but that did not deter them from making something out of what was available to them – and conducive to their precarious social conditions – at the time. If these lesbians took anything from Louÿs, it was the licence that they, too, could participate in the contested afterlife of the fragmentary Sappho. Unlike Louÿs, they would author a chapter under Bilitis’s name by and for lesbians.
While I like the idea of people having integrity, it does seem like the government is being purged of people that want to do the right things, to be decent people. This government is corrupt and is run like a crime syndicate with a mob boss wannabee at the top. I think how fast these people took over the government and turned all the good that government can do upside down so that government has become the very engine of harm in our country. Hugs
Texas A&M University, earlier this month, banned a philosophy professor from teaching about Plato’s Symposium because it’s too gay (well, in their words, for discussing “gender ideology”), and, while obviously philosophy classes should be allowed to teach about Plato and state lawmakers and administrators shouldn’t be interfering in curricula… they are right that the specific texts that they banned are pretty gay.
If the legislators’ and administrators’ goal is to make LGBTQ+ people feel more isolated and alone as a way of getting them to conform and pretend to be cisgender and heterosexual, this won’t be enough to accomplish that goal — however, it’s a necessary step towards that goal.
I grew up in the ’90s in a conservative part of central Indiana, and I went to college on the other side of the country, determined to get away from everyone I knew and to live my life as I wanted. One of the classes I had to take in my first semester at college as an 18-year-old freshman was a survey of Western civilization-type class that included Symposium as one of its readings.
I still remember the professor warning us in the class prior to reading Symposium that the text was about “love” and that, for Plato, that very much included love between two men. This was 2001, pre-September 11, just a couple of years after Ellen DeGeneres came out, and at a time when homosexuality was illegal in many states, so, yes, we got a “trigger warning,” and the potential trigger was a discussion of homosexuality.
It’s hard to say what impact that book had on me. Pretty much the only mentions of homosexuality in grade school that I remember from Indiana were the slurs kids would throw around every other sentence, the jokes and insults that were never any deeper than calling someone gay, the Christians randomly arguing (against no one!) that homosexuality was sinful, the casual discussions of violence against gay people (I grew up in the days when fantasizing putting all gay men on an island and dropping a bombshell on them was just a normal thing for people to talk about, like the weather)… and here I was — a freshly minted adult among other adults — talking about Plato, the famous philosopher who (pretty much every adult my whole life had said) was an important historical figure. And Plato was gay. Maybe not “gay” in the modern sense, but he was writing books about loving men, and that was close enough for me.
[This] is why MAGA wants to end liberalism itself. To them, people are workers, soldiers, baby-producing machines, not human…. It’s a cold and sad way of looking at the world.
One of the passages that Texas A&M University had an issue with was Aristophanes’ speech about the origin of love. The short version is that, in the distant past, humans rolled around like balls with four arms and four legs and two faces. Some people were all male, some all female, and some a mix. They were powerful and a threat to the gods, so Zeus cut them all in half. Now they (we) spend our lives looking for our other half and holding on when we find them.
While the point of the story isn’t an explanation of why some people are gay and others are straight, it’s baked in, and modern readers are going to notice that Aristophanes is saying that same-sex love has the same origin as opposite-sex love. They’re all just normal variants of human sexuality, and it’s not something that anyone else in the book even comments on. That is, same-sex love is just another legitimate expression of love that comes from the same place, at least for Aristophanes. Others in the book have different opinions about male same-sex love, but none are disapproving.
I wasn’t the only one to take that message from that story. I have heard it mentioned by other queer people throughout my adult life. It featured prominently in the late-90s musical (and later film) Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It’s a part of the queer lexicon.
“The ‘gender ideology’ of this tale comes to us from the fourth century BC,” writes Guardian columnist Osita Nwanevu. “And philosophers in the many centuries since have examined it not only for what it tells us about the Greeks in Plato’s day but for what it might tell us, as far removed as we might be from ancient Athens, about sex, love, and longing. It is a tale about universal aspects of the human experience philosophers have examined in the service of understanding what it means to be a human being.”
Nwanevu’s larger point is that the underlying ideology of the presidential administration — as shown in Stephen Miller’s claim that the world is “governed by strength” and Vice President J.D. Vance’s statement that America is nothing more than a “homeland” for “people with a shared history and a common future” — is really selling people short. What it means to be human is much more than mere strength and domination, and America is supposed to be an idea and an ideal, not just a piece of land where we live.
LGBTQ+ rights flourished in the post-war world, as did other human rights protections; ending the constant spats over pieces of land inspired people to understand that there’s a lot more to being human…
That is, America is supposed to be about all people’s inherent value and right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” not Miller’s “iron laws of the world” — those of “might makes right” — that Nwanevu rightly calls “the laws of animals.”
This is fundamental to how the global neo-fascist movement sees the world: For them, everything is about domination and resource-hoarding. All other considerations are secondary.
It can be seen in the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights that are often justified by pointing to a decline in the birthrate, or in the attacks on humanities and social sciences at universities, degrees that many claim (often incorrectly) don’t pay well. This can be seen in the complaints that schools shouldn’t teach kids to be more tolerant of diverse people — a necessary skill in a multicultural world where we all get along — and should instead teach them the bare minimum of reading, writing, and arithmetic (and, since it’s the 21st century, how to code). It can be felt in the right-wing mockery of art and arts funding when they never have complaints about spending money on military equipment that will never (and should never) see combat.
And it’s in this horrifying Greenland business, which is what Miller was talking about when he was discussing “the iron laws of the world.”
| Shutterstock
On the one hand, invading Greenland would end NATO, end all sorts of ties between the U.S. and Europe, and end the peaceful world created in the latter half of the 20th century that led to prosperity in the West and an end to the wars for territorial expansion that defined Europe for millennia.
On the other hand, Greenland looks kinda big on Mercator-projection maps, and adding a big splotch to the part of the world labeled “United States” would make the president feel like he actually accomplished something of value in his life.
It shouldn’t be surprising that LGBTQ+ rights flourished in the post-war world, as did other human rights protections; ending the constant spats over pieces of land inspired people to understand that there’s a lot more to being human, to be concerned with their own and other people’s happiness, and to try to live up to the ideals laid out in previous centuries.
Which is why MAGA wants to end liberalism itself. To them, people are workers, soldiers, baby-producing machines, not human. Our worth is measured in terms of how much stuff we can produce, how much we can contribute to our nation’s domination over other nations. Individuals’ fulfillment and happiness are secondary. It’s a cold and sad way of looking at the world.
So Plato, of all people, is taking a beating in Texas. Learning about philosophy opened my mind when I was young and taught me to ask questions about what life could offer. (The part of Symposium about how homosexuality results in intellectual reproduction instead of biological reproduction like heterosexuality wasn’t even on the syllabus at Texas A&M, but I still haven’t forgotten about it.)
In the war on human-ness itself, LGBTQ+ identities will always be one of the first victims. That’s why they don’t want us learning about ourselves.
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What is shocking is how ill informed some people in the US are. This is part of the dumbing down of the US education system. So many right wing / or maga people are so uneducated and wrong because they believe the misinformation fed them along with the hyper US is always correct and never wrong they are fed by the right wing media that is designed to mislead the maga public ready to accept / follow an authoritarian government meant to make their lives harder while making the lives of the very wealthy even more wealthy. Just listen to the arrogance the person asking the question has even though they are totally incorrect on everything they claim / write to Belle. Hugs
Of course tRump gets to control the money himself and he claims he will control all of Gaza with the goal of creating a beachfront resort and hotel complex with no input from the Palestinian people nor any mention of where they will live. It is a total money making gambit with no humanitarian aid allowed for the Palestinians at all. No food, no healthcare, nothing. It is like they simply will not be there one way or the other. Hugs
What is the US treasury not secure enough? Who is getting the money? Who bought the oil. As the report says this is all to side step the legalities that would or could arise if the money was held under the US legal system in the US. Which leads to questions. Again who is getting the money and why? Is this going to tRump and family while the US taxpayer gets the bill for securing the ill gotten gains? Is it so creditors can’t collect their legally due money again so tRump and family get to keep it. See my issue with all this? The US is being led by a mob boss wannabe gangster. Hugs
I put this one here with because tRump needs to be a total authoritarian strong man dictator to be able to grift and steal as much money as possible both from the US treasury along with other sources. Hugs
In order to please tRump and stave off the maga thugs republicans in elected office are trying desperately to change reality. Some are doing it to practice what tRump is able to do which is to make people accept his version of reality even when it is completely false and made up. No one but tRump can do that and he has been doing it since he was a kid. He has the ability to convince himself that what he wants to believe is true is true because he wants it. By the fact he was always wealthy or people thought he was it worked and twice he has had the power of the presidency along with the cult behind him. Other republicans don’t have that ability and can not command the maga cult. But that won’t stop them from trying. Hugs.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., is leading a congressional subcommittee reinvestigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Trump administration has promoted a distorted and whitewashed history of that day’s events.
Andrew Harnik/AP
A new Republican-led congressional subcommittee to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol held its first public hearing this week. GOP lawmakers used the opportunity to criticize the Biden administration and, at times, promote conspiracy theories about the riot. An NPR fact check has identified multiple false and misleading claims from the hearing, which coincides with a broader effort by the Trump administration to rewrite the history of the attack.
The hearing unfolded against the backdrop of Trump’s mass pardons for the Jan. 6 defendants almost one year ago. Stewart Rhodes, the former leader of the Oath Keepers who was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the attack and sentenced to 18 years in prison, appeared at the front of the audience. Rhodes is one of a small group of former defendants who did not receive a full pardon from Trump, and instead received a commutation. As a result, Rhodes was released from prison but his seditious conspiracy conviction remains on his record.
The official topic for Wednesday’s hearing was “Examining the Investigation into the DNC and RNC Pipe Bombs.” On Jan. 6, just as rioters began breaching the outer perimeter of the Capitol, two bombs were discovered outside the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national committees, diverting law enforcement resources at a critical moment.
During the Biden administration, the investigation into who planted the bombs stalled, and the lack of an arrest fueled conspiracy theories. Dan Bongino, the conservative podcaster who would later become deputy director of the FBI, said on his show in November 2024 that he was certain the bombs were placed by “either a connected anti-Trump insider or this was an inside job.”
A year later, Bongino told a very different story.
Former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino confirming the arrest of a suspect in the Jan. 6 pipe bomb case at the Department of Justice in 2025.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
While serving as a top FBI official, he appeared at a press conference announcing charges against Brian Cole Jr., a 30-year-old man from Virginia accused of planting the bombs. Cole, who has pleaded not guilty, twice voted for Trump, according to his lawyer. Federal prosecutors allege that Cole confessed and said he believed votes had been “tampered” with in the 2020 election.
Bongino addressed his shifting stance on the pipe bomber case on Fox News in December 2025. “I was paid in the past for my opinions,” Bongino said, “but that’s not what I’m paid for now. I’m paid to be your deputy director.” Bongino left the FBI at the beginning of January 2026 and is set to return to podcasting.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., who chairs the subcommittee, has made the pipe bomb case a central focus of his inquiry. He repeatedly criticized the FBI for failing to crack the case for nearly five years and said internal documents “paint a dismal picture” of the investigation during the Biden administration.
In one of the few moments of bipartisan agreement, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., praised the FBI under Director Kash Patel for making an arrest, calling it “a rare bright spot for federal law enforcement over the last year.”
But with the pipe bombing case now moving through the courts — rather than the political arena — lawmakers sometimes veered into claims that did not match the facts.
Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Samuel Corum/Getty Images
The claim:
“The Biden FBI did have undercover agents and confidential informants embedded within the rally crowds,” said Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La. “And the Biden FBI did conspire to entrap MAGA Americans prior to J6 and then successfully entrapped several hundred Americans on J6.”
The facts:
Joe Biden was not president on Jan. 6 — Donald Trump was.
At the time of the attack, the FBI was led by Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee.
Joe Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021, two weeks after the riot, and Wray remained FBI director for the duration of his presidency.
A Department of Justice inspector general report examined the presence of confidential FBI sources in the crowds on Jan. 6 and found that “none of these FBI [Confidential Human Sources] was authorized by the FBI to enter the Capitol or a restricted area or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was any CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6.” The report also found no evidence “showing or suggesting that the FBI had undercover employees in the various protest crowds, or at the Capitol, on January 6.”
Higgins’ office did not respond to a request for comment.
Raskin said Trump failed to act decisively to stop the riot and “did nothing to send out the National Guard under his unilateral direct control in the District of Columbia.”
In response, Loudermilk countered that Trump “cannot just send the National Guard unless the National Guard is requested by the legislative branch.”
Referring to former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, Loudermilk said, “There were multiple requests made by the former chief of police for National Guard before the request to call them was given. And that was only after shots were fired in the Capitol. That request was made to the Department of Defense in the one o’clock hour on Jan. 6.”
The facts:
The president has direct control of the D.C. National Guard, and the Capitol Police requested assistance from the guard prior to the breach of the building. Still, troops did not arrive until hours later.
Loudermilk appears to have jumbled the timeline of the National Guard’s response, which is laid out in reports from both the Capitol Police and Department of Defense Office of Inspector General.
At 1:09 p.m. and again at 1:22 p.m., former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund asked the House and Senate sergeants at arms to declare an emergency and formally request help from the National Guard. By that point, rioters had breached the outer perimeter of the Capitol grounds and were assaulting police, but had not yet broken into the building.
At 1:49 p.m., Sund called the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard directly to request the assistance of guard troops at the Capitol.
At 2:10 p.m., Sund relayed that he received formal authorization from the Capitol Police Board.
At 2:13 p.m., rioters broke a Capitol window and began flooding into the building.
At 2:44 p.m., Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd fired a single shot, striking rioter Ashli Babbitt as she attempted to breach a door to the Speaker’s Lobby, where members of Congress were trying to evacuate. Babbitt subsequently died. National Guard troops did not arrive at the Capitol until 5:55 p.m.
In an email to NPR, Loudermilk’s Deputy Chief of Staff Brandon Cockerham said that the congressman’s reference to a request made “only after shots were fired” was an allusion to a later moment in the timeline, when acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller authorized the mobilization of the National Guard.
“I believe the Chairman meant to use the word ‘authorization’ instead of ‘request’ as he was alluding to the authorized mobilization of the D.C. National Guard which came at approximately 3:04 PM,” Cockerham wrote.
Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, criticized police officers who testified before the previous Jan. 6 select committee, which was led by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo.
“They set out to have a highly pre-scripted hearing, designated to play on the emotions of Americans,” said Nehls. “For example, the hearing with Capitol Police officers Dunn, Gonell, Fanone, Hodges — four Trump haters who gave highly scripted and pre-planned testimonies.”
The facts:
Nehls was referring to testimony by Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell, who served with the Capitol Police, and Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges, who served with D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department.
All four officers have publicly criticized Trump, in large part because of the injuries and trauma they suffered defending the Capitol on Jan. 6.
But their politics are not as simple as Nehls suggested.
Fanone, who was dragged into the crowd and repeatedly beaten and shocked in the neck by a rioter with a Taser-style device, voted for Trump in 2016.
“I was looking for a candidate that supported law enforcement,” Fanone told NPR in an interview last year. “I regret the decision. It was clearly the wrong decision in hindsight.”
Fanone suffered a traumatic brain injury and a minor heart attack due to the assaults on Jan. 6.
Nehls’ office did not respond to NPR’s request for comment.
Alex Bollinger (He/Him)January 15, 2026, 3:30 pm ESTShutterstock
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