All Episodes
Previous Next
June 21, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:08:43
WHO IS JOHN ROBERTS? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 115
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Should conservatives rethink our whole philosophy of the court?
The FBI sordid history.
And political commentator Michael Knowles joins me to talk about his new book, Speechless.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The recent Supreme Court decision, Fulton versus the city of Philadelphia, is causing me to rethink the whole conservative philosophy of the court, the whole jurisprudence that we as Republicans, as conservatives, have brought to the court over the past 30 years, going all the way back to a judge and legal scholar Robert Bork.
I remember Bork very well.
He was my neighbor at the American Enterprise Institute and just a wonderfully witty, ironic, curmudgeonly fellow.
At one point, I remember his research assistant comes in and he goes, I forget her name, but it was like, Sandy, I didn't see you at work yesterday.
And she goes, Judge Bork, yesterday was Veterans Day.
He goes, Sandy, are you a veteran?
And And she was like, well, this was Bork.
He was gentle, but he could be rough in tone.
But most importantly, he was the architect of this whole conservative way of thinking about the court.
Things like, we got to look to the original intent of the framers.
Things like, the judge is an umpire and not a player.
Things like the judge should respect precedent.
Precedent creates a kind of legal authority.
Things like we should defer to the legislature because judges, after all, don't make the rules in a democracy.
The legislature makes the rules.
The judges, in a sense, only call the plays.
But all of this, I think, needs to be now re-examined, in part because even though conservatives have sort of dominated the nominees to the court, we haven't actually seen dramatic shifts in the conservative direction, really on any key issues.
Even on the Roe v.
Wade case that the court is taking up, The court is not looking at the foundations of Roe by taking a case, for example, the Texas heartbeat bill, which essentially says life begins at conception, or at least at the heartbeat.
They're taking the Mississippi case, which is about whether or not abortion can be regulated after 15 weeks.
Now, the victories of the left at the court are spectacular.
Gay marriage. And when they have a win, it's kind of like a done deal.
It's never reopened.
It's almost like we now have to sort of just kind of reconcile ourselves to it.
The left is able to move and create a milestone, and then it's almost like their victories are permanent.
Our victories are always tentative and provisional and have to be fought all over again.
And this latest case, Fulton versus City of Philadelphia, is no exception.
So let's Kind of get into the case.
Now, it may seem odd that I'm doing this kind of reexamination of the court when it's a case that our side won.
And not only won, but we won it 9-0.
We got even the liberals.
So think about it. We're talking about a case that's, by the way, not an unimportant issue.
We're talking about placing children with gay couples in foster care.
And the Catholic...
Social services said, we're not going to do that.
And the city of Philadelphia said, well, yes, you are.
Otherwise, you don't get any government contracts.
And both sides went to the court and said, you know, you tell us whether or not the anti-discrimination law that protects gays can be used to force A religious organization, in this case Catholic Social Services, to kind of go against its teaching, go against its conscience, and do something that they are religiously prohibited from doing.
So it's kind of interesting that we got even Sotomayor, we got even Kagan, we got Breyer, all on the 9-0 side of this ruling.
Of course, the left has been complaining.
Here's Representative Pramila Jayapal.
This case isn't about religious freedom.
It's about discrimination against LGBTQ plus families.
Now, first of all, asserting something doesn't make it so.
Obviously, the case does involve religious freedom, and it involves LGBTQ protections, and the real question becomes, which takes precedence?
You can't just announce that one, it's not about this, it's really about that.
This is not really about censorship.
We're just basically preventing you from insulting people that we think should not be insulted.
No, you can't just say it and it doesn't become the law because you said it.
In the case itself, I think the win here, and by the way, conservatives have been winning these religious freedom cases.
I believe we have now had 18 out of 19 wins in a row, which is pretty impressive.
And that is a measure of the fact that I think even the liberals on the court, even the progressives, the Democratic nominees, are taking the position that if somebody has a religiously informed position based on conscience, This is not a position sort of designed to be against anybody.
It is a philosophy of the family.
It is a philosophy of human dignity.
It's anchored in centuries of teaching.
And if this is a sincerely held point of view, then no, you don't get to come in and force them to go against those convictions.
Even if you have some competing, deeply held value, no discrimination against LGBTQ, that's fine.
But what the court said is, what we're talking about here is making an exception for a religious organization based upon the religious freedom clause of the First Amendment.
So, all of this is, you know, good news for our side.
But in the middle of this, there's a big problem.
And that is that the court was reluctant to overturn the precedent-setting case, which is the Smith case.
The Smith case, which goes all the way back to 1990, Employment Division v.
Smith, this is the decision that basically said that you can force religious groups to act in conformity with what's called generally applicable laws.
And certainly the Philadelphia law is a generally applicable law.
It applies to everybody.
No one's allowed to discriminate.
And the amazing thing is that that Smith decision was written not by some leftist, not by some liberal, it was written by Justice Scalia.
And herein is the problem.
So in the next segment, I want to take up the problem.
How is it that the greatest obstacle to achieving religious freedom comes from what some people would say was the most conservative justice on the court?
Doesn't this imply that there's something fundamentally wrong with conservative jurisprudence in general?
So guys, we are now in the closing two weeks of the Dinesh MyPillow book and movie offer.
I've been signing books, I've been getting those movies put together, putting them all ready to get out, and some of them are already out and on their way to you.
This is the Dinesh book and movie deal.
Now, I'm working with the folks at MyPillow to sort of orchestrate it.
Here's the deal. You go all out and buy $250, $500, or if you can, $1,000 of MyPillow merchandise.
Now, this is, by the way, not hard to do.
Mike Lindell has more than 100 great products, from his classic premium pillows, to the Geezer Dream Sheets, to the MyPillow Robes, the MyPillow Mattress Topper, the MyPillow Dog Beds, the list goes on.
Now, here's the fun part. If you spend $250, I'll send you a copy of one of my recent books, one of my favorites, personally autographed to you.
If you spend $500, you get two signed books plus two of my movies.
And if you spend $1,000 or more, you get four signed books and four movies.
A kind of mini Dinesh collection.
Call 800-876-0227 or go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Dinesh.
What else do you have to do to get these books and movies?
Nothing. I'll get the info from the MyPillow team.
I'll send the books to the same address that you use for your merchandise.
Now, the offer ends July 4th, so act now.
Again, that number to call, 800-876-0227, or go to MyPillow.com.
You gotta use promo code D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
The greatest obstacle to achieving religious freedom right now is the case of Employment Division v.
Smith, dated 1990.
A case, incredibly enough, that was written, the majority opinion, by Justice Scalia.
Now, how could it be that a solid conservative has authored a decision that in a way undermines religious freedom?
Well, let's look at the case.
The case basically involves Native Americans.
Two Native American men in Oregon challenged the state because the state refused to provide them with unemployment benefits after they lost their jobs.
They lost their jobs.
Why? Because they were regular users of peyote, an illegal drug.
But the Native American said, we use the drug for religious or sacramental purposes in the Native American church.
And basically, Justice Scalia said, no go.
Now, Justice Scalia's argument went something like this.
He said, listen, this is a legitimate law that forbids drugs.
It's not passed to single out Native Americans.
It's a, quote, generally applicable law.
And therefore, you've got to follow it.
You can't just claim an exemption and say, oh, my religion doesn't let me do that, because I think Scalia, in fact, he said, this would, quote, if you allowed that principle, it would, quote, lead towards anarchy.
So what we have here is a It's not just that he's had, you know, too much Pinot Noir.
It's not that he's not thinking straight.
He's applying conservative judicial philosophy, which is what?
Well, it's basically the idea that the judge, the conservative judge, should by and large defer to the legislature.
The legislature, after all, makes the rules in a democratic society.
The judge's job is not to make those rules, but merely to sort of call the plays, in or out.
And Scalia's basically saying, in this case, as far as the Native Americans are concerned, they're out.
But the problem here, I think, is, again, not with Scalia having, quote, made a mistake.
It's with the conservative jurisprudence itself.
Why? Because conservative jurisprudence has been framed in terms of judicial activism versus judicial restraint.
So judicial activism is the idea that the judge is somehow activist.
The judge disregards the Constitution, imposes his or her own political preferences on the Constitution.
Activism is thus bad.
Restraint, which is the judge's sort of humble, the judge sort of controls his or her own ideological impulses, does not impose them on the Constitution or the text, a certain kind of timidity, a certain kind of economy, if you will, of judicial power.
And what is wrong then with this distinction?
Isn't it true that the judge should in fact follow?
The law and apply the law.
Well, here I think is the key problem.
That when people talk about judicial activism, On the left, they're talking about two things.
One is the idea of activism is that you overrun the Constitution.
You just ignore what the Constitution says.
You decide what you think is right under the circumstances.
And so the Constitution is kind of conveniently set aside.
It's a living Constitution. It evolves.
Now, obviously, that kind of activism is bad.
But there is a second type of activism that conservatives also seem to object to, and this type of activism is not bad.
This is the activism that says that the legislature has passed a law, but that law contravenes what could be called America's super law.
Super law. So when the judge is supposed to call the plays and enforce the laws, yes, but the question becomes, which laws?
We obviously have the laws that are made by the Congress, by the legislature, but we also have the supreme law of the land, which is the Constitution, which, if I can use this word, trumps.
The everyday laws.
The Constitution is the governing law.
So now let's look at this case once again, the peyote case.
Yes, it is true that there are laws against drugs.
And that is the law made by the Congress.
But there's a super law here, which is to say that religious freedom must be protected.
That's the First Amendment.
And the judge in enforcing that provision of the First Amendment doesn't have to be restrained.
He needs to be activist, activist in the sense that vigorous in applying the First Amendment against the law that is made by the Congress.
So the point I'm trying to make here is that just the general distinction of activism versus restraint to me doesn't make a lot of sense.
It's kind of like saying, you know, should America and the world be activist or should it be restrained?
Well, the answer is, it depends.
Frankly, if someone's attacking you and your basic liberties are threatened and your society is endangered, you're going to be activist.
you're gonna wanna sort of apply full force.
On the other hand, in general in the world, you live and let live, so we practice sort of a, you may say a philosophy of restraint.
We let people by and large govern their own societies and run their own affairs as long as they're not seriously interfering with us.
Now, it's kind of amazing to me, but every time there's a judicial hearing, you see, and we've seen this procession all the way back from Roberts to Gorsuch to Kavanaugh, all the way to Amy Coney Barrett, these judges go and say, I will not impose my values on any of my decisions.
I will ignore the fact that I'm Catholic.
I'll ignore the fact that I'm conservative.
My views and my values will have nothing to do with how I rule.
What?! This is not how the liberals think.
Can you imagine Sotomayor or Kagan going, I will not let the fact that I'm a woman, I will not let the fact if I'm a lesbian, I will not let the fact that I'm a left-winger, I'm a progressive, I will not let any of those views that I have have anything to do...
They would never dream of doing it.
In fact, on the left, they picked judges on critical issues who vote their way with absolute certainty.
Now, you could say, wait a minute, Dinesh, hold on, hold on.
We just had a 9-0 ruling, so you just told us that the liberals voted on the conservative side in favor of religious freedom.
But no, even this seeming exception to the rule is not an exception.
Why? Because when you look at the 9-0 ruling, there were three conservative justices that wanted to overturn the Smith decision.
And create, if you will, a new precedent.
The other three judges, and by the way, this includes the Trump appointees, decided, no, we don't really want to overrule.
We want to have a more narrow ruling that does support Catholic social services, but doesn't overturn the Smith precedent.
So what happened is, the liberals, you may say, decided to vote with the right.
To thwart the far right.
The liberals decided to throw in their lot with the people who wanted a narrowly constructed ruling to prevent the more dramatic overturning of the Smith decision.
So even here, the liberals are acting very consistent with the liberal philosophy.
You can say they chose the lesser evil from their point of view over the greater evil.
The bottom line... It's time for us, having now surveyed the record of the court, a very mixed record.
We've made some gains, but even though we seem to have this decisive majority, we don't seem to get the kind of landmark rulings that we're looking for on key issues, free speech, religious freedom, pro-life.
And maybe part of it isn't just the individuals involved.
It isn't just that you've got wimps.
It isn't just that you have people who have stage fright.
It's also that we have a philosophy of Of judicial restraint versus judicial activism that I think requires a basic re-examination.
Court packing is the tool of left-wing authoritarians.
Hugo Chavez packed Venezuela's Supreme Court with his socialist cronies and paved the way for his tyrannical regime.
But now Joe Biden and America's socialist radicals want to pack our Supreme Court with four new leftist justices.
Now, court packing isn't just some way to improve the courts.
It's a coup. A coup to take away your constitutional freedoms and mine and to turn America into a socialist country.
Now, this is why the First Liberty Institute, this is the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated to defending religious liberty.
You might remember we had Kelly Shackelford from First Liberty in our movie, Trump Card.
They're doing something about it.
First Liberty recently launched SupremeCoup.com to serve as a one-stop shop in the fight against court-backing Help patriots like you learn the truth about what's happening in our courts.
More importantly, there's a big take action button that you can click to do your part to stop the Supreme Court coup.
If you want to defend our God-given freedoms and stop the left's court backing scheme, head over to SupremeCoup.com slash Dinesh.
So let's spell it out.
S-U-P-R-E-M-E-C-O-U-P dot com slash Dinesh.
The FBI has become a grave threat to our national security.
In fact, I would say the FBI now poses a greater threat to our national security than any militant white supremacist group.
Thugs with badges are always more dangerous than thugs on the street.
Here's an FBI thug, a thug with a badge.
This is a former FBI official, but he's now a kind of consultant to the left-wing cable networks.
And he's talking about what should be, in his view, the FBI response to January 6th.
Listen. Look, Chris Wray testified publicly on the Hill that what happened on January 6th is domestic terrorism.
What have we learned from our experience with international terrorism?
In order to address that problem, arresting low-level operatives is merely a speed bump, not a roadblock.
In order to really tackle terrorism, and this time domestically, you've got to attack and dismantle The command and control element of a terrorist group.
And unfortunately, and I know this is painful to hear, that may mean people sitting in Congress right now.
So this is chilling stuff.
First of all, the guy seems to be applying the Venezuelan model.
Quickly round up all my political opponents.
Let's arrest them all.
Because think about it. He's talking about January 6th.
The command and control was run by presumably Republican members of Congress.
Well, who? Name them.
Who are the Republican members of Congress who are organizing the entry into the Capitol?
He knows that there's not a single one that can be named.
And so what he's doing is engaging in a kind of despicable effort to smear people and imply that this is some kind of a high-level plot when it turns out that if there was a plot, it was a plot by the FBI itself.
Now, this brings me right back to this revolver bombshell expose.
Which I think two features of it are often kind of missed.
One is the idea that the FBI has been talking about infiltrating groups like the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters.
They've been talking about that now for some years.
So why would anyone assume that they haven't done it?
Is it really the concept that the FBI hasn't got its own informants and men inside these groups?
Is that so hard to believe?
It would be hard to believe if they didn't.
Now, the second point made by the Revolver article is that it's not just that there were unindicted co-conspirators, that many of the unindicted co-conspirators were the leaders of the plot.
So, in other words, ordinary guys who are trespassing, oh, he's sorry, he didn't have a permit to come into the building.
These guys are sitting in solitary confinement, but guys who were actually planners, organizers, people who had a direct role in violent activity have not been charged.
This is the point. The Revolver article demands an explanation.
To date, there has been no explanation.
The Revolver article also pointed out that the FBI has done it before.
In the kidnapping of the Gretchen Whitmer case, out of 14 people arrested, no less than five, and maybe more, were in fact FBI agents or operatives.
So, this notion that the FBI doesn't sort of stoke the fire and go, hey, let's go do this, and then they turn around and then they become witnesses, this is actually a familiar pattern.
Now, it's interesting that you've got some, even some conservatives, and I see Andy McCarthy as part of this, I'm a little surprised, because Andy McCarthy's basically been saying, you know, no, no, no, no, no, guys, this is, you don't understand, this is not how the legal process works.
In other words, in the legal process, if you consult the FBI manual, there's an important distinction to be made between, quote, unindicted co-conspirators on the one hand, and FBI operatives and informants on the other.
They're not the same people.
Well, yeah, but just a couple of years ago, when it came to FISA abuses, we heard exactly the same thing.
No, no, no, guys! This is not how the FISA process works!
Well, the FBI was abusing the FISA process.
They were manipulating what the judges got to hear.
In one case, they actually altered the FISA documents so that the judges would be misled.
The idea that the FBI will entrap people is hardly new.
Does the name Michael Flynn ring a bell?
Comey basically admitted later that, yeah, we were out to entrap Flynn.
We wanted to get him to say things.
We want to make sure that his guard was done.
We want to make sure the guy didn't necessarily call for his own lawyer.
This was an entrapment operation run by the FBI. In my own case, having had access to my FBI file, I've been told about it by people in the Congressional Oversight Committee, the simple truth of it is in a $20,000 campaign finance violation case, the FBI immediately assigned $100,000 to investigate the case.
Why? Well, the answer is right there in my FBI file.
Dinesh is flagged as, quote, as a prominent critic of the Obama administration.
And that's why the FBI goes, let's get him.
So what you have here is a rogue agency.
And what I think is amazing, I just came across this article by Glenn Greenwald.
Which makes me a little bit embarrassed, a little bit ashamed.
Why? Because he's actually talking about the war against terror.
The article was written in 2015 and he's talking about the fact that even in the war against terror and going after allegedly these so-called radical Muslims, he goes, what the FBI does is it eggs them on into plots and then immediately arrests them.
Why? To show what an amazing job the FBI is doing.
Let's take an example. In 2015, the FBI announces the arrest of three Brooklyn men, basically ages 19 to 30, on the charges that they conspired to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS. Now, it turns out, none of these three men had anything to do with ISIS. They weren't ISIS members.
But there was an FBI informant who was planted inside the group.
And later, one of the men told the FBI informant, he goes, A, I can't fight for ISIS. He goes, I don't have any money.
He goes, number two, my mom took away my passport.
So you've got this guy.
He's basically a kid. He's a complete loser.
There's no way he's going to go fight for ISIS. But the point is what happens in the operation is that the FBI provides the resources.
No problem. I'll get you a passport.
No problem. I'll give you the money.
So what's happening is you're getting people to do things.
And maybe these guys have radical views.
But the point is they're not going to go fight for some foreign army unless you egg them on.
And so what happens is that the agency isn't disrupting a planned terror attack.
What they do, they create the context of the attack, then they stop it in its tracks, and then they issue press releases praising themselves for thwarting dangerous plots.
So this is a wicked agency that is pursuing wicked schemes and doing it with a halo.
Oh, we're keeping the American people safe.
Nonsense. They're padding their own budgets.
They're fortifying their own power.
They're creating mystical enemies.
So this is a rogue agency, very dangerous.
And I think that the GOP needs to be all over this.
In other words, it's not enough to say things like, we deplore the FBI's conduct.
No. I think the GOP should make it really clear that when the tables are turned and we have the Congress and we have the White House, we're going to conduct full investigations and prosecutions of all DOJ and FBI and deep state officials who are involved in selectively targeting and torturing Trump supporters.
We're going to identify these people.
We're going to hold them accountable.
And the very jail cells that they have now deposited these Trump Protesters in, they're going to be sitting in those jail cells themselves.
Don't you want to pay off high interest credit cards, get a lower rate and save money?
Refinance your credit card balances and save with a credit card consolidation loan from Lightstream.
It's an easy way to save hundreds of thousands of dollars and lower your interest rate.
Lightstream offers credit card consolidation loans from 5.93% APR with auto pay and excellent credit.
Lower than the average credit card interest rate of over 19% APR. The rate is fixed.
So it will never go up over the life of the loan.
Plus, there are no fees.
You can even get your money as soon as the day you apply.
Lightstream believes that people with good credit deserve a better loan experience, and that's exactly what they deliver.
Just for my listeners, apply now to get a special interest rate discount and save even more.
The only way to get this discount, by the way, is to go to lightstream.com slash Dinesh.
So that's L-I-G-H-T-S-T-R-E-A-M dot com slash Dinesh.
For more information.
I'm really happy to welcome Michael Knowles to the podcast.
He's the well-known conservative political commentator.
He's host of the Michael Knowles Show at the Daily Wire.
And he has a big important book coming out, well, tomorrow.
It's called Speechless Controlling Words...
Controlling minds.
Michael, welcome to the program.
Great to have you.
Looks like you are taking on the big, I would say the biggest issue in the country today, namely this issue of But censorship, I take it, you're not just talking about digital censorship.
I take it you're talking about the way in which thought and ideas and expression is suppressed across the culture, right?
From schools to campuses to corporations where you can get the boot.
This is a society-wide problem.
Say a word about what is the scope that you cover in the book.
The issue of the censorship, not to bring everybody down here, it is much worse than anybody thinks it is.
A friend of mine says that the difference between a Scottish optimist and a Scottish pessimist is a Scottish pessimist says things can't get any worse and a Scottish optimist says, oh yes, they can.
That's what I'm telling you in this book.
It is actually much worse.
We hear about critical race theory.
We obviously know about big tech censorship.
censorship, the three oligarchs in Silicon Valley suspended the duly elected sitting president of the United States. So obviously censorship is very bad, but it's much broader than that. The kind of censorship that's going on right now is in a way a kind of pre-censorship.
The way in which the left has controlled our language, has controlled our symbols that we use, has controlled our ideas, is actually censoring us before we can even think of the ideas that we're attempting to articulate.
And this is not a new phenomenon.
You know, we think now about critical race theory is very much in the news or cancel culture or wokeness or the gender theory or whatever.
It goes back further, actually, to one of the great books of the last 30, 40 years, your own book, The Liberal Education, talking about what was going on on the campuses in the 1980s, 1990s.
It goes back even further than that, to the new left of the 1960s.
It goes back further than that, actually.
To the critical theorists who thrived in the 1930s, came back in the 60s, goes back even further, I think, to a line from Karl Marx.
He wrote it in a letter to Arnold Ruge, and he called for the, quote, ruthless criticism of all that exists.
And I think this culture of critical race theory, debunking, deconstruction, it all comes out of that, and conservatives have been absolutely impotent at stopping it.
Let's look at some examples today of this phenomenon.
And the phenomenon, I take it, is one of establishing categories and terms and maybe frameworks of thinking about debates so that you rig the outcome by the way you set up the problem.
I mean, to me, a good example of this would be something like the concept of proportional representation.
If a bunch of people apply for a job and you discover that the outcomes don't match the racial breakdown of society, we're supposed to believe that that is somehow intrinsically racist.
Now, to me, that's flat-out nonsense.
I mean, if you look at Indian Americans in this country, We seem to be concentrated like in six fields, right?
We've got Indian doctors, you've got a bunch of Indians running motels, running across the country.
You've got one Indian or a couple of Indian political figures like me.
So what you're getting at is the Indians, you don't have a lot of Indians in America who go into, say, farming.
And so just by introducing the notion of proportional representation, you're making people think In a way that produces a prefabricated outcome.
Is that kind of what you're getting at?
Or am I off track here?
Certainly. You're absolutely right.
There's a story out of a Minneapolis or Minnesota school district.
I forget exactly where in Minnesota.
That is now calling for the end of suspensions of students.
Because they saw that a disproportionate number of black and Native American students were being suspended.
So this is just evidence of systemic racism.
and now we've got to let students run free doing whatever they like in the classroom.
It doesn't seem to me particularly equitable or just, but that is the kind of perverse logic.
But it's even, I think, more insidious than that.
I go back often to the example of gay marriage.
We now have this concept of same-sex marriage, marriage equality.
And regardless of what you think about same-sex marriage, the redefinition of marriage, the more interesting aspect here to me is the way that the supposed debate took place.
Because there never was any debate.
We know that the way that it became a law was through the Supreme Court, through the romantic poetry of Justice Anthony Kennedy.
But even beyond that, the debate became over whether or not we should give gay people the right to get married.
But that's actually not the question of same-sex marriage.
The question was always, what is marriage?
Does, as civilizations have thought from the dawn of time until about five minutes ago, does sexual difference have something to do with marriage?
You know, husbands and wives?
Or, does sexual difference have nothing to do with marriage?
It's merely the union of two people.
Not three or four for whatever reason, but two people who love each other and want to get along together.
That was the debate.
And the way that the left rigged the game was they assumed their own conclusion.
They assumed that sexual difference had nothing to do with marriage.
They begged the question as the technical term.
And so when it became a question of who has the right to get married, well, we all agree everyone has the right to get married.
But that wasn't the issue to begin with.
And I think even many conservatives have totally fallen for that prick.
And so they don't even know they've been played by the time the issue's over.
Yeah, it seems to me historically, marriages had a number of sort of definitional attributes, right?
First of all, one man and one woman, yes.
But also, marriage is limited to two people.
You can't have a marriage of seven people who decide to go, we'll all marry each other.
Obviously, you can't marry someone who's a close relative.
Obviously, you have to be a certain age in order to be married.
So, it's very interesting to me that when gay marriage was introduced, it's sort of like they were saying, let's pull up this one peg of the marriage definition, but leave all the others intact.
Because, of course, the obvious question becomes, if it's merely a matter of consenting adults, you should be able to marry your son.
Because after all, if both of you agree, and let's say the son is now 19 years old or 22 years old, so he's an adult.
He can contract for himself.
Why can't you marry your own close relative?
So I think you're right.
But let me ask you this.
While I agree with you that that reflects a certain kind of...
You may call it sly manipulation of terms.
Why would it fall under censorship or speechless?
Because it seems to me you're not dealing with censorship there.
It's almost like they're pulling a rhetorical trick on you the way a lawyer might in a courtroom.
They're fooling you, but they're not censoring you.
So the rhetorical trick here...
leads to a kind of censorship.
And I think this is why conservatives have gotten this issue wrong.
I'll take it even into the stranger sexual realm, because I think this highlights it a little bit better.
The pronouns.
We are in a national mania over the pronouns.
Is Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner, a he or a she?
Now, the left will alternately tell you that it is very important that you call Bruce Jenner a she, And also, it's not a big deal.
Just go along with it. Just come on, you bigots.
Go along with the she. Now, they know that in those little pronouns, there is a whole premise, a very essential premise about human nature.
What is a man? What is a woman?
So the left obviously cares quite a lot.
They've invested a lot of time and resources and energy into this question.
If Bruce Jenner is a she, if we all have to go along with this, That will utterly warp our perception.
So in some cases, you will be deplatformed if you refer to a man who thinks he's a woman as he.
That's one example of censorship.
In certain schools, you'll be punished.
In certain aspects of the government, in corporate America, you'll be punished.
There's a censorship that's involved there.
But to my mind...
The issue is not so much that we have a debate at the moment between free speech and censorship.
I think the left is a little smarter about this.
They realize that there are always going to be standards.
There are always going to be some limits to speech because if Bruce Jenner is a she, then he's not a he.
I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
Unfortunately, either way we react to this campaign seems to advance the left's agenda.
Either we go along with the new standards, we call Bruce Jenner as she, and that advances it, or we issue standards altogether.
We say, you can say whatever you want.
I'm an absolutist of free speech.
You can have critical race theory in schools.
You can teach radical gender ideology.
Whatever you want, I'm an absolutist on this issue.
Well, the problem is, Either way, the traditional standards are abandoned, and because nature abhors the vacuum, the radical new woke standards fill their place.
When we come back, I'm going to probe this a little bit further with Michael Knowles.
I don't know if you remember the inflation of the 1970s, but it was downright crazy.
Prices changing week to week.
Our currency being devalued rapidly.
Now we're moving in that direction.
In May, the U.S. inflation rate, 5%, the highest in 13 years.
We've all seen higher fuel prices, higher food prices, higher car prices, construction costs, housing prices, the list goes on.
So inflation is here.
Now, have you protected your savings, your investments?
If you haven't yet diversified a portion into precious metals, the answer, regrettably, is no.
Now, for decades, I never wanted to invest in gold, just the stock market.
But now I'm seriously worried, as many economists are, about the regime we have in Washington, no sense of fiscal responsibility.
So listen, if all your investments are tied to greenbacks, you're sitting on a bit of a ticking time bomb, invest a portion of your savings into gold and silver.
Birch Gold Group. That's who I purchased from.
That's who you can trust to convert an IRA or eligible 401k into an IRA backed by gold and silver.
That's right. Through a little known tax loophole, you can convert your retirement savings tied to the stock market into an IRA backed by precious metals.
It's your hedge against inflation.
Text Dinesh to 484848 for your free information kit.
on precious metals, IRAs, or to speak with a Birch Gold representative today.
With 10,000 customers, an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, and countless five-star reviews, Birch Gold can help you too.
Text Dinesh to 484848 and invest in gold like I did before it's too late.
I'm back with political commentator Michael Knowles.
We're talking about his book out tomorrow called Speechless Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
Michael, I think the subtitle is kind of key to what we've been talking about here.
You're talking about the left's manipulation of language, but this is not just about words.
They're actually trying to redefine very fundamental things such as the way we think about human nature, the way we think about the difference, for example, between a man and a woman.
And what I find particularly interesting is the way in which the left is claiming that psychology trumps biology.
You know, it's almost as if I were to announce tomorrow that I've, you know, I've decided that I'm, let's say, a horse.
Right? And I say that this is the case, not just that I want to become a horse, but that I've always been a horse, but I'm a horse in a human body.
People would go, okay, Dinesh, you've lost your mind, or they'll just ignore me.
But I think with the left, what you get here is, then I want to run in the Kentucky Derby.
And that's when the problem arises because not only am I announcing myself to be a horse, I want everybody else now to succumb to my psychological claim, my psychological self-definition, if you will.
So I'm able to sort of alter who I am in public space and extract an unwilling concession from you that what my mind says goes.
And this idea, the idea that you have the right to define reality, goes back quite a ways to Planned Parenthood v.
Casey, at the very least, this abortion case at the Supreme Court, where Anthony Kennedy, the famous romantic poet of the Supreme Court, famously said that there is a constitutional right to define your own concept of existence as Antonin Scalia mocked this as the sweet mystery of life passage in the case.
Of course, we don't have that right to make demands of reality because, as you say quite rightly, I can say that I'm a horse and that I suppose makes no demands on society, but eventually I'm going to demand to run in the Kentucky Derby.
And that does make a demand on society.
And you see this playing out with the pronouns issue right here.
It's interesting in this case of the gender identity Because the left is simultaneously pushing opposite views, contradictory views of human nature.
And I think it shows you this whole campaign is really just a destructive one to destroy the old standards.
Because on the one hand, the left tells you that your body has nothing to do with who you really are.
Dinesh, you got an Adam's apple, you got a deep voice, you look like a guy.
But if you think that you're a woman, it's not even complicated.
You just are a woman.
Your body has nothing to do with it.
They say that on the one hand, but then on the other hand, they push a rigorously materialist view of mankind, whereby they say our souls, our hopes, our dreams, our loves, our joys, they're just illusions, they're just synapses firing in the brain.
All we are is our flesh.
So those are two completely opposite views, but they both are geared toward destroying the traditional Western understanding, which is that we're body and soul joined together here on Earth.
It's this purely negative campaign, and when they impose those views on you, you are now precluded from holding that traditional view.
It's not as though we can be in this neutral space forever.
Eventually, society is going to have to come to certain conclusions At the very least, about what is a man and what is a woman.
If we can't agree on that, we simply do not have a society.
I mean, it's interesting that they use this kind of idea that you can declare who you are only when it comes to things like sexuality, to a certain degree race, but they don't apply to any other context.
I mean, if I run into a homeless guy on the street and he says, I'm Napoleon Bonaparte, Right?
People would go, no you're not.
Or at least they would say, yeah, yeah, yeah, you are.
But then they wouldn't take orders when Napoleon begins to issue edicts about what the rest of us should do, because we don't actually accept that he's an emperor.
We basically think he's a little bit disordered, if not downright nuts.
Right? And the left thinks that too.
But somehow, when it comes to this particular sacrosanct area, they're able to say, no, you're able to declare whether you're male or female, regardless of the way your biology is constructed, your gender is not the same thing, I guess, as your biology.
So this is an attack on, you may say, the traditional view of sexuality.
Let me turn to how you think we can fight this or how you think we can respond to it.
If conservatives have been on the wrong track so far, what's a better sort of martial strategy here?
Well, I've pointed out this trap whereby if you go along with it or you stand stalwart against the new standard and you eschew standards entirely, either way you advance the left's problem.
I'm going to say something, Dinesh.
This might be controversial. I think we need to learn from the left.
I think the left understands speech and censorship better than we do.
I think our slogans over the past decade or two on free speech absolutism, they're a little overblown.
I think we need to recognize as conservatives that from the very beginning of our country, whole swaths of speech have been off limits.
And they've been off limits, actually, to protect free speech.
So I'm talking about things like fraud, things like sedition, things like threats, things like obscenity, for that matter.
As recently as 12 years ago, the federal government threw a pornographer in prison merely for obscenity.
It was not for any other crime committed on his film sets.
We have always done this.
The reason is...
As Chesterton said, there is a thought that stops thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.
There is speech, free speech, that undermines free speech.
If you have a free speech protection for fraud, then you've undermined free speech because we can no longer rely on our words.
We also need to recognize the inevitability of standards and taboos.
In the 1950s, conservatives understood that speech had limits.
We prosecuted people for being communists, as well we should have.
The difference is not that now we cancel people and in the past we did not.
The difference is what you get cancelled for.
In the past you got cancelled for being a communist.
Today you get cancelled for not being a communist.
What this comes down to I think is standards.
And conservatives need to be able to defend standards.
The tradition of free speech in America, not pie in the sky abstractly, but as it has actually existed.
And I think we need to be able to say that some things are true and some things are false, some things are good and some things are wrong.
Reliability, to some degree, of our faculties of reason and our moral conscience, then we do not possess the ability for self-government, which requires that we make these distinctions and that we legislate them.
That is the process of making law, is drawing on these distinctions, putting forward a standard, and enforcing it and standing by it.
If we're not willing to do that, not only have we ceded the conservative political project, we've ceded the whole project of self-government.
To take a concrete example, and maybe we'll wrap up on this, when the digital platforms first said that they were restricting hate speech, would it be a correct application of your principle to say, well, listen, if they really did that, for example, Let's say that they just prevented people from screaming the N-word at each other.
Then you, Michael Knowles, would be okay with that.
But what they're doing is they're suppressing legitimate debate on valid issues, the origins of COVID, where did it come from, what treatments are effective or not effective, how vote totals are tabulated, whether mail-in ballots exacerbates the problem of fraudulent voting.
So in other words, legitimate topics of democratic debate are being crushed.
Under the bogus pretext that they are somehow correcting misinformation or restricting hate speech.
Yes. Go ahead.
No, this is such a good point, Dinesh, and a great way to clarify it.
We've always had sort of things that you're not permitted to say on television.
George Carlin had a funny comedy bit about this.
Now you can say all of those things.
Any sort of obscenity, any sort of licentiousness, which were always off limits because they do not actually fall under the category of Political, protected speech, all of that now is permitted.
But all of the important, meaningful, substantive speech, so much of that is now not permitted.
So much of that will be censored.
It's a total inversion of the way things are in the American free speech tradition.
And so, yes, I think, not that we need to become these censorious people who are, you know, thrown an altar or something.
What I'm saying is, look back with prudence at the tradition of speech Look back at the fact that there will be standards.
No one wants to hear someone yelling the N-word left and right, and you'd be kicked out of polite society for it, and I understand why you'd be kicked off of television, too.
But that is not what's going on.
The left has conflated these two things, and the purpose of it is not for politeness, as we are told.
The purpose of it is to stifle important, legitimate debate.
Michael, I want to congratulate you.
I think you're breaking new ground with this book.
You've thought in a fresh way about an issue that's been around for a while.
I really commend you, and I want to urge people, good time to go out there and order Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
It's out tomorrow. Be one of the first to get your copy.
Michael, thanks for coming on the program.
Dinesh, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it. Did you ever read the fine print that appears when you start browsing in incognito or privacy mode?
It says that your activity might still be visible to your employer, your school, or your internet service provider.
How can I even call it incognito?
to really stop people from seeing the sites you visit you need to do what I do and use ExpressVPN. Think about all the times you've used Wi-Fi at a coffee shop, a hotel, or any other public place. Without ExpressVPN, every site you visit could be logged by the admin of that network. And that's still true even when you're in so-called incognito mode. What's more, your home internet provider, I'm talking Comcast, AT&T, whatever, can also see and record your browsing data. And in the U.S., they're legally allowed to
sell that data to advertisers. Now, ExpressVPN is an app that encrypts all of your network data and reroutes it through a network of secure servers so that your private online activity stays just that, private. ExpressVPN works on all your devices as well.
It's super easy to use.
The app literally has one button.
You tap it to connect, and your browsing activity is secure from prying eyes.
Stop letting strangers invade your online privacy.
Protect yourself at expressvpn.com slash dinesh.
Use my link at expressvpn.com slash dinesh to get three extra months free.
That's expressvpn.com slash dinesh.
Is America becoming a nation of renters?
Is the single-family rental, the SFR, becoming the new norm?
I've talked about this now a couple times on the podcast, and I've talked about the fact that you have these huge Real estate investment trusts, pension funds, hedge funds, putting giant amounts of money into buying up huge developments of homes and then converting those homes, and these are detached homes, single-family homes, into rentals.
And they're managed kind of the way that you manage a bunch of, you know, condos or apartments in any of our nation's major cities.
Now, is there some kind of insidious goal here to kind of deprive the ordinary American family of the aspiration of buying a home?
The World Economic Forum a couple of years ago put out the slogan with a meme, you know, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
And this was a little fishy because it seemed like they were...
Saying that you don't need to own property.
You don't need to own your own home.
Now, the person who came up with that meme insisted that she was not advocating that people own nothing.
She was merely predicting that there's a move toward owning less and essentially just renting what you need.
And this would apply just as much, for example, to a car as it would to a home and perhaps to other things as well.
Now, what I find very interesting is that I've now seen a couple of articles, one in Bloomberg and one in the Atlantic, advocating that people don't own their homes.
Here's the article in Bloomberg.
It's called, America Should Become a Nation of Renters.
Wow. They want Americans to rent instead of buy.
And then here's the article in The Atlantic.
Renting is terrible.
owning is worse. So again, renting is the lesser evil supposedly, but it's very much an advocacy of moving away from home ownership. And now my question is, why? What is the agenda, if any, of the people who are saying this? Because under normal circumstances, if someone came to me and said, hey Dinesh, what's your advice? I'm thinking of buying a home. I'm currently in a rental. What should I do? I would say, well, there's no obvious answer.
Home ownership in general is better, but home ownership is a very illiquid asset, which is to say that once you sink your money and you come into a mortgage, a 15-year mortgage or 30-year mortgage, you're stuck.
And so let's say you get a job in a different city.
You've got to move. What then?
It may not be very easy to sell, let alone sell at short notice.
So my advice is unless you know that you're going to be anchored in a particular place for a minimum Five years and usually longer.
And unless you're able to comfortably maintain the payments on the home, which is to say you have a job that you can rely on or sources of income that you can rely on, and you're also able to maintain the upkeep of the home because homes have maintenance costs, as Debbie will quickly attest with our home, the bottom line of it is if you can do all those things, then in general, you're better to own.
But there's no obvious answer to this.
So I find it odd. And then as I read the Bloomberg article, and I read the Atlantic article, the agenda comes jumping out at me.
So I'm now going to read a couple of sentences.
This is from the article in the Atlantic article.
He talks about the fact that in cities, middle-class households are paying all this rent, and they admit that after a while, you've paid all the rent, the rent keeps going up.
It's $30,000 a year this year, and next year it'll be $32,000, and the next year it'll be $34,000, and at the end of it, you have nothing to show for it.
So the Atlantic knows this.
So they're trying to offer a solution, and here's their solution.
A public ownership rental option might solve this problem.
Pause. What they're basically talking about is the government buying huge developments and converting them into rentals.
And they go on to say that the government does this and then what they do is they make you pay your rental fee, but they go that over time, the government in a sense would have been paid back for the money that it invested in order to buy these developments.
And once it's all paid back, Then you could actually, quote, build equity as a citizen in this kind of public or governmental program.
So what they're essentially trying to do is take a concept like Social Security and apply it to home ownership.
You've got this fictional pool, because think about it, with Social Security, there is, in fact, no real pool of funds.
Young people pay into it and old people take money right out of it.
And I'm sure that this would work kind of the same way.
In short, it would quickly become a scam.
But the reason that progressives like these kinds of scams is that they increase the power of the government vis-a-vis the private sector.
Ultimately, it may not even be an issue of whether you rent or you own.
It's a matter of whether or not we are living in a private economy with competitive forces and market prices, or are we living in a government-regulated economy?
The American home has been a kind of bulwark against full government control.
They don't control you as long as you completely own your own home.
It has nothing to do with them.
So they want to get their grubby little paws into the home ownership business.
And so some of this advocacy, oh, let's all be a nation of renters, is aimed at reducing the power of the market and the private sector and, a very familiar story, increasing the power of the federal government.
Guys, I want to thank so many of you for participating in the Dinesh book and movie deal with MyPillow.
If you spend $250 or $500 or $1000, you get books and books and movies signed by me straight to your home address.
I want to talk about Mike Lindell's products and how great they are.
I want to focus now on his bed sheets.
Mike found the best cotton in the world.
It's in a place where the Sahara Desert, the Nile, and the Mediterranean Sea come together to create the perfect weather conditions for growing cotton.
His new Giza Dream bed sheets are made with this long staple cotton.
They're going to be the most comfortable sheets you ever own.
The first night you sleep on them, okay, you'll never want to sleep on anything else.
The Giza Dream sheets are available in a variety of colors like all of Mike's products.
60-day money-back guarantee, 10-year warranty.
So right now, buy one, get one free by calling 800-876-0227 and use promo code Dinesh.
Again, for a limited time, buy one, get one free on the sheets, discounts on all the products.
Call 800-876-0227 or go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use promo code Dinesh.
Part of conservatism is to conserve the greatness of the Western tradition, a tradition of art and poetry and history and philosophy.
And we shouldn't just be for the great books and the great poems and the great works of art.
We should actually know something about what's in them.
I want to talk about a very famous poem today by the poet John Keats.
And it's called Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Grecian here meaning Greek.
It's about a poet, Keats, who is looking at an ancient piece of pottery, an urn, and he's reflecting in a very creative way about what's on the urn.
It's a poem on the Grecian urn.
Ultimately, it's a poem about The mystery of time.
Now time is a very, if you think about it, a very strange thing.
It has no dimension.
Time doesn't seem to have weight.
Time is very difficult to kind of get your hands on and yet we all live in time.
But what is time?
For Aristotle, time was change.
Time was a measurement of change.
Either change in motion, but change of any kind.
And so there's a remarkable inference from Aristotle that if you didn't have change, if everything kind of came to a stop, if everything was in a complete standstill, according to Aristotle, there would be no time.
Time would not, in fact, Now, Newton did not agree with this.
Newton believed that time was something more like a river.
Time flows. Time has an existence independent of us.
And time passes whether or not we are there.
To pass time.
Einstein, of course, had his own complex idea of space-time, a kind of four-dimensional idea that it's even more difficult to grab and think about.
It's really almost more of a mathematical concept than anything else.
Now, let's turn to Keats's poem, in which the poet is staring at some beautiful images on the urn.
And reflecting on them.
So I'm going to begin just reading a few lines from the poem.
Thou still unravished bride of quietness.
Thou foster child of silence and slow time.
Sylvan historian who canst thus express a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.
So, Keats is basically saying here that the urn is this, quote, bride of quietness.
So, like a modest bride who says nothing, very shy, the urn doesn't speak.
The urn is silent. The foster child of silence and slow time.
Slow time, why? Because this is a very ancient urn.
It goes back to the 3rd or 4th or 5th century BC. Sylvan historian.
Sylvan here meaning rustic or village or rural historian.
Now, how can an urn be an historian?
It's kind of crazy because history is about events.
It is about dates and it is about battles.
The urn, in a way, however, What Keats thinks is a kind of historian.
It is telling a story.
Even though the urn is quiet, it, quote, speaks like a historian.
It's telling us something, and it's perhaps telling us something more important than history itself.
It doesn't give you any dates.
It doesn't even say what time the urn itself was made, but it is able to communicate something.
Well, what is that? Keith says, a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme, that the urn can, in a sense, tell a more beautiful story than this poem itself.
Let's turn to what that story is.
Now on the urn, you have a young youth, a boy, and he is playing on a flute as he is pursuing his beloved.
He's sort of chasing her, if you will, and he's trying to attract her attention by playing on a flute.
Here goes Keats. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.
Now, what can this possibly mean?
How is it possible that when you hear something...
It's sweet, but what you don't hear is even sweeter.
I think what Keats is saying here is that everything that we see and experience in the world, beautiful though it is, seems to point to a beauty beyond itself.
You see a beautiful thing, but its beauty is elusive.
It's almost as if, and here we have to turn a little bit to Plato, this idea that the beautiful thing has a kind of beautiful idea behind it that reflects the true perfection of the thing.
But the thing is in front of you.
The idea, however, has to be imagined.
It has to be called forward by looking at the beautiful thing.
Plato's idea of the forms.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave thy song, nor ever those trees be bare.
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss.
Though winning near the goal, yet do not grieve, she cannot fade.
Though thou hast not thy bliss, forever wilt thou love, and she be fair.
What this means is that the lover, the pursuer, the guy playing the flute is on the urn.
He's pursuing the beloved, but he's never going to catch her.
He's never going to get there.
They're never going to actually kiss.
And this is both a disappointment because it's like a love unfulfilled, unconsummated.
But Keats says, on the other hand, it's a love permanent.
It's never going to stop.
Why? Because you always have the urn.
The urn doesn't pass away.
And so what Keats is pointing to is the fragility of love.
Now, he's not talking here about the fact that people will, on earth, that love doesn't last...
But he's talking about the fact that even when you die, love comes to an end.
Earthly love is in that sense always temporal.
It's short-lived. It's not eternal.
But on the urn to a certain degree, as long as you still have the urn...
You still have the romance.
You still have the feeling of pursuit.
You still have the anticipation of being united with your beloved, even if that never comes to pass.
And notice that this is happening not just with the lovers, it's happening with everything around them.
Ah, happy, happy boughs that cannot shed your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu.
So the idea here is, hey, you know these little leaves and these flowers?
In normal life, leaves die.
You come back a little later, they're brown.
The flowers have fallen off.
But not on the urn.
On the urn, they're permanent, just like love is permanent.
It never comes to an end.
And then we find that keeps goes in a rather surprising direction.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar?
And then he talks about what little town by river or seashore or mountain built with peaceful citadel is emptied of this folk, this pious morn.
So now we see on the urn and we get an idea of what else is on the urn besides the lover and the beloved and the trees.
And it turns out there's a kind of procession.
There's a procession of people, and so we've gone from the individual to a community.
The procession is obviously some sort of a religious ritual, maybe some kind of a feast day, and all these people from some ancient time, and again, this is supposed to be a history, right?
Sylvan historian, but we don't know when.
We don't know where. The town is never named.
And yet, there it is on the urn.
This is some town, somewhere of people engaged in some important social ritual.
And then we read this.
The town he's talking about is emptied of these folk, this pious morn.
And little town, thy streets forevermore will silent be and not a soul to tell why thou art desolate can e'er return.
So suddenly we have the poet and he's right there in this town and he's asking like, where'd everybody go?
Where'd they go? And the answer is, no one knows.
The town is now, the procession is over, the feast is gone, the people are gone.
Now remarkably, all of this, this idea of the poet showing up, where is the town, where are the people, is not on the urn.
So what you have in Keats' poem is he's gone from what you see, To now the poet himself imagining what happens next, imagining that perhaps there's been a great battle, this town has been leveled, the people have all been taken captive, they've all been forced to flee.
So what you get here with Keats is he starts with what is given and what the urn itself brings to mind, but very soon we are now in the literary imagination of the poet himself.
And this leads to the famous closing lines of the poem, which are kind of a mystery.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
That's all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Very famous lines by Keats.
Probably the most famous lines in the poem.
Now, when T.S. Eliot read these lines, he's like...
This is nonsense. Truth is not beauty, and beauty is not truth.
Those are two different things.
And I guess on the surface, I would have to agree.
I mean, if you think, for example, about the apple in the Garden of Eden, where Satan provides the apple.
The apple was beautiful. It was fair.
It looked delicious.
Oh my gosh, I can't wait to eat it.
So it was beautiful, but did it represent truth?
No. It represented the falsehood of Satan.
It represented temptation, the seductive lies of the tempter.
So beauty is not truth, and truth is not beauty.
But I think what Keats is trying to say in this poem is that inside of the artistic imagination, those two things are united.
When you have a beautiful poem, the beauty itself is a vehicle that the poet uses, as in this case.
▲
Export Selection