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Aug. 26, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:37
CLOSING THE FLOODGATES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 162
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The legal mastermind who convinced the Supreme Court to strike down Biden's immigration policy, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joins me.
Also, the unfunny comedian Stephen Colbert says that the Taliban are exactly the same as the January 6 protesters.
I strike back.
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.
A massive win for us on the issue of immigration.
The Supreme Court by a ruling of six to three, and this is one case where the conservatives have come through for us.
All six conservatives on one side, including, by the way, Justice Roberts, the three liberals dissenting.
The Supreme Court has essentially struck down Biden's policy by which people can show up at the border, kind of get themselves arrested.
Why? Because they know they're going to be released.
Released into the United States.
Dispatched all over the country through buses and trains and airplanes.
Dissolving into the general population.
Asked to show up for a court date at which they may or may not show up.
So basically you had, you can almost call it Biden's remain in America policy, which was a replacement for Trump's remain in Mexico policy.
Trump's policy was, listen, if you want to apply to come to the United States, we're not just going to let you in.
If you're unauthorized, if you're illegal, you can even apply for asylum, but you stay in Mexico until your case is adjudicated.
Once you've been approved, then you come in.
I mean, this would seem to be obvious.
It's really preposterous.
We're even fighting about it.
But Biden reversed Trump's policy.
and over the last six months, hundreds of thousands, perhaps as many as a million, illegals have been allowed into America by Biden and this was going to continue indefinitely.
Can you imagine what Biden could do, the kind of damage that he could do over four years if he kept doing this? Essentially, it's a demographic sort of wrecking ball aimed at America itself, a deadly weapon against, you may say, the existing population of America.
Well, the Supreme Court has basically said, at least for now, no.
And I'm very happy to say that coming up right after this, I'm going to have the architect of that policy, the guy who convinced the Supreme Court to do this, the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
There's a statement right out from Trump.
Trump says, So it's not often we win a big one and so cleanly.
But when we come back, I'll be diving into how this victory was accomplished, what the Supreme Court decided, what we can expect to happen next with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
I'm delighted to welcome Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Ken, thanks for making the time.
I know it's a crazy busy time and you're winning victories right and left on so many different fronts.
You were just telling me about a big win on mask mandates.
But I want to focus today on this huge win at the Supreme Court that essentially overturns the Biden sort of remain in America policy.
Talk for a moment about the actual impact of what this decision does.
Well, if you'll remember when President Obama opened the border up, we had a massive number of people coming from Central American countries and Mexico.
And so when President Trump came into office, he had a huge problem on his hand and it took him some time to figure out remedies.
And one of the remedies that worked especially well was this remain in Mexico.
And the way this was working prior was he would come in.
They were advised by immigration lawyers, probably in America, claim asylum.
And then you have a hearing, but the hearings aren't for one, two, three years.
You disappear. You never show up.
And only about 14% of the people actually qualified for asylum, but they were coached on what to say.
And what it did was really allow these people to come up to border agents to say, I'm claiming asylum so they could just stay.
And so President Trump put the Remain in Mexico policy in place, and the law was...
Backing him up. And when he did that, it really cut down on the number of people who were using this loophole to come in because they realized they weren't going to just walk in and stay.
Well, President Biden, kind of a long story, but President Biden undid all of that immediately.
And of course, you can see the results.
We're back to even worse than what happened under President Obama.
We're back to numbers just a year later, a year after President Trump left, that are the largest numbers we've ever seen.
Last month, we have over 200,000 New people come in that we know of the month before the same.
We're talking massive numbers.
And it was partly because this policy was stripped.
And now we've got an injunction to keep it in place because the U.S. Supreme Court said that what President Biden did was illegal.
Now, let's talk about the claim that you made, as I understand, on the behalf of Texas, but it was also Missouri joining the case, essentially saying that, look, this is unfair to Texas.
It's unfair to Missouri.
Why? Because... If the federal government, through its own actions, is dispersing all these illegals into our states, we then have all these responsibilities to provide them with this and provide them with that, and that's a burden on the state.
Explain the basis for the lawsuit itself.
How did Texas claim injury at the hands of the Supreme Court?
Well, it's relatively easy for a border state and it's even becoming a lot easier for almost any state to claim injury because these people come in, they cost money, we have to educate them, we have to provide for health care, We have law enforcement costs.
We have crime costs.
We have social costs. We have healthcare costs related to COVID. They're not prevented from coming in right now because of COVID. Now, if you're a U.S. citizen, you can't come back into the country.
But if you're illegal, you're not only brought in, but then you're dispersed around the country to spread COVID everywhere.
So these costs are being transmitted everywhere.
We showed, we demonstrated at the court, It is a particularly high cost for our state, and that's damaging to our state, to our economy, and to our people.
Now, as I understand it, and tell me if I'm reading this correctly, because I have the decision, but I'm slowly making my way through it.
The Supreme Court appears to have affirmed a ruling that said, in effect, that, look, if the Biden administration wants to take illegals, it actually can, but it's got to house them or detain them itself.
That it can't simply, you may say, spread them around the country and let the states fend for themselves in dealing with the illegals.
And that since the Biden administration does not have the ability to hold these illegals on its own, therefore it needs to restore the Trump-Remain-in-Mexico policy.
Is that a correct reading?
Or if not, correct me.
No, that's right. And, you know, the reality is they can't, they can't house.
They got more people than they've ever had.
It's being overrun.
Even if they could house them, I still don't think that this should be, obviously, it's illegal immigration.
But just the fact that they're letting millions of people just tromp through our state, you know, over the last year, and it's just going to continue.
And we can't even keep track of all of them because they're being transported secretly around the country.
Now, if I think back to when the Supreme Court rejected the claim by you, which is by Texas, but also by other states on the issue of the election, the court basically said you don't have standing, right?
The court basically said that what happens in Pennsylvania, what happens in Michigan is, I guess, no concern of Texas.
It seems to me that they couldn't really say that here because it's so obvious that illegal immigrants flooding the southern border of Texas...
Texas has standing, right?
Yeah, and obviously I didn't agree with that standing argument because when a state sues another state, we don't have another court to go to.
We are not allowed under the Constitution to go to a federal district court or a state court in our own state.
The Constitution provided one place for go.
It was a U.S. Supreme Court on state versus state cases.
So it's a little bit different issue.
And I don't think they were right on the standing.
I think Alito and I think it was Thomas were right on the standing issue because the founders envisioned a place for everybody to have their day in court, even states.
And if this interpretation by the Supreme Court is right, states don't have a place to go if the Supreme Court says no.
When we come back, I want to probe with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton the basis of the Supreme Court's decision and what happens to the illegals that Biden has already let in.
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I'm back with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Ken, let me ask you about the, what, almost half a million or a million people that Biden has let in between January and now.
They're in the United States.
Does this ruling affect them in any way, or does it only apply to people trying to come after this?
No, I think it should apply to them as well.
They should have been part of this program.
Just because the Biden administration failed to enforce federal law at the time doesn't mean that they can't now go back and enforce it.
The challenge is the Biden administration probably doesn't know where they are.
They were transported all over the country.
I know from just watching what happens in Texas, these buses come into Dallas from the border.
People walk out and they disappear into the night.
The Biden administration, I don't think they're tracking these people.
They're not trying to track these people.
They didn't want to track these people.
They just wanted to let them go wherever they were going, and that's what's happening.
I don't know how they find them now, but I do think they have an obligation to find them.
The question is, how? Do you think that this was part of a kind of scheme by the Biden administration just to, you may almost say, inundate the country and no one knows what's going to exactly happen to all these guys, but the presumption is long term they'll figure out some way to stay in the United States and they're not going to be mass deported and over the long term these people will somehow become, I guess, future Democrats.
Do you think that's the political motive driving this?
Well, I think it's part of it.
I'm particularly angry about this because they're willing to trade a lot of really bad things to do that.
So yes, I think they want more voters in Republican states.
So that's why you'll see a lot of these illegals put in Florida and Texas and Arizona and probably ship, we don't know, because they won't tell us, to other Republican states.
They also, I think, want to do damage to the economies.
And they want COVID to spread among states that are more open and free because then they can claim that we're not managing our COVID. So I think they had some even worse motives for the time being.
They were fine with the harm to citizens in our states.
It's clear that they are because they know that the cartels are behind illegal immigration.
They're making a lot of money, billions of dollars.
The Chinese are behind importing fentanyl, which kills people.
They're sex trafficking. The Biden administration knows all of this, and yet They're willing to let people come in with COVID and spread the disease that they know will kill people, and they're also willing to let cartels have an amazing amount of control over people as they come into our country.
Now, while these low motives are operating in reality, they put up a very kind of pompous front before the court.
And one of the arguments that they made, both at the trial level, but also to the Supreme Court, as I understand it, is that these states like Texas and Missouri are interfering in something that is the exclusive prerogative of the federal government, namely foreign policy.
And their argument is that since we're making these deals with Mexico, the courts cannot meddle in our dealings on a foreign policy matter.
The courts need to defer to the superior judgment of the federal government, in this case, the Biden administration.
What would be your sort of answer to that?
That's a pretty good argument made in Disneyland, but not in reality, because that is not true.
We're talking about our soil.
We're talking about Texas soil.
We're talking about impacting citizens of this country in a very, very negative way.
There's no good impact for our state, for our country.
And we have every right to ask the federal government to defend us from all of these very bad harms that we've already addressed.
And this foreign policy argument is just bogus.
Now, Ken, if you were the Biden guys, I mean, you're not the Biden guys, but if they were to say, what can we do now?
We've been sort of put up against the wall by the Supreme Court.
We haven't been granted this kind of injunction that would allow us to continue doing what we've been doing for six months.
Are they going to try to go back and fight the case in front of Judge Kaczmarek at the local level?
What is their next move?
Well, I mean, the next move is, one, they have to enforce the law because we have an injunction now, so they have to.
That's the most important part.
They can go back to the federal district judge and say, you know, we can have our trial on the merits, and if we have to do that, we'll do that.
But I think they've already been shown, I mean, to get an injunction, you have to show The damages that you're suffering and that you're likely to win on the merits of trial.
So the U.S. Supreme Court has already said, hey, Texas and Missouri are very likely to win on the merits.
So, sure, they can come back and try the case, but we're likely to win on the merits.
Well, Ken, I do want to commend you.
This is a huge win for our side, and it's at a time when a lot of people had doubts about the Supreme Court, and particularly Justice Roberts, who's become kind of the swing vote.
Now, this was not a 5-4, it was a 6-3, but I thought it was highly significant that Justice Roberts was on the 6 side of it.
This, by the way, is the same guy who had voted to strike down some of Trump's DACA. Yeah, no, I agree. And, you know, I commend the Supreme Court.
They did the right thing. They followed the Constitution.
The President can't change federal law.
He has to implement federal law.
And it's pretty darn clear that he didn't do his job and that he's violating the Constitution.
He's ignoring federal law.
If we're going to have a dictator, that's one thing, but supposedly we have a constitutional form of government, and the Supreme Court did their job, and I commend them for doing it.
And I commend you, Ken Paxton.
You are the man of the hour. I know you're also very busy.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
I appreciate it. I appreciate the time, and obviously an important issue.
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The American airlift of stranded Afghans and Americans is in its final phase.
And just today, a bomb explosion at the Kabul airport.
We don't have information yet on the extent of the damage or the casualties.
But what we do know is that this confirms what not just the US, but the UK, France, other countries have been warning of, which is that the whole atmosphere We're good to go.
And on the other hand, the self-congratulatory approach of the Biden administration, it's a historic operation.
We've overperformed our own metrics.
They love that word, metrics.
We've defied expectations.
Well, it depends.
If the expectations are essentially zero, defying expectations doesn't amount to much.
But it's important to emphasize here that the reason we're dealing with a historic airlift, never have so many people been airlifted and so on, is because...
We left them behind. We could have had them out first, but the Biden administration made the decision to close the base first and then figure out, in the teeth of danger, how to try to get people out.
In fact, never before in our history has America conducted a foreign operation and left so many of its own citizens behind.
Not even in Vietnam, a much more protracted war.
America got its troops out before that last helicopter took off from Vietnam.
Saigon. So this is really what is historic about it.
It's historic abdication.
It's historic dereliction.
It never before has a U.S. president been so much at the mercy, not just of terrorists, but of a terrorist regime.
U.S. officials are publicly admitting, yeah, we're kind of beholden to the Taliban.
Whether or not we get our people out depends on them.
Like it or not, those are the people who are now in charge.
Now, Here's another interesting fact.
As the U.S. government releases these numbers, you know, 10,000, 20,000, 35,000 people out, you have to look at the fine print to realize that the vast, vast majority of those people are not Americans.
Here's Anthony Blinken, just from I believe yesterday.
82,300 people have been evacuated.
Guess how many of those are Americans?
4,500.
That means 78,000 are non-Americans.
Those are Afghans who are going to be relocated, perhaps not all to the United States, but probably most.
Six out of seven evacuated are not American.
Here are some leaked numbers that were put out by the Politico journalist Alex Ward.
He's talking about just August 23rd.
The United States evacuates 6,900 people from Afghanistan that day.
483 of those are Americans.
All the rest are Afghan nationals.
Then, of course, there's the whole separate issue of the vetting of these Afghans.
No information on how that is occurring.
No information on whether we actually know who these people are.
We know much about them.
We know that these guys aren't, for example, Taliban guys who go, listen, A, free trip to the United States.
B, the United States is paying for some terrorists from over here to get over there.
We don't even have to pay our own airfare.
This is fantastic. We can now cause trouble in the United States.
So, what makes all of this so disgusting is that this is a completely botched operation, a disastrous operation, either disastrous by incompetence or disastrous by intent.
In every single way, Americans who are being put last, the Afghans are getting in here much easier, it seems, than American citizens, and yet it is American citizens here at home who are paying for the whole thing, paying in more than one way, paying financially.
We're going to be supporting these Afghans as they get resettled in America and paying dearly for the incompetent fool that currently occupies the White House.
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We are in the age, alas, of the unfunny comedian, and perhaps no one is unfunnier than Stephen Colbert.
And to compensate for their lack of humor, the ability to really make people laugh or even smile, they resort to political extremism instead.
And here's Stephen Colbert equating the Taliban in Afghanistan with the January 6th protesters here in America.
Listen. Why should our soldiers be fighting radicals in a civil war in Afghanistan?
We've got our own on Capitol Hill.
You know, as you can see, I'm trying to laugh.
But it's really hard to laugh because what you're dealing with here is just nothing more than a ridiculous political comparison.
Let's think of what, if we take for a moment what Stephen Colbert is saying at face value, he seems to be implying that we are in America now, Number two, our soldiers are fighting the wrong people.
They shouldn't be fighting and killing Taliban.
Why go all the way over there to do that?
They should be fighting and killing Americans.
We have January 6th protesters.
The January 6th protesters are like the Taliban.
They are maybe American Taliban.
Let's kill them instead.
You know, it doesn't really require, I don't think, an analysis to show why this equation of the Taliban with January 6th is absurd.
Well, first of all, they are radical Muslims, and the January 6th protesters are not.
The Taliban just did an armed overthrow of the government.
The January 6th protesters were not even armed, nor did they even plan a coordinated attack, and I'm getting that straight from the FBI. For the analogy to really work, you'd have to say that when the Taliban tried to take Kabul, there was only one guy who was killed, and that was a Taliban protester trying to break through a window, shot through the neck by an American, and there were no other casualties.
So you see how at every level this analogy completely implodes.
But I think there's one part of the analogy.
Now, this is going beyond Colbert's pea brain.
But there's one part of the analogy that does, to me, ring true.
And that is, I ask myself, how did the Taliban prevail?
And the Taliban prevailed really by...
Focusing on four things.
One, asabiyah, which is tribal unity and solidarity.
Two, a clear focus on what they were trying to accomplish.
Number three, a kind of ruthlessness of execution, focusing on getting the job done.
And four, portraying the United States as an alien invader and essentially saying, we are not going to be an occupied people.
So when I spelled those things out, I was just jotting them down, it occurred to me that to some degree, we in the United States, conservatives, are in a somewhat similar situation vis-a-vis the left.
And how do we fight them?
Number one, asabia, which is to say solidarity.
Our team needs to hang together.
No petty divisions.
Let's recognize that the opposition needs to be united to win.
Number two, let's have a clear focus in identifying who the left is and how we can disrupt and defeat them.
Three, I would call it a political guerrilla strategy.
Not a military strategy, not an armed strategy, but a political strategy to disrupt the operations of the left in every which way we can. And finally, the concept of the alien invader. What we really have here is a kind of globalized elite that doesn't really care about the American people, that wants to establish here in America, establish American citizens themselves as a captive nation.
So in some ways, just as the Taliban viewed America as a foreign invader, we have an alien force in America, the left, that is trying to rule over us with a tyrannical hand, using censorship, not seeking, if you will, our consent.
We have that here now.
So if there's some analogy between us and the Taliban, let's realize that even if sometimes outnumbered, if we hang together, focus on our goals, and hang tough, we can actually defeat this adversary.
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That sleazeball governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, is happily out of office.
But he was kicked out of office for the Me Too allegations, but not for the worst thing he did, which was the killing of a whole bunch of New Yorkers.
And in fact, that number was to the very end understated.
The new governor just released a report that there were 12,000 uncounted COVID deaths.
So COVID deaths were counted but concealed by Cuomo.
And on his way out, almost as if to thumb his nose at the process and at the American people, at New Yorkers, Cuomo pardons a notorious criminal, a notorious thug.
We live in a time that's unique in many ways, the pandemic, the border crisis, never has the border been so open, censorship.
But one thing that is not unique is political violence.
We had a lot of political violence in the 1960s.
And I want to talk about...
One case of political violence, this was the Brinks Armed Robbery.
The Brinks Armed Robbery was done by a bunch of far-left radicals led by a guy named David Gilbert.
Gilbert was with a group of co-conspirators, some of them women, a woman named Judith Clark, and Gilbert's, at the time, partner, a woman named Kathy Boudin.
And these are people, during this armored car robbery, two police officers, Nyack Police Sergeant Edward O'Grady and Officer Waverly Brown, were murdered.
Well, David Gilbert was found guilty.
Three counts of second-degree murder, four counts of first-degree robbery, sentenced to 75 years in prison, no possibility of parole until 2056.
Now, Cuomo pardons this guy, David Gilbert.
And so, he is most likely going to be getting out.
A very bad guy. And part of the reason Cuomo did this is lobbying by David Gilbert's son.
David Gilbert's son is Chesa Boudin, the very left-wing attorney general of San Francisco.
Very interestingly, Chesa Boudin has a role in how Debbie and I first met.
Debbie sent me a bunch of videos that had been made by Bill Ayers.
Yes, that Bill Ayers.
The Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground.
And Bill Ayers was in Venezuela talking to the Venezuela Education Minister about bringing the Marxist We're good to go.
As a result of the Brinks robbery, Bill Ayers and his wife decided to raise Chesa Boudin.
So you see how these radicals are all sort of connected one to the other.
And Chesa Boudin just tweeted how happy he is.
My heart is bursting on the eve of my first child's birth.
My dad, who's been in prison nearly my entire life, was granted clemency.
So here you see how the left...
It takes care of its own, and by its own I mean dangerous political criminals who have committed nothing short of murder.
And so while the left is going after these January, this guy was, you know, this guy was trespassing.
That guy stepped on the Capitol steps.
This guy had a Trump flag.
They're trying to keep these people locked up.
They are letting out people who are responsible for committing mayhem and murder.
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There's a small controversy at a somewhat obscure socialist magazine that is highly amusing and highly instructive about the failures of socialism itself.
Now, the magazine in question is called Current Affairs, and my attention was drawn to this by a tweet.
Which says, written by one of the socialist writers for current affairs, I'm grieved to tell you that Nathan Robinson, this is the guy who is the Harvard grad and the editor of current affairs, has effectively fired me and most of the current affairs staff because we were trying to organize into a workers' co-op.
And then the writer goes, I wish this was a joke, but it's not a joke.
So, evidently, you've got this guy who's a socialist and...
He's being challenged by his staff that wants to create a union.
Now, Nathan Robinson writes this really, I think, pathetic reply to all this, but it gives you a window into why socialism itself is idiotic.
I just want to read and offer some commentary on Nathan Robinson's kind of almost sycophantic response.
Because he feels like his socialist credentials are being called into question.
So he goes...
For years, I made the magazine basically alone in my living room, and I felt it's my baby and I know how to run it.
It was hard to feel like I was slowly having my ability to run it my way, taken away.
So by the way, here's a completely legitimate sentiment.
Nathan Robinson starts the magazine.
He basically does all the work.
He creates the structure, and now this workers' co-op wants to basically jointly govern the magazine.
Now, Nathan Robinson says, I think it's easy to talk about a belief in power sharing, but when it comes down to actually sharing power, it felt very difficult to do.
So Robinson here feels like morally, ethically, he should share power.
He never seems to ask himself the question, why?
If it's his magazine, he got the idea for it.
He started it. He did all the work.
Why would he create a kind of artificial equality between him and other people who obviously have contributed a lot less?
The problem with Nathan Robinson is that he has already conceded the principle and therefore he finds it hard to back away from it.
Let me go on here. He goes, this is not about money.
I am not a capitalist.
I do not expropriate surplus value.
This is idiocy on stilts.
Why? Because, first of all, what Nathan Robinson evidently does is he pays all staffers $45,000, including himself.
So right away, he's conceding the principle that he is of no greater value to the magazine than anyone else.
Well, if that's the case, why don't you make decisions by lottery?
Why should you, Nathan, be in charge?
And when he says, I don't expropriate surplus value, he's buying into Marx's absurd idea that capitalists supply nothing other than capital.
So all the idea for the magazine, wasn't that yours, Nathan?
Number two, who organized the magazine in the first place?
Who brought on board all these other guys?
You did. Who's the one who's the face of the magazine?
You are. Who markets the magazine?
You do. So, you're not expropriating surplus value.
If you had any sense, you'd realize that you are contributing more value, at least to the degree that one can say that Marxist commentary provides value at all.
But nevertheless, you're the guy doing it journalistically much more than the others.
So, he then goes on to say something like that there was chaos that was coming into the magazine because nobody knew who was in charge.
In fact, nobody really was in charge.
Things didn't really get done.
No one was accountable for them not being done.
In other words, when you don't have organization, when you don't have responsibility, when to some degree you don't have hierarchy...
Things don't get done.
And he goes, all I wanted was the ability to remain the executive director of the organization, have the staff report to me to make sure stuff was getting done.
Then he goes, that may have been wrong, but that is how I felt.
So he reduces it to feelings.
It's not about feelings.
He wants to get things done.
Nothing does get done without organization, and yet he has to apologize for it and bring it down to, well, let me just say that this was kind of my sentiment about the matter.
And finally, the groveling conclusion, I will try my very best, my very best, to make sure this is done, reorganization is done in accordance with sound leftist values.
This was not that.
So what you have here is the abasement, the intellectual depredation, the sheer embarrassment, the sheer stupidity, not just of one Nathan Robinson, but of socialism itself.
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I want to conclude today my discussion of diversity in two of Shakespeare's important plays, Othello and The Merchant of Venice.
I talked earlier about Othello.
I'm now completing my discussion of The Merchant of Venice.
A play that sets, you may say, Jew against Christian.
And here I don't just mean individually, Shylock on the one side against Antonio on the other, but the Jewish worldview, you might say, in the orthodox sense, against the Christian worldview.
And the Jewish worldview is an appeal to justice, an appeal to the God of the Old Testament, an eye for an eye.
That is the basis of Shylock demanding the pound of flesh.
It's you treat me badly as a Jew, I'm going to get my revenge on you as a Christian.
Revenge is a big word for Shylock.
But while revenge is seen as a bad thing today, he wanted to just get revenge.
He was motivated solely by revenge.
Let's remember that revenge is used in the Old Testament as a positive, as a way of generating a form of justice.
Someone did a grievous wrong to you, well, you have to do a grievous wrong to them to kind of, you may say, equalize the scales.
And that's what motivates Shylock.
At no point does Shylock ever think that he is not claiming his due.
And his due is not merely dictated by the fact that he's treated badly, it's dictated by the fact of a contract.
You made a deal.
You agreed that if you couldn't pay your loan back, Antonio, that I could take a pound of your flesh.
It says it right here in the bond.
And so Shylock, in that sense, is a kind of, you may almost call him a judicial literalist.
He says, here's the clear language of the contract.
I'm demanding no more than what the language emphatically says.
And Shylock, you may think, would have some doubts about his ability to enforce this contract.
Why? Well, frankly, because he's in a hostile country.
He is in Christian Venice.
So why would the Duke of Venice, who's obviously himself a Christian, and everybody else in the courtroom for the most part is Christian, why would the Duke side with Shylock?
Why does Shylock think he has a prayer, you might say, by going...
into the courtroom? Well, the answer is really simple, and it's made clear by something the Duke himself says at the very beginning of the play. I'm going to read now from the Duke, who becomes in the end the sort of arbiter of this dispute. The Duke says, the Duke cannot... no, I'm sorry, this is Shylock talking about the Duke. The Duke cannot deny the course of law, for the commodity that strangers have with us in Venice, if it be denied, will much impeach the
justice of the state, since that trade and profit of the city consisted of all nations. Basically what Shylock is saying here is that for Venice to be a cosmopolitan city...
To encourage foreign people to come to Venice and invest and trade, they've got to apply the law equally to everyone.
They cannot play favorites because that will destroy the credibility, not just of Venice the city, but of the Venetian currency.
And so the Duke cannot afford to let that happen.
So Shylock is confident that even though they may not like him as a Jew, Nevertheless, he can appeal to that equality of rights under the law that the Duke is obligated to enforce.
Now, if Sherlock is a kind of Old Testament figure who sees success as success confined to this life, who is an eye for an eye man, we have to contrast him with the incredible generosity of the Christian characters in the play, specifically Antonio, but also Portia.
Very often, people think of the Christianity of the Merchant of Venice as solely embodied in Antonio.
And Antonio is unbelievably generous.
I mean, his friend Bassanio comes to him and says, I want to court this woman.
I've kind of wasted my own money.
I'm a spendthrift. I owe all these debts.
Antonio basically goes, listen, I will give you the money.
And it'd be one thing if Antonio was like, here, let me give you the money.
Antonio doesn't have the money.
The money that he has is that his ship's And they haven't come back yet.
So Antonio goes out and borrows the money to the point of being willing to risk a pound of his own flesh just to help a friend.
At no rate of interest.
Just out of friendship. Think of the generosity of that.
And then think about the generosity of Portia later.
Where Portia basically decides, I'm going to leave Belmont where I'm very happy.
I've got a nice husband, Bassanio.
But because Bassanio has a friend...
And this friend Antonio is in trouble, and his life is at stake, and it's bothering my husband, it becomes my problem.
So I'm going to now, along with my assistant, my maid, we're going to go to Venice.
We're going to play an active role in trying to get this guy Antonio off.
And so this is the kind of largeness of heart that you see and that Shakespeare associates with Christianity.
And Portia utters, I think, one of the most powerful and profound lines of the play when Shylock is appealing to justice.
Justice! I want justice!
I want nothing more than justice!
Portia says,"...in the course of true justice." None of us would see salvation.
And there you have it in one line, the essence of the Christian doctrine that goes beyond the courtroom.
What Portia is basically saying is if we stand before God and we appeal to justice like Shylock, the only just verdict would be to dispatch us all off to hell because we have all fallen woefully short of God's standard.
And the genius of the play, I think the genius of the denouement, the conclusion, is that in the end, Portia, after she appeals to Shylock, she's trying to appeal to his Christian generosity, but obviously he has none.
And even though Portia says things like, I'll pay you back four times over, Shylock is like, no, no.
No, I want my bond.
I will not be satisfied with anything less than the pound of flesh, just like it says right here in the contract.
And sort of the brilliance of Shakespeare is that in the end, Portia prevails by, you may almost say, out-Shylocking Shylock.
She becomes even more of a literalist.
She says to Shylock, okay, let's look at the contract.
What does it say exactly?
Well, it says that you're entitled to a pound of flesh.
Fine. Does it say over there anywhere that you're entitled to all the blood that comes out with the pound of flesh?
No, I don't see it.
Where is it? We're not living with the living constitution here, guys.
We're talking about a literal contract.
So, okay, Shylock, you take your pound of flesh.
But, but, if you take any blood, which you're not entitled to, because why?
It doesn't say so in the contract.
Then you have violated the contract.
You have shed blood.
You have shed Christian blood.
And you then will have to pay with your life.
And Shylock, of course, realizes, oops, I probably should have put a clause about the blood in the contract.
I didn't think of that.
And so Shylock is sort of undone by his own literalism.
And so the play has a kind of happy ending in the sense that Antonio is exonerated.
Bassanio's mind is at ease.
Bassanio and Portia live happily ever after in Belmont.
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