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Nov. 5, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:12
STOPPING THE MADNESS! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep212
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Time Text
Democrats are determined to push ahead with their massive spending boondoggle.
They blame Manchin and Sinema for their election losses in Virginia and elsewhere.
General Milley's woke military goes into action with predictable results.
I'll tell you more about that.
And who's right about these $450,000 payments to illegals?
Is Biden right?
Or is his DOJ right?
I'll give you a guess on that one.
And finally, I'm going to explore Aristotle's idea of a tragic flaw by looking at one of Shakespeare's greatest heroes, Coriolanus.
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 election results in Virginia and elsewhere can be interpreted, I think, very clearly as a stop-the-madness scream from the American people.
But the Democrats have no intention of stopping the madness.
In fact, they are interpreting the election results as a need to heighten the madness.
Here's an article in The Hill, Democrats feel new urgency on Biden's agenda after Virginia rout.
Now, some of this is just horrible analysis.
One line of analysis from the left is that, well, you know, Youngkin was just a really terrific candidate.
He was sort of, yeah, he might have embraced Trumpism, but he was the opposite of Trump.
Here's a quotation from Mark Bergman, who advised Governor Ralph Northam's campaign.
He says, this guy flipped eggs, shot basketball, and looked goofy.
That's the pathway for Republicans.
So, in one way, I guess one could say that this is the Virginia result they're trying to attribute just to the personality of Yonkin.
But how does that explain the near tie in New Jersey, where you had a very different candidate, not Yonkin, and yet he almost, almost beat Governor Murphy, the incumbent Democrat who was expected to win by over 10 points.
I think that the Democrats here are trying completely the wrong lesson.
Now, Manchin is drawing the right lesson.
There's been a kind of in-depth interview with him, and he goes, it's unbelievable to see what went on in Virginia, not just from the governor's race, but all the way down the ticket.
He read the fine print, you might say.
And Manchin then just basically says, I told you so.
I've been saying this for many, many months.
And then he adds, we have a divided country that needs to be united and you can't unite it by just doing it as a one-party system.
Manchin also says that this idea of rushing things is crazy.
He goes, we've had no hearings, no open hearings, no debate.
This is just simply something that his party, the Democrats, are trying to ram through.
Now, The left is basically saying that the reason Manchin and Sinema are to blame is because, well, let me quote The Independent, Biden let two senators derail his entire agenda.
No wonder Democrats aren't voting.
Well, first of all, it wasn't two senators who derailed the agenda.
It's two senators. They're forgetting the wall of 50 Republicans.
So that's a Senate majority that's holding up this agenda, not just these two senators.
But the left seems to think, you know, we've got all this popular stuff.
We've basically got all this, you may call it, political cocaine in these spending bills.
We want to expand Medicare.
We want to implement paid leave.
So this is going to buy us a lot of votes for the midterms.
And so we've got to do that right now.
Manchin and Sinema are holding it up.
But, of course, these seemingly popular programs have a lot of toxic material in them.
So, for example, the Democratic plan on Medicare includes Medicare for illegals.
So, how are the American people going to feel about that one?
I mean, the cost of this will bankrupt the system.
If you bankrupt Medicare, there's no Medicare for anyone.
So the Democrats' larger point appears to be the reason we have to push, push, push, and the reason that people are restless in America is not because what the Democrats are doing is bad, but because they're giving the impression that they can't get anything done.
And so the argument is, let's just do it.
Let's show them that we can get it done.
But I think this gets the problem completely wrong.
The Democrats have gotten a lot done.
It's just that what they've gotten done is not the right stuff.
What have they gotten done so far?
Well, they've basically turned over Afghanistan to the Taliban.
They got that done. They left Americans behind.
They got that done. They had people falling out of planes.
They got that done. They've opened the border.
They got that done. So the Democrats, it's not that they have been inactive.
Biden may be sluggish personally, but the Democrats haven't been sluggish.
Inflation. Inflation.
They got that done. Here's Debbie weighing in.
Pretty soon, we're going to have to call it the Deborah D'Souza Podcast.
Well, there is a line of thought that basically says, Nancy Pelosi has lost it.
Nancy Pelosi is what?
I'm going on 100 years old.
She's coming to the end of the line, her career.
And so she wants this to be her legacy.
And she doesn't really care about the ramifications.
In other words, Nancy Pelosi is willing to kind of go with Thelma and Louise.
she's willing to let the Democrats go off the cliff as long as she can kind of ram this through.
And I think if that's the case, I don't know if it is the case, I mean, it's not hard to believe that this woman has kind of gone batshit on us.
But if it is true, if this is in fact Nancy Pelosi's approach, I think we should encourage her.
Why? Because we want to see the Democrats go off a cliff.
So I would say simply, you know, let's handle the bottle.
Let's let, you know, I realize you don't want DUI and so on, but if Vodka Nancy wants to be, you know, imbibing while she takes not just herself, but the whole party off a cliff, I think we should be standing right alongside the cliff, cheering.
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And Republicans have done well, really, across the country, wherever elections occurred.
I mentioned earlier the election in Texas and San Antonio.
A Republican takes a seat, an open seat, but one that had been held in the past by Democrats for a long, long time.
In New York, a rout of Democrats.
And this is the ethnic areas of New York, the boroughs, Queens, and so on.
Republicans make real inroads across the board.
And the Democrats are beginning to see this as a pattern.
But here's an interesting article though, Huffington Post.
They're very angry reading the title.
At least eight Republicans at the January 6th rally just got elected to office.
Now, these aren't January 6th defendants, but these are evidently people closely connected to them, people who were at the Trump rally, people who were waving stop the steel banners.
And the Huffington Post is annoyed because they say, quote, three of them were elected to state legislatures, so they're now going to be part of the state legislative process.
In fact, two of them in Virginia alone, and five won positions at the local level.
And now I'm going to read the hysteria.
That these candidates enjoy the support of the wider Republican Party and are winning elections does not bode well for American democracy.
Well, hold on.
They're participating in the democratic process.
They're being elected by the people.
What is that But democracy.
It doesn't bode well for democracy.
So apparently there's some other democracy, big D democracy, that surpasses actual elections and people winning office.
And apparently these democratic winners are violating the big D democracy.
Let's continue with this incoherence here.
They say that it also shows the GOP is completely unrepentant about January 6th.
I think that's actually true.
I'm unrepentant.
I hope you're unrepentant.
So I mentioned two of the Republicans were re-elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.
That's Dave LaRock and John McGuire.
And they go, this is how he goes, McGuire won his seat despite his Democratic opponent unearthing a photo showing him standing near men in paramilitary gear.
So now, no one's saying that LaRock was in military gear.
He was standing near some men in military gear.
And Marie March, a restaurant owner who was also a Stop the Steal rally organizer, won a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates.
Susan Soloway, who organized a bus tour to transport Trump supporters to the rally, won re-election to the Hunterdon County, New Jersey Board of Directors.
This one I like a lot in Braintree, Massachusetts.
A former high school teacher who was forced to resign after local activists sent a photo of him outside the Capitol on January 6th won a seat to the school board.
So the guy is off the teaching roles, but he's now going to be making policy for Braintree, Massachusetts.
So I love this.
I mean, if you look at who these people are, they're ordinary guys.
They're here a realtor.
They're somebody who owns a store, a high school teacher.
This is the triumph of populism.
It's the triumph of ordinary people.
It's also, by the way, the triumph of justice.
And I think it's going to be taken to a new level.
I'm just waiting for this to happen.
I really wish this happens a little bit down the road, maybe in 2024, if not 2022.
A January 6th defendant, a guy who is locked up, a guy who's in solitary confinement, gets elected to Congress.
I would love to help to make that happen because that would be a really terrific way of spiking the ball on this.
And think about it. Here's a side benefit.
If a January 6th defendant is elected to Congress, he can walk into the Capitol at any time.
He's not going to be trespassing.
He's not going to be obstructing an official proceeding.
And you know why? Because he's going to be conducting the official proceeding.
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Feel the difference. I've been talking about the Virginia and all the other elections as a triumph of populism, of ordinary people.
Now, Glenn Youngkin was a kind of money manager guy.
But across the board, you see ordinary people winning elections.
And here's my absolute favorite, the New Jersey truck driver who beat the New Jersey Senate president after spending $153 on his campaign.
This is great.
Now, the other guy, the Senate President, this is a guy who spent $1 million.
We're talking about a guy named Sweeney.
And this guy has been Senate President since 2010.
He's been a New Jersey State Senator since 2002.
But in this case, a truck driver...
This guy named Edward Derr, Ed Derr, decided to challenge him.
Here's a little snippet from Ed Derr's video in which he introduces himself.
Listen. Hello, my name is Edward Derr.
I'm running for New Jersey State Senate.
I've lived here all my life, raising my three kids.
So... Edward Durr, apparently his campaign videos were made on his phone.
And he had to conserve cash.
And a lot of his campaigning was basically door-to-door.
Apparently, the left is particularly outraged because they claim that one of the reasons that motivated him to run is he was turned down for his concealed gun permit.
And that galvanized him.
And wow, he pulled it off.
He got 52%. And the District 3 Senate race.
And his campaign themes were very familiar.
We would like them all.
He goes, higher taxes, increasing debt, the rising cost of living.
Let's end single-party rule in New Jersey.
I think we can all second that.
We all know what single-party rule produces.
The Democrats are trying to produce it across the country.
By the way, Durr was part of a larger pattern in Jersey, in southern New Jersey.
Two Democratic assemblymen went down to defeat.
They were defeated by two Republican women, Beth Ann Patrick, a firefighter, and realtor Beth Sawyer, who will now be serving in the New Jersey State Senate.
And then Ed Durr was interviewed, actually was interviewed, On Fox, I believe, or maybe Fox Business.
And they asked him, well, what is your plan when you get to Trenton?
Trenton is the state capitol.
What's your agenda?
And I love this. He goes, I really don't know.
He goes, that's the key factor.
I don't know what I don't know.
So I will learn what I need to know.
Now, some political professional types may be appalled.
Oh my gosh, this is the kind of person we're sending to the state capitol.
But to me, it's really refreshing because the truth of it is that expertise has proven to be a problem.
The people who have been stuck in there, who supposedly know what they're doing, don't know what they're doing.
And I'd rather send in a guy with a fresh face and fresh ideas and a fresh openness of mind.
He says he...
Knows that he doesn't know, and he wants to learn, and that maybe, for our moment, is enough.
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See site for details. Who's right about these $450,000 payments that are being given individually to illegals?
Is it Joe Biden or is it his DOJ? Well, it turns out Biden was asked by Peter Doocy of Fox News, is it true these reports in the Wall Street Journal that the government is getting ready to make these massive payments?
Here's what Biden said.
Listen. If you guys keep sending that garbage out, yeah. But it's not true.
So this is a garbage report?
Yeah. $450,000 per person.
Is that what you're saying? A family member at the border under the last administration.
That's not gonna happen. Now, the remarkable thing about this is that Biden...
When he's asked about it, it's very clear as he's listening, he doesn't know what Ducey is saying.
He's like, what payment?
How much again? So it's the first he's heard of it.
And I think part of what I got listening to that was, this guy is clueless.
And he's clueless because people around him are keeping him clueless.
We have a sort of a window here into the puppet presidency.
Joe Biden's executive branch is operating essentially without Joe Biden.
It's almost as if Joe Biden could go away, just maybe put on one of those carbon cutouts of Biden so people can take an occasional photo, but the government would continue to proceed as it has been proceeding.
My suspicions were confirmed when the DOJ came out.
Well, first, the ACLU came out.
The ACLU is one of the litigants on behalf of these illegals and said, quote, President Biden may not have been fully briefed.
I love the word fully.
He might not have been fully briefed.
What they mean is nobody told him about the actions of his Justice Department.
And then just yesterday, the government comes out.
This is the press office.
And they say Biden is okay with this.
Biden is, quote, perfectly comfortable with whatever settlements the DOJ agrees to.
And so that closes the circle.
Biden really didn't know.
Biden said it's not going to happen.
In fact, he called it garbage.
It's garbage. Well, it's not garbage.
It's the garbage you're talking about is what your administration is doing in your name.
And I'll give the final word to Ted Cruz on this.
This is a wry moment from Ted Cruz.
He goes, so Joe Biden wants to give $450K to every illegal.
He goes, at the same time, we're learning that Hunter Biden's paintings sell for $500,000.
They're worth $500,000 a piece.
So he goes, quote, perfect solution.
Give a Hunter Biden painting to every illegal immigrant.
I love this Ted Cruz.
I think that's an appropriate last word.
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The U.S. Marines have developed an almost legendary reputation in America and around the world.
And there were so many famous incidents associated with the heroism and the doggedness of the Marines, going back to Tripoli, 1805, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Inchon, Quezon.
So the Marines have developed this, even Fallujah in 2004, The Marines are the sort of bedrock, if you will, the elite of the U.S. Army.
And we need the Marines, and we need the U.S. Army, we need the U.S. military.
Why? Because we have a formidable foe, China.
And China has now developed the wealth, and of course it already has the population.
And China is explicitly devoted to the idea of military superiority.
They recently tested these hypersonic nuclear weapons.
They want to build a formidable and unrivaled military force that will dominate not just the region, but also the world.
So given all that, it's very disturbing to read a little report that's come out now.
It's all over the place. And I'm just going to read a few sentences of it from the Daily Mail.
There was a Okay, here we go.
Royal Marines Commandos, meaning British Commandos, dominated U.S. troops and forced them into a humiliating surrender just days into a mass training exercise in the Mojave Desert.
Apparently, the British forces took part in a five-day mock battle against the U.S. Marines.
This was one of the largest military training areas in the world.
And guess who won?
The British! What?
What? The Royal Marines, along with Allied forces from Canada, the Netherlands, and the UAE, the UAE destroyed or rendered inoperable nearly every U.S. asset and finished the exercise holding more than 65% of the training area after beginning with less than 20%.
Essentially, the U.S. military surrendered in this exercise.
Now, this wasn't real war.
They were using training ammunition, which basically fires would produce pressure and velocity.
They used high-tech simulators for heavier firepower, like artillery, and live ammo on these expansive ranges.
It was a five-day exercise, and basically the U.S. military said, stop, we give up, we've lost.
Now, what's going on here?
I think we have to blame this on—well, this is really my term for it—General Milley's pansy pirouettes.
The pansy pirouettes is my colloquial term for the woke military.
They take military cadets and put them in high heels and make them walk.
They make them read endless tracts by Ibram Kendi.
So instead of these guys studying Sun Tzu, instead of them doing push-ups.
But this is a problem, by the way, that precedes Milley.
It started with Obama.
Obama basically said, well, let's sort of bring in the gays, let's bring in the trans people into the military, let's lower military standards so women are held to a different standard than men.
So this has all been going on now since 2008.
You can't undo the greatest military in the world overnight.
But this has been going on while the American people have been looking at other things internally.
I mean, this is part of the ingenuity of today's left.
They corrupt these institutions from within.
They've done it to the education system.
They've done it to a lot of corporations.
And they've done it to the FBI. And now they've done it, it seems, to the military.
Now, when you point this kind of stuff out, and I do it in my own inimitable way on social media, I get the left lashing out.
So here's a guy on Twitter.
He goes, What branch of the service were you in, Dinesh?
I forget. Well, I guess once I get my testicles chopped off and I put on a skirt, I guess I'm not going to enroll in the military until I do that.
You know why? Because if I do that and enroll in the military, I'll make general in two years.
That is the rapid path to the top.
Well, let me just draw the conclusion of all this.
I mean, 250 years ago, the United States gained its independence essentially by beating the British.
On our own ground.
And now we're back.
What? To losing to the British again.
Once again, the forces of the crown are dominating the forces of America, just like in pre-independence America.
We're back to where we started, and this time it's the left that's responsible for it.
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You know, guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Libby Emin.
She's the editor-in-chief of The Postmillennial.
Now, The Postmillennial is a journalistic outfit that does fearless reporting.
They break all kinds of stories.
I read them regularly, but they've come under fierce attack from the left, and that's what I want to talk about.
Libby, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me. Congratulations on the The good work that you guys are doing.
Talk a little bit about the Postmillennial and the kind of journalism that evidently has stoked the ire of the left.
Sure. So the Postmillennial is a Canadian site.
We do a lot of American news, but we were founded in Canada by Matt Azraeli, who's the owner of the site, who wanted to have a place where...
Views that he wasn't seeing represented elsewhere could be expressed, where stories could be reported that he wasn't seeing actively reported in mainstream media.
And so, you know, that is what we do.
We have A lot of reporting about Antifa with our editor at large, Andy Ngo.
These are the kind of stories that you're not seeing, for example, in mainstream media outlets, but they're very important to report.
As we saw last summer during the riots of 2020, this was a beat that we were already well entrenched on reporting, and so we were very primed to do all of that work last summer, which was really important, I think, for the country.
One of the things, Libby, that Andy has reported that I find really creepy is the complicity of the journalistic community with Antifa.
They will not record Antifa setting fire to things or breaking things because they don't want Antifa to look.
So they're sort of in on it with Antifa.
And they must be viewing not just Andy's work, but the work in the Postmillennial as a threat to them, because although you're based in Canada, your work is all over the place.
It's all over social media.
It's easily accessible. I'll mention your website, thepostmillennial.com.
So now talk about this latest attack from the left.
How did it come about and what effect has it had?
Sure. Just to add also, when we saw the election of 2020 and the Trump voters, the GOP supporters were roundly silenced during that election, these were also people that we wanted to speak up for and whose voices we wanted to represent in media.
So that was also very important to us.
That's a bulk of our readership and we feel that they deserve a place in the media landscape.
Lately, we've come under fire.
The bigger we get, the harder they come after us, it turns out, by left-wing activists who want to silence us.
And the way that they've discovered that they can do that is by going after our advertisers.
And that's what they do.
They do it on social media.
They specifically target an advertiser.
They call them out.
They make up lies about us.
They say that we are Nazis and racists.
We're, you know...
We're very clearly not any, you know, there's no evidence provided by these people to show that.
And yeah, even just last night, they were going after Equinox gym.
And I don't know if, and Equinox basically caved to these demands that they pull their advertising from us.
And I don't know if their owners at related companies have any idea that this is what's going on either.
Do you think that these companies are just, when they get these kinds of reports, do you think that they bother to investigate them, or do you think they just go, oh, this is something, we don't need the hassle, we don't need these people calling us names, it's basically going to create an unpleasant aroma around us, and so they run for cover.
In other words, do you think it's cowardice?
What is the motive that's causing these advertisers to sort of give in and flee?
I think you hit it right on the head.
I think it's cowardice.
I don't think they particularly have any political views.
They just want to go along to get along.
So when someone calls to them and says, hey, racist, Nazi, all of these terrible terms that can instantly get you canceled and boycotted, I think they just go for it because they are afraid themselves.
They don't have any political perspective.
They don't have any ideology.
Clearly, they have no values.
And the people who are targeting us don't want there to be an open press.
They don't want there to be a free exchange of ideas.
They only want to allow press to exist that agrees with their far-left progressive propagandist mentality.
Now, what you're pointing here, I think it seems, Libby, to an important psychological difference between the left and the right, because if I see the Daily Beast on social media, it doesn't really cross my mind.
What can I do to shut those people down?
Should... Should we start thinking like them?
Should we start contacting their advertisers, making salacious accusations against them?
I don't know, they're pedophiles, they're this, they're that, they're domestic terrorists, the FBI is looking into them.
In other words, two can play at that game, right?
So if corporate America is driven to fear by mere accusation, should we be making the same kinds of accusations?
I wonder about that.
Dan Bongino put out a podcast where he was talking because they're going after him as well.
They're going after Daily Wire and The Federalist.
And Dan Bongino said, you know, two can play the cancel game and if they're going to cancel us, we're going to cancel them.
I think it certainly makes sense for people to vote with their wallets, to not perhaps go to Equinox or whatever these other companies are if they don't want to support That kind of cowardice and behavior.
But in terms of the cancel game, I think that's a garbage game.
I don't know why we would want to get involved in something like that.
As someone who I spent my whole life basically as a liberal with the idea that free speech is paramount.
And that is what I believe in.
I'm a firm believer in free speech.
For example, we had Netflix employees and trans activists going after Dave Chappelle for his comedy special.
Colin Kaepernick just released a special where he was actually comparing the NFL draft to slavery.
We're not trying to cancel that.
We're saying what he said is really stupid, especially for someone who at one point was averaging $19 million a year in income from the NFL. We trying to cancel that documentary?
No. We're just saying that it's inaccurate and false, you know, basically.
But no, I don't think we should play the cancel game.
We can, however, play the boycott game.
That's a different That's a different game entirely.
And I think on the other side of the coin, we can support our own side when they're being cancelled.
I mean, on this show, we talk about Mike Lindell being cancelled, basically, and the fact that his company, and here's a guy who's selling sheets and pillows, and yet the left is going after him.
And one way we fight back is we support them.
And one way we fight back is supporting you guys.
So I would urge people to check out.
It's thepostmillennial.com, two L's, thepostmillennial.com, the great work of Libby Emmons and also of Andy Ngo and others.
Hey Libby, thanks for coming on the podcast.
I appreciate it. Thanks so much, Dinesh.
I really appreciate it. What is the greatness of Shakespeare?
What makes someone like Shakespeare great?
Why is it the case that we read Shakespeare now?
We're in a different place.
We're in a different time.
So Shakespeare is separated from us by a chasm of space and time.
There must be something to the universality of Shakespeare that allows us today to read and enjoy and learn from him.
And I'm going to explore the greatness of Shakespeare by focusing on One of his greatest heroes, Coriolanus.
But the play Coriolanus is probably not one that immediately comes to mind when you think of Shakespeare.
You think of Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice.
You think of Romeo and Juliet.
You think of plays like that, King Lear, Othello, but not Coriolanus.
Yet this is, I think, a surpassingly great play.
If it's the only play Shakespeare wrote, he would still have a global reputation.
Now, to me, Shakespeare is very different than a Milton or a Dante because Milton and Dante are partisans.
They have a point of view and they aggressively prosecute it.
Their point of view is in some ways expansive, broad, but it's also narrow.
So Milton, for example, is aware of Dante.
You can see in Milton's Paradise Lost that he almost recreates scenes from Dante, who wrote a few centuries earlier.
But Milton is a militant Protestant.
Dante, of course, was Catholic.
Dante lived really before the Reformation.
And so Milton doesn't want to acknowledge Dante.
There's no acknowledgement in Milton.
Even though one of his poems is largely patterned on a scene from the Divine Comedy.
So Milton, in that sense, is making his case.
And Dante, in his own way, made his case.
But with Shakespeare, you get the feeling that there is no case to be made per se, at least not by the playwright himself.
The playwright is invisible.
He almost disappears.
He goes into hiding. And what I mean is that when Shakespeare treats a character, He throws himself into that character so fully that he becomes that character.
That character speaks with full conviction, and for the moment, that's Shakespeare.
And then you turn to a rival character, and Shakespeare throws himself into that character so that Shakespeare becomes that guy.
So this is the sort of incredible richness of Shakespeare, and we're going to see a little bit of this in...
In Coriolanus, which is, by the way, a different kind of tragedy than the tragedies we've come to expect in general, but also from Shakespeare himself.
Now, normally when you think of tragedy, Think, for example, of Othello, or think about Macbeth, or think about Lear.
You think about a main character who is, in a sense, deep and subtle and complex, and usually wrestling with some kind of tremendous moral dilemma.
For Lear, it has to do with his legacy.
You're the king. You're about to step down.
What do you do? How do you divide your kingdom?
How do you deal with family members who have different types of agendas?
How do you proceed?
If you're Hamlet, how do you avenge your dead father?
Do you kill your mother and her co-conspirator?
Do you act or do you not act?
And this is really Hamlet's choice, not just to be or not to be, but to act or not to act.
With Othello, how do you respond to these suspicions of infidelity on the part of your wife that have been assiduously cultivated by, as you don't know it, but it's the villain, Iago?
What do you do? How do you achieve?
How do you protect your own pride and your own dignity?
And with Macbeth, there's a great scene where Macbeth at the beginning of the play is contemplating killing King Duncan, but he can't do it.
And if you listen to what Macbeth says as he talks about the virtue of Duncan, he talks about the Revenge of the gods.
He talks about the fact that there's a universal human nature that will not put up with this.
He talks about the infant Jesus.
So Macbeth roves over philosophical and theological and psychological territory.
You can kind of see his wicked, but nevertheless, his mind is going back and forth.
His mind is at work.
And And I think for these reasons, Aristotle's description of tragedy, which is that you've got kind of a great man who has a hamartia.
A hamartia is a tragic flaw.
Now, the word hamartia means something more like a mistake rather than a flaw.
A great man who makes a mistake.
This is Aristotle's view of how tragedies are, that the great man is brought low by kind of one thing.
But I think that when you apply this to Lear, for example, or to Hamlet, or even to Macbeth, it's not so clear.
You can identify things that are the one thing.
Maybe King Lear is haughty.
Maybe Othello is excessively suspicious.
It could be that Macbeth is too ambitious.
But that doesn't really seem to do justice to what their motives are, to what makes these people who they are.
But with Coriolanus, we have a different kind of hero, a different kind of Shakespearean hero.
And Coriolanus is, in a sense, one-dimensional.
Now, this is not to say that he's a flat or dumb character.
It doesn't mean that he can't change.
In fact, we see him change back and forth in the play.
But what I mean is that he's not multifarious.
He's not somebody who has this kind of deep kaleidoscopic personality.
He believes in one thing.
And what is the one thing that he believes in?
Military heroism.
Essentially, Coriolanus is a conqueror.
He's a conquering hero.
And you see in the play his conquests, and his conquests are truly great.
In fact, in the play we see him at a place called Coriolis.
He gets into a battle with the Volscians, who are the great enemy of Rome.
Coriolanus is a Roman.
This play is set in Rome.
And it's set in Rome in the days of the early republic.
Rome is a republic. They've expelled the Tarquin kings.
And they're now being ruled, by and large, by a patrician or aristocratic class.
But the aristocratic class is in league with a plebeian or popular group of people representing, if you will, the tradesmen and the people.
But Rome is besieged.
It's being attacked.
And its great enemy is the Volscians.
And so the Volscians...
And all of this occurs during the play.
The Volscians attack... At Coriolis, and Coriolanus repels them in a fantastic fashion.
In fact, he gets trapped in the Volscian sector.
He fights his way out, and then he leads his own troops to a glorious victory over the Volscians.
The Volscians are so terrified of him, they compare him to a god.
They call him things like Jupiter and Mars.
You could almost think in a small society where very small armies were fielded, 4,000 men, 5,000 men.
A single man can make a huge difference, particularly a single general, a single leader.
And this is what... Coriolanus is.
In fact, that's where he gets his name.
His real name is Caius Martius, but once his great victory at Coriolis is so memorable that the Romans take that name, Coriolis, and call him essentially Coriolanus, and we get Coriolanus from that.
So here's Coriolanus, an unquestioned military hero.
But he's a military hero who believes that since conquest is the most important thing and other things are less important, and since the patricians are aristocratic class, these are the people who lead the battles, they win the fights, they save Rome from its enemies, the patricians should rule.
And of course, the patricians do rule.
But they have to rule by making some allowance for the plebeians.
In other words, society is a balance.
Yes, military leaders are necessary.
In fact, they're indispensable.
But hey, you know, you need also cobblers, and you need carpenters, and you need tradesmen, and you need laborers.
They're important too. And they have, if you will, a sense of their own worth, their own pride, if you will.
And so the Roman Republic is based upon a kind of delicate balance in which 80% of the power is with the patricians, but 20% has to be conceded to a group called the tribunes.
The tribunes are the ones who are the representatives of the people.
And what we see here is a kind of a rift.
Between the tribunes and the patricians, Coriolanus is right in the middle of it.
The tragedy of Coriolanus is that he is now up for the position of consul, but to be consul, he has to sort of bend his knee, at least symbolically, to the plebeians.
This, it turns out, he is absolutely unwilling to do.
And so this is the motor that sets off the plot.
I'm doing nothing more today than sort of setting the background.
The background is that Rome has just won a battle and repelled its enemies, the Volscians.
Coriolanus, the triumphant hero, is now up for console.
To get that position, he has to do only one thing.
He has to stand before the plebeians, before the tribunes, their representatives, and ask for their support.
And what happens next launches the tragedy of this play.
Coriolanus won't do it.
The tribunes, who are very cunning, are able to poison opinion against him.
And Coriolanus is issued an order of banishment, which, let us just say, he doesn't take very well.
I'll close with Coriolanus' response to banishment and then pick up this theme next time.
Because you get a sense of Coriolanus' personality.
He goes, you common cry of curs.
In other words, you losers.
He goes, you do corrupt my air.
I banish you.
So what Coriolanus is basically saying is, you people are so stinky.
I can't even breathe the air that's coming out of your mouths.
And you think you're banishing me?
Sorry, I'm banishing you.
And this great speech ends with the phrase, There is a world elsewhere.
Coriolanus says, I'll go someplace else and I'll come back and you'll never forget it.
We have time today for an audio question.
I'm looking forward to it. Listen.
Hi, Dinesh. My name is Biji, and I live in the San Diego region.
I was born and raised Catholic.
Your recent guest, Dr.
Jeffries, stated that the demise of cultural Christianity and a return to basic Christianity would be a good thing.
This is pedestrian coming from a Baptist minister.
It is, in fact, cultural Christians who face the greatest persecutions in the world, whether they are Coptic, Chaldean, or some other old orthodoxy living under Islamist rule or an atheistic regime such as China.
It seems to me that these cultural Christians, persecuted and martyred as they are, are living mere Christianity.
What do you think, Dinesh?
I think your question raises a couple of very interesting issues.
So, Robert Jeffress, I think, was saying, and he was making a point appropriate, I think, solely to the United States.
He was saying that you've got a Christianity in America that is And I think what he meant by cultural is habitual.
You have people who listen to Christian music, but not because they're particularly devout about it.
They go to church, but they're not particularly interested in what happens there.
They absorb a set of Christian habits and mores that they've taken on from their parents and their parents before them, but the underlying creedal rationale, why am I doing this, is sort of lost.
And I think what Jefferson's saying is that maybe if this cultural Christianity, these habitual ways start to erode, you don't become a Christian that way, then the people who do become Christians will be true Christians.
They'll become Christians, you may say, for the right reasons.
They will embrace creedal Christianity.
They will say things like, I'm doing this for the love of Christ, not just because this is the only way I know and I don't know any, and all my friends are doing it that way, so I'm going to do it that way too.
I think the question is coming from a more cosmopolitan, a more international direction and is based upon a premise that's completely right, which is to say that when a Muslim attacks a Christian somewhere in the Middle East or in North Africa or in the middle of Africa, they don't say, hey Christian, are you willing to confess your belief in Jesus Christ?
They don't say that at all. All they care about is whether or not you were born a Christian.
So, in other words, Christianity in many parts of the world is seen as a matter of birth and blood.
You're a Coptic Christian because you're born into the Coptic Christian community.
You may actually not even be practicing, but nevertheless you are targeted as a Christian, you are treated as a Christian, and then you are in some case killed as a Christian.
So, there is something to be said for cultural Christianity because Even people around the world who identify as Christian or who are identified as Christian face torments because of it.
Now, obviously, I think as Christians ourselves or myself, I want cultural Christians to become creedal Christians.
I want them to be deeper in their faith.
I remember an argument that my dad and my uncles had years and years ago in which...
They were discussing whether or not somebody, they were talking about Christians who don't really believe, should still go to church.
And my dad was taking the position they shouldn't.
He said it's hypocritical.
They're going to church, what, to make a show?
They shouldn't go. If they don't believe, don't go.
And my uncles took the position, no, it's better that they do go, even if they are not particularly devout.
Because maybe it'll do them some good.
It can't hurt them. It's only going to push them in the right direction.
So it's better that they go than that they don't go.
And here you see really the difference between my dad was sort of arguing for creedal Christianity, the Jeffress point of view, and my uncles were arguing for cultural Christianity.
So I'm not going to try to settle the issue between those two.
I'll simply say that it's my fervent prayer and wish that all cultural Christians also become creedal Christians.
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