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Nov. 9, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:33
MADE IN SOCIALISM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep214
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Nicole Hannah-Jones says she went to the Hiroshima Museum and she felt on behalf of America a sense of collective shame.
I want to discuss this issue of collective shame and what it reveals and what it conceals.
Debbie and I are going to talk a little bit about socialism, what it feels like to live under socialism, and about creeping socialism in America.
There's been a lot of excitement about the climate conference.
Obama and Biden are both there.
And I'll talk about Obama's hot air and Biden's natural gas.
Former Congressman Doug Collins is here.
We're going to talk about Biden's report card and about his new podcast.
And finally, I'm going to conclude my discussion of Shakespeare's Coriolanus by asking whether, even when it comes to the highest virtue, Couldn't there be too much of a good thing?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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One of the central issues in critical race theory, one of the central themes of the 1619 project is this issue of collective shame.
The idea of feeling responsibility and feeling guilt and remorse over things that you didn't do.
Now, I want to explore this a little bit because Nicole Hannah-Jones, the lead author of the 1619 Project, Who's kind of a Rorschach test here for the culture.
She sort of represents the current thinking among progressives on these sorts of topics.
And she went to visit the Hiroshima Museum and she says that,"...as an American, I felt shame." And of course, her point is not about, she doesn't care about Hiroshima per se.
Her real idea is to immediately pivot to the race issue and make the case for transfers of benefits to blacks.
And she goes,"...the desire for so many Americans to be free of collective shame, collective atonement, and collective responsibility for the shameful legacy of centuries of slavery, racism, apartheid, and terroristic violence..." So you can see here, this is essentially the moral case for reparations, that we need to feel collective shame.
Now, there have been some libertarian-oriented rebuttals to Nicole Hannah-Jones, which I think are inadequate.
Here's a fellow named Thomas Chatterton Williams, who essentially says,"...you have one life and are responsible for your own actions.
You will have much to be ashamed of.
That will be your own fault. But," and this is his punchline,"...don't let anyone compel you to feel shame for other people's actions over which you exert no control." And I suppose to a degree this is true.
I mean, let's say I as an Indian, a person of Indian descent, I don't feel shame over the caste system.
Why? I didn't create it.
As a Christian, I'm not part of it.
The caste system operates within Hinduism.
I'm in no way implicated in it.
So I detest it.
I abhor it. But I disapprove of it.
But disapproval is not the same thing as shame.
Now, this kind of rhetoric, Nicole Hannah-Jones and her friends who are weighing in on this, jump in, which I think is a pretty good point.
And they say, in effect, if you embrace pride in good things that America has done, why wouldn't you feel shame for bad things America has done?
And it's true, as conservatives, we take a great deal of pride, for example, in the founding.
We take a great deal of pride in the accomplishments of America.
And so, says Nicole Hannah-Jones, shouldn't we, by the same token, just as we didn't do the founding, we're not responsible for those achievements, but if we can feel a justified pride in them, why wouldn't we also take responsibility for the bad stuff?
Now, I actually agree that there is such a thing as collective responsibility in certain cases.
So, for example, let's apply this to Nicole Hannah-Jones.
As a black woman, does she feel collective responsibility for the Africans who sold her ancestors into slavery?
No. Does she feel responsibility for her 3,500 fellow blacks in the 19th century who collectively in the American South owned upwards of 10,000 black slaves?
I don't see her taking responsibility for those things.
It's very interesting that she wants to take responsibility for America.
What does she never want to take responsibility for?
Well, the obvious answer is the Democratic Party, her own party.
Because it wasn't America that did slavery.
In fact, from the very beginning, there were free blacks in America, and there were emancipation movements.
There were emancipation movements in the American South.
There were over 100 emancipation movements in the American South prior, around the time of the American founding.
100,000 Southerners fought on the Union side in the Civil War.
So if you can point responsibility precisely, you would have to say that the primary responsibility for slavery politically was the Southern Democratic Party allied with the Northern wing of the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party was the party of enslavement.
And Nicole Hannah-Jones is a member of that party.
So let's look at the evil she described, slavery, racism.
The Democrats essentially invented white supremacy.
You didn't need a lot of white supremacy, by the way, under slavery.
It was after slavery that white supremacy became the glue holding the Democratic Party to get apartheid.
Who do you think has promoted all the segregation laws in the American South?
The Democratic legislature signed by Democratic governors.
Not one word about this from Nicole Hannah-Jones.
So what is really going on here is it's not that I'm objecting to the idea of collective responsibility.
What I'm saying to Nicole Hannah-Jones is, take some.
Take some responsibility on behalf of your own party, lobby your own party, the Democrats, to publicly acknowledge their role in these grave crimes.
Accept the responsibility for reparations.
Send the bill for reparations to the DNC and see if those guys are going to pay it.
It seems that really what Nicole Hannah-Jones is up to, and this is really why she wants to blame America, is she knows that there are people like me and Debbie who are immigrants, but we identify with America.
We're pro-American, so she somehow wants to force the responsibility for slavery, racism, apartheid onto people like Debbie and me instead of recognizing that it belongs squarely on the shoulders of her own political party.
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Debbie and I were chatting this morning about your aunt.
Your aunt in Venezuela.
She's in her 80s.
And you're in constant touch with her.
And in a way, her life gives you a window into not just socialism over there, but creeping socialism in this country.
Right. Talk a little bit about her.
Yeah. Well, you know, at first I didn't really understand what she meant by, you know, I have to go to this grocery store to get eggs.
And then I have to go to this one to get bread.
And then I have to go to this one to get this something else.
I never really like, I was like, oh yeah, that's terrible.
Or, you know, I cannot, I can't find toilet paper anywhere.
I have to use Kleenex or I have to use a towel and wash it and this and that.
It just really didn't...
While I thought it was horrific, I didn't understand it.
I didn't really... I couldn't put myself in her shoes to see what she was feeling.
And not just now the shortages, the empty stores in Venezuela, but talk about how the price escalation, the levels of inflation...
I mean, we help your aunt a little bit, but we've decided to help her a little more and say why.
Yeah, so my aunt used to get a pension, and really her pension was, you know, pretty good, you know, in American standards.
It was probably, I would say, about $10,000 a month, you know, pension.
She's in her late 80s.
And all of a sudden, you know, Venezuela's currency really became worthless.
Inflation rate was a million percent.
We can't even imagine that, right?
We're here at 5% inflation, a million percent inflation.
So her $10,000 became like a quarter.
A quarter cents, you know, 25 cents versus $10,000.
It was almost nil.
So we, you know...
And meanwhile, with that shrunken currency, you know, like we go to the grocery store, if you buy a roasted chicken, it's, you know, what, $3, $4?
Yeah, yeah. So my aunt says that to buy a chicken in Venezuela costs about $20 to $30.
Yeah. So, obviously, she can't afford protein.
She can't afford to eat protein.
At her age, she should be eating a healthy diet of protein and carbs and all of those things.
She can't do that.
Now, for Americans in general, this is incomprehensible.
I know when I was growing up, We didn't have those kinds of shortages, but what we did have was ration cards because everything was processed through the government and you were allotted a certain amount.
So much rice, so much cooking oil and so on.
But Americans are now getting a taste of it, not just under COVID, but under Biden.
Right. And you know, you often talk about India and the rationing in India, but the difference, and when then I bring up Venezuela, is that Venezuelans were not used to that.
I think in India, that is how you grew up and you didn't know anything different.
Venezuelans were used to going to the grocery store and getting whatever they wanted.
They could get a, you know, the brand of shampoo they wanted, the brand of toilet paper they wanted, anything, right?
And then all of a sudden...
They had to have ration.
They rationed it because they didn't have enough.
And what happens with socialism, and I want everybody to kind of realize this, you know, during COVID, when you went to the grocery store and you were super frustrated because you went and there was no toilet paper or you went and there was no, the brand of eggs that you typically get was gone forever.
The milk that you like no more.
You had to get the generic milk or milk that you never really liked.
So you had to get things at the grocery store that weren't really what you were used to.
That is the reality of socialism permanently.
Well, let's say why. What happens is the government imposes increasingly confiscatory taxation.
It drives these private companies out of business.
Then the government goes, oh, they're not providing eggs.
So we need to do it.
So the government takes it over, and then you get a government run, but then you have one type of toilet paper.
It's the generic brand.
It's the national brand.
And why? Because all of these companies that are not making a profit anymore Leave.
They're no longer there.
So goods and services can no longer be provided by private individuals or private companies.
They leave. They leave the scene.
And the only thing left is a national company that makes toilet paper like sandpaper.
And so that's what happens.
And it's... I'm thinking about all these young people.
They're so used to an abundant standard of living, and we know it with our own kids.
They take things for granted that we never had.
And yet, these are people who think somehow socialism is idealistic.
It's going to make things better.
But I mean, what they don't realize is that socialism is drab.
It's uniform. It's one size fits all.
It's a kind of hollowing out of the soul.
And socialist societies are really dull.
Well, yeah. Nobody has the will to do anything anymore.
I mean, think about it.
If you're given...
And then you actually think that whatever you're given by the government is good, but you were used to going to a coffee shop with your iPhone and you're doing Snapchat with your friends and things like that.
Well, you know... I don't think Apple would like being taxed at 90%.
Do you really think Apple could operate that way?
So what would happen?
Apple would cease to exist.
And do you think that the government could come up with an Apple product?
I mean, it's the secret wish of the progressives to control those companies.
I mean, their main objection to Facebook is that Facebook is doing censorship on their behalf, but they want to do it themselves.
So they want it to be Biden censorship and not Zuckerberg censorship.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I mean, and if, you know, we have chats like this all the time, and you're now on locals, dinesh.locals.com, and it's really fun.
The last couple of weeks, you've been doing these Q&As Thursday nights.
Yeah, I mean, I do some content that's censored elsewhere.
Yeah, exactly. You just can't talk about...
You talk about pretty much everything, and so you get a little window into our, like, living room and a little...
My office, because that's where you hang out, mostly.
Yeah, and the Q&As are cool.
I mean, we do on the podcast.
People can send in questions, and I try to answer from time to time.
But I do a kind of freewheeling, no-holds-barred, 45-minute, 30-45-minute Q&A once a week.
It's Thursday. I'm going to do one on Locals this Thursday.
7.30 Eastern. 7.30 Eastern.
And it's just dinesh.locals.com.
Yeah, and I come in and sneak in at the end and give you, like...
Tell me where I went wrong.
Correct my errors. The Debra D'Souza podcast.
Thank you very much.
My husband likes to tease me about it because I'm a little bit of a control freak, in case you hadn't noticed.
I think actually people like the interaction because...
It's fun. It's a lot of fun.
And, you know, we don't always talk politics, but a lot of times we do.
Well, I mean, I've posted on all kinds of topics.
You were laughing at the post I did on Locals about different types of food and which cultures.
Are you boring these people with all the foods?
No, no, no. No, I mean, it was about which cultures take cuisine seriously.
Yeah, yeah. So anyway, that's a lot of fun.
But the socialism, you know, is definitely something that is a very serious topic.
And, you know, we talk about it, number one, because I personally...
Deal with it with my family in Venezuela, and I see what it's done to their soul, and I don't want that here in America for anybody.
I don't even wish it on the left.
I mean, it's easy to get into, and it's really hard to get out of.
Once you have it, I don't think you'll ever get out of it.
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Feel the difference. The FBI, along with the support of the Southern District of New York, this is basically the launching pad for left-wing investigations.
It was the group that prosecuted me.
It's the group that's going after Trump.
And the SDNY directed the FBI to raid the offices and then the home of James O'Keefe of Project Veritas.
And this is an extraordinary step, to send the FBI to raid the home of a journalist.
And it's remarkable here how the Biden people and the Biden justice operation does not hesitate to do this kind of thing.
We saw, by the way, a window of it in California when, partly under the aegis of Kamala Harris, The state of California raided David Daleiden.
He's the journalist who was exposing Planned Parenthood.
And essentially, he was a political opponent.
And so their idea was to criminalize.
He was doing undercover videos, but the undercover videos, no one denied, were legitimate.
They were exposing things that Planned Parenthood, which, by the way, gets a lot of government money, was doing.
And so their idea was go after him, prosecute him.
And with Project Veritas, The pretext for this raid is extremely flimsy.
Apparently, President Biden's daughter, Ashley, claimed that she had a diary that was stolen.
Apparently, this is a diary that went missing a few days before the presidential election.
And she didn't report the diary as stolen, but later she said, yeah, I think it was stolen.
Now, what does Project Veritas have to do with any of this?
Well, Project Veritas apparently received a tip from someone saying that they knew where the diary was.
It was abandoned in a place, and they knew where it was.
So the Project Veritas guys went and retrieved the diary, and they looked at it, but they had no way of knowing that this was really a Biden diary.
And so they realize that something might be afoot here.
And so what do they do?
They call the police and turn the diary over to law enforcement.
They didn't use the diary or the contents of the diary.
And so let's pause for a moment and ask the question, what is the FBI doing conducting raids over a missing diary?
You might say, well, wait a minute, Dinesh, there could have been some national security issues at stake.
No, this is a diary that was made by Biden's daughter prior to the election.
It's not when Biden is president where somehow she might have been privy to some sort of sensitive information.
None of that. So since when is Biden's daughter's diary a matter for the FBI to jump?
And nor, by the way, did Project Veritas try to somehow sell the diary or use it to shake down the Bidens or some kind of leverage, asking for some sort of ransom or trying to get information out of the Bidens in exchange to get the diary back.
None of this is even involved.
And what strikes me as odd is the fact that Here you've got this kind of brazen violation of normal protocol.
Well, I mean, think about it. What's the underlying crime?
What's the crime even being alleged here?
It's kind of hard to say because nothing was stolen.
Nothing was really even used.
And so this seems to me an intimidation tactic that's been pursued by the Biden administration.
And the media silence over it is also telling.
Why? Because it shows you that the media kind of approves of this.
They want the deep state to go after conservatives in this way.
So this is very troubling developments that are going on.
I've said previously that I think that these require the sternest response, and so Republicans are going to need to have to do a lot of this.
It's very bad, and it goes against our nature to do it.
But I don't know another way to show the other side that what goes around comes around.
Show the other side that if they do it to us, we're going to have to do it to them, not because we approve of these tactics, but because we're going to do whatever it takes to make them stop.
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There are two news items that appear to be coming out of the climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
Joe Biden is there, and so is Obama.
I think Biden's contribution to the conference largely seems to have been, I don't know how to say this, a fart.
So, Biden was evidently at a reception with Boris Johnson, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Camilla Parker Bowles.
And evidently, according to this seems to be coming out of Camilla Parker Bowles, because it appeared first in the British press, was then repeated, Biden emitted a, quote, long and loud fart.
No further details on the fart.
I wish I had an audio of it to play.
But according to the New York Post, quote, Camilla hasn't stopped talking about it.
So, it evidently was newsworthy.
And, you know, there are different reasons to do this.
It could be that Biden is at the age where he doesn't have a lot of self-control.
It could be that Biden was really bored with the conversation.
He was expressing his disapproval by blasting out from the other side.
But I think it was Biden, you know, Biden these days, you can't rely on things coming out of his mouth because they're often incoherent.
They make absolutely no sense.
So, I think Biden was sending a message that natural gas is the future.
It's absolutely right. Natural gas is bad for the environment?
Well, it's better than...
Maybe better than... Well, yeah.
Debbie's weighing in on the issue of the cow parts.
Let me... Let me...
In the name of dignity, pivot to Obama because Obama, I was on Fox yesterday talking about this, but Obama was at the conference talking to young people.
He goes, vote like your life depends on it because it does.
You know, and he's relying on, you know, he's relying on absolute dummies.
You know, some young guy, I better go vote because otherwise I may never have a chance to turn 40.
You know, these are the kind of morons that Obama's counting on to robotically respond to him.
And here's a little clip about Obama talking about his own previously unknown philanthropic side.
Listen. I can afford to give up a lot of my current lifestyle to benefit the planet.
Ha ha ha! Obama's willing to give up his lifestyle.
Well, nothing's stopping him.
I mean, think about it. If Obama really thought we're in an existential crisis, he could say, listen, I want to basically not only help others, but help myself.
I'll put 70% of all my wealth right now into climate solutions.
But he's not doing that. He's not even putting a penny in it.
So his idea, whenever Obama says something, it's almost like you need a kind of Alinsky-ite translation manual to say what he's really saying.
Here's what he's really saying. He's saying, well, I'm a wealthy guy, I can afford to pay more, but he doesn't intend to pay more.
It's a metaphor. What he really means is he wants America to pay more.
So here you get the anti-colonialism of Obama.
He knows that countries like India and China have no interest in this climate change nonsense.
They're rapidly developing.
They use massive amounts of fossil fuel, and they intend to use more.
And they're candid about it.
But see, Obama's point is, well, let them, let them.
They're developing countries.
So even China, which, by the way, funnels a lot of its money into the military, into high tech.
China can hardly be called developing at this point, but even so, Obama wants to transfer wealth away from his own country, America.
He wants to unwind the wealth and power and influence of America, and he wants to do it by increasing.
He's using climate as a pretext to do that.
Now, we know Obama doesn't care about the climate, because if he really thought the oceans were rising, you'd think he would invest $12 million in oceanfront property at Martha's Vineyard.
Absolutely not. And not only does Obama know it's nonsense himself, he knows everybody else knows it's nonsense.
Because if buyers thought that property values were going to sink, they would have acted on it.
If sellers, they would have acted.
You'd see property values plummeting all around the coast, but that's not happening.
So... I think what we have with Obama is a kind of sly attempt to achieve his, I call it his forever agenda.
His agenda is always to increase the power of the state over the private sector, and it's always to damage and weaken America, weaken America politically, militarily, economically, at the benefit of Of non-Western countries.
That's the Obama philosophy.
And whenever you see Obama talk, you'll see that hidden behind his postures and his words is always the same old message.
Here's some pretty monumental news.
It was recently announced that Social Security benefits are going to increase by 5.9% in January.
That's the highest increase in 40 years.
Now, this means the government is admitting that inflation is out of control, and yet the left is still pushing through for trillions more in spending.
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You know, guys, you probably know that this podcast of mine is sponsored by Salem Media.
It's also available, by the way, on the Salem Podcast Network.
Well, we have a new podcaster joining our team.
It's former Georgia Congressman Doug Collins.
He was the representative from Georgia's 9th Congressional District, previously served in the Georgia State Legislature.
And he is a U.S. Air Force Reserve chaplain.
He was deployed to Iraq, but now he's entering the world of podcasting.
Doug, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you sort of on our extended Salem team.
And let me start by asking you, this is a very different gig, if I may say, than serving in Congress.
How are you making the adjustment and are you liking it so far?
Well, so far, so good.
It's been good. It is a little bit similar to Congress in that I get to talk about ideas that I care about and shape the message, and a little bit more that I can have fewer Saturday mornings that I have to run off to a meeting and do some things.
But it's still fun.
And so far, it has been great.
I've done a mix of guests and a mix of just my own personal thoughts, which I think is going to be the mix of the podcast.
And it's going to be a mix, not just politics, but life in general, because I believe it's a whole life approach that we as conservatives have to take.
Doug, are you doing the podcast audio and video?
And what are some of the platforms where people can find it?
Well, right now it's audio.
We're preparing video and being a part of the Salem Network.
They're doing a great job of getting us ready for that.
And so a few more, probably a few more weeks will be both audio and video like you, Dinesh, and then we'll go forward.
But you can get it on any of the platforms on Salem Podcast Network, Spotify, Apple, Google, anywhere you get your podcasts, you can find it.
Awesome. Hey, let's talk a little bit about the Republican Party, because it seems like the GOP with this infrastructure bill is, well, maybe snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is putting it too strongly.
But, you know, you had this Virginia election, this New Jersey election.
Clearly, Biden is very unpopular.
This would seem like a really good time to kind of keep him down for the count.
But it looks like a fairly decent number of Republican senators, 19 and 13 Republicans in the House, decided to help Biden get past the finish line, at least with this kind of smaller, if I can call it that, infrastructure bill.
Do you think that this is a tactical blunder on their part, and why are they doing it?
I do. And look, I know a lot of these folks and say, look, three of them were retiring anyway.
They were basically off.
You're not going to control them for the most part anyway.
And I've already indicated they were going to vote for it.
The rest were in sort of an interesting mode in their districts, as one of them put it.
That, you know, he is in trouble if he voted for it, probably from a primary perspective.
He was in trouble if he didn't vote for it from a general perspective.
And that happens with members.
But I really believe here, sometimes you have to take a long game.
And I've talked about this a lot.
Democrats have a long game perspective.
Republicans, unfortunately, we have a, I used to like to call it, we're like a gnat on Red Bull.
We're bouncing everywhere most of the time.
While Democrats are solidly focused, and I think what this did is we could have took a longer perspective.
It would have made the Democrats really, really have to work at getting their packages through, in which they wouldn't have got through.
And that's the part that is concerning to me, because what's happening not only in this infrastructure bill, which was nowhere close to infrastructure, only 15% to 20% at best, whereas what we would know as infrastructure, The rest is social policy, and now you've got reconciliation coming behind it.
They know that they're in trouble next November.
All they're trying to do is get the policy in place now, because once they need it in, they know it's very hard to get out.
Do you think that they're just...
In some ways saying, listen, we believe in this ideologically.
We want to push it through.
We don't mind.
We don't care if we take a beating at the polls in a year or a year and a half from now.
Or do you think that they think that by spending all this money, they will buy enough votes to Through the various programs that are built into these bills, where they will be able to woo people over whether they might think, well, you know, Biden's a doofus and he's a fool, but you know what?
I like getting all this extra money from the Democrats and they're the ones who are Santa Claus, so I'm going to stay with the Democratic Party, even if sullenly so.
I'm a firm believer in something that I've talked about on a podcast and other places.
And this is that I believe that Democrats have a Nancy Pelosi in particular, and I'm no fan of Nancy Pelosi.
She's no fan of mine. We fought in Congress the whole time.
But I will say this about her.
She is willing to sacrifice principle.
I mean, she's willing to sacrifice power and position to get a policy.
I've not seen that yet from Republicans.
And when Republicans are in higher positions of leadership in Congress, they're willing to make deals, cut it, and maybe not get the best.
Pelosi's a different animal. Go back to history.
2010, she was willing to put the whole majority on the line for Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, when she knew she would probably lose.
She didn't care. She knew once those were in place, it would stay for a number of years.
What was her price for that?
Eight years out of the speakership.
Well, now she's back in the speakership.
Look at what she's doing. She knows probably what happens next November.
But again, position and power, she's willing to sacrifice for that third P called policy because she knows that legacy and policy will far outlast what she does on a short-term political basis.
Which raises an interesting question, Doug, which is, do we need—it seems silly for me to say, do we need Pelosi-style leaders?
But I think you know what I mean.
I don't mean ideologically.
But what I mean is, do we need tacticians like a Pelosi on our side?
I mean, it looks like we've got—you know, McConnell knows how to count votes, and McCarthy, in a way, represents, I think, the middle of the party.
But they don't seem to have the ruthlessness of the Democrats in the way that they fight.
We're fighting a kind of gentleman's fight— I saw that a little bit, and I agree with you.
I think the more I was there and now looking at it from being outside, this is the one perspective 10 months away.
My last two years, remember, Dinesh, I was the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.
I sat right next to Jerry Nadler.
We fought Mueller. We fought impeachment.
I was the face of that.
And what I would see is that we wasn't coming together, and I saw it in the majority of I was able to pass a lot of legislation.
We did the First Step Act, which was my bill on the criminal justice.
We did music modernization. But I never gave up who I was.
And I think that's the part Republicans miss a lot, is we need to go in and push, be willing to push it up to the edge, and be willing, again, if we believe our principles are right, and my question is this, if we believe that it is right to have a conservative budget or a conservative tax policy, then it's worth losing your office to put that in place And you may say, well, then you don't get to do anything else.
All I say is look at Nancy Pelosi.
She did for Barack Obama.
She got Dodd-Frank.
She got Obamacare and some other things in.
She was out of power for eight years, and now she's back looking to basically implement a social agenda like we've never seen before.
And that will be her legacy, not the fact she was out of power for eight years, but the power that when she had it, she used it and to get whatever she could.
Remember, she's not going to get everything she wants, but she's willing to get something because we know that it stays safe.
As Reagan told us before, it'll stay, it's almost the closest thing to eternal life on this side of heaven, would be a government policy or government program.
I think that's very insightful, Doug.
Hey, listen, this is the kind of insight you're going to get on the Doug Collins podcast.
Check it out. Doug, thanks for joining me.
Love to have you back sometime to talk more about this stuff.
Look forward to it, Ness. Take care.
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See site for details. Toby and I were listening to a fascinating sermon last Sunday.
We're watching online.
It's a sermon by Celebration Church in Texas.
The pastor is a guy named Frankie Mazapica, a very kind of inspired, very talented teacher of Scripture.
And he was talking about, he was contrasting the prayer of Satan to With the prayer of Jesus.
And immediately, of course, I was in prayer of Satan.
Well, he's referring to Luke 22, verse 31, where Jesus says, Simon, Simon, Simon here being Simon Peter.
This is the Apostle Peter.
Simon, Simon, Satan has asked for you.
Wow. And asked who?
Obviously, God. So Satan is making a petition to God for Peter.
Satan is praying, in a weird way, for the soul of Peter.
And then Jesus says this, But I have prayed, this is Jesus' prayer, for you, that your faith may not fail.
And this is a kind of fascinating prayer, not just by Satan, but by Jesus.
Jesus is praying not that Peter not ever succumb to temptation.
In fact, Jesus is going to go on to say, just moments later, a couple of verses later, that Peter will betray Jesus.
So, Peter is going to fail, and Jesus knows this.
So, what is Jesus' prayer?
It's not to sort of fortify Peter against temptation, to make sure that Peter has the strength to withstand it, to endure it, to resist it.
But rather, Jesus is praying for Peter to have faith, even though, even though.
He might and in fact will fail.
And then Pastor Mazzapeka raises, I think, a rather interesting question.
He says, well, if you think about it and you think about Peter's failure, the triple betrayal of Jesus, how does that really differ from what Judas did?
I mean, let's remember that Judas sold out Jesus for silver, for 30 pieces of silver.
And that, of course, was an abominable betrayal.
But when Jesus was led away, pretty much at the same time, Peter betrayed Jesus, denied him, Not just once, but three times.
So, was Judas' action so radically different than Peter's?
Well, I guess you can explore the motive of it a little bit.
Judas' motive was mercenary.
I want money.
But Peter's motive was kind of mercenary too.
I don't want to be associated with Jesus.
I don't want to be caught.
I don't want to be tried myself.
I don't want to be humiliated.
I don't want the crowd to be going after me.
So, Peter too had, you may say, low motives in his betrayal.
I think the difference, and this is the difference that Pastor Mazza Pica stresses, is in the response.
When Jesus' eyes met Peter's and Peter realized what he had done, he broke down and wept.
So he repented of his betrayal.
He knew that it was wrong to do.
And the point is that he never lost his faith.
Even though he betrayed Jesus, he never lost his faith.
And his faith was in Jesus as the Son of God.
You might remember in Scripture, Jesus at one point asked Peter, and I think this is really why Peter has a sort of unique position among the apostles.
You know, who do you say I am?
And Peter says, you are the Son of God.
And then Jesus says, Jesus, almost a little surprised, says...
In effect, you could not have figured that out by yourself.
God must have told you that because there's a knowledge there, a discernment, a wisdom that goes beyond human intelligence.
Now, I want to extend the analogy between Peter and Judas, even beyond Pastor Mazapika, by looking at the deaths of Judas and Peter.
Because their deaths are also kind of similar.
Not entirely similar. Judas committed suicide.
He hanged himself. Peter didn't commit suicide.
But Peter was a martyr.
He was, in fact, crucified upside down.
And Peter went back to Rome, knowing that there was massive persecution in Rome, Knowing that it was very likely he would be apprehended and that he would be subsequently killed.
So, to that degree, Peter, like Judas, voluntarily went, you may say, to his death.
But I think the key difference is that Judas' death was a death of hopelessness.
Basically, Judas didn't really, at the end, even believe in Jesus as the Messiah.
We know this because he calls Jesus, not Messiah, not Savior, but Teacher.
Jesus is a teacher, and that's all he is.
And so for Judas, in the end, his only confidence, in a sense, is in himself.
And when he loses faith in himself...
It's the end for him.
For Peter, on the other hand, Peter hangs on to his faith in Christ and, in fact, takes it even further.
He now is willing to put his life on the line for that faith.
In a sense, you could say that this is his true penance.
His true act of penance was saying, Listen, Jesus, I betrayed you three times.
I'm sorry for it, but I'm also willing to give my life for you as you indeed gave your life for me.
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I want to conclude my discussion of Shakespeare's Coriolanus by looking at the great closing scene of this play.
To just recapitulate the plot, the haughty soldier Coriolanus insults the people.
He insults the tribunes who represent the people.
He's expelled from Rome.
He joins the enemies of Rome.
And together with the Volscians, he shows up at the gates of Rome to conquer and destroy the city.
At this point, Coriolanus' friend, the senator Menenius, tries to talk him out of it.
Other people try to talk him out of it, but he is so dug in.
He is so determined to do this.
He is so angry, not just at the people, but at Rome itself, that he cannot be talked out of it.
And so in the final scene, his mother shows up, Volumnia, and his wife and his young son, Martius, And it's the mother we want to focus on here because she is one of the great heroines, one of the great characters in Shakespeare, together with Lady Macbeth and Portia.
And she is a Roman aristocrat.
Interestingly, she is the one who has taught Coriolanus to be the way he is.
She talks about the fact, she says...
To a cruel war I sent him from where he returned his brows bound with oak.
And what she means is that Coriolanus' martial strength as a soldier, she cultivated, she put into him.
And even his hatred of the common people, When Coriolanus gets into a shouting match with the tribunes and retreats back with his fellow aristocrats, he says this.
He goes, I amuse my mother does not approve me further, who was want, want here means who was likely, who was disposed, to call them woolen vassals, things created to buy and sell with groats, to show bare heads in congregations, to yawn, be still, and wonder.
And what, what... What Coriolanus is saying is, you know, my mom would really think I'm awesome here because she too thought that these people were yahoos.
She too thought that all they do is buy and sell and stand there with their eyes wide open.
So now we realize that although Coriolanus' mother is about to show up, At this point, to talk him into trying to make peace with the people, with the tribunes, that Coriolanus learned his hatred of the people and of the tribunes from his mom herself.
And his mom's point is not that he needs to make peace because the tribunes are worthy of any kind of respect.
It's purely a show.
It's a strategic move to appease these people because you need their approval to become worthy.
But in the closing scene, here is Volumnia, the mother, and she's there to plead with her son.
And her son knows that this is going to be a harder confrontation than he had with his friend Menenius.
It's easy to say no to him, not going to be easy to say no to mom.
And his mom begins by trying to make all kinds of arguments.
She says, oh, Coriolanus, you know, you're kind of an in-between man.
You're Roman, but you also know the Volscians.
Now you're on their side. You are in a position to make peace between the two sides.
Why do you need to have a war?
And Coriolanus is unappeased.
He's unconvinced.
And then she makes other arguments, all aimed at appealing to Coriolanus' sense, here's your wife, here's your son, and Coriolanus again is unmoved.
Until finally Volumnia says this.
She says, come, let us go.
Meaning, I've tried.
It's not going to work.
Remember this whole time Volumnia goes down on her knees and stretches out her hand and Coriolanus, I think it's one of the great scenes in Shakespeare, Coriolanus takes her hand but says nothing.
He listens, but he doesn't speak.
And at the end, he faces really what can only be called a mother's unconcealed rage.
She says, come, let us go.
This fellow had avulsion to his mother, meaning, I'm not your mom.
Your mom really belongs, is avulsion.
That's the side you've chosen.
Go find a mom over there.
His wife is in Coriolis.
Meaning, go take another wife.
Your Roman wife doesn't really belong to you.
And this child, like him by chance.
It's almost like saying, this is not your real kid.
Or at least, it's morally speaking, not your kid.
He might resemble you, but that's only by chance.
Yet, give us our dispatch.
Meaning, farewell.
And he says, I am hushed until our city be afire, and then I'll speak a little.
So what this means is that she knows that the Volscians with Coriolanus are stronger.
Rome is going to be burned.
So I'm going to be quiet until our city is in flames, and then I'll speak a little.
Now what does that mean? Well, I think what it means is, and that's when I will have to curse my own son because he did it.
He burned our city.
And so you see here Volumnia is not just a Roman mom.
She's kind of a Spartan mom.
She has the view, which the Spartans did, when the Spartan mom sent their sons to battle.
It was like, listen, come back with your sword or on it.
Meaning there's no such thing as surrender.
There's no such thing even as retreat.
Either you win or you die on your shield.
And this is Volumnia.
And this ultimately breaks down Coriolanus.
This idea at the end that he will have his mother's not just disapproval, not just rage, but curse is too much for him and he submits.
Ultimately, this is a heroic act by Coriolanus, but he also knows the outcome.
The Volscians are now going to be outraged.
They're actually going to turn on him.
He's actually putting his life in peril.
He will be torn to pieces by the Volscian mob when he goes back to Coriolis.
And he knows all this.
His mother doesn't really realize it, at least not at first.
And so, when Coriolanus is back with the Volscians, his His partner, Ophidius, who was once his enemy, but then his ally to overtake Rome turns on him and says to him, thou boy of tears.
And what he says, what he's saying really to Coriolanus is that you are still a mama's boy.
You have still never grown up.
You still have to sort of listen to mother.
And in the end, that's what costs Coriolanus his life.
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