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Nov. 17, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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WE ARE KYLE RITTENHOUSE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep220
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Today I'm going to examine the Kyle Rittenhouse case in its widest significance, its implications for Antifa, for the Trump movement, also for gun rights.
Do we need a new conservative philosophy of jurisprudence as we nominate Supreme Court justices?
Do we need to rethink this from the ground up?
I'll tell you what I think. Debbie asked me the other day, how many lives have been slaved by the Texas abortion law?
So I do the math, and I'll share it with you.
And Harvard scholar Ruth Weiss is going to join me.
She has a new memoir, and she's going to talk about the woke culture in academia.
She's also going to talk about how anti-Semitism is the acceptable bigotry of the left.
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.
I want to talk about the Kyle Rittenhouse case and its widest implications.
And in fact, this discussion that I initiate now, I'll be continuing tonight on Locals.
A kind of uncensored Q&A live, 7.30pm Eastern.
And if you want to check it out, go to dinesh.locals.com.
It's going to be lively.
Now, the Rittenhouse case is in the hands of the jury.
I make this podcast right about the time in the morning when the jury is beginning to deliberate, so I won't know the outcome, even if it comes today.
And I'm not going to talk about the outcome, per se.
I'll take stock of that after it happens.
What I want to talk about are the wider implications of the case.
Now, there are a lot of people opining about these implications.
Here's David French, the never-Trumper, formerly of the National Review.
Now I think of an obscure publication called The Bulwark.
Anyway, he goes,"...the movement to make a hero out of Kyle Rittenhouse is both ridiculous and dangerous.
He was a foolish kid wielding a deadly weapon." I've said before that if I was Kyle Rittenhouse's mom or his dad, I would discourage him from doing this.
So there's an element of me that agrees with French.
But there's another side to it that I want to highlight, and that is that, you know, I'm a little offended by this tone from David French.
I mean, I could almost retitle his article, Why, you know, I, David French, kind of sitting on my butt while Antifa thugs are burning down Kenosha, I'm morally superior to a lower middle class white teenager who rushed to defend a community where his dad and other family members lived.
That's the other side of it.
I mean, this Rittenhouse kid has guts.
He has more guts than the prosecutor.
The prosecutor himself said, I wouldn't go out there at that kind of hour.
The cops weren't there.
At least they came, but they came much later.
Much of the male population of Kenosha was cowering in fear, hiding in their homes, while left-wing rioters are destroying the city.
Who's the real hero here?
Well, a case can be made that the real hero is Kyle Rittenhouse.
And the left is trying to demonize him, just as they tried, by the way, to demonize the McCloskeys when the McCloskeys came out of their home in St.
Louis, sort of guns drawn, because they're trying to demonize all of us.
They're trying to demonize the Second Amendment.
They're trying to demonize the idea that you can allow, that you can use force and guns to defend yourself when you are under direct assault, an assault that you did not start and you did not, in fact, So gun rights are very much on trial, and I say that because this is such an open and shut case of self-defense.
In each of the three cases, Rittenhouse was directly attacked, and he was attacked in a manner that he had reason to fear would cause him deadly harm, if not death.
So this is a clear-cut case.
If you can't vindicate self-defense here, where can you vindicate it?
What's an easier case?
It's really hard to say.
Now, the left's common refrain here is, we can't have a vigilante justice.
That's the lesson that they're drawing from this.
And this is a lesson that, in a way, Jen Psaki echoed.
The president wants to convey clearly that we can't have vigilantes.
And, of course, on MSNBC, pretty much the same message, which is, this is all vigilantism.
That's Don Lemon.
But I want to actually argue that vigilante justice arises out of the failure of normal justice.
I just read a little item that says that 500 National Guardsmen are now in Kenosha in case that there are riots over the verdict.
I guess they are thinking it might be an acquittal, and so they need the National Guard.
Well, if you had those 500 National Guardsmen before, you wouldn't have had the riots.
And when you don't have law and order, when you've got people who are looting and marauding and burning your town, and the cops are nowhere to be seen, what other form of justice is there other than vigilante justice?
I think back to the Charles Bronson movies of the 1970s when New York, at least in the movie, was portrayed as absolutely the Wild West.
Rape and murder and pillage occurring all over the place.
And so, the reason that we identify with Charles Bronson in those movies is because we recognize that vigilante justice may be a crude form of justice, but it is justice.
It's the same thing in the old Western movies.
You have a kind of stranger who comes in from out of town, the kind of man with the gun.
He becomes, in a sense, the enforcer of justice now.
Was he appointed sheriff?
Was he elected by anybody?
Who told him that he could enforce the law?
Well, when there's lawlessness around, and the point here, and this is the key point, the left created this lawlessness.
It sanctioned it. It signed off on it.
It could easily have been stopped.
And we see this when the prosecutor goes out there and calls Antifa a bunch of heroes.
It's a crowd full of heroes.
Think of what he's saying.
He's talking about criminals, pedophiles.
He's talking about domestic abusers, terrible people, the absolute dregs of society.
But see, the left loves these people.
Why? Because they are doing the paramilitary bidding of the left.
They are the colectivos of Venezuela.
They are the brown shirts of the Nazis.
They are the black shirts of They're the black shirts of Mussolini.
This is the left. They want it to be so that they can be marauding at their say-so, and the rest of us just step back.
They don't like Kyle Rittenhouse because he said enough is enough.
He drew his AR-15.
That's what terrifies the left.
That's why they want to go after him.
They're after the larger phenomenon of brave people defending themselves.
And I think one of the lessons of Kyle Rittenhouse...
Is that if we see a mass breakdown of law and order, and if we see the left unleashing these paramilitaries on the street, we're going to need hundreds if not thousands of Kyle Rittenhouses.
Just think about it. If it wasn't Kyle Rittenhouse alone, but if it was, let's just call it a kind of Rittenhouse committee, a sort of Rittenhouse squad, a hundred people with AR-15s in Kenosha, all marching together, I think the Antifa guys would have been stopped dead in their tracks.
They would have been stopped by a citizen militia, a kind of Kyle Rittenhouse times 100.
And this is really what gets the left all freaked out.
Not because they're against violence.
They want all the violence to come from their side.
They don't want any kind of violence to stop their violence.
That's why they don't want the cops on the scene.
And that's why they don't want Kyle Rittenhouse.
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I want to talk in this next segment about the conservative judicial philosophy of originalism or original intent.
Now, I've suggested in the past that this philosophy, by the way, very cogently articulated by Robert Bork, my former colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, especially in his book, The Tempting of America.
If you want a kind of erudite exposition of originalism, that's where you can find it.
But what I've suggested is that originalism has problems.
One of the problems is its tendency to defer to the legislature.
By the way, that's why Justice Roberts voted to affirm Obamacare.
He said it's not the court's job to strike it down if the legislature wants it.
And if the legislature kind of got it slightly wrong, well, maybe we can just fix it and call it a tax.
So originalism has caused problems for our side.
Not just because Roberts, quote, sold out.
It's because Roberts was actually implementing the philosophy that he defended when he went up for his nomination.
Now, it's a very interesting article in Slate that's talking about the Supreme Court and the recent gun rights case called New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v.
is Bruin.
And the article goes on to make the point that when you look at the history of gun rights, the way that gun rights, going back into English common law, but then coming to the colonies and continuing past the American founding, the theme of the article is that there is no unambiguous, clear cut affirmation of the Second Amendment.
And so what the article is saying, this is an article by Saul Cornell, it says that, yeah, the Second Amendment does seem to emphatically say that the right to own arms cannot be abridged.
But the writer says that no right is as absolute as that.
And in order to figure out what a right means, you've got to look at the original kind of soil that gave rise to this right.
And he goes on to point out that under English common law, you were allowed to own a firearm, but there was a sharp distinction between owning a firearm in private, on your farm, for example, and in the public square, in the market.
A whole different set of rules applied.
He goes on to argue that even in American history, there is a complex history in which firearms have at times been regulated by In fact, very interestingly, the Democratic South sought to restrict blacks from owning firearms because they didn't want blacks to have any kind of defense against the Ku Klux Klan and other racial terrorism being launched under the aegis of the Democratic Party.
And then Saul Cornell concludes in this article, he goes, so these conservatives on the court who talk about originalism don't really believe it because they're not willing to look at the original intentions and the history and the context of the Second Amendment, which would, if you did look at it, modify the Second Amendment.
In other words, it would show that the Second Amendment isn't quite as absolute, that the concrete judicial history of the Second Amendment would narrow the Second Amendment at least somewhat.
Now, I don't want to argue about the history of gun rights per se.
I want to make the broader point that maybe originalism is a doctrine that has sort of outlived its usefulness.
And so in responding to the article, I tweeted, I go, because essentially the article is saying that the Supreme Court is sort of, wink, wink, ignoring the originalism it pretends to profess.
And I go, great!
I say this means that we are focused on winning cases, not vindicating some abstract theory about how to read the Constitution.
I say to heck with originalism.
What we actually want are free speech, equality of rights under the law, gun rights, and the overturning of Roe versus Wade.
That's our judicial philosophy.
Now, here comes, and I knew this was coming, but here comes a guy who's not unfriendly, but he goes, Dinesh, it's wrong when the court's left makes it up as they go along in order to justify their political whims, and it's just as wrong if the right does it too.
So here we have this direct appeal to sort of, Dinesh, are you giving up your conservative principles?
He goes, the right must not stray from originalism.
And so to tweak him a little bit, I replied thus.
I say, look, What is the original meaning of Hamlet?
What is the original meaning of the Bible?
In other words, is there any meaning of a text other than what's in the text?
You want to know what Hamlet means?
Read the play. Don't ask, well, what were Shakespeare thinking when he wrote it?
What were his motivations?
No one knows what they are.
What were the motivations of the ancient Hebrew writers when they sat down to write the Bible down?
We don't know. What we know is what they wrote.
That's the Bible. What's in the Bible?
That's my point. And here's another guy.
This guy is from the left.
He goes, Shh, Dinesh.
You're not supposed to admit that Republicans are so openly unprincipled.
To which I reply, On the contrary.
Our principles are free speech, civil liberties, equality of rights under the law, gun rights, and respect for human dignity.
In other words, originalism isn't our principle.
These are our principles.
The The reason we were attached to originalism is it was the means to deliver these ends.
And I guess what I'm saying is let's stand on the ends themselves.
Let's defend our actual principles instead of some dubious procedure that may or may not vindicate them.
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The most remarkable thing about the Texas abortion law, a law, by the way, that is now under consideration by the Supreme Court.
The court, you might remember, just several days ago had hearings on whether they should temporarily set aside the law pending their decision in the Missouri case.
So the Texas law is somewhat up for consideration, but it is in effect.
And the big news from this law is I would have to say no news.
And what I mean by that is the left has been predicting now for, gee, several decades that, hey, if you restrict abortion, let alone outlaw it, and if abortion is effectively outlawed in Texas, there will be massive social convulsions.
There will be back alley abortions, code hanger abortions.
Nonsense. None of that has been witnessed or reported in Texas.
In fact, I myself might have expected, if not convulsions, at least tremors, but not even a tremor.
Texas is actually getting along just fine without Roe v.
Wade, and this is kind of a message to the Supreme Court that they can overturn Roe.
Without worrying about, as conservatives often tend to worry about, conservatives are concerned with stability and concerned with social order.
So the idea that this may cause havoc or chaos would be a deterrent, I think, to the court in striking down Roe.
But now I think the court can see in Texas, gee, well, and remember that there will be anti-abortion laws mainly in conservative states where the people in those states want them.
So it's a reflection of the shared moral sensibility, or at least the majority sensibility, in those states.
Liberal states will continue to have liberal, probably no restrictions, if any, on abortion.
Mentioned to me the other day, she's like, I wonder how many lives have been saved by the Texas law.
And I thought, you know what?
It shouldn't be that hard to do the math.
The law has been in effect not that long.
It was signed in May by Governor Abbott, but it only went into effect on September 1.
And here we are in the middle of November, so it's only been three and a half months.
September, October, and half of November.
So I'm sorry, it's actually been in effect two and a half months.
Two and a half months. Now, let's do the math.
I looked up total abortions in Texas, 2020, 54,741.
Total abortions 2019, 57,275.
So it's about, Texas is not a state with the greatest number of abortions, on the contrary.
But nevertheless, about 55,000 abortions a year.
And that works out to about 4,600 abortions a month.
4,600 abortions a month.
So it's very easy to figure this out.
You just multiply by two, you get 9,200, and you then just add half.
Which is 2,300.
And so you get 11,500.
So basically, you can say confidently that Texas has saved, just in these two and a half months, 11,500 lives.
That's not an insignificant number.
And congratulations go to Shelby Slauson, To the legislators who sponsored these bills in the House and the Senate, also to the sort of intellectual architect behind them who devised this ingenious law.
Whatever happens, even if the Supreme Court tomorrow puts the law on hold, these lives are still saved.
These babies have already been born.
They're going to grow up.
They're going to go to school. They're going to go to college.
They're going to get jobs. They're gonna live lives that they wouldn't otherwise have had.
And so it really shows you the urgency of the pro-life cause and also the practical benefits of deterring abortion, both by law and by persuasion.
A lot of these groups around the country that provide, for example, Prenatal services, they provide adoption services, they allow moms who do become pregnant, who don't want to, are unable to care for their newborns, they allow them to give them up for adoption, or they make it possible for you to raise them if you want to.
So this shows you the practical benefits of the pro-life cause, and the practical benefits are the affirmation of human dignity and human life itself.
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See site for details. Do you remember the scene in Ghostbusters where you got these guys and they've started this business and they're really not sure if there's going to be any demand, if the business is going to take off?
And then suddenly they get a call and one of them shouts, we got one!
We got a customer!
And I would have to say the same thing about...
We got one.
And what I mean by this is that we have busted Attorney General Merrick Garland on his huge lie that he is not, and his agency, the DOJ, the FBI, let's remember, is under the DOJ. That the FBI and the DOJ are not going after parents, not labeling them as domestic terrorists.
In fact, not even eavesdropping on parents' meetings, school board meetings.
The FBI is not going to start tracking what parents say.
That none of this is really going on.
That they are merely looking for...
Cases of real violence, of domestic terrorism, but this is not a systematic campaign against the concerned parents of America, parents who are merely outspoken or agitating on behalf of their children.
They have every right as parents, and they have a First Amendment right on top of that, to do that.
Now, this is what Merrick Garland said.
This is what he said under oath.
But it turns out he was not being truthful.
And there's a whistleblower who has released an important document to the Republicans in the House.
And the beauty of it is the document is an email that That has been sent from the FBI. Now that we're going to go into this a little bit, the email was signed by Timothy Langan, the FBI's Assistant Director for Counterterrorism.
It was also signed by Calvin Shivers, Assistant Director for the Bureau's Criminal Division.
So these are like the top guys at the FBI, and they're signing a memo which says what?
Well, It says that the counterterrorism and criminal divisions of the FBI have, quote, created a threat tag.
A threat tag.
And that tag is just called Edu Officials.
That's the name of the tag.
To track parents.
It says, quote, We ask that your officers apply the threat tag to investigations and assessments of threats.
The purpose of the threat tag is to help scope this threat on a national level.
So what they're basically saying here is that we are in fact monitoring these parents for threats.
We're doing this not just here or there based on, let's say, a report of a threat, but systematically.
And in order to coordinate these efforts, we're giving a sort of threat label that you can pin onto these parents so we can collate where are these threats coming from, who are the parents who are involved, are they in cahoots with each other.
So you have here clearly a system.
That is being organized by the top people at the FBI to target parents and to label them as potential domestic terrorists.
And so we have a letter now that is going out from the Committee on the Judiciary, the Republicans, to Merrick Garland saying, what's the deal?
You told us you're not doing this.
You've repeatedly said that you're not doing this.
In fact, I'm quoting Merrick Garland now, I do not think that parents getting angry at school boards for whatever reasons constitute domestic terrorism. It's not even a close question.
Well, I don't think that it's possible to deny that an FBI system of doing this is going to have a deeply chilling effect on parents.
It's going to scare parents.
I mean, what normal family?
What normal mom? I had a mom on the show yesterday, Stacey Langton.
You think that she would not feel threatened at this idea that she could have some FBI label attached to her because, you know what, she was shrill on my podcast?
Or she shouted at a board meeting?
She suddenly, what, a national security threat?
This is the fear that Merrick Garland deceitfully denies he's doing it, but he apparently wants to do it.
I mean, can you see what a wicked man this is and how actually relieved we should be that this thug with a badge is not on the Supreme Court?
Imagine the kind of damage that he could inflict.
So thank you, Mitch McConnell, for spiking this ball.
Now, obviously, this guy has migrated his sly way into another position of authority, so he is the threat to national security.
In fact, this guy, I think, the Republicans should be unified in their demands that he resign.
And they should use this episode.
Now, the FBI is rushed to sort of try to undo the damage.
I'm not quoting them. The FBI has never been in the business of investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings.
No one's saying that they're policing speech, per se.
What we're saying is that they've created a system of monitoring parents Of identifying them as threats and of targeting them.
So, in other words, of trying to shut down the parents' movement under threat of coercion.
What makes all this so shameful is that there's no distinction here between, you know, look, there's not been a single case of parents hatching a plot to blow up a school board or assault a teacher.
Not one. Not one known case.
At least no case that I'm aware of and no case that's been cited either in this letter or by Garland himself.
So they're responding to what?
They're responding to nothing more than organized parents' movements in multiple states.
That's what's provoking this.
And we've talked about the history of it, the way in which the Biden administration essentially colluded with the School Board Association to create a bogus request for monitoring.
And then the Biden administration jumps on it, even though it was probably their original idea.
And they're very determined to push forward on this.
And so this is, again, a case where Republican passivity will continue to provoke Democratic aggression.
And so Republicans, wake up, hang tough, apply a kind of political siege to Merrick Garland, because we've basically got a really bad guy in a position of great authority, and it's really important to try to root him out.
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Feel the difference. I had planned to have the Harvard literary scholar Ruth Weiss on the podcast.
And she was scheduled to come on.
Debbie and I just talked to her.
But she's...
I mean, the remarkable thing is she's a woman in her 80s, but she's unbelievably eloquent.
Her mind is as sharp as ever.
But what wasn't as sharp as ever?
Her Wi-Fi. So when we started talking, I realized that her mouth was moving, but her voice was coming in delayed.
And I've been looking forward to this interview.
So I didn't want to do a half-baked interview with her.
So we're going to reschedule the interview, but I'm going to talk about her book, which I've been reading.
Her new book, I'm going to hold it up.
It's called Free as a Jew.
Now, a little bit about Ruth Weiss.
She was, for about 25 years, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard from the early 1990s all the way to 2014.
Before that, she taught at McGill University.
She is now at a group called the Tikva Fund.
And she's written a whole bunch of marvelous books.
And I'm not so much going to do a kind of review of her memoir per se, but I want to talk about a few snapshots in the book because they trigger things in my own mind.
So this is not so much her book by itself.
It's a book with kind of Dinesh riffing off of it.
And the story is chronological.
She tells about how she and her family moved to Canada.
They were Jews originally fleeing from Europe as the skies darkened around Europe, the Nazi era.
But she was raised away from all that.
In fact, she was raised in Montreal.
Her parents were pretty successful, pretty middle class.
She was a bright, curious girl.
But what's remarkable is that from a very young age, I notice this in the book, she's completely aware that she is part of this Jewish community.
It's a community, you may say, of memory.
So that even though she's over here, she does have relatives over there.
And she knows that her privileged life, in which ordinary things you can enjoy and take for granted, reading a book, reading a poem, this all became very important because later she became one of the most distinguished literary scholars of the 20th century.
But she's aware of being a Jew.
She's aware of this link among Jews around the world.
And she's aware that there is a tormenting of the Jews that is going on, not just episodically, but systematically.
It's part of a very old tradition of anti-Semitism that's become especially virulent under the Nazis.
Like so many people who go into scholarship, her early life is defined by her mentors.
And I want to talk about a scene here.
She has a teacher named Louis Dudek, and she's enrolled in his English literature, European literature class, and they're reading a book by the German scholar Goethe.
It's called The Sorrows of Young Werther.
A famous work, early work by Goethe, a business before Goethe wrote Faust.
It's a story about a young man who is from the country, kind of a rural township.
But he moves to a new area and he falls in love with a woman, but he realizes that she's engaged to someone else.
And she goes on ultimately to marry that someone else, but this man is so obsessed with her that he cannot kind of get her out of his mind.
And so he begins ultimately to go into a kind of Passionate paroxysm of feeling that is so strong, so uncontrollable, so, in his own view, authentic, so real, that at the end of the story, he commits suicide.
Why? Because he is just overwhelmed, you might say, by a passion that can't be Now, interestingly, at the time when this book came out, young Germans were apparently ravished by this story.
There's even some accounts of Germans committing suicide themselves as they read this book because they were so taken by it, and they identified with young Werther, the kind of young hero, if you can use that word, of the novel.
And so Ruth Weiss reads the stories of young Werther, and like Werther himself, she is completely enraptured.
And so, she begins to think, yes, you know, here I am, Ruth Weiss, I've got a scholarly bent, I like to read, but I don't have a full life like this Bertha character.
This is a guy that really knows how to live.
And then she goes to class, and her professor takes the completely opposite view.
His view is that uncontrolled passion is not only a bad thing, but it's a very immature adolescent thing.
It's only people who are unable to put a rein, a leash, on their desires that are considered adult or mature.
In fact, Dudek likens Werther's behavior to a kind of tantrum, kind of like some kid who starts throwing things because they don't get the piece of candy that their mother or father denies them.
And so, Dudek reads the novel not as a celebration of emotional excess, but as a warning against it.
And moreover, Dudek says that that is what Goethe is trying to convey.
What Goethe is trying to do as a novelist is say, you know what?
As a young man, I was probably a lot like young Werther, my hero.
But now that I'm older and wiser, I recognize that this is a kind of emotional gluttony that young people are particularly susceptible to, that as you get older, you have to learn to suppress emotions.
And to curb.
And so for Ruth Weiss, this is kind of a shocking lesson.
And she says herself, quote, that it's an early introduction to conservatism.
So her conservatism, notice it's not a political conservatism.
It's not like she's against FDR or she's taken by Reagan, but rather it's the conservatism of recognizing the limitations of human nature and And of recognizing that human beings are a compound of passion and reason and passion out of control by itself isn't really an indicator of a full and healthy life.
There's nothing wrong with the passions.
In fact, I don't agree with Plato's view that your passions are like wild horses where you are a sort of philosophical charioteer and your job is to administer not only the reins but whips and lashes to put your passions into place.
No. I agree more with Aristotle, which is that reason should be more like a gentle guide or master of the passions, directing the passions to constructive and wholesome ends.
And this, I think, is where Ruth Weiss comes out as well.
And so it's part of her education.
You see here how through books she is deriving a wisdom about life.
And this is one of the remarkable things about books.
They can provide us sometimes with more wisdom than even experience can deliver to us.
Here's some pretty big news.
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That's the highest increase in 40 years.
So this is the Biden administration admitting that inflation is out of control.
And yet, those very guys are pushing through trillions more in spending.
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Have you ever seen a Woody Allen movie?
The Woody Allen character is always sort of the same.
Now, this may not be true of all his movies, because I've seen a bunch of them.
I haven't seen them all. But what Woody Allen plays is a Jewish character that can be called the Shmiel.
The Shmiel is sort of the schmuck.
He's the joker.
He's the picaresque character that you see not just in Jewish literature, but also in Jewish life.
Now, I've been talking about the Jewish scholar Ruth Weiss, a long-time professor of comparative literature at Harvard.
I've been talking about her new book.
Here it is, Free as a Jew.
And I've been doing little kind of snapshot interpretations of things that I've read in the book.
And here I want to talk about this notion of the schmeal, which by the way, was the subject of a book I haven't read, Ruth Weiss's first book, which was about the schmeal.
In fact, it's called, The Schmeal as Modern Hero.
And Ruth Weiss detects this character, the schmeal, not just in Woody Allen, by the way, she detects him also in Fiddler on the Roof.
Think of the wry main character in Fiddler on the Roof.
He's kind of a joker.
He jokes and plays even with God.
And he's got this kind of sly look, which suggests that he is not to be taken lightly.
Think of the famous song from that movie, If I Were a Rich Man, in which he, again, is playing with the notion of being rich in almost a comic fashion.
But at the end of the day, the shmeel is not merely a fool.
There's a famous short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the great Nobel laureate Jewish writer, called Gimple the Fool.
And again, Gimple on the surface is a complete fool because his friends in a Jewish village convince him to be married to a prostitute, a prostitute that apparently keeps producing children from different men, but Gimple thinks they're all his.
So he thinks he's an amazing husband, but of course he's Gimple the Fool.
What Ruth Weiss is getting at here with this notion of the Shmiel is that the Shmiel arises out of a certain kind of contradiction in a Jewish life, and in human life more generally.
Of course, if you go back to the beginnings of Jewish history, you've got the Jews who are the chosen people.
And this would seem to be like a fantastic blessing.
The Jews are, I mean, God chose the Jews, and He didn't choose anyone else.
There's a little kind of ditty that goes back to the writer Hila Belok.
He goes, how odd of God to choose the Jews.
And out of this comes a sort of shmiel experience, because...
God chose the Jews, but why?
Well, it turns out for no reason.
God just chose them.
And you might think that this chosenness confers all kinds of benefits on them, but if you read the Old Testament, it's not the case.
God's always sort of yelling at them.
You have betrayed me.
You haven't lived up to the commandments.
I'm going to have to rain Sodom and Gomorrah on you.
I'm going to have to send you to the desert for 40 years.
And so, it's sort of like, wow, man, you know, this is what it means to be chosen.
What would we like to be not chosen?
Right? So the Jewish experience has this sort of absurdity built into it.
And this, by the way, is not something restricted to Scripture.
It continues through history.
Jews are a very successful group through history.
But at the same time, no one seems to want them.
They're always on the run.
They're always in sort of diaspora.
They're always being threatened and persecuted.
And so you have Jewish success.
But it goes hand-in-hand with Jewish tragedy, Jewish horror, Jewish holocaust.
And the shmeel is an effort to come to terms with this, but to come to terms with this through an element of wry humor.
The Woody Allen movies are, as I say, a classic illustration.
Here's another illustration.
Ruth Weiss talks about kind of a hero of mine.
In fact, he's the father of my longtime editor of a lot of my nonfiction books.
Saul Bellow, the great American novelist, some think the greatest American novelist of the 20th century.
Obviously, he's an elite company with Hemingway, with Fitzgerald, with maybe Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, just a handful of names that would belong in this camp.
But Saul Bellow is in this camp.
And Saul Bellow has a novel, I think his best work, but Adam, my friend, my editor, might disagree.
This is his dad after all.
I think it's Saul Bellow's work called Herzog, which is about this cranky Jewish guy.
Again, he's brilliant, but...
But he's unsuccessful. And by unsuccessful, what I mean is he's always running out of money.
He's got a wife who is a regular tormentor.
And she somehow has a hold of, even though they're separated, she has a hold of all his financial information and is constantly charging on his account.
And so what Herzog does, and this is really the premise of the whole novel, is that he sits in his dark apartment in Chicago, and he writes letter upon letter upon letter.
These are physically handwritten letters.
To whom? Well, he writes them to everybody, to people he knows, to the President of the United States, to various senators and Supreme Court justices.
He writes them to famous scientists like Einstein, famous philosophers like Heidegger.
He writes them to fictional figures in the past.
He writes letters to God.
And his letters are like, they're a little crazy.
He writes a letter, for example, to the chairman of I believe it was Bloomingdale's.
And he goes, Dear Mr.
So-and-so, he goes, This is Moses Herzog.
That's the name of the main character, Moses Herzog.
And he goes, I am writing to notify you that the charges on my Bloomingdale's account from one Madeline P. Herzog are not mine.
Please take note and make the proper adjustments.
So this is the entirety of one of his letters.
Now, He writes a letter to the philosopher Heidegger.
Heidegger has a famous phrase which is falling into the quotidian.
Quotidian means like everyday.
And what Heidegger is getting at, kind of an important idea, is that we don't contemplate the profundity of human experience because we are distracted by everyday nonsense.
I've got to fix my shoe.
I have an itch in my back.
I've got to figure out how I get from here.
Do I take the subway? Do I take the train?
Do I take the bus?
So, this is called falling into the quotidian.
But Moses Herzog will have none of it.
Here's his letter. Dear Herr Dr.
Heidegger, I am very intrigued by your phrase, falling into the quotidian.
When did this fall exactly take place?
Where were we standing when we fell?
Now again, this is like parody.
This is irony. This is the shmeel kind of poking Heidegger in the side.
He doesn't hesitate to do it to Einstein.
He doesn't hesitate to do it to FDR. He doesn't hesitate to do it to God.
So this is what Ruth Weiss is getting at with this concept of the shmeel.
So, what we're doing here is we're plumbing into the depths of literature, and I'm actually looking forward to having this conversation with Ruth Weiss because what literature is doing is it's revealing the depths of life itself.
Conservatism, what we call political conservatism, is an affirmation of the realism of the human struggle and of human experience and of human life.
And this is the moral and literary anchor of the political conservatism that we talk about every day on this podcast.
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Free as a Jew.
As I mentioned earlier, I was looking forward to having her on the podcast.
We had bad, really bad Wi-Fi, so we're gonna reschedule the interview.
And I was gonna talk to her About what it's like to be a conservative, literary and political conservative at Harvard in the midst of an increasingly degenerating, increasingly woke, increasingly intolerant academia.
She says a few things about that in her book, but I don't want to focus on those.
I'm going to save those For my interview, because I think what's happening at Harvard is kind of a...
Harvard's the premier institution in the country.
It's a reflection. If it's gone wrong at Harvard so fundamentally, think of what that means for the rest of academia.
So I'll discuss that with Ruth when I can get her back on the podcast.
Now, let me conclude my discussion of her book by taking another snapshot.
The snapshot here is a remarkable essay in 1962 given by the political philosopher Leo Strauss.
He was speaking at the University of Chicago, and Strauss is a topic for a whole, not another day, but another series, because this is perhaps the most important conservative thinker of the 20th century. No, it's not William F. Buckley.
No, it's not Russell Kirk or Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Important as those figures are in their own way.
But in terms of the title of philosopher is a very rare one.
I would give it to Leo Strauss.
And he's talking about a remarkable topic.
It's called Why We Remain Jews.
And I'm going to read a couple of lines.
The root of injustice is not in God.
But in the free acts of his creatures, in sin, the Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption.
This one could say is the meaning of the chosen people.
Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.
Wow. I mean, what a...
What a powerful and sort of disturbing interpretation of what it means to be Jewish.
Because if someone were to ask, what's the difference between a Jew and a Christian, you'd have to say, well, the Christian believes the Messiah has already come.
And the Jew is waiting for the Messiah.
But what Leo Strauss seems to be saying is waiting until when?
We've been waiting for thousands of years.
Is this Messiah even coming?
In other words, is this redemption promised by God going to get here already?
Or... Realistically, for those of us, those of us Jews, he means, who are waiting, waiting, waiting, is at the absence of redemption.
No Messiah that is characteristic of the Jewish experience.
Now, you may think here that Strauss is pushing in the direction of some kind of atheism, but no, it's the opposite.
Here's Strauss. He continues...
Quoting a Jewish prayer.
It is our duty to praise the Lord of all things to ascribe greatness to Him who formed the world in the beginning since He has not made us like the nation as of other lands.
So basically what Strauss is doing is he is praising God for choosing the Jews to carry this special mission.
And yet, what is the mission?
Nothing more as far as he can see than to wait.
To wait for this Messiah who hasn't come, and according to the Jews, shows no immediate sign of coming either.
And so, you see right here, I mentioned in the previous segment, this notion of the shmiel or the fool.
But you can see how Jewish humor comes straight out of this.
Hey God, you chose us to wait?
Wait for what? Wait for nothing.
Thanks for nothing, God.
Thanks for making us wait.
We're still sitting here, what, 2,000 years later.
We'd like to get it going.
So you see right here that orthodoxy and skepticism kind of go hand in hand.
On the one hand, you are making a jibe at God.
Hey God, what did you choose us for exactly?
To suffer? To take a beating?
To end up in a gas chamber?
And yet, you hold on to God.
And Ruth Weiss at once talks in her book about people who lost their faith.
Gave up their Jewishness during the Holocaust because they thought, how can God do this to us?
But her own reaction...
And Strauss, both of them Jewish and very much aware of this exact history, nevertheless end up in the opposite posture, not in rejecting God, but in clinging to God even in the face of extreme adversity.
So what you have here, I think you get a glimpse of it, is a very substantial woman.
Not just learned, because you can be learned.
Not just smart.
You can be smart. Big deal.
But somebody who is fortified, not just by the wisdom of human experience, because human experience goes far, but it doesn't go far enough.
It can only go so far.
And beyond experience, what you have is you have nature itself.
You have the universe itself.
You have transcendence.
And you have the God that made it all.
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