We just had the Rittenhouse trial, the Charlottesville trial, the Arbery trial, and now the Jussie Smollett trial, the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.
I'm going to talk about the media's role in these trials.
And also, as our institutions seem to be eroding, even collapsing around us, what about the idea of the wisdom of juries?
We now find out that the 80,000 Afghans admitted to America were never properly vetted.
I'll spell out the implications.
And I'm going to talk about Shakespeare's Macbeth.
Lincoln considered it to be Shakespeare's greatest work, and I think the reason was it exposed a temptation that Lincoln himself felt.
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.
There seem to be a whole bunch of high-profile trials swirling around us.
And I want to do a little bit of an inventory of the trials that are just concluded, which is to say the Rittenhouse trial, the Arbery trial, the Charlottesville trial, and also the two big trials starting today.
First, Jussie Smollett.
He's on trial three years after the original fake racial hoax.
You remember the Nigerians that he hired to pretend like Trumpsters beat him up.
That's Smollett. But also the Ghislaine Maxwell trial.
And I'm saying Ghislaine because that's how our name is spelled.
I think that's how most people read it.
It's actually a French name.
Gilaine. So anyway, she's on trial facing sex trafficking charges.
She was part, of course, she was essentially Jeffrey Epstein's pimp.
And there's going to be salacious information, at least that we're going to be looking for.
Whether it's going to come out is going to be a whole other question I'm going to discuss in a moment.
Now, in a divided America, when we're facing these high-profile trials, can we even count on a jury to be impartial or objective?
That's a question I want to address, but I'm going to defer it to the next segment and focus on In this segment on the fact that so many of our other institutions, including institutions that deal with justice in one way or the other, I'm thinking, for example, about the FBI, I'm thinking about the police, the detectives, the prosecution, the prison system, and the media, media coverage of these cases.
We really can't trust the system anymore.
Our civics book idea of these institutions has been badly frayed, if not eroded completely.
Let's start with the trial that we heard almost nothing about, Charlottesville.
Think about it. This was the whole basis for pinning Trump as a white supremacist.
You go to Charlottesville, you'll see why.
But in the Charlottesville trial, with all the leading figures now coming up on the stand...
You find the guy who was the head of the neo-Nazi website, Richard Spencer, the poster boy of white supremacy.
Now, what's interesting, Jason Kessler, the organizer of Charlottesville, turns out these guys are all left-wingers, and they talk about this on the stand.
No wonder the media was like, let's not cover this.
This is going to be toxic.
This is going to blow up our narrative.
So, dead silence about Charlottesville.
By the way, right now, going on, dead silence about Waukesha.
What I mean is that you have the Waukesha incident and there wasn't some immediate coverage.
And of course, a lot of attempts as soon as it was discovered that A, this was a black guy.
B, he's a BLM supporter and vehemently anti-white, at least if you can trust his posts on social media.
C. Here's a guy who had been let out by a left-wing judicial system and a left-wing DA on a $1,000 bail.
He's got a long rap sheet.
Here's a guy, by the way, also who was apparently wanted for a bomb threat.
If one guy should have been on the FBI list, it's this guy.
But the FBI seems to have shown absolutely no interest in him at all.
And finally, notice that his deadly weapon wasn't an AR-15.
In fact, it wasn't a gun at all.
It was his automobile!
And of course, the media tried to...
Of course, avoid all these inconvenient facts.
This is really why they want to move on away from the Waukesha story.
But they want to pretend like this was a...
This was a crime committed by a car.
Let me now read. This is CNN, a fairly typical Washington Post, the same thing, talking about an SUV plowing into a crowd.
Here's CNN. It wasn't a black guy.
It wasn't a black leftist.
It was a car that drove, apparently driving itself.
So this is the way that our media operate.
You can't trust these snakes at all.
And it shows you why trust in the media has been so low.
I mean, think about it. It's pretty clear, if we turn for a moment to the Arbery trial...
In the Armaud Arbery trial, it was very clear that there was a racist motive.
I mean, here were three guys who go, yeah, what's this black guy doing in our neighborhood?
Let's chase him down. The racial motive was present, present in a way that it wasn't present, for example, in the Rittenhouse case.
But the racial motive is also clearly present in the Waukesha case.
And notice the discrepancy of media coverage.
They highlight a non-existent racial motive in the Rittenhouse case, and they completely downplay, in fact, pretend that there isn't.
Any kind of racial implications in the Waukesha case.
By the way, the Waukesha attack, deadlier by far than Charlottesville or January 6th.
And so it's the absence of coverage, the dog that has embarked, that is really striking.
A couple of details I want to highlight about the Smollett and the Gillen-Maxwell trials.
I'll be covering those as we learn more.
Of course, the funny thing about Smollett is that, first of all, a corrupt prosecutor, Kim Foxx, tried to make this case go away.
She was, by the way, acquainted with the Smollett family.
She dropped the case.
And then, fortunately, there was a special counsel appointed, and he has brought this case.
And the funny detail about this that I'm still chuckling about is the fact that Jussie Smollett, although much later the cops show up at his apartment and he still has the noose around his neck.
He's like, yo, yo, yo, here, look, look.
A noose that, by the way, he obviously applied himself for.
He paid these two black Nigerians to put on him.
One of them, by the way, was a fellow actor of his on his set.
So this has all now been completely busted.
It's going to be just delightful to see it all put on the public stage and these lies exposed.
By the way, this is the guy that Kamala Harris prays to the sky.
She goes, this was a lynching.
This was Kamala Harris prejudging the Jussie Smollett case.
And now, obviously, she's had to backtrack from that.
In the Gisela and Maxwell trial, here are some significant facts.
Number one, you have an Obama appointee judge.
Number two, get this, the prosecutor is James Comey's daughter.
What? James Comey's daughter, the very guy who sort of conveniently lost the video of Epstein's first suicide attempt.
Now, this judge has banned media from the courtroom, and there's no live stream, supposedly, to prevent, you know, sensational and salacious information from getting out.
But, of course, that's the information we sort of want.
Bill Clinton took multiple rides on the Epstein jet.
Ghislaine Maxwell probably knows a lot about that.
But apparently the prosecutors and the judge are trying to narrow the focus of the case just to show that Ghislaine Maxwell trafficked these girls.
For Jeffrey Epstein's exploitation and not going to the wider web.
It looks like we're not going to find out much about the wider web of corruption that might have included Prince Andrew, that might have included the New Mexico former governor, that might have included all kinds of characters who apparently the swamp and the deep state are now kind of eager to protect.
Guys, our friend Mike Lindell had a thank-a-thon over the weekend, and it was an in-depth discussion of a complaint, a Supreme Court legal complaint that Mike and others have drafted.
They're looking for attorneys general to sign on to it.
And by the way, Debbie and I, you know, we did the podcast Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, but then we skipped town.
We actually went to visit Debbie's mom in the Rio Grande Valley.
And we didn't have a podcast Thursday through Sunday.
So obviously, we haven't addressed this issue because we were gone.
This is the first day. I'm now back.
But I'm reading the complaint myself.
And I will want to talk about it.
But you can read it. And Mike wants you to read it.
And I want you to read it. The way to read it is to go on frankspeech.com.
This is Mike's platform.
The complaint is linked there.
You can also hear Mike talking about this.
And as I say, I'm reading the complaint.
It's very important for Mike to emphasize that he's been canceled not just for being for Trump or for his faith, but he's also been canceled, in fact, primarily by most of these box stores and shopping channels for talking about election fraud.
I mean, we know this to be a fact.
We also know that talking about election fraud gets you automatically banned on places like Facebook and on YouTube.
I am currently reading, as I mentioned, the complaint that Mike has to the Supreme Court.
And I do want to talk about it.
But of course, I'll only be able to talk about it on free speech platforms.
I can talk about it on Rumble.
I can talk about it on Parler, on Getter.
I can talk about it on Locals.
In fact, I'm doing a Tomorrow podcast.
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And go to dinesh.locals.com and we can talk about this.
I will be talking about this and about other matters.
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Even though, as Americans, we've lost confidence in so many of our judicial institutions, The FBI, the prosecution, the cops, look at their behavior, for example, in the Capitol Police in the January 6th case.
The prison system, look at the way that those guys have been abusing what clearly are now political prisoners on January 6th.
And the media, utterly corrupt and twisted in its presentation of facts.
Now, the question is, can we still trust juries?
And this has been a little bit of an open question.
In fact, Debbie and I were having conversations on this very issue when the jury was deliberating.
Remember, they deliberate almost three days in the Kyle Rittenhouse case.
And there obviously were one, maybe more, holdouts in the jury.
At that time, we didn't even know holdouts in what direction.
But it seems like the Rittenhouse case and in the Armand Arbery case that in both cases justice was in fact served.
And served also in both cases by a multiracial jury.
Now, here is the Democrat, and I say Democrat slightly in quotation marks, Tulsi Gabbard, who has been sounding more and more conservative lately and probably is about time she were to vault over to the Republican Party.
She's too sensible to be a Democrat anymore.
But here she's talking about the verdicts both in Rittenhouse and Arbery.
Listen. So the jury in the Arbery case got the verdict right today, just like the jury got the verdict right in the Rittenhouse case.
These jurors are our peers.
They are our fellow Americans.
And these verdicts show in both these cases how these jurors have the intelligence and the honesty to make the right decision based on examining evidence and facts, not based on race or politics.
So these examples directly undermine the woke narrative that Americans are stupid and racist.
Now, I think this is dead on.
In the Rittenhouse case, by the way, there were 11 white jurors and one black juror.
And so the media didn't want to highlight the black juror, of course, because it would make a multiracial jury.
They kept pretending that this was sort of an overwhelmingly white jury.
Now, it is worth noting that this was a predominantly female jury.
So it was really a jury mostly made up of white women.
But let's turn for a minute to the Arbery case, where you also had 11 white and one black juror.
And think about it. The 11 whites signed off on the fact that this gang of three, father, son, and associate, if you will, were in fact guilty of murder in the Arbery killing.
So the jury, it appears, has done something that might have seemed not impossible but difficult in a divided America.
Debbie, in fact, in the Rittenhouse case, was kind of expecting a hung jury.
Not even so much because of the racial factor.
She's like, look, we're in a divided country.
Even in blue America, you have red people.
You have red people in blue America.
So whatever the makeup of a jury, it's going to have a mix of Republicans and Democrats.
And we see the world so differently these days.
How can we look at even the same set of facts?
Pull people in radically different directions, at least when politics is involved, as it clearly is in both these cases.
But nevertheless, remarkably, the jury—and I think the prosecution in Rittenhouse was hoping, listen, if we can't get him on first-degree murder, the jury surely is going to get him on— Something, lesser charges, reckless endangerment.
But no, in case after case, and with all the defendants, the jury went, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty.
And by contrast, in the Arbery case, guilty, guilty, guilty.
So I think this is actually a hopeful sign that juries are able, despite their political differences, which are undoubtedly real, to be able to zoom into the facts of a case, apply the law, To the case.
And come up with a consensus, even if it takes three days, to come up with a consensus that this is what happened, this is the way in which it does or does not violate the law.
And that, I think, is a hopeful sign in this politically divided America.
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Feel the difference. I want to talk in this segment and the next one about immigration.
I'm going to talk now about what's going on at the southern border.
And in the next segment, I'm going to talk about the vetting, or perhaps I should say non-vetting, of the Afghan refugees who were led in en masse into this country.
Now, with regard to the southern border, it's very interesting that Biden has been saying that the United States faces a new threat with the Omicron variant of COVID. And we've imposed, we meaning the country has imposed travel restrictions, not just on South Africa, where the variant apparently began, but also on a bunch of other African countries.
It is worth noting here that when Trump did this, imposed travel bans on China, oh, this is racist.
Biden was out there. Kamala Harris was out there.
This is racist. But evidently now, when you have travel bans on a whole bunch of African countries, the racism now disappears.
There's no racial motive at all.
So the double standard is worth highlighting here.
And the other fact is that we've had people from not just dozens, but I would say over 100 countries showing up at the southern border, including South Africa.
And not only has the Biden administration not stopped them, but it doesn't plan to stop them either.
So if you're a South African and you want to come to America, there's an easy way to do it.
Head down to the Rio Grande and come into Texas or come in through San Diego.
There's no COVID testing going on.
You'll be flown to a part of the country where you can basically spread the Omicron variant as much as you please.
So this is the blatant hypocrisy of the Biden administration.
Now, pressured by a court, and notice, by the way, this court decision came weeks, perhaps even a couple of months ago, Now, the Biden administration is getting around to enforcing it.
I'm talking about Trump's remain in Mexico policy.
Now, the Biden administration is simultaneously fighting this policy.
They're litigating it in court.
But they agree, I guess reluctantly, that they have to do it.
And so, apparently, starting this week or next week, the policy is now going to go into effect.
And asylum seekers are going to be turned back to Mexico.
But see, right away, there's all kinds of ifs and buts that are creeping in.
Here's the first one. They're making exceptions for, quote, vulnerable populations.
Who are these vulnerable populations?
Apparently, transgenders.
According to Kamala Harris, transgenders are facing persecution in South American countries, and a major motive of migration is transgenders want to skip out of Central America and South America and evidently come to the mecca of transgenderism, namely the United States.
Pregnant women are also going to be given an exception.
And the third point is that you can't do the Remain in Mexico policy without the agreement of Mexico.
Now, Trump had actually worked out this agreement, but the Mexicans spot a weakness with the Biden people.
And they also noticed that it's time for another familiar sort of third world or second world shakedown.
And so they're saying to the Biden people, oh, we have a lot of humanitarian concerns about you sending these people back.
You're going to have to move quicker on your efforts to fund development programs in Mexico and Central America and South America so we can settle these migrants.
We care about these people.
What's going to happen to them now?
And of course, the problem with this is that they're not saying this to a Biden administration that's going to go, stop talking nonsense.
How do you treat people trying to break their way into Mexico on your southern border?
No, the Biden people are going to be like, yeah, this is an opportunity to funnel more money to Mexico and Honduras and El Salvador and South American countries, all taxpayer money, by the way, coming out of your wallet and mine.
So while it is mildly consoling that the Biden administration is finally going to follow the law, you can see that they're looking for every which way to make loopholes in it, to fight against it in court, to let people off the hook, and also to use it as an opportunity to pretend to be shaken down and fork over a whole bunch of money to South and Central America,
all in the name of a humanitarian agenda that none of the South Americans or Central Americans, or for that matter, the Biden administration, cares one whit about.
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When the Biden administration admitted...
Some 82,000 people airlifted out of Kabul to the United States.
There were repeated assurances given by Biden and by the Department of Homeland Security and by the State Department that these immigrants, these refugees to America would be thoroughly vetted.
Now, the vetting process was put into place following the September 11 terrorist attacks, and it's a rigorous process of checking these people out, using various means to figure out who are they, Who are they known to?
Who are they known to that we know something about?
What is their background?
Who are their relatives?
What do we know about their political views and their likelihood of posing a security risk?
So there is a process that has been put into place to do this.
And there's new information that's now come out that the Biden administration decided basically to ignore the process, not to really vet.
These refugees at all.
Now, let's say a few things about these Afghans who came to America.
There was a kind of a swarming of the airport.
And the Biden administration admits that tens of thousands of people who were evacuated were in no way qualified to come.
They weren't asked to come.
They just basically showed up, got on the plane.
And the Biden people said, nevertheless, we're going to be taking these people to military bases.
We're going to have some of these people vetted by third-party countries.
But it turns out that there is an important distinction between a basic screening And a vetting.
So a basic screening is this.
You get an Afghan, my name is Ahmed Ahmed, and I don't know what my birth date is.
Apparently a lot of Afghans don't know what their birth date is, and so the practice for the Biden screeners was just to write January 1.
Let's just pretend you were born on January 1.
And then they look you up in a database, a criminal database and terrorist database, and they look to see if Ahmed Ahmed shows up.
If not, you're good.
Go. So this is the most basic screening, but it's not vetting.
Vetting is something entirely different.
Now, the...
When the Afghan evacuation first took place, many Americans were under the idea that these are mostly Americans who are being evacuated.
No. This very tiny minority of Americans were evacuated.
The vast majority, over 75%, were not American citizens or green card holders or Americans.
Afghan special immigrant visa holders.
So the special immigrant visa, the so-called SIV, is a special classification for foreigners who are given permanent residency because they were actively aiding the U.S. government during the war on terror.
So all of those groups put together less than 25 percent.
75 percent, basically, we don't really know who they are.
And let's remember, by the way, that these people who got to the airport were allowed to get there by the Taliban.
The Taliban controlled Kabul. The Taliban controlled access to the airport.
The Taliban could easily have let people that they know through, while blocking people that they don't know or were, from their point of view, suspicious of.
So this is a very troubling fact as to who got to the airport.
Equally troubling is the fact that there's been more than one case, but at least one high-profile case of a 20-year-old Afghan man in Fort McCoy in Wisconsin who's been charged in federal court in September with a whole bunch of sexual assault charges against a minor under 16.
So right away we know that there are problems that are coming in this wake.
But now we know that the source of the problems isn't simply the fact that you've got Afghan cultural practices of this and that, but rather the Biden administration basically decided it was too difficult.
And why bother? I mean, we're letting people in on the southern border anyway.
We don't know who they are. And we know that those are people with connections to criminal cartels.
So the idea here is to swamp the country.
Without regard to the integrity of the border, without regard to the safety of these people, this is a recklessness of a magnitude that is even hard to describe.
Essentially, what the Biden people are doing is unwinding the United States right in front of our eyes.
and this failure to vet with any degree of exactitude these 80,000 plus people who were airlifted from Kabul to the United States is only the latest and one of the most gruesome examples.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. There's a very strange case out of Old Dominion University in Virginia in which a professor named Alan Walker, a young person, age 34, is now resigning as an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice.
Now, let's back up and talk about what happened.
This Alan Walker fellow I did an interview with the Prostasia Foundation, a San Francisco-based child protection organization, and he basically made the argument that people should stop talking about pedophilia because the phrase pedophile is stigmatizing.
His argument is that these people should be called MAPs, Minor Attracted Persons.
Now, when he said this, it caused a stir at Old Dominion University, this idea that you have a guy, and by the way, this is a guy who has written a book, apparently.
The book is called A Long Dark Shadow, Minor Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity, of Dignity.
He's apparently himself a transgender guy who uses unorthodox pronouns, you could say.
And what's interesting is that when there was a petition to get this guy to be disciplined, the idea is that you've got a guy who's trying to justify child abuse or potential child abuse.
Interestingly, a number of professors from around the country came to his defense, and what interests me here is their reason for coming to his defense.
So, Dr. Craig Harper from the Department of Psychology at Nottingham Trent University says that this guy was doing, quote, nothing more than talking in relatively broad terms about a burgeoning research field.
Dr. Skye Stevens, St.
Mary's University, the crux of what Walker writes is widely accepted in the field.
Another professor, Dr.
Michael Seto, University of Ottawa, says that the university should, quote, defend the academic freedom of one of their faculty.
And... Here's Michael Bailey giving a typical argument on behalf of Walker.
He says, quote, we can't help what or whom we're attracted to.
This is the crux of the matter.
And in fact, it's a point that is made by Walker himself.
The argument here is that pedophilia and child abuse are not the same.
So pedophilia is attraction to children or young people, and child abuse is acting on it.
So, let's explore this logic for a moment, because reading Walker's comments, you get the idea that what he's saying is that there are people who have these feelings, and feelings by themselves are neither good nor bad.
They just are. They come to you, if you will, from the outside.
You can't help how you feel.
And what really matters is how you respond to your feelings.
So what matters is not your feelings, but your actions that are taken on the basis of those feelings.
I was thinking about this. I'm thinking, well, let's apply this to some other areas to see if, by and large, this logic holds up.
Let's take, for example, anti-Semitism.
Or racism. Those are feelings.
Antisemitism, of course, is defined as a feeling of dislike or hatred toward Jews.
Racism is a belief or a feeling that certain races are superior or inferior.
These are feelings. So let's say you were to take this logic.
You'd say, well... Can't help how I feel.
Those are my feelings.
I don't choose to have them.
They just come to me.
And feelings are neither good nor bad by themselves.
And therefore, why are you criticizing me for my feelings?
Now, if I act on those feelings and deny someone a job or persecute them in some way, well, that's not actually racism.
That's discrimination. That's when the antisemitism or the racism is now converted into some sort of an action.
But are we willing as a society to say that the feelings themselves don't matter?
That the prejudices, that the antagonism, that the bigotry, the hatred—which is a feeling— Is somehow above criticism?
That the feeling itself is something that you can't be held accountable for?
We don't take that view.
So it's very interesting that within the orbit of identity politics, what we now have are sort of, is a multi-layered argument.
And I'm sure that Professor Walker himself, if you were to ask him, a lot of people have feelings that certain groups are inferior.
What do you think about those? Oh, that's horrible.
Those people should be hounded and thrown off social media and they should be held accountable for their beliefs and so on.
But interestingly, when it comes to this one area, we have an argument that is supposed to stand alone and not be tested against a broader application of the principles, because once you apply the broader application, I think the inadequacies of the argument become glaringly apparent.
Sometimes I get a little sick of the news.
I mean, every day it's the left trying to make another money grab, whether it's spying on your accounts, taxing your unrealized gains.
There's no shortage to their creativity when it comes to taking your hard-earned money to fund their expensive, far-reaching agenda.
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I want to talk in the next couple of segments.
I'm not quite sure if I'll be able to complete my discussion of the subject.
I want to talk about Shakespeare's great work, Macbeth, one of his most political plays and a play with a deep and interesting subject relevant to our current situation, the issue of tyranny.
I have to say that for most of my adult life, I have routinely thought of America as a free society.
But now, for the first time, I ask myself, are we really living in a free society?
Take a number of our basic liberties.
Well, we can't take them for granted.
We can't exercise them.
And I'm obviously thinking about free speech, which now is corralled or controlled in many ways in the public square.
We can't talk about not just one or two things, but a whole menu of things.
But also your religious freedom, your freedom of assembly, your freedom to not be persecuted by the government, to have equal rights under the law.
All of this is open to question.
So I wouldn't say we're living in a tyrannical society, but I would say that we are moving in the tyrannical direction.
And This is, I think, why Macbeth remains perpetually, and especially now, interesting to us.
Now, Abraham Lincoln considered Macbeth to be Shakespeare's greatest play, which is just another way of saying that it was his favorite play.
Quoting Lincoln now, he goes, It's a very interesting statement by Lincoln because when you think of Shakespeare's plays, most people would say that you've got King Lear, you've got Othello, you've got Hamlet.
Yes, Macbeth is in that category of the great tragedies, but there are also great history plays, there are great comedies, so...
What is it about Macbeth that Lincoln found so interesting?
I want to suggest that what Lincoln found so interesting is that Macbeth is about the temptation to tyranny, a temptation that is not merely felt by a monarch who is in a position perhaps to become a tyrant.
But it's really felt by even leaders in democratic societies.
Lincoln felt himself the temptation to tyranny, the temptation to belong, as he once put it, to the tribe of the eagle or the lion.
In other words, the king of the forest that sort of has his way with all the other animals in the kingdom.
Lincoln knew about this.
He talked about this in his speeches.
And I think Lincoln felt that temptation himself, a temptation that he had to overcome, the temptation to become.
In fact, there were some Confederates at the time, and even some subsequently, who said Lincoln became a tyrant.
I don't think he did, but he understood tyranny.
And I think part of the reason he understood it so well is because of Macbeth.
Now, Shakespeare's work is so abundant that his comedies have elements of tragedy.
His tragedies will have comic scenes in them.
You have histories like Richard III that are tragic, certainly in their unfolding, in the murders that take place.
And then you have plays that are hard to classify.
The Merchant of Venice. It's not really a comedy.
You wouldn't call Shylock a comic figure, although there are characters in the play who see him that way.
Neither is it really a tragedy per se.
In fact, it has a sort of satisfactory ending in the sense that the That Portia brings about a favorable result.
Antonio is not unjustly killed.
Bassanio marries Portia.
So some people have called the Merchant of Venice a romance, which I think is also an inadequate term.
But one of the things we can say about Shakespeare's work is that it satisfies Samuel Johnson's definition of a classic.
Samuel Johnson said a classic is a work that survives the provinciality of its own moment in space and time.
Even if you go to other places or other times, a classic will still be interesting.
And that is true of Shakespeare.
A classic is a work that sort of refuses to go away.
And we see that to be very true of Macbeth.
In fact, at one point, Lincoln was even reading sections of Macbeth to his own cabinet.
Now, the remarkable thing about Macbeth is that it is a study of tyranny, but from a very unusual point of view.
It's a study of tyranny from the point of view of the tyrants themselves.
Shakespeare has a sort of interesting scriptwriter's direction in a number of his plays.
You'll see this, for example, in Hamlet.
You'll see it in Richard III. The instruction is, enter two murderers.
And what he's usually describing is someone that's been deputized By Richard or deputized by some evil person to go out and murder some other people.
The murderers aren't always named.
They're just sort of bad guys and their job is to come on stage and kill people.
But interestingly, this description, this stage direction, enter two murderers, can also describe the whole of Macbeth.
Enter two murderers, Macbeth himself and his wife, Lady Macbeth.
And as I say, this is a story that is psychologically told from their point of view.
They dominate the action.
You see their minds at work.
So Shakespeare, while he discusses tyranny in other cases...
Julius Caesar is perhaps not a tyrant, but he's clearly on his way to becoming a tyrant.
That's why Brutus and Cassius assassinate him.
But Caesar is a very minor figure in Julius Caesar.
He says a few pompous and declaratory things.
You get the idea that he very much sees himself in charge.
At one point, he's offered a crown, but he playfully goes, no, no, I'm not going to take it.
And that's the only window you get into Caesar.
The play is really much more about the assassins.
It's about the psychology of Cassius, the psychology of Brutus.
Richard III gives you a kind of almost stereotypical villain, a delightful and interesting villain.
Richard is a remarkable kind of play actor.
In fact, he tells you before he does something evil, kind of, here's what I'm going to do, check me out.
And then he goes and does it.
And after he does it, he gives kind of, you could almost call it dramatic commentary, artistic criticism of his own performance.
I mean, it's remarkable how he lets the audience onto the stage, so to speak.
And it's fascinating. But again, Richard is not presented as psychologically complex in the sense that he says, essentially, I'm deformed.
God sent me out into the world with a crooked back.
And essentially, he implies I've got a crooked nature to go with it.
And that's the end of the matter.
That's all you need to understand about Richard is he's an evil guy who's going to go about doing evil things, kind of like Iago.
There's no explanation for why Iago's so envious, why he really wants to get rid, why he wants to destroy Casio, why he wants to destroy Othello.
That's just Iago. He's sort of pure evil.
He's evil personified.
But this is not the case with the Macbeths, either with Macbeth himself or with Lady Macbeth.
And Shakespeare here is attempting something extremely difficult because it is kind of easy to depict tyranny from the point of view of the victim, but it is not easy at all to show tyranny from the point of view of the tyrant.
I mean, try to imagine, let's say, doing a play on World War II or even the Holocaust from Hitler's point of view.
I mean, no one would even attempt it.
It would be sacrilegious and scandalous beyond belief.
And the idea that you could somehow probe the complex psychological motivations for evil, this is something that I think modern writers would shrink from, would run away from.
But Shakespeare, and this is part of the sort of deep genius of Shakespeare, he's like, I'm going to go there.
I'm going to show you the destructive effects of tyranny, not just on the victims, but interestingly, on the tyrants themselves.
I'm continuing my discussion of the problem of tyranny in Shakespeare's Macbeth.
And I want to focus on the actions of the two main characters, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.
Now, the scene here is Scotland.
Primitive Scotland. This is Scotland.
It's run by warrior clans that are loosely brought together under a king.
The king is Duncan, a wise king, a king who is described in almost Christian terms.
He's a gentle king.
And Macbeth and his wife plot to kill him so that Macbeth can replace him as the king of Scotland.
Now, the king has a son named Malcolm, and obviously plans to have his son crowned once the king himself dies or steps down.
But Macbeth has other plans.
Now, Macbeth gets the idea that he deserves to be king from a very strange scene.
Shakespeare masterfully does these sorts of scenes in which the witches, a group of so-called weird sisters, bizarre creatures, these are not really witches in the classic sense, but they apparently have the power of prophecy.
And they say to Macbeth that you will become...
You are the thane of Glamis, you are the thane of Cawdor, and you will also become king.
Now, Macbeth is in fact the thane of Glamis, but he's not the thane of Cawdor.
And shortly after the witches predict this, he becomes the thane of Cawdor.
The king gives him this new title.
And so Macbeth feels like, wow, these prophecies are being vindicated.
Now interestingly, even if these prophecies are being vindicated, they provide no automatic pretext for murder.
Let's remember that the witches told Macbeth, you will become king.
This is sort of like Marx predicting that there will be an overthrow of the capitalist class.
Marx is not saying, he's not even urging that people do anything.
He's saying that there's a law of history.
This is going to happen, regardless of what you do or don't do.
This is going to occur. And similarly, the witches are predicting this.
And Macbeth knows this, because here's Macbeth.
He goes... He goes, in a sense, I don't have to do anything to become king because chance might somehow make me king just as these witches are predicting.
But somehow, this is where Macbeth's ambition, what he calls his wanting ambition, comes into play.
And he begins to, right from the beginning, nourish the idea, this is how I can get there.
Now, it's remarkable to go into Macbeth's mind because Macbeth is not, in a sense, simply motivated by pure evil.
He has a goal in mind.
He wants to be king.
He thinks he can actually be a good king.
He's been the king's right-hand man.
But his discussion of the subject in his own mind, his moral imagination, is conflicted.
There's ambition on the one hand, but what's on the other hand?
Let's listen to Macbeth.
If it were done when tis done, then t'were well if it were done quickly.
He goes, if I do it, he's not willing to go, I'm gonna do it.
If I do it, I gotta do it fast.
And then he goes on, he goes on by saying that, first of all, in thinking about this, he goes, we'll jump, we jump the life to come.
And what he means is, I'm not going to talk about the afterlife.
In other words, you can tell the afterlife, Christianity, will he be damned for his crime?
It's on his mind, but he doesn't want to kind of go there.
But he has to go there, because as he discusses this, he talks about the virtue of Duncan, the king.
He talks about the fact that he's so meek and kind.
He talks about the fact that if you kill him in this brutal way, his virtues would cry out.
He talks about the fact that he, Macbeth, is in a double position of trust.
He's a subject of the king, and therefore morally obligated not to kill him.
He's also the king's trusted protector.
And the king is under his hospitality.
He's visiting Macbeth.
So Macbeth has a duty to take care of him.
And if Macbeth violates that by killing him, Macbeth says that, quote, He speaks about the, quote, He talks about the, quote, Shrieking out against him.
So this is the convulsions that are going on in Macbeth's mind.
But interestingly, Macbeth is talked into it, the murder, by his wife.
At the beginning of the play, Macbeth is wracked with doubt and uncertainty.
And the person who has certainty is Lady Macbeth.
And she is unbelievably cool and pragmatic.
And she basically, first of all, she taunts Macbeth's manhood.
Are you a man? You're talking about this.
You know you want it. You're supposed to be a warrior.
You lack, in a sense, the guts to go ahead with this.
And to Macbeth's concerns about the virtues of Duncan shrieking out and the people rising up, she goes, they'll never find out.
Quote, a little water.
Clear is us of this deed.
In other words, we'll pin the blame on other people.
We will wash our hands off the blood, and that will be the end of the matter.
So Lady Macbeth, remarkably, appraised to evil spirits, not to God.
Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.
What she means is, I'm a woman.
I'm supposed to be weak. Take away my womanliness.
And fill me from the crown to the toe-topful of direst cruelty.
She's praying, remarkably, to be made cruel.
Make thick my blood.
And so, at the beginning of the play, you have Macbeth shivering and trembling, and Lady Macbeth, go for it.
Let's do it. But this is the complexity of Shakespeare, that as the play progresses, you have a remarkable reversal.
And that is that Macbeth, having done it, having gone for it, digs in.
He won't go back.
I'm quoting Macbeth, I am in blood, stepped in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.
What he's basically saying is, I've crossed the river.
I'm past the halfway point.
It's easier for me to keep going to the other side, even though it's a river of blood, than for me to try to go back.
So Macbeth, in a sense, never looks back.
But interestingly, Lady Macbeth, who was, as I say, initially extremely cool, no problem.
I'm unsexed.
I'm a man. I can do this.
I'll do it if you won't.
Now becomes, in a sense, her conscience eats away at her.
I'm not saying that she has regrets.
Never once does she have real moral regret or remorse.
But what I am saying is that the reality of conscience, and this is part of Shakespeare's point that even tyrants have a conscience, they have to sort of wrestle with their conscience and win.
They have to defeat their conscience.
And so you have this great scene toward the end of the play where Lady Macbeth Is trying to sort of rid herself of her conscience.
And how is she doing that? She's trying to wash the blood off her hands.
But the blood has been washed off.
There's no blood on her hands.
But she thinks there is.
She's in a sense in a sleepwalking trance.
And so what she's doing is she's washing her hands.
And her doctor and her maid are looking on.
And they're really puzzled. And here's Lady Macbeth.
Out, out, damned spot.
She sees a spot of blood.
She can't get it out. And so, what you have here is Shakespeare's brilliant portrayal of the voice of conscience that remains unappeased and continues to eat away at the inside, so that just as Macbeth is in the end physically destroyed, he's killed in a battle with Macduff, Lady Macbeth is eaten, if you will, by her conscience from within, so at the end she very appropriately commits suicide.
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