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Dec. 7, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:31
THE DEMOCRATS’ CRIME WAVE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep232
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In the wake of a huge crime spree across the country, one that threatens to disrupt the holidays, I'm going to talk about how Democrats have unleashed criminals and now can't control them.
I'm going to pursue the Chris Cuomo scandal and show that it's a wider scandal involving CNN, and I've got a great solution.
CNN should fire everyone and then dissolve itself just like the Soviet Communist Party did in the early 1990s.
And as part of my continuing examination of tyranny in Shakespeare, I'm going to look at one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, Julius Caesar.
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's a crime wave that's sweeping the nation, or more accurately, that's sweeping democratically run cities.
you And this is kind of messing things up for the holidays.
We're seeing these mobs raiding places like Nordstrom's and other retailers.
They smash the glass, they go in, they just loot the store.
These are called smash and grabs and they're occurring all over the place.
California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New York, Los Angeles.
In fact, an LA police detective is quoted in the Washington Examiner.
And he says, hey, LA is now unsafe for tourists.
Don't come. Don't come to Los Angeles.
And he blames progressive district attorneys for, quote, advocating for criminals.
So this is a moment of candor about why this is going on.
Dominic DeLuca is the head of a skateboard shop on Melrose Avenue in LA. He goes, I've never seen anything like this in the past two years.
I've been broken into three times.
So this is something that is now becoming chronic.
And, you know, the problem isn't just stolen toys or stolen goods.
There's a lot of violence that goes on here.
A lot of people are injured and a lot of people are killed.
In Philadelphia this year, 521 homicides And that is the all-time record.
It even exceeds the number of homicides in 1991, which was kind of a peak year.
And think about it, that was almost three decades ago.
In Los Angeles, a highly publicized 81-year-old woman, Jacqueline Avant, kind of a philanthropist.
She's the wife of the music legend Clarence Avant.
A home invasion in her Beverly Hills home.
Absolutely horrific.
Homicides in Los Angeles are up 46.7%.
Shooting victims are up 51.4%.
Now, the New York Times, which is not normally honest about these kinds of things, says that the criminals have, quote, a sense of impunity.
And they go on to make a subtle point, which is that all of this really started with the George Floyd protests.
The New York Times actually notices that when this happened initially, a lot of the retailers whose stores were being robbed, Nordstrom, Target, Marc Jacobs, refused to blame the rioters, refused to blame the looters.
In fact, they said the opposite.
Here's Marc Jacobs tweeting on Instagram, quote, He goes, property can be replaced.
Human lives cannot.
It's almost like he's inviting people to rob his store, saying it's really no big deal.
And now, of course, these same retailers are trying to kind of put the genie back in the bottle.
Oh, this crime is horrible.
It's ruining our Christmas.
It's making it difficult for us.
You know, we have to board up our stores.
We've got to hire extra security.
Well, yes, but...
You're the one who condoned it.
So the point the New York Times is making is that these retailers who tried to sort of be politically correct, they wanted to be woke in the wake of George Floyd, they're now reaping a harvest of the emboldening of the criminal class, which now sort of can't be subdued.
The Los Angeles Times makes the point that much of the violence, which initially started in poorer communities, affected people, you know, the homeless, run-down neighborhoods where there's not so much security, is now making its way into wealthier enclaves.
And so you've got all these wealthy people now in San Francisco, in L.A., and they're like, oh man, this is making our lives miserable suddenly.
But, you know, remember, these are the same people, many of them, who voted for these DAs, who voted for these policies.
The Biden administration, by the way, is in complete denial.
Jen Psaki keeps trying to blame the crime wave on the pandemic.
And as if to say that because there's a pandemic, it's sort of excusable.
Governor Newsom, quote, the level of organized retail theft we're seeing is simply unacceptable.
It's unacceptable. Doesn't say what he's going to do about it.
Businesses and customers should feel safe during their holiday shopping.
You know, this is the kind of vapid moralizing we've come to expect from these people.
They take no action.
They don't know what to do or they're unwilling to do it.
By the way, when Newsom was having this press conference, the progressive DA, the left winger who's been actually letting all the criminals out on the street, was nowhere to be seen, probably consorting with the criminals themselves.
And ALC thinks the whole thing is a myth.
She recently said, quote, I don't know if she means that there are attempted robberies that aren't being successful, but when she said this comment, you see all kinds of people, heads of retail associations and so on, basically saying this is absolute nonsense.
Even Walgreens put out a statement saying, quote, Organized retail crime is one of the top challenges facing the company.
In other words, it's actually putting these companies now at risk.
And as I say, this is a crime wave that's been occurring not just in one place, not just here or there, but really everywhere where you have Democrats in control.
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Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, one of the notorious members of the socialist squad, doesn't really want to pay her student loans.
And here she is talking about the problem and in a very personal way.
Listen. I worked full-time Monday through Friday and took weekend classes to get my law degree and still close to $200,000 in debt.
And I still owe about $70,000.
And most of it was interest.
We're supposed to feel sorry for her.
Now, I have two reactions.
First of all, I think that this is...
You need translation when you listen to these people.
And I think the translation here is what Rashida Tlaib is saying is that she's kind of a bovine idiot.
What she's saying is that she's terrible at law.
She apparently went to law school.
But, you know, when you go to law school, one of the first things you learn is contracts.
You make a deal. You make an agreement.
And she made an agreement to take out these loans.
And now, evidently, she doesn't want to keep those contracts.
She wants to be, well, to use law school terminology, in breach of contract.
Or better still, she wants laws that somehow allow her to get out of the contract through some kind of loan forgiveness program.
She's also obviously horrible at math because here's a woman who apparently is shocked that when you take out loans starting in the undergraduate and continuing through three years of law school, That you have interest, and interest does pile up.
And so she apparently was unable to do this simple math and measure her own future income, or likely future income, against the cost that was being incurred in going to school and going to law school.
And so, basically, I guess what her message is that happily for an irresponsible moron like herself, she's now landed in the perfect place.
Congress! Congress!
Now, what's the larger issue here?
It's the issue of student debt.
And it's true, there's about $1.5 trillion of student debt out there.
And look, who takes out this debt?
Typically, it's not somebody who goes to a community college and gets an associate degree or even gets a four-year degree.
The cost of community colleges is quite low, and so normally you can actually work your way through it, and you end up with little or no debt.
And the people who accumulate debt are by and large people who go to state schools and private schools and they borrow away and then they go on to graduate school and they borrow away some more.
Now, even then, you don't have to end up in massive debt for the simple reason that, well, studies have shown that the typical guy who gets a bachelor's degree over their career is going to earn about a million dollars more than somebody who doesn't.
In fact, even someone who gets an associate degree over a career is going to earn $360,000 more on average than someone who has no degree.
So in other words, the economics here does kind of work out.
You can borrow money, you can pay it back, you can still come out ahead, but not if you get a useless degree that makes you unemployable.
Not if you get, you know, I've got a degree in women's studies and I owe $200,000.
And what can I become?
Well, a full-time Antifa activist and organizer of the Women's March.
So a lot of these leftists get liberal arts degrees.
And look, I have a liberal arts degree, and so does Debbie.
But I figured out a way to convert my liberal arts degree into, let's call it, remunerative employment.
Right. I actually do pay my bills.
I paid off my student loans just a few years out of college.
Now, colleges, of course, have driven this racket.
They've driven prices up, even though inflation in the past has been 1% or 2%.
Colleges increased their costs 10% or 12%.
Why? Because they know that the federal government is making the money available.
So that's the other culprit.
The government, by making loans easier and by, in a sense, fueling, priming the pump, The government has encouraged these colleges to create this kind of racket and the students are at the receiving end.
Now, just a point about these loan forgiveness programs.
I'm going to focus here on Elizabeth Warren's program, which is basically a program that would...
Would retire debt. She'd forgive up to $50,000 of debt for households that earn less than $250,000 a year.
But even though this is supposed to be like helping the needy, helping people who make less than $250,000, the simple truth is that people who accumulate this kind of debt are not the poor people of our society.
They're not even the lower middle class.
They are relatively affluent.
And so a bailout program is essentially making a trucker in Toledo, a waitress in Atlanta, working at the wall We're good to go.
To a democratic constituency.
Not a transfer program that promotes social justice of any kind but one that is aimed at conserving and buying political support.
Aren't you sick of the news sometime?
Every day it's the left trying to make another money grab, whether it's spying on your accounts or taxing your unrealized gains.
There's no shortage to their creativity when it comes to taking your hard-earned money to fund their expensive, radical agenda.
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I talked on the podcast yesterday about the woes of Chris Cuomo, a guy who has not only been implicated in all kinds of conspiratorial dealings to rescue his brother and, in fact, to expose these women who accused Governor Cuomo of sexual harassment, Cuomo was texting with Melissa DeRosa, the head of the governor's office, basically saying, you know, I'll use my contacts.
I'll get leads on these women.
Let me be involved in the strategic prep.
He was drafting statements for his brother and so on.
Now, interestingly, at the late hour of all this, Chris Cuomo himself has an allegation of Now, interestingly, there's an article in the New York Post...
Chris Cuomo claims CNN boss Jeff Zucker knew about involvement in governor scandal.
So what Chris Cuomo is now saying is, wait a minute, Jeff Cuomo is acting like the French policeman in Casablanca.
I'm shocked, shocked to hear that Chris Cuomo has been doing all this when, according to Cuomo, or at least Cuomo's people, Jeff Zucker was completely in the loop.
Now, obviously you're dealing here with very disreputable characters.
Jeff Zucker is not exactly of a more ethical stature than Chris Cuomo.
And the good news is that all of them may find themselves on the pavement pretty soon.
I read that there's a big change underway.
The Discovery Channel WarnerMedia and Discovery are now combining, and this combination will put the new conglomerate in charge of CNN. Now, the largest shareholder of this Liberty Media, which is the major shareholder in Discovery, is this guy named John Malone.
And here's John Malone, quote,"...I would like to see CNN evolve back." The kind of journalism that it started with and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing.
Now, there's a little bit of sarcasm here, but you can see there's a biting sarcasm.
John Malone is basically saying that CNN today, A, doesn't have journalists, and B, doesn't do journalism.
And who's responsible for that?
Well, obviously, Jeff Zucker.
So what Malone is saying is that, on the one hand, he's saying, look, we don't need to sell off or get rid of or shut down CNN. But on the other hand, he's saying very clearly, we need a CNN that is actually going to do real journalism.
Now, it's one thing for a shareholder to say that.
It's another thing to carry it out.
And as it turns out, CNN is going to have a new boss.
Jeff Zucker is going to have a new boss.
His name is David Zaslav.
He's the head of Discovery Channel.
And this guy says, he's quoted in fact in Deadline, one of the entertainment journals, saying that he intends to be, quote, very hands-on in running this new combined entity.
He says that he has, interestingly, some praise for Fox News Channel.
Particularly, he praises Bret Baier.
He praises the model that Fox has used to make itself such a powerful cable network.
And then he goes on saying this.
He says that, I think overall we'd be better off if we had news networks in America rather than those with just opinion content.
But we don't. And he says...
He wants to see a news organization, and I think he's speaking here of CNN, that is, quote, more fact-based.
CNN has been rather low on facts, or put it differently, CNN is big on, well, I'd call them meta-stories.
I used this term yesterday on Fox.
I was on the Ingram angle.
And I said, in trying to understand the media, you have to make a distinction between stories.
Which are particular events, and meta stories, which is the governing leftist narrative.
And for the media, very often a story is not a story, at least not a story that deserves sustained coverage, if it doesn't fit the meta story.
The Rittenhouse case was big.
Why? Because A, it involves a white guy slash white supremacist, and it involves an AR-15.
The gun, the gun.
Waukesha was not a big story because black perpetrator out on bail let out by a liberal DA, not to mention that his deadly weapon was not an AR-15 or a gun at all.
It was in fact a car.
So this was the story.
Let's move it away. Why?
Because the story doesn't fit the meta story.
My preference for CNN would be for CNN to dissolve itself, kind of like the Soviet Communist Party did in, I believe, 1992.
They just abolish themselves.
They decide there's no good reason for us to exist.
I think this recognition should come to CNN. We're an evil empire, just like the old Soviet Union, and we may as well quit because we serve no useful journalistic purpose at all.
A kind of, not crisis of conscience, but a crisis of legitimacy.
Now, I don't think that's going to happen, but the next best thing is for guys like Malone and Zaslav to get together to make a list of all the people who work at CNN and put them all out together on the street.
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This past weekend, there was a supposed white supremacist march in Washington, D.C., led by a group called the Patriot Front.
Now, these white supremacists, if you generally look at them, they kind of look almost like Confederate soldiers.
They're like Overweight, big beards, confederate flags.
There's a kind of signature to this kind of a rally.
And if you looked at the Patriot Front, it couldn't be more different.
These looked like 25-year-olds to 30-year-olds.
They were all extremely trim.
In fact, they even physically looked similar to each other.
Short marine-style haircuts, all their faces covered.
They all were wearing identical outfits.
I mean, identical khakis, almost like they bought those, like from Dillard's, in a kind of bulk sale.
The gait, the uniformity of the marching, all looked extremely suspicious.
And so I raised the question, as others did, that this is really...
Not a genuine white supremacist event.
this seems to be not necessarily an event of just like FBI personnel but this looks to be something that was instigated by the FBI.
Now the basis for this is that if you look at the Southern Poverty Law Center website on the Patriot Front it's very clear that this is a group it's led by some 23 year old this is a guy who was a cartoonist for a student newspaper of course the Southern Poverty Law Center tries to inflate the guy's importance because why because they're raising millions of dollars off this 23 year old oh the specter of white supremacy but they also point out that these this group this tiny little group is infiltrated by the FBI and I would suspect that the FBI
kind of put him up These groups, in a sense, are now doing the FBI's bidding, and they are part of a larger ideological purpose.
Now, when I said this, a whole bunch of leftists were like, no, Dinesh, this is a real group.
You've got to check it out. It's a legitimate group.
Now, there's some very interesting information that surfaced that tends to support my suspicions.
First of all, how did people find out about this rally?
Turns out there was a young woman.
I'm going to show you a picture of her face.
She looks like a kind of...
Take a look at her. She basically looks like a kind of pleasant young mom who put out the information that this is going to be going on.
And her name is Cheryl Llewellyn.
And now the interesting thing about Cheryl Llewellyn is that she has no Google history.
You can't find out anything about her.
She joined Twitter a few days ago.
So she's a newcomer to Twitter.
A little bit interesting.
This is her second tweet ever.
She's never tweeted other than this and one other tweet, which is basically about trying to raise $2,500 to help a dog.
Yeah. This is her second tweet.
And yet, with apparent sophistication, she tags all these left-wing groups, and she tags all these journalists, and her tweet about the white supremacist rally gains over one million views.
Very fishy. Now, once she tags these journalists, they immediately begin to retweet it.
They begin to share this information.
This is groups like the Capital Terrorist Exposers, which is essentially a group that is trying to expose the January 6th insurrection.
And then another guy checks into this woman, Cheryl Llewellyn, and says she does not really exist.
Her face, the image I just showed you, is not a real person.
In fact, he shows that this image was generated by artificial intelligence.
By combining the features of different people, it's created a fake person.
Cheryl Llewellyn.
And this fake person is announcing this event.
Now, interestingly, when she announces this event, another guy named Christopher Goldsmith is now sharing information, actually calling upon Antifa to show up for the event.
And he says something really interesting.
If you're in the D.C. area, he says, and you see U-Haul or other similar trucks...
Take out your camera and start filming them.
Now, this is very interesting because it is before the event, and as it turns out, the so-called white supremacists show up in, guess what?
A U-Haul truck.
They all jump out of the U-Haul.
At the end of the event, they all jump back into the U-Haul and take off.
Now, how did this guy, Christopher Goldsmith, supposedly responding to a tweet from a fictional individual, know that there were going to be U-Hauls involved?
Now, very interestingly, this fellow, Goldsmith, who has an interesting history in left-wing activism, he then tweets out, he goes, I was duped by a fake account.
He says, when I started this Patriot Front thread, it's a real video, it's a real event, but the person tweeting it doesn't exist, it's an AI-generated image.
So, what he's saying now is, yeah, this was a real march, this was a real rally, but he found out about it from a fictional individual who duped him.
You can see here why we have every reason to believe that these are, particularly in this age of deception, this age of smoke and mirrors, this age of illusion, where you have media lying, you have the FBI weaponizing itself against political opponents, A lot of what we see today is staged.
In fact, as citizens, we're called upon to exercise a much higher level of skepticism and vigilance than usual.
Why?
Because what you see is not what's really going on.
In other words, there's far more to it than meets the naked eye.
I just read today that the Biden administration is now consulting with journalists to improve public perceptions of its economic policies.
I mean, think about it. They're not trying to change the policies.
They're not trying to make things better for the American people.
They're Through the media, using their allies in the media, let's get people to believe that things are better than they are.
Let's create ultimately a David Copperfield stage effect, or more precisely a kind of Goebbels stage effect, not to inform the people about what's going on, but to deceive them about what's going on.
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Feel the difference. We're living through a time of creeping tyranny.
I would almost call it progressive tyranny.
Progressive tyranny is a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it?
Because when we think of progress, we think of moving ahead, leaving bad things behind, a movement towards, let's say, greater freedom, greater prosperity, greater equality, a betterment of the human condition.
So the concept of progressive tyranny is one that jars you.
And in order to understand what we're going through, it helps to understand tyranny proper.
Because our traditional view of tyranny is archaic.
It's wrong. It's too limited.
It doesn't capture the complexities of tyranny.
And if we don't capture those, we don't really know what we're experiencing now.
For the American founders, there were two types of tyranny.
There was the tyranny of the one, the monarch.
And there was the tyranny of the many, the tyranny of the people themselves.
But I would say that today what we're seeing is something more complex than just the tyranny of the one or the tyranny of the many.
The people aren't tyrannizing over America.
So who is? And what are the mechanisms of tyranny at work?
I want to look at one of Shakespeare's great plays, Julius Caesar, to help illuminate I'm going to be looking at it in some detail because what this play shows us is that tyranny has a very complex shape.
Now, let's start by talking a little bit about Shakespeare himself.
Shakespeare wrote comedies.
He wrote histories.
He wrote tragedies.
He wrote plays that are sometimes called romances.
And this, by the way, was in his time unusual.
Because typically, and if we go back to the ancient world, we find that there are playwrights.
By the way, playwriting, the stage, is invented in ancient Greece.
Around the 5th century BC. Think about it.
Kind of interesting. There were many other cultures, but there were no plays in China.
And there were no plays in India.
American Indians didn't put on plays.
But in ancient Greece, the stage and the theater is invented as a sort of art form.
But in ancient Greece, you have tragedians.
The most famous are three, Aeschylus.
Euripides and Sophocles.
You have comedians or comic playwrights, the most famous of whom is Aristophanes.
But the comic playwrights write comedies, and the tragic playwrights write tragedies, and there's no sort of, you may say, mixing of the genres.
There can't be, in a way, because the comic theme is the low theme.
It's the ordinary man, and in comic plays you have ordinary guys, shoemakers and carpenters and cobblers, and comedy arises out of ordinary experience.
By contrast, tragedy is kind of a higher form.
It's a higher form in that it deals with higher people.
It deals with elevated souls.
It deals with aristocrats and kings and warriors and princes.
And tragedy deals with their predicament, with their situation.
Now, the great philosopher Aristotle, who was a lot more than a philosopher, he was a biologist and he was also a literary critic.
And Aristotle wrote a book called The Poetics, one of the earliest and some think still one of the greatest works of literary criticism, in which Aristotle asked about tragedy and supplied a kind of model for tragedy, which is interesting to think about in the context of Shakespeare.
So here are some of the key ingredients of tragedy according to Aristotle.
Number one, a tragedy is written in the kind of grand or elevated style.
It has to deal with, in other words, a grand individual, a noble person of some sort.
Generally, by the way, a man.
There are, at least not in Shakespeare, and certainly not in ancient Greece, any tragedies in which the main character is a woman.
Now, there is one exception to that rule that I can think of off the top of my head.
Euripides wrote a play called Medea about a woman who kills her own children.
But the tragedy here does not involve Medea per se.
It is the horror that is experienced by the hero Jason.
This is Jason of the Golden Fleece because his partner Medea, whom he has, in fairness, abandoned, Takes her revenge on him by killing their children.
So the tragedy, the tragic figure here is Jason, not Medea.
But Medea is in fact the title character of that play.
If you think of Shakespeare's tragedies, they're generally named after the noble man who is the tragic figure, right?
Think of Hamlet or think of...
Othello. Think of Lear.
Coriolanus. And in some ways, although we're going to see how Shakespeare's tragedies are a little different, think of Julius Caesar.
Continuing with Aristotle, you have the great man, you have the high, elevated style, and this great man in some way experiences a tremendous reversal, a fall from grace, a collapsing of his condition.
He suddenly finds himself destroyed or close to being destroyed.
And why?
Because of some action, some behavior, some step.
Now Aristotle uses the word hamartia, which has been kind of wrongly translated as a tragic flaw.
It's not necessarily a tragic flaw in the hero.
There may be a tragic flaw.
There is in some cases.
Arguably, it's Othello's jealousy is his tragic flaw.
Arguably, with Hamlet, it's his kind of intellectual inaction, his indecisiveness that is his tragic flaw.
With King Lear, it's his kind of foolish desire to want to be praised by his own children, to extract, if you will, from them promises of love.
But the point here is that hamartiya really just means a mistake.
And the mistake could be a mistake that is caused not just by a bad decision.
It is a bad decision by the leading character.
But there could be a whole set of circumstances in the society, in the values of the surrounding culture, that cause...
This disastrous choice to be made, this fork in the road, taking the wrong road, so to speak.
And then you have a catastrophe that follows.
But, says Aristotle, out of this comes something that he calls anagnorisis.
Anagnorisis meaning recognition.
So out of this calamity, Come some awareness.
The hero, so to speak, looks in the mirror and comes to an understanding of himself.
In this case, we're dealing with he's, not with she's.
Comes to an understanding of himself or about the human condition so that some kind of knowledge or wisdom is extracted from the crucible of the suffering.
So, in other words, the tragedy isn't just meaningless.
There is the prospect of meaningless.
Think of Macbeth, for example, talking about life is meaningless.
Nothing. It's just actors strutting about on a stage.
So the meaninglessness is introduced as an option.
King Lear, at some point, talks about meaninglessness.
What is the point of it all?
And one character in Lear talks about the gods who sort of treat us like wanton schoolboys.
My treat a fly.
They use us for their sport.
But in general, says Aristotle, this recognition is a moral gain.
It's a moral gain on the part of not just the lead character.
Not only the lead character comes to some understanding of himself, but we, the audience watching the play, come to some better understanding of the human condition and of ourselves.
And then the final result, says Aristotle...
He calls it catharsis.
Catharsis, which means a kind of purging.
A purging of what?
Of the emotions of pity and fear.
And these emotions of pity and fear, says Aristotle, are transformed in the context of watching a tragedy so that at the end of it, it's not just the characters on the stage who are transformed, but it is we who are transformed as well.
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I'm continuing my discussion of tyranny in the context of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
And of course, in the earlier segment, I didn't say a whole lot about Julius Caesar.
I talked more about Aristotle and his concept of tragedy and the ingredients of tragedy according to Aristotle.
Now, we do find, if we do a quick survey of Shakespeare's plays, that they generally seem to loosely fit into this Aristotelian mold.
So Hamlet, Othello, Lear, even Macbeth, they are noble figures.
They do make catastrophic decisions in every case.
In Macbeth's case, to kill the king.
In Lear's case, ultimately to put his kingdom in the hands of two daughters who absolutely hate him.
And who have married husbands that also hate him.
So he has created, by the way, not just a personal crisis, but a crisis of the whole kingdom.
In Othello's case, he falls victim to a rather very clever scheme that causes him to murder his own wife and bring disaster upon himself.
And of course, in Hamlet, you have the crisis of having to avenge The King, a crisis that nevertheless ends with bodies all over the stage.
I mean, Hamlet is dead earlier.
Polonius has been killed.
Desdemona is dead.
Laertes is dead.
So it is a mass of corpses on the stage at the end of Hamlet.
Hamlet himself mortally wounded.
In all these cases, you see a figure fallen from grace.
And in some cases, you have anagnorisis or recognition.
They come to some understanding.
Hamlet says toward the end, I am Hamlet the Dane.
He recognizes, in a sense, who he is.
And it is a hard-won recognition at the end of a crisis that is not only political, but also deeply psychological and personal.
King Lear has multiple recognitions, anagnorises perhaps.
At one point he discovers the plight of the common people and he goes, I should have taken more care of this.
Meaning, I was cut off, good king though I was, from my people.
I didn't understand what ordinary people go through.
And now that I'm one of them, I do see.
And then later, Lear, I am a fond, foolish old man.
He comes to the recognition that once he's stripped of all his titles, he's divested of his knights.
Well, what's left? Just a really old guy who has made some very foolish decisions at a critical point in his reign.
The critical point being the point where you turn over the reigns to your successor.
Now, interestingly, in Julius Caesar, you find that this Aristotelian framework doesn't really work.
Because, first of all, the main figure of this play is not really Julius Caesar.
Or at least if you measure the amount of time that Caesar spends on the stage, he's pretty active.
You see a lot of him in Act 1.
But even in Act 1, he shares the stage with the other two characters who turn out to be main characters, namely Brutus and Cassius.
And Anthony makes a kind of cameo appearance in the opening scene.
Part of the play. But then Julius Caesar is killed.
There's a conspiracy. Brutus and Cassius come together with other conspirators.
Caesar is stabbed to death.
And that's the end of Caesar.
Now later we have Caesar's ghost.
But Caesar himself is out.
He's gone. And so this is not a play about Caesar.
Now as I'll say later, it is in fact a play about Caesarism.
A very particular type of tyranny, very meaningful for our time, and we want to think about what Caesarism is and what it represents.
But what you see here is that Julius Caesar is a play with multiple main characters.
Brutus and Cassius are probably the two main characters of this play.
In the second half of the play, or in the middle part of the play, Anthony comes to the forefront as their main antagonist.
Now, Anthony gives his great speech over the body of Julius Caesar, so Caesar is present.
And I'll argue that Caesar's spirit is there throughout the play.
There's a line in Homer talking about Achilles, who's, by the way, absent from many books of the Iliad because he doesn't want to fight.
And Homer says, Achilles absent was Achilles still.
So Achilles is still present in the action.
He is on the minds of others.
He's on the minds of Menelaus.
He's on the minds of the other characters, even though he, Achilles, isn't there.
Same with Caesar. Caesar is dead, but Caesar is spirit.
People are doing things invoking Caesar in the name of Caesar.
They're doing things, in a sense, for Caesar.
They're trying to establish, and what happens at the end of the play is that Caesarism...
is successful.
Now, oddly enough, it's not successful eventually in the form of Mark Antony.
Mark Antony himself is defeated by Augustus, initially called Octavian.
He becomes Augustus Caesar.
He inaugurates, you may say, the dynasty of the Caesars, one Caesar on top of another.
So, if you look at the history of Rome was a republic.
This play is set right at that kind of nodal point where the Republic of Rome is about to be destroyed and replaced by Caesars.
One Caesar after another.
And the Roman Empire stretches between the period of the Republic and then the period of the Caesars.
And Caesar here is the potential tyrant.
But I say potential tyrant because it's a little bit of a puzzle.
We don't see Caesar doing anything all that tyrannical.
Who's he tyrannizing over?
And so the big questions we're going to want to think about in this play is, who is tyrannizing over whom?
It seems at first glance the answer to that is obvious.
Well, Caesar is tyrannizing over the people.
No. Caesar is not tyrannizing over the people.
In fact, Caesar is making the people into his allies in a political battle against the Senate.
In other words, this is a case of the one, Caesar, allied with the many, the people, against the few, which is to say, the senators.
And... And the Roman legislature, if you will.
There's a plot to overthrow Caesar and to defeat tyranny, to, in fact, prevent tyranny before it starts.
Brutus is very clear about this.
He talks about the fact that the snake hasn't really struck out at anybody.
But he goes, but it's still a snake.
And he goes, you gotta kill it.
And that's why Brutus, who's by and large a good man, Let's remember Mark Anthony at the end.
This was the noblest Roman of them all.
So, Brutus enrolls in the plot because he sees tyranny coming and he wants to stop it, but he can't stop it and he doesn't stop it and the conspiracy fails.
And this, of course, raises an interesting question.
Why did the conspiracy fail?
The conspirators were successful in overthrowing Caesar and getting rid of him.
But nevertheless, they're defeated in the end.
So what is their failure?
What is their failure of strategy or of perception that enables not Caesar, but Caesarism to be triumphant in the end?
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