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Dec. 10, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:58
YOUR TURN, ELON MUSK Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep235
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I'm really laughing my head off because, you know, all those big Democratic politicians and Hollywood and media celebrities, justice for Jossie!
Well, you know what?
You finally got your wish.
The perpetrator has been apprehended.
Debbie and I are going to talk about Elon Musk and the great opportunity and great responsibility before him.
I'll expose the obscene immoralism of Gavin Newsom, who wants to make California a sanctuary state.
For women seeking abortion.
Actor Nick Searcy will join me.
We're going to talk about his new film about January 6th.
It's called Capital Punishment.
And I'm going to begin a review of the morality of revenge as depicted in Shakespeare's greatest play, Hamlet.
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.
One by one, all the progressive narratives are falling apart and it's just great.
Think about it. Russia collusion.
Poof! Rittenhouse.
Poof! Jussie Smollett.
Smollier. Poof!
What's next?
Probably January 6th.
Now, I want to talk about the Jussie Smollett verdict, because...
I'm laughing because all these prominent Democrats, these leftists, these Hollywood types, these media types were like, justice for Jussie!
Justice for Jussie!
And Jussie himself, I will not rest until the person responsible for this is going to be apprehended.
Well, you know what? He has.
Justice for Jussie has been served.
The perpetrator has been caught.
Yes. And here's the Reverend Al Sharpton.
He goes, this was when the attack was first reported.
The reported hate attack on my friend and brother, actor Jussie Smollett, is despicable and outrageous.
The guilty must face the maximum.
And you know what? I agree.
Throw the book at the slimy SOB who planned this hate crime, namely one Jussie Smollett.
Now, it's so interesting to go down memory lane a little bit and look at the way in which this was not only exploited by Jussie, but sort of picked up by the left uncritically.
And they ran with this narrative.
Why? Because it sort of fit their fictional picture of the world.
In their fictional picture of the world, white supremacy reigns supreme.
There are MAGA terrorists and marauders running around.
Black gay men are natural targets even in the middle of the night, even while trying to get a Subway sandwich.
Here, by the way, is Jussie himself.
You know, a lying snake being interviewed by Robin Roberts on TV. And what I want you to watch is not just the snake Jussie, but the snake charmer Robin Roberts massaging the narrative and building up Jussie.
It's just, it's both hilarious and a little appalling to watch.
Check it out. Why do you think you were targeted?
I can just assume, I mean, I come really really hard against 45.
I come really really hard against his administration.
That's the motive. Jussie's been, you know, so outspoken against Trump that, you know, there's bound to be some kind of blowback, if you will.
And then here's an article in Variety magazine, and right about the same time, this is Jussie talking about his own unbelievable bravery.
He goes, I fought the F back, meaning I didn't yield.
I fought hard. And he then goes on to say, I'm the gay Tupac.
So just as Tupac struck this, you know, pose of the very tough, the outlaw rapper, Jussie saying, I kind of went Tupac on those guys.
And, you know, it's fun to kind of recall this dramatic, nail-biting fabrication of Jussie telling basically how he orchestrated a hate crime against himself.
Here is a...
A series of comments.
I'm only going to read a couple of them that kind of shows you how everybody else jumped into this.
Here is Joe Biden.
What happened today to Jussie Smollett must never be tolerated in this country.
So there's no attempt even to wait for the facts.
There's no attempt to try to find out, did this really happen?
What happened to Jussie Smollett?
And the reason they go so easily to it is it fits their worldview.
Kamala Harris. This was an attempted modern-day lynching.
Now, I think what we can see in retrospect is that modern lynchings don't hardly ever occur.
There are no modern lynchings, and therefore, if you want to pretend that you live in a world of modern-day lynchings, you have to fake them.
You have to orchestrate them.
It's kind of like if you want to live in a world of the Middle Ages, there's no Middle Ages right now, you kind of have to put on a play in which you dress up or like Don Quixote, you get on a horse and you get a lance and spear and you go around looking for, you know, dragons and all you find are windmills.
This is really the left today.
And it goes on and on.
Cory Booker, Eric Swalwell, Rashida Tlaib, AOC, Lori Lightfoot.
And, you know, even while the case was going on, I mean, Black Lives Matter issues a statement on the eve of the verdict, and it kind of shows you how completely gone these people are, how out of it.
They go, in an abolitionist society, this trial would not be taking place.
Meaning what? Meaning if you have a black perpetrator, no need for a trial?
Does it mean fake hate crimes are okay?
They go on to say, we find ourselves once again, I love the once again, once again being forced to put our lives and our value in the hands of judges and juries operating in a system that is designed to oppress us.
Now, in this case, let's be really clear.
The orchestrator, the hate criminal here, the person perpetrating the hate crime is Jussie Smollett.
That doesn't fit the left's narrative.
In their narrative, it's always blacks and gays who are the victims and white guys with guns a la Kyle Rittenhouse who are the perpetrators.
But in this case, the truth is the exact opposite.
You have a black gay perpetrator.
And who are the victims? You know, it's funny because I just saw a comment by one of the Obama guys basically saying, you know, the city of Chicago is the victim.
No, the city of Chicago is not the victim.
It's white Trump supporters who are the victim.
Jussie didn't try to pin the blame on the city of Chicago.
He falsely tried to pin the blame on white Trump supporters.
So it is white people, it is Trump supporters who are on the receiving end of this hate crime.
By the way, here is Don Lemon who tried, apparently it's now come out in the trial, to tip off Jussie Smollett, texting him and saying, hey Jussie, the police don't believe your story.
So notice the way in which the media works together with these liars to try to cover their tracks or to tip them off that the posse is now onto them.
And so, where is this going to come out for Jussie?
I'm going to discuss this in the next segment, but it seems to me that, in a sense, we've already won here.
Yes, I would like Jussie to get a pretty severe sentence because this is inexcusable behavior.
But even if he doesn't get a huge sentence, the good news is that we have completely exposed and destroyed his huge lie.
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One of the lessons of the Jussie Smollett verdict is that ordinary people who make up juries, and these ordinary people are black and white, they are male and female, they have a lot more sense, a lot more wisdom, a lot more, they're more reliable, they're more trustworthy, they have a better sense of justice than the stupid, slimy, morally corrupt elites who prejudged and misjudged not just this case, but so many other cases as well.
Jussie Smollett was relying on this kind of slimy corrupt type to get him off.
His guilt was never really in question.
Jussie basically tried to say, no, the Nigerian brothers hated me.
They beat me up because they had a beef with me.
But here, this is a text sent by Jussie Smollett to one of the Nigerian brothers the day they were arrested.
So right after the reported incident, quote, I love you.
I stand with you.
I know a thousand percent you and your brother did nothing wrong.
So Jussie had no beef with them.
They had no beef with him.
They were all in it together.
Here's Jussie offering moral support and basically saying, I'm behind you, the stuff that we planned.
Don't worry, I'm going to support you through this.
So Jussie's story makes absolutely no sense.
But what was Jussie going for in his defense?
To some people, it might seem bizarre.
It's a defense that sort of ignored the facts.
But I think Jussie was going for what OJ went for, jury nullification.
Now, what is jury nullification?
It's simply the idea that it's not that the jury is blind.
It's not that the jury doesn't get the picture.
The jury gets the picture, but exonerates the defendant anyway.
The jury basically goes, these are the facts, but we're going to ignore the facts.
The political scientist Jonathan Turley describes a famous case.
This is going back to the times when England and Scotland were fighting England and the British and the Irish were sort of at odds.
And an Englishman apparently accused an Irishman of stealing a pair of boots.
And the jury was entirely Irish, and the guilt of the defendant was obvious, but the jury goes, no, the defendant is innocent.
But then one of the jurors wrote on the jury form, he goes, we do believe O'Brien should give the Englishman back his boots.
So, in other words, the jury's saying, you know, we're Irish, we're going to stick with the Irish guy, but you know what?
Give him back his boots. After all, you did, in fact, steal them.
So, the point here is that the jury refuses to convict a defendant of a crime because they agree with the crime.
They're in sympathy with the crime.
They feel that the crime reflects a deeper truth that needs to be revealed.
So, in the OJ case, for example, the jury, evidently, a heavily black jury, by the way, decided, you know what?
We think that blacks get a raw deal in America.
We know that OJ did it, but we're going to let him off just to send a larger message that we don't believe the justice system is fair.
And that was the meaning of the OJ verdict, at least the message that the jury intended to send.
Same here. I think Jussie was hoping that he would get from the jury the same sympathy he got from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and people at CNN. See, their views seem to be from the beginning of this, we don't care if Jussie did it.
We don't care if it's fake. Why?
Because Jussie is exposing a larger truth.
Hate crimes occur. So even if this one was set up...
Nevertheless, it is dramatizing a phenomenon that is real, if not in society, at least in our minds.
In our leftist ideology, this is the way America is, and Jussie is drawing attention to it.
The jury didn't go for it.
The jury did what juries are supposed to do.
They paid attention to the evidence.
And they convicted Jesse out of five out of six counts.
Now, it's really funny. I'm showing WCNN basically has a headline that says, in effect, Jesse convicted on some counts.
The implication is, well, you know, he won some, he lost some.
Jesse kind of came out of it on a tie.
This is the kind of deceitful journalism that has made mostly peaceful protests as, you know, violence and arson is going on behind the reporter.
Now, what's Jussie going to get for all this?
I hope he actually gets a year in prison.
In part, I think the judge may give it to him because the judge is going to recognize that Jussie showed no remorse, showed no contrition, in fact, was trying essentially to mock the court system by telling the jury, you know, don't believe your lying eyes.
I did it, obviously, but let me off anyway because, hey, I'm like you, I'm black.
So, this was Jussie's brazen attempt to evade responsibility and evade justice.
We can take some consolation, whatever Jussie's penalty, from the simple fact that this guy's career is over.
He's been obviously written out of the Empire, the series that he was part of.
He's apparently got no acting gigs.
He apparently directed some kind of a feature film, but he doesn't have a distributor.
Remember all the A-list celebrities that were all, our sympathies are with Jussie, this warm, wonderful guy.
All those guys are nowhere to be found now.
I don't see a lot of tweeting today on behalf of Jussie.
And so Jussie, remember, set up this plot to do what?
To boost his career, to become sort of the top black guy in America.
But the good news is that the plot has failed.
And if we all know Jussie Smollett's name, if he's become famous, he's famous now only as a liar and a bigot.
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Chatting and chuckling a little bit at the remarks of the richest man in the world.
No, we're not talking about Jeff Bezos.
If you've been keeping track, the richest man in the world is Elon Musk, SpaceX, Tesla.
This guy is just an unbelievable genius and what an entrepreneur.
Now, Of late, he did a session with the Wall Street Journal.
And I got to say, well, first of all, I mean, really, Elon, that haircut?
What are you going for? The Kim Jong-un look is a little bit unnerving.
But I like all the things he said.
Honey, let's talk a little bit about some of the things.
First of all, he comes out against the infrastructure bill.
And I love this. I mean, he goes, honestly, I would just can this whole bill.
Don't pass it. I would just delete it.
Delete. Delete.
So you see here his libertarian streak.
He goes on to say, and this is the broader point, It does not make sense to take the job of capital allocation away from people who have demonstrated great skill, in other words, from the entrepreneurial class, and give it to an entity, the government, that has demonstrated very poor skill.
And then he sums up the nature of government, I think beautifully, where he goes, the government is simply like a big corporation.
In fact, it's the biggest corporation in the country.
But it has, A, a monopoly on violence, and B, you have no recourse.
So normally with a company, you don't like it, go shop somewhere else.
But with the government, you don't have...
Well, I mean, look at when we go to the DMV, or we go to the post office, or, you know, it's like, oh my goodness, do we have all day to waste?
But this is how they are.
This is how they operate. Very inefficient...
Unlike, probably, his facility is amazing.
You know, I can only imagine.
And going to a place like the Apple Store, you know, you go right in, right out.
Boy, wouldn't that be something if government could work like that?
Remember Dana Carvey, you know.
Oh my gosh, yes. Socialism is the DMV. Capitalism is the Apple Store.
What do you want? Which one do you want?
Now, with Elon Musk, you know, here's a guy.
Now, he makes some general points here about society.
He says, you know, civilization is going to crumble if people don't have more children.
In fact, he says a lot of elites think there are too many people in the world.
But he says, in fact, I can't emphasize this enough, there are not enough people.
And then he goes on to point out this is one reason why he has six kids.
Oh, I was going to ask, how many kids does he have?
Yeah, he's setting a good example.
So he's practicing what he preaches.
Yeah, definitely. But we were talking about how there's a little bit of a larger role for him.
It's almost like the stage is set.
It's waiting for Elon.
And we're calling this Your Turn, Elon Musk.
And what do we mean by that?
Yes. So what we mean by that is that we are tired of the billionaires on their side of the aisle making all of these changes that are extremely disturbing.
For example, look at what Zuckerberg did with all those drop boxes that his money bought.
Or George Soros.
As I've told you before, George Soros not only changed the landscape of Europe, Spain, Portugal, all those areas there.
Asia. But he also changed South America.
He was very involved in the Venezuelan politics.
And with Hugo Chavez, Maduro, his money went down there to change their country and to make sure that it was socialist.
And he's trying to do the same thing here.
So when people talk about Soros, don't assume that he's just wanting to socialize just America, which is bad enough.
But he wants to socialize the entire world.
And his money can do it.
But you know what, Elon?
You have more money than George Soros.
Yeah, I mean, let's put things in perspective.
I mean, Soros has a lot of money.
And Soros can spend a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there.
But if I'm not mistaken, Elon Musk's current net worth is close to $300 billion.
Unbelievable. So this is a guy, you know, he says at times he wants to stay out of politics.
You know, he'll do a tweet here, a tweet there.
I mean, here's Elon Musk kind of pontificating.
There are minimum age requirements for the House, Senate, and presidency.
Reciprocally, there should be maximum age limits to blah, blah, blah.
I mean, this is okay.
Yeah, yeah. Right. But it's not really, it's not an adequate response to the situation.
The country hangs in the balance.
He's the only person in the world that can do anything about our politics in America, right?
He lives in America. He can literally change the way the culture is.
I mean, I can't emphasize enough that How much, Elon, you could help us.
Well, it's not just the fact that he has the opportunity to do it and he has the means to do it.
I think it's a broader point.
A lot of these entrepreneurs, they work hard at making money, but they don't do enough to protect the infrastructure that makes capitalism possible, that makes their own success possible.
Here's Elon Musk, a success story.
He comes from where? South Africa with nothing.
Now, true, it's his own genius, but where would his genius be if he went to Afghanistan?
Right. His genius is realized in the American context.
And so it's kind of like saying, hey, listen, I'm going to move my family out west, but there are all these outlaws trying to destroy the ranch, trying to prevent civilization from planting itself here.
I need to hire some gunslingers on our side to keep the outlaws at bay.
That's what he's not doing.
Right. Why don't you look at the camera and tell Elon this?
Tell him that we need his help.
Well, we don't know if he's listening, but he should listen because...
Hopefully somebody will tell him that we're talking to him.
Well, what we're really saying is he needs to be...
We'd like him to be the anti-George Soros.
Yeah. And not even necessarily define himself in negative terms.
I mean, Soros is a Lilliputian compared to what Elon can do.
Yeah. And you love what America has made possible in your life.
I think with that comes some moral responsibility to defend the principles that have made America America and to defend the principles that have made Elon Musk Elon Musk.
And Elon, if you're listening, we want to talk to you.
So, you know, you know how to reach us.
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The state of California has made itself a sanctuary for illegals.
But now they want to go one step further.
Led by Governor Gavin Newsom, California wants to become a sanctuary abortion state.
Now, recently, a group called the California Future of Abortion Council.
It's made up of 40 abortion providers, advocacy groups.
It released a whole series of proposals that's in front of the California legislature.
And you might think, well, this is some independent group.
Who cares what they say? No, this is not some independent group.
This is a group that is put together by the kind of creme de la creme of the California Democratic power structure.
So, for example...
Tony Atkins, the San Diego Democrat who heads the state Senate, he's involved in this.
Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom himself started the group.
And he says, we're going to be a sanctuary.
And he goes, we are looking at ways to support...
That inevitability.
He means the inevitability of the overturning of Roe v.
Wade and looking at ways to expand our protections.
Now, California already pays for abortions for low-income Californians through the state's Medicaid program.
California is also one of only six states that requires private insurance companies to cover abortions.
So California is going, has been, all out an abortion state.
But what they want to do now is go even further.
What they want to do is they say, look, they're going to be, if Roe v.
Wade is overturned, if the Mississippi law is upheld, you're going to have two dozen, maybe three dozen states that have some sorts of limitations on abortions.
Some may forbid it altogether.
Let all those people come to California.
We'll take care of them. Not only are we going to make abortion available to them, we're going to help pay for it.
Especially if they can't afford it.
So this report is recommending funding, taxpayer funding, public funding, to support patients seeking abortion that will cover their travel expenses, their gas, their lodging, their transportation, their childcare.
And it's asking lawmakers to reimburse abortion providers for services to those who cannot afford to pay.
Here's Jonathan Keller, the president and CEO of the California Family Council.
This is a pro-life group.
And he says, listen, we have to ramp it up from our side.
California has apparently about 160 pregnancy centers.
And so these pregnancy centers are gearing up from their side to say, listen, if all these women come to California looking for abortions, Maybe we can counsel them.
Maybe we can talk them out of it.
Maybe we can advise them and persuade them to have these babies and then provide them with the means, the resources, the information, the referrals that will help them to take care of them.
So, it's very interesting, you know, I think the Californians, and this is probably Governor Newsom, thinks to himself, you know, yeah, you know, we're sort of like the people who sheltered the Jews who were fleeing, you know, we're providing a sanctuary the same way that there were groups in the 1930s that provided sanctuaries for Jews.
But, see, that's a false analogy.
Why? Because the Jews weren't the killers.
The Jews were the ones being killed.
And in this case, the sanctuary is not being provided to the unborn.
It's not a sanctuary for life.
It's basically more like sheltering the Nazis.
Hey, listen, come do your killing here.
California is going to be a state that's going to not only permit this, but encourage it, and even worse, use public money to pay for it.
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Yesterday, Debbie and I watched a documentary about January 6th.
It's called Capital Punishment.
A powerful and moving documentary.
In fact, Debbie was saying this morning, she's like, I had a bit of a sleepless night after I watched this documentary.
And yet, interestingly enough, in watching the documentary, at multiple points, Thank you. I want you to take a look at the clip,
and then I'm going to bring Nick Searcy on, the producer and the narrator, to talk about this film, Capital Punishment.
Take a look. On January 6, 2021, I went to Washington, D.C., along with multitudes of other Americans, because we believed that the election was stolen.
What they show you on the media doesn't tell half the story.
I step out, I have red dots all over my chest.
I'm really scared. They handcuffed me.
They handcuffed you? Yes.
The 6th was all deception.
This is psychological warfare.
Guys, this is a film that's well worth watching, and I'm going to tell you how you can watch it.
But let me bring on Nick Searcy, an award-winning actor.
He's known for a whole bunch of films, The Shape of Water, Moneyball, Castaway, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Fugitive.
He was a co-star on the hit television series, Justified.
Hey, Nick, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
Wow, you've made a really powerful film here.
And I want to start by asking you why you decided to take on this January 6th narrative.
I know that the January 6th committee, the Pelosi committee, and the Liz Cheneys of the world are trying to portray January 6th as an inside job, but an inside job unleashed by Trump and the people around Trump.
Did you start out on this film to show the exact opposite, that January 6th is a kind of inside job, but not an inside job perpetrated by Trump, but an inside job perpetrated by the deep state and the left in order to go after Trump supporters?
What is the real truth about January 6th?
Well, thanks, Dinesh.
I decided to make the movie because I was there myself on January 6th, and I saw what I saw, and then when I got home and watched the news, I didn't see any of what they were showing me.
It made it look like it was a few violent people, when in fact they were...
Over a million people there, you know, and some people say as high as two million.
And so that's kind of the impetus of how it came about.
It was like I kept saying to my director, Chris, why are they lying about what we saw?
Why aren't they showing the truth of it?
And we began on the journey then of like, let's make a film about the people that we know that were really there and what is happening to them in the aftermath.
At one moment in the film, and this is the part that made both Debbie and me chuckle, you talk about the eerie fact that the reason why lots of people came to Washington, they came to Washington because they believe something went deeply wrong in the 2020 election, and the Supreme Court evidently decided, you know, this is not something we're really going to look at.
And there's an image of you.
You're standing in front of the Supreme Court and you make the wry comment that the Supreme Court denies the cases surrounding January 6th because they say that they lack standing.
And you go, wait a minute.
Here I am. I'm standing.
I'm standing right outside the court itself.
Why don't you hear the case?
Isn't this in fact the frustration that led people to go toward the Capitol in the first place?
This wasn't a coup. This wasn't an insurrection.
This is what it was all about, wasn't it?
Yes, it was a protest.
And, you know, it's not against the law to say I believe that the election was fraudulent.
That's not against the law.
And if I was on the other side, I would certainly want to prove that the election was fraudulent.
Was just. Why would you not want that to be proven?
That would unite the country.
But that's the problem.
The people behind this don't want to unite the country.
They want to divide us.
And so the way they combat this idea that the election was stolen is by demonizing people who say that and terrorizing them and saying, if you say that...
You are anti-American or something.
It's a terrible situation that would be easily fixed if you would just go ahead and investigate the problems that so many people like me saw.
You have a very, I think, heart-wrenching, but also, in a weird way, coolly objective interview with Ashley Babbitt's husband.
And I thought it was very telling that he was quite familiar with the conditions under which the use of deadly force is permitted.
He described a kind of series of escalations that have to occur and that you use every available means to de-escalate the situation before you go to force, let alone deadly force.
And none of this appears to have occurred in the case of Ashley Babbitt.
And the left doesn't seem to care about it.
They exonerated the officer without seemingly even a full inquiry, certainly not with the public interest.
So how are these wounds, Nick, if at all, going to be ever healed when you've got these atrocities that are now going on in front of us and nothing is being done about them?
Even the GOP is silent about them.
Yeah, it's hard to understand how we get back from here, because the left will never admit that anything untoward happened.
And I think that's because they wanted it to be worse.
I think that really what was going on was they really wanted some real violence, like a massacre, to happen, so that they could then use that to completely stigmatize and terrorize and demonize Trump supporters.
The shooting of Ashley Babbitt, we show the entire two-minute clip in the film, and it's definitely uncanny.
The gun is out long before Ashley Babbitt even gets in the window.
So... This idea that she was a threat and he had to stop the threat, it doesn't hold up.
And Aaron Babbitt's explanation of this in the movie is very compelling.
Both he and Ashley were trained in this use of force continuum.
And he says in the film, if she had heard a verbal command to get down, I'm telling you right now, she would have gotten down.
She knows the rules. And she never received any sort of verbal command and was just shocked.
I mean, Nick, we live at a time where, and you hear this even from Republicans, they're talking about human rights violations in China.
They talk about political prisoners.
I mean, I don't know what other term you can use to describe somebody who is put in solitary confinement for months and And A, they haven't been convicted of any crime.
They haven't been tried. They haven't been convicted.
They're not even accused of a violent offense, and yet they are subjected to what can only be called psychological torture.
I mean, I've tried to put myself in the place of somebody sitting in a dark room 23 hours a day, and the fact that people have not been even convicted of anything and are subjected to this, I mean, wouldn't it be accurate to say that these are political prisoners and it is problematic today to refer to America as a fully free society?
They definitely are political prisoners.
I mean, and I believe that it is a deliberate terror campaign.
The government is trying to send a message to everybody by treating these people this way.
Don't ever be one of these people.
That's why they come through neighborhoods, as we show in the movie, little suburban neighborhoods with armored vehicles.
They treat these people in the movie like they are Drug dealers or human traffickers or, you know, serial killers.
These people have never been arrested for anything violent, anything at all in their lives, and suddenly they're treated as criminals simply because they went to Washington on January 6th, most of whom never went in the building.
And this is a deliberate terror campaign.
They are trying to send a message, do not resist us or this will happen to you.
Folks, this is a critical issue, and this is a critical movie.
It's called Capital Punishment.
Nick, if some people want to watch this film, what's the easiest way that they can watch it?
Tonight or this weekend?
Yeah, right now you can go to CapitalPunishmentTheMovie.com and you can purchase it directly from there and watch it right away.
And we released it that way because we didn't want to be shut down.
You know, it's on a secure server that can't be attacked.
We can be suppressed, but we can't be attacked.
So if you go there right now, you can watch it.
Click on the red button that says watch for $9.99.
So, capitalpunishment, C-A-P-I-T-O-L, punishmentthemovie.com.
Right, exactly. Thanks, Nick Sirsi.
I appreciate you coming on the podcast.
Thank you so much, Dinesh.
Good to see you again. Breaking news.
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I've been talking about Shakespeare now for, gee, I guess a few weeks and I've covered a number of Shakespeare plays.
I want to turn now to perhaps Shakespeare's greatest play.
And I think if you had a poll among Shakespeare scholars and Shakespeare aficionados, Hamlet would come in as Shakespeare's greatest play, and this is an assessment that I agree with, but at the same time, it is an assessment that is a little bit...
Controversial. It's controversial because it's hard to say what is so great about Hamlet.
It's a play of almost bottomless depths and at the same time of great lines.
Shakespeare is known for his elegant and unforgettable turns of phrase.
Your youth is your salad days, for example.
And to be or not to be, that's right out of Hamlet.
And there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
That's Hamlet. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
So, Hamlet has got all these kind of one-liners.
And it's got this mysterious main character, Hamlet, who is a student, he is an intellectual, he is a prince, he is someone who is set on a mission, but it's a mission that he doesn't seem to want to fully carry out.
And he doesn't carry out, not really, and even when he sort of does, it's toward the end of the play, and it's a very long play, and there are dead bodies all over the place by the time this even happens.
So it is an odd play on so many levels.
Let's take one of the great lines from the play that seems to summarize, you may almost call it, the contemporary philosophy of our culture, of modern Western culture.
To thine own self be true.
This line is right out of Hamlet.
It's uttered by Polonius.
And it is sort of a great line in that it affirms this notion that so many people believe that, you know, there's a kind of inner self inside of you, and you should be true to that, and that's your kind of true self,
and your outer self is distorted by conventionality and by society, and so recovering your true self in the Rousseau built a whole philosophy on this idea, which Shakespeare anticipated and wrote, expresses here, better than Rousseau, 150 years before Rousseau.
And yet, what makes the line problematic is it is uttered by a man who is a complete fool.
Polonius is this buffoonish father of Ophelia.
He's pompous.
He's ridiculous. And yet, this line expressing a seemingly interesting and in some ways profound idea comes out of a doddering idiot.
Now, I think, and what I'd like to do today, and I'm going to delve into this more deeply in a couple of subsequent podcasts, is I'm just going to give a sort of overview of what I think is the great theme of Hamlet and what makes Hamlet as a play so interesting and powerful.
Its great theme is revenge.
Revenge. And revenge is a very interesting thing because it is something that we are all for, and yet we have reservations about.
We have qualms about.
Revenge is seen as a good thing in some ways.
It is. Think about movies, for example, where some horrible wrong is done at the beginning, and the audience is rooting for the main character to get his revenge.
And there's a tremendous sense of not just satisfaction, almost elation, experienced both by the character and by the audience when this revenge actually takes place.
Now, why is that?
You might be familiar with an old phrase, revenge is a form of wild justice.
I think this is really what makes revenge both appealing and problematic.
It's appealing because it is related to justice, and it's problematic because it is kind of wild.
It doesn't go through the approved social system.
Now, revenge doesn't make things whole.
If somebody has wronged you, someone has killed one of your relatives, and you go and kill them, well, you don't get your relative back.
Revenge in that sense doesn't restore the status quo ante.
It doesn't make you the way you were before.
But what it does do, unmistakably, is it punishes the perpetrator.
And we all have this belief, You know, when we say things like, he got what was coming.
You go to a movie and you see that the wrong is away.
He got what was coming. And what you mean is that evil deserves punishment.
And that's what revenge does.
It inflicts the necessary and condign punishment on the perpetrator.
And to that degree, what revenge does is it upholds moral responsibility.
Now, what makes Hamlet interesting and powerful is I want to argue is that you've got a character who has every reason to act, every reason to take revenge, and yet somehow cannot bring himself fully to do it.
He knows he wants to do it.
In fact, he concedes in many places the moral superiority of doing it, of acting.
But instead of acting, he thinks, he wonders, he gets in a kind of introspective frame of mind.
And what makes him do it?
I want to argue what makes him do it is not what many people think.
They think, oh well, it's because Hamlet is a student.
You know, he's a bookish character.
He's not a man of action.
He's not a warrior. But while Hamlet is in fact a student, he's also a prince.
Hamlet is a political man.
In the same way that Brutus in Julius Caesar is a political man.
Brutus is also studious.
Brutus has a library. Brutus reads books.
But Brutus is a political man in political society, and Brutus does not hesitate to act.
When Brutus decides that Caesar is becoming a tyrant and Roman society will be better off without Caesar, Brutus moves forward and he never looks back.
He has no qualms.
He doesn't. He never regrets what he does.
He accepts the outcome of the choices that he has made.
So what is the difference between Brutus and Hamlet?
Hamlet is a hesitator.
You know, I mentioned earlier that Aristotle talked about the mistake, the hamartia, that a great man will make in a tragedy, the kind of character flaw, if you will.
And in Othello, perhaps it's jealousy.
And maybe in King Lear, it's a certain kind of excessive desire for flattery.
And in Macbeth, it's vaunting ambition.
Well, in Hamlet, his flaw, his hamartia, is believed to be indecisiveness.
He hesitates.
He delays. He doesn't act.
In the Olivier version of Hamlet, the movie, there's a kind of preface that comes up on the screen before the movie begins.
This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.
But the question I want to ask is, why?
Why is it that Hamlet can't make up his mind?
And I want to answer, the reason he can't make up his mind is Christianity.
Hamlet is in a Christian universe.
Hamlet is troubled by conscience.
And I don't just mean conscience about what is the right thing to do here and now.
Hamlet thinks a lot about death.
Not just the death of the king, his own death.
Hamlet thinks a lot about the afterlife.
Death for him is the undiscovered country from whose born no traveler ever returned.
And Hamlet says very often, you know, we want to hold on to life because even though there might be lots of evils in life, we don't know what evils await us after death.
So here you have Hamlet in contrast with, say, Brutus.
Brutus does not spend any time really thinking about the afterlife.
And for Brutus, it's all about this world.
There are right things to do.
And Brutus is, in fact, motivated by conscience.
Brutus thinks, for example, that acting in a conspiracy to overthrow Caesar is right.
That is what a political man should do, and that is what he does.
But for Hamlet, it's not so simple.
For Hamlet, this is a matter not just of human beings acting in the world, but souls.
What will happen to the king's soul?
What will happen to Hamlet's soul?
So in Hamlet, you have a huge clash between the warrior ethic, which is avenge the king.
Avenge the king's death.
You are Hamlet, the son of the king.
Become the king, but be a just king.
And that is morally unproblematic in the world of Julius Caesar.
But it's morally problematic in the Christian world.
And so here you have Hamlet, a man who knows he must act, but is prevented from acting by his Christian conscience.
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Guys, we're going to do a, I guess, a video question today.
And I should also tell you that I do weekly a 30 or 40 minute live Q&A once a week, typically on Tuesday at 7.30 p.m.
Eastern. I do this on Locals and I cover some topics that I actually can't touch on the podcast.
So go to dinesh.locals.com.
You want to know how you can support my work?
This is a great way. Just become, join Locals and be a supporter of my work there.
But let's do a question for today.
Listen. Hey, I was going to Nash.
My name is Troy. I'm from Bloomington, Minnesota.
And I wanted to say that you are the number one reason I became a conservative.
So God bless you and thank you for all the work you've done for our nation and to spread the word about conservatism.
My question to you is, on PragerU, they have a really excellent video by Michael Knowles detailing what the far left is all about.
I think it's very important that we know the difference between the leftist, the liberal, the conservative, and the far right.
I haven't found a whole lot about what the far right stands for.
Can you talk a little bit about what you think they stand for and how we should differentiate ourselves from them?
Thank you and God bless you for all you do.
You know, the reason that you've had trouble finding out a lot, as you say, about the far right is that the far right is a very elusive, problematic, and in some degrees fictional entity.
A number of people who are identified as far right are actually on the far left.
A classic example of somebody that I've exposed is Richard Spencer.
This is a guy routinely described as alt-right, far-right, Trump supporter.
This is a guy who very publicly...
Is for Biden.
He said he voted the straight Democratic ticket in the last election.
He voted for Biden and Harris.
Think about it. You've got a guy who's supposedly a white supremacist, and yet he's voting for Kamala Harris?
Really? There's something counterfeit about that.
Jason Kessler, the organizer of Charlotte.
He's far right. No, he's not far right.
He's actually far left. He was an Occupy Wall Street guy.
And as you go down the list, you'll find that to be the case.
The guys I see who are far right, I mean, here I see this kid, Nick Fuentes, this kind of saucy kid, and he's making jokes about the Holocaust and he's talking about putting six million cookies in an oven.
I mean, it's distasteful, it's ridiculous.
There's no intellectual content there at all.
Recently, there was talk about this far-right group marching in Washington, the Patriot Front.
So I look up the guy who's supposedly the founder of this.
This is a kid who was born in 1998.
He's 23 years old.
His name is Rousseau.
I think Thomas Rousseau.
And his main job when he was in high school was he made memes and cartoons for his high school paper.
Now, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which raises money off of these people, they inflate their importance.
They act like, oh yeah, he's one of the strategists of the far right.
No, he's a confused, muddle-headed kid who's probably just trying to strike a pose to be against prevailing orthodoxies because he thinks this is a way for him to get some maybe notoriety or recognition.
I know what we believe as conservatives.
We are essentially classical liberals with one modification.
So we believe in liberty.
We believe in civil liberties.
We believe in economic liberties.
We believe in political liberty.
That's our classical liberalism.
But the one element that we would add to that, and by the way, the kind of most interesting of the classical liberals who are aware of this, people like Lord Acton, to some degree Edmund Burke, that classical liberalism does also need civic and social and personal virtue.
So if you take classical liberalism and add the ingredient of virtue, you get this amalgam that is modern American conservatism.
So I would say hold fast to that.
Hold fast to the principles of classical liberalism and hold fast to the idea that even this classical liberalism sustains itself inside of a transcendent moral order.
And so if you can keep your eye both on society, on yourself...
Recognize that self-government is not just the government of democracy, it is also self-government, the government of yourself.
You will be holding true to a conservative philosophy and not have to worry about any kind of fictional, anti-intellectual, and obtuse far-right.
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