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Jan. 10, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
57:57
SCOTUS TO THE RESCUE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep245
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My first episode of the new year.
This is actually season two of the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
I'm excited to be back.
It's been a really nice vacation.
I also want to wish my wife Debbie a happy birthday.
Today is the big day.
I'm not going to tell you how old she is, although she doesn't hesitate to.
So happy birthday, honey.
And... I think she's putting in for her favorite slice of chocolate cake from a local Italian restaurant, and we've been holding off on the dessert, so it's pretty exciting.
I'm going to have my share as well, even though it's not my birthday.
Well, today is going to be a good day.
We're going to talk about the Supreme Court hearing on vaccine mandates.
I'm going to talk about how, a generation after the Civil Rights Movement, we suddenly see race creeping back into public policy, and specifically here, in terms of assigning COVID remedies.
Daniel D'Souza Gill is going to join me.
We're going to talk about the social media skirmish between Congressman Dan Crenshaw and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And literary scholar Ruth Weiss is coming back on the podcast.
We're going to talk about a couple of giants of literature.
Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and another Nobel laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer.
This is the Domestika 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.
The Supreme Court just held a major hearing on vaccine mandates.
We're talking about the Biden administration's decision through the OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, of attempting to impose a kind of nationwide mandate, including on the private sector companies with 100 employees or more.
And this has been in bitter court battles.
Now, the appellate court, I believe it was the Sixth Circuit, Upheld the validity of these mandates.
So to put it somewhat differently, refused to issue an injunction that would bar them pending the adjudication of the case.
So this is what is before the Supreme Court.
It's not the ultimate constitutionality of the mandate.
It is, listen... Can the Biden administration continue to impose the mandate while this is all being fought over?
If the Supreme Court issues an injunction and says no, then the mandate is essentially dead pending this final adjudication.
Now, this is not an argument about the validity of the vaccines.
It's about the mandate.
And it's also specifically about, can this agency of the government, let's remember, this is a bureaucratic agency mainly charged with occupational safety.
And it typically does things like regulate asbestos and make sure that workplaces are safe to be able to do work.
So the question is, can an agency like this have this kind of authority?
And this was argued before the court.
And, well, the three progressive justices seem to be just fine with the OSHA mandate.
They would not, in my view, and in the view of most observers, issue any kind of injunction.
But what's interesting is the kind of absurd misstatements that came out of not just Sotomayor.
I mean, she clearly is the most ridiculous.
Her statement about, you know, 100,000 children are endangered and many of them are on ventilators.
I mean, all kinds of...
Even the liberal fact-checkers are like, that is just outright false.
But even Breyer appeared to have no clue about differences between different types of COVID. And so what you have here is almost a garbage bale of flat-out false assertions mingled with just prejudiced rhetoric.
And what I find odd about this Sotomayor business is, you know, she's been hailed from the time of our appointment as some kind of a champion of the, you know, the first woman Latina on the court.
And the problem with this kind of genuflection and this kind of elevation is that when you say stupid stuff, you basically make Latinas look bad.
Because you're supposed to be, if you will, the quintessential, the representative...
This is a justice, and this is sadly true of at least two, maybe all three of the progressive justices.
They're really kind of indifferent to the text of the Constitution, to some degree, at least in this case, unfettered by facts.
And in Sotomayor's case, you have a militant activist who seems to have no qualms about twisting and bending the law to achieve a kind of predetermined result.
Now, the good news? I don't think the conservatives are going to go for this.
Not even Justice Roberts.
Justice Roberts made the comment.
He said, listen, when OSHA was established 50 years ago and was given statutory authority by Congress, he says, quote...
That was 50 years ago when Congress acted.
I don't think it had COVID in mind.
In other words, it is a stretching beyond recognition of OSHA's mandate to do this, to allow that.
Gorsuch and also Kavanaugh, their point was, listen, if there's going to be a vaccine mandate, if you want to have a law that requires even private corporations to act in a certain way, well, which branch of government passes laws?
The Congress! So it's not the executive branch acting unilaterally through OSHA that can do this, not even by claiming it's an emergency.
After all, let's remember this emergency is now, you know, two years old.
COVID started really in early 2020.
Here we are in 2022.
So we're now dealing with COVID. This is not something that has just come out of nowhere with nothing known about it.
It was Ron Klain, Biden's chief of staff, who said early on that these mandates are, quote, workarounds of the Constitution.
In other words, let's figure out a way to get around the Constitution.
By the way, several of the justices quoted him and commented on this during the hearings.
And I think all of that is a way of saying that these justices know that the Biden administration is playing fast and loose with the Constitution and they're not about to let them get away with it.
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Make sure to use promo code DINESH. I want to talk about the Biden administration and its policy for handing out these monoclonal antibodies as a treatment for COVID. Now, this is a treatment that is administered after you get COVID. It's a way of minimizing the symptoms and helping you to get better.
And it's a completely legitimate treatment.
It's been approved by the FDA, authorized by the FDA. It's even recommended by the National Institutes for Health.
Now, very interestingly, the Biden administration doesn't seem to want to dispense these remedies in a very widespread way.
They've been actually withholding monoclonal antibodies from Florida.
This appears to be a way of trying to politically go after.
Governor Ron DeSantis is not merely somebody who has been, in a sense, going in the opposite direction from the Biden administration's approach, but he's also a serious contender for 2024.
And so it looks like this is a politically motivated, you know, let's not help him out in any way because we don't want his state to look good.
Interestingly, in New York state, New York has issued a kind of guidance memorandum Well, they basically say that these monoclonal antibodies should be handed out in part on the basis of race.
Now, this is where we want to hit the pause button and take a closer look because the law says that you've got to offer these treatments based upon need, based upon medical conditions.
So what New York is doing is they're pretending like your skin color is Is a kind of medical condition.
In other words, the rule is for people who have a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.
Now, of course, there are other factors that increase your risk, and those are things like...
That you have, you know, obesity is one of those factors.
Chronic illness is another.
Things that would dispose you, for example, chronic kidney or liver disease, diabetes.
All of these things are meant to be the other factors.
But New York is adding to those factors race.
And their claim is that, quote, I'm going to quote them now.
They say, May contribute to an increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19.
So they're acting as if merely being, let's say, Latino or Black somehow disposes you to COVID. By the way, there's no medical evidence for this at all, but they're appealing to the generic.
Our healthcare system is systematically biased.
What I find really strange about this is that we've had a civil rights movement that...
50 years ago, that clearly enshrined in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the principle of colorblindness or race neutrality.
I'm now quoting from a Department of Justice memorandum on the act.
quote, it prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.
So if you get federal financial assistance, you cannot discriminate on the basis of race.
And New York is clearly kind of flouting this.
They're basically saying, hey, you know, we don't care.
And we know that the Biden administration, by the way, is willing to flout the Civil Rights Act.
In fact, they dropped a case against Yale University, a case that involved Yale discriminating against white and Asian-American students and discriminating kind of blatantly, openly, in favor of black and Latino and Latina students.
So the Biden administration appears to be committed to the idea of reinstituting race.
As a basis of public policy, moving us away from Martin Luther King's dream of a colorblind society.
And I think that this is not simply an unnecessary move in the connection of COVID, but it is also deeply pernicious.
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That's 800-246-8751 or go to Just a few days ago, we celebrated, I won't say celebrated, commemorated the one-year anniversary of January 6th.
And as expected, there was the usual orgy of absurd overstatement and a repetition of these incendiary accusations, insurrection, terrorism.
Poor Ted Cruz, who actually blurted out it was a terrorist act, got into a huge amount of trouble, was kind of excoriated by Tucker Carlson, backed off from his earlier statement.
But what makes all of this so absurd is, how do you have, I want to know, an insurrection without insurrectionists?
Let's note that not a single one, not one, of the January 6th defendants is even charged with insurrection.
Now, so if they did insurrection, there would be proof of insurrection.
They would be charged with insurrection.
That is, in fact, a very serious offense.
But in fact, they're charged with things like trespassing, parading through a public building, and so on.
So obviously, no insurrection is involved.
And we should do nothing more than just chortle when we hear these absurd statements because they bear no resemblance to reality.
But it's very clear that the left is using this narrative to justify demonizing, if not criminalizing, the entire MAGA and Trump movement.
Here, interestingly, is Washington Governor Jay Inslee, obviously in a kind of post-anniversary of January 6th afflatus.
He goes, we have to criminalize the lies about election results.
I mean, this guy is actually saying that people who question election results should be charged with a crime.
Now, he's calling for this in his own state, Washington State.
But look at the madness that is now posing for respectable public opinion.
He says, quote, it should be a misdemeanor subject to incarceration, quote, to willfully lie about election results.
But what does this willful lying mean?
people who question election results are trying to dispute what those results might be. By the way, Democrats have done this going back to the 2004 election.
They certainly questioned the election results of the 2016 election. So this has occurred on really both sides. And in a free society and in a society that has a First Amendment, questioning election results is part of the process.
It's something that one has a legal right to do, and in fact, making sure that election results are fair is obviously essential to any functioning democracy.
Now, Inslee kind of knows all this, so he says, well, that this is only going to be a crime if, quote, there is knowledge that there is a potential to create violence.
But the problem is with the word potential, because anything has a potential to create violence.
Whenever you question an election result, someone can say, well, that could lead to another insurrection.
That could cause all kinds of problems.
So what you're doing here is, this is another kind of attempt to put a clamp, put a chill on free speech under the threat that it could be criminalized in some way.
Now, a number of Democrats, and this is Democrats in office, but also leftists in the media, are also saying that if we can find Republicans that had a role in January 6th, and the real question is, what do they mean by role?
There certainly were no Republican elected officials who, you know, stormed the Capitol.
No. But the idea is we wanted, the Democrats are saying they should be disqualified from running again.
Wait, what? In a democracy, you're going to disqualify members of the opposition party from running for re-election?
I mean, this is what they do in Iran.
You know, in fact, the U.S. government recently issued a statement where it basically said that the mass disqualification in Iran, this is by the so-called Guardian Council, a group of like nine mullahs, they looked at 583 Iranian candidates and they basically said, you can't run.
So in Iran, they have free elections, so-called, but they're not really free.
Why? Because you can only choose from a pre-selected group of candidates picked by the ruling coalition, the ruling council itself.
And that's apparently what the Democrats want to do in this country.
They want, Democrats do, to have a kind of veto power over Republicans.
And over which Republicans run for office.
It's absolutely absurd.
Now, they're appealing to an obscure civil rights law.
I mean, sorry, an obscure law from the Civil War era.
In other words, going back to the 19th century.
And this was the Civil War law came because after these southern states were being readmitted to the Union, there were a number of people who showed up.
Either running for office or purporting to already be in office, and these were people who were leaders of the rebellion.
These were leaders of what?
Well, this was in fact obviously an attempt to split, not just an attempt, a successful attempt to split the country into two to generate, to provoke a war that cost well over 600,000 lives on both sides.
So that the Civil War law was passed for that circumstance to deal with armed rebellion against the country.
Let's remember that, you know, just as many people were killed in the Alec Baldwin shooting incident, as were killed on January 6th, namely one.
And the one person in the case of January 6th, as we all know, was a Trump supporter, Ashley Babbitt.
But as the New York Times said recently in one of its articles, quote, every day is now January 6th.
And we see right here the left's strategy to create a kind of sustained panic.
They're using January 6th as a sort of Reichstag fire incident in which it's a pretext.
It is an attempt to say, listen, there was an attempt to overthrow the Constitution, and so we're now going to do that.
We're going to destroy democracy in order to save it.
We're going to protect democracy by preventing members of the opposition party from running for office.
We're going to protect civil liberties, how?
By squashing the free speech of people who question the validity of elections.
So what we see here is this is not the normal functioning of things.
The Democrats are trying to ramp things up and trample on our basic civil liberties.
In fact, trample on democracy itself in an absurd pretense of, quote, standing up for democracy.
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An acrimonious, if somewhat amusing skirmish has erupted on social media between Congressman Dan Crenshaw and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
There's a good bit of fur flying and mutual accusations.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is calling Dan Crenshaw a Democrat.
Dan Crenshaw is calling Marjorie Taylor Greene an idiot, which I guess they're both accusing each other of the same thing.
But my daughter Danielle D'Souza Gill is in town, I think, till tomorrow.
She's the host of the show called Counterculture, a weekly show on Epoch TV as part of the Epoch Times.
So if you download the Epoch Times app, you can watch the show very easily.
Daniel, what do you make of this skirmish?
It appears like there's a couple of issues involved.
One has to do with COVID. One has to do with COVID. With censorship and digital controls, let's start with the COVID fight.
What do you think is the issue here?
Well, I think I really just hate to see two Republicans fighting with each other when we could be allying against Biden and focusing on the radical left as opposed to each other in these times.
But, you know, I wish they would sort out these issues not on Twitter or Instagram and could come to some kind of discussion amongst people as opposed to making it into a social media fight.
I mean, the first issue is just simply about the so-called FEMA-run testing centers, right?
And apparently, Crenshaw thinks we need more of them.
Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to think that they're kind of a waste of time.
Maybe she thinks it's an expansion of government.
The issue that I find a little more interesting is this issue about Section 230 and digital censorship because here it appears like what Crenshaw wants to do is reform Section 230, reform it in a way that doesn't get rid of it, but on the other hand, it would ban discrimination based on racial, sexual, ethnic, but also political affiliation.
So it would hit at the political censorship.
And Margie Taylor Greene thinks, I think, that it leaves intact protections for pornography because there's a lot of porn on the internet.
Apparently there are people who try to do sex trafficking on the internet.
So this appears to be a clash between them.
What do you make of it? Well, I think we need to get rid of Section 230, not amend Section 230.
I think there should not be any protection for these kind of companies or immunities, and they should be held to the same standards as AT&T or any kind of company, you know, like New York Times, let's say it is.
They're not special in any way, and so I think they need to decide if they want to be a publisher or a platform.
Right. Now, AT&T is in fact a platform in the sense that AT&T does not discriminate.
You can call and say anything you want on the phone.
They're not trying to regulate your content.
But on the other hand, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, those are publishers.
And you're saying that if these digital platforms are regulating content on a whole bunch of issues, they're publishers.
Why give them any protection at all?
Exactly. I think he listed a couple things that would help them to lose their exemption, but it's just a couple things.
So then it really opens the door to, well, what are they really violating there?
Is this a different issue? And then I'm sure there could be all kinds of ways they'd weasel their way out of it and, you know, still be able to censor us.
So I don't think we need to have any form of Section 230 exemptions.
I think that in this issue of pornography you're dealing with a clash between libertarian principles and traditional conservative principles, which I would put this way.
The libertarian view is that you've got the left-wing censors and that the best way to fight them is to have freedom across the board.
So you should be able to say anything as long as it's legal.
On the other hand, there's a more traditional conservative view, and I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is affiliating herself with this view, and that is that, listen, we're not trying to have a complete sort of say-whatever-you-want internet, because there are anti-Semitic slurs, there are racial epithets, there is explicit pornography.
We're not trying to protect that.
What we're trying to protect is legitimate debates about climate change, legitimate debates about voting, legitimate debates about a whole bunch of issues, the trans issue, which you can't have online.
So the traditional conservative view is not an absolutist defense of free speech.
It's a qualified defense of free speech.
So which side do you take in this libertarian versus traditional conservative clash?
I would definitely be on the traditional conservative side.
Also, I think Michael Knowles takes that side in his book about free speech.
So it's not just Marjorie Taylor Greene who thinks this, if that's kind of how they're trying to characterize her.
There are other people who argue the same thing, which is that in some ways we are going to have some limits in speech, but what kind of limits would those be in those situations?
And again, I just don't understand why these social media companies should be held to a different standard than any other company.
Yeah, I think the thing about it is, it does, you know, part of, I think, what makes this unfortunate is that on the one hand, Crenshaw is implying that if you don't agree with him, in fact, on the vaccine issue, he basically goes, if you don't support the Trump vaccine, and apparently he thinks the vaccine center is our logical consequence of having a Trump vaccine, then that makes you an idiot.
You're a fool. There's no reasonable position on the other side.
But conversely, I would say that Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to think that if you don't agree with her, it makes you a Democrat.
I don't think Dan Crenshaw is a Democrat.
Dan Crenshaw, I think, is maybe a little bit more of an establishment Republican.
And so there is this tension between the MAGA Republicans and the establishment Republicans.
But the truth of it is we do need both in the party.
is about them fighting about the vaccine.
But these FEMA testing centers are really a question of, are we going to be using taxpayer dollars to fund this kind of big government mass testing all around the country?
And I think that's what she was questioning, not necessarily the merits of the vaccine.
Yeah, this is the case I think where it would be good for McCarthy just to kind of bring the two of them into the room, pop open a beer or have him sit down and talk it through over a cup of coffee and figure out that, listen, these are actually different strains within the Republican camp, and there's absolutely no reason for this kind of public exhibitionism.
And a lot of people agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene or agree with Dan Crenshaw.
So if they're going to just write off a lot of other people in our same party, then that doesn't really make sense.
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One of the central falsehoods of the so-called 6019 Project, this is the study that was issued by journalist Nicole Hannah-Jones under the aegis or sponsorship of the New York Times.
One of the central falsehoods was the idea that the American Revolution was fought Not merely to gain freedom from British rule, but in order with the motive of protecting the institution of slavery.
Now, this has been widely debunked.
This has been openly ridiculed by the leading living scholars of the American founding, of the American Revolution, and of American slavery.
I'm talking about people like James McPherson of Princeton, author of the classic work Battle Cry of Freedom, but there have been a number of other leading historians.
Gordon Wood of Brown University, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, James Oaks, all of whom have basically said this notion is nonsense.
But there's a second equally nonsensical idea that runs right through the 1619 Project, and this has actually not gotten a lot of attention.
And this is the idea that plantation slavery was a classic manifestation of capitalism in action.
Now, on the face of it, when you think about it, you realize how silly this is because capitalism is basically a system of wage labor.
Capitalism is based on the idea that the worker sells his labor or her labor at the highest price that you can get for it.
Employers then buy that labor.
They create products that are sold freely on the open market.
And the core to capitalism, the core notion is consent.
Somebody wants to sell you a carton of milk.
If you want to buy it at that price, you do.
If you don't, you buy something else or you leave the store.
Similarly, when you go apply for a job, you say, I want to be paid $100,000 a year.
The employer goes, yes, or maybe, or no.
You negotiate it out.
It's all based upon consent.
If you don't have that consent, there's no capitalism involved.
And so slavery at its core is not capitalism.
Why? Because it's based on forced labor.
And forced labor is the very antithesis of capitalism.
Now, Nicole Hannah-Jones kind of knows this, and so she's thinking, how do I find a way to blame capitalism anyway?
Well, one way to do it is to say that, listen, the cotton that is produced on the slave plantations is nevertheless sold on the world market.
But that hardly proves that slavery is a form of capitalism.
You could have forced labor in a Soviet labor camp, and then the Soviets could then take that.
Let's just take the shoes that are made by forced labor, sell them on the world market.
That wouldn't mean that capitalism created the forced labor camps.
No, not at all. So, So there has to be a way here for these leftists to try to, how do we pin, if you will, the slavery tail on the capitalist donkey?
And they think they've figured out a way to do it.
It's called plantation records.
And so there are, and there were, in fact, detailed plantation records kept by slave owners, and this has been known, by the way, really for two centuries.
Scholars have been studying these plantation records since the end of the Civil War.
So the fact of plantation records isn't new, but what is new is the claim by the 1619 Project that the existence of these plantation records, kind of a form of bookkeeping, if you will, proves that, hey, this is capitalism at work.
The existence of plantation records proves nothing of the sort.
Why? Because in any society, whether capitalist or socialist, you have to keep records.
In the Soviet Union, they kept all kinds of records.
Detailed records of who was in the labor camps, what were the hours of labor, what were the uniforms being issued.
In fact, think about it. When you don't have prices as a form of information, you need more centralized planning.
And that means you need more records.
If the United States government, if we didn't have a capitalist system in this country, the government would have to keep all kinds of records.
Why? They'd have to figure out, well, how many computers should we make next year?
Well, let's figure out how many people there are.
Let's figure out how many computers per household.
Well, since there are 300 million people, let's just say one computer per person, we're going to have to make 300 million computers.
So, in other words, the existence of records is not a demonstration of allegiance either to the capitalist system or to the socialist system or any other kind of system, a fascist system, a monarchical system.
Any system has to have records of some sort.
By and large, capitalist societies require fewer records for the simple reason that the pricing mechanism sorts things out.
You want to know how many computers to make for Apple?
Apple says, well, how many did we sell last year?
What does the demand look like?
So, in a sense, the records are more necessary in an unfree society than in a free society.
The problem with all this is that we see with the 1619 Project a complete kind of sloppiness here.
Yes, the plantation records exist, but no.
The inference from the plantation records to see, this is double entry bookkeeping.
They're making a record of how many slaves there are, hours of work.
Provisions assigned to them, therefore, we have proven, no, therefore, you've actually proven nothing except the fact that plantations, unfree societies, work through systems of accounting that exist in all types of regimes.
Even though the New York Times is sticking by the 1619 Project, even though it has infiltrated its way into curriculums, we see that in one case after another, the central claims of this botched enterprise are being exposed and are being discredited.
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Feel the difference. Folks, when we talk about conservatism, we often think just in political terms.
But I like on the podcast to introduce the broader concept of, well, I would call it cultural, perhaps even moral conservatism, looking at the wider issues of life that include politics but are not limited by them.
I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Professor Ruth Weiss, longtime professor of literature at Harvard, now at the Tikva Fund.
And her latest book, she's written a bunch of them, but the latest one is called Free as a Jew.
Ruth, I'm delighted to have you back.
Thank you for joining me.
The last time we talked, we talked about your memoir.
And I thought it would be really cool to introduce people on the podcast to...
To sort of take them inside of some of the Jewish literature that you've been talking about and teaching to see what's distinctive about it and what we can learn from it and whether it is, in the broad sense, conservative.
I want to focus on, first, the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won the Nobel Prize, who wrote, I believe, largely, if not exclusively, in Yiddish, so his work is available to us in translation.
For people who don't know Singer at all, say a word about who he was, because you don't just know about him, you know him.
Yes, I had met him on many occasions.
He was a fascinating man and a very important person to know about.
He was born into an extremely Orthodox Jewish family.
That is to say, he was born at a time when all Jews were Orthodox, almost all, except those who were already moving into modernity.
But he had a particularly intensive Jewish upbringing because his father was a rabbi.
Of a mystical persuasion.
And his mother was the daughter of a rabbi, an even more important rabbi.
She came from a higher status family of the rabbinate, of a much more intellectual orientation.
So in his book, which is translated into English as In My Father's Court, he actually describes in extremely charming and marvelous ways what it was to grow up in that household, which was not only Extremely refined in its moral, religious life, but also divided between father and mother, because the two really clashed.
The father always striving for some kind of mystical revelation and hoping that this would come to him someday, and the mother being really rational, skeptical, and very much harder.
By the way, this is a kind of distinction that you find very often reflected in Yiddish literature.
The dreamier man and the harridan housewife.
So Bashevis Singer often also uses this typology, but in his case, it was there in his home.
Now, the interesting thing was that his older sister and his older brother also became writers.
His brother was particularly influential because his older brother became a very well-known Yiddish writer.
Before Bashevisinger began to write.
So he had something to follow.
But his brother, when he broke away from home, sort of became a secular, modern guy who hung out very much in the neighborhood where his parents lived.
But already in an artist's atelier where there were nude women posing for writers and so forth.
So here you had in Warsaw, where young Isaac was growing up, you had kind of these two worlds, which were hundreds of years apart developmentally, but basically there together.
And he made this transition.
In a kind of a very dramatic way.
And the two things never really merged for him.
He did not see that you could combine them in any way, that you really had to make the choice between one and the other.
Let's, if I may, there's a wide body of work here, of course, and I thought we could focus on a single short story that Singer wrote.
It's called Gimple the Fool, perhaps his most famous short story.
And I think you see in this story a dramatic clash, which I'll come to in a moment.
But maybe we can start by me asking you to give a brief summary of what the story is about.
Well, basically, it's Gimple the Fool telling his own story.
And he says, you know, I'm Gimple the Fool.
And he makes it clear at the beginning, I don't think myself a fool, but that's what everybody calls me.
And he shows you how this town began to mock him.
Because he believed everything that he was told.
So when, for example, he was told that the rabbi's wife was pregnant, he really didn't notice how long it took for someone to give birth and so forth.
And because he was so easy to make fun of, they actually married him off to the town prostitute.
And she actually also took unfair advantage of him and had several children.
By other men, convincing him each time that these were actually his children.
And he lives that way until she dies.
And then he briefly thinks that he's going to get back at the town that made fun of him.
He tries to urinate in the dough because he's then working for a baker.
So he thinks if he urinates in the dough, it will You know, contaminate the bread of the whole town and it will pay them back for all the, you know, fun that they had at his expense.
But then he sees her in a dream and she warns him in that dream against the blackness that she is experiencing.
And so he becomes a kind of a penitent and he goes out into the world.
And what he finds in the world is that You know, what doesn't happen yesterday will happen tomorrow.
And that really, you know, there is no such thing as foolishness.
That it is just as well to believe.
And when he's on his deathbed, it's a very ambiguous ending because he says he's going to go to heaven and there even Gimple cannot be fooled.
Very interesting.
In some ways, it seems to me that there is a tension here that is being exposed between knowledge on the one hand and virtue on the other, and that Gimple is a fool in the sense that he's gullible, and to the degree that he's gullible, he doesn't have knowledge.
But Gimple doesn't mind being a fool in that sense because knowledge is not the most important thing to him.
The most important thing to him is to be a good person.
And he thinks that your goodness isn't violated by being gullible.
So what? I think that's the meaning of, you know what?
So what if I believe it's going to come true at some point?
Do you agree that this is the kind of governing tension of the story?
Absolutely. And it's the radical argument, you might say, for religious consciousness, because it's not just goodness, but that is a kind of behaviorism that comes with goodness.
Yes, that at any price, you stay true to your being, even if it exposes you ultimately.
Now, but Dinesh, you understand the...
The tragic undercurrent here, because he wrote this during the Second World War, And this was not a question only of Gimple the Fool, who was taunted by the town.
This was now a question of the Jewish people that had been completely destroyed in Europe because of its, quote, naivete, because of its trying to remain so good and sweet as his parents were.
And of course, his parents, his brother, I mean, all these people were murdered.
And by the time he wrote this story, he knew that.
Bashevis Singer knew that.
So I think that the Gimple figure is a figure of fun, and it's a humorous story in its own way, but the tragic undercurrent is definitely there.
It's not in hiding. Wow, let's take a pause.
When we come back, I want to move to another figure who is actually related to Isaac Bashevis Singer, and this is the great novelist Saul Bellow.
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One of the great writers of the 20th century, Saul Bellow.
In fact, Saul Bellow, it was who translated Isaac Basheva Singer as Gimple the Fool.
And I'm talking to Ruth Weiss, longtime professor of literature at Harvard, now at the Tikva Fund.
Ruth, thanks for joining me.
Let's talk a little bit about Saul Bellow.
You knew Saul Bellow.
I never met Saul Bellow, but my longtime editor was his son, Adam Bellow.
So I've gotten to know the father, so to speak, through the son.
But you would agree, wouldn't you, that Bellow was one of the towering figures of literature in the 20th century.
Do you agree with that and why?
What is it that made him so important?
Well, he's certainly important to me because he was my favorite writer long before I met him.
That's partly because he comes from Montreal, which is where I grew up.
So it was very homey.
But it's also because of the kind of writer that he was.
He came on the scene, I think, understanding that literature was enormously important.
And I think that one of his insights was that the world was becoming more disjointed, that The consciousness was being torn in a hundred directions.
Well, if it was that way in his day, you can imagine how much more so it is in our day, when there are so many things bombarding you.
And so I think that one of the things that he felt was that the novel could really provide the most entire picture of what our human experience is through the prism of an individual.
And in his writing, that individual is very often a kind of Saul Bellow.
He doesn't choose to write about a person who's different from himself, but rather some projection of himself, so that it's always a very erudite person, a good person, basically, but struggling.
With difficult problems, and not just social problems, but the essential problems of life.
Love, liberty, and really what is the meaning of human existence?
And going back to Isaac Bashevis Singer, pretty much the same questions as well.
Dare you be a very good person in a world which often disappoints the good people?
So what is the relationship between trying to live a moral existence in an immoral context?
Anyway, he was very ambitious as a writer, and the books become more and more ambitious as he goes along.
I could read Saul Bellow forever.
Now, you have a wide range of books, The Adventures of Augie March, The Dean's December, the late work Ravelstein, his work Herzog, which I've referred to in the podcast, which is, I think, very entertainingly and interestingly characterized by Moses Herzog.
Blasting off letters of varying erudition and length to an enormous variety of people.
So, if I were to compare Bathsheba Singer's Gimple the Fool, which is a kind of very cleanly unfolding plot, it couldn't be more different from Herzog, which is set against the kaleidoscopic background of urban life with all kinds of things coming at you from all directions.
Is that Bellow's goal to kind of try to Capture the full aspect of it, the roundedness of it, and kind of put it all in there, even though it produces a little bit of a hodgepodge effect.
Wouldn't you agree? Well, I would, but it's so interesting that you've drawn these two together because, of course, the first sentence of Herzog is, if I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog, which is pretty much the same sentence as you find at the beginning of Gimple the Fool.
I am not a fool, but they think me a fool.
So basically, it's very much the same kind of idea that...
You know, if I seem to be out of my mind, then this gives me a chance to really talk about everything, to really let myself go.
I don't mind if I seem to be, as you say, drawn in a hundred directions.
If I seem to be writing letters, for example, to Heidegger, writing letters to Adlai Stevenson and Eisenhower, who were competing in the same election.
It doesn't matter if I am jumping from one bed to another or And trying to reconcile these different kinds of love and women whom I'm attracted to and so forth.
I can draw it all together.
I know what this meaning is to me.
And this book is a way of seeing myself through the difficult situation in which I find myself and staying whole, complete, comprehensive within these challenges.
Now, late in life, if Bellow's early and middle works were kind of, as you say, different versions of a Saul Bellow-type character, late in life he wrote the book Ravelstein, which, as I understand it, was loosely modeled on another man, Alan Bloom. Who's known for his work, The Closing of the American Mind.
Now, Alan Bloom I did know better because he came to give some talks at the American Enterprise Institute while I was a fellow there.
And, of course, both of us were drawn in the political correctness debate.
But what a fascinating character.
And it seems like Bella was sufficiently entranced by Bloom to make him the leading figure of this late work, Ravelstein.
Well, yes, but he appears, Bellow appears in the book very prominently because he is basically narrating the book as Chick, the younger friend of Ravelstein.
And it is a roman a clay.
It is a story where you are almost supposed to recognize the people about whom he's writing.
But it's also a book that's very personal about Bellow because he does describe, in the form of writing about Chick, he describes not only Bloom's death, But he describes how close he himself came to death.
And it's only because of his wife, Janice, who is Rosamund in the novel, it's only because of her that he actually was saved from death that one time, right?
Not ultimately, of course, but that time.
So the book in its final stages is a book about mortality, Blooms and his own, and really what happens to the soul, right?
And again, one of the differences between him and Bloom in the book, or him and Ravelstein in the book, is that Ravelstein is much harder.
He says there's no afterlife.
He doesn't like this talk about the soul, but Chick pushes it and says, despite your disclaimers, I see that you really do.
So the book, I would say, goes deeper in that sense than the much more socially, politically oriented novels that preceded it.
Let me ask you, Ruth, in closing, you haven't hesitated to call yourself a conservative, even I would say bravely so in the Harvard environment that you were in for so many years.
Would you say that in their attention to topics like transcendence, the afterlife, the soul, that novelists like Singer and Bellow would also...
I think of them that way, but not because of the emphasis that you've placed.
I don't disagree in any way, but that's not where I would place the emphasis.
I think it has to do with the degree that you acknowledge the presence of evil.
And that you're prepared to think of the worst case scenario, rather than always thinking in terms of the possibilities of perfectibility of the world.
And I think that there's something profoundly conservative in my understanding of Judaism.
Because, basically, the contract that Jews have with God at Sinai is the Ten Commandments.
And the Ten Commandments, if you read them, have to do with disciplining the animal.
The Jews are a rabble when they come to Sinai.
And the Ten Commandments says, Thou shalt not.
Thou shalt not.
And it makes civilized people out of them.
And I think that strain in Judaism is very profound.
So yes, there is, I mean, in a sense, it's a liberal tending religion in many ways, but its basis is that conservatism.
And that's something that Saul Bellow felt very deeply.
And of course, Bashevis Singer felt even more deeply.
Thank you very much, Ruth Weiss.
It's been a real pleasure. I appreciate it.
Thanks a lot. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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