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Jan. 12, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:44
BIDEN WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep247
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Joe Biden went to Georgia kind of for the same reason that the devil went out to Georgia in the song, to sow the seeds of lasting corruption.
I'll explain. Debbie's going to join me.
We're going to talk about election integrity laws.
We're going to talk about the Democrats' endgame with the effort to change the way elections are organized in America.
I'm going to reveal how I elected representatives, Republican and Democrat, profit handsomely from stock trades, and it's not because they're savvy investors.
Historian Phil Magnus is going to join me.
He's going to talk about the howlers and absurdities of the 1619 Project, and I'm going to continue my introduction to Russian literature, the greatness of the Russian window into the human heart and the human soul.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Joe Biden seems to have set himself the task of destroying constitutional democracy in the name of saving it.
Now, like the devil, Biden went down to Georgia and Kind of for the same reason.
He went down there to sow the seeds of lasting corruption.
And I'll start out with the observation that, interestingly, Stacey Abrams and, in fact, a number of the kind of voting rights groups, the left-wing groups in Georgia, decided to stay away.
Why? Well, in the case of the voting groups, they sort of said, listen, we're staying away because this is all talk and no action.
This is very symbolic.
Biden's not really doing anything.
Of course, It remains an open question what Biden can do.
Stacey Abrams just said that she was really busy.
She had another appointment.
So think about this.
This is apparently Stacey Abrams' number one issue.
This is the big effort by Biden to try to get this kind of reshaping of American elections.
Passed the finish line, but Stacey Abrams had a hairdresser's appointment or someplace else to go.
Now, Biden's speech was divisive, incendiary, preposterous.
The Jim Crow of the 21st century.
I'm thinking to myself as I listen to this reputed Jim Crow of the 21st century, I'm thinking, if this really is Jim Crow, Jim Crow wasn't that bad.
I mean, I I didn't live through Jim Crow, but it sounds like Jim Crow was no big deal.
Why? Because the perfunctory things that you're being asked to do in an election, like follow the proper procedures, produce an ID, do it within the allowed voting period, you can't vote if you've moved out of state, all of this is supposedly voter suppression.
How preposterous.
Here's a small clip from Biden showing how he tries to use the normal and sensible prohibitions as a form of voter suppression.
Listen. When the Bible teaches us to feed the hungry and give water to the thirsty, the new Georgia law actually makes it illegal.
Think of this.
I mean, 2020, and now 22...
Well, I mean, leave aside the scrambled brain.
What year is it, really? What century is it?
You know, I'm thinking about it, just as he asked me to.
And here's what I want to know. Is it really necessary to feed the hungry and give beverages to the thirsty while they are standing in line to vote?
I mean, do you think the democratic operatives, the left-wing organizations that do this, are motivated by Christian charity?
Think about it this way. You want to know why activists shouldn't be allowed to hand out food and beverages to voters in line?
For the same reason that they aren't allowed to hand out $20 bills to voters in line.
Because far from it being a form of Christian charity, these are forms of trying to influence the voter.
It's exercising undue influence.
It's really a form of bribery.
It's called cheating.
Now, the...
The issue of ID, which is a more serious issue than food and water, is one that the Democrats are really targeting because they want a system in which you really don't have to show ID. And yet, interestingly, in Democrat-run cities these days, you have to show voter ID all the time.
In New York City and in Washington, D.C., you have to bring your vaccine card and your valid photo ID to confirm that it's you who has been vaccinated.
And Democrats not only have no objection, they're pushing this.
They don't seem to say, well, wait a minute, this is going to prevent blacks from eating in restaurants.
No, it's evidently not eater suppression to do that, but it is voter suppression to have voter ID laws.
The point here is that there are two types of voter suppression.
The first type, of course, is that laws that somehow discourage or prevent you from voting, those are voter suppression.
And that's what the Democrats are supposedly fighting against.
They're trying to prevent voter suppression of that kind, although it's really hard-pressed to find laws that do that.
But there's another form of voter suppression that goes ignored.
And that is, if someone votes who's not eligible to vote, who's a college student too young to vote, or who moved out of state and not supposed to be voting, or they're dead, they shouldn't be showing up at the polls, or for whatever reason, you've got people who are You're filling out mail-in ballots for others, a guy voting twice. Anyone who is casting an illicit vote is canceling out illicit vote.
And so think about it. That's voter suppression, too.
It's voter suppression not of preventing someone from voting, but it's voter suppression by preventing someone from having their vote properly counted.
Their vote is, in a sense, invalidated by an illicit or illegal vote.
And this is really what the Democrats are all about.
Their new law that they're pushing would block all kinds of efforts to clean up the voting rolls.
It would block efforts to have voter ID. It would expand mail-in ballots.
It would restrict efforts to do signature checking and signature matching.
It would legalize voter harvesting.
So this is an effort, I would say, at voter suppression.
And ironically, it is being advanced in the name of fighting voter suppression and in the name of promoting democracy.
No, it's not promoting at least the constitutional democracy that we have in this country.
It's really an effort to subvert democracy.
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Make sure to use promo code DINESH. I'm here with my better half, the boss, the producer.
We're here to talk about, well, more on Biden and what the Democrats are really up to.
Did you say more on Biden or moron Biden?
You know, that's actually...
I am a punster without even knowing it.
Oh, oops. Okay. I heard moron.
What do you think about this speech that he gives where he's, we have to fight the Jim Crow of the 21st century.
Yeah. The Democrats are up to their usual tricks.
Yes, they are. They definitely are.
And it is really, it's amazing to me how they use a tactic in one aspect and not another.
Because, you know, we were just talking about that this morning, how he feels like asking for an ID is just horrific.
Not to mention, it's not biblical if you're in line and you don't get water or bread.
However, that same logic doesn't apply to going to a restaurant and the restaurant asking for a vaccination card, does it?
How horrific that they're not going to feed you.
How unchristian-like.
Muriel Bowser, the mayor of D.C., just said, listen, everybody in D.C., you need your vaccine card and you need a valid photo ID. Okay, there you go.
That's racist. If they say it's racist to do one thing, it's racist to do another thing.
Right. And so the point is that it's supposedly voter suppression to require an ID, but it's, you know, is it suppressing blacks from flying on airplanes to ask them for ID at the airport or the bank?
It only applies to something that can easily be manipulated, if you get my drift, wink, wink.
I can't say it on YouTube or any other, you know.
Yeah. Now, let's talk about the, I mean, what's interesting here about Venezuela is it provided almost a playbook for the Democrats, right?
They, voter suppression, and the voter suppression here, people don't realize that one form of voter suppression is if there are laws that prevent you from voting.
But laws that permit cheating and permit illegals from voting, people who shouldn't be voting, are also voter suppression, aren't they?
Because they cancel out the votes.
They cancel out your vote. And you know what it also causes is when people, and you know, I hate to say this and point this out, but a lot of people think that there were some shenanigans in this election, right?
So... When people start believing, and in Venezuela this did happen, people started believing that their vote didn't matter because no matter what they pulled the lever on, it was actually going to count for the other guy.
So they're like, I'm not going to go stand in line and vote if my vote doesn't count.
I'm done. We know some of that happened in Georgia in the election in January, where people were discouraged and they felt like, my vote's not going to matter.
And that is voter suppression, because they feel like their vote doesn't count.
They're being disenfranchised. Right, they're being disenfranchised.
So I think that it causes all sorts of issues when you do not...
Conform to a particular way of voting in every state, and that is make sure that your vote counts, but only your vote counts.
Yeah, I mean, who would participate or watch even a sports game if you believed that the rules were somehow being rigged, right?
Or that the game was already decided.
How fun would that be if you watched the Super Bowl, and they had already determined who the Super Bowl winner was going to be, and all of the referees were all in on it.
That's kind of how we feel.
Or in this case, all the referees are actually working for one side.
In other words, it's not open to question that part of the great infusion of cash that came from liberal billionaires, people like Zuckerberg, got the state and local governments involved in the election in effect on the Democratic side.
Why? Because they were plowing all this get-out-the-vote money in heavily Democratic districts.
That is not even really arguable.
It is a case of kind of weighing the odds so that one side has a built-in advantage and using the government itself to do that.
Right. It's really interesting how all this has gone down.
And I speak mostly to you about the Venezuela.
The reason that I became so involved in 2010-2012 elections with True the Vote, Catherine Engelbrecht, a dear friend, is because she knew then, as she knows now, That there are a lot of shenanigans that go on.
I mean, you observed them. I observed them.
In 2012, was it? I was a bilingual poll watcher, and I witnessed a...
A judge, a voting judge, actually tell a Hispanic couple who and how to vote.
And you cannot do that.
And I caught her red-handed doing that.
Well, she didn't know that you knew Spanish.
She didn't know that I knew Spanish, and I surprised her.
Oh, chica. But all that to say that it's not new.
We need to make sure that our voter...
Integrity is something that is an American ideal, right?
If we start succumbing to third world country tactics, I mean think about it.
I mean, that is the purpose of these voter integrity laws, and that is why these voter integrity laws are being targeted by Biden and are being targeted by the Democrats, because they want to establish a system in which these kinds of measures to protect voter integrity do not exist.
They don't. And before we end, I just want to wish my mom a speedy recovery.
She is, unfortunately, has COVID, and so sending my prayers to mommy.
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Let's say you're a Congressman or a Senator and you're part of a team that is negotiating with pharmaceutical companies about how many vaccines the government is going to purchase or vaccine pricing.
And at the same time, while you're doing this, you are also investing yourself.
And benefiting from shifts in the stock price of pharmaceutical companies.
I mean, should this even be allowed?
Now Nancy Pelosi says yes.
She says, and in fact she is, I can see why she says yes.
She's known to be the most successful stock picker on the hill.
Not because of her having gone to business school.
Not because of her wide experience in understanding how the stock market works.
None of that. It's because, and this is true not just of Pelosi, I have to say, but it's true of a lot of people in Congress, they have access to information.
Why? Because the government has its tentacles in everything, in so many industries, from gas to energy to manufacturing to high-tech and, of course, to pharmaceuticals.
There's an interesting report on a website called unusualwales.com, well researched.
It goes into all the stock trades that these congressmen and senators have been doing over the past year, in fact, throughout essentially the year 2021.
And it's Republicans and Democrats, and we're talking about pretty large numbers.
Representative Susan Delben, D-E-L-B-E-N-E, her family sold $25 million of Microsoft in September and October.
In the Senate, Bill Haggerty sold $5 million of the tech company Datadog.
Senator John Hickenlooper sold millions in tech stocks, Amazon, Apple, Google.
Remember, the government deals with these entities.
That's the point we're trying to get at.
And the point is, how are these congressmen and senators doing with their stock trades?
Here is where things get really interesting.
It turns out that in 2021, Congress pretty cleanly beat the market.
Now, it's really hard to beat the market.
You've got even professional hedge funds.
A lot of them don't beat the market.
And so, the only way to consistently beat the market is to know something that the ordinary investor in the market doesn't know.
And I think it's fair to say that congressmen do know things.
Now, on average, House Democrats and Republicans, the report says, had returns at 14.7%.
Senate Democrats were up 15.4%.
Senate Republicans, just under 13%.
And the stock market was a few percentage points below that.
Now, there have been some efforts to stop this.
To basically say, listen, either you don't trade when you're in office, or if you're allowed to trade, just buy blind trusts.
I mean, just use blind trusts.
To invest in mutual funds, a wide assortment of a diversified portfolio, and that way you are not actively involved yourself using information that you might have from a hearing or from a committee or from what some CEO told you to take advantage of the market and have a sort of an unfair edge.
Nancy Pelosi is opposed to this, and for this reason alone, it's not going to happen anytime soon.
But perhaps it should be part of what Republicans vow to do as part of cleaning up corruption, or if not corruption, cleaning up at least the appearance, in this case, of impropriety and corruption.
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Guys, I'm really happy to invite and welcome to the podcast Dr.
Philip Magnus. Now, Phil Magnus is an economic historian.
He's an expert on, well, a whole range of issues from taxation to slavery.
He's written about the political economy of slavery.
He has a PhD from George Mason University in Virginia.
He's currently a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.
And we're going to talk about...
The 1619 Project.
Phil, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks so much for joining me.
Let me begin by noting that you are an historian who was cited by the 1619 Project favorably until they realized that you were a critic and then they sort of booted you from their canon.
So talk a little bit about what you were cited by.
And then what happened when they realized that you weren't entirely on board with the overall thesis?
True story.
So back in 2019, when the 1619 Project first appeared in the New York Times, it came under criticism from some other historians because it drew attention to Abraham Lincoln's work with the colonization movement.
This was the idea to resettle free slaves abroad in Liberia or Central America.
And right after that criticism came out, Nicole Hannah-Jones, who was the principal organizer and author of the 1619 Project, responds to her critics by saying, no, you have the history wrong.
Recent research on Abraham Lincoln has shown that he was indeed a colonizationist and was involved in all of these projects.
And what was that research? Well, she tweeted out a link to a book by myself, Colonization After Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, which is one of the first full-length scholarly studies of Lincoln's colonization work.
This is a subject I have been doing research on for the better part of two decades, and I've not only published books and academic articles on it, I even wrote an article in 2013 for a little newspaper called the New York Times, That was about Lincoln's colonization work.
So she cites this.
She tweets it out and says that this vindicates her.
And within a few days of her posting this, someone points out that the author is Phil Magnus, who had been a critic of other parts of the 1619 Project.
So within a matter of weeks, Nicole Hannah-Jones turns around and not only stops citing my work in support of her claims, she starts attacking me personally.
She starts trashing my credentials and Points out that I have a degree from a public policy school in economic history rather than a traditional history department.
Starts accusing me of not being sufficiently well published on slavery to weigh in on the 1619 Project.
Mind you, I've written over two dozen scholarly works on this and she has zero.
So just like that, because she found out I was a critic of the 1619 Project, she dropped me, and then the icing on the cake is when the new book edition of the 1619 Project comes out, she heavily revises that exact passage, doesn't cite it to me, now she has a new revised account of Lincoln and colonization that's cited to Ibram X. Kendi, the critical race theory scholar.
And let's point out that Nicole Hannah-Jones herself, far from being a published academic with a body of scholarly work, is basically a journalist who has been...
And a lot of her defenders too.
I mean, she's been criticized by some of the leading scholars of the American founding.
I would say that her...
You know, the theory that the American founding was somehow mobilized to defend slavery, that has been pretty widely debunked.
But what you have taken into your sights, which I think is really important, is a second theme that has gotten a little bit less attention.
And this is a theme that Nicole Hannah-Jones is currently teaching a so-called master class on.
And it's the idea that the slave system was a sort of quintessence of capitalism.
The slave system was the capitalist system par excellence and to some degree led to the establishment of global capitalism.
Start by talking, am I correctly describing what the 1619 Project contends?
Let's start with that and then I'm going to ask you why that thesis is flat out wrong.
I think this is absolutely a perfect summary of what's going on here.
So there was a second essay in the 1619 Project and it was written by a sociologist at Princeton by the name of Matthew Desmond.
Desmond had never worked on slavery before.
His academic work was on 20th century race relations.
But for some reason she tapped him to write this essay.
And the gist of the essay is that American capitalism is infused with the brutality of the plantation slave system.
They're basically wedded at the hip.
And he jumps from this to a modern day 21st century political argument that basically claims that American capitalism is forever tainted by slavery.
And the obvious implication is it needs to be overthrown.
We need income redistribution.
We need to reformulate how we look at the economy.
We need to pass things like the Green New Deal and socialized health care.
So it's very much a political agenda packaged into trying to tie I'm sorry, I was going to say one of the smoking gun pieces of evidence that is produced to make this point is plantation records,
right? In other words, you have Desmond and you have Hannah Jones both saying, listen, these plantation owners kept I think one guy even calls them Microsoft Excel spreadsheets about the plantation.
So many slaves, supplies, this is the clothing allocation, this is the amount of cotton.
And they're using the existence of accounting to say, well, listen, that's capitalism right there.
Who else does accounting except capitalists?
And you point out that everybody does accounting.
Capitalists do it, but of course, non-capitalist societies also do accounting.
Say a word about that. Absolutely.
So, yeah, this is the big claim.
And Matthew Desmond states it in his essay.
He says that Microsoft Excel traces all the way back to the plantation accounting books.
I even found his citation on that was to another book.
He mistranscribed where the author of the other book said, I'm not claiming Microsoft Excel comes from the plantation accounting books.
And yet that was the claim of the 1619 project.
But here's the interesting thing.
Every society that deals with allocation needs to engage in accounting of some form.
And one of the arguments that these historians, the new historians of capitalism that Desmond and Nicole Hannah-Jones rely upon, make is that the very existence of accounting books on the plantation proves that they're capitalistic.
Well, I'm sitting here saying, wait a second, we can go to the Soviet Union's gulags and find accounting books where the labor records are entered in.
We can find the most horrendously central planned society's In history, use some of the most complex forms of accounting known to man for the very reason that they've obviated the price mechanism.
If you take economic exchange out of a market, you actually need more accounting than you do for like a self-regulating mechanism of the market.
So it's a complete non sequitur that they're basing this claim on that capitalism has somehow demonstrated Let's take a short break.
When we come back, I want to explore how, in the broadest sense, slave plantations, far from being an expression of capitalism, were the antithesis of capitalism.
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I'm back with economic historian Phil Magnus.
We're talking about the 1619 Project and its claim that the slave plantation was somehow a kind of classic expression and in fact a forerunner of modern capitalism.
Phil, isn't it a fact that capitalism at its core is based on the idea of voluntary consent?
In other words, that you walk into a grocery store, something costs $50, you decide if you want to buy it, they decide if they want to sell it, and if there's an agreement, you do it.
The same if you go apply for a job.
The employer says, I'm willing to pay you $75,000 a year.
If that's acceptable for you, you go for it.
If you don't, you walk out.
So, that's capitalism at its core.
It's based upon voluntary transactions.
Now, the slave system couldn't be further removed from that.
So how do the 1619 historians overcome this central obstacle that you've got a coercive system at its core?
Did they just argue that capitalism represents somehow more disguised forms of coercion?
Well, they play word games.
It's all a semantic argument.
Basically, what they do is they redefine other economic systems, economic systems that were historically in contest with capitalism, as capitalism.
One of the examples here is And what you see, if you go back to the slave economy of the antebellum era, this is an economy that is not based on free exchange.
In fact, the whole free labor movement is attacking this notion.
This is why free labor in the North is seen as a competitor to slave labor in the South.
But rather, what you see in the slave system is an economic order that's built upon heavy and intense government subsidy and support.
They rely on state and federal government expenditures to pay the slave patrols to recapture fugitives.
They rely on military expenditures that create fortifications and armories to put down a slave insurrection.
They rely on the regulation of the post office to keep abolitionist literature from being sent to the South.
This is an economic system where they view slave production as integrated Thoroughly into the functions of the government and it's one of the reasons why the southern states secede in 1860 and 61 is they think that Abraham Lincoln's election is going to take away the subsidy that they've been receiving for the previous 70 to 80 years from the federal government.
So when these new historians of capitalism and the 1619 Project claims that slavery is connected to capitalism, all they've done is redefined what the term capitalism means And try to attach it to stuff that they don't like and try to attach it to stuff that has a very horrendous and violent legacy,
which is slavery. I mean, I remember reading the Marxist historian Eugene Genovese's role, Jordan Roll, many years ago, and he, of course, makes the point that the whole plantation system of cotton was, in fact, delivering cotton to a world market.
I guess to that degree, no one would disagree that, for example, the textile mills in Manchester and so on did depend upon this raw material.
But then he goes on to point out that the slave system itself was, He calls it patriarchal.
He calls it paternalistic.
He says it was anti-capitalist.
So he makes the point that you had the irony that an anti-capitalist system was producing raw materials and then delivering them.
I mean, this seems to me just a much more sophisticated analysis than the shallow attempt to just claim that everything is essentially capitalism.
Well, that's absolutely the case.
You see historians like Genovese and then some of the other historians that work on it They tend to categorize slavery as something of a throwback to feudalism, sometimes it's integrated with mercantilism, but it was historically seen as being at odds with capitalism.
And one of the figures that we see to tell us this is the founding father of capitalism himself, Adam Smith, the great economist that wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776.
Well, Adam Smith, it turns out, was also an abolitionist.
So there's a disconnect going on in the 1619 Project's argument here, where they're saying that slavery is wedded to capitalism, and yet the intellectual figure who basically sparks the movement that gives us our modern understanding of what a free market economy happens to be, Adam Smith, It also happens to be an abolitionist.
Something doesn't add up here.
They don't take care of them.
Nobody pays their medical bills.
Nobody puts these workers up.
Whereas here in the South, our slave system is a welfare state.
He goes, it begins at the cradle.
It ends at the grave.
You've got children who can't work and we look after them.
You've got old people who can no longer be slaves.
So he is actually arguing for the socialism of the slave plantation.
This, I'm assuming, is not something that is brought up or italicized in the 1619 Project.
It's not even acknowledged at all.
And you have someone like Fitzhugh, he begins one of his books by declaring that laissez-faire theory, the theory of free market capitalism, is at war with all forms of slavery and therefore it needs to be destroyed.
He announces in his book that Adam Smith's work needs to be cast into the fire because it's an existential threat to slavery.
And he's not the only one that thinks this way.
Before the Civil War, Fitzhugh's doctrines are adopted by several die-hard fire-eater secessionist southerners, people like James Henry Hammond, the senator from South Carolina, where he goes on the Senate floor and he declares that cotton is king, and he says it's king because it's a superior economic system based on imposing order on what he sees as the lower classes, the mudsill of society.
So he sees central planning as existing on the microcosm of the plantation, And he sees the capitalist free labor North as exploitative in an inferior economic system.
You see this in Fitzhugh as well because Fitzhugh's economic theory basically echoes and anticipates what Karl Marx writes in Das Kapital a little over a decade later.
He's saying that the wage labor system of the North exploits the workers by separating them from the product of their labor.
The capitalists are taking the profits away from the laborers and denying it to them.
And, you know, where Marx says we need to have a socialist overhaul of society to correct this, Fitzhugh says, well, we already have that socialist system in place.
The socialists just don't recognize it.
It exists on the plantation.
The plantation is a microcosm of a perfect socialist society in Fitzhugh's mind.
And then you start thinking, you look fast forward to the 20th century, things like the Soviet gulags and the work camps that we see across the socialist parts of the world.
And it seems like Fitzhugh actually kind of had a point there.
Phil, this is crushing stuff.
I want to congratulate you on the great work you're doing.
Thank you for joining the podcast and keep it up.
Appreciate it. Thanks again for having me.
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Feel the difference. The actor Sidney Poitier, who was also made a knight, Sir Sidney Poitier, died last week.
He was 94 years old.
And there have been a lot of tributes that have come out to him.
But it's interesting to recall that for much of his life, Sidney Poitier, even though a huge star...
A pioneer, if you will, in Hollywood.
Nevertheless, he was not embraced by the left, not embraced by even the kind of militant civil rights activist movement.
They saw him as kind of a sellout.
Now, I'm thinking back to an essay I remember reading a long time ago by James Baldwin on Sidney Poitier.
It was just called Sidney Poitier.
And this was a little before Sidney Poitier had reached the full height of his eminence.
In fact, it was before To Serve with Love, it was before In the Heat of the Night, it was before Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which might be Sidney Poitier's most famous film.
And Baldwin had a kind of ambivalent view of Sidney Poitier.
He wasn't actually bashing him in the way that subsequently left-wingers would criticize Poitier because their point is that Poitier is not doing militant black stuff.
You know, he's not organized.
He's not kind of an early BLM guy.
He's apparently not knocking down any Confederate statues.
He's evidently not setting fire to things.
Here's a guy who's basically portraying citizens and cops and detectives.
He's playing out his roles and he's doing it with dignity and he's doing it well, but he's sort of not doing, you might say, the black thing.
And yet, if you look at Sidney Poitier's films, I think what's striking to me, I'm thinking here of In the Heat of the Night, which I remember probably the best of those films, is Sidney Poitier plays a detective.
I think the guy's name was Virgil Tubbs, and he was helping to solve a small-town murder with a lot of bad guys who are trying to prevent the murder from being solved.
It's the murder of a northern businessman.
At one point in a sort of climactic scene in the film, a kind of local redneck, if you will, slaps Sidney Poitier right across the face and there's a kind of pause and then Sidney Poitier slaps him back.
And that, I think, may have shocked the original audience that saw it.
It didn't shock me. It sort of thrilled me because it was like, wow, here's a guy standing up for himself.
And this is the point. Sidney Poitier did not hesitate to show strength.
His characters often did.
In another point in the movie...
Where Poitiers is being attacked by a group of thugs with lead pipes and chains.
He is able to overcome them and toward the end of the scene he pulls out his gun.
So here again you've got a guy, a detective, using his gun to defend himself.
And if this seems like, what's the big deal, Dinesh?
This is normal behavior.
That's exactly the point.
What Sidney Poitier is showing is that race doesn't matter.
What Sidney Poitier is showing is that a black guy should be expected in a given situation to act the same as a white guy.
But see, this is the very point that is now denied by the left.
The left, in a sense, doesn't like the full display of humanity on the part of Sidney Poitier.
Why? Because they sort of want Sidney Poitier to do antics.
And that Sidney Poitier never did.
Kamala Reid does antics.
Joy Reid does antics.
Al Sharpton does antics.
Stacey Abrams does antics.
And so those people are actors of a different sort.
They're actors who, in a sense, are, you may say, performance artists.
And they play the racial game.
Oh, you know...
I was asked my name by a policeman.
That wouldn't have happened if I was white.
This is all a sort of, I would call it, theater of race that people have become specialists at playing these days.
Well, Sidney Poitier didn't do that.
He wasn't, in that sense, a performance artist.
He was just an artist.
He wasn't a political artist.
He was an artist who played roles.
He played roles with important roles, starring roles, roles of consequence, roles of dignity, and roles of humanity.
And it's for those reasons, ironically enough, that he is not very popular these days with the left.
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I'm continuing my discussion while I'm still in the introduction part of the discussion of Russian literature.
And I listened to a series of lectures on Russian literature over the holiday.
They're given by a guy named Erwin Weil, a guy who studied at the University of Chicago.
And Weil says that while he was at Chicago, he read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and he was so drawn in, he was so enthralled.
That he couldn't put it down.
And he was, you may say, inhaled into Dostoevsky's world, which is an experience everyone has of reading Dostoevsky.
You're in his world and you sort of want to stay there because it's endlessly fascinating.
And then Erwin Weil read Tolstoy's War and Peace.
And he said, wow. He goes, I felt at the end of that novel like I knew those people.
And I knew them well.
In fact, he says, I felt I knew them better than all the people I know in the real world.
People I think that I am actually quite very familiar with, that I see regularly, and yet I don't have...
As sort of a deep and complex relationship with them, as I do with these characters.
And Erwin Weil goes on to point out, he goes, wait a minute, these characters are Russian.
They're in a different place, the 19th century, a different time.
I'm sorry, a different place, Russia, a different time, the 19th century.
And also, some of them are counts.
And I'm not a count. Some of them are serfs.
I'm not a serf. But nevertheless, I feel like I have this kind of intimate knowledge of them.
Now, how is it?
That Russian literature develops this kind of richness and complexity.
One of the points that Weil makes, which I want to emphasize here, is that Russian literature is able to draw on three broad streams that are all in very different ways kind of feeding the themes of this literature.
The first stream We're good to go.
And the pre-Christian tradition was a naturalistic tradition, was one that attributed gods and deities to nature.
There was the river god, and there was the thunder god, and there was the forces of nature were deified.
This, by the way, is not unique to Russia in any sense, but let's remember that Russia is a huge country.
I mean, Russia is a country stretching across 11 time zones.
So it's got a massively varied landscape and nature and the forces of nature.
Think of it. Think of moving, for example, taking a train journey.
This happens, by the way, in Dr.
Zhivago, across Russia and through Siberia.
And think of how powerful and in some ways cruel it is.
is the landscape and for the Russians that reflected divinities that were, in a sense, embedded in these forces of nature.
Now, the second tradition is the one I want to focus on here, but I'll mention the third tradition, which is, of course, the modern, the skeptical, the secular, the rational, and in some ways the revolutionary and even communist tradition, which has influenced Russia and Russian literature, particularly in the 20th century.
Now, when we think of socialism, when we think of revolution, don't think of that as having started with Lenin.
Lenin, in a sense, was the culmination of a revolutionary tradition that was very familiar to Dostoevsky.
He writes about it in Notes of the Underground.
It was familiar to Turgenev.
You see it right there in Fathers and Sons.
So it was there, starting in the middle of the 19th century, people who called themselves revolutionaries, later who called themselves socialists.
And so Lenin comes kind of at the end of that line, which then later continues with Stalin, and so on.
But let me talk a little bit about the Christian tradition, because I think of the three traditions, the pre-Christian naturalistic or nature tradition, the revolutionary slash communist tradition, the Christian tradition, the third one, is unquestionably the most powerful.
Now, even in the naturalistic tradition that preceded Christianity, there were, as I say, there were gods, but there were also devils.
The Russian literature and the Russian imagination is full of devils.
There are devils, and there are about three or four different names for devils because there are three or four different types of devils.
There are kind of the There's Satan, there's Mephistopheles.
That comes from Christianity.
But Russians also tend to believe in imps and demons and monsters and even what they call household devils.
There's a devil that lives in the fireplace, for example, and this guy actually helps the house.
He helps things get along.
He's kind of a friendly devil, but you have to be careful not to sort of upset him.
You can't cross him because if you do, He's going to wreak some kind of disturbance, some kind of vengeance on you.
Now, this tradition of a kind of wide multiplicity of devils and demons was supplanted, but not completely supplanted by the Christian tradition with its invocation of God, both the Old Testament God and then, of course, Jesus, the Son of God, and also Satan.
The reason the Russians got to know all this stuff is because early in history, this is going back now over a thousand years to about the 9th century, two Slavic guys by the names of Cyril and Methodius were at a monastery and they were asked to take the Bible.
And to translate it into Slavic.
This is not even translating it directly into Russian, but into the languages that eventually became Russian.
And these guys were absolute geniuses.
They took the Psalms of the Old Testament, they took the Gospels of the New Testament, and they produced a Slavic translation so eloquent, so forceful, So emotionally and intellectually powerful that it is said by people who can read it in Slavic, not me, that it completely rivals the King James Version of the Bible in English.
The King James Version is a sublime, recognized as a sublime translation of the Bible.
And this is what these two guys, Cyril and Methodius, were able to do in Russia.
And so what happens is that the Russians get Christianity.
Now they don't get, I would say, Roman Christianity or Western Christianity.
The Christianity in Russia is Eastern Christianity.
We talked today about the Russian Orthodox Church, but this Eastern Christianity came to Russia via the Byzantine Empire.
What am I talking about?
Well, the Roman Empire became so big that it split into two.
It split into a Western Roman Empire with a Caesar based in Rome.
And an Eastern Roman Empire with its capital not in Rome, but in Constantinople, which is now called Istanbul.
It's now, of course, a part of modern-day Turkey.
And this Eastern Roman Empire, the so-called Byzantine Empire, had its own Caesar, by the way, the Russian term Tsar.
It comes from Caesar.
One of the early Russian emperors basically said, I want to be the Caesar.
And, of course, the name Caesar was modified in Russian to become Tsar.
I'll talk tomorrow further about this Christian tradition in Russia, but it produced, very broadly speaking, two types of saints.
I'll say more about this tomorrow.
The active saint, the saint who's in the world, but then the monastic or withdrawn saint, the saint who sees the world as evil and sees the monastery as a refuge And both those traditions are actively present in Russian literature.
We see them in Tolstoy.
We see them in Dostoevsky.
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