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Jan. 18, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:28
DESCENDING NATION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep251
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Coming up today, a bunch of good stuff, but before I get into that, I want to mention that I'll be doing my live Q&A this evening on Locals.
You can weigh in, check it out.
It's very cool. I cover topics that I sometimes can't touch on the podcast, so go to dinesh.locals.com and check it out.
It's at 7.30 p.m.
Eastern. Today on the podcast, I'm going to talk about ascending and descending nations.
When I came from India to America in 1978, India was stagnant and America was it.
But now it seems like India is an ascending nation and America a descending nation.
I'll talk about whether those kinds of trends can be reversed.
Puerto Rico manages to have election integrity without a single charge of racism or voter suppression.
I'll explain. Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Lou Barletta is going to join me.
We're going to talk about Biden doing nighttime flights of shipping illegals, young illegals, into the Keystone State.
And I'm going to continue my discussion of Russian literature.
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.
Normally on the podcast I tend to zoom into current events, what happened in the news just now or yesterday.
But sometimes it's good to step back a little bit and try to get the larger picture, the sort of 10,000-foot view, if you will.
And I'm watching a very interesting skirmish playing out on social media that raises this kind of a larger issue.
So you got a guy, he's called The Last Contrarian on Twitter, and he's been posting photos of India versus the United States.
Obviously catches my interest to someone who came from India to America in the late 1970s.
And this guy makes the point, he goes, listen, most Westerners think of India as this kind of backward, slumdog millionaire, begging bowl of the world type of country.
But he goes, you don't realize what India looks like now.
And he posts all these pictures of how clean the airports are, how efficient and modern the trains look, the huge skyscrapers that make even New York to some degree start looking a little bit old and run down.
And he then makes the point, which is that India is an ascending society, and he says it's part of the ascending world, whereas America is part of the descending world.
And he implies that Westerners are kind of in denial that they are in, you may say, on the downward slope.
Now, a couple of Indians weigh in on this and kind of reinforce what he's saying.
And one guy says that if you compare the Indian city of Kanpur, it launched a new metro rail system, which it built in two years.
And he says, contrast this with San Francisco, which has spent $300 million and literally decades to build a metro system, and it's still not finished.
So the efficiency is the point here.
And then this Indian guy, Balaji Srinivasan, makes the point, he says, you know, if you told me, even 20 years ago, that Indian cities would look better than American cities, or live better, you can actually have a more livable life in them, he says, I would have thought you were out of your mind.
And he says, but today, Chennai, previously...
He says Chennai is better than San Francisco.
It looks better. It's cleaner.
The infrastructure is better.
It's a more livable city.
And he says that Indian airports today are better than American airports, particularly these older, non-refurbished ones.
And then, of course, against this comes a kind of wall of pushback.
And you've got one guy saying, you know, this is ridiculous.
I lived in India.
India is a basket case.
And another guy goes, you've talked about Chennai, and Chennai, like Mangalore, has been a somewhat planned city.
He goes, now do Mumbai, which of course has massive parts of it that are absolute chaos.
This one guy says, the infrastructure in India is nowhere close to the U.S. India is at least 50 years behind.
Now, how do you resolve this dispute?
Who's right? I think actually both parties are right, but they're talking past each other.
Let me give an analogy to say what I mean.
Think about being on an escalator and there are two escalators side by side and one is going up and the other is going down.
Now, you see a guy on the escalator and he's higher up.
And this is the being 50 years or 20 years ahead.
And the other guy on the escalator is down, closer to the bottom.
But the escalators are moving in opposite directions.
So one escalator is going up, and the guy who's lower down is coming up, and the guy who's further up is going down.
So it is predictable that if current trends continue, and that's always an open question, obviously the guy who's at the bottom is going to end up on the top, and the guy who's higher up now is going to end up at the bottom.
So it doesn't make any sense to say, I mean, it is true that large parts of India are still destitute.
In fact, they've been destitute for eons.
But India is getting better.
Debbie and I have been, well, before COVID, we would go every couple of years and we always notice improvements.
Oh, the airport is better. Oh, you're not walking on the mud anymore.
And the highways are suddenly cleaner.
And the... The life of the Indians appears dramatically improved.
The size of the Indian middle class, for example, has dramatically grown, not to mention the affluent class, whereas it seems that in America the middle class is pulled in two directions.
Yes, there is an affluent class, but then a lot of people have actually been yanked from the middle class into the lower middle class.
America, I think it is fair to say, and this is even more fair to say under Biden, is a descending society.
And obviously, if we keep on the current track, this descent will be more rapid.
There are some factors that are putting America on the descending slope that have nothing to do with Biden.
There are broader issues, which I'll talk about at another time.
But it seems to me that we need to focus, number one, on rooting out the Biden contagion, the Biden plague, getting rid of these Democrats, who literally seem...
Not only accessories of American decline, but cheerleaders of American decline.
And once we get rid of those, our problems still aren't over because we still have to vindicate the full promise of America.
We still have to get America off the descending slope and put it back to where it was.
Really, from the early 19th century all the way to the middle to late part of the 20th century, America was moving up, up, and up.
And that's what I think Reagan meant when he talked about In his very poignant phrase, morning in America.
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Voter integrity laws in the United States are hugely controversial, by which I mean that they have the left and the media left screaming.
I just saw on social media Elizabeth Warren, you know what these laws are about?
They're about suppressing the vote.
They're suppressing women.
They're suppressing persons of color.
They're suppressing college students.
And so we have this kind of drumbeat.
To the effect that the very nominal measures that are being taken in a number of states to protect the vote are somehow voter suppression.
There's a very interesting article.
This is actually from AEI, and it's a long time since I've, well, I don't even know if I've ever cited an AEI report on the podcast, which kind of gives you an idea of how out of it AEI is generally now as a so-called think tank.
But this is an interesting article.
I mean, it's about voting laws in Puerto Rico, and this is written by a guy who lives in Puerto Rico, so he actually knows what he's talking about.
And I want to highlight a few items.
He goes, first, you have to obtain a voter ID card before you can vote in Puerto Rico.
He goes, this is a laminated photo ID with holograms and a barcode.
It's a completely separate ID from your driver's license.
It's a voting ID. And he says, to get the voter ID, you go to a voter registration office.
You've got to bring your birth certificate and another photo ID or your passport, as well as proof of being a Puerto Rican resident, like your property deed or utility bill.
So he says, then when you show up to vote, he goes, they inspect your voter ID card and they scan the barcode.
And he says, not only that, they also scan your hands with a blacklight to make sure you haven't already voted.
So there's actually a kind of mark that is deposited on your hands once you vote.
And that makes sure you can't vote twice because it will be highlighted by the...
The scanner. Then they find your name on a list of registered voters.
And on this list, your name has your picture next to it so that they can match your picture on the photo with your voter ID card.
And then they dip your finger in this black light visible dye.
And so the point here is that this is a thorough, stringent, and yet sensible voting process in Puerto Rico.
And then the writer goes on to say, look, if voter laws have supposedly repressed the vote, you'd expect to see this in Puerto Rico.
He goes, first of all, the median income in Puerto Rico is under $20,000.
By the way, it's half of in the rest of the United States.
He goes, and yet Puerto Rico is a very high voter turnout.
In fact, higher than the rest of America.
So clearly, these measures that check who you are, make sure you are who you say you are, work.
And don't suppress people from voting.
And he goes, moreover, I've never even heard anyone in Puerto Rico, white, black, or otherwise, ever say that these laws are racist or that they somehow discriminate against people based on color.
He goes, there's a universal agreement in Puerto Rico that...
These laws are not only useful, they're necessary.
They're necessary to make sure that voting in Puerto Rico is legit.
So, think of the embarrassment here.
You've got Puerto Rico, which has implemented what seems to be a fully functional voter ID system.
In fact, more thorough than any of the voter integrity laws in any of the Republican states.
So, if anything, my point, the lesson I draw from Puerto Rico is not just that our voter integrity laws are fine, but we need more of them, and we need them to be a little more stringent to make sure that they still don't have a lot of leakage in them, a lot of opportunities for masquerade and opportunities for illicit people who are not eligible to vote casting a vote.
It seems odd to say, but there's a thing or two we can learn from Puerto Rico.
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Even though the Democratic bid to overrule, to get rid of the filibuster in order to pass a highly dubious voting rights law This democratic effort would seem to have failed.
But nevertheless, this hasn't stopped the democratic sort of howling and screaming.
And it kind of reminds me of a star that is actually burned out, that is dead, but its flashes of light continue to be felt throughout the universe because the light is still traveling, even though the star, the source of the light, is gone. But I want to talk about the massive hypocrisy of the Democrats on this score, on the filibuster score, which has a sort of new twist to it.
But first, let me start with the background.
We all know that in 2017, when Trump was in office...
A bunch of Democrats, in fact, 32 Senate Democrats, signed a letter basically saying, we need the filibuster.
The filibuster is an essential protection of minority rights.
The filibuster is something that you can't possibly think of getting rid of.
And that same filibuster that the Democrats rushed to defend in 2017 now has become, oh, it's a reflection of white nationalism.
It shows contempt for democratic values.
It's downright fascist.
So the same people who defended the filibuster now flip around and suddenly make all these accusations about it.
It's not just that they have changed their position.
I suppose that kind of hypocrisy is normal in politics.
It's the rhetoric they use.
Suddenly the filibuster has now become standing on the side of George Wallace.
Suddenly it's become choosing Bull Connor over John Lewis.
Suddenly it's become choosing the Confederacy over the Union.
I mean all this high temperature rhetoric and some of this rhetoric is even directed against two fellow Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, as if they are now in the camp of the bigots and the racists.
Now, what makes this twist so interesting is that right now, in fact, this past week, In Congress, Senator Ted Cruz has been trying to push a bill that would impose sanctions on Russia for its Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Now, this is a pipeline, you may know, that Russia is building to pump oil to Germany.
It gives the Russians all kinds of leverage over Europe and specifically over Germany.
This is something, by the way, that Trump...
The so-called Russian asset opposed and something that Biden has cleared.
And the interesting thing about the Ted Cruz sanctions vote is Ted Cruz has 55 votes for sanctions.
In other words, he lost only a single Republican, Rand Paul, on libertarian grounds.
But he has a bunch of Democrats.
By and large, Democrats from swing districts.
But these Democrats have signed on to Ted Cruz's sanctions.
So he has a majority. So you would think that the sanctions law would pass.
But it hasn't passed.
It won't pass. Why?
The Democrats are filibustering it!
So this very racist tool, this Jim Crow relic, this Bull Connor tactic, this George Wallace scheme is being used not in 2017 under the Trump administration, but is being used right now under the Biden administration this past week by the Democrats.
To block the sanctions bill on Nord Stream 2.
So, this is carrying hypocrisy to a whole new level.
Only the Democrats can reach this kind of zenith of absolute two-facedness.
And what this shows is that this is a party really utterly without scruples.
These are people utterly without shame.
Why? Because they know that they're using the filibuster.
As they are using the filibuster, they're pretending on a different venue.
And of course, with genuflecting media cooperation, they're pretending like, we need to get away from this racist relic, the very relic that we are using right now.
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Lou is the former mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, former congressman and Republican candidate for the governor of Pennsylvania.
Lou, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
I'd like to talk to you about this business, about the Biden administration organizing this Night flights into Scranton, into Pennsylvania, and taking illegals who have come across the border in Texas, I'm not sure, maybe even California, and sort of scattering them through the country and depositing them secretly into Pennsylvania.
Now, you mentioned to me a moment ago that this is an issue that you've been on for a while, going back to your days as mayor.
Talk a little bit about what got you interested in the issue, and then we'll come to the Biden night flights.
Sure. While I was mayor of Hazleton in the early 2000s, actually I was elected in 2000, we realized in the first few years as our population grew by 50%, our tax revenues stayed the same.
As we had an influx of folks moving in, we realized through many investigations of crimes that were being committed that, for whatever reason, we had an illegal immigration problem in Hazleton, which is 2,000 miles away from the nearest southern border.
It wasn't a town you would expect that to happen.
Our hospitals were affected, our schools, and nobody wanted to help me, literally.
I was on my own, met with the Department of Justice in December of 2005, and They were great, brought in all these experts, and at the end of the day, they gave me a nice coffee mug, a lapel pin, pat on the back, and realized I was on my own.
I created the first law in America as a mayor in dealing with the problem of illegal immigration.
I was sued by illegal immigrants, and we fought that all the way to the Supreme Court.
And because of that, it sort of thrust me onto the national stage, fighting the problem of illegal immigration, which I did in Congress as well.
Well, what this is showing us is that this is not a problem that started recently.
I mean, obviously, it's been carried to a completely new level.
It seems like the incidents you're describing were occurring under the Bush administration, right?
Because you were talking about 2005, 2006, the second Bush term.
But it looks like with Biden, we have gone from, I shouldn't say the frying pan into the fire, but we've sort of taken things to a completely new level.
And how is that being experienced in Pennsylvania?
Well, sure. As we know, Donald Trump, President Trump, really, I believe, one of the reasons why he was nominated to be president was because he talked about securing our southern border.
I served on the Homeland Security Committee while I was in Congress, and I understand what comes...
Across the border, the gangs that move in, the drug cartel, the human trafficking, the horrible stories of people who are being abused by that border.
And with Joe Biden's open border policy, we see a crisis at the border like we've never seen before.
I mean, it is literally people, tens and tens of thousands of people pouring in.
But that problem didn't stay at the border.
It ended up in states like Pennsylvania, which we're seeing right now.
Do you think, Lou, let's talk a little bit about these flights.
These are chartered flights.
It seems that the Biden administration is contracting with some of these companies that do these flights to pick up the illegals, a lot of young people in Texas, and then fly them.
It's very telling that they do these flights kind of at night.
Do you think it's because they want to prevent the people from Pennsylvania from finding out that you're basically getting new members of your community, whether you want to or not?
Well, you can judge for yourself.
I think there's no question about it.
These ghost flights were meant to come into Pennsylvania without anyone knowing about it.
It was first brought to me on the flight of December 17th, which I think is very telling.
That flight, someone had taken a screenshot of FlightAware.
FlightAware, you can actually track flights while they're in the air.
This plane from El Paso It was 58 minutes outside of Wilkes-Barre-Scranton Airport coming in for a landing.
All the information from that plane disappeared after the plane landed.
The tail number as if the flight never even happened.
The passengers got out, were met on the tarmac, put into buses and taken somewhere.
And that began the questions, a series of questions that I had for the governor and attorney general as to what was going on.
The next flights came on Christmas night.
Same deal.
At night, buses waiting for them, taken away.
They then moved the flights after the attention.
They then moved the flights to Allentown, where the next flight came in on New Year's night.
Again, same deal.
Buses moving people off.
And then they moved the flights to Harrisburg, where those passengers, adult males, We're taken to a detention center in Clearfield County, two hours away from Harrisburg, and that's where they were brought.
I'm reading in one of the local papers that if you try to get a flight manifest of who was on the flight, it's unavailable.
So, in other words, they're doing everything they can to throw a camouflage over this.
What, to the best of your knowledge, is happening to these illegals?
They're being dispersed, but where do they go?
Are they sent to adoption centers, or where are they going in Pennsylvania, or does nobody know?
Nobody really knows. And those are the questions that I asked our governor.
Of course, we're not going to get it from the Biden administration because they have a crisis at the border and they need to move people from the border into the interior of the country.
But our governor should know and our attorney general should know.
And, you know, the questions are, you know, we were told by HHS that these are unaccompanied children being reunited with their families and sponsors or relatives.
But how do I explain The flights in Harrisburg that took people to a detention center.
And there were witnesses that saw the passengers from the Allentown flight.
They were bused to New Jersey where they got out of their cars at a visitor center, out of the bus at a visitor center, put in cars and taken away somewhere.
You know, there are a lot of questions.
If these are an accompanied children, the questions I would have, are they vaccinated?
Not only for COVID, but it's Pennsylvania law.
To get into school, you have to be vaccinated for polio, hepatitis, mumps, measles.
Are they, in fact, vaccinated?
Have there been background investigations?
We know MS-13 and the drug cartel are moving fentanyl into our communities through this program.
And where are they going?
And why the secrecy? Why at night?
Why not be honest?
If you're not doing anything wrong, why not be upfront?
I have heard, Lou, about these night flights, not just in Pennsylvania, but also in Florida.
And every time I hear about them, it appears that this is happening in, well, let's just call it a key state or a swing state.
Do you think that there is some consciousness on the part of the Biden administration that, listen...
It would be kind of nice to tip the balance in all these swing states so that there is an enduring democratic advantage.
In other words, do you think that there is a political motive for identifying Pennsylvania as the venue for where to deposit these illegals?
Well, I'm sure that would be an added plus for the Democrats, obviously, especially in key states like Pennsylvania, swing states.
But I really believe it's because the Biden administration is hooking up with liberal governors who are literally willing to just close their eyes and help him with the problem that he's created at the border that now becomes a problem here in Pennsylvania.
And it's unfair to the people here that they don't have the answers to these questions.
Why? How does this benefit anyone in Pennsylvania?
To be taking people who have come into the country illegally at the border and sneaking them in here at night, I don't know.
Lou, this is fascinating.
Thank you very much for joining me.
I appreciate it. And all the best to you on your campaign.
Thanks. Thank you.
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Text Inesh. I think we all know that Chicago has been, for quite a long time, a political cesspool.
And as a cesspool, it produces cesspool monsters.
I mean, we can think of people like Valerie Jarrett or Obama.
And now, of course, the latest, which is Beetlejuice herself, Lori Lightfoot.
Now, to show you how third-worldish the operations are in Chicago, let me focus on a single incident.
This is an incident involving a smash-and-grab in Chicago.
Now, this has, by the way, become kind of commonplace in Chicago.
We've seen a rise in crime across the board, a rise in sexual assault, a rise in carjacking.
The city recorded 797 homicides last year.
More than in 2020.
In fact, it's the highest number since 1996.
Shooting incidents. And so Chicago has become, well, an even more dangerous place than it was before.
Now, this would have seemed, the incident I'm talking about, would seem like one of their normal smash and grabs.
Looting incidents, basically.
In which you've got a guy who runs a kind of high-priced store...
It's called Gold Coast Exotic Motorcars.
But they don't just sell motorcars.
They sell other stuff as well.
And apparently some people broke in and they stole a bunch of expensive watches.
In fact, so expensive that they're collectively worth several million dollars.
So this was a kind of a heist.
And this guy, a guy named...
Let's see what his name is.
Um... Perillo, a guy named Perillo, goes on Fox& Friends and he says, this is horrible.
These smash and grabs have become epidemic in Chicago.
And he goes on to say, and this is a little ridiculous, but he goes, I voted for Lightfoot.
Wow, you voted for Lightfoot.
Well, right there, I begin to feel a little bit less sorry for you.
But he says, but I'm not going to support her next time.
So let's just say that this Perillo character is an extremely slow learner because he doesn't realize that this is what you get when you vote for Democrats.
But what's interesting is that after he goes on Fox& Friends, the following happens.
Suddenly he notices that the authorities from Chicago are showing up at his door and I don't really know all the details.
They're also supposedly interfering or obstructing A commissioner in his performance of duties.
Who knows what all this is, but the point is, the point is all of this nonsense descends upon this guy Perillo the moment he goes public and speaks out about these smash and grabs.
And so you see here, this is sort of...
This would happen in Mumbai when I was growing up.
If you went out publicly and said something about the local politician, they would immediately come and start auditing your taxes.
Or they would come and suddenly find that you were not keeping the city code.
You weren't following some sorts of requirements, and immediately you start getting tormented by the government.
Now, of course, Chicago denies that the two things have anything to do with each other.
Oh no, this was a routine.
But see, what happened was that Lightfoot had met with this guy, Joe Perillo, and talked about the smash and grabs, and he must have said, you're failing us as a city, and she apparently, although she now denies it, called him an idiot.
And immediately upon her giving this public signal, Lightfoot, that this guy's an idiot, it was like a message to the other city agencies.
Okay, let's go get this guy.
And this is Chicago.
This is today's Chicago. And this is the kind of, well, petty gangsterism in this case, except the gangster I'm talking about are not the guys who looted the store, but Beetlejuice herself, Lori Lightfoot.
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feel the difference. I want to talk about the corruption of Marilyn Mosby now. If you don't know who Marilyn Mosby is, she's one of the Soros-style attorneys, district attorneys.
She's the Baltimore State Attorney. And she came to public attention in the Freddie Gray case. You might remember several officers were accused of both manslaughter and in some cases murder charges for killing this criminal, Freddie Gray. And Marilyn Mosby was all over it. She was like, we're going to prosecute these cops. So, the interesting thing about these Soros DAs is they hate to prosecute criminals, but they love to prosecute cops.
This is their MO. And this is Marilyn Mosby's MO. Of course, the prosecution turned out to be a disaster.
All the cops were exonerated.
The whole thing fell apart.
But nevertheless, Mosby is one of these kind of high-minded Democrats who always acts like they're motivated by the public interest, they're trying to serve the public good, they're trying to reduce the city's preoccupation with crime, and they're trying to replace punitive measures with humanitarian measures.
So there's nothing but high, these are the sort of Pharisees of our time.
So therefore, I really chuckle when this mask, so to speak, is taken off.
And you'll understand why I'm using the analogy of the mask.
Because this BLM supporter, this Soros DA, has finally been busted.
She has been indicted on federal charges of perjury.
This is fantastic.
Why? Because she took COVID money, large amounts of COVID money, used that money to buy a house in Florida.
And she claimed on her, this is where the perjury comes, and she claimed on her government application that she was suffering financial hardship and that her fortunes had taken a sharp downturn under COVID.
Now, it takes only the briefest kind of review to see that Marilyn Mosby's salary in 2020 was $247,955.
I'm sorry, $247,955 and 58 cents.
And this was actually a $10,000 increase over a previous year's salary.
So far from COVID having hurt her...
Her salary went up.
And even though she had to work less or work remotely, she was paid not just the same, but actually more.
And even so, what she did was she submitted an application...
Under the so-called coronavirus-related distribution requests, and she got withdrawals of $40,000 and $50,000, respectively, from the city of Baltimore's Deferred Compensation Fund.
And this was all based upon the lie that she was suffering undue financial hardship.
So basically, you have a person who's a complete crook.
A crook masquerading as a champion of social justice, a crook masquerading as someone motivated by the higher good.
It's very clear that the closer you begin to look at the lives of these Democrats, you realize that the higher good that they have in mind is nothing more than what's good for themselves.
I'm doing a segment or a series on Russian literature today.
And I want today to talk about one of the greatest works, an early work, of the Russian Golden Age.
This is considered to be, by many, to be the greatest poem.
And it's a long poem, so it's published as a book.
You can get it as a Penguin classic.
It's written by Pushkin, and it's called Eugene Onegin.
Now, in Russian, Evgeny Onegin, but I'll use the anglicized Eugene Onegin.
And this shows the breathtaking capacity of Pushkin as a poet, because you see in this poem, in this long poem, in the story, the combination of the different influences that shaped Pushkin.
Pushkin had received a kind of European education.
He was fluent in French.
He was familiar with London and England and had a knowledge of Shakespeare.
At the same time, Pushkin was through a housekeeper who raised him, a serf.
He had been exposed to the kind of folk tales of the old Russian tradition.
This is, in fact, folk tales, some of which had their roots going back to pre-Christian Russia.
And so Pushkin somehow managed to combine all this.
And Pushkin also had African heritage.
Which is very interesting.
The story behind it is sort of weird.
The Tsar apparently heard that other European monarchs around Europe had Moors, which is to say black North Africans, at their court.
And he goes, I want a Moor.
I want a black guy in my court.
And so he had a Moor, a young Moor, dispatched to the Russian court.
He made him a military officer.
And the man became an educated person of some rank.
And Pushkin came from that line.
So Pushkin actually had African blood and was very conscious of being part African.
Now, this work called Eugene Onegin is a product of, you'd have to call it, late romanticism.
And although Pushkin denied it, there are echoes in this work of the English poet Lord Byron.
Lord Byron was, in his early career, a sort of enraptured romantic.
He was caught in the wind of the romantic movement.
And, of course, the romantic movement was ecstatic about nature.
It was ecstatic about being in tune with yourself.
It was ecstatic about the idea of falling madly, uncontrollably in love.
And all of this you see in Byron's early work, Child Herald.
But then you have the late Byron, which turned a skeptical, or one would have to say ironic, eye toward romanticism.
And this is the mood that Pushkin is going to pick up and capture.
In other words, it's romanticism, but romanticism that turns upon itself and applies a certain measure of irony, almost as though there's a character or characters laughing at the romantic character.
Going on and on about daffodil or going on and on about the ecstasies of love.
We can see this late romanticism in Byron.
Byron wrote a work called Don Juan, but in Byron's day, it was actually pronounced literally Don Juan.
And in fact, the first lines are kind of funny.
Byron goes, I need a hero.
I need a new one. I think I'll call him Don Juan.
And you can see, if you think about this, that what Byron is doing is he's kind of chuckling.
He's mocking his own hero.
I need a hero. I need a new one.
My old heroes have disappointed me.
And so, you know, I think I'm just going to call this guy Don Juwin.
And... Pushkin now adopts this late Byronic cynicism and puts it into his main character, a cosmopolitan cynic named Eugene Onegin.
And you see elements of Byron, but also elements of Pushkin in this roguish cosmopolitan character.
Eugene Onegin and his friend, who is a poet, are visiting a country estate of two sisters, and their names are Olga and Tatyana.
And the poet, this is to say Onegin's friend, is very interested in Olga because Olga is beautiful and she's glamorous and she's sort of plucky and has a sort of confidence to her.
The other sister, Tatyana, is reclusive.
She's shy.
She's withdrawn. She doesn't seem to say a lot.
But Eugene Onegin, who is a very perceptive observer, notices right away that this sister Tatyana, the shy one, is actually a woman of great refinement, great sensitivity, great spirituality, great taste.
But this is a sensibility that's not appreciated in the country.
And also, so she is withdrawn.
She is reserved. But she's only reserved because she is, you may say, concealing her virtue.
And at one point, Onegin says to his poet friend, he goes, you know, check out the other sister, Tatyana.
I think you picked the wrong one.
Onegin sort of knows in a way that his romantic...
Poet Friend doesn't, that the real catch here is not the glamorous, over-the-top Olga, but the shy, reclusive Tatyana.
Now, very interestingly as the plot goes, Tatyana, maybe in part recognizing Onegin's appreciation of her, falls madly in love with Onegin.
And she decides, and this is a remarkable thing for someone to do in Russia, in the aristocratic class in the 19th century, to write a letter to Onegin confessing her feelings for him and essentially saying, I'm in love with you. And this was not done.
This was considered a very, not just inappropriate, but a little bit of a dangerous thing to do because it could cause a bad man to take advantage of you.
But nevertheless, having thought about it and reflected on it and obviously agonized over it, this shy girl...
Tatyana decides to go ahead and she writes this beautiful letter.
I say beautiful because Pushkin tells us the letter was written in French.
Now this is an odd thing to say because obviously Pushkin is writing in Russian.
But the genius of Pushkin is that he can write in Russian And when you read it, you can pick up the cadences of the French.
You can see that what Pushkin has done is written the letter in French, translated himself into Russian, but the French sensibility is there in the letter.
And here is Tatyana talking about all kinds of things in this letter, but revealing herself to be a person of great depth of feeling and of great ability to love.
And she's Putting it all on the page and putting herself on the line and she gives this letter to her nurse and says, essentially, go give it to Onegin.
And then she runs out into the wilderness and she's like, I just want to hide.
I don't know what's going to happen.
I don't know what's going to come of me.
And so the nurse goes and gives the letter to Onegin.
And it takes a couple of days and Tatiana is in this kind of suspenseful agony.
She doesn't know what's going to come of it.
And then on the estate, who shows up but Onegin and his friend, the poet.
And Tatyana sees them and she bolts.
She takes off. She becomes, in Pushkin's words, like a deer fleeing from her predator.
But Onegin spots her and he goes running after her.
And he kind of catches up with her and he basically says, you wrote a letter.
And she kind of...
Denies it. No, no.
And he's like, yes, you did. Don't deny it.
You wrote a letter. And then he says something very remarkable.
And Jägen says, you know, you have an incredible heart.
You have an incredible ability to love.
You would make an incredible wife for someone.
But not me.
But not me. And then he goes on to say, he goes, you know, you don't know what kind of a person I am.
Onegin says, I'm a man of the world.
I've sort of been everywhere. I've been in places you don't really want to even know about.
He goes, I have experienced the world.
I've had relationships with many women.
You know nothing about any of that.
He goes, I'm not the person you think I am.
In fact, I say one thing, but I do another.
In short, there's a lot of not just complication, but there's a lot of evil in me.
And so, while you would make me a very good wife, I would make you a terrible husband.
And then he goes on to say to her, he says, listen, the other thing I want to tell you is that this letter is a little bit reckless.
This is not the kind of letter a young woman should write to a man.
You have no idea what its consequences could be.
So, you have here, and this is Pushkin really in his kind of gentle, but I would say beautiful irony.
Here's Onegin, who's kind of a scoundrel.
This guy is a guy of low morals.
This guy is a dubious character.
He's been in gambling dens and so on.
And what is he doing? He's lecturing a perfectly virtuous woman about virtue.
Young lady, you better think twice about what you do.
Don't write these kinds of letters.
So, he's basically become the kind of moralizing...
And, of course, Tatiana's completely devastated.
She's horrified. She obviously regrets writing the letter.
And she snatches it back.
And she doesn't say another word.
And then I'm going to leave the plot right there.
And tomorrow I'm going to pick it up to where these two, who are separated at this point and don't encounter each other for many, many years, meet up toward the end of the novel in what is actually a very fascinating climax.
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