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Feb. 17, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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TRUTH BOMB Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep273
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Trump's new platform, Truth Social, is coming, coming.
Well, it's almost here.
I'll tell you what I know. One exposed how the media left is using fascist intimidation against those who support the Canadian truckers.
Project Veritas has a new expose of the Food and Drug Administration, and I'll give you the eye-opening details.
And I'm going to continue my introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy by asking, how do you read a great Italian epic in English?
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.
I'm Dinesh D'Souza.
Trump's new social media platform, Truth Social, well, I had read it was supposed to be coming the end of March.
There was an interview with Devin Nunes, who is the CEO of the Truth Social, and I got the impression that, well, this is going to be sometime later in the spring.
But I now realize it's going to be sooner, much, much sooner.
In fact, I was contacted by Nunes, by text, and he's like, hey, let me loop you in with our team over here.
And I'm now inside of the Truth Social beta testing.
And the beta testing is a kind of dry run.
It's a rehearsal. It's being able to start checking out the features on the platform, looking for any kind of bugs or things that don't seem to work very well, create a feedback loop where we let them know.
And I got to tell you, this is going to be a really fun platform.
It's beautifully designed.
It's very simple.
And what I mean by that is that if you're somebody now who uses Instagram or you use Twitter, it's not wrong to look at Truth Social as a kind of hybrid between Instagram and Twitter.
Now, we know there would be a Twitter component.
Trump, of course, loved Twitter.
And one could safely predict that he would want something that will allow him to get back into his element.
And you may almost say, let Trump be Trump again.
And I think he's going to be.
In fact, he did a sort of a test comment, which was then disseminated on social media.
Just goes, get ready, your favorite president will see you soon.
And I think what he's getting at here is, I'm back.
Because here's a guy who's been off of social media now for well over a year.
And so I've, you know, kind of got myself now set up on Truth Social.
I did my first post.
And as I say, this is a simple, beautiful, easy to use, and I predict it's going to be a huge platform.
I also understand that the launch of Truth Social is coming imminently.
In other words, it's an accelerated launch.
They're going to beat their own deadlines.
They're going to put it out there.
It's going to be up and running.
And here's the good thing.
It's working in conjunction with Rumble, which is to say that Truth Social is not going to be dependent on the left and on the tech moguls who would have then the power to pull it down.
They'd have the power over it that Trump doesn't want them to have, rightly so.
And so he recognizes this is what happens when you get burned, is you realize I now have to develop in a way that makes me secure and makes me invulnerable to the kind of attack that, for example, Parler experienced when it took a coordinated strike from Amazon and from Apple and so on.
The Truth Social is going to be using, as I understand it, some Rumble equipment, perhaps some Rumble servers.
And the Truth Social that we're going to see shortly is not the fully developed Truth Social because they have all kinds of ambitious ideas for things that can be added later, streaming services and so on.
And so the idea that Debbie and I sort of transmitted to Trump when we met him in November Of what now?
Was it 20? November of 19 is we were saying, hey, you know, start a network.
And a network doesn't necessarily have to be a TV network, but it has to have a TV component to it.
And it looks like Truth Social is going to be bigger than just a social media platform with all kinds of capabilities down the road.
So this is all very exciting.
I mean, we've been waiting for this for over a year.
Fortunately, we do have some alternative platforms, and I like them all.
I'm on them all. I'm a huge fan of Getter.
I post regularly on Parler.
I post on Gab. I have over a couple of hundred thousand now on Telegram.
And, of course, Rumble.
I post all my videos on Rumble.
And now Truth Social. So I think what we're showing here is that the left...
While they were able to cut us off from our own audience, and one can't say that their censorship policies have been effective in doing that.
That was their goal, and it has achieved its goal in restricting people like me and others on places like YouTube.
So we're banned, we're Shadow banned.
Our influence is shortened.
We have all these strikes against us that we have to try to get cleared.
And so we're all looking to move to greener pastures where we aren't under this kind of cloud.
Again, it's not that I'm going to quit these platforms.
Why quit them? But the point is we're going to set up and be very active on these alternative platforms.
And I think the biggest one of them all will be TruthSocial.
Boy, Mike Lindell is trying to get 10,000 pillows into Canada to give away, to donate to the truckers.
And the Canadians are doing everything that they can to make it difficult to stall him, to block him.
So this is Mike.
You know, he won't give up. And he's pushing to get this.
He's getting one permit after another.
Well, they need another permit. You need another permit.
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I want to talk about the kind of fascist intimidation that is used by the media, and in this case I mean the Canadian media and the U.S. media, in going not against the truckers, but against people, ordinary people who support the truckers, who make small contributions to the truckers.
Let's look at the case of a gelato cafe in Ottawa that is called Stella Luna.
It is owned by a woman named Tammy Giuliani, employs about 40 people.
And on February 5th, the owner, Tammy Giuliani, sent a $250 donation to the truckers.
And now that wasn't known at the time.
And to quote Tammy Giuliani, she says basically that she supported the fact that these guys were standing up for small business.
They're standing up for freedom.
She says, I loved what they were doing.
I thought it needed to be said.
And so she decided to help him out.
But now this donation has become public because evidently someone hacked into the GoFundMe account.
This was the GiveSendGo account.
And there was an article in Reuters that published the list of the donors with a kind of a spreadsheet of what the hackers came up with.
By the way, it's very interesting.
Twitter, which had censored the Hunter Biden story, claiming that they thought that that was hacked.
Now, it wasn't hacked. And Twitter subsequently had to back down and apologize for doing that.
But here, Twitter is perfectly allowing this hack of the names of people who have contributed to the truckers.
And here's an interesting post by the Washington Post.
This just came out today.
And that is, the Washington Post is now sending emails to people who gave money.
And this is someone who gave $40.
I'm going to read the email. I'm a reporter at the Washington Post, and I'm writing about leaked data on Give, Send, Go contributions to the trucker convoy in Canada.
Your name and email address are associated with a $40 contribution.
Can you tell me if this matches your records?
And then what motivated you to contribute to this campaign?
So clearly what they're trying to do here is get these people's names flushed out so that they can be harassed and they can be intimidated.
And we know that that's happening because it happened to Tammy Giuliani.
Let me describe it. She goes...
She says that her staff began to receive threats once her donation was publicized on Twitter.
She says that they're, quote, they're threatening to throw bricks through our window.
They're threatening to come and get us.
We said lock the door. We'll find out what's going on.
And so this woman is now backing off.
Now she's basically saying, listen, I'm sorry.
I thought I was supporting a good cause.
I didn't mean to cause any trouble.
We support a lot of good causes.
So, in short, she's been intimidated.
And no surprise, they forced her to close her store.
The Gelato Cafe is now shut down.
So this is pure socialist intimidation.
I mean, just think about all the things you read about socialist societies where people are encouraged to rat on their neighbors.
Hey, I saw my neighbor.
He was reading a book about freedom.
Think about all the way in which the Chinese crackdowns using technology against people who go against the regime.
Well, all of this is now here.
I mean, it's in the West. It's in Canada.
It's in America. And you know what's interesting is that the media is Is playing a willing accessory role in this kind of thuggery.
Now the most surprising development in this whole story, let me read this.
This is a tweet this morning.
I failed to see why any journalist felt the need to report on a shop owner making such an insignificant donation to get them harassed.
It's unconscionable and journalists need to do better.
And the author of this tweet is none other than Ilhan Omar.
I remember when I first saw it, I had to sort of do a double take.
I thought it might be someone with a similar name.
And I'm tempted here to sort of look for some ulterior motive, but I'm actually not going to.
I think one of the striking things we find when we look at politics is that you have very bad people who sometimes do something nice.
Or you have very good people who sometimes do something wrong.
And I think in this case, I just think that here's Ilhan Omar of all people, and it's too much even for her.
Even she sees this idea that these thug operations like the Ottawa Citizen, that's the paper that reported on this in Ottawa, or the Washington Post, these are nothing more than ideological goons, even though they're ideological goons on our own side.
Who are going after ordinary citizens for contributing, what?
40 bucks. This is the state of our society today.
This is the state of our media.
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Project Veritas is clearly one of the best and one of the very few operations doing real journalism.
And what makes that journalism so effective is that it's not based upon an unnamed source told us this, a person who refuses to identify themselves told us that.
It's not that kind of bogus boilerplate that we've become so depressingly familiar with.
What they do is they get people on tape.
And they play the video. It's a little bit like 2,000 mules.
You don't have to take it on faith.
We're going to play the video. And Project Veritas plays the video.
And in this case, they've got video of this guy named Christopher Cole.
He's the FDA Executive Officer of Countermeasures Initiative.
Very interesting guy. And very candid guy.
And what he says on the video, I think, is really telling.
And you can hear him saying it in his own voice.
Now, he's talking about COVID and he's talking about the fact that they are moving toward the idea of everybody in the country, and he says children included, getting an annual shot.
He says, quote, Biden wants to inoculate as many people as possible.
But none of this, I wasn't so much interested in the medical issue here, but what I was interested in is the description of the process that the FDA uses to come up with these decisions.
Quote, He's talking about Big Pharma.
And he says, they give you, meaning us, meaning the FDA, more money.
He goes, great. And it increases the chance of approval.
Wait, stop. What he's saying is that the FDA, the agency charged with regulating Big Pharma, is being bought off by Big Pharma.
And he says that the more money that Big Pharma puts into the FDA, the more chance that they have of getting a particular drug approved.
I'm continuing to quote him. Quote, he says,"...a billion dollars a year into the FDA's budget from people we regulate." Think of what that's saying.
What he's basically saying is that the FDA gets a budget, but there's an additional billion coming in from the very targets of the FDA's investigations.
And he's going, that has obviously corrupted our process.
That dictates who we say yes to and who we say no to.
And here's the money quote, in my opinion.
Quote, The drug companies, the food companies, the vaccine companies, they pay us hundreds of millions of dollars a year to hire and keep the reviewers to approve their products if they can get every person required to get an annual vaccine.
That's a recurring return of money going into their company.
Boom. What's he saying?
He's saying, as I take it, that put aside the merits of getting the shot.
That's not what this is about.
For Big Pharma, and for these companies, and for the vaccine companies, it's a money-making operation.
Which would you rather have?
People get a shot? They make money and then everybody goes back to normal.
No, but what if it's an annual shot?
Then the giant accumulations of cash that these companies have had in the COVID year have become normalized.
It becomes part of their expected annual return.
It's going to be reflected in their stock price.
It's going to be reflected in the bonuses that the corporate executives of these companies have.
Now, we've all known for a while that when government claims to be representing the public interest, No, they're motivated by the same greed and selfishness and motives of aggrandizement that the private sector is, except it's all camouflaged in the rhetoric of altruism.
We're doing this because the public safety demands it.
We're doing this because we're trying to stop pollution.
So there's a noble motive.
A Pharisaic invocation of piety, but in reality, you see, these are crony capitalist operations, and they have co-opted the government agencies that they purport.
There's a whole, by the way, school of scholarship called Public Choice.
It's Public Choice Scholarship that analyzes the ways in which agencies that are supposed to restrict and regulate corporations become captive.
Did those corporations begin to do the bidding of those corporations?
And we have, it seems, a telling and a chilling example right here with the FDA. Ronald Reagan saw it 40 years ago.
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Folks, I've been reading a really remarkable book.
It's called The President's Man, The Memoirs of Nixon's Trusted Aid.
And I'm delighted to welcome the man himself, Dwight Chapin.
He was a personal aide and then deputy assistant to President Nixon.
And he then went on to a very successful career in communications and strategic affairs.
And this, The President's Man, is evidently his first book.
Dwight, welcome to the show.
You have written a terrific book.
I'm kind of sorry you haven't been writing books all along because you're obviously a very gifted writer.
And this book is kind of a window into the world, well, your world, But also the world of Nixon.
What gave you the idea to write this book now?
Well, I wrote the book now for a couple of reasons.
Principally, Getting the history down.
I had sat with it for such a long time, 50 years.
And I knew the man in an extraordinary way, having been so close to him over a couple of decades.
And I thought I owed it to history.
And then more importantly, I thought that it was needed in order to bring some balance to the interpretation of the man himself.
He was such a gifted person.
He was such a great president.
And most people know Nixon either for two things, going to China or Watergate.
And the Watergate cloud casts over everything that he accomplished.
So I thought it was important because of the position that I was privileged to hold to clarify things.
One of the striking observations you make about Nixon, and this almost, to me, sets him apart from any president that I can think of in the modern era, is you say that he was shy, he was an introvert, and that his happiest position, you describe it this way.
You say, the president would work late into the night reading briefing books.
He loved this thinking time.
If you put Nixon with a comfortable chair, an ottoman for his feet, you give him a yellow pad and a cup of hot coffee, he's like in heaven.
And so Nixon, in that sense, preferred a world of isolation.
He was an avid reader of history.
And I think this, it's hard for me to think of any recent president who would meet that definition or come close to it.
Thank you.
Yes, but, Dinesh, let me say I don't know that he preferred isolation.
He had a way of thinking.
He had a way of getting his creative juices flowing.
I mean, you're an incredibly creative man yourself.
You know that there are certain ways that you get yourself positioned or into a certain mental frame of mind, and that creativity seems to expand.
And with Nixon, I mean, he would sit with his pads, and he would have his coffee and so forth, but it wasn't that he was isolating, it was that he was incubating.
He was a strategist at heart, and he was incredibly knowledgeable.
And so I look at it that way.
You describe an interesting process.
I remember seeing Pat Buchanan has a memoir in which he talks about Nixon, and he gives me the idea from that book, Buchanan does, that Nixon didn't really understand the conservatives.
In fact, Buchanan quotes Nixon saying something like, Who are these conservatives?
Tell me about them, you know?
And you, in your book, give a different angle.
You say that Buchanan sort of represented, you may say, the hard right, but Nixon also had guys like Ray Price, Len Garment, one of his attorneys and law partners, Bill Sapphire, who was a speechwriter for Nixon, later went to the New York Times, and you go...
That Nixon liked to have this kind of balancing act of a range of views.
Talk a little bit about why Nixon cherished having competing points of view around him.
Yes, this is part of his confidence factor.
This is part of how well he was anchored.
He could draw views from any number of different places.
I mean, he had Pat Moynihan as part of the staff.
And then he has Pat Buchanan.
I mean, you get across the ideological span, if you will, he was able to draw that in and use that to enhance his own thinking or understanding on issues.
Pat Buchanan is one of my closest friends.
And Pat was extremely important in the whole Nixon operation.
And the president loved the views that he got from Pat.
But he knew right where Pat was coming from, and Pat was on the conservative side of the ledger.
But it was important to Nixon not to just rely on Pat, not because Pat was a conservative, but because Nixon was incredibly pragmatic, and he liked drawing from these other men.
I think when we look back at Nixon and we try to classify him ideologically using today's framework, it's a little bit hard to do because he was a law and order man.
At the same time, I would say domestically and socially, he was something of a liberal.
He didn't hesitate to use government programs, for example, for what he saw as necessary purposes.
In the foreign policy domain, he was anti-communist, to be sure.
But he wasn't sort of one of those rollback guys.
I remember a series of books that Nixon wrote even after the presidency where he described what he called hard-headed detente.
He wanted to figure out a tough-minded way that we could get along with the Soviet Union.
And my question is this, in the end...
Was Nixon wrong about the Soviet Union because the Soviet collapse occurred in a way perhaps that shocked us all, but was nevertheless midwifed not so much by the Nixon strategy but by the Reagan strategy?
I'm not sure on that, Dinesh.
Let me just say that His view of foreign policy, the world, world affairs, this is an evolutionary thing.
This is not static.
It's changing.
I was really struck by the reality that when Nixon went to China, 50 years ago, he was in this geopolitical exercise where he had Russia on one side and China on the other, and he had them separate, and he was working both of them in that case, and particularly against the Vietnam, trying to solve the Vietnam War.
But we just finished the Olympics.
Officially, America is not even there.
You've got China and Russia close to each other and their leaders standing there.
And this is not, I don't believe, what Nixon envisioned.
Very interesting. Let's take a pause.
When we come back, I want to explore further the enigma that was Richard Nixon.
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I'm back with Dwight Chapin.
He's the author of The President's Man.
He's a former personal aide and then deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon.
We're talking here about the enigma of Nixon.
Let me start by asking you, Dwight, I mean, here you are now reflecting back on your earlier life, where at a young age, you found yourself right there in the middle of things, working with Bob Haldeman, who was the chief of staff, right there with Nixon, in a sense, managing Nixon's day.
And how does that experience feel to you now with some perspective and with some time having passed?
Well, it feels, because I've written The President's Man, it feels very familiar because I've spent so much time reflecting back using archival materials, my diaries, letters that had been exchanged with Bob Haldeman and so forth.
So right now the feelings are very raw.
I worked with a collaborator who was very helpful in that he He kept asking me as we did certain things, how does that feel?
And it's amazing how when you start focusing, you can...
Count up the feelings that you had 50 years ago.
For me, going back and doing this was a labor of love.
I admired the man so much.
And to be able to, at 81 years old, have the opportunity to go back and capture these memories, capture these events, and try to describe the man I knew was a real privilege.
I mean, the feeling I got as I read your book was almost a wistful sense that here was a man of genuine greatness who was undone.
There's the Greek phrase of the hamartia, which is sometimes described a little bit incorrectly as a tragic flaw.
But you say in your description of Nixon, he was a political genius, but he missed completely the dangers of Watergate.
Talk a little bit about what was it about Nixon that gave him a blind spot?
I mean, he knew that he hated the media.
He knew the media hated him.
He must have known that they were out to get him.
What made him blind to the dangers that they posed to his presidency?
Well, he was very aware of his adversaries.
The one thing that he was not aware of And that is the sad part of this whole thing, is that he was loyal and trusted his counsel, John Dean.
And for nine months, John Dean lied to Richard Nixon.
And we have this documented without question.
In the back of the book, we have the appendix.
A reader can take and go back into the appendix of our book and read the transcript.
And we also...
Give instructions, specific instructions on where to go on the internet with a laptop or whatever, and you can hear what Nixon and Dean are saying, as well as read the transcript.
And there is no question.
That John Dean completely misled Richard Nixon.
And so for nine months, he never knew the truth.
I used the comparison the other day, Denise, where, do you remember...
Robert McNamara was running the Defense Department, and later when he wrote his memoirs, he admitted that he had been lying to Lyndon Johnson, supplying inaccurate information to Lyndon Johnson.
Lyndon Johnson is trying to run the Vietnam War, and his Secretary of Defense is giving him false information.
This is very similar.
Richard Nixon is trying to figure something out, and John Dean is giving him incorrect information because John Dean is trying to save his own skin.
Now, you describe in Watergate, you have these kind of kooks and hoodlums, people like Gordon Liddy, and they plan this burglary.
You make it really clear, and I think history acknowledges, Nixon didn't know about that, right?
He knew nothing about it.
They execute this burglary, and Nixon is later caught in the cover-up, and that's really what Watergate was.
It's the effort to cover this up and And as you say, Nixon was trying to kind of clean it up and sort of get rid of it because it obviously was not something he wanted to be associated with.
The reason I'm mentioning all this, though, is because we're now dealing with a, I would say, quite similar scandal in which it appears that the Clinton campaign at the highest levels...
They organized, with the collusion of the FBI and also of the media, the planting of false information regarding Russia on Trump.
They knew they didn't have anything on Trump, but they wanted to make it seem like they had to damage him politically.
I just like your assessment with the perspective of history.
How does Watergate compare to this scandal, where it appears that this is not a case where some other guys did something and then Hillary, but Hillary.
This is coming from the Hillary campaign itself.
Yes, it's so un-American and it's so unbelievable what they did.
Now, I think we were dealing with a deep state issue, too, back in the Nixon years.
It was always there.
He knew it was there.
He had experienced it through the Eisenhower years.
But this most recent situation, these reveals, thank God for Durham.
I mean, I was thinking of Jack Kennedy yesterday when I was on the airplane.
I thought if he was rewriting Profiles in Courage, I think we may have a new candidate coming along here named John Durham.
If that man sticks with pursuing the truth and getting the truth out to the American public, he will have made one of the great contributions because there is something very wrong at the center of this.
And in my opinion, the wrongness not only lies with the Clinton aspect of this thing, but in terms of January, you know, people talk about January of 2021.
There's the January right after Trump was elected and the meeting in the Oval Office where members of the Obama administration Are going to go brief Trump the next day.
And starting right in that little piece of time is the effort to undermine a new president of the United States that was fairly elected.
And they start undermining and undermining and bringing this Russia hoax back.
Personally, I think it's outrageous.
It's wrong.
And I'm just hoping that Durham gets it nailed.
Dwight Chapin, you've written a terrific book.
It's called The President's Man, The Memoirs of Nixon's Trusted Aid.
And here you bring this kind of wonderful, strategic and intelligent man right to life.
But I also like your personality as it emerges through the book, in which you're, you know, you're learning your way and you're being given advice by Haldeman.
I think at one point he says to you things like, you know, If Nixon asked you a question and you don't know the answer, you tell him you don't know and you're going to find out.
Don't try to BS your way through.
Right, right. That was a great piece of advice and I followed it and it paid off.
And I joke about it, but there were times the president would look at me and he would say, you don't understand what I mean, do you?
And I'd say, that's right, sir.
I don't, but I'll find out.
Awesome. Thank you very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Dinesh. This is terrific.
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If we can put a man on the moon...
And usually what follows is somebody's trying to get funding for some housing program, or they're trying to fix homelessness, or they're trying to do something domestically in society.
And they use the man on the moon analogy to suggest that if we can do that, surely we can do this.
And so the concept of the man on the moon, the successful project of NASA, the Aeronautics and Space Administration, to put men on the moon, that has now become almost the reference point, the case study of, you may say, government success.
Why? Because this project was pursued, at least through the 1960s, through the Kennedy administration, and subsequently through the To the Johnson administration.
And of course, in 1969, the United States did put the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong.
And so this is sort of the glory days of NASA. And to this day, we find that those glory days are invoked.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we?
Blah, blah, blah. Now, there's a very interesting article in Commentary which talks about, well, they call it good NASA, bad NASA. And they point out that for every achievement that you can say about NASA, you've got to recognize that there's a lot of bad stuff.
That has happened with NASA also.
So, for example, NASA was indeed successful, a huge and, by the way, very expensive operation to put a man on the moon.
I didn't realize this, but it's pointed out in this article, 400,000 people worked on this project.
And it consumed over 4% of the federal budget over a decade.
So think about that. This was a substantial commitment and allocation to do that.
And it was successful, and was it worth it?
I would say perhaps yes, because just the idea of human beings, really, for the first time in history, being able to sort of leave this planet and set foot on the moon, I mean, that does represent some kind of human accomplishment.
Not in utilitarian terms.
You could have, well, what did we get out of it?
Some moon rocks, really?
But looked at it from the point of view of the human imagination and human aspiration.
Okay, that was a NASA accomplishment.
But one can step back and say, what has NASA done since then?
I mean, here's NASA, this heavily funded agency.
And what have they actually done if you had to put your finger on it in the last, let's say, 50 years?
Well, It turns out they've done, I'd say a little, they've done some things.
They've done some space telescopes, they've done some Mars rovers.
And none of this, by the way, is to imply that there aren't, you know, brilliant and smart people and scientists and technicians working at NASA. Of course there are.
But NASA has had also a lot of failures, one on top of the other.
And if you really look at why NASA has had these failures, you begin to realize that they've had these failures not because of NASA by itself, but because of the way in which NASA has been viewed by the Congress.
As nothing more than a kind of boondoggle, as a jobs program, as a way to bring, you may say, pork to various congressmen and senators' home districts.
And so NASA would come up with these ideas, and typically very expensive ideas.
Now, we know they're very expensive.
You might say, well, you know, space is expensive, Dinesh.
If you want to put boosters, rockets, send people into space, it's going to cost a whole lot of money.
Well, it does cost a whole lot of money, but if you follow what Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX, he's very careful to reuse rockets.
He's very careful to sort of figure out ways to keep the cost down.
He's approaching space like an entrepreneur, and he's also approaching space like a business.
If ultimately you want to have, let's just say, consumer tourism to space, if you want to give people a chance to go to the moon, you basically say, okay, well, how much are they willing to pay to do that?
And how much revenue does that mean for me?
And how much does each trip have to cost so I can make that happen and make it worthwhile?
But see, Congress doesn't do any of this.
The way they look at it is if there's an expensive space program going on, people go, well, What's it going to mean for my district?
Are they going to be building all kinds of equipment here, all kinds of accelerators?
And are we going to be launching boosters from here?
And are we going to use a lot of technical people?
Are universities going to get massive research grants?
So from Congress's point of view, this is just another way to raid the public purse.
And the net effect of it is not only to waste a whole bunch of money, your money and my money, by the way, but also at the end of it to say, well, NASA seems to have forgotten to do what it once knew how to do well, which is to fly people into space.
NASA now realizes that it's so costly for NASA to do that, that NASA's actually better off cutting a deal with Elon Musk and maybe later with Jeff Bezos and say, listen, you do it!
We'll pay you to do it.
So ultimately what's happening is that these private entrepreneurs and tycoons are kind of moving ahead of NASA in the space business.
There's a kind of parallel to this, by the way, and that is when the government decided to sequence the human genome, the so-called Human Genome Project, by the way, headed by Francis Collins, who has been one of Fauci's sidekicks in the COVID issue.
But Francis Collins was spearheading the Human Genome Project.
And a private entrepreneur in San Diego says, listen, I don't need a big government program.
I'll do it. And I'll do it faster than those guys.
And he did. Now, eventually, he sort of decided to cooperate with them and share the credit.
But that was just munificence on his part.
This shows you how nimble and effective the private sector is compared to government.
I think ultimately what seems to have...
Reduced the effectiveness of NASA, allowed bad NASA to triumph over good NASA, is not the lack of intelligence, is not the lack of know-how, but is simply the fact that this is just another big, fat government program.
Of all the careers that I've contemplated in my younger days, and I'm not talking about when I was five and I wanted to be an astronaut, or when I was ten, I wanted to be the world chess champion.
I'm talking about careers I seriously considered when I was in my late teens or twenties, when I was in college and sort of charting my path forward.
I did seriously consider the idea of becoming a Dante Scholar.
And it was an idea proposed to me at Dartmouth by a professor named Robert Hollander, one of the Probably a handful of leading Dante scholars in the world.
He was actually a professor at Princeton, but he taught at Dartmouth in the summer.
And I took his Dante course.
I did very well. And at the end of it, he's like, have you ever thought about making a career in Dante scholarship?
And I actually remember asking him at that time.
I go, well, I said, it's an interesting idea, but I said, it's just a single poem, one poem.
You want me to devote, like, my life to a single poem?
What's so great about that poem?
And he made an almost offhand comment that has sort of stayed with me over the years.
He goes, well, he goes, this is a poem, and he was referring, in a sense, to its topic, but he was also speaking more broadly, he goes, that will give you a foretaste of heaven.
What a statement, right?
A foretaste of heaven.
So Dante is describing Inferno, Paradiso, and heaven.
But the poem itself says Professor Hollander is going to give you an experience of what that will actually be like.
Not the experience of reading about Dante's heaven, but the experience of going to heaven.
And I thought this was very intriguing.
And... What he was promising really was a kind of an intellectual, a feast of the intellect and of the imagination.
There's so much to say about the Divine Comedy.
I just want to talk a little bit about how to even approach and read this great Christian epic.
In my view, the greatest of all Christian epics.
And one of the handful of great epics of all time.
This is in the Divine Comedy.
It's in the company of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid.
And perhaps Milton's Paradise Lost.
And pretty much the list is right there.
Now, the Divine Comedy is divided into three parts.
There's Hell, which is called Inferno.
There's Purgatory, and we'll talk about Purgatory, because Purgatory, at least in some quarters of Christianity, is a very odd and ambiguous concept.
Purgatory? What? Isn't there just Heaven and Hell?
What's this nonsense about Purgatory?
We'll talk about that.
And then Paradiso, or Paradise.
And Dante's journey is essentially from one to the other.
The work is divided into a hundred cantos.
Cantos are, well, the word canto just means song, but you can call these chapters.
Each chapter runs about 130, 140 lines.
Some are a little longer, some are a little shorter, but Dante is very careful with numbers.
The Inferno has 34, The Purgatorio has 33, and Paradise has 33.
So, that's 100 right there.
And each of these cantos, or songs, is further subdivided into what is called tersets.
A terset is essentially three lines.
And Dante uses a kind of rhyming scheme that he calls terza rima, which basically means triple rhyme.
And it's a beautiful rhyming sequence That runs through the entire poem and works, obviously, beautifully in Italian.
Now, rhyming is kind of easy in Italian for the obvious reason that pretty much every Italian word ends with a vowel.
And since there are only a handful of vowels, it's not difficult to have rhymes in Italian.
much more difficult, by the way, to have rhymes in English.
And the reason all of this is relevant is that when you think about the Divine Comedy, you ask yourself, how can I read an Italian poem?
Well, you have to read an Italian poem in translation, but right away you have the problem.
How do you translate a poem that rhymes so easily in Italian that's not going to be easy to rhyme in English?
Well, it turns out that to this problem, there have been three different solutions.
Solution number one, you have poets.
And this has been attempted in the last, both in the 20th century and early 21st.
You have American poets and Western poets who go, listen, I'm going to make it rhyme.
I'm going to... I'm going to take the Italian and figure out a way to make it rhyme in English, but because English is so much more hard to rhyme in, what happens is that the poems end up kind of forcing the issue or changing the meaning.
They're working so hard to get the rhyme that it's not exactly what Dante said.
And so, for this reason, I think that the rhyming versions of the Divine Comedy should be skipped.
I mean, they're interesting to look at once you really are familiar with Dante, just to kind of see what that effort produces, but realistically, that is not really Dante.
Now, the other approach goes to the other extreme, and it's people who say, listen, this rhyming business is nonsense.
We need to capture the actual word-for-word meaning of what Dante said, and so you have prose translations of Dante that go word-for-word.
And there's a certain usefulness to this because, after all, there is an attempt here to capture with literal authenticity and accuracy Dante's own words.
The problem with it, of course, is that it misses the fact that Dante was a poet.
Dante was delivering his words in a certain, not just rhythmic, but you may say poetic way.
And so I think the best translations of Dante do not try to force the rhyme and don't go completely in the prose direction, but work to sort of get close to the poetic force of the original.
And for this reason, it is those kinds of translations that work the best.
Now, perhaps the most famous translation of Dante was done by a guy named Singleton.
I think it's Charles Singleton, the Singleton translation.
But the Singleton translation is known largely, I mean, it's a good translation, but it's known because it has prodigious notes.
In fact, it has notes so long that they exceed the length of the poem itself.
And so the Singleton translation, invaluable, by the way, for Dante scholars.
But I really wouldn't recommend starting with it because it really is so dense that very often a single word of Dante will provoke pages and pages of Singleton commentary.
The Penguin translation of Dante, which is the one I'll be using for our discussions, is by Mark Musa, and it's a very good one because it's a good translation.
It's God captures some of Dante's poetic force.
Now, it doesn't do what I actually had at Dartmouth and I enjoyed, which was a side-by-side Italian and English translation.
Where you could not only read the English, but you could look over at the Italian.
And my knowledge of Italian, very spotty.
But I could nevertheless get a little feel of what Dante's own language sounds like.
So we don't have that in the Penguin translation.
But no big deal. Because Musa does a really good job.
And his notes are good. And you might ask, well, why do I need notes?
What the heck? What's the point of notes?
Well, the point of notes is because...
Think about it. When we read old books, and this is true, by the way, of Homer, this is true of Shakespeare, we realize we're not the intended audience.
It wasn't written keeping you and me in mind.
It was written for an audience that was presumed to be familiar with certain things that we may not be familiar with.
And the thing about Dante is his landscape is absolutely huge.
The one thing I want to say, and I'll pick up next time more about who Dante is, and I'll talk about Dante's Florence, but here I just want to say the thing about Dante is that his landscape goes from the beginning of time, literally the first characters in time who appear in the Divine Common are Adam and Eve.
So Dante goes all the way from Adam and Eve To the year 1300.
Now to qualify to be in Dante's Divine Comedy, you had to die.
You have to be dead because this is the afterlife.
You can't be in hell or in purgatory or in heaven if you haven't died.
So the only people eligible are people who have died by the year 1300.
But in that huge...
Range, Dante includes, I mean, you have Alexander the Great is in there, and Julius Caesar is in there, and the Emperor Trajan is in there.
A wide assortment of characters, including a lot of people who lived in Dante's own time.
And so the value of notes is that they are a needed enhancement of the text.
Now, you know, you can just pick up The Divine Comedy, read it from beginning to end, you'll get a lot out of it.
But what the notes do is you'll run into all kinds of people, and Dante kind of assumes if you don't know everything about them, you know something about them, something about their milieu, something about their politics, and the notes helps you to clarify that.
So this is a work that can be appreciated for what it is, but it's also a work that I think rewards Patience and study and effort.
And if you combine the kind of naked reading of Dante's Divine Comedy with some attention and some patient examination of the notes, you begin to get the fullness of the experience that Professor Hollander was referring to when he said that this is a poem that can give you a foretaste of heaven.
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