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Feb. 18, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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RED WAVE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep274
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I'm going to tell you today why I'm optimistic about the Republican prospects for the midterms.
Left-wing activist Ibram Kendi wants to know why blacks have more problems in school than whites, and I'm happy to tell him.
Political scientist Charles Kessler joins me.
We're going to talk about a tale of two constitutions, the progressive constitution and the real one.
And you wonder why Richard Gere has sort of disappeared from sight?
It's because he angered the Chinese.
I'll give you details.
And I'm going to continue my discussion of Dante.
I'm going to set Dante the poet against the tumultuous backdrop of late medieval politics in Florence.
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.
A couple of quick announcements before I get going, guys.
I do want to tell you that no podcast on Monday.
It's President's Day, and so I'll pick it up as normal on Tuesday.
Also, Debbie's mom, Mitzi Sestero, has a birthday today.
Happy birthday, Mitzi!
And I also want to mention I've been having a lot of fun on Truth Social.
I've been doing part of the beta testing, and it seems to have caught a tiny glitch, but it's all fixed now.
And so it's nice to see this coming along beautifully.
And it's, I'm told, going to be going live sooner than expected.
All right. I want to talk about the midterms.
And we don't want to be complacent about the midterms.
And of course, the Democrats have shown that they know how to manage the election better than we do.
We might be better at campaigning.
They're better at election management.
And I think you know what I'm talking about.
Nevertheless, this is not a time, by the way, to sit home and to wallow in despair.
The opposite is true. This tremendous opportunity.
And it's time to, well, politically speaking, metaphorically speaking, stick a fork in Biden.
Yes, right in the buttocks.
And I think if we do this effectively, he's not even going to be able to go, come on, man.
He's going to be like, come on, man.
So, the issues are lining up on our side.
So, I'm going to talk about what are the little sharp ends of that fork.
Well, the first one is...
Law and order. Safety.
The Democrats came up with defund the police.
They're trying to run away from it.
Oh, we never said defund the police.
Well, yes, you did. It wasn't just the squad.
It wasn't just AOC and Ilhan Omar.
The mainstream of the Democratic Party embraced the slogan.
Many police departments were defunded, if not demoralized.
That is issue number one.
I think it's a powerful issue for Republicans in the midterm.
Number two. We're good to go.
I think that's a powerful issue.
And then that is then reinforced by the fact that Biden's taken a very soft view toward China.
Notice he's rattling the war drums about Russia.
But a far more dangerous power today, China, is really being coddled.
The Olympics are kind of a good example.
The United States has a symbolic diplomatic boycott.
But no, all our athletes are there at the Olympics.
So... This was a kind of an ineffective sanction, if you can even call it that.
Immigration. Wow.
We've seen the highest number of illegal border crossings in history.
Almost two million arrests made this year alone.
Wow. So this is Biden essentially just yanking open the gates at the border and letting people in.
And the change from Trump couldn't be more stark.
And the political opportunism of this couldn't be more grotesque.
And then inflation.
That's the pocketbook.
And we're talking about inflation that's driven by Biden's big spending.
It's also driven by the promiscuous monetary expansion of the Biden Fed.
And no wonder we're seeing inflation now, 6%, 7%, now 7.5%, the latest numbers.
Gas prices are at a high.
And that's not just because of generic inflation, because generic inflation would seem to fall pretty evenly across the board.
But no, Biden has blocked new natural gas and oil permits on federal lands.
He stopped the construction of the Keystone Pipeline.
So you put all of that together and you can see why we've seen such a sore...
And finally, schools.
The leftist enthusiasm for continuing shutdowns, for unreasonable mask mandates, and for the sanction of open racial indoctrination Open trans indoctrination in the schools.
And parents are realizing they've lost control, not just lost control of the schools, but lost control of the schools to left-wing radicals who essentially are turning the children against their parents, who are attacking the values of the parents, and who are polluting the children's minds at a time when their minds aren't fully developed, they don't have the full skills of critical thinking, they're subject to this left-wing indoctrination.
So parents want to take Back the schools.
Let's call it make the public schools great again.
And if we put these issues together, we have a powerful formula for really letting these guys have it in November and showing them that their effort to sort of transform America in this way and to create on top of it a one-party state, well, the American people are not okay with that.
Kind of a crazy story about Mike Lindell.
He was trying to get 10,000 pillows to the truckers, and the Canadians were blocking him, finding all kinds of pretext not to let the pillows get in.
And so the Daily Beast apparently got a hold of Mike Lindell, and Mike Lindell jokingly said to them, Well, you know, maybe I'll just fly over Canada and, like, parachute these pillows in.
And the Daily Beast evidently thought, this is a ridiculous scheme by Mike Liddell to fly over Canada.
So, apparently these idiots thought that he was being serious and did a, you know, big article about this.
So, here's Mike Liddell.
And I hope he's having a good laugh at their expense because here's a guy who, by the way, stands pretty strong even when...
When they try to block him and thwart him at every stage.
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I want to talk about the flawed logic of critical race theory as we can see it dramatically in a recent statement by one of the kind of apostles of CRT. This is Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist.
And now, Kendi recently put out an article, and this was not his article, but he was sharing the article from Vox.
And let's talk about the article first, and then we'll get to Kendi's interpretation.
So the article shows very clearly It's talking about a government accountability office, a GAO study.
And it shows that in K-12 schools across the board, and this doesn't matter if you're dealing with schools that are in more affluent neighborhoods or schools in the suburbs or inner city schools, it makes no difference.
You basically see that black children, black kids, Have much greater disciplinary problems.
And there's a graph here.
It covers a bunch of different things.
Out of school suspensions, in-school suspensions, referral to law enforcement, expulsion, school-related arrests.
And in every case, you see that the numbers for blacks are large, and the numbers for every other group are smaller.
The Asian Americans seem to have the least problems, then whites, then Hispanics, then blacks.
Now, we've seen this pattern in academic achievement, but here we're seeing it on the back end.
We're seeing it on the disciplinary end.
Now, the GAO study is very careful to say that this could point to a systematic pattern of discrimination in the schools, but it doesn't need to because there are other possible explanations for why this would be the case.
But here's where Ibram Kendi comes in.
He doesn't think that there are any other explanations.
So he thinks that there are two explanations.
Number one, black kids are inferior to white kids, and therefore they have more problems because they are more a defective group.
And Ibram Kendi, of course, flatly rejects that possibility, and therefore the only other possibility is racism.
So, according to Kendi, and I'm going to read his statement, to teach a black child that skin color doesn't matter, in other words, we should go for the colorblind idea, is to teach black children that they are being suspended and expelled at higher rates than white kids, not because of their skin color, but because there is something wrong with them.
So, notice the dichotomy that Kendi sets up here.
Either you have blacks, black kids are inferior to white kids, Or there's something wrong with the black kids.
And because nobody wants to say the first, he says we have to go to the second.
And this is the reasoning that leads to, you may say, critical race theory.
Obviously, this is supposed to be a finding of discrimination.
There's a very interesting statistic here that I want to pull out because it doesn't deal with race at all.
It deals with gender. It's talking about boys versus girls.
And it shows that on the exact same measures of disciplinary problems, and this has to do with suspensions, expulsions, arrests, Turns out, boys are much more over-represented than girls.
Put it differently, boys have more behavioral problems than girls.
Now, why is that? Is that because boys are intrinsically inferior to girls?
No. But boys actually cause more trouble.
So in other words, the reason that you have boys who are being suspended more is they do more things that lead to suspension.
Why are they being arrested more?
Because boys are more likely to do violent stuff than girls.
And this is all taken as obvious that everybody knows it's true.
Well... It turns out that when you're dealing with blacks and whites and different ethnic groups, you also have major behavioral differences between groups.
Now, of course, Kendi very quickly assumes that if there are behavioral differences, that is because of racism.
Racism is causing the behavioral differences, but there are many other causes that need to be taken into account.
And I think this is where critical race theory is completely missing the boat.
Many years ago, a Stanford sociologist named Dornbush was very puzzled at why Asian American kids were doing better in the San Francisco schools.
And so he said, let me do a study.
It can't be because Asian Americans are somehow superior to every other ethnic group.
And so he does a study and he concludes...
You may say, no surprise, Asian-American students study harder.
End of story. So, by and large, he found that the white kids put in like an hour a day of homework, and the black kids half an hour, and the Hispanic kids 45 minutes, and the Asian-American kids two and a half hours.
So, there you have an adequate and full explanation.
You don't have to go to theories of cranial superiority or biological.
No, it's basically behavioral differences.
Now, These behavioral differences themselves are rooted in broader cultural factors, the amount of importance that families put on education, the structure of the family.
For example, single-parent households where the mom is working or has all kinds of other things to worry about, not enough time to supervise the child's homework habits and so on.
So, I think what we find is that in the black community, particularly when you deal, not just in the inner city, by the way, you have serious problems of the breakdown of the black family.
You have the appeal of gangs where young black kids look to gangs to provide surrogate families to the families that they don't seem to have at home.
And so, all of this, I think, is the actual cultural basis for behavioral differences between groups.
Now, Kendi dismisses this out of hand.
There's no recognition that he even knows this exists.
And so what you have is the idiotic dichotomy.
Either blacks are inferior or blacks are the victims of systematic racism.
And the true explanation is neither.
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I mentioned a couple of days ago the great news that in a recall election, three of the most left-wing members of the San Francisco School Board were tossed out.
And tossed out not by some 51-49 margin, but giant margins in excess of 70% in all cases.
Now, these three leftists on the school board, I mean, they are actually probably three of the dumbest people in San Francisco.
I'm talking here about Gabriela Lopez, Fauga Moliga, and Allison Collins.
And they were part of this group.
That was pushing to rename the schools in San Francisco.
And to get an idea of how monumentally inane these guys are, they wanted to throw off...
Well, they wanted to kick off Washington because he was a slave owner.
So that's it.
Enough said. With Lincoln, they couldn't say that he was a slave owner because he wasn't.
So they go, Lincoln's policies were, quote, detrimental to Native peoples.
One strike and you're out.
But to me, the funniest one was Paul Revere.
And so apparently somebody did a kind of a Wikipedia or Google search.
This is the extent of scholarship at the San Francisco School Board.
And they said that Paul Revere had taken part in an expedition that stole the land of the Penobscot Indians.
Well, it turns out they misread the article.
Revere did have a role in what's called the Penobscot Expedition, but this was a campaign against the British, not against the Indians.
So, Paul Revere essentially was kicked off a school for reasons that had nothing to do with what the guy actually did.
Reacting to their expulsion, the head of the San Francisco school board, and this is Gabriela Lopez, she tweets out, she goes, so if you fight for racial justice, this is the consequence.
Don't be mistaken. White supremacists are enjoying this.
And the support of the recall is aligned with this.
So she's basically acting like the recall was led by white supremacists.
Now think about this. 70% of the voters in San Francisco are white supremacists.
Now, the truth is, first of all, in San Francisco, illegals can vote locally.
And so, illegals were part of the vote to throw these three scoundrels out.
Number two, the gay community had organized as part of the recall.
In fact, what kind of makes me chuckle, the guy leading the gay effort is a guy who dressed up as Abraham Lincoln, and he called himself Gaybraham Lincoln.
So, Gaybraham Lincoln was leading the gay effort to throw these leftists out.
And then the Chinese played a leading role in this effort, and one of the sponsors of the recall resolution, an Indian guy, Siva Raj.
So this whole notion that these white supremacists are doing this, no, this is leftists coming to the dismaying realization that the very ethnic groups and the very kind of identity politics groups they champion...
Those people themselves don't like this nonsense.
They want good schools.
They like Abraham Lincoln.
They like George Washington.
They like Paul Revere.
Well, the next big recall coming up in San Francisco, and this I'm going to be watching closely in the summer, Chesa Boudin, adopted son of one Bill Ayers.
This is a guy who has been letting criminals out left and right.
Very bad guy. And think of it, the very bad guy, the...
The wolf, if you will, is guarding the hen house.
And so, again, he's on the ballot, and I hope the San Francisco voters recognize that if you want a city that's even halfway safe, it's time to recall Chesa Budin.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast an old friend of mine, Charles Kessler.
Charles is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.
He's editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
He's a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, and he's written a whole bunch of excellent books, the most recent which we'll talk about, Crisis of the Two Constitutions.
Charles, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Boy, I was thinking back to when we first met, which, as I recall, was 1983, because that's the year I graduated from college.
I was an English major, but I said to myself, I don't know a whole lot about political philosophy.
And so I applied for something called the Publius Program with the Claremont Institute.
I came out to Claremont, lived in a dorm with about eight other fellow scoundrels, and you were one of our tutors.
That's right. Yes, 1983.
I remember it very well.
Not quite like yesterday, but still, it's great to see you again.
And now your children can become Publius Fellows.
It's been sufficient time that they're the right age.
But those were great days.
Of course, in America, 1983 was a good year.
You were just out of Dartmouth and America had Ronald Reagan as president.
And, you know, even though the Cold War was on, it was a good time to be a conservative.
Absolutely. And of course, one of our buddies and one of your colleagues at Claremont was Larry Arnn, who subsequently became and is the president of Hillsdale College.
And as I remember, our kind of mentor, yours and indirectly mine, was this kind of Older dude, Harry Jaffa, who has had a very, I think, important influence on American conservatism.
Say a word about why you went out to Claremont to study with Jaffa and what Jaffa represents in American political philosophy.
Right, well... I went out to Claremont actually to teach with Harry Jaffa, I mean, to be a teacher at CMC, Claremont McKenna College.
Jaffa was already there and would soon retire from formal teaching.
But I certainly went there.
I myself was a Publius Fellow three years before you in the summer of 1980.
So I went out to study with Jaffa at that point.
I had written a piece about him, which was a cover story for National Review in 1979, which led me to meet him and to discover the Claremont Institute and to meet all of the wonderful guys at the Institute and to agree to come out.
And that led eventually to this position.
In 1983. But Jaffa, who finally has a book about his intellectual life and career by Glenn Elmer, a very good new book, was really one of the great re-founders of political philosophy as a discipline in America, in the American Academy.
But he was also a, he wrote Barry Goldwater's acceptance speech in 1964.
He was a very activist professor.
He was a principled conservative and he spent his life trying to refashion American conservatism to be more effective and more American.
To appreciate the genius of the Declaration of Independence, of the power of the idea of human equality, and of course the truth of that idea.
And I think, although he was cantankerous and engaged in many disputes over the years, and always thought less of himself than he should have in a way, He was successful.
I mean, I think the American conservative movement was changed and in favorable directions by his long career and influence.
It's interesting, Charles, and I think I want to give people a sense of how there was a conservative intellectual movement that had a web of connections.
You went to Harvard.
You studied under a Harvard political scientist, a conservative named Harvey Mansfield.
Then you went out to Claremont to be colleagues with Harry Jaffa.
Harry Jaffa was himself...
One of the key students of a German émigré philosopher named Leo Strauss.
And among Leo Strauss's students were people like Alan Bloom, a political philosopher named Joseph Cropsey, Martin Diamond, and others.
So there was this intellectual wing, you might say.
And I don't think we saw ourselves entirely as an adjunct of the Reagan administration, but we were, loosely speaking, trying to provide a certain...
of what the Reagan movement meant.
Yes, that's right.
And to encourage it, you know, and to help it prosper, but also to understand it and to appreciate what it ought to do or could do for America.
And in that sense, you know, Reagan was himself so marinated in the American conservative movement that you had a very different sort of situation from Trump's conservatism.
I mean, Trump was not marinated in the conservative movement.
I mean, he was a transactional politician in many ways.
He didn't have the kind of intellectual background that Reagan had, actually.
He wasn't widely appreciated at the time, but I think it has been We were a hardy band of young fellows back in those days, fighting a very good fight.
And the conservative movement is, you know, it's different today than it was then, but it's better off for Jaffa's efforts and for Strauss's efforts and for that whole intellectual school.
I have to say that my mentor at Harvard, Harvey Mansfield, is still teaching.
He is about, I think, to turn 90 years old in a few days or a few weeks, and he's still in the classroom, which is a remarkable example for all of us.
Charles, let's take a break.
When we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about all this, but also about your important book, Crisis of the Two Constitutions.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with my friend Charles Kessler, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, author of Crisis of the Two Constitutions.
Charles, we were talking about the conservative intellectual movement of the Reagan era, which appears to have become somewhat, I don't know, fractured is the right word or dissipated is the right word.
I mean, certainly a number of the conservative intellectuals Turned against Trump.
And some of them were very dug in and are still dug in against Trump.
And I think that has weakened the alliance between the conservative political movement and the conservative intellectual movement, which was very strong in the Reagan day.
Yes. I mean, that alliance was always one part policy and one part principles.
And I think the...
Both the policy and the principles side of the alliance, as you call it, has suffered under Trump and the Trump administration.
It's not his fault, exactly.
I mean, somewhat his fault.
But it's also the need to recast conservatism in a new idiom.
I mean, the age, the issues are different.
The Soviet Union is gone above all.
The Cold War is over.
Foreign policy has You know, had to be reexamined, it seemed to me.
And the path of America in the world had to be revised.
I mean, NATO may be a very fine alliance, but it's very old.
I mean, it's much older than most such international alliances.
The enemy it was created to defend against is gone, although we have, you know, the Russian nation is itself formidable.
And so on foreign policy, domestic policy, the The questions of immigration, of how the middle class and the working class, let's say, in America are faring in a world of globalized commerce dominated to some extent by China.
These are all issues that needed to be addressed, but that the mainstream of the conservative movement was shying away from.
And in some cases was simply intellectually incapable of examining critically.
And Trump was the great sort of kick in the seat that got everyone to sort of get out of the groove that they were in and to begin to look at these issues in a fresh way.
And in so doing, he was, I think, His principles were American.
I mean, he called his sort of philosophy America first, meaning not exactly the, you know, the World War II, the pre-World War II period, but just the common sense that every nation begins by tending to its own affairs.
And it's, you know, you're in charge of your life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not every other nations in the world.
And you start there.
You try to help other nations as you can, as it helps you.
So all of that I think he brought a refreshing common sense to, but which somewhat bewilderingly absolutely infuriated many of our old friends in the conservative intellectual movement, who became and remain, as you say, never Trumpers.
Charles, a story that you tell in your latest book, which I think is one that encompasses both the Reagan era and the Trump era, is you're talking about a kind of fork in the road in the way that the Constitution is understood and accepted.
You're talking about the emergence of almost a rival constitution, let's call it the progressive constitution, in contradistinction with, well, let's say the real one.
And so, since people may not quite know, what's the difference between these two constitutions?
How would you describe that succinctly?
Well, I mean, a nation can't take two constitutions.
One is the usual number.
And so we're sort of in a situation which a Marxist might call a pre-revolutionary situation, but it doesn't necessarily have to end in something like that, something as grim as that.
Yeah. But the original Constitution was one based on individual rights, natural rights, limited government, and consent.
And a sort of common sense understanding, which you could trace, you know, to its roots in reason or in revelation, that man is a sinful being, a fallen being, a creature divided between passion and reason.
And hence, Prone to go astray, prone to do wrong things, to be blinded by anger or by lust or by other kinds of passionate drives.
And so you need to limit the power that you put in the hands of fallible human beings.
And that means limited government.
And that's the old constitution.
The new constitution is much more optimistic about the nature of man in a way.
It's a progressive constitution.
It really does believe that history guarantees that human nature itself gets better, improves over time, not because of God or any influence larger than man, but simply because of what man does.
Man makes himself, basically, by his success in history, by building civilization.
We don't just change the physical world, we change ourselves.
We change the moral world too.
And so man is now, for the first time, according to progressivism, Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt even and others, a hundred years ago, the school of progressivism said, man has been an evolving being, but now we can take charge of our own evolution.
We don't have to depend upon nature and random experiments, you know, over millions of iterations.
We can have a science that directs how we evolve and how we make ourselves better, how we become more sociable and less selfish.
And if man is constantly improving, then government has to be constantly improving too, both to allow us to get better and to direct us as we get better.
And that means a living constitution, as Woodrow Wilson was one of the first to call it.
That is not a constitution that's hard to change and that is trying to preserve the same rights of human beings in every age, because it's the same human nature in every age.
But a constantly evolving government, That changes to solve whatever the current social problems are and really solve them in such a way that you can permanently predict or you can predict a permanent improvement in human affairs.
It's almost consciously utopian.
It is sort of like making a heaven on earth through social science.
Through social engineering.
And that's the modern constitution.
That's the liberal constitution, which is increasingly, it overlays the old constitution and you have a kind of regime struggle between the two of them.
And that's why our politics is so divided and so deeply worrying today, I think.
So you're saying that the conservatives, if you will, are very much living in the present, but what they're doing is they are hearkening back to the enduring principles of the original constitution.
That's what they're conserving, and that the progressives almost interpret progress as a movement that Away from the founding.
And then I think a second thing that you alluded to, the progressives like the idea of a centralized, sort of scientifically driven expertise in which a kind of knowledgeable panel makes decisions about the society which they think are better than allowing the kind of normal hustle and bustle of society to push us forward.
Yes, that's right. I mean, democracy is problematic for the progressive in a way that it isn't for the constitutionalist, I think.
Because democracy means the rule by majority will.
That's sort of the Democratic Party's view of this question from The very beginning, and it's the modern Democratic Party, the modern progressive movement's view of it as well.
What you really need to make a rational state is science and experts who know how to do things and what to do, frankly.
They're supposed to get the consent of the governed still, but that consent is to be schooled, you know, properly.
It is to be administered through an administrative state that consists of PhD experts and other kinds of experts who interpret popular will in a more rational direction if necessary.
And who coach and tutor and lead like a shepherd leads his sheep forward into, you know, the sunny uplands of progress.
And that is, I think, what so many of us today are revolting against, the condescension of that theory.
I mean, I can well understand why Canadian truckers are...
Packing into Ottawa right now.
There is a sort of generalized resistance or frustration to being treated as, in effect, children who have to be tutored by the state.
Charles, this is awesome stuff.
I think it makes so much sense of what we're dealing with in the world today.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Love to have you back sometime.
His book, Crisis of the Two Constitutions.
Thank you very much, Charles Kessler.
Thank you, Dinesh, it's great to see you.
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Remember Richard Gere.
Remember movies like Pretty Woman?
Richard Gere was a huge star.
In the 1990s.
And then, somehow, he disappeared.
And I remember noticing, what happened to Richard Gere?
Kind of thought, well, maybe he just made plenty of money and decided to go do something else.
But no, it turns out that Richard Gere was blacklisted by Hollywood and blacklisted over his critique of communist China.
There's a new book out called Red Carpet and it has the gory details.
Evidently, The story goes like this.
In 1993, when Richard Gere was handing out an Academy Award, this was for Best Art Direction.
Gere was simply the presiding guy to hand out the award.
But he took time in his opening remarks to decry, quote, the horrendous human rights situation there is in China, not only toward their own people, but toward Tibet as well.
So here's Richard Gere, who's some kind of a Buddhist.
And so he was speaking out against China and he also openly allied himself with one of China's state enemies, the Dalai Lama, who is an enemy, who's a political enemy as well as kind of a religious enemy because he's seen as competing for the minds and the affections of the Chinese.
And Richard Gere has embraced and met with multiple times the Dalai Lama.
Now, in 1997, Richard Gere made a film called A Red Corner.
called a red corner.
And this is a film about an American executive who's trapped in China and is hauled up under charges and is, you kind of, it's a...
It's a journey through the maze of the communist so-called justice system.
And it's very clear this is Kafkaesque.
They don't really have any proper charges.
You don't really have a legitimate defense or defense attorney.
The whole system is a show trial.
And the Chinese, of course, were really upset.
And it turns out about the same time that movie came out, and the movie was not a huge success.
In fact, it came out the same year as Men in Black and My Best Friend's Wedding, both of which kind of dominated the charts.
But it turned out that right around that time...
The Chinese president, this is Zheng Zemin, came to America to visit Bill Clinton, and they were talking about expanding relations and talking about trade deals.
And at the time, this movie was right out there, was being talked about, and apparently upset the Chinese.
And so, you might say, so what?
So what if you upset the Chinese?
So what if you rile up the Communist Party?
Big deal. Well, as it turns out, As we came into the 21st century, the Chinese economy became a global force.
And Hollywood began to see that its future is in China.
So the American movie market, and this is long before COVID, it sort of leveled off.
And by contrast, what was happening in China is a lot of Chinese were moving from rural areas where there were peasants, farmers, moving to the cities, buying apartments, becoming part of the global manufacturing economy.
And these are people ripe for, you know, buying a pair of jeans and also for going to the movies.
And so Hollywood basically made the decision to Kind of play the game with China.
Now, play the game means the Chinese are very strict.
There's certain types of movies, certain types of scenes.
You can't do them in China. And Hollywood is like, we're okay with that kind of censorship.
Chinese censors scrutinize every scene.
So in 2006, Mission Impossible deleted all kinds of scenes the Chinese didn't like.
The 2012 James Bond movie Skyfall had a scene in which a Chinese security guard is killed.
And apparently the Chinese thought, well, this kind of makes our troops look kind of wimpy.
We don't like this. Cut it out.
They cut it out. And so basically Hollywood made the decision, you know, this guy Richard Gere, publicly associated with critique of China, he's a little bit radioactive.
So let's try not to sort of put him out front and center because we're trying to push all our movies in China.
So this is how Richard Gere got canceled.
And of course Richard Gere for the most part said nothing about it.
So, no one really knew.
But this is the reason.
This is a guy who basically hasn't made a big movie since 2008.
I think, was that Unfaithful with Diane Lane?
I think that might have been his...
Yeah, but I think Unfaithful with Diane Lane was his kind of last big movie.
And now the guy is doing apparently independent features with like Nicholas Jarecki and the second best exotic Marigold Hotel, which is...
So I think a movie maybe even with an Indian landscape to it.
So Richard Gere is on a 21st century blacklist.
And again, it's not because he is a communist, as in the McCarthy days, and it's not even because he's a right-winger, because he certainly isn't.
It's simply because he doesn't have a good thing to say about China.
I'm continuing my introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy, and today I want to talk a little bit about the sort of two sides of Dante himself.
We're talking about Dante Alighieri, who lived in the 13th and 14th century, which is to say in the 1200s.
He was born in 1265, and then the early 1300s.
In Florence. Now, Dante was both a poet, that's well known, he wrote the Divine Comedy, but he also wrote other types of poetry, and he was also a political figure, and I'm going to focus a little bit on the politics.
We're going to talk a lot about the politics of Florence, but we'll see that we're talking about universal themes in politics.
Whatever's happening in Florence is kind of the way we see politics all over the place and in all times and places, not just in Italy but everywhere.
Dante was known in his early career as a love poet, and he wrote a collection of poems which was published in a kind of very odd, slender volume called La Vita Nuova, The New Life.
And La Vida Nova is not just a collection of poems, which you might expect it to be, but it's poems together with commentary and literary criticism of those poems integrated with a little bit of memoir and autobiography written by Dante himself.
So you have a remarkable phenomenon, the poet...
He's writing the poem, but then he's also playing critic to the poem, and he's telling you how the poem came about and how it fits into the narrative of his own life.
So this is a kind of, well, I call it a minor masterpiece by Dante in his early career, something that probably we'd study today even if Dante had not written The Divine Comedy.
But there's no comparison in scope, in range, in fame, in importance between La Vida Nuova And Dante's great magnum opus, the Divine Comedy.
But Dante, people don't know as well, was also a thoroughly political figure.
And he was part of the internecine politics of this important medieval city called Florence.
Florence is, by the way, 30 or 40 miles north of Rome.
And at that time, Rome and Florence, there was no country called Italy.
In fact, there was no country called Italy until the 19th century.
And so Italy was divided into little combative city-states that were rivals in economic power, rivals, and they fought over water rights, and they fought over, this castle belongs on the border, it belongs to us, not to you.
So there was a lot of rivalry between these Italian city-states.
But the rivalry also existed in a larger context.
I'll come to that context in a moment.
Let me talk about Florence for a moment.
A city of about 100,000 people.
A city smaller than today's Florence and surrounded by tall walls.
Medieval cities had to be walled to protect them from outside aggression.
And inside of Florence, of course, very densely packed.
And most people lived most of their life outdoors.
Why outdoors? Well, remember, there was no electric lighting, obviously.
There was even no good way to heat homes.
So by and large, people spent a lot of their day outside.
And that means that their lives were public.
And that means that everybody knew everybody else's business.
And that meant that there were a lot of local conflicts outside.
Local kind of clashes.
Sometimes these clashes were between the merchant class and the aristocratic class.
Sometimes they were over grievances that were very personal.
There was a massacre in Florence that was caused in the 1200s.
Over a man, a prominent man in Florence, who was engaged to be married to a woman, he got a better offer from another woman, so he snubbed the first one, and it ended up that the bridegroom, members of his family, members of rival families, all end up killed.
So this is like, you know, this is like godfather-type behavior, but there it is, going all the way back into the 13th century.
And so, this is the world into which Dante was born.
And Dante was also a political figure himself, and he became part of the ruling council of Florence.
He was one of the handful of men that made decisions for the city.
Now, his tenure there was short because they had a kind of rotational system, but even when Dante was not doing that, he was an ambassador, he had important diplomatic posts, so he was a successful politician in Florence.
Until something happened, which we'll get to, that sent him into exile.
Now, if we think of the rivalries in Florence, they have to be set against the bigger rivalries that were occurring across Italy and in Europe at the time.
Now, if you think of the... Italy is shaped like a boot.
And if you think of the boot of Italy, the top third of Italy...
Was these independent city-states, and they were enemies of each other for the most part.
We're talking about places like, well, Florence was probably the most prominent, but there's also Siena and Lucca and Arezzo and Pisa.
And so these are the dueling city-states, all of which were fiercely independent, although sometimes they made alliances for military and other purposes.
Now, the middle of Italy, which includes Rome, this is central Italy, was ruled by the papacy, by the Pope.
And when we say ruled by the Pope, I don't mean that the Pope was kind of the spiritual authority.
The Pope had political and military control over the middle of Italy.
The Pope functioned in all practical respects as a kind of monarch over Middle Italy.
And then the southern part of Italy, this would include, for example, the island of Sicily.
It would include Naples, Italians called Napoli.
So this whole area in southern Italy was ruled by a king.
And this was a French king.
But this French king was also named, in Dante's time, the head of the Holy Roman Empire.
What's the Holy Roman Empire?
Well, it's actually a...
That goes all the way back to Charlemagne in the year 800.
The Holy Roman Empire was the ruled by the king, very powerful entity, not just in Italy, but all throughout Europe.
Now what happens is that the Holy Roman Emperor decides it would be a good idea for him to control not just the south of Italy, but also the north.
And you can imagine how this news would be received by the Pope.
Why? Because the Pope, a guy named Boniface VIII, would now be trapped between the Holy Roman Empire on the north and on the south.
So the Holy Roman Emperor, a guy named Frederick II, Frederick Hohenstaufen, that's his name, gets into a rivalry with the Pope.
Now you may say, wait a minute, aren't all these guys Christians?
What are you talking about?
Why would they clash?
Well, they're clashing because of the rival domains of, you can say, church and state.
Now, it's not that the church, as I say, is a spiritual power and the state is the temporal power.
No. As I mentioned, the church itself has temporal power.
And similarly, the head of the Holy Roman Empire also claims to be God's man.
So, the real issue is, who is God's top man?
Yes, it's nice for the papacy to cooperate with the Holy Roman Empire.
Yes, they're both within the Christian orbit.
But who's kind of numero uno?
That's what the fight is about.
It's an old-style struggle for political power.
And the point I'm trying to make is that this larger conflict that's occurring in Europe is then reflected right in Florence.
Why? Because when you have factions in Florence, what always happens in these situations is the factions then go to bigger powers for support.
They basically go, you help us against those guys.
You help us against these guys.
So in Florence...
Recognizing that the two biggest powers in Europe were the Papacy on the one hand and the Holy Roman Emperor on the other, one group of Florentines went to the Emperor and said, you help us.
And that group was called the Ghibellines.
And another group in Florence went to the Pope and said, you help us.
And that group was called the Guelphs.
And so the struggle, the political struggle that's going on in Florence is between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.
Now, notice that they are appealing for help to outside powers.
But this is an important political conflict, not just to understand kind of the background of Dante.
Dante, by the way, is a Guelph.
Because all of this plays out right in the Divine Comedy itself.
The Divine Comedy isn't just some kind of spiritual tract removed from the world.
It is actively engaged with historical figures, political figures, military figures, as I mentioned, going all the way back to Adam and Eve.
But a lot of the figures are the figures from Dante's own day.
Now, not Dante's contemporaries, because Dante's contemporaries are alive.
And to be in the Divine Comedy, you have to be dead.
But you have to go back a generation or two.
You can say the generation of Dante's parents or his grandparents.
And the Divine Comedy, I'm talking about hell and purgatory and heaven, are densely populated with all kinds of Italians from Florence and neighboring cities who are part of this political struggle between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.
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