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Feb. 22, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:41
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep275
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Quick announcement, guys.
Tonight, 7.30 Eastern, I'll be doing my weekly Q&A, live Q&A on Locals.
Great place to interact with me, and I go back and forth, answer questions for 30, 35 minutes.
It's really fun, and so check it out at dinesh.locals.com.
You can kind of check it out as a member.
Hopefully you'll also like it to become a subscriber, but this is a great way to have your questions discussed and answered.
Now I'm going to talk about Truth Social today.
I have Devin Nunes, the CEO of Trump's new social media platform.
We're going to discuss this exciting new development.
Liz Cheney has an ingenious plan to win her primary through the support of Democratic voters.
And to top that, Trump has an even more ingenious plan to stop her.
Kim Potter seems to have gotten kind of a light sentence for the death of Daunte Wright, but I want to argue the opposite.
No, her sentence was excessive in light of what this woman actually did.
And I'll continue my introduction to Daunte's Divine Comedy by discussing the idea of exile and the significance of exile in this great work.
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.
Guys, one of the most exciting new developments is the emergence of Trump's new platform, Truth Social.
And I'm more than delighted to welcome to the podcast Devin Nunes, longtime congressman from California, winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom 2020, and now the CEO of Trump's Media and Technology Group and the guy who's sort of the spearheader of Truth Social.
Devin, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
This is, I gotta say, I mean thrilling.
It's wonderful to see this platform emerging.
I'm delighted to be part of the beta testing for it.
It's a beautiful platform.
It's fun to be on.
What I also like is that it's kind of a self-evident platform.
It doesn't require tutorials or a handbook.
You go on there, you play around with it, boom, you're going.
And so, congratulations on how wonderfully this has been constructed.
But talk a little bit about the rollout of Truth Social, because some people seem to be confused about it, and the media is putting out, I think, some false reports about it.
Well, Dinesh, surprise, surprise, I think we know what the fake news does.
And what people are really going to notice and what you see on the platform is that People are so excited.
They're so inspired to be back on social media again.
And I really feel that this is only the beginning.
People are going to realize how bad they were being treated on these other platforms.
So, you know, what we did is we opened this thing up.
Gosh, now almost, what has it been?
Probably like 11 or 12 days we've been open.
We've been bringing people on the platform.
A couple days ago, we started bringing on people who had pre-ordered the app from the Apple App Store.
And our goal here is to try to get all those people on in the next week or so that have pre-ordered and continue to pre-order, get them all onto the platform.
Because as you and your audience know, we had to build this from the ground up to ensure that we can't be canceled by one of the tech tyrants.
So it's going to be a slow process as we build out.
And just so folks know, because we're getting a lot of questions on this, and that is about, you know, when will we be able to get it on Android?
Well, the next product we're going to come out with, or the next capability, is going to be a progressive web application.
So that you get it on your desktop, then you will be able to put a wraparound, so to speak, on your Android.
Once we get that, so think of it as we're doing Apple iOS first, then we're doing the web application second, And then we will see if Google wants to work with us and they want to let us on the Google Play Store.
We would like to be there just because so many people do have Android phones.
But regardless whether or not they let us on the Play Store or not, you will be able to get the web application, bookmark it, and put it on your phone.
So we're getting that question a lot.
But that's essentially... Kind of the plan here.
And our goal is, what President Trump and I have both been clear on, is we want to be fully operational by the end of March so that basically anybody can sign up at any time, get a handle, and get on the platform.
That's our goal. That's what we're working to.
And at this point, everything looks good, but we don't know what we don't know yet, right?
Every minute, we're bringing in more and more people.
Who came up with the idea of the name Truth Social?
Was that something that you devised or was it something that they had come up with before you came on board?
It's kind of a clever name and it speaks not just against censorship because censorship is preventing you from saying what you want to say, but it's also a way of saying that truth itself emerges from open debate.
So I think it's an ingenious name.
Just curious, did Trump come up with this or who did?
You know what? It's a very good question.
You're going to break news on your program here today.
I haven't been asked that question yet, but in fact, it was Donald J. Trump that came up with the name Truth.
Wow. That's fascinating.
Yeah, and I liked it from the very first time I saw it.
I think people enjoy it, right?
I mean, everybody's got great ideas.
There's all sorts of names we could have went with, but...
But truth really works, I believe.
I like it a lot.
I mean, I think truth is the goal, right, of all this inquiry.
It's finding ways to get at the truth through discussion and through debate.
Now, you mentioned something a moment ago, Devin.
You mentioned... Fortifying the platform against potential attacks.
I think you know that there are going to be hackers who try to disrupt it, people who try to cause trouble.
Do you feel pretty confident with the way that you're going forward, that you're able to build the defenses and fortifications and sort of self-reliance that makes it difficult for someone to disrupt you or take you down?
Yeah, so look, every minute of every day we're getting attacked.
We're trying to isolate those attacks and minimize them.
We know this is just going to continue.
Look, this is going to be a battle from now to the end of time, right?
Just trying to protect this platform.
And that's why we're taking a very...
We're kind of staged approach as we bring more and more people on the platform.
So, you know, and quite frankly, what's happened over the last 24 hours, I mean, we've been overwhelmed, right?
We're number one overall in the App Store, and the people just keep coming.
I mean, it's really, and you've been on there, Dinesh.
What's really inspiring to me, I mean, it's really something to see people who are posting on there, and you know they're legit because they're using their own name, they got a picture of themselves, and they're saying, oh my god, I was kicked off Twitter three years ago, I just quit Facebook yesterday because now I'm on this platform and I can't believe how fun it is.
And people are moved, I mean, it's moving for me, and I know it's moving for you, and I know you've seen a lot of those comments too.
And, you know, It's something that I didn't expect.
I knew watching my experience through being on both Parler and Rumble, I knew how the big tech companies were shadow banning us and all those sorts of things.
But I never thought about that person that lost their voice.
And we're giving them their voice back.
And now we've opened up the communications architecture across the internet so that people can Get to the truth.
I think you said it perfectly.
I mean, I think for me, interestingly, I mean, I've been restricted on Facebook, restricted on YouTube.
I've never been banned outright, but I've had all these strikes against me.
And the effect of it is, well, it's almost to make you develop a sort of abuse spouse mentality.
You know, in other words, you... We're good to go.
Yeah, I mean, look, the censorship platforms, I like that term, or the tyrannical tyrant platforms.
I mean, look, the people that have joined Truth, Dinesh, they're never going back.
You see the quality on the platform.
We're going to continue to get better.
There's a lot of things that people want.
And the reason they're not going to go back is because, you know, you've seen my hashtag on there, Instead of America first, we're saying customer first.
Like, we value the people that are on our platform, right?
Imagine, this is not rocket science, okay?
You don't have to be, you know, I probably learned this in one of my first business classes, right?
That customers come first.
Any book you read, you should treat customers first.
So the tech tyrants don't believe in that.
I mean, they've been printing gold bars.
They don't care about the customers.
So I am convinced that everybody that comes over to this platform, they're never going to go back to those other social media platforms as long as we can provide quality and continue to improve the product.
I think the next, obviously a thing that people really want, you've seen this, the option to quote truth.
That's something that's in the pipeline.
It's going to be a while. But people understand that.
And then the next stage that we really want to get is we want to have groups, right?
Groups where you can put pictures, videos, family groups, that sort of thing.
So that indeed, if you have all of this data that you've had for 10 or 15 years or whatever on the other tech tyrant platforms, you should be able to bring that data.
We want to make it so you can bring all that data, insert it into your truth, So that you don't lose those great family memories that you have.
That's awesome. But that's going to be a ways off.
But in the meantime, we're focusing on bringing people on as quickly as possible that have ordered the app.
Keyword, ordered the app.
And then we'll roll out the web application here in the coming weeks.
Devin, let's take a pause. When we come back, let's talk more about the features on the platform and what you are doing in this very new and different type of job.
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Initially, I think some people might have been a little surprised at your selection as CEO of Truth Social, maybe expecting to find some kind of nerdy, high-tech guy having that kind of a job.
Talk about why this seemed like a good fit for you and why it's the right step for you to take next.
Yeah, I would say that the big issue is, and we talked about it a little bit in the last segment, I was one of the first guys to catch these big tech tyrants I've come from the ground up being one of the guys that was majorly censored for the last 5, 6, 7 years. And that was largely due to the whole Russia hoax and us running an investigation and outing this huge scandal.
They didn't want to let my word out because, you know, we were telling the truth.
We were catching criminals.
We were making criminal referrals.
It's why we have John Durham right now.
So, you know, I had immense, immense pressure put on me and the left started manipulating these tech tyrants to essentially ban and censor us.
And I will tell you, You're going to see this on Truth.
Whether you're an average user, you're going to see that you're going to have a lot more interaction.
And Dinesh, you're going to have way more interaction.
So let me tell you the watershed moment for me was I was one of the first...
I think I was the first elected official to go to Parler.
And you just watch that like a rocket ship go up.
And how was it possible that a platform nobody had ever really heard of, how was I getting more interaction on Parler than all the other platforms I was on combined?
And that was way before.
That was in the early stages of Parler.
So right away I noticed, well, there's something going on here.
The effect of the internet, that open free space, clearly was not working for me on those other platforms.
The second kind of big, oh, you know, oh crap moment, so to speak, I want to keep your show family friendly also, Dinesh, was Rumble.
So I had a little podcast that I was doing.
Every week I was growing in audio listens.
I decided to go to and put it onto a video.
And I didn't know much about YouTube.
I had a YouTube channel.
I thought, oh, you know, 8,000, 9,000 subscribers, that must be okay, right?
So my audio listens kept going up and then what I noticed on YouTube was they were almost flattening or going down.
And I was just using this podcast to effectively communicate around the fake news and reach directly to my supporters across the country.
And it's virtually impossible, Dinesh, for views to go down because I was sending it out to millions of people that had signed up to my list, millions of Americans.
So how the hell was it possible that my views were going down?
So I said, God, this is ridiculous.
I've got to find something.
And I discovered this little video player company in Canada called Rumble, which you're very familiar with.
And And I said, hey, can you just, if I go on your platform, they thought it was a prank, right?
They just thought this was a joke. If I go on your platform, will people be able to search and find my podcast?
And they thought, well, of course.
What kind of dumb question is that?
I said, well, try it on YouTube.
See if you can find my podcast.
And that was like the oh crap moment.
So, Dinesh, bottom line was, this is just an easy example.
9,000 followers on YouTube.
I think I had the count for a couple years.
In three weeks, okay?
Nobody's on Rumble in America, basically, right?
They had some, like, little animal videos, and they were riding players.
Three weeks, 35,000 followers.
Three months, 350,000 followers.
Now, today, I'm almost at a million.
I know you've come over to Rumble, and now everybody has realized How they've been getting screwed so badly by these tech tyrants, all of the conservatives and now even independents and moderates who are getting banned or censored on YouTube, they're coming over to Rumble and all of a sudden your followers skyrocket.
How's that possible on a company that hardly anybody had heard of?
So that's kind of my story is I kind of grew up through all of this, watched this all happen.
And then I was out basically around the country all last year You know, hammering on how wrong it was that we were being censored and how you cannot win a war, a battle of ideas, if you can't even communicate as a country.
So, you know, that's why I wanted to do this job, because I feel like it is the most important issue at the highest level.
You can't win any kind of kinetic war or propaganda war if you can't even communicate with each other.
And I think, you know, you said it best, like, this is an opportunity for people to get to that town square and And get to the truth.
I really like that. I'm going to steal that from you.
You can have it for sure. I remember talking to Chris Pavlovsky, the CEO, the founder of Rumble, Canadian guy and not somebody initially enmeshed in American politics at all.
And he made a sort of a wry joke to me. He goes, you know, I know I knew you guys sort of down south were fighting about the Second Amendment, but he goes, I didn't realize that the First Amendment had become an issue. And so I think he has seen that there's an opportunity here to have genuine free speech platforms. Let me ask you as we close to talk a little bit about the partnership with Rumble, is that going well and is that likely to continue to blossom?
Yeah. So Rumble now is it's amazing.
They're moving from Canada, ironically, to the United States of America.
We are using the video platform on there, and we're also using their servers.
So they're going to be a key partner for us moving forward.
That's all public information.
They're a great company, and they, like me, have seen this from the ground up.
And they've given a home.
I mean, Dinesh, to you, I think you've got to be one of the largest, you have one of the largest followings on Rumble.
And look, I just say, thank God we have them, right?
We're so lucky because not only did they build from the ground up, we're lucky to have them to be able to ride on their rails.
Imagine if I had to Find all our own servers for truth.
Imagine if I had to develop a video player.
We'd be six months away from launch.
And now we're operational.
We're continuing to bring people on the platform.
And Rumble is our most important partner.
This is all tremendously exciting.
So guys, you got to check this out.
You got to sign up for the app and be a little patient because this is a rollout that's coming over time, but it's going to, I think, change the entire political landscape in the country.
Devin Nunes, thanks very much for joining me on the podcast.
Hey, Dinesh. Thanks. I enjoyed it.
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Many of us are looking forward to the Supreme Court.
Overruling or severely slashing back the Roe v.
Wade decision. But in a very important article, a legal scholar named Hadley Arcus argues that it is just as important how the court goes about doing this.
The article is in the magazine First Things, one of my favorite magazines.
It's called On Overruling Roe.
And Professor Arkes, whom I know, and is a very shrewd observer and has been writing about this topic now for, I would say, three decades.
He makes the point that the court could sort of go two ways on this.
That there's the traditional conservative way, and then there is, well, let's call it the better way, the Hadley-Arkes way.
So the traditional conservative way...
goes something like this.
The Supreme Court, in effect, says, listen, the abortion decision, the Roe v. Wade decision, wrongly makes abortion a matter that is settled at the Supreme Court level in which nine justices decide abortion policy, you might say, for the whole country.
And the court might say that this is locating the authority, the decision-making power, in the wrong place.
That the abortion decision really belongs as a state matter and should be decentralized so that each state can apply its own, let's say, principles or values or reflect the moral sense of its own community.
And thus we can have a variety of laws on the abortion issue that more closely approximates the actual sentiments of the Now, this has been, you could call it, conservative talk for almost three decades.
But Hadley Arcus thinks the conservatives here, we, have it all wrong.
Why? Because he says this makes abortion seem like some kind of procedural issue.
That the decision is really about who decides, and that there's no right and wrong of the matter.
That somehow all we're trying to do here is place political authority where it truly belongs, which is to say at the state level, not at the level of the government.
But Hadley Arcus says if you actually listen to the way people talk about abortion, they don't talk like this.
They basically say things like, you know, she's pregnant.
She's having a baby.
And what is abortion?
But the termination of the life of that independent, developing baby.
By independent here, I don't mean that the...
Unborn child is in no way linked to the mother, but I mean it has its own organs.
It's not exchanging life with the mother.
It has its own life.
It has its own fingers, its own toes, its own heartbeat, and so on.
And Professor Arcus quotes some remarkable...
He's quoting from legal briefs, but it's very eye-opening.
I just want to read a couple of lines.
At the end of the first month, the child is about a quarter of an inch in length.
At 30 days, the primary brain is present, and the eyes, ears, and nasal organs have started to form.
Although the heart is still incomplete, it is beating regularly and pumping blood cells through a closed vascular system.
The child and mother do not exchange blood, the child having from a very early point in its development its own and complete vascular system.
Earliest reflexes begin as early as the 42nd day.
The male penis begins to form, the child is almost half an inch long, and cartilage has begun to develop, and on and on like this.
So what?
Bye.
Really, Professor Arkes is getting at is that we are talking in the case of abortion about snuffing out a human life.
So, yes, Hadley Arkes says, all right, let's say the court wants to overturn Roe and return it to the States.
He says it's really important that the court doesn't make it look like this is purely a matter of...
Kind of placing the legal authority where it belongs.
What he says the court should say is essentially the idea that, look, we are dealing here with the taking of human life.
Yes, states can actually adjudicate these issues, as states do, by the way, adjudicate issues of life and death.
But nevertheless, the starting point for any discussion is that it is a human life we are talking about.
So here's Professor Arcus.
He goes, he's kind of almost writing an opinion for the court, and he says, So what he's getting at is...
Yes, you can return this matter to the states, but sort of in the process of doing it, make it really clear that what the states are going to be adjudicating is not, well, I have one set of values, and you have your set of values, and ultimately we're each going to kind of have laws that reflect our values.
Rather, he says, listen, the real issue is, when is it okay to kill someone?
That's really what's being adjudicated.
So, just as in the case of slavery and other similar types of issues where the fundamental issue, Lincoln understood very clearly, the fundamental issue is, is the slave a human being, yes or no?
And if you answer yes, a whole bunch of things follow from that.
And even state laws in the end will have to bend the simple truth that we are dealing with a human being here.
So, I think the profound aspect of this article is that it goes beyond the kind of bloodless procedural conservative jurisprudence and focuses on the key issue, when is it right, if ever, to take innocent human life?
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Liz Cheney, her behavior has been very puzzling to anyone who thinks that she wants to have a political future.
So the question then becomes, what is Liz Cheney thinking?
what is her own view of how she can get herself re-elected, which she seems to want to do.
She's running for re-election, she has a campaign, she's fundraising, she's had numerous events that have been attended and organized by various sort of never-Trumper types, members of the old Dick Cheney circle. And it turns out that Liz Cheney does seem to have a plan, and her plan to win the primary is called Democrats.
What? Well, it turns out in Wyoming, the Democrats can vote in the Republican primary and vice versa.
So you can choose, you can cross parties, if you will, in the primary.
And so now Liz Cheney's behavior begins to take on a certain kind of sense.
Liz Cheney is going to kind of poke the bear, attack Trump, in a sense, betray her own party.
But what is she doing in the process?
She's sort of courting Democrats to say, listen, you know what?
You can cross over the aisle and vote for me, and I'll continue to be kind of your thorn in the side of the...
Trump wing of the GOP. So this seems to be the Liz Cheney, well, it's a pretty ingenious and if diabolical kind of plan.
Liz Cheney denies she's doing this, but it seems clear that this is something that Wyoming law allows.
Trump, however, is on it, and he has a plan to stop her.
It's called passing a law in Wyoming, by the way, a heavily Republican legislature, a Trump-friendly governor named Mark Gordon.
And so Trump has been actually publicly calling for and making calls behind the scenes, basically saying, listen, you guys pass a law, which you can do, preventing this kind of party switching.
So if that happens, I think Liz Cheney is completely doomed because her support in the Republican Party has, well, I don't know if it's plummeted to single digits, but it's certainly headed in that direction.
Here's Trump.
It makes total sense that only Democrats vote in the Democrat primary and only Republicans vote in the Republican primary.
And I think the reason this does make sense is you don't want to have people in one party be able to subvert, even to a degree, the nominee of the other party.
And that's exactly what can happen.
And now we see a political logic in which it might, in fact, happen.
Trump has been having a fundraiser recently for Hageman, the woman who's running against Liz Cheney.
I had her on the podcast recently.
And she's becoming a really viable candidate against Cheney.
In fact, I think she's going to beat Cheney as long as Trump is successful and Wyoming Republicans are successful in preventing Democrats from voting in Republican primaries.
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Remember Kim Potter?
This is the policewoman who accidentally shot Daunte Wright.
And you might remember from the video, the tragic scene.
Here's Daunte Wright.
He's trying to get away.
And Kim Potter is trying to restrain him.
She goes for her taser.
And we know this because she even shouts on the camera footage, I'll tase you, taser, taser!
And then, boom, she fires a single round, and then she realizes she got her gun instead, and Daunte Wright collapses, and then Kim Potter bawlingly collapses herself on the curb.
So, this is, I mean, it's horrific.
It's a certain kind of negligence.
I mean, you have to be trained to tell the difference between a taser and a gun.
But at the same time, this was unquestionably an accident.
And an accident, by definition, is not a crime.
But nevertheless, Daunte Wright being black, I think if he had been white, a whole different story, but since he was black, suddenly it became, you got a prosecutor, you got a charger, and sure enough, she's charged with first degree manslaughter, which is a crime.
And the jury, in a kind of charged political environment, goes ahead and finds her guilty, both actually a first-degree and second-degree manslaughter.
And now Kim Potter comes up before Judge Chu, this is Regina Chu, for sentencing.
And something really kind of remarkable happens.
The prosecution...
Is going for a seven-year sentence in prison.
Wow. Seven-year sentence for an accidental shooting.
And Daunte Wright's family is, you know...
piling on, they're like, yeah, she should get the maximum sentence. She's not remorseful. And so they were there talking about how it was the worst day of their life.
And of course, I understand their loss. And Kim Potter does, because at the sentencing, Kim Potter breaks down and she says to Dante Wright, she says this to the family of Dante Wright, I'm so sorry. I brought the death of your son, father, brother, uncle, grandson, nephew.
And then she says to the mom, Katie, I understand a mother's love.
I'm sorry I broke your heart.
My heart is broken for all of you.
And this was so moving in the courtroom that the judge began to cry.
This is Judge Regina Chu.
And the judge basically says, come on, quote, she never intended to hurt anyone.
Her conduct cries out for a sentence significantly below the guidelines.
And so what does Kim Potter get?
16 months. And she's quite likely to be out in half of that.
So essentially a very moderate sentence.
And of course, the prosecution vigorously objects, probably partly in kind of a big display of public theater.
Oh, we're objecting. We want racial justice.
You know, blah, blah, blah.
But the judge, Asian American, by the way, essentially goes, no.
She goes, I'm not doing it.
This is not, she says, Kim Potter's remorse is genuine, which I think is unquestionably the case.
And so that is that.
Now, even though this seems—I mean, I'm actually consoled by the result because I was afraid in a horrific miscarriage of justice that this woman would get five years or seven years—outrageous.
But I still think that the 16-month sentence is excessive.
Why? For the simple reason that what Kim Potter did— Is not a crime.
And that's the key issue.
There's a difference between a crime and an accident.
Accidents do occur.
They're tragic. And there are, by the way, all kinds of ways in which people can be held accountable for an accident.
One of them is civil penalties, civil charges.
You can sue Kim Potter.
You were responsible for the wrongful death of my son and there's monetary damages and you have to mortgage your house and so on.
But the idea of locking people up for accidents is really not the way I think that we as a society want to go.
And so even though Kim Potter got this 16-month sentence, my own sentence for her crime would have been, it's not a crime, you're free to go.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. The left continues its campaign against Joe Rogan and not able to get him on the issue of COVID. Oh, he's putting out COVID misinformation.
He's interviewing, admittedly, highly qualified epidemiologists and virologists, but they're part of the conspiratorial gang that's telling lies about COVID. Well...
That didn't work. So then the next line of attack, and this is a line that still continues, and Joe Rogan has sort of, I won't say fed this, but he's sort of given in to it a little bit, is Joe Rogan has used the N-word.
Now, first of all, Joe Rogan has been podcasting and...
He's been out there doing his thing for years.
He's just done a giant number of podcasts.
And in 13 years, he has used the N-word a handful of times.
Now, interestingly, Joe Rogan apologized for this.
He said, I should never have used it.
And fair enough.
But it's also true that the taboo against the N-word has intensified in recent years.
And I remember, in fact, I gave a talk at Debbie's alma mater, Texas State.
I was talking about Lyndon Johnson.
I was quoting him, and I literally used the N-word about 20 times.
Now, I wasn't using it.
I was quoting Lyndon Johnson using it, but I nevertheless said it.
And I said it because at that time, and there were a couple of people, oh, Dinesh is using the N-word.
I'm not using the N-word.
I'm quoting LBJ using the N-word.
In any case, Joe Rogan did this, and Spotify has taken down those episodes.
Spotify claims with Joe Rogan's consent.
But either way, it makes it difficult to kind of go back and see what Joe Rogan actually said.
Well, happily, there's a guy who has done that.
He goes back and he looks at Joe Rogan's use of the N-word, and in every case, Joe Rogan—in no case has Joe Rogan actually— Expressing anything racist or using the N-word in a racist way.
He's discussing rap music or he's discussing what terms are okay to say and not to say and how certain things could be said and now can't be said.
So there's really nothing here.
Joe Rogan had nothing to apologize for.
And interestingly, I find that one of the groups that's going most after Joe Rogan are the comedians.
I'm thinking really of people here like John Oliver, you know, who thinks that because he has a British accent, he's funnier than he is.
Oh, he's Joe Rogan!
And then there's this Trevor Noah, another guy, you know, South African guy, who's basically...
Tries to, you know, play the race card whenever he can.
That's the key to his humor.
And these guys hate Rogan.
And I'm trying to think about what it is about Rogan that makes them hate him so much.
And I think the reason is that Rogan exposes these people as comedy frauds.
Now, what do I mean by comedy fraud?
Well, real comedy...
And this was going all the way back to the days of the court jester.
Part of what made the court jester so effective is that the court jester used humor to make fun of the court and fun of the king.
And in doing this, the court jester took risks because the king could always say, lock that man up, off with his head.
But the cleverness of the jester was to be able to avoid that kind of fate through humor.
And so humor is speaking unpopular and often taboo truths to people who are truly powerful.
And that's what Joe Rogan does.
Joe Rogan is, in a kind of open-minded way and often in a funny way, willing to take on topics that other people are running away from.
Guys like Trevor Noah and John Oliver are the exact opposite.
They're not genuine comedians.
Why? Because instead of speaking truth to power, they speak from a position of power and on behalf of the powerful against the ordinary guy.
So that's their point.
Ordinary people don't want to wear masks, those yahoos.
Ordinary people go to church, those yahoos.
So these are people who are doing the exact opposite of what the function of comedy is.
Instead of saying that the emperor has no clothes, they're like, the emperor is actually right.
You peasants need to fall in line.
And that's funny. I don't hear anyone laughing.
Why not? So this is the, I would call it, un-humor of our time.
Our comedians aren't funny.
Nobody's laughing worldwide.
If you want genuine humor today, you almost have to go to other countries and find, I mean, there are out there, you know, Muslim comedians and Indian comedians and people who actually are still willing to poke the bear and are still willing to generate real humor instead of these guys like Trevor, Noah, and Oliver.
Who are ultimately nothing more than propagandists for the powerful showing up on stage in a comedy outfit.
I'm continuing my introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy, and I want here to focus on the issue of Dante's exile, because his exile, political exile, is key to understanding this poem.
It's written from the point of view of somebody who's away from their homeland, and the poem begins to explore what that means.
Now, one reason we know that we're dealing with one of the greatest poems of all time, if not the greatest, is it is a poem that has drawn and inspired more commentary than any other work ever written, including the works of Milton and Shakespeare and Homer, any other work other than the Bible.
Dante's Divine Comedy has a tradition of commentary.
And, of course, there are commentaries on Milton.
There are commentaries on Shakespeare.
But we're talking about detailed, line-by-line commentaries that go on.
I mean, whole essays, articles, books, written on a single line of the Divine Comedy.
And you can't think of any other work for which that has been done other than the Christian Bible.
The commentary tradition, interestingly, began in Dante's own lifetime.
In fact, almost when the ink was like dry on the Divine Comedy, the commentary, the commentators start moving in, they realize that there's a, this is a poem with so much there that the poem itself is a kind of tip of the iceberg. And one of the earliest commentators on Dante was his own son. And then, of course, other people took it up and that has continued.
So one of the reasons we read this commentary is we get a much deeper understanding of the underlying landscape and also the profound resonances of this poem. Dante was one of the most learned men in Europe. And so even though the poem has a kind of beguiling surface, there's a lot underneath.
There's a kind of whole leviathan, if you will, under the tip of the whale that you see poking out from the water.
Now, Dante's exile is important because it allows Dante to reflect upon exile in all its meanings, a political exile, a spiritual exile.
I mean, if you think about Dante's journey, His journey through hell and purgatory and to heaven, that's a kind of exile, right?
It's an exile from life.
Dante is, you may say, out of this world, and he's someplace else.
But from Dante's point of view and from a spiritual point of view, you could almost say that the exile is the other way around.
And what do I mean by that?
Well, from the Christian point of view, we are exiles here and now in this world and in this life.
So our real home is elsewhere.
And our exile is this world.
And Dante has this bigger and moral sense of exile in the back of his mind.
But he's also thinking about political exile, and that's what I want to focus on.
Because I talked last time about the political factionalism that was going on in Dante's Florence.
Essentially a duel, if you will, between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.
But the Guelphs and the Ghibellines were reflecting larger divisions in Europe and in Italy.
Divisions between, on the one hand, the Pope.
The Guelphs were kind of the party of the Pope.
And on the other side, the French king became the Holy Roman Emperor.
So the Ghibellines were the party of the Emperor.
And this factionalism was going on in Dante's Italy.
Now what happens is if you're a Guelph or you're a Ghibelline in Italy, you're going to try to make allies not just with powers that are in the rest of Italy, the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, but you're also going to try to make allies with people who are friendly to you from outside of Florence.
And in a famous battle that occurred in 1260 called the Battle of Monteperati, this is, by the way, In this battle, the Ghibellines, who were kind of the minor party, the smaller party in Florence, allied with an external power, and that is the city-state of Siena.
Against the Guelphs.
Against the army of Florence, made up mainly of Guelphs.
And the Ghibellines won.
The Guelphs were defeated.
And in 1260, the Ghibellines became the rulers of Florence, and they remained that way for about six years.
This is all relevant because five years later...
Dante was born.
So Dante was born when Florence was actually under Ghibelline rule.
And the Ghibellines, when Dante was one year old, were kicked out and the Guelphs came back in.
So there's all this factionalism going on.
And although Dante's poem is written for all time, it's written for the ages, Dante is very enmeshed in this.
And he uses the factionalism to make larger points about We're good to go.
So, with the Guelphs having won in Florence when Dante was very little, and in fact the Guelphs stayed in power, one might think, okay, now there's going to be stability.
One party is one straight out, so kind of Florence is going to be sort of a one-party state.
Well, interestingly enough, that doesn't happen.
Interestingly, what happens is something like what happened with the Democratic Party in the 19th century, when after Jefferson and after the Democratic Party became kind of the only party, the Federalist Party sort of went out of business, what happened to the Democratic Party?
Well, it essentially split.
Jefferson's old Democratic-Republican Party splits, and you have the Democrats and the Whigs.
So, similarly, in Florence, what happens is that the Guelphs, believe it or not, who are now the ruling party, they split into two bitterly opposed camps, which historians now call the whites and the blacks, kind of the white Guelphs and the black Guelphs.
And the reason we call them white and black is because of their armbands, the insignia, they're just a way of distinguishing one group of Guelphs from the other.
Now, Dante is, if you will, a white Guelph.
But at this time, this is now when Dante is coming into his 30s, the late part of the 13th century, the 1290s, what happens is that the Holy Roman Emperor at this point is kind of weak, and the really powerful force in Italy is the papacy.
And so both the Guelphs, the white Guelphs and the black Guelphs, go to the Pope and they say, you back us.
And of course, the Pope can only back one or the other.
And for a variety of reasons, Pope Boniface VIII, a figure very important in the, actually a figure that Dante puts right into hell.
Dante does not hesitate to put popes into hell.
But Boniface, his presence is felt throughout the comedy, but he's the Pope.
He decides to go and back the Blackwells.
And the moment he does that, and in fact, remember, the Pope's backing is not, I endorse the Black Guelphs.
No, the Pope is going to send armies to expel the White Guelphs from Florence.
And Dante, at that point, is completely doomed.
In fact, Dante is in Rome at the time, Once Boniface makes his decision, Dante is essentially in exile.
He can't go back to Florence.
In fact, he couldn't go back to Florence for the rest of his life.
What does he do? He goes to Verona.
Remember Verona? That's the site of Romeo and Juliet.
He then moves to other places in Italy, and he ends up in a place...
Kind of a little bit of a godforsaken place on the Adriatic Sea.
It's called Ravenna.
And Dante dies there in Ravenna.
And he's buried there in a kind of out-of-the-way place with a small sign, Dante.
And in Florence, they built a massive monument to Dante.
And they were trying to get Dante's body from Ravenna to Florence.
But no, Dante, in fact, is in Ravenna.
And so when you look at these two things, the great monument to Dante in Florence...
That's kind of Dante at the height of his power.
In fact, that's the date at which the Divine Comedy is set, when Dante is an important figure in Florence.
But then Dante, when he writes the poem, is in exile.
He initially had tried to get back to Florence, but he never did.
And so he is in Ravenna.
He had begun the Divine Comedy earlier in Verona.
He completes it really a little before his death in Ravenna.
And this concept of exile becomes central to the Divine Comedy in a way that I will explore tomorrow.
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