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Feb. 23, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:05
WAG THE DOG Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep276
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I'll discuss today what's going on in the Ukraine in the context of the movie, Wag the Dog.
A former military general explains why our woke military is really incapable of fighting a war.
John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John's Pizza, is going to be here.
We're going to talk about entrepreneurship, about cancel culture, and about inflation.
And I'm going to continue my introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy by leading us now to the gates of Inferno.
This is the message of the 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.
It's a little hard for me to get worked up about the Ukraine.
I don't think about the Ukraine on a normal basis.
I think the last time I heard about the Ukraine, they were giving money to Hunter Biden.
And I'm a little more worried about things closer to home.
I think my own personal security and probably yours is far more endangered by Merrick Garland and the Biden administration than it is by Vladimir Putin.
I don't think it's Vladimir Putin who's going to come to our house, send helicopters to arrest us, put us into solitary confinement, all for being domestic terrorists.
No, that's not Putin.
That's our guy.
And I'm kind of watching with a sense of, well, just curiosity and disgust, the way that Biden is responding to the Ukraine.
Here's a small clip that gives you a sense of what kind of leadership we have at the helm.
Listen. Yesterday, the world heard clearly the full extent of Vladimir Putin's twisted rewrite of history, going back more than a century as he waxed eloquently.
Who writes this stuff?
Who says this kind of stuff?
This is just, I mean, to me, think of the scenario.
The West is currently led by one bumbling dotard, that's this guy, Biden.
One laughing hyena, that's Harris.
And a handful of metrosexual adolescents, Trudeau, Macron.
I mean, Putin must feel very confident going up against this goofball brigade.
Now, what is Putin after here?
Well, he's after the Ukraine, and I don't think he's going to need an invasion to pull it off.
It's funny how we're getting all these war drums.
Oh, we need to care about the Ukraine.
We need to mobilize troops, and we need to get the Western alliance all ginned up, and we need to impose sanctions.
Why does Putin We're good to go.
So here you've got this feckless group of people.
And I think Putin is sitting back and saying, listen, I can accomplish my goal of dominating the Ukraine just by putting those troops on the border.
I don't even have to invade.
It's the mere menace of having them there.
It's going to get this Biden guy to start scrambling and calling for a summit.
Let's have a discussion. Let's have a negotiation.
And you know what? I can sort of predict how that negotiation is going to come out.
Basically, Putin says, listen...
I'm not going to invade the Ukraine, but I merely want to control it.
I want to essentially supervise the Ukraine.
I want to have de facto control, even though I don't have de jure control.
I want parties in the Ukraine that are pro-Russian.
And Biden's going to go, okay.
Why? Because there's nothing he can do about it.
Let's remember, Russia is a nuclear-tipped power.
This whole idea that, you know, we can swat him down.
No, we can't swat him down.
We're not going to go to World War III over the Ukraine.
And so, Putin's calculation, I think, is that Biden will come out of some sort of summit and declare victory, but it'll be obviously a hollow victory.
Of course, you'll have people like...
You know, Brian Stelter and CNN and others.
Oh, Biden, you know, negotiated his way.
This is a spectacular achievement by America.
We've kept Putin out of the Ukraine.
But no, in reality, Putin will have achieved his objective.
He's going to be the one having the last grin or the last laugh.
And then we're getting all this kind of wag the doggery, I'm going to call it here, in America.
Biden says things like, you know, we better get ready for gas prices to go up a little bit because, well, gas prices were going up long before the Ukraine.
Here's a headline in CBS News.
The U.S. economy has been hit with increased gas prices, inflation, and supply chain issues due to the Ukraine crisis.
I mean, this is a headline with a straight face.
Even though all these things were happening prior to the Ukraine, but now they're being blamed on the Ukraine.
So what's happening here is the Ukraine is a big distraction.
It's a distraction from the failure upon failure upon failure of the Biden administration.
Now you're saying, well, maybe the Ukraine will end up a failure as well, as I think it will.
But in the meantime, you can use that failure to distract from the other existing failures that are right in front of our eyes.
So we've got a disastrous administration.
They kept saying, oh, you know, Trump is in bed with Russia.
I think most of us realize deep down that if Trump were in office, this would not be happening.
And why? Because if you think about Putin and you think about his psychology, he's basically a man's man.
He's basically a macho guy. He's basically a bully who understands the language of force.
And when you see Trump, you got somebody of equal stature, somebody who is in a way a little bit of a bully himself, somebody who's gonna say, hey, I'm not gonna let you get away with that.
No way, that's not happening.
And Biden is just incapable of doing that.
Biden can do a lot of bluster when he's here at home, when he's talking in front of an adoring media, I'll show Putin's what's what, I'll teach him a lesson, I'll take him behind the gym.
But now that Biden actually has to deal with Putin, we're seeing what a pathetic, bumbling guy he is.
And so we have a moment of real vulnerability in the Ukraine and we're dealing with a resourceful and cunning opponent.
And the best that our administration can do, and this has nothing to do with foreign policy at all, is try to create a domestic policy diversion, is try to go full-scale wag the dog.
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And I'm using that phrase metaphorically.
Because we have here a retired Marine three-star general who, in the face of all this kind of wokeness, this racial propaganda, this gender nonsense, this climate, you know, climate change is the greatest threat facing the country, and the military has now got to be prepared to deal with climate change.
So here is Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold.
And I think what he said to himself is, I need to put down, I need to remind the civilian population of what the military is and what it does.
And I think for me it was kind of a sobering article to read.
Gregory Newbold, by the way, retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General, He's commanded platoons, divisions.
He was direct of operations for the Joint Chief of Staff in the Pentagon.
So this is basically a heavy hitter.
And I want to read some of his statements because I think we kind of know them to be true, but you can see how alien woke culture is to what this guy is talking about.
He goes, And he says the danger,
it's one thing if politicians go blah blah blah, but he goes the condition is exacerbated and enabled when the most senior military leaders who ought to know better defer to the idealistic judgments of those whose credentials are either non-existent or formed entirely by ideology.
Now, we get to the meat of his point.
So that's the theory of deterrence in a nutshell.
Now, the U.S. military, says General Newbold, cannot be a mirror image of the society it serves.
Values that are admirable in civilian society—sensitivity, individuality, compassion, tolerance for the less capable—are often antithetical to the traits that deter a potential enemy and win wars that must be fought.
General Newbold goes on to say, the values that the military cultivates, conformity, discipline, duty.
He says, he's talking now about direct ground combat.
And he says, when you're thinking about direct combat, you want people who are in We're instinctively and almost irrationally disciplined.
Do this. Go there.
Run up that hill.
And you don't want someone to go, well, is that really a wise judgment?
Explain to me the logic of asking me to do that.
What will our... No.
The idea is you've got to operate, in a sense, as a team.
And he goes, nothing about intense ground combat is polite.
It is often subhumanly coarse.
And what he's getting at here is that there's an element of warfare that reduces human beings to animals, reduces human beings ultimately to brutes, and war is in its nature brutish.
There is only one overriding standard, says General Newbold, for military capability, lethality, lethality, the ability to kill.
And he goes, the officeholders who dilute this core truth with civil society's often appropriate priorities, diversity, gender, etc., undermine the military's chances of success.
Reduced chances of success means more casualties, which makes defeat more likely, and then this which I love, Combat is the harshest meritocracy that exists.
And nothing but ruthless adherence to this principle contributes to deterrence and combat effectiveness.
This is what a military is supposed to be.
This is what generals are supposed to understand.
And then he goes on to make a couple of other good points.
I'll just touch on them. Wars must be waged.
Only with stone-cold pragmatism, not idealism.
So war here is a means to an end.
And the end is defeat of the enemy and the establishment of a peace, but not just any peace, a peace that is actually in your favor.
And there's no room here for idealistic bloviation.
The idea here is to achieve the goal on the ground.
And finally, a military force's greatest strengths are cohesion and discipline.
Individuality or group identity is corrosive and a centrifugal force.
It disperses, in other words, unity.
Indeed, the military wears uniforms because uniformity is essential.
Basically, what he's saying is, look, there are two enemies of group cohesion, the cohesion of the whole group.
One is the idea that I'm an individual.
I'm me. I'm not you.
I've got my own distinct personality.
You have to adjust to my eccentricities.
No. And number two, the idea of group identity.
Because the only group that should matter is the group, the military group itself.
So, the only group identity that works is patriotism, love of country.
We're all in this together.
But any other group identity, I'm black, I'm Hispanic, I'm gay, I'm Asian, any of that is going to create subgroups within the group, undermine military morale.
So to me, this is a kind of dose of clarity and realism coming from someone who knows what they're talking about, but sadly, we live at a time when it seems like these kinds of basic military lessons that were once taught routinely in the Naval War College and at West Point and in the military schools, they were part of what it meant to become a military man, all of this has now become submerged,
has become dissipated, has been lost, and wokeness has found its way even into the area of American lethality and American combat.
Thanks for watching.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. We all know that Biden's Afghan evacuation was a disaster, but we're now only learning the kind of full magnitude of the disaster, and we're getting confirmation that some of our suspicions about how this was carried out are true.
There was a Pentagon audit done by the Inspector General.
And this was an audit of the people who were brought into the United States following the evacuation.
Let's remember there were some 75,000 or so evacuees who have been brought to America.
And the question always from the beginning was, how are these people going to be properly vetted?
Now, the Biden administration has said two things.
One is, these are the people who helped America.
And as it turns out, that is not true of the majority, not just of some, but the majority of these evacuees.
They didn't help America.
These are people who just...
Good guys or bad guys, they ran for the plane, they were let on the planes, they had to prove nothing, and they were essentially evacuated.
So this idea that we helped the guys who helped us, total illusion, total lie.
In fact, most of those guys were left behind.
They were abandoned, along with, by the way, American citizens, and some of whom are still in Afghanistan.
Now, above and beyond this, what the audit shows is that not only were all these sort of random people piled into planes, but there was really no system of proper vetting of them before they were released into America.
In fact, there is a Defense Department database.
It's called the Defense Department's Automated Biometric Identification System.
And there are some other intelligence databases which could have been consulted to go through who these guys are one by one and try to find out exactly who they are and find out if some of them are actually hostile to the United States and dangerous to our security.
By and large, the vetting process skipped over that.
They didn't even bother to do that.
So what they did was they asked people for information that they chose to share.
What's the name of your brother?
What's the name of your uncle?
That kind of thing.
And then they basically looked at a sort of public database to see if there were any signs that this guy had a criminal record.
Obviously, our information in another country like that, public information, is going to be inadequate.
So it turns out that tens of thousands of people have now been brought to America.
The Defense Department, as I say, had this database.
But instead of using that Defense Department database, the only thing that the Biden administration asked the Defense Department to do is to house these guys on military bases.
And so eight military bases were utilized.
For putting these guys up, essentially it became their temporary transitional residence before they were let loose into America.
And then the Defense Department decided, okay, well, we've done our job.
We wash our hands off the matter, let these guys go, and whatever they do, they do.
So... These Afghans have now disappeared into the population.
They were free to leave.
No proper audit has gone on.
And the Democrats, by the way, are pushing now for some of these guys to be given permanent legal status, or in some cases even being made citizens.
Fortunately, Senator Chuck Grassley is on top of this, and he goes, listen, this is not going to happen.
This is something that has been a disaster for U.S. policy.
So the Republicans, again, somewhat late to the game, are recognizing that this was handled terribly from start to finish.
And the Democrats, who in their customary way want to take a problem that was badly handled and make it worse, our job is to make sure we don't let them.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast John Schnatter.
This is Papa John Schnatter.
He's the founder and former chairman and CEO of Papa John's Pizza.
Of course, he's been a pizza guy most of his career.
He grew the store Papa John's to over 5,000 stores in 45 countries.
He's now a philanthropist and he's someone who also thinks about the direction of the country.
John, what a pleasure.
Delighted to see you. I'm seeing here you During your 33 years of leadership and you look like you're like 45.
I mean, you're looking really good.
And is it all those pizzas that are keeping you healthy?
Well, one thing is that Papa John's, back in the day when I was running Better Ingredients, Better Pizza, wasn't a slogan.
It was a way of life.
Everything that we did, we tried to do a little bit better.
And so basically, we got all the chemicals and all the stuff out of the product.
And it's amazing that The health of all of us depends on our diet.
That's why I started Papa Farms as of late.
If you get those chemicals out and you get rid of the processed foods, you get off the pharmaceuticals, you have good water and good air, you can rejuvenate yourself and stay young.
Talk to me about your quintessential American success story, an American entrepreneur.
Talk a little bit about what makes one become an entrepreneur.
What are the qualities that you need to start a business like this, obviously a competitive business, there are lots of other pizza companies, and be successful.
What is the secret of entrepreneurial success?
Well, I think it starts with a dream, a vision, You want to have hope.
But I think the key is find something you love to do and find something you're good at.
I love making pizzas since I was 15.
I just love it. I love the business.
I love everything about it. I like making it.
I like serving and I like putting smiles on face.
And then I learned how to run a business.
My dad had a bankrupt bar.
We had a solar heating company.
We had a grass cutting company.
We had a painting company, Dinesh.
And so I found something I was good at and I found something I love to do.
And if you work it and you're focused, I think the most important word in the English language when it comes to being successful in business is focused.
Prioritize what you do.
Don't do what you could do.
Do what you should do.
Work it to the bone every day.
Get that flywheel spinning.
Before you know it, you know, you have 5,000 stores.
They go, how do you build 5,000 stores?
You build one at a time. You just one like laying bricks.
You just build it every day. You just stick to your knitting and do what you do and keep at it.
Um... I came to America in the late 1970s.
I lived through the Reagan era, then, of course, later the Clinton era.
It seems like there was an entrepreneurial boom in the 80s and the 90s, and one that carried over into the early part of the century.
But it seems like now, in today's environment, we're facing a kind of attack on entrepreneurship.
Do you agree that that's happening in our society, and where do you think that's coming from?
Dinesh, America works when America works.
And if you have the work ethic and people have a job that they can make their lives better and make other people's lives better in the process, and you have that entrepreneurial spirit, then you have America.
I founded Papa John's in 1984, right in the middle of Reaganomics.
Leadership, policy, attitude, energy all starts at the top.
And if you have a president, a leader...
Reagan, Trump, Clinton to a degree, that is pro-business.
60% of the new jobs start with small businesses.
If you want that small business owner to get up and get going and to be successful, because all big businesses started out as small businesses, it starts at the top.
To your point, right now this administration is making it extremely difficult through regulation, paying people not to work, You've got the gas prices going through the ceiling.
We've got a supply chain issue.
We can't get ovens to build stores at Papa John's.
Extremely difficult for the little guy to make it in this day.
I don't think if I started Papa John's today, I don't think I'd have 5,000 stores.
You, John, are an outspoken guy.
You tell it like it is.
You're straight in the way you talk.
And you've run occasionally headlong into this bizarre phenomenon of our time, cancel culture.
This idea that somehow corporations should be woke.
They should kind of adhere to a party line.
Talk a little bit about cancel culture and the threat that it poses to a free society.
Well, I was like Barbara Mandrell.
You know, I was country when country wasn't cool.
I got in this three years ago when, you know, we were basically the genesis of Paragon.
So we had no model, no track record of how do you handle this onslaught.
And, you know, whether you're the parents in West Virginia or the truckers up north or Joe Rogan, I mean, yourself I mean me I mean it's brutal it's it's a very nasty thing to go through and it's been a great experience I've learned a lot as you have I'm sure going through your personal experience I don't want to ever go through it again but the key is stick to the truth the part that you didn't do right on that stick to the facts and fight like hell because these the upper echelon of the elite left are venomous they have no guard for no regard for humanity No regard for the people that wake up and make our country great every day.
And no regard for people that live and breathe and stand for the American dream.
And that's what Papa John's is.
It's the American dream.
And it throws a stick in the elite left's gears.
The Papa John story. It debunks everything they stand for.
Their entire ideology goes out the window with the Papa John story.
You mentioned something right before we went on air, and that was the fact that the ordinary guy has his disputes with his neighbor, and he might have some issues with his marriage and so on.
But the kind of...
You may say systematic venom that is in our politics.
You said that is alien to the ordinary American, but it does seem to have become, does it not, a feature of our public life.
Absolutely. That's why the electorate, whether you're Democrat or Republican, you just, you know, if you're working up every day and you're doing your job and you're just trying to better your life and better your family's life, you know, you may have too many beers, you may fight with your neighbors, you said, you It may gain a few pounds.
But they don't see the evilness and the darkness of Sores and Gates and Fauci and the Clinton administration.
They don't see it. They can't imagine child trafficking.
They can't imagine pedophilia.
They can't imagine, you know, I think with Clinton we're up to 22 people dead.
Epstein, everybody's showing up dead.
I mean, these people will scorch the earth for their ideology.
The ends justify the means.
It's totally Machiavellian.
But the average person doesn't see it because they don't think in terms of being that evil.
They can't comprehend that level of darkness.
Wow. Let's take a pause.
When we come back, let's talk about some of these Biden policies and the effect it's having, not just on your businesses, but businesses throughout America.
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I'm back with John Schnatter, the original Papa John, the founder, former chairman, CEO of Papa John's Pizza, now a philanthropist, now someone who is talking about some of the issues facing our country.
John, let's talk about Biden's economic policy.
Now, I saw a funny thing today because with Ukraine in the news, there was an article basically saying inflation, the debt, supply chain problems, all of this is due to Ukraine.
And I'm thinking, what?
All of this was going on long before the Ukraine heated up.
Talk a little bit about the economic environment that someone like you as an entrepreneur is now forced to deal with on a regular basis.
Well, the question before the House is, can this president do as much damage in the next year, year and a half, that he did the first year and a half?
I mean, the first thing he did was cut off that pipeline, which is 800,000 barrels a day, Dinesh, which is 4 percent, with a commodity.
Gasoline is a commodity.
And then he opens up the Russia pipeline.
So he immediately takes our gas up $1, $1.50.
And that lets Putin build a war chest to attack Ukraine.
You combine that with entitlements.
What concerned me from the get-go, and I said this 30 months ago, is the psychology of the workforce is going to be the most crucial thing in this whole scenario.
Habits are formed in 22 days, good or bad.
In 44 days, they're pretty solidified.
66 days is your number.
We've been going now almost two and a half, three years Paying people not to work.
Now, you combine that with the COVID. If this vaccine is venomous, and I'm not saying it's genocide, I have friends that do, and now we have a built-in mechanism for people to blame their illness on something government mandated, now we have a workforce that has another excuse not to go back to work.
So you have this supply chain issue, you know, you can't get work. You can't get ships. You can't get truckers you have this devaluation of the dollar because Remember to count to a millions 11 days to count a third a billion is 32 years to count to a trillion is 32,000 years The I'll give you the good news in the bad news The bad news is...
$32,000,000 is so much money that it finally blew it up.
The good news is when you spend that kind of money, it does happen fast enough where the consumer goes, what happened here?
See, if you drip it out, $500,000,000,000 here, $600,000,000,000 here, the consumer doesn't feel it.
If you do it in trillions, all of a sudden you've got a 6, 7, 8, 9% inflationary month and the consumer gets it.
So I can't think of one thing that this administration has done To help the American worker that's increased the standard of living, the quality of life, and help small business owners.
Not one. I mean, you asked me right before we went on, and I thought this was very interesting.
Like, when you don't understand the logic of what someone is doing, they can even see the consequences of it.
And you asked me, like, what's their endgame?
Like, don't they recognize that they're harming the economy?
They're harming the ordinary worker?
And I replied that it seems to me that we're dealing with the left with a sort of Chavista phenomenon where these guys...
Have become detached from the economy, detached from the ordinary worker, and so America can go down and at the same time their ship can go up.
So they can benefit as a ruling class that operates by different rules and taps into different sources of wealth and power even as the ordinary guy's life becomes more miserable.
Yeah, your observation, your insight on that paradigm kind of hit me to the heart.
When you're an entrepreneur, And you've created over 2,000 millionaires, multi-millionaires.
You know, you just make the pie bigger and we all win.
I mean, successful companies have successful workers and successful communities.
So free markets, capitalism...
When it grows and it prospers and it's done correctly, legally and morally, I might want to add, because I question some of the corporations today on their morals, then everybody wins.
The mindset you pointed out was, no, we're going to make sure people either stay the same or lose, but we're going to be the aristocrats.
We're going to be the top echelon.
We're going to win at everybody's expense.
That's a mindset, a mentality that is foreign to the way I think and foreign to my soul.
As far as mutually beneficial relationships, partnerships, collaborative alliances, win-wins, the thought of somebody else winning and the other guy's losing, that is a losing hand.
You can't substantiate that.
It's not sustainable.
Well, I mean, the irony is that in the sort of leftist and quasi-Marxist rhetoric, they portray the entrepreneur as benefiting at the expense of the worker.
But as you've pointed out, by and large in successful companies, not only does the founder and CEO do well, a lot of other people do well underneath, and there is a kind of spreading around of the wealth and of the success.
Now, do you think that the American people...
As you say, because they're feeling a shock, foreign policy disgrace, Afghan abandonment, you know, the rising inflation, higher prices.
Do you think that that's enough of a wake-up call that the American people are going to go, you know what, it's time to teach these people a real lesson in the midterms?
Oh, absolutely. I'm an optimist.
I think even on the darkest night, there's a few shining stars.
And light always overcomes darkness.
Good always overcomes evil.
We're going to come out of this better.
What breaks my heart, Dinesh, is why do we have to have all this suffering to get here?
Well, you look at the border and you look at the drugs and you look at Afghanistan and all the people.
The women and children we left behind that are getting raped and murdered and molested.
Why does that have to happen for people to wake up and see the light that these policies are detrimental to humanity?
You know, America's over 200 years old.
It's the greatest economic engine in the world.
And I'm not saying that the third element of the Declaration, Pursuit of Happiness, is all about money.
But you do want people's standard of living to go up.
It's nice when people do have clean water and clean air and good housing and good jobs, good paying jobs.
And I think the most important thing is hope.
People want to know that they're going to go up and get better with their career, and they want their kids to get better with their career.
As long as we let America's economic engine, America works when America works, I think we're all better from that, and it makes for a better life and a happier life.
And the pursuit of happiness, I think, is the ability to overcome a very difficult task.
If you're competent at something that's very difficult, you put in a 5-, 10-, 15-hour day and you feel good about yourself, there's something said about happiness there by making a contribution to your fellow man.
So what you're saying is that the entrepreneurial motivation is partly the economic success, but it's also just a psychological satisfaction of overcoming hardship and a job well done.
Well, you could argue peasants 300 years ago with a hut that didn't bathe for a month.
But they put in a good day's work, and they had hope in a future life, a divine, divinity.
You could argue they were maybe happier than where America's at today.
I mean, there's a lot of murders going on every night in America.
I do like the prosperity element.
I like everybody's standard of living.
But I think there's more to happiness as far as your soul, believing in something bigger than yourself, that is more important than the materialistic, the money part of it.
The relationships with human beings or the relationship with your creator.
I think that's true happiness.
John Schnatter, thank you very much for joining me.
I hope we can have you back to talk some more about all this.
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feel the difference. The group called Black Lives Matter is playing a very sly and shady game called Hide the Money. Now BLM has come into a lot of money and part of this is just the aftermath of George Floyd but I think part of it is also kind of the, well the genius of the BLM name, Black Lives Matter, because it's kind of a name that's hard to argue with.
Nobody disputes that black lives matter.
Well, what do you do? Black lives don't matter?
And so, by putting automatically critics on the defensive, even though this organization is doing all kinds of things that do not advance black lives, in fact, that show a blithe indifference to black lives when...
Black-on-black shootings that are going on, gang violence that's happening all the time.
But because it's black-on-black, we're not going to talk about that.
We're going to focus on the one cop over here, another cop over there.
And so, Black Lives Matter from the beginning has been a racket.
But a very profitable racket.
And tens of millions of dollars, in fact, 66.5 million in 2020, apparently, flows into the coffers of BLM. Now, it was raised with another group called Thousand Currents, which took a big fat commission.
Thousand Currents keeps its millions, and they fork over 66 million to BLM. So, where did that money go?
This isn't just a question I'm asking.
It's a question that local BLM activists are asking.
Like, that's a lot of money. It's one of the most, you may say, lavishly funded charities, so-called, in the country.
And so some sort of accounting is necessary, some sort of public disclosure.
closure, where did the money go?
So what does BLM do?
BLM doesn't want to say where the money went.
In fact, from what we can see, the money has basically all been going in large numbers to BLM people and to their relatives and to their boyfriends and to the fathers of their children.
And I've talked a little bit about this on the podcast.
Patrice Colors, she had a child with this guy, Damon Turner.
So this guy has a company.
He got a bunch of cash to supposedly produce an election night live stream, something that should have cost probably $10,000.
They paid him $150,000.
And Colors also owns a consulting firm.
What's it called? Janiyah and Patrice Consulting.
No surprise! They're doing business with BLM. They're doing business also with another group called Reform LA Jails, another nonprofit that's taking in cash, and their consulting firm is paid $20,000 a month, and on and on goes.
So this is basically, you may say, it's a racket in the name of social justice.
But even rackets need sort of legal protection.
And so what BLM has done is they've gone running to the Democratic Party.
Yes, the official Democratic Party and the top Democratic lawyers and the top Democratic consultants.
And so guess who is now the lawyer for Black Lives Matter?
None other than Mark Elias, major Russia hoaxer.
This is basically the guy...
Mark Elias is now basically in charge of the BLM legal operation.
This is a sign that the Democratic Party is, you may say, officially taking over this racial racket.
And one of the first things that BLM has done now is they have put a woman named Minion Moore.
She's, by the way, a longtime ally of Hillary and Bill Clinton on the BLM board of directors.
And now Mark Elias, putting his kind of legal head to work, what he's done to hide the BLM money, or at least defer any public accountability, is he changed the BLM, you could call it accounting year.
So the way to think about this is like this.
Normally, if you do your taxes on a calendar year, BLM's calendar year would be 2020.
They took in $66.5 million.
Where's the money?
What do you do with it?
So Mark Elias goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We're having a new accounting system, which begins in the middle of the year.
And so we're going to do our accounting now from 2019, the summer of 2019, to the summer of 2020.
By the way, this is before BLM got all that cash.
So by creating this artificial accounting year that goes kind of from the middle of one year to the middle of the next year, your accountability for the money, which obviously all came in the latter part of 2020, is deferred by several months.
BLM doesn't have to do disclosures for a while.
So you can see here that what you're dealing with is accounting shenanigans.
I'm not sure there's anything illegal about this, but what it shows is that the Democratic Party is putting its legal brains to work, to cover up and protect BLM. Why?
Because BLM has now become, you can say, an extension of the Democratic Party itself.
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Today I want to talk about the very beginning of Dante's Inferno.
That's the first part of Dante's three-part Divine Comedy.
But let me begin by reflecting on something I mentioned earlier, which is the idea of Dante being an exile.
An exile politically from Florence.
But this also causes Dante to think about the issue of exile in a much deeper way.
We are, after all, in some sense, exiles in the world.
And part of what it means to be a Christian is to feel a little bit of a sense that I don't entirely belong here.
In a sense, you could say we are eternals who are now in a temporary pilgrimage, if you will, with human bodies here on earth.
I remember Cardinal Dolan, the Cardinal of New York, once told a story about visiting a Dominican friar.
And when he went to his room, he noticed there was, like, nothing in the room.
And he asked the friar, like, where's the rest of your stuff?
And the friar goes, well, I don't have any other stuff.
This is all I got. And then the friar says to Cardinal Dolan, he goes, well, you know, you only have a small suitcase.
And Cardinal Dolan goes, well, yeah, but I'm just passing through.
And the friar goes, well, aren't we all?
Aren't we all? So this is a very Dante-esque sentiment, to be able to see the world and our life from different angles.
And this is part of the beauty of the Divine Comedy, is it's not just that we see hell and purgatory and heaven, but we see Dante in those places looking back, you may say, at us.
Now, here's an interesting question to ask about hell.
Who goes to hell?
And you might say, what do you have to be to go to hell?
What do you have to do?
And I think most people would answer, well, you have to be, you know, a sinner.
You have to be a bad guy.
You have to have done some really bad stuff.
That, as it turns out, is the wrong answer.
Why? Because all human beings are sinners.
If hell is full of sinners, and it sure is, Purgatory is full of sinners.
Heaven is full of people who sinned in their lives.
And some really spectacular sinners are, as it turns out, in heaven.
So, being a sinner is actually not the line of demarcation that decides who goes to hell and who doesn't.
The real answer is that you have to be an unrepentant sinner.
That is the key phrase, unrepentant.
And we will see as we go through hell, and we're going to make some kind of stops along the way, who are these unrepentant sinners and what does it mean to be unrepentant?
Part of what Dante thinks about is, what does sin do to you?
And if you don't give it up, so to speak, if you don't acknowledge it, if you don't appeal to grace, then sin forms who you are.
It forms your character.
One of the most ingenious things about Dante's Hell is we can't think of Dante's Hell as, you know, we're going to go to deeper and deeper circles and Dante is going to be, wow, he's going to be putting his imagination to work.
He's going to come up with unbelievably ingenious tortures and punishments.
Not at all. Part of the sort of profundity of the Inferno is that Dante asks of the sinner, what is it that you truly want?
What is your real objective?
And then your punishment, if you can call it that, is he gives it to you.
One of the things you see about sinners is they are punished in a manner that directly corresponds to what they were after.
They, in a sense, get what they wanted.
Except that what they wanted turns out not to be what they thought it was.
So to put it somewhat differently, all sin has some kind of veneer.
It has some kind of surface appeal.
Think about it. If it didn't have that, why would you do it?
So sin does promise you something wonderful, but the sin itself is not wonderful.
The sin itself is actually ugly and disgusting, but nevertheless it's what you want.
And Dante basically goes, in hell, you can have it.
You actually have it, but without the surface veneer, with the surface veneer removed.
And as we look at the architecture of Dante's hell, we see that it's, well, there are nine sort of circles of hell, but there are three categories of hell, three sort of levels, if you may.
And each level has circles within it.
So the three levels are I'm going to call them concupiscence or incontinence, loosely speaking, lack of self-control.
That's the upper circles.
Then we go to violence.
And then we go to fraud.
And as we go deeper into hell, the sins become more serious.
So right away, Dante does not take the view that sort of all sins are equal and that, you know, a small thing that you did, you didn't help a guy who needed, you know, five dollars, is the same thing as you were, you know, you cheated on your wife or you murdered some guy.
No, for Dante, sins have levels of gravity.
And levels of gravity require different levels of punishment.
And so Dante's hell is, well, you'd have to say hierarchical.
It's an inverse hierarchy in which the deeper down you go, the worse things begin, the worse things get.
Now, let's just begin by reading the first couple of lines of the poem.
Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path.
So here's Dante, beginning in a very interesting way.
He's in the middle of his life.
He's 35 years old, and the year is 1300 AD. And what Dante is saying is that he wandered off from the straight path.
And he's giving you right there the idea of what sin is.
It's wandering off of So sin isn't, I did this and I did that.
We'll come across a lot of specific sins in hell.
But Dante's original kind of confusion, the fact that he's in this so-called dark wood, is not due to any particular thing that he's done.
In fact, he never says what that is.
You almost get the idea that he's going through some kind of, I won't call it a midlife crisis, but some kind of a spiritual crisis.
And Dante thinks he's going to get himself out.
And so he's like in this dark wood.
In fact, he goes on to say...
Very interestingly, how I entered there, I cannot truly say.
And I think this really resonates with us because what it's saying to us is, look, sometimes you end up in a place in life and you're like, how did I get here?
In other words, I didn't mean to get here.
I didn't want to become this kind of person, but somehow I have and I now have to face up to it.
And so here's Dante. He's sort of taking stock of himself and he's trying to get out of this dark wood and He sees the sun momentarily and he goes, I'll climb out of it.
He says, but you know, I had to drag my bad leg.
So you see this idea of Dante the Poet.
Let's remember always, we have two Dantes here.
We have Dante the Pilgrim, who's the character invented by Dante the Poet.
Dante the Poet is writing the poem, and in the poem, you've got a 35-year-old guy named Dante who's undergoing this journey.
And while Dante himself...
The pilgrim is somebody who's going to be disoriented.
He's going to be making mistakes.
A lot of times he gets things wrong.
We should never think this of Dante the Poet.
Dante the Poet is the older Dante who is writing the poem and writing the poem, you might say, as someone who has already gone through this journey.
So here's Dante. He's in the dark wood.
He's all confused. He sees the sun.
He's trying to climb out of it.
And then his path is blocked by three animals, one by one.
They come one by one and they block.
So one comes over here.
He goes, let me go over there.
And the three animals are a leopard, a lion, and a wolf.
And scholars over the years have sort of debated who's the leopard, who's the lion, who's the wolf, and they've tried to identify particular sins with these animals that perhaps Dante is symbolically confessing to.
But no, in reality, I think that these animals represent the three big categories of sin.
So the leopard, with its spots and its kind of...
Dante even uses the word gaudy, the gaudy leopard.
The gaudy leopard represents concupiscence.
Concupiscence is desire, it's lust, it's incontinence.
The lion represents...
Violence. And the wolf, the third...
By the way, in Italian, all these names begin with L, and there's a kind of melody.
The leopard, the lion, and the wolf.
The wolf represents fraud.
So here's Dante.
He's in this thicket.
He's in this confusion.
He doesn't know how to get out.
He's blocked by, you can say, the overpowering force of sin.
And just as he's about to despair...
Somebody shows up.
And that somebody will be a figure, already dead, long dead, named Virgil, a great poet, author of the Poet of the Aeneid, an epic poem that in some ways is a rival to the Divine Comedy, but also one of Dante's heroes in life.
Dante admired Virgil.
He copied Virgil's style.
He learned from Virgil.
He saw Virgil also to some degree as a competitor.
And here is that very Virgil, long dead, now showing up as a shade, as a ghost.
Showing up to Dante in this moment of confusion and saying, Listen, I'm here on a mission.
I'm sort of heaven sent.
We'll talk about what that means.
And Virgil goes, I am here to take you on a journey.
But you're not going to go up.
There's no way to get out of here by going up.
We've got to go down.
Down where? Down into the earth.
Down into hell.
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