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Feb. 25, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:32
BREAKFAST IN KIEV Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep278
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Now, Biden's named a new nominee for the Supreme Court, and Judge Jackson, Ketanji Jackson, Not even entirely sure how to say her name, but I'll be checking her record out and I'll talk about her nomination next week.
Today, we're going to talk about the Ukraine.
Really going to show how this combination of woke politics, identity politics, all the kind of nonsense that has overtaken our culture makes it difficult to understand very simple power politics on the world stage.
Identity politics is also driving the Biden administration to suspend an anti-espionage program against China.
What? I'm going to explore why women who have traditionally been conservative in their voting habits for decades now vote more progressive.
Why is that? And toward the end, I'm going to talk about the famous tryst between Paolo and Francesca in Dante's Divine Comedy.
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.
The battle for Kiev is on and Russian forces are pushing toward the capital, the Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
And according to US intelligence estimates, it's not going to take them long to get it.
They have deployed a ferocious force.
150,000 troops.
They've got superior weaponry.
And so you see all these grim pictures of the Ukrainians in bomb shelters and kind of hunkering down.
But according to news reports and apparently according to intelligence estimates, it's only going to be three to four days before the Russians are in Kiev and Putin is having, you know, breakfast in Kiev.
Now, what to me is really disturbing, and this really shows the shift in our culture, is the way in which various figures in the media, in entertainment, even in politics, are talking about this in a manner that suggests a complete lack of seriousness about foreign policy, a lack of understanding, a lack of comprehension, and a kind of jejun inane projection of local
concerns that have to do with political correctness and other kinds of nonsense on to Putin and on to Russia and on to a global stage that doesn't really see things this way.
I'll talk about power politics in a moment, but let me just read a few things that I've been seeing and hearing.
Here's Joy Behar. She's a little upset about what's happening in Ukraine.
She says, this could kind of shake up the map of Europe and Italy.
She goes, I've been planning a vacation to Italy.
This could interfere with that.
This is Joy Behar.
Apparently, it all comes down to Joy Behar's vacation.
Then we have a guy also on social media, an academic of some sort, and he goes, well, you know, Putin, yeah, where does he get the arrogance to do this kind of thing?
It's probably because of white supremacy.
Putin's white. Could he really do this if he were black or if he were brown?
And I'm thinking to myself...
How out of it is this type of analysis?
I mean, it's one thing to, you know, talk like this at, like, Oberlin or Bowdoin College, but to put this out when we're discussing a serious international event, I mean, people are even talking, addressing Putin directly.
I've seen some videos of this effect, and they're talking to Putin like he's some woke graduate of, like, Yale, and that he, you About how you feel, or how the Ukrainians feel, or how the world, I keep hearing, the world will not forgive you, the world. As if Putin is sitting around, what does the world think about what I'm doing?
This does not enter into his brain at all.
Here is John Kerry, our climate czar, from really just a few days ago.
Listen to this. He goes, now, northern Russia is thawing, and his infrastructure, Putin's infrastructure, is at risk, and the people of Russia are at risk.
So I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do on the climate.
On the climate. And here's the New York Times talking about the fighting in Ukraine.
And what gets me is the second sentence.
The first one is kind of normal.
The fighting in Ukraine's east is forcing a mass migration to the west that is crowding mass transit centers and trains and jamming roads.
But then comes this little rhetorical classic, this gem.
Quote, video images of the large number of Ukrainians on the move show few signs of face coverings.
Even as the country is just getting past a record high point in its infection rate.
So the Times is a little worried that, you know, not only are the mask requirements being ignored, but what about social distancing, guys?
You're all in a bomb shelter.
You're abnormally close to each other.
And I think to myself, you know, it actually makes me uncomfortable to read this kind of nonsense because it is just so detached from reality.
It's the mark of a certain kind of ideological derangement.
The left has been trying to portray conservatives as somehow pro-Putin.
You know, these guys are for Putin.
No, we're not for Putin. None of us are for Putin.
We want the Ukrainians to hold out.
We want the Ukrainians to win.
We're not for Putin.
Putin's a thug. But here's my point.
I have a certain kind of grudging respect for Putin for the simple reason that he's a thug that understands his country's interests and he's a thug that understands the use of power.
I'd say exactly the same thing, by the way, of China's Xi.
These are thugs, but they're thugs who pay careful attention to how do you get things accomplished.
We can't really say the same thing about Biden.
The problem here with the Ukraine is a bigger and deeper one, and that is that the United States has played very poorly the game of power politics.
It's almost as if we egged on the Ukraine.
Oh yeah, the United States is the world's sole superpower.
No worries, Ukraine. Why don't you guys come into NATO and, you know...
Together we will...
Putin's days are numbered anyway.
Russia's going down, down, down.
So you can be part of the winning team.
Now the problem with all this is it ignores a simple fact.
Ukraine is a very tiny dot right next to a big Russian bear.
And Russia is going to try to make sure that the dots around it are subordinate to Russia.
And so the question is, has the United States lulled Ukraine into a kind of illusion?
Join our side, we'll be there for you.
When the US and even Western Europe had no intention of directly coming to the rescue of Ukraine, as we are not now doing.
I saw a ridiculous posting that says that the US is now hoping to help to train Ukrainian forces, quote, remotely.
What? Training Ukrainian forces by Zoom call?
Hey guys, listen. Let us give you seven helpful tips as you take on the Russians.
So, this is unseriousness that seems to be permeating our society.
No wonder. Here we are, the world's sole superpower.
At least we have been until now.
This is not a conflict I think we're likely to win.
Biden even knows that.
He's basically saying... We're not going to be using missiles.
We're going to be using sanctions.
But you know what? Sanctions can just be as terrifying as missiles.
And I don't think there's anyone, not even Biden himself, at the end of the day, who believes it.
Debbie and I just got a call from Mike Lindell a day or two ago, and he's like, hey, Dinesh, I want to support your movie.
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I love Mike Lindell and the way he's willing to get behind stuff and really push it and all the risks that he's taken and the price he's paid for his convictions.
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And to get the discounts, you need to use promo code DINESHDINESH. The Department of Justice, Biden's Department of Justice, is shutting down an anti-espionage program aimed at China.
Why? Wait till you hear this.
Because they've become a little concerned about using racial profiling.
They're worried that they're stereotyping the Chinese.
Now... This, to me, is pathological behavior.
Over the last few years, the United States has been prosecuting various scientists who have been kind of in league with China, working for China, and at the same time not disclosing their ties to China.
Now, it is possible for researchers to work on behalf of China.
But there is a disclosure requirement.
And so there have been a number of high-profile prosecutions of academics and researchers who have made grant applications but not disclosed, not revealed that they are disclosed.
Turning over their information to the Chinese, in fact, ultimately to the Chinese Communist Party.
Last December, a jury found the former chair of Harvard's chemistry department, Charles Lieber, guilty about lying to federal officials, filing false tax returns.
This is exactly what this DOJ program was aimed at uncovering.
Now, it's true that they sometimes have had a case that has failed.
They dropped all charges against an MIT mechanical engineering professor named Gang Chen, who was indicted for concealing his ties to Chinese programs.
There's an ongoing case against a guy named Franklin Tao, a University of Kansas chemical engineering professor, and he goes to trial again.
But right while this program was humming along and it's aimed at dealing with the real problem, and the problem is that China is aggressively engaged in academic and industrial espionage, so no one denies that simple fact.
But the DOJ sort of, almost without warning, has shut down its program, its law enforcement program, for finding and discovering and prosecuting this espionage on behalf of China.
And here is Assistant Attorney General for National Security, Matthew Olson.
And what he basically says is, DOJ will no longer use the framework of the China Initiative, that's the name of this program, to organize or to describe our efforts to counter threats by the PRC, People's Republic of China Government.
He goes, we are ending the China Initiative.
Now, the shocking reason is when he tells you why.
And he basically says, quote, listen to this, I'm now just quoting.
By grouping cases under the China Initiative rubric, we help give rise to a harmful perception that the department applies a lower standard to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct related to that country, or we in some way view people with ethnic, racial, or familial ties to China differently.
So to translate, to decode, what he's saying is the people we're going after in this program are kind of all Chinese.
And we don't want to create the impression we've got anything against the Chinese.
So we've got all these people we're indicting and they've got Chinese names.
They've got names like Tao and Gang Chen.
And so we're a little worried here that we're going to be accused of racial stereotyping.
In other words, we're going to be accused of being kind of unwoke.
And so we got to shut down this program.
Now they say, look, we're not like totally getting rid of it.
We're kind of going to sweep it into a kind of a bigger anti-espionage program that kind of involves Russia, Iran, all countries lumped together.
This way we can't be accused of singling out the Chinese.
So this is how political correctness is killing us.
It's killing legitimate programs aimed at uncovering real threats.
And these real threats become somehow blurred because the people who are supposed to be investigating go, you know what, that guy's name is Wong.
Can we really go after a guy named Wong? Too bad his name isn't Smith.
We could then really go after him.
Let's discontinue the anti-China initiative and just lump it under some bigger thing.
This way we won't be accused of racial insensitivity.
How pathetic, how disgusting, and how dangerous.
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As I watch the disintegration of these democratic cities, the The way that their schools have gone into a tailspin, the escalating crime rates.
One question that I ask is, you know, are Democrats okay with this?
These are the Democrats who are keeping these authorities in office, the mayor, the district attorney.
And so are Democrats happy to be living in this kind of cesspool that we now call San Francisco, that we now call L.A.? Well, there are some signs that Democrats are kind of waking up.
I mentioned a couple of days ago on the podcast of San Francisco, school board recall.
Three leftists on the school board, yanked by margins of over 70%, in which basically died in the wool Democrats, including, by the way, a lot of ethnic Democrats, decide it's time to give these people the boot.
Good news. Well, here's some good news out of LA. There is a big move now to remove, to recall the district attorney.
This is George Gascon.
This is a guy who has essentially alienated the entire, and I mean the entire, law enforcement community.
There's a statement just come out from the Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys.
And more than 9 out of 10 LA prosecutors, according to a survey conducted by this group, approved the recall.
They want this guy out.
And the head of the group...
He's talking about why this is a guy named Eric Siddle.
He goes, it has been one year of Gascon's social experiment, an experiment that he says has been, quote, a miserable failure.
I'm now just going to quote from this guy, Eric Siddle, because it sort of describes not just what George Gascon is doing in LA, but what we've seen in New York, What we've seen in St.
Louis, what we've also seen in San Francisco.
And I'm happy to say also that Chesa Boudin, the DA in San Francisco, is also facing a recall.
So it's going to send a message that these Soros-back DAs, these far-left DAs, are alienating even the Democratic constituencies that put them into office.
So back to Eric Siddle, vice president of this group called the Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys.
He goes, quote, One of the first things Gascon did was to create a set of directives, in other words, internal rules that DAs are supposed to follow, and some of these rules directly contradicted California's state law.
So for example, one rule, he says, is we could not file strikes pursuant to the three strikes law.
So California has, listen, three strikes and you're out.
But according to Gascon, don't do that.
Don't identify the strikes so we don't get to three.
So essentially, Gascon is unilaterally repudiating an existing California law.
And Siddle continues,"...and the three strikes law is a mandatory law.
It's something that prosecutors don't have the discretion to ignore." A second violation says Siddle is Gascon's alleged order for prosecutors to dismiss existing charges that he, Gascon, personally disagreed with.
So even though there are charges filed and they're filed by local DAs, Gascon goes, I don't like that one.
I don't really think that's...
So you drop it. Now, this is again, according to Siddall, he continues, whole sections of the penal code are no longer enforceable, he goes.
And this is a serious problem.
We can't just void sections of the law.
In effect, what he's doing is making things legal by not enforcing them.
So again, Gascon has become sort of, on his own discretion, deciding, yeah...
This law, I think we're going to apply.
That one, I don't think we're going to.
And so, all of this, by the way, these are not like random errors that fall on both sides of the net.
Gascon is essentially the criminal's favorite DA. And he is the crime victim's ultimate nightmare.
So this is a guy that is bad news.
It's just the sheer stupidity of the Democratic voters that put him into office.
It is the slow process of realizing just how bad he is.
A lot of times people don't realize right away because, you know what?
My home wasn't robbed. My car wasn't broken into.
Nobody stuck a knife in my back.
So it takes a lot of victims to be shrieking out there for the ordinary guy to finally pay attention and go, you know what?
Maybe I shouldn't have voted for this guy.
Yeah, it's time to recall him.
So this is the Democrats, I would say, very gradually waking up, sleepily pulling themselves out of their beds and recognizing that some of the people that they've put in office are downright bad guys.
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Hey guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Tamika Hamilton.
I've met Tamika a few times.
I've been out and spoken with her at conferences and for her.
And she's running for Congress in California's 3rd Congressional District.
She served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force for over 14 years, deployed to the Middle East.
Her husband, Ray, is also a veteran and now a local police officer.
Tamika, thanks for joining me.
It's good to see you again, even if remotely.
And let me start by asking you about how you became a Republican.
Was it something that happened naturally or was there a kind of moment of awareness or of conversion?
Yes. Hi, Denise. Thanks for having me on.
It was naturally.
You know, being a conservative was just natural to me.
I was raised in a traditional family.
Home, while we didn't talk a lot about politics, you know, when it came time to vote, it was just a natural thing to vote conservative.
So no dramatic story, sorry.
Now, you've had a military career, and then you decided to run for Congress.
You came really close the last time.
You got, I believe, 46% of the vote, and not in a particularly Republican district.
So this is kind of what I want to talk to you about, which is, what is a way for Republicans and conservatives to compete in districts that are swing districts or moderate districts?
What is your strategy?
So my strategy, and that's a really great question, and my strategy is the ground.
I tell people all the time, you know, winning race is about peer-to-peer, pressing the flesh, phone calls, and sending mail.
And that's what we have done here in this district to be effective.
And we got really close to beating a 50-year incumbent, first time running.
And now we're on target to win this year because of the foundation that we laid in 2020.
When you make your case to the voters, how do you frame the Republican message?
Do you do it differently from the kind of traditional Republican message that you hear in the media?
Or how do you pitch the case to a voter?
Let's say I'm a skeptical voter.
I've heard the Republicans are the party of the rich.
I've heard Republicans are the party of white supremacy.
How would you break through to someone who's kind of picked those sorts of themes up from the media?
So one of the things that's really surprising is that that's not what I get when I go door to door.
We're talking about the kitchen table issues, and I always put the focus on what they have going on and then what I want to do.
And then, oh, and I just so happen to be Republican.
And so a lot of times they are taken back by me being Republican, but not, you know, too often.
And then they make a decision on whether or not they want to vote for me, because they actually saw me.
And Building a relationship in these communities is what it takes, especially in a district like this, to get the Republicans to win.
You have to just build a relationship, and that's where it starts.
You made the point to me that Republicans have tended to, you know, downplay or somewhat ignore, particularly the black vote.
Well, how can Republicans, I mean, Trump did a little bit better with black communities, but we're still a long way from being competitive in the African-American community.
Do you think Republicans can make deeper inroads and how?
Yes, you know, a lot of times, you know, Republicans go off the data when it comes to connecting with communities in general.
You know, they look at the data.
This is what the data says, and this is where we're going to pursue putting the most effort, right?
But in order for you to get where we need to be, and especially with the Black vote, we're going to have to step outside of that and challenge ourselves.
And if we say we care, if we say we have the solutions, then we need to be going in those underserved communities and making the case.
And again, sticking to the kitchen table issues.
And focusing on what's in front of you.
I'm the candidate. This is what I want to do.
And what are your issues and how can I help?
Republicans have not emphasized in general identity politics.
We try to run sort of as a colorblind, if you will, party as if race doesn't really matter.
The Democrats do the exact opposite.
They italicize and highlight race.
Do you think the Republicans have the right approach or do you think that there's nothing wrong for Republicans to practice a little bit of identity politics, at least to say, hey, listen, we're a party that's a big tent.
We've got a lot of people who look like America and look like you.
How do you Play on this particular issue.
Yeah, and that's another great question.
It's something that you and I've talked about before.
It's marketing.
I think that when we talk about identity politics, a lot of that is political theater.
That's played up so that there can be this disconnect with Republicans actually talking to Black voters, Hispanic voters that don't traditionally vote for them.
And there's nothing wrong with saying Okay, this is a group that needs X, Y, Z, because every community is something different.
And Donald Trump did a really amazing job in trying to build those coalitions.
And so that is a model I think that people should look at in respective districts that are like mine.
There's nothing wrong with marketing to specific groups.
It's really not.
And we need to change that.
And I think part of what you're saying is there's nothing wrong also with Republicans trying to make an effort to have a lot of black and Hispanic candidates so that blacks and Hispanics can see, hey, listen, this is a party in which I can feel at home, in which we are not only asked to be members, but we also can participate in the leadership.
Absolutely. I will tell you, when I first walked into my Republican Central Committee meeting, no one looked like me.
And I'm still the only Black woman in a lot of these groups because they don't do outreach.
And some of these organizations are in the middle of the hood, and they still do not outreach to the community.
How is that even possible?
And so that's on us.
That's on the Republican Party.
And, you know, and the other thing I would add is that I did not get into this because someone tapped me on my shoulder.
Someone asked me to run. You know, every candidate is kind of out there on their own.
You know, when you see the Republican Party kind of going, doing a lot of support and pushing candidates, probably that's after they win.
That's after they've already been there, you know, and they want to keep them there.
But a lot of candidates, 90% of them are out on their own.
And working really hard to get that name ID, raise the money.
That's what I'm doing.
Like, I'm not currently supported by the party, even though, and when I say supported, I mean like in the big tent, like, you know, in D.C., you know, I'm not, I haven't gotten that big D.C. support yet.
But locally, I've been endorsed.
You know, the community around me is supporting me, even Democrats.
And so, again, this is about making those inroads and taking chances, because in order for us to expand and grow, evolve, We have to step out of that normal comfort zone because we're not going to last long going the way we're going.
Tamika, you're on the front line and you're doing a good job.
I really wish that this time you can cross the finish line and be successful because I think your message is particularly important and you're showing the way for Republicans to win in districts that are not traditionally Republican.
Thanks very much for joining me on the podcast.
Thank you so much.
And I would just like to add, go to my website, votetamika.org.
And go check out my website and support if you can.
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There is a difference today in politics between the way that men vote and the way that women vote.
It's typically called the gender gap.
Men tend to lean more Republican.
Women tend to lean more Democratic.
And a lot of times an election hinges on, because they're roughly the same number of men and women, whether the gender gap is bigger on the men's side for Republicans or bigger on the female side for Democrats.
Now, It's a very interesting article.
Sometimes I dive into the academic literature.
This is from the International Political Science Review, written by two people I respect.
They lean left, but they're fair-minded scholars.
The names are Ronald Engelhardt and Pippa Norris.
This is a study of the gender gap, not just in the United States, but also in Europe.
And they make the interesting point that women used to be conservative.
Women used to lean right.
So the question that they're asking, and they don't fully answer it, but they raise it, is why is it that women who used to lean right for decades are now leaning left?
What happened? What's the change?
And let's look at some of the data.
Apparently... When they looked at both the United States, this is going all the way back to the time when women were given the vote.
For a number of decades, women leaned Republican.
They voted more for Republicans than they did for Democrats.
And this was even, by the way, in the FDR time when, of course, the Democrats were winning elections at the presidential level pretty decisively.
But Pippa Norris and Engelhardt say that this was also true in Europe, that by and large women tended to vote for center-right parties in Western Europe, For example, in places like Italy and Germany, they would vote for the Christian Democrats over the labor or left-wing or socialist parties.
And they also point out, for example, that if you look at things like church attendance in Europe, women tend to go to church more than men.
So these were the factors that were seen to make women more conservative.
Also, I think if you look at things just from a very broad, almost sort of Darwinian perspective, you discover that women are more risk-averse than men.
They take less risk. They're more religious than men.
They're also more conscientious in getting things done, detail-oriented.
I think Debbie's like, yes, indeed.
In this family, that's certainly true, than men.
But the point is, all of these are indices that point in a more conservative direction.
And so you have kind of a mystery, which is that somehow...
And this is back to the study for a moment.
In the 50s and 60s, women are more conservative.
Then somehow in the 70s, they kind of move toward the middle.
And then starting in the 80s and 90s, and all the way continuing to now, women are now sort of on the left end of the spectrum, at least on average.
And the article, as I say, doesn't really resolve the question of why, but I want to offer a kind of theory of why, which goes back to a conversation years ago that I had with a political strategist who made a startling observation to me based upon the data that he was familiar with.
And what he said was, he said, By and large, he says, if you show me a married woman with kids, that woman is going to be almost surely Republican.
Not always, but most of the time.
He goes, you find me a married woman with no kids?
Leaning Republican. You find a divorced woman?
In the middle. You can't really say.
You find a single woman?
Leaning Democratic. And he goes, you find a single mom with kids, you can almost surely predict that's a Democratic voter.
And so, if this kind of bell curve, if this spectrum is right, which I think it is, it really gives you the clue to solving this problem.
The reason that women have moved left over these decades It's because the traditional family has broken down.
The traditional family, while it's intact, the majority of women were in traditional families.
They were moms who had kids, and they voted, consequently, more right-wing, more to the right.
Then, as you began to see rising rates Of divorce, that began to push the women as a group toward the political center on average.
And then as the number of single women, i.e.
women who never married, and also women who are single moms with kids, you now begin to see the desire, well, I need sort of a provider.
It's no longer going to be the husband, per se.
Maybe it's going to be the government.
So suddenly, these new factors come into play.
In which you would almost argue that the government is taking the place of the provider.
In fact, the government is seen as a more steady provider than some kind of a, you know, ne'er-do-well type provider who may be here today, gone tomorrow.
And so I think that this welfare state dependency factor begins to kick in.
And since more women are falling into that kind of cohort, this is part of the explanation.
Maybe not the full explanation, but part of the explanation for why women who used to lean right of center Now lean the other way.
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feel the difference. When we last left Dante, he was at, just gone past the gates of hell.
He had seen in the outer precincts of hell the so-called neutrals, the people who couldn't decide, never make a choice, never commit themselves. And as I mentioned, Dante gives them the anonymity they deserve. He doesn't name any of them. But now we're in Canto 4, which is the circle of hell that is called Limbo.
Dante doesn't use that term, but it's the place where you have the virtuous pagans.
The virtuous pagans. Who are the virtuous pagans?
These are the good guys who lived before Christ.
They weren't Christian.
In fact, they didn't know about Christ.
And they are here where they don't suffer any severe punishment, but they also feel a sense of weariness, of exhaustion, and they don't have hope.
So in that sense, they are part of the abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Dante presents these as sort of good people, good in the human sense.
They have been pursuers of truth and of knowledge.
But they don't have the Christian revelation, and so they don't get the final knowledge that they seek.
And this is really why they're always groaning and sighing, because their efforts to get somewhere are always falling short.
And the problem, of course, with being in hell is that they fall short now eternally.
You'll never get to the place that you want to go.
By the way, Virgil himself, Dante's guide, belongs here.
He is an inhabitant of Limbo, of the circle of the virtuous pagans, the outer ring of hell.
And he's been temporarily asked to go on this mission with Dante through really all of hell and will seem virtually all of purgatory.
But when that ends, Virgil will come back here into his circle.
Who's in the circle?
Well, it's a grand tour of a lot of interesting characters.
By the way, Dante doesn't distinguish between people who actually lived and some characters in books, mythical characters, if you will.
Dante treats them all as real.
And so you go through hell, and who do you see?
Well, you see Plato. Plato. Plato was, of course, a real person.
Socrates also. But you also see people like Aeneas.
Aeneas is the hero of Virgil's Aeneid.
There he is in the fourth.
He is in Canto IV in the circle of the virtuous pagans.
You find the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales.
You find Seneca, the Roman writer.
Hector, who is the fictional hero, one of the heroes of the Iliad.
He's in there. Homer, Horus, Ovid.
But then you find something interesting.
You find that there were people in this circle of the virtuous pagans who are no longer in hell.
And you have to stop for a moment and go, wait a minute, what?
I thought hell was eternal.
I thought abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Once you get in, you can't get out.
Well, as it turns out, and this is how complex Dante is and how interesting, there's an exception to this rule.
What's the exception?
Well, the exception turns out to be the faithful Jews of the Old Testament who didn't know about Jesus.
In that sense, they too would fall into this camp of not being saved.
But Jesus apparently went into hell and got them out.
Now, this is not directly in the Bible, but it actually is in a Christian tradition going all the way back to the beginning.
It's called the harrowing of hell.
This is the basic idea.
And I can cite the lines from the Creed.
This is the Nicene Creed.
On the third day, he descended into hell.
Oh, he descended into hell and on the third day he rose again.
So apparently Jesus was three days in hell.
What was he doing? Well, he was getting out the virtuous, he was getting out the faithful Jews who were taken up into heaven.
So this is the only case we can find.
There's one more case, which I'll mention in a second, of somebody in hell who actually got out.
They were temporary inhabitants of hell.
Who's the other case?
Interestingly, Dante. Dante doesn't, even though Dante goes through the gates of hell, abandon all hope, ye who enter here, Dante is not like everybody else.
Dante is, in fact, going back to his normal life after he's done.
So he's an exception.
Now, Virgil, interestingly, died himself, the real Virgil, in 19 BC. And there's a very interesting message where Virgil says to Dante, he goes, you know, This harrowing of hell, this event in which Jesus came down here and took out the faithful Jews and took them with him to heaven, he goes, that occurred shortly after I got here.
So Dante is now referring to Virgil, who apparently experienced this event called the harrowing of hell.
And a final little twist, a little detail that I think should not go unnoticed, as Dante is making a list of all these guys he's running into, Homer and Horace and Hector, he also mentions two Muslims.
Wait, what? He mentions Averroes and he mentions Avicenna.
These are two Islamic philosophers who, by the way, were, as far as we know, devout Muslims.
They believed in Allah. And what are they doing here with the virtuous pagans?
Well, I think what Dante is saying is that these guys were not known for being malahs or Islamic fanatics.
No, they were philosophers.
And they were philosophers who engaged with the same themes that occupied people like Thomas Aquinas.
So they were struggling to get a better understanding of God.
And so Dante doesn't see them as Muslims per se.
He sees them as philosophers in the same category as other philosophers who are right here with the other virtuous pagans.
So we see here how Dante takes a very interesting view on topics like is there salvation or even the possibility of salvation for non-Christians.
He makes us think very hard about where people actually belong.
He's forcing us to second-guess his own judgments, and of course his own judgments are judgments that will be ultimately decided not by us and not by Dante, but by God himself.
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We're now going to turn to Canto 5, which...
which is one of the most famous, if not the most famous, Canto in the Divine Comedy.
And I'm going to take this one a little bit slow, because not only is it important in itself, but it gives us a real idea of how Dante views sin in general, punishment in general.
So it becomes a kind of preview for the entire moral structure of the Divine Comedy.
It's kind of funny, as I was thumbing through my Canto 5 a moment ago, Debbie got a...
Hey, look at this on...
We got this message through the website.
I'm just going to read it. Please compile and release the Dante discussions as a self-contained video recording.
I'd love to listen to them all in sequence.
good stuff. Well, I'm delighted because, you know, I sometimes hesitate about doing these historical and philosophical kind of excursions, wondering if in a political podcast, are people like, why is Dinesh even talking about all this stuff? I see it as a nice complement to the other stuff that I talk about. And I don't think I can right now figure out how to put all this, put all the Dante material together. I mean, it's all there, and I typically have it toward
the end of each podcast. So it's pretty easy to find, but maybe sometime when I can, I'll get around to figuring out how to thread them together to create a kind of sequence of videos that you can watch one after the other.
Well, in Canto V, we're dealing now with the Canto of the lustful.
And to remind you, in Dante's schema of the Inferno, you have three types of sins.
You have the sins of incontinence, so concupiscence.
And Dante classifies those as the mildest sins.
They're serious enough to get you into hell, so they're not mild.
But they're milder than the second category of sins, which is the sins of violence.
Violence against others.
But as it also turns out, violence against self.
And then finally, the sins of treachery and betrayal and fraud.
And those, for Dante, are the worst sins, the ultimate corruption of the mind.
So you can think of the sins of concupiscence, this category we're going to talk about now, as the triumph of desire over reason and wills.
So for Dante, we humans are divided into sort of three parts.
There's passion or desire, there's reason or intellect, and there's will.
And you can almost think of will as the referee, the umpire, arbitrating between reason and desire.
And ultimately for Dante, what you do is a matter of choice.
You make that choice.
And as we'll see here, the canto of the lustful, what you have are sinners, and we'll meet one in particular, a woman named Francesca, Francesca da Rimini, and the essence of her unrepentance, her refusal to repent for her sin.
Remember, if you repent for sins, however grave, that's going to move you right out of hell and into either purgatory or We'll get to that in a minute.
Now, in Dante's Geography of Hell, very interestingly, you'll find that the punishment, I won't just say fits the crime, but reflects The fulfillment of what the sinner actually wants.
And so as Dante comes into hell, what he sees is he sees these souls, evil spirits, he doesn't hesitate to call them, and they're being blown from side to side.
They're being buffeted.
Dante compares them to large birds that spread their wings and get caught in air pockets where they are thrown from one side to the other.
Sometimes from a long ways away, they appear to be beautifully in control.
But no. As you get closer, you see that the birds are out of control.
They're being tossed back and forth by the wind.
So, this is what Dante calls an infernal storm.
An infernal storm.
So, who's in this circle of hell?
Well, Cleopatra's in here.
And Dido, who is the heroine of the Aeneid.
Dido, by the way, is abandoned by Aeneas.
She commits suicide.
She is someone who, quote, died for love, says Dante.
Achilles is here, and if you read the Iliad, you find that Achilles was angry because he had a concubine, Briseis, and he's being denied the services of the concubine, so he's in the circle, appropriately, of the lustful.
Paris, who spirited away Helen of Troy and began the tumult that led to the Trojan War, he's here.
So, Dante sees all these guys.
He mentions Dido a couple of times, but he doesn't talk to her.
We see her Dante style.
You see a bunch of people, you zoom in, you zoom into one or two, and then Dante will talk sometimes to only one.
And the one that he talks to is a woman named, as I said, Francesca.
Now, Francesca is not somebody who's famous like Dido or Cleopatra.
She's somebody who had local fame.
She was involved in a kind of, well, you'd have to say kind of a sex scandal in Dante's own time.
And it was a very kind of like sordid, torrid sex scandal, which I'll just describe.
And then next time, by the way, I'm not going to talk about Dante Monday or Tuesday.
I'm doing special episodes those two days, so we're going to pick this up on Wednesday.
We'll talk more about Francesca's story and Dante's reaction to the story.
But here, I just want to kind of give you the facts.
Basically, Francesca is a woman in Florence who is involved with a genuinely torrid love affair with a man named Paolo.
Now, Paolo, it turns out, is not her husband.
In fact, Paolo is her brother-in-law.
So here's Francesca, this beautiful woman...
And she is sort of doing it with her husband's brother.
The husband's brother apparently discovers them in bed and immediately kills them both.
And so they die, if you will, in the act and unrepentant.
And both of them are right here in hell in the circle of the lustful.
Paolo's standing right behind Francesca, and he sort of appears to be writhing his body in a certain kind of torment.
He, too, is being buffeted from side to side.
But the only one that Dante speaks to is Francesca.
And the content of that conversation, extremely important and interesting, is something we'll get to next time.
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