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March 2, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:45
VLADIMIR THE TERRIBLE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep281
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Vladimir Putin has really upped the savagery in the Ukraine, and I want to talk about this man and his ruthless ambition, Vladimir the Terrible.
A couple of reactions today from me on Biden's State of the Union.
I'm going to tell you why I'm laughing so hard about Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene heckling him during the performance.
Biden's nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, is...
They're now up for consideration, and the Democrats are like, this is above politics, and I want to tell you why it's really not.
And literary scholar Mark Bauerlein joins me.
We'll talk about what happened, how the universities went into a tailspin, and I'm going to begin a close reading of the encounter between Dante and Francesca in Canto V of the 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.
Debbie and I were in Florida the last couple of days and yesterday we had a very interesting one hour With Trump, we met in Mar-a-Lago and my family was there.
Danielle, my daughter, was there and her husband.
So it was the four of us with former President Trump.
And we talked about a bunch of stuff and I'm not going to go into it all.
But he was very exercised, as he should be, about the brutality that is being meted out by Putin in the Ukraine.
And he rightly pointed out the obvious, which is, this wouldn't be happening if I was in charge, if I was in the saddle.
In fact, it didn't happen.
So Trump doesn't have to prove it wouldn't happen.
It didn't happen. So it's, as the Marxists like to say, it is no accident, it is no accident that this is happening under Biden.
In fact, the last time the Russians acted up, a Democrat was in the White House.
Now, There's disturbing escalation at all levels in the Ukraine.
Perhaps most unnerving, here is the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
He's actually talking about the possibility of nuclear warfare.
He was interviewed in Al Jazeera, and he says, well, you know, this...
Who knows? It could be the start of World War III. And he goes, World War III is going to be nuclear for sure and unbelievably destructive.
And so to have such an apparently casual references to nuclear war is disturbing, to say the least.
Now, again, we should always think that these could be rhetorical tactics.
It's a way of Telling the West, listen, it's very easy for you to talk about doing this and doing that, but don't forget that you're dealing here with a nuclear-tipped power.
And countries with massive nuclear capability deserve at least a modicum of respect because of what we can do to you if things get out of hand.
We're dealing here with brutal people and we're dealing here with the brutal language of power.
And I think this is something that is difficult for Democrats and liberals and progressives to sort of get a hold of.
Their thing is to wag your finger.
He's not a nice man.
Yeah, he's not a nice man.
No one said he was a nice man.
I've never said he was a nice man.
And so sometimes my critiques of Biden people go, well, are you on Putin's side?
No, I'm not on Putin's side.
Part of my problem is that That if you want to take on an adversary like Putin or like Xi in China, you need to take their full measure and understand how strong these guys are, how tough they are, and how they don't necessarily interpret their interests the way you think they do.
You think you've got them figured out, but you really haven't.
Now, I use the phrase for this thumbnail with this podcast, Vladimir the Terrible.
because I think Putin is very much in the kind of in the mold or in the mode of the old wicked czars. I'm thinking of the worst of them, not Peter the Great but somebody like Ivan the Terrible who was the prototypical kind of murderous czar. Ivan the Terrible known by the way for spearing his own son and putting all kinds of people to death.
And the czars in general didn't care about the lives of the people below them.
They didn't care about the serfs. Even Peter the Great, otherwise kind of a noble man in some respects.
But nevertheless, he's like, listen, you know, we got to build a new city here.
Let's deploy like 25,000 serfs.
And who cares if they break their backs?
We'll have a city at the end of it.
And so, let's remember that, you know, people say, well, Putin is trying to reconstitute the Soviet Empire.
No, I don't think he is.
I don't think he can.
It's just, what's he going to do?
Take over East Germany? Germany is already unified.
That would start World War III, by the way.
You think he's going to get all of Eastern Europe back?
Nonsense. I don't even think he thinks he can.
But the Ukraine is a whole different matter.
If you remember a series I did earlier on Russian literature, Russian literature began in the Ukraine.
Initially, there was no Russia.
There was Kiev.
And the intellectual class of early Russia was mainly in Kiev.
Later, it moved toward Moscow and a kind of new...
Russia developed around Moscow and the areas around Moscow, and that displaced Kiev.
And so this is part of the history. This is part of what Putin, by the way, was talking about in his kind of interesting, although somewhat selective reading of Russian history to make the case, which he tried to do, that Ukraine is sort of, it's Russia.
It's always been part of Russia.
Now, Ukraine is a small country.
It's a small circle right next to a big circle called Russia.
And it is the law of human nature, and it is the law of nations, that this is a dicey situation.
It's always a dicey situation when a big, aggressive, powerful country is hovering over a small, relatively defenseless country.
And what that means is that you've got to, you may say, tread very carefully if you're the small country.
Now, the liberal elite in the West has been telling Ukraine the opposite.
Oh, listen, you know what? That's all right.
You can kick the bully in the shins because, after all, we're there behind you.
We're on your side.
You can be, you know, you're part of the West.
They're not part of the West. Russia is part of the East.
And so the point I'm getting at here is that all of this, I think, is a little reckless and a little irresponsible because it misses the simple point that if the bear turns around, And begins to maul the tourist, in this case the tourist is Ukraine, then the rest of the world suddenly is not all that eager to do anything.
Or it's willing to beat the war drums but not actually go to war.
The United States is not really willing to commit troops.
It's certainly not willing to risk a nuclear exchange, nor should it, nor should it.
But the point is that when you're not willing to do certain things, you have to then recognize, if you're Ukraine, that, look, I may have some friends outside the neighborhood, but these are friends who are not going to come to my rescue if I am set upon by this grizzly bear called Putin, called Russia. And so...
All of this is a way not to minimize but to italicize the brutality of Russia.
Just look at the way in which they've deployed a massive convoy of force.
They don't hesitate to use it.
And you can't say things like, oh, Putin's being really irrational.
Because... That means you're defining rationality different than he is.
It's important to realize what matters to people.
ISIS is not being rational.
Why are they beheading people?
Well, they're beheading people because it's rational from their point of view.
Obama's not being rational.
He's taking down the United States' wealth and power.
Yes, he is being rational because that's what he wants to do.
He has ideological reasons for wanting to do that.
And so, again, for Putin, world opinion may not be so important.
Ukrainian opinion certainly isn't important at all.
What is important is the sheer, simple, brutal calculus of power.
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Now, Biden got some applause when he talked about the evils of Putin and the horrors of the Ukraine, which, by the way, he's right about to that extent.
And, of course, some on the left are trying to make it seem like conservatives are pro-Putin.
No, we're not pro-Putin.
We're pro-Ukraine.
But the point we're trying to make is that Biden is utterly inept in dealing with this.
And you can't have a foreign policy based on illusions.
I mean, here is a report.
The U.S. is now hoping to, quote, train Ukrainian troops remotely.
What? By Skype?
Zoom calls? Is this going to be an effective strategy to get the Ukrainians to effectively fight back?
Here is an article in the New York Times, of all places.
Biden presents China with intelligence on Russia's troop buildup, hoping that Xi would step in and speak out against it and use leverage against Russia to block it.
Well, what does Xi do? He turns over these reports to the Russians.
So here's Biden, who is obviously dumb enough that he thinks that he's, you know, buddies with China.
Why? Because he's taken all this money from China.
China understands and China is very consciously trying to create a rival axis to America.
let's call it the Iranian, Turkish, Russian, Chinese axis to counterbalance the power of the so-called free world.
And so the idea that you can somehow trust the Chinese when the Chinese have every reason, I made it really clear that they have common cause with the Russians, not exactly common cause in every given issue, but common cause in building this sort of new world order.
So Putin knows what he's doing, and Xi knows what he's doing.
My question is whether Biden knows what he's doing.
Now, Biden's State of the Union was quite a spectacle, and I was really chuckling to see the heckling that Biden got from Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Now, some people, including some Republicans, were a little offended.
Oh, this is an appropriate behavior!
It's not an appropriate behavior.
First of all, their basic point, leaving aside what they said, was, the emperor has no clothes, and that's a fact.
Well, but it's not the right occasion to point this out.
Well, let's look at the right occasion.
Here's Biden, and he's about to launch into the same big, fat lie that he is told about his son Beau, as if his son Beau was killed on the battlefield, you know, as a prelude to how he understands what the troops are going through, and he understands the horrors of war.
Now, the two have nothing to do with each other.
It's a bogus narrative.
But it's a bogus narrative that apparently people like Lindsey Graham and others want to go along with.
And so they're like, oh, don't interrupt Biden.
He's telling a moving story.
He's on the verge of tears.
But I think what Lauren Boebert's point is, listen.
Let's talk about the actual 13 Americans that you, Biden, helped to get killed in Afghanistan.
That's your responsibility.
You didn't even mention those people.
We're hearing more nonsense about Bo.
I guess it's a relief you didn't bring up the smartest guy you know, Hunter.
So... So I think that it's time for Republicans to take the gloves off.
All this kind of, you know, we've got to sort of mindlessly cheer.
No, we're not going to mindlessly cheer.
Remember all the Democrats staring stone-faced when Trump recited his achievements?
Remember Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the Union address in front of Trump, or behind Trump, I should say?
So that's how they behave.
Well, this behavior is going to come back to haunt them.
And if there's any practical significance coming out of all this, I think it comes actually from a side note from Joe Manchin.
He was interviewed about the Build Back Better.
This is kind of Biden's only remaining domestic initiative before the midterms.
And he was asked, you know, is there any way to sort of revive?
This is the media like lobbying him.
Is there any way we can get some of the Build Back Better?
And Manchin's answer is no.
No. He goes, are there any pieces of Build Back Better that he can see passing?
Manchin's answer, no.
Not until you get your financial house in order.
Can you do that? He goes, to me, it's all about inflation.
So essentially what Manchin is saying is Biden's given us this runaway inflation.
The country is economically in trouble.
This idea of spending, you know, a few trillion here, a few trillion there.
By the way, all of that would only Manchin knows elementary economics.
So even though we got the typical kind of Biden song and dance routine at the State of the Union, in reality, the Biden agenda has been stopped in its tracks.
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Biden has nominated a judge from the D.C. Circuit.
Her name is Ketanji Brown Jackson as the replacement for Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court.
And there is not a whole lot to be said about Judge Jackson because she's not a very distinguished judge.
In fact, she's not on the second highest court in the land.
She has not written a lot of opinions.
In fact, very few.
And she has been, on a couple of significant cases, swatted down by higher courts that basically said, you're exceeding the authority of a judge.
I'll get into some of those cases as we get a little bit closer, talk in a little more detail about her record.
But here I want to talk about kind of the broader point, which is you've got all kinds of people on the Democratic side, notably James Clyburn of South Carolina, saying, you know what, lay offer.
Let's not have another intemperate judicial nomination process.
And then he says this line, which I want to focus on, this is above politics.
Now, why is it above politics?
Is it above politics because judicial nominations in general are above politics?
That would be news to me.
Going all the way back at least to the Bork nomination, judicial nominations have been all about politics.
So maybe that's not what he means.
I think what he means is that we have a kind of totemic nomination.
We have a first.
We have a first black woman card here.
And so Republicans need to sort of...
We've got a twofer.
We've got someone who's not only a person of color, but also a woman.
So there's a kind of double immunity here from what the Supreme Court itself calls strict scrutiny.
I think that this call for treating Judge Jackson, you may say, with kid gloves is nonsense, and the Republicans should not fall for it.
Why? Because, first of all, Clarence Thomas is black.
Was he treated kindly by the Democrats?
No, they went after him with a kind of comprehensive ruthlessness that had to be seen to be believed.
They tried to destroy the man's credibility and destroy the man's life.
They tried to humiliate him.
I mean, I remember Thomas himself called it a high-tech lynching.
That's how he described it.
So that's the treatment that the Democrats gave to that black man.
And Republicans need to realize that this kind of racial immunity, if we don't get it on our side, we don't need to give it to them on their side either.
Number two, what about the woman card?
Well, what about Amy Coney Barrett?
She's a woman. The Democrats sort of say, listen, you know, we're not going to be too hard on her because she's a woman.
This is a very special occasion.
No. No. Their idea was, let's go after her.
Let's try to discredit her.
Let's try to make her a religious fanatic.
Let's try to demand that she recuse herself on cases related to election fraud.
Let's use every card we can to try to defeat this nomination.
Of course, we all remember what they did to Kavanaugh.
So I think Republicans are going to be in for this kind of treatment unceasingly.
Until they realize that they're going to have to mete out some of that same treatment to the other side.
And so what I would recommend, let's unleash some private investigators.
Let's find out everything we can about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Let's find any skeletons that we can in her closet.
Let's highlight them, expose them, bring them up.
Let's put her under the toughest scrutiny possible.
Now, this is a case where the Democrats need 51 votes.
But they do not want to, first of all, they've had a little trouble getting 51 on their own side.
But I think that they might in this case.
They probably will. But they're hoping to get Republican votes.
They're hoping to get a bunch of them.
They'd love to get Romney and Susan Collins and Murkowski and six or seven others so they can say, well, this was a bipartisan approval.
Let's remember Amy Coney Barrett got through on pretty much a straight party-line vote.
The Democrats don't want that.
They want to create a kind of air of bipartisan legitimacy.
And Republicans may not have the power to stop this nomination, but they do have the power to deny the Democrats that.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast someone I've been reading, well, for a long time now with admiration.
It's Mark Bauerlein, who's a senior editor at First Things, where he hosts a podcast.
He's also a professor emeritus of English at Emory University.
He's written for The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times.
And he's written a number of important books, including The Dumbest Generation, and now more recently, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up.
Mark, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you so much for joining me.
You are a veteran, I would have to say, of the culture wars, and you've seen the culture wars in the place where they seem to have been almost incubated, namely the American University.
Can you talk a little bit about how things changed over your career?
In other words, if you take a snapshot of when you first went into teaching English, To when you got out, what was the difference?
I was... I finished in 1988.
I got my doctorate at UCLA in 1988.
I came out. I got a job.
I taught as a lecturer for a year at UCLA. Then I got a job at Emory University in Atlanta in an English department, which was growing, had a lot of money, a lot of hiring going on.
I was a carbon copy academic in the humanities.
I was ferociously liberal.
I was actually a militantly atheist.
I would never even consider even taking seriously a Republican candidate for office because Republicans were either greedy or stupid, take your pick.
And actually one of the topics in those years, as you remember quite well, were the academic canon wars, the culture wars.
I actually remember you did an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about how pop culture, Westerns were now really supplanting Western civilization and great literature.
And we all took notice of what you and a few others were.
I mean, Alan Bloom and Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza, the Illiberal Education book.
Those actually had...
A real impact on the humanities in higher education.
They rippled through, and the impact was nervousness.
You made us nervous.
We felt deeply discomfited.
We didn't take your ideas seriously because we were the smart ones.
We knew better. We were the ones who were there credentialed, and we were tenured or getting tenure.
So we were in charge.
We knew. But these arguments by these people like Kimball and D'Souza, they were just an irritant.
And what gradually came to me was, over the course of the 90s, as I saw these identity politicians in departments who were hard left, and there may be only two or three of them in a department of 25, Those two or three were able to cow and silence and intimidate the other 22 more or less reasonable moderate liberals in the room.
And this is something that I thought, what is wrong here?
These people are destroying civilization as we know it, as we understand it, as we teach it.
And I started sort of reacting to that, and then I started actually reading people like you more carefully, David Horowitz and others, and think, you know, these people are kind of right about what's going on,
and that actually pushed me to the right, and it's one of those things where you start moving, and then you move a little farther, and things open up, and I read classic books like Witness, you know, Whitaker Chambers, and I started reading the Weekly Standard and some of the other conservative publications, The New Criterion, and I simply found myself becoming a cultural conservative and realizing I always was, actually, an education conservative.
I believed in Western civilization.
I believed in great books.
And Seeing my colleagues just kind of letting that slip away, I thought, what are you, are you people decadent?
Are you just corrupt or just cowards?
My goodness. And that pushed me over to the right.
I went to work for the W's administration for a couple of years, and it just sort of kept moving me.
To the right, reading more things.
And part of what I saw was education was, humanities education was deteriorating.
The popular culture was deteriorating in terms of maintaining a little bit of high culture, high literature in there.
And I was seeing it in my students.
And then I saw the digital age hit them.
They all become addicted to those little screens.
They were walking around on Facebook and there were all these cheerleaders saying, the young are going to lead us into the 21st century.
Look at all the innovative, improvisational things they're doing with this Facebook stuff and now this iPhone and then texting.
And that's why I wrote the first book, The Dumbest Generation.
The first full title is How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future or Don't Trust Anyone Under 30.
And so that warned, we're letting 15-year-olds here go into their rooms and Encase themselves in screens, which are just purveying youth culture and peer pressure all the time.
The grown-up issues of history, politics, religion, great books are not penetrating into their lives.
They have the tools now to shut things off.
I didn't when I was 15.
I'm not better than they were.
I just didn't have the equipment to do what they were doing.
And I warn, they're stupefied now.
They are going to grow up and they are not being prepared for anything.
Citizenship in an open society in a free republic.
And here we are now, Dinesh, we're 15 years past it.
How are the millennials doing?
Well, they're in middle age. Depression is up.
Anxiety is up.
Narcissism is up. Who would have thought that they would become narcissists when we handed them a tool where they could carry 250 pictures of themselves around in their pockets at all times?
Suicide is up.
They're not getting married.
They're not forming families.
They still want to live with their friends, like those 90s TV show heroes, friends.
Friends are very, very important to them.
They were said to be so tolerant, so progressive.
They helped elect our first African-American president.
And now they rate more intolerant than any older generations.
They actually have a vindictive sense of their fellow citizens.
They have high social mistrust.
And when they see an injustice going on, even a microaggression, they want that culprit to pay.
So they'll sign a petition with 2,000 others to get a stranger fired for telling some dumb sexist joke on Twitter.
That's where the dangerousness is coming in.
They are illiberal citizens.
As you wrote, they got an illiberal education.
The screens...
The digital tools reinforced that illiberalism.
Remember, Ninesh, when they were 15 in the bedroom, and they're on Facebook, and one of the Facebook contacts writes something that he doesn't like, Unfriend, you're out.
They've been canceling for 15 years.
Wow. They've been blocking.
You could just block someone.
A news feed is coming in.
You don't like a story?
It's out. So you could fabricate the reality that was all affirming.
It was the daily me.
Remember that term? The daily me.
And so they never had to face a contrary opinion, a disagreeable outlook.
And what they've done is transfer the norms, the mores of that 15-year-old bedroom into the workplace, into the public square.
So I shouldn't have to listen to this.
This is offensive.
And not only will I just walk away, but you have to shut up.
Yeah. Hey, Mark, you know why this is such a fantastic interview is it makes my life unbelievably easy.
I go, hello. You go for eight minutes straight.
Then we take a break. Then I go, hello again.
You go for another eight minutes.
But you've said so many interesting and provocative things.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, I'm going to actually just probe you on a couple of things you said.
This is just fascinating. I'll shorten my response.
No problem. We'll be right back.
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I'm back with Mark Barline, a performer professor of English at Emory University, author most recently, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up.
Mark, you said right up front, we were talking about how this sort of Liberal mainstream was overrun and intimidated and sort of pushed aside by what was originally a relatively small radical faction.
And I want to think about why that happened, because obviously the liberals, the old liberals, had the power.
The radicals numerically were not strong enough.
They were younger professors.
So I'm thinking, could it be that the older liberals...
Somehow shared some of the assumptions of the radicals so that the radicals were able to say things like, you're supposed to be an anti-racist.
How can you not agree with us that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Friend does not belong in the curriculum?
Why would an argument so inane work unless the old liberals were to some degree vulnerable to it?
I think the old liberals felt a great deal of moral authority from the civil rights movement and then from women's liberation and then from the gay liberation of the 70s.
This is liberalism.
This is be a free individual.
This is live and let live.
Do your own thing. Whatever floats your boat.
That was kind of the popular liberal attitude.
And what they didn't realize is that Not only were they offering this individualization that would liberate in their eyes, they were taking away the foundations of any kind of ultimate kind of moral authority, the foundations that would give deeper purpose, deeper meanings in life.
So the liberal outlook really became, don't believe in anything too strongly, right?
We don't want strong gods.
We don't want to be too forceful in our convictions.
Let's not judge. We don't want to judge.
We're going to let people be. And the thing is, the left never got into that kind of relativistic, easygoing, live and let live.
They kind of offered that as a surface excuse or rationale, but what they really were doing was playing deep power games. Saul Alinsky tactics, who was a brilliant tactician, by the way, and they ran circles around the liberals and the liberals were always scared of getting the leftist accusation of, you know, well, what kind of conservative truism?
Are you trying to take us back?
You want to take us back to Jim Crow?
You want to put women back in the kitchen and the bedroom?
And they were so vulnerable.
They were so intimidated by those accusations.
I mean, I saw them in meetings when some liberal would offer open free speech kind of things.
Oh, you think it's okay to offend these people?
Haven't these people suffered enough?
And the liberals would buy it.
They were such dupes. They were the useful idiots for the left.
And so I would see the way the bureaucracy would be structured to make this happen.
So if you teach a course, you have 35 students in the course.
Two students on the course evaluations complain that you committed some little microaggressions.
Maybe you taught Huck Finn, which has the N-word in it.
Those two students complain.
The other 33 students, good teacher, really, you know, learned a lot from him.
The usual. Those two students count more than those 33.
They can file a complaint.
It might take months.
The administration would take it very seriously.
You may end up saying, oh, I'm sorry I taught that book.
I didn't want to offend anyone.
They do the apology, you know, the struggle session routine.
And it passes away.
But meanwhile, you've had three or four months of feeling like you've been smeared.
I'm a good person. I didn't do anything, but I didn't want to offend anyone.
That's the liberal sensibility at work.
The process is the punishment.
And so what does the liberal teacher do?
I'm not going to teach that book anymore.
I'm going to change my ways.
I'm not going to fight.
There's something about the spinelessness.
Yeah, and I think, Mark, I want to highlight the point that it's not just that it's a complaint from two students, because let's imagine that those two students were being taught James Joyce's Ulysses, and the same two students were to say, you know, this book has an awful lot of raw sexuality in it.
I've been raised in a conservative household.
This is a little disturbing to me.
You shouldn't be teaching this kind of explicit stuff in a university.
It's going to corrupt the morals of young people.
You... I mean, the administration would not take that seriously.
The professor wouldn't have to worry about that.
So it is the very nature of the allegation coming from the left and tapping into, well, it's kind of the race card, isn't it?
And it's the gender card.
As my boss, Rusty Reno, puts it, well, liberals are against it, except when they're for it.
They're very flexible about these things.
We would say they're hypocritical.
No, we're nuanced.
They would always rationalize their inconsistencies on precisely the grounds that you identify.
The double standard You know, Dinesh, it was amazing how they would just do it.
And I think that they realized, well, this is how you rise in academia.
I mean, if you're a college president now, you might be dealing with millions of dollars here and there.
You've got an endowment to take care of.
You've got big donors. You've got a new hospital that you're building.
All these big things going on.
If you see five students walking down the hall to your office with a grim look on their face, and a couple of them, female, students of color, again, that's where the selectivity comes in.
You start shaking. You quiver before those angry students who might have one of these complaints that have been so intensified by the media, by Hollywood, the victims.
They've been established, they have victim status, and it's a sacred status.
This is where we get into the realm of not politics, but more taboo, ritual, the sacred, the purity, the impurity.
This is what they play on, and it's a setup.
And it's been set up this way, again, for 50, 60 years now.
And liberals played along, and at this point, they're all scared.
My liberal professors are scared of their students.
And if I said to them 10 years ago, you know, you're going to have to be very careful of your pronouns.
They say, oh, listen to the conservative alarmist talking.
Come on. Well, here we are.
Now, I'm waiting for a college president to tell those students, turn around, go back to the library, and read your books.
Don't bother me with this trivia, this temper tantrum.
Dinesh, if he did that, he'd be gone.
This is the way the institution is now set up.
And you've got an army of the media reinforcing the All of these episodes and the victims and the victimization going on.
We've got your villains, got your good guys, bad guys.
And I see very, very few liberals willing to stand up.
And I think it's a mistake for conservatives to make too much about the scattered episodes of Barry Weiss or Andrew Sullivan.
I mean, I salute them for standing up, but they're not...
They're not on our side.
What you're saying is that the institutions are far gone.
And what I find so profoundly sad about this is I'm assuming that, by and large, anyone who goes into English to teach literature loves books, right?
Loves literature. Why else would you do it?
And to see your ability to teach a book be so captive to this kind of terroristic ideological attack...
It must make even the liberal, in a way, recognize that the original motive of going into this field has now been undercut, don't you think?
Dinesh, they've made their peace with it.
In their little classrooms, they can still have a little bit of control, do their own thing.
They can teach some of the books that they love.
And then, you know, in all the administrative side, the admissions side, the policy side, they just sort of keep their heads down.
It's like, look, you saw what happened at Dartmouth when the students about four years ago marched through the library.
It was during finals week.
The Black Lives Matter protesters students, they're marching and they were yelling at the kids trying to study.
And a lot of these kids, they were just putting their heads down, saying, please, please.
They're the achievement types.
They want to get ahead.
They don't want to get involved in anything that might compromise their admission to medical school.
They just keep their heads down, hope it goes away, and keep doing their work.
That's the general attitude now in these institutions.
So many of them have any lies.
Does a liberal have to tell himself every day?
How many lies does he have to go along with on campus in order to maintain his status?
And remember, the left always has very good radar.
They've got good radar.
If you agree with them 19 times, but there's a 20th time as a disagreement, not sure you're suspect at this point, and you better come around.
This is the utopian argument.
Condition that we're in.
And the millennials, again, they have an amazingly punitive outlook.
They're fragile.
But, Dinesh, we know fragility can actually be very dangerous.
A fragile temperament can do a lot of damage.
The tantrums that we see, they work.
And like, you know, that case about five or six years ago at Yale of the girl screaming obscenities at the professor, Professor Christakis, and the other students surrounding him.
This went on for an hour more.
That student yelling at him, she and others in that crowd, they won activism awards at Yale at the end of the year.
They were honored.
That student is now a.
A law school student at Columbia University, she's the head of a few activist organizations on campus, she's done real well.
Yeah, this this is now this is now a career move.
Yeah. Cancel the cancellation, the tantrums, the illiberalism is now a way to get ahead into the elite.
How telling, Mark, this has been just fascinating and thank you very much for coming on.
I've got to have you back to dive into all this in more detail, but you've given people just a little taste of the real Mark Bauerlein, so thanks for joining me.
Let's do it again. Thank you.
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Feel the difference. Really happy, guys, to be returning to Dante.
As you know, we've taken a couple of days break, partly because we were, as I mentioned earlier, in D.C. But now I'm glad to be back and picking it right up.
Now, there's a saying in Dante's scholarship that when you have finished reading the poem...
You're ready to read it again.
And you may think, why?
Why would you read the same poem twice, let alone more than that?
And the answer is, you begin to see as you read this poem that Dante has very ambitious goals.
And his goals are, number one, to make you a wiser person.
Number two, to make you a happier person.
And number three...
To help you on your journey to the paradiso.
In other words, to make you a holier person.
And Dante is very explicit that this is what he's trying to do.
This is not an ordinary poem.
Oh, you read it for fun.
Yeah, you do. But there's a lot more to it.
My goal in this series is to play, well, it's to sort of play Virgil, right?
Virgil is Dante's guide.
He's a guide, not of Dante the poet, but of Dante the pilgrim.
And Virgil is leading Dante the way through, but not all the way through.
At some point, Virgil is like, now you've got to go with other guides or go on your own.
And that's my hope here, too, is to guide you in reading this poem, but I actually want to point you eventually to the poem so that you can be your own guide.
And I think also it's fun to read the poem to get an edition of Dante that has the English translation on the right and the Italian on the left.
There are a number of translations that are like that.
And what I do sometimes is I just go over to the Italian and I don't, you know, I speak very little Italian, but I read the words because you can capture some of Dante's melody.
And it almost makes you feel bad, like, wow, I'm not getting the poem in its full power.
I'm getting it at like 60%.
Because I need to learn Italian and in fact I need to learn sort of late medieval vernacular Italian to fully get Dante not only in the message but also in the medium.
Now, we're talking about Francesca and Paolo.
We're talking about Dante in the fifth canto of the Inferno.
And it's important to see here that the unrepentance of the sinner, in this case Francesca, is really beautifully shown by Dante in the way she talks and in what she says.
It's very clear that she is not in any way regretful about what she did.
And in fact, her need is to compulsively justify and explain and in a sense put the blame on someone else.
and the ingenious, charming way that she does this is kind of a metaphor for all the sinners in the deeper circles of hell. There's a kind of a prototype, and even though the sins get more grievous, the technique of the sinner is always the same.
It's sort of, I'm the center of the universe.
And everything has to be seen from my perspective.
And what's so clear here is I told you a little bit the backstory of Francesca.
She was kind of caught in the act with her brother-in-law, this guy named Paolo.
The husband comes bursting in, kills them both.
That's why they're here in this...
Well, Dante calls it an infernal storm.
And so you've got the sinners, the evil spirits, in Dante's words, being hurled about left and right.
They're literally out of control.
They're just being buffeted.
And for Dante, this is a, I think...
A beautiful way in which the moral geography of hell matches the sin itself.
Dante is not just coming up with sort of ingenious punishments or ever more macabre ways of hurting the sinner.
The punishment is kind of what you really wanted, what your sin was about, what you wrongly coveted.
In this case, what Paolo and Francesca coveted, what they wanted most was to be, you may say, out of control.
And so Dante is like, okay, you got it.
You can have it. And here is your desire itself, but stripped of its kind of veneer of appeal.
Now, what's remarkable about the story as Francesca talks to Dante is Dante does not give you the full story.
Well, why not? Because neither does Francesca.
She's telling a highly selective, edited version of what happened.
And this is all so important that I'm actually going to do it kind of line by line.
But what I want...
To point out right here that this is kind of why we need notes for reading Dante, because if you didn't have the notes, see, the Paolo Francesca scandal was kind of a big scandal in Dante's own time.
So Dante's readers knew about it.
It's kind of similar to things we might hear about Marilyn Monroe or O.J. Simpson.
And so if you write about Marilyn Monroe or O.J. Simpson, you don't have to actually say, well, Marilyn Monroe, she took pills, O.J. Simpson.
No, because people already know that.
And so what's interesting here is to listen to what Francesca says But the notes help us to understand the full story, the backstory, what Francesca's leaving out.
But Dante lets her speak.
Dante never challenges her narrative.
He never goes, but wait a minute.
Or he never goes, what a bunch of nonsense.
No. In fact, as you'll see, Dante is very much taken in by what Francesca says.
And this shows a couple of things.
One is it shows that this is actually a sin that appeals to Dante.
And by appeals to Dante, what I mean is, this is a sin that Dante himself, in his own love poetry that was mostly what he wrote before he wrote the Divine Comedy, Dante is very tempted himself by the same things that tempted Francesca.
And Francesca talks in a way, as we'll see, that matches Dante's own love poetry.
So this is hitting Dante very close to home.
Let's remember Dante is a very, well, almost called like a classic Italian.
In one of his earlier poems, I remember, I'm not sure if this is in the Vita Nuova, Dante talks about the fact that when a beautiful woman goes by, his head turns.
To which I say, classic Italian.
Dante is like that. Don't think of Dante as some kind of, you know, Luther in a monastery.
This is a guy who's on the street of Italy.
This is a guy who knows beauty when he sees it.
So... So this is Dante, in a sense, listening to a woman, and he knows the language that she is speaking.
So here we go. Here's Francesca talking to Dante.
"'O living creature, gracious and so kind, who makes your way here through this dingy air to visit us, who stained the world with blood.'" Let's stop for a second.
This is her first line to Dante.
Oh, living creature.
Now, in Italian, even better.
Oh, animal.
So, she uses this very odd phrase to refer to Dante.
And let's think for a moment about what it means to be an animal, an animal, as opposed to a human being.
An animal is essentially a human being minus intellect and will.
Animals don't have intellect in the sense that they can't reason, nor do they have, in a sense, the control that can put desire, if you will, at the behest of reason, that puts reason in the charioteer's position so it can kind of guide desire.
Dante's not against desire, but he wants desire to be under the rule of reason.
But animals can't do that.
They respond to instinct.
They respond, you may say, helplessly.
And this is going to be absolutely key.
This is going to be Francesca's self-defense.
She's going to argue, I did what I did because I sort of, I was taken captive.
And you can see right here again, this infernal storm.
These evil spirits being thrown around.
Francesca's going to say, I was thrown around.
I was taken by love.
Love captive. And she uses beautiful phrases.
And then I want to just highlight one more phrase here.
So Francesca's sort of acting like, Dante, it's really nice of you.
I mean, this is an incredibly long journey for you, but, you know, you've come all this way to see me.
I mean, this is just unbelievably great.
Now let's pause for a moment and realize that Dante is not there to see her.
Dante is going through this journey because of his own spiritual malaise.
Dante was in a dark wood.
This is something that Dante has to do for his own, you may say, salvation.
And yet Francesca doesn't care about any of that.
She's not interested in why Dante is here.
She's like... Oh, how nice of you to drop in in this faraway place to play us a visit.
Because for her, it's ultimately about her.
She is like all the sinners in hell in the exact center of the universe.
And so this kind of self-centeredness and the moral blindness that it produces, these are very important themes as we move into a deeper discussion of what Francesca has to say, which I will pick up next time.
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