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March 9, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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END OF AN ERA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep286
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I'm going to talk about the big picture in the Ukraine conflict today, which is to say, are we witnessing right now the end of the American century?
I'm going to reveal how Biden is using his excuse of banning Russian oil imports, which he's finally decided to do, to now shore up his favorite despots in Iran and Venezuela.
My daughter, Danielle D'Souza-Gill, will join me.
We're going to talk about the left strategy post-Roe v.
Wade and also why women vote more progressive than men.
And finally, I'll consider the example of a politician, Farinada, and a poet, Cavalcanti, In Dante's Canto X to get to the true meaning of heresy.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy in 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 Ukraine conflict drags on and I want today to step back from it to try to get a little bit of a bigger picture on what all of this is doing to America's place in the world.
America's place in the world hasn't been that secure for a couple of decades.
It's always more insecure under Democrats, for reasons I'm going to go into.
But it was going down even before Ukraine.
Biden has been, you may say, unwinding America on a number of different fronts, continuing in this respect something that Obama was doing for two terms.
But I think the Ukraine conflict may be the turning the inflection point.
And I'll say a word about that in a moment.
Now, here is Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, who seems to be trying to whip everybody up into a kind of, let's call it a World War III frenzy.
And he's doing it by using World War II rhetoric.
Let me just quote him here.
And there's a... Tendency here to chuckle a little bit, which I guess is not appropriate.
But here he is. We will fight till the end at sea in the air.
I mean, this is a kind of pathetic avocation of Churchill, who in the dark days of Nazi advance said, in effect, we will fight them in the hills, we will fight them...
Here and there and everywhere.
And here is a guy, Zelensky, you know, an admirable fellow in that he's fighting to defend his country, but let's just say he's no Winston Churchill.
And more importantly, the analogy is a false analogy, because even though the United States was very slow to get into World War II, in fact, it took a Japanese direct hit on On America, on Pearl Harbor, for America to get into war, that was a war that did directly engage America's vital interests.
Why? Because, after all, the Nazis were overrunning pretty much all of Europe.
It's almost a miracle that they didn't crush British opposition.
They did, of course, overrun France.
They overran a number of other countries.
And the United States, I think, could and should have gotten into World War II even earlier.
But Ukraine is a completely different situation.
This is a country that's on the periphery, not of America, not in our backyard, in their backyard, in Russia's backyard.
And Ukraine doesn't make anything particularly vital that we want to buy.
Ukraine is not strategically located in such a place that it's essential to...
The defense of America or of crucial American allies.
And so, not to say that we shouldn't sympathize with what's going on in Ukraine, not even to say that we shouldn't give them aid, including lethal aid, which we have been giving them.
I believe the Congress just approved another...
It's an aid package that was pushed through on a bipartisan basis.
But what I'm getting at here is that I think that the neocon sort of strategy for pushing the Russians back, the latest example of which is an article by Elliot Cohen in The Atlantic, he outlines a kind of a three-part strategy that he thinks is going to work.
And he seems rather giddy that this is going to be effective.
His first point is the support of the Ukrainian forces through lethal military aid.
So he's not calling for the deployment of troops, but he is calling for more lethal aid.
And this is a version, I have to say, of the Reagan doctrine, which is to say, let the Ukrainians fight, we will help.
And that is his strategy number one.
Now, I think even if we give lethal aid, when you just look at the relative size of Ukraine and Russia, there is no way for Ukraine to win that war.
Just as there's no way, for example, for Taiwan by itself to beat China.
It's just laughable that they could do that.
Now, can they discourage an invasion?
Can they make it expensive for the Chinese to do it?
Can they increase, in this case, Ukraine the cost on Putin of the war?
Yes, I think all those things are true.
Number two, sanctions.
Now, sanctions, again, are effective only if they have the effect of shutting down the Russian economy and shutting down Putin's ability to make effective war in the Ukraine.
I'm far from convinced that that could happen.
It does look like Biden, reluctantly, has finally said, okay, I'm not gonna buy Russian oil.
And I'll talk in the next segment about where he wants to get the oil.
Not from here, where we have it, but apparently from some other places, which happen to be Russian allies.
So the stupidity continues.
But completing the Eliot Cohen article, he finally talks about, and this to me is the silliest point of all, the kind of moral power Of universal condemnation.
In other words, the idea here that Russia is now making all these enemies around the world and all these countries are drawing themselves to their full height and saying, we disapprove.
We're not going to be supportive of this.
First of all, this is a theatrical move.
Half of these countries are still working with Russia.
Let's take China, for example.
China says things like, we're really hoping for a negotiated settlement.
If the Chinese were religious, they'd be like, we're hoping and praying for a religious settlement.
They're not hoping and praying for anything.
They're actually sitting back and chuckling because this is a war that, A, the Chinese and Putin concocted together.
Putin even kind of got clearance from Xi as to when he could do it.
And so, I think it's time here to think about the bigger picture.
And the bigger picture is the unwinding of the American century.
Now, the American century...
Some people think the American century is the 20th century.
But no, America didn't actually become a superpower until the end of World War II. So, if you're counting an American century, I think you'd have to date it from 1945 to, well...
Maybe to 2022.
To now. Which is another way of saying that the American century lasted, really, 75 years.
And it began in the middle of the last century.
And we can almost date this moment, this conflict, as the end of the American century.
Which is not to say that America doesn't remain a powerful force in the world.
Not to say America is not one of the main powers.
But it is to say that America is no longer the sole superpower.
Many things will happen going forward without America.
And this presumption that we can kind of call the shots that there's going to be...
A negotiated settlement in Asia.
We're the ones who are going to be brokering it if there's a peace in the Middle East.
Can't happen without the United States.
I think these things are now things of the past.
We will have to look wistfully back to the days when America was top dog because now we're just one of the boys along with other countries, Russia, China, Brazil, India, and so on.
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You've got to use promo code DINESHDINESH. Gas prices are totally getting out of hand.
We've seen, even here in Texas, where prices tend to be lower than in the rest of the country.
We've seen prices well into the $4 plus, $5 in some places.
I've seen people taking photos at the pump of prices that are $6, high sixes, even early sevens.
And some people are predicting that gas will go up to $10 or even higher and relatively soon.
So the Biden administration realizes that this is a problem and that there are lots of people who will find these prices intolerable and will go nuts.
And this is not going to do any wonders for Biden's already tottering poll ratings.
Now, Biden says, he's been saying that this is not his fault, this is something that is caused by Russia, this is Ukraine, the re-Ukraine war.
It's gonna go up.
Can't do much right now.
And there's a little bit of truth to that, but only a little, because gas prices were rising dramatically before all this.
So, it has a lot to do with the fact that Biden has actively suppressed oil production in the United States.
He's actually been quite blunt in saying he doesn't want To see fossil fuels in America.
He's going to do what he can, he said in the 2020 campaign, to shut down oil production, to move away from fossil fuels.
So when you do that, you're basically suppressing the supply, and it's the law of supply and demand.
Prices are going to go up. Now, this latest...
Conflict is going to make things worse.
So what is Biden's solution?
You think he might be like, well, let me rethink.
Let me maybe at least temporarily go back to oil production in America.
No. Biden's plan is to go to Russia's allies, namely Venezuela and Iran, and buy oil from there.
Now, Debbie's laughing at this, and rightly so, because number one...
Debbie's like, Putin's a Sherbrooke daddy, Venezuela.
And Iran, of course, is working hand-in-hand with China and with Russia.
So the idea that sort of, I'm not going to buy from Russia, I'm going to go buy from China and Venezuela to kind of get around Russia.
I mean, who are you fooling?
I think the idea, quite honestly, is just to fool the American people because this is a completely ineffective approach.
In fact, if you want to be funny about it, not that the Venezuelans or the Iranians need oil, but they can say, okay, we'll sell to America and we'll buy from Russia.
So, this is not exactly an effective or a winning strategy, but I think there's a plot afoot here.
And what I mean is that the Biden administration, kind of continuing from the Obama days, remember Obama's idea was to sort of take America down a notch.
And Obama tried to do that many different ways, one of which was to bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt.
Unfortunately for Obama, he was thwarted in doing this.
The Egyptian military came in and Mohamed Morsi was pushed out.
So Obama failed in his effort to install a Muslim Brotherhood, radical Islamic, anti-American regime in Egypt.
But nevertheless, Obama did do the Iran deal.
Trump, of course, unwound the Iran deal.
And it looks like Biden is now trying to put it back.
So what Biden is trying to do is rehabilitate Iran, restore the Iran deal, remove sanctions on Iran, buy Iranian oil, and then also prop up the Maduro regime in Venezuela.
So the United States now becomes an active...
The upholder of socialist tyranny in Venezuela and also of Islamic radicalism through the premier Islamic radical regime in the world, which is the regime of the malas in Iran.
Republicans are calling for Biden to restore the Keystone Pipeline, to restore some of the Arctic drilling leases that he canceled, to reduce the taxation and regulation on the oil drilling industry.
But it looks like Biden is deaf to those kinds of pleas.
We have an energy policy that is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.
In some ways, I'm not...
I'm not hoping for Biden to succeed here.
It seems to me, and of course, there have been people on CNN and elsewhere who have said, well, you know, I don't think Americans are going to mind higher gas prices because they're very outraged by what's going on in Ukraine.
First of all, I think this is complete nonsense.
But I will say that I don't entirely mind higher gas prices.
Why? Because I think that this administration is such a disaster that anything that needs to be, anything that can serve as a wake-up call to the American people to unleash absolute fury and destruction on the Democrats, both in the midterm elections and hopefully in the 2024 election, anything that makes that more likely, I think long-term is good for America.
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There's an interesting survey in the Hill about the fact that more than a third of white students lie about their race on college applications, survey finds.
And I gotta say, as I read this, you might've expected me to be like a little indignant or people are misrepresenting their race, but I was actually chuckling my way throughout the whole thing, Why? Because I think the whole concept of racial distinctions is stupid.
And so anything that you can do to game the system is probably great.
Go for it. As long as you can get away with it.
Why? Because there's really No moral basis for this in the first place.
It's kind of like saying, you know, for college admissions or for a job, it's, we're going to give it to you whether or not you have bushy eyebrows.
We're going to give it to you whether or not you have a straight nose.
Well, straighten your nose, you know.
Play the game, because this is a corrupt system, affirmative action as it is.
So here are the apparent facts.
Apparently, as many as 34% of white students who've applied to colleges have said or have claimed on their applications that they're some sort of racial minority.
Now, it turns out about 48%, almost half, have claimed to be Native American.
Oh, yeah. You know, my parents talked about an ancestor, you know, with high cheekbones.
And, you know, I think his name might have been Running Bear.
Yeah. Apparently, 77% of the white applicants who lied about their race were accepted to college.
They've actually beat the system.
This is actually great.
And some of the students, of course, said they needed to get accepted.
Some of them said they did it because there's minority-only financial aid.
Another scam. We shouldn't be handing out financial aid based on race.
In fact, honey, if I remember when you were in school, they had some...
They had some Hispanic scholarships, and Debbie is like...
Not to mention, I could have used the Apache, but I didn't.
And Debbie says she didn't even play her American Indian card.
Debbie has a lot of cards, by the way.
She has a black card. She has a Latina card.
She has apparently also an American Indian card.
And the one thing she's not is Asian Indian.
Yeah. No, I was...
Debbie wanted to use her American card.
That's the way it should be. And another point to make here is that a lot of these racial categories are completely bogus anyway.
Black. First of all, black?
Most people who are black are lighter skin than me.
I mean, look at Jesse Jackson, Whitney Houston.
If they stand next to me, it's like, you know, who's the lighter person here?
And I'm not black.
So in other words, most black people in the United States are not really black.
And what I mean by that is that they're mixed race.
They're partly black.
They typically will have one black parent or Or certainly if you go back a generation or two, you find that there is white mixed in with the black.
So black here really means mixed race for the most part.
What do you think Latina means or Latino?
Mixed race again. Because typically Latinos are partly European and partly something else, partly indigenous.
The Mexicans in particular have a very small amount of European and a lot of indigenous.
And of course, as you go throughout Central and South America, the percentages vary.
It depends on the region. It depends on the region.
Debbie was saying in Argentina, for example, it's almost all European, very little indigenous in Venezuela.
That was not the case.
You actually have a fair amount of indigenous.
So this is the point.
These are fluid categories.
And so the idea of sort of reifying them, of making them into sort of fixed categories and handing out Social privileges.
I mean, it gives you an idea. People talk about white privilege, but the only legal privilege that is given on a racial basis in America is against whites, turns out also to be against Asian Americans, by the way, and is given to blacks and Latinos.
So I guess my point is if someone's gaming the system, more power to them.
Why? Because the system itself is corrupt.
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I'm always delighted, guys, to welcome to the podcast my daughter, Danielle D'Souza-Gill.
She's host of a weekly TV show that appears on Epic TV. You can go to the Epoch Times app, download it, watch it.
It's called Counterculture with Danielle D'Souza-Gill.
And she's also author of a book called The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America.
Hey, Danielle, thanks for coming on the show.
I thought you'd get a chuckle out of my sweatshirt.
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And actually, Debbie's wearing hers today.
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I love all of these.
I have a bunch of different ones.
This is the Constitution Can't Be Canceled.
You know what I like about them, and you've made the same comment, is they're actually very soft.
They're very, very soft, and when you wash them, they get even softer, so I love that.
Yeah, they're a good quality merchandise.
And Danielle, this was your idea.
You actually pitched it to us.
We came on board. Tell us how you came up with the idea and why you think it's cool and also where people can find out more about this merchandise.
Well, I just think it's a great way for people to be able to express their patriotism and conservatism without having to shop from leftist stores.
But you can find all of those at shop.dineshdessousa.com Probably go on your social media and click directly to the links through there too.
But yeah, I think all the designs are great, so I'm really excited for people to be wearing them.
Cool. I mean, there are sweatshirts, there are hats, there are t-shirts, there are mugs.
So it's pretty much...
Yeah, here's a cool glass.
This actually is...
This is the United States of America, not the United States of socialism.
So this is where I drink my sparkling water while I'm doing the podcast.
All right. Let's talk about a couple of topics that are going on out there.
is there's been a lot of comment from the left, fear really, of what the Supreme Court is going to do in its big abortion decision, the decision on the Mississippi case, which essentially outlaws abortion, I believe, after 15 weeks.
Now, the court is supposed to make a decision this spring.
So sometime in the next, I guess, two to three months, we should be getting this decision.
But it looks like the left is already sort of gearing up.
They fear that it's a decision that will be 5-4 or 6-3 against them.
They fear that Roe versus Wade will go down.
And they seem to be saying, we're going to have to now mobilize at the state level.
Well, let's start by talking about the decision itself.
How do you think it's going to come out and do you think that the court is going to take the step of overturning Roe?
I do. I think that both sides of the aisle see that Roe v.
Wade will likely be overturned, and hopefully there will be a situation where it goes back to the states.
I think that there was some discussion of maybe they will decide on 15 weeks or some other time point, but I don't think that will happen because they then will then have more cases come to them that say, well, what about 11 weeks and things like that.
And so I really hope that Roe v.
Wade is overturned. And I think that it will happen because we're already kind of living in a post-Roe world in some states like Texas, where people virtually can't get abortions in places like that.
But of course, California, New York, very liberal states will still allow abortion, probably even till the nine month point.
But most states will have abortion restrictions.
How do you think that Justice Roberts is going to vote?
I say this because if you look at other areas, not abortion per se, what he seems to do is to sort of lean right but try to give something to the left.
So that, I don't know if this is partly just that he sees himself as more of a centrist.
I don't know if it's partly that this is his way to, in his own mind, preserve the credibility of the court.
But, A, do you think that Justice Roberts is going to go with the majority?
Or do you think he's going to try to carve out this unique middle position?
And what would such a position even look like?
Well, I think he has voted before in favor of Roe v.
Wade, and so I don't know if he would change his views on that.
We don't need his vote, so I wouldn't be surprised if he comes out with his own opinion on things.
But I do think that he is going to take a more moderate view than what was being argued by the left, and I don't think it's going to be simply Agreeing with the left justices about how Roe v.
Wade is constitutional and things like that.
I could see him maybe proposing some other limit, but I think the other conservative justices will likely vote to overturn Roe.
There's an article in The Nation that I sent over to you to take a look at where they're talking about the fact that, and this is an interesting development, in some other countries around the world, they have been liberalizing abortion laws.
Now, by and large, I have to say that those are countries that had stricter laws than the United States.
So, the United States is I'm talking about countries in South America.
I believe even Thailand has done something similar.
And so the left here is talking about the fact that they need to organize Kind of women in the streets.
This is, of course, a threat that they've been brandishing for years.
But do you think this is going to mobilize a new wave of left-wing activism post-Roe?
And if so, does the pro-life movement have to gear up to counter it?
Well, I think they've already tapped into all of the activists they can find.
They've already been doing that, you know, protesting Kavanaugh's Supreme Court hearing, all these other things that have been happening, Amy Coney Barrett's hearing.
So I think they already have those people.
I really can't imagine them getting more just because they've probably already reached those people.
Maybe they will have some kind of protests in Texas or places that have laws like this, but they will be able to get those abortions likely where a lot of those liberal people live.
So I think because if Roe v.
Wade was overturned, the laws would be so different in different states.
They would have to act like, oh, we're going to go to this other state.
We're going to go to Oklahoma and try to You know, get the women there to have abortions, but I don't really see the women actually in Oklahoma going to protest that other than maybe a couple people just because that's not what the Oklahoman people want and that's not what they would vote for.
So it would be these activists that come from San Francisco and New York City.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, we're going to pivot to a different topic, which is why women vote more progressive than men.
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I'm back with my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill.
We are now going to talk about the voting behavior of women as opposed to men.
This is, of course, the so-called gender gap.
And there's a very interesting article.
I mentioned it on the podcast, but I wanted to get your take on it, Danielle, which is an article that says that women historically have been more conservative than men.
And this has been true in America.
It's been true in Western Europe.
But in recent decades, perhaps the last four or five decades, we've seen a real shift in which women who are to the right of men are now have moved to the left of men.
And so today you can pretty much count that men will be more likely to vote for Trump, more likely to vote Republican.
And Democrats, by contrast, can count a little bit more on the women's vote.
So I thought I'd try to get your take as to...
Whether you think this is true, why it's true, and then if we can talk in a little more fundamental way about whether there are sort of fundamental psychological differences between men and women that cause these differences.
I definitely don't think it's the latter.
I think it's that it really aligns with first wave feminism, second wave feminism, and third wave feminism.
So the original first wave feminists were actually very conservative and very religious people.
A lot of them really were the primary home makers, child rearing people.
And so I think they did have conservative values.
And a lot of the women, even from the time of prohibition, they wanted that because they actually wanted To, you know, keep the men kind of from drinking too much, things like that.
So I think a lot of the women were actually just had those conservative values because that's what they believed in.
But then I think with second wave feminism, they kind of started teaching in the 1960s that women should be like Gloria Steinem or be kind of these activists, you know, join all these other leaders.
And bundled that cause with civil rights and other causes.
And then I think now with third wave feminism, they're really killing the entire movement because they basically have gotten rid of gender overall and have really moved towards trans, kind of making women into androgynous beings, making everyone gender fluid so there really isn't any women's empowerment anymore.
It's really just more about choosing your sexual identity or something like that.
I think, unfortunately, after the 60s and so on, a lot of the women probably learned those things in school or learned it from the media, from Hollywood, things like that, and so their values changed, but I don't think that it's inherent to male and female differences.
Well, I mean, I think what's interesting about that is it also helps to explain why younger women are more progressive than older women.
Because, of course, the changes often begin in school and in the university.
And then, of course, they percolate out into the larger culture so that young girls who are in school now are probably getting the most propagandized of perhaps any generation in history.
Right. I do hope, though, that because third-wave feminism is so...
Blatantly horrible and is ruining women's sports, ruining all these things that women will see that actually they need to move right, because what the right argues for is women's empowerment, where men and women are complementary, they both have really vital skills that make our world better, things like that, and isn't really to stamp out feminism, but to allow women to do things that they want to do, whether that's in the home or not.
But I think that hopefully younger women are starting to see that.
Now, you said a moment ago that you don't think that there are fundamental male-female differences that have a political consequence.
Do you think that men and women from society and from the political sphere want pretty much the same things?
Or do you think that...
You know, sometimes people have written things to the effect that women, let's say, are more risk-averse than men.
And for this reason, are more likely, for example, to look favorably on, you know, the government providing certain basic securities where you have a safety net, where you can count on health care, where you can count on this and you can count on that, rather than just saying, hey, listen, go out into the market and try your luck, that men are a little bit more willing to take that kind of a bargain Whereas women incline more toward the safety of a government program.
Do you sort of reject that as an explanation for male-female differences, or do you think there's something to it?
Well, I definitely think there are male and female differences, biological, psychological, of course.
But I think if we're thinking about political leanings, if I think about, you know, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or a woman, let's say, from 1800, maybe, let's take Abraham Lincoln's wife, and she were to meet...
You know, AOC or something.
They would just be such totally different people.
Even Margaret Thatcher would be so different from Hillary Clinton.
I mean, so I think that The way that our culture has changed in terms of religion, in terms of values, in terms of the family has changed so much.
And maybe that's because I think a lot of women used to really care a lot about the family.
Whereas now, I guess there's kind of more of a push for women to kind of abandon their family, not have a family.
I mean, of course, that goes back to abortion, things like that.
But it's kind of like, you know, you're not really celebrated in today's culture unless you're like a big career woman or something.
And maybe if you do both, that's cool.
But if you're mostly in the home, then you're kind of forgotten.
So I think it's a lot of cultural factors and not just the biological nature of women, because I think a lot of women, even if we think back to the wives of the founders or the wives of our early presidents, first ladies, they were so different than these activist Planned Parenthood protesters today.
So part of what you're saying, I think, is that what we need is a little bit of a revival of traditionalism across the board for men and women to put our culture into a healthier place.
Absolutely. I think a revival of focusing on religion and traditional values and also I think this awakening to parents going to school board meetings is really positive for us because there are so many parents who do care about their kids and don't want them to be indoctrinated to this level.
So I definitely think that we're going to see a change in how women are viewed and celebrated and I think that our side, the conservative side, can play such a huge role in that.
And making sure that women know that they don't have to be these horrible leftist pro-abortion activists.
Absolutely. Great stuff. Hey, thanks, Danielle.
Thanks for coming on. Good to see you on the podcast.
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That's 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm going to do a couple of segments on Dante today, because I want to finish my discussion of Canto X, which is the circle of the heretics.
Now, when we left off, this towering figure, Farinata, was in a kind of argument with Dante, in which Farinata said, I scattered your ancestors.
This was a reference to the Battle of Monte Perti, where The Ghibellines, one of the parties, Farinata's party, allied with the Sienese from Siena, a kind of rival state.
And together, this Ghibelline force invaded Florence and defeated the Guelphs, who were the majority in Florence.
And then Dante counters, well, yeah, you know, your ancestors did kick out my ancestors, in fact, twice, but my ancestors came back.
And at the date of the poem, 1300, it's Dante's ancestors, which is to say the Guelphs, who are now installed in power in Florence, and the Ghibellines have become kind of a minor force.
So you can say while Farinata is playing the past card, the history card, Dante is countering with the present card, which is to say...
We're the winners right now.
And Dante basically says that my ancestors figured out the art of coming back, something that your ancestors never figured out.
But Farinata comes back to that with something very interesting, which is to say Farinata actually predicts Dante's own exile.
And he does it by saying this.
He says, first, if that art they did not master, Farnada's talking about his own ancestors, if that art, which is what art?
The art of coming back to power.
If that art they did not master, he went on, that gives me greater pain than does this bed.
Wow. So Farnada's in a flaming tomb.
He's in hell.
He's suffering eternal damnation.
But he goes, the pain here...
Is nothing.
Is not a big deal compared to the pain I would feel if my ancestors up there on earth aren't doing very well.
If they haven't figured out how to come to power.
I mean, you get the idea here of how much Farinata is a party man.
He is a man who values his family.
He's a man who values his party.
Now, Dante's point is not, I'm a Guelph, you're a Ghibelline, and so your party's in the wrong.
Not at all. Dante is actually getting at a deeper point.
A point that becomes apparent when Farinata first addresses Dante.
Let's think about it this way. Farinata is of a rival party than Dante.
Dante is a Guelph.
He's a Ghibelline. Farinata has a different family.
Farinata thinks a better family, more distinguished family.
But Farinata also has some things in common with Dante.
Number one, they're both Florentines.
Number two, they're both Italians, Europeans.
Number three, they are both Christians.
Number four, they are both human beings.
So notice that Farnata never mentions any of those things.
In fact, he doesn't care about them.
He's more concerned with the partial things that divide him from Dante, that establish his superiority over Dante and his competition with Dante, than he is the things they haven't And I think what Dante is getting at here, Dante the poet, is that this is kind of the essence of what heresy is.
Heresy is taking the part, the partial truth, and making it the whole truth.
If you think of what a heretic does, is he wants to sort of hair split over something.
Oh, Jesus is only the son of God, but he's not really God.
And that little partial element somehow supersedes the bigger truth, who died for your sins?
Isn't Jesus the one that God sent to come down to earth to die for your sins?
So all of that gets set aside in some kind of a side squabble.
And so heresy, Dante is saying, is bad, not just because you're wrong, you're theologically mistaken, but you're essentially taking a partial truth for the whole truth, and you're creating unnecessary acrimony and division when the Christian world should be united.
Now... What's interesting is that you've got Dante having this conversation with Farinadha And right in the middle of the conversation, something weird happens, which is that another guy comes sliding out of the tomb, the exact same tomb that's holding Farinata.
Apparently, this guy shares the tomb with Farinata, although, as we'll see in a moment, the two of them don't recognize each other at all.
They're in the same tomb. And again, think of what this means for heresy.
You basically got two guys, and again, they're both Florentines.
They have something in common, but they don't recognize that.
That's not what's important to them.
They care about something else.
So this other guy is not quite the sort of statuesque figure that Farinata is.
In fact, his head comes up outside the tomb and it's kind of bent over on the tomb.
And he looks around and he sees Dante and he starts weeping.
And he says this to Dante.
This is the other guy, not Farnata.
If it be great genius that carries you along through this blind jail, where is my son?
Why is he not with you?
So Dante looks a little more closely.
And he's a little taken aback.
He recognizes the guy.
So the guy is a father of one of Dante's own friends.
His name is Cavalcante, the father, and of course so is the son.
And Dante recognizes him, and apparently this Cavalcante guy is saying to Dante...
Since great genius brought you here, I mean, think of the premise, which is flatly wrong.
Dante is not undertaking this journey as a reward for his great genius.
Dante is actually on a kind of spiritual quest.
He began, as we remember, in a dark wood in a spiritual malaise.
So this is part of, you could almost call it, the spiritual and moral educational journey of Dante the Pilgrim.
But Cavalcante acts like Dante has gotten a big prize.
Man, you've gotten this kind of free ticket to go through the afterlife.
Well, if you got a free ticket, if you're the great guy, where's my son?
Why isn't he with you?
And... Then, before Dante can even reply, he continues like this.
He goes, is he not living?
The day's sweet light no longer strikes his eyes?
So you get the idea now that suddenly Cavalcante thinks that although Dante is here traveling through the afterlife...
Obviously, as a living being, Dante is not a shade.
Dante is actually a living person traveling through the afterlife.
And so Cavalcante concludes, in effect, that his son, his own son, must be dead.
Must be dead. But before Dante can reply to him, and it turns out Cavalcante's son is not dead, he's back on Earth, but Dante never had a chance to say that, this guy slides right back into the tomb, and we never see him again.
He's gone. He disappears.
And so, you have this somewhat comedy of errors where this guy...
Known to Dante, inquires about his son, apparently thinks that his own son is an important figure, important enough to be accompanying Dante on this heroic journey.
So Cavalcante misunderstands what Dante is doing there, and then jumps to the conclusion that the absence of his son is proof that his son must have somehow died, and before Dante can clarify that, He's back inside the tomb.
So Dante cannot speak to him anymore.
And then something really amazing happens.
We're going to pick this up in the next segment.
Farinata, the other guy who was standing tall and erect, continues his conversation picking up where he left off.
He picks up exactly where he left off, which is to say he pretends like nothing just happened.
He completely ignores the other guy and he essentially just picks up the thread, continues the conversation with Dante, and we'll touch upon what he says and we can conclude our discussion of these two interesting characters in the next segment.
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I'm continuing and will conclude my discussion of Farinata in Canto X of Dante's Inferno.
And as I mentioned in the last segment, when Cavalcanti slumps back into the tomb, Farinata pretends like nothing has happened and continues right where he left off.
And he says this to Dante, The face of the queen who reigns down here will glow not more than 50 times before you learn how hard it is to master such an art.
Now, what is going on here?
The face of the queen. Well, that, it turns out, is the moon.
Why? Because there's no sun in hell.
In hell, there is only the moon, and you have to tell time by the moon.
So the face of the queen will glow not more than 50 times.
Farnad is actually making a kind of prediction.
He's saying that within 50 months, 50 months of what?
Of the year 1300, when this poem is set, he says...
Within that time, he tells Dante, you will learn how hard it is to master such an art.
What art? Well, the art of coming back politically.
So what he's saying is that, because remember, Farnada had begun in his exchange with Dante in playing the history card, which is to say my ancestors kicked out your ancestors.
Dante responded by playing...
The present card.
Hey, guess who's ruling Florence now?
It's our guys, not you.
Well, it turns out, Farinata has one card left, and it's the best card of all.
It's the future card.
Farinata predicts that within a few months...
According to the Moon, you, Dante, are going to be expelled from Florence, and you will never come back.
You'll learn how hard it is to...
You're talking to me about how your ancestors mastered the art of the comeback.
Well, let's see you try it.
And as it turns out, and as we know, and as Dante, the poet, knows writing this poem, he was never able to come back.
So Farinata, in a sense, wins, if you can use that term, the exchange.
Although I think what's interesting here is that Dante, the pilgrim, makes the mistake of getting into this, who's greater, whose party is better, with Farinata.
In a sense, Dante himself is lapsing into the very fault that is responsible for Farinata being right here in Canto X, in this circle of the Of the heretics.
Now, Farnata now asks Dante a question, and he says, Why should your party be so harsh to mine in every law they make?
Now, what's Farnata saying here?
What he's saying is that once the Guelphs came to power in Florence, they expelled all the Ghibellines.
And then in the year 1280, they allowed some Ghibellines to come back.
Because the Guelphs by now were firmly established, they let the Ghibellines return to Florence with one exception.
And that was the Farinata family, the so-called Deluberti family, was prohibited permanently from re-entering Florence.
And so Farinata is saying to Dante, why is your party so mean, as we would say today, so harsh on my family?
And here's what Dante replies.
The massacre and butchery that stained the waters of the Arbia Red now caused such laws to issue from our councils.
So here's what Dante is saying.
There was a Battle of Monteperty, admittedly now 30 years ago, in 1260.
But what happened? Your family essentially became traitors to Florence.
What did you do? You went outside of Florence and you found an external power, Siena.
You allied with the Sienese and you came back and massacred the Florentine army, which is to say the Guelphs.
And you did so much butchery that the waters of the Arbia River were dyed red because of the butchery.
So, what Dante is saying is, is it any surprise that we remember those things?
Is it any surprise that this kind of treason is going to be punished by permanent expulsion?
That's why your family is not allowed to come back.
Now, there are some people who read this kind of exchange here, particularly between Dante the Pilgrim and Farinata, and they think that Dante the Poet is sort of settling political scores.
They think that, you know, Farinata's in hell because Dante's a Guelph and he's a Ghibelline.
And I want to refute that idea once and for all by making an observation that has to these same readers been very surprising.
Which is that the winners of this Battle of Monteperty were, on the one hand, Farinata's family, yes, but on the other hand, the Sienese.
And the Sienese army, the commander, was a guy named Provenzan Salvani.
And if this interpretation that Dante is kind of a political man, he's on the Guelph side against the Ghibellines, he's going to find dark places in hell for the Ghibellines, you would expect Provenza and Salvani to be in some deep circle of hell, because after all, these were the outside forces that invaded Florence.
But no. Once we get into the Purgatorio, we discover there's Provenza and Salvani.
He's in Purgatory.
He's actually on his way to heaven.
He's one of the saved.
So right away we begin to see that this is not about Guelphs and Ghibellines, and to view it just that way in that narrow sense is to completely misunderstand what is really going on.
Now, Dante has a very interesting device here.
How is it that Farinata is able to predict Dante's exile?
How is it that he even knows what's going to happen to Dante?
Well, in the schema of Dante's poem, the people who are in hell do not, in fact, know the present.
In fact, they don't know what's going on right now on earth.
That's really why the other guy, Cavalcanti, was like, is my son dead?
He doesn't know one way or the other.
And so he wants Dante to tell him...
But, they do know the future.
So, they don't know the present, weirdly.
But they are able to tell what's coming.
Now, let's remember that this prophetic ability that gives Farinata the ability to say, Dante, you're going to go into exile.
That's going to continue for a while, but that will end sometime.
When will it end? Well, it will end with the Last Judgment.
Because think about it. Once you have the Last Judgment, There's going to be no future.
In a sense, we're no longer in time.
And so time comes to an end.
And so, in a sense, the people in hell at that point, since they don't know the present, will know nothing at all.
As this discussion is concluding, Dante, before he leaves Farinata, makes a kind of closing point.
And that is, he tries to get a message through Farinata to the other guy, Cavalcanti.
In other words, Dante's feeling bad that he wasn't able to tell Cavalcanti, hey, listen, your son's still alive.
And so he says to Farinata, he says, now, will you please tell the fallen one, meaning Cavalcanti, his son is still on earth among the living.
And Dante observes here that Farinata's response to this was silence, indifference.
And essentially what happens is Farinata now descends.
He too goes back into the tomb.
And I think the message of the poem is really clear.
There's no way this is going to happen.
Farinada and Kavalkanti, although occupying the same tomb, don't communicate in any way.
They're not going to be transmitting messages from one to the other.
The picture we get here is isolation.
And it seems very appropriate, because think of what heresy is.
Heresy is, in a way, cutting yourself off.
It's isolating yourself from a moral community.
Heresy is a form of saying, I don't belong.
I don't want to be in with you guys.
I'm going to cut my own separate path.
And I think all the kind of bad qualities that go with that...
A kind of titanic pride, which we see with Farinata.
My family's better.
You know, my ancestors scattered your ancestors.
And let's remember, again, a complete absence of repentance.
Now, with Kabbalah Kanti, the picture is a little more complicated, because what Dante is basically saying is that here is a guy who puts, you may say, his own son and his own fame above everything else.
So he is a heretic in a very different way.
Unlike Farinada, he's not a political guy.
He's in fact a poet.
But all that matters to him is reputation.
Here's Dante.
He's a big famous poet.
Where's my son?
Isn't my son a big famous poet as well?
So again, what we're seeing here with regard to heresy is an emphasis on one thing, family, in the case of Kabbalah Kanti.
Family and party, in the case of Farinata.
But to those, to both of them, those things, those partial things, which are admittedly important, are more important than other things.
They're more important than your faith.
They're more important than your country.
They're more important than your community.
They're more important than your humanity.
You're taking a partial thing and turning it into everything.
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