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March 11, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:22
BIDEN’S WRECKAGE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep288
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So, guys, I'm going to do a special Q&A episode next week, and I'd love to have...
It's been a little while since I've taken a question on the podcast, but I'd love to have questions, and I'm going to sort of pull them together and devote a full podcast to answering questions.
So, send me your questions, ideally audio or video, and send them to questiondinesh at gmail.com, questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Now... I'm going to talk today about the economic wreckage caused by the Biden administration from the energy crisis to runaway inflation.
Rick Grinnell, the former director of national intelligence, is coming back on the podcast.
We're going to talk about the Ukraine and what can be done to repel Putin's invasion.
In the wake of the Jussie Smollett verdict, I'm going to talk about why the Osandero brothers, the two Nigerians, might be hearing once again from Jussie.
And I'll examine the elegant, forlorn figure of Pierre Delavigne in Canto XIII of Dante's Inferno.
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.
♪♪♪ Faced with oil prices that are high and moving higher, Joe Biden is doubling down and declaring, as he just did, quote, it is simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production.
I mean, it's incredible that this guy can look into the cameras and say this with a straight face.
And then the media just kind of nods like, yeah, that's right, he's speaking truth.
Well, he's not.
And since you're not going to get the YouTube or the Facebook fact-checkers checking Biden on this one, they just assume that what he says is true, they only fact-check the other side, which is our side, let me fact-check Biden on this.
Biden himself has been quoted saying multiple times, including in the presidential debates, that he wants to end, end Biden.
He wants to end fossil fuels in America.
He froze new drilling permits and stopped leases on federal lands.
In fact, when he first took office, he moved to ban new oil and gas leases on federal lands.
And that's, by the way, a huge slice of Now that measure was stopped by the courts, but not for lack of trying by the Biden administration.
One of the things the Democrats were saying, and this is long before Putin invaded the Ukraine, is that we have plenty of energy to meet our domestic needs.
We don't need more.
So you had the Democrats and you had the media.
Basically promulgating the message that, yeah, we are cutting back on oil and gas, and that's a good thing because we don't really need it.
Of course, no one's going to forget, I don't think you are, that Biden shut down the Keystone XL pipeline on his very first day in office.
He signed an executive order, and this was part of his campaign, he himself said, to reverse 100 or more Trump-era policies.
In June of 2021, Biden suspended oil and gas leases that Trump had granted in Alaska.
And this, of course, outraged the people in Alaska and local officials in Alaska because it was one of the key steps to expand energy production and to create self-reliance for the United States.
In fact, the left was so excited about what Biden was doing again before Ukraine to suppress domestic production that the climate activist Bill McKibben said that, quote, Biden's actions are...
Quote, may well mark the official beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.
And he said they, quote, send a decisive signal about the end of one epoch and the beginning of another.
So this is something Biden was doing and the Democrats were cheering and the media was cheering.
And now that it's become politically inconvenient...
Biden's two strategies are, number one, try to blame it all, all on Putin, and number two, declare with kind of brazen dishonesty that, quote, his administration, it is simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production, even though it is true.
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The latest figure is just out.
Inflation rises to 7.9% in February, the highest in four decades.
So it seems like every month now we have the highest, the highest, the highest.
Why? Because it's higher this month than it was last month, and it's higher last month than it was the month before.
And I just saw Janet Yellen.
From the Federal Reserve basically saying, hey, this is something that is going to be something we're going to be living with certainly for the rest of the year.
And Jen Psaki says, we're kind of hoping things will moderate by the end of the year, but that can be taken as propaganda.
It's more of More an expression of the Biden administration's wishful thinking than anything else.
Inflation here is being driven by a series of factors, all kind of coming together.
I would say there are two that are paramount.
One, of course, is the big reckless spending of the Biden administration itself.
Essentially, when you print money, you get inflation, and that's the domestic cause of inflation.
And then the secondary cause is global instability.
When you have constraints on oil supplies, And now the United States is not buying oil from Russia.
We're going to buy it supposedly from Venezuela and from Iran.
But again, if you say, I'm not going to buy it on the world market, the cheapest place I can find it, it generally means you're going to end up paying more.
And we see energy prices soaring.
That's a major driving factor in inflation.
And we're seeing that then percolate into the prices of everything.
We're not just talking about paying higher gas prices at the pump, but of course it takes fuel to bring food deliveries.
It takes fuel to deliver furniture.
It takes fuel to operate hotels and motels.
And so we see prices rising across the board.
Fuel oil is up 44%.
Well, used cars are up 41%.
Gas is up 38%.
Hotels, 29%.
Furniture, 17%.
And then you look at steak, chicken, fish, flour.
Food prices are all up more than 10% apiece.
Appliances up 11%.
And even rent, which would seem to be a factor not immediately or directly affected, up 4.3%.
So all of this means that the ordinary American is being squeezed.
And sure, if you're well off or even upper middle class, it may be a pinch.
But for people who live paycheck to paycheck, for people who have to worry about, hey, can I really fill the tank?
Or do I have to, if I do, I'm going to have to take the money out from somewhere else.
And that means I can't, you know, eat fast food or I can't buy everything I want to at the grocery store.
So this, I think, is...
Well, let's call it cruel and unusual punishment being imposed on a large number of Americans by a callous government and by a callous Biden, who really doesn't care.
You don't even get the sense that there's any empathy over all this.
Obviously, his empathy is for himself and his poll ratings, and so he's a little nervous about it, clearly.
but the nervousness has to do with how it's making him look and not how it's making you feel when you feel the actual bite of inflation.
So I think this is a way in which the failures of the Biden administration are felt by ordinary people.
I mean, you can see what's happening, the disasters on the global front, you know.
You can see people falling out of planes in Afghanistan.
You can see the disaster of Biden's policies in Europe and in the Ukraine.
And you can hear and read about Biden's corruption at all levels.
He's raking in money from China, raking in money from all these other countries.
And much of this operation operated by his wayward son, who he claims is the smartest guy he's ever met.
I'm surprised he's not consulting him on the Ukraine.
What are Hunter's thoughts on the Ukraine, Joe Biden?
Here's Biden, and you can see these disasters all over the place, but inflationism is the way in which all of this is brought home.
So, some people have made amusing comments about how Republicans should be standing right there at the gas pumps and signing people up to vote, because it's like, you don't like what's happening in the country?
Well, there's a solution coming up this November, and a solution in two more years.
If you don't like the way the Democrats are running the country, it's time to throw them all out.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome back to the podcast Rick Grinnell.
He was the acting director for national intelligence in President Trump's cabinet, 2020.
Before that, U.S. ambassador to Germany, 2018 to 2020.
Also special presidential envoy for Serbia and Kosovo.
Peace negotiations...
Rick, thanks for coming back on.
Let's talk a little bit about how things are looking in the Ukraine.
It's a little difficult to know what's happening on the ground because we have this fog of propaganda, including a kind of single narrative coming at us in the United States from the media.
What's your take on how it's going?
Are the Ukrainians successfully holding out, or is this a case where Putin is just overrunning the country?
First, Dinesh, thanks for having me.
It's a real honor to be here.
Look, I think that the Ukrainians are surprising Putin, they're surprising the Europeans, and they're surprising Senate Democrats.
We have to remember that there's been a titanic shift In what's happening in Europe, you now have the Germans, think about that, the Germans in a post-Merkel world, the Germans have admitted that they really caused this.
Their admittance is, we got to scramble to pay our 2% NATO bill, which we haven't been paying, and for God's sake, we've got to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
There's not enough media attention on this shift.
In a post-Merkel world, the socialists Olaf Scholz, who was the Minister of Finance, came forward and really said, you know what, this is probably causing a war.
Our dependents on Russia are racing towards Nord Stream 2 and an over-reliance on energy.
What we do know is that the Germans are now really admitting that that is not just a pipeline of It's really a pipeline of influence.
And the European Parliament has been saying this for years.
One mistake that I think the Biden administration and our dutiful media in Washington always make is they've really started to believe that Europe is Berlin, Paris, and Brussels.
And Europe is much different.
It's Budapest. It's Warsaw.
It's a lot of different areas of influence now.
And we should never make the mistake of just thinking that Berlin and Paris are running Europe.
I mean, this is a huge moment in the shift in Germany, and it would not have happened if not for the rest of the pressure of Europe.
It certainly didn't happen because of pressure from Joe Biden.
Let's back up for a second.
I want you to assess the thesis that was advanced, well, initially several years ago by the realist political thinker John Mearsheimer, who said in effect that, look, the Ukraine is on the border of Russia.
And that the West has sort of made the mistake of giving the Ukraine or Ukraine the illusion that they can be part of the West, they can be part of NATO, they can sort of poke the Soviet bear, and we're all going to be right behind them there to protect them.
And then when the bear turns around and swats them, the Ukraine realizes that they're going to have to fight this largely by themselves, yes, with support from the other countries, but the other countries aren't going to commit troops to Do you think looking at it from that realist angle, Mearsheimer has a point?
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, look, we see the slippery slope of neocons constantly forgetting that Ukraine is really a bridge.
They somehow forget that, you know, Europe hasn't, the EU hasn't let Ukraine in.
NATO hasn't let Ukraine in.
And there's a reason for that.
And I think it's because of exactly this.
There are a lot of There are a lot of pro-Russia voices.
There are a lot of people sympathetic towards Russia and Putin in Ukraine, but there are a lot of people who want to fight for freedom.
And it is a battle there.
You have to be able to balance both sides.
Ukraine has always been a bridge, and yet we have too many people in the United States who forget that a bridge means two sides.
And what they've assumed is That we're just going to, you know, roll them into a pro-capitalist Western-style democracy.
And that's the same mistake that I would say that we've made in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places.
Part of the America first idea is not just putting America first and bringing our troops home and not starting wars.
But you have to remember that America first was also Pushing our allies to stand up and do more.
It's why we brought our troops home from Somalia, actually.
We said to the Kenyans, hey, it's your neighborhood, can't you do a little bit more?
It's why we really pushed Germany to pay their fair share.
It's why we started to bring our troops home from the Middle East in different places.
And it's also why we tried and started the conversation to say we should bring our troops home From Kosovo.
We have 600 plus troops in Kosovo.
And this is an area of the Balkans that they can begin to police themselves.
There's a theoretical part to America First that I think people didn't really grasp.
Let's push the logic of America first a little bit, because I'm assuming that if we're America first, we accept that the Chinese would be China first, the Indians would be India first, and Putin would be Russia first.
And so what if Putin were to say, hey, listen, the Ukraine is kind of in my backyard.
And if you've got all these Western powers prowling around the Ukraine, how would the United States feel if you had, for example, China, you know, stationing troops, doing military exercises, talking about importing Canada and Mexico into some kind of Sino alliance?
It would make us extremely nervous.
So his point is, can't you see my point that a Russia-first policy for me requires a Ukraine that is at least not actively hostile to Russian ambitions?
I realize today if you say these things, people go, you're pro-Putin.
And I think you know I'm not being pro-Putin.
I'm just trying to look at it from the other angle.
Yeah, so I spent eight years, I know you know this, I spent eight years at the UN inside the Security Council watching all of these debates that went from realist to practical to philosophical debates.
And I've heard this argument quite a bit because you are exactly right that every country is about themselves.
And the only country that gets in trouble for putting themselves first is America.
But, you know, Dinesh, I've been in thousands, maybe tens of thousands of diplomatic meetings.
And I've never been in one where the other side doesn't ask the United States for something.
And so we have to remember that this is diplomacy.
You have to be able to defend your country and be able to put your country first.
And then here's the key.
Explain why your position is good for them.
This is basic negotiations.
What I would say to your very good question.
Is that I am proud to push an America First agenda.
And I think the State Department should train our U.S. diplomats to never, ever apologize about America First.
Because an America First agenda is good for our allies.
And we should be able to explain that.
When America stands for truth, justice, the American way, it means that democracy flourishes.
It means the rule of law flourishes.
It means human rights are respected.
Russia First can't claim that.
And we should be able to explain to our friends, allies, and others that America First is good for them, it's good for the world economy, and everybody will benefit, and we should never shy away from that.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, I'd like to talk some more about Ukraine with Rick Grinnell.
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Guys, I'm really enjoying this.
I'm back with Rick Grinnell.
We're having a conversation about the Ukraine and America First and Putin.
And let me start by asking you, Rick, about Putin and his ambition here.
Do you read him?
I've heard some people say that Putin is trying to, in some way, reconstitute the Soviet Empire.
And that seems to me to be...
But Putin has said that one of his greatest regrets is the fall of the Soviet Empire.
So, do you think this is a case where Putin is sort of getting into the global imperialism game and seeing himself as doing, perhaps in conjunction with China, providing a kind of rival alliance to the West?
What's Putin's grand ambition here?
Thank you.
Well, first of all, let me just start by saying I thought that Bill Burns, who's our CIA director, who's got a long history of knowing Putin, I thought that he was a total flop when he just testified.
There were so many people that rushed in Washington to say, oh, this is a man who knows Putin and, you know, he looked him in the eye and he flew there recently.
Well, if all that were true, we keep beating our head against the wall because we're doing the exact same things.
I call them the 1990s crowd, which comes back in and tries to pretend like Putin is a rational actor and we have to just deal with him in rational ways.
But something has happened with Putin over the last couple of years, and I believe that we have to look at leaders not just historically and in terms of the moments that they're governing in and what their ambitions are, But look at them personally as well.
And that's where I think Bill Burns really failed to really give us the inside of what he knows about Putin personally.
I would say this as the former acting director of national intelligence and somebody who's got to see Putin and what we know.
Is that over the last several years, something flipped with him.
And I don't know if it's a focus on death and a more cognizant look at where he is going with his life, where he fits in history.
But the emotional aspect of Putin understanding and self-reflecting about his place in history has never been more evident.
He's getting angrier with people that aren't allowing him to do What he wants to do.
There seems to be a sense of urgency or limitations to his time of how much time he has.
I think there's a frustration growing.
That there are people not helping him.
I think that people who really value their place in history and are seeing the end of their time here on Earth get more desperate.
And so we're not dealing with somebody who's rational.
And I think there's no question that he calculated that he could move in, take parts of Ukraine, probably get Zelensky out, maybe kill Zelensky, and remove that government that is too pro-West and bring it back to at least a bridge, if not a tilt towards Russia.
And I think that has been the goal, is to get rid of this government in Ukraine that's moving to the West too fast and too quickly.
You know, there's no question in my mind he understands that if he crosses into Poland, that there's an Article 5 tripwire for NATO.
I'm not sure he cares, but he seems to respect it at this point.
He's probably flirted with it.
I also will just finish by saying I don't really buy this argument that delivering Polish jets...
Into Ukraine is somehow going to escalate the war.
We've already given them javelins.
If that didn't escalate the war or cause World War III or cause, you know, a moment where Putin says, now I'm going to attack Poland or the United States, then I'm not sure that it's that escalatory to go from javelins to, you know, fighter jets.
So I don't really buy that.
I do think that it's okay for us to equip Ukraine and let Ukraine fight their own battles.
We can supply what is needed, but I'm against a no-fly zone, and I think that would absolutely put us in the position of firing upon Russia, and we don't need to be in that position.
I mean, Rick, in a way, this seems to me to be a kind of revival of the Reagan doctrine, and by that I mean you remember, of course, going back to the late 70s and 80s, U.S. support in Afghanistan for the Mujahideen in Angola, in Mozambique, around the world.
The Reagan's idea was, we're not sending troops, but people should fight for their own freedom, and if they do...
And this is especially true if you're invaded by somebody else, as was the case with Afghanistan by the Soviet Union.
So, do you think that in general, this kind of Reagan doctrine is more consistent with an America First policy and occupies kind of a middle position between isolationism on the one hand and the kind of Bush interventionism on the other?
Yeah, it's realism. And I think, yes, Reagan and Trump really honestly have this idea that America should be strong.
They both built up the Defense Department.
They both didn't want to go out and cavalierly try to put U.S. troops in harm's way.
I think that official Washington over the last decade, and I would put the Bush administration into this, So maybe a little longer than a decade.
But the reality is, is we have had official Washington pushing the State Department aside, mocking diplomacy with muscle, asking for our diplomats to just go to dinners And, you know, cut the baby in half and pretend like that's a win.
And instead, we've just gotten into this habit of having the Pentagon and DOD put forward their ideas.
It's troops on the ground or it's our men and women trying to win hearts and minds.
I made this proposal at CPAC and I'm really passionate about it.
It gets a little wonky, but At the State Department, there are cones.
And when you sign up to be a Foreign Service Officer, you can pick which cone you want to go into.
An economic cone, public diplomacy cone, maybe human rights.
And that becomes your expertise.
And I think that it's time that the State Department have a crisis cone where we have diplomats who sign up and say, you know, I want to parachute into the difficult areas, to the crisis situations.
I know what I'm signing up for, but I want to try to talk through some of these issues before We all of a sudden transfer the file over to DOD where they don't negotiate.
I think that the State Department should be negotiating with diplomacy with muscle.
Send in our best people.
Don't mock people who are trying to defend I would put forward a team of people who are diplomats who rush into crises and call it a crisis cone.
Rick, this is awesome stuff.
Thank you very much for joining me and giving us a really enlightening window into what's going on in the world today.
Thank you. Thanks, Inesh.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. Jussie Smollett is one of the kindest, most gentle human beings I know.
I'm praying for his quick recovery.
This was an attempted modern-day lynching.
No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or color of their skin.
We must confront this hate.
Signed, Kamala Harris.
This was Kamala Harris in the wake of the reports of Jussie Smollett's victimization at the hands of some vicious Trumpsters.
These are MAGA people who supposedly confronted Smollett well.
You know that the whole story is now unwound.
We know that the perpetrator of the hate crime has been caught.
His name, as it turns out, is Jussie Smollett.
And of course, Kamala Harris wasn't alone.
Biden, there were so many others.
Cory Booker, who expressed the public sympathy for Smollett, obviously automatically accepted his story.
And I'm contrasting all those sickeningly false claims with what the judge said in sentencing Smollett yesterday.
And I love the fact that the judge sort of didn't hold back.
He was very candid and he didn't mince words.
Let me give you a few of his quotes.
He's speaking directly to Jussie.
You've turned your life upside down by your misconduct and shenanigans.
You've destroyed your life as you knew it.
There's nothing any sentencing judge could do to you that could compare to the damage you've done to yourself.
Now, while I agree with this, I will say that this is a little bit of an understatement here, because what Jussie Smollett did was a hate crime.
That's the one thing the judge didn't say, that when you falsely accuse a racial group of doing something to you that they didn't do, you're trying to falsely pin the blame on them.
That's a hate crime, and it's a hate crime directly based upon But let's continue with the judge's comments.
To Jassi, you premeditated this crime to an extent that is amazing.
So this is not something you just thought of in the spur of the moment.
You recruited the two Nigerians, the so-called Osandero brothers.
You paid them. They went out and bought the noose and all the other equipment.
The judge continues.
To Jassi, you're profoundly arrogant, selfish, and narcissistic.
Absolutely true. You're not a victim of a hate crime.
You're not a victim of a homophobic crime.
You are a charlatan.
Again, all true, but understates the matter because while Jussie isn't the victim of a hate crime, he is in fact the perpetrator of one.
And then my favorite really here, the judge, your performance on the witness stand can only be described as pure perjury.
In other words, Jussie was lying, and he's never stopped lying.
And we'll see that even after his sentencing, he's still lying.
So I think in a way, you know, to me, the most important outcome in the Jussie Smollett case is that the truth is finally out.
It's been adjudicated, and the judge, in a sense, sort of presented it with almost a kind of oracular dignity.
And this sick pattern of leftist lies that began with Jussie himself but was amplified by a dishonest media, by the way, cut from the same cloth as Jussie himself, this has finally been shut down by a no-nonsense judge.
And here's the sentence, and I think this is—I'm actually pretty happy about it.
Debbie was like, this guy's going to get away with it.
He's going to get absolutely nothing.
Debbie always sort of takes the most pessimistic view of things, and she's often right.
But in this case, the judge did, in fact, bring down the hammer.
30 months probation, 150 days in Cook County Jail, and you know what?
Jussie was sent right to Cook County Jail.
No walking out and checking in later.
Go to jail right now.
$25,000 fine, but in addition, $120,000 in restitution.
So Jussie is going to be paying for this offense, and I'm really glad to hear about that.
But as he's leaving, Jussie gives the Black Power salute, and he basically says, oh, he starts talking about the fact that if something happens to him in jail, he didn't commit suicide.
He wants people to know right now.
And so... So, Debbie's like, you know what?
This guy is staging his...
Well, Debbie thinks he's mentally ill, but I also think he's staging his next hate crime.
So, the Osindaro brothers, I mean, they might have moved on to other things, but they might be getting a call anytime soon from Jussie Smollett himself.
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We're back on the road with Dante descending in the circles of hell.
And some of you wrote me through the website yesterday like, I thought you mentioned even yesterday about Dante and there was no Dante.
Well, actually there was Dante, but we had a technical glitch.
Apparently what happened while I was recording was that The camera began to zoom into my face, initially chopping off the top of my head and my chin.
And I really don't know where it ended.
It might even have zoomed into a single cyclops-style oracular eye.
And I figured, you probably don't want to be hearing about Dante just by looking at one of Dinesh's eyes.
So anyway, technical problems caused us to delete that segment, which I'm going to redo today, so you're not going to miss anything.
And I'm going to do a couple of segments.
So I can take us through Canto 13.
Now, let me kind of remind you of the schema here.
We're going through the circle of violence.
And in the circle of violence, it's divided into sort of...
It was one circle, but it's divided into three categories.
Violence against others.
Which includes, by the way, the plunder of property, but also murder and other forms of harming other people.
Violence against self.
That's what we'll be talking about today.
And then violence against God, but also against God's creation, which is to say violence against nature.
Now, the circle that we're in in Canto 13 is the circle of the suicides.
And Dante beautifully sets this up because in this part of the circle, the geography is a little different in the different sections of the circle, but here it's very barren.
There's almost nothing there.
All you see are a few nondescript shrubs.
No souls.
Dante can't see anyone.
And the whole place has the aura of, well, let's call it an aura of negation, an aura of, as people say today, negativity.
Let me read the opening lines.
Not yet had Nessus reached the other side, when we were on our way into a forest that was not marked by any path at all.
No green leaves, but rather black in color.
No smooth branches, but twisted and entangled.
No fruit, but thorns of poison bloomed instead.
And it goes on like this, and you begin to realize, and you can't miss the no, the not.
There's essentially...
What Dante is getting at here is the notion of a negation, of a refusal, of something that is not present.
And if you think of suicide itself, it is something that is not present, namely life itself.
Now, suicide is a complicated theme in part because it was viewed differently in the ancient world, in the pre-Christian world of classical antiquity, than it was in the medieval Christian era when Dante lived.
And Dante knew this. Dante was very familiar with the fact that in the Greek and Roman era, they were important figures, and suicide for some of them was a mark of virtue.
Think, for example, of Brutus running on his sword in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
The idea here is that Brutus refuses to be dragged through the streets of Rome.
He refuses to be, in a sense, captive to Mark Antony and to Augustus, and so he prefers the exit of death, which is, in Brutus' own mind, anyway, honorable, but also seen by others.
Remember Shakespeare, this was the noblest Roman of them all, and so on.
Now, Dante knows this.
And Dante himself is not entirely unsympathetic to this classical point of view, as I'll tell you in a moment.
But Dante, of course, is closer to the medieval view, which is that life is a gift from God.
And so, suicide is what?
Well, it's basically a returning of the gift.
Here, God, take it back. I don't want it.
No. So, suicide in a way is a sort of declaration to God that the control of my own life is not up to you, God, but is up to me and will be lived on my own terms or will not be lived at all.
Now, we're going to be talking about a suicide in this canto.
This is a guy named Pierre Delavigne, and I'll come to him in a moment.
But I do want to mention first that if we go on to purgatory, I'm sort of flash-forwarding here a little bit, we will meet in purgatory.
And somewhat surprisingly, this is Dante.
He's full of surprises, and he really makes you think you meet the Roman statesman Cato.
And you're surprised on two counts.
Number one, Cato is a pagan.
He's not a Christian.
So what's he doing in purgatory?
Apparently Dante thinks that he is on his way to heaven.
And so Dante has a pagan here who nevertheless is counted among the saved.
He isn't saved yet.
He's still in purgatory.
But all the people in purgatory are going to be at some point in heaven.
Purgatory is a whole different feeling than we have here in Inferno.
But the second thing that's surprising about Cato is that Cato famously committed suicide.
He committed suicide, why?
Rather than submit to the thumb of Caesar.
So, in other words, Cato did not want to be under tyranny, and so he rather took his own life than do that.
Dante seems to take the view that that, in Cato's case, was a noble thing to do.
Why? Because as Dante sees it, Cato was not refusing life.
Cato was not saying, in effect, that my life is terrible, I'm out of here.
What Cato was basically saying is that liberty to To me, is more important than tyranny.
And so, the motive here of Cato's action becomes critical.
And by the way, in the Christian framework, Dante himself knows, motive is critical.
Why you do something is key to what makes it good or what makes it bad.
Now, let's come to the canto itself, where Dante is walking with Virgil in this barren landscape, and he sees all these little, ugly, nondescript shrubs.
And then Virgil tells him to sort of break one off, to snap one off.
And Dante does that, and the shrub begins to talk.
I mean, it turns out that the shrubs are themselves the suicides.
They've been turned into these shrubs.
And think of the appropriateness of this kind of imagery, because what Dante's created are these nondescript plants.
But the plants themselves can't speak, as plants obviously can't speak.
But Dante says that in this case, when you break off a shrub, you create an opening.
Here are Dante's words.
A little bit very Dante-esque in their kind of bluntness and the beauty but also the grotesquery of their imagery.
Like a green log burning at one end only, sputtering at the other, oozing sap and hissing with the air it forces out, so from that splintered trunk a mixture poured of words and blood." So you snap open the plant and blood comes out and words come out.
So it starts to talk.
It's a person who's engaging Dante in conversation.
And here's what the guy says.
I'm just going to start with his comments and then pick them up in the next.
He says... He says, be not displeased if I am lured into a little conversation.
You're apparently dealing with a fairly elegant character.
And as it turns out, this is a guy named Pierre Delavigne.
The name means Pierre is actually just the word for Peter.
Just as it is in French, Pierre means Peter.
Vinier means vine.
So Pierre of the Vine.
But who is this dude?
Why is he talking to Dante?
And why on earth did he take his own life?
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Feel the difference. We're in Canto 13 of Dante's Inferno.
We're in the circle of the suicides.
And here Dante is being spoken to by one of the suicides who says to him this, I am that one who held both of the keys that fitted Frederick's heart.
I turned them both locking and unlocking with such finesse, That I let few into his confidence.
So by his words, we know who this guy is.
His name is Pierre Delavigne, and we now know his job.
He was the sort of gatekeeper for the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II. I've mentioned Frederick II before, and I mentioned Frederick II as the key pivotal figure, the figure of empire, who is contesting, who's fighting, struggling with the pope For essential control, not just over Italy, but to some degree over Europe itself.
And we know by this time in the Inferno that Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, who died in the year 1250, is in hell.
Where is he in hell?
He's actually in Canto X. Now, when I discuss Canto X, I discuss Parinata, I discuss Cavalcante, but Dante in Passing notes that in this canto of the heretics, we have Frederick II. Now, why was Frederick II a heretic?
It seems like a very odd thing to say about the Holy Roman Emperor.
But it turns out that one of Frederick II's practices that he encouraged was emperor worship.
Now, Frederick II took on this idea from Augustus and from the Romans, and he essentially transplanted it into a Christian framework.
And this notion that you worship not God, but you worship the emperor, you can see why Dante viewed that as a kind of heresy.
And apparently the chief propagandist for this campaign, For Frederick II's emperor worship was none other than this dude, Pierre de LaVigne, who is talking about how he controlled access to Frederick II. And then he says, I think what he means here is just that he's a workaholic and he had no time.
In fact, he had no life.
All he was doing was working for the emperor.
And then he says this, that courtesan who constantly surveyed Caesar's household, Caesar here is Frederick II, he calls him Caesar, with her adulterous eyes, mankind's undoing, the special vice of courts, inflamed the hearts of everyone against me, and these inflamed, inflamed in turn Augustus.
He's calling Frederick II Augustus.
And my happy honors turn to sad laments.
Now, what's going on here?
What Pierre de Lavinia is saying is that there's a courtesan, apparently some kind of an adulteress, some kind of a woman of low virtue, in the court who is inflaming people against him.
And getting them inflamed, and then they go inflame the emperor, and then the emperor turns against him.
And so his happy honors turn to sad laments.
And then he says, My mind, moved by scornful satisfaction, believing death would free me from all scorn, made me unjust to me who was all just.
In other words, I did my job.
I acted with justice and loyalty, but I was...
Forced to take my life to sort of exit the stage, to free myself from this kind of derision and scorn, not just from other people at court, but from the emperor himself.
And then he says to Dante this, If one of you, meaning you or Virgil, should go back to the world, restore the memory of me, who here remains cut down by the blow that envy gave.
So he's telling Dante, when you go back to the earth...
There's nothing I can do now here.
I'm in hell. I'm going to stay in hell.
But maybe you can improve my reputation in the world out there by telling people about the fact that I did a great job until I was done in by this courtesan.
But now we learn who the courtesan is.
I remain cut down by the blow that envy gave.
And envy is the courtesan.
Envy is the adulteress who was spreading the rumors about him.
Now, here's the kind of key line of the whole canto, where Pierre de Lavinia says to Dante, By these strange roots of my own tree, I swear.
Remember, he's a shrub, and so he's kind of swearing, not by God, but by his own roots.
He goes, So, Pierre Delavigne, like all the sinners, does not take responsibility.
Let's remember, Francesca, love made me do it.
Here is Pierre Delavigne.
Envy made me do it.
No repentance, no contrition.
He's not sorry for what he did.
He's justifying what he did.
He wants to restore his reputation, which he thinks is unjustly taken from him.
And then, never once did I break faith with my Lord.
And of course, by my Lord, he means Frederick II. So Frederick II turned on me, but I never turned on him.
I stayed true to my Lord.
Well, yes, but I think Pierre Delavigne is forgetting that he also is subject to another Lord, a higher Lord, capital L Lord, the Lord his Creator, and he did in fact break faith with that Lord.
So what we see here with suicide, and you have to bring out the mentality of it, what Pierre Delavigne is basically saying is, listen, Life is a game.
And while I was winning, while I had the chips all in my corner, it was great.
I was enjoying it.
I appreciated it.
I valued my life.
But then when my fortune turned against me, these people spread rumors about me, my boss turned against me, I decided, you know what?
I'm not going to play anymore.
Because after all, life can only be lived on my terms, and if it's not going to be lived on my terms, it's not going to be lived at all.
And for Dante, this really here is the sin of suicide.
It is the sin of thumbing your nose at God and saying, in effect, you've given me this gift of life, but when things turn against me, when my standards aren't in play, when the chips aren't all in my corner, I'm going to quit.
And by the way, you can see right here, and I'll close on this, the appeal of this.
You know, at the beginning of this canto, when I started reading it for the first time, I thought, well, Dante's going to skip right through this because Dante himself is not tempted by suicide.
He never committed suicide, so he's just going to be sort of, from a distance, intrigued by the suicides.
But no, we see here that the kind of...
Remember, Dante is writing this poem in the year 1300.
He's about to go into exile.
Dante, the poet, is in exile when he's writing the poem.
So the idea that your life takes a turn for the worse, where you used to be kind of in in Florence, now you're a nobody, you're in Ravenna, and in fact, you'll never get back to Florence.
The psychology, the attitude that says, hey, listen, life isn't worth living if it isn't going my way, Dante certainly understood that, and this is why this canto is so important for us and also for Dante.
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