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March 14, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:10
PUMP SHOCK Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep289
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Debbie and I today are going to talk about pump shock, the outrageous gas prices, and the Biden administration's clever effort to try to pin this on external causes.
I'm going to explore some psychoanalytic examinations of Vladimir Putin, as if to say that we can get insight into his war motives in this way.
Investigative writer Julie Kelly joins me.
We're going to talk about the Whitmer kidnapping case and also about January 6 cases.
And I'll examine the sin of Brunetto Latini in Canto 15 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.
Is it good in life to be an optimist or a pessimist?
And what I mean is, which approach is going to make you more successful, give you more satisfaction in your job and in your life?
Which is going to be better for your health and which is going to contribute to your emotional equilibrium?
Now, there's an interesting discussion of this in Rob Henderson's newsletter, and I'm going to summarize his conclusions.
He actually begins, very interestingly, with an episode of Mad Men, where a young girl, Sally Draper, is talking to her grandmother, Grandma Pauline, and apparently Grandma Pauline describes him when she was young, one time her dad woke her up early in the morning and basically just gave her a kick.
What? And when she goes, what was that for?
What did I do? The father goes, that's for nothing, so look out.
Now, you'd think the grandma would be outraged, but no, it turns out what she tells the young girl in relaying this anecdote is, what she learned from that episode is that the world is a random and dangerous place, and so you better be prepared.
In other words, it's good to be a cynic.
It's good to be a pessimist.
It's good to expect the worst.
It's good to detect in people dark motives.
And the question that Rob Henderson raises in the newsletter is, is that actually true?
Are you better off thinking the worst about people or the best?
So there's apparently a bunch of studies on this which examine what is sometimes called primal world beliefs.
So one primal world belief is people who are positive, let's call this the optimists, they think the world is a relatively safe place, people are generally good, things are generally getting better, and you contrast this with the cynics or the pessimists who think the world is a very bad place, it's very dangerous, people are cutthroat, and misery is the normal course of life, and so on.
And the studies look to see not who's right, not which set of beliefs matches up with the world, really, but rather which subjective frame of mind helps you in getting through life better.
And it turns out that positive beliefs are better.
It turns out that people who have positive beliefs generally are healthier, they're less depressed, they have more success in their work, they have more job satisfaction, and they have more kind of life satisfaction or psychological flourishing.
And people who are real cynics, who always are expecting and predicting the worst, they actually have worse outcomes.
So it becomes, in a strange way, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Now, what's interesting about this is that this finding is so robust.
What it means is that you've got people who are kind of positive.
And they don't do as well as people who are really positive.
And you've got people who are kind of pessimistic.
And they do a little better than people who are completely pessimistic.
So, the spectrum, in other words, holds all the way across.
And again, like I say, this has nothing to do with who's right, because the pessimists may go, all these optimists are living in la-la land.
You know, they don't understand human nature.
They don't understand the world as it is.
Debbie's kind of laughing. I think it's called the laughter of recognition.
Debbie goes, that's kind of my philosophy he's describing.
Honey, this is supposed to create bad outcomes in life, and you're generally out.
So I don't think you're...
That's because she hangs up with an optimist.
I'm rubbing off on her. I'm responsible basically for her psychological flourishing and general state of happiness.
If I were to step out of the picture, things would go rapidly downhill.
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Debbie and I wanted to do a segment together on Biden and gas.
Now, to be clear, we're not talking about the time when Biden released gas when he was in London giving Camilla Parker Bowles a virtual heart attack.
No, we're talking about Biden and gas prices.
Gasoline. Gasoline. And you and I were chuckling because there's an article in CBS News.
This is how the media regurgitates the propaganda of the administration.
It's called Three Reasons Why Gas Prices Are So High and When They Might Come Down, right?
So we think, okay, well, they're bound to emphasize a couple of reasons, but surely one of the three reasons is going to have to do with Biden suppressing domestic energy production, right?
Right. Wrong! There are three reasons that they have nothing to do with any of this.
Yeah, of course not. So basically, I go on Facebook every once in a while and post things.
And I thought it was so telling because in my feed, I was looking at different posts of people arguing about who's responsible for the price of gas.
And so it got me thinking and I was like, you know...
Everyone, please send me photos of the pump after you fill up because I want to see how expensive it is for you to fill up.
And my goodness, I got some great photos as I'm going to post some on the video portion of the podcast so people can see most of them are over $100.
And we talked about this.
People that make minimum wage That's like their whole day.
That's like working eight hours to pay for gas.
It's ridiculous. But anyway, so I was very, very interested in what people are saying.
And of course, our side says one thing.
The other side says Biden is not responsible for gas prices.
Stop being that way. Even my own little darling daughter tells me that it's a global issue, but I think she's been listening to TikTok a little too long.
Well, the Biden administration, which I guess is trying to reach this cohort, which is the 18 to 25 cohort, has been briefing these TikTok issues Influencers, right?
Oh, and they're influencers, all right.
They influence a few people that I know.
Right. Well, one person you told me, one of the influencers apparently doesn't speak on TikTok, but merely dances.
Oh. So somehow this person, through dance, is conveying the reasonableness of the Biden position.
Well, you know, coming back to the CBS article, which was written by...
Amy Peachy. And as I say, it's nothing more than an echo of what the administration is saying.
It's talking points basically recycled into an article.
And so basically they give three reasons.
And let's look at them one by one.
The first one is Putin.
You know that was going to be number one.
Their second explanation is post-pandemic demand for gas.
The idea was that people weren't using gas for a long time, then suddenly there was a spike as people are out, they're driving again.
They're going back to work. But this doesn't explain all that much, because the truth of it is, if you weren't using gas for a long time, there would be accumulated reserves.
And then when there's a spike in demand, sure enough, there's plenty of supply to meet that demand.
So I'm going to put aside Explanation 2 and turn to Explanation 3, which is OPEC and cuts to oil production.
Now, again, the idea here is that OPEC and other oil producing nations haven't ramped up their supply.
And so as a result, there's a global rise in prices.
Now, again, this is true, but all of this can be easily mitigated had we been producing as much oil and gas as we can produce at home.
And I think that's the key point.
We haven't due to the deliberate conscious policies of the Biden administration.
Deliberate. Wanting to get You know, oil from enemies is like their thing.
I mean, they love doing that.
Obama loved doing that, you know.
I mean, they were, the Biden guys were literally boasting.
Biden has all these videos.
We're going to be moving away from fossil fuels.
We don't need fossil fuels.
Democrats were saying things like, we don't need to manufacture.
We don't need more domestic oil production.
We have enough. And so they were taking it as a compliment, taking it as an achievement that they were blocking new drilling leases in Alaska, blocking new drilling on federal land, that they killed the Keystone Pipeline.
They were patting themselves on the back over all this until gas prices began to surge.
And then Biden kind of squints and put on his usual kind of grumpy face and he goes...
What do you mean? What do you mean me?
What have I been doing to suppress domestic?
So these flat-out bald-faced lies, which then, you know, idiots like Amy Peachy kind of just kind of mindlessly repeat.
Not to mention they like to, you know, they want to indoctrinate the TikTok as if they need to indoctrinate them more so that they tell, like you say, the 18 to 25-year-olds, don't listen to any right-wing or conservative news media.
It's not true. It's the argumentum ad ignorantium.
It appeals to the ignorance of the audience because you're relying on these young people to have no context.
They haven't really taken economics 101.
They don't know the laws of supply and demand.
And they probably don't even pay for their own gas anyway.
Their parents do. And then they don't know that the United States domestically has enormous gas resources and enormous oil resources, and we are deliberately choosing not to tap them.
Exactly right. We're good to go.
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I want to discuss an interesting article written by an author who has studied Vladimir Putin.
Her name is Rebecca Koffler.
Her book is called Putin's Playbook, Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America.
And she has an article in the New York Post, which kind of made me chuckle when I first read the title.
It's called, How Putin's Rat-Infested Childhood Shaped His Philosophy on War.
And I'll get to the article in a moment.
You can make what you will of it.
But in general, I'm not a fan of this mode of reasoning.
I'm calling it the sort of psychological attempt, often delving back into childhood.
You know, it's things like, you know, Hitler was unloved as a child.
You know, Mussolini didn't receive proper toilet training.
You know, this kind of attempt to account for the behavior of world leaders, I think, is generally a little bit suspect.
But... What I find interesting about this article is it does contain some details about Putin, the man.
And as I say, the impact of these kind of anecdotes on his behavior now, I'll leave you to sort of figure out.
Apparently Putin grew up poor.
Now in this he was not unusual.
Soviet communism was a complete disaster.
There were shortages of all kinds of basic goods.
You lived in cramped, rat-infested apartments, and Putin was no exception.
He was apparently a young thug on the streets of Russia, and he lived in a communal apartment in what was then Leningrad.
And many other families kind of shared bathrooms.
They had no individual bathrooms, and no hot water, and apparently a rather malodorous toilet.
And Putin, in fact, would describe—this is coming, by the way, out of Putin's own memoirs, which are called Kvartos.
Putin talks about when he'd run up the stairs to go to the bathroom, there were rats all over the place, and Putin, with a stick, would have to fight off these rats and run away from them.
And after a while, he kind of almost got into a battle, apparently, with these rats.
So he would face them and they would attack him and then he would swat them away.
And he, according to this article, got the idea here that the way to beat these rats was never to retreat.
That the more you back off, the more they kind of keep swarming at you.
And so it's a metaphor, of course, for Putin's philosophy that you've got to keep pushing forward because you're in a desperate struggle for survival.
Now, we do know that Putin, and this is mentioned in the article, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Putin got the feeling that essentially the ground had been pulled out from under him.
Here's a guy who had gotten, made advances in the KGB under the communist system.
Suddenly the system itself is gone, and he felt a sense of vertigo.
In fact, he even talks about it as a terminal disease without a cure, a kind of paralysis of Now, one interesting set of details in the article, Rebecca Koffler's article, is she talks about the fact that Putin was emotionally very affected by both the death of Saddam Hussein as well as the death of Gaddafi.
Saddam Hussein, you remember, was captured by U.S. soldiers in 2003.
And apparently Putin has spoken of this event.
He's spoken about how he would sort of Stare at Saddam Hussein's, at pictures of Saddam Hussein's body.
He'd see that his eyes were partly open, his neck was kind of distorted, and Putin has referred to this as a very barbaric act on the part of the United States.
And then very much in the same vein, You might remember Hillary Clinton gloating over the death of Gaddafi.
We came, we saw, he died, that kind of thing.
And Putin has commented about Gaddafi being trapped in a kind of drain and likened it to being a rat.
You're like a rat who's trapped in a drain under a highway.
And then he was killed before security guards could get him to the hospital.
And for Putin, apparently, there's a kind of fear that this would be his fate, that this could happen to him.
And so, as a result, Putin is obsessed, it seems, with power, with conquest, with not backing down, with making sure that he's not in a position of weakness, similar to Qaddafi, similar to...
To Saddam Hussein, that would enable him to be at the mercy of a power like the United States in this way.
So again, to me, this is all very interesting.
I actually didn't know these details about Putin's childhood.
I'm relaying them because I think that they're interesting in and of themselves.
But whether or not they provide any adequate explanation for who Putin is now, how he really thinks about the world, I think is something that we can just sort of Ponder.
My own way of thinking is mainly to look at these powers, China, Russia, in terms of really two factors.
The first is the underlying ideology that governs the state.
In the case of China, of course, it's a certain peculiar form of Marxism-Leninism.
In the case of Putin, it's nothing more than a kind of mafioso gangsterism.
And then on the other hand, just look at the power politics driving all this.
In this case, a big power, Russia, being intolerant or not being willing to live with a Ukraine that is on its border and is in any way hostile to Russia's objectives in the region.
For me, Vladimir Putin is explained less by his own personal psychology and more by what you could call reasons of state.
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Guys, delighted I am to welcome back to the podcast the one and only Julie Kelly.
You know Julie Kelly.
She's the investigative writer for American Greatness.
She's also the author of a book that you must get.
It's called January 6th, How Democrats Use the Capitol Protest...
To launch a war on terror against the political right.
Hey Julie, thanks for joining me.
I thought we have two segments and I wanted the first one to focus on the Whitmer trial.
I just learned from you that the Whitmer trial is postponed for a couple of days because somebody apparently has COVID. Do we know who?
We don't know who.
I contacted one of the defense attorneys, and of course, no one is saying anything who this person is.
It's a little strange.
I live in Illinois, so we're right next to each other, and I just checked the COVID cases in Michigan are basically non-existent.
that doesn't mean that somebody doesn't have it. But it is suspicious because of what's happening in this trial, which is basically the FBI, as much as the four federal defendants are on trial, accused of entrapping these men using at least a dozen undercover agents and informants to concoct this scheme to lure these defendants into it.
And then that resulted in their arrests October 7th, 2020, just in time for the presidential election in a key swing state when early voting was underway, created lots of negative headlines for Donald Trump, accusing these alleged militia men of taking their cues from the president.
So everything about this is very suspect.
And this latest claim that somebody has COVID is just yet another odd wrinkle.
Now you have this judge, this fellow named Jonker, and it appears like at the beginning he was reluctant to let the defense make this entrapment case, or at least make it up front.
And then he changed his mind and he said, yes guys, this is key to your defense, you can go right ahead.
What caused him to make that switch?
So you're right. So his initial order was that the FBI entrapment case, which the defense attorneys have really been building in a flurry of motions really since last summer, that he did not want the FBI entrapment defense to be presented until the government presented its full case, all of its witnesses, which would really be a couple of weeks.
It was clear, Dinesh, after the opening statements by both the prosecution and defense, it would be impossible to explain to jurors the complexity of this case without bringing up all the numerous informants and undercover agents who were involved.
So they took their first morning break, the first day of testimony, which was last Wednesday, came back, the defense said, we need to present our entrapment case, all four of the defense attorneys agreed, and the judge said, You're right.
There's no way that we could put this off like I had originally planned to.
And so he allowed the defense then to move forward with the entrapment case.
And that has been the major focus of the first few days of testimony.
And so that's why the COVID thing is a little sketchy, because it did not seem in the first few days of the trial, in my opinion, that it was going well for the government at all.
Now, your article, which goes into all this in some detail, is titled, it's a really good title, Stoned Crazy Talk, Not a Plan, say Whitmer defendants.
And I take it what the defense is arguing here is that, look, we've got some wild and crazy guys, and they were saying some reckless and irresponsible things in online chatter and in communications to each other, but they were too big of losers to actually pull off any kind of plot.
They didn't have the means, the know-how to do it, and that the FBI injected itself into the operation from the very beginning and sort of shepherded it to its conclusion, step by step, and that without the FBI's involvement, this wouldn't in fact have even happened.
Is that, am I summarizing correctly, the thrust of the defense argument?
You summarized it perfectly.
I mean, this was basically online chatter Online, Facebook, video rants.
But until this key informant known as Dan entered the picture in March of 2020, this random group of outcasts, really misfits, would never have gotten together but for Dan's involvement.
And then another key informant, he goes by the name of Steve.
Steve is a convicted felon with a rap sheet and In nine states, yet he's a longtime FBI informant who organized all of these trips.
So he organized a militia conference where a few of the men attended.
He got them all ginned up.
This was two weeks after the George Floyd riots.
He recorded what these men were saying in private.
Of course, the whole country was up in arms about what was happening.
Recorded that he organized surveillance trips to Whitmer's cottage, which is way up north in Michigan, not easy to access.
To your point, these defendants could not even pay for gas.
The main leader is a guy named Adam Fox, actually a very sad story.
37-year-old man, basically unemployed, especially because of the lockdowns.
He lived in a dilapidated cellar.
A vacuum repair shop in a strip mall in Grand Rapids.
If he had to use the bathroom or brush his teeth, Dinesh, his lawyer said last week, he had to go to the Mexican restaurant next door.
You're telling me this guy, so down on his luck, no family, really no friends, concocted this multi-state operation with all these militia men to go kidnap, possibly kill Gretchen Whitmer outside of her very remote vacation cottage in upstate Michigan?
None of this makes sense.
And the more that you're hearing about these agents and informants, the more Americans should be truly alarmed how this FBI operates, what they've been saying about how they handle their informants, their lax rules, paying them in cash, they reimburse them without receipts.
I mean, this would never be allowed in any sort of American business, but this is how our top law enforcement agency is conducting its business, which I write about in my piece that you're talking about.
I mean, one of the key figures here, a guy that I think deserves a lot of scrutiny, is Stephen D. Antono.
This is a guy who was apparently the head of the FBI Detroit office.
He supervised this seeming entrapment scheme and then, very interestingly, was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he's kind of supervising the January 6th Which is to say that, and I think this is an implication very much in your article and in your book, that it could be that the Whitmer kidnapping was a dress rehearsal for the much bigger operation that we now know as January 6th.
I think it's hard to separate the two because the Whitmer kidnapping case also centered around a protest at the Lansing Capitol building in April of 2020, which looks a lot like a dress rehearsal for what happened on January 6th.
What's interesting, Dinesh, and of course the timing of the Whitmer trial is terrible for the January 6th prosecution.
All the speculation, even by some in Congress, about the use of hundreds of FBI undercover agents and format some sort of assets and what happened before and during January 6th.
Here's what's interesting.
The government moved to conceal the true identities of two undercover FBI agents who were really central towards the end of the kidnapping scheme.
They asked the judge not only to conceal their true identities, but to prevent the courtroom artist from sketching their faces and making that public.
The argument by DOJ was that these two men are also involved in ongoing domestic terror investigations, which has to be January 6th, because this is the largest unprecedented domestic terror investigation in American history.
The judge thankfully denied that motion.
I expected those men to be testifying this week.
This could be contributing to the alleged COVID delay.
But why did they want to hide the identity of these undercover agents?
Why did they try so hard to keep this away from the public?
So once we see, if we do see, who their identity, their identity and even their images, which was a really odd request, that may give us some more open doors into exactly what DeAntonio was doing during the Whitmer kidnapping trial, oddly promoted to D.C. the week after the arrest in October 2020, and certainly the man in charge of the key FBI agency during the events of January 6, 2021.
Julie, let's take a pause.
So when we come back I do want to pivot to January 6th and talk about a couple of new developments there.
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I'm back with Julie Kelly, investigative writer for American Greatness, author of January Julie, let's turn to January 6th.
you shared a video, a new video, that is pretty eye-opening in revealing the role of the Capitol Police and the authorities in terms of the violence that occurred on January 6th. Can you explain?
Yes, I was doing some research and came across this video.
It's a compilation of interviews with paramedics and fire department officials who were on the scene on January 6th.
They describe in detail How they tended to the four victims who died that day.
And it confirms a lot of my recording and what I describe in my book is that excessive force, police misconduct, and in some cases police brutality contributed to the deaths of four Trump supporters on January 6th.
This seems to be supported by the first-hand witness accounts of DC paramedics and fire officials who talk about tending to the first two men who had heart attacks on the west side of the capitol building that day before two o'clock.
Now as I've reported and you have covered as well, police started throwing explosive devices into the crowd outside the building.
And I mean far outside the building.
These weren't people who were trying to get in, breach, or break windows.
They were outside DC Metro were throwing something called flashbangs, also known as concussion grenades, into the crowd.
This emits a huge, loud, explosive sound and emits a flash of light.
They also were throwing something called sting balls, which when hits the ground deploys rubber bullets into the crowd.
So these two men So you have the EMTs who are talking about these two men suffering heart attacks right when this is happening.
There are other witness accounts who talk about these men either being hit by rubber bullets or suffering a heart attack when the flash grenade went off right in front of them.
So that's supported in that video.
Then, of course, they talk about how they tended to Ashley Babbitt.
When she was shot, one paramedic is alarmed because the crowd really got riled up after that and they were hostile towards the EMTs.
Well, of course. Some of them, this would have been the third person that they saw killed or died that day within a span of few hours.
But more alarmingly, they talk about what happened to Roseanne Boylan, how her body was handled.
And despite what the coroner said, looks like she died because of excessive force used that day, the late afternoon, and then her body egregiously mishandled by police, by law enforcement officials, and possibly by paramedics as well.
I mean, Julie, to me, what's significant about this...
This new report is that it's one thing for Trump supporters who supposedly you could say are trying to maybe put the blame on the police.
So you've had this eyewitness testimony by Trump supporters who were there.
But here we're talking about People who are paramedics on the scene, professionals in a sense, doing their work and describing what's going on at the same time.
So if their testimony corroborates what the Trump supporters are saying, then you pretty much have a true picture, don't you?
You really do.
And I'm sure that's not what these EMTs intended.
I mean, I applaud their honesty, how they were talking about.
They were mostly talking about how to deal with this huge mob.
But in the meantime, they revealed and confirmed what law enforcement cops were doing that day, and this is Capitol Police in DC Metro.
And the fact that there were people on the scene, police officers, who put Roseanne Boylan's body on either a pull cart or a dolly, which is how one paramedic described her situation when they arrived on the scene.
This is why they don't want to release the video, Dinesh, right?
You and I have talked about this for months.
14,000 hours of surveillance video that would show exactly what happened inside and outside the building that day.
This is why they don't want that video released.
Because it will confirm excessive force, police brutality that occurred that day.
And every officer, every single one, including Michael Byrd, who shot and killed Ashley Baddett, every single one has gotten away with what they did.
And would it be accurate to say that the January 6th Commission, which has been posing as a truth-telling commission, which you would expect would be going after all this information to bring it out into the public light, is in fact not doing that, but approaching things in a very selective, almost you could say constructed way to support a kind of pre-existing narrative?
Well, that's why their very first and really only public hearing with witnesses was four police officers to D.C. Metro and two Capitol Police officers who, by the way, Dinesh, testified that they handled Roseanne Boylan's body that day.
This is Officers Equilina Gunnell and Officer Harry Dunn, who claimed that he was called all sorts of racial slurs that day.
Still no video to support that.
They handled her body.
After she really died outside of this tunnel that day.
So can we see the video?
They testified it was all part of creating this heroism around these officers who really did not deserve it, who really perpetrated a lot of the violence and confrontations that we saw on January 6th.
So they were very shrewd, the January 6th committee, presenting them, and of course the media did from the very beginning, That these were heroes.
You know, six months before, everybody was bending a knee talking about defunding the police and how horrible they were.
Then all of a sudden, you know, they're embracing them, giving them congressional awards, and giving billions of dollars in new funding to Capitol Police.
None of it makes sense, but this is exactly why.
It's part of the cover-up to what those two law enforcement agencies did that day.
Wow, Julie. Thank you so much for joining me.
This is obviously a huge story, and it's ongoing, and I hope you'll come back to tell us more.
Thanks so much.
Thanks, Tinashe.
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You'll feel the difference. More good news out of Texas, guys.
The Texas Supreme Court has swatted down a set of lawsuits that were aimed at canceling the Texas pro-life law.
The abortion providers and a bunch of left-wing groups, having failed at the Supreme Court, which is the US Supreme Court, went running to the Texas Supreme Court and basically said, we have every right to sue state officials and regulators who passed this law or who would be in a position to enforce the law.
And the Texas Supreme Court turned around and said, no, you don't.
Because, first of all, state officials don't enforce this law.
This is a law that is structured in such a way that it's enforced by, well, private parties.
Anyone in Texas, any private party, can sue not the person who gets the abortion, but the people who provide the abortion.
So this would be the clinics, this would be the We're good to go.
We've seen drops in the number of abortions.
Planned Parenthood, of course, is panicking.
There are some people, of course, and this is to be expected, who have been going to neighboring states to get abortions.
So there's a surge in abortions in neighboring states.
And, of course, here's Planned Parenthood, a statement.
Texans are living in a state of sustained chaos.
Crisis and confusion and there's no end in sight.
This is laughably untrue.
There is, in fact, no observable chaos, crisis, or confusion in Texas.
In fact, Texas has shown that you can actually, essentially, invalidate Roe.
Let's remember the Texas case is actually, the Texas law is far more stringent against abortion than even the Mississippi law that is up before the Supreme Court.
The Mississippi law outlaws abortion after 15 weeks.
But the Texas law is a heartbeat bill.
Basically, once a heartbeat can be detected It around much earlier.
You can't have an abortion really under any circumstances.
And so I think it's good that these courts have upheld the law and Texas has become a kind of demonstration project to the Supreme Court, saying to the Supreme Court, in effect, that quite apart from the constitutional justification of knocking over Roe versus Wade is also a practical justification, vacation, this is a situation that works.
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you I'm now continuing my discussion of Dante and our journey with Dante the pilgrim, sort of down, down, down in hell.
And we're now going to reach Canto 15.
Which is the canto of, well, the sodomites.
I sometimes call them somdomites.
Why? Because, well, it's kind of a misnomer.
In the famous case of Oscar Wilde in the 19th century, Oscar Wilde, who was kind of a notorious homosexual, took up with another guy, an aristocrat, and the aristocrat's father was extremely angry, and he kept calling Oscar Wilde a somdomite.
Oscar Wilde strangely sued him, and there was a famous case which Oscar Wilde lost because he sued the guy for libel, and truth is a complete defense against libel, and Oscar Wilde was in fact homosexual, and so he was humiliated and lost the case.
But back to Dante and the sodomites, we are now in a strange canto, and one that And one that we have to listen to very carefully.
It may seem on the first glance that, again, as I said with the suicides, like what does Dante have to do with...
Dante's not a homosexual, so you think again that he will kind of, you may say, wander in and wander out and not have a lot to learn in this canto.
But the opposite is the case.
Dante actually crafts the canto with great care, and he has a lot to learn.
Because of the way in which he treats this issue, not in the literal meaning of the term, but in a kind of profoundly metaphorical way, which we, very similar to the way that Dante treated heresy.
He didn't treat the sin literally.
Now, there are some hints that there is a literal meaning Exercise of this particular vice or sin going on in the canto.
And I'll talk about that.
But by and large, Dante's treatment is he's discussing sodomy while not discussing sodomy.
Now, to remind you, we're in a circle of the violent.
And that itself gives us a little bit of pause because you have to ask, well, where's the violence here?
It's pretty clear if there's violence against other people that...
We all know what that is. Other people are being harmed in some way, or their property is being plundered in some way.
And even violence against self, which is the taking of one's own life, is comprehensible in the literal meaning of the term.
But what does it mean?
In this case, we're talking about violence against God.
And also violence against nature.
But how can you be violent against God?
First of all, God is not a material being.
So you cannot attack God in the same way as you would attack another person, let's say.
through violence. Well, for Dante, blasphemy is a form of violence because you are in a sense thumbing your nose or wagging your finger or mocking God.
So, there's a, let's call it a rhetorical violence against God. But here we have a complex situation in the canto of the Sodomites.
In what sense are they violent against God? Well, here we turn from God to God's creation and we're going to explore what does it mean to be violent against God's creation.
Now, let's approach this by going into the text itself, and I'll make my comments as we go along.
The landscape, and the landscape is always important in Dante here, is fiery and also barren.
The soles in here are parched, and in some cases their features are kind of burned.
And you get a sense right here that you're talking about, just in the landscape itself, the barrenness, the parched plain that Dante has to walk across.
He says, we had left the wood behind.
So it's no longer a wood.
It's no longer really green.
And he says, and we saw a troop of souls come hurrying toward us beside the bank.
And each of them looked us up and down as some men look at other men.
Pause right there. Notice how Dante here is kind of invoking homosexuality, but in a very kind of subtle way.
He says, well, the souls began to look me up and down, kind of check me out, so to speak.
And then he goes, they strain their eyebrows, squinting hard at us as an old tailor might at his needle's eye.
So here's Dante the Poet.
Beautiful analogy that just as a tailor squints into the eye of a needle, these souls are squinting to get a sort of better look at Dante and Virgil.
And they need to get a better look.
Why? Partly because their vision is blurred.
Their faces are kind of scorched or burned.
And then he says, So here again, from Dante, in the subtlest way, the kind of indication of the kind of homosexual taste for style and for clothing.
So the first thing the guy does, grabs Dante's garment.
He goes, almost as if feeling the texture and the quality, how marvelous, what an amazing...
Sort of garment you have here.
And then Dante says...
So Dante crouches...
Brings his face close to this man whom he knows, whom he recognizes, and then Dante says, is it really you here, Sir Brunetto?
This is Brunetto Latini, a famous Guelph, not just poet, but also a statesman of the generation before Dante.
And so this is one of Dante's mentors.
Not in the sense that this is a guy who taught Dante sitting at his knee, but rather he was kind of a role model for Dante.
Why? Because Dante was a politician, and Dante was also, of course, a poet.
And so he looks up to Brunetto Latini as being an eminent poet and statesman of his time.
And Dante is, you can tell, a little surprised and shocked.
To see him here, to see his mentor here in the circle of the sodomites in hell.
Now, Brunetto Latini says to Dante twice,"'O my son, may it not displease you if Brunetto Latini lets his troop file on while he walks at your side a little while.'" And then a little bit later, my son, he said. Now, I think this is a little joke by Dante.
And I say a little joke because, of course, sodomites don't, in the normal course of things, have sons.
But Dante isn't really making fun of Brunetto at all because Brunetto is a mentor.
And mentors, a teacher, for example, would frequently think of his students as sons.
And so Dante here is...
Showing that Brunetto has this kind of almost paternal affection for Dante, which is shared by Dante.
Dante has an almost reverent feeling toward Brunetto.
So this reminds us of Canto X, where Dante was struck with pity and sympathy for Francesca.
But of course, he didn't know Francesca.
It was because of Francesca's theme that Dante was sympathetic.
Dante could kind of empathize.
But here, Dante is an actual disciple, you can say, of Runeto-Latini.
And so he talks about the fact that he, well, he speaks with utmost respect.
He says, quote, with head bowed, bent low in reverence, he moves alongside him.
And then Brunetto Latini begins to talk, interestingly, not about himself, but about Dante.
And he says this, which we'll discuss in depth the next time.
But he says,"...follow your constellation." Now, the puzzle I want to raise is, what does any of this have to even do?
With sodomy or homosexuality, Brunetto Latini is basically saying to Dante, listen, follow your star.
You're going to become a big-time poet.
You're going to be very successful.
Heaven is smiling on you.
And gee, if I had lived longer, I would have been right there promoting you, advancing you, and so on.
So here's Brunetto Latini pointing Dante toward, well, as it turns out, the fame that later would come to Dante.
And so we have to really think hard about, and Dante wants us to, To take this mode of thinking, which appears completely benign.
Here's a mentor. He's trying to do well by his own mentee, you might say.
Trying to advance Dante's career.
Dante, obviously, very happy to hear that he's top dog.
He's going to become really famous.
Dante has no quarrel with any of this.
Dante is, in fact, kind of flattered by it.
And yet Dante himself has to be on his guard, as we do as readers.
Why? Because Dante knows that if he Gets carried away in this way, and if he sort of flies, you might say, with the wind beneath his wings supplied by Brunetto, well, he's likely to end up exactly where Brunetto Latini is.
So next time, what we're going to do is look a little more skeptically at Brunetto Latini, saying one of the interesting things about these sinners is they always reveal more than they mean to.
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