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March 16, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:51
IN HIS OWN WORDS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep291
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Ukraine's President Zelenskyy is talking to the U.S. Congress today and I'll give an initial reaction to some of the things he said.
The question I want to explore is, is Zelenskyy pulling us into what might be World War III? The left is trying to, quote, cancel Russia.
In other words, they're trying to do the same thing to Putin that they do to the politically incorrect in this country.
So what's up with that? Kyle Rittenhouse.
Yes, the Kyle Rittenhouse is going to join me.
We're going to talk about his life now and how he intends to hold the people who slandered him responsible.
And I'm going to ask what Ulysses, this is the same as Odysseus, the hero of Homer's Odyssey, what's he doing in...
Dante's Inferno right there in hell.
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.
I'm Dinesh D'Souza.
Now, specifically, he wants America to establish a no-fly zone.
Which, as a practical matter, it sounds a little benign, but it's not.
It really means the United States would send fighter planes over to Ukraine, intercept Russian MiGs and Russian jets trying to get over Ukrainian airspace and shoot them down.
And this would be done presumably in conjunction with NATO. It could very well be the invitation or the trigger for a much wider war and potentially even a world war.
I was watching the press queering Jen Psaki yesterday, and I found it funny that you have all these progressives, all these leftists, beating the drums of war, essentially saying things like, well, what do you mean?
They were a little hostile, if you will, to the Biden administration, saying things like...
Why are you making an independent assessment of what the Ukraine needs when Zelensky is telling you what he needs?
Zelensky is making it clear that he wants jets and he wants you to shoot Russian planes down.
Why aren't you doing it?
And I thought, what an interesting spectacle.
Because these are the very same people, by the way.
Who deplored the Iraq War.
These are the same people who were very hostile to America's escalations and so-called surges in Afghanistan.
These are people who were very supportive of the United States getting out And now they have become, well, they've become neocons.
In fact, the neocons, by the way, have noticed this.
The neocon movement today is much smaller than it used to be.
But nevertheless, in their kind of house organ, a magazine called Commentary, they were like, well, the neocon perspective is triumphing once again.
And it's triumphing, interestingly, not on the right, where it was, in some ways, the guiding philosophy of the Cold War.
And of the Reagan doctrine and Reagan's approach toward the Soviet Union.
But it's now meeting resistance on the right and is being embraced by, you could call it, the establishment left.
Now, not necessarily by all of the left.
Because I'm seeing indications that there are some people on the left very uneasy about the way in which the Democrats are throwing in their lot with the idea of risking another global or at least European conflict.
Now, let's examine this neoconservative perspective for a second, and then I want to turn to a couple of the things that Zelensky said.
The neoconservative argument was always based on the idea that the Soviet Union is ideologically totalitarian, and that's the first reason to oppose it, and the second poses a mortal threat to our security and our interests.
I want to argue that neither of those things is true today.
First of all, the Soviet Union is no longer even an ideological state.
Even China is far closer to Marxist-Leninist ideology, at least in its political system, not so much in its economic But Russia has become kind of a gangster state.
So I'm not saying that these are good guys, but I'm saying that they're not driven by any particular ideology.
So there's no ideological totalitarianism.
You basically have a kind of despot, Putin, who wants to have his way with Ukraine.
But the second point is the critical one.
What is America's vital interest in Ukraine?
I'm not talking about our humanitarian interest.
We have humanitarian interests all over the world.
If the Hutu begin to wipe out the Tutsi in Rwanda, we would have a humanitarian interest, but I don't think we would risk starting World War III over that.
If there was a conflict, let's just say, even between India and Pakistan, the United States would send in negotiators to help resolve it and so on.
But I do not believe the United States would start World War III over that either.
And so the question is, why Ukraine?
Country that, as far as I know, we don't do any particular trade with.
Now, I agree, the Biden family does do trade with Ukraine.
Remember the $83,000 that was flowing into Hunter Biden's account and the Biden family account?
Yeah, I know all about that.
Now, let's turn to Zelensky for a second.
He's sort of doing the, I think he's doing a little bit of a Churchill imitation because, and sure enough, he talked about, well, he first talked about 9-11, but then he started talking about World War II and talking about the attack on Pearl Harbor, and he's used almost Churchillian rhetoric.
We will fight them in the fields.
We will fight them in the streets.
We will never surrender.
And I think all of that actually is impressive, but here's the point I want to make.
Despite the fact that Churchill made numerous appeals and entreaties and solicitations to the United States to get involved in World War II on the British side, we didn't.
The simple truth of it is the United States did not get directly involved until attacked.
And it was precisely when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that we went, our shores are under attack, okay, now's the time when we don't have a choice, now's the time when we do get involved.
So I understand the analogy.
Of course, Ukraine has been attacked.
There's every reason for them to defend themselves.
I'm not saying we shouldn't help them.
But I am saying it is their freedom.
It is their country. They should fight.
We should help. In other words, I'm invoking, in a way, the Reagan doctrine.
But a Reagan doctrine prudentially applied and with the recognition that the Ukraine is far away from our borders, there's a limit to what we can do.
And there's also a limit to the American public's appetite for war, another war, On top of the wars we've already fought.
So, I think that the lesson, while Zelensky thinks that by appealing to 9-11 and appealing to World War II, the lesson is get involved, I think those very analogies convey an opposite lesson.
Be very cautious because you never know the long-term implications of getting involved.
You come to rue the things you did in a kind of wild heat of enthusiasm.
You begin to realize that you've made some horrible mistakes.
You pay the price of those mistakes.
And it's better to learn from experience now than to make the mistakes all over again.
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And the take that is nothing other than cancel culture.
In other words, Putin, we're going to be canceling you the same way that we cancel conservatives in the United States.
This is the, you could almost call it the BLM tactics now taken to the level of The global stage.
Or to put it differently, the culture war has now overtaken American foreign policy.
Revolver News puts it very well.
They call it George Floydism converted from a domestic cudgel into a foreign policy doctrine.
And I must say, this is actually very surreal to watch, because there are such close analogies between what the left has been doing to domestic critics in this country, going after, you know, racists and people who question the transgender movement, and the idea is, let's cancel them.
Cancel them how? Well, number one, let's throw them off social media.
And number two, let's try to take away their banking privileges.
And then let's put them on a no-fly list.
In other words, let's try to ruin them from going about their normal life.
Remember, Michelle Malkin came on the podcast, talked about how she and her husband, her husband, by the way, has nothing to do with politics.
They're banned from Airbnb.
They can't stay at an Airbnb when they travel.
So all of this is very petty and very nasty.
And yet it might seem like something that is being used at home in America as a kind of inside or internecine political tactic against opponents.
So it's a little bit odd to see this now being elevated to the foreign policy front.
But, exactly the same tactics are being used against Russia.
Law firms are saying things like, we will not represent Russia.
We will represent Ukraine free or pro bono at the international court.
Banks are saying we won't allow transactions to be processed in Russia.
Russian athletes are being denied. In fact, I just saw the International Paralympic Committee says, well, the Russian athletes can participate, but not under the Russian name, or the Russian flag, or the Russian emblem.
They just have to participate as if they are athletes without a country.
So, and then on and on it goes.
The University of Milan cancelled the course on Dostoyevsky.
And when everybody said, this is ridiculous, Dostoyevsky lived in the 19th century.
He wasn't an ally of Putin.
And so there's a kind of philistinism, a kind of stupidity going on here.
And then the university goes, well, we will relent, we'll change our mind as long as we include Ukrainian literature.
Ukrainian literature for balance, I guess.
So... All of this is treating Russia, a whole country, as some kind of a wayward, you know, Nick Fuentes.
And what I find odd about this, and I think it is odd, but what's wrong with it?
You may say, well, maybe this tactic is going to work.
I think the tactic is actually silly and flawed on two counts.
First one, it confuses the virtual world with the real world.
So, in other words, here's Putin, and he's operating in the domain of tanks and guns, and he's got a military and a political objective.
And the idea that he can be deterred by taking away his Twitter is laughable.
Again, it confuses the social media realm, and of course, we can live virtually in this You could almost call it virtual universe or go on Meta, which is the metaverse, part of Facebook, and buy virtual real estate and meet virtual friends and even develop a virtual identity.
But nobody should confuse this with the actual world, which has real property and real people living in it.
And if you cut your finger in the virtual world, you don't bleed.
But if you cut your finger in the real world, you do.
The second point to be made here is that a lot of this cancellation is really hitting the wrong target.
I realize some of it is intended to be sort of tailor-focused or laser-focused on the Russian oligarchs, but think of it this way.
You have innumerable Russians who are trying to live their normal life, and suddenly they can't Get a check cashed at a bank.
They can't have their transactions processed.
Or if you're a Russian singer at the Met, you're making a living, you're a very good soprano, they won't let you sing.
Why? Not because necessarily of your politics, but because you are Russian.
So this idea of canceling all things Russian, I think, is to fail to make a distinction.
Look, if you're going to say that Putin is a dictator, it follows from that that he doesn't represent the Russian people.
Dictators are not elected by the people in the normal course of things, and the people should not be held accountable for what the dictator is doing.
And yet that's exactly what the cancel culture is trying to do, is penalize ordinary Russians for the actions of the Russian government.
In any event, I don't think that this is actually a reasonable way to conduct foreign policy.
I think it really shows how a kind of woke generation has been sort of raised and acclimated to these kinds of tactics, and they somehow think that they're going to work with people like Putin and China's Xi.
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That's 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Kyle Rittenhouse.
You all remember Kyle Rittenhouse.
He doesn't really need an introduction, but I will say that he is from Antioch, Illinois.
He was a minor when he was involved in the case involving Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum.
This, of course, had to do with the Black Lives Matter riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
I do want to emphasize Kyle was acquitted on all charges.
And, Kyle, welcome to the podcast...
You know, you have been through an ordeal that very few young people your age have had to endure.
I mean, the very idea of being charged with murder, the idea of facing, really, your life being destroyed, your whole life in prison.
How are you doing now?
I mean, have you had a little bit of time to sort of digest and recover from what would seem to me the PTSD that would inevitably accompany something like this?
Well, Dinesh, thank you for having me.
And it's been a little bit rough.
I've been just trying to hang out with my dog as much as possible.
I started college at ASU yesterday.
So I've been studying, working with my dog, and trying to stay as busy as possible.
I'm starting to go to church on Sundays and just hang out.
Let's talk a little bit about that life.
Are you able to have something resembling a normal life?
You say you're at ASU. Are you doing online or are you actually going into class?
I'm doing it through the computer.
Okay. And are you finding that you're able to have a semblance of normalcy or is your life even now something that is in the twilight zone?
It's still a little crazy.
I'm worried to go to a store still because I can feel people's eyes just looking at me and I don't know if they have a perceived notion of who I am or if they're going to attack me so I'm a little scared to go out still because of the false media narratives which made these people believe that I'm this bad person.
Yeah, let's talk. I'd like people to get to know you a little bit, Kyle.
So talk a little bit about, you know, you grew up in Antioch.
I obviously saw your testimony at the trial.
But talk a little bit about how you grew up and where and what your family was like.
And then we'll get to sort of why you went to Kenosha.
But let's start with just your memories of your childhood.
I grew up in a small town in Antioch, Illinois, hanging out with friends and then When I was 15, I dropped out of high school to help my mom.
I was working three jobs, two as a lifeguard, one as a landscaper, just to help put food on the table.
In my free time, I'd go to the beach, hang out with friends, go to car meets if I wasn't working, just to try to help.
I was a police explorer, a fire cadet.
And I wanted a career helping people.
Well, Kyle, you're an all-American kid doing what you can to help your family.
Now, let's fast forward a little bit to the events in Kenosha.
What would make you a teenage kid who's in Antioch, Illinois?
Now, you have some family in Kenosha, I understand.
What made you want to go there in the first place?
I got a text from a buddy who asked if I could help protect this business because the owners have asked him.
And I said, yeah, sure, I can help.
I'll bring my first aid kit.
I'll help with medical and I'll help put out fires.
So I went down there to help with first aid and put out fires.
But you knew it would be a little bit dangerous because obviously you did take a weapon.
And so were you fully clued into the sort of politically charged atmosphere that was going on in the United States?
I mean, not just in Wisconsin, but really across the country in the wake of the whole Black Lives Matter movement.
Were you sort of aware of all that or were you a little bit naive and sort of walked into it?
I knew a little bit about what was going on with all the riots, but it wasn't part of my realm.
I didn't pay attention to that.
I was focused on work and hanging out with friends doing normal 17-year-old stuff, not focused on what's in the media.
Kyle, what's interesting about this, it seems to me, is that I think a lot of people thought of you as some kind of a political activist.
And of course, later there were false attempts to portray you as a white supremacist.
But I think people would be a little surprised to realize that you don't seem to me to even be all that political, if at all.
No, Dinesh, I'm not a political person.
When I was 17, I couldn't even vote.
All I cared about was what type of garbage trucks were going to be driving down the road that day so I could take a video of them.
Wow. Okay. So you go to Kenosha.
I mean, had you even heard of Antifa?
It seems like you had heard of Black Lives Matter, but did you know who those guys were and what they sort of do?
No, I didn't know about Antifa until after my incident.
Okay, so you go to Kenosha.
I mean, one of the things I found amazing about...
I didn't watch the whole trial, but I watched parts of it.
I mean, I saw a detective basically say, Oh, those guys weren't running after Kyle Rittenhouse.
They were merely running in the same direction.
And I thought to myself, Wow!
You know, isn't it true, Kyle, as we think back about your case...
That you were really saved by the video.
And what I mean by that was, if there wasn't video evidence, let's say, you know, we were 20 years from now, 20 years earlier, and there wasn't the video where the jury could see for themselves what happened, I mean, I fear that if that were the case, you might be locked up today.
Absolutely. If it wasn't for all the independent journalists who captured this high definition video, I'd be in prison right now.
It would be my word against the mob's word, essentially.
And it must have been, I mean, you know, I feel this as an adult in a lesser degree, but as a teenage kid to feel the venom of the media and the way in which narratives get constructed, I mean, I've just got to say it's a little impressive that it hasn't broken you because it seems to me that you're still psychologically, emotionally intact.
You've kind of come through this, but it must have been quite something to go to live through.
It was definitely difficult to have to see what the media was saying, calling me a white supremacist, a murderer, saying my mom drove me there, saying I crossed state lines with a gun, just lying about me.
It was really difficult. And what really helped me get through this was the number of support I had and the praying to God.
That's what helped me get through each day.
Would you say that the process has made you a little more religious because you found a source of strength in faith and in God?
I would say that it's definitely helped.
It helped grow my connection with the Lord, knowing I can rely on Him no matter what.
Okay, let's take a pause.
When we come back, we'll talk some more about all this and also about his life now with Kyle Rittenhouse.
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I'm back with Kyle Rittenhouse.
We're talking about the Rittenhouse case and about Kyle's life, the aftermath of it now.
Kyle, what was your level of trust in the legal system?
You know, here you were, you had this incident, you were arrested, and you knew that you were going to go to trial.
Did you have faith that the legal system would exonerate you, or did you think you were walking into a political show trial?
I don't think I should have been brought on trial in the beginning, but I was, and I thought it had to do with political reasons with the state trying to push their own political narrative and trying to put my head on their shelf.
So I didn't know what they were going to do, what they were going to lie about at trial, so I was a little fearful that they may be able to get away with those lies.
Thank goodness they didn't.
I mean, you know that you are up against some powerful forces, right?
A whole prosecutorial team.
And even if you have a defense team, they can always put more lawyers on their side.
And in general, in these kinds of trials, prosecutors have a pretty high rate of jury conviction.
I mean, one thing that struck me in the trial was that once they realized it wasn't going all that well for them, They thought, well, if we can't get him on this, we'll at least get him on that.
Were you a little afraid the jury might, quote, compromise by going for one of the lesser charges that would still have you locked up for a long time?
I was a little fearful of that.
I was scared that there were going to be some negotiating in the jury room, be like, okay, we'll give him this lesser included and take that off the table.
So I was a little worried about that.
What about your...
I just want to talk a little bit about your emotional connection with the jury, because I find that fascinating in this kind of situation.
Did you make eye contact with the jury?
Did you have a sense that there were some jurors who were, like, listening to you and nodding and going, yeah, you know, I'm...
Did you feel that there were some that were on your side?
And did you detect that there were others who were looking at you, like, with a hostile glare?
Yeah. Um, the jury had like poker faces.
It was hard to read, but they were all very attentive and paid attention.
It took really good notes.
So they were very focused on everything that was being said and all the evidence being presented.
And do you feel now, having been through this and having been exonerated, that, I mean, I'm sure you're relieved that the system worked for you, right?
Absolutely. Okay.
Let's talk a little bit about your life now.
Have you become more political as a result of this?
Because, like you say, this was a political case.
You were, I think everyone else would say, even if you wouldn't, a victim of a political hit that That was going to make you a poster boy for not just murder, but, you know, the skinheads and the white supremacists and all.
You are fitting into this larger narrative.
Are you more aware of that narrative now?
And are you a little bit more politically alert than you were before?
I know a little bit about politics now, but I'm still not a political person.
I just like to focus on me.
I do support Trump because Trump supported me and Trump was right.
Trump defended me from day one.
I just saw you posted a photo with Trump.
Was that from a recent meeting?
And talk about that. Yeah, I went to Mar-a-Lago to see President Trump.
He's a really nice guy.
We hung out for a little bit.
I had some burgers at Mar-a-Lago.
If you ever get a chance, Dinesh, I would highly recommend it.
You recommend the burgers?
I'd recommend the burgers.
Awesome. Okay, talk about your dog.
You have a dog. It seems like it's a real source of comfort to you.
What's your dog's name and what's he like?
Or she? Milo is a purebred golden retriever.
He's a male. Me and him are doing training.
We're going to start search and rescue training pretty soon just to be able to give back and help people.
He's a smart dog.
He's getting really obedient, learning to walk off leash.
He's going to be starting Agility in April, so I'm excited to see that with him running through the ramps and the hula hoops.
It's going to be really interesting and cool.
You mentioned earlier that your life is still not back to normal.
And so, not to move this into sort of the morning show territory, but Debbie was saying, ask him if he has a girlfriend.
So, do you have a girlfriend?
Or at least is that the kind of life that you're looking for down the road?
I do have a girlfriend.
She's beautiful. I'm actually going to see her in a couple weeks.
Okay, and she's been supportive through this ordeal, I hope?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Her and her family have been amazing.
One of the things that the left was trying to do is kind of connect you to, you know, the proud boys, and of course the prosecution was trying to bring this into the trial.
I think part of the point that I read, and I'm asking you if this is true, was that, look, when a kid like you is under the gun, you're going to find, and probably at the beginning you had few supporters rallying to your cause, Did you sort of gravitate to these guys in part?
Because, hey, listen, these are among the few guys who are standing up for me.
So let me meet these guys and hang out with them for a little bit.
No, no, I didn't gravitate towards anybody.
I didn't know who the Proud Boys were.
Just didn't know who they were.
Okay. Part of my realm.
And talk, if you will, about it.
It seems like you had a troubled kind of legal experience, at least at the beginning, but were you happy with the way that your legal defense was conducted?
I mean, obviously you were successful in the case.
Were you able to find good lawyers and felt that you were well represented in the case that was eventually put forward?
Absolutely. Mark Richards, Corey Trofsi, and Natalie Wisco are phenomenal defense attorneys, and they did an amazing job.
And they helped me be able to spend Thanksgiving with my family.
Now, Kyle, when you signed up at ASU and there was some talk about you're going to resume at ASU and now you have, there was some, and I don't know if it was silly or if it was significant, efforts on the part of leftists on that campus to say, oh, we don't want to have, you know, a dangerous individual like Kyle Rittenhouse on our campus.
Has all of that faded away or is it still part of the landscape you have to deal with?
At the beginning, it was pretty powerful.
It was a little upsetting because I deserve an education just like anybody else did.
I worked really hard to get my high school diploma while on trial, so it was stressful.
And ASU has been very helpful with monitoring death threats and threats that have been contributed towards me and just helping keeping me safe in a place that I can learn to be accepted.
Kyle, you strike me as a normal kid who's just trying to live a normal life.
Let me just ask you as we close, I mean, I think it's really important that you hold some of the egregious slanderers who said really bad things about you accountable.
The last I saw, you were planning to set up some sort of a public fund to do that.
Talk about where that is and whether you have—because there's a temptation to want to move on.
But whether you have the determination to make sure that just as you are held accountable in court, these people will be held accountable in a different way in a court of law, too.
Absolutely, Dinesh. We have launched the Media Accountability Project, TMAP.org, and it's two parts.
Part A is to hold the media accountable and make sure this never happens again.
And part two is to keep them accountable and help independent journalists by providing...
Grants or funding for equipment or new cameras and creating a hub for independent journalists to have what's really happening on the streets compared to what mainstream media is saying.
You can join our fight by donating to tmap.org and helping us hold them accountable.
And what's that website again?
Teamapp.org. Just teamapp.org.
Yep. T-M-A-P dot org.
Oh, gotcha. Okay. Kyle, thanks for joining me.
This has been really interesting and I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Dinesh, for having me.
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I want to talk about Truth Social, but I'm making a point that is applicable also to other conservative platforms, and this would be notably true of Getter as well.
Now, I was on doing my locals Q&A, live Q&A, and somebody was asking.
They were like, wow, you know, there's not that many people on Truth Social yet.
Now, apparently, there's several hundred thousand people on Truth Social.
I mean, I'm almost at 50,000 followers already, and so it's not all that small.
But the point is, it is a kind of gradual...
The waiting list is bigger than the number of people on Truth Social.
And I think what they're trying to do is make sure that the platform is refined and perfected so that when it is open to the public, you're not going to have glitches, you're not going to have hacks, you're not going to have the system crash and burn because, of course, the left will be rejoicing and gloating and laughing out loud if that were to happen.
And I think Devin Nunes knows this.
Now, even though Truth Social is in the beta phase, and this is the point I was making to the guy who was raising the question, is listen, be patient because Truth Social is actually not up and running.
It's kind of like, this is a car, it's a, you know, yeah, it's a Tesla, it's a really good car, but it's in the test driving phase.
It's not actually out on the highway yet.
So you've got to recognize that.
When it's on the highway, you can judge it by kind of highway standards.
But what to me is really striking is And there's an article here that's actually done by the writer, the journalist John Solomon, in which he does something really simple.
He just picks a handful of people.
He picks Dan Bongino.
He picks Congressman Steve Scalise.
He picks himself. And he goes, let's compare our following on, let's say, Twitter.
And our following on Truth Social, which of course is very small at this point.
I mean, think about it. Twitter overall has something like 300 million people, some 60 million people on it regularly in the United States.
And many of us have pretty big followings on Twitter.
Bongino is 2.5 million.
I have 1.9 million.
And yet, here's the point.
When Bongino or I, and this applies to Steve Scalise, it applies also to Solomon...
If we post on Truth Social now, with the highly reduced following, so let's compare, 1.9 million on Twitter, I've got 48,000 on Truth Social.
So look at the discrepancy.
And yet if I take the same post, and I post it on Twitter, and I post it on Truth Social, my traffic, by which I mean likes, retweets, they're called re-truths on Truth Social, are about the same.
Now, think of how striking that is, because what that's really telling you is two things.
And by the way, what I'm saying is true, not just to me.
It's pretty much the same for Bongino.
It's the same for Solomon.
Here's Solomon. When I tweeted out a story on voting irregularities, he says,"...the post attracted 871 likes, 550 retweets on Twitter." The exact same post on Truth Social produced 1,480 likes and 1,030 read Truth.
So more traction on Truth Social with its smaller population, you might say, than on Twitter where Solomon has, as we all do, far more followers.
Solomon actually has 860,000 followers on Twitter and 24,000 followers on Truth Social.
So what is this telling you?
Well, it's telling you two things. One, Twitter is suppressing you.
It's suppressing us. There is no rational way.
And honey, you've made this point where Debbie goes, she'll post on Twitter, she'll get eight or nine likes.
And she goes, how is that even humanly possible?
Or on Facebook, she'll post a political post.
She has 5,000 friends on Facebook and 5,000 followers on Facebook, and she'll get three likes.
On a political post that is, you know, very lively and should normally attract hundreds if not thousands of likes.
Or if I mentioned Or if she mentions me, I'm apparently persona non grata on Facebook.
Well, the good news and the good side of all this is that in a relatively short amount of time, none of us are really going to care.
Why? Because it shows you, well, let's just call it the sort of versatility of these emerging platforms.
And as I say, this is true not just of true social.
I'm noticing on Getter, for example, I have enormous traffic.
And Getter has come to become a completely functional, vital, lively, interesting platform.
I mean, just elegant to look at and very easy to use.
So this is all good news.
It shows that conservatives, after being, you may almost say in a daze for several months following the 2020 election, when it seemed like our hands were tied behind our backs, the left kind of had us where they want us.
We're finally breaking free.
It's not all that easy to do.
The transition is a little bit painful, but like a kid going away from home for the first time, once we establish our own life and our own jobs and our own apartments and our own independence, we're never going to want to look back.
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Feel the difference. This is a segment on Victoria's Secret.
And I've got to say that when I veg to Debbie, I'm like, I'm going to be talking about Victoria's Secret.
She's like, what are you going to say about Victoria's Secret?
She was immediately alarmed.
And not because, by the way, not because she thinks I'm some sort of a perv who's going to be talking all about my experiences, you know...
Handling the lingerie.
None of that. I'm not under suspicion for any of that.
Debbie's point is, she realized I might be saying some politically incorrect things, so I've been sort of warned, right?
You're worried about it. Oh, yeah.
But I want to talk about an article.
This is by Chris Ruffo in City Journal.
It's called Social Justice Lingerie.
And the article is just downright funny.
It's not intended to be funny.
Ruffo's not exactly like a laugh-a-minute guy.
But what he's describing is how Victoria's Secret...
They came under fire from all these left-wing activists.
They came under fire for no other reason than their basic business model was beauty, right?
This is the idea of saying to women, if you want to look beautiful, if you want to look like a model, these are the clothes you should wear.
And of course, to some degree, it's an illusion, as all advertising is, to some degree, an illusion.
But nevertheless, the activists were up in arms, and they started raging about the fact that Victoria's Secret was transphobic and didn't care enough about the environment and was doing deforestation and so on.
Well, what's happened is Victoria's Secret has sort of completely surrendered.
And what that means is they've sort of...
First of all, they've booted out all their old kind of famous models.
People like Heidi Klum and Gisele Bundchen and Tyra Banks.
All these people are like out.
They're gone. They don't represent truth social anymore.
In fact, they represent...
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
Anyway, the point here is that Victoria's Secret has decided to go with a new coterie of models.
People like Megan Rapinoe, LGBTQ activist.
People like transgender swimsuit model Valentina Sampaio.
Or Amanda Decadene.
So, and Amanda Decadene says the point of Victoria's Secret is no longer to sell underwear.
It is to, quote, shift culture.
They basically got into the cultural activism business.
And so, what is Victoria's Secret's current business model?
Well, let's call it intersectionality.
The idea is that traditional beauty standards are racist and patriarchal and sexist and ableist and sizist.
And everything is now built upon oppressed identities.
And so, the new Victoria's Secret Collective apparently has an African refugee, a pink-haired lesbian, an obese biracial woman, and a male-to-female transsexual.
And let me just say, if that's your role model, that's where you should go.
This is where you're going to get clothes and a look that is going to be suitable to all that.
Now... I mean, the real question here is, you know, for a long time, libertarians used to say, well, listen, you know, the market will sort it out.
But we have seen, Victoria's Secret might be an extreme example, but many corporations are moving in the woke direction.
They're not, they're only perhaps unique because they were such a flamboyant symbol of one type of image.
And they've now gone to, we may almost call it the opposite type of image.
And of course, what they're trying to do is there's a cultural indoctrination here.
They're trying to basically say to young people, sort of, you're...
Standards of beauty are all wrong.
Look at this person.
They're, you know, 300 pounds.
They're beautiful. What you think of as beauty needs to be completely revised.
This is beautiful.
And the question is whether this whole, you know, approach can work.
Is it possible to tell people...
That up is down and beautiful is ugly and ugly is beautiful.
Can you actually... Are these categories so subjective that with enough advertising and enough kind of positioning, you can pull this off?
Well... The short answer is we don't know.
The verdict is out as far as the market is concerned.
Now, the early signs are that common sense is prevailing, which is to say that Victoria's Secret stock is down about 30%, one-third, since this reorganization and this movement in the kind of oppressed model direction occurred.
The company recently put out a forecast.
They're actually predicting declining sales And the real issue here is, of course, and Chris Ruffo points us out, it's not about Victoria's Secret.
Who cares if Victoria's Secret as a company succeeds or fails?
But Victoria's Secret is kind of a symbol here of woke corporations and let's call it the woke business model.
And for this reason, I hope that Victoria's Secret...
I hope that this model does not succeed because the Victoria's Secret doesn't succeed.
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Last time I discussed Brunetto Latini and Canto 15 of Dante's Inferno.
and we're going to take the plunge now and go much deeper into hell, Canto 26 out of 34.
And we're now in, you can almost call it the deepest rung of hell, which is the circle of fraud.
To remind you, we have sort of three categories of sins in hell.
The sins of incontinence, or you can call them lack of self-control.
We talked here about Paolo and Francesca in Canto V. Then the sins of violence, and violence against others, violence against self, violence against God and nature.
And we talked last time about Brunetto Latini.
But now we're moving into the circle of fraud.
And in the circle of fraud, you have two types of fraud.
You have simple fraud and complex fraud.
Complex fraud is distinguished from simple fraud in that simple fraud is taking advantage of somebody to achieve a goal that is beneficial to you, but not to them.
You're deceiving them by drawing them into your You may say, corrupt scheme, and you're trying to pull a fast one over them in a malevolent and evil way.
But complex fraud takes this to a whole new level, and we'll talk about complex fraud later.
Taking advantage of people with whom you have a special trust, to whom you owe a certain deep bond of obligation, and to betray that is, you may say, an even deeper type of fraud.
But now we're going to talk about simple fraud, although, as you'll see, simple fraud does not mean minor fraud.
And there are two very important cantos we're going to sort of take together in the Inferno.
This is Canto 26.
And Canto 27.
And in each of them, we meet a single major figure that dominates the Canto.
In 26, we meet a classical hero named Ulysses.
Now, Ulysses was kind of the Roman name.
The same figure, the same person in ancient Greece was called Odysseus.
And you might remember Odysseus.
Odysseus is the hero of Homer's Odyssey.
And so right away, we have a very interesting question.
Why would somebody, Odysseus, who is presented as very intelligent and very capable and very resourceful, and somebody whose homecoming is the subject of Homer's Odyssey, and clearly Odysseus is the hero of the Odyssey, how can somebody like that be right here, pretty deep, In Dante's Hell and presented as a fraud.
As a fraud. Now, in some ways, Dante, in a very Dante-esque fashion, treats Ulysses.
I'm going to call him Ulysses because that's what Dante calls him.
That's the Roman name.
By the way, the Romans renamed a number of the Greek heroes and also a number of the Greek gods.
And so, if you're a classical scholar, very often when you're talking about a god, one of the gods, pagan gods from classical antiquity, you need to know the Greek name and the Roman name for the same god.
But Dante, in treating Ulysses, has this discussion of fraud, and as you're going through it, a question keeps running through your mind, where's the fraud?
Where's the fraud? And that's what makes this canto so tantalizing, is that Dante makes you think, and it's almost like he makes you read the next canto, in which you're going to meet a completely different figure.
Again, this is Sort of Dante's style of moving between classical antiquity to the present, and the present is, of course, his present, where we will meet a character named Guido da Montefeltro, a political figure right out of Tuscany.
And now that guy, we very clearly will see what his fraud is because he describes it in rather riveting detail himself.
But the point I'm trying to make is it's almost like you have to recognize that Ulysses and Guido de Montefeltro are in the same circle.
And then you have to ask, what is it that they have in common?
And that's going to help you to understand what Ulysses' fraud is.
And so, this is where Dante is asking his reader to really think.
But we'll get into the canto probably next time.
I want to just say a few introductory words about Odysseus.
Because this is a background that not only Dante knew, but Dante would sort of expect his readers to know.
And his contemporary readers would know.
So, Odysseus is...
...is a figure who is present in the Iliad and in the Odyssey.
Odysseus is the guy who thought up the clever stratagem, the clever technique of the Trojan horse.
You remember that toward the latter part of the Trojan War, the war was kind of at a standstill.
It was going back and forth.
Even though the Greeks had a much bigger invading army, they were not able to get into Troy.
The walls of Troy held...
And so, Odysseus came up with this idea since the Trojans were superstitious.
Well, I mean, the Greeks were too.
The idea was to create this massive totemic horse and present it almost like a kind of peace offering on the part of the Greeks.
And the Trojans were expected to then pull the horse into their city, which they did.
The Greek ships actually withdrew.
The Trojans thought the Greeks are gone.
They've essentially left us this peace offering, the horse.
The Trojans begin to celebrate, but of course concealed in the horse are all these Greek soldiers.
And so at night when the Trojans are asleep, the Greek soldiers come out.
They not only kill the guards, but they open the gates.
The Greek army, which is now assembled for the purpose, swarms in.
So, this was all Odysseus' idea.
And Odysseus was regarded, this is Ulysses, Odysseus, Ulysses, regarded as the cleverest of the Greeks.
In fact, after the Trojan War, the Greeks awarded a prize to their greatest soldier, and it came down between Odysseus and a guy named Ajax.
Now, Ajax was sort of the straight-out fighter on the battlefield, the guy who killed the most people in battle.
But the Greeks decided to award the prize to Odysseus because they felt that in this particular case it was cunning rather than brute force that produced the best result.
And in fact, Ajax committed suicide out of his shame and anger at being passed over by the Greeks.
And there's a whole play in Greek tragedy called Ajax about exactly this.
So here you have this Homeric hero, this hero of ancient Greece, Odysseus.
And yet, interestingly, Dante takes a different view of him.
And Dante does it not really by going back and questioning or attacking the circumstances or reinterpreting and saying, oh no, you know, in coming up with the Trojan horse, Odysseus did this underhanded tactic or No, Dante does something kind of spectacular and you may almost say original.
What he does is he writes a new chapter of Odysseus' life.
He basically says, this is all we know about Odysseus.
No problem. I'm on board with it.
You didn't know that when Odysseus came home, when he returned to his family, when he reunited with his wife Penelope, when he reunited with his aging father, when he reunited with his son Telemachus, after all that happened, something else happened which I, Dante, am going to tell you about.
So as far as we know, Dante invents this.
A kind of addition to the Ulysses story.
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