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March 17, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:11
THE REAL FACES OF THE GOP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep292
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Ukraine President Zelensky has been, well, beating the war drums and, of course, a lot of people in the media on the left are like, he knows what's good for his country.
Yeah, but do we know what's good for ours?
There's a very interesting article by Paul Berman about the motivations of Putin in invading Ukraine.
I'm going to talk about that.
Debbie joins me. We're going to talk about the multiracial complexion of today's GOP. We're also going to talk about why the left is so angry that parents are getting more involved in their children's education.
And then I'll show why Ulysses, the hero of Homer's Odyssey, Finds himself in the circle of fraud in Dante's hell.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Ukraine President Zelensky made an impassioned appeal to Congress to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, kind of up the American and Western and NATO involvement in the war.
And he was very well received, kind of a standing ovation, not just the Democrats, a fair number of Republicans as well.
And Zelensky was pretty shrewd.
He kind of tapped all the right chords.
He invoked 9-11, Pearl Harbor, quoted Martin Luther King.
And after it was over, the Biden policy toward Ukraine appeared to be, well, pretty much the same.
And so you had this specter of reporters.
These kind of metrosexual reporters calling on Biden to do more.
And one of the kind of consistent themes is, well, Zelensky knows what's good for his country.
Why aren't you just doing what he says?
Doesn't he understand the situation on the ground better?
Isn't he the world's expert, so to speak, on Ukraine?
And, of course, the presumptive answer to that question is, yes, he is.
But that's really not the question before us.
Obviously, he knows what he needs.
He knows what he wants.
He knows what's good for his country.
But this might be a little different from what we need.
It might be a little different from what we can afford.
It might be different from what we are prepared to do or what's good for our country.
In other words, it is up to us to assess the level of commitment that we want to make and also the risks that we want to take.
Now, I think that attempting to enforce a no-fly zone is In that remote part of the world is a very dangerous thing to do.
I'm not saying necessarily that it would automatically provoke World War III. There's no such thing as automatically in these situations.
And I would actually like to see more open debate about these issues, which we don't see all that much.
What we get are these kind of social media jibes.
Here's one by a guy on the left who goes, What's all this about these World War III hysterics?
He goes... Russia can't even win a war against a neighboring country which has half the GDP of Miami.
What makes you think the Russian army is any good is the basic point over here.
But, of course, this is a strange thing to say when the United States just proved that it can't win a war against a country that has, what, 150 at the GDP of Miami, namely Afghanistan?
Can't beat a bunch of peasant herdsmen?
If you can't do that, You should not be too arrogant about your ability to conduct a remote operation in a faraway part of the world.
Essentially what Zelensky, I think, is asking is for the United States to sort of do Iraq all over again.
And in fact, even in Iraq, there were no risks of nuclear confrontation or nuclear escalation as there are now.
I think we also need to review the domestic situation in this country because it is not like anything we've seen before, at least not in the time I've been in this country.
I put out a poll on social media that went just like this.
Who's a bigger threat to your life, your security, your freedom, your family's prosperity, your children's future?
And then I just put Putin?
I didn't try to stack it in any way.
These are obviously the key considerations that any citizen would have in thinking about the world.
And the result, 31,000 votes in just a few hours...
5% say Putin.
95% say Biden.
I'm not saying my audience is sort of representative of the country, but I do think it's revealing that a large number of people think that Biden is a greater threat to our way of life and to freedom itself.
And to us, this is the point, that we're not talking about the welfare of people in Ukraine.
we're talking about the welfare of people right here in the United States.
The other thing that can't be avoided is that we seem to be fighting the Soviet, we seem to be fighting Russia while sort of becoming the Soviet Union. And what I mean by that is that we're establishing a regime of intolerance toward the Russians but also toward our own citizens that cannot be, cannot be missed.
And this is happening not just in the United States, it's happening also in Here's a little headline that is from the domain of sports that kind of illustrates the point, I think, in a stark way.
Daniel Medvedev, we're now talking about the number two tennis player in the world.
By the way, the number one tennis player in the world, Djokovic, is already sort of excommunicated because he won't go along with the COVID guidelines and refuses to be vaccinated.
He can't play in the tournament.
He was out of the Australian Open for this reason.
Well, here we go. Daniel Medvedev is told that he will be banned from Wimbledon unless he denounces Vladimir Putin.
What? This thorough politicization of art and literature and sports, this is itself a Soviet tactic.
And I'm almost thinking to myself, well, you know what, with this kind of madness, you know, Djokovic, you're out because of COVID. Medvedev, you're out because you won't say the right things about Putin.
I mean, it turns these international tennis tournaments into kind of a joke.
It's almost as if Djokovic should tell Medvedev, hey, listen, while Wimbledon's going on, Why don't you and I play three matches against each other?
This will be the real world championship and Wimbledon is going to be sort of a sideshow where every sort of second and third raider and also RAN can play against each other.
We have to make a distinction between Putin and the ordinary Russian.
This is another distinction.
I mentioned this yesterday that's getting completely lost.
To go after Russian citizens and basically say, hey, listen, you can't do banking.
You can't travel.
We're going to destroy your livelihood all over the world.
You can't even enter your pets into international pet competitions.
Again, what does this reflect, if not the exact tyrannical streak that we're identifying in Putin?
So yeah, I'm against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I think we should help the Ukraine to resist it.
But I think in trying to fight Putin's tyranny, we got to avoid the risk of resembling it.
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I've tried to analyze the Ukraine conflict in the context of power politics.
And power politics sets aside individuals.
In fact, it even sets aside ideology.
It just looks at the realm of large and small countries.
It looks at the realm of realpolitik.
And it looks at the focus on national interests, national self-interest.
I've also touched upon psychological analyses of Putin, which I find interesting, although I want to be careful not to sort of take them too far, because this idea that you're doing something solely because of your childhood trauma or because you...
In Putin's case, afraid of rats.
I think that there's a limit to the value of that kind of explanation.
Now, here's a different analysis.
I would call it a historical analysis.
It's coming from Paul Berman, who's one of the more astute students of American foreign policy.
He wrote some very interesting things about Islamic radicalism and 9-11.
And he broke with kind of liberal orthodoxy.
He's writing as a liberal, but as a kind of a tough-minded liberal about radical Islam.
Now, here's Paul Berman talking about, and he says, what is the...
The Russian problem.
This is an article, by the way, in the magazine called Foreign Policy put out by the Brookings Institution.
It's called The Intellectual Catastrophe of Vladimir Putin.
A little bit of a misleading title because we're not actually talking about just Putin himself.
We're talking about the position in which the Russian leaders find themselves.
And what Berman says is that the Russians have been facing a problem for a long time, in fact, going back to the 19th century.
What's their problem? Well, they have a great history.
They have a great culture and a great literature.
And they also have an incredibly vast country, one of the biggest countries in the world.
And so one would expect that based upon Russian size and Russian...
Past glory and also the sophistication of Russian culture.
The Russians are very good at a lot of different things, from music to chess.
Berman says you would expect the Russians to have formed a kind of successful government, a stable political system to match or to go along with.
There are other achievements, but they sort of never have.
And he goes back to the 19th century to say that even under the Tsars, Russia had created this kind of medieval aristocracy, this kind of empire, but an empire based upon mass serfdom that was technologically quite backward, even though it was culturally quite advanced.
Russian weakness became apparent when Napoleon's forces invaded Russia.
Here was a French army, you may say, bringing the French Revolution, not just the ideas of the French Revolution, but the kind of technological sophistication of Europe, to Russia.
And the result was that the French basically just mowed down the Russians and suddenly Napoleon's troops were on the outskirts of Moscow.
Now, The Russians began to sort of sulk over this and says Berman, what did the Tsar do?
He says, well, what the Tsar did was he decided, listen, I'm having a hard time trying to beat up on Europe or to establish my superiority over these advanced armies in Germany and France or even the force of Great Britain, so I'm going to pick on some smaller countries and kind of whoop them.
And sure enough, what Nicholas I does is he invades Poland and then he invades Hungary.
And Berman's point is that these invasions are kind of demonstrations of Russian power, reflecting not strength, but a kind of weakness.
Reflecting not genuine pride, but a certain kind of humiliation, a desire to take it out on someone else.
And, says Berman, if that seems like a kind of little tidbit of history, kind of uprooted from the present, he says, no, let's kind of follow the same track through Russian history.
And let's look, for example, in the communist era.
You have going into the 1950s.
Hungary begins to clamor for more independence.
And what does Khrushchev do?
Soviet troops come blasting into Hungary, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
And then just over a decade later, exactly the same thing in Czechoslovakia, this time under Brezhnev, when you have a Czech uprising and the Czechs decide, listen, we're going to go out in the streets.
We want more liberty of choosing our own jobs.
We want more ability to speak our minds.
In comes Soviet tanks and crush the aspirations of the Czechs.
And so this is kind of Berman's starting point for saying, now look at Putin.
Now, admittedly, it's a great mistake to see Putin as just sort of just another czar.
And it's an even bigger mistake to see Putin as sort of just another Brezhnev or just another Stalin.
He's actually not. Putin is an old KGB guy, but he never...
He seems to be one who is broken with kind of strict communist ideology.
He never appeals to it.
In fact, he appeals to the opposite.
The only thing that he takes from the communist era is this, is a kind of anti-fascist posture.
I've talked before about how communism and fascism are actually ideological cousins, but ideologies that our cousins have often fought bitterly.
Think, for example, about the Shia and the Sunni.
They're very close in ideology.
They've fought bitterly over the centuries.
And so, nevertheless, in World War II, the Soviets developed this kind of anti-Nazi, anti-fascist rhetoric, and Putin has definitely absorbed that.
But, says Paul Berman, Putin is in pretty much the same position.
After the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Russia becomes basically a big Canada.
Yeah, Canada with nuclear weapons.
But it's kind of this sort of society that's ignored, that's not given its pride of place in the kind of pantheon of nations.
And so Putin goes, let me show, let me pick on some little country that's right in my backyard and kind of punch him in the face.
And this will give me the kind of respect that I deserve on the world stage.
So, this is an attempt, as I say, to understand Putin not in terms of his individual psychology, but the psychology of the leader of a humiliated nation that has not found its place in the world or in the sun and is trying to take by force the respect that is being denied to it on the basis of its own achievements.
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I was talking yesterday about how Hispanics, Latinos, and Latinas are moving pretty rapidly toward the GOP and the leftists, they can't stand it, they're enraged.
And they start talking about the white nationalist Hispanic community and Debbie's like giving me the look from the side as if to say, what kind of crazy people are we dealing with?
Well, I don't...
Crazy, desperate people is who we're dealing with.
They don't like it. They don't like it when Hispanics think for themselves or when blacks think for themselves.
Oh my goodness. We have to, you know, they have to call them Uncle Toms and now they're calling us, me, a white supremacist.
Well, part of it is the left cultivated this narrative, and they've done this over 30 years, and the narrative can be summarized as demographics is destiny.
So they thought that as America becomes, you know, the browning of America, as America becomes sort of less monolithically white, more Hispanics, more blacks, more Asian Americans, they thought we got it made.
We don't actually even have to do much because we're going to see a natural drift to the Democratic Party.
And they thought with Trump, we'll just portray him as the most racist president ever.
And the fact that he got more black votes and more Hispanic votes in 2020, this has unnerved them.
But again, it's beyond Trump.
It's a movement of freedom, really.
Is what it is. And what I'm seeing, you know, people may say, well, you know, Venezuelans, and because I happen to be half Venezuelan, half Mexican, Venezuelans and Mexicans think differently.
So Venezuelans are going to be more apt to vote Republican.
Why? Because they have just been through socialism and they know what it is and they don't want it here, right?
Whereas with Mexican Americans, the Democratic Party has always taken it for granted that they are going to vote that way.
And when things started changing down in the Rio Grande Valley, like for example...
In Texas, in South Texas, very, very, very blue area of Texas.
Monica de la Cruz, who's in Texas Senate District 15, and Mayra Flores, who's in Texas District 34.
Both, you know, beautiful women, strong Republican women who have won their primaries and are challenging the Democratic status quo there.
Suddenly the Democrats are dispatching consultants and pollsters and strategists for the simple reason that they know that seats that they could once take for granted.
I mean, you remember the seats in the Harlingen area, which is where Debbie's family is.
The Democrat didn't even really have to campaign.
He got 60% of the vote just by doing nothing.
But that's no longer true.
You can't take that for granted.
Yeah. And I think, you know, so Hispanics as a group, I think, have decided we're not going the way of the African Americans.
Asian Americans are the same, by the way.
I think for reasons of conformity, some of them were kind of staying in the democratic fold.
But I think a lot of them have realized crime rates, the campaign against merit in the schools, very bad for the upward mobility that Asian Americans aspire to.
So you're feeling pretty good about a childhood dreamer.
To turn the valley red.
I mean, that's been a dream of mine.
And I'm really hoping and praying that it happens.
And, you know, we're seeing this across Texas, too, though.
Of course, there's some, you know, black Republicans who have won their primaries.
You know, so as far as the Republican Party not liking women and not liking minorities, yeah, that's not the face of the Republican Party.
So it used to be that the Democrats wanted to portray this kind of multi-racial Democratic Party, the rainbow Democratic Party, against the sort of sea of white faces.
And even at Trump rallies, you'd notice that CNN and so on would sort of try to avoid the black guys, try to avoid the Latinos and the Asians and the Filipinos.
Let's just focus on a sea of white faces.
But that's turning out to be a kind of media fiction.
The real face of the Republican Party is now...
More. I won't say it is as multicultural as it should be.
I think there's a lot more room.
We have a lot of work to do.
And as some of you know, we don't get involved in primaries, you know, Dinesh and I, but we really want to help all these candidates win the general.
And so we are going to be really focused on turning not just the valley red, but pretty much all of America.
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My friend Larry Taunton, whom I've had on the podcast before, a very smart guy, has a very interesting article about schools and about the role of parents in shaping the education of their children.
And he raises the question of why the left is so hostile to this.
What is it that they're after?
He talks about a woman named Jennifer Berkshire who wrote an article in The Nation.
She's supposedly some kind of a child specialist.
And she has this statement, this kind of thinking that kids should only be taught what their parents want them to learn is anathema to a democracy.
Now, let's think about why would somebody say that?
What is anathema to a democracy about that?
Democracy is the idea that the people rule.
And why is the idea of parental, let's even call it control of education, somehow inconsistent?
There seems to be no logical relationship between these two things.
And what Larry Taunton says is that there actually isn't.
That what the left is after using the rhetoric of democracy is something else.
And that is the socialist idea that children belong to the state.
Hmm. He goes, that's really what they're about.
That's why they're so nervous about this.
And this goes back to Marx.
I mean, here was Marx. Marx said, do you accuse us of wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents?
To this crime, we plead guilty.
So Marx's view is that children are actually victims of what?
Parental exploitation.
And as a result of that, the state is their liberator.
And what essentially Marx was saying is we need a system, which of course we saw the Soviet Union tried to implement other socialist regimes in which the parent is sort of displaced and the state runs the life of the child.
In fact, the child is even encouraged in extreme cases to sort of rat out the parent's To the state.
And you're a teacher.
You're a former teacher. I taught 11 years.
I taught kindergarten through 12th grade.
So I know these little children and I know their minds and I know how they work.
And here's the key to this, is if you indoctrinate a five-year-old, by the time they get to high school, they are fully indoctrinated.
And they're not going to listen to their parents about pretty much anything, especially politics.
So it's quite...
An advantage for the state to make sure that these children are indoctrinated as early as kindergarten, even preschool, but definitely kindergarten.
And, you know, it's one of these things where the state thinks that they are the guardians of all people.
So they don't like parents and they don't like God for the same reason.
I mean, Larry points out that if you actually look at the way all this played out in these socialist countries, you didn't get children, quote, raised by the state.
The state can't raise a child.
And so what happens is that the state ends up creating nothing more than ways of dealing with completely delinquent children.
The children become—they live on the streets.
Some of them sleep in trash bins.
The girls become prostitutes.
The boys become gangsters and criminals.
creates incarceration facilities, foster care, orphanages, confinement, you know, gulags.
So what they do is it becomes a botched experiment, but instead of then saying, oh, we got it wrong, this is not the way society should be organized, they double down and try to radicalize what the bad, and this is the left does that here too.
They come up with ideas, they don't work, and then they radicalize the idea to deal with the debris that their own policy has created.
Right, right. And they have to break up the family.
That's important. That's really important because the more scattered the family is, the more the minds of those little kids can be molded, right?
And it's really super...
I love hearing when parents get very involved in Going to the school board, changing policies.
You know, I actually, I was not only a teacher, but I was also a parent that did that at one point.
You know, Julianna, the youngest, was in middle school, and they were building another school.
And they wanted to take all of the kids that had been at that middle school, 6th and 7th grade, And wanted to put them in eighth grade on another campus.
And several parents, you know, and I got together and we said, we cannot allow this.
These kids have to finish middle school in the same school that they started.
And so we campaigned and we won.
We actually won that case because we became involved.
So it's really important for parents to become involved in their children's education.
And I always loved, as a teacher, when parents would become involved in their child's education because it really made things easier for me as a teacher because I didn't have to, you know, hey, where's your homework?
No, they did it. Their parents sat down with them.
After school and help them because, you know, I only had them eight hours a day.
I couldn't change their test scores in eight hours a day.
They had to go home and actually get help from their parents.
So it's important for parents to really keep an eye on their kids, especially nowadays.
I remember going back to the late 70s, a Soviet dissident named Igor Shafarevich, he says that the left, and he's talking about the socialist left, always attacks the family and property and religion.
And it was interesting because it's not obvious why those three things go together, why you need to attack all three.
And I think part of what Larry is saying in this article is...
Is he saying that the left can't openly declare its campaign.
They can't say, we're against the family.
We're against private property.
We don't want you to own anything. And we're against God.
We're against the churches.
And so their surrogate word for the state is democracy.
You notice this? They kind of just stick in the word democracy.
It's become a placeholder chant.
You're against democracy.
You say, am I against having elections?
Am I against having a vote?
Am I against representative selection of our congressmen?
No, no, no, no.
But if you want to go to be active in the school board, you're against democracy.
Now, think of what Tocqueville would have made of this.
To him, parental involvement is participatory democracy.
It is citizens getting involved in civic institutions, including schools.
But the state wants to be the parent, and they want to be God.
Yeah, they want to have the naked, shivering individual on the one side and the all-powerful state on the other with no intermediate institutions in between.
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Debbie and I were talking about the interview I did with Kyle Rittenhouse yesterday, and we were reflecting about how different the real Kyle Rittenhouse is from the Kyle Rittenhouse that was,
you could almost say, manufactured by the left, and how different Kyle Rittenhouse's story is from the utterly deceitful narrative that was created Around him in the aftermath of BLM and Antifa riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Reading Kyle Rittenhouse's posts on social media, I messaged him and I go, hey, you know, you should come on our podcast.
And he agreed to do it.
But the woman who kind of handles Kyle, you know, basically contacted us and said, hey, listen, you know, Kyle's not that political.
So don't ask him about the Ukraine or political issues, because Kyle is just a kid, which I kind of knew, but I thought it was funny that Kyle has been doing a couple of interviews and some of these hosts have been like, oh, what's your position on Zelensky?
And when you saw Kyle out there, you realize why that's not the right way to talk to Kyle Rittenhouse.
This is a kid, a very modest kid, who's trying to live a normal life.
I mean, I was kind of touched by how he said, yeah, I tried to drop out of high school.
My mom kind of needed me at home.
So sad. Here's a lower middle class white kid who is trying to find his way in the world.
And I was kind of thinking about it when he said, you know, he says, even now, I just want to help people.
And I was mentioning this to a friend of mine, and he goes, that's a sure way to ruin your life.
These days, just wanting to help people makes you a bit of a naive, a naive person in a very cynical world.
I don't think Kyle Rittenhouse had any idea the kind of minefield he was walking into.
And I don't just mean, I mean, it was a literal minefield in the sense that there was danger and violence going on, but it was also a political minefield because there were all these people who had a stake in, you might say, driving a stake into Kyle Rittenhouse.
All these kinds of people who were waiting to sort of salivate and revel in Kyle Rittenhouse being locked up for life.
They would not have given a moment's thought or qualm about that.
And this included, by the way, the prosecution.
Kyle Rittenhouse was never a white supremacist.
He isn't even remotely that.
Ironically, the one thing that came out in the trial was that Rosenbaum, the guy who attacked Kyle Rittenhouse, he was the one using the N-word repeatedly, and this was a little bit of an embarrassment for the left.
They acted like, well, that didn't really matter.
Well, if you're going to talk about racism, there's a pretty good indication it's the guy who goes around using the N-word, and that certainly wasn't Kyle Rittenhouse.
I raised with him the issue of the Proud Boys.
The judge excluded, by the way, a meeting that Kyle had had, basically just meeting at a kind of bar with some of these Proud Boys.
And I was thinking, and I said to Kyle, in effect, well, listen, these guys supported you at a time when no one was supporting you.
And Kyle's like, I don't even know who the Proud Boys are.
So here's a guy whose world was detached from this highly ideological world that probably, certainly Debbie and I and probably you live in, where we are plugged into all these different types of groups.
Kyle had sort of remotely heard of BLM, but he said he wasn't even that familiar with Antifa.
I think it was striking that Kyle agreed with me that the video saved his life.
And I think it is kind of cool that this organization and this website that he set up is not merely to go after the people who slandered him, but is also to support videographers in gathering the kind of evidence that can be critical In saving people's lives.
I have to say, I was thinking in this context also about my upcoming movie, 2000 Mules.
And let me put it this way, the video once again tells the story.
Because it's very difficult to argue when you can see the offense being committed.
You can see sort of with your own two eyes.
I was pleasantly surprised that ASU, this is Arizona State University, has not only enrolled Kyle Rittenhouse but is protecting him.
Because here's a kid who I think is in some sense a target.
I'm glad that he's aware of this and is taking precautions.
He's become a kind of lightning rod, a Rorschach test for larger currents in our culture.
But even though he is that, He is also, at the end, just a simple kid trying to make his way in the world.
He's just an ordinary teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse.
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I'm in Canto 26 of Dante's Inferno.
In fact, I've covered now the bulk of the Inferno.
There are just a couple more cantos I want to talk about, and then we'll have completed this book, this part of...
The Divine Comedy. And we're here in the circle of fraud.
And we are about to encounter two different characters.
One from classical antiquity.
And this is Odysseus.
Also called Ulysses.
And that's what Dante calls him.
We're going to talk about Ulysses in Canto 26.
And then we're going to meet a very sneaky...
Florentine named Guido da Montefeltro in Canto 27.
But these two guys are in the same circle.
And so it's interesting to compare them back and forth.
But let me start by doing a little bit of the backstory of Odysseus, because Odysseus is the hero of Homer's Odyssey, and it's a little bit of a puzzle what he's doing at all in Dante's Hell.
Well, I mean, you might expect him to find him in the category of the virtuous pagans, because after all, he has a figure, a character, that lived long before Christ.
At least Homer lived long before Christ.
But no, he's in the circle of fraud.
Not just pride, not just ambition, but fraud.
And we want to find out what his fraud is.
In Homer's Odyssey, we have the story of Odysseus and his long journey home.
That is the Odyssey, and the word Odyssey means a kind of journey.
The Greeks went off to fight in Troy, and it was a 10-year project.
And then they committed some horrible atrocities against the Trojans.
What were these atrocities?
Well, they murdered the Trojan king Priam in a temple.
So that's the sacrilege.
They raped Priam's daughter, Cassandra.
They flung Hector's son, Stionix, from the battlements.
This was a baby boy.
So these horrors outraged the gods, the pagan gods, who said to the Greeks, in effect, you're not going to get home safely yourselves.
You're going to have all kinds of troubles getting home.
And many of the Greeks were lost at sea.
Some of them were killed on their way home.
And Odysseus spent 10 years wandering before he was able to get home.
And this is the story of the Odyssey.
Now, Odysseus gets home and he is reunited with his old father.
And with his wife, Penelope, and with his son, Telemachus.
And this is where sort of Dante picks up the story.
And you get the sense here that this is an important story for Dante, both the original story, which emphasizes Odysseus' kind of resourcefulness and Odysseus' cleverness, But also Odysseus' vaunting ambition.
And then Dante, as I mentioned, kind of adds to the story.
And we should always keep in mind here that Dante, when he gives a lot of attention to a character, as in this case, Ulysses, he's usually talking about a sin that is a temptation for him, for Dante himself.
And in this case, I think we should remember that Dante, like Ulysses, is a very talented guy.
He's a very clever guy.
He has wanting ambition.
And like Ulysses, he might be tempted to commit a certain type of fraud.
What is the fraud? Let's find out by kind of going to the text.
So Dante and Virgil are walking through this circle of hell and what they see are these kind of flickering flames and apparently encased in the flames are the souls that are captive in this ring of hell.
So you here see again Dante's imagination in constructing scenarios that match the sin itself.
And just as you can't look at a flame and see what's kind of in it, fraud is a kind of deception.
It's a flickering light.
You don't really know what's going on.
And so the appropriateness of Dante's imagery here is really good.
And here comes a flame that Dante wants to speak to, but Virgil won't let him.
Virgil goes, let me talk.
Virgil goes, see to it your tongue refrains from speaking.
Leave it to me to speak.
And the dialogue that follows is between Virgil...
And Ulysses, not between Dante.
Dante kind of stays out of it.
Now why this is so is not entirely clear.
It may be that Virgil is himself a figure from classical antiquity.
Sort of in that sense, Ulysses is one of his guys or from his era.
And that's why Dante has it this way.
But in any event, here is...
Here is Ulysses' story.
When I set sail from Circe, Circe is an enchantress that had held Ulysses captive, who more than a year had kept me occupied, so continues Ulysses, not sweetness of a son,
nor reverence for an aging father, nor the debt of love I owed to Penelope to make her happy, Could quench deep in myself the burning wish to know the world and have experience of all man's vices, of all human worth.
So here's Ulysses. He's come home after being away for 20 years.
His son, who was just a child, is now grown up.
His wife has been without him for two decades.
And his father, who is now in the last phase of his life.
And what does Ulysses say?
He goes, you know, I just got home.
But no sooner did I get settled that even my attachment to my father, my wife, the obligations to my family couldn't quench in me.
What? The burning wish to know the world and have experience of all human vices, of all human worth.
Wow! So Ulysses wants to know everything.
He's an adventurer.
He's a voyager.
He's a scientist.
He's not scared away by the idea of human vices.
He wants to sample them too.
Not necessarily to become captive to them, but to see what they are, to know.
And this sort of, what you get here is almost a preview of the Enlightenment philosophy.
It is man's quest to know.
There's nothing that should be forbidden.
There's no knowledge that should be out of bounds.
And here's Dante questioning this.
Dante's raising the question, is that really true?
Or is the lesson of the Garden of Eden true?
That there is certain types of knowledge, and let's call it, there are certain forbidden vices, forbidden things to do and to venture into, or even to think.
And that it is wise and prudent to stay away from certain things that life may have to offer, but that are not good for you.
And Ulysses basically goes, no, I reject that.
I'm out to learn.
I'm out to know.
And there are no limits to human knowledge.
And Dante is going to explore, and I'll pick this up in the next segment, the consequences of Ulysses' choice.
We're talking about the adventure of Ulysses in Canto XXVI. Ulysses, having come home, decides not to stay.
He decides it's time to voyage out.
And still, we haven't come to any fraud.
It might be unwise for Ulysses and irresponsible for him to leave his family all over again, and that's certainly part of what Dante is saying.
It may be that Dante rejects Ulysses' idea that all knowledge is somehow good, That, yeah, you know, there are all these vices that are out there in the world.
I got to try every single one of them.
Dante is like, no, you don't.
But where's the fraud?
We have to think carefully about where the fraud is.
So let's continue with the text.
This is Ulysses talking.
And he goes, but what he does is he goes, so I set out on the deep and open sea with just one ship and with that group of men, not many, who had not deserted me.
So all the guys who come back with Ulysses at the end of this 20-year voyage, many of them go back to their families.
But apparently there's a small group that's still willing to go sail yet again with Ulysses.
And they get into a boat, and they come into a kind of narrow point where the sea, by its own motions, as Dante says, warning men not to go beyond that point.
And what happens?
Ulysses gives a speech in which he talks his men into pushing forward.
Here's what Ulysses says.
He goes, He goes,"...do not deny yourself experience of what there lies beyond, behind the sun in the world they called unpeopled." So in other words, there's a world out there.
There may not be even any people in it.
But no man has gone there before, so we gotta go.
And don't be afraid.
Let's keep going. He continues, Ulysses,"...consider what you came from.
You are Greeks. You were not born to live like mindless brutes, but to follow paths of excellence and knowledge." So Ulysses is kind of talking them into it.
And the poem continues.
This is Dante, not Ulysses, talking.
With this brief exhortation...
Sorry, this is Ulysses talking.
I made my crew so anxious for the way that lay ahead that then I hardly could have held them back.
So Ulysses is so convincing, he's so cunning, that his men get all fired up.
Yo, let's go, let's go, let's go.
And they go, as it turns out, to their untimely death.
So here we are now getting to the fraud as Dante sees it.
What's the fraud? The fraud is not just that Ulysses decides to venture out irresponsibly on his own.
That's his business.
The fraud is that he rounds up these other men.
These are dedicated soldiers who are loyal to him and trust him.
And essentially, Ulysses goes, you guys have nothing to fear.
Come with me. I know what I'm doing.
I'm going to take you into the great beyond.
There are all these treasures of knowledge waiting for us, and essentially, none of them make it.
Let's find out why.
And you can capture here the beauty of Dante's prose.
We made our oars, our wings, for that mad flight, gaining distance, always sailing to the left.
So these are skilled sailors, to be sure.
Five times we saw the splendor of the moon grow full, and five times wane, meaning they were sailing for five months.
Since we had entered through the narrow pass, Where then appeared a mountain shape darkened by distance.
So far away in the distance they see a mountain.
What mountain? As it turns out in Dante's geography, it's the mountain of purgatory.
So they're sort of at the end of the earth.
They even see the purgatorial mountain that arose to endless heights.
I had never seen a mountain like it.
And then... Our celebration soon turned to grief when from the new land there rose a whirling wind that whirled us around three times in churning waters.
The fourth blast raised the stern up high and sent the bow down deep.
And then the sea was closed again above us.
So, three massive whirlpools, the front of the ship goes up, the back of the ship goes down, and they're swallowed up by the sea, and that is the end of Ulysses.
Now, what Dante is going here is, he's saying that leaders...
And what Ulysses decides is that his own personal, unquenchable ambition that disregards his obligations to parents and wife and family is one thing.
But In order to pull this off, Ulysses needs to become a kind of a con man.
And he needs to talk all these other people, who also, by the way, have families and attachments and duties and responsibilities, and yank them all into this kind of, let's call it, pointless voyage.
Pointless. Why? Dante is not questioning the legitimacy of the voyage to Troy.
That was for a purpose.
And in a sense, you could say the Greeks had an obligation to do it, to go get Helen back, to teach the Trojans a lesson.
So Dante is not questioning any of that.
And as I said, he has sort of created this episode.
And by the way, in doing it, you might say, well, what is Dante doing adding to Homer?
Well, part of what Dante is doing in adding to Homer is Dante is saying that I am in the same league as We're good to go.
It takes the tradition of classical antiquity, and it builds upon it, it refines it, it introduces a new moral element that was perhaps not there before, and in doing so, it perfects it.
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