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March 23, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:34
THE CUNNING OF HISTORY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep295
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I'm going to talk today about what's going on in Russia, China, and the Islamic world under the rubric of Hegel's notion of the cunning of history.
Rebecca Koffler, author of Putin's Playbook, is going to join me.
We're going to talk about what's going on inside of Russia and what's going inside of Putin.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the hearings and the crackpot ideas of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Get ready for that. And reviewing Dante's Inferno, I'm going to show how the self-described fox, Guido da Montefeltro, found himself deceived by an even bigger fox, Pope Boniface VIII.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
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.
I'm hearing a lot of, well, I'm going to call it, you craziness in the context of the Ukraine war.
And I'm hearing it not only from Democrats, but also from Republicans.
I mean, phrases like, yeah, there are fascists and Nazis fighting on the side of Ukraine, but, you know, they're good fascists or they're good Nazis.
No one puts it exactly that way, but that's kind of the implication of their position.
Or, yes, you know, World War III, if it's going to come, it's going to come.
Or some people even take the position, we are in World War III. And I think to myself, how is it that our thinking has become so detached, not just from reality, but from a very useful way to look at reality that can be called realism?
Realism is nothing more than seeing the world for what it is and understanding not just human beings, but states.
Now, realism was the governing philosophy of the 19th century.
Every state acted in its own self-interest.
Nobody expected otherwise.
People, of course, would make alliances with other states, but the point of that was to counter the influence of still other states.
And it was a multipolar world.
There was a lot of, of course, internecine rivalry among the European powers, in particular between Britain and France.
And then we moved into the 20th century, which was defined, of course, by the bipolar conflict of the Cold War.
And it was in that context that the West came up with some very clever ideas International schemes to strengthen its own side of the conflict.
And these were things like the United Nations, the international organizations like the Monetary Fund.
Of course, there were all kinds of regional alliances on top of that.
There was commissions of human rights, the Geneva Convention, and most importantly, NATO. But NATO existed, not in some abstract world, but NATO existed to counter something very concrete.
And it was the Warsaw Pact.
And what was the Warsaw Pact?
An alliance formed by the Soviet Union in which all the different members, you may say, of the Soviet Empire were pulled together into a single, not entirely voluntary, alliance.
The point I'm trying to make is that these international institutions that were formed by the West and for the West...
We're formed in the very specific context of the Cold War.
And all of that's important now because we can raise questions like, we keep talking about NATO. Should Ukraine be in NATO? Nobody asks the question, what is NATO for?
What is NATO actually opposing?
Who's the other side?
Is the other side China? Is NATO consciously positioning itself against China?
Is it Russia?
Is there some kind of a direct political or ideological conflict between the West and Russia?
And is that what NATO exists to foster?
And who gets to be in NATO? What's the basis for NATO membership?
I think the reason we've lost a lot of clear thinking about all this is that at the end of the Cold War, once the Soviet Union dissolved, The West became infatuated with the idea that Francis Fukuyama encapsulated in the phrase, the end of history, but is perhaps more fully captured in Hegel's phrase, the cunning of history.
Now, Hegel's idea here is that history isn't sort of one thing after another.
Hegel's idea is that history is directional.
It's teleological.
It has a kind of purpose.
And by the way, Hegel was offering a secularized version of an old Christian idea.
If you go back to the early part of the medieval period, there was a Christian writer named Joachim of Flora, who basically divided all of history into three phases.
He called it the age of the father, this was the Old Testament before Christ, the age of the son, this was the period of Jesus' life on earth, and then what he called the age of the spirit.
And according to Joachim, we are now living in the age of the Spirit, and that's it.
There are no more ages. When the age of the Spirit comes to an end, it's the end of the world, and essentially it's the time for the last judgment.
So this was the Christian teleological scheme in which the end of history represents, you may say, the end of the world.
And Hegel secularized that idea as if to say that history at some point will end, not in the sense that things will stop happening, but that the ideological conflict defining history will cease to exist.
And I think this is really the virus that is infecting us now.
This is why people think things like, listen, There's only one way to organize a society, and that is the Western way.
Everybody has to become a democracy.
Everybody has to have some form of liberal democracy.
Sure, you can have more welfare states over there or a more libertarian form of liberal democracy, but that is the model.
And if countries reject that, it's because they're sort of living in the past.
They're sort of relics of a bygone era.
And I think this was the kind of psychology that led the West to say to Ukraine, you're more advanced than Russia.
You're one of us.
You're essentially a democracy like we are.
You belong to the future.
Putin belongs to the past.
not realizing that countries like China and Russia have their own history, they have their own culture, they have their own way of looking at things, and they in no way agree that sort of we're living in the 21st century and they're not, as if we don't all occupy the same planet at the same time.
So I think it's important that we step outside of this kind of arrogant nonsense that somehow believes there's only one way to think about the world.
And we recognize that Ukraine has interests, but you know what?
They're not the same as ours.
Russia has interests as well.
And if we're America first, we shouldn't be surprised that the Russians are Russia first.
And so if you get, you know, a singer at the Met or somebody, a Russian chess player, and they go, yeah, we like Russia, what, cancel them because they're too pro-Russian right now?
This is just nonsense, and this reflects a certain kind of inability to think clearly about the world.
We don't want to start talking about World War III. Nobody should, unless they're willing to contemplate their own extinction.
Because any country that is existentially threatened and happens to have nuclear weapons will certainly use them.
We can be quite sure of that.
Why? Because that's what we would do.
If we were existentially threatened and we had nuclear weapons, we would use them.
And so there's no reason to believe that other people are somehow different and they will exercise greater restraint than we would in a comparable situation.
A little bit of realism, I think, will go a long way in helping us understand better what's going on in Ukraine, all the better to respond to it.
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She's a Russian-born US intelligence expert.
She's worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency, with the CIA. She's briefed the Pentagon.
And she is the author of an important book called Putin's Playbook, Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America.
Rebecca, thanks for joining me.
Delighted to have you.
I want to talk about Russia and Ukraine, but before I do that, I'd like people to get to know you a little better.
You grew up in Russia.
Talk a little bit about your kind of formative years and then when you or your family moved to America.
Sure. Thank you for having me, Dinesh.
I'm so delighted to be here with you in your audience.
Yes, I was born and raised behind the Iron Curtain in the former Soviet Union.
And my parents never agreed with the Soviet system, and they were raising me to go to America eventually.
They encouraged me to learn English.
Which I did from third grade and then all through high school and then I went to the university in Moscow and I learned some more and eventually in 1989 I came to America just like my mother wanted me, the land of freedom and justice and opportunity.
And after September 11th, I really wanted to go serve in the intelligence community and I became an intelligence officer at DIA and I worked with CIA as well.
Now, Rebecca, as you know, the Berlin Wall came down 1989, the Soviet Union dissolved 1991, 1992.
A lot of people breathed a huge sigh of relief, and there were a lot of theories floating around at the time that the ideological conflict that had defined the 20th century was now a thing of the past.
And that the new Russian leadership, starting, of course, with Yeltsin, but now continuing with Putin, was somehow uprooted from that old communist ideology, was charting a new path.
And I'd like you to comment as someone who was sort of there and then observed it from America.
What is going on with Russia today?
Has Russia broken completely with its communist past?
Or is Putin linked to that past?
So while everyone expected the so-called peace dividend, Dinesh, no one in Russia really expected Russia to magically turn into a democracy.
There's nothing really in Russian history that points to the fact that democracy would be even a viable system of governance.
And so I was absolutely not surprised that Seeing that Putin came to power, a typical authoritarian, a very typical Soviet KGB-style operative produced by the same culture that produced Ivan the Terrible, who killed his own son, and Joseph Stalin.
Who killed, murdered millions of Russian people.
So it's an excellent question whether Russia is broken with its communist part.
An interesting piece of data is that every single time that Putin was elected president by the Russians, which was four times, the runner-up was a communist.
So communism is well...
alive in the Russian thinking and in fact the popularity of Joseph Stalin, the bloody, you know, murdering communist, is now rising in Russia.
There's been some debate about Putin himself and what his objectives are and this begins to bear upon the Ukraine or Ukraine.
Um...
Is it the case that Putin, in some ways, is looking as best as he can to reconstitute something of the old Soviet empire, obviously in a somewhat new form, Or is Ukraine a kind of one-off challenge for him?
In other words, he goes, here is this little country right on my border.
I want to have a country here that's not going to be openly hostile to me in any way.
But I'm not looking for other prey.
This bear is only interested in one meal, and that's Ukraine.
But I think you see that Putin has a larger objective, and it goes way beyond Ukraine, doesn't it?
Absolutely, 100% correct.
Ukraine is not a one-off.
Dinesh, Putin has always wanted to reconstitute a USSR-like alliance, where countries like Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Moldova, possibly the Sands, would go back under Moscow's control.
Putin never made his strategic ambitions a secret.
This The ambition of his is clearly recorded in every single strategic planning document that he approved.
The Russian military doctrine, the national security strategy, foreign policy concepts, the list goes on.
It's just that we haven't really been listening and believing him.
And people who were listening, who were trying to warn us, like Senator Romney, like myself, I tried to warn the intelligence community.
We were laughed at and called crazy while now here we are grasping at straws because we never developed a counter plan to Putin's playbook.
And do you think, Rebecca, that what Putin is after here is a kind of Russo-Chinese-Iranian or Turkish alliance that would provide a unified or semi-unified counterweight to the West?
In other words, is Putin's plan part of a larger plan that might include Xi, might include people like the Mullahs in Iran?
Right, so yes, he is a long-term thinker, a pretty clever strategic planner, and his ambition is really to develop a counterweight in terms of a loosely affiliated military alliance to counter NATO, Which was stood up as a direct counterweight to the Soviet Union, right?
But he also would like to present a counterweight in the moral sort of sense.
He is seeing, and the Russian general staff, the Russian government, are seeing what is happening today in our country with democracy.
Where the foundational principles of democracy have been stood up on their heads, so to speak, right?
We are really now oppressing free speech ourselves.
The big tech is the big brother today, censoring religious voices, conservative voices.
We are now redefining the marriage, right?
As a union between man and a woman.
And so Putin is amplifying this sort of his propaganda saying the West is degrading.
We can't really allow this type of democracy.
And we, Russia, China, we are pro-traditional family values.
family values.
We represent Russian Orthodox Church, spiritual values, and the list goes on and on and on.
And so that's where that unity comes in that you articulated.
But when it comes to Russia and China, they're more of a marriage of convenience to the Extend that they both hate the United States and view us as a threat, and that's why they're aligning forces.
But they're not really allies in the American sense of the word, like we in Great Britain are.
Let's take a pause, Rebecca.
When we come back, let's probe further some of the themes in your book, Putin's Playbook.
We'll be right back.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code BALANCE. I'm back with Russian-born U.S. intelligence expert Rebecca Koffler.
She's the author of Putin's playbook, Russia's secret plan to defeat America.
Rebecca, you said something I find very provocative, which is you said that the United States is being criticized today by countries like Russia and China for having sort of gone morally and culturally degenerate.
In other words, that these cultures are now posturing as the forces of stability and family and tradition, and they're portraying, I guess, the United States as kind of, let's just call it a drag queen empire of morally corrupt values.
I want to ask you, isn't it true that this is a pretty successful propaganda technique, by which I mean that most people around the world are pretty traditional?
I mean, I grew up, I obviously was born in India, I've lived in Asia, I've obviously traveled in Africa.
Most cultures are pretty traditional and I think if they look at America, they probably are more attracted by America in the 1950s than they are by America today.
So doesn't this propaganda that you're talking about, although coming from a disreputable source, nevertheless strike a chord?
Absolutely. It definitely strikes a chord.
It resonates with the Russian people.
I grew up with very traditional values.
You know, mother was a female, father was a male.
You know, I am now married to a guy.
You know, I have two kids.
And so this is being very, very successful.
Even though the Russians themselves, like if you look at the Russian society, it's not as traditional.
Abortion is still through the roof.
When I was growing up, abortion was a form of birth control.
It's very normalized.
So yes, the Russian people are now more religious than they used to be because religion was outlawed in the former Soviet Union.
It was officially an atheist state.
Remember how Lenin said religion is the opium of the people.
So this type of amplification of our sort of shortcomings of our society today works for the authoritarians.
And I regret to say, Dinesh, that I am horrified right now when I hear talk about socialism being normalized, when I hear all of these, you know, various critical race theory, which is a Marxist ideology, I feel like I am back in the USSR. This is not why my mother uprooted me from my family, sent me here alone.
I came alone, by the way.
My mother died in the Soviet Union.
And eventually I brought my sister and now my dad.
But I came to the country, the land of freedom and opportunity.
I did not want USA to be transformed into USSR 2.0.
And I will fight it with all I have.
It sounds like we're fighting, aren't we, Rebecca, two battles, one on the international front and one on the domestic front.
One interesting thing I noticed about your book is that as you read through it, you come across these sections of the book that are literally blacked out.
And it appears that you, the book itself, had to go through, I assume, a vetting process.
And so you obviously are telling things that you're trespassing on sensitive territory because they've blacked out.
I mean, it actually makes the book more fascinating to read.
And I'm almost sort of trying to read between the lines.
What could they possibly have blacked out here?
Talk a little bit about this vetting process and a little bit about what the book had to go through in order to make it into print.
Sure.
As a former intelligence officer, I had to submit my manuscript to DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, my former employer.
And they had to also submit it to CIA, for whom I also did some work as part of their National Income Debt Conservative.
because, believe it or not, there's a great shortage of Russian speakers, if you will, and people who actually understand the Russian mindset.
Because remember, Russians don't think like Americans.
Putin doesn't think like an American.
And so there were things that were critical of the intelligence community and of our national security apparatus and all the mistakes that were made.
I briefed Dinesh scores and scores of former President Obama's Pentagon officials, warning them about the threat.
You know, Joe Biden, when he was Obama's VP, received briefings, and yet Joe Biden, together with Obama and Hillary Clinton, kept pursuing a foolish reset Putin strategy, right?
Instead of developing and taking this time to develop a viable counter strategy, you know, securing our communications networks from cyber attacks, securing our satellites from cyber warfare, you know, weaning ourselves off of our dependency on Russian energy.
They've never done those things.
And obviously, the U.S. government didn't want Americans to know How unprepared they were.
And also, I disclosed way before the Mueller report and the Durham report, I disclosed how the intelligence community assessment that the corrupt spy agency chiefs like James Comey FBI Director James Clapper,
the Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, the CIA Director on the Obama's team, they lied to the American people by saying in the official intelligence community product, That the Russians wanted to elect Donald Trump.
That is science fiction.
The reason for Russian intervention in our 2016 U.S. election was to foment disorder and discord and to plunge our government into dysfunction, which they successfully achieved previously.
Precisely because those corrupt intelligence officials, instead of preparing us for the threat from Putin, they were digging dirt on former President Trump to oust a democratically elected president.
This is the third world country type of stuff that we're talking about, and this is why they blacked out several portions in my book.
Rebecca, you're actually making me laugh because normally you think of this kind of vetting as you're revealing the number of submarines that the Russians have or the number of MiGs.
But it sounds like what you're saying is you had critiques of the intelligence agencies themselves and they were like, let's black that out.
We don't want the American public to know about that.
Exactly correct.
You nailed it, Dinesh.
I would never reveal truly classified information.
You know, we guard our sources and methods because the people, you know, who risk their life, right, the spies or we call them the assets, human assets, right?
We protect them because we don't want them killed.
So I would never do anything like that.
And think about it this way.
If I actually did include classified information in my manuscript, I wouldn't be sitting here talking with you, Dinesh.
I'd be, you know, thrown in jail.
This is what happens, you know, with some other people.
They were charged, you know, people who revealed some of the information, like John Bolton, they were charged.
Well, let me take that back.
He was accused, actually, of revealing classified information to his attorney.
Okay? And that's why he was charged.
And when I consulted my attorney, he said, absolutely, by no means.
You do not submit your manuscript to an attorney.
Go yourself. And this is what I did.
I submitted it myself, but they dragged their feet.
They tried to sabotage the publication of my book.
We had to change the publication date a couple of times because they wouldn't respond to me.
I wouldn't respond, and I had no choice.
It was either, like, give up, and that's what they hope that you do.
They've done that to other people, but I didn't give up, and so my publisher said, okay, we're going to go ahead and publish it with blackouts, and DIA came back to me and said, Oh, don't you want to edit?
There are some partial sentences.
And I said to them, well, weren't you the ones who said you can't when I requested alternative language, which is what they were supposed to do, right?
If they think this is classified, give an alternative language.
And they said, no, that wasn't possible.
And then all of a sudden, they were surprised that we were...
So it's a game.
They play that game because they don't want people to know how badly they bungled up the Russian threat and how unprepared we are.
And now the Ukrainian people are paying with their lives for that.
And now we, American people, are risking a potential war with nuclear Russia because the Washington establishment was caught with their pants down regarding Putin's threat and completely underestimated, failed to understand their opponent, Vladimir Putin.
That's fascinating. And it's a fascinating book, Rebecca.
And I'd like to have you come back.
We'll rebook you to talk more specifically.
I meant to talk a little bit more about Ukraine.
We haven't done that yet. But this has all been very eye-opening.
So thanks for joining me.
And I look forward to actually bringing you back to talk a little bit more just about the Ukraine conflict.
Of course. Thank you, Dinesh.
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I've been talking about foreign policy today, and I want to extend that conversation by now talking for the next couple of segments about Iran.
I want to discuss an article that I just read in the magazine called Foreign Affairs, a magazine with a leftist tilt.
But still, it has good people who really know the world, very often from the countries themselves, talking about what's going on in relationship to those countries.
And here's an article by Kareem Sajjadpur, and it's about Iran's aspirations in the Middle East.
Now, this is all important because I think that Rebecca Koffler is right.
There's a very poor understanding of how Things look to people over there.
And this is partly why we try to read and expand our range of thinking.
So, when we think of Iran, we think about these mullahs.
And they are ensconced in an admittedly powerful country, population some 70 million or so.
Clearly a big player in the region.
But it seems like Iran is, in a sense, outnumbered.
And it seems that Iran, of course, the Iranians are Shia.
And the Shia are a minority in the Muslim world.
Virtually all the Muslim countries are made up of Sunnis.
Iraq, of course, is Shia, but apart from Iraq and Iran, all the other major countries, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and so on, made up of primarily Sunnis.
And, of course, we have been taught that the Shia and the Sunni have been fighting for centuries, and so Iran would seem to be a little hemmed in in its ability to export its revolution and export its radicalism and export its influence.
But this article is about why that is not so.
And it explores dimensions that I hadn't really thought about, and so I want to go into a couple of those now.
So, the writer points out that Iran has a kind of surrogate that operates on its behalf in a number of other countries, and that is the radical group known as Hezbollah.
Now, Hezbollah is Shia, but as the article goes on to point out, Iran doesn't just work with Hezbollah.
Iran is actually perfectly happy to work with radical Muslim groups of whatever stripe.
Iran supports...
Al-Qaeda. Iran supports the Taliban.
Iran supports Hamas.
And you might go, wait a minute, those are Sunni!
But this is sort of, I would call it, third grade understanding of the Muslim world.
What the Iranians have realized is that Islamic radicalism is a powerful force.
Now, some of it is of the Shia variety, and some of it is of the Sunni variety, but it's both Islamic.
It's both coming from the same taproot of Islam.
Now, the Iranians have further realized that they are opposed to To the governments of Saudi Arabia and of Egypt.
And guess what? Those governments cannot tap radical Islam because the radical Muslims in those countries are fighting to overthrow those regimes.
And so there is a lot of radical Islam in Saudi Arabia, but the radical Muslims in Saudi Arabia are trying to topple the Saudi royal family.
So the royal family can't count on them because they are ideological opponents.
Similarly, in Egypt, where the military has by and large held power since they pushed out the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt, the truth of it is the Muslim Brotherhood, which is probably the most powerful radical Islamic group in Egypt, is trying to overthrow the military regime of Egypt.
And so, the Iranians know all this.
And so, the Iranians have realized, listen, why don't we basically subsidize and support radical groups all over the place?
Let's support the Shia ones, because those are kind of, you know, on our team.
We also encourage the Sunni radicals because they too are helping achieve our political objectives.
And so we see here a kind of, not a grand plan, but a regional strategy by Iran to dominate the region by capitalizing or taking advantage of the most powerful force in the region, which of course is Islamic radicalism.
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Feel the difference. I'm continuing my discussion of Iran and its operations in other countries in the Middle East and even in North Africa.
The article I'm discussing was written by Kareem Sajjapur in Foreign Affairs magazine.
And Sajjapur makes the point that Iran uses its surrogate, which is Hezbollah, to conduct operations in a number of other countries, but particularly in Lebanon.
Now Hezbollah is by far the most powerful force in Lebanon today.
They just go about doing whatever they want.
I mean, they want to assassinate a political opponent.
That's it for him.
They run their own underground economy.
They've implanted thousands of rockets in Lebanon that have the capacity of striking Israel.
And at one time, Hezbollah claimed to be sort of its own organization.
It was not part of Iran.
But of late, they've become very explicit about the fact that Hezbollah essentially is Iran.
Here is Sheikh Nasrallah.
This is, by the way, the founder and leader of Hezbollah.
And he goes, as long as Iran has money, we have money.
Just as we received the rockets we used to threaten Israel, we're receiving our money.
So this is Nasrallah basically saying, hey listen, I'm Iran's man outside of Iran.
I do Iran's bidding and the Iranians are perfectly happy to fund me.
Let's remember that Iran also uses Shia radicals and local groups in Iraq.
And they used it while America was in Iraq to sort of destabilize the Iraqi regime.
Which they were very successful in doing.
Similarly, Iran is very active in Syria.
Now in Syria, it's very interesting because Iran is allied with Bashar al-Assad.
So here you have a relatively secular dictator of Syria.
And a guy who comes from the Alawite wing of Islam, a very kind of minor wing of Islam, almost an extension of a large family.
But nevertheless, he has decided that his fate...
It's more secure with Iran.
And so Iran needs Syria.
In fact, Syria is kind of the gateway as a bridge to Hezbollah and Lebanon and also against Israel.
And of course Assad needs Iran to basically survive.
Iran has also moved into Yemen.
Where there are some Islamic radicals called the Houthis.
And the Iranians are backing the Houthis.
And the Houthis, of course, if you listen to them, they sound exactly like Iran.
One of their favorite phrases, death to America.
So you can imagine the mullahs just kind of seconding that or cheering that, you know.
And so the Houthis have essentially adopted the ideology of Iran on the foreign policy front.
So, here you have Iran operating through surrogates, Hezbollah notably, but as I mentioned before, also some of the Sunni radical groups.
And all these groups are perfectly happy to be junior partner to Iran.
Why? Because they realize that Iran provides two things.
One is a stable commitment to radical Islam.
So there's an ideological component.
It's like, this defines the side of, we're on the side of kind of Islam in italics.
And if you believe that, then we're going to stick by you.
So there's a kind of ideological predictability to what Iran is doing.
And second, the Iranians are very happy to supply predictable sources of cash.
And What all of this means is that although other countries would seem to have more population than Iran, Egypt, for example, or have a greater, I mean, no one has more Islamic credibility than Saudi Arabia, in part because Mecca and Medina are both in Saudi Arabia.
But nevertheless, the Saudi regime is far more precarious and has more internal problems than Iran.
Why? Because it's got a lot of Saudis who don't like the regime and are fighting to overthrow it.
Turkey, of course, has also liked to be a player in the Middle East, and Turkey has been a great sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But the Muslim Brotherhood hasn't been faring all that well.
The Muslim Brotherhood actually was kicked out of Egypt.
The Muslim Brotherhood has been struggling to gain recognition in other parts of the Middle East.
And so Turkey, although it has had historical presence in the Middle East and has aspirations now, is being eclipsed by Iran, who at this point appears to be the clear leader.
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I've been watching some, only some, of the hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, and quite honestly, they're a little hard to take, in part because she's a little hard to take.
I mean, she's just annoying.
And her answers are...
Very strange. And so you're dealing with a radical woman who nevertheless puts on this kind of almost colloquial conversational tone, almost as if she's chatting with you in the corner of a street.
And I just want to focus on a couple of my favorite episodes from the most recent round.
Here's Marsha Blackburn.
Can you provide a definition of the word woman?
Now, take a break for a moment to think about this.
Ketanji Jackson is on the court because she's a woman, right?
Biden says, I'm going to choose a black woman.
So you have to be black and you have to be a woman.
So one would think that Ketanji Jackson would know what a woman is.
And... So this conversation proceeds like this.
Can you provide a definition of the word woman?
No, I can't. No, she can't.
Blackburn, you can't?
Jackson, I'm not a biologist.
She's not a biologist, so she can't provide a definition of a woman.
This is a woman who wants to be on the Supreme Court, where you deal with issues of gender equity, Title IX, the Equal Protection Clause, you know, no discrimination on the basis of race or sex.
So you'd think that knowing what a woman is is kind of a fundamental requirement for being able to adjudicate these cases.
Then let's also think about it this way.
If she needs a biologist to tell her...
What a woman is, or to make a distinction between a woman and a man, does she need an ethnologist to tell her what the distinction is between someone who's black or white?
Is it very difficult for her to tell who's black or white?
Listen, I can't say.
I would need to consult an ethnologist about this.
So, this kind of stupidity is what we're dealing with in the case of Ketanji Jackson.
I mean, it never stops. You would think that this is one case where this is not going to be a bipartisan issue.
Judge Jackson's going to crack down.
No! She actually gives very light sentences, sentences below the guidelines.
And what's interesting is her reasoning.
Here is an 18-year-old who was apparently entrapped in a kind of...
A child pornography scheme is downloading images of children as young as eight.
And now I'm quoting from Judge Jackson.
This case is different because the children in the photos and videos you collected were not much younger than you.
Hold it. We're not talking about an 18-year-old downloading some erotic pictures of a 16-year-old.
We're talking about downloading the pictures of an 8-year-old.
So, think about what she's saying.
And then she goes, this seems to be a situation in which you were fascinated by sexual images involving what were essentially your peers.
An 18-year-old is downloading pictures, nude pictures of 8-year-olds.
Oh no, that's your peer.
I mean, even if you have an 8-year-old sibling and you're 18, you don't talk to him.
So she doesn't. So, now, it becomes clear as you probe these cases that in many of these cases, you have perpetrators who are black.
And it becomes clear that what Judge Jackson is doing is trying to produce, quote, equity in sentencing.
This, by the way, is a big theme of hers.
And even though she's denied, oh, critical race theory, never really heard of it.
I don't really know what that is.
In fact, the left keeps telling us critical race theory is not taught in schools.
It's only in the law schools.
By the way, we're dealing here with a judge.
So you'd think that if it's only in the law schools, it's only part of legal theories, that Judge Jackson would be completely familiar with it and be able to state clearly what her position is on it.
So this whole thing is an exercise in pure prevarication and camouflage.
I think on top of this, you're just dealing with an individual that's kind of dumb.
And if this seems kind of surprising, I don't think it's that surprising, and here's why.
It comes right out of Biden's criterion for picking a judge, right?
And this is not about race.
It's not even about gender. Here's what it's about.
If you say, I'm going to pick someone who's black, right away you're narrowing your selection to 13% of the population.
Why? Because only 13% of the population is black.
And then if you say, I'm not just going to choose someone who's black, but a black woman, you're cutting that population in half.
So now you're down to 6.5%.
I think this helps to explain Biden's choice of a mediocrity like Ketanji Brown Jackson.
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Continuing my discussion of Guido da Montefeltro and Canto XXVII of Dante's Inferno, let's just pick up Guido's story.
And he says that all my actions, he says, in his political life, this is a Ghibelline political leader in the northern part of Italy, all my actions were not those of a lion, but those of a fox.
The wilds and covert paths, I knew them all, and so employed my art that rumor of me spread to the farthest limits of the earth.
So Guido is saying, I wasn't really the strongest guy on the battlefield, but I sort of was the cleverest.
And I became famous and successful as a very cunning political operator.
I got my way through a kind of political jujitsu.
In which I was able to use art rather than just simply brute force.
By the way, notice the similarity here to Ulysses in the earlier canto, where Ulysses too is not the strongest, that would be Ajax or Achilles, but the cunningest of all the Greek warriors.
That's how he came up with the stratagem of the Trojan horse.
Continuing with Guido, when I saw that the time of life had come for me, as it must come for every man, to lower the sails and gather in the lines.
Now again, think of how beautifully Dante is linking Guido again with Ulysses.
Remember Ulysses in his last voyage that he got all his sailors?
Yeah, come on board. So yeah, Ulysses got his sails together and went out at sea.
But Guido is saying, no, if you want to be an intelligent and prudent and truly cunning character, you've got to realize the time of life comes when you've got to pack it in.
Don't be like Ulysses.
It's time to sort of draw in the sails.
But here's what Guido means by that.
Things I once found pleasure in then grieved me.
Repentant and confessed I took the vows a monk takes.
So Guido decides, you know what, I've been kind of a cunning politician and I might have done some shady things in my life, but there's a time to draw in the sails, there's a time to repent, a time to sort of change your lifestyle, a time, you may say, to start preparing for the next life.
And so what does Guido do?
He takes the vows of a Franciscan monk.
He joins a monastery.
And then he says this, and this is truly one of my favorite lines in the entire Inferno, maybe in the entire Divine Comedy, and it's a line that requires a little bit of reflection.
Guido goes, and oh to think it could have worked.
Now... There are right away two possible meanings of this phrase.
The first one is the kind of obvious one, which is Guido says, you know what, I've kind of lived a rough life, and it's maybe time for me to cool it, maybe time for me to change my ways, maybe time for me to be genuinely penitent.
And repentance here is a key theme in this canto, the meaning of repentance.
And so Guido is saying, you know what, One way to understand this phrase is that Guido is saying, you know, I decided to become a different person.
And oh, to think it could have worked.
I might have actually been able to manage this transformation if I wasn't.
And Guido's going to go on to tell us how the Pope, in a sense, drew him out of his clerical life back into the murky world of politics and how there somehow he lost his soul.
Guido's going to go there.
But I think that there's a second possible meaning of this phrase that should not be missed.
And that is that Guido's real motive was never to repent.
Guido's real position is something more like this.
I was an extremely cunning operator as a politician.
I was very successful at doing what I did.
And then I realized as I come to a later phase in life that, you know, there might be an afterlife.
Who really knows? But there might be one.
And if there is one, I might have to find myself before God.
So I need to continue my fox-like techniques.
I need to pull a fast one on the big guy.
I need to pull a fast one on God himself.
And so what Guido is saying here is, and oh to think it could have worked.
I almost did it!
I almost fooled God!
But then Guido's going to go on to say that he was conned by, as it turns out, an even better con man than Guido himself.
Now, here we come to this beautiful irony of Dante and gets really very much to the way that Dante thinks of sin.
Guido wants to be a con man.
He operates like that.
And what happens in the end? He gets conned.
He becomes a victim of the conned.
And notice by the way, in the beginning of this section, Guido is conned even by Dante.
Not deliberately, of course, but Guido says this.
If you remember, he says to Dante, if I thought I was speaking to a soul who might someday go back to the world, Guido says, most certainly this flame would cease to flicker.
I'm not going to tell you my story if you're going to go back to the world and tell other people.
And of course, Dante is telling everyone in the Divine Comedy.
Guido thinks that only dead people can show up in hell, and therefore he's safe in fessing up and telling his story because there's no chance it's going to get out.
But of course, again, the great, sly, wily politician, the guy who reads human beings and human nature, turns out he doesn't read Dante.
He doesn't realize Dante is a pilgrim.
He's passing through.
And so Dante is going to go back and tell Guido's story.
So here we see that for Dante...
The issue is, of course, that if you do repent, your past sins are wiped out.
But does Guido, in fact, repent?
We're going to continue tomorrow in Guido's actual dealings with the Pope and come to a better understanding of this figure, Guido de Montefeltro, one of the more complex and certainly very interesting and more diabolical characters deep in the depths of Dante's Hell.
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