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March 24, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:56
THE PERFORMER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep296
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Hey, my stepson Justin turns 27 today, so Justin, wishing you a happy birthday.
Now, coming up, I'm going to talk about Ketanji Brown Jackson.
She seems to be putting on a kind of audition here, but not even so much as a Supreme Court justice.
She seems more like one of these hack performers.
Danielle D'Souza Gill is going to join me.
We're going to talk about Jackson's mentor, the radical legal activist Derek Bell.
I want to examine the strange appeal of the most controversial figure in France, and he's running for president, Eric Zemmour.
I'm also going to conclude my analysis of Guido da Montefeltro in Dante's Circle of Fraud.
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.
As I follow the hearings with Ketanji Brown-Jackson, it's got me thinking about her philosophy that the Constitution is something that is in a constant process of change.
So this is the, and I've discussed this before in the podcast, the idea of the living Constitution.
I came across a very eloquent refutation of this idea that was Given by Calvin Coolidge almost a, well, almost a century ago.
I just want to read it because it so beautifully states why the Constitution and the founding itself are not in some sense living, but are dead in the sense that they reflect enduring principles that have been put down on paper and put down on paper for a reason.
So, here we go. It's often asserted that the world has made great progress in 1776, and that we have new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern.
So, see how Coolidge appears so prescient here in talking about things that people are talking about now.
And then, says Coolidge, but that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter.
If all men are created equal, that's final.
If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that's final.
If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that's final.
No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality.
No rights of the individual.
No rule of the people.
Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress.
They are reactionary.
Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient than those of the revolutionary fathers.
And then he goes on to say,"...we live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things.
These did not create our declaration.
Our declaration created them." And this is the point to make about the founding is that it's enabled America to become the kind of country it is.
It's enabled the best of America, you might say.
And here we have Judge Ketanji Jackson, who clearly does not represent the best of America.
I mean, if you've got someone who doesn't even know if they're a woman...
How can they propose to tell you which guns should be banned?
Or which vaccines work?
Or which infants have a right to life?
Which child molesters and pedophiles should be out in the streets?
Apparently, Judge Jackson is perfectly comfortable making all those kinds of nuanced judgments.
But on a simple question, she's completely and very tellingly stumped.
Now, she's not really stumped.
She actually does know what a woman is.
But what she is, she's a pawn.
She's a pawn and she's a performer.
She's putting on a performance and it's for the people who have pushed her forward.
And who are they? They're basically the radical leftists of America.
They're people like Demand Justice, which is an influential group on the left that's fighting to pack the court.
There are people like the Arabella Advisors, the Left Wing Billionaires Network, George Soros' operations, groups like Planned Parenthood have been pushing her, the National Education Association, the Southern Poverty Law Center.
And it's because they know that this is a woman with a very spotty and mediocre record, but it's someone who is going to do their bidding.
Now, a lot of the discussion has focused on her very lenient attitude toward pedophiles and child molesters, and she's been really put on the defensive.
And I don't think it's because she's actually, you know, pro-child molestation.
What it is is she's applying the critical race theory notion of equity.
And so her point is that since a lot of these offenders are black, We can't give them severe sentences.
The real issue here is that she's willing, even with serious crimes involving children, to sort of look the other way and let the perpetrators out in order to serve this ideological theory of justice, which basically says that if blacks are 13% of the population, we've got to make sure that blacks are only 13% of people in prison.
If whites for offenses get one year in prison, it doesn't matter if blacks commit different offenses, equity demands that they kind of get the same penalties.
So this crackpot doctrine, which is not justice at all, because it's not assigning to perpetrators in proportion to what they did, that's really what the Republicans are successfully able to bring out.
We've got someone whose brain is addled with the doctrines of critical race theory, who is essentially a pawn of the far left, And she is now Biden's Trojan horse nominee for the Supreme Court.
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My daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill, is in town.
And you know Danielle. She's the author of The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America.
She's also the host of Counter Culture with Danielle D'Souza-Gill.
It's on Epic TV. And we thought we would talk a little bit about the hearings and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
I'm afraid that this is a woman who's going to probably make her way on the court.
Now, she doesn't alter the balance of the court, but she is going to be on the left.
I mean, in a group of leftists, she's going to probably occupy the The farthest position on the left.
What do you make of her statement that she couldn't even define what a woman was?
Well, I think that this just shows what Marsha Blackburn said, which is that this is how radical she really is.
She really is just a far left-wing progressive and even further than any kind of traditional progressive we would think of because she can't even acknowledge anything in the realm of feminism because she doesn't even know what a woman is.
So she's obviously solely focused in her mind on the trans issue.
But I think that, hopefully, I hope that people like Manchin, Sinema, and others will see this as she is so radical, so please send this back and bring us back a more moderate Democrat, or maybe someone who is left-wing, but she is another level of left-wing that is not acceptable.
I mean, what you're saying is that even feminism is too right-wing for her.
Feminism is too right-wing for her because she doesn't acknowledge that there's a such thing as a woman, even though she was nominated because she was a woman.
She herself is a woman, but she clearly doesn't know that, so I don't even know how she identifies herself when she's You know, marking her gender on a paper or things like that.
She doesn't know what woman is.
I think, interesting, Ted Cruz kind of had her sort of up against the wall where he goes, listen, if identifying as a woman makes me a woman, he then goes on and says, well, I'm Hispanic American.
Now, what if I identify as Asian American?
Can I sue? Do I have standing to sue a woman?
On the basis of discrimination against Asian Americans, because I identify as one.
And of course, she was a little flustered by this, because after all, if gender is a completely subjective and fluid category, why isn't that also true of race?
In fact, you could ask of Ketanji Jackson, how do you know you're black?
And I think, too, is sometimes we think in terms of race, you know, we shouldn't view race, right?
We view everyone the same.
We want things to be based on merit.
But that's not even what she was saying in terms of gender, in terms of Oh, you know, it's okay.
Like, we will treat men and women the same.
That's not even along the lines of what she was saying.
She was basically saying that womanhood doesn't exist.
She's basically stamping it out as opposed to saying people are equal.
So I think that she's mostly focused on, you know, forget women.
Forget that. The new thing isn't feminism.
It's the trans issue.
Gender is optional. Yeah.
One of our radical mentors is this professor at Harvard, now dead.
His name is Derek Bell.
He's one of the kind of gurus of critical race theory.
And I'm just going to read from Ketanji Brown Jackson.
This is from a speech he gave a few years ago.
She goes, My parents had this book on their coffee table for many years.
She's talking about Derrick Bell's faces at the bottom of the well.
And then she says, The subtitle is something like, And then she goes on to say things that she goes on to some reflections about the civil rights movement.
Now, number one, the thing that's interesting is that this book was published in 1992 when she was a student at Harvard.
That's probably how she encountered Derrick Bell.
But this whole notion that she stared at the book on the coffee table while she was growing up, it's a clear fabrication because it didn't exist when she was growing up.
Right. So this is a case where I don't know if memory plays tricks on you or if it is the case that All these race activists invent storylines which are detached from reality, and then they become somehow convinced that that's the way it was.
And so just as history for them is twisted out of recognition, their own memories are too.
Exactly. And she even has a different story about her parents that I read.
She basically said... Clarence Thomas reminds her of her parents.
So then that would mean that her parents wouldn't be reading this woke book.
They wouldn't be reading this, you know, Marxist book.
They would be more traditional people.
They would have a different view of race and so on, similar to what Clarence Thomas said.
So I don't actually know which one is true.
Maybe her parents were these woke people or maybe they were more traditional people wondering what the heck happened here.
Why is our, you know, daughter becoming woke at Harvard?
I don't know. But either way, I think they just make up whatever story works for them.
And talking about making up stories, to give you an idea of how whacked out and crazy this Derrick Bell character is, he has, in the faces at the bottom of the well, he has a story, a fictional story, science fiction.
It's called The Space Trainers.
It's actually made into a movie.
So here's the basic idea.
Invaders from outer space come to Earth, and they tell the Earthlings, we will solve all of your problems, the deficit, health, environmental problems, on one condition.
You have to agree to sell black people to us into slavery.
And Bell goes, yeah, man, you know, people struggled with this, but they decided to go for the bargain.
And so he ends the story with black people being kind of packed into these spaceships and being sent off.
Now, let me read from him.
On the dunes above the beaches stood U.S. guards.
There was no escape, no alternative.
Heads bowed, arms linked by slender chains.
Black people left the New World as their forebears had arrived.
Now, I think to myself, and I think, you know, what's going on here?
This is not just dystopian fiction.
Like, this is a reality that could happen.
I actually think it's imaginative, wishful thinking.
And by wishful thinking, I mean, these are guys who kind of want to revel in slavery.
They want to keep slavery alive.
It's the opposite of what Martin Luther King was keep hope alive.
These guys are like keep slavery alive.
And what I mean by keep slavery alive is as long as slavery is at the front and center of the American imagination, it's like pay up time for the population, right?
So the way to keep cashing in on slavery is to keep the wound in people's sight even 150 or more years later so you can continue to collect workman's compensation.
Yeah, and I think that's definitely the left's goal, and that was Obama's goal, basically reigniting racism, reigniting these kinds of flames from so many years ago and making it out like everything about you is only about your race, just to kind of make people even more infuriated, I guess, and to keep people voting for Democrats.
But then I think, like we kind of said with the gender issue, but then what is their goal with that?
Even if they want to make it so you can never escape your race, the only thing about you is your race.
This is clearly holding you back.
That's what, you know, Miss Jackson would say or whatever her pronoun would be.
But then it's like, well, then how would you view that as gender?
Why is it that that is something you've suddenly thrown in the trash?
So I think it's a real double standard.
This is an affirmative action generation we're dealing with.
If you read Derrick Bell's book, you can see this is a mediocre intellect.
How did he end up at Harvard in the first place?
Happily, Harvard denied him tenure.
And then sure enough, it's like, I'm being denied tenure because I'm black.
Even though there are plenty of other black scholars at Harvard, Orlando Patterson, Randall Kennedy at the law school, many others.
So the point is he's being denied tenure because he was mediocre.
But all these people have cashed in on race.
And in some ways, they've even cashed in on gender.
And so, as you say, it's ironic that having done that, they didn't turn around and go, gender?
What? Gender? We don't know what that is.
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Go to I talked a day or two ago about Thomas Sowell, and for me, it's sort of refreshing to do this in contrast with critical race theory.
And of course, there's a new book out on Sowell.
It's called Maverick, a biography of Thomas Sowell.
It's written by the Wall Street Journal writer.
Jason Reilly. And I've kind of been making my way through the book.
But as I do, it also flashes my mind back to my friendship with Saul over the years and the way that he has been a mentor to me.
Years ago, when I published my book, The End of Racism, this, by the way, is my most scholarly book.
If you haven't read it, it's...
A giant book, several hundred pages, 2,000 footnotes.
And the book was a little controversial because it talked about the reason why you have group differences in academic achievement and economic performance.
It attributed those differences not to race, not to biology, but to culture.
Glenn Lowry, a prominent black scholar who was at that time affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, another guy named Bob Woodson, resigned from AEI. They broke with AEI, and it was supposedly all over my horrible book.
And at that time, this was only my second book.
I was a young scholar, so it was kind of...
It was problematic for me to have these luminaries distancing themselves from AEI. It was causing problems for AEI. But to my defense rushed the greatest black living scholar in the country, Thomas Sowell, who basically said that he had read the book extremely carefully, and it was the best book on race relations written since Gunnar Mordahl's classic work, An American Dilemma, published several decades earlier.
Over the years, I got to know Sol and his wife quite well.
His wife is also an economist.
And I thought it was interesting as I would talk to them about racial discrimination.
And they would go, you know, Dinesh, when people think of race discrimination cases, they think of the sort of classic civil rights situation going back to the 50s and 60s.
A black guy and a white guy apply for a job.
The black guy is better qualified.
The white guy gets a job.
Hey, that's racial discrimination.
And they go out of 100 cases, Dinesh, today...
Only one or two are like that.
The vast majority of cases have nothing to do with that at all.
They are all based upon statistical issues of under-representation.
So a black guy applies for a job, he's actually not qualified.
He doesn't get the job.
But then he sues.
And he claims that blacks are underrepresented of this corporation.
And because blacks are, let's say, 12% of the surrounding population in San Jose, but he wasn't hired at this Silicon Valley company, they're obviously racist, they need to implement affirmative action policies.
So both Sowell and his wife said that is actually the normative, that's the normal case that is now fought out in the courts.
It really shows you that the old forms of discrimination that the civil rights movement was mobilized to fight are kind of gone.
And there are now these new invented forms of discrimination that are not only statistically bogus but they're morally bogus.
And I'm grateful to both Sowell, Thomas Sowell and his wife for drawing my attention to this fact.
Now Sowell is somebody who, if he was not a conservative, would have gotten offers from every Ivy League college.
In fact, he is far superior in intellect and in his publishing record.
Here's a guy who's written 36 books.
I mean, he's kind of a walking encyclopedia.
And the thing about his books that I find so fascinating is that although he's an economist, his books aren't just about economics.
He's well-read in literature.
He knows something about anthropology.
His examples are drawn from history.
So you have this kind of wide-ranging knowledge coming to play in his books.
Saul wasn't so much an original thinker, but what he was was a great elucidator and a great explainer.
One of his books, for example, called Knowledge and Decisions, How popularizes Friedrich Hayek's theory of knowledge?
Now, Friedrich Hayek has a very brilliant and ingenious theory of knowledge.
Essentially, the simple insight is this, that centralized authorities do not have enough information.
However, even if they have supercomputers, to figure out what's really going on at the local level.
You need decentralized decision-making because only the guy who lives at Lexington and Fifth knows what's going on at that intersection.
The hot dog vendor who's there every day at that street corner, he knows.
And Sol was very good at this kind of example.
He would take the Hayekian theory and he would show, giving example upon example, drawn from contemporary life, drawn from literature, drawn from history, showing how the Hayekian principle works, how it can be applied to a wide range of situations.
Decisions are best made at the local level.
And so I think if we look back, We'll find that this man, Thomas Sowell, has been one of the towering intellectuals of our time.
Happily, he's on our side.
And when you contrast his ideas with the shallow nostrums of critical race theory, it's embarrassing to even make the comparison.
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And who are the bad guys?
Well, they are the autocratic, the authoritarian regimes of the world.
And then there are the good guys, which are the democratic regimes in the world.
And the underlying assumption is that democracies hang together and support each other.
Autocracies hang together and support each other.
And I want to throw a little mud at this theory and at this distinction by showing that it's invalidated by actual experience.
And the experience I want to point to here is a new study that has come out of the Middle East, which is kind of an opinion survey of people who live in Middle Eastern democracies and people who live in autocratic regimes in the Middle East.
And so the autocratic regimes in the Middle East are Jordan and Egypt and Morocco, and autocratic here in the sense that they don't have free elections, they basically either have a king or some kind of a dictator or the military that's ruling the country.
And for the democratic regimes, we have countries like Lebanon and Iraq and Tunisia.
And the people in these countries, autocratic on the one hand, democratic on the other, were asked, do you want to have closer ties with America or do you want to have closer ties with Russia and China?
And here's the interesting paradox.
The citizens of the democratic countries, who would be expected to want to ally more with us, have closer economic ties with America and the West, went in the opposite direction.
And they said, no, we want to see closer ties with Russia and China, and we're less interested in developing more close ties with the United States.
This is the citizens of democratic countries like Lebanon, like Iraq, and like Tunisia.
In Tunisia, 63% of people said we want stronger ties with China.
50% said we want stronger ties with Russia.
45% said, yeah, we'd like to have ties with the United States.
But if you add up China and Russia, you discover that there's a kind of a strong majority that want to tilt in the Russo-Sino direction rather than our direction.
Now, by contrast... If you talk to citizens in autocratic Middle Eastern countries, countries like Jordan and Egypt and Morocco, you find that the poll numbers kind of reverse themselves.
So for example...
We find that in Egypt, you have people who want ties with Russia and people who want ties with China, but the numbers for ties with the United States are much higher.
In Morocco, you find that 40% want stronger ties with Russia, but 43% want stronger ties with the United States.
And so you have this interesting situation where in democratic regimes, the people there...
Are leaning to China and Russia.
Now why is that? Well, the theme of this article is because democracy has not really delivered economic welfare to these countries.
And so you look at a country like Egypt.
Now Egypt, of course, doesn't have oil in the way that Saudi Arabia does or the way that Iran does.
But even so, Egypt should be a prosperous country.
It's got an educated middle class.
And yet Egypt is kind of an economic basket case.
And so even though...
Egypt has had strong democratic trends over the past.
Now, currently, there was a military coup, and the situation is a little bit complicated.
But Iraq has had...
Iraq made a transition to democracy.
So has Lebanon. But Lebanon's an economic basket case.
Tunisia's an economic basket case.
And evidently, these countries have decided, listen, instead of getting democracy lecturers from Joe Biden or Jake Sullivan, We rather would take Chinese deals to build roads and build ports and give us loans that we can use to start businesses and try to produce economic prosperity.
The bottom line I'm trying to make is that Biden's sharp distinction of autocracy on the one hand, democracy on the other hand, does not really seem to hold in this case.
In fact, if you look at the trends, they point in the opposite direction.
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Have you heard the name Eric Zemmour?
This is the guy who is running for the presidency of France.
And he is a kind of a dark horse candidate, you'd have to say.
But he's turning out to be a magnet for the media.
It turns out that he has hidden reservoirs of support.
He's called the most controversial man in France.
And he's an intellectual.
In fact, what's kind of amusing, and you'd never see this in the United States, his commercials are basically Zemmour sitting down in his study.
He's sometimes sipping alcohol or smoking.
And he doesn't look at the camera.
So it's as if he's just talking, but not talking to you.
As if he doesn't particularly care whether you're listening or not.
He's delivering a kind of intellectual rhapsody.
And this is how he talks.
And it's the kind of language that is, I think, emotionally powerful.
And it's striking a chord in France.
Here is Zemmour. You walk down your streets and your towns and you don't recognize them.
You look at your screens and they speak to you in a language that is strange and in the end foreign.
You remember the country of your childhood?
You remember the country that your parents told you about?
You remember the country found in films and books?
The country of Joan of Arc and Louis XIV? The country of Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle?
The country of knights and ladies of Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand?
The country of Pascal and Descartes?
Your children are homesick without ever knowing...
Without ever having known that this country that you cherish is disappearing.
France is no longer France, and everyone sees it.
And by the way, while Zemmour is delivering this sort of sophisticated diatribe, he has Beethoven playing in the background.
By the way, it's not French.
This is Beethoven's Allegretto.
I'm a cosmopolitan, I'm a westerner, but I want to defend a certain view of old France that is being wiped out by the elitists in France, by the left.
That is sort of bringing in new people to permanently transform France.
And you can see why I'm talking about all this as a kind of a resonance in what Zamor is saying even in this country.
Now, you know, there's a presidential election going on in France and you think there's debates about the retirement age and negotiation with public transport unions or the public safety net.
Zamor doesn't talk about any of this.
His topics are what the French media calls the four I's.
Immigration, identity, insecurity, and Islam.
That's what he talks about.
And his declared aim?
Make the French once again feel at home.
Now, what's really interesting about all this is that even though this is supposed to be very far out and very right-wing and, you know, borderline racist, the funny thing is that as the campaign has gone on, the other candidates in the race are now starting to sound more like Zamor.
And I don't just mean people who are in the opposition party.
Let's look at Emmanuel Macron.
This is, of course, the incumbent.
Suddenly, he talks about the fact that the woke sensibility that's coming to France needs to be dismissed and suppressed.
He also says that France is in a culture war.
He talks about the fact that there's a kind of alliance between radical Islam and the left.
And Macron's biographer has said that Macron is even worried about the, quote, great replacement in which the actual demographic composition of France is being deliberately changed and essentially France is becoming a sort of, at least in appearance, a third world country.
The French intellectuals are all over this, by the way, and most notably a guy named Michel Houlebecq, who in his 2015 novel, which was called Submission, very interesting novel about this kind of atheist, alcoholic, intellectual Frenchman who fights against an emerging Islamic current that's coming into France, and eventually he gets defeated by it.
He gets beaten down, and he even converts to Islam in the end.
Now, Hulabek's point is not that Islam is bad and France is good.
Hulebek's point is actually in some ways to contrast the kind of devotional fanaticism and piety of Islam on the one hand with a kind of relativist, indifferent French intellectual tradition that doesn't really believe in anything anymore.
And that the French, Hulebek is suggesting, are so desperate for a set of enduring values, they apparently no longer find refuge in the Christian values that built their civilization, that even Islam comes as a kind of relief, even Islam supplies some kind of certainty, even though the certainty may be unbelievable, may be remote, may be alien.
Nevertheless, it's better than the kind of relativism that the French are sort of living through now.
So France is, in a sense, having, I think in a fairly sophisticated and interesting way, a debate over what does it mean to be French.
And those debates, although conducted in the French language and with a distinct French accent, have some meaning and some resonance for us over here.
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Feel the difference. I've talked the last few days about this extension of cancel culture now to all things Russian.
And it seems like every day I find something that takes this to a newer and even more inane level.
Here's an article in the New York Times.
I saw this on social media today.
I'm just going to read the headline because it says it all.
An oak tree in Russia, said to have been planted 198 years ago by the novelist Ivan Turgenev, I've talked about Turgenev in my series on Russian literature, was disqualified from the European Tree of the Year competition over the country's invasion of Ukraine.
Even trees have become political now.
A 400-year-old oak tree in Poland has been awarded the top spot.
What kind of madness is this?
And I'm getting a little disturbed because, of course, my favorite hobby is chess, and I'm discovering I go on chess.com, I play people, usually people from all over the world, who are, I mean, I'm no grandmaster, but these are people who are, you know, good players, and it's fun to play people of your own level.
I play these blitz games that are five minutes apiece.
But suddenly I read on chess.com that all kinds of Russian players...
are being canceled and are being denied participation in chess tournaments.
Why? Evidently because they don't disavow Russia.
They don't disavow Putin.
Now, the latest example is a guy named Sergei Karyakin.
This guy is one of the top probably 10 players in the world.
He played against the world champion Magnus Carlsen, lost very narrowly.
And so Karyakin is getting ready to play In a big tournament, he plays a bunch of matches to qualify for the tournament.
He does qualify for the tournament.
And then a committee of the International Chess Federation, it's called FIDE, which is, by the way, made up of some guy from Guyana, some guy from India, some guy from Sweden.
They all decide, well, you know what?
This guy's Russian.
He's been making some statements in favor of Russia.
Let's kick him out of the tournament.
Now, interestingly, there are other Russian players who are not kicked out, and these are Russian players who, in some cases, have made statements against the war.
But in one case, there was a guy who also made statements in favor of Russia, but they decided, we don't need to kick him out because he doesn't have as big a reputation in chess as this Karyakin guy.
So, in other words, this has nothing to do even with what you said.
It has to do with whether or not people are listening to you and whether or not you have an audience.
And I want to read from the FIDE rules about this and their reason for excluding this guy because you can hear the Orwellian accents.
And, of course, what makes all of this so ironic is it's all in the name of fighting authoritarianism.
In the name of fighting authoritarianism, we're going to outdo the authoritarians.
We're going to take subjects like a tree contest or someone singing at the Met or someone teaching Dostoevsky, subjects completely remote from Putin, and we're going to nevertheless enforce this Orwellian code.
The statements by Sergei Karyakin on the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine has led to a considerable number of reactions on social media and elsewhere to a large extent negative toward the opinions expressed by Karyakin.
And then they go, Is that the statements have reached the public domain.
So in other words, the fact that Karyakin is posting them on his social media, and they're claiming that his statements, quote, damaged the reputation of the game of chess and FIDE. So in other words, you've got this International Chess Association, and evidently if you're a chess player, and you make statements of your own views on social media, and what are the statements that we're making?
I mean, here is Karyakin, and all that the guy says...
First of all, I'm a patriot of my country and only secondarily an athlete.
And then he says he supports the president of Russia, he supports the people of Russia, and he supports the Russian army.
Now, this is by and large what people of every country do when their country is involved in some kind of foreign conflict.
They support the president, they support the country, they support the army.
Notice that in America, when there were American expeditions abroad, it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree, A lot of people say, well, you know, I don't really agree with the Afghan war.
I don't really agree with the Iraq war.
But I support the troops.
Or, but I support the president.
I want the president to succeed.
And so you've got this kind of statement of what I would call benign nationalistic sentiment.
Sentiment that you'd find in every single country in the world when that country is involved in some sort of conflict.
If India were to invade Pakistan tomorrow, I guarantee you 9 out of 10 Indians, well, probably all 10, but close to 10, are going to say...
I support the president.
I support the country.
I support the Indian army.
You'd have to go far and wide to find an Indian who didn't have that view.
And that's Kariakian's view.
But it's a view he's just expressing on social media, mainly as a professional chess player.
And so it's the intolerance here that kind of gets to me and the fact that we are mobilizing these kind of institutions, institutions that deal, as we see here, with trees and with chess.
To take political positions and enforce them through a draconian code.
It just strikes me as a sentiment that is deeply illiberal.
And in condemning authoritarianism in the case of Putin and Russia, as we should, we don't want to start resembling those authoritarians ourselves.
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I am going to conclude today my discussion of Guido da Montefeltro in Canto 27 of Dante's Inferno, where we left off Guido, a Ghibelline politician, a crafty, individual, self-described fox.
Has given up his armaments and he has taken up the garb of a Franciscan friar.
And he's hoping, as I mentioned last time, to sort of pull a fast one on God.
But from his own point of view, he's not doing that.
He says, I was trying to repent.
And he goes, but then I was conned by someone even craftier than I am.
And who is that?
The Pope! Pope Boniface VIII. So let's pick it up right here.
And he says that he asked me to advise him.
This is the Pope asking Guido to advise him.
And Guido says, I was silent for his words were drunken.
So the Pope is asking him to do something really out there, really crazy, really bad.
And Guido is like, you know what?
I don't want to do it.
I'm not in the political business anymore.
I'm not in the dirty tricks business.
I used to be, but I'm now kind of in the friar business.
Here's Guido. He says, then he spoke again.
The Pope spoke again to him. What does the Pope say?
Fear not, I tell you.
The sin you will commit, it is forgiven.
Now you will teach me how I can level Palestrina to the ground.
Wow. So here's the Pope.
He's telling Guido, I want to level this city called Palestrina.
We'll get to why in a moment.
And you can help me to do it.
And it's going to take some dirty tricks and some bad tactics.
And you're going to have to commit some sins in advising me how to do it.
But don't worry, because I'm the Pope.
I have the power to forgive sins.
And so I can wipe out your sin before you even commit it.
Let's continue. Mine is the power, this is the Pope talking, as you cannot deny, to lock and unlock heaven.
Two keys I have, those keys my predecessor did not cherish.
So the predecessor wasn't smart enough to know that this Pope, Boniface VIII, can actually lock and unlock the gates of heaven.
And so he goes, I'm going to use that power.
I'm going to sort of absolve you in advance of what you're about to do.
And then says Guido, he goes, and when his weighty arguments had forced me to the point that silence seemed the poorer choice.
So Guido now is kind of being talked into it.
Now let's back up here for a moment and talk about what's going on here.
So Boniface VIII controls and rules, like a king, the middle part of Italy.
And he rules it not only in the spiritual sense, but in the actual sense.
He rules it with troops.
He is the actual governor of that part of Italy.
And he has opposition, though.
There are powerful families in Middle Italy that are opposed to Boniface VIII. These are families that themselves have high church offices.
Some of their members of those families have become popes.
And one of those families was called the Colonna family.
So here you have Boniface.
He's opposed to the Colonna family.
And he wants to attack them.
I mean, think about this. This is a pope mobilizing troops to attack fellow Christians.
And so the Kelowna family flees, and they go to a place called Palestrina, which is up on a hill, and they're up in their castle there.
And even though you bring troops, you can't get up there.
You can't get to the castle.
So the pope needs a devious strategy to get those people out of the castle, and this is why he's turning to Guido for help.
And Guido apparently goes for it.
And think of it. Guido says his weighty arguments.
What's the weighty argument? The weighty argument evidently is the Pope's promise that if you do this for me, I'll forgive you in advance.
Apparently Guido finds this weighty.
It's in fact not weighty for the simple reason that Dante wants us to be able to see this, that the Pope doesn't actually have this kind of power.
Now, Dante is a Guelph.
He's on the party that's actually on the side of the papacy.
But Dante's point is that the Pope is the spiritual head of the church in this world.
And so the Pope does have certain types of power.
He can excommunicate you, which is to exclude you from the community of Christians in this world.
But over the power of heaven and hell?
No, the Pope doesn't have that kind of power.
Only God has that kind of power.
And yet, here is the Pope abusing his office, and here's Guido falling for it.
Now, we come to the kind of astounding climax of this canto.
And this is Guido talking.
St. Francis came to get me when I died.
So Guido does advise the Pope.
What does he advise the Pope to do?
He advises the Pope to go, to send him, Guido, to the Kelowna family and tell them that the Pope is offering them an armistice, a A truce, a peace.
Come out of your castle. We're going to make a deal.
And then when the Colonna family comes out of the castle, what happens?
They get attacked. They get blown up.
Palestrina is leveled to the ground.
So complete deceit. Essentially, Guido teaches, tells the Pope, I'll be your man to con, to pretend to be your emissary to these guys.
And then I'll sucker them into coming out of the castle.
Then we'll pulverize them when they do.
So this is what actually happens.
Guido dies. And being a Franciscan friar, he goes back to being a friar.
Francis, naturally, the founder of the Franciscan order, apparently comes down to take a look.
And then this is what happens.
But one of the black cherubim, one of the devils, cries out, Don't touch him!
Don't cheat me out of what is mine!
So the devil says, Guido's mine!
You can't have him! He must come down and join my other servants for the false counsel he gave.
From then to now I've been waiting for him because one cannot be absolved unless repentant, nor can one both repent and will a thing at once.
The one is canceled by the other.
So, What's going on here is that the demon, the devil, is making a theological argument.
The devil is basically saying to Francis, listen, you can't have this guy.
Why? True, he said that he repented, but you cannot repent in advance for something that you're about to do.
One cancels out the other.
Your repentance can't be sincere.
Repentance means I did it.
I didn't mean to do it. I'm really sorry I did it.
If I could do it again, I would not do it.
But obviously with Guido, this was all done in a very sneaky way.
Guido wasn't really sorry.
He merely went through that ritual in order to kind of get his way into heaven.
And so the devil is saying, you know, no, that doesn't really work.
So think of the amazing situation you have here.
You have basically... Three people.
You have the Pope, you have a Franciscan friar, Guido, and you have the devil.
And my question to you is, who is the best theologian of the three?
Turns out, the devil, hands down.
Why? Because the devil is making the unassailable point that there is such a thing as repentance, and repentance does get you into heaven, but how can you repent for something in advance of doing it?
Obviously, the repentance is fake.
It's insincere.
And then the devil says, and the devil you can see here has a sense of humor, he goes, Guido says, oh wretched me how I shook when the devil took me saying to me, perhaps you never stopped to think that I might be something of a logician.
So the devil is now telling Guido, I think I've got kind of a watertight argument for why you've got to go with me.
And then he drags Guido down into hell.
The creature named Minos assigns, he swirls his tail, and Guido ends up in the eighth circle, here in the circle of fraud.
He's encased in a flame in grievous pain.
And then, twisting and flickering and gnarling, Guido departs, and Dante and Virgil make their way, I wouldn't say onward, but I should say further downward.
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