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March 28, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:48
REGIME CHANGE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep298
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Putin wants regime change in Ukraine, and Biden wants regime change in Russia, which raises the question, what about lawful regime change in America?
The left desperately wants New York to file criminal charges against Trump, and I think we all know exactly why.
Biden has a new tax proposal, but it has a very old, tediously familiar ring to it.
Missy Robertson, the star of the popular family-focused TV show Doc Dynasty, is going to join me.
We're going to talk about her new children's book, and I'll continue my discussion of Ugo Lino deep in the depths of Dante's hell.
This is the Dimestious Who's the Podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
In the kind of a one step forward, one step back manner that has now come to characterize, if not define the Biden administration.
Biden says that he wants regime change in Russia, and then the White House clarifies that he doesn't.
So, this all started when Biden was giving a talk to some of the troops, and he says that Putin, quote, cannot remain in power, end quote.
So, the implication could not have been more clear that it's going to be part of U.S. policy to get Putin out.
Now, let's remember that this is actually consistent with things that, for example, Lindsey Graham said earlier.
Several weeks ago, when Graham, in effect, said, listen, isn't there somebody who's going to sort of rise up?
Now, in Graham's case, he was talking about somebody in Russia.
But Biden's implication was somehow that it would be a strategy of the United States to be working, perhaps with other generals, other figures in Russia, to oust Putin.
Now, needless to say, this is a very dangerous and provocative thing to be saying from the leader of America to a nuclear tipped adversary.
If Putin were to think that his own existence in power and probably his own life were somehow jeopardized by what the U.S. is plotting against him, think about how he might react to that.
So the United States, I think, It's completely one thing to say, all right, we're going to try to have regime change in Iraq.
We're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
And of course, under Bush, we did.
Or that we're going to have regime change in Libya, as we did under Obama.
And we're going to get rid of Gaddafi.
And that did happen.
But it's a whole different matter to say this about the Soviet Union, just as it would be a whole different matter to say this about China.
So here's an unbelievably reckless and irresponsible statement by Biden.
And the White House, however, instead of talking to Biden and having Biden go out himself and clarify.
And clarify here, let's be clear what we mean by this.
Clarify doesn't mean that Biden said something he didn't mean.
He actually did mean it. We're good to go.
For regime change in Russia.
So this is like Biden says A, and then Blinken says not A. And this is another way of saying, I think, that Biden's not really in charge.
Biden says what he thinks, and then the rest of them tell him, that's not what you think.
Meaning, they're the ones deciding.
And think about it, who's the they?
The ones deciding haven't gotten one vote from the American people.
These are appointees.
and yet they very clearly are driving Biden and not the other way around.
So, Putin continues to execute his plan in the Ukraine.
And look, to me, the kind of interesting conclusion from all this is that here you have Putin, he wants regime change in Ukraine, and then you have Biden, he wants and then doesn't want, but maybe secretly wants regime change in Russia.
And the question I want to leave you with is, what about regime change in America?
I think all of us, in fact, a majority of the American people, according to most polls, would like to see Biden out of there.
They don't really believe he's doing a good job either on foreign policy or on the economy.
Now, we're obviously not talking about, we're talking about lawful, electoral regime change brought about through the democratic process.
But I think That's the kind of regime change that I, and probably you, and most certainly most Americans, are wishing for.
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But make sure to use promo code DINESHDINESH. The left has been desperately hoping that they can somehow get the Manhattan District Attorney.
To criminally indict Donald Trump.
Now, the motive for this couldn't be more clear.
It's not even quite so much that they want to lock Trump up, although they would love to do that because he, to them, represents the kind of acme of villainy.
So they would love to see him behind bars.
But their real goal... Their sort of proximate objective is to prevent Trump from running again.
If Trump is under criminal indictment, he'd have to defend himself.
There'd be a cloud over Trump.
He'd be dealing with this nonstop.
And the chances of him being able to mount an effective campaign in 2024 would certainly be reduced, if he could at all.
But the plans of the left have gotten a kind of setback because the Manhattan District Attorney, a guy named Alvin Bragg, reviewed the evidence produced by this whole team of prosecutors, a team headed by a guy named Mark Pomerantz and another guy named Kerry Dunn.
And he looked at it and he goes, eh, there's not enough here.
And I think, in particular, they can't get witnesses to testify against Trump.
They've been desperately trying to get people within the Trump organization to sort of spill the beans or sort of rat Trump out or somehow point the finger of blame at Trump.
But Trump inspires so much professional loyalty within his organization that they have sort of struck out again and again and again.
And so, nevertheless...
The prosecutors, Pomerantz and Dunn, begged Bragg to go ahead.
And they said that, quote, this is something that has to be not just done, but done now.
And in fact, kind of amusingly, Pomerantz goes with it.
As time passes, the case kind of begins to weaken, and the chances of being able to bring it off go down.
So it's almost like they're saying they have a window of opportunity, we've got to move.
And Bragg's like, no, there's no there there.
There's not enough to make an indictment.
And of course, there are huge implications to indicting a former president.
And so disappointed, and in fact, frustrated and exasperated at Bragg's refusal to go forward, Mark Pomerantz and Kerry Dunn resigned.
And in resigning, they basically almost, you can say, shut the case down.
And not shut it down entirely in that Bragg, the Manhattan DA, says an investigation is ongoing.
But Pomerantz recently released his resignation letter, one of those self-justifying, you know, I'm the martyr, I worked so hard to bring this about, one of these kind of embarrassing-to-read type of documents.
But the main thrust of it is that...
I believe your decision, he's talking to Bragg, not to prosecute Trump now and on the existing record is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest.
The public interest here is supposedly that Trump never be able to run again.
Pomerantz says that he believes Trump is, quote, guilty of numerous felony violations.
And he goes on to say that Trump has, quote, a long history of fabricating information, lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people.
So apparently, I think this refers to a statement Trump once made, estimating his own net worth.
I believe Forbes magazine had put Trump's net worth at a billion or two billion, and Trump was like, no, it's a lot more than that.
In part, drawing upon the estimated value of the Trump brand, which, of course, is obviously somewhat subjective and is obviously worth a lot.
Can you imagine the name recognition, for example, worldwide?
Trump is probably the most famous name in the world.
Now, Trump himself has issued a sort of petulant and dismissive, very Trumpian statement, a radical left lawyer who works with Chuck Schumer's brother at a Democratic law firm.
He points out that the firm represents the DNC, is Hillary Clinton's law firm, has politicized our justice system.
And he basically goes...
Why don't you guys get back to solving the skyrocketing crime problem in New York instead of going after me?
Well, the answer, of course, is the Democrats don't care about the crime problem.
In fact, they're, in some cases, kind of on the side of the criminals.
But there is one particular guy that they do want to put into their criminal crosshairs, and that is Trump himself.
I think this is happening at a time when the Democrats are very aware that Biden's poll ratings are hemorrhaging.
People are beginning to recognize what a fool is in the Oval Office.
And this naturally is going to produce some buyer's remorse.
Hey, you know what? I wonder if we should have voted for the other guy.
and the anticipation that maybe it's better to have Trump back, back in the White House.
And so the left is desperate to avoid this.
And so what are they trying to do here?
What they're trying to do is create a criminal atmosphere in order to prevent the American people having a say in 2024 about who they want to be their next president.
They want to take Trump off the eligibility list.
And this is a whole elaborate scheme, and evidently a scheme that at least to this date, the Manhattan DA is not willing to go along with to achieve that nefarious objective.
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Biden's last big economic initiative, the Build Back Better trillion-dollar boondoggle, burned out like a falling star.
And not entirely surprisingly, the Biden administration has cooked up a new tax proposal.
Now, this tax proposal is interesting in that it seems to include a component of a wealth tax.
What's a wealth tax?
Well, a wealth tax should be distinguished from an income tax.
In an income tax, you're taxed on the money that you earn in a given year.
And in a wealth tax, you are taxed on what you own.
You're taxed on what you have.
Now, Biden isn't proposing exactly that people, in this case, rich people, The New York Times says billionaires.
Here's the title of the New York Times article.
Biden to Include Minimum Tax on Billionaires in Budget Proposal.
But the article is contradicted by the second paragraph, which I'm now going to read.
Indeed, the tax would require that American households worth more than $100 million pay a rate of at least 20% on their income, as well as unrealized gains in the value of their liquid assets, such as stocks and bonds, which can accumulate value for years, but are taxed only when they are sold.
Now, first of all, somebody who makes $100 million, somebody who's worth $100 million, is not a billionaire.
It's time to just lay out what a billionaire is.
So we all know what a million dollars is.
It's one with six zeros.
A thousand million makes a billion.
A hundred million is one-tenth of a billion.
So, the New York Times apparently doesn't know the difference.
So, you got this writer, Zolan Kano-Youngs.
Zolan Kano-Youngs has no idea that a hundred million is one-tenth.
So, he goes, Biden to include minimum tax on billionaires.
It's to fortify the democratic rhetoric.
We're going after the billionaires.
They can't really say we're going after the millionaires.
Because too many American families, including a lot of Democratic families, are millionaires, including, by the way, families like Bernie Sanders.
Now, what is interesting here is that this wealth tax, and I'll talk about in what sense it is a wealth tax, picks up from people like...
Senator Ron Wyden, the Democrat of Oregon, or Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, they've been pushing some form of a wealth tax for years.
Now, in Elizabeth Warren's case, she just wants to take these very wealthy Americans and take their net worth and charge them 1% or 2% on the total every year.
So this is truly a kind of wealth tax in the classic sense.
It's kind of adding up your assets, and let's say your assets are worth $300 million, you would then pay $3 million or maybe $6 million if you go to 2% per year just for having it, just for having all that dough.
Now, Biden's proposal is not that.
It's not just a tax wealth across the board, but rather it zooms in on stocks and bonds and Those of you who have assets in the stock market, investments in the stock market, know that if you buy a stock, let's say an Apple stock or any other type of a stock, and the stock goes up 10 or 20 percent, and you don't sell it, you hang on to the stock.
You don't pay taxes on it right away.
Even though the paper value of your money has gone up, When you sell it, then you have to calculate your gains and you pay taxes on that income.
Why? Because you've actually taken it out as income.
And so Biden is zooming into this.
He's basically saying that, listen, if your assets go up, your investments, your stocks and bonds go up in value...
Your net worth has gone up, even if you haven't cashed out, even if you haven't sold that stock.
So you need to pay a tax on that accumulated depreciation.
But of course, part of what happens here is that stocks go up and stocks go down.
So a stock may go up 20% and you haven't sold it.
And the next year, it goes down 20%.
So you're right back to where you were before.
And yet, under Biden's proposal, you would pay taxes on the stock going up.
Obviously, you wouldn't pay taxes, but you wouldn't get any of that money back if the stock goes back down.
So you can kind of see the unfairness of it here.
So look, I'm not going to be, you know...
Particularly in an age when a lot of these billionaires are leftists.
They're deploying their money to support the woke culture of the left.
I'm not exactly sympathetic to these characters.
And so any effort to raid their wealth on the part of the Democrats, it's like, listen, you voted for these guys.
If they're going to go after you, you have sort of made your own bed.
You lie in it. So I'm not speaking out of political sympathy for these scoundrels.
They're actually on the wrong side.
We don't need to sort of be crying over billionaires spending their spilt milk over Oh, the guy to pay an additional 7%.
Who cares?
But the point I want to make here is that it is a...
What we find with these taxes, they always start...
Let's start by going after the...
In this case, again, not billionaires, but centi-millionaires...
Then let's go down to the millionaires.
Then let's go down to people who make over $250,000 a year.
So what you find is that with the Democrats, there's a kind of, let's call it, tax creep.
And it's a tax creep that creeps downward, starting by targeting the very rich, then the somewhat rich, then the merely well-off, and pretty soon it's every single person who earns a dollar in the country.
So I'm not in favor of tax creep, and I'm not exactly in favor of the creep in the White House who's proposing it either.
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Feel the difference. Guys, I'm really pleased to welcome to the podcast Missy Robertson.
She's the co-star of the hit series Duck Dynasty.
And she's also a mom of four, wife to Jace Robertson, a brand new grandmom.
But we're here to talk about a children's book that she has written, which is called Because You're My Family.
It's published by Brave Books.
Missy, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Yes, thank you for having me.
For sure. Let's start by just talking a little bit about...
I think one of the great appeals of Duck Dynasty was the very powerful sense of family and not just immediate family, but almost extended family that came through on the show.
Will you talk a little bit about why family is important to you and how you were also able to convey those values through the show?
Well, I think that just happened basically in my life.
My parents actually moved me when I was three months old away from the only family they knew for a job.
My dad was a preacher and took a job at a local church that we still are members of.
So we moved away from family and did not have very much growing up.
And then I met the Robertson family when I was a teenager.
And they just, there were four boys, and one was already married.
Alan was already married to Lisa.
And so just having that larger family already available to you.
I had an automatic sister-in-law.
And then, of course, having the children.
It really was just a natural progression of family, adding more and more and more.
And then As most people are aware, just less than two years ago, we found out that Phil had another daughter.
So I had another sister-in-law out there.
And so the family part of it is a natural thing that the Lord created.
He created family.
He created the hierarchy of family.
But what we do sometimes as people, we're flawed and we make mistakes.
And that unconditional love of family is usually not there.
At times, sometimes problems get too hard or too rough for us to be able to handle or for us to be able to forgive.
And so the breakdown of the family then starts to happen.
So I can honestly say within my family and the Robertson family, forgiveness has to be there.
Without forgiveness, there's no way that we could be able to heal those relationships and forgive those flaws.
And so family is very important.
And it also means that you have to be able to surrender yourself.
And admit that you've made mistakes.
So there's a lot that goes into family because there's a lot that goes into relationships.
But family is very, very important and it takes a lot of work.
But the blessings are abundant.
I mean, it's interesting how there's been such a degree of family deterioration or family breakdown, not just in America, but in Western culture more generally.
And it seems that taking family as an indispensable institution, as you say, is key to making it work.
The families are flawed. There sometimes are sources of conflict that arise within families, not just between spouses, but sometimes between parents and children.
I think what you're saying is that this is something that is kind of given to us as something natural, as almost a kind of a gift, and it's something we should cherish.
Bye.
Absolutely. The Lord created it.
He has his own family.
He's the father. He has a son.
He has a counselor that he left with us when Jesus went back to heaven.
And so he has that comfort.
Moms are a lot of that comfort within a family.
This was not something that just happened to expand the universe.
It was actually very detailed in terms of the design of The whole thing goes back to love.
The Lord did this for us because He loved us.
He wants to create an environment for us to love each other.
The whole mirror image of the Father and the Son with us, we should be able to do that with each other and within our family.
But we can't sometimes because we're human.
So that's why it's so important that you may be thinking or your viewers may be thinking, My family is nowhere near anything that what Missy's talking about, you know, the love and forgiveness and mercy and kindness and compassion.
It's just not there.
But you can start.
It can take one person.
You can start it maybe with you and your spouse.
Maybe you don't have a spouse. Maybe you were left with a child.
Start it with your child.
All it takes is just one person at a time with those fundamental values of love and Kindness, forgiveness, patience.
It's all of the things that we want to receive from people, but sometimes we're not willing to give back to them.
But if it starts with us, then the lives around us will change.
Missy, you've teamed up with Brave Books, and you can find Brave Books, by the way, at bravebooks.us.
And you've written this charming book.
It's a picture book.
It's called Because You're My Family.
And it kind of mirrors and illustrates some of the themes that you've been talking about.
So can you give us a little preview of what the story of the book is about, and what is the lesson that children will take from it?
It's one book in a series of books, actually.
It's number nine in a series of books from Brave Books.
So if you started from the beginning, you've kind of learned about the characters that you will find in my book.
But Little Valor is a tiger.
And in a previous book, he was adopted by his lion parents.
And so it's a beautiful story about adoption.
And a lot of people can relate to that.
But then also the love that is shown in this book.
Little Valor goes and makes mistakes.
He disobeys his mother and then he hides because he's afraid to get in trouble.
He's disappointed. He knows that he's disappointed his parents.
But what the parents do is sacrifice their own health and well-being to go look for him in a storm.
The disobedience is forgotten at the moment because he is far more important than what he did.
And so when they come back home, they find him, they bring him back home in the warmth of the kitchen and And in the fireplace, and my favorite line of the book, I'll read it.
Valor says, Daddy, why did you save me when all I've done today is pout and disobey?
And the father says, I love you because I don't love you because you obey me.
I love you because you're my son, and nothing can change that.
That's the value in this book that we want to teach our children.
That yes, they're going to disappoint us.
We expect them that they're going to disobey.
We would rather them not. But when they do disobey, sometimes I can speak from my own experience with a high octane children that you get caught up in just the discipline and the punishment and the over and over.
It seems like you just say the same things every day, all day long.
And we forget to stop and say, I know you've disappointed me.
You have disobeyed me.
However, I love you and I'm never going to stop loving you.
There's nothing you can ever do that will stop my love for you.
And I wish I would have done that more to my younger children for sure.
But if we can start right there in our homes with this book, and it's a beautiful book, by the way.
The illustrations are amazing, and it will keep your children's attention.
So to learn that value of unconditional love, the children then in this story can learn how to return that love to their parents and even ones outside their home.
And there's activities in the back of the book.
There are questions.
There are gains. So you can actually make this like a little project for your family.
It seems to me really important that these kinds of values, which sometimes don't come out of our mainstream culture, are created and promulgated.
So, you know, I'm delighted Brave Books is doing this.
To be honest, they've approached Debbie and me about doing a book together, so we're thrilled to be partnering with them a little bit.
A little bit down the road.
But this is exciting.
The book is called, it's the children's book.
It's called Because You're My Family.
It's by Missy Robertson.
Guys, check it out. Missy, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Thank you so much, Nesh.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code BALANCE. It is sometimes said of history that we need to remember the lessons of history, because if we don't, they will be repeated to our great regret.
And I want to talk about the history not of the American Civil War, which I'm very interested in and talk about a lot, but of the Spanish Civil War.
Now, The reason I'm doing that, I'll do this for the next couple of segments, is because you'll see that it has kind of an uncanny bearing on some of the issues that we're dealing with today.
We have to remember, of course, that we're dealing with Spain, a different country, displaced from us not only in space but in time.
Why? Because the Spanish Civil War was in the early part of the last century.
So circumstances are different, but there also are some...
I think very telling parallels.
Now, most of us, most people in America and even educated people don't know a whole lot about the Spanish Civil War.
It is part of the mythology of the left.
Orwell writes a lot about the Spanish Civil War, for example.
And the general storyline is that Spain was, the Spanish Civil War was the result of a fascist named Francisco Franco.
Usurping power from a democratically elected left.
And this is the mythology of the Spanish Civil War, and it's been debunked by a number of excellent studies and books.
And I just want to dive a little deeper into the into what happened in Spain because I think it ties in with some of the tensions and conflicts we're having in our society now.
It's sometimes said that democratic regimes are not by themselves susceptible to internal destruction and revolution.
Now, we know from the Civil War in America that you can have A massive conflict, and there was one in this country, over the issue of secession.
Historically, civil wars have occurred not over secession, but over succession.
In other words, a king, for example, has two sons.
They both claim to be heirs to the throne, and then you have a civil war, or going back, for example, to ancient Rome.
You have a civil war between rival factions that want to seize power and take over the country.
Now, what happened in Spain was that a revolutionary sensibility began to develop On the political left.
And this seems a little bit odd because, traditionally, it is believed that revolutionary sentiment comes out of some tremendous military or economic stress.
And so, for example, there were revolutionary sentiments in other parts of Europe in the aftermath of World War I. We know about the revolutionary sentiments in Germany and Italy that developed and led to World War II. But interestingly, Spain had a pretty long liberal and parliamentary and democratic tradition that stretched pretty far back into the 19th century.
Moreover, Spain was sort of very peripherally involved in World War I, and the damage suffered economically due to the depression in Spain was pretty contained, pretty limited, much less than in other countries, including the United States.
So interestingly, the Spanish brought revolution on themselves.
It was due to a rise of revolutionary sentiment That quickly became violent within Spanish society.
And one of the interesting things to say about revolutionary sentiment is it is politically contagious.
And by that I mean it might begin on one side, but if that side begins to sort of escalate and get away with it, the other side at some point will inevitably respond.
This is exactly what happens in Spain today.
There's a very poignant and, I think, instructive phrase by the writer Joseph de Maestra, and he says, the counter-revolution is not the opposite of a revolution, but is an opposing revolution.
What he's saying is that we think there's revolution, and then we think there's kind of something else called counter-revolution.
But he goes, no, the counter-revolution is itself a revolution.
And his point is that if the revolution intends to remake society from the ground up, The counter-revolution cannot avoid doing so, too.
And so, essentially, the maestro's point is that once you have this revolutionary sentiment that has baked itself into society, you're going to end up with a new society one way or the other.
You don't know if it's going to be a new society of the left or of the right, but the old society, the old Spain, or in perhaps our case, the old United States, is sort of gone forever.
Now, What happened in Spain was that the socialists began to attack the parliamentary system and say that it was rigged against them.
They began to say this, especially after the 1933 election, in which a left-wing coalition was just defeated straight out by the right-wing party, which was called CEDA. It's the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights.
They won the CEDA, Group 1, the 1933 election.
So what does the left do?
They basically go, we refuse to accept the result.
And the president of the Spanish Republic, a guy named Zamora, Alcala Zamora.
He takes it upon himself to conclude that, you know what, I really don't think we can have the right run the country.
It's almost like the right is disqualified from democratic rule simply by virtue of being the right.
So this shows you how the culture in Spain had become infected with the nostrums of the left.
They were able to portray the successful elected right-wing party as ineligible to rule.
And so what does Zamora do?
He realized, I can't give control of the government to the losers.
So he said, let me pick a third party.
Let me create myself a centrist coalition that includes some elements on the right.
So what you have here is almost a usurpation in which Zamora decides that he will ordain a centrist government.
That will bring the sides together.
And the right, of course, doesn't, in this case, have a lot of choice, so they grumpily go along with this.
And the result of it is that you now have essentially an illegitimate force that did not win a democratic majority ruling the country.
Now, what happens is that the left now turns from attacking the right, which they were doing, now turns to attacking the center.
And when we come back, I'm going to explore how this cycle of violence initiated by the left at a certain point begins to escalate and becomes now picked up on the right.
And that's how you get the Spanish Civil War.
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I'm continuing my examination of the Spanish Civil War, mostly because I'm trying to draw parallels that we can think about for our own time.
And when I left off, a centrist government is ruling Spain but is being attacked by the left as being illegitimate.
Now, the left contests the 1936 election, which occurs three years later.
After the 1933 elections.
And the left wins.
But this is an election that is marred by all kinds of improprieties.
Again, sound familiar?
What you have are last-minute changes to election laws that gave the left disproportionate influence.
They even created a kind of electoral commission to review any disputed districts.
And so what you have is...
Following the Zamora establishment of a quasi-legitimate government, a sort of centrist government of his own making, you now have a polluted and disputed election, and the left comes to power.
But at this point, it's almost as if the whole country looks around at itself and realizes, we no longer really have a Spanish Republic anymore.
It's been rotted.
It's been corrupted from within.
Out of this chaos comes the remarkable figure of Franco.
Now, Franco is sometimes called a fascist in that he led a fascist coup.
But no, Franco was actually a monarchist and a deeply devout Catholic and really a military man.
In fact, he was a military man who initially was not that interested in politics.
There had been several appeals on the part We're good to go.
And he had a remarkable military record, and he was known as a man of some charisma.
But it wasn't until a sitting member of parliament of the right-leaning party, a guy named Jose Calvo Sotelo, was murdered by some socialist revolutionaries.
That the Spanish basically, the Spanish right, if you will, came alive and Franco decided enough is enough.
So Franco was sort of drawn into the conflict because of what he took to be.
Franco was actually a cautious man and he had been staying out of it because he thought the risks of a civil war are too high.
But once he saw that a sitting member of parliament can be murdered and sort of In a kind of public outrage, and organs of the state are involved in the murder.
Think about this. Using state power to politically target not just opponents in general, but a sitting member of parliament, Franco, decide, it's more risky for me not to get involved than it is for me to get involved.
And so what happens now...
Franco begins in the countryside to mobilize a counter-movement.
And it turns out that he was able to lead this counter-movement, this counter-revolution, if you will, to success.
It was a bitter and bloody civil war, and it lasted several years.
And it was followed by the establishment of the Franco dictatorship.
We can't deny it. It was a dictatorial regime.
And then there were reprisals, because with all the blood that had been spilled by the left, Franco's point was, now it's my turn.
And so you had a sort of regime, an era of vengeance, in which there were essentially Spaniards dangling from trees.
And Spanish leftists who are being rounded up and shot.
And of course, there's been a huge amount of propaganda about the outrages of the Franco regime and, oh, this right-wing dictator.
But eliminating the context out of which all this arose, I think ultimately we see the truth.
Of what de Maestro was saying when he says that when you have a revolution on one side and it breeds a counter-revolution on the other, is the counter-revolution ends up imitating the revolution.
You get two revolutions, one on top of another, and out of it you get a society remarkably different from the one that you started with.
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For more information, call 855-565-5519 or visit StandWithIsraelTour.com I'm continuing my discussion of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33 of Dante's Inferno.
And you find with Dante that he likes to sometimes focus on sinners in pairs.
If we think back to the cantos we've talked about already, remember the pair in Canto 5, and that was Paolo and Francesca.
And remember Farinata and Cavalcante in Canto 10.
And this recurs in the Inferno.
And here we have two characters, Ugolino and Rogeri.
One a politician, Ugolino.
The other an archbishop, Rogeri.
And so we have a pair here as well.
Although, as with...
For Francesca, in Canto 5, only one sinner speaks.
And so here, in Canto 33, it's only Ugolino that speaks.
And as with Francesca, when we're listening to Ugolino, we have to pay very careful attention to what he says.
He's going to be giving, let's call it, his side of the story.
But his side of the story leaves a lot out.
And also has to be somewhat, not translated, but decoded for what he is saying and what he is rationalizing and what he is concealing.
Now, the fact that Ugolino is a politician And Ruggieri as an archbishop is also important.
Dante is implying here that part of what we're getting in northern Italy, we're talking here, by the way, not about Florence, but about the neighboring city of Pisa.
And I'll come back to that in a moment.
But is the distorted relationship between church and state.
So the tension between church and state is not some kind of modern phenomenon.
It goes back to ancient times. In fact, when Jesus says, Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, you have right there a distinction between the realms of the church and the state.
And Dante's view is that the leaders of the church have moral authority, but it's over the soul.
It's over your religious life, and it's over, you might say, the quest for salvation and for the next world.
It's not the job of an archbishop, for example, to be engaging in political rule or political machinations, and yet that's exactly what happens here.
So even though Dante nowhere directly addresses the issue, the implied distortion between church and state is part of the story of this canto.
And the story that Dante is developing here is one of mutual political betrayal.
Ugolino and Ruggieri are deadly enemies.
They hated each other when they were alive and they hate each other just as much now.
You see Dante continuing his pattern where the afterlife mirrors your life.
The sinner, in a sense, gets what he or she wants.
So what does Ugolino want?
Well, he basically wants to bite the head off of Ruggieri.
And so what's he doing in hell?
He's gnawing on his head.
And it's kind of, at some point, when you see this gruesome scene deep here in Dante's Hell, you might think, well, who's worse off?
Is Ugolino the biter?
Kind of in the worst position.
Or Ruggieri, whose head is being bitten off and gnawed.
And really, they're in exactly the same position.
They're in a position of mutual recrimination and hatred.
And part of what Dante is getting at is that the sinner suffers too.
So your sin is something that imposes tears and pain on the sinner.
But sins, of course, also affect other people.
And here we come to, remember, we're in the circle of fraud.
Dante is talking about a particularly bad type of fraud, fraud that betrays those to whom we have a certain kind of moral obligation or trust.
And it's also fraud that takes a toll on innocent people.
Now, let me give you a little bit about the background, and then tomorrow we'll actually get back into the text, talk about what Ugolino says, Ugolino's side of the story.
As I mentioned, we're talking about Pisa, which is a Ghibelline city.
And the city is surrounded by Guelph.
Notably Florence, which happens to be a larger, more powerful city than Florence.
And so what these Guelph cities are doing is raiding the Ghibelline city of Pisa and capturing castles and territory on the kind of outskirts of Pisa.
And so the Pisans become very worried.
They're actually not strong enough to be able to defeat the Guelphs by themselves or even with allies.
And so what the Pisans decide is, listen, we're Ghibellines.
But why don't we bring in a Guelph?
Why don't we bring in a Guelph kind of from the other side and make him our kind of city leader?
The Italian term is potestà.
Why don't we appoint a Guelph as our potestà and then we'll have him negotiate on our behalf and he could probably get us a more favorable deal, a more favorable bargain than we could get by ourselves.
So this is what happens. A Ghibelline city.
Hires Ugo Lino, who's a Guelph, to come in and be the leader of their city and negotiate with the Guelph neighbors or not-so-friendly neighbors, hostile neighbors like Florence.
Now what happens is that Ruggieri is the archbishop who orchestrates or is involved in orchestrating this arrangement, bringing in Ugolino the Guelph.
But the moment that Ugolino comes in, you begin a cycle of mutual betrayal.
Ruggieri comes to the view that this was a horrible mistake.
I should not have brought in a Guelph.
And so even though at this point Ruggieri is politically out of power, he's still an archbishop, he begins to undercut Ruggieri.
Ugolino. And Ugolino, realizing this, recognizing that he's being betrayed inside of Pisa by the Ghibellines, decides, well, you know what?
Why don't I restore my old alliances with the Guelphs?
And so he's saying to the Guelph raiders from other cities, hey, listen, you come and take that territory.
I'll look the other way. I'll send my troops to place X while you seize castle Y. So what's happening here is you've got this horrible...
It's a degenerating cycle of betrayal on both sides.
And so part of what we're going to find out as we get into Ugo Lino's story is that he weaves a kind of tearful narrative appealing ultimately to the suffering and tears of his own children.
It's a narrative that by itself is pretty convincing and draws your sympathy.
But even though Ugolino's objective is to say, let me tell you what this horrible, evil Ruggieri did to me, and not just to me, but to my family, what Ugolino always leaves out is, and here's what I did to him.
I was doing exactly the same thing to him.
That he was doing to me.
And so what you have here is that Dante is exploring what happens when there is a complete breakdown of trust in a community and the trust is replaced by jealousy, by betrayal, by treachery, by recriminations.
Dante is gonna look at how far can that go?
And the horrific consequences, in this case for Ugolino and for Ruggieri and for Ugolino's children, we will take up next time.
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