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March 29, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:25
IT’S OUR TURN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep299
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Quick announcement, guys.
Coming up tonight, 7.30 p.m.
Eastern, my live Q&A on Locals.
I actually didn't do it last week because I'm in the throes of filmmaking, but I'm back on tonight, and I'll be talking about regime change, I'll be talking about Ketanji Jackson, the movie, a bunch of other cool stuff.
So, dinesh.locals.com, check it out, 7.30 p.m.
Eastern. I want to make the case for why Republicans need a concrete plan to go after the Democrats and to go after Biden, and specifically to impeach Biden if Republicans take the House and Senate this November.
We need to say we're going to do it.
We need to do it. And I'll tell you why.
I'm going to look at India's relative indifference to the Ukraine to raise a question, a bigger question.
Isn't this exactly the policy that America has followed for more than a century and perhaps a policy that we should more closely think about now?
Radio host Sebastian Gorka joins me.
We're going to talk about current issues and an upcoming trip that he and I are going to host to Israel.
And I'm also going to talk further about Ugo Lino and Ruggieri, deep in the depths of Dante's Inferno.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Every day I see some new aggression on the part of the January 6th Commission or on the part of the left.
They're going after the Trump lawyers.
They're going after, now it seems, a Trump social media guy, Dan Scavino.
They're going after this operative named Peter Navarro.
So one after the other, the left is upping the ante.
Their message is, we're going to keep doing this to you while we can.
Yeah, if we lose the House and Senate in November, we'll have to stop because you might disband the January 6th commission.
And my point is, Republicans need to have a counter-strategy here.
It's not just simply, we're going to stop you from doing bad things to us.
It needs to be, here are some of the things that we plan to do to you.
And so, I don't even know if we need to disband the January Commission so much as turn it around and put people like Pelosi and Merrick Garland and a lot of the prosecutors in its sights.
So, in other words, a continuing January 6th commission.
The other thing I'm thinking about is the idea of impeaching Joe Biden.
And this, I think, is almost a political must.
They impeached Trump twice, and both times with absolutely no pretext.
So people say, and this is a very typical Republican, well, what are we going to do impeach him for?
Well, does it matter? Did the Democrats say, well, what are we going to impeach Trump for?
Well, they found something. Let's find this.
Let's find that. Let's just impeach him.
Why? Because we can. That's really the reason they did it.
They wanted to weaken him.
And now their main goal is, let's try to indict him.
Again, what are we going to indict him for?
Who cares? The Democrats' views, let's indict him for something.
Because in this way, we're going to kind of prevent him from running again.
So this is how these people operate.
This is how a bully operates in a kind of playground.
And what is the answer to a bully?
Is it that once I get outside the bully's grasp, I feel much better because there's not going to be fingers around my neck and no one's going to be stamping on my foot?
No. The real answer to a bully is to stamp on his foot.
So he goes, oh, I better not do that to this guy because this guy is crazy and this guy is going to turn it around on me.
And so that's the point here.
The reason for impeaching Joe Biden is because we can.
Now, you want a reason? I'll give you plenty of reasons.
Let's start with Hunter Biden.
Let's start with all the Biden family corruption.
Let's start with all the sales of access to foreign policy.
Let's then continue with all Biden's lying.
I mean, they went after Trump for a single statement that he made on a phone call.
A completely benign statement, by the way.
Just as they've been going after him ever since for, let's march peacefully and patriotically to the Capitol.
And somehow that has become, quote, an incitement.
And so...
What I'm suggesting really here is to take a page from the Democrats.
And now, of course, there are people again who say, well, Dinesh, you've got to really think about what you're saying, because if you're successful, well, first of all, we won't be successful.
We don't have 60 votes in the Senate.
We're not going to be able to actually get Biden out of office this way.
The idea here is to bruise him, to penalize him.
The idea here is to teach the Democrats a lesson.
Of course, if we did get Biden out of office, I still say that would be better.
Yeah, but what about Kamala Harris?
Well, it'll be a greatly weakened Kamala Harris who comes to power in the same way that when Nixon resigned in disgrace, it was a greatly weakened Gerald Ford who took his place.
And of course, Ford was promptly defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.
So the point here is that impeachment is an effective process.
Political bruising strategy.
And if by some miracle it works, that's even better because we will have shown that we can actually do to the Democrats something that they were not able to do to Trump and that is drive him from office.
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But to get these discounts, you've got to use promo code DINESHDINESH. What should America's foreign policy be toward Russia and Ukraine?
And here I think, if you fair-mindedly look at it, there's a little bit of, you're pulled in two opposite directions.
On the one hand, you want to say, listen, Ukraine couldn't be more remote from America.
It's really far away.
And number two, what are our national interests in the Ukraine exactly?
Will Ukraine, can Ukraine be counted on to rush to our defense if America was somehow morally threatened?
No. A country like Saudi Arabia that supplies vital oil that America depends on or has depended on for the past half century or more?
No. So what are we undertaking these risks for exactly?
Let's remember our democratically elected leaders are elected by us to look out for us, to protect our interests and our welfare.
So On the one hand, this is a case for keeping hands off, staying out of it.
But on the other hand, there is the sense that America is a country that stands for freedom.
The Ukrainians are, in fact, fighting for their freedom and their own survival.
And so there is an element of our conscience and our values that say, let's do what we can to help.
One thing that I find a little bit odd is the way in which the Biden administration thinks that other countries that aren't helping are somehow being bad actors.
Even though, as I say, there is a case for and against, even domestically.
One of the great sort of countries that's misbehaving in this area, and it's a big embarrassment for the United States, is India.
And it's an embarrassment because India is a democracy.
In fact, our population is a bigger democracy than the United States.
So here's Biden trying to say, well, democracies are on one side, the autocracy is on the other.
And here's India as a big democracy.
And they're like, we don't care. So Biden apparently and the Biden people are kind of annoyed at India.
They've even talked about doing sanctions against India.
So this is a good way to sort of poison your own allies and turn even your friends against you.
But let's think about why India is acting this way.
Well, quite simply, the Indians are looking at the Ukraine and they're like, listen, We have a kind of moral sympathy for what's going on in Ukraine.
We do think that this Russian invasion is an outrage.
It violates, of course, Ukrainian sovereignty.
But, and this is the very big but, again, what is Ukraine to India?
India is not a country that is in a position to basically be taking positions and involving itself in everybody's affairs in the world.
In fact, somebody made the astute observation that India's foreign policy toward the Ukraine is exactly the same as what the American founders believed America's foreign policy should be toward every other country.
Basically the American founders said, listen, America is a new country.
It is a country that is finally kind of coming up in the world.
Why on earth do we want to risk our safety and our treasure getting involved in other people's fights?
Leave it alone. It's none of our business.
Stay out of it. If the European powers want to knock each other out, be my guest.
We have nothing to do with it.
Now, of course, if they want to come and intervene and exercise their power in our backyard or threaten our own territory, that's a whole different matter.
But otherwise, our goal as a country is to grow, is to gain strength, is to maintain a sort of prudent non-involvement in other people's fights.
And this is basically India's position. India's position is not pro-Putin so much as it is, look, we need Russian oil, we're buying Russian oil.
And we are not in the same position as Americans to pay two times, three times, four times the price of oil just because our leaders go, you know what, let's just get involved in Ukraine.
Let's just sign up. No, the Indians don't want to go. They don't want to be involved.
And what they want to do is build their own country and build the lives of their own people, many of whom are starting from the very bottom of the heap.
So I mentioned the Indian example only because it's instructive from the point of view of America's own history.
And that's a history that we need to contemplate now as we think about what to do.
Not about countries that are in our vital interest.
That's a whole different matter. We're not talking about invasions here of Germany or France or Canada.
We're talking about a country that is quite distant from our own, not only our own shores, but also our own security, our own freedom and our own welfare.
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The World Health Organization is, in my view, very unwisely jumping right into the international abortion debate.
The WHO has issued a document And the document is called the Abortion Care Guideline Document.
Although this is supposed to be a guideline, and of course the World Health Organization does not have legislative power over any country's abortion laws or abortion rules.
What the WHO is doing here is using its kind of totemic position as the world's health authority To try to pressure countries to liberalize their abortion laws and liberalize them to the extreme.
You have to read through this document to see that although it starts off in a kind of cautious mode, and it appears initially that they're talking about, well, we need to have safe legal abortions to protect women's health, By the way, there's a kind of studied indifference to the life and the welfare and the health of the unborn.
That's kind of sidelined or pushed to the side because obviously that's a health issue too.
What about the World Health Organization's interest in potential life, life that's coming into being?
And what about the issue that there is a right to life there?
that and you're canceling that out by promoting abortion.
So the only way the left deals with it is pretending that the unborn don't exist or to put it differently pretending that they aren't really human or pretending that they can be sacrificed for convenience or for other reasons. Now the WHO document essentially is about allowing abortion under all circumstances.
It's also about stopping women from needing the approval of a doctor or nurse which by the way is the law in many countries.
Many countries do have various levels of restriction and regulation on abortion.
And by the way, even the European countries have stricter abortion laws than the United States.
By and large, you need to have a reason.
and the idea that you're just having an abortion because, or you're just having an abortion as a form of birth control, this is actually not allowed.
There are medical professionals throughout the world who, even when countries that have abortion laws, where abortion is legal, nevertheless say, I don't want to perform one, and they appeal to conscience.
And the WHO actually talks about this as a problem.
It treats the right of conscience as a kind of obstacle to women getting proper health care.
And it talks about ways in which you sort of have to work against these rights of conscience in order to make sure that women who want abortions can get them.
Now, no surprise, this document is prepared in consultation with the usual kind of abortion industry suspects, International Planned Parenthood Federation, Planned Parenthood USA, the Center for Reproductive Rights.
So they brought in all the usual suspects to weigh in on this.
And, of course, essentially what they're doing is they've created the most radical abortion legislation in the world, mirroring the United States.
And it's almost like they're saying, well, you know, the United States seems to be going in a different direction.
Who knows what the Supreme Court will decide in the Mississippi case.
So we better push in the other direction.
And that's exactly what these guys are doing.
The World Health Organization does useful work in other areas.
It does. And so I don't want to make a diatribe against the WHO or say essentially the country shouldn't contribute to the World Health Organization or get out of it.
But I do think that countries need to use their leverage with the WHO to say, listen...
You know, there is the health of the mother, but there's also the health of the unborn.
And it's not your job to tell us to prioritize some lives over others or some people's health over others.
You stay with what you're good at and we'll do what we need to in terms of regulating or not regulating abortion in our own countries.
The Russia invasion of Ukraine has sent the markets into an uproar.
The market's going down.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a friend, a Salem colleague, Dr.
Sebastian Gorka.
He's a former White House political strategist, a media pundit, a Salem radio host.
He's also the author of The War for America's Soul.
Seb, thanks for joining the podcast.
Great to have you. It was really fun to see you in California.
We were doing a sort of a summit with a number of our other colleagues, Charlie Kirk and Larry Elder and others talking about the movie.
So I hope you had fun and of course we're delighted to be featuring you in the movie.
Yeah, it was a great, great day, not only to be with you and the rest of the members of the Salem faculty like Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager, Larry Elder and others.
It was shocking.
I mean, what you showed us, the evidence that you had acquired through geolocation of cell phones and CCTV footage from municipal buildings of activities occurring during the last election, I think It will be a tectonic shock to the political order when that film comes out.
And I hope my responses on camera will demonstrate just how an amazing film you and your colleagues, Catherine and everybody else and Debbie, have brought together.
Because I think people who don't consider themselves to be political will wake up as to what happened in 2020.
Let's pivot and talk about some current issues.
I want to ask you about this issue of regime change, because Biden talked about, we want regime change.
Then the White House clarifies, we're not trying to have regime change in Russia.
What do you make of this idea of the United States even thinking about it?
I mean, clearly Biden said what he thought.
And then they basically said, no, that's not what he thinks.
That's because we're running the show here, not him.
What do you make of this concept of attempting regime change?
I mean, we tried it in Iraq.
We obviously did it in Libya under Obama.
But it's a whole different matter to even contemplate it about Russia, isn't it?
Well, yeah, I mean, we've done it badly in certain places.
We've done it very successfully in 1945 in Japan and in Germany.
So that's after we dropped nuclear weapons and we were the only nation that had nuclear weapons in 1945.
And the idea that you can do this easily in a nation which has 5,000 nuclear warheads and 11 time zones is sheer insanity.
What we should always be saying, whether it's in Ukraine or whether it's in Russia, that it is up to the people of those nations to create the political freedom that they demand for themselves.
We can assist them.
That's why we're giving anti-tank weapons to the brave Ukrainians.
We can assist them, as we did during the Cold War, when we gave fax machines, when we gave copiers to dissidents.
In the 1980s, we gave mimeograph machines to Solidarnosc, the illegal trade union in Poland, to undermine the writ of the martial law dictatorship that had been put in place by Yaroslavsky.
So, at the end of the day, we need to understand Ukraine is a type of 1776 for Ukrainians.
If Russians want to replace Putin, good luck, but it's not going to be because the 82nd airborne parachutes into Moscow.
Now, Seb, your show is called America First.
You're an America First guy.
And it appears that there are some people who interpret America First to say, in a sense, let's kind of withdraw from world conflicts.
As long as somebody doesn't show up in Arkansas, show up in Texas to sort of take over our country, it's none of our business.
But it appears that what you're arguing for is an America-first policy that does not hesitate to have America not only engaged in the world, but intervening in prudent ways when possible and when it is, I guess, in our national interest to do it.
Yeah, the word that you use there is the key one, a prudence.
You know, the philosophy of my show, America First, is very much the philosophy we had in the Trump administration, that we're not interventionists.
We don't invade other countries.
In fact, we want less stupid wars.
We want to bring American troops back.
But when interests are affected, either directly or indirectly, we take action.
When I was in the White House, we saw the evidence of a second use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria.
And we thought, nobody should be using chemical weapons against civilians, against women and children.
We didn't want to invade Syria.
But what did President Abdul over chocolate cake with Xi Jinping in Mar-a-Lago?
He said, by the way, Xi, I just dropped 52 cruise missiles on the Assad regime to send a message.
A message that wasn't about regime change, but a message that certain things are not And the philosophy is the following.
When America leads, not in an interventionist sense, but when America is strong, the world is safe.
Remember, we had a very strong alpha male as commander-in-chief.
We had no new wars.
Russia didn't invade anybody for the first time.
ISIS was destroyed in terms of its physical caliphate.
Little Kim was put back in his box in North Korea.
And Iran was economically put on the road.
When you had Obama in office, we had the rise of ISIS. We had the invasion of Ukraine.
We had the Iran nuclear deal.
We had Kim launching ballistic missiles of the Sea of Japan.
And now it's even worse.
We have a man who doesn't know what he's saying.
Full gap. There's a poor gap in 48 hours in Brussels and Warsaw.
It's the, we're going to use chemical weapons, which is illegal.
Telling the 82nd Airborne, you're going to see what it's like when you get to Ukraine.
And then he has the regime change gap, and on top of all of that, he does something a commander-in-chief's never supposed to do.
You're never supposed to sit down and stuff your face with pizza.
Whilst other members of your military haven't eaten yet, whether you're a second lieutenant or the commander-in-chief, you wait!
Everybody is fed, and ideally, you don't eat in front of them at all because you're not the important person.
They're the warfighter.
Show me one photograph of President Trump choking on a slice of pizza in front of all warfighters.
He understood what it meant to be a leader.
This man is a senile disaster, Danette.
I mean, the other thing I think, Seb, that's remarkable is you've got this kind of callous and cranky Biden.
And it's one thing to make a gaffe.
It's another thing to come out and say, hey, listen, you know, that's not what I meant, or I spoke too fast, or I was caught up in the moment, and give a sober kind of reassessment.
But what's interesting here, I notice, is that Biden never does this.
He digs in.
He basically denies that he said what he said and other people have got to be produced at the microphone who then supply the supposed nuance.
It's almost like there's a recognition here that you've got this old man and this is a guy who's like dug in.
His mind can't be changed.
if he's called on something, he never said it, even though there it is on tape.
This is a little bit of a perilous situation for us to be in, right?
And for the free world to be in, to be led by this kind of a leader.
Well, it's very dangerous.
24 hours a day, within 30 feet of that man, there's a military aide with a very, very large briefcase called the football that has the launch codes for our nuclear weapons.
And this is a man who's had two brain aneurysms already and is just gaslighting the nation.
I'm going to use the cut on my show today.
Peter Doocy stood up yesterday and said, Mr.
President, you said these three things about regime change, about chemical weapons, about the 82nd Airborne going to Ukraine.
Why did you say them?
And what does he say? He gets angry.
He gets crotchety like a person with dementia, because one of dementia's side effects is a zero filter.
And then he says, I said none of those things.
Well, that's the definition of gaslighting.
Let's try to convince you, the viewer, that you didn't see or hear what you saw or heard.
So, yes, there's the mental competency aspect, but there's also the fact that he lies to your face, to the American people.
Amazing. Let's take a pause.
When we come back, Seb, let's talk about a trip that you and I are hosting with the Salem Network, and this is a trip to Israel in the early part of December.
We'll be right back. We're good to go.
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I'm back with my friend and Salem colleague, Dr.
Sebastian Gorka.
He's host of the America First show.
And Seb and I are, well, we're kind of hosting or leading a trip to Israel from November 30th.
to December 9th of this year.
And so, Seb, I'm delighted to be going on this trip, and to be honest, I've never been to Israel.
I believe you have.
Give a little preview of what we're going to see.
What's Israel all about?
I mean, I've always wanted to go.
It's kind of funny that I'm now leading a trip and I'll be myself, you know, wide-eyed and gasping and, you know, wow, here's the Sea of Galilee and here's Jerusalem and here's Gethsemane and all the places that we've heard about since we were all children.
And now we finally get to go and people get to go with us and hang out with us for the better part of two weeks.
Yeah, I'm so excited.
As you say, I've been to Israel many, many times.
The first time I went was in 1992, a long time ago.
And the thing about this trip is what you just said.
So if you read the Bible, you know all these names, you know all these places.
Jesus was a real man.
He is our Lord and Savior and man at the same time, which means He walked the earth in those places that you mentioned.
He went to Jerusalem as a child, as an adult.
He went to the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
He recruited his disciples from among the fishermen.
He went to the Garden of Gethsemane.
These places aren't just names in the New Testament.
They are real places, and we will be standing there.
We will be at the temple walls.
We will be there on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
We're going to go to the Holy Church of the Sepulcher, where the body of Jesus Christ was laid down.
This is the beauty of this trip.
And even if you've been to Israel before, Guys, if you're listening, you haven't been with me, you haven't been with Dinesh or with Debbie, so join us.
It is truly the trip of a lifetime.
And the great news is, Israel has admitted we got it wrong when it came to vaccine policies with vaccine passports.
They've changed all of that.
I'm not vaccinated, I've had COVID, and I'm going to Israel.
If you're fed up with the COVID blues, Join us for a trip of a lifetime.
You know the truth, Dinesh.
It's not about the stuff you buy.
It's not about the money or the things you accumulate.
It's about the memories.
And you're going to have some amazing memories on our Stand with Israel course.
I mean, what you're saying, Seb, which I find really exhilarating, is that this is a trip that will expand your knowledge, expand your horizons, give you a deep sense of history.
And it's one thing to read history in a book.
It's another thing to be standing on the rocks.
It's another thing to be feeling the wall.
But second, you also seem to be saying that this is something that could also encourage and fortify your faith.
It can actually bring you into a deeper relationship with God because God is, of course, universal and there's a universality in the Bible.
But, of course, God also has a chosen people.
And they happen to live in Israel.
And God also manifested Himself concretely in history in the person of Jesus.
And He happened to be in that part of the world.
And He walked over here and He died over there.
And this was the Via Dolorosa.
And you're saying we'll get to trace those paths ourselves.
Absolutely. And not only that, if you're worried that this is going to be, you know, passages from the Bible every single day and reenactments, no, we're going to go to these real places, you're going to see them for yourselves, the places where Jesus walked the earth.
And on top of that, you'll get an amazing sense of...
Of Jerusalem, of Israel, of the Israeli people, the challenges they face, the incredible diversity of that nation.
So there's also this additional geopolitical aspect that you will see that there's so much propaganda, lies about the state of Israel.
We're going to see how diverse and incredible this nation is and the challenges we face.
And we're going to have the best guide.
We're going to meet the people of Israel as well.
Seriously, guys, if you haven't done so, go to StandWithIsraelTour.com and join me and Dinesh and Debbie for this trip later this year.
I mean, Seb, I'm glad you mentioned the guides because people are probably thinking, if Dinesh hasn't been to Israel, is he actually going to be telling us about all these places?
And the answer is no.
Dinesh will be contributing to political analysis and talking about some of the history, but we're going to have seasoned guides who are going to instruct people in what's going on here and what's the meaning of this and what's the meaning of that.
So the website guys is StandWithIsraelTour.com.
There's a limited window to sign up for this.
There's a limited number of people who can go on it.
So I think it's time to make your plans for, well the dates are depart for Israel November 30th back on December 9th.
It's a trip of a lifetime.
So Sab, looking forward to it and we're going to show people a really good time.
Absolutely.
Yes, guys, don't miss it.
And we're going to have the very best guide possible, and me and Dinesh as well.
Imagine the lifelong impact of a journey to the Holy Land.
Surrounded by like-minded travelers, picture yourself stepping foot in iconic locations right out of Scripture.
Join Dr. Sebastian Gorka and Dinesh D'Souza on this life-enriching Israel Tour, November 30th through December 9th, 2022.
For more information, call 855-565-5519 or visit StandWithIsraelTour.com.
I'm going to conclude today my discussion of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33, the very depths of Dante's Inferno.
And where we left off...
Ugolino was just beginning to tell his story to Dante.
And let's remember, he's the only one we hear speaking here.
Ruggieri does not say a word.
Ugolino has been chewing on the head of Ruggieri, and then he sort of lifts his head up and begins to tell his story.
And really, his story is about what a terrible, awful, wicked man this Archbishop Ruggieri is.
So he's getting the other guy.
He's been getting him by biting him, and now he's getting him by, in a sense, recounting Ruggieri's misdeeds.
But we've got to listen very carefully, because we want to find out not just about Ruggieri, but about Ugolino himself.
And it turns out that Ugolino will reveal more of himself than he intends.
And as readers, we need to be attentive to what that is.
We have to do that throughout the Inferno.
We, like Dante, have to learn as we go along.
Let's remember that when Dante first heard, say, Francesca's story, he's completely taken in.
He's sort of suckered by it.
He swoons in pity.
But Dante has learned.
And he's going to be much more savvy about figuring these sinners out.
He's going to be much more likely to sort of We recognize in their predicament the justice of God, to take God's side, if you will, and we have to learn to do the same thing.
So here we go with Ugolino, and he's talking about Ruggieri, and he says,"...I, trusting in him, was put in prison through his evil machinations." Where I died.
And then he goes on to say, So let's remember what's going on here.
A reciprocal sets of treachery and betrayal between Ugolino and Ruggieri.
And eventually, Ruggieri gets the upper hand.
This is, of course, in Pisa.
And Ugolino is imprisoned in the Tower of Pisa along with his four children.
And he's now going to recount the circumstances of his death and, as it turns out, the deaths of his four children.
So Ugolino is going to appeal to our natural sense of pity.
Wow, they not only went after me, they went after my kids.
And in order to expose the true evils of Ruggieri.
Now, let's continue.
Through a narrow slit of window, high in that mew, which is called the Tower of Hunger, he goes, I watched moon after moon go by.
And he talks about dreams that he had.
And then he goes to this key passage.
When I awoke before the light of dawn, I heard my children sobbing in their sleep, asking for bread.
And then Ugolino pauses and says to Dante this, If the thought of what my heart was telling me does not fill you with grief, how cruel you are!
If you are not weeping now, do you ever weep?
So Ugolino is, as Francesca did, appealing here to, You have human feelings.
Think about this. My poor kids are with me.
We are all in this predicament together, imprisoned.
And then Ugolino continues.
And then they awoke. The children, that is.
It was around the time they usually brought our food to us.
But now each one of us was full of dread from dreaming.
They had bad dreams. And now continuing.
Then from below I heard them driving nails into the dreadful tower's door.
With that I stared in silence at my flesh and blood.
I did not weep.
I turned to stone.
Inside they wept.
And my little Anselmuccio spoke, What is it, Father?
Why do you look that way?
From them I held my tears back, saying nothing.
So what's going on now is that the Pisans, the Ghibellines, have decided they've had enough of this guy.
They're going to starve him and his family to death.
And so they can hear, instead of passing food through the door, they're nailing the door shut with the intention, obviously, of starving this entire family to death.
And Ugolino says, very interestingly, I did not weep.
I turned to stone inside.
Now, how odd a statement this is, because just three lines earlier, Ugolino has said to Dante, hey, what a story I'm about to tell you.
You're not even human if you don't weep.
You gotta weep. And yet he says that he, the very dad of these four children, does not weep.
He turned to stone. I think this is very important because kind of what Dante is saying is that this continual cycle of viciousness and treachery and evil exchange for evil has dehumanized Ugolino.
He has already, in a sense, turned to stone.
And even at a time here, where his children are in desperate straits and need him.
And remember here, we're in the circle of fraud.
And fraud is especially bad, in Dante's view, when it affects people, not just affects other people, it almost always affects other people, but when it affects people with whom we have a special trust.
So here's Ugolino.
He has a special bond, a special obligation to his own children.
Now, he isn't directly responsible for their predicament.
Ruggieri is the one who got them locked up.
But Ugolino's dealings with Ruggieri have laid the foundation for this retaliation on Ruggieri's part.
And so we continue.
A meager ray of sunlight found its way into the misery of our cell, and I could see myself reflected four times in their faces.
So this is a true kind of poet's clarity of observation.
A thin ray of light comes in.
So now Ugolino, who is otherwise largely blinded by the dark, can see.
And what does he see?
He sees his own face reflected in the eyes of his children.
And what happens?
The children actually offer to Ugolino their own flesh.
They basically say, you know what?
In this desperate hunger, day after day, eat us!
And Ugolino, of course, refuses.
And then one by one, the children actually die.
They die right in front of him.
And the fourth day came, and it was on that day my gado fell prostrate before my feet, crying, Why don't you help me?
Why, my father? Then he died.
Just as you see me here, I saw the other three fall one by one, and the fifth and sixth day passed.
And then a key passage.
What is Ugolino saying here?
Well, What he's saying is that he was blinded with both the darkness in the cell and his debilitation.
He can't even see.
He's groping over the dead bodies of his children.
He's calling out their names.
But then the key line, then hunger proved more powerful than grief.
So he was grieving for them, but he was also ravenously hungry.
And so what happens?
Well, Dante doesn't say.
And for centuries, scholars have debated what this line means.
But it seems to me that there's really only one, there are some obscure meanings that you can sort of tease out of it, but there's only one clear meaning.
And the clear meaning is this, the meaning of hunger proved more powerful than grief is that Ugolino's hunger got the better of him.
though he was for his children's death, he was hungry and the hunger was more powerful and so he ate them. He actually ate his own children. Why? Because that prolonged his own death. He was gonna die anyway and he couldn't prevent himself from dying and he does in fact in the end die and that's how he ends up here.
But what Ugolino is saying is that he couldn't control himself, loved his children though he did, he in a sense his last act was an act of cannibalism.
And so we see here Dante depicting the sheer horror of a man involved in such a cycle of treachery that it eventually gets him and it gets his own kids.
And after betraying Ruggieri and his political enemies on the other side, in a certain sense, he betrays his own kids at the very end by eating them.
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When we left off, we had this gruesome scene with Hugo Lino.
Right before he dies, cannibalizing his own children.
And think of the kind of beauty and depth here of what Dante is doing, because the next we see Ugolino, what's he doing?
He's chewing on the head of his archenemy, Rogeri.
So it's kind of like his last act on earth, which was eating his own children, is now reenacted.
Here in eternity, in inferno, in hell, where Ugolino is now back to it all over again, but this time it's his archenemy, Ruggieri.
And I think what Dante is doing here is he is evoking in these images not only the idea of How bad can things get if this cycle of treachery and fraud is allowed to go unimpeded?
I think Dante is exploring that.
How far can it go? But I think he's also making a deeper point, which is what happens when life, human life, Is completely uprooted or detached or separated from the realm of the spiritual altogether?
What happens when all that matters is kind of earthly goods and earthly rivalries and earthly politics and everything is reduced, in a sense, to the material, to a quest for gain and for power?
That's how Ugolino lived and that's how Ruggieri lived.
When we think about cannibalism and eating of a body, we can't help but think of a certain type of cannibalism that is endorsed, in fact, by Christianity.
In fact, let's think here about Jesus' words,"...this is my body." When you eat this bread, you are, in a sense, eating my body.
When you drink this wine, you are, in a sense, drinking my blood.
Now, this is a very kind of odd and yet profound thing for Jesus to say.
And what Jesus is doing is he is speaking, obviously, not in a literal sense.
He's not talking about people eating his body.
He's talking about a spiritual meaning of that, which is imbibing, you may say, the spirit of God or the spirit of Christ.
And the same is true with the image of drinking of the blood.
So in Christianity, there is a fusion or a union between the material and the spiritual.
And what Dante seems to be saying is that that's the way it ought to be.
But when you take the material...
And you cut off the spiritual.
You remove all the spiritual meanings.
What you get is the cannibalism without any elevated spiritual meaning at all.
What you get is Ugolino eating his kids.
What you get is Ugolino gnawing on Ruggieri's head.
This is, you may say, what human beings are reduced to when our higher or spiritual nature is completely removed.
And this is why we are here deep in the bottom of hell, because we're really dealing with humanity completely divorced from God.
Humanity completely cut off from the spiritual.
And Dante is now at the very end of the first part of his journey.
Not the whole journey, because there's a long way to go.
All of purgatory and all of Paradiso.
And so I'll just close with the closing scenes of Inferno, where Dante encounters Satan, and as I mentioned earlier, Satan is not in the flames of hell, but rather he's encrusted in ice.
And interestingly, he's got these two other traitors alongside him, and he is sort of chewing on their heads.
So this notion of cannibalism is an image that Dante continues all the way through the end of Inferno.
Dante, of course, now recognizes the best thing that he can do is get out of there.
He's not interested in dialogues with Satan or any of that.
This is just a kind of absolute...
Adir, a bottom point of evil, and Dante's goal is to escape, to move out.
And he moves out, and he moves into what is now going to be called the Purgatorial Mountain, sometimes called the Seven-Story Mountain.
So when we pick it up next time, we are out of Inferno, and we're going to begin a climb.
And I'll only pick a few high points along the climb of the Mountain of Purgatory on our way to Paradise.
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