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March 30, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:34
SUPREME INJUSTICE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep300
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Hey guys, before we get started, a quick request.
Do, as you listen to the podcast, come up with questions or just questions from things going on in the world that you'd like me to address and shoot me some questions.
Send them audio or video to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
In fact, I've got a couple of episodes coming up where I'm going to do Q&A. And so I'd like to get a wide range of questions on different topics and address them.
And the good thing is I'll be able to address them in a little more depth because I'll be doing kind of a single segment just on one question.
So again, that email is questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Just, you know, turn on your phone, record the question as an audio or a video, and just email it in.
It's really easy. 30 seconds or less.
30 seconds or less, Debbie, reminds me, for the question, to give me a little more time for the answer.
All right, I'm going to talk today about the left's really pathetic attempt to smear Clarence Thomas based upon emails sent by his wife, Ginny Thomas.
They want him to recuse himself.
We'll talk about that. I'll review a telling case involving Ketanji Brown-Jackson that the Biden administration sought to hide from the Senate.
Debbie's going to join me.
We're going to talk about California's flight toward Venezuela, which Debbie calls Calisuela.
Welcome to my show!
Wow. And I'll begin with Dante, climb up the purgatorial mountain, but I'm going to start by asking a simple question, which is, why purgatory? This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
America needs this voice.
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.
Debbie just reminded me, this is the 300th episode of the podcast.
Wow! So we've created really starting, I guess January 11th it was, last year, 300 hours roughly of content.
And I hope you've enjoyed it.
It's been a great journey.
And so, you know, there's no time to celebrate.
On we go to 400 and onward.
I want to talk here about the left's really pathetic attempt to get Thomas, Justice Thomas, to recuse himself, maybe even step down.
He should resign. And why should he resign?
Not because of anything he's done, evidently, but because of some emails and some political activism on the part of his wife.
This is Ginny Thomas, by the way, a friend of mine.
I've known both Thomases now for several years.
In fact, I was kind of buddies with Clarence Thomas back in his old days at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
We had lunch a few times.
I just loved to hear his booming laugh.
And I just enjoyed his perspective on issues.
Now, this is a guy who's really not just a great justice, but he's been a great human being.
And somebody who has withstood unbelievable attacks from the left.
And they've never let up. Of all the justices, this is the guy that they can't stand.
And by the way, this really dismantles all their rhetoric of race.
You know, we've got to have the first black woman in the Supreme Court.
Well, you've had a black justice on the Supreme Court, and how have you treated him over the past...
So the latest ruse or pretext to go after him is Ginny Thomas.
Anyway, putting all that to the side, who cares?
There's a big difference between what Ginny Thomas is doing.
Now, if Clarence Thomas was doing all that, you could say, well, wait a minute, he's supposed to be on the court.
These are cases that could come before the court.
He has somehow taken a political position or compromised his objectivity as a judge, but none of that is even at issue.
The issue is, should Thomas recuse himself from cases or should he step down because of his wife's email activism?
Now, by the way, Ginny Thomas didn't organize the events of January 6th or anything like that, so any suggestion to the contrary has no support at all.
But the point is this, that there is a kind of well-established standard for when judges have to recuse themselves from cases.
And the standard is this, they have to do it when they have a financial conflict of interest.
So, a judge has a lot of his investments in Company A. Company A is suing Company B. They're coming before the court.
Yeah, that's the case where the judge has a clear interest, a financial interest, or when the judge has some obvious reason to question the judge's impartiality.
An example has actually come up in connection with With Ketanji Jackson.
But let's think, for example, about a judge that served on the Harvard Board of Trustees and has been, in a sense, very active in the administration of Harvard University.
Now there's a lawsuit over Harvard's Affirmative Action Program.
The judge would obviously, in a sense, tend to side with Harvard because he or she has got a longstanding relationship with the university.
So there's a question of impartiality.
So those are cases where judges recuse themselves.
But Let's remember that most judges, and this applies to appellate court judges, district court judges, Supreme Court judges, they're married to influential people.
And these influential people do all kinds of things.
And in some cases, these influential people are in the law.
They're in the legal field. They file legal briefs.
And they file legal briefs in some cases that are cited in Supreme Court rulings.
But in all these cases, we find case after case where judges are not...
Do not step down and not required to step down and ethics reviews of their conduct show that they did not have to step down.
Here's an example. Here's Ninth Circuit Court Judge Stephen Reinhart of the Ninth Circuit.
This, by the way, is kind of a liberal icon.
And a case was making its way up to his court and his wife, who was the head of an ACLU chapter, had commented on the lower court opinion And the ACLU submitted a brief to the court, so you'd think that Judge Reinhardt would be like, well, maybe I should step down.
My wife is involved. The ACLU is involved.
But Reinhardt goes, quote, that his wife used a, quote, hers not mine, and I do not in any way condition my opinions on the position she takes regarding any issues.
So basically what Reinhardt is saying is I'm my own man and the fact that my wife is a public figure and the fact that she has opinions doesn't make them my opinion.
So, you know, there appears to be here on the part of the left a kind of resurrection of the old standard that wives sort of don't have positions of their own.
Their positions are a kind of annex or extension of their husbands.
And therefore, Ginny Thomas' activism is now sort of automatically attributed to Clarence Thomas.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her husband Marty Ginsburg, was a prominent figure in a law firm.
That law firm represented parties before the Supreme Court.
In no case did Justice Ginsburg recuse herself.
In fact... In fact, even her daughter, Jane Ginsburg, is a law professor, and she's wrote articles about cases coming before the court.
Justice Ginsburg, in one case, voted for the result that her daughter advocated in an article.
Nobody said there was anything improper about this.
Why? Because that's Justice Ginsburg's opinions, which are separate from the opinions of her husband or her daughter.
So, you know, reporters here are being utterly disingenuous.
If they wanted to have a single standard, a quote, let's call it a marriage penalty, well, let's apply it across the board.
Every time a judge is a spouse, and the spouse takes the position, we attribute the position to the judge, and we ask the judge to step down from that case.
But that's not happening here.
They're singling out Clarence Thomas.
They're applying a standard to him that they're not applying to other justices.
And this makes the whole thing a transparent exercise in liberal activism.
it's not going to work, nor should it.
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But to get these discounts, you've got to use promo code DINESHDINESH. At this point, I would have to say that Judge Ketanji Brown-Jackson looks like she will make it.
I saw today that Senator Susan Collins of Maine said that she intended to vote for Jackson.
Now, I think this is the first public statement by a Republican senator saying that they were going to vote for Jackson.
I think Romney said that he was undecided.
He was looking further into her record.
But I'm guessing that she's going to get one, maybe two votes.
Maybe three Republican votes.
And that, of course, is enough.
In fact, it gives the Democrats a small margin in the unlikely event that they lose Manchin and or Sinema.
They've got Republicans to make up for it.
So I think Etanji Jackson looks at this point to have relatively safe passage.
It's a very interesting development here, which is that one of the main themes in the hearings has been her relatively light sentences handed out to people involved in child porn cases.
And it turns out that the White House appears to have left out an important case that she decided less than a year before she was elevated to the D.C. Circuit Court.
And they did it because they didn't want her record to look bad.
Now, the case was called U.S. v.
Cain, and it involved really a massive download of files, 6,500 files, children, elementary school, middle school, either nude or in various compromising positions.
But apparently there was also sadism, masochism.
I mean, this was a horrible dump of really bad stuff.
And the guy who did all this, the probation office said, listen, he deserves to go to prison for 84 months in the case.
So, seven years.
But Ketanji Jackson goes, no, I'm going to go below and I'm going to give him only 60 months, which is to say five years.
Now, five years, seven years.
I mean, the point here is that there's a consistent pattern of Ketanji Jackson minimizing the seriousness of these cases and letting these offenders go off with lighter sentences.
Again, very tellingly, we see in her statements, in the sentencing transcript, Jackson says that she did this because of, quote, the need to avoid unwarranted sentencing disparities.
And here we get to the heart of it.
It's not that she's sympathetic. To child porn, it's that she doesn't want blacks to get, as she sees it, more severe sentences than whites throughout the system.
So she's engaged in a certain kind of racial leveling.
And she does this basically by taking black defendants and giving them lighter sentences to, quote, balance things out.
So this, I think, is really not what a judge is supposed to do.
In fact, it's a denial of justice in the individual case.
Now, the White House says...
They didn't mean to leave this case out.
It was just, quote, relatively recent and we kind of overlooked it.
But the GOP Judiciary Committee said, listen, either the White House didn't properly vet this nominee or they knew about this case, they knew about the record, they intentionally left it out in the hopes that the nominee would be confirmed before the full record could be uncovered and reviewed.
And let's remember, too, that the Biden administration has been conducting a kind of campaign with friendly reporters, leaking all kinds of information to the media, basically to trumpet the positive qualities of Ketanji Jackson to undermine what the Republicans are saying about them.
But what Ketanji Jackson herself thinks is pretty clear.
I'm actually going to quote her now.
And this really shows her way of thinking about these issues.
A computer is at work with respect to nearly all distribution offenses today.
And it's typically very easy to receive and possess and distribute child pornography electronically, such that the mere number of images and the fact that you used an electronic medium are not ordinarily in themselves indicative, We're good to go.
The mentality here is one of minimizing offenses, one ultimately of not holding criminals accountable.
I mean, this is what the left does.
This is why they nominated someone like her.
She's essentially a, you can say, a criminal's advocate on the court.
And that's not really what we want.
That's not really what's good for America.
But it looks like that's what we're going to get.
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And you might remember an episode going back now to when the Taliban first came to power.
They hate these Buddha statues because to the Taliban, this is sort of heresy.
This is not heresy, but this is the wrong path to the truth, if you will.
The only path is Allah's path.
And so these other religions are kind of...
And so, the Taliban mounts what can be accurately called a crusade against those Buddha statues.
And they blew up a bunch of them in a part of the country.
They said, these are pagan idols.
We don't want them in an Islamic state.
And so, bam, down they go.
And the world was a little outraged.
Not because the world is...
people around the world are partisans of Buddhism per se, but these statues have a historical and a historical significance as well as obviously a religious significance for Buddhists. So there was a sort of outrage against religious freedom, a kind of outrage against the idea that these are a preservation of the historical record, but the Taliban of course doesn't care about any of that historical record. Who reads history? And probably for them
history begins in the 7th century anyway.
Now, interestingly, the same controversy has been resurrected now because there are ancient Buddha statues carved into the cliffs of rural Afghanistan, and they are looking over a kind of ravine, and hundreds of meters down, there is what is believed to be the world's largest deposit of copper.
Now, The Taliban want to promote economic development in their country, and I think ordinarily they'd be really happy to blow up these Buddha statues, but they've realized that the Buddha statues are going to be of some value to any country that wants to come in and mine that copper for them.
Now, a bunch of countries want to be in on this deal.
Russia has said, we'll do it.
We'll mine the copper.
Iran has said, we'll do it.
Turkey said, we'll do it.
But the country that wants to do it the most is China.
China. And interestingly, although China is a communist society and although China is officially anti-religious and they, of course, persecute Christians in China, the Chinese like the Buddha statues.
Partly it could be because there was a history of Buddhism We're good to go.
And interestingly, the Taliban knew this even when the fighting was going on with the American troops and with the American back troops in Afghanistan.
Apparently, at one point, when there was fierce fighting in the area of that copper mine, the Taliban sent soldiers to protect the statues.
Why? Because they knew that those statues might be important in the Taliban getting a financial deal.
So again, the Taliban don't care about the statues.
What they want is they want to be able to take advantage of this huge deposit of minerals, of copper in particular.
And look at the way that other countries approach the Taliban.
They're basically like, we don't care about the Taliban.
We want the copper too.
So the Chinese are interested in Afghanistan because of the copper.
And it kind of shows you how dumb America is in its foreign policy.
Because we go to Afghanistan, we're sitting around there for 20 years, we don't even think about the copper.
The cop was there.
It's there to be lifted.
And so you would think American companies could have cut deals with the Afghan government, which was allied with us over all these years.
In fact, it was so expensive to pay for the war, the Afghanistan could have covered some of the costs by saying, okay, we'll pay you in copper.
But the United States didn't even dream of doing this.
And so our kind of ridiculous foreign policy, let's sow the seeds of democracy over there.
And that didn't work.
And now the Chinese come in and they don't care about democracy, but what they care about is copper.
They're cutting a deal with the Taliban.
And in a sense, they're redrawing the geopolitical map of Asia.
So all of this we're seeing in front of our eyes, the collapse of American unipolarity, the collapse of America's global dominance, and the emergence of not just one, not just two, but perhaps three or four rival powers.
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Debbie and I want to talk to you about socialism, progressivism and golf courses.
We were chatting this morning and you said you came across this article.
Where was it? Talking about California and about golf courses.
Right. So I get John Solomon's emails, you know, on all his stories.
And one of them, in just the news, was California considers subsidizing cities to turn golf courses into affordable housing.
And all of a sudden I'm like, whoa, take me back to Hugo Chavez!
You know, it was just like, I couldn't believe it.
Because I know that this woman that proposed this bill, her name is Garcia, I believe.
Yeah, Christina Garcia. Christina Garcia.
And it's Assembly Bill 1910, right?
Yeah. I know she has no idea that Hugo Chavez did the same thing in Venezuela.
I know that. But what it does tell me is that these people are cut from the same cloth.
They think exactly the same way.
Let's talk about what her bill does.
What does she want to do? She wants to establish a program providing grants for local agencies to convert the locally owned golf courses in California into housing and public open spaces.
Which, again, is like I'm reading from Hugo Chavez.
Because, you know, that's exactly what he wanted to do.
And basically they say that in California they have about 1,100 golf courses.
With nearly 250 owned by local governments.
And so they're saying given the average size of a golf course is 150 acres.
The analysis estimated California's municipality-owned golf courses could hold...
375,000 housing units at moderate density.
Well, this is...
Look, the reason California is so high-priced...
It's partly because it is such a badly run state.
And so it drives the cost of everything up.
There are high levels of taxation, high levels of regulation, making business more expensive.
So they ruin the state.
Then it becomes very difficult to afford to live there.
People start moving out.
And their solution is to kind of radicalize the problem by going after the remaining sort of residues of privately owned wealth.
Well, you know, that's why I call it Calisuela.
Calisuela. Calisuela, because a lot of the things that are implemented in California were actually implemented in Venezuela.
You know, the water, the conservation of water, you can only take three-minute showers, all of those things, they did in Venezuela.
And they also drove business owners and entrepreneurs out of that country, so Well, what are they doing out of California?
Entrepreneurs and business owners are leaving, right?
And so it's causing... Gun control laws.
I mean, to be honest, even the...
Look, California has legalized vote harvesting.
Right. So you look at the ways in which...
Absolutely. So I guess what you're saying is that if...
If America is moving in the direction of Venezuela, California will go first.
California is going to go first because it's already almost there.
I mean, it really is. If you go to San Francisco, LA, you see all these homeless people all over the place.
You know, that's kind of the plight in Venezuela as well.
What happens is that these people, you know, and you've talked about this before, why capitalism is so important because it sort of trickles down.
You know, the people that are affected by the attack on the rich are the poor.
So the more you attack the rich...
The more you're actually attacking the poor.
And the poor suffer for it.
I mean, the rich are the ones who employ the poor.
Exactly. And talk about, you were telling me a little bit about, in Venezuela, how Hugo Chavez, he didn't actually nationalize the golf courses, but he sort of threatened to do it, and it caused a...
Well, he didn't threaten to nationalize the golf course.
He didn't want the golf course.
He wanted to do the exact same thing that Cristina Garcia is doing, right?
He wanted to use golf course land...
You know, the course itself for public housing, you know, all sorts of other things that had nothing to do with golf because he called golf a bourgeois sport.
And, you know, he hated anything bourgeois, of course, unless he was in it, right?
Well, this is the point. I think one of the ways...
One of the ways that the golf course owners in Caracas were able to survive is they became Chavistas.
And so by aligning themselves, and we see this with rich people in America, they try to protect their wealth by identifying with the left, by mouthing climate change, oh yeah, BLM, Black Lives Matter.
And in this way, the New York Times gets off their back, the left doesn't want to cancel them anymore, so they're able to survive.
They go under the radar.
They go kind of under the radar.
And to be honest, even today...
There are people that are very rich in Venezuela, still thriving.
And I've told you before, I have a friend, I'm always showing you photos.
When I look at their photos, I'm like, wait a minute, is this Venezuela?
So there's kind of a two-tiered system there, a parallel universe, so to speak, where...
There are people that are going to golf courses, enjoying caviar, going on yachts, having fur coats, all those things, while at the same time there are people like some of my family members who are starving, who have electricity very rarely.
So this is socialist privilege.
Basically, the socialists live high on the hog.
And this is what they've always wanted.
The rhetoric of equality and social justice is a mechanism to achieve this, to achieve this two-tier society.
We saw this in, of course, all the other socialist countries from Cuba to the Soviet Union.
A ruling class lives by...
They have limousines.
They have beautiful penthouses.
Everybody else lives in ramshackle apartments and can't get running water.
Right. No, exactly. And the...
The payment for some of these people that are non-college people, minimum wage basically, is $8 a month.
People live on $8 a month.
That's why my aunt is so excited when we send her a little bit of money, because we're sending her like ten times the amount of what people get paid per month.
And it's horrible.
It's hyperinflation.
I mean, it's just, it's a very sad situation in Venezuela where you do have some people living high on the hog and other people living like a hog.
And I think the Venezuelans also realized at some point that it was too late.
It's very difficult to go back.
It's almost like you at that point need external intervention in order to save the country.
And so it's all a warning signal that we don't want to go there because it's going to be kind of hard if you get into the ditch.
It's a little bit hard to get out.
Right, exactly. The Russia invasion of Ukraine has sent markets into an uproar.
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I don't know if you've heard about Proposition 16, which was the proposition that went up on the ballot in California about affirmative action.
And by affirmative action here, we mean kind of racial balancing.
Trying to make sure that in university admissions, in jobs, in government contracts, That each racial group is equally represented.
And remarkably, in a democratic state, in a state that Biden won decisively, Trump wasn't even really competitive in California, And in a state where the proportion of minorities is increasing so that the white voters in California no longer can shape the outcome.
It now depends really on the Asian voters and the Hispanic voters.
So California is very much a multiracial state.
And yet, this multiracial state decisively voted down affirmative action.
And I think the point to make here is that it's the non-whites who killed it.
Now, that, for the Democrats, I think, is really crushing, right?
Because this is their formula.
The Democrats think that society is becoming more diverse.
And as it becomes more diverse, things like affirmative action become viable.
At one point, they might have been pushed by the courts, but now they're going to be anchored firmly in public opinion.
And so they must be watching the left with such dismay as they lose not just the white vote.
They do lose that.
But they lose, they haven't lost the black vote yet, but even that's shrinking.
And they're losing the Asian voters, they're losing the Hispanic voters.
So that's telling you that this notion that a more multiracial America means an America more tilted to the Democratic left is not true.
Right. Well, you know, as a Hispanic myself...
I have to say, I never have liked affirmative action.
I don't like it simply because I feel like it is actually racist to tell me that by my own accord and by my own abilities, I can't do something.
They have to kind of give me a little bit of a head start.
And I've never liked that.
I like to do things.
That's why I never wanted to check off the Hispanic box.
Because I didn't want anybody to give me that hand up like that.
And I think this is why it probably was defeated, because a lot of Latinos probably feel the exact same way that I do.
See, this is the point. I think that some people may think, okay, well, Debbie, you used to have a side conservative Latina.
You are a Latina, but you don't actually represent the majority of opinion in the Latino and Latina community.
But I think increasingly you do.
I mean, you look at this.
There's an analysis here.
This is an article in Axios.
So it's coming from the left, and it's kind of they're making these grudging concessions one after the other.
They say, Democrats talk about climate change, but dismiss the fact that many Latinos work in oil fields.
Democrats talk about diversity, but they please the white progressives, but they push out moderate Hispanics.
Mm-hmm. They want to talk about immigration.
A lot of Latinos are like, you know what?
There are enough of us here. You know what?
We know the Latinos. We don't want any more of them.
Or at least we want them to come the legal way.
That's a more accurate way of putting it.
And they also said key factors, which is what I just said, is the skepticism among Hispanic voters about programs they view as handouts.
We do not like handouts.
Well, this is a way of saying that in the Hispanic community, it's a community that hasn't lost its dignity.
You know, in the black community, after the era of the Depression, a lot of blacks felt that they needed to vote for the Democrats because the Democrats were offering handouts.
It was not because the Democrats were the party of civil rights, because the Democrats were the party of the KKK and segregation, but I think blacks felt that they had lost their dignity under slavery.
And moreover, in the extreme stress of the Great Depression, you know, it's like dignity doesn't put food on the table.
So I'm willing to sort of put that to the side if I can get some practical benefits that are going to help me and my family.
So you can kind of see why blacks who used to be Republicans pivoted the Democratic Party.
And it's been a hard job getting blacks back to the Republican Party.
Yeah.
Well, I hope that blacks take a little bit from the Latino community and see that the Latinos are saying, hey, enough with the pandering.
We don't want this.
And you pointed out the Republican consultant Mike Madrid told Axios, as Democrats start to focus more on white cultural, progressive cultural issues, they're losing the fastest segment of the non-college educated population, and that's the Latinos.
Because we don't care about those progressive cultural issues that they are facing.
Constantly, you know, the woke, the wokeness.
Your Latinx. Our Latinx.
That's ridiculous.
So, of course, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna lose Latinos.
And it's a good thing, actually.
This creates a real opportunity for the Republican Party.
And I don't just mean politically to win the Latino vote.
But I mean in a policy sense to be able to push issues like colorblindness by, you know, dismantling this elaborate structure of racial preferences and affirmative action that's embedded itself in our culture.
It's been there now for almost 50 years.
And just as with Roe versus Wade, now's the time to start rooting all this bad stuff out.
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I want to offer a few initial thoughts, preliminary thoughts, about Mark Zuckerberg's dream environment.
It's called the metaverse.
I haven't been to the metaverse.
I don't even know if I will ever go.
But I think the concept of it is strange.
It's very Zuckerbergian.
It's actually the kind of place that a complete social misfit and nerd would come up with.
Because it's an alternative environment in which, you know, nerds are welcome.
It's a place where people can go if they don't like real life.
And live the imaginative life that they've always wanted.
But they live it not in a real way.
Not in a way that taps genuine feelings.
It's more like a movie experience.
You kind of get to be in a movie.
And you get to live a sort of celluloid life.
And you get to pretend to be this and pretend to be that.
Of course, you know, pretty soon you get hungry and you've got to go to your refrigerator.
You've got to go to the bathroom where somebody calls you.
So you snap out of the metaverse.
Check back in.
There's a little Rye article that I saw called A Day in a Metaverse Life.
And this guy, he's being kind of satirical about it, so you've got to take it with that grain of salt.
This is a tongue-in-cheek article.
But he's talking about his life in the metaverse.
And I think you get a sense here of how...
In a way, intriguing, but at the end of the day, also how sad it is.
So I'm going to read a few lines because I want to comment on them.
He goes, when I first moved into the metaverse, I was nervous.
Would I like the new neighbors?
Would there be any good restaurants?
Now, right away, this is a little bit of a joke because your neighbors are virtual entities.
They're not neighbors. They're actually avatars and emojis, I guess.
And these are your, quote, neighbors.
And as for the restaurants, we are not going to be eating any real food.
It's kind of like watching Top Chefs.
You might see other people eating food.
Oh, that looks good. Oh, that looks good.
But there's no food for you to eat.
And then he goes on to say that basically the metaverse is like living inside of a big Zoom call.
You know, these Zoom calls.
But at least in the Zoom call, they're real people in the Zoom call.
You can interact with them, and there's a kind of background knowledge of who these people are and what their lives are like that makes even a Zoom call, in some senses, real.
A Zoom call isn't that different from sitting across in a conference room, because those actually are real people.
But in a metaverse...
The people aren't really even, they don't even really exist.
They're the imaginative projections of other people.
So you might want to be talking to Dinesh, but I decide I'm not Dinesh.
I'm in fact Superman, or I'm some other character, or I've always wanted to be a woman or a toad.
And so you're now conversing with the toad.
And this is your life in the metaverse.
This guy now talks about his room, and he goes, I now live inside a perfect digital replica of the Sistine Chapel.
He gets to live in the Sistine Chapel in the Metaverse.
He goes, my fifth floor walk-up in Queens had cockroaches.
So his real apartment stinks.
So he's got to climb up five stairs.
He's got all these bugs in his apartment.
And the Metaverse allows him to have the illusion, and this is the point, it's an illusion.
And he goes, the Metaverse is a major upgrade for us urban dwellers tired of storing our winter coats in the bathtub in the summer months.
So, again, if your life stinks, if you have this kind of closeted, miserable life, you don't have any friends, you know what?
Mark Zuckerberg has a solution for you.
And the solution is to offer you imaginative exotica.
Here we go. Quote, My new apartment came with a pet koala.
The koala kept speaking Russian and demanded I call him Dimitri.
Okay. So, look, I mean, there's a certain type of sort of maladjusted personality that likes to...
I mean, it's one thing for me to tell you this and you to chuckle along.
It's another whole thing to spend hours and hours on this kind of stuff.
And there are people, by the way, who buy real estate in the metaverse with real money.
And plants. He goes, the nice thing about having the plants in the metaverse, he goes, is the plants never die.
Yeah, of course they never die.
That's because they're not real.
It's like, you know what?
There's some plants described in the Dickens novel, and every time I pick up the novel, the plants are still there.
The plants are still alive.
So... And then he finally goes, Zuckerberg lives down the road, no matter what road you live on.
I think what he's basically saying is if you're in the metaverse, you get to see a lot of Mark Zuckerberg.
And that alone would keep me away from the metaverse.
I mean, to be in Zuckerberg's kind of weird presence, this...
This kid basically has problems, even though he's a talented programmer and he's obviously started this and he's mega rich, but this is life for people who don't like life.
And look, there are elements of life that all of us don't like.
And of course, if we're Christians, we believe that there is a better life waiting for us.
So this life is not all there is.
But still, this life, for all its problems and all its failures and all its weaknesses, is a little better than the kind of fake life, the bogus life, the nerd's life, otherwise known as the metaverse.
I've been talking now for, gosh it seems, a few weeks on Dante's Inferno.
And I'd like to do a brief summation of Inferno and then we make our way, we begin to make our way to Purgatory.
And so this segment is introductory remarks to Purgatory and a brief summary of Inferno.
Now, it seems to me that What Dante has been trying to say in Inferno is that sin, and we're talking here about sin that is unrepented, sin that you take a certain, you may say, relish in, you hang on to, and you hang on to in such a way that the sin forms your character.
It makes you who you are.
Your character, after all, is shaped by your activities, by your habits, and also by the things that you love and you hate.
And you can see, for example, how Francesca was defined So, in hell, you have people who believe that they are the center, the exact center of the universe.
And one of the themes in Hell is isolation.
Francesca and Paolo are together, but they don't speak.
Only Francesca talks to Dante.
And then you have Farnada and Kavakanti, they're sharing the same tomb.
They are not even aware of each other's existence, and Dante's effort to give a message to one to be delivered to the other, completely hopeless.
It'll never happen. And here's Ugolino biting on the head of Ruggieri.
Ruggieri himself doesn't speak, only Ugolino.
So you've got Dante dealing with these characters, and the lesson of hell that he takes, and he needs to take, and this is his kind of learning experience in hell, is negative.
Don't be like these people, because if you do, you're going to, well, end up in the same place that they did.
And so Dante has a lot of learning to do in Inferno, but it's not positive learning.
It is almost seeing the ghosts that he needs to stay away from.
He needs to do the opposite of what these guys are doing.
And there's an emphasis throughout hell on sins that Dante himself Might be tempted toward, in particular incontinence or lust, in particular pride and boastfulness, in particular the ability to use his own great talents to defraud or exercise illicit power over other people.
And I think, in a way, the most poignant and profound message of Dante's Inferno is That even if God were to come down to hell and open it up and say, guys, you're free to leave.
They wouldn't leave.
Why wouldn't they leave?
They wouldn't leave because they're actually getting what they always wanted.
Paolo and Francesca wanted to be in this state of, you may say, tempestuous lust in which their reason is overpowered by their passions, and that's what they get in hell.
And Brunetto Latini wants to be his own man, if you will, and await the day in which he gets earthly recognition.
He doesn't value any other kind of recognition.
And so there he is.
He's doing exactly what he wants to do.
And what does Ugolino want to do?
Give it to Ruggieri.
He wants to bite his head off.
The only thing that can get him to interrupt him from doing that is to slander Ruggieri and tell Dante what a bad guy he is.
And then he goes right back to biting his head.
That's what he wants to do.
So even if God were to say, I've got a different plan for you, Ogolina would be like, get away from me.
I want to bite the head of Ruggieri.
And so... You see here, although in our normal rhetoric, people often talk about, you know, here's God, he's grabbing these sinners and flinging them against their will, unwillingly into hell.
No, what Dante is really saying is, this is actually where they want to be.
This is who they are, and hell is, in fact, the appropriate place where they are receiving, not just their just desserts, but they're receiving what they always wanted.
When we turn to purgatory, well, let me begin by asking kind of an interesting and simple question, which is, for a lot of Christians, especially today, and particularly in a country like America, which is a country shaped decisively by the impact of the Reformation, We need to ask a question that would never occur to Dante, which is, why purgatory?
In other words, we understand Inferno, that's hell.
We understand Paradiso, that's heaven.
But purgatory?
Where'd that come from? Purgatory is not mentioned in the Bible.
And so, purgatory, the question about purgatory is not, how is it designed a certain way, but sort of, what is it doing here at all?
Now, Again, we discover that Dante approaches this issue a little differently than traditional theology.
So let me give sort of the traditional theological view of purgatory, and then let me give you sort of Dante's view.
The traditional theological view of purgatory is that when you repent of your sins, You naturally become, you're sorry for what you did.
And that sorrow needs to go or should go with some form of atonement.
So you don't just repent.
Now, it may be that atonement is impossible.
But in cases where it is possible, you should do it.
And so, for example, if you stole $500 from somebody else and you're sorry you did it, your sorrow is a little bit hollow if you've still got the $500 and you decide, I'm not going to give it back.
I'm just going to keep it and spend it.
I'm sorry I did it, but I'm going to continue to enjoy the benefit of what I did.
That would really put into question whether you are repentant in the first place.
If you really thought you shouldn't have done it and you're in a position to restore it, you should.
But now consider a hypothetical example where you've actually stolen $500 from someone else and you are sorry.
And you say, you know what, at some point I'm going to give him the money back.
I've got to go to the bank to get the money and I'll give it back to him, let's say tomorrow or next week.
And it turns out that you're hit by a car and you drop dead.
So, in other words, you are sorry, but you were not able to carry out the atonement that goes with that sorrow.
And here you are before God, and so you have atoned, you are sorry, I'm sorry, you have repented, but you haven't made restitution, and you haven't been able to sort of carry that repentance out to its place.
So, traditional theology says that purgatory is a place where this kind of atonement takes place.
In other words, you are sorry for your sins, but they're still sins, and they have done harm to other people, and you have to undergo a certain...
This process of atonement before you have, in a sense, before you're ready to show yourself before God and be given admission into paradise.
Now, all of this is sort of traditional theology, and I've stated it in a very kind of colloquial way, but Dante's view is a little different than this.
Dante's view is that we are bent or warped as human beings in part because that is our human nature.
Our human nature is intrinsically selfish.
Our human nature is intrinsically oriented towards we are the center of the universe, my welfare matters more than anybody else's welfare.
And Dante's point is in this condition, even if we are repented of our sins and our sins themselves are forgiven, we're really not ready to sort of march our way into heaven.
Why? Because, in part, we haven't been purified to a degree in which we now recognize that it's not our welfare, that what we actually want most and what is best for us is actually the perception and the experience of God.
That is not only the most important thing, that's the only thing.
All the other things that we pursue throughout our life are completely secondary and sort of fall to the wayside.
So, how do we get from here, where we are now as human beings in the world, to there, in which we not only are ready for this beatific vision of God, but that's what we want.
So, Dante Cree has this idea that we go through a period of, you may call it, moral improvement or moral preparation, and Dante's word for that, and it's built into seven stories, the seven-story mountain that we're going to next climb, it is a mountain in which, a mountain of self-improvement that will take us ultimately to the gates of paradise.
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