All Episodes
Previous Next
March 31, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:06
"WE'RE IN TROUBLE" Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep301
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez says the Democrats are in trouble and she's right about that, but perhaps not for the reason she thinks.
Joe Biden is very proud he signed the first anti-lynching bill in U.S. history.
The question I want to know is why Democrats oppose lynching legislation when lynchings were actually going on in this country.
I'll reveal today how Yale compromised its integrity and its reputation by giving respectability and influence to a bunch of Russian oligarchs.
And I'll explore how Dante's purgatory is less of an adjunct of inferno or hell, and really more of a vestibule or waiting room for paradise.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The Democratic Party is clearly in trouble.
And this is confirmed now by a series of surveys and studies and polls.
And even the mainstream media, which would obviously view this as bad news, they've been cheering and trying to kind of prop up Biden now ever since the guy came into office.
But evidently those efforts have failed.
Or put it differently, even though the media has been cheering for Biden, the American people really aren't buying it.
And Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, has a sort of diagnosis for why this is so.
Now, obviously, I agree with her starting point.
Her starting point, which is the thumbnail of this podcast, is we're in trouble, and we here refers to the Democratic Party.
So I think she's right about that.
Now let's look at AOC's diagnosis as to why that is the case.
Because I think, ironically, that her policy prescriptions, her solution, may actually be what's causing the problem in the first place.
So here's AOC. She says, first of all, And this is in a description in New York Magazine that's giving a kind of favorable analysis of AOC. She says that Biden is under a kind of delusion.
And the delusion is that the Democrats can reach out to the moderate center And cut deals.
And so Biden, she thinks because of his past, he's kind of a backroom politician, light up the cigar, sit down, work out a deal, particularly inside of his own party.
She thinks that this is what Biden has been trying to do with people like Sinema and especially with Manchin.
And according to AOC, that is the old Democratic Party.
That politics is now antiquated.
AOC says, quote, I think that there's a real nostalgia and belief that that time still exists or that we can get back to that.
So apparently, according to AOC, and again, she may be right about this, there are not a whole lot of moderate Democrats left in the Democratic Party.
So the idea that you can bring a guy like Manchin along, she says, was always an illusion that she never sort of fell for, but she thinks Biden did.
She thinks that Biden in his effort to reach out to people like Manchin and meet them halfway, remember Biden took the Build Back Better bill, $3.5 trillion, sort of scaled it back to $1.5, thinking maybe I'll get Manchin that way, but even that was too much for Manchin.
So AOC's point is the Democrats need to go the other way, that their problem is not that they are too left-wing, it's that they're not left-wing enough.
And so AOC thinks is that because of Biden's kind of waffling and his desire to kind of keep Manchin on the boat, that Biden is demoralizing the progressives, the young people, the blacks and Latinos who are the activist base of the Democratic Party.
Now, it's very clear that AOC plays to that base.
And it's very clear that she has used that base to build up her own image and her own following.
And it's a big following. I mean, just on social media alone, 13 million followers on Twitter, 8.5 million on Instagram.
So this woman has become a sensation out of nowhere.
And she's also made her own position kind of impregnable in her own districts.
People run against her.
They have like $100,000.
She has like $8 million.
So it's very difficult now.
She's become a star and a fundraising star in the Democratic Party.
A clue that AOC's analysis may be off the mark can be seen in the New York mayoral race, where she endorsed the left-winger, this woman named Maya Wiley.
And of course, the moderate in the race, or relative moderate, we're talking about Democrats after all, was this guy Eric Adams.
But it turns out that not only did Adams win decisively, but working families of color, namely black working class guys and Latino working class guys, voted for Adams.
They didn't want defund the police.
They didn't want all this left-wing identity politics.
So they went in a completely different direction.
And what that tells you is that while AOC may be right about the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party has lurched left.
There aren't a whole lot of moderates left.
At the same time, AOC seems to be completely wrong about the country.
The country is not on board with the progressive agenda.
Sure, if you go to people with very blandly worded polls, would you like to have some more bridges?
Well, yeah, I think I would.
Would you like to have more money for schools?
Oh, yeah, I think I would. So in principle, people are like, yeah, I'd like to see more of that.
But when you tell people, would you like to pay the price of that?
Are you willing to give up this in exchange for that?
In other words, when you bring people into the real world by asking them to make the kind of trade-offs that are inherently necessary when you make these kinds of decisions, then people go, nah, I'm not so happy about that.
I'd rather figure that one out to myself.
In the same way that people in their own lives, whenever you ask someone in principle, hey, would you like to have 10 candy bars?
Well, yeah, I would. Yeah, but would you like to destroy your health while doing that?
No, not exactly. You want to pay all this money to have this thing that you otherwise would have, which will prevent you from buying something else?
Well, no, I think given that, I'm not going to do it.
So, AOC in this sense is crashing into the real world.
And because she lives in a certain kind of progressive bubble where she's surrounded by, you know, giddy and giggling activists, she thinks not only that's the Democratic Party, but that's the country.
And therefore, she comes up with this recipe, which I think, far from solving the problems of the Democrats, would only make their political woes worse.
Debbie and I just love our MyPillow towels.
We know that there's a big difference between those towels and other types of towels.
Now, other types of towels just don't dry you that well.
They feel soft and lotion-y when they're new in the store, but that's an artifact.
You take them home and they don't absorb.
Why not? Because ordinary towel companies typically import the product and they add softeners to make the towels feel good, but they don't dry you very well.
Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, has founded the best towel company right in the USA. They have proprietary technology to create towels that not only feel soft, but actually work.
They're all made with USA Cotton.
They come with the MyPillow 60-Day Money-Back Guarantee, and these are the only towels Debbie and I use in our home.
For a limited time, Mike is offering a really good deal on his six-piece towel set.
Two bath towels, two hand towels, two washcloths, all made with USA Cotton.
Regularly $109.99, but now $39.99.
Call 1-800-876-0227.
That number again, 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com.
Enjoy this offer.
By the way, get deep discounts on all the other MyPillow products.
But to get these discounts, you've got to use promo code D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
I must say I was kind of intrigued and also bemused to see Biden on the news.
And the guy was, you know, drawing himself up to full height.
And he says that he is signing on his desk the first anti-lynching law in American history.
And now quoting Biden, no federal law, no federal law, he repeats, expressly prohibited lynching until today.
So... Let it go on the record that Biden is against lynching.
Now, are there lynchings going on in America today?
No. Was there anyone that you can remember in the last five years?
No. In the last 30 years?
No. Yeah, sure, you can think of hate crimes, the Ahmaud Arbery case more recently.
And of course, going back 20 or 30 years, we can find Emmett Till and their other examples, of course.
But lynching hasn't really occurred in the classic sense in America in 40 years.
So it's not exactly an ongoing social problem.
And to some degree, coming out today, now, and saying, listen, we're going to be banning lynching all across the country in all 50 states, this is kind of like saying, you know, we're going to be banning cannibalism, or we're going to come out four-square against witch-burning.
I mean, yeah, and when one goes into the landscape of history, you can ferret out the Salem witch trials, and you can find there was some ancient cannibalism, perhaps, um...
But none of these are pressing social problems.
So this appears to be a certain kind of absurd virtue signaling.
At least that was my initial reaction until I began to look a little bit more at the law itself.
And what's interesting is that the law is not about lynching.
It recognizes the absurdity of outlawing something that isn't even happening.
So what is the law doing?
Well, the law, and this is a very kind of democratic move, is in the name of fighting lynching, is actually fortifying penalties for so-called hate crimes.
And herein lies the problem with the law.
Now, very interestingly, Chip Roy, I saw Congressman Chip Roy of Texas talking about this, and he goes, a number of Republicans voted for this.
They didn't really want to, but they were like, how can we come out against lynching?
And this is kind of the cleverness of the Democrats.
They label, they throw the lynching label on something, so it appears like if you vote against this, you're for lynching.
And the actual wording of the law...
is about trying to have enhanced penalties for so-called hate crimes.
Now, there's a completely, there's a sort of separate problem with that, that is unrelated to lynching, and that's this, that when you have a hate crime, You have a crime, typically, for example, in which you have people of two different races.
Now, hate crimes generally have a kind of one-sidedness to them.
In other words, a white guy kills a black guy.
It's a hate crime. A black guy kills a white guy.
It's just a murder.
But even if you apply an even-handed standard on this, the question is this.
The murder is high in and of itself.
Obviously, the intention behind the murder matters.
We know that in the law, for example, a manslaughter is completely different from a murder that's premeditated.
But what is the point of putting enhanced penalties based upon, you may say, the political thoughts of the individuals involved?
This is really where the hate crime legislation sort of takes off.
Because what it tries to do is criminalize thoughts.
Well, this guy was prejudiced against gays.
Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn't.
Lots of people may be prejudiced against gays, but it's a whole different matter as to what they do about it, right?
In other words, there's a difference between the thought and the action.
Let's remember that racial discrimination is not a thought.
Racial discrimination is an action.
And so... You have things here that are already classified, not only as crimes, but as hate crimes.
And what this anti-lynching law tries to do is attach enhanced remedies.
Now, really the reason all of this is dangerous is that we're under a Biden regime which cannot be trusted to fairly administer or prudentially administer this kind of power.
These are people who go against political opponents for their thoughts.
Their thoughts, by the way, they label as hate crimes.
Oh yeah, you voted for Trump.
That's a hate crime.
Oh yeah, you contested the election.
You said that the election needed to be adjudicated.
Well, you're obviously provoking an insurrection.
So you can see the way here that this kind of law is susceptible to massive abuse.
And this was Chip Roy's point, and I completely agree with him.
So, again, my first reaction to this was to laugh at Biden.
You know, you kind of senile fool.
You're outlawing something that isn't really occurring.
It hasn't for decades. But my second reaction is to realize that, once again, the Democrats are kind of up to their diabolical old tricks, and that in the name of fighting against one thing, they're actually enhancing penalties on something completely different.
We all know that in order to keep our immune system strong, we need extra protection for it.
My friends at Centurion Labs have combined five key ingredients to defend your immune system against allergies, colds, the flu, even coronavirus.
It's called Centurion Defender.
It incorporates vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, copper, and quercetin in just one capsule.
No more swallowing 10 pills a day or not taking supplements because the individual cost is too high.
Debbie and I currently take just one Defender with breakfast, one Defender with dinner, and this definitely keeps the germaphobe in our family happy.
Centurion Labs has dedicated the last 15 years to research and develop safe, effective, and affordable healthcare products made in the USA that you can trust.
For a limited time, listeners of this podcast can save 20% off their first order of Centurion Defender when you visit centurionlabs.com and use promo code Dinesh.
So go ahead, defend your health today with Centurion Defender.
Go to centurionlabs.com slash Dinesh.
Welcome to my show. Welcome to my show.
And it's interesting to look at it over there and see how it compares to what's going on over here.
There clearly are some parallels, although obviously with a kind of British accent.
So I want to talk about Glasgow, the city of Glasgow, which a couple of years ago, well, 2019, commissioned what's called the Glasgow Slavery Audit.
So they got a bunch of historians, and they said that the wealth of Glasgow...
It seems to have been accumulated through the tobacco trade, which was, of course, tied back to, in previous centuries, to slave plantations abroad.
Not slavery in England, but slavery in the colonies controlled by England, and so Glasgow apparently owes its current status.
And its importance to this tobacco wealth that was seemingly illicitly generated through slavery.
So my thought whenever I hear things like this is, okay, are you planning to give it back?
Are you planning to relinquish the wealth that is obviously ill-gotten gains?
It's kind of like if you stole a bunch of paintings and they're still hanging up in your house, well, return them to their rightful owners.
But Glasgow has no intention of doing this. No surprise.
Their idea is to turn this into one of those self-congratulatory virtue signaling enterprises. How?
Because their point is a lot of streets in Glasgow are named after tobacco barons who helped to build the city. And there are also monuments to these same barons sprinkled throughout Glasgow.
And their idea is, let's take the monuments down, or let's consider taking them down.
Let's consider renaming the streets.
And, as often happens, this kind of project kind of gets started, and pretty soon it starts targeting people who shouldn't be targeted.
No surprise. We've seen this in America, where they start by saying, well, let's ban the books written by Confederates, and pretty soon you're banning, like, Huckleberry Finn, you're banning, like, the...
To Kill a Mockingbird.
And in Glasgow, they started out and they identified some people.
There's apparently a slave baron named Colin Campbell, John Moore, James Oswald, Robert Peel, Jr.
And so they started identifying these names of people.
Then they started identifying buildings named after people.
Hags, Castle, Lynn House, Glasgow Academy, and then street names, Buchanan Street, Glassford Street.
And finally, they settled in on a guy who was one of the most famous missionaries of all time, David Livingston.
Now... You probably know the famous phrase.
Livingston, by the way, was a missionary in Africa, and he sort of went missing.
No one could find him. And then an American journalist was sent to look for him named Stanley, Henry Stanley, and Stanley found him.
And apparently famously said, although said ironically, Dr.
Livingston, I presume. Now the reason that the irony has been lost in history is that Livingston was sitting there with basically 200 black Africans.
And so obviously he was Livingston.
So the I presume is kind of a little bit of a British joke.
But... Historically, people think, you know, that Stanley really said that.
He was kind of identifying Livingston.
Anyway, the point is this.
Livingston is a giant of British history and, in fact, of world history.
Here was a guy who not only did missionary conversion in Africa and, by the way, helped to bring Christianity to Africa.
Think of it. Today, there are large countries in Africa that are 50% Christian.
People like Stanley and Livingston had a lot to do with that.
So Africa is now divided between Christianity and Islam, and the Christian part of it is due to missionary efforts by Livingston and by others.
Now, Livingston grew up poor, and when he was 10 years old, he worked in a mill.
He did this out of desperate poverty.
There was nowhere else for him to...
He was essentially a child laborer.
So, this is how idiotic the Glasgow Council is.
They're basically saying, we need to remove Livingston's statue in Glasgow because he worked in a tobacco mill that likely used West Indian cotton.
Think about this. First of all, what did Livingston have to do with that?
The cotton barons were having a cotton trade, but here you have this destitute kid who works in a cotton mill because he can't get a job anywhere else, and then he goes on to become a prominent abolitionist.
He's against slavery. He has all these statements condemning slavery.
He's credited with helping to end the slave trade, and yet he gets caught in the woke net.
And there is now talk about taking down his statue.
Now, I should say that the Glasgow City Council has not taken any action yet.
There have been all these proposals, you know, change the name of this building, change the name of that street, take down Livingston statue, but the Glasgow City Council hasn't acted.
And kind of what I'm hoping is that cooler heads will prevail and that as people begin to recognize what's going on here, they'll realize how stupid it is to take down a statue of David Livingston, a poor kid who came up working in a mill and then went on to become a famous not only missionary, but also abolitionist.
The Russia invasion of Ukraine has sent the markets into an uproar.
The market's going down and gold is going up.
Well, hey, this is exactly why you have gold as part of your investment strategy.
Gold is a hedge. Precious metals have historically been a safe haven in times of geopolitical Now, Birch Gold is the leader in converting IRAs and 401ks into tax-sheltered IRAs backed by gold and silver.
So now's the time to protect yourself by investing in something with real value.
Gold and silver from Birch Gold if you haven't done so already.
With thousands of satisfied customers, an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, Birch Gold can help you protect your savings.
So go ahead, text Dinesh to 989898 and you'll get a free email.
information kit on gold.
There is no obligation.
Text Inesh to 989898.
Get your free information kit now.
And like me, you're going to be thankful that you have gold in your retirement account.
I want to tell you about the result in a trial that I mentioned on the podcast several weeks ago.
A trial of two prominent people in Finland who were accused of hate crimes, essentially for communicating their Christian beliefs.
So, let me revive the facts of the case.
You have a woman named Paivi Rasanen.
She's a physician. She's a mother of five.
And she was a member of the Finnish parliament.
And then you have Johanna Pajola, a bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese in Finland.
And both of them were accused or indicted together for Apparently using their free speech to promote what the government of Finland called hate speech.
So this is essentially a hate speech trial.
What happened is that this woman named Rasanan had put out a pamphlet in 2004.
She had apparently made some comments in a 2018 radio debate.
She apparently had a Twitter post in 2019.
So this was the basis of the indictment.
And they said that she was guilty of hate crimes because her statements were, quote, likely to cause intolerance, contempt, and hatred toward homosexuals.
This was the indictment.
Now what was the charge against the other individual, Pojola?
They said basically that this was a guy who published a pamphlet In which he once again supposedly was promoting hate by emphasizing the biblical principle taken right out of the Bible, quote, male and female, he created them.
So the idea here is that God made human beings male and female, he created them.
That's hate speech!
So this now goes before a court in Helsinki.
And there was an investigation before this.
And the defense was simple.
We're articulating our Christian beliefs.
In fact, in one case, one of the defendants said, I'm simply saying in a little different way, and in Finnish, I suppose, what the Apostle Paul said.
The prosecutor was not abused.
He goes, the apostle Paul isn't on trial here.
He goes, but Rasanen is.
Meaning this individual, this woman, this member of parliament, she's on trial.
And so regardless of what Paul said, if she repeats it, she now said it.
And so she needs to be held to account.
Finally, the court in Helsinki has issued its verdict, and I'm happy to say it's a complete dismissal of all charges.
It's a complete victory for both Pai V. Rasanen and Johanna Pajola.
And basically what the court says is this.
They say that, yes, these are two individuals who were articulating essentially biblical concepts, and the court says in a unanimous ruling, quote, it is not for the court to interpret biblical concepts.
The court says these people are Christians.
They have every right to be Christians.
They're saying what Christians believe.
And it's not our job to say whether that's good or bad, right or wrong.
So it's not that the court declares that this is hate speech or it's not.
The court basically says that these individuals are exercising their free speech rights.
They have every right to do it.
Now, interestingly, there were some U.S. senators And I believe Rubio was one of them.
And there were some others.
Rubio, Hawley, Lankford, Inhofe, and Braun.
And they wrote letters to the court in Finland, basically saying that they were very concerned that this attack on free speech, that these were people articulating biblical principles.
And I think what they were trying to do is avoid a precedent that would then I'm delighted to say that even though there was an attempt to squash free speech in this case, in Finland, it did not succeed.
Does it make sense that the same company that controls half of online retail also passively eavesdrops on your private conversations at home?
What about the idea that a single company controls 90% of internet searches, runs your email service, and gets to track everything you do on your smartphone?
Think about how much of your life is on the internet, sadly.
Every site you visit, video you watch, message you send gets tracked and data mined.
But when you run ExpressVPN on your device, the software hides your IP address.
It's time to put a layer of protection between your online activity and these tech juggernauts, and that's why I use ExpressVPN.
ExpressVPN makes your activity harder to trace and sell to advertisers.
ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your internet data to keep you safe from hackers and eavesdroppers on your network.
It's rated the number one VPN service by Mashable and TechRadar.
I love how easy ExpressVPN is to use.
Download the app on your phone or computer, tap one button, and boom, you're protected.
So stop handing over your personal data.
To internet service providers and other tech giants who mine your activity and sell off your information, protect yourself with the VPN I trust to keep me private online.
Visit expressvpn.com slash Dinesh.
In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine...
There's been a retaliation on the part of America and the West, and some of that has focused on these Russian oligarchs.
Now, the Russian oligarchs are people who are part of Putin's inner circle.
These are people whose, many of them with communist backgrounds, but nevertheless, they have profited handsomely in the kind of gangster regime that Putin set up in the aftermath of the Cold War.
And what's emerged recently, and there's a very interesting article that reports on this in depth, a number of American universities, notably Yale, we'll be talking about Yale, has apparently been getting money by not only cutting deals with these Russian oligarchs, not only admitting their sons and daughters, To Yale as part of this buddy-buddy arrangement.
But then also giving prominent positions on various boards, advisory councils, setting up exchange programs, and giving leverage to these Russian oligarchs over the actual management and running of Yale.
And all of this has been done in exchange for, well, money.
Money. The investigative reporter looking at this, a woman named Clara Mallott, she noticed that there were just a lot of Russians popping up at Yale, and not any Russians, but Russians connected to these Putin oligarchs.
Denis and Daria Avon, for example, happen to be the son of a guy named Petr, or Peter, Avon, the former head of Russia's largest private sector bank, and he's very close to Putin.
So the Avon twins are recent Yalies.
And they're not the only ones.
There's Irina Vexelberg, Yale School of Management, class of 2005, and a younger brother, Alexander Vexelberg.
Now these are the two children of an aluminum czar, another Putin buddy, Victor Vexelberg.
Then there's Laura Friedman, F-R-I-D-M-A-N, class of 2015.
And Karia Friedman, class of 2018.
These are the daughters of a multi-conglomerate kingpin named Mikhail Friedman.
There's also Alexander Abramov, class of 2014.
Actually, it's Alexander Abramov Jr., who is the son of, you guessed it, Alexander Abramov, steel czar in Russia.
And then there's Laila Blatvynnik, class of 2024, daughter of billionaire investor and Putin buddy, Len Blavatnik.
So what you see here is this kind of team of oligarchs dispatching their sons and daughters who apparently have an open door at Yale.
Now, that's only the starting point.
It'd be one thing, look, colleges, and this is a little shameful for Ivy League universities to do this because they don't need to.
Generally, they're flush with cash, and we'll come back to why Yale believed that they needed the cash in this case.
But nevertheless, it's one thing to say, all right, well, this is a famous person.
Let's let them in.
It's a whole other matter to allow these oligarchs to essentially bring their tentacles into Yale University, set up programs within Yale, and begin to manage the curriculum, and also to shift Yale's emphasis in a kind of pro-Russian direction.
Now, how did this all...
Get started. And a big culprit here, by the way, isn't just Yale in general, but specifically the Yale School of Management.
Yale School of Management saw a huge opportunity in tapping into this wealth in Russia, and I want to talk about how that actually happened.
So evidently this all began in 2008 with, yes, the 2008 crash.
Apparently, Yale University had a big chunk of its endowment invested in Lehman Brothers.
And Lehman Brothers, you remember, went bankrupt, went belly up after 2008.
And that was a huge hit.
Yale lost 25% of its endowment in one shot.
And so naturally, Yale was scrambling, how do we get all this money back?
And, of course, this is where the Russian oligarchs began to sort of step in.
The key figure here was a guy named Viktor Vekselberg.
And this is a guy who is, in effect, running a school of management, or at least he's the mover and shaker, a school of management in Moscow that's called the School of Management...
This is the Russian name for a kind of corresponding school of management.
And so this guy, Vexelberg, comes to Yale and he says, look, there's a lot of money that can come your way, not just for me, but also for my friends.
But we're not looking to just give it.
We're looking for, as he put it, a relationship.
And this is the key word. Basically, what Wechselberg was saying is, we can provide money, but the golden rule is that he who provides the gold helps to make the rules.
And we want kind of in at Yale.
We want to be able to set up programs beneficial to us.
We want to reorient Yale in such a way that it has a better relationship, which is to say it's more pro-Russian in its curriculum.
And so this has been now going on for several years.
And apparently, it's only now, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that it's come to light.
And not only come to light, but Yale has been moving really quickly now to wipe out the records of its deep connections with these Russian oligarchs.
So one by one, their names are all disappearing off of various buildings, off of various committees, and essentially Yale is engaged in a kind of cleanup operation.
So, this journalist, Clara Malad, is very shrewd in noticing, wait a minute, this guy used to be on this committee.
He's gone. And Yale just simply maintains, well, we don't really comment on how we put names on buildings.
Well, look at this Russian olig.
He was serving on this board of directors.
I see that he's been removed.
Oh yeah, his term must have expired.
Well, she notices his term hasn't expired.
So, what's going on here is the equivalent of the New York Times going back and stealth editing its earlier articles, except now it's a university doing this.
Essentially, these Russian oligarchs who were previously VIPs at Yale have now come to become, you know, bad guys and we can't be associated with them.
And so suddenly a cleanup operation is underway.
But if you ask me, Yale is sort of trying to have the best of all worlds.
It's trying to get rid of the stain of the Russian oligarchs while keeping their money.
Some of us wish we could rewind the clock when it comes to our health.
You know, exercising, climbing stairs, all the things young people take for granted, well, these aren't things that should stop just because you age, and neither does suffering from the normal aging aches and pains, because now there is a 100% drug-free solution to all that, and it's called Relief Factor.
Relief Factor supports your body's fight against inflammation.
That's the source of aches and pains.
The vast majority of people who try Relief Factor order more.
Because it works for them.
Debbie loves using relief factor.
When her shoulders started acting up about a year or so ago, it was really the only thing that worked for her.
And she knows if she stops taking it, hey, the pain's going to come right back.
So Debbie's like, I don't want to be without this again.
You too can benefit. Try it for yourself.
You'll see. Order the three-week quick start.
Great price. The discounted price is just $19.95.
Go to relieffactor.com or call 833-690-7246 to find out more about this offer.
That number again, 833-690-7246 or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. We're now in purgatory.
In Dante's purgatorio.
And, um... Dante begins having escaped or made his way out of inferno, out of hell.
He is now approaching the purgatorial mountain, the so-called seven-story mountain of purgatory, each story representing a kind of terrace, and each terrace representing one of the seven deadly sins.
So purgatory is a place of Purgation.
Let's think about the name for a minute, purgatory.
It's the place where we are purged.
Purged of what? Well, purged not just of sin, but of the effects of sin.
So this is the point about Inferno is that sin has a kind of disfiguring effect on you, on your personality.
And if that sin and its effects are not removed, then you are eternally saddled with that.
And that's why you're in hell.
In hell you remain the way you are, the way you always wanted to be, and you get what you wanted.
But what you wanted is in no way preparing you for paradise.
Purgatory is a preparation for paradise.
It's the place where the effects of sin are purged.
It's the place where you are In a sense, divested of your trivial and wrong-headed attachments.
Attachments that were perhaps not bad in themselves, but are not ultimate.
And you are in purgatory prepared for that single-minded devotion to God.
That is the beatific experience of paradise.
Now... The important thing to be said about purgatory is that everybody who is in purgatory is going to go to heaven.
This is really important because purgatory is not a place where your fate is to be determined.
You can't flunk purgatory.
Purgatory is a temporary way station on your way to heaven.
And this is really important because if you look at Dante's Purgatory, particularly in the early sections, you appear still to be in hell.
In other words, there are really bad guys.
In fact, some of the guys are even worse than the characters we've encountered in the Inferno.
And one interesting question is, what distinguishes them from the people in Inferno?
And we'll find out what that is.
In fact, you know what that is.
It is the fact that however horrific their sins were on earth, they did acknowledge them.
They did reach out to God.
In some cases, they did it at the very end of their life.
It was a kind of last-minute conversion.
But the remarkable thing in Christianity is that that is sufficient.
That is enough.
So, despite the outward resemblance of purgatory to hell, as we will see, in purgatory you have people who are suffering, and in some cases suffering pretty intensely, but the meaning of the suffering is totally different.
So, in hell, the suffering is essentially getting what you wanted and now realizing that that, what you wanted, is in fact very painful.
Look at Ugolino.
What did he want? He wanted to do nothing more than to give it to Ruggieri, to bite on the head of Ruggieri.
He gets that. He can do that.
But it turns out that's painful.
That is a constant reenactment of his original rage and hatred which has made him into who he is.
And he wants to stay that way.
And that's why he gets what he wants deep in the bowels of Dante's hell.
Now, because purgatory is temporary, and by temporary what I mean is that the souls in purgatory have to sort of undergo a stage, multiple stages of purgation.
They are climbing up the purgatorial mountain, and to be honest, when they get to the top, they reach a place called the earthly paradise, and then beyond that, heaven.
So, Dante here, interesting distinction between the earthly paradise, which is essentially the Garden of Eden, and heaven, which is above and beyond even that.
Heaven is not the same thing as the earthly paradise.
The earthly paradise is the highest stage before you get to heaven.
But purgatory is temporal in a way that neither hell nor heaven are.
So right away we see a very important difference.
And when we come into purgatory, the whole mood is different.
And you begin to think, well, why is it different?
Well, it's different because heaven and hell are eternal and purgatory is temporary.
And as I say, by temporary, I mean not only that it will come to an end once you've climbed the seven-story mountain, that's true, but it's also true that if while you're climbing the seven-story mountain, we arrive at the last judgment, it's time for the last judgment, well, you know what?
Every soul in purgatory is immediately dispatched to heaven.
And in eternity, purgatory either ceases to exist or purgatory is completely empty.
So nobody is going to stay forever in purgatory.
And think of how that makes purgatory different.
Because hell is eternal.
People in hell are not going to get out of it.
People in heaven stay there forever.
They're happy forever. But purgatory is transitional.
Purgatory is a kind of clean-up place.
It's the place where you get ready for the next place, which is heaven.
Now, for these reasons, I think it is much better to understand purgatory, despite the punishments that occur there, not as a kind of extension of hell, but as a kind of vestibule or gateway to heaven.
Purgatory has more to do with heaven than it has to do with hell, even though they're really bad guys or people who were once really bad guys who are in purgatory.
There's a single gate that separates hell from purgatory.
But interestingly, there's no gate that separates purgatory from heaven.
And that's, I think, Dante's very beautiful way of showing that purgatory kind of is the entry point.
There are some people who can go straight to heaven, but it doesn't seem from Dante's universe that that's the majority.
The majority of people do require some kind of It's like you gotta get ready for heaven, and so it appears that more souls are going through purgatory before they in fact get to heaven.
We're talking about Dante's purgatory, and I mentioned in the last segment that purgatory is transitional, while hell and heaven are eternal.
And that means that purgatory is a place of change.
What we see in purgatory Is that souls are, even under the pressure of punishment, they're improving themselves.
It's a place of moral improvement.
And so, right away we see that punishment has a totally different purpose in purgatory than it does in hell.
Punishment in hell is nothing more than your due.
You're getting not just what you deserve, but you're getting what you always wanted.
But in purgatory, punishment is...
It's a form of restoration.
So punishment, even though sometimes harsh, is always beneficial.
Punishment is for your benefit.
And in that sense, the souls in purgatory know that.
And so you get this very positive feeling in purgatory, even on the part of suffering souls, because A, they know their ultimate destination, which is onward and upward.
And ultimately into heaven, and B, they know that this kind of purgation that they're undergoing is good for them, is actually necessary for them.
Now, Dante himself is going through this.
He himself is changing.
He himself is improving.
Now, Dante did improve in some ways through hell.
He improved, you may say, negatively by meeting all these really bad, evil spirits.
Dante realized, I don't want to be like that guy, and I don't want to be like that guy.
So there is a kind of learning through negative example.
But in purgatory, Dante is along with other souls who have been disfigured by anger or by greed or by lust or by pride, but have repented, but are undergoing this process of getting that out of their system.
And Dante, in going through purgatory, is doing that too.
Now, the beautiful thing is that as a reader, we can undergo the exact same process.
In other words, we can read the Purgatorio in a way that makes us better people at the end of it.
Now, this is why I think in many ways Purgatory, and I'm probably not in the majority here, is kind of my favorite part of the Divine Comedy.
Now, generally, if you talk to college students and you ask them, what's your favorite part of the Divine Comedy?
They'll all answer, well, it's Inferno, because, you know, it's just, like, really out there.
And, man, you encounter all these intriguing and unbelievably Machiavellian and vicious characters, and it's all fascinating, and so we're going to vote for Inferno.
And if you go into a kind of Christian monastery and you talk to monks and you ask them what's their favorite part of the inferno, they're likely to say, well, you know, it's Paradiso.
It's the place where we can kind of sit and contemplate the beatific vision.
Nothing ever changes.
That's the life we seek and that's why we went to the monastery to get a sort of almost a foretaste of eternity.
But I think for ordinary people kind of slogging your way through the world, you Purgatory has a great appeal because, like Dante, we are trying to improve ourselves in a manner that makes us ready for paradise.
And one of the things that we learn in Purgatory, and you learn this right away, you learn this like in Canto 1, is that Dante's story, Dante's scheme is...
Is not finished.
Because there is, again, particularly for students today, reading the Inferno, they think, okay, well, I don't really need to read Purgatory.
I kind of got the picture.
Dante's given me his idea.
These are the sins. Okay, I get it.
But no, the first thing you realize when you get to Purgatory is you don't get it.
Dante has not unfolded his whole scheme.
In fact, rules that seem to be laid down in the Inferno are modified or repudiated in the Purgatorio and again in the Paradiso.
And so this is a very remarkable poem that forces you to sort of keep re-evaluating it.
I once heard a professor, a lecturer, say that the Divine Comedy is not so much a puzzle to be unraveled, but a mystery to be experienced.
I think that's actually the correct way to think about it.
And we begin to see this right away as we continue to read the poem.
So, to take up a few questions that sort of throw this picture into clear light, Ask yourself this question.
What does somebody who commits suicide, where do they end up?
Heaven or hell or purgatory?
Well, we would tend to think, well, obviously hell.
We just met Pierre Delavigne, a suicide, he was in hell.
There's an actual circle of the suicides.
But suddenly you realize in the first canto of purgatory, there is a guy named Cato who committed suicide.
And he's evidently in purgatory.
He's kind of the gate man of purgatory.
But listen, like everybody else, he's on his way to heaven.
He will ultimately end up in heaven.
And moreover, this guy Cato is a pagan to boot.
In other words, he's a Roman.
Now, he lived in the time of Julius Caesar.
And in the great wars between Caesar and Pompey...
Cato committed suicide.
So here you have a pagan and a suicide.
So what's he doing in purgatory?
So Dante is forcing us to sort of re-evaluate this kind of thing and re-evaluate it in a very interesting way.
Dante takes the view here that there's suicide and there's suicide.
So Pierre de LaVigne took the view that, look, God gave me life, but you know what?
While it was going well, I liked it.
It was a gift. I thought it was cool.
But then when my fortunes turned, when people became envious of me and they undermined me and I lost my position, I'm like, I'm out of here.
I don't want this gift. Take it back, God.
I don't need it. So that, for Dante, is suicide in the kind of sense of an unforgivable sin.
This is basically thumbing your nose at God.
But for Dante, Cato is not doing that.
What Cato is doing is he's basically saying, I refuse to give Caesar the benefits of tyranny.
I refuse to let him subjugate me.
And so in the name of freedom...
So Dante accepts the idea that Cato's suicide is really an act of defiance.
In that sense, Dante sees it as more similar to the Christian martyrs who gave their life.
I mean, they weren't suicides.
True, they said, listen, I refuse to repudiate Christ.
If you're going to kill me, go ahead and kill me.
So for Dante, Cato's actions are more similar to that.
Than they are to a Pierre de Lavinia.
And so right away you realize that there's no simple rule here.
And Dante is also making us think that when it comes to sins, it's not just the action that matters, it's also the intention.
Yes, you did it, but why did you do it?
What made you do it? What was your motive?
And the motive is an important clarification to the gravity of the offense, or whether, as in the case of Cato, it was an offense at all.
▲
Export Selection