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April 1, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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AFTER UKRAINE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep302
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Russia-born U.S. intelligence expert Rebecca Koffler joins me.
We're going to talk about the state of the war in Ukraine and what comes next.
I want to examine a revealing admission from the left that Biden is the cause of the economic woes that he now tries to blame on other factors.
There's some good news. A judge has expelled a group of Pennsylvania school board members for refusing to comply with the law on mask mandates.
And I'll introduce some of the surprising faces in Dante's purgatory.
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.
One of the disturbing things that's happening in the economics community, at least among so-called left of center or progressive economists, is that they are quite literally becoming stupid.
And what I mean by becoming stupid is essentially forgetting the laws of supply and demand, forgetting the first principles of economics, forgetting the very ancient truth that when you print more money and there's more money chasing the same amount of goods, that's going to cause inflation.
There's no way around it.
True, there could be other factors involved also, but the simple effect of turning up the crank on the printing machine, putting more dollars in circulation, in other words, for the government to spend more money by printing it, is going to cause inflation.
This is a, let's call it an economic fact.
Now, there's an article in Vox, and the article is only illuminating because it quotes a number of economists.
And here's Vox.
Among economists and experts, there's no strict consensus about what exactly is to blame.
And then they go on talking about things like rising oil prices.
Now, rising oil prices can't be the cause of inflation.
Rising oil prices are a form of inflation.
After all, what is inflation?
Price rises. So you can't say, well, you know, I think I know why inflation is going up.
That's because the price of clothes is rising.
Wage prices are rising.
Oil prices are rising.
You're not describing a cause of inflation.
You're just describing inflation.
That's what inflation is. If you're looking for a cause, you have to look at what's causing the prices to rise in the first place.
And the answer, again, printing money.
Now, In an interesting interview with Larry Summers, remember Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, a reporter named Ezra Klein kind of gives the game away in a very interesting way.
And it's not even what Summers replies to his question.
The question itself shows you that the left tried to do something here with the economy.
That's what got us this inflation.
And now even the left is like, whoa, what is it that we've caused?
So what I'm getting at is Ezra Klein, you can see from his question, he knows what it caused inflation.
And he's actually upset about it because he thought he was doing or he thought the left was doing something wonderful.
And it's essentially come back to bite them.
So here's Ezra Klein talking in his interview with Larry Summers.
He goes, there are things that feel just.
Here we have the leftist.
It feels just. So let's do it.
There are things that feel just that many of us have wanted for a long time.
More hiring, wage increases, particularly at the bottom, stimulus checks for people that have had a lot of bad years, child tax credits for families that could really use that.
So kind of what Ezra Klein is getting at is, we wanted this.
This has been our wish list for a long time.
And COVID supplied us with the pretext.
He doesn't say that, but he implies it.
Let's go on. And then he goes, I mean, there was a reason the Biden administration wanted to run the economy hot.
Now, run the economy hot here is essentially, you can call it shop talk for printing money.
Run the economy hot means let's run the printing press, pour a bunch of money in the economy, do a bunch of things that we on the left have always wanted to do.
And then he goes, even in this terrible time, this horrifying pandemic, we were giving people who needed it quite a bit of help.
So the left was using COVID to create this kind of redistributionist agenda to essentially send out checks.
Remember, for the Democrats, checks is a form of vote buying.
This is how they win over the allegiance of people long term.
And then Ezra Klein says this, And then for that to then turn into this horrifying inflation problem, which is now eating back those wage increases, I recognize the world doesn't have to please me, but it's maddening.
So what Ezra Klein is saying is, we printed all this money, we thought we were giving people more, but then by getting inflation, we ended up eroding the value of their money.
So a guy has more dollars in his pocket, but those dollars aren't buying any more than he could buy before.
Because even if you have $100 and the government gives you $10 and you now have $110, but there's now 10% inflation, you're basically back to, well, back to square one, Debbie puts it perfectly.
And so we see here an admission of guilt that the left caused this problem.
This is a self-inflicted injury.
This is not inflation that came out of nowhere.
This is not due to corporate greed.
In fact, Larry Summers swats down the idea that this is due to corporate greed.
In fact, Larry Summers makes the point, he goes, listen, you know, just because these corporations get on phone calls, on so-called earnings calls with their investors, and they talk about the fact that they're able to set prices, he goes, it doesn't mean, they're not saying that setting prices is an arbitrary business.
We can set our price at whatever we want.
No, price setting is a complex business driven by competition and many other factors.
If you are a business, you set your prices too high, nobody's going to buy your product.
So Larry Summers pours cold water on the idea, the left's idea.
Again, operating in an imaginary world, anyone who runs a business knows.
I mean, I'm in the movie business.
Can I set the movie ticket price as $100?
Well, I'll just set it at $100. I'll make more money.
Corporate greed. Nonsense.
If you set the price high, people won't go.
It's not just because they may say, I want to go to the movies.
There are many other ways I can entertain myself.
So bottom line is we're having a great erosion of knowledge about how things get done in an economy.
This is a problem that the left doesn't understand, and it's also a problem that the left has created.
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Well, here's an interesting story about a parent, a single, just one person, in Pennsylvania.
This is in Westchester, Pennsylvania.
And her actions caused five elected members of the school board to be removed.
So let's follow the story.
The The Westchester School Board decided to defy the authority of the state.
The state essentially passed a law ending mandatory school masking.
So mandatory school masking is no longer the law in Pennsylvania.
But the Westchester School Board decided, well, you know, that doesn't matter.
We're going to continue with masks.
And And so they required masks.
And a lot of parents were like, wait a minute, haven't you seen the new law?
You can't require masks to our students.
Masks have to be optional.
And then the school board sort of relented, and they said, okay, well, masks are optional right now, but we reserve the right to impose mandatory masks pretty much when we feel like it, or when we think the science demands it.
And so a parent, Beth Ann Rosica, And now here's the interesting thing.
She found a law. It's actually not very often used Pennsylvania education statute.
It's not exactly new, but it basically says that school board directors who, quote, neglect their duty can, in fact, be removed for failure to perform their duties or for neglecting their duties.
And it says that 10 resident taxpayers in a district can make a petition to the court To have the court look at it, and if it's warranted to have the school board members removed.
So that's exactly what this parent, Beth Ann Rossica, did.
She went to Judge William P. Mann in Chester County Court of Common Pleas.
And this guy looked at the law, and he said, well, yeah, I have to admit that the school board is violating the law here, even though the masks aren't currently being required.
The idea that they required them, even after the state said no, and the idea that they reserved the right to require them in the future, That's a violation of the law.
And so the judge basically ordered five of these school board members to vacate their offices.
They're out. And he told, he essentially told the existing school board members who remained, as well as the parent, which is Betha and Rasika.
By the way, she has two students, two of her kids are students in the district.
He goes, you give me the names of replacements and I will look at them.
And I'm going to essentially appoint people to fill those positions until the next election.
Now, who is Bethan Rasika?
Well, she is a executive director of a group in Pennsylvania called Back to School PA. So it's a back to school group, a parents' rights group.
So you see here that by organizing parents, And by paying attention to what these laws are and what your rights are under the law, you can actually do something.
You can exercise your legitimate power in the democratic process.
And in this case, it's just fantastic to see that you've got these arrogant school board members.
They think they run the show. They think no one gets to tell them what to do.
And now a judge says, I beg to differ, and bangs down his gavel.
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Feel the difference. I did myself a little bit of a double take when I was scrolling through social media, and I came across a post on Twitter, and this is by the German Embassy.
This is from the German Embassy in America.
I'm going to read it. They have it in German, but I hit the translate button, so here it is in English.
Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine is a criminal offense.
Anyone publicly approving the war may be liable to prosecution in Germany.
This applies to using the Z symbol, too.
German security authorities are keeping an eye on the use of the symbol, Ministry of the Interior.
Now, this is extremely disturbing, what the Germans are basically saying.
And to me, there's a big non sequitur here.
The second line doesn't arise out of the first.
Let's look at the lines carefully.
Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine is a criminal offense.
I agree. Number two, anyone publicly approving the war may be liable to prosecution.
Stop! The Manson murders are a criminal offense.
Let's say that I was nuts and I went, I don't see anything wrong with the Manson murders.
Well, I haven't committed criminal offense.
Sure, I'm an ass for defending Manson, but on the other hand, I don't deserve to be locked up.
I'm nuts. Leave me alone.
In other words, it's completely one thing for something to be a crime and something else for someone to say, it's my opinion that that's not a crime, or it's my opinion that that's no big deal, or it's my opinion that we're responsible for making them do it.
This is what it means to live in a free society.
So I recognize that there are extreme circumstances in which you can limit even free speech.
I mean, free speech was to a degree limited in America during World War II. It's been limited in countries that are at war.
And while in general, I don't approve of those kinds of restrictions, I recognize that they are sometimes necessary.
And there is a stronger case to be made when a country is at war.
But here's the point. Germany is not at war.
The West is not at war.
We don't have any kind of declared war going on with Russia.
So, the idea that the German government is imposing restrictions on German citizens just speaking out.
I mean, you would think there was a time when the left would find this totally unacceptable.
And it's so bizarre that today the left is okay with this kind of proto-fascist behavior.
Now, proto-fascism, of course, is on the left.
And ironically, the Germans do a lot of this kind of restriction in the name of fighting fascism.
Now, amazingly, or sort of perhaps not amazingly, the fascists, as far as we can identify them in this war, are in the Ukrainian camp.
In fact, there is a fascist battalion, a neo-Nazi battalion called the Azov Battalion, fighting for the Ukrainians.
I find it funny. Here's an article from CNN. They call it, quote, a far-right battalion.
They don't even want to call it neo-Nazi because they don't want to make it seem like we're on the side of the neo-Nazis, even though we are.
The Biden administration is.
So what's happening here is a real effort to camouflage the truth of the matter.
And this is why it's all the more important to have free speech, because when your government's lying to you and the authorities are lying to you, the ability to think freely for yourself and speak freely is certainly a form of liberation.
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Guys, I'd like to welcome back to the podcast Rebecca Koffler.
I had Rebecca on the show on March 23rd, Debbie reminds me, so about 10 days ago.
And I meant to get into the discussion of the Ukraine war.
And we went down some fascinating trails, but we didn't even get there.
So I thought, well, we got to have Rebecca back.
Let me tell you a little bit about her.
She's a Russian-born U.S. intelligence expert.
She's worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA. She's briefed the Pentagon, the White House, and NATO. She's received the National Intelligence Professional Award.
She's also the author of this book, Putin's Playbook, Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America.
Rebecca, welcome back. Thanks for joining me again. And we've got this, you know, war raging in Ukraine. Now, it seems to have lasted maybe longer than people expected. And what I mean by this is I saw some early estimates which were attributed to intelligence officials, basically saying this was going to be like a three day or a five day war. I think they were expecting
the Russians to be in Kiev. That has apparently not happened. Were the original estimates off?
And why is it that the Russians, who seem to be so much bigger and stronger than Ukraine, having so much difficulty here?
Yes, Dinesh, the estimates were completely off, and that is nothing new for the intelligence community.
Remember, they were wrong on three key things, and this is just recent fiascos.
The intelligence community assessed that the Russians wanted to elect Donald Trump in 2016.
Nothing can be further from the truth.
They feared Trump. The Russians, by intervening in our elections, wanted to sow discord and foment social unrest and polarize our society.
And regretfully, our intelligence officials, the corrupt ones, helped the Russians to do that.
We're still polarized. Number two, with regard to COVID origins, they did the same thing.
They suppressed a very viable analytic line which did not align with the group thing.
And believe me, the intelligence community is all about the group thing.
So what do we learn now?
Is that COVID origins likely stem from some biological weapons lab, right?
So number three, Hunter Biden's laptop.
50 intelligence officials from the spy agencies.
Not one, not two.
50, Dinesh.
signed a petition saying that Hunter Biden's laptop story was Russian disinformation.
So are we surprised about this complete failure to understand their adversary, Vladimir Putin?
So, Rebecca, let's talk about the Hunter Biden laptop for just a minute because it's hard for me to believe that these 50 intelligence officials genuinely believed that it was Russian disinformation, right?
Isn't it more likely that they had a political interest We're good to go.
Many people appeal to that.
Many media sources said, well, look, if they say these are the people who supposedly know, then we can write this off as we can justify not covering the laptop story because we don't want to be just replicating Russian disinformation.
One hundred percent, Dinesh.
The intelligence officials, the corrupt ones, and they are part of the deep state.
Some people don't believe that such a thing exists, but it does.
I was, when you and when your listeners finish my book, you will know what I mean by the deep state.
And so just like the Russians said, Sought to divide the United States, my adopted homeland.
As you said, I was born and raised in the totalitarian state.
In this manner, the corrupt intelligence leaders Wanted also to divide America by hiding the information and effectively intervening in our democratic process, the electoral process.
Imagine that. They're just worse than the KGB, basically.
And it's the same people who are trying to democratize other countries.
They are fighting right now, trying to help Ukraine become a democracy.
They are destroying democracy in our own land.
This is not the same country that I came to in 1989.
Democracy is being eroded and becoming more and more like a word with nothing real behind it.
Rebecca, we'll come back to Ukraine in the next segment, but let me ask you about Russia, because you were raised in Russia in the era of the Cold War, and we're now in a post-Cold War era.
I remember going back to the 1970s and 80s, Jean Kirkpatrick, whom you might remember, was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
She made an important distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, which, as I understand it, a totalitarian regime tries to run your life from beginning to end.
They care about what you eat.
They care about how your family is organized.
They want to tell you whether you should go to church, yes or no.
They want you to only work in a certain sector that they assign to you.
But an authoritarian regime is not like that.
So if you think of, say, Pinochet in Chile, he was an authoritarian dictator.
He wanted to be in power.
If you came out in the street to oppose him, he would send goons to beat you up.
But he didn't care how you lived or what you ate or what religion you practiced.
That was unimportant to him.
You could live your life normal.
So, the way I look at it is an authoritarian regime is a tyrannical regime, but it is not as tyrannical as a totalitarian regime.
Could I ask you to reflect on this distinction and apply it, if it applies at all, to the difference between, let's call it the old Soviet Union and Russia after the Cold War?
Well, to be honest with you, to me, it's just semantics, Dinesh, because I grew up there, and perhaps you could describe the Soviet Union, the USSR, right, as an authoritarian regime.
Indeed, the We're good to go.
I had no idea until later in life, because that's just not something that you were allowed to talk about.
And any kind of criticism of the Soviet leaders would have been, have tremendous consequences.
You could be expelled from school.
You could be losing your job.
You could even end up in jail or in a mental hospital.
Well, right now, perhaps it's more totalitarian.
Putin doesn't really care.
You can be religious.
In fact, he's promoting Russia as a religion-leading country, right?
Russian Orthodox Church.
But this is all, you know, propaganda partly.
But I also want to bring up, Dinesh, we are sliding down.
Towards that kind of authoritarian regime in America.
And I am frightened by that because my children are taught right now things that I was indoctrinated in when I was growing up.
The Marxist ideology.
We're banning books left and right.
We're banning conservative views, religious views, deplatforming people.
I mean, we are turning into USSR 2.0 and this needs to stop.
Rebecca, let's take a pause.
When we come back we'll pick up with the spread of authoritarianism around the world and what we can do to stop it.
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That number is 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code BALANCE. I'm back with Rebecca Koffler, Russian-born US intelligence expert, author of the book, Putin's Playbook.
Rebecca, you were talking in the last segment about an irony, which is that you've got all these U.S. intelligence experts, and they seem to be participating in a scheme in America to contract and repress liberty, certainly to oppose truth from coming out.
Sometimes they deploy their power to go after political opponents.
They're deploying these kind of socialist tactics in America.
And that are undermining, as you say, democracy.
And at the same time, their rhetoric is consistently one of promoting democracy abroad.
In fact, this is their whole justification for trying to mobilize a global campaign on behalf of Ukraine.
We got to protect democracy against authoritarianism.
What do you think is the actual agenda of these guys?
Normally, when I find that people are acting in a double standard, there's some single standard hiding behind the double standard.
So what's the agenda of these guys in promoting, let's call it authoritarianism at home, freedom abroad?
I'm actually just as stunned as you, Dinesh.
It is a mystery to me what these people are up to, because it is really not only ironic, but it is scary that they are talking about promoting democracy in every nuke and cranny of the world, even willing To go to war over it, sacrifice thousands of lives of American servicemen and women, the real patriots.
You know, these are the people in the Washington establishment who make decisions that affect people's lives, and yet they're willing to suppress democracy here.
I do not know.
I'm at a loss, Dinesh.
All I know is that This needs to stop and we need to expose these people.
These 50 people need to really lose their security clearances right now.
And anyone who suppressed alternative analytic view, whether it's COVID, whether it's the Russian interference in 2016 election, they need to be fired right now.
Rebecca, where do you think this Ukraine war is going?
And I mean, I'm kind of, I'm assuming you agree with me that some of this attempt to cancel Russia, you know, to, in other words, block Russian banking from going on and make sure that the Russian singer at the Met is not allowed to perform or all this kind of stuff.
I'm assuming that Putin's not going to be particularly fazed by any of this.
Now, he might be a little more phased.
We talked about this last time by the campaign against the Russian oligarchs.
That might actually hit a little bit closer to home.
But do you think that his goal is to level Ukraine and take it over?
Or do you think he wants to bring the Ukrainian government into a position of abject submission to Russia in which Ukraine would remain quasi-independent, but nevertheless, it will do Russia's bidding going forward?
So remember how this war started, Dinesh.
Putin stated several times that Ukraine's potential membership in NATO was a red line.
The reason it is a red line for Putin is because NATO is a military alliance, which specifically was created to counter the Soviet Union.
And so the distance right now between NATO forces And St.
Petersburg, which is the second largest city in Russia, has reduced from the Cold War to today from 1,000 miles to 100 miles, okay?
Putin wants to enforce his version of the Monroe Doctrine.
He believes that is part of his vital interests.
You know, the strategic security perimeter, it is true that Russia has relied on that A strategic buffer zone for centuries for wars, and most wars have come from the West, right?
So that's a pure military calculation.
So right now, even though tactically the Russians have performed horribly, miserably, it's embarrassing.
So Putin's strategic plan has not survived contact with the adversary.
He has achieved and is achieving his strategic goal Which is to prevent Ukraine from becoming part of NATO. Why?
It's because so long as Ukraine remains in active conflict, and so long as there's no territorial integrity and sovereignty, it can become part of NATO. Second, several Ukrainian cities have just been obliterated.
Foreign investment is not flowing in Ukraine.
Ukraine has been destroyed, both physically and economically.
And that just suits fine for Putin.
And so this is a very, very long game.
It's not going to end anytime soon, not in a month, not in two months.
He's in it for a very, very long haul.
Rebecca, you just said something to me that's very fascinating, which is that, you know, you would hardly be accused of being a Putin apologist.
You are, in fact, your book is a kind of scorched earth expose of Putin and the bandits around him.
And yet...
You made a point that anyone who takes a kind of, let's call it America-first way of thinking about the world, we have to say that if we think about American interests, and of course America came up with the Monroe Doctrine, just as you said, in order to protect its own backyard, that there is an element of rationale in what Putin is saying when he says, in effect, I need to protect my backyard.
I don't like the idea of NATO troops breathing down my neck 100 miles away from St.
Petersburg any more than you would if the situations were reversed.
Do you think that, in fairness, that the West has been a little dismissive of Russia's legitimate security concerns?
And in that sense, did the West, through its own recklessness...
Obviously, Putin's doing it.
We're not trying to say that the West is doing it.
But did the West contribute to this...
This is kind of Mearsheimer's point in a realist analysis of the situation.
And is there the case that the Biden administration in the West does bear a little bit of the blame here?
So I 100% agree with John Mearsheimer.
In fact, this is a highly intelligent person.
He's a West Point graduate, right?
But look, nobody invites John Mearsheimer to speak on TV, even, you know, even on regular networks that are conservative-leaning, because he's His version of events, like the reality that he's describing to us, real politic, right, which drives every single statesman, real statesman, right, not just authoritarians.
So he describes that how it is.
So here's the crux of the matter, Dinesh.
We have refused to acknowledge that Putin has legitimate security concerns, and we pretend that those don't exist.
But they do exist.
And the longer we are going to deny that reality, we are not going to be able to predict how far Putin is going to go in order to defend his perceived security concerns and his perceived sphere of influence.
And we're also going to underestimate what he can potentially do.
And what he can potentially do, and I've said it many times, and this is why in some quarters I'm no longer invited, is because I talk realistically.
I provide sober intelligence analysis instead of making people feel good.
He may use tactical nuclear weapons to de-escalate conflict in Ukraine and to achieve victory that he believes is very important for him to achieve.
Rebecca, that's a very sobering analysis.
I'm assuming it applies not just to Putin, but also to the way we understand China.
As you say, all countries in the world operate in their own self-interest, and so this kind of analytical playbook is absolutely vital.
Folks, I recommend Putin's Playbook by Rebecca Koffler.
Rebecca, thanks so much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Dinesh.
Very, very nice to be here with you and your audience.
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you Dante's Purgatory is full of surprises.
And, well, Dante is full of surprises.
Now, in hell, the surprises are usually very bad.
We're surprised to learn something, and usually it means that we think we're at the...
Bottom of the elevator, but there's another floor below.
You're in the basement, you may say the moral basement.
In purgatory surprises are generally good things.
Why? Because this is a place of moral reform, of regeneration.
And although I've been talking about purgatory, we're not yet in purgatory.
Interestingly for Dante, there's a place kind of before you get to purgatory, where souls are kind of ferried toward purgatory.
Scholars call this anti-purgatory, A-N-T-E, anti-purgatory.
And interestingly, Dante keeps us in anti-purgatory for almost a quarter of the purgatorio.
So anti-purgatory is very important.
It's a kind of a waiting room for purgatory.
And as it turns out, as we'll discover, the waiting room exists because people have, and so many of us are guilty of this, Augustine was guilty of this, make me chase to a Lord, but not yet.
When we keep God waiting...
Dante says that God's going to keep us waiting.
So you've got people who need to go through purgatory because the moral regeneration of purgatory is necessary for heaven, but they can't begin the process because they kept God waiting generally for almost all of their life, and so they have to themselves wait a little bit now.
The first figure you meet in purgatory, and I mentioned him before, this is Cato.
The Roman Stoic.
And Cato is a surprise on two counts.
Number one, he was a pagan, which is to say he lived at the time before Christ.
He didn't know about Christ. He wasn't a Christian.
So you would expect him to be in Inferno 4.
You'd expect him to be in limbo in the place of the so-called virtuous pagans.
By the way, Virgil belongs.
Virgil... He has to go back at some point and rejoin the other figures in Limbo.
But Cato's here, and Cato's destined for heaven.
That's a surprise, and it's an even bigger surprise when we know that Cato was someone who took his own life.
But here's how Dante describes that.
This is now...
This is now Virgil talking to Cato.
You know, you found death sweet in Utica for freedom's sake.
So what Virgil is saying is that your death was not a case of running away from life or rejecting the gift of life.
You gave your life for freedom.
In that sense, you are a freedom fighter.
You are, to some degree, a martyr.
And that's why Dante has Cato here.
In purgatory, en route to heaven.
Now, pretty soon, Dante runs into another character.
He sees a group of souls kind of making their way, and he recognizes one of them.
And it's a friend of his, or a guy who died in Dante's own lifetime.
But Dante knew him.
He was actually a singer, and his name was Casella.
And Dante says to Casella, in effect, he goes, hey, he goes, you know, you died a little while ago.
How come you're here?
How did you just get here?
Because Casella apparently was just brought over.
And Casella basically says, look, I normally would have to wait because I kept God waiting.
So this is the idea here.
Of sort of getting your due.
But my entry into purgatory proper was hurried, was accelerated by a jubilee year that was declared in Rome.
And that has sort of opened the gates of purgatory and lots of souls are being brought in right now.
And that's why you see all these people moving around you.
So you have to realize now that this jubilee year, by the way, the first one in church history, this jubilee year, this year of forgiveness, you might say, was proclaimed by none other than Pope Boniface VIII. This is the guy that, quite frankly, Dante hates.
This is the guy who was directly responsible for Dante's exile.
This is a guy who is himself deep in hell.
And yet, and this shows you the complexity of Dante, Dante's point is he might be in hell.
But he was still the Pope.
And as the Pope, he still has legal authority.
Legal authority, of course, in the canonical domain.
What that authority is, we'll come to realize in a moment.
It's not unlimited by any means.
But nevertheless, Dante's point is this, that just as a king who's a bad king, but makes a law...
The law is a law.
The king has the legal authority to make the law.
So Pope Boniface has declared the Jubilee, and even though Pope Boniface's own motives might have been thoroughly corrupt, you know, I want to raise money for the church, I want to do this, I want to do that, Dante's point is, nevertheless, Here, right down in Purgatory, it is accelerating the movement of souls to begin this purgation process.
And Casella is part of this.
And so Dante says to Casella, basically, Hey, Casella, you're a heck of a singer.
You know, kind of strike up a tune.
So you have this amazing scene here in Purgatory where Dante is like, Let's hear one, you know, put up your banjo and sort of sing a song.
And Casella begins to sing.
This is a little bit of Dante-esque humor.
Basically, Casella begins to sing a song whose words are from Dante.
So here you have Dante the poet, and he creates this character, Casella, who is using Dante the poet's own words.
To sing this song.
But just as Casella begins to start singing this song, and it's, of course, given in Italian, Cato, stern Roman kind of gatekeeper of purgatory, shows up and he basically goes, stop this nonsense.
I mean, enough of this nonsense.
It's time to kind of get moving.
And at first glance, this may seem kind of inappropriate.
It may seem kind of, what, is there no singing in purgatory?
But the point here is not that singing is bad.
The point is, and I'll pick this up in the next segment.
How am I on time, honey? I'm coming to the end.
Oh, I've got it. Okay. It turns out that it's the wrong kind of singing.
Or to put it differently, what Dante is asking Casella to do is, like, let's have a performance.
And there's all kinds of singing in purgatory, but it's generally, you'll see from, it's communal singing.
It's souls singing together, and they're actually singing about redemption.
They're singing, in this case, a little earlier in the very same canto, you have souls, and they're singing a song, and I'll come to the song in the next segment, but it is, Dante gives it actually in Latin.
In exitu Israel de Egypto, which basically means when Israel came out of Egypt.
When we left off...
Cato had stepped in and disrupted Casella from singing his song, the song using the words of Dante.
And we were trying to figure out why Cato would object and why he would kind of move Dante and Casella along.
And it turns out the reason he does this is it's not that he objects to music, it's that it's the wrong type of music.
And we see earlier a group of souls singing about the Exodus.
That's what this means.
When Israel came out of Egypt, Dante writes, they were all singing with a single voice.
Now... The Exodus, of course, was the expulsion of the Jews and the Jews fleeing Egypt.
And this is a central theme in the Old Testament.
So it's a central theme in the Hebrew Scriptures.
But it's also a central theme in the New Testament.
And Dante himself had a very complex way of reading scripture, of reading the Bible.
And I think it's a way that can enrich the way we think about scripture.
Because sometimes we get into, even today, fights about scripture.
And the fights typically are between people who do, let's call it, a literal reading.
Or people who do, let's call it an allegorical or a metaphorical reading.
And so you'll have some people who say, well, when you're looking, for example, at Genesis 1, was the earth created, was the world created in six days?
Or do the six days reflect six eras, for example?
And we see right there, the literalists on the one side, and if you will, the Allegorical reading on the other.
So which reading is right?
Well, according to Dante, both of them.
And here I'm going to turn to an epistle, a kind of letter that Dante wrote to a fellow named Can Grande, Can Grande della Scala, in which Dante happens to discuss not just his way of reading scripture, but his way of reading this exact line that is now quoted in The purgatory in exodo Israel de Egypto, when Israel came out of Egypt.
And Dante is going to interpret this line, and you begin to see the complexity of how Dante reads it.
So here's Dante. I'm quoting him.
For the clarity of what will be said, it is to be understood that this work, now Dante is referring here to his own divine comedy, is not simple, but rather it is simple.
Polisemis. Polisemis means it has multiple meanings.
That is endowed with many meanings.
Well, there you go. For the first meaning is that which one derives from the letter.
Another is that which derives from things signified by the letter.
The first is called literal and the second allegorical or mystical.
So pause. Dante is basically saying there are two ways to read, and we know about that.
And Dante is saying that his work, just like the Bible, needs to be taken in both ways.
So let's continue. Here's Dante.
Boom! This is the exact line from the Divine Comedy.
And then Dante continues, the line continues in the Bible itself.
The house of Jacob from people of strange language.
Judah was a sanctuary and Israel his dominion.
Well, here's Dante's interpretation.
If we look only at the letter, this signifies that the children of Israel went out of Egypt in the time of Moses.
That's the literal reading.
So, there was an historical event.
There were the pharaohs.
The Israelites were their captives.
And then they got out of Egypt and they went off to look for the Promised Land.
That's the literal meaning. That's what happened.
Dante agrees. Dante continues.
If we look at the allegory, it signifies our redemption through Christ.
It signifies the turning of the souls from the sorrow and misery of sin into a state of grace.
So now, here's Dante, and he says, in a sense, the exact liberation experienced by the Israelites, moving out of captivity and into freedom, that's the kind of freedom that Christ came to deliver us from.
What's the captivity?
The captivity in our case is sin.
We're captives to sin and being liberated from sin is moving out of captivity to a promised land, a promised land that in this case is nothing other than paradise itself.
So it's so appropriate that you have these lines here in the Purgatorio because what do they represent?
They basically represent the fact that souls...
Come to purgatory, and even though they've repented, they have still been somewhat disfigured or twisted by sin.
They need to undergo this moral purgation that is exactly the same as the Jews getting out of captivity and making the hard journey through often deserts and through suffering to try to reach, and ultimately they do reach, although Moses himself doesn't, but the Jews do reach, the Promised Land.
And so what Cato is saying to Dante and to Casella is, listen, this is a place of moral regeneration.
This is not a place for fooling around.
This is not a place for showing what a great singer you are.
This is not a place to remember the old days.
There is perhaps a time and a place for all those things, but that's not what you're doing here.
What you're doing here is, like the Israelites coming out of Egypt, you are shedding your old ways.
You are putting aside your captivity.
You are improving yourself and preparing yourself for that place that literally could be called in the Old Testament the promised land, but for us is the promised land of ultimate union with God.
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