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April 7, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:38
THE BIG GUY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep306
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There's now a piece of direct smoking gun evidence tying the corruption of Hunter Biden to Joe Biden.
And so the left's attempt to avoid implicating Joe is going to be a little more difficult.
I want to know why Justice Roberts always feels obliged to vote with progressives when there's really no rational reason to do so.
Conservatives have been defending, rightly, the concept of manliness, but I want to ask what is the meaning of that concept?
What is manliness? And finally, I'm going to talk about the three central figures on the Terrace of Pride in Dante's Purgatory.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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The Democrats on the left seem in complete denial.
Well, I don't think it's really denial.
They know about Joe and Hunter Biden.
They know about the Biden family racket.
They're trying to hide it.
Jen Psaki was recently asked by Peter Doocy at Fox News, Hey, there's an email in which Hunter is talking about needing to get some keys made for his new office mates, and one of them is Joe Biden.
And Jen Psaki goes, they were not office mates.
So this is just essentially the idea that just by denying something, it makes it untrue.
No, it is true.
You're just trying to obfuscate the simple fact.
Well, turns out there's now a piece of smoking gun evidence That ties Joe and Hunter Biden very closely together in the Biden racket.
It is an email that reveals that Joe Biden wrote a letter of recommendation for a crooked Chinese businessman who was in partnership with Hunter Biden.
So this was a political favor directly extended by Joe Biden.
President Biden wasn't the president then, but it was vice president.
And And this is the same Joe Biden who said, I don't know anything about my son's business deal.
I don't have any involvement in any of that.
It has nothing to do with me. And this has been the left's mantra now.
Now that they can't deny the laptop, they are taking refuge in the idea, well, Joe didn't know anything about it.
Well, let's look at what happened here.
Turns out in 2017, then-Vice President Biden I wrote this letter of recommendation for a guy named Jonathan Lee, L-I. And this guy Lee is the head, the CEO of a big company, which was in a joint venture with Biden's, Hunter Biden's company, which was called Rosemont Seneca.
Hunter Biden, in fact, had a 10% stake in the Chinese guy, Lee's company.
And this guy, Lee, sends a note to Hunter Biden and his business associates, which is Devin Archer and Jim Bolger.
And this is what Lee writes.
He goes, Please find the attached resume of my son, Chris Lee.
He's applying to the following colleges for this year, and he lists Brown University, Cornell University, and New York University.
And then he attaches, quote, an updated version of his son's CV. Now, what's interesting is to kind of follow this trail.
Hunter Biden's associate, James Bulger, responds with, and he's responding now internally to Hunter and Devin Archer.
He goes, quote, Let's see how we can be helpful here to Chris.
In other words, what can we do for this kid?
And then a few weeks later...
Eric Schwerin, who is the president of Rosemont Seneca, this is the Hunter Biden company, he replies to Lee.
And he says, Jonathan, this is Jonathan Lee, Hunter asked me to send you a copy of the recommendation letter that he asked his father to write on behalf of Christopher for Brown University.
So what we have here is confirmation that Joe Biden went ahead and, as his son asked, wrote the letter for this guy and submitted it to Brown University.
Now look, when you have Hunter Biden collecting money from Chinese companies, companies under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, then taking that money and putting it into the family coffers,
10% for the big guy, And this is all now has multiple avenues of corroboration, not just the validated emails themselves, but also the testimony of Tony Bobulinski, who was brought in as a business partner by the Biden crime family.
So all of this puts pressure now, I think, on Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel.
Why? Because it's really clear that Joe Biden is not being honest here.
What Bobby Linsky said was that Joe Biden tried to keep his name out of all this.
So Biden was aware that he was doing crooked deals, but he wanted to make his own fingerprints as faint as possible.
And so at one point...
Apparently, there was a clear instruction given, don't mention Joe being involved.
And so Biden was trying to keep his name out of it, so to speak, even though he was involved.
And at some times when they refer to Biden, because they have to refer to him at some time, he's part of the racket.
He's basically the Don Corleone of the racket.
They would use code names.
So two of Biden's codenames were Celtic and The Big Guy.
And of course, as I mentioned, The Big Guy was at one point talked about in terms of getting a 10% share.
So all of this, I think, means that the Republicans now need to be on the bullhorn demanding that Merrick Garland appoint a special counsel in order to investigate not just Hunter Biden.
This is not just about Hunter Biden.
James Biden The President's brother, Frank Bryden, the other brother, are all involved in this.
And the recommendation that Joe Biden himself wrote for this corrupt Chinese businessman, Hunter Biden's partner, is clear evidence that the big guy is very much involved.
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What's Justice Roberts' game?
I ask this because there's a new decision just out from the Supreme Court.
Our side wins 5-4.
But why 5-4?
Shouldn't it be 6-3?
It turns out that of late, we're winning a lot of these decisions 5-4.
And what that means is that Justice Roberts is, for whatever reason, and we'll look at the reason in a moment, tilting on the liberal side almost as if to sort of balance out the scales.
And this latest decision is not a very important decision on its merits, but it's just important for what it shows about the court.
The court is actually making an emergency ruling here.
In other words, it's operating out of what's called its emergency docket.
And the issue here is whether states, and we're talking mainly about democratic states, Can restrict projects.
These are actually water projects under the Clean Water Act because they claim that these projects are environmentally risky and unhelpful.
So, in other words, what we're dealing with here is the authority of democratic states To have their own de facto veto of federal projects by saying, yeah, we're not going to take that one because that one is going to create too many strip malls in California, or this hydroelectric project or this oil and gas pipeline is going to be bad for our state.
So... Normally, when there are federal laws, the states don't get to override them.
And in this case, the states want to have that power.
And so, Republicans in those Democratic states filed lawsuits, and those lawsuits were crawling their way up the courts, and so they appealed to the Supreme Court to issue an emergency ruling that basically blocks these Democratic states from having this kind of override.
In other words, for reinstating a Trump administration rule that basically said the states do have to conform in this respect to federal law Under the Clean Water Act.
So, a Trump rule is now back in effect.
But the issue I really want to think about here is the behavior of Roberts.
Roberts kind of jumps in here, and he doesn't really comment on the merits.
What he says is that the Supreme Court here should not have used its emergency power.
The Supreme Court should not have put this case on the emergency docket.
Why? Because the case is not an emergency.
So, what Roberts seems to be saying is this could have been something that could have been considered in the normal process rather than the Supreme Court taking this precipitous step.
There's a lot of speculation by court watchers on why Roberts is doing what he does.
And I think some people think that Roberts is somehow being, he's kind of under the control.
Maybe they've got something on him.
And I don't think this is it.
I think the two factors here are, number one, Roberts is very eager to preserve his own respectability.
And in Washington, D.C., that means a certain kind of liberal respectability, a certain kind of prestige within the liberal quarters of Washington, D.C., That's very important to Roberts.
I think the second factor is that Roberts seems to think that the way to protect the integrity and independence of the court is to balance out the scales.
Now, there's no really good reason for him to do that.
He's a Republican nominee.
He has a judicial philosophy that I think bends to the right, but it seems like what he's doing is imposing a kind of restraint, a prudential restraint on himself.
In order to make these decisions come out close, so the left doesn't think, oh, man, we've got to pack the court because we've really lost the court.
We're losing 6-3.
And, you know, putting Ketanji Brown-Jackson isn't really going to make a difference.
He's replacing Breyer.
And so there's no change in the real balance of power.
So it looks like what Justice Roberts is trying to do is give the liberals a certain kind of hope, maybe somewhat illusory, but nevertheless, a sense of hope that, look, these decisions are pretty close.
It's 5-4. Yeah, Yeah, you lost this one and you lost the last one and the one before that, but there could be decisions that go your way because this is just really a one-vote issue.
If you're really persuasive maybe with the next case, you might win that one.
So I look at Roberts in a little more benign light, thinking that what he's doing is a certain kind of jurisprudential balancing combined with a certain all-too-human desire for prestige and respectability.
It doesn't make him a highly admirable character, But I think this is actually what he's trying to do to tilt the scales in these close decisions.
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The political cognoscente, the insiders, have already begun to read the tea leaves on the 2022 election.
And one of the journals that is very good in doing this is the National Journal.
When I was in D.C., Many years ago, the National Journal was mandatory reading.
I'm not so much into the inside baseball of day-to-day politics, so I don't read it anymore.
But I spotted an interesting article online, Josh Kroshauer, writing about how the Democrats are thinking about the 2022 election.
And what Kroshauer does is he looks at...
One of the biggest Democratic super PACs, which is putting $100 million into the Democratic Party for the 2022 election.
But the interesting question is, how are they spending and where are they spending?
Because when they put a lot of money on a race, it tells you something.
It tells you that they know something about that race, and this is why they're spending a lot to fight it out.
So, Kraschauer actually begins by talking about Las Vegas, and he's talking about the city of Las Vegas.
Now, the Democrats just did some redistricting in Nevada, and you would think that as a result of the redistricting, they would have protected the three urban seats in Las Vegas.
And those seats would be safe.
So you wouldn't need to spend a whole lot of money on them.
But no, out of the $100 million, $11.6 million is going to try to protect three Democratic incumbents in inner city Las Vegas.
And what this means is that the Democrats are worried that Dinah Titus, Susie Lee, and Stephen Horsford are all going to be swept out of office.
This is in a place that Joe Biden won.
Well, he won Nevada, but he also won Las Vegas.
But he won it closely.
And so the point is that this is a sign that the Democrats are not looking good, even in places where they should be stronger.
There's a black plurality seat.
This is Sanford Bishop's seat.
And we're talking now about Georgia.
And 55% black district.
Biden won with 55% of the vote.
And normally a Republican would have trouble knocking a black guy out of a black majority district.
But this guy, Bishop, is evidently in trouble.
And Republicans think that their army veteran candidate, Jeremy Hunt, might beat him.
And so a whole bunch of Democratic money is going to shore up this guy to try to protect him from getting defeated.
Republicans, by the way, have targeted a whopping 72 democratically held seats to flip this year.
Now think about it. The Democrats have a fairly thin majority in the House.
And if they lost 50 seats, let's say...
This would give Republicans a 30 seat, 30 or so seat majority.
And that would be fantastic for us and very bad news for Biden.
His legislative agenda would be effectively dead right there.
And the Democrats also facing problems in the Senate.
Now we turn to California.
Democrats now have super majorities in large parts of California.
And they did some redistricting in California to try to take Republicans who had won narrowly and put them in trouble.
So a good example is Michelle Steele.
They redrew her district and they made it more Democratic-friendly, thinking, okay, now she's done, she's cooked, she's finished.
But the environment has changed so that Michelle Steele is leading, even in the redrawn district.
And so the Democrats, again, are throwing a lot of money into that race.
They thought they could win it easily before.
They can't win it easily now.
So I think Crash Hour's point in looking at these individual races is a bigger one.
And that is that the Democrats and the Republicans actually agree.
That the Democrats are facing strong headwinds this year.
Now, this isn't just what you would call historical headwinds.
Historical headwinds are basically that, look, you have one party in power, and two years later, there's always a little bit of exasperation with the party in power.
So the other party generally does better.
But we're talking about the other party doing a lot better, better than even what historical trends would suggest.
And we're talking about wipeout possibilities for the GOP, We're good to go.
The way the Democrats are spending money, this is Kraschauer's point, illuminates the fact that the Democrats are having to defend areas where they thought they should be safe.
They have given up on certain seats where they thought at one point these could be contested, but now the lead is too formidable and it's not actually worth.
There's limited dollars on both sides.
So you have to make choices, and the choices that the two parties make show you what they think that they can win and where they think it's worthwhile to spend.
All of this means the GOP is looking good at this point.
It's still several months away for November.
But I think it's really important for the GOP to be thinking not just about can it make advances, but what is the agenda for which the Republicans should claim a mandate?
Republicans need to say that we are running not just on the opposite of what Biden stands for but here is our plan.
And we realize that if we win in 2022, we can't put that full plan into effect.
We can pass laws and we can pass bills through the House.
They'll have to go through the Senate, but of course Biden could veto them.
There's no way we're going to have a veto-proof majority.
But nevertheless, that'll be a testing run for an agenda that the Republicans could start putting in place if they win the presidency in 2024.
So I think the Republicans need to think about not simply being the opposition party.
Opposition is, in fact, a good strategy, and opposing bad things that Biden are doing is probably the main reason that Republicans will win decisively in November.
They need to marry that kind of reflexive oppositional strategy to a kind of more visionary practical strategy and legislative strategy that will pay dividends not just over the next two years, but ultimately in 2024 and beyond.
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There is a presidential election coming up in France this month.
The latter part of April.
And the French right-wing candidate, his name is Eric Zemmour.
I did a segment on him on the podcast several days ago.
I kind of want to continue this discussion because what we're seeing in France is a kind of a remaking of the French right, the French right-wing.
And Zamor, the candidate who came kind of out of nowhere.
This guy is an intellectual.
He's a former pundit and sort of newspaper columnist.
But he's a bespectacle, somewhat brooding, but also emotionally and rhetorically powerful writer and speaker.
And He is giving the French right a kind of new flair, a new respectability, and he's finding a broader swath of support.
Now, it may not be enough for him to beat Emmanuel Macron, but it'll be really telling if a guy like Zemmour, who is, in a sense, like Trump, altering the parameters of politics, taking topics that were once outside the bounds.
Topics like, who's a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman?
What does it mean to be French?
And taking the movement of French culture over the last 30 or 40 years, which has been dramatically toward greater multiculturalism, more of an Islamicization of France, a challenging of the old French idea that That you become French by essentially speaking the French language and embracing French national identity.
So that assimilationist model of France is being challenged by the left in France.
Now, what's interesting, and I mentioned this the last time I talked about Zemmour, is that he has actually pulled Macron to the right, and this may actually be his greatest accomplishment.
Now, when there are debates in France over phrases like, the great replacement, I mean, think of that.
It's a controversial phrase, because it's based upon the idea, and we've had echoes of this in the United States, the idea that the left is trying to Alter the DNA of the country in a very literal sense by bringing in sort of new DNA, new people who think differently than the people who are here.
And the strategy is one of making Americans feel not at home, in fact, feel like aliens in our own country.
And the same thing in France.
In France, One of the key themes of Zemmour is the French no longer feel at home in their own country.
And now if you ask Emmanuel Macron, he says, yeah, that's actually true.
So a proposition once deemed to be massively controversial has now kind of migrated almost to the center of the political spectrum.
Now, prior to Eric Zemmour, there was a kind of controversial family.
This is the Le Pen family.
That was, its patriarch was a guy named Jean-Marie Le Pen.
And this guy was an outrageous character.
He was accused of anti-Semitism.
In fact, it was said that he liked to make Holocaust jokes.
And this guy defined the French, you know, far right.
And the media was, of course, had an easy time in portraying Le Pen as a racist and portraying him as an extremist.
Le Pen was then, in a sense, pushed out and replaced by his own daughter, a woman named Marine Le Pen.
And she's still around, and she's still a force in French politics.
And the Le Pen family has had its share of controversies.
I mean, at one point, Jean-Marie Le Pen's wife left him and gave an interview to Playboy all about what a freak he was.
And then, as I mentioned, the daughter of Marine herself was the one who ousted her father, although they subsequently reconciled.
But as long as the Le Pen family defined the French right, it was not easy for the French right to gain broad respectability.
Because there are a lot of French people who are sophisticated, cultivated, they're business people, and they embraced a sort of Gaullist attitude.
By Gaullist here, I mean the tradition going back to Charles de Gaulle.
And the Gaullist tradition of French politics is nationalistic.
It's for the country.
It's transbursed. But it's also a tradition that is liberal in the classical sense.
One of the reasons that Le Pen founded a rival party was that he objected to Charles de Gaulle's decision as president to withdraw France from Algeria.
You remember thinking back to movies like The Day of the Jackal, which depicted the historical climate in France over this.
But the conservative...
Gaullists, if you will, are not disposed to go with a guy like Le Pen with that kind of a history of rejecting, indeed, repudiating the Gaullist tradition.
And so, a really significant development recently is that...
The granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
This is a woman named Marianne Marical.
And she decided to break with the Le Pen family, her own family, and move over and endorse Eric Zemmour.
So what does this mean?
Well, it basically means the...
The beginning of the end of the Le Pen domination of the right in French politics.
And it means that we now have a new French right wing, if you will, under Zemmour, which I think is more in the mainstream of the French tradition.
So we're going to see, I think, the right wing in France be more competitive.
In French politics. And what this is telling you is that this appeal to family and country is very resonant in France, as it is in the United States, as long as it is done in a vocabulary, in Zemmour's case an intellectual vocabulary, that is not easy for the other side, for the left, to be able to portray as somehow beyond the bounds or extremist or racist.
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It's time to protect AMAC. What does it mean to be a man?
What does it mean to be manly?
And is manliness...
A political and a civic virtue?
Is that something that's worth defending in our society today?
This is a topic that's being discussed in some of the more intellectual quarters of the right.
It seems like it is a debate about who's a man and who's a woman, but it's not really about that.
This is not a debate about Leah Thomas.
It's not a debate about biological males and women's sports.
none of that. It's a debate about whether there is a distinction between males and females that could be described as manliness and is that something that our society should in a conscious way cultivate and and celebrate. Now the debate sometimes takes a kind of low turn in that the defenders of manliness start looking around and looking particularly at the left and finding
very mannish women or you may say unmanly men.
And so a lot of this degenerates into a kind of name-calling.
Obama's unmanly because he doesn't know how to throw a baseball.
Look at Beto O'Rourke.
This is such a beta male.
He's so unmanly.
And consequently, there are efforts to look at women on the left and in the Democratic side, Michelle Obama notably, and proclaim them unbelievably manly.
And so... At this level, the debate is nothing more than a kind of slinging of epithets.
In some cases, by the way, conservatives will even turn around and say, you know, libertarians are extremely unmanly.
And it's a...
Manliness is a lot more than this.
I think that's really the point.
So what is manliness if it's not simply flexing your muscles or showing off tattoos or being able to show your prowess in the MMA ring?
What does manliness mean as a political and as a cultural virtue?
Let's start with a couple of thoughts about this.
There's a scene in the Iliad where Hector, the leader, the great fighter for the Trojans, is about to go to war, and he's talking to his wife Andromache about it, and she's crying because he's about to leave.
And, of course, she depends on him, and he might be killed, and what will that mean for the family?
And so here you have Hector having to make a very difficult decision to go fight for his country, to defend the Trojans.
Remember, the Trojans are under attack by a superior force of a thousand Greek ships, and Hector is needed.
He's the... He is the oldest son of King Priam so he has to do this.
He's being manly in living up to his duties and in this case his duty to Troy is even greater than his duty to...
In fact, the way he protects his family's virtue is by fighting for Troy.
But there's a scene at one point where his little son, Asteonyx, becomes frightened because a gleam of sunlight flashes on Hector's helmet and sort of goes into the little baby boy's eyes.
And so Asteonyx reacts to that and then the mom kind of smiles through her tears.
It's just a beautiful scene.
It encapsulates, you can write a thesis on this scene in the Iliad, It encapsulates the rival claims of manliness, but in every case, manliness comes down to duty.
Hector has a duty to his family.
Hector has a duty to Troy.
So manliness here understood not as mere a kind of demonstration of physical strength, but understood as a recognition of parental and, in this case, also citizen responsibility.
C.S. Lewis talks at one point about how if your neighbor comes over and starts complaining about the children, typically a husband and a wife will react differently.
Differently to that kind of complaint.
He says the wife will, in a natural way, defend the children.
Not my children. They wouldn't come over and trash your yard.
They wouldn't come over and poison your dog.
They didn't do that. It's got to be some other bad guys.
Not my kids.
And then C.S. Lewis goes, well, the dad takes a different response.
The dad is like, hmm, yeah, well...
You know, these guys have been known to do some rather suspect things, and what's the evidence that you have that these characters were involved?
So, in other words, the father takes a somewhat more objective position, more detached, more willing, if you will, to put his little tribe into question, and the manliness here is represented by C.S. Lewis as a love of justice.
So, the wife may think that the husband is being a little bit of a betrayer, Wow, aren't you defending the family?
Wait, what? But from the husband's point of view, the feminine virtue is to stand up for the flock, and the masculine virtue here is one of looking the situation in the eye and trying to make sure that justice is carried out.
So, manliness, in this sense, is not simply a matter of strength, but it is a matter of using strength to protect the weak.
And that, I think, is where manliness becomes something admirable and something that's worth celebrating.
So manliness means things like...
Working hard to protect your family.
Making sacrifices for your family.
Taking your family to church on Sunday, even if you don't feel like going.
You recognize it's important for you, and it's important for them.
Manliness means getting up in the middle of the night when you have to.
It means taking your kids to swim class.
It means singing silly songs with them.
Ultimately, it means laying down your life, if you need to, to protect the things that are valuable and dear to you.
And it is in this sense that I think conservatives should celebrate man.
It's a conservative virtue because it conserves the virtues that are important in a society.
Women are, of course, capable of manly virtues because women can stand up also and defend the weak.
But these virtues appear to be—I think this is C.S. Lewis's point, and it's a point affirmed by the entire conservative and Western tradition—is that With men and women, these virtues are not evenly distributed.
Women seem more inclined to certain virtues, men to other virtues.
We're not saying that one set of virtues is more important than the other, but we're saying that manliness is a virtue that is something that males should strive to be worthy of.
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We're now with Dante the Pilgrim in the Terrace of Pride in Purgatory.
And Dante begins by not seeing the souls of the proud, the proud who are now in the process of learning humility, but he sees carvings, he sees art, he sees sculpture.
And the first carving is from the Old Testament.
And you see David And David is sort of dancing in humility before the Lord.
And for Dante, here you have this great king, this powerful ruler, and yet the ruler realizes that he himself needs to be ruled, that he's ruled by a higher power, and that in fact his power as a ruler derives from God.
David knows all this, and so despite his triumphant position as king, He humbles himself before God.
So this is an example that Dante, of course, picks right out of the Bible.
But then he picks a second example, which comes out of the classical tradition.
Very Dante-esque. He draws on both the classical and the biblical traditions.
You may say he draws on Athens and Jerusalem.
But here he's talking about The Emperor Trajan, and so the second sculpture is a carving, is the Emperor Trajan is in a procession, and he's halting his chariot to listen to the plea of a poor widow.
Now, here's Trajan, the Grand Emperor, and obviously this was not part of his agenda.
His agenda is one of making a kind of impressive march, chariot march through the city, and yet...
A widow kind of beckons, and what does Trajan do?
He kind of pulls over, so to speak, and he listens to her.
And so Dante presents this as an example of a kind of great man, an elevated figure, an emperor.
Lowering himself.
Lowering himself metaphorically, but also physically.
He's bending down to listen to what this widow has to say.
And so, for Dante, these are two beautiful depictions of humility shown through art.
And now Dante notices that you've got these bent-over figures in Purgatory who are carrying stones, pieces of stone, that are used for sculpture.
Think of how ingenious Dante is to pick this particular punishment, because not only does it depict the once proud being now humbled, just they're physically bent over, very much like the old woman, But even more than that, the idea of having these little stones on your back gives the impression that what Dante is saying is that our lives are works of art.
And we want to be sculpted by God in the same way that a sculpture can take an idea and make something beautiful or something perfect out of it.
What purgatory is all about is a kind of polishing or sculpting process, getting souls ready for paradise.
We meet in Canto 11, three figures.
We meet a guy named Umberto, a poet named Odorisi, and then third, a figure I've mentioned before, the great winner in the Battle of Monteperati.
This is Provenzan Salvani, a Sienese fighter.
All these guys have something to do with Siena.
And I want to say a word about Siena for a moment.
Siena is a small city that is near Florence.
And earlier in the Commedia, earlier in the Inferno, Dante sort of takes a somewhat wry view of Siena, in part because the Sienese always think that they're as great as Florence.
And of course, Florence is much bigger.
It's more powerful. It's economically more successful.
And so Dante has this view that the Sienese think that there's more to Siena than there really is.
But what's remarkable here is that you've got three Sienese guys.
And one of them, by the way, the very guy that allied with some traitorous Florentines and overthrew the Guelphs in Florence, Dante's own party.
And yet the leader of that Sienese army that destroyed Florence, Provenzano Salvani, is not in hell.
He's right here in purgatory on his way to heaven.
Now, when Dante talks about Siena, what he's saying is that Siena, in Dante's own time, is a pretty well-run city.
Yes, it's a Ghibelline city, so these are the political rivals of Dante, but this is the great objectivity of Dante.
Dante sees that his own city, run by Guelphs, his own party, but notice the Guelphs started fighting the black Guelphs throughout the white Guelphs.
Dante is going to be in exile.
Florence is actually a very combative, divided, and fractious city.
Siena is not. It's pretty well run.
And Dante, it takes a lot for Dante to admit this, but think about how appropriate it is.
It's appropriate for Dante to admit the superiority of Siena in his own time.
Why? Because that requires humility.
And what are we talking about?
We're in the Terrace of Pride.
We're talking about humility.
So let's talk about these three Sienese characters, and I'm going to go through it a little bit, and I'll continue in this next segment to do it.
So here's the first guy. This is this guy, Umberto, and let's listen to him.
I was Italian, he tells Dante, born of a great Tuscan.
Gielmo Aldo Brandesco was my sire.
Perhaps you never heard the name before.
Now, right away, think of how different this psychology is from the inferno.
When Farinata talks to Dante, haven't you heard of my family?
My family is greater than your family.
And right away for Farinata, that's what matters.
But here is a guy, and he's the son of this guy named Aldo Brandesco, and he says, you've probably never heard of him.
And it's not a big deal.
So, what right away Umberto is showing is that those things like family, which appear to be everything in the other world out there, don't matter a whole lot over here.
Family has a different meaning in purgatory than it does on earth.
And even reputation that is big on earth becomes extinguished later.
It doesn't really matter.
When we come back, we'll pick it up with Umberto and we'll go on to two other guys.
I'm back talking about three Sienese guys in the Terrace of Pride in Dante's Purgatory.
When I left off, we were talking about this guy, Umberto.
And he says to Dante, I am Umberto, and the sin of pride has ruined not only me, but all my house, dragging them with it to calamity.
Now, this is a guy who was a Ghibelline.
In Siena, he turned Guelph.
In other words, he saw the political fortunes.
He became a traitor to his own side.
Now, in a way, he defected over to Dante's side.
And you may expect that Dante likes this.
Oh man, you came over to our side.
No. Dante's point is that by this kind of treason, this guy undermined his own family because his own family's reputation became untenable in Siena.
And at the time that Humberto is talking, his family is kind of in ruins, and he sort of knows that.
So, what Dante is making the point is that a lot of sins are very damaging to the sinner, yes, and they have eternal consequences for the sinner, yes, but they also affect other people.
They hurt other people, and Humberto is very well aware of this.
And so this is the nature of sin.
It has a corrosive effect on innocent people and on society.
And then Dante moves on and he runs into a kind of painter who engaged in illumination painting.
Illumination here is taking manuscripts and rendering them in an artistic manner.
The art called illumination.
Oh, says Dante, you must be that Odorisi, honor of the art which men in Paris call illuminating.
So this is the presentation, the elegant presentation of manuscripts.
And look how Odorisi responds in the most unexpected way.
Dante is celebrating him.
Hey, you're the great Odorisi!
And Odorisi goes, the pages of Franco Bolognese, the pages Franco Bolognese paints...
Smile more radiantly.
His is the honor now.
Mine is far less.
Wow. I mean, how rare it is to have a great artist.
Basically say, you know, my work was good, but you know this other guy, Franco Bolognese?
He's actually better than me.
He deserves more honor than I do.
The ability of someone to say that shows that they are in the process of overcoming pride, that they are learning a certain humility, they have the objectivity to be able to say, yeah, you know, I did a pretty good job, and I take a certain satisfaction in that, but I wasn't the best guy at this.
And so, while Dante is giving Odorisi credit, Odorisi turns around and gives another guy credit.
And we don't know anything about Odorisi.
We don't have a single one of his illuminations.
We've never heard of Franco Bolognese either.
But as the conversation goes on, we realize that what Dante is talking about, even though we don't know these guys, Dante certainly knows what he's talking about.
Because... Because Odorisi continues, and he's talking now about art and painting in Florence, and he says this.
He goes, once Cimabui thought to hold the field as a painter, Giotto now is all the rage, dimming the luster of the other's fame.
So what Odorisi is saying is, in the world of painting, there was this guy Chimabue, and he was a good painter, but now Giotto is thought to be even better.
And so the analogy that Odorisi had made between him and this other guy, Bolognese, is now replicated here.
Cimabui is a pretty good painter, Giotto is greater.
Well, as it turns out, these are two painters that we know a lot about.
In fact, if you go to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence right now, you walk into this huge room right near the entrance, what do you see on the left?
A giant Madonna by Cimabui, and on the right, a giant Madonna by Giotto, and you know what?
The Giotto one represents a much greater perspective and realism, and all of this was coming into Florence at this exact time.
And so Dante's description here, that Giotto is replacing Cimabue in terms of the depth and perspective of painting, this is absolutely 100% right.
So Dante knows what he's talking about here.
And then it goes on in a very interesting way, because...
Because Odorisi says, he's now talking about poetry.
And he goes, so one guido takes from the other one poetic glory.
And perhaps, and already born perhaps, is he who will drive both from fame's nest.
So here, and this is really why we need a little bit of footnotes with Dante, he's talking about two Guidos.
And he goes, there was one Guido, he was a pretty great poet, but he got replaced by another Guido, and maybe there's a third guy already born who's going to be even greater than those two.
So let's try to unpack this a little bit.
Turns out that the first Guido...
is a guy named Guido Gunicelli.
We'll actually meet him later on in Purgatory.
And what Odorisi is saying is that that Guido, Guido Gunicelli, has been replaced by Dante's own friend, a guy named Guido Cavalcanti.
Let's remember in Inferno, we met Guido Cavalcanti's dad, Farinadan Cavalcanti.
That's He's also Guido Cavalcanti.
So you've got Guido Cavalcanti, the father.
He has Guido Cavalcanti, the son.
So that Guido, the son, has replaced this guy named Gunicelli.
And who's the third guy already born who's going to displace both of them?
Well, that's none other than Dante himself.
So here we have a little bit of a problem, because it may seem, you know, we're supposed to be in this terrace of pride, and isn't Dante kind of going the other way by going, you know what, you had one guido, then you have another guido, and here's Dante, and I'm going to be greater than both of them.
And that would be a way that you could read Dante sort of patting himself on the back, except for what comes in the exact next line.
Here it is. Your earthly fame is but a gust of wind that blows about, shifting this way and that, and as it changes quarter, changes name.
And a few lines later, what are ten centuries to eternity?
You see that soul?
Well, that's the next section.
I'll come to that next time.
What's going on here is that Dante, right away, after talking about the emergence of Dante the painter, He makes the point that fame is fleeting.
And fame may seem like a big deal, and it is a big deal.
Look, here we are, you know, a thousand years later, we're discussing the Divine Comedy, so Dante was right.
Dante knows that his own fame is, in that sense, more enduring.
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