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April 14, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:35
SHANGHAI TEARS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep311
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Couple of quick announcements, guys.
So, no podcast tomorrow.
Tomorrow's Good Friday. And so, I'll be back in the saddle on Monday.
Well, also I'll be doing, by the way, a Getter Live Q&A this evening, 7.30 Eastern, and you can watch it on the social media platform, Getter.
All right, today I'm going to talk about the severe lockdown in Shanghai that has kept citizens confined to their homes.
What's going on there?
Mike Pence seems to be running for president, sort of, but...
I'm really curious who's going to vote for this guy, I mean, outside of immediate family members.
I'm having a moment of schadenfreude.
I'm taking a certain pleasure.
CNN has spent a fortune promoting its CNN Plus, and nobody's signing up.
On happy news, Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter.
This could be a transforming moment in the history of social media.
And I'm also going to talk about Dante and how he treats the sin of sloth in a completely new way.
Sloth, in Dante's view, has nothing to do with laziness or inactivity.
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.
It seems that COVID has returned to China with a vengeance.
And it seemed for a while there that China was doing well, was doing better than everybody else.
And China, of course, took pride and said, well, this is because we have sophisticated contact tracing.
But now we find that a number of Chinese cities, Tianjin, Shenzhen, are in lockdown.
And no city is in worse shape on this regard than Shanghai, which has now had, well, over two weeks of strict COVID lockdowns.
And if you look at the social media images coming out of it, it's like out of a horror movie.
You've got people essentially confined to their homes.
They are having trouble getting food because not only are the stores empty, but there's very poor delivery systems.
A lot of the delivery places are now out of food.
The government apparently is supplying some food, but here's a guy.
This is David Culber of CNN. He's still in Shanghai, and he was actually talking about how he lives.
And he says, quote, They're like a weird mixture of kind of what's available.
So I guess the previous, he goes, lately he's been eating eggs and carrots because that's all he's got.
So this is what's going on in China.
It's a little bit puzzling because...
Because the Chinese, as I say, first of all, the virus came from China.
It was released out of China.
And it seemed that the Chinese had a strategy, maybe even going to the very beginning, for how to let this virus wreak havoc on other countries while the Chinese themselves did relatively well.
But they're not doing all that well now, and that's very interesting.
Apparently, the country's biggest e-commerce platform, this is Alibaba, has basically suspended deliveries.
This is essentially the Amazon of China, and you can't get food deliveries from Alibaba.
One of the social media videos that went viral, not just here, but around the world, was Chinese health authorities apparently beating a dog to death on the street.
Now, why were they doing that?
Because apparently the dog's owner was in quarantine.
And, um, uh, he apparently then, um, couldn't take care of the dog or couldn't find someone to take care of it while he was in quarantine.
So he just sort of let the dog go.
And apparently in the belief that the dog might've gotten COVID presumably from him, the health authorities kind of went berserk and a health worker was dispatched in full kind of, um, protective gear to dispose of the dog.
And so you've got this horrific images of this dog, gruesome clip of him being essentially, you know, a flogged to death on the streets of Shanghai.
So, uh, I don't know if you can see it, but, um, the dog is, uh, So, you know, I have a little bit of a sense here that this is karma because the Chinese have, through this virus, inflicted so much suffering on the world, have refused to take responsibility for what they've done, and now their own citizens are paying the price.
Not exactly that the government cares deeply about its own citizens.
When I was looking at this video of residents in Shanghai, these are people in tall buildings, and they are literally screaming with terror.
In a sense, what they're saying is, we're more scared of the lockdown than we are of the virus.
So in other words, let us have food.
We're going to be in a worse condition here.
And you may say the remedy is worse than the disease itself.
But one of the, in some ways, benefits of having a totalitarian society is that you can take action kind of at the center and do what you want without having to go through the checks and balances that you have in free societies.
But the big downside of that is that you have governments that really don't care about their own citizens.
They believe, well, if this is what you have to do, that's your problem, really not ours.
And our only job is to make sure that your protest doesn't reach a certain level where it breaks into the street, and then we've got to send the cops down to sort of take care of you.
So this is life in a totalitarian society.
It's hard enough living in that kind of society.
But now with these lockdowns, it seems that the confinement and the level of government control Has been taken to a whole new level.
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What's the deal with Mike Pence?
I've been trying to figure out Mike Pence.
And it's not as if Mike Pence is a stranger to me.
I've actually known Mike Pence for many years.
In fact, long before he...
Right about the time he first launched his political career.
He was originally a radio host and a kind of commentator in Indiana.
And then he stepped into the political arena.
But he's always been the same kind of a guy.
In some ways, the classical, understated, Midwestern type.
A perfect gentleman and a guy who lives by a decent code.
He's got a nice family. He is truly a nice guy.
And at the same time, he represents, you may say, the...
The strength but also the great weakness of the Republican establishment.
I got a little exposure to the establishment myself.
I was in Memphis a couple of days ago talking to a group of members of the Republican National Committee.
They were in Memphis for a training session and you get a feeling for what the Republican establishment is.
These are people who are, you may say, members of the club.
They think of themselves a little bit in terms of being an inner circle.
And I think that's what Mike Pence says.
It's sort of like you pay your dues, you get in the club, you rise through the ranks of the club, the club protects you.
And there must be a version of this even on the left in the Democratic Party, but this is what it looks like in the Republican Party.
And the thing about it is it's not really a sufficient way to operate anymore because the country is in a crisis.
I mean, we are in a kind of a tailspin and we need leadership in this difficult time.
Now, Mike Pence was at the University of Virginia this week, and he was talking about, well, he wasn't talking about the things on everybody's mind.
And he wasn't talking about his own role in the important events that occurred in the aftermath of the election.
None of that. So what is Mike Pence doing?
He's giving the kind of speech that any boilerplate politician could have given.
He's denouncing cancel culture and what he calls wokeism.
And of course, the lines are just absolutely cliches.
You could swap them out for any other Republican figure.
They'd be exactly the same.
We live in a time when many on the radical left routinely demean the American founding.
Today, radical progressives seek to rewrite our Constitution and erode the liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
And then his conclusion is that the antidote to cancel culture is freedom.
The antidote to woke America is freedom.
Blah, blah, blah.
What is the point of this?
There's no excuse for it, really.
It's not that Mike Pence is wrong, but what you have here is that kind of standard trope where you stand up on a soapbox, you say things...
I mean, this to me is the speech equivalent of Rona McDaniel's tweeting...
We will not stand for election fraud.
We refuse to accept the Biden administration's position on the border.
Blah, blah, blah.
Now, remarkably, there was a controversy over Mike Pence speaking.
I mean, think about it. Here's a guy who's basically white bread, and he's saying nothing of importance, nothing that even causes the left to shudder in any way, and yet they don't want him to speak, right?
And so the Cavalier Daily, the campus newspaper, apparently says that, you know, this is very dangerous to have this guy speaking because it's just like Charlottesville all over again.
The white supremacist march in Charlottesville in 2017.
So, I mean, basically at UVA, they're going to be living off Charlottesville, I predict, for at least the next 40 years.
These are people who take every incident and then milk it for its, well, not real, but imaginary terrors.
I think the problem with Mike Pence is that he's a relic.
In some ways, he's a creature of the Reagan Revolution, but he's a creature of the Reagan Revolution who sort of was never unfrozen.
He remains in that same position as if it's still 1980 right now.
And the same rhetoric, we have to be strong, peace through strength, trust but verify.
There was a freshness to all that when I was in my early 20s.
But, it sort of reminds me a little bit of my grandmother.
I would talk to my grandmother, and this is really in the 1970s, but my grandmother was a creature sort of out of the 1870s.
She was a Victorian, and she would use Victorian phrases.
That family, yeah, they're from old stock.
Oh yeah, that woman, you know what?
She just turned 25.
She's a gone case. In other words, if you weren't married by 25, you were a gone case.
And so you have that same sense with Mike Pence of a fossil, somebody who's frozen in time, and it's excruciating to watch.
Well, first of all, it's as interesting as watching, you know, paint dry.
And so the question I have is, how does a guy like this even think about running for president?
There's nothing wrong with Mike Pence, but there's not a whole lot that's right about him either.
And the one thing that he isn't is right for our particular time, our particular place, and the crisis that we're going through right now.
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He's offered to buy it for $54.20 a share in cash.
This would value the company, by the way, at about $43 billion.
And, you know, it comes as a shock to the left because it seemed like, and I was a little worried that the left had sort of gotten to Musk because he had been talking about getting a seat on the board.
And then he said, well, I'm not going to do that.
And I thought that maybe he didn't want his life to be made miserable by these termites that are all over, not just Twitter, but they're all over Google, they're all over Facebook.
This is just an infestation of leftists and social media.
And it seems like Musk had even deleted some of his old tweets that were critical of Twitter.
But in a beautiful move, he's up the ante and basically said, listen, here's a public company.
The company has gone public.
I think Twitter should be private.
And so suddenly the left, for a while, it was that, yeah, don't be concerned about billionaires owning these platforms.
It's no problem. But now it's a problem.
And, oh, you know, don't complain about censorship on social media.
These are private companies. They can do exactly what they want.
And now it's like, oh my gosh, it's going to be Elon Musk who's making the rules.
This is a very dangerous situation.
So it's funny how these things come full circle.
And they come full circle kind of both ways, right?
Because... Because I now am a little bit less worried about billionaires owning social media platforms.
Why? Because here's a billionaire and I have far more trust that Elon Musk will protect free speech than I do in the social retards Jack Dorsey or this Indian fellow Parag Agarwal or the clowns over at Google or the...
Or the autistic Zuckerberg.
Now, censorship in social media is not going away.
In fact, it's been getting worse.
This is really why we need the Elon solution.
Debbie just showed me this.
This is from Google AdSense.
They're now censoring debate about the Ukraine.
I mean, wow. First, it was the election.
Then it was COVID. Then they started throwing in other issues.
There was abortion and the trans and climate change.
And now Ukraine. I'm just going to read a line or two.
It says... That we have already been enforcing on claims related to the war in Ukraine when they violate existing policies and they're saying that these restrictions are include but not limited to claims that imply victims are responsible for their own tragedy or similar instances of victim blaming such as claims that Ukraine is committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own citizens.
What they seem to be saying is that you can't say any of these things regardless of the truth or the accuracy or inaccuracy of what you're saying.
In the fog of war, there always are competing claims.
I guess what part of what these social media companies do is they take refuge in, well we're going to be relying on official sources of information, but the official sources are propaganda.
I mean, Russia's putting out propaganda, the United States government has kind of by its own admission putting out propaganda, and Ukraine is putting out propaganda.
So, the official sources in that sense are not fully trustworthy.
But back to Elon Musk.
Look, here's a guy who's willing to put $40 billion on the line.
So this is a guy who cares deeply about free speech and is willing to put his money where his mouth is.
He sends his letter to the board of Twitter and he says that Twitter has the potential, extraordinary potential, he says.
And he says, I will unlock it.
But he says, not in its current form.
Twitter, I guess he's thinking, is too much, too captive to the interests of perhaps some of the big hedge funds and other places that have money in Twitter and have been using their leverage on Twitter, not to mention the ideology that prevails inside of Twitter.
It's driven by Twitter's own leftist programmers and employees, some of whom, by the way, have been threatening to quit Twitter.
And I hope they do quit.
And I hope that these platforms which have reached the point of, well, look, they seem almost unsalvageable in terms of protecting genuine free speech.
But here's Elon Musk. He has the resources to fix the problem.
He seems to have the will to do it and the good intentions to do it.
I don't think he should underestimate the battles ahead.
They are formidable, but he is also formidable and, in my view, up to the challenge.
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Feel the difference. It's time for us to take a minute and have a really hearty laugh over the woes over at CNN. Their new streaming platform called CNN Plus.
Now, this was announced with great fanfare.
CNN says, we're going to be putting up to a billion dollars.
And they've already put in $300 million to attract viewers to this paid subscription platform called CNN Plus.
And evidently, despite this expenditure of $300 million, they have fewer than 10,000 viewers per day.
Wow! 10,000 viewers.
That's about the size of one of my larger speaking events.
It's about the size of a small radio station in the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama.
This is CNN. They're essentially a sinking ship, and it's really fun to watch them sink.
It's fun to watch for all kinds of reasons.
Well, first of all, the whole notion of CNN Plus was a fundamentally inane idea.
Nobody wants to watch CNN for free.
So the idea that people will pay, pay money monthly to watch CNN, this was an adventurous premise at the start.
The second thing was you've got all these guys like the pompous ass Chris Wallace.
He's like, I can't tolerate the atmosphere at Fox News because there are some people here who denied the results of the election, so I'm out of here.
I need to be in a more comfortable environment.
And so he essentially flies into the arms of Jeff Zucker, and then Zucker gets the boot over at CNN, which is a delicious turn.
And then here's Wallace now sitting with this program.
Apparently, he's trying to get out of CNN Plus and get on CNN itself.
I think he's hoping there that the free coverage.
And look, I mean, does anybody even watch CNN?
The only people I have seen watching CNN are, quite honestly, people who are at a bar, or or people who are at an airport.
Or literally if you're standing at a urinal.
I mean, there's nothing else you can do.
So you watch CNN out of sheer bored necessity.
But to see someone actually choosing to watch CNN and engaged and grossed, I mean, I think that is a very hypothetical human being.
I'm not sure such human beings even exist.
And so... So here's CNN, and it is apparently now facing this crisis.
They're talking about slashing jobs, which is always a good thing.
Whenever propagandists lose their jobs, it's good news for us, and it's good news for journalism.
CNN isn't really journalism, so...
People who think, oh, well, this is a blow for journalism.
It's not a blow for journalism.
It's a blow for free speech.
It's a blow for getting rid of this kind of propaganda.
It's a blow against smarmy, self-righteous, self-indulgence.
CNN is a big mess.
And it's time for us just to sit back and...
Have a little bit of schadenfreude, a little bit of pleasure in other people's misery.
Generally not a good thing to do, but politically in some cases a necessary thing to do.
And so my message and my feelings in terms of CNN's current troubles can be summarized in really three similar sounding phrases which are called ha ha ha.
I want to talk to you about a groundbreaking new documentary. It's called Whose Children Are They?
And then right after this, I'm going to have a producer of that documentary and the writer come on and talk about it. Well, this is a documentary that exposes the indoctrination, the anti-Americanism, the critical race fanaticism, the sexualization of children, all this crazy stuff.
love.
And the documentary is available on SalemNow.com.
Whose Children Are They? features empowered parents, brave teachers, frontline experts, and they pull back the curtain exposing the hidden agenda in America's schools.
Here's a short clip.
Public education has gone off the rails.
You cannot use racism to eradicate racism.
Whose children are they?
Guys, you just heard and watched a trailer for a new film called Whose Children Are They?
And I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast the producer and writer of that film.
Deborah Flora is the president of a nonprofit called Parents United America.
She's a producer and founding partner of Lamplight Entertainment.
media group and she's also currently running for the US Senate in Colorado.
Wow Debra you've got you got your plate full there and with the political stuff and the film but talk a little bit about this talk a little bit about this movie and who is it aimed at and what is its central theme. Thank you so much Dinesh.
It's great to be on to talk about it.
I founded Parents United America about three years ago because I realized that parents were getting shut out of most areas of their children's lives, you know, from medical to education, but primarily education.
But what we realized is that what really needed to happen was a grassroots effort, letting parents really know what is going on in their students' education, because that's how things are going to change.
And, you know, so many people think it's an isolated event here.
You know, maybe it's sex education in one area, it's gender fluidity in another, it's CRT in another.
But what we wanted to do is put together a comprehensive expose that connected all of the dots, brought it all together, and then empowered and galvanized parents, grandparents, concerned citizens to stand up.
So that's what we did.
It's over 120 hours of footage that we had to whittle down.
I know you know how difficult that can be.
Over 80 interviews all across the country from brave teachers, caring parents, even courageous students and frontline experts.
And what we did is we showed the through line of how these are really all connected, what the agenda behind it is, and most of all, what people can do about it.
Let's start by talking about the agenda.
Some people will say, well, this is a longstanding sort of neo-Marxist goal, which is that you indoctrinate the children and that becomes the starting point of creating a We're good to go.
Without a doubt. So what we do in the very first part of the movie is we set up, and the basic question, whose children are they?
It comes to the fundamental crossroads of the Marxist idea that the children belong to the state, as Marx said, from the moment a child can be without their mother, they'll be in the care of the state, versus what we know to be the Judeo-Christian fundamental founding of our country, and honestly, what everyone knows intrinsically.
Which is the right and authority of parents to be the ultimate say in their children's education in every area of their lives.
The children don't belong to anyone.
They're created by God. But whose care are they to be in?
And so we set up a very clear agenda, starting all the way back with John Dewey, the father of modern education in the 20s, who basically was a huge fan of the Soviet Union.
He was a communist, he became the honorary president of the Teachers Association.
And his goals were to start with the teachers unions, the teachers teaching colleges, and begin to implement these agendas.
And it definitely is the replacement of parents.
It is the state being the ultimate authority.
It's moving education away from academics, which is what most people think it's about, to the very fundamental, foundational things of forming a child's worldview.
I mean, when you see the plummeting of academics in America and you see the rise of politics and indoctrination, everything from gender fluidity in kindergarten To, you know, BLM teachers coming in, to CRT. And CRT, as you know, Dinesh, and I've said so clearly, CRT is just Marx's critical theory with a different wrapper on it.
It's all about dividing people into groups and pitting them against each other.
And you do that It's actually neo-racism.
We need to call it what it is.
So there is an agenda.
It's been a long agenda going on for quite a long time.
And what has happened now is parents are finally waking up.
After COVID, when they actually saw what was in their children's education, Parents, I don't care if you're a Democrat or Republican, you're a mom and a dad first, they are waking up and they're realizing this is not at all what I thought my children were going to be learning.
There's an agenda here. And if we don't think they're trying to shut parents out, all we have to do is look at cases like in Tennessee, where they wanted parents to sign a waiver saying they wouldn't observe what their children were learning online.
You only do that when you're hiding something.
Do you think, Deborah, if a parent is listening to this and goes, you know, I need to become more active, not merely in overseeing my own kid, would you say, you know, run for school board?
Would you say become more outspoken as a parent?
Uh, Obviously, part of the responsibility, particularly in public schools, isn't that with local elected officials who also oversee what's going on with the schools?
Maybe state legislatures that assign money, not just to schools, but also to public universities.
What are three things that parents should think about doing if they've got the time and the inclination to do it?
In what direction would you steer them?
Oh my goodness. There are so many things that parents can do, and I think that's important why parents are awake now.
I mean, everybody imagined education was like their education 20, 30, 40 years ago.
It's so different. So now that parents are awake, the number one thing is, do not go back to sleep.
Just because your children are back in school, it doesn't mean that anything has fundamentally changed.
Schools are supposed to be the most local control of all governmental examples.
That means at your school board, ask one question.
Ask your school board candidates, are you taking money from the teachers unions?
If they're taking money from the teachers unions, that's who they serve.
It is not good teachers.
It is not parents. It is certainly not students.
And then if you find that's the case, don't vote for them.
If there's not another candidate, run for that school board seat and let every parent know.
In our own school district in Douglas County, we flipped it this last cycle.
I was one of those parents that stood up and mom got my dander up and we flipped it and we got the word out.
And now we have a school board that's not answerable to the unions.
It's answerable to the stakeholders, the parents, the taxpaying citizens, and the students.
That's one thing you could do.
Elect legislators who are moving towards the money following the student and not the system.
I mean, the reality is school choice, educational freedom, whatever you want to call it, it helps most those who are most vulnerable, you know, underprivileged, inner city students who can't move to other areas.
So there's multiple things to do.
And then ultimately, if your school is unresponsive and you're not able to flip that school board, consider other options.
Because honestly, right now we are in the fight to flip our school system back to what it's supposed to be, which is education, not indoctrination.
If it's not happening fast enough for your student, Find another option for your student and then continue the fight.
Because there are multiple things we need to do, but it took us decades to get here.
It's going to take a little while to get back.
But honestly, not nearly as long as you wake up parents.
That is the sleeping giant that has awakened.
And grandparents do. They're playing a huge role in this.
This is awesome. Guys, the film is called Whose Children Are They?
It's opening very soon, April 15th.
The platform is SalemNow.com.
So check it out. And Deborah Flora, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much, Dinesh.
I really appreciate all that you do with documentaries.
We know it's a tool to drag things into the light.
So do go to WhoseChildrenAreThey.com.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
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Here we are in the very middle of Dante's purgatory, and as we move up the terraces of purgatory, we're ascending through the purgation of the seven deadly sins in declining order of importance.
So it's lighter as you go higher.
The weight that the suffering souls bear becomes lighter.
And Dante himself, he's got these seven Ps referring to sins.
And each P gets removed as he moves upward.
So we've gone through the Terraces of Pride and Envy and Wrath.
And we're now in an interesting terrace called the Terrace of Sloth.
Sloth is one of those seven deadly sins that we are like, why is it even a deadly sin?
What's the big deal about Sloth?
Isn't Sloth basically the kind of inactive, recline on your couch, have some popcorn, watch TV all day, be a little bit of a bum?
What's wrong with that? That may not be the most admirable thing in the world, and maybe it's even a vice if you make a habit of it, but...
Why is it one of the seven deadly sins?
Can't you think of other things that are sort of more deadly?
And Dante's view is that that's because you don't understand what sloth is and what it means.
And as we go through with Dante, we find in the Terrace of Sloth, Some examples of sloth, and some of them are historical.
I want to focus on just one, and that is the sloth, this is taken from the Bible, of the Israelites crossing the desert.
And essentially, the way Dante portrays it is that the Israelites kind of took their time.
They were in no urgent hurry to get to the Promised Land.
In fact, it took them years and years, 40 years of dawdling.
And And this was even after the Lord opens up the Red Sea so that they can escape from Egypt.
But their punishment, and they had an earthly punishment for that.
In fact, in the Old Testament, a lot of punishments for sins are delivered, not necessarily in the next life, but right here in this life.
And their punishment is that a lot of them were not able to reach the promised land, only their children did.
So, let's think about sloth in this case.
So, sloth here is not mere inactivity.
It is not doing the thing that you are supposed to be doing.
So, sloth here means not focusing on the necessary project at hand and instead doing either nothing or doing something else.
Now, For Dante, sloth is loving the wrong thing.
And this may seem like a very odd thing to say, but let me try to clarify it this way.
Let's say, for example, that I have or you have a very serious problem in your family.
It could be a problem of the relationship of a husband and a wife.
It could be a problem where, let's say, the kids are on their way to some kind of disaster.
And let's say that you don't want to deal with that problem.
In fact, it's too difficult to deal with or you don't have the heart for it.
And so what do you do? You channel your energy into something totally different.
You say, okay, well listen, I'm just going to redouble my efforts at work.
I'm going to become a complete workaholic.
I'll be gone from 7 in the morning till 10 at night.
In a modern sense, people would say, well, you can't accuse that guy of sloth because look at him.
I mean, he's working so hard.
He never seems to stop.
He's going a mile a minute and so on.
But from Dante's point of view, that is sloth.
Why? Because sloth isn't the fact that you aren't doing anything.
Sloth is that you aren't doing the thing that you ought to be doing.
And if you're doing something else, even if you're doing it vigorously and with tremendous energy...
You are, in fact, guilty of sloth because you are neglecting your, in a sense, divine assignment.
You're neglecting your important duties.
Now, Dante, as he goes through the Terrace of Sloth, you find that these pilgrims, their strength has ebbed from them.
And this is, again, how Dante shows that the opposite of Sloth is focused activity.
And for Dante, focused activity is related to love.
And this may seem like a...
A strange thing to say.
But Dante looks at love not simply as, you know, you are in love.
But love is really what you choose.
People, you can always tell what somebody loves by what it is that they're choosing to do.
And moreover, how is it that they are choosing to be?
To be. This is critical because sometimes when we think about morality, we think about it in very narrow terms.
It's a list of do's and don'ts.
Don't do this. Don't do that.
Mainly don'ts. And if you don't do those things, supposedly you're a moral person.
But for Dante, morality has a much wider scope.
It involves not only what it is good to do and not to do, but it is how it is good to be and what it is good to love.
So... If someone is spending all their time on X, that's a clue that that's what they care about.
That's where their energy is devoted.
That's where their efforts are deployed.
And so by their actions, it kind of illuminates, well, look, that's the thing that these people love to do.
And when they have a chance to do something, that's where their energy goes.
And so, remember we had talked in the terrace of, in these important cantos, that Dante began with a discussion of free will, and he affirmed the importance of free will.
In fact, think of it, you wouldn't need inferno, purgatorio, or paradise if there were no...
If there was no moral responsibility, if their fault was in their stars or somehow in their genetic code, Dante's point is no.
Those things might affect you, but in the end, you do have free choice.
And here, Dante's applying that principle and saying that the things that we love, it's not because we fell in love.
It's not because some Cupid shot an arrow.
It's because we chose...
This is the thing that we want to focus on.
And Dante is not here thinking merely about the people that we are in love with, but he's thinking just about everything that we choose.
Everything that we choose. If I decide, I've got a weekend, I'm going to spend it reading a book.
Well, that shows you I've got a love of reading and of learning.
Or I'm going to spend it playing video games.
Well, that shows you that's what you love.
And what you love is a window into what your choices are and what you are.
Here's Debbie. She's like...
Oh, Dinesh, I'm now going to take these theories that you're speaking in a very objective, academic way about and apply them to you.
Isn't it true that right after you finish eating dinner, you suddenly strike up a game of chess where you're playing some guy in Norway and you're on the time and you're like, Honey, wait, don't interrupt me.
I'm trying to beat this guy from Finland.
A guy you don't even know, by the way.
So, Debbie's like, Interesting!
What are you going to tell Peter at the gates of paradise when this issue comes up, Dinesh?
So yes, I think Dante would have somewhat of the same take.
And it's very important in this poem to apply what we see and learn, not just to others, but also to ourselves.
And Dante does that. In the circle of pride, he turns the mirror on himself.
And he says, well, how do I square in here?
And I think Dante would say that the time that he's spending in exile is not devoted to To this great poem, to writing the Divine Comedy, to telling about his journey, you may say, through the afterlife.
Time spent doing other stuff.
If it's not necessary, and if it's not part of, you can say, his assigned duties, then that too becomes an example of sloth.
From Dante's Terrace of Sloth, we now move into the Terrace of Avarice, the Terrace of the Avaricious.
Who are being purged of that particular vice.
And avarice, we can see, is a serious sin.
It's a sin related to covetousness, to greed, to wanting something that doesn't belong to you, and to keep wanting more even though you have enough, even though you have more than you need for your own use or for your own even satisfaction.
And in this canto, I want to focus on...
Dante gives a number of examples of avarice and different ways in which the avaricious are being purged and punished.
And so we encounter figures like Midas, you know, remember the kind of...
We have Pygmalion.
We have Crassus, who was reputed to be one of the richest men in antiquity.
But the main figure that Dante talks to is a guy named Hugh Capet.
Hugh Capet is the founder in France of the Capetian dynasty, the Capetian dynasty of ruling princes.
Let's go through the text a little bit.
On earth beyond, I was called Hugh Capet.
He's talking to Dante.
From me have sprung the Luises and Philips, rulers of France, up to the present day.
So Hugh Capet is saying that out of his line comes this profusion of French royalty and kings.
And even in Dante's time, which, remember, the poem is dated in the year 1300...
You have various Louise of France and Philip of France, and these are the descendants of Hugh Capet.
And then Hugh Capet starts talking about some of the things that his descendants did.
While my descendants kept their sense of shame, they...
So, apparently he takes a little bit of a dim view of his descendants, but he goes, listen, as long as they had a sense of shame, they didn't go too far.
They may not have done any great deeds or any good stuff, but they didn't do a lot of bad stuff either.
But then, says Hugh Capet, things changed in Dante's own time.
And we have some very striking and remarkable lines, very memorable.
And he says, I see the fleur-de-lis enter Alanya.
So what's the fleur-de-lis?
The symbol of France, the fleur-de-lis.
So I see the fleur-de-lis, his own descendants, by the way, now ruling France, enter Alania, a town in Italy.
So the French troops are invading Italy.
And in his vicar, Christ made prisoner.
I see the gall and vinegar renewed.
I see him being mocked a second time, killed once again between the living thieves.
Now, this is very strange.
It's very strange for a couple of reasons.
What is Hugh Capet talking about?
He's talking about French troops invading Italy.
And supposedly...
Turning Christ, or he says Christ's vicar, into a prisoner.
Well, who is the vicar of Christ in Dante's time?
Well, it's none other than Pope Boniface VIII. And where is Pope Boniface VIII? Well, he's actually going to, well, he's alive, but he's going to be in hell.
There's a beautiful scene in the Inferno where Dante encounters a pope who is in hell, and he's smashed into a kind of a crevice in the rock.
And he turns to Dante and he goes, in effect, he goes, Boniface?
Dante's like, I'm not Boniface!
And the guy goes, oh!
And remember, people in hell are able to sort of see the future.
At least they can't do that until the Last Judgment.
And so this Pope, who's smashed into the rock, and there's another Pope smashed in even deeper than he is, he knows that Boniface is going to be joining him in hell.
And Boniface will, in a sense, push him further and deeper into the rock.
So, we know that Dante takes this view of Boniface as a deeply corrupt pope who is abusing his spiritual responsibilities and, as a result, is going to be in eternal damnation.
And yet, this very same Boniface is being talked about here, but talked about not only in very different terms, but you may almost say in the opposite terms.
He's being compared to actually Christ.
And let's continue.
I see the gall and vinegar renewed, the old fight renewed.
I see him being mocked a second time.
So it's almost as if Boniface is like Christ, being mocked a second time and is being killed between the living thieves.
Does this represent Dante kind of revising his view on Boniface?
Oh, I portrayed him as a bad guy early on, but I've totally changed my mind.
Nonsense. Nothing like that at all.
This is the way in which we find in Purgatorio and Paradiso very interesting nuances that force us to take a more enlarged view of things.
And so, remember early in Purgatory where...
There was a reference to a jubilee, a jubilee, a kind of public declaration by the Pope, by Boniface.
And the jubilee, even though made by a bad Pope, by a bad man, nevertheless has positive effects.
Souls move more quickly through purgatory because of this jubilee.
And right here, what happens is this Hugh Capet is saying, my troops went into Italy and they arrested the Pope.
And what do they do?
They beat him up! And quite, if we look at history, we see that Pope Boniface, after this incident in Elania, died a month later.
We don't know if he died of his wounds, but you take an old man and you beat him up, and you're pretty much bringing his life closer to the end.
And that's actually what happened.
And so, for Dante, this guy may be a bad pope.
But you know what? He's still the Pope.
He might be a vicar of Christ who has abused his office, and he's going to be held accountable for it.
But you know what? While he lives, he's still the vicar of Christ.
And if he excommunicates someone, they are excluded from the church.
No, they're not dispatched to hell.
Their soul isn't damned.
The Pope doesn't have that kind of power.
But he does have the same leadership power We're good to go.
And what Dante is basically telling you is that Inferno is not my final word in the comedy, in the Commedia.
You should take Inferno for what it is, but then look at the ways in which those ideas are made more interesting and more complex in the Purgatorio, and then again we will see further refinements, further elaborations.
So this poem becomes more like an unfolding experience.
In which you become more wide-angled and more sophisticated and more wise.
And Dante would also hope more holy along the way.
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