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April 18, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:44
TWITTER’S POISON PILL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep312
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The board at Twitter is using a so-called poison pill to go after Elon Musk, but they aren't just going after Elon Musk, they're going after free speech.
I want to find out who's going to blink first in this Ukraine war.
Is it going to be the Russians or is it going to be the U.S.? What is the future of the pro-life movement in a post-Roe world?
I'll explore. I'm also going to examine the implications of China posing as the global defender of traditional values.
And finally, I'm going to explore in Dante's Purgatory the remarkable meaning of Dante the Pilgrim and a Roman poet named Statius.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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.
Guys, you might have noticed that I used the phrase the Dinesh D'Souza show instead of the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
It's kind of a minor change.
But the reason for it is that Salem Media Corporation, which is the sponsor of this podcast, is now going to be also uploading it to their new television network that's called Salem TV Network.
And so for that reason, it now doubles as a podcast and a show.
It's going to be in primetime, 7 or 8 p.m., We're good to go.
But they want to continue their practices of censorship.
They are so committed to censorship.
Let's think about it. This is a media corporation that is deeply wedded to the idea of censorship.
That's why they're freaking out.
And they're freaking out to such a point that they're even willing to cost themselves money and a great deal of money because Elon Musk is offering a pretty fancy price for Twitter.
I mean, let's look at the Twitter value for a second.
Twitter It was, at one point, at $73 a share.
Then when it became clear that Twitter was sort of chasing away half the country, censoring political opponents, essentially throwing its lot in with woke culture, people realized Twitter's audience is going to be stagnant.
It's going to shrink. And so Twitter's share price dropped.
To the 40s, the mid-40s.
Now, Elon Musk is offering to buy at $54.20 a share, which is a sizable premium above Twitter's current price.
But the Twitter board is like, we don't want to have to start protecting free speech again.
No, no, no, no, no. We're good to go.
Twitter has now become habitual in its censorship.
I don't think it's as bad as YouTube and Facebook.
They are actually far worse.
They are in the Xi Jinping category of censorship.
Twitter is not as bad, but it's still pretty bad.
Twitter recently, for example, suspended liberals of TikTok.
Well, what's the libs of TikTok?
What's their great offense?
Their great offense is nothing more than quoting the left.
They actually capture videos of leftists saying, you know, really hateful and stupid things.
And then libs of TikTok has been banned for, quote, hateful conduct, irony upon irony.
The Babylon B, a satirical site, has been banned and so many others.
Parag Agarwal, the Indian dude who runs Twitter, has basically said Twitter doesn't care about the First Amendment.
We're not, he says, bound by the First Amendment.
And he says, in fact, content moderation is kind of what Twitter is all about.
Quote, our role is particularly emphasized, where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.
So that's what Twitter wants.
They want to manipulate who can and cannot be heard.
They have no trust in what can be called the free market of ideas.
And now, Twitter, in doing all this and in trying to block Musk in this way, is facing considerable liability.
In fact, it's facing a revolt from its own shareholders.
Why? Because they stand to make a good chunk of money if they accept Elon Musk's offer, and they stand to lose money if they don't.
I mean, Elon might get mad and sell his 9% share in Twitter, and that would most likely cause the price of Twitter to fall.
All of this is a way of saying that Twitter now has this insider board.
By the way, most of the board members don't own a lot of Twitter.
At one point, they owned a decent chunk because Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was on the board.
But now that he's basically left Twitter and he's left the board, Twitter now has all these guys on, you know, some of them are just academics, PhDs.
They own tiny fractions of Twitter.
So the bottom line is they don't really have a big economic stake themselves.
Their interests are not aligned with those of the shareholders, a point that, by the way, Elon Musk has himself made in, of all things, a tweet.
And we see, as we look at the cultural landscape, all these people, the Washington Post, for example, Max Boot, he goes, for democracy to survive, we need more content moderation.
See, content moderation is the euphemism for censorship.
These guys realize that from the time we were kids, we're all taught censorship is bad.
We've all read George Orwell.
We all know that socialists and totalitarian countries practice censorship.
The Nazis practice censorship.
So you don't want to be known as the guy who does censorship.
So the polite word is content moderation, which is essentially a polite word for, well, censorship.
MSNBC's Katie Turra basically says if Twitter protects free speech, this could have, quote, massive life and globe-altering consequences for just letting people run wild on the thing.
In other words, letting people express their ideas is now running wild on Twitter, extremely dangerous for the future of democracy and of the globe.
And Robert Reich, who's the dwarf who used to be in the Clinton administration, he's an economist, but he pontificates on all kinds of subjects, usually speaking absolute rubbish.
In his latest, his censorship is, quote, necessary to protect American democracy.
So even though democracy relies on free speech, relies on exchanges of ideas, relies on presenting competing ideas before the American people, righteous having none of it.
For him, democracy means essentially shutting down the opposition, having a one-party state, having one set of opinions out there on social media.
These people are essentially, they're tyrants in tweed.
They're authoritarians, you know, in khakis.
And it's scary that Twitter and all these leftist allies have now assembled to fight Elon Musk.
Not because they're worried about a billionaire owning Twitter, but they're worried about having to do free speech.
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And Ukraine is hanging in there.
They continue to fight gallantly against the Russian population.
Putin invasion of Ukraine.
But who's going to run out of weapons first?
The Russians or, well, us, the West?
For a while there, I kept reading gleeful articles in the media.
Oh, the Russians are going to pretty soon be out of ammunition.
The Ukrainians are going to have them on the ropes.
On the face of it, this is a little bit implausible.
Ukraine is going to defeat Russia in a war.
Well, Ukraine is getting a lot of help.
It's getting a lot of help from the West.
Shipments of Western, not so much troops, no troops, but rather weaponry, artillery, and rockets, and all kinds of lethal aid.
Now, the West has done this in the name of protecting, quote, the arsenal of democracy.
This is some fictitious alliance of democracies around the world.
There's no actual such alliance, and in fact, big democracies But nevertheless, this is the kind of public fiction.
The democracies of the world are hanging together against the autocracies of the world.
Well, it turns out that initially the expectation on the part of U.S. intelligence was that the Russians would overwhelm the Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians would be reduced to fighting a kind of Afghan-style guerrilla war over the next, you know, year or even decade, and the United States would be supporting this insurgency in various ways, large and small.
But it turns out the Ukrainians are still in the fight, and as a result of being in the fight against, obviously, a more sizable opponent, The Ukrainians are demanding very aggressively.
Zelensky almost every day is calling for escalations.
He wants more drones.
He wants more anti-tank weapons.
He wants more anti-aircraft weapons.
He wants more ammunition. And so here is Russia pummeling the Ukraine's industrial base pretty successfully, as it turns out.
By the way, recently General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that the West has already delivered 60,000 anti-tank weapons, 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons to Kiev.
And the Biden administration just recently approved a new $800 million package, helicopters, armed personnel carriers.
And so the Ukrainians want more artillery, more coastal defense drones, other types of materiel.
Now, the interesting thing is that no one really planned for this.
No one really expected that the U.S. and the West would have to produce this kind of weaponry and deliver it, and deliver it at very, very short notice.
They say that Kiev is blowing through, you know, a week's worth of deliveries in like one day.
And then they want more.
So, suddenly the Western countries are like, wait a minute, let's take a look at our own arsenal to see how much we've got to spare.
Apparently, Germany has decided, you know what?
We're not giving Ukraine any more tanks.
You know why? We need them.
If we ever face a crisis, if somebody attacks the German border, we need German tanks.
Canada says no more rocket launchers for Ukraine.
Why? Because the Canadians need them.
And so the United States has already given the Ukraine.
I'm getting this now from a very interesting article in Bloomberg, an article written by a guy named Hal Brands.
He points out the U.S. has provided one-third of its overall stockpile of Javelin anti-tank missiles.
And the U.S. is now saying, you know what, we can't really part with all that many more because we need to protect ourselves.
We need to have enough to protect ourselves.
Now, the point here is that the United States has...
It spends a lot of money in the military, so it may seem like we have an unlimited supply.
But what most people realize is that our military has basically become a giant welfare program.
And what that means is that a large chunk of our military budget goes to things like health care.
It goes, obviously, to all the idiotic woke training that the military is doing.
Only a fraction of military spending is on military equipment, military personnel, direct efforts to create military readiness.
And this is why we've got ships in mothballs.
This is why we've got nuclear weapons that are now ancient.
We don't even know some of them will go off.
The military is not exactly in good shape, and it's partly because of this kind of ideological infestation.
So all of this is a serious problem.
And now, actually, we have to use our military, or at least use our military in delivering weapons to Ukraine, and it turns out we don't exactly have a massive surplus.
Another key point here is that the United States in World War II... And even in the Korean War, had a massive manufacturing industrial base.
We were essentially the manufacturing capital of the world.
And so we could make stuff.
We had the workforce to do it.
We had the resources to do it.
But now we don't.
Now our economic leadership is not really based on manufacturing.
And that's why we have shortages of machine tools, shortages of skilled labor, shortages of spare production capacity.
And so we can't scale up so easily in the way that we used to.
The workforce that once did this for us no longer exists.
It turns out that the United States, although despite a lot of, you know, propagandistic bluster, the Russians are going to face another Vietnam, the Russians are on the ropes, the truth of it is that Russia is willing to pay apparently a high price to create a kind of bear grasp.
on Ukraine. And as for the United States, in a war in which our national interests are not clearly involved, this is not in our backyard, in fact it's in their backyard, in this war that is really a chosen conflict for us, it seems like we may be the ones to first run out of weapons to spare.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code BALANCE. What happens to the pro-life movement if the Supreme Court does, kind of like expected, and overturns Roe v.
Wade? The court's decision is due this spring.
It could come any time in the next few months.
And it may well be that a majority, either a 6-3 majority or a 5-4 majority, will dispatch not only Roe v.
Wade, but Planned Parenthood v.
Casey. And this would return the abortion decision to the states.
Now, apparently a lot of states are kind of gearing up for this, or some version of this.
A handful of states have passed Mississippi-style laws, and these are laws that basically use the 15-week threshold.
They go, yeah, abortion is allowed.
Before 15 weeks, but after 15 weeks, it's not.
Now, some of these cases have been blocked by the courts pending the Supreme Court's decision, but if the Supreme Court overturns Roe, these laws will all immediately be viable, to use that phrase, plucked from the abortion debate itself.
Now, there's also, as you know, a Texas law which empowers private citizens to file lawsuits.
It does not even involve the instruments of the state in enforcement.
And this has proven very effective in essentially, if not completely eliminating, then sharply scaling back abortions in Texas.
Major abortion providers have, in effect, been rendered inoperative.
And all of this is to the great benefit of human lives in Texas.
And other states are now picking up this Texas so-called heartbeat law.
Now, the Mississippi law is 15 weeks, but the Texas law is like six weeks.
As soon as the fetus shows a heartbeat, the idea is that the fetus is now worthy of protection.
And So you had Idaho become the first state to sort of pick up the Texas blueprint and adopt it.
Now, Idaho's Supreme Court has temporarily blocked it from taking effect, but again, the Supreme Court has allowed the Texas law to go forward.
So, by the way, has the Texas Supreme Court.
And Oklahoma just passed a very severe anti-abortion law.
10 years in prison if you perform an abortion for any reason except to save a woman's life in a medical emergency.
By the way, there are a bunch of Texas people who have been fleeing to Oklahoma to get their abortions.
That won't be so easy if the Oklahoma law is eventually upheld.
So... So what's happening here is that the ground is being cleared for the issue of abortion, which was proclaimed as a federal right, a federal right that somehow magically appears in the Constitution, even though the Constitution says nothing about the subject.
What the Supreme Court did was they sort of lifted vague phrases from the 14th Amendment, even from the 5th Amendment.
They talked about some of the so-called penumbras of the Constitution, a penumbra is a kind of halo effect.
So essentially it was a rhetorical muddle.
And by the way, the 14th Amendment, which prohibits states from, quote, depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
If anything, the 14th Amendment can be read both ways.
It's far from it being a protection of a woman's right to have an abortion.
It can equally be read as an unborn child's right to life.
I have the right to life, and no one can deprive me of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
So the idea that I could be arbitrarily killed because someone decided, let's just have an abortion, let's just abort Dinesh.
No, the 14th Amendment protects me.
So what you have here is a very interesting next step for the pro-life movement, by which I mean...
And by the way, in saying all this, I'm doing nothing more than following the recipe of the left.
What the left did with issues like gay rights is they started out by diffusing the issue.
They started out by appeals to tolerance.
Let's tolerate the gay lifestyle.
But pretty soon they went from that to establishing gay marriage as a kind of national right.
And that means that states are prohibited from passing laws that restrict gay marriage in really any way.
Why? Because it's now declared to be a constitutional right.
If by analogy, life, the right to life is declared to be a constitutional right, drawn straight out of the 14th Amendment, then it turns out that states are not going to be able to pass laws restricting abortion, or at least restricting abortion, quote, without due process of law.
That's the language of the 14th Amendment.
So what I'm pointing to is the way in which these issues twist and turn.
If it seems like we are the party of states' rights and the left is the party of federalizing rights, that's not entirely the case.
What really happens is that each side uses the federalizing argument or the state rights argument to sort of defend its own convictions.
And when the federal argument helps us, we use the federal argument.
And when the states' rights argument helps us, we use the states' rights argument.
Why? Because our constitutional system is neither purely federal or centralized, nor is it purely a state's rights document.
It is what Madison called partly national and partly federal.
And so what I'm going with this is to say that, look, it could very well be that a first-stage victory, and a very important one, is to topple the idea of abortion as a constitutional right.
Diffuse the issue to the states and let it be there for a while.
But that's not your ultimate endpoint.
Your ultimate endpoint is not to sort of decentralize the issue of abortion, but rather to make abortions more rare.
In fact, make abortions ideally non-existent in the United States.
And to do that, you don't just want a law that says, hey, listen, abortion is a complex issue.
Let's let every community decide for itself.
But rather you want to say that the right to life is sacrosanct and it needs protection across the board.
The global upheaval caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the crippling sanctions on Russian trade are showing to have massive ripple effects across the world, including right here in the U.S. And it's not just that the gas pump food prices are soaring right now.
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One of the reasons I like the work of Chris Ruffo is that in places like City Journal and elsewhere, he does a really good job in a concrete way documenting how woke culture plays out in major corporations and also in the media.
Well, here's a very interesting story that comes out of Reuters.
This is the Thomson Reuters Corporation, a massive media conglomerate that at one time had a reputation for kind of objectively and critically presenting the news and letting people decide for themselves.
Well, no more. Reuters has gone woke in a big way, and Zach Kriegman turns out to have become its latest victim.
Now, here's a guy who has got terrific credentials.
He's got a BA in economics from Michigan.
He's got a JD from Harvard.
He's got lots of experience with high-tech startups.
He's essentially an econometrics research consultant.
And he's been with Reuters for six years, where he's involved in statistics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and software engineering.
In fact, his title in the beginning of 2020 was Director of Data Science at Reuters.
Interestingly, when the George Floyd business began in 2020, this guy Kriegman began to see all kinds of claims being made, not just broadly in the culture, but at Reuters.
And he realized that these claims really don't stand up to any kind of empirical evidence.
And so what he did was he began his own research project to sort of look into them.
And he began to examine all kinds of statements that were being made by his own media corporation and found them to be completely faulty.
Now, what kind of statements are we talking about?
Well, first of all, This idea that the police disproportionately target black victims.
And Kriegman found that to be simply not true.
The police are just as likely to identify white perpetrators, not victims, but perpetrators, I'm sorry.
And in fact, the system is slightly biased against whites.
That was his conclusion after carefully looking at the data.
Another data point is the claim that Reuters was uncritically transmitting that somehow defunding the police and cutting police budgets has had no effect on effective policing.
And this guy was like, really?
Let's look at the evidence.
Well, it turns out that there is an effect.
And you see a kind of direct correlation between the cutting back of police programs and the soaring of crime rates.
Of course, crime rates are soaring across the board, but the rate of increase is greater in those departments that have seen these kinds of cutbacks.
And so this guy, Kriegman, laid all this out in a kind of data-intensive essay that he uploaded on the internal, it's called the Hub, it's a kind of internal Reuters conversation site.
Needless to say, when he did that, it caused a furor.
So right away, first of all, they took it down.
They took his post down. Second of all, they dispatched him to a series of lectures and training programs.
Now, by the way, Reuters had already been doing all this kind of work.
Arm twisting and cajoling and this kind of diversity, browbeating, race-based.
They would talk about the importance of race-based reparations.
They had sessions called How to Be a Better White Person.
They talked about how, you know, black people are like, it's impossible for them to function in daily life.
They're like ready to go nuts.
And what whites have to do is essentially bow and scrape and respond with automatic contrition.
I believe you. You're right.
I've got a lot of work to do.
I apologize. I'm going to do better.
This kind of browbeating has now become standard in many corporations.
And this Kriegman guy was all too familiar with all of this.
But his point was, okay, fine, we'll go through this kind of training.
But it shouldn't prevent Reuters as a media company from being able to look at what's happening in a factual way.
We are, after all, a reliable or once reliable news corporation.
But it turns out that it was not to be.
By and large, they tried to get him to retract.
They tried to send him to the diversity counselors to raise his consciousness, i.e., to get him to recant.
But he didn't recant.
And so they fired him.
They got rid of him. And what he says to Rufo is that he goes, you know, what's interesting about all this is they never really challenged anything I said in my data-driven essay.
I had all the documents. I had all the data.
They didn't want to make a critique of the data.
Their point was just that it's insensitive to be doing this at all.
You're supposed to be a robot.
You're supposed to be on board.
You're supposed to chant in unison with us.
And so they got rid of this guy.
Now, he's not the first one, of course.
I think of cases like James Damore.
Remember the guy who wrote a critique of the diversity program at Google?
He got the boot.
Think of Barry Weiss, the writer at the New York Times.
She began to raise questions about diversity and woke culture.
Now she's off doing her own thing.
Jody Shaw was an employee at Smith College in Massachusetts.
They hounded her out of Smith.
And so you've got this kind of—Paul Rossi was a high school math teacher, if I recall.
He's been driven out.
So you've got this kind of—I won't call them martyrs.
That may be too extreme of a term.
but nevertheless these are heroic people who have paid a high price for being independent-minded, and in most cases extremely responsible critics of this diversity movement.
But the diversity movement brooks no criticism at all. It treats these dissenters as sort of enemies of the state and enemies of the system. And the latest enemy of the system, a guy that had to be pushed out, is Zach Kriegman of the Thomson Reuters Corporation.
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Feel the difference. Something very interesting is going on in China, inside of China, but also in the way that China projects itself to the world.
China is now portraying itself as the champion of, well, traditional values.
Here's an article just out from CNN. China bans footballers from getting tattoos.
And by itself, this is just one of those kind of trivia type of articles, kind of intriguing in and of itself.
They show, it has a picture of a guy named Zhong Lin Ping of Wang Zhu.
And here's a guy with a big tattoo on his neck.
And evidently, the Chinese have had enough with these tattoos.
And so what they've done is they've issued a new directive.
And they're basically saying that footballers, people who play football, need to be, quote, a good example to society.
This has come from the General Administration of Sport in China, the GAS. And what they say is, listen, athletes of the national team and the U23 national team are strictly prohibited from having new tattoos.
And those who have tattoos are advised to remove the tattoos by themselves.
And they say that in special circumstances, I'm assuming they're assuming some kind of family significance or something like that, tattoos must be covered during training and competition after the consent of the team.
So the Chinese are basically saying, we don't think the tattoos are the way to go.
And as I say, by itself, this would just be nothing more than a quirk.
I mean, the Chinese, by the way, do know that the practice of getting tattoos, this is not coming from traditional Chinese culture, even though some of the tattoos themselves are dragons and they're Chinese symbols, but nevertheless, the idea comes from the West.
So it's Chinese athletes trying to be westernized, which is perhaps from their point of view to be cool, and the Chinese are like, cut that out.
Now, this comes on top of the Chinese issuing directives, this one goes back now a few months, that they don't want their men to start acting or dressing or looking like women.
They don't want so-called effeminate males.
And we all know, in fact, I talked about this yesterday or the day before, on the podcast, the Chinese have ordered Disney to cut out gay scenes from movies that are played in China.
So even the implication of some kind of gay relationship, Dumbledore and some other guy, no, get it out.
And so what's going on here is that the Chinese are not only affirming sort of traditional values at home, but this is a very, I want to suggest, a very cunning and effective public stance for China to have in the world.
Why? Because many cultures around the world, cultures in Asia, cultures in Africa, even cultures in South America, are quite traditional.
And so you appeal to traditional people when you take this kind of a public stance.
For a while, even the radical Muslims...
We're able to pose as defenders of traditional values.
They would say things, there are phrases that come out of some of these radical Muslim thinkers, people like Sheikh Karadawi and others, where they would say, modernization, yes, westernization, no.
And what they're basically saying is, yeah, we want western technology, yeah, we want western modernity, but no, we don't really want western cultural depravity.
And now the Chinese seem to be the latest who are now climbing aboard this kind of bandwagon.
And it's going to appeal to a lot of people.
In fact, it's going to ultimately create, in my view, anti-Americanism, even among countries that are generally well-disposed toward the West.
Take, for example, my native country of India.
The Indians have been, over the last 25 years, I would say, the most pro-American people in the world.
To such a point that the Indian enthusiasm for America, and in general for the West, has even dissipated the anti-colonial ideology of my youth.
When I was young, it was fashionable to deplore anti-colonialism, attack the West, the British Empire was the great villain, and so on.
But in a weird way, the Indians affection for the American way of life, for the American ladders of opportunity, for the American dream, has made the Indians pro-Western across the board.
And today, if you start railing about colonialism and so on, people think you basically have some kind of psychological problem.
They don't want to argue with you.
They just go to get a drink or they leave you to yourself.
And so India, in that sense, has been emotionally, psychologically, intellectually a great potential ally for America and for the West.
You'll notice that in recent months, the Indians are tilting away from that.
India, for example, has refused to go along with the big Ukraine program.
Well, the democracies of the world are uniting, and the Indians say, well, we're the largest democracy, but we're actually not getting on that bandwagon.
Sorry, see you later. The Indians want to continue to, they're not only buying oil from Russia, but they're even buying weapons from Russia.
And India also, the next step for India, which would be a devastating blow, Would be a tilt toward China.
And so the Chinese, again, in this strategy of we're affirming traditional culture, we stand for tradition, we stand for moderation, we stand for family.
Now, the Chinese don't really do that.
In fact, that's the whole point of Marxism-Leninism is it overrides the family, it overrides the local community.
So I'm not saying that this Chinese program is sincere.
What I am saying is it has symbolic potency and that by the Chinese doing this, It's going to lull other countries or at least outwardly give them the sense that, hey, the Chinese are actually protecting the kind of values that we in our cultures want to protect.
And we want to protect it from Western degradation and from Western contamination.
So this could be a very successful propaganda strategy for the West.
And we in America should watch it, I think, with legitimate concern and alarm.
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We're now at the later cantos of Dante's Purgatory.
And I just have probably two or three more segments before we're through with Purgatory and on to the Paradiso.
In Canto XXVI, Dante and Virgil meet a very interesting character, a Roman poet named Statius.
S-T-A-T-I-U-S. I mentioned the last time that Dante had a Christ reference in his poem.
And ironically, the Christ reference was to a pope that we find in hell.
But the pope, nevertheless, was compared to Christ being crucified on the cross.
And Dante continues with this kind of Christ analogy.
He says, when suddenly, he says, just as we read in Luke that Christ, new risen from the tomb, appeared to two men on the Emmaus Road.
A shade appeared. So, in the same manner that Christ just sort of suddenly showed up among two men, this shade, this soul, shows up right in between Dante and Virgil.
And then he says, quote, My name is Statius.
Still well known on earth, I sang of Thebes, then of Achilles' might.
And then he says that the spark that kindled my poetic ardor came from the sacred flame that set on fire more than a thousand poets.
I mean the Aeneid.
So here you've got this guy, Statius.
By the way, a very well-known figure in Dante's time, and a very well-regarded classical poet.
This is somebody who lived about in the first century after Christ.
Now, Virgil, by the way, lives in the century before Christ, so Statius is a little later than Virgil, and his reputation has never been as great as that of Virgil.
But as I say, he was a well-regarded poet in Dante's time, and it turns out that he is a huge admirer, Statius is, of Virgil.
And so you've got a remarkable phenomenon.
Here's Dante, who is himself an admirer of Virgil, and here's Statius, more of a contemporary of Virgil.
Dante, of course, comes.
More than a thousand years later, but Statius is also an admirer of Virgil.
And then Statius says, and if only I could have been alive when Virgil lived, I would consent to spend an extra year of exile on the mount.
So here's Statius basically saying, I love this guy Virgil.
Oh man, if I could only meet him, you know, I would extend the sufferings of my life by a whole year just for the joy of meeting Virgil.
Here we see, by the way, how there are surprises in Purgatory, and there are almost always good surprises.
Well, it turns out that Dante can't wait to tell this guy, Statius, that, you know, this guy right here is Virgil.
Virgil's right here. So this is how Dante describes it, and this is always Dante's ability to...
Put things so beautifully.
He goes, At these words Virgil turned to me.
His look told me in silence.
Silence. Virgil is like, don't tell him.
But here's Dante.
But the power of a man's will is often powerless.
Laughter and tears follow so close upon the passions that provoke them that the more sincere the man, the less they obey his will.
Dante's basically saying, I couldn't control myself.
My emotions overwhelmed me.
And in effect, what Virgil does is he says to Dante, well, okay, fine, you know, go ahead.
And here's Dante. Dante says...
You seem to find my smiling very strange.
Custaceous is like, why are you smiling?
Dante, you seem to find my smiling very strange.
Oh, ancient spirit, but I have to tell you something stranger still.
And what he has to tell him is, this right here is Virgil.
Quoting Dante now.
This shade right here who directs my eyes to heaven is the poet Virgil, who bequeathed to you the power to sing the deeds of men and gods.
So you have this joyous reunion of Statius and Virgil.
And Dante says, already he was bending to embrace my teacher's feet.
This is Statius bending down.
But interestingly, Virgil draws back.
But Virgil, brother, no.
You are a shade.
It is a shade you see.
So a very interesting turn here in Purgatory, where Virgil is basically saying, you know, on Earth, this kind of homage that you pay to a poetic mentor, it's one thing over there.
But we're up to something a little different over here.
We're in the afterlife.
You're a shade. I'm a shade.
Let's not do this right now.
So an interesting kind of pause in the action.
But Statius' role is going to continue for several cantos.
And a conversation then continues between Dante and Statius.
And we are now in the terrace of avarice.
And in effect, what Dante asked Statius is, he says sort of, he goes, you know, avarice is just such a low type of sin.
How could a guy like you, someone with the kind of magnanimity of your poetic style, how could you commit such a sin?
And interestingly, Statius gives an answer where he says, well, actually in my case, the sin was not avarice at all.
Rather, it was the opposite of avarice.
I wasn't avaricious or greedy.
I was prodigal.
I was wasteful.
So think of it.
Both avarice and prodigality are opposites and both show a kind of lack of proper regard for things.
And that's the sin that has Statius right here repenting in purgatory.
We're continuing the discussion between Dante and the Roman poet Statius on the high terrace of Purgatory, one of the most fascinating episodes in the entire Commedia.
And Dante raises a question that should have occurred to you and all of us by now, which is, what is a pagan poet?
Someone who, as far as we know, was not a Christian.
What is he doing in purgatory on his way to heaven?
And moreover, if Statius was a disciple or a student of Virgil, how is it that Virgil belongs in limbo in the outer portals of hell?
Virgil cannot, and as we'll see in the poem, Virgil can't go much further even in purgatory.
Even as a temporary guide, Virgil's going to have to quit.
He's going to have to go back. And how is this guy, Statius, moving on, moving on in ascension to the ultimate bliss of heaven?
So Dante asks Statius directly.
From what you wrote in Cleo's company, it does not seem that you were faithful then to that faith without which virtue is in vain.
If this be so, says Dante, tell me what heavenly sun or earthly beam lit up your course so that you could sail behind the fishermen.
I mean, what a beautiful way to put it.
Dante's like, well, how is it that you are being counted among the followers of Christ?
Weren't you a pagan?
And this is Statius now talking to Virgil and saying something downright shocking.
He says, it was you, it was you directed me to drink Parnassus waters.
So far, no problem.
It was you, Virgil, who taught me the art of poetry.
It was you whose radiance revealed the way to God.
What? Virgil, the pagan, leads Statius, another pagan, to Christianity.
But how is this even possible?
How can someone who doesn't know the light of Christ lead another person to Christ?
What's going on here? And here's Statius.
With one of the most memorable analogies now, again, in the entire Purgatorio.
This is Statius talking.
You were the lonely traveler in the dark who holds his lamp behind him, shedding light not for himself, but to make others wise.
So here's Stacia saying that you, Virgil, are sort of like a guide, but instead of holding your lamp in front, where you yourself can see the light, you're sort of holding it behind you.
You can't see, but what you're doing is you're clearing the way for others behind you to be able to see further and go further than you ever could.
Now, how did Virgil do this?
What was Virgil's lamp?
Turns out, Virgil's lamp was a poem that Virgil himself wrote.
Now, not the Aeneid, but rather a poem called the Fourth Eclogue, in which Virgil wrote this.
These are the lines that Dante quotes.
For you once wrote, this is Stacia speaking, he's now quoting Virgil, The world is born again, justice returns, and the first age of man and a new progeny descends from heaven.
Now, this is in fact in Virgil's poem, The Fourth Eclogue, written before the time of Christ.
And most poetic literary scholars and historians will tell you that what Virgil was writing about in this poem was a presumed heir to the Emperor Augustus.
So, Virgil, the great celebrator of Rome, was in effect saying a new child will be born, born to Augustus, will now rule, this child will now become an emperor, just as Augustus was, and a kind of golden age will come down upon the world, and in a sense, history will be transformed by the birth of this single, solitary child.
But, says Statius, I didn't read the poem that way.
I read it completely differently.
Let's remember, Statius is born after the time of Christ.
And even though, from history's point of view, Statius, as far as we know, never became a Christian.
But here's Dante doing something very daring, something that he did with Ulysses in the Inferno.
He's doing it with Statius here.
He's kind of adding to what we know about Statius.
And he's doing it inventively, but to make a really profound point.
And what Dante is really having Statius say, in effect, is, listen...
Although you, Virgil, might have written the poem intending one meaning, I, Statius, took that birth of a child to refer to the birth of a Redeemer.
Just as in the Old Testament, we have in Isaiah and others prophecies of a child to be born that Christians later took to be.
Look, right there, what Isaiah is talking about is the birth of Christ.
Similarly here, Statius says, I read your poem, Virgil, differently than you did.
I took it to mean that Christ was now born into the world and the transformer and redeemer of the world, and that set me on the path to become a Christian.
Now, there is all kinds of things to be said about this remarkable episode.
But the one thing I'll say now, and I'll pick it up next time...
Next time is not going to be, by the way, tomorrow or the next day.
I'm doing a special episode Wednesday.
But Thursday, I'll pick up this track.
What I want to say is that what Statius represents for Dante and Virgil...
It's the place at which the intellect finds its outer point.
In other words, Virgil represents reason, and what Dante is really saying is that reason by itself can only take you so far.
At a certain point, faith has to be your ultimate guide.
Faith is what's going to get you to the top of the purgatorial mountain.
And so here's Dante treading very lightly upon a great theme, the theme being the limits of reason itself.
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