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April 21, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza

48:41

UNMASKED Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep315

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	Coming up today, the battle's not over, but I'm going to be celebrating the unmasking of America and also the dismay of the angry, well, let's just call them mask-holes, who are losing control over their fellow citizens.
	They're not happy about it. I'll use Florida's cancellation of a Disney subsidy to show how conservatives need to fight today.
	I want to examine how journalist Taylor Lorenz doxxed a private citizen and then tried to portray herself as the victim.
	And I'll discuss the epic meeting of Dante and a group of Florentine poets on the topmost terrace of Purgatory.
	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, the movie 2000 Mules is ready.
	It's being closed out.
	It's being put into the system.
	And it's super exciting.
	I want you to know that you can start buying tickets now.
	Go to the website. It's 2000mules.com.
	So these are the different ways you can watch this movie.
	One is in theaters.
	It's in 275 theaters on two nights.
	Monday, this is May 2nd, or Wednesday, May 4th, 7 p.m.
	showing. And all those theaters are up on the website.
	You can search it by state.
	You can buy your ticket. And so you're set to go.
	You can see it in the theater.
	But not everyone will be able to see it that way because we don't have theaters all over the country, although we have a lot of them.
	The second way to see it is the virtual premiere.
	This is out of a magnificent theater in Las Vegas.
	It's live.
	It's going to be on Saturday, May 7th.
	Saturday, May 7th.
	And what you do is you buy a ticket, you're given an access code, you log in, there'll be an opening program, you'll be able to watch the movie as if you're sitting in the theater.
	And there's a live Q&A with some of the key people in the movie occurring right afterwards.
	So this is a great way that anyone can see the movie by buying a ticket to the virtual premiere on Saturday, May 7th.
	And that's also, details are up on the website.
	There's a small number of VIP tickets for people who want to be physically present.
	In the theater in Las Vegas.
	You can also pre-order a DVD for the movie and there's a link to do that.
	And there's also some pretty good bulk rates if you want to buy a bunch of DVDs to share with friends.
	That's a great way to get the message out.
	Eventually the movie will also be available just for straight digital download.
	And those details will come a little bit later.
	But these are three great ways to see the movie in the premiere week, in the first week.
	So, once again, the website, it's the number 2000, 2000mules.com.
	And get your tickets now, right away.
	Alright, let me talk about...
	The CDC's mask mandate, which was basically sent down the tubes by a great judge, a Trump judge.
	Her name is Catherine Kimball Mizell.
	Apparently she's only in her 30s.
	And so she decided, you know what?
	I'm going to take on the CDC. I'm going to take on the whole Biden administration.
	By the way, the mask mandate is kind of one of the last vestiges of their kind of COVID control, right?
	Most of these states have now opened up.
	They don't have lifted mandates in restaurants and places like that.
	But the travel mandate, the mandate for public transportation and for airplanes, was still in place.
	And basically, the judge ruled, listen, there's no constitutional warrant for it.
	In fact, the law under which they had passed this mandate was apparently a sanitation law.
	They were claiming that this is part of, quote, sanitation.
	And the judge goes, actually, no, I think I know what sanitation means.
	Sanitation basically means cleaning up stuff.
	And so using sanitation as a pretext to sneak in a mask mandate for the entire country, no can do.
	Moreover, the judge said the CDC had not followed its own rulemaking process.
	And moreover, it hadn't provided a sufficient justification for why these masks should be required.
	So the mask mandate went down.
	And you know, it's fun. Debbie and I were at the airport.
	And it's such a different mood.
	It's such a different atmosphere. I mean, it was kind of exhilarating for me to walk through the terminals, no mask.
	I mean, I felt like I got my face back because I've been sort of, you know, for two years now, walking around in masks.
	And I'm looking around the airport and I see three types of people.
	There are the maskless people.
	That's the majority. Debbie and I counted what?
	Maybe 60% of people, no masks, enjoying their freedom.
	Then the second group was the masked.
	And this was a group of people who apparently still, maybe they have pre-existing conditions.
	I'm not questioning people who want to continue voluntarily to wear a mask.
	But these are the people who are, you know, running scared.
	But the third group is the group that amuses me the most.
	And these are the so-called, well, I call them mask holes.
	Now, I didn't invent this term, but it's perfect for the occasion.
	These are people who glare at everybody else and give you dirty looks for not wearing a mask.
	And I'm just waiting in the airplane for some mask hold to sort of start berating someone for not wearing a mask and then have, you know, security show up and the cops show up and drag these control freaks out of the plane or out of the airport.
	Now, the Biden administration Not surprisingly, not very happy about the knocking down of this mask mandate.
	And so they're like, well, if the CDC wants us to, if they want to sort of extend the mask mandate, we will now go to a higher court, a court of appeals, and ask that court to stay or to put on hold the judge's decision.
	So that's apparently what the Biden administration is planning to do.
	It has filed an appeal with an appellate court.
	Not to adjudicate the case on the merits, but say that while the case is being adjudicated, the mandate should be allowed to go back into effect.
	Now, Debbie and I were talking about this on the way to the podcast and we're like, this is going to be very unpopular.
	Why? Because people have sort of had it.
	And they have a chance now to return to a vestige of normalcy.
	They have a chance to travel.
	And think about traveling, not just on a short flight for an hour or two.
	I mean, we were just going back and forth to Florida.
	But imagine if you were going cross-country or going internationally.
	You're going to wear a mask for, what, 6, 7, 14 hours?
	It's almost unbearable.
	And apparently there's very little rational justification for it.
	By the way, a number of the airline CEOs have testified that these masks, they've looked at this very carefully, do not enhance the safety of passengers.
	So I'm delighted that a Trump judge has seen the light, has struck down the mandate, and we'll see what happens going forward.
	But for now, I, and I'm sure you and many others, are enjoying our freedom.
	Let's help to uncancel the most cancelled man in America.
	How? By supporting his great products.
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	All the MyPillow products come with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a 10-year warranty.
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	You need to use promo code D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
	Disney declared war on the state of Florida, and now the state of Florida has declared war on Disney.
	This is, by the way, a Republican administration, by the way, a Republican legislature that knows how to fight and is showing the rest of the country how to do this.
	Imagine if all Republican governors and legislatures operated in this way.
	And it's basically a way of saying, listen, you don't mess with me and we won't mess with you.
	But if you want to take us on, game on.
	Let's see who wins.
	So here's Disney.
	And they decided to, as a company, officially come out foursquare against a rather benign Florida law.
	This is HB 1557, which basically says that we don't want explicit sex education, let alone sexual instruction techniques, to be given to very young children in the first or the second or the third grade.
	And even in later grades, we want sort of age-appropriate sex education.
	So this is common sense.
	Parents would support this 99, if not 100%.
	And yet Disney, you see, Disney is kind of thickly populated with gay activists.
	And these gay activists pressure Disney as a company to sort of, you know, it's a don't say gay bill.
	This is their kind of stigma that they're trying to put on the bill, even though the bill doesn't even talk about that.
	Anyway, Disney decides that they're going to fight against this bill.
	Quote, our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts.
	And they say we're committed to fight to help this to occur.
	But Governor DeSantis goes, you know what, Disney, you've picked a fight with us, and we're ready for it.
	The governor says, quote, the political influence that they're used to wielding, that Disney is used to wielding in the state of Florida, he says, has dissipated.
	Now, Disney has for almost 70 years had a special protection, a kind of tax protection, and also an autonomy protection in Florida law.
	This was a law passed by Florida's House and Senate.
	It created what's called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, and it gives essentially benefits to Disney that no other corporation has.
	These are benefits for Disney to kind of run its own company as a town.
	So Disney basically has created, it has its own police.
	It has its own sanitation.
	It has its own road maintenance.
	And in exchange for this, Disney is exempt from all kinds of taxes and fees normally imposed on corporations that own land in the state of Florida.
	And so DeSantis goes, well, listen, this isn't just about Disney, but we're taking away these special protections.
	Why should we give them to some corporations and not others?
	Florida law generally says treat corporations in the same way.
	And so the Florida Senate has already passed, has already voted 23 to 16 to dissolve this special protection.
	Dissolution would be effective of June of 2023.
	So it's going to be a year from now.
	It goes into effect. This is now going also before the Florida House.
	And of course, it's a Republican House, just as it's a Republican Senate.
	And so the votes are there.
	The House is likely to pass it.
	It's going to go then to the Republican governor, who is likely to sign it.
	Now, this is not, by the way, the kind of law that's easy to take to the court and have the court overturn it.
	Why? Because no one denies that it is in the And remember that Disney is not being singled out here.
	Disney had a special protection, and the special protection is being repealed.
	Now, of course, there's going to be a lot of flouting and a lot of pouting and a lot of rage inside of Disney.
	I'm sure animators and so on are just, you know, taking their crayons and making all kinds of angry marks on the page and so on.
	But after their tantrums subside, Disney's going to have to consider an important question, which is...
	You know, what moves are left in Disney's camp?
	Can Disney sort of strike back?
	Well, probably the easiest way to strike back is to leave the state of Florida, but you know what?
	That's not very easy to do.
	Where can you go? We'll go to California.
	Wait a minute, we already have...
	We already have Disneyland in California.
	Where else can we go?
	It's not sunny in all places in the United States all year.
	And where are you going to find, you know, 100 acres plus of real estate in a sunny place where people want to go on vacation?
	It's not so easy.
	So I don't think Disney has a lot of good options here.
	I think this is a lesson for corporations in general, that particularly when you're in a state like Florida, if you want to pick a fight, the other side is going to fight as well.
	See, I think the left doesn't really expect this.
	They sort of expect that they can throw their tantrums and they can do their cancellation, and no one's going to cancel them.
	But you can see here Florida showing the way in saying that, look, you can cancel us, but we're going to try to cancel you in return.
	And quite frankly, we have the laws on our side.
	We make the law. We're the legislature.
	Governor DeSantis here has shown terrific leadership.
	Like I say, I wish other Republican governors were able to use his combination of fearlessness, willingness to use the process.
	Now, there's some people, you know, and in fact, National Review Online, these ridiculous characters are like, well, Florida already kind of won the battle by passing the law.
	Why are they going scorched earth on Disney?
	You know why? Because they can.
	So that's the answer.
	If you want to know why we're going scorched dirt on the left, it's because they've been doing it to us now for months, if not years.
	They've been getting away with it, and it's time for us to go scorched dirt for a change on them.
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	There's a huge amount of buzz on social media going on about this doxing of a woman.
	This is a woman who runs the...
	Twitter handle, Libs of TikTok.
	And this is a woman who posts videos.
	And the videos are nothing more than posted videos by leftists themselves.
	Now, they often are saying crazy things or they look crazy.
	And it's crazy talk by the left.
	But what she does is she just collects these videos and posts them.
	She's reposting the left's own posts.
	But these posts are so devastating and they're so hilarious and it shows what a bunch of absolute demented freaks these people are that she has become a dangerous force on Twitter.
	She's got a big following.
	People share her videos.
	And so it...
	The left has been trying to figure out, how do we get her?
	How do we go after this person?
	She's not doing anything that's wrong.
	She's not violating the Twitter guidelines.
	And so their idea was, how about if we threaten her?
	How about if we make her life miserable?
	How about if we even start putting her in danger?
	Let's dox her. Let's reveal who she is.
	Let's reveal where she lives.
	Let's reveal her profession.
	And this way we can see if her employer may go after her.
	Let's see if we can get some Antifa types to harass her.
	This is how the left thinks.
	And no one more than a writer for the Washington Post named Taylor Lorenz.
	Now... This Taylor Lorenz is a whiny, nasty individual.
	In fact, oddly and ironically, not very long ago, she posted her own TikTok video saying, doxing is horrible!
	And she's thinking, obviously, of when people are dox like herself or journalists.
	Now, remember, Taylor Lorenz is a kind of public figure, because she writes articles under her own name, and yet she's whining about what happens when people criticize journalists, and she's, you know, moved to tears, and so she's a complete drama queen.
	But, even though she's so sensitive about what might happen to her, she's perfectly willing to ruin the lives of other people.
	In fact, she sort of... It reminds me of the kind of nasty village busybody of earlier eras.
	You know how in every village you had some individual who made everybody else's business their business?
	If they'd see like a teenage couple holding hands, it's like, let's follow them.
	Let's see what they're up to.
	Let's see if I can tell everybody about it and ruin their lives and make them miserable.
	So, sneaking on people, ratting them out, deriving a twisted pleasure from their public discomfort.
	Well, this is Taylor Lorenz to a T. And then, when the libs of TikTok pushes back and says, hey, listen, what is this doxing?
	And conservatives basically start blasting Taylor Lorenz for what she did in revealing these details about this woman.
	Of course, Taylor Lorenz, not surprisingly, goes into an orgy of kind of self-dramatization and sort of victimization.
	Oh, I'm the victim! Suddenly, she's the victim.
	The amount of insane stuff that's happened over the past 24 hours has been unbelievable.
	It's eye-opening to see how sophisticated and vicious these coordinated attacks have become.
	So, this is a turning of the tables in which the perpetrator is now posing as, Oh, I'm the victim!
	Everyone's going after me!
	Now, there's a very interesting article in Revolver magazine, this is Darren Beatty's magazine, that looks at how Taylor Lorenz got this information.
	You might think, oh, well, she's a dogged reporter.
	That's how she got the information.
	No, Taylor Lorenz is not a dogged reporter.
	She's a lazy individual who sits basically at her desk.
	But it turns out that there is a network, a kind of secret network on the left, That basically does the kind of infiltration to ferret out this kind of information and then they feed it to people like Taylor Lorenz.
	So Taylor Lorenz is simply the front line of a kind of leftist campaign campaign.
	about, oh, we're trying to maintain civility, we're trying to protect people, we care about their safety.
	You think they would go after this kind of network, they would uncover it, but no, it turns out that Twitter basically seems to be okay when these kinds of attacks are launched from the left.
	In fact, as you dig into this, and the Revolver article lists a kind of maze of connections, it's very clear that the silencing that's going on on YouTube, on Google, on Twitter, on Facebook is a move that involves government officials.
	It involves international collaborators.
	I mean, remarkably, there's a group in Germany.
	That's sponsored in part by the, it has a big long German name which I won't try to read, but it's a government sponsored project to ultimately go after people on social media.
	And so it turns out that Taylor Lorenz got her information about the woman on the libs of TikTok person from an Antifa Twitter user named Karma161.
	Karma161. O-N-E-S-I-X-O-N-E. And so I think it's fascinating here to see the way in which you've got a web of leftist intimidation.
	It doesn't travel under its own identity.
	In fact, it operates surreptitiously.
	But it uses people like Taylor Lorenz at the Washington Post as their magnifying vehicle.
	But the goal, here as always, is to silence the other side, and if they don't sing the hymns of the official choir on the left, to do your best to ruin their life.
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	So guys, Debbie and I today are going to do a joint interview, which we do occasionally.
	And we're just delighted to welcome to the podcast and the program Jorge Granier-Phillips.
	He's the founder and CEO of El American.
	We're going to talk about El American.
	But Jorge is an entrepreneur.
	He's an award-winning media producer.
	He's produced shows for Netflix, for Warner Brothers, ABC, CBS... And he's now building El American, which is America's first bilingual conservative platform for Hispanics.
	Yes, there's a little correction. It's Phelps.
	Phelps. So sorry. Yes, yes.
	So welcome to the podcast.
	Finally, Jorge, it's great to have you.
	Thank you very much. Thank you, Debbie.
	Thank you, Dinesh. It's a pleasure to be here and an honor.
	Thank you very much. Yes.
	Jorge, tell us about El American.
	This is an exciting idea because, of course, Hispanic programming, at least in this country, has been dominated by Telemundo.
	It's been dominated by the left politically.
	And it seems like you're trying to create an alternative.
	How did you develop the idea to do that?
	Yes. I think the idea came to us, me and my co-founder, during...
	The last, I'd say three years, we'd started to see a trend within the media that was wearing and troublesome.
	There was also an issue of polarization in the US, which we had seen in our native Venezuela.
	So we got together with a group of local investors, all from the Hispanic community, from different parts of the United States, and we decided to create an alternative in the new segment that treated Hispanics in a more fair way and provided the foundations that this country was built upon and why we came here looking for a better life
	and are now into our second, third, and fourth generation as Hispanics here in the US.
	Well, I was very honored to be one of your first op-ed writers for L American, that you asked me to do that.
	But, you know, one of the things that I noticed was the sheer amount of censorship that El America went through and still is going through.
	And were you surprised by that, given that in Venezuela you were censored all the time?
	So, yeah, so our background is, for me, I come from a traditional broadcasting family from Venezuela that was in business over 100 years, started the radio stations there, the first private TV station, and we faced a significant amount of censorship throughout the Some of the democracy years in Venezuela,
	but mostly and most aggressively with Chavez when he came to power and he saw as a major threat being the largest broadcaster in the country.
	So there was, I thought here in America, it wouldn't be like that.
	So there was a lot of surprise.
	And as you say, we launched in late 2020, right after the election.
	That's when we saw that we needed to do something, that there needed to be a different messaging for Hispanics and Latinos here in the US. And we thought that there was a great opportunity in the marketplace as well to talk to Hispanics with a conservative message and that they would listen.
	So far, we've proven our thesis right.
	And it's been incredibly, incredibly successful, our rate of growth.
	But we have faced significant censorship from all the way from hosting providers and server providers to traditional social media, which you guys know and are very well of, that big tech is censoring a lot of our messaging.
	Jorge, it would seem that Venezuelans in America would see something that actually Debbie has pointed out for many, many years, the parallels between socialism, which is now consolidated in many ways in Venezuela, and the kind of emerging socialism, not just economic redistribution, but suppression of civil liberties that we're seeing in America.
	But are you able to also communicate this message to people who are outside of the Cuban and Venezuelan community?
	In other words, notably to Puerto Ricans, to Mexican-Americans, people who might have a different history back in their home countries, but who nevertheless are dealing with the same problems as other Hispanics in this country?
	I think yes.
	And the answer is, here in South Florida, I see it not only from Venezuelans and Cubans, but Nicaraguans.
	People now coming from Peru, coming from Chile, where the elections have significantly changed the countries and their opportunities there.
	We have Argentina with its monetary problems and that influx of Argentinians to the United States.
	And then to the biggest part of the Hispanic community, which is Mexicans and, as you mentioned, Puerto Ricans, which are Americans.
	I think they come to the United States for the American dream.
	And if you look at the data, economic data that we're seeing, is that the Hispanics are driving the American dream in the United States.
	So when they have fled their countries to find a better livelihood in America, and they come here and they start seeing the same policies that made their countries go bad, then we have a problem.
	And that's why you're seeing Hispanics go bad.
	To the conservative side, understand and share the conservative message because it's within them.
	They believe in, you know, they're religious.
	They believe in family. They believe in entrepreneurship.
	They own their own businesses.
	They create wealth.
	And those are the things that are being attacked by progressives and by this new redistribution agenda that the administration has.
	That's hurting us all.
	We see it in inflation. We see it with shortages.
	That's not why we came to America.
	We came to America to live a better life.
	And I think we've done that so far.
	And we're doing that as Hispanics as a whole.
	But yeah, so I think the message is getting to them because they see it.
	The country's not going in the right direction.
	Let's take a pause, Jorge. When we come back, let's pick up these themes of upward mobility and of the American dream with Jorge Granier Phelps, founder and CEO of El American.
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	Feel the difference. Debbie and I are back with Jorge Granier Phelps, the founder and CEO of El American.
	Yes, so Jorge, tell us about your plans for El American.
	I know that it's print media mostly, but I know that you have plans beyond print media.
	Can you talk about that? Yes, absolutely.
	So initially we launched as a website at lamerican.com and we quickly got, thanks to collaborators like you guys, we got a lot of attention and we hit a nerve within the Hispanic community.
	We've since grown and raised some money and we now have a presence in all of social media.
	So you can find us in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Getter, Truth.
	And that's been growing at a very rapid pace, very impressively.
	We're now in the hundreds of thousands of followers there, reaching millions and millions of people every month.
	We also started a video series with video programming.
	We now have 14 shows.
	That we produce every week.
	And these are distributed on our website and different platforms as well.
	And some of those shows now have been turned into podcasts as well.
	And we now have a podcast series also.
	So in that sense, what we are trying to create is a modern media company across all platforms.
	So the next step is going to be launch our streaming platform.
	Our app will launch this month.
	And then we'll go to a full-on fledged TV channel by the end of the year, hopefully.
	Jorge, this is really exciting, the idea that Hispanics who feel left out of Univision or Telemundo now have a place to go and a place to hear their ideas not only affirmed, but also new information that they're not going to get on the other channels.
	Is your focus primarily or exclusively the United States, or are you trying to create a sort of international awareness that draws in the countries of Central and South America?
	I think that's inevitable, what you're saying.
	Our main focus right now is within the US, because we saw the market opportunity and the market need here at this moment.
	But as you say, there's a great market out there, there's great possibilities, and there's a great need for a conservative message and a more well thought out government plans by the states in inland America and Spain.
	I think we grow from the United States internationally eventually.
	So, Jorge, does Venezuela know about you?
	Do they know what you're doing? Yes.
	I think our editor-in-chief, Orlando Avendaño, has been on Diosdado Cabello's program quite a few times.
	So they know what we're up to.
	They know what we're doing. They obviously don't like it because we have a clear message against that way of thinking and that way of government.
	Yeah. What's happening to the Hispanic community in America?
	I mean, this is a community, by and large, that has been very much identified with the Democratic Party.
	And this goes back to the days of Franklin Roosevelt.
	So it's been the case now for, I won't say 100 years, but certainly more than 50 years.
	And yet there appears now to be a real break that's going on, a schism within the Hispanic community.
	Is it over this issue of upward mobility and making a better life?
	Is it that the Democratic Party has changed, or have Hispanics changed?
	I think it's a combination of the Democratic Party changing and radicalizing and being run now with a more progressive agenda, which is hurtful to that upward mobility and that American dream that Hispanics came originally to the United States for.
	So the Hispanics, I think, have been thought about just playing as Democrats, a throwaway.
	And we're now realizing that they're not a monolithic voting bloc.
	And we are realizing that we care about family, which is being attacked by the left heavily.
	We care about freedom of religion, which is being attacked by the left.
	We care about taxes.
	And because we run our own businesses or we work and we want to keep our money and provide for our families.
	So it's a multiple of things.
	And I think as the Hispanic population's ability in the United States has improved, they've realized that these democratic tendencies, these democratic policies are detrimental to their improvement and to their betterment and to their upward mobility.
	Yes. I mean, what you're saying I think is exciting because it shows that not only on the cultural or moral front, but even on the economic front, Republicans are seeing that free market policies are actually a way for them to get ahead.
	Absolutely. I think the free markets are the way to...
	Liberation of people and personal freedom, and people understand that that's why they came to America, because of that free capitalism that's here, that they couldn't strive for in their original country.
	So now as we have these second and third generation Latinos here, they're realizing, oh wait, my parents or my grandparents fled that, and this is hurting me.
	So they're going and voting with Those policies in mind, you know, what's going to improve their lives and their kids' lives.
	Jorge Grania Phelps, thank you so much for joining us, folks.
	Check out the website. It's LAmerican.com.
	At Twitter, they're just at LAmerican, and they're at LAmerican underscore, and also on other social media.
	Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you.
	Thank you, Debbie. Thank you, Dinesh.
	Great seeing you. Thanks so much.
	Have you noticed lately that criminals, illegal migrants, corrupt politicians, even tyrants are getting all the protection?
	Well, I say it's time we protect what's right and good and my friends at AMAC can help you do just that.
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	We're now at the very top of the terraces of Dante's Purgatory.
	And the last time I talked about Dante, I talked about the Roman poet Statius, who learned lessons from Virgil that went beyond Virgil.
	So Virgil, in a way, was able to help save Statius, but he was not able to save himself.
	And this, I suggested for Dante, shows the limitations of reason.
	So Virgil represents classical reason.
	The reason of the ancient Greeks and Romans of pagan antiquity.
	And... And the point that Dante's trying to make is reason is very good.
	Virgil has been a very good guide for Dante.
	He's taken him all the way through Inferno, most of the way, almost to the very end of Purgatory.
	But then Virgil has to go and will come soon to Virgil's departure.
	And Dante needs a new guide, a guide which will turn out to be a woman named Beatrice.
	But this issue of the limitations of the intellect is a very important one because we have had a tradition in the West, going back to the Enlightenment, that reason is capable of knowing just about everything.
	In fact, why should reason have any boundaries at all?
	True, there may be things that we don't know.
	There may be scientific discoveries, say, that are yet to be made.
	But in principle, everything can be known.
	In fact, ever since Newton's time, It has been held, at least by a lot of people who are children of the Enlightenment, that while we may not be able to know the movements of every neuron, every particle in the universe, that in theory, if we had supercomputers that had all the necessary information, that we could apply the Newtonian laws and later the Einsteinian laws, and we could in fact know everything, everything that there is to be known.
	But Dante would insist, and I think even modern science bears him out, that this is incorrect.
	That there are limits on reason, and there are things that we can't know, and we don't know, and that cannot be known by reason alone.
	Now, what are those things?
	Let's start by just noticing that as human beings were thrown into the world.
	And so we appear, we emerge as human beings, we look around, and we see a whole world that we didn't create.
	So obviously that world came from somewhere.
	But where did it come from?
	Not how did it come about.
	That's basically the Big Bang, a description of how the world came about.
	But I'm asking kind of a deeper question, which is, what is the reason for the creation of the world?
	Why is it that we have a world at all?
	And what is the ultimate explanation, not merely a description of the process, but an account for the origin of the world?
	Second, What is, in fact, our purpose here?
	We're flung into the world, but what is our reason for being here?
	What is the purpose or plan for our lives?
	Is there no plan?
	And we are supposed to come up with a plan?
	Is there a plan? What happens after we die?
	This is a question that is beyond empirical resolution, right?
	Shakespeare calls it the afterlife, if you will, the undiscovered country.
	Dante tells us he went there, but I think even we would have to insist that this was a kind of a prophetic or an imaginary or a visionary journey.
	In fact, no one has come back from the afterlife to give us a description, and so we don't even know if If there is an afterlife, at least we don't know that based on reason alone.
	This is my point. And this is Dante's point, that beyond reason, there lies faith.
	There are things that we need to discover through faith because they cannot.
	They cannot be known by reason.
	Faith isn't there to contradict reason.
	Faith is there to take the traveler on a journey that goes beyond reason alone.
	If we think about the limits of the intellect, there are external limits, limits imposed by the universe itself.
	I mean, think about it this way.
	Our universe is fourteen and a half And that means that we can get information in principle from light traveling over that distance, 14.5 billion light years.
	But what about beyond that?
	What about if there's information outside that radius?
	Well, it turns out That we will never know about it for the simple reason that it would take light longer than 14 and a half billion years, and the universe hasn't been around longer than that.
	So that information is, in principle, unavailable to us.
	And then there are, I would call them, internal limits.
	To what we can know.
	And I realize here that I'm moving a little bit beyond Dante.
	I'm sort of in the realm of philosophy and I'll tackle this some other time in a discussion of this exact issue.
	But the point I'm trying to make is this.
	We have inside of us certain types of equipment with which we see the world.
	So think of it this way.
	A tape recorder can record sound, but it can't take photos.
	A camera can take photos.
	So depending on the kind of instrument you have, you can gain information based upon that mode of receiving the information.
	And so we have five senses.
	We can see, we can hear, we can touch, we can smell, and so on.
	But that is sort of like our five-mode tape recorder.
	Which means it can get information those ways.
	But are you saying that all knowledge that is in the universe comes only in those ways?
	Well, we know that there are other types of creatures that get information in other ways.
	Bats get information from echolocation.
	Underwater eels that can sense things and can hear things that we can't hear.
	So our senses impose limitations on the way that we can know the world.
	And this would all be an affirmation and a confirmation of what Dante is getting at.
	There are external and internal limits to what we can know.
	And that means there are limits on reason itself.
	And where reason finds itself coming to an end, that's when the domain of faith opens up.
	One of the lessons that Dante learns from Statius, and from Statius' debt to Virgil, is the limits of reason.
	But there's a second lesson that's just as important, and that is that what Dante needs to learn to do is to take secular experience And if you will, Christianize it.
	Notice that this is exactly what Statius does.
	Virgil has a poem, The Fourth Eclogue, and the poem talks about the birth of a child who will change the world.
	And for Virgil, that is a secular, we would call it today a secular claim.
	Virgil is talking perhaps about...
	The birth of an heir to the Emperor Augustus.
	But Statius reads that passage in a Christian way.
	So what does Statius do?
	He modifies the meaning in his own mind.
	And he says, for me, this is a prophetic pointer, not to Augustus at all, but rather to the birth of a child in a manger who will, in fact, change the world far more than even Augustus or the Augustan legacy did.
	And with that in mind, Dante continues to ascend.
	Now, Statius was in the terrace of the avaricious, and we are now moving into the terraces of gluttony and lust.
	And interestingly, Dante meets in these terraces a group of Florentine and Italian poets.
	So we are going now from Statius, who was an ancient Italian figure, to Dante's own contemporary poets.
	And there's a bunch of these guys.
	And the first one of them is a guy named Foresi Donati.
	A guy who was, well, not a poet really in Dante's category.
	When they were young, the two of them tried their hands at poetry.
	And you may almost say Dante became the Olympic sprinter and the other guy was just kind of running for fun.
	Dante and Foresi Donati would exchange what were sometimes called insult poems, probably similar to some sort of rap routine today where you have two rappers exchanging playful insults with each other.
	And Dante sees this guy, Foresi Donati.
	And here's Dante.
	He's describing the souls in this terrace of gluttony.
	And let's remember that because their gluttonous, their punishment in purgatory, their purgation is going to involve that somehow.
	And it turns out that they are the opposite of gluttonous in this terrace.
	They are emaciated, they are starved, you might say.
	Their eyes dark-shadowed, sunken in their heads, their faces pale, their bodies worn thin, so every bone was molded to their skin.
	And then a little further down, Dante, I never would have known him by his looks.
	But in his voice, I clearly recognize the features that his starving face disguise.
	So Dante recognizes for AC, not by his face, it's too shriveled, but by his voice.
	And, essentially, what Pharesi says is that in life, he was a glutton, a glutton not just in the sense that he ate a lot of pasta and linguine and so on, but he was a gluttonous in his desire for pleasure.
	He wanted pleasure and the pleasures of the flesh, and he pursued those.
	And then he says this, he goes, What Pharesi is basically saying is that a...
	A good woman, a virtuous woman, helped him to get over his gluttony.
	In fact, to recognize it as gluttony.
	And ultimately to repent of it.
	And here in purgatory, he is being fully purged of it.
	So, Dante is talking here about gluttony in its literal sense.
	But gluttony in the broader sense of sort of stuffing yourself.
	And then Dante moves into the circle of lust, and you find out that lust is treated similar to gluttony.
	Lust here is seen in the topmost terraces of purgatory as lacking control, very much lacking the kind of control that Francesca should have exercised in Inferno.
	In the earlier cantos of the Inferno.
	And here, what's interesting is Dante meets a fellow poet named Bona Junta, and he praises Dante.
	He says, Tell me, do I not see standing here him who brought forth the new poems that begin, Ladies who have intelligence of love?
	And what Bonajunta is doing is he's quoting one of the first lines of Dante's Vida Nuova, and he's saying basically to Dante, you are the ultimate love poet.
	We're love poets, but we're not in the same league as you.
	But this is all really tricky, because for Dante to go, yes, I am, and we'll follow the exchange next time, would be for Dante to say that I'm doing what Francesca did in the Inferno, and if I do that, I'm going to end up like Francesca.
	So Dante has to be very careful here, on the one hand, to embrace the poetry of love, but to embrace it in a different way that doesn't get him to end up in the wrong place.

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