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April 22, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:45
AUNT KAREN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep316
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I'm going to talk today about the pettiness, the sheer political foolishness of the Biden administration trying to revive the mask mandate on public transit.
Uncle Sam has become Aunt Karen.
Despite Democratic opposition, drilling is picking up in Texas, and I'll tell you where and why and how.
I'll also react to Kamala Harris's bizarre observations about space, which raised the question of whether we're dealing with a total space cadet.
I'll also examine the epic meetings that Dante has at the very top terraces of Purgatory, in fact, at the gates of the earthly paradise.
This is the Nash D'Souza Show.
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.
I'm your host, Dinesh D'Souza.
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Now, let me turn to what's going on with mask mandates.
Well, the surveys show, by the way, that Americans have really kind of had it with the mask mandates on public transit.
Most of the other mandates have sort of already started to fall away, if they haven't fallen away already.
TripIt, the travel app, did an interesting kind of poll of its own users.
And they found out that a clear majority says enough of the federal mask mandate.
We're done. Let's get rid of it and keep it gone.
60% of respondents even said they don't want the COVID testing requirement for international travel.
That should be lifted and should be removed.
And Tripit, in a kind of little notice about this, basically says this is a, quote, appetite for normalcy.
People kind of want to get back to their lives.
By the way, this latest variant is contagious, but also mild.
In fact, it appears to be the mildest of all the variants.
Now, the Biden administration is having none of it.
They're still kind of pining for the mask mandate.
They like mandates in general.
Anything that forces other people to do things.
And as we can see, there's a certain psychology of even some ordinary citizens.
These are the kind of nanny types who like to sort of lecture other people.
Why don't you have your mask on?
Put on your mask! And these are people, you know, they'd be village busybodies in an earlier era.
And you can think of the Biden administration as this kind of nanny individual writ large.
So the Biden administration is like one big national nanny.
It's kind of Uncle Sam has given way to, you know, Aunt Karen.
And so the Biden people are running now to the CDC and saying, hey, listen, you know, by the way, if you still kind of want a mask mandate, tell us and we'll file an appeal.
They're very angry at this Trump judge, a woman named Catherine Kimball Mizell.
Who basically said, listen, you guys are making nonsensical arguments for this mandate.
First of all, you're appealing to a federal law that empowers the government to take care of, quote, sanitation.
And somehow, under some very broad definition of sanitation, you're including a mask mandate.
Well, what does a mask mandate have to do exactly with sanitation?
Nothing at all. And so, down goes the mask mandate.
Not to mention all kinds of other procedural irregularities that Judge Catherine Mizell pointed to.
Now, the Biden administration can appeal, but if they appeal, the fun part is that the appeal goes to the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which is a conservative-leaning court.
And even if by some quasi-miracle the Biden people win there...
Well, it's going to be appealed to a conservative, now you mean leaning, a conservative Supreme Court, which has already slapped down Biden mandates.
Remember the Biden vaccine mandate for businesses with 100 employees or more?
No go, says the Supreme Court.
So, the Supreme Court seems to look very skeptically...
At the Biden administration's, you know, trust us.
We know better. We're the experts.
And the Supreme Court is like, well, if you're the experts, you know, you have to actually produce evidence, not only that the mask mandates are necessary, but that they're the only way to go, that the compulsion involved is the right approach.
By the way, the airline CEOs and the airlines have their own experts.
I've all basically said, look, you know, we have filtration systems on the airplanes and those do a better job in killing off viruses, including the COVID virus, than essentially strapping a mask across your face.
Not to mention the irritation, inconvenience, you know, confrontations and all the other issues.
Debbie, for example, has claustrophobia.
It's already bad enough for her to be cooped up in a small spot in a plane.
Then you put on a mask.
And for a short plane flight, it can be endured.
But for long plane flights, she just won't really do it.
And so I think what we're seeing here is COVID is turning a corner.
And people are saying, not that they're somehow not going to get it, but if they get it, Okay, well, they're going to have to live with it.
Maybe we're going to have to live with COVID in some form for the foreseeable future.
The good news is that freedom is starting to peek its face out from under the mask, from behind the mask.
And for those of us who use airports a lot and walk around airports a lot, it's just an exhilarating feeling.
Let's call it the feeling of freedom.
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Oil drilling is picking up steam in Texas.
And that is actually very good news for all of us.
It actually should be good news for the Biden administration, but they don't see it that way.
In fact, I just saw Biden and he was saying, we've kind of got to get away from this kind of...
Addiction to oil.
And we've got to kind of get off this oil kick that we've been on.
So these guys are dug in ideologically against fossil fuels.
And it's, I guess, because of their climate enthusiasm.
But what's happening is that even though Biden has done his best to suppress drilling, he has shut down, as you know, the Keystone Pipeline.
He, in fact, to the point where he was willing to approve a German pipeline, a pipeline connecting Russia and Germany.
So he's willing to allow abroad what he was not willing to allow at home.
Also blocking drilling on federal land, making it more difficult to get permits, and so on.
And so as a result, what happens is you have an international crisis, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
You have the United States then being, in a sense, politically compelled to not buy Russian oil.
You begin to see a contraction in the supply.
So naturally, the price of oil begins to go up, begins to skyrocket.
And people become really annoyed, especially people for whom it's not something that easily affordable to spend $80, $100 to fill up your car or your SUV. But the market has a strange way of sending signals.
And so when the price of oil soars...
Suddenly, the oil companies go, wow, it's even more profitable for us to drill for more.
And so for companies that do have permits, they can increase the volume of drilling.
And so that's what they're doing.
Now Texas has an area called the Permian Basin which is just flush with oil, just rich in oil and in energy.
It is huge in size, well I mean Texas is huge in size, obviously Texas is politically friendly to oil drilling.
And so the Permian Basin is where the oil is coming fast right now out of the ground.
The big oil companies have all said look we are ramping up production a big time where we've actually got sizable profits from the high oil prices.
We're going to take that money and put it into drilling more.
And the good news is that that should have the effect of bringing prices at least somewhat down.
And so we're expecting Exxon is on this.
They're saying they're going to raise their Oil drilling by 25%.
Chevron says they're going to do 10%.
ConocoPhillips and Shell are also boosting their capital investment in further oil drilling.
So oil drilling in the Permian Basin now has already exceeded the pre-pandemic level, which is, as I say, good news.
Because why? Because more oil increases the supply.
The demand is roughly the same.
And so more supply, same demand price goes down.
I'm now quoting a guy who's head of shale research at one of the oil companies.
He goes, there are clear signals here that the operators in the basin are kicking into high gear on their development plans.
Now, again, this is something that the Biden administration should be thrilled about.
They should say, you know... We're facing a situation where the American people, many American people, are hurting, are feeling this.
And also, the effect of oil prices is pushing the prices of other things up.
So we're not just dealing with an energy problem, we're dealing with an inflation problem.
And that's also going to have other effects on the stock market, on the national debt, and on the ability of the United States to return to economic normalcy.
And so they should You would think the Biden administration would be like, you know what, we're not exactly fans of the oil drilling business, but the truth of it is this is going to provide immediate and measurable relief to the American people, so we're going to be behind this completely.
No, in fact, they're not.
They seem to be sort of looking askance, looking kind of grumpily over at Texas.
Why are you doing this? Do we really need this?
Shouldn't we be getting away from oil and moving toward, well, what exactly they are unable to say?
So, I think here's a case where the Biden administration is going to get some political benefit, even though they deserve no credit for this.
They are not behind this.
In fact, they're opposed to it.
But the oil drilling is occurring anyway, and it's going to have a beneficial economic impact.
Now, I think we should welcome it, and we should welcome what Texas is doing to solve problems that the Biden administration apparently has, is both unwilling and perhaps even unable to solve itself.
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You'll feel the difference. I'd like to react to something that Kamala Harris recently said about space.
Now, I want you to notice that Kamala Harris is not talking to three-year-olds or first graders.
She's actually talking, you can see in the background of this clip, a bunch of military guys and adults.
People in the armed forces.
And she is talking about the experience of space.
Now, listening to Kamala Harris is, well, listening to her and listening to Biden are both very challenging in different ways.
With Biden, you've just got the zoning in and out of consciousness, the staccato outbursts, the comical come on mans.
But with Kamala Harris, you're kind of in a...
Northern California surreal zone, as you're about to discover.
Listen. Space is exciting.
It spurs our imaginations.
And it forces us to ask big questions.
Space, it affects us all.
And it connects us all.
I think these are statements that need...
Just like I'm doing with the Divine Comedy, a little bit of, I would call it a close reading.
Now, let's start with, I think everyone here recognizes how extraordinary space is.
And I'm thinking to myself, Space is not extraordinary.
Space is actually very ordinary.
Why? Because it's everywhere.
Everywhere you go, there's space.
In fact, even if you leave this planet and you get out there, you go beyond the atmosphere and what do you see?
More space! It's outer space!
So here's Kamala Harris sort of playing space cadet here, but notice that space is so ordinary that it literally never ends.
I'm using a kind of Newtonian approach here, but if you think about it, if you go out in space and keep going and keep going, where does space end?
You might come to a sort of a final point.
You go, what about this? Well, what's beyond that?
More space. So space is, if anything, not extraordinary.
It's very ordinary. Next, Kamala Harris, space is exciting!
Why is space exciting?
How is space exciting?
First of all, is she talking about ordinary space?
Let's just take the space between two dots.
I'm looking at it.
There's some space. Why is it exciting?
Is she talking about scientific discovery?
Here, I have a table right below me.
I'm kind of tapping on it.
You can probably hear me tapping on it.
Now, we do learn in physics that most of matter, including matter that appears to us hard, is made up of empty space.
Does Kamala Harris know this?
Has she discovered that most of matter is actually made up of empty space?
This is what's exciting about it?
Or is she talking about outer space?
But why is outer space exciting?
Outer space is mostly empty.
There's mostly nothing there.
The philosopher Blaise Pascal once said that he was...
Terrified by the silence of the vast empty spaces.
He's talking about what happens when you move beyond the planet Earth and you essentially have the nothingness of space.
And Pascal is sort of experiencing this in a kind of philosophical sense.
But this is not Kamala Harris.
Exciting to her is just a word with no meaning.
She's excited when she thinks about the idea of space.
Let's see why she thinks it's exciting.
It spurs our imaginations and it forces us to ask big questions.
First of all, why does space force you to do anything?
Where's the compulsion involved?
If I'm walking somewhere, I look out there, I don't see anything.
I don't feel forced to think about anything at all.
What are these big questions?
Kamala Harris doesn't say.
Is she talking about...
I mean, I remember going back down to the 1960s when the Russians put cosmonauts into space.
They actually gave them a project.
They said, I think this was Khrushchev, if I'm not mistaken.
He's like, go look and let us know, you cosmonauts, if you can find God.
Out there in outer space.
Because if you can't find him, he's probably not there.
So this is sort of logic Soviet style.
But this would be at least a big question.
It's kind of a stupid question when put that way.
But is that the big question Kamala Harris is talking about?
She maintains a kind of sphinx-like silence on the matter.
And then finally, space.
It affects us all.
And it connects us all.
Well, first of all, how does space affect us?
How does it connect us all?
Is she basically saying that if it wasn't for space, we would all be physically attached to each other?
And so, since we have space, it is space that connects us to each other.
But if you think about it, isn't space what separates us from each other?
If you're standing a hundred yards away from me, what's between us is empty space.
How is that space connecting us?
It would appear to be separating us.
That's why we use phrases like, get out of my space.
In other words, back off.
Stay away from me. Don't be connected to me so closely.
So, space here is clearly a gap.
It's a break. It's a kind of hole in the fabric of reality.
I'm sort of taking this a little too far, but what you can get at is I'm trying to show the sheer meaninglessness, the sheer vacuity, the sheer intellectual null set that is otherwise known as Kamala Harris.
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Now, I've said before how disheartening it is that so few Republicans, with the exception of a handful in the House, to my knowledge, not even a single senator has prominently stepped forward to speak out about the outrages against the January 6th defendants.
I mean, you have people Who are held in confinement now well over a year since those events.
And they haven't been convicted of anything.
So judges just hold them under the presumption that there's some kind of a danger to society to release them.
Why? Because they would mount future insurrections.
I mean, the sheer foolishness of this, the maliciousness of it is outrageous.
And, you know, here we are.
We've thrown our lot in with the Republican Party.
We do a lot for the party.
We are activists for the party.
And what does the party do for us when it shows this kind of blind willingness to leave its own troops bleeding on the battlefield, so to speak, on the political battlefield?
Now, I noticed that in some of these cases that are coming up, there are left-wing judges that are quoting Republicans in trying to make a, quote, bipartisan argument that January 6th was some kind of threat to national security, a terrorist plot against the government.
Again, this is nonsensical stuff, but these judges, by the way, blatant left-wingers, I'm talking about People like Tanya Chutkin, I believe Obama appointee, and also Emmett Sullivan, another guy who has been...
These people are just torturing these January 6th defendants in the manner that you would expect from more authoritarian or even totalitarian states.
I'm not saying we are living in a totalitarian regime, but I'm saying these judges are acting like we are.
They have the same kind of apparatchik mindset that you find in those regimes.
So here is Emmett Sullivan.
And this is a recent case involving a guy named Robert Geiswine, who is apparently a member of a group called the Three Percenters in Colorado.
And this guy says, listen, I'd like to have my case moved out of DC because it's a left-wing environment here.
You could just as well have said, I got a left-wing judge.
Probably not a very left-wing jury.
How am I going to get a, quote, jury of my peers?
This doesn't match in any way the ideological diversity of the country or anything even close to that.
So what does the judge do?
He gives this guy, Robert Geiswine, a kind of pompous lecture.
And what he does is he reads a statement from the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, on the first anniversary of January 6th.
Quote, the United States Capitol, the seat of the first branch of our federal government, was stormed by criminals who brutalized police officers and used force to try to stop Congress from doing its job.
Evidently, that's a quote from McConnell.
And Sullivan is reading it against the defendant to say, hey, look, you know what?
You want to go to bat for a party?
You want to be a conservative right-wing activist?
Well, here's your own leader saying that you're, in fact, a terrorist and you're trying to take over the government.
And continuing with McConnell, this disgraceful scene was antithetical to the rule of law.
This is McConnell as quoted by Solomon.
By the way, Solomon's also quoting Ted Cruz, who called the riot a riot, a violent terrorist act.
Of course, Cruz did back off from that and said his comments were misunderstood and he shouldn't have said it that way.
But Sullivan also went on to quote Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio.
And I just find it downright appalling that you've got Republicans supplying, if you will, fodder for these left-wing judges to do what they're doing.
In this way, you can see Republican complicity.
I'm not saying that the Republicans made these statements with the intention that they would then be used by the judges, but you've got to realize your public statements are that.
They're public statements, and they can, in fact, be used in that way.
So it doesn't look like this poor guy is going to have his case moved.
And by the way, same deal with Judge Tanya Chutkin, whom I mentioned earlier.
She denied a request from another defendant.
This is Russell Alford.
He wanted to move his trial outside of DC. And Judge Chutkin basically says, hey, look, you know, the Boston Marathon bomber wanted to move his prosecution.
That motion was denied.
And As if there is any meaningful analogy between the Boston Marathon bomber and these guys, most of whom went to DC for reasons we know well.
They just wanted somebody, anybody, to adjudicate these issues about the election.
They were not insurrectionists.
This was not an attempt.
This was not a serious attempt in any way to take over the government or mount a coup or any of that.
Nevertheless, the irresponsibility, the sheer abandonment, the political cynicism.
And at the end, it's going to be a self-destructive cynicism because it's going to come back, I think, to haunt these guys.
Clearly, we have a serious problem of leadership in the Republican Party.
And I'm talking not just about Mitch McConnell on the Senate side.
We've seen some recent discoveries about tapes.
And Kevin McCarthy on the House side.
It shows that we are a party.
We're the only party that can save America.
But we may have to first save the party from its own leaders.
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When we say that the January 6th defendants are being mistreated, the question always arises, compared to what?
Because justice is a matter of law, and law is a matter of treating people equally.
That's really why you have laws.
You wouldn't need laws if you treated everybody as an individual case.
Hey, or...
A very good driver so you can go faster.
Hey, you're not a very good driver.
You've got to go a little slower. You don't need a speed limit.
So a speed limit is a law.
And in order to be meaningful as a law, it has to apply equally to everyone.
Here is a settlement just announced by the Justice Department, the Biden DOJ. This is a settlement about the public protests by the left.
The plaintiffs, by the way, in this case were Black Lives Matter, a bunch of left-wingers who attended these protests.
These arose from the June 1, 2020 protests in Lafayette Square.
You might remember those. They were aggressive, they were violent, and there were a lot of arrests made in the aftermath of those protests.
But very light prosecutions, hardly any real accountability.
And that itself is a stark contrast to January 6th.
But now it turns out that the Very people who mounted that protest are suing or have sued the government and demanded that there be changes in governmental policy and specifically in police policy.
And guess what? The Justice Department has decided to sort of...
Accept responsibility.
Responsibility for what? Well, for ill-treating the protesters, for being a little too harsh.
And so, even though these protesters were treated with preposterous leniency, the government has essentially done a mea culpa and agreed to do a whole bunch of things.
Let's look at this. Changes to the agency's policies include, quote, More specific requirements for visible identification of officers.
Officers can't just say, I'm an officer.
You need to have visible identification.
Number two, limits on the use of non-lethal force.
And procedures to facilitate safe crowd dispersal.
Wow! Again, contrast to January 6th.
Do they follow these methods?
No. They were blasting all kinds of tear gas and all kinds of shock pressure.
Devices into the crowd.
And they used not only non-lethal, but lethal force on January 6th, protesters.
And so look at the disparate way in which these two incidents, January 6th on the one hand and Lafayette Square on the other, are...
In the one case, domestic terrorists.
They've got to be locked up, in some cases, for a year or more.
Throw away the key. Who cares if they're abused while they're there?
Who cares if the guards have kind of a free hand in the way they treat them?
No, we're not going to. We're good to go.
Oh, well, these are on our side.
These guys are doing kind of what we would be doing if we were on the outside.
So let's treat them as a special case.
Let's be solicitous.
Let's make all kinds of agreements with them that if they do this again, we're going to be even milder the next time.
We went a little too far because you know what?
Some of us didn't have our badges prominently displayed.
And you know what? Some of us...
Well, we use non-lethal force, but we didn't use the least non-lethal force that we could have used to subdue the guy.
So we're going to now agree that we need to use minimal non-lethal force.
Of course, when it comes to oath keepers and three percenters and right-wingers of any sort...
None of this applies. None of these rules apply.
Then it's open season on those guys.
Then it's actually, let's mobilize the force.
Let's treat this as if the civil war has erupted all over again.
So, you can see here why we see, not just in theory, a flagrant misapplication of the core principle of justice, which is equal treatment under the law.
And I think we have to fully digest this to realize that we're not living in a lawful society in that sense.
I'm not just talking about our leaders, the way that Trump is treated, for example.
I'm talking about the way ordinary American citizens on one side of the aisle are treated versus ordinary American citizens on the other side of the aisle.
There's no comparison.
Essentially, if you're on one side, you get a free pass.
If you're on the other side, you find yourself in a dark room with food being passed in through a window and one hour of time to get outside and look at the sun in a day.
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When we last left off, Dante was in the circle of gluttony and the terrace where gluttony is purged.
And then he's going to move on to the terrace of lust.
But in both terraces, you find these fellow poets, Florentine poets.
And I talked about 4AC Donati.
I also mentioned this guy, Buona Junta.
And I now want to pick up with Buona Junta's conversation with Dante.
He praises Dante. He says, you know, aren't you the guy who wrote the poems that begin, quote, ladies who have intelligence of love, apparently a line from Dante's Vida Nuova.
And here's Dante replying...
I am one who, when love inspires me, takes careful note and then gives form to what he dictates in my heart.
So here's Dante, not really so much taking credit, but acknowledging that this is kind of how I do it.
What do I do? When love inspires me, I take careful note.
It's almost like love is another speaker.
I take careful note and then give form to what he dictates in my heart.
So Dante is describing himself here, not as someone who contrives love poetry, but someone who takes a kind of dictation from love itself.
And then Bonajunta continues, he goes, my brother, now I see the knot that held back Gutoni and the notary and me from the sweet new style I hear.
So, basically Bonajunta is saying, well, you know, me and these other guys, Gutoni and the other guy, you know, we didn't know this technique, this sweet new style that you, Dante, have figured out.
And he continues, Now I see very clearly how your wings fly straight behind the dictates of that love.
This certainly could not be said of ours.
So, they're praising Dante, but this is very ambiguous because they're praising Dante for his early love poetry, very much the same kind of talk or sound that we heard from Francesca, who is... Writhing in hell in Inferno 5.
And Dante, if that's all he does, is going to be there as well with her.
So Dante has to learn here that love, in order to be worthy of being, you may say, presented before God, needs to be somehow sanctified.
To put it somewhat differently, in terms that C.S. Lewis made famous in his book called The Four Loves, the love that is eros, Needs to be converted, or at least refined, into the love that is known as sometimes agape, or divine love.
And Dante is learning this.
And by the way, he's learning this in exactly the same way that Statius, the Roman poet, learned how to Christianize the classical verse of Virgil.
So, Virgil was...
Speaking in secular language, and Statius understood it in, you may say, Christian language.
And similarly here, what Dante is saying is, yeah, all my buddies, the old Florentine poets, we knew a thing or two about love, and quite frankly, I, Dante, knew a lot more than those guys.
But you know what? Even that's not enough.
I've got to hear, learn, and purgatory.
And remember, these guys are being purged of that.
When Dante is talking about lust here, he's not talking necessarily about the lusty lives of these guys.
He's talking about the lust that's in their poetry, that's in the poems themselves.
And after this guy, Buona Junta, Dante runs into another guy named Guido Guinicelli.
This is one of the two Guidos.
We talked about Guido Cavalcanti.
This is Guido Guinicelli.
And this guy...
It says, I'm Guido Guinicelli.
I repented long before I died.
And he says that, he talks about father of my betters, all who wrote a sweet and graceful poetry of love.
So, This is for Dante a temptation.
There are certain temptations, both in Inferno and here in Purgatory, that Dante has to pay careful attention to.
And sometimes the sins like gluttony, which don't seem to really apply to Dante, this is not a guy who's like gluttonous in the normal sense, but gluttony for fame, gluttony for earthly goods, gluttony In the widest sense of the term, yeah, that is a temptation that Dante feels and has to deal with.
And then at the end of all this, We have Virgil and Dante crossing through a kind of excruciating heat.
They're actually almost going to make their way here out of purgatory, and they're going to reach, well, not heaven, but something called the earthly paradise.
I'll come to that in a moment.
And Virgil speaks what turned out to be his last words in the poem.
We don't know they're his last words yet, but they're pretty significant.
Virgil turns to Dante, and he basically, he says this...
You now have seen, my son, the temporal and the eternal fire.
Notice that they've just come through the scorching heat.
So, you have seen, my son, the temporal, the earthly, and the eternal fire.
That was the inferno. You've reached the place where my discernment now has reached its end.
What is Virgil saying?
The knowledge that I have to impart to you, the knowledge that's based upon classical reason...
That's reached its terminal point.
I can't help you anymore.
And in fact, my errand is complete.
Remember, Virgil had been dispatched at the beginning of the poem by Beatrice on instructions from the Virgin Mary herself.
And Virgil has essentially done his job.
So Virgil is going to leave.
And in the next... We'll see what happens when Virgil leaves, but these are his last words.
He's telling Dante that, kind of, I've been a worthy guide, but now you're going to need a better guide.
Now you're going to need someone who is familiar with the truths that go beyond reason, the truths accessible, if you will, only through revelation by faith.
And that's going to be a woman named Beatrice.
Again, a woman whom, in her own life, Dante thought the most beautiful woman in the world.
But now he sees her in a completely different, which is to say, in a more divinely sanctified light.
And she will be the one who takes his hand and leads him up through the earthly paradise and into heaven itself.
We're now coming to the end of the Purgatorio.
We're in Canto 27.
It's the earthly paradise.
It's, in fact, the Garden of Eden.
It's the place where God originally created and deposited man and woman.
But after Adam and Eve were expelled, paradise, in a sense, has been empty.
But here's Dante, and he gets to see it.
And he's walking through it, and he describes it in ways that only Dante's prose, and his prose in Italian, of course, surpassing the translation in English.
We're reading the Mark Musa translation in Penguin.
But I'm just going to read it, of course, in English.
Here's Dante. Perhaps those poets of long ago who sang the age of gold, its pristine happiness, were dreaming on Parnassus of this place.
So what Dante is saying is that, you know all this beautiful poetry that all these wonderful classical poets have produced describing things that seem to almost surpass earthly beauty?
Dante goes, they were probably in some ways, they probably had some inkling or some premonition of this place that I'm in now.
They were, even if they didn't know it, describing this earthly paradise.
The root of mankind's tree was guiltless here.
Here in an endless spring was every fruit, such is the nectar praised by all these poets.
So here's Dante talking about the great natural beauty of the earthly paradise.
And he sort of makes his way through it.
And then comes an incredible, we can only call it a heavenly pageant.
Dante describes it, devotes almost a whole canto to it.
This is almost the, you could call it the drumbeat for the appearance of Beatrice at the very end of the Purgatorio.
You've got seven candlesticks.
You've got 24 elders.
You've got a chariot drawn by a griffin.
And you've got to the right of the chariot three ladies, one in red, one in white, one in green.
Let's remember, these are the colors of faith and hope and love.
Red is the fire of love, green is the color of hope, white is the color of faith.
And one hundred singing angels appear.
And here Dante moves from Italian, the language of the poem, to a couple of phrases in Latin.
He talks about a hundred spirits, ministers of God, shouting Benedictus qui venus, and then tossing flowers in the air.
These are the angels. Manibus odate lilia plenis.
Manibus audate lilia plenis, scatter ye lilies with full hands.
Now, interestingly, this line is a quotation from the Aeneid.
So in the Aeneid, this line is used in actually a different context.
There is a memorial, a death, and we're talking about scattering lilies to remember that To be part of the mourning ceremony.
Notice how Dante here is using the exact line and the exact image of angels scattering lilies with open hands.
Beautiful image. But now it's an image of celebration.
Why? Because it's celebrating not a departure, but an entrance.
Someone is about to enter.
But the great beauty of this line is also highlighted by the fact that Virgil is about to leave Dante.
And what is Dante doing here?
He's paying a tribute to Virgil.
What a wonderful way to do that.
He invokes a line from Virgil's own poem in the very canto where Virgil is going to exit and be seen no more in this poem.
Here's what happens. Dante sees this kind of marvelous heavenly presence.
This is Beatrice. This is this sanctified woman appearing before him.
She's going to be his guide from now on.
And Dante is so stupefied, he's essentially frozen.
And then when he's able to kind of immobilize himself, he turns to Virgil, basically to say, like, hey, Virgil, check this out.
And now we come back to the poem.
But Virgil was not there.
Virgil is gone.
Famous line in the poem, and it represents a real transition point.
And then Beatrice, you might expect, would embrace Dante in her loving arms and say, Dante, I'm going to be your guide from now on.
You've made this arduous journey.
You're now ready to experience the bliss of heaven.
It's nothing like that.
Here we go. Dante?
Dante. This is the very first and the only time that Dante's name appears in the entire Commedia.
Only one time Dante uses his own name and it's Beatrice talking to him, Dante.
But what follows is perhaps not what he expected.
Though Virgil leaves you, do not weep, not yet.
That is, for you shall have to weep from yet another wound.
Do not weep yet. Don't weep for Virgil.
You're going to have to do some weeping, but it's not for Virgil.
It's actually going to be for you.
And then Dante says, this is Dante, I sense the regal sternness of her face.
And then, this is Beatrice.
Yes, look at me. Yes, I am Beatrice.
So you at last have deigned to climb the mount.
You learned at last that here lies human bliss.
Notice that Beatrice isn't really praising Dante.
She's like, finally you're here.
Finally you've realized that this is the place that you ought to be.
Finally you have sort of reconnected with me and gotten here this way.
So what's about to come is a major...
This is a verbal thrashing of Dante that's going to be followed by a kind of, you may almost call it a spiritual examination of Dante.
And I won't, I go even so far as to say a spiritual condemnation of Dante.
And this is remembered by the woman that he loves, the woman that he adored.
But she's going to give him a kind of flagellation here.
This is Dante's own purgation.
Dante has been coming through the terraces of purgatory.
He's getting each bee removed from his head.
But this is the place where it all comes to a head where essentially Beatrice is going to scrutinize Dante and essentially say, Dante, listen, you know, are you ready for what's coming next?
Do you accept full contrition for your sins?
Are you someone who is in a position to make with me the ultimate journey into paradise?
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