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June 9, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:27
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep347
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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.
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln made this striking observation.
He said, So what's Abraham Lincoln talking about here?
He's talking about instigation.
He's talking about incitement.
He's talking about, in this case, Democrats who were urging Union soldiers to not participate in the Civil War.
And we hear a lot these days about incitement, about instigation.
Of course, the January 6th committee, starting well tonight, It's going to try to make its case, rolling the stone up the hill, so to speak, that Trump somehow instigated January 6th.
It's a little hard to show because all those people came to D.C. and Trump's speech was on that day itself, so the people who were there...
With regard to the Capitol, what Trump said was completely benign.
Let's march peacefully and patriotically.
There's no incitement there.
By contrast, I want you to listen to this statement by now Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Listen. Here we go.
I want to tell you, Gorsuch.
I want to tell you, Kavanaugh.
You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.
Woo! Now, what could be more incendiary than that?
There's a kind of a double...
Effect to what Schumer is saying.
Number one, he's trying to strike fear into the justices themselves, essentially calling them out.
Hey, Kavanaugh! Hey, Gorsuch!
So he's threatening them directly.
And then second, he's telegraphing to the extremists on his own side, the Antifa types, the kind of fanatics on the left, and there are obviously plenty of those.
So, what you have here is the leadership of the Democrats, guys like Schumer, are calling on the paramilitary fanatics on the left to then make good, if you will, on their threats.
And evidently, one man, a California guy, decided to try to do that, decided, in fact, he was going to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh.
And the guy shows up from California, his name is Nicholas John Roski of Simi Valley.
Apparently, the U.S. deputy marshal saw him jump out of a taxi cab and he had a suitcase.
Well, the suitcase contained, let's see what it contained.
I'm now looking at the FBI report here, which lists all the things it had.
An inventory search revealed black tactical chest rig, tactical knife, a Glock 17 pistol with two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, screwdriver, nail punch, crowbar, pistol light, duct tape, hiking boots with padding on the outsides of the soles and other items.
So this guy came with, like, gear.
And it's a very dangerous situation.
And what I find remarkable is, first of all, I listened to this CNN reporter.
And she's like, it's not really clear if he even had any weapons or what weapons he had.
So here you have the media actively suppressing the seriousness of the incident, implying that not a lot is really known about this, even though it's very clear.
The FBI has actually been pretty forthright about what happened.
And this guy, by the way, was dressed in all black.
So it's almost like he came in costume.
He's now, by the way, he's been arrested.
He's facing very serious charges of attempted murder because he even said that his purpose of coming was to kill a Supreme Court justice.
He apparently said that the justice that he was going to kill was going to uphold the Second Amendment.
Think about this. He's going to uphold gun rights.
I've got a gun, by the way, myself.
And he's also going to...
Right?
I mean, think about the stupidity.
Exactly. I mean, what's funny is these people on the left aren't geniuses.
They're vicious morons.
And the left unleashes these vicious morons.
By the way... This hasn't been just going on with Kavanaugh.
And frankly, if you looked up the New York Times, you would hardly know this was a news story.
It was hardly covered. Similarly with ABC News, I was looking at the site.
It's there, but it's so hidden and so downplayed like it's not a big story.
And I was just thinking to myself, imagine if someone threatened, you know, Eleanor Kagan.
Or Sotomayor. Would they treat it the same way?
Of course not. So this is not just a matter of double standards.
We're basically dealing with the fundamentally dishonest media.
And we're also dealing with threats that have been going on and being carried out at places like pregnancy centers and so on around the country.
Here's a headline. Pro-abortion terrorist firebomb Buffalo pro-life pregnancy center.
So this violence, in other words, we're beginning to see is not just focused on the court itself.
But also focused against essentially ordinary citizens who are trying to find alternatives to abortion.
Mike Lindell's newest product is also one of his best.
It's the MySlippers.
Now, Mike has taken over two years to develop these MySlippers.
They're designed to wear indoor or outdoor all day long.
Made with MyPillow foam and impact gel to help prevent fatigue.
And they're also made with quality leather suede.
Now, for a limited time, Mike is offering the Slipper blowout sale of the year.
It saved $90 with promo code Dinesh.
The regular price of these MySlippers is $139.98, but now on sale $49.98.
Wow. Debbie and I just love ours.
I got the moccasins. Debbie got the slip-ons.
Call 800-876-0227.
That's 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com.
Now to get the discounts, you need to use promo code DINESH. Debbie and I have been talking about Chesa Boudin and Chesa getting the boot from the voters of San Francisco.
And, you know, we've had some dealings indirectly.
We don't know Chesa.
I discovered Chesa many, many years ago when looking through some archives of some footage of Chesa with Bill Ayers.
And the czar of education in Venezuela and how interesting that dynamic was.
You know, Chesa, of course, is fluent in Spanish.
So Chesa was interpreting for Bill as he was telling the Czar of Education in Venezuela what he too wanted to do for the education system in America.
And I thought that was just unbelievably amazing.
I couldn't believe I found probably about 12 videos of that and I was super excited to show them to you.
That's how we met.
And then subsequently, we were actually sitting across from Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn in a restaurant in Chicago.
And they were talking pretty affectionately about their family, Bill Ayers' dad, as I recall, but then also Chesa.
And they couldn't have been more proud of Chesa because, was he already the DA at that point?
No, he wasn't the DA at that point. No, but he was a rising figure.
I think he had gotten his law degree.
I think that he had just gotten his law degree.
I could be wrong. But anyway, it's really interesting how some of these...
And I don't even call him far left.
I call him a communist.
Yeah. I mean Che Guevara in the background.
Yes, yes. These are communists.
You know, I used the phrase, and a couple of people wrote me there, like the phrase is red diaper baby, which is a phrase coming out of the 20th century.
It basically means that your parents are communists.
Right, the offspring of communist parents are red diaper babies.
Who often become very similar.
And red diaper meaning the red, meaning communism.
Right. And by the way, what's important about this is many people think that children routinely rebel against their parents.
Very interestingly, many of the hard leftists of the 1960s were red diaper babies.
They had the exact same politics as their communist parents from the 30s.
Well, you know, David Horowitz was a red diaper baby.
Right. But he grew up and rebelled against that lifestyle.
Right. But I don't think he was typical.
No, he was not typical.
Right. Usually they kind of stay the course, you know.
And so anyway, so talking about...
You know, one point you were making about Chesa is that although he may be more extreme, we see this...
Ruin of crime and homelessness and dirt and decay and filth.
And I sometimes joke, I go, you know, are there people in America who like to live like bigs?
I mean, they keep voting for policies that give you...
People are very soft on crime and criminals.
So, you know, if you elect a DA in your city, in your town, in your county, that is a leftist, it's almost a guarantee that the crime rate is going to skyrocket in your town, and your town is going to become a little bit of a Venezuela, a little bit of a Caracas, I call it.
Yeah. But we had this challenge, and I was thinking about this the other day.
I thought, you know, if you live in a Democrat city in America that is thriving and clean and no homelessness problems, no beggars, none of that, just super nice, super clean, safe. Yeah, the crime rate is low.
Can you please send us a photograph of that city and send it to questiondinesh at gmail.com because we want to see such city.
I claim it does not exist.
Please prove me wrong.
Yeah, I mean, it's theoretically possible.
But I mean, if you can find a city like that, you'd have to ask, how is it that the Democrats in that one place are different from Democrats everywhere else?
And is that one place really different?
An anomaly? I mean, you know, for example, you were telling me about some city in Maine.
Now, do they have a homelessness problem in Maine?
Or do all the rich liberals live in Maine?
And that's why they don't.
Yeah, that's a good point. So, you know, if they're all socioeconomically in a high bracket, and they don't invite, you know, other people.
Or what they do is they have private-gated communities and private security.
Right. And so they're able to overcome the depredation of the city.
Right. Everybody else has to endure it.
Right. I want to see evidence that the city is not, you know, there is no depredation in the city.
I want to see evidence of that.
Because, and I told you this morning...
Texas, for example, is a Republican-run state, but it has major cities that are not Republican-run.
And in many of these major cities, there's a homeless problem.
Inner-city Houston. Inner-city Houston, inner-city Dallas, inner-city Austin.
They have all of that, and they're kind of filthy.
And then you have suburbs around these cities that are just thriving and beautiful and low-crime and all of that.
Republican. Yeah. Republican-run.
So what is it about these cities that make them so horrible to live in, and why do people vote for people that make their city horrible to live in?
I don't understand that.
I mean, you know, it's one thing to be liberal in a social sense, but come on, guys.
We all live in a country where we want to feel safe.
I mean, is that not the case with you?
I don't get it. I mean, so my answer to the question, the question to the San Francisco Democrats, do you like living like pigs?
And my answer is that their answer is yes, we do.
Except we just don't want it to pile too high.
And with Chesa Boudin, it was piling a little too high.
And so this is why Chesa Boudin was essentially given the boot.
I'm sure you've noticed it's pretty colorful at the grocery store in the produce section, all those vibrant colors of fruits and veggies.
Well, our friend Dr.
Howard at Balance of Nature explains that all those colors you see represent nutritional variety.
Different colors signify different key nutrients.
Now if you eat only your favorite one or two veggies, you're going to miss a whole world of vital nutrients.
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Revolver is just simply one of the most original investigative websites in the country.
It's edited by Darren Beatty, who's been on the podcast a couple of times.
In fact, Darren has sent me a bunch of questions to answer to do a kind of a Q&A on 2,000 Mules.
I need to get to do that.
I told Darren I've been under the weather, but I will oblige.
I'm also on book deadline, by the way.
I'm finishing my book for Regnery, which comes out at the end of August.
Now, in Revolver News, a fascinating article about...
A new idea for the GOP. And the idea is, how do you strike back at the kind of defamation that is routinely done by the left of conservatives?
And Revolver basically says, look, we can take a little page out of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial.
Why? Because there was systematic vilification, really for years, of Johnny Depp.
He was the bad guy. And what did he do in the trial?
He kind of We're good to go.
And essentially overcome a slanderous and malicious and sinister media that had been cultivating this image of Depp.
So Depp's success in doing that gives Revolver a kind of an ingenious idea.
And that is, how can we use defamation law to go after the left?
Well, what is the most incendiary accusation that is made by the left of conservatives almost always false.
And therefore, something that we can use to go after them on.
And the answer is, it's the charge of being a racist, a white nationalist, a white supremacist.
Now, says Revolver, yes, you can file a defamation case now, but a lot of times courts don't take it seriously because they go, well, you know, they're just calling you a name.
But Revolver says, no, wait a minute.
You know, this accusation of being a racist, of being a white supremacist, a white nationalist can destroy your entire life.
And they give numerous examples in the article that Of how it happened exactly that way.
Hulk Hogan. There was a sex tape involving Hulk Hogan.
No big deal. A little bit of an embarrassment.
He could care less about it.
But then, when there were transcripts from a longer version of the tape where Hogan used the N-word...
That's it for Hulk Hogan.
Essentially, his career evaporated.
Hulk Hogan, you know, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, pro wrestler in history, essentially was erased from public consciousness.
His career was essentially ruined.
What this really shows, Revolver says, is that there's nothing worse than being called a racist.
And what Revolver's getting at here is this.
GOP legislatures in various conservative states, but even in swing states where Republicans do control the legislature, need to expand defamation law.
And what they need to do is they need to take these phrases like white nationalist, white supremacist, and make them per se defamatory.
Now, in defamation law, When you say you've been defamed, there are two types of defamation.
There's sort of the defamation per se, which means that just by falsely calling you this, you've been damaged.
You don't have to prove separately damages.
But in other defamation...
You do. You have to show not only that it's false, but that you suffered actual damages.
And sometimes it's very hard to prove that because the damages are hard to concretize, to make very specific.
But when it's defamation per se, the idea is that the wrongful accusation is so harmful.
For example, these are examples of defamation per se.
Let's say that somebody, for example, accuses you of being a criminal.
You're not a criminal. So all you have to show is I'm not a criminal.
They accuse me of being a criminal.
That's defamation per se.
Why? Because that is inherently damaging to someone.
You don't have to prove it damaged you.
Falsely calling you a criminal is damaging.
Here's something else. Claiming that some person was inherently unethical or incompetent in their professional conduct.
That's obviously going to be damaging if it's done, let's just say, for example, by a competitor or by an employer.
Somebody who's essentially saying that you, who's, let's say, a plumber or you are no good at plumbing.
You don't know what you're doing. You're incompetent at your job.
Well, that's going to obviously damage people being willing to hire you.
Claiming that you have some kind of contagious or loathsome disease.
Again, if someone falsely accuses you of this, as a result, you become a kind of a social pariah.
Oh, yeah, this guy, you know, yeah.
He's got Ebola. So you can't do that because that is defamation per se.
Well, it's quite obvious that calling somebody a white nationalist is worse than any of these.
Which would you rather?
Would you rather that someone claimed you had a loathsome disease?
Which would be more damaging to your life?
Or if they publicly accused you...
In your employment context, to your friends, in your social world, of being a white nationalist, which is more damaging?
Obviously the latter. And so this is the point.
What Revolver is calling for is they're calling for Republican legislatures.
To toughen up these defamation laws in a way that makes the false accusation.
Obviously, if you're accusing someone of being a white nationalist and they are the head of a white nationalist organization, that's not defamation.
Defamation is when you are falsely accusing.
But if you're some professional, you're some ordinary guy, you're some Trump supporter, you're a doctor or lawyer, and somebody says you're a white nationalist, the idea is okay.
You know what? I'm going to take you to court, just like Johnny Depp.
I'm going to accuse you of defamation because this is such an incendiary allegation.
It can destroy my career.
It can destroy my life.
And the idea is severe penalties for defamation, per se.
Why? Because you don't get to falsely accuse people and ruin their lives just because it gives you kicks or just because you want to make...
An ideological point.
So the left has been making these accusations, getting away with it.
They're often encouraged by social media.
They're encouraged by places on places like Twitter.
They're sometimes supported by digital moguls.
And the idea is, let's hold all these people accountable.
Let's make them...
Let's do to them what Johnny Depp was able to do to Amber Heard.
Let's hit him up with $10 million verdicts and then see how willing they are to make these kinds of false accusations.
Well, they can still do it, but no longer with impunity.
A war is being waged on reality and the left is leading the charge.
Their radical gender ideology has seeped into children's classrooms, into medical terminology, into our everyday life.
It's producing a generation of psychologically infantile and confused young people.
Not only that, but this radical ideology is trying to erase the people who brought us all into the world.
Women. Now that Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire, he's taken matters into his own hands.
He recently embarked on a journey around the world.
To ask one simple question, what is a woman?
And you'll be surprised not only how few people are capable of answering, but also how many have a completely twisted idea of what a woman is.
Thankfully, Matt got the whole experience on film, the documentary they don't want you to see.
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You can check it out today at dailywire.com slash Dinesh.
Radical gender ideologies have a not-so-secret agenda, and this film exposes it at all.
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I say was because he has just quit.
And we're going to look into why.
This is a guy who was the head of the Georgetown Law Center for the Constitution.
He's the author of a book called Supreme Disorder.
Competent scholar and I wouldn't even say a conservative, slightly right of center.
When Biden said he wanted to pick a Supreme Court justice based on race, Ilya Shapiro basically objected.
And as a result, he was kind of hauled up under charges for a tweet in which he questioned Biden's decision to sort of racialize the court selection process.
Evidently, after a kind of witch trial, he was cleared on a technicality.
The dean, a guy named William Traynor, said, all right, well, in this case, we're going to let it go.
But they nevertheless said, this is a very harmful tweet that this guy has put out.
And they made it very clear that it didn't matter what his intention was or whether he was making a legitimate point.
The very fact that people were offended or claimed to be offended was enough for him to have violated the sort of anti-harassment policy at Georgetown.
And in fact, they went on to say that if he made similar remarks and created, quote, a hostile environment based on race and gender, he would have to be disciplined.
Now, Ilya Shapiro goes on to say, well, what does this really mean?
Let's say the Supreme Court issues its ruling, as expected, overturning Roe v.
Wade, and he supports it.
Obviously, someone can just jump up and down and go, well, he's denying women's humanity.
He's making her feel unsafe.
He's threatening her with violence.
Or if the Supreme Court, as expected, strikes down Harvard's race-based admissions policy, and if Professor Shapiro goes, well, that's actually consistent with the Constitution.
The Constitution does not really allow racial discrimination in favor of blacks or against blacks, in favor of whites or against whites.
Well, suddenly all these students in Georgetown could say, these comments are antithetical to the diversity that we see at Georgetown.
After all, that diversity has been created by affirmative action, so Professor Shapiro is creating a hostile environment for us in class.
Or... He says in a class I'm teaching, if we're discussing whether or not somebody has to, let's just say, be compelled to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, even if we have normal arguments back and forth on the two sides, he goes, the very idea that somebody could make an argument for not baking a cake is insulting to LGBTQ members in the classroom.
It's to treat our brothers and sisters as second-class citizens.
It's to create a hostile classroom environment.
So basically what Professor Shapiro says is that His mere exercise, not just of free speech, but of his carrying out his intellectual task as a professor and as a teacher, is now being deemed a form of harassment.
And he goes, if you really think about it, who's harassing who?
He goes, it's the Georgetown administrators who have created a hostile work environment for me.
In other words, it is becoming very difficult for him to do his job under this kind of a witch hunt atmosphere that they've created at Georgetown of all places.
In 2020, Professor Heidi Feldman of the Law Center, she tweeted this, The other group is a combination of a cult and an insurrection supporting crime syndicate.
And basically what she's saying is we're a one-party state.
And says Professor Shapiro, wait a minute, she's implying that Republicans in her classroom are somehow illegitimate.
They don't even have a legitimate party to belong to.
They're just a cult. And so talk about creating a hostile work environment for conservative and right-leaning students, and yet...
Where's the punishment for Professor Heidi Feldman?
Where's she hauled up before charges?
Nothing of the sort. She prudently deletes the tweets later, and nothing is even said about it, no.
Here's Professor Josh Chaffetz.
He's talking about the protests at Supreme Court Justices' houses.
And he basically says when the mob is right, some but not all more aggressive tactics are justified.
Now, I don't think Professor Shafetz, when he says more aggressive tactics, is talking about the guy who tried to kill Kavanaugh.
But nevertheless, the very fact that he thinks it's okay to go to these justices' homes, it's okay to harangue them and harass them at their homes, some types of sort of mob aggression are okay.
Again, talk about creating a hostile environment.
Again, this guy's not disciplined, not so...
What you find at Georgetown is that they are okay with their types of mobs.
They're okay with their types of extremism.
And Professor Shapiro essentially has had enough.
So he goes, I'm out of here.
I think he's joined the Manhattan Institute in New York, where he's going to become a scholar there now.
But you see the way here in which universities are being emptied out of professors.
That are not woke.
That are not going to go along with their propaganda.
And this bodes very badly, I think, for the future of higher education.
Fear of out-of-control inflation is hammering the stock market.
The S&P 500 is having its worst start to the year since World War II. So not only is your money worth less, you now have less of it.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast, Tim Columba.
He's a freelance media producer.
And after he was last on the podcast, he built an online directory.
It's called freedomofcreativity.com.
And it's basically for patriotic creatives and businesses to connect and collaborate together.
Tim is also joined with a veteran comedian, Michael Loftus, to produce a kind of right-leaning comedy show.
That's what we want to talk about.
It's called That Show Tonight.
Tim, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you back.
Let's talk a little bit about that show tonight.
Now, to be honest, I wasn't familiar with it until I saw the sketch that you guys did on 2000 Mules.
So let's start by talking about the sketch.
If you could describe it a little bit, I want people to see it who haven't, so you'll tell them where they can see it.
But let's talk about it first because I'd like to tap into what makes these things amusing.
Sure, so thanks again for having me on.
The premise of the 2,000 Mules watch party sketch is kind of an exaggerated view of the actual experience of watching 2,000 Mules.
Someone says, hey, let's watch 2,000 Mules, and they're kind of reluctant.
Oh, come on, this is propaganda.
And then they watch it, and everyone's like, wait a minute, oh my gosh, what's going on?
And it kind of shows the...
It's exaggerated, but it shows the...
You know, what happens when people kind of get red-pilled or wake up to this stuff?
And it's just a fun look at, you know...
The craziness of it all, you know?
Yeah. So, that show tonight is going to do guest hosts, live sketches, digital shorts, musical guests.
Let's talk a little bit about how you build a kind of a comedy channel, if you will.
Are you finding an audience?
Is the audience you're aiming for a younger demographic, sort of right-leaning?
Talk about who you're going after.
Sure. So, I mean, we're aiming for people like me.
You know, I'm in my 30s. I got a kid.
And I think, more broadly, we're aiming for people who are kind of on that fence right now, who aren't sure.
They know something's going on in this country, and, you know, they just want to laugh, and they just want to...
They just want to laugh and not be inundated with woke politics and all that, the stuff you get from SNL. And basically how we got together was I reached out to Michael Loftus and I said, hey, let's create a right-leaning SNL. And he said, hey, we're already doing it. We got together.
And we just wanted to prove that we could do it.
So we started to do live shows.
We did our first show in Nashville.
And then now we're doing shows in a warehouse in Long Island, a great venue over there.
And we have a great audience actually in Long Island.
It's a very right-leaning area of New York.
But also, we're getting lots of support online.
The biggest challenge we're facing is We try to advertise on YouTube and they shut down our ads.
Same thing goes for Facebook, all that.
So it's hard to even get the word out.
What we're hoping to do is we put out this content and we hope that people share it and we hope that people can relate to it and they say, hey, look at this.
This is funny. Can't you relate to this?
They share it and that's how people come to us.
We have a subscription service website.
We have our own servers.
It's basically like Patreon.
Think of Patreon where you can I mean, what I think is really cool about doing the live events is that It provides the kind of equivalent of the improv, right? If you're a young comedian, you want to be able to stand up in front of a crowd.
I mean, you're going to sometimes tell a joke that completely dies and being able to endure that and keep going and come up with the next funny one and make it work.
I mean, that's the formula and I think that's fantastic.
Have you guys thought about using the platforms of Getter and Truth Social and Rumble?
Because it seems to me that some sort of a partnership with Rumble would make a lot of sense.
I also want to mention to you that we put 2,000 mules on the Rumble-owned platform called Locals and we're able to have people pay money and buy the movie.
So they can stream the movie that way.
And I know that Locals wants to open that up to other, not just movies, but you know, so if you're able to put together a one-hour comedy performance, let's just say with a dozen or two dozen comedians all doing short skits and stints, I mean, you could probably charge 10 bucks or $15 for that and put it on Locals, promote it through Rumble.
So I'm just throwing out ideas here, ways in which we can, you know.
I mean, it's important to monetize these things because you can't demand that you create all this kind of cultural creativity and everybody work for free.
People even say to me, why don't you put the movie for free?
Well, unless we can create viable systems for making movies, which you can't do in a kind of, you know, hand everything out for free framework, you want people who believe in what you're doing and enjoy your product to be able to also pay for it.
Absolutely. And that's, you know, going on those platforms is useful for us where, you know, those are kind of trusted platforms.
I understand going to like a website is, you know, you might not know what you're getting, but I agree where, you know, where...
The more people that support us, the more people that find us share the word, it's crazy how much more we'd be able to do.
We have show ideas like a talk-soup knock-off, or we could do higher production values.
And, you know, we can have guests like you on.
That's really the goal is to, you know, spread the word in terms of other conservatives and show a different side of them.
Like, you know, you're known for your documentaries, but I've seen you on the show where, you know, you can be funny, and that's the kind of stuff we want to bring out of the conservative movement.
That's... That's really the goal, is to show, you know, we're not stiff, we're not red ties, you know, we're a fun group of people, and we're not afraid to make fun of people, we're not even afraid to make fun of the right, you know, we make fun of rhino republicans, we make fun of We just make fun of some of the ridiculousness all around.
Totally. You should be in touch and maybe there's something I can do with you guys and moreover.
Send us also, Debbie and me, clips that you guys do which we'll be happy to share on social media.
Let's talk about where people can find you.
ThatShowTonight.com That's the website.
And also follow you at That Show Tonight Official and also at Freedom of Creativity US, right?
Those are the two places that they can follow you on Twitter.
Correct, yeah. So if you go to thatshowtonight.com, you can subscribe for, it's $5 a month or $50 a year.
Just again, think of it like a Patreon.
You're supporting us, our growth, and you're supporting us getting out there, getting the word out.
And again, you're getting an awesome, it's like about, usually it's about an hour, 15-minute comedy show every month.
It's live. And you're seeing all of our sketches first.
There will eventually be some behind-the-scenes footage.
And with your support, you know, we'll be able to fly Dinesh over and get him onto the show.
We'll be able to, you know, get other conservative people.
We had Jim Brewer host the show.
We have Nick Searcy involved in some sketches.
We have some other really fun people getting involved in the future, too.
So it's a great project.
Tim, it's good stuff. Comedy, I think, is a great way to communicate.
Thanks for coming on the podcast and all the best to you.
Thank you so much for having me, Dinesh.
Appreciate it. We're good to go.
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Feel the difference. I'm now in the 33rd, which is to say the very last canto of Dante's Divine Comedy.
We're in the 33rd canto of Paradiso.
Let's remember... 34 cantos in the Inferno, 33 in Purgatorio, 33 in Paradiso.
That's 100 cantos.
And we're in the very last one, which we're going to go through pretty slowly and pretty much line by line.
What you have, it begins with...
Bernard of Clairvaux making a prayer to the Virgin Mary.
Now, I talked about why it was appropriate that the Virgin Mary appear here at the very end.
It was the Virgin Mary in Dante's story that began this whole process.
The Virgin Mary called upon a saint, a woman named Lucy.
And Lucy then summoned Beatrice, and then Beatrice summoned Virgil, and Virgil became Dante's original guide.
And so you can almost see things moving now in the opposite direction.
Virgil hands off to Beatrice, Beatrice hands off to Bernard of Clairvaux, and Bernard of Clairvaux brings Dante, in a sense, before the Virgin Mary and makes a sort of petition to her.
So this is Bernard talking, not Dante.
Oh virgin mother, daughter of your son, most humble, most exalted of all creatures, chosen of God in his eternal plan.
Notice the paradoxes here, the opposites.
Virgin mother, daughter of your son.
Most humble, most exalted.
So what Dante is doing here is he's moving now into the language of paradox.
And he seems to imply that that is the only way you can now talk in the upper reaches of paradise.
In other words, normal language doesn't quite suffice.
Things here have this kind of character in which you can express them well only in this...
Mystical or paradoxical language.
Lady, you are so great, so powerful, that who seeks grace without recourse to you would have his wish fly upward without wings.
And what Bernard seems to say here is that the Virgin Mary...
It's in some very fundamental way critical to his petition to get to Christ.
This is the notion, and it's a controversial notion, it's been controversial since the Reformation, of the Virgin Mary as a sort of intercessor.
The Virgin Mary here representing, you may almost call it the human face of Christ.
Remember, Christ was fully divine and fully human, but being fully divine, in some sense, Christ, even on earth, had nevertheless a fully human mother.
And so, for many centuries, and particularly in the Middle Ages, the fully human mother was seen as the sort of gateway to be able to reach, if you will, Christ.
I remember years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine, John Agresto, who was head at the time of St. John.
John's College. And this guy was raised a Catholic, but he was not a practicing Catholic.
And in fact, he wasn't in some ways religious at all.
And he once made to me this striking statement.
He goes, I don't believe in Jesus, but I do believe in Mary.
And I was like... What do you mean by that?
And he said, He rejected Jesus while embracing, supposedly, Mary.
But let's move on.
Here's Bernard saying to Mary, this is a man, pointing now to Dante, who from the deepest pit of all the universe up to this height has witnessed one by one the lives of souls who begs you that you grant him through your grace the power to raise his vision higher still to penetrate the final blessedness.
So here is Bernard asking Mary to allow Dante ultimately to go, you might almost say, beyond human consciousness.
Because you have to.
The human vessel and human senses are not enough.
To fully participate in kind of the bliss of the Emperein.
So it's almost as if Dante needs new faculties here, and Bernard is telling Mary, can you help Dante to get those faculties?
And I, meaning Bernard, who never burned for my own vision more than I burn for his...
Now, this is important here because what Bernard is saying to Mary is that those of us who are up here in heaven aren't here, in a sense, to derive our own satisfaction, our own happiness somehow from ourselves.
On the contrary, we are here to participate in this kind of divine congregation.
Our blessedness, our happiness, our joy comes from that.
In other words, the source of goodness and joy and bliss and happiness is God.
And so what you learn in heaven is it's actually not about you.
You're happy to be there because you derivatively are gaining this kind of...
You're able to see the face of God.
You're able to participate in this divine blessedness.
But God is the center.
This is not a human-centered enterprise at all.
I'm continuing my reading of Canto 33, the very last canto of the Paradiso.
And here's Dante trying to, in the upper reaches of heaven, experience it.
So not merely to understand it, but somehow to become part of it.
And here's what Dante says.
"'And from then on my vision rose to heights higher than words.' In other words, Dante is like, now we are talking about experiences that are going to be very difficult for me to be able to comprehend, remember, and reproduce.
So Dante is talking here ultimately about the senses at their very extremes.
and he gives a beautiful analogy.
As he who sees things in a dream and wakes to feel the passion of the dream still there, although no part of it remains in mind, just such am I.
My vision fades and all but ceases, yet the sweetness born of it I can feel distilling in my heart.
Here's Dante. Sometimes he says, you know, we have a dream.
And it's a wonderful, it's a fantastic dream.
And you wake up, and you have the emotions that you had in the dream.
And they're very pleasant, and they're very positive, but you can't remember the dream.
The actual content of the dream has faded from your consciousness, even though you might say that the after effects are still there.
And Dante goes, that's how it was for me.
I'm in heaven, I experience it directly, but afterward...
If you ask me to somehow recreate it, I'm very hard-pressed to do it.
It's like I remember I had a dream, and it was a fantastic dream.
It was an unbelievable dream, but I'd be hard-pressed to tell you exactly what it was.
And so we have here, developing in the last canto, Dante on the one hand emphasizing and using all his poetic powers to describe an experience, while at the same time expressing the limitations of the intellect and even the limitations of poetry itself to be able to reproduce that experience.
O Light Supreme, so far beyond the reach of mortal understanding, give to my tongue eloquence enough to capture just one spark of all your glory that I may leave for future generations.
For by returning briefly to my mind and sounding even faintly in my verse, more of your might will be revealed to men.
So here we find Dante praying himself.
This is his prayer. Oh, Light Supreme.
He's calling for divine illumination.
To do what? Well, to clear his mind so he can take some of this back with him.
And so we see the poem here coming full circle.
It's not just that Dante has gone through this journey.
He's now in the upper reaches of paradise.
He has this experience and then that's it.
No. The point of the experience, the reason Dante is doing all this, it's partly, of course, for his own moral reformation.
He makes that clear.
There's a personal element to it.
But... There's also a broader mission.
You almost call it a divine assignment.
And what's a divine assignment?
Go write the divine comedy.
Go back and take this message, this experience, and share it with other people.
So Dante, in that sense, is one of those rare figures.
Almost like a classical figure from classical antiquity who somehow, you know, visits the afterlife and then comes back.
Dante is within a Christian universe having that identical experience.
And it continues, Oh, grace abounding and allowing me to dare to fix my gaze on the eternal light.
How so deep my vision was consumed in it, I saw how it contains within its depths all things bound in a single book by love of which creation is the scattered leaves.
So, in this new image, Dante now talks about creation itself as a book.
And all the created things of the world are the leaves, are the different pages of that book scattered widely through the universe.
And again, the reference to a book here brings our mind as readers back to the Divine Comedy.
Why? Because it too is a book that is full of leaves or chapters or verses, and these verses are scattered, and what are they trying to do?
In some ways, they're trying to almost Imitate God's own creation.
They're trying to cover all of human experience, all of human history, not just life, but also what comes before life and what comes after life.
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