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Nov. 4, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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Coming up, I'm going to talk about affirmative action and make the case for why laws and policies should ignore these racial distinctions and treat us all as a minority of one.
I'll highlight the callousness of the Biden administration by focusing on its conduct in the aftermath of the Afghan withdrawal.
Debbie's going to join me.
We're going to talk about a range of issues, Paul Pelosi, the midterms, and a very fancy wedding.
And I'll offer an introduction to a relatively unknown Russian writer who was very sly and skillful in exposing the workings, or maybe I should say non-workings, of socialism.
This is the Dinesh 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.
The Supreme Court has heard arguments in both the Harvard case and the University of North Carolina case involving affirmative action and racial preferences. The decision will be out sometime early next year, maybe in the spring, so maybe March, maybe April. We'll have to see.
I'm expecting a very good decision and one that is going to really change the landscape of universities and I hope begin a larger process of changing the landscape of American society, changing in how By rooting out this race consciousness that has now become embedded in society and has also become embedded in the law.
Now it's one thing if something is in society, it's in the customs and the mores of society.
And that could be a good thing or a bad thing.
It's a whole other thing to take, in this case, racial identity and use it as the basis for state-sponsored discrimination.
Let's remember, we have a long history, an ugly history in the country, led by the Democrats, by the way, of state-sponsored segregation, state-sponsored discrimination against Blacks.
And oddly enough, we have now been living for about 40 years with state-sponsored segregation and state-sponsored discrimination, but this time in favor of blacks.
And then as America has become a more multiracial society, other groups are now classified as being either, you may say, victims or victimizers.
And the victim groups now you have added to the list.
It's blacks, but also Latinos, Hispanics, and also Native Americans.
And again, peculiarly on the victimizer list, we have Asian Americans, even though Asian Americans are victimized.
Nobody, certainly nobody, in the long stretch of American history, in fact, with the Chinese exclusion laws and the various laws limiting immigration from Asia, not to mention the internment of Japanese in the World War II period.
So my point is, Asian Americans have been on the receiving end, certainly not in a manner comparable to Blacks, but perhaps in a manner in some ways comparable to Latinos.
Now, The question I want to ask is, how did we get to this strange place where we are all being lumped together in these racial boxes?
Didn't we have a civil rights revolution that was based upon the ideal of the colorblind society?
Wasn't that Martin Luther King's dream?
And of course, even though the dream might not be realized, it's after all a dream.
A dream is generally an aspiration.
We want to get there.
Isn't it odd that we have laws and policies that are actively moving us in the opposite direction?
So our aspiration now is not colorblindness, but what the left calls equity. And I think what they mean by equity, in fact, I don't think this is what they mean by equity, is that they are trying to respond to the performance differential, quite honestly the performance inferiority, of certain racial groups as compared to other racial groups.
So if you look, for example, at a pure individualistic Admission system, which is the way it should be.
We apply to college as individuals.
Now, this is not to say that our social circumstances can't be taken into account.
If Dinesh, for example, applies to college, I'm 17 years old, people can say, well look, here's a kid who grew up in India in a very different society.
He grew up in a middle-class family, so he was not deprived in terms of having a decent education.
But he's come to America with $500 in his pocket.
He's trying to make his way here.
So we're going to look at this kid in the context of his or her circumstances, and we're going to decide what kind of academic and intellectual promise they offer, and we're going to decide if he deserves admission on that basis.
That's the way it should be. We're good to go.
But Hispanics and Blacks would be less.
So Blacks might be 12% of the population, but 4% on the campus.
Latinos, about the same.
So you see what's really going on is that the seats that would be...
In a sense, you could say the Asian Americans are overrepresented and the Blacks and Hispanics and American Indians are underrepresented.
And this is really the inequity that they're trying to correct.
Now, they can't say that.
They can't say, fewer Asians, more Latinos, or fewer Asians, more blacks.
So they try to make it sound like they're fighting white privilege.
But they're not fighting white privilege.
They're fighting merit. They're fighting the idea.
They're fighting against the idea that people should be judged on their own merits.
This is what makes this whole thing so insidious.
And this is really why I think the Supreme Court needs to reaffirm that, listen, yeah, we belong to various types of groups.
By the way, not just racial groups.
We belong to groups of all kinds.
But when we're being judged by the government and when we're being judged for jobs or contracts or university admissions or for promotions, we should be judged as individuals.
In other words, we are all in this country a minority of one.
That's our identity that really matters, our individuality, and decisions should be made on that basis.
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I've sometimes talked about the President, Joe Biden, as a nasty, callous, I-don't-care kind of guy.
And it might seem that I'm referring solely to his ugly personality.
And I am referring to that.
I'm including that.
But there's also a callousness and indifference and ugliness to the Biden administration.
And what I mean is that the Biden administration is kind of Biden writ large.
I'm not saying he's driving the canoe, but I'm saying the canoe and its direction reflects the personality of this gross, crotchety man that is sitting at the helm.
Now, here's an example of that, and I'm getting this from news reports, that a new federal watchdog report shows that the State Department, this is the Biden State Department, recently was found to have as many as 325,000 unread emails from Afghans who assisted the U.S. war effort and want to be evacuated.
So... Let's back up.
The United States does this ignominious, humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, but there's a public assurance that this is not going to be a Saigon-style turn, tail, and run.
We're going to get our own people out, and we're also going to make sure that the people who worked with us, who had trust in us, will at least be considered for Now, what was really bad about the actual evacuation is a whole bunch of people ran onto the planes who were not vetted.
Nobody knew who they were.
They hadn't actually helped the United States in any way.
They were just the fastest guys to get on the plane, and they got out.
And there were people there who had worked as translators, worked in various capacities with the U.S., who apparently have been, in the many months now, living, by the way, these would now be seen as collaborators with the U.S. and targets for the Taliban regime.
These people have been trying to reach out to the U.S. State Department, probably to document what they did for the U.S., probably give their circumstances and ask if the United States can do anything to help them.
Now, I'm not even saying the United States needs to help all of them and the United States needs to figure out a way to get them all out, but I'm saying that it is beyond callous to have all these emails come into the U.S. State Department.
And you know what? Don't read them.
Don't even open the emails.
So, turns out that as of May of this year, this is the federal report I'm talking about, covers the period of nine months from the U.S. military evacuation until May of 2022, more than 300,000 unread messages going all the way back to August of 2021.
And there's also apparently a big backlog of applications to get the special immigrant visa that the US was extending to people who had helped us in our long sojourn in Afghanistan.
The United States has always been known around the world for a country that exhibits the kind of basic decency where they can't always agree with you, but they're going to give you a hearing.
They're going to listen to what you have to say, particularly if you are working hand in hand.
So there needs to be a vetting process and so on.
But this idea that you've got all these Afghans who over the past 20 years have worked with the U.S., they're now desperately trying to get out.
They're targeted by the Taliban regime.
We don't even read their emails.
I think that's just a telling reflection, a kind of epitome, if you will, of the nastiness that has come to define this Biden administration.
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Here I am with Debbie.
We are actually, well, we're going to finish the podcast, obviously.
We're going to do our Friday roundup, but then we're off to the airport.
We're heading to Florida, and we're going to, well, we're going to a very fancy wedding.
Which we will talk about a little later.
Which we will talk about a little bit later.
We'll come to that.
Yes. Let's start by talking about the midterms.
Wow, here are we, the weekend, then election coming up really just a few days from now, Tuesday.
And I must say, I'm feeling pretty good about it.
As I do the book promotion with 2,000 Meals, people are like, do you feel the election will be secure?
And I say, yeah, no, I think the awareness that was brought about by the movie and the book is going to help a lot.
Well, you know, I think, and even going further than that, I think that if it wasn't going our way, I don't think Biden would have done that speech, that very divisive speech that he did that reminded me of the Hugo Chavez-Maduro speeches.
Because what do they do when they feel like the opposition is gaining ground?
They have to demonize them.
They have to shut them down.
They have to teach them a lesson.
And they have to act like they're conspiracy theorists and they should never be trusted.
I mean, so tellingly.
And what happens with Biden is he says something dark, divisive, outrageous, which is that essentially the opposition party is against democracy.
He's for democracy. They're against democracy.
So you have to vote for him no matter what.
And then other people pick that up and echo it.
So here's Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian.
And he was on, I don't know, CNN or MSNBC. And he says things like...
You know, don't just vote in economics.
Your kid's future is in danger.
America's future as a democracy is in danger.
So they're trying to raise the stakes.
They have to go there. I mean, like I said, third world country tyrants go there, you know.
And so the rhetoric doesn't surprise me one bit.
Here's an interesting article in The Hill, which is getting to a key constituency, which is to say suburban white women.
Okay. And the idea is that whatever happened in 2020, there was a population of suburban white women in places like Georgia.
That didn't like his tweets. That didn't like Trump.
Right. They were like, anything but Trump.
We don't really like Biden, but we're going to give the Democrats a try.
There were people who talked like this and acted like this.
Mm-hmm. And I think what's happening now is that those suburban white women are having major buyer's remorse.
Good. And they're doing it on the economy.
They're seeing that, look, you know, inflation, high prices.
So suddenly their livelihoods are getting pinched.
So... Half of suburban white women now think the Republican Party has a better way to fix the economy and make life easier.
Only 35% think Democrats.
And let's remember, many of these women are Democrats, so they're not just polling Republican women.
But, I mean, what planet is the 35% on?
Well, that's a good point.
Well, the Democrats apparently think that, well, I think you have the entitlement Democrats.
Right, of course. And these are people who don't care what the economy is doing because they're looking to see, am I still going to get a monthly check?
Exactly. So for them, the economy is just fine.
Right. Exactly. And then you've got the 16% who cited the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v.
Wade as being an important decision.
Not necessarily a decisive issue, but an important issue.
Now, Democrats had hoped that that number would be around 50%, that about half of women would be like, we're going to vote on abortion, we're going to secure our abortion rights, control our bodies.
But it's turning out that no, more than twice as many people say that it's the economy that's driving.
So Democrats have had, by the way, in many elections recently, an advantage among women.
Mm-hmm. But not in the midterms.
Really? That's really interesting.
And going back to the Roe v.
Wade, you know, I think that they would have had a little bit more of a point if the decision had been no abortion at all, nowhere, right?
But that isn't what Roe v.
Wade, the overturning of Roe v.
Wade was about. It was leaving it to the states to make those decisions.
So they never took away abortion rights.
At all. They just said, it's not in the Constitution, guys.
The decision is really about who decides.
And the Democrat position is that a woman decides, quote, with her doctor.
The with her doctor part is all nonsense because no one actually goes to your doctor and says, what do you think I should do?
No, women go into the plane, they go, you know, abort my kid.
And they say, okay, come into this room and we'll do it.
So this idea that there's a kind of humane consultation about the various procedures involved, the various interests involved, this doesn't happen in practice, nor do Democrats want it to happen.
No, they really don't.
They really shouldn't even call themselves pro-choice, really.
They're pro-abortion, period.
End of story. Yeah, very scary.
But look, this is a case where I think the red wave is carried by many different currents.
There's an economic current.
There is a portion of people who...
I think even the disaster with Afghanistan remains in the back of people's minds.
You know, this guy does not know what he's doing on the international front.
And no one would be entirely surprised if he gets us into a big war because he's such a fool.
And the people around him are such nincompoops.
There's these little twerps who you can see have had no life experience, no foreign policy experience.
And so it's a very scary situation on the foreign policy front and then on the cultural front.
This is a guy who's tearing the fabric of American society.
So it's bad news all around.
So are you feeling good about the midterms?
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A couple of days ago I had on the podcast a progressive scholar, Shadi Hamedi's a scholar at the Brookings Institution. By the way, I'd love to have more progressives, even leftists, on the podcast, on the program. It's not that I'm unwilling to do that. It's hard to do because these guys are scared of coming on, they're scared of debating. So in the Times, there are some exceptions. We had Bill Ayers on the podcast and there have been a few guys who have come on.
But by and large, they tend to run away these days from discussion.
Shadi was not like that.
And I noticed, honey, that you were sort of, you had all kinds of expressions on your face as he was talking.
And so I thought it'd be fun for us to talk about what he said and this whole idea of liberalism and democracy and how sometimes the one can be set against the other.
Yeah. Well, first of all, I have to say, usually I know who's going to be your guest because I either have a direct, you know, relationship with them as far as like setting up the podcast, setting their interview up for the podcast.
But for some reason, this guy, like totally, I missed him on my radar.
So you and Patricia, our scheduler, like, You know, decided to got him going.
And then so I thought, oh, OK, so he's a he's a Muslim scholar.
OK, well, you know, you were expecting him to.
Right. So I thought he was conservative.
I had no idea.
So when when he starts talking and he starts, you know, talking about the election and about how January 6th, I was like, I was making faces because I thought, wait a minute.
This guy's supposed to be on our side.
And then so part of me was thinking, why do you have him on the show?
And then the other part of me was thinking, you know what?
We need more guys like that on the show because we need more debates.
We never debate anymore, right?
No, it's true. But it's not because we are reluctant to, and it's not because we don't have the arguments.
It's because the... See, I think what's happened is that the left...
Came to the view that because they dominate the megaphones, academia, the media, and they also have tremendous leverage over censorship, they don't need to debate.
So their idea was a CNN panel should be six guys who all think the same.
You might find someone with an R, Republican, behind his name, but that guy will also agree with the other people on CNN. So it's essentially...
Their idea of debate is a unanimity of opinion of people saying the same things maybe with varying degrees of vehemence But they're all on the same side. Yeah, and the CNN hosts are like that. So You're right. It's very good to have genuine discussions too rare now What did you think about so the first point that Shadi Hameed made was he said look we Let's talk about the Muslim countries
And he said that in the Muslim countries, you have democracy, but what if the Muslims don't want liberalism?
So democratically, we use the term...
They want sharia. They want some form of...
Islamic law. Islamic law.
And they're voting by majority vote for that.
So who are we?
And I think this is also, we didn't go into this, but what he's kind of saying, I think, is who is U.S. foreign policy to go and start flying the gay flag all over the Middle East?
Right. Why are we putting this in their face?
Their people have chosen a course for their society.
Why don't we respect the traditional values of traditional society?
Right. Well, I agree with him in the sense that I don't ever believe we should be in the Middle East to begin with.
Like, for anything. Change hearts or minds.
So... Their country is a theocracy, right?
And so if they want to, like you said, if they want to democratically elect the leader that wants Sharia, and that's what the people want, that's what the people are going to get.
We don't want Sharia in America, right?
And that's us, right?
That's our country.
But I did agree with him on that point.
Right. The second part of the interview focused on the issue of, is there a way for the left and the right, who are at polar opposites ideologically, to coexist?
And I think what his solution was is that, look, if we accept the procedures of democratic society, and I think he honestly means free and fair elections, he doesn't mean a rigged system, then It's okay if one side or the other side wins.
He hasn't seen 2,000 mules, though.
Well, he hasn't.
We need to send him a copy of 2,000 mules before he comes back on.
Right. I'll tell him to look at it because, yes, I think in that sense he was a product of the left-wing bubble.
And he was acting as if it was utterly unreasonable to raise questions about 2020.
And that January 6th, Was an utterly unreasonable response.
Open and shut case. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. So that was a little dogmatic.
But I think his personality and there was an intellectual openness, I sense.
Oh, and he was a very nice guy.
Very, very nice. Yes.
Yeah. Which we don't see too many of their side being this nice.
Right. Well, some of them have made their peace with just flagrant lies.
And I think that they know better.
I think of a guy like Philip Bump at the Washington Post.
Oh, yeah. This guy is just a chronic liar.
And he will recycle lies even once you point out to him why he's wrong.
He'll do a long thread repeating what he said before, almost as if he hasn't seen what you posted in response.
That is the mainstream of today's left.
And I think our friend, well, friend Shadi Hamid is an exception.
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In the last few days, I have been commenting, not just on the podcast, but also on social media, on the, well, let's call it the evolving Paul Pelosi story.
But what's funny is that Debbie, at times, has been, like, shaking her head, Either about a substantive disagreement or about a disagreement with my tone or with me going there or jumping to conclusions.
So I thought it'd be fun for us to do a segment where we sort of revisit the Paul Pelosi phenomenon to see what your thoughts were about it.
Well, before we go there, I was talking to my mom this morning, okay, and then she goes, Debbie, I think that Paul Pelosi thing, I think it was planned.
Yeah. You know, she's like, and you know I'm not political, but I think something fishy is going on.
I'm like, Mom, you too?
Well, I mean, I've never said it was planned in the sense that they put up this guy to do it.
Not in that sense. And look, even my views about it have adapted to the release of...
What I find odd is they put out one set of facts...
And alongside a big narrative.
And then you look at the facts more closely and you say, the facts don't really match that narrative.
In fact, they lend themselves to a rival narrative that makes more sense.
And that rival narrative, oh my goodness, when you put that out, I was like, oh honey, no you didn't.
Oh no, you didn't. But you and a lot of other people did that.
What I found just appalling, really, is I don't really care about his personal life and about his drunkenness and all those things.
I mean, he's a weirdo and so is his wife, who, by the way, she actually has started this fight because...
Do you recall when Trump was doing the State of the Union address and she was behind him tearing up the program and all of that?
So she started it.
She is the one that started it.
But anyway, I digress.
But I don't like the fact that they jumped to conclusions about this guy being a MAGA person.
And, oh, look, he's a Trump supporter.
And look what Trump supporters are doing and all of those things.
That's what I have a problem with.
Well, the reason they did that is because we're right on the edge of an election.
And one of their themes is that not only are Republicans a threat to democracy, but that Republicans are instigating violence.
And so they've got a violent act And so they were like, hey, listen, how do we spin this?
The guy's obviously a kook.
He's a crazy weirdo. They knew from the beginning he was a Berkeley nudist, that he was involved with a woman who says, this guy loved Pelosi.
Think about that. So...
But when you have a psychotic and conspiratorial mind, you're going to grab onto conspiracy ideas wherever they come from.
So this guy was a grab bag of craziness.
Some of it left, some of it right.
But in no way was he sort of predictably on the MAGA track.
Not at all. In fact, I highly doubt he voted for Trump.
He probably voted for Biden, if he voted at all, of course.
If he voted at all. He probably didn't vote.
But no, and then there's this CNN politics issue.
Article, Donald Trump joins the Paul Pelosi conspiracy caucus.
Yeah, the point about it is, you know, you were like, well, Dinesh, be careful.
Don't say things that you later regret.
And the point I was making, Debbie, was, this is a developing story.
You're given certain facts.
Both men were in their underwear.
Well, okay, I mean, how many conclusions?
That points in one direction.
But then they came back and said, no, it was only Pelosi.
Then they said no. But then they also said at the same time, he didn't know the guy.
And yet we know, and this is by the way from a recording of a call, I'm not even getting it from the media, I'm not getting it from the police, the recording of a call in which the police are saying that the RP, the reporting person, says his name is David and he's a friend.
Now, the left's comeback to that is, well, you know what?
He was under duress.
He was trying to sort of finesse this because the guy was right there.
But that doesn't square with the fact that he tricked the guy.
He tricked David DePape.
He convinced David DePape that he needed to go to the bathroom.
So when he was talking to the cops, he didn't have to sort of edit or censor what he said.
He could have told them, I'm in trouble.
There's a bad guy out here who's trying to get me.
He has a hammer. He's going to harm me.
Get over here as quickly as possible.
He said none of that.
Well now this, you know, this article says, uh, this and others have, have been totally and completely debunked by law enforcement.
There is absolutely no evidence that Mr. Pelosi knew this man, San Francisco police chief William Scott told CNN in an interview.
As a matter of fact, the evidence indicates the exact opposite.
This is what the police chief said.
Well, I mean, the point is you.
It's one thing to just...
When you draw a conclusion, the conclusion has to be based on facts.
And in this case, the facts are available.
Evidently, there is video surveillance.
They're not releasing it. Evidently, there is a 911 call.
They're not releasing that.
So what they want...
And see... Look, in a city like San Francisco, where you've got a kind of a mafia boss, the Pelosi family, that's in charge, the police chief is not going to want to go against her.
And the DA is not going to want to go against her.
The DA is also an ardent left-wing Democrat.
So you have these people rushing to protect not just Pelosi, but the Pelosi narrative.
And that's why the rest of us are like, listen, you know, you can easily put everything to rest by showing us what actually happened.
I mean, look at our approach in 2000 Mules.
We're not just like, we are now going to tell you about what happened in the 2020 election, and I'm going to then sermonize for 90 minutes.
No. It's like, let's roll the videotape.
Let's talk about geotrack.
We're relying on evidence.
We're putting the evidence up on the screen.
They have the evidence.
Why don't they put it up on the screen?
Hmm. They're not good.
Right. It's because the evidence, I'm guessing, does not fit the narrative.
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Debbie and I are off to, well, Mar-a-Lago this weekend.
It's return time for us.
I don't know if we're supposed to say where we're going.
Why? I don't know.
I think it's okay. Is that okay?
Of course.
I mean, I know. So we're going to Florida for a wedding, but I didn't know if we were going to say where.
No, no, it's okay. I think it's fine.
Well, we went. We had our Mar-a-Lago premiere.
And we've been there on more than one occasion, but we haven't been there since the Mar-a-Lago raid, but we're excited to be going back.
This wedding looks like it's going to be...
Oh my goodness. So we got an invitation in the mail by UPS. Not regular mail, but by UPS. It was gorgeous, and you forgot to bring it.
I wanted you to bring it so we could show everybody.
So these are friends of ours from Florida, but...
They are going to have, like, a party to end all parties.
I mean, like, you know, a wedding to end all weddings, I think.
Right. And so we were invited.
And we don't know how many people are going to be there or who's going to be there.
Normally, we, and Debbie can explain, is we tend to hesitate with these kinds of things in part because, well, I think the way you put it is it becomes an event.
So explain what you mean by that.
So, yeah, so occasionally people invite us to go to like a Lincoln dinner where Dinesh is not speaking or a wedding or a party or whatever.
And Dinesh is, I have to say, quite the popular guy.
I mean, people, even when they went during Halloween, trick-or-treaters, the parents, oh, Dinesh D'Souza, you know, so people recognize him.
And so what ends up happening is it takes away from the event for those people.
And we don't want to do that, nor do we want to do another event because we want to just relax.
Dinesh does enough events as it is.
And so when we go somewhere, we kind of want to just chill and not have to talk about politics and whatnot.
Right. I mean, it happened, gosh, this was now a little while ago, but there was an event in the Houston area.
And if I remember, it was a, was it the birthday of Rafael Cruz?
Yes, yes. And so I thought, you know.
And we adore him.
We adore him. He married us, so I thought it's a courtesy.
I must show up. And so we were there.
But then what was happening is while Rafael Cruz stood up to speak and people were doing tributes, people were like, hey, Dinesh, can I get a selfie?
Can I get a photo? Let's step outside where the light is better and stuff.
And Debbie's like... You're kind of ruining his event.
I mean, this is supposed to be, the focus is supposed to be on the Cruz family, on Rafael Cruz.
So this is something where our presence is proving to be a bit of a disruption.
I think, I mean, we're going to know people, I think, this weekend.
And this looks like one of those fancy weddings that's Very memorable.
Oh, yeah. So I have to wear a long gown, which I did finally select one to wear.
And you have to wear black tie.
Right. So we're going to go like kind of fancy.
Well, I no longer have the bow tie that I used to wear.
So I now wear black tie with literally the black tie.
I have a really nice black tie.
I just have to say I hate this man because he's wearing the same suit he wore when we got married almost seven years ago.
Well, Debbie did say to me, she goes, well, I think you better try on your tux to see if it still fits.
Yeah. I was like, it's not going to fit.
It's not going to fit. And he puts it on and I'm like, oh, it fits.
Wow. I am not the same weight as I was in 2016.
Probably my tux was a little bit loose then because, and maybe it's a little bit tight now.
I'm able to get into it.
And I, you know, I hate to go out and get another tux.
It's not the expense. It's just the trouble.
One of these days, we'll have to just kind of chat about our diet.
I mean, you'll order a dress, and then you'll go to the alteration guy, and then they'll extend the sleeves and do this and that.
And to me, it's like...
Right, but look, I'm almost 5'1", okay?
Very short.
So any dress I order, whether it be long, short, whatever, is going to be super long on me.
And my shoulders are a little bit on the small side, but my, you know, and so I have to have alterations.
I just have to. I can't ever just find something off the rack and, you know, oh, this fits.
Great. You know, I can't do that, unfortunately.
Well, it's going to be great.
We're going to Palm Beach.
Well, the other thing is the weather. Oh, the weather.
High 84, low 78.
Oh, my goodness. What a dreamy weather.
I mean, that's your Garden of Eden weather.
Oh, that is the ultimate weather.
It's going to be awesome. If I could live in that all year.
My daughter Danielle's there with her husband, Brandon, so it's going to be...
Yeah, it'll be fun. It'll be fun, and I think we're going to have a great time, but we'll see you...
On Monday. On Monday.
I'm done with the Odyssey, and we're now venturing into new waters.
Instead of doing something really in-depth right away, I'm going to take a few days, maybe a week, and introduce you to a writer you probably haven't heard of.
But you're going to really enjoy this, because this guy is a character, and he's a humorist, and he's a satirist.
And what is he satirizing?
Well, he's basically satirizing Soviet socialism.
And even though Soviet socialism, which is, of course...
Collapsed with the Berlin Wall and glasnost and perestroika and the Communist Party abolishing itself.
It might seem like that has now all receded into history, but there are some weird and almost very telling parallels between what this writer writes about in Soviet society, writing in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, and things that we experience, in a sense, as socialism begins to raise its ugly head here So, have you heard of this guy, Mikhail Zoshenko?
No, you probably haven't.
Of course, we follow Russian literature at all.
There is an incredibly distinguished line of great Russian writers going all the way back, of course, to the 19th century.
People like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
And then coming into the 20th century, of course, there's Maxim Gorky and Pasternak, who wrote Dr.
Zhivago, and then on through figures like Solzhenitsyn and others.
Zoshenko is not in that company.
He would not be seen as a, quote, great writer.
And it's partly because, unlike Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, he doesn't actually take on great themes.
War and peace.
Crime and punishment.
No. This guy, as we will see, is nothing more than a kind of wry, clever, and sly observer of Soviet socialism in action.
The left doesn't like him.
Why? Because he made the Russian people laugh.
Laugh at their own society, laugh at socialism, laugh at the kind of comic and ridiculous attempt to remake society and remake human nature.
And Sochenko doesn't bother to argue with any of it.
In fact, he operates through fiction.
He creates characters.
And he just shows you these characters who are essentially, well, they're versions of himself.
I don't think it's fair to say that it's all, it's Zoshenko himself, but it's parts of himself in these situations kind of noticing the, and participating in the comic absurdity of it all.
A little bit of background on this dude.
Mikhail Zoshenko, born in 1895, grew up in St.
Petersburg in the period before the Russian Revolution, started off as a writer, and people began to notice he was sort of a detached observer.
He would notice things.
He doesn't try to be too moralistic.
He looks at manners instead of morals.
So his subject is, let's call it mores.
Mores are the customs and the behaviors of people.
And he doesn't go to the fantastic the way Gogol did, or he doesn't try to probe deep into the psychology in the way that, say, Dostoevsky does.
He's a strange fellow.
He was a little frail, apparently.
Sensitive, detached.
And when the communists took over in Russia, Lenin, Zoshenko joined a group of riders who were, well, they were called fellow travelers.
And of course, we use the term fellow traveler today to mean someone who's kind of running alongside socialism.
The reason that these riders did that is they didn't want to get into trouble.
They They basically said, all right, well, you know what, we're sort of on board with this socialism.
We're not trying to bring the czarist regime back.
We're not counter-revolutionaries.
There's no reason to arrest us.
But we're going to, because we're on your side, we're going to claim a certain independence of outlook.
Russia has always valued its writers, so kind of leave us alone and let us do our thing.
Our business is literature and not government.
So my point is that fellow-traveling here is a ruse, and Zoshenko and others are claiming to be fellow-travelers so they can actually do their work in peace.
Zoloshenko is not funny in the obvious sense that he's telling jokes.
He creates very funny situations, and you have to—it's funniest to the people who live under those situations, because they see right away that this guy is, like, on target.
But even if you don't live in those situations, as long as you have some familiarity with the sort of bureaucratic heavy-handedness of socialism, you can see that this guy is, as they say, circling right over the target.
He managed to stay for most of his life outside the reach of Russian authorities.
He dealt with the ordinary life of Russian citizens.
So his characters tend to be, this guy's a town official, that guy's a clerk, this guy...
You know, a peasant.
But very often it's the ordinary citizen, but dealing with some aspect of socialism, like the Soviet hospital or the Soviet literacy program.
And as we'll see, these stories are very enjoyable for the way that this guy treats them.
He uses a kind of homespun language, and there's a contrast between the bureaucratic prose of the Russian sort of commissariat, socialist language, if you will, which is highly technical, bombastic, and the proletariat.
And what he does is he has a contrast between that quote, official language, and the language that ordinary people speak.
So he will have like little chuckles and snorts and guffaws all written into the speech itself.
And so I think the next few days with Zochenko are going to be really fun.
Toward the end of his life, he was actually called out, along with another very prominent dissident, a woman named Anna Akhmatova, a poet.
And the Soviet authorities were like, Anna Akhmatova and Zoshenko are troublemakers.
And Zoshenko basically realized that the last part of his life, he might have to cool it.
And so he did.
He sort of went silent.
He didn't really write anymore.
But we have his body of work and what I have with me, not easy to get by the way, is his book is called Scenes from a Bathhouse.
Now he doesn't mean a bathhouse in the gay sense, but he means scenes out of a place, a public bath.
Where people go, that's the title story, if you will, of this collection.
Scenes from the bathhouse and other stories of communist Russia.
When we pick it up next week, we'll pick up our first story involving this very interesting, odd, and in some ways revealing Russian writer, Mikhail Zoshenko.
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