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July 10, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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BUSTED Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep617
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Coming up, I'll celebrate a major strike against government censorship in the Missouri v.
Biden case. The left is screaming at the Supreme Court for taking a supposedly bogus case involving LGBTQ and religious freedom, but I'll argue that bogus cases are the specialty of the left.
seemingly odd phenomenon of Trump's rising popularity even in the wake of mounting legal challenges.
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Debbie and I got back from London Last evening, long flight, but a wonderful trip.
It was kind of a, well, it was a family reunion.
And we went to Wimbledon, watched some tennis.
We also ate at a really cool Indian restaurant.
London supposedly has the best Indian restaurants.
And this was a restaurant called Gymkhana.
And we I think best Indian food we've both tasted.
Debbie's nodding her head in agreement.
And it was really fun to see my brother and my sister.
I haven't seen them since before COVID. In fact, the last time I went to India in 2019, when my mom died, of course, that was also brief and it was that occasion.
So it was nice after all this time to have some time to really just walk around, catch up and do some fun stuff together.
And now I'm just getting caught up on all the stuff that's been going on.
And I want to start today by talking about the important development in the Missouri versus Biden case.
So to... Ring you up to speed, this is the case filed by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration for collaborating with social media platforms to do systematic censorship, not only on COVID, but also on election fraud and a whole bunch of other issues.
What I want to talk about is that a federal judge in Louisiana has essentially outlawed, forbidden the Biden administration from communicating with the social media platforms on a wide series of topics.
In other words, you've got to stop this censorship collaboration and you've got to stop it now.
Now, the New York Times is very upset about this.
They say, quote, a ruling that could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.
We can write this off as gobbledygook because the question is, these aren't false or misleading They're false or misleading narratives according to Biden and according to the New York Times.
But that's only because they contradict the premises of the left.
In many cases, what is being censored is true information.
And in fact, this is even admitted when they start talking about malinformation.
Malinformation is information that is true, but somehow, quote, harmful.
The word mal just means bad.
Now, what's going on here is this is a big case and it's not going to be resolved immediately.
The litigation is pending.
But Louisiana and Missouri asked the judge to issue a temporary injunction.
So a temporary injunction means I'm going to issue an order now based upon the likelihood of That Missouri and Louisiana will win this case.
The judge has to make a determination in advance or at the early stages based upon existing filings and existing discovery.
I think these guys are likely to prevail, and so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and stop the censorship sort of preemptively or while it's going on, and then the case can proceed.
Obviously, if the outcome comes out differently, we can make a different decision at that point.
So this means that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube can no longer have these portals where government agencies like the FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services, the White House are feeding in, suspend this guy, deplatform that guy, remove this kind of content.
All of that has to stop.
Now, the judge did say that...
This is Judge Terry Doty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
He said, look, government agencies can still notify social media platforms about what?
Post-detailing crimes...
Posts that have to do with national security threats or foreign attempts to influence elections.
So that's allowed. But the rest of it, the idea of censoring U.S. citizens, that has got to stop.
And not only is the government forbidden from interacting with the social media platforms directly, it can't even use intermediaries.
Let's If the government wants to do something, they don't do it directly.
They go to the Election Integrity Partnership, the so-called EIP, or the Virality Project, or the Stanford Internet Observatory, and they say, listen, these are all the guys we want kicked off, and then the Stanford Internet Observatory passes that along to Twitter, or that along to YouTube, and they obligingly knock those people off.
Or knock most of those people off.
And so the government is able to sort of disguise its participation in the censorship industry by sort of officially staying out of it and using these intermediaries.
Well, the judge goes, no, can't do that either.
No using these intermediaries.
You've got to stop. So this is actually a very significant victory for free speech.
No wonder the New York Times is having some fainting spells over it.
Quote, federal judge limits Biden officials' contacts with social media sites.
But what this means is that free speech is not a lost cause.
Obviously, Elon Musk showed that one way to save free speech is to buy Twitter, $44 billion price tab, and then liberate it, so to speak.
So Twitter is now largely a free speech platform.
But the other way to do it is this way, which is to say, and it's very good to see these attorney generals taking the front lines.
I mean, there are so many Republican attorneys general...
And many of them don't do a whole lot.
So we do want to congratulate Louisiana and Missouri for taking the lead in this.
I think this could very well be the most important First Amendment case in decades.
It certainly is the most important First Amendment case so far of the 21st century.
Huge implications affects not just Trump, not just certain prominent people, but affects you and me.
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Right before I left for London, I did somewhat detailed examination of the issue of affirmative action and the Supreme Court's very important affirmative action case, but I only alluded to or gave a little bit of short shrift to The issue of religious liberty.
And there were two very interesting religious liberty cases that the court decided.
The first one was a very simple, I mean, a very clean 9-0 decision.
A postal worker who wanted a religious exemption from having to work on Sunday.
The post office basically goes, no, that's rules are rules.
We need you to come in on Sunday.
The guy goes, I can't come in on Sunday for religious reasons.
And the court basically sided with the postal worker and said, look, if somebody has a...
Uh, uh, a problem grounded in conscience with not being able to perform a certain task.
The company has a duty to try to accommodate this guy, to oblige him, to figure out a way.
The guy wasn't saying he wanted to work one day less a week.
He was happy to work on another day.
He just said, I can't do it on Sunday.
And the court basically said, unless this places a, uh, A kind of strong burden on the company.
They somehow can't function.
They're a company that only does business on Sundays.
In which case, why is this guy working for that kind of a company?
Unless the company has some strong reason for doing it, they cannot just because rules are rules.
We feel like asking him to work.
The court 9-0 basically sided with the postal guy.
Now, the other case, much more controversial, had to do with an LGBTQ... An LGBTQ demand that a woman, Lori Smith, create a website, she's a web designer, promoting LGBTQ themes.
And the case went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court sided with Laurie Smith and said, look, you can't force people against their will to do things that go against their conscience.
And so if this is a woman who has a Christian objection to building LGBTQ websites, the LGBTQ couple needs to go, the LGBTQ person who wants the website needs to go elsewhere.
Now, once the case was decided, the New Republic did a story basically saying that the case was bogus.
And it's bogus. Why?
Because the man who supposedly sent the original inquiry Saying, hey, I'm an LGBTQ guy.
You need to make a website for me.
Turns out not to have wanted that website.
It's not clear who sent the original demand, whether it was sent in his name.
But in any event, apparently in good faith, the demand was made.
The case went forward.
It moved its way through the courts.
It reached the Supreme Court. So now the New Republic is basically somehow implying that the outcome is invalid because the case is sort of bogus because there's no real plaintiff.
Because there's no genuine conflict.
There was no real LGBTQ person who wanted the website.
And so the idea here is the Supreme Court is being horribly irresponsible and activist by taking a fictitious case that's not based upon genuine defendants.
They're not really in these problems.
And so this is a sort of a hypothetical that the court has taken up, and yet it's making a ruling that's going to affect so many other situations.
In other words, by and large, this is a big win for religious liberty, and it's a big blow for the agenda of the LGBTQ activist movement.
A bunch of senators, well, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, faux litigation takes a new step into fakery in a Supreme Court case.
And the point I wanna make about all this is that while the New Republic thinks it's onto something really big, the simple truth of it is a lot of prominent cases going back really over the last 50 years, cases that you and I know by name, major cases, are also bogus in this sense.
And by bogus in the sense, what I mean is consider the case of Rosa Parks.
Was Rosa Parks a tired old woman who just got into the bus and then didn't want to move to the back of the bus?
No. She was an activist.
She worked for the NAACP. They put her up to it.
She had trained for this.
This was, in other words, a staged event.
And so, the great Rosa Parks case was propagandistically presented as a tired old woman, but that's really not what it was.
Similarly, the NAACP followed a very conscious strategy of creating cases involving segregation, and ultimately, in the Brown case, Brown v.
Board of Education, challenging segregation itself.
In a prominent case in the 1960s, Loving v.
Virginia, it involved interracial marriage.
There was a challenge to an old law.
In Virginia that prohibited interracial marriage, well, Virginia wasn't prosecuting people who were interracial and who got married.
The law was archaic.
It was just there on the books.
But nevertheless, the left wanted to knock it out.
And so they produced an interracial couple and they produced a challenge under the law, even though, again, the law wasn't actually being carried out.
The sodomy case as well.
There were old laws against sodomy.
It wasn't that they were being enforced.
Even in the contraception case, Griswold v.
Connecticut, it's almost like the left stages the event.
They force an arrest.
Look, we're deliberately breaking the law.
We want you to arrest us so we can file a case.
And so all these cases have gone, as you can see, Rosa Parks, the Brown case, Loving, the sodomy case, Griswold, all go before the court.
But they're not real conflicts.
It's not as if Rosa Parks really had a problem sitting in the bus.
She was put up to it.
So, what I'm getting at is that while the left thinks that in this particular case they've got a big winner, oh, listen, we can't find a real plaintiff, and so on, ADF's point is that it's irrelevant.
The woman got a request, she made a complaint, and she basically said that, look, I don't want to be found in violation of the law because I refuse to make a website.
That issue carried itself forward before the court and the court made a ruling.
So it's not a, quote, hypothetical case.
It's a real case involving real principles.
And the left is only angry it didn't come out their way.
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The newest development in the Ukraine war is the decision by the Biden administration to up the ante to send cluster devices to Ukraine, which is an escalation.
And all of this is being done, I think, quite recklessly.
It's being done quite recklessly because escalations on one side produce escalations on the other.
That is an almost predictable principle of conflict.
And at some point, Vladimir Putin is going to say, listen, this is a proxy war.
I'm not really fighting Ukraine.
In fact, if I was fighting Ukraine, I would have won a long time ago.
This is a war with NATO. This is a war with America.
America is just fighting it as a proxy war.
And so an escalation at some point can find us or find NATO itself or find European targets to become vulnerable because of the ramping up that is going on from the Western side.
Now, How did all of this even get started?
Is this a case where Putin just decided one fine day to invade Ukraine?
No, I don't think there's any responsible or informed person who thinks that.
But some people think that it started because Putin was on the defensive and Putin basically has imperialistic ambitions that Putin somehow wants to revive the old Russian Empire.
Other people think that, no, this all goes back to 2014.
The United States supported a coup in Kiev.
The Crimea then voted to join Russia.
But even that is not really the beginning of all of this.
The beginning of all of this is much earlier.
And there's an interesting post in medium.com which talks about the fact that all of this goes back to the end of the Cold War.
In fact, it began in 1990.
Now, the Soviet Union collapsed a little bit later, 1991, 1992.
But Eastern Europe was already being liberated.
Remember the Berlin Wall, 1989.
So this is that very epical moment in Russian history when a giant empire that had been established going all the way back to the early part of the century, around the time of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and that lasted about 80 years.
Now, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the major leaders of the West did go to Mikhail Gorbachev and say to him, they obviously wanted to encourage him to continue with Glasnost and perestroika, to accept, if you will, the New position of the Soviet Union no longer as a world's sole superpower.
But, of course, Russia had legitimate and ongoing security concerns.
What's going to happen to us if we dismantle communism and if we start changing our system and if we change our relationship to the West?
And by and large, the leading figures in the West said, listen, we are not going to advance NATO into areas that will threaten your security.
Who said that?
George H.W. Bush said that, the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the French President Mitterrand, and even UK's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Of course, the Russians were very worried about the unification of Germany.
Why? Because Western Germany and East Germany, which was previously part of the Soviet orbit, were not going to come into a single country.
So East Germany was, in a sense, going to join the West.
And so the West made assurances and said, in effect, and I'm quoting now U.S. Secretary of State Jim Baker, he said, there will be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction or NATO forces one inch to the east.
In other words, NATO is not going to march further east.
Now, there are two possibilities.
One is that This was never true, that NATO always intended to expand eastward.
Or what happened is that the Bush administration was voted out of power.
Clinton comes in. But in any event, Clinton now begins the expansion of NATO. And I think Clinton felt, sure, why not?
Let's do it. Russia is basically weak.
China is poor. The United States has sort of unchallenged hegemony or domination.
And so in the 1990s, you have a NATO summit in Madrid.
Poland joins NATO. Hungary joins NATO. The Czech Republic joins NATO. And then seven more countries joined NATO in 2002, and four more have joined since then.
So, the point here is that Russia has been watching these developments...
In its neighborhood, in its own backyard, with considerable alarm.
In fact, in 2008, NATO was even talking about Ukraine and Georgia becoming members of NATO. And so we are seeing a Russian reaction to all this.
In order to understand Russia's position, let's remember that we in the United States have the Monroe Doctrine.
We don't always enforce the Monroe Doctrine, but the Monroe Doctrine has been in effect now for well over a century, in fact, a century and a half.
And the idea of it, which is more important than the doctrine itself, is simply the idea that the United States doesn't tolerate other superpowers establishing themselves, establishing beachheads in our backyard.
In fact, this was the basis of John F. Kennedy's concern over the Russian missiles in Cuba.
The idea of the Monroe Doctrine is stay out of our backyard.
And this is really what the Russians are feeling now.
They're feeling, wait a minute, what's all this stuff going on in our backyard?
and Ukraine, let's remember, is in fact in Russia's backyard.
In the 1990s, the Russians tried to work with the West.
In fact, they embraced American politics, American economics, American culture.
Many of the Russian billionaires were regular kind of presences in the West and in America.
And all of this with a diminished position of Russia, a reduced GDP.
The Russian GDP had fallen over 50%.
And so what's happened with Putin is that he's trying ultimately to create some version of his own Monroe Doctrine, which is to say, from a weaker position to be sure, but enough is enough, or there's a limit.
And so, one argument for what pushed Putin to get into Ukraine is the idea that The assurances that have been given by the West going all the way back to the end of the Cold War were not followed.
And so, the West did not pay attention to Russia's legitimate security concerns.
Now, this is not a defense of Putin's decision to go into Ukraine, but it's trying to understand the psychology of a country, Russia, that has, by the way, been invaded many times from the outside by Russia.
Aggressive powers in the West.
Let's think, for example, of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, Hitler's invasion of Russia.
So the Russians are not wrong to think that they have been attacked from the outside by Western powers.
And to this degree, their legitimate security concerns need to be taken into account.
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I've been following over the past several weeks the polls that show a continuing dominance of Trump in the Republican primary landscape. And not only is Trump the leading figure, but his lead appears to be increasing. At one
point Debbie was saying to me, I think that you know this is getting to be close and Trump is going to have other people maybe jostling at his heels.
And it did look like that was the case.
But suddenly, Trump is pulled away.
Trump's lead appears to be as big as ever.
In fact, he's, I think, right at the edge of 50%.
DeSantis is around 20%.
So think about it. There's a 30-point difference there.
Some of the other candidates are moving up and down.
Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and so on.
But suffice to say that Trump doesn't at this point seem to have much to worry about.
And the left is really baffled by this because, after all, there have been two indictments that have come down.
And they are not small indictments.
There are indictments on multiple counts.
There's the indictment in New York with Alvin Bragg.
And then there's the indictment that came down from Jack Smith, multiple felony charges, long prison terms.
And it's almost as if, and this is really what worries the left, that the more indictments, the more People huddle around Trump, the stronger Trump becomes.
And from the left's point of view, it's like, what's wrong with the Republicans?
Why are these Republicans so crazy?
Do they like criminals?
I thought they were anti-crime, Dinesh!
Well, what's happening here is this is a phenomenon that does need to be explained.
I should say that Trump himself is very aware of this.
And in fact, he has been saying on the campaign trail things to the effect of, hey, every time they give me a subpoena, I gain like two points in the polls.
And so more subpoenas means more public support.
And I think Trump is right to say that the, not necessarily the American people, because we don't know what the American people think quite yet.
There are some polls, by the way, that match DeSantis versus Biden and Trump versus Biden.
But I'm talking now just about polls inside of the Republican fold.
It's pretty clear that the Republican Party, Republicans in general, do not attach any weight, any serious weight to these charges.
They consider them to be ridiculous, put up, Trump is being framed here.
He's being singled out.
He's being charged with things that other people have done, but they figured out a way.
Let's figure out why we can charge Trump and not charge the other guy.
Well, see, Biden had classified documents, but he gave them back, even though he kept them longer and he had them going back to his Senate days.
And even though Biden doesn't have a right to declassify and Trump does, somehow that kind of disappears and Trump becomes the fellow to be pursued and not Biden.
In fact, there is a special council that's been named to look into Biden's classified documents.
And guess what? We haven't heard one word from that guy.
It's almost like that guy has gone on a long-term vacation and dead silence.
No talk about charges.
no talk about pulling together a grand jury, no talk really about anything.
It's almost as if this was like, let's find a guy that we kind of know.
We'll kind of do a little bit of a wink wink.
He'll pretend to investigate.
We'll pretend to have commissioned him to do it and nothing will come of it.
We'll know just about, we'll hear from him in the same way we've heard the truth about the, what was it, the Las Vegas mass shooter.
Whatever happened to that?
It kind of just vanished.
And I don't think it vanished because we don't know, because no one knows what happened.
They do know what happened. They're just not telling us.
That's the point. Now, I think the reason that Trump continues to have the support is that people realize that, look, here's a guy...
Who not only was wronged in 2020, and I'm talking here about 2000 Mules, but I'm also talking about the 12 different ways in which the playing field was made on level.
In other words, in which the rules were changed under COVID. Let's have drop boxes and let's have them in the inner cities.
Let's have them in democratic areas.
Let's put democratic activists into the election administration.
So they're the ones that are kind of running things on election day.
All of this outrageous stuff, not to mention media censorship and digital media censorship of the Hunter Biden story.
So all of this. So here's Trump.
He's wronged in that way.
And now he's being wronged in the sense that they are, before they tried to impeach him, maybe that'll stop him from running again.
Then they tried to fix the outcome.
And now it's like, let's put him in prison so he can't run again.
And Republicans are like, well, this is outrageous.
You're doing all this in the name of democracy.
How outrageous is it to pretend to be a defender of democracy and go after the leading candidate of the opposition party in this way?
So it's these banana republic tactics by the left that help to explain why people are like, listen, I may have some issues with Trump, but I'm Trump all the way.
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Feel the difference. As Debbie and I landed in London, We realized that we couldn't get to our hotel.
Why? Because there was a massive pride parade going on.
And so, remarkably, we were dropped off.
Like, what, honey? 100 yards or 200 yards?
Yeah, Debbie was 20 minutes away.
And so here are the two of us, you know, dragging our suitcases through the streets of London because the hotel was simply inaccessible on account of...
Pride March. And then through the week, we just noticed that this Pride stuff is kind of everywhere.
And then a week later, right before we left, there was another march, which was a trans march.
This wasn't Pride generally, so it wasn't LGBTQ. It was just T, the trans part of it.
And it wasn't as big as the Pride march, but there it is, down the same street.
Streets are blocked and so on.
And all this kind of exhibitionism going on.
And so naturally, this was a subject of conversation when we were, you know, getting our ride back to the...
We're at the airport. We're talking to the driver.
And he's like, you know, and I think this is a general feeling, is he's like, I don't understand any of this.
What's really going on?
Now, in the Pride March, we noticed, of course, there were the, you know, the guys with their shirts off and the guys with, you know, all kinds of get-ups.
But there were also some people that you wouldn't expect to see.
There were some elderly ladies walking down there.
And Debbie's like, you know, I mean, are they gay?
Are they champions of the gay lifestyle?
No. So we're asking ourselves, why are they there?
What are they marching for?
What do they see themselves as doing?
And I think the answer is they see themselves as promoting goodwill, being nice, being tolerant, being accepting.
Allowing people to be themselves.
So, you have on the one hand the LGBTQ agenda itself, which is aggressive, in some ways quite dark.
But then you also have this kind of benign aura or spin that is put on it, as if at the end of the day, it's not about anything all that threatening.
It's no big deal. We're just letting people be themselves.
Even on United Airlines, we were flying back to Texas.
I saw that there was United supports Pride.
Now, I looked at the sort of the meme, and the meme doesn't show gays.
It doesn't show people holding hands.
It doesn't show people engaging in any kind of affection.
It's just some guy in a kind of a hazy background, and then there's a sort of a pride flag in the distance.
So United is obviously soft-pedaling the kind of more blatant imagery that you see at the marches themselves.
And then the guy driving us was saying, you know, he was saying, listen, well, I guess we, you know, it's natural to feel this way.
Our parents also felt that, you know, things were going downhill and morals were being corrupted.
But I stopped in them.
I said, well, you know, our parents were right.
In other words, our parents said that if you take moral standards and you start diluting them, there's no easy stopping point.
And there were many people in the past who said, well, of course there is.
You don't have to be on a slippery slope.
If you say okay to homosexuality, that doesn't mean you're saying okay to polygamy, and it doesn't mean you're saying okay to pedophilia and bestiality and all the rest of it all.
You're just making room for a group of people who are trying to live their lives.
But the point I'm trying to make is that the prophecy that things would go from bad to worse, and that when you open up a Pandora's box, all kinds of evils fly out.
This has turned out to be true.
And then as I looked at the trans march, I was actually at a restaurant with kind of almost a close-up view of all this, you realize that these are very unhappy people and their unhappiness is not the result of society.
They make it sound like it was you, society won't accept us and that's why we're... and I'm thinking to myself society won't accept you. I mean you're...
The White House is...
Every company is embracing you and every corporation is embracing you and here you are going down Piccadilly Street in London and this is going on all over Europe.
You couldn't be more accepted.
In fact, nobody does this for any other group.
So the level of acceptance is huge.
The tension is not between the trans or the gay lifestyle in society.
It's an internal conflict within the trans people themselves.
It's a conflict, you may say, between psychology and biology.
And when you see things like the trans people have the highest suicide rates, what that really means is that they are the most violent critics of themselves.
Ultimately, they're the ones who are saying, my life isn't worth living, I'm going to get out of here.
Well, that's a much stronger criticism than someone who just says, I don't like the trans lifestyle or posts something on social media.
In a sense, through their actions what they're saying is that this is a lifestyle that doesn't work, not even for those of us who are trying to make it work.
Guys, I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel.
I post a lot of exclusive content there, including content that's censored on other social media platforms.
On Locals, you get Dinesh Unchained, Dinesh Uncensored.
You can also interact with me directly.
I do a live weekly Q&A every Tuesday, and no topic is off-limits.
I've also uploaded some very cool films to Locals, documentaries, feature films, both my films.
And also films by other independent producers.
2,000 Mules is up there.
I'm doing a new film this year, a big one.
And I'll be giving you the inside scoop on Locals.
Hey, if you're an annual subscriber, you can stream and watch all these films for free.
So check out my channel. It's dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's dinesh.locals.com.
I completed, before I took off for London, my mini-course on Christian apologetics, focused on my book, What's So Great About Christianity?
I'm in that little interregnum before I launch into a new project, a new book, or a new big idea.
I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do next, but I thought what I would do today is Talk to you a little bit about the Russian writer Anton Chekhov.
Why? Because on the plane, I was reading some of the best short stories of Chekhov.
And you might remember a year or so ago, I did a...
Kind of an incomplete series on Russian writers.
I covered Pushkin. I covered Dostoevsky.
I think I did Tolstoy, Gogol.
But I then sort of interrupted it and I didn't cover Anton Chekhov or even the 20th century Russian writers.
So I'm going to focus on a particular story of Chekhov, partly because it's good in of itself, but partly also because I think it applies to our own situation, our cultural moment now.
So there's something we can learn specifically from it.
Chekhov was both a playwright and a short story writer.
Now, in terms of chronology, he comes a little bit later.
He's the end of the 19th century, leaning into the 20th century.
Let's remember Pushkin was more toward the middle of the 19th century, and then Tolstoy, then Dostoevsky.
So Chekhov comes a little bit after that, even after the writer Turgenev.
And Chekhov is very different than the writers that preceded him.
Particularly in the short stories, he doesn't follow a traditional short story format.
Now, typically in a short story, you have a very tight plot.
There's typically a single incident, often a single main character, and the main character has a problem.
The problem deepens, reaches some kind of a climax, is then resolved, and that's how the short story ends.
This is the short story formula that's been used in many cultures, but certainly in Western culture over many, many generations.
But Chekhov doesn't do this.
It's almost like his short stories are a slice of life.
And he picks up the action almost in the middle of somebody's life.
There's not necessarily this kind of typical build-up to a climax.
And then he doesn't necessarily even resolve the situation.
Very often the situation is left hanging.
So you might think that these stories would, for this reason, be kind of dull.
They would be somehow They would lack sharply drawn character or plot.
But what Chekhov is after is not so much any of that.
What he's after is the depiction of real life, the capturing of life as it is going on, so to speak.
And he also wants to capture the emotion of things.
So he pulls you into a situation where Chekhov was, by the way, by profession, a medical doctor.
But he was not a medical doctor in a big city, but in the provinces, in the small towns.
And so he, in his life, encountered a lot of different types of people.
He encountered, well, peasants, but also army officers and petty bureaucrats under the czar.
And he realized that all of this, their lives, could be the material.
That's the raw material for Chekhov's stories.
He's written some 600 stories, some very famous ones, The Lady with the Dog, The Darling, Ward No.
6, Peasants, and...
And what Chekhov has done is reinvent the idea of the short story because he, after Chekhov, a lot of writers began to write in the Chekhovian mode.
And I'm going to focus on a story of Chekhov that is called Men in a Case.
I'm actually finding the story here.
The man in a case.
Now, by case here, we don't mean a law case.
We mean the man physically enclosed in a case.
This seems a little bit strange, but Chekhov begins by talking about this fellow.
He lives in a small town.
His name is Bailikov.
And Chekhov begins by noting that this is a guy who always seemed to be covering things, enclosing them, if you will, in a case.
Here's what he writes.
He carried an umbrella even in the finest weather, and his umbrella was in a case, kind of in a sleeve.
He had a watch, but his watch, too, had a place to store it, and it was a case made of gray leather.
He took out his penknife.
His penknife also was in a case.
And Chekhov says even his face appeared to be in a case.
Why? Because he always hid his face in a collar that was turned up to hide most of his face.
He wore dark glasses.
When he got into a cab, says Shekhov, he always told the cab driver to pull up the hood.
In those days, of course, cabs were horse carriages, so pull the top so you can't really see him.
And so, says Shekhov, in short, the man displayed a constant and insurmountable impulse to wrap himself in a covering to make himself, so to speak, a case which would isolate him and protect him from external influences." Reality irritated him,
frightened him, kept him in continual agitation and perhaps to justify his timidity, his aversion for the actual, he always praised the past and what never existed, and Belikov tried even to hide his thoughts in a case.
Now, when I come back, I'll pick up this remarkable theme of a man who shrouds himself in coverings and wraps.
This is the man in a case, and as I will argue, it has something to say to us today.
I'm talking about Anton Chekhov's story, The Man in a Case.
And this is a man named Bailakov.
And the turn of the story is when this guy, who, as it turns out, is a kind of a recluse, but he meets a girl.
Her name is Varinka. And she's the opposite of him.
She is ebullient and lively and has a ringing laugh.
Chekhov even goes, ha, ha, ha.
She laughed, she sang, she danced.
And interestingly, he is too protective, too cautious to approach her.
But other people, including the headmistress of the school, decides, you know, it'd be kind of a good thing for Bailakov.
He's so reclusive.
It'd be good for him to get married.
He's about 40. Now, here's this girl, Varinka.
She's about 30. She's a lot of fun.
Here's the headmistress.
He's a good deal over 40 and she's 30.
I believe she would marry him.
And so the whole town gets it into their heads that, look, this is going to be a match that we ought to make.
So they encourage the two of them.
They keep prodding this guy, Bailakov, to make a proposal.
And Bailakov, being the man in the case, he goes, I like her.
He says, and I know everyone ought to get married, but, you know, this is all so sudden.
One needs to think about it.
And his friend goes, not really a friend, but an acquaintance, goes, get married.
What's there to think about? He goes, no, no, no.
Marriage is a serious step.
You've got to weigh the duties, the responsibilities.
Things could go wrong. So he keeps putting it off.
He won't do it. And then what happens is one day he sees the girl Varinka on a bicycle riding with her brother.
Now, he doesn't know immediately that it's the brother, but he's sort of scandalized by this idea that here is Varinka along with the schoolteacher, this is the brother, and they're riding a bike.
And so he decides that this is inappropriate.
First of all, it's inappropriate for a schoolteacher to be seen, but with a young, unmarried woman.
He goes, I've got to sort of take up the matter with him.
So Belikov goes to see the guy.
The guy basically tells Belikov, stay out of it.
She's my sister. What's it to you?
So what if we're riding a bike?
Big deal. You know, buzz off.
And Belikov, he can't really get his head around it.
He's like, well, have you cleared this matter?
Have you gotten it approved by the school?
This is the kind of guy he is.
Very anal, as we say these days.
And so he begins to become annoying.
And so the brother just kind of pushes him and accidentally Belikov slips and he goes rolling down the stairs.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And he lands at the bottom.
And this is not only humiliating enough, but at this exact moment, the girl, Varinka, shows up, and she looks at him, and she goes, well, she doesn't understand what's going on.
She doesn't, of course, realize that he was pushed.
She feels that he just kind of slipped, and he's not...
Badly hurt in any way, so she can see there's no reason to be alarmed, and so she laughs.
Ha ha ha ha! She thinks it's very funny that this happened.
But, of course, Beliakov can't take it that way.
He is so insulted.
He's so humiliated.
He feels like he has been degraded, first by the brother and now by the girl herself.
He immediately abolishes all thoughts of marrying her, and in fact, his self-image is so damaged that he goes home and He refuses to come out of his house.
He catches a horrible infection inside the house and he dies.
And then, of course, this is very Chekhovian in its sort of irony.
A month later, Belikov died.
We all went to his funeral.
Now when he was lying in the coffin, his expression was mild, agreeable, even cheerful, writes Chekhov, as though he were glad that he had last been put into a case which he would never leave again.
So this is a man who lived all his life in a case, and now finally he is in a case, otherwise known as a coffin, and this is a case that he will never get out of.
And says Chekhov, yes, he had attained his ideal.
And, so here is Chekhov.
You might think the story might somehow end there, but it really doesn't, because it continues with two other guys who are now commenting about...
And one of them, a guy named Ivan Ivanovich, makes a very interesting observation.
He says, hey, this is how it was for this poor guy.
He always wanted to shield himself from reality.
He couldn't get out, if you will, of his case.
He couldn't see the world as it is.
And then he says, quote, And isn't our living in town airless and crowded, our writing useless papers, our playing musical instruments, isn't that all sort of a case for us?
And our spending our whole lives among trivial, fussy men and silly, idle women, our talking and listening to all sorts of nonsense, isn't that a case for us too?
I think what Chekhov is getting at here is the human tendency, which is also true ideologically, to get yourself into a case or to get yourself into a framework, into a bubble in which you can't look at things as they are.
You have to interpret things through the narrow lens or the narrow peephole, if you will, looking out of the case and And what Chekhov is basically saying, and again, Chekhov stories don't have morals.
It's not that there's a lesson to be learned.
It's more that there are insights to be derived.
And the insight I'm drawing here, and we see this so often with the left, is they can't get out of their bubble.
They can't look at Trump the way that he is.
It has to be through a series of slogans.
And so they are in their own way men in a case.
Men and women enclosed in such a way that they can't see the world as it is.
And we should also remember that we ourselves need to resist the temptation to be that way.
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