The following is part one of a four-part series taken from a speech delivered by Michael Knowles at the National Intercollegiate Studies Institute Honors Conference.

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Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet, politician, and political philosopher. The occasion of writing his magnum opus, the “Divine Comedy,” came as a result of politics. But before we get into the poem, we need some historical context. Those of you who have read Dante know that politics is a recurring theme. You need a lot of context.

Dante served in political life for just over seven years from 1295 to 1301. There were two dominant political parties in Italy during Dante’s time: the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. The Guelphs supported the pope; the Ghibellines, the Holy Roman Emperor. Dante was a Guelph, and he fought the Ghibellines at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289. 

The Guelphs won. But after the victory, they split into two factions: the Whites, who wanted to limit the temporal power of the pope, and the Blacks, who wanted to expand the temporal power of the pope. Dante was a White Guelph: pro-pope but also pro-emperor — the medieval Florentine version of a RINO.

Eventually, the Whites took control, and Dante ascended to Florence’s supreme governing council, the Priorate, on June 15, 1300. This is an important date. Because it occurs historically just two or three months after the action of the “Comedy” takes place. Dante wrote the “Comedy” from 1308 to 1321, but the events occur in 1300 over the course of seven days, from Holy Thursday through Easter Wednesday.

Dante served in the Priorate for two months. In 1301, both the Whites and the Blacks appealed to Pope Boniface VIII to resolve the conflict. You can infer what Dante thought of the man by the fact that Dante signals his damnation in Hell three years before the pope actually died.

While Dante entreated Boniface to help settle the civil war in Florence, Boniface sent Charles of Valois, brother of King Philip IV of France, into Florence with the Black Guelphs to ransack the city, slaughter Dante’s friends, and exile the Whites, including Dante, who was stripped of his property and threatened with death if he returned. Dante never saw Florence again.

Portrait of Italian poet, politician, and author Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321), early 14th Century. Author of ‘The Divine Comedy.’ (Photo by Stock Montage/Getty Images)

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Who cares? Why do we need to know all these political minutiae to appreciate a poem about the afterlife? Isn’t the point of eternity that we don’t need to care about all this historical trivia?

An intelligent, widely read, deeply educated friend has made this complaint to me. He loves Dante’s cosmic vision, but he hates that Dante demands so much political and historical context. The references are just so particular. John Milton doesn’t demand that we memorize the annual register of Roundheads to appreciate “Paradise Lost,” but Dante insists that we learn about Forese Donati, Henry VII of Luxembourg, Charles of Anjou, and so many others. My friend in exasperation has joked that the poem could be called the “Divine Comedy: or, Guido Pizzarelli Gets His.”

But that’s the point. Politics and the particularity of politics are crucial to understanding Dante’s vision — because Dante understands that politics is the medium through which our salvation occurs. We are pilgrims who will reach our final destination, wherever that may be, only through history. The journey of our life will not occur through teleportation.

Our pilgrimages entail particular deeds done with particular people in particular places as well as particular words said in particular languages — languages which are, as Dante’s decision to write the “Comedy” in the vernacular underscores, historically contingent and constantly changing. If one were inclined toward academic jargon, one might say that Dante understands the whole cosmos through a hermeneutic of particularity.

WATCH: The Michael Knowles Show on DailyWire+

There is no escaping history. For us, there is no neutral or eternal standpoint. We must always be moving — in our minds, in our hearts, and in our bodies — because this is not our home. We are all exiles. The particularity of Dante’s exile from Florence is a literal representation of humanity’s allegorical condition since our first ancestors ate the forbidden fruit. All of history is and must be understood to be a kind of exodus.

Dante makes this point explicit in a letter to his patron in Verona, Cangrande della Scala. In the letter, Dante writes, “The sense of this work is not simple. … The first sense is that which comes from the letter, the second is that of that which is signified by the letter. And the first is called the literal, the second allegorical or moral or anagogical.” Dante points to the story of Exodus; he quotes from Psalm 113, which he again quotes in “Purgatory”: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion.”

Dante says the literal meaning is “the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses.” The allegorical meaning is “our redemption done by Christ.” The moral of the story is “the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace.” And the anagogical sense — the mystical or eschatological sense — is “the leave taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory.” One line, four layers of meaning.

To ask why Dante needs to include all these obscure references to political figures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is to ask why God needs to lead a particular people at a particular time from Egypt to Jerusalem. It is to ask why God needs to send his particular Son to be born of a particular woman in the fullness of time in a particular town under the rule of a particular emperor to die on a particular Cross. That is simply how God tells his story — which is to say, that is how the story is told. We tell our stories with letters; God tells his story with us.

Dante begins his story in a similar way, with the literal and the allegorical, the particular and universal all immediately apparent. He begins, “In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.” Dante is at this point 34-years-old, about to turn 35, which is middle age, according to Psalm 90. (For some of us, this is the first of many harsh facts that will appear in the “Comedy.”)

Beyond the language of “me” and “I,” there’s something even more particular going on in the first lines of this poem. We notice the repetition of the same word three times. Three is obviously an important number for Dante. The poem is divided into three canticles: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The rhyme scheme is what’s called “terza rima” — rhymes that occur in triplets interlaced. And three the number of the Trinity.

The repeated word is “selva” — wood. The translations don’t preserve the repetition, but in the Italian we read:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

ché la diritta via era smarrita. 

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte….

“Selva,” “selva,” “selvaggia” — there’s the meaning of “savage” there, but it’s also as if he said “a wood that’s a woody wood.” Dante had a rather robust vocabulary. So why the repetition?

The answer, I believe, lies in Canto VI of “Inferno,” the first of the three political cantos. Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is so meticulously ordered and harmonious that it can be read not only vertically but also horizontally across the canticles. And the sixes are all political cantos because the sixth day is the final day of creation before God rests and the day when God creates man, the political animal. “Inferno” VI is about the city; “Purgatorio” VI, the nation; “Paradiso” VI, the Empire. 

The following is an edited transcript of an interview on an Exclusive edition of Morning Wire. Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley sits down with CEO, president, and general counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom, Kristen Waggoner, and Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon about a new lawsuit over censorship.

Earlier this month, California’s Gavin Newsom signed first-in-the-nation “deepfake” laws – a move that came just weeks after he said a Kamala Harris online parody video should be “illegal.” While the Democrat governor’s office is celebrating the laws as a “safeguard” against the use of “deceptive” digital content, conservatives say this is a massive violation of free speech.

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JOHN: Joining us now to discuss for the first time the lawsuit they have just filed today against the state of California is Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee, and Kristen Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom. Seth and Kristen, thank you so much for joining us. Now you’ve partnered to sue over these new laws just recently signed by Governor Newsom. First, Seth, I’d like to ask you, why did you feel compelled to bring this lawsuit?

SETH: Well, I guess a number of things. We started out the Bee as a comedy site that’s mission was just to tell jokes on the internet. And over the course of the last several years – you know, the Bee’s been around for eight years now, if you can believe that – and for most of that time for the last six years, we’ve been battling either big state, big tech censorship or state laws that clamp down on speech with either rules against misinformation, rules against hate speech, laws now that we see popping up trying to prevent parody, the use of deep fakes, memes, things of that nature. And so we’re concerned about freedom of speech first and foremost, but we’re also concerned about our business, and when you’re doing satire, when you’re parodying people, you’re adopting their voice, you’re adopting their likeness. Satirical articles are meant to look like real articles and that’s the hook that pulls you in and then you hit them with a punchline. So, Babylon Bee’s content requires that we engage in this satire, where we’re adopting a voice and a viewpoint and using that to mock and ridicule a subject. And this law in particular – well, there are a couple of laws in play here – but one of them affects content creators, specifically satirists and people doing parody by requiring them to put disclaimers to let you know that this is parody that you’re reading right now – which completely stifles and kills the joke. It disrupts our ability to do what we do the way that we do it, in the voice we do it in. And so that’s very problematic for us. If we’re unable to publish satire without putting disclaimers all over it, and we’re going to face potentially penalties if we don’t do that, then that’s a very serious issue too. So we’re fighting back in every way we can against laws that clamp down on speech. So this is just one more, this is just the latest example of an effort where the state is now basically turning these social platforms into an arm of their censorship apparatus and coming after satirists like us very aggressively. So, we see that as an important thing that needs to be pushed back on.

JOHN: Right – and this brings us to the legal arguments here. Kristen, can you lay out the legal case that you’re bringing against California?

KRISTEN: I can. These laws that were passed in California target core political speech. These laws were passed by politicians to protect politicians from speech that they don’t like. I’ll point to two in particular. The first law is used to punish speakers for posting political commentary online that the government doesn’t like, decides is materially deceptive content, and it is targeting that content that affects candidates or election officials and what they say might harm their chances of getting elected. It also allows anybody to file a lawsuit if they want to file a lawsuit regarding a post. So in addition to what Seth talked about with regard to these disclaimers that actually defeat the whole point of the joke, they also subject all kinds of people – me and you – to saying, ”Well, should I repost this or not? Because what if it gets me sued?” It’s deeply disturbing and sets a roadmap for widespread censorship across the nation.

LISTEN: Catch the full interview with Seth Dillon and Kristen Waggoner on Morning Wire

JOHN: So this isn’t just for companies. This is for individuals. This applies to individuals posting any content online, even reposting content. Is that correct?

KRISTEN: Yes, that’s correct.

JOHN: So this really opens the floodgates legally. Have we seen anything similar to this in any other states?

KRISTEN: We’ve seen censorship writ large in Western democracies now outside of the United States. And I think it’s important for Americans to understand that the United States is the last country in the Western world, among Western democracies, to protect free speech, to protect core political speech. The last people who should be doing the fact-checking are the political candidates and Gavin Newsom – and that’s what these laws do. They’re incompatible with self-government and democracy.

JOHN: How much of a burden is this to the platforms – this is a threat to the platforms as well if the state decides they’re not properly policing content, correct? 

KRISTEN: It’s absolutely a threat. It is a roadmap to widespread censorship. There’s no question about it, and there is no law that has gone this far. If we want to maintain a free society, if we want self-government, if we want democracy, then we can’t allow Gavin Newsom to tell us what we can post and what we can’t post.

JOHN: Elon Musk’s platform X is obviously fighting against censorship laws. Are any other platforms pushing back on these new laws? 

KRISTEN: Yes, I believe there will be more platforms that will push back on it. One of the problems with this law is that it’s so vague. In certain parts, it’s even hard to know what it says. And if the lawyers are having trouble explaining it, imagine what the average person is going to have to do to be able to repost something and feel like they won’t get sued for it. So there is one lawsuit that’s pending right now related to a post, and this is the second lawsuit. And I expect you’ll see more. I hope you will see more.

JOHN: Now you brought up fact-checking. I know this is something that Seth has talked about a lot, and here at The Daily Wire, obviously, we’ve dealt with this firsthand. We have a current lawsuit related to the Biden administration’s collusion with fact-checking groups. Central to this is the idea that the state can actually identify what is true or not true, and that they are the arbiters of that. What is the legal case against that kind of suppression via “fact-checking”?

KRISTEN: The legal case is that the free speech clause of the First Amendment in the United States Constitution — as well as a number of state constitutions — protects our right as Americans to be able to decide what is true, what is false, what is worthy of being said in the public square. We necessarily understand that if you allow the government to decide what speech is worthy of being given voice to, you are not only impairing the right to self-government and to impose a check on government officials, but you’re also impairing the pursuit of truth and social progress. We know in particular satire and parody have been used since the days of Voltaire and George Washington and Aristotle. Political satire has been used to reveal truth, to shock people into considering things in a new way. It serves a vibrant purpose, particularly in public debate.

JOHN: Now the argument presented by advocates of these censorship laws often focuses on “misinformation” – that “misinformation” is dangerous for the public. We saw a lot of this during the COVID era. But you see this really highlighted in satirical content, in particular. The Babylon Bee has really led the way on this issue, highlighting the fact that this distinction between satire and straight news is not made – often in a very disingenuous way by the people that have the authority to block content on social media platforms. Seth, how have you seen this play out writ large in the last few years?

SETH: Well, it’s funny you mentioned COVID. That whole scenario seemed like satire to me as I was watching it, and then watching the excuses they were making for the censorship. You remember they were telling you what you were and weren’t allowed to say based on whatever the prevailing narrative was. Whatever the CDC says you’re allowed to say or whatever Fauci says you’re allowed to say, that’s permitted, but you can’t challenge that. Then, later on, as the facts changed and people realized some of the things that they were saying were wrong— it was actually the case that many people had been speaking the truth and had been censored. And it just really highlights the fundamental problem with trying to decide up front what the truth is. Kristen mentioned a moment ago the utility of being able to speak freely. Part of that is truth seeking. You have to be able to debate ideas and challenge ideas rather than just arbitrarily deciding at any given moment in time what’s true. If knowledge changes over time, then it may turn out that you’re censoring people who are speaking the truth today. And that’s exactly what we saw with COVID. That is actually a knockdown argument against censorship for what they were doing with COVID and the way that the facts actually played out and disrupted some of those narratives. And so with “misinformation,” we’ve seen our jokes fact-checked so many times and we’ve been threatened with de-platforming and demonetization so many times by a number of these different platforms.There are state laws that are trying to clamp down on the spread of misinformation or on hate speech. And so, on the one hand we want to just kind of mock and make fun of that stuff, and on the other, we have to take it very seriously and push back with legal challenges when necessary.

JOHN: ADF is really leading the charge on those challenges. Kristen, what other kinds of cases are related to this that your team has been a part of? 

KRISTEN: Well, we’ve seen government censorship play out here in the United States. First of all, in cases like Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cake Shop, where laws have been weaponized to force people to say things that they don’t believe and to face severe punishment in some states, even jail time for declining to speak messages about marriage and other topics. Then, we have moved to instances where pregnancy resource centers, for example, are facing assaults right now to have to refer to abortion — or to essentially express speech that violates their pro-life beliefs. We have a case right now at the US Supreme Court that we’re asking the Court to hear involving the right of a young boy in school who simply wants to say that there are two genders on his T-shirt when all of his colleagues are wearing things that suggest otherwise. So we are seeing this across the spectrum. We litigate more cases in this area than anyone else. But I also want to highlight the international perspective right now, because we have cases on five continents. We have congressmen in Mexico we’re defending; someone on death row in Nigeria. We had a trial this week in the UK for someone who engaged in silent prayer. Peru just had a criminal conviction, a case that we won this last week. So this is an all out assault by government officials. The World Economic Forum right now says its greatest threat is “misinformation” and “disinformation.” And when the public hears those words, they should understand what that means is government censorship. Someone who wants control will first take away the right to speak freely, and our First Amendment says that it’s up to the American people to decide and to think for themselves in the context, particularly of political debates. And we need to make sure that stays the same way and that those laws are upheld, despite what California’s trying to do here. One last thing on this that we haven’t even touched on is that this California law actually sets up social media platforms to be snitches on people. A second law actually requires these platforms to accept complaints and then to censor speech, even when they don’t want to censor speech. So it is Orwellian in nature.

JOHN: So this California law turns Americans against each other, sort of weaponizing them with this “misinformation” clause. Now this case focuses on satire. Is this an original case in some ways? How much has satire played into the legal history of censorship laws?

KRISTEN: We have not seen any law like this in the United States. Now perhaps there’s some that I’m unaware of, but we’ve seen no similar law where it has been targeted in this way through a state law. And frankly, in terms of the Western democracy and the laws that we’re seeing, they’re far more draconian. We can look at Brazil right now, where we have a petition before the Inter-American Commission — they’re just simply taking X down altogether. But this is the way it starts. These are code words that allow government officials and political opponents to sue over speech that they just don’t like.

SETH: Yes.What she said a minute ago was right on point. It’s when they use words like trying to crack down on “misinformation” and “hate speech,” these attempts at content moderation, they are euphemisms for censorship. What they’re trying to do is guard certain narratives, not the truth. And they often end up guarding those narratives at the expense of the truth.

JOHN: Final question, to return to California. What’s next for this case? And do you think these laws have any chance of standing up in court?

KRISTEN: We will be filing the case that will go up through the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. We will be asking the trial court for a preliminary injunction and then a permanent injunction to stop these laws from going into effect. It’s difficult to say what will happen in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals up through the federal system in California, but I do believe, I am optimistic that the United States Supreme Court will stand up for free speech. But time will tell. It takes a lot of time, a lot of resources, and courage by groups and people like Seth and the Babylon Bee to stand up, because again, under this law, you and I can get sued for posting a parody or a satire, some type of joke – and that’s chilling.

JOHN: Well, we certainly will be tracking your lawsuit, as its outcome impacts, well, all of us. Seth and Kristen, thank you so much for joining us. 

SETH: Thank you for having us.

KRISTEN: Thank you.

JOHN: That was Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee, and Kristen Waggoner, president of Alliance Defending Freedom – and this has been an Exclusive edition of Morning Wire. 

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LISTEN: Catch the full interview with Seth Dillon and Kristen Waggoner on Morning Wire