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Feb. 2, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:35
THE OTHER LINCOLN “PROJECT" Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep17
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The big scam called Listen to the Science, Perversion at the Lincoln Project, and author Eric Metaxas on the Road to God.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
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The Lincoln Project, a so-called Republican effort to overthrow Trump and, in fact, defeat the GOP, a group that spent over $30 million against Trump and in favor of Biden in the recent election.
And on the grounds that Trump is immoral, Trump has had such a perverted life.
Well, as it turns out, the Lincoln Project has some problems of perversion in its own camp.
Its co-founder, a guy named John Weaver, has apparently been on a multi-year expedition of prospecting for young men.
He sends them sexually suggestive messages and texts.
In one case, he was even chasing around, in a lewd way, a 14-year-old boy.
And all of this has kind of suddenly sprung to light.
It sprung to light now, but it's been known for a while.
And it's caused a big furor, as it should.
Now, very interestingly, for a long time, these accusations were covered up.
Journalists knew about them, but they liked Project Lincoln.
They liked the Lincoln Project. They wanted it to do damage to Trump, and so they protected this guy, Weaver.
Karl Rove said that he knew about these accusations going back to the 1980s.
And yet, when he talked about them, here's an interesting article, a little snippet from the Atlantic magazine.
Rove spread a rumor that Weaver had made a pass at a young man at a state Republican function.
Weaver won't reply to the smear, but those close to him told me of their outrage at the nearly two decades old lie.
So The Atlantic, claiming that something is a lie that we now know is not a lie, and is in fact absolutely true.
Now, George Conway, sometime husband of Kellyanne Conway, Winner of many TV game shows for America's Worst Husband.
Nevertheless, George Conway was recently on TV talking about these revelations about Weaver.
Listen. Conway, thanks for being on this morning.
I'd be remiss not to ask you about the story about John Weaver, who is a founding member of the Lincoln Project, 21 men accusing him of online harassment.
Your organization has a pretty clear statement on this kind of harassment, but wanted to ask you directly about this issue.
Yeah, it's terrible and awful and appalling and unfathomable.
I I didn't know John very well.
I frankly only spoke to him a couple of times on the phone early on in the Lincoln Project.
I just, it's almost, I don't even know what to say.
It's just terrible.
I mean, there are two striking things about this clip.
The first is the solicitousness of the host.
She's very reluctant to bring it up.
Oh, if I can bring up an awkward topic.
In other words, she'd rather not bring it up.
Just imagine if Steve Bannon was the one who was being accused of all these things.
Oh, these people would have such relish.
There'd be non-stop, wall-to-wall coverage.
In fact, you'd get interruptions and notifications on your phone about it.
Here, they're trying to downplay it.
And the second thing that's even funnier and more telling is Conway's response.
He's like, I hardly knew the guy.
You know, first of all, it kind of reminds me of that great scene in Casablanca where the...
Where the French police officer is discussing his amazement over gambling going on in the casino.
Listen. Everybody's to leave here immediately.
This cafe is closed until further notice.
Clear the room at once. How can you close me up?
On what ground? I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.
You're winning, sir. Oh, thank you very much.
Everybody out at once.
Suddenly, you know, nobody really knows this guy Weaver.
Even though these fellows, Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson and Conway, they're all buddies.
They formed this group together.
They spent all this money together.
They've flown on planes together.
Here I have in my hand an article from the New York Times.
We are Republicans and we want Trump defeated.
December 17, 2019.
Four authors.
George Conway, Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, John Weaver.
So, these guys knew about it.
It seems pretty obvious.
It's really unbelievable that they wouldn't know.
In fact, many of the boys in question complained bitterly.
And they were rebuffed.
They were sort of poo-pooed, you might say.
And this is really very disgusting because it's almost reminiscent to me of the whole Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Because Jeffrey Epstein had enablers.
I mean, Ghislaine Maxwell was basically, you may say, his madam, his pimp.
She was the procurer.
She's the one who approached the underage girls.
Oh, come give Jeffrey a massage.
Yeah. You know, come to Lolita Island.
We've got all kinds of surprises planned for you.
There are going to be a lot of rich old men there.
So I'm wondering if something like this was going on in the Lincoln Project.
I mean, I think it all bears investigation.
This is a case where we need to find out whether or not John Weaver was a lone predator, which is one possibility, or whether his predation was part of a Lincoln Project operation.
Because after all, it all kind of throws a new motive on the whole thing.
On the first glance, you would have thought, oh, this guy Weaver, he's appalled by Trump.
Oh, Trump is just so out of line.
His behavior is just unacceptable for a Republican.
That's why we got to start the Lincoln Project.
But now we have a second motive, a more important motive.
I'm a pedophile. I'm a pervert, says John Weaver.
What about if I start a project that is a Republican hit on Trump?
This way I can guarantee media cover if any of this ever comes out.
Because we know that from the Clintons to Epstein himself, the left-wing media provides cover for perverts and pedophiles as long as they are on their side.
I think this is the story of John Weaver and the Lincoln Project.
And when we come back, I'm going to ask a question, which is, was John Weaver simply born in the wrong time and the wrong place?
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I've been thinking about John Weaver, the massive pervert and pedophile at the Lincoln Project, and also all his buddies.
And initially I thought to myself, man, these revelations must be so crushing and so humiliating and so disgraceful.
But then it occurred to me, I had a strange thought, and that is that John Weaver may be thinking to himself, wow, if I only lived in a different time and a different place, I'd be just fine.
Not only that, I'd be normal.
And all these other people criticizing me, they would be the strange ones.
I'm thinking here of the world of ancient Greece, particularly the world of Sparta, the world of the Spartan wrestling pits and all the shenanigans that went on there.
Now, this was a subject shrouded in secrecy, kind of the Greek practice that dare not speak its name, you might say, but it was the publication of K.J. Dover's book, Greek Homosexuality, about a generation ago, that kicked off a real study Into what was going on in ancient Greece.
You may say, John Weaver country.
So I kind of have this idea of John Weaver getting into a time machine, going back into the world of classical antiquity.
And let's see what he would discover when he got there.
First of all, he would discover that homosexuality was pervasive in ancient Greece.
Apparently the practice began in one part of Greece, and the Dorians, they were the last tribe to migrate to Greece.
It came to the Dorian island, Crete, and then there was a practice in Crete where grown men would kidnap these adolescents and then do what they wanted with them, and then this began to spread.
Typically, homosexuality in Greece involved an older man and a younger boy.
The older man was considered to be kind of the bearded guy.
He was called the Erastes.
And the younger boy was called the Arominus.
So Greek homosexuality, weirdly enough, was not between, quote, consenting adults.
It was not between, let's say, two 30-year-olds.
In fact, that was considered perverted.
What we would consider gay was considered abnormal in ancient Greece.
It had to be an older man and a younger boy.
And in fact, as you look closer, you realize that this bizarre relationship, initially thought to be a prerogative of the aristocratic class, but now believed to have spread even in other classes as well, this was actually based upon a theory of education.
Yes, believe it or not.
I think Weaver would be kind of excited to make all these discoveries education.
See, the idea here was that the younger boy and the older man each had something to supply to the other.
There was a kind of reciprocity.
So the younger boy supplies sex.
And what does the older man supply?
Education! Wisdom!
So, you know, this is like, John Weaver's like, hey, you know, I've been on all these political campaigns.
I mean, I've got a lot of wisdom to give.
Allegedly, Weaver was chasing after a hundred different boys at different times, at least according to the reporter who broke the story.
I mean, this is... Wow, a hundred.
I mean, it takes a village to please this guy.
In any event, the pedagogical theory of Greek homosexuality was based on this idea of reciprocity and exchanging each party supplying something to the other.
Interestingly, the boy was not supposed to be sexually gratified.
In fact, the word used for the boy was philia.
The boy was interested in friendship and maturity, and it was eros on the man's side, so kind of on the John Weaver side.
Interestingly, there are Greek poets, Theogenes of Megara being one of them, but we also see this in, I have my copy here of Plato's Symposium, and there's a remarkable speech in it by Pausanias.
And Pausanias is talking about falling in love with these younger boys.
And the remarkable thing is, far from considering it an exploitation of the younger boy, what Pausanias is complaining about in Plato's Symposium is that this arrangement is unfair to the older man.
Why? Because these younger boys are just so ruthless and they use up one man and then they move to another.
They abandon the older man, leaving him with his own affections and so on.
So remarkably here, this is considered a relationship that is cruel to the older man.
Again, I can see Weaver's eyes kind of lighting up at this whole idea.
Now, Socrates, of course, will have none of this.
He's attracted to younger boys, but he has self-control.
He basically says no.
And the younger men are attracted to Socrates.
Here's his Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium, talking about Socrates.
"'When I listen to him, my heart beats faster than if I were in a religious frenzy, and tears run down my face, and I observe that numbers of other people have the same experience.'" He goes, nothing of this kind ever used to happen to me when I listened to Pericles.
So, Alcibiades was not turned on by Pericles, but he's majorly turned on by Socrates.
But Socrates is not going for it.
And this is the key point, and I think a point relevant to our day.
What Plato is saying, ultimately, is that, yeah, we have these passions, but part of being an adult and being mature is to sublimate them, to use your reason to say no.
And this is basically What John Weaver refused to do.
My final point about this is this.
A lot of our modern ideas of perversion in the West come out of Christianity.
Practices that were depraved in the Greek world are considered depraved because Christianity called them so.
It was the philosopher Nietzsche who used the phrase shadows of God to refer to the moral influence of Christianity in the world.
And part of what Nietzsche was saying is that if Christianity goes down, if Christian influence begins to decline, then the shadows of God will go too.
In other words, our sense of what is cruel and barbaric, our respect for the preciousness of life, for example, or our abhorrence of practices like pederasty will begin to dissolve.
That will be a world that John Weaver may be excited to live in, perhaps also his other buddies at the Lincoln Project, but I don't think it's a world that decent people want.
I think it's a world that we should say no to, and that means we've got to fight to protect, even though it's declined, perhaps, the residual influence of Christianity in our culture.
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On issues from coronavirus...
To fracking, to climate change, and so many others.
One of the kind of great phrases of our time is, listen to the science.
We heard Joe Biden, listen to the science.
Kamala Harris, I'm listening to the science.
And you know that something is really, a word is really getting out when it even reaches the perky ears of Greta Thunberg.
Listen. Because I don't want you to listen to me.
I want you to listen to the scientists.
And I want you to unite behind the science.
And then I want you to take real action.
And there we have it.
Listen to the science.
Listen to the scientists. Now, of course, the first underlying assumption Here is that science or the scientists all speak with one voice.
And, of course, that is Greta Thunberg's assumption and the assumption, oh, Dinesh, 97% of all scientists worldwide endorse the climate change agenda, therefore the Green New Deal.
First of all, that is flatly untrue.
97% of scientists do not endorse the Green New Deal.
What 97% of scientists, so I would even say 99, endorse, is the greenhouse effect.
The greenhouse effect is a very simple and proven idea in science, and that is that when you release carbon into the atmosphere, the effect is warming.
It's a warming effect.
I agree with that.
Who doesn't? But of course, once you've said that, you haven't said very much because all kinds of other things could be going on.
I mean, think about it this way. It's a principle of science that when I turn on my stove, the room gets warmer, the kitchen gets warmer.
But of course, what if the window is open and it's February?
Then cold air is going to come in and the room is going to get colder, even though the effect of the stove itself is warming.
So there could be all kinds of other things going on.
Which scientists don't agree on.
And they don't agree on what to do about it and what the best response is.
Now, quite Beyond the issue of the consensus of scientists, we have some deeper issues involved.
Namely, how does science discover what's true and what's false?
Well, one way science does that, obviously, is by making predictions.
One way you know a scientific theory is good is if it can correctly forecast what's going to happen.
Now, I happen to have right here in my hand a very interesting book.
It's by Lowell Ponty, and it's called The Cooling, Global Cooling, dated 1976.
And you may go, well, this is just one guy, Lowell Ponty.
But no, it turns out his book on the back carries blurbs from a lot of the leading climate scientists of the day.
Here's a blurb by Stephen Schneider, professor of environmental biology and global change at Stanford.
The preface to the book by Professor Reed Bryson, climatologist and director of the Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And this guy Bryson, writing in the preface, says this.
He's talking about the opinion in the scientific world, and he goes...
That there is a majority of scientists, in his view, who believe, quote, that the longer trend will be downward.
And by downward, he means global cooling.
We're actually heading, he says, to an ice age.
The author also cites the National Academy of Scientists, a report in 1975, basically saying that we're headed headlong into a new ice age.
Now, what I want to highlight is the rhetoric of global cooling, because see how familiar it sounds to us today.
It sounds exactly like what we hear about global warming, except it's global cooling.
I'm going to read a sentence here.
The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations.
It has already made food and fuel more precious, increasing prices.
If it continues and no strong measures are taken to deal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war.
And this could all come by the year 2000.
Yeah, global cooling.
By the way, the author has all kinds of solutions that are just as whacked as the Green New Deal.
Let me just read one of them.
He has an idea of stopping global cooling by a multi-billion if not trillion dollar project to dam up the Bering Strait.
In other words, a giant piece of water that links, you may say, the Far East.
He wants to dam it up.
And he goes...
Yeah, it's going to be very costly, but every year that global cooling endures costs the world economy even more.
Now, Of course, the global warming crowd knows about all this.
And it's kind of an embarrassment to them.
Is the Earth getting hotter? Is it getting colder?
Don't you know? And the answer is they don't know.
So what do they do? They came up with this brilliant idea.
Let's drop the name global cooling.
Let's even drop the name global warming.
Let's just go with climate change.
The beauty of climate change is whatever happens...
It's climate change. Too many hurricanes?
Climate change. Too few hurricanes?
Climate change. Forest fires?
Climate change. No forest fires?
Climate change. It feels really hot around here?
Climate change. So the beauty of the theory is that it explains everything.
But of course...
As the philosopher of science Karl Popper showed a generation ago, any scientific theory that explains everything is completely useless.
What you want is scientific theories that are not broad in that sense.
But narrow. Scientific theories that can make surgically accurate predictions and then be tested against those predictions.
Think of, for example, Einstein's theory of relativity.
Einstein's theory of relativity was able to explain the irregular orbit of Mercury, which Newton's theory could not explain.
And that's why it was vindicated.
People were able to say, wow, this theory really works.
It makes an outrageous prediction, and the prediction happens to be true.
So the bottom line of it here is that we're not dealing with real science.
The people who say, listen to the science, aren't listening to anything.
They're not following the science.
They're making the science follow them.
They're using science to their political purposes.
And when we come back, I'm going to say more about that.
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One of the big slogans of the democratic left these days in justifying a whole range of policies, not just in coronavirus, but also climate change and fracking and other things, is listen to the science.
And interestingly here, the left is big on science and always has been.
Marx was big on science.
In fact, he advanced his theories about the revolt of the proletariat as scientific predictions.
Marx even says, in effect, he doesn't have to agitate for social change.
Why? Because it's built into a scientific law of nature.
Now, of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
Marx's predictions have been falsified, not just in his own time.
They haven't come true anywhere in the world to this day.
So the guy was, if anything, a mad scientist, a bogus scientist, or perhaps better thought of as a false prophet.
And then we go to the Nazis, who are also big on science, racial science.
Mengele even goes to Auschwitz to do scientific experiments on twins.
He finds human specimens, if you will, to conduct his macabre experiments.
Woodrow Wilson, the founder of modern progressivism.
Democratic president elected in 1912.
Woodrow Wilson was big on science.
In fact, he thought that the American founding should be set aside because it was, quote, unscientific.
Here's a very telling quote.
The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation.
The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of checks and balances.
The trouble with the theory is that the government is not a machine but a living thing.
It falls not under the theory of Newton's universe but under the theory of organic life.
It is accountable to Darwin not to Newton.
So listen to this guy. He thinks that the Newtonian mechanical universe is obsolete and the organic Darwinian universe is the way to go.
But now think about this for a minute.
What is Woodrow Wilson trying to justify?
Government control of markets.
But markets are Darwinian.
Markets are adaptive.
Markets are constantly changing based upon local conditions.
So here's a guy, Princeton president, a swadizan intellectual, whose own analogy doesn't even apply.
His science is bogus, and you can see that he's not listening to the science.
He is superimposing a kind of crackpot science onto his ideological progressivism.
And that's what goes on from all the time on the left.
Let's consider The example of coronavirus.
Now, I don't for one minute dispute the science of the virus.
It's a real virus. It is more contagious than the flu.
It has all kinds of effects.
That's the science. But the question I have to ask is this.
What follows from that in terms of public policy?
And the answer is absolutely nothing.
Why? First of all, there's a philosophical problem.
Science talks about what is.
Public policy is what ought to be.
It was the philosopher Hume who reminded us, really now almost three centuries ago, that you can never deduce an ought from an is.
You can never go from this is the way things are to this is the way things ought to be.
Those are two different kinds of statements.
But if I was a policymaker and someone told me these are the facts about the virus, I would then ask a question.
Does that mean that we should have a national lockdown?
How long should that lockdown last for?
How many jobs should we be willing to sacrifice in order to respond to the virus?
Now think about it. Those are not scientific questions.
Whatever is true about the virus, whether it's twice as infectious as the flu or ten times, you still have to bring in all these other considerations before you can make a policy judgment.
And so the point I'm trying to make Is that to pretend that you can declare, here's the science, and here's what we want to do, and one follows logically from the other, this is a fallacy.
Now, I don't know if the people perpetrating this fallacy are just, they haven't read Hume, they're super dumb, they don't know that you can't get an ought out of an is, or if it is the case that they are just trying to claim the prestige of science in order to justify the things that they want to do.
Politically. And what is it that they want to do?
Why this appeal to science?
What is the goal? The end goal is really simple.
With climate change, as with coronavirus, this is a pretext for the tyrannical mind to go, aha, we have here an opportunity to do what we could not otherwise do.
We have the opportunity now to shut down civil rights.
We can block people from going to church.
We can tell them what to say.
We can regulate their movements, control freedom of assembly.
We can control the economy.
We can essentially create the kind of economic dependency that benefits the left politically.
So ultimately, this is not about science.
What it is about? Is the tyrannical streak in human nature playing out through leftist ideology to establish regimes of social control?
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My friend and author Eric Metaxas is a remarkable figure, a figure of intellect, but also a creative force in the culture.
I remember his group Socrates in the City sponsoring a debate I had with a prominent atheist.
Eric and I have been friends over the years and I'm delighted to welcome him on the podcast.
Eric, this is unbelievable.
You actually have written an autobiography.
You are known, I would say, more as a biographer because you've written marvelous biographies, one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German dissident against fascism.
You've written about the anti-slavery movement in England.
But now you have written about a towering subject yourself.
And my first question is, I mean, does it take a little bit of chutzpah to write an autobiography?
It takes a lot of chutzpah, but you and I have got plenty of that.
You know, it's kind of funny, Dinesh.
You and I have been friends, and I love just joking with you.
It's a weird thing.
I didn't really mean to write...
First of all, it's not an autobiography.
It's a memoir. It's only my early years.
And the real reason I wrote it was because for years, I mean...
I have a very strange and interesting story.
I am the son of immigrants.
My parents came from Europe, so it's not the typical American story.
It's really the working-class Greek immigrant story, and then my mother's from Germany.
So my parents brought that World War II experience and a real hatred of communism to me as a kid.
So I grew up with that here in New York, in Queens, and then we moved to Connecticut to hang out with the American Americans.
And really, I realized that this is a story that's atypical.
And I had a church experience.
Many people, you know, I went to the Greek Orthodox Church, but it was mostly a cultural Greek experience, as it is for a lot of people.
And then, as you know, because you went to Dartmouth, I went to Yale, and I was punched in the face with this secular humanist, super liberal, globalist worldview, and I didn't know how to respond to it.
And it really knocked me for a loop.
I wasn't really decided on what I believed at that time.
I was just confused. And around my 25th birthday, I had this very dramatic, undeniably miraculous conversion dream.
I mean, it's one of these things that if it happens to you, you just say, I read about this in books, but it totally blew my mind and changed my life.
So in terms of chutzpah, I really meant, I said, I need to share this story because it's an insane story.
I didn't invent it.
You know, a novel, you can take credit for the plot.
I can take no credit.
This happened. And the more time passed, the more I thought it's valuable for me to communicate this because I think there are a lot of people like me wondering about the meaning of life, wondering about where does God fit in, where, you know.
And I feel like in some ways I had a typical experience and an atypical experience, but it led to this very dramatic epiphany.
And I said at some point I have to share this in a book, and it ended up being this memoir.
But it wasn't like I planned it.
I didn't know what it was going to be.
Well, it's like a lot of good memoirs.
It has a combination of experiences that resonate with other people.
So you and I have had very different backgrounds.
I grew up in Mumbai, India.
I came to America at the age of 17.
But that immigrant experience of coming from the outside, of living in other parts of the world, you bring a kind of cosmopolitanism that I identify with.
I'm like, wow, Eric's been pretty much everywhere.
And Eric discovered America, in a sense, as I did, at a young age.
You described very poignantly kind of a patriotic moment where a teacher of yours took you to Flag Day.
And I'm just going to read a line or two, but you say, you know, they sang My Country Tis of Thee, and it was a little bit of a Norman Rockwell moment.
And you go, the memory of that morning seems to grow over time and I see now that I was being taught without words to love my country and cherish freedom.
The Norman Rockwell ideal, I think, remains a powerful ideal in America.
It captures a lot of elements of Yankee simplicity, of this idea that our country represents not just a place that we live, but an idea that we can identify with.
Right. And it seems like you discovered that at a pretty young age.
I have to say, and it's only because I happen to have an old teacher.
I mean, I was like nine years old.
My teacher, that was her year of retirement, Mrs.
Saul. And she'd probably been doing this since the late 40s or early 50s.
On Flag Day, June 14th, which is Trump's birthday.
But I didn't know that it was Flag Day.
I never heard of Flag Day. I went to a Greek Orthodox parochial school where we sang the Greek national anthem, you know?
You want to sing a bar or two?
What does it sound like? Yeah.
I mean, it's...
You know, I sang this every morning as a child.
And then I think we sang My Country Tis to Be as well.
But in a Greek Orthodox parochial school, you know, you're trained to be Greek and to be proud of what the Greeks did.
They stood against the Muslim Turks.
And you're not so much taught what I bumped into when we moved to Connecticut, to this Norman Rockwell world.
And I felt like this was the last gasp Thank you very much.
That was something I grew up with because of my parents coming here from nations that were not so free, because they saw the evils of communism.
This was like baked into my story.
And it's only in writing my new book, Fish Out of Water, that I really thought about this.
It never really occurred to me.
That my parents had trained me to know that communism is evil, that there's evil in the world, that things can be much worse.
Be careful about socialism.
Be careful about big government.
Be careful about freedom of religion, which we don't have around the world.
These are kinds of things that I... I took for granted because my parents would tell me stories and stories they weren't even trying to particularly teach me just they told me their stories and I knew that there was there was evil and I knew that the Soviet Union was an evil empire and I looked up to people like Solzhenitsyn and many of my friends in school they didn't get that they didn't see that and I think now where we are in America we need to know What is true,
what is real, what people have died for, and what we need to stand for, because it's going away quickly unless we, the people, stand up against it.
When we come back, Eric, I want to ask you what it means to be a fish out of water, and we also want to talk about the fish as a symbol of Christianity when we come back.
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Eric, if there's a single unifying theme in your book, Fish Out of Water, I would say it's the theme of discovering Christianity and living as a Christian, a fish, in secular culture.
Maybe that's what you mean when you say you're a fish out of water because the water, the culture, is hostile to the fishes that live in it.
I don't know if that's a stretch in the title, but talk about living in secular culture and what was the road that took you from that to a discovery that there is a sort of transcendent meaning that our culture is often not only blind to,
but hostile to? Well, first of all, I have to say the title, Fish Out of Water, it was given to me by my friend Jill Lamar, dear, dear friend, Christian, and she told me years ago, your book should be titled Fish Out of Water, because she knew that my dream, my conversion dream in 1988, involves a golden fish.
Obviously, I write about it in the book, but it was an utterly miraculous experience.
And Jesus is the fish out of water because growing up as a Greek kid, my father would always point to the chrome fish on the back of a car and say, you see that?
That's the Greek word for Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
The early Christians would use that fish symbol to represent Christ, and he always taught me about that.
So a number of things come together in this epiphany, tying everything that Previously occurs in the book together.
But the theme of being a fish out of water, I've experienced that my whole life.
And you're correct, I'm experiencing it even now.
It seems to be kind of just how God made me.
But growing up as a Greek kid in Greek schools with a German mother, we didn't speak Greek at home.
All the other kids, they were totally Greek.
So I felt like a fish out of water in the Greek parochial school.
I fit in, but I didn't really fit in.
Then when I was around...
American Americans. I never felt American enough.
I'd never played baseball or anything because my parents are immigrants.
They're just lucky to have food on the table.
So I felt like this kind of fish-out-of-water European immigrant kid.
Then I go to Yale and I feel like a fish-out-of-water because I'm the working-class kid.
I just didn't fit into that globalist, you know, liberal world and I was trying to figure it out.
Then, of course, after my conversion, which I don't write about in this book, but I am going to write in a sequel, another memoir, I have ever since that time, more than anything, felt like a fish out of water because you know and I know that the Ivy League, the intelligentsia, they tend to sneer at simple faith in the God of the Bible.
They act as though we've evolved past that.
Believe me, that's nonsense.
I don't need to convince you.
But to have conservative values, to be a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, to believe communist is evil, to believe America is the last best hope of Earth...
To believe all that corny stuff that the founders believed and that previous generations believed and to believe in Jesus and to believe in the Bible and to take it seriously, you become a fish out of water.
So living in New York City and being in the publishing world, most people look at you like, you've got to be kidding.
Anybody like you surely must know what we all know, that the Bible is a book of folktales.
And that, you know, communists are evil.
You and I don't know that.
We know the opposite. But we're fish out of water.
But sometimes God calls us to be a fish out of water.
You know, most missionaries, wherever they go, they're a little bit like the people.
They try to be like it. But ultimately, they're fish out of water, too.
So that's kind of, it does end up describing my life experience in many ways.
Eric, this is a beautifully written book, and I'm just going to read a couple of sentences which I think are powerful, not just for the content, but also the writing of it.
And this is where you're talking about Christianity and the idea of grace.
And you say,"...when each of these barriers was removed like brushwood, as they seem to be, day by day and week by week and month by month, I was more and more able to see clearly across the vast abyss to God." Wasn't that the point?
That we cannot reach Him across the vast abyss, but that He can reach us and won't unless we want Him to.
It seems to me that is a...
Crystal clear summary of the Christian message, which is not that man is ascending some laborious ladder to God, but that God is condescending or reaching into the world through Jesus and reaching out to us.
So in the end, this is not just a political book, it's a deeply spiritual book, isn't it?
Well, definitely it is.
And Dinesh, thanks for that.
I mean, the book, as I said earlier, it's a melange of many things, because in a way, that's me.
I mean, I can be very serious and wistful.
At the same time, I can be very silly and jokey, you know, depending on the situation.
So there's stories in the book that...
That are insane, hilarious, crazy, crazy stories that are true.
And so a lot of it is very funny.
And if you don't laugh, you're not reading it because it's nuts.
I mean, some of the stuff that I lived, but some of it is moving because it was real to me.
And what you just read, that was a very painful time in my life.
I was really asking the question.
Is there a God? Can we know that there's a God?
How does some people know?
They claim to know.
Are they just kidding themselves?
Probably. I don't really know.
And yet I was in enough pain that I would once in a while pray those kind of half prayers like, God, if you're there, give me a sign, give me a sign.
And the fact that Eventually, God spoke to me and gave me a sign and has given me many signs.
That is purely miraculous.
There is no way around it.
And to my dying day, I know that these things were real.
These things are not fictions.
They are not wish fulfillment or whatever some sloppy pseudo-Freudian would claim.
This is real. And when you experience something like this, you're never going to stop talking about it.
And that's why I wrote about it in the book, because I thought if this can happen to me, God wants this for everybody.
Every single person on the planet, God loves them and wants to speak to them in a way that would maybe make sense to anybody else.
He knows each of us perfectly individually.
He created us.
He invented each of us, knows our stories, and wants to speak to us in a way that would make sense maybe to nobody else.
So I wrote the book really to give everybody hope, especially people maybe who are sort of literary or people who are not on the same page as we are, Theologically or politically, I really was trying to talk to them.
People like I was, who just wasn't in a world where I was hearing these hopeful things that, yes, God really is for you.
He's not just for the people who cling to guns and Bibles in the Midwest.
He's for you, for educated people, for everybody.
Eric, I really appreciate it, giving us a little window into your world and the book.
It's passionate, it's intelligent, it's deep.
Thank you for coming on the podcast.
Thank you, Dinesh. God bless you.
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Where are the Biden Democrats going with the abortion issue?
One of Biden's first executive orders was to overturn Trump's Mexico City policy.
The Mexico City policy, which actually goes all the way back to 1984 to Reagan, was when the Reagan administration implemented a rule that basically said that U.S. funds that are used for family planning abroad cannot go toward abortion or could not go to organizations.
That do and promote abortion.
So it was essentially a leash on using taxpayer money to fund abortion-related services abroad.
Now the left went berserk all the way back to the 80s and they called it the gag rule because you're gagging people from even talking about abortion.
But the bottom line of it is very clear.
The left wants to promote abortion.
Abortion abroad.
They want to turn abortion, you may almost say, into an international right.
They want a universal Roe versus Wade.
They want to run roughshod over poorer countries that have more restrictive abortion policies.
America's policies are among the most radical in the world.
And strong-armed them by saying, hey, you want family planning money?
You want U.S. money?
You need to liberalize your abortion laws.
This is the dirty game that the left is up to.
And they've been playing it for a while.
So by and large, you've had this kind of ping-pong in which, under Republican administrations, the Mexico rule is in effect.
The limitations are in effect.
And when Democrats come in, whether it's Clinton or Obama or now Biden, they overturn the Mexico City policy.
But I think that they want to go further even in this country.
They don't just want to subsidize abortion abroad, which is disgusting enough.
But they would like to overturn the Hyde Amendment here at home.
The Hyde Amendment, again, goes back to Congressman Henry Hyde, limits or prevents federal funding from going to abortion.
Now, this issue, I think, puzzles some people because there are leftists who argue that Wait a minute.
Abortion is not a meaningful right if it doesn't come with funding.
If you're a poor woman and you want an abortion, you don't have the money to pay for it, then your right is not even really meaningful unless the government is willing to provide the means for you to exercise this right, provide the financial support that enables, you may say, this particular right.
My daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill, addresses this topic of federal funding head on in her new book, came out last year, called The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America.
And she makes a point that I think has not occurred to a lot of people, that I just want to read a few sentences.
Let's consider, she says, our basic rights, constitutional rights.
We have a First Amendment right to free speech.
But ask yourself, is that funded by the government?
If I can't afford a newspaper or internet, will the government pay for that for me?
No. I have a First Amendment right to freedom of religion.
Will the government build me a church if my friends and I can't afford to put one up?
No. I have a Second Amendment right to own a gun.
Will the government buy me the gun and ammunition?
No. So down the list of rights we go, she writes, and it becomes clear that none of our fundamental rights are paid for by the government.
Wow. So what this means is that, number one, a right can be a fundamental right, like the free speech rights or rights to conscience in the First Amendment, and not have government funding go with it.
And the second point is that the left clearly believes that abortion is a kind of super right.
If the government doesn't fund free speech and doesn't fund churches and doesn't fund your stock of ammunition or your gun, if the government doesn't fund any of those rights and yet the left wants it to fund abortion, That means that in the church of modern liberalism, abortion isn't just a right, it's almost some sort of a sacrament.
Today we're in a battle for truth, and this is a time for strengthening our faith and worldview.
I'd like to recommend an insightful book to you called Reflections on the Existence of God by bestselling author Richard Simmons III. He writes on a whole bunch of topics—life, death, sex, truth.
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The book is well-researched, easy to read, and is now a bestseller on Amazon.
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We're now in the mailbox section of the podcast, and I want to try to take a couple of questions.
And the first one from Michael.
Hi, Dinesh. Do you believe China intentionally unleashed the COVID virus on the world, or do you think it was accidentally spread from Wuhan?
Interestingly, just yesterday, I believe, I saw that a World Health Organization team is trying to answer this question.
They're apparently combing the Wuhan market to try to find the origin of the virus.
But it's also clear that there is a Wuhan lab that has all kinds of toxic specimens.
I don't believe, and I must say this is really conjecture more than anything else, that the Chinese used the virus as a biological weapon.
Like, hey, listen, let's put the virus out there and see what it does to the world economy.
I guess that's a possibility, but I don't think there's any evidence that they did that.
What seems to me actually more likely is that they were careless and the virus got out and there were people in the lab that made warnings about it and the Chinese shut those people up and shut them down.
And then the virus got to the market and it began to spread and the Chinese panicked and they realized they didn't want to be blamed for it.
And so they didn't take responsibility for the virus having come out of their lab through negligence.
And they probably also realize that, wow, now that it's out there, there might be certain political benefits in it for us.
Namely, that if we can contain the virus here at home and the virus runs rampage abroad, it will strengthen China's position vis-à-vis other countries, particularly vis-à-vis its main rivals in Europe and in the United States.
So bottom line, I don't think this was a plot.
But I do think that this was gross negligence covered up by the Chinese, which, by the way, fully justifies the term Chinese virus.
Here's a question from Caleb.
You've spoken about fighting cancel culture.
How do normal people do that?
Many of us can't start our own movie studio.
We work regular jobs and have regular lives.
What are some practical things that we can do?
And this is a very important question because I think that in life many of us don't use our influence.
We use only a small part of the influence that we have.
I'm always trying to ask myself, how can I use my influence wherever I have it?
Whether it's creativity in making a movie, whether it's an access to people of wealth who are able to invest in things that need to be done, whether it's getting a message to Trump and his team and suggesting that they do this or drop this question on Hillary in the debates...
I'm trying to maximize the way in which I use my influence and I'm going to try to maximize the influence of this podcast to make it a forum where we can meet people and talk about what are effective things that we can do.
Well, one thing that you can do right out front Share the word.
Share the message. Because I think that this podcast, I'm trying to make it very unique.
And I want it to get out.
It's out a lot, but I want it to get out a lot more.
Now, you might say again, one is tempted to say, oh man, I only have, you know, 50 friends on Facebook.
Yeah, but they have 50 friends on Facebook.
So, in today's world with technology, we are all mini publishers.
We have the ability to get the word out.
And I would really appreciate your not just sharing and subscribing to the podcast, but letting people know about it so they can sample it and see if they like it.
So become an agent of influence in whatever circles you move in.
Obviously be prudent about that.
I'm not saying in work make yourself a pest by, you know, handing out MAGA hats.
One has to be, whether as a Christian or as a conservative, there's a place and a time and a way in which you communicate with others.
But if you do that effectively, you will be salt and light in the world, and you will be a force for good.
You'll be doing your part, and you can't be asked to do any more, your part, to saving our culture and saving America.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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