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Feb. 18, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:01:24
MADE IN CHINA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep29
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Biden says we should respect China's cultural values.
Does that include tyranny?
What would a China-dominated world look like?
And is Kamala Harris already taking the reins?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Hey guys, this is day three in the bunker at home, making the podcast from here.
And hey, I'm actually very relaxed about it.
But of course, Texas is going through a tough time.
A lot of people have died.
Texas just is not equipped to cope with this kind of unexpected situation.
Enduring storm, freezing rain, freezing cold, and so on.
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The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
It's not very often you get more than a few sentences out of Biden.
It's normally mumbling, bumbling, incoherent.
So it's worth paying attention when Biden does string a couple of sentences together.
And recently he did and made a kind of intriguing, provocative statement about Chinese cultural values.
Listen. If he doesn't reflect the values of the United States.
And so the idea, I'm not going to speak out against what he's doing in Hong Kong, what he's doing with the Uyghurs in western mountains of China and Taiwan trying to end the one-China policy by making it forceful.
I said, and by the way, he said he gets it.
Culturally, there are different norms in each country and their leaders are expected to follow.
So let's try to make sense of what Biden is getting at here.
On the face of it, what he seems to be saying is that, for historical reasons, China has had this kind of paranoia, which has created a sense that the only way for China to deal with the world is to hang together, to have things tightly controlled from the center.
And that is China's cultural value, and it's being affirmed by Premier Xi Jinping.
And he, Joe Biden, of course has different cultural values because he comes from America.
So his approach is going to be to articulate American cultural values, but while understanding that the Chinese have their own cultural values.
So... Where does this really get us?
Because Biden seems to be saying something like this.
Hey, Premier Xi, we in America don't believe it's really good to beat up on the Uyghurs, and we don't really believe that tyranny and genocide are such a good idea.
We have a long tradition in our country of opposing those things.
And Xi goes, well, our cultural tradition is somewhat different.
We like to unify.
We like to smash all the opposition.
That's the Chinese way, Zhou.
And Zhou goes, oh, interesting.
Well, I just want you to know that that's not the American way.
And what? Full stop?
Dead end? Each side basically affirms their way of seeing the world.
I mean, what, you say tomato, I say tomato?
Is that it? Now...
You might be tempted to hear me go on about cultural relativism and the flaws of it, but I do want to say that in some ways there is a grain of truth in what Biden is saying.
Cultures do have values, and it's not so easy for one country to...
Press or even impose its values on others.
Now, in fact, this is something I think Trump would agree with.
It's the bitter lesson of the last 20 years of American foreign policy.
I mean, think about it. You had all these kind of neoconservatives who go, you know, freedom is a human right, democracy is a universal human value, let's go export those values to Afghanistan.
And so you show up and you basically are dealing with these Afghan tribesmen who are, you know, one step out of the 7th century.
And it's like, guys, haven't you read John Stuart Mill?
Haven't you read the Federalist Papers?
You need to have a fair election!
Now, this is not to say that there is no tradition of democracy in Afghanistan.
They do have these tribal consultations, and it was kind of smart, actually, for some people in the U.S. military to work within the Jurga or tribal system in Afghanistan.
But see, there's limits to that, because they believe in democracy or consultation within the tribe, but of course not for other tribes.
So what have we achieved in Afghanistan in terms of having democracy there and settling tribal disputes?
Basically nothing. We might have taken them from the year 730 to the year 745, but they're not in the 21st century, and I'm not sure they ever will be.
The point to make here is that there are cultural traditions and we've got to recognize the limits of American power.
Even if we don't engage in cultural relativism, what is it that Biden can actually do about the Uyghurs, for example, or just about Chinese tyranny in general?
Well, he can impose economic sanctions.
There are other things that he can do, but there are limits to what he can do.
I remember many years ago, there was a very interesting debate about this very topic in Russia, in the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident, had denounced Soviet tyranny.
It talked about how Soviet tyranny was a betrayal of Mother Russia.
And the Sovietologist Richard Pipes...
Who's Polish, of Polish origin.
And Poland, of course, has been at the receiving end of Russia, even before communism.
Richard Pipes said, no, Russia has had a long authoritarian tradition.
It predates communism.
The czars were also very authoritarian.
When the Bolshevik Revolution came to Russia, they substituted one form of tyranny for another.
Basically, what Pipes was saying is that this is Russian culture.
It's authoritarian. Let's remember that in China, there really has never been a tradition of the people having a say.
This was not the case before.
It was not the case under the Ming Dynasty or the Manchus.
It was not the case under communism either.
So you're dealing with a tyranny that may be more extensive now because it's communism.
It's more totalitarian.
It stretches across the entire swath of a billion people.
Biden has a real problem, and I'm not sure he really has a grip on that problem.
Just a kind of blithe assertion of Chinese cultural values doesn't really do it.
There's a kind of a funny quip here in the Babylon Bee today.
It goes, Biden defends Hitler's concentration camps.
Nazi Germany just had different norms.
And of course, what they're doing is they're exposing what happens if you push relativism too far.
If you push relativism too far, you're saying that anything goes.
Anything can be done in the name of cultural values.
In the 19th century, the British Outlawed the practice of bride burning or sati in India.
And of course the Indians protested and said, these are Indian cultural values.
Basically, we've been burning our brides for centuries.
This is the Indian way.
And the British said, well, if that's the Indian way, it's the British way to hang people who do that.
So you do your way and we'll do our way.
This is where cultural values ultimately meet, I would say, universal human norms, universal rights.
Now, the key point about Biden is we can debate cultural norms, we can debate relativism, cultural relativism, moral relativism.
But I think in Biden's case, his attachment to China, his respect for Chinese cultural values, comes down to something really simple.
It's really not about the philosophy.
It's about cold cash.
Here's a little clip from the movie Trump Card that shows...
What the Bidens have been doing in China.
The Chinese have had a strategy throughout the Asia-Pacific region of striking deals with the family members of political figures, like Joe Biden, because they expect favorable policies in return.
And if you look at Joe Biden's trajectory as an official as it relates to talking about China when he was a senator to now when he's vice president and then afterward, he has become incredibly soft in his criticism of China.
It is in our self-interest.
That China continue to prosper.
And I personally believe it is directly linked to the fact that his son was doing multiple deals with the Chinese government at the time that he was vice president of the United States.
So there you go. You got a presidency that to some degree, I think it would not be an exaggeration to say, is made in China.
Biden is not reflecting about Chinese cultural history or values.
Basically, his family has been on the take in China.
Maybe he expects it to continue.
There's a sense in which the Bidens are still, they haven't divested themselves from their financial interests.
Hunter Biden and the brothers are still raking it in from the Chinese.
And as Peter Schweitzer said, this is a Chinese tradition.
Corruption is what they do very well.
And the Bidens are trying to make sure that they are in on it.
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China is on its way to becoming a superpower.
And the implications of that, I think, have not fully sunk in.
For the last 30 years ago, really since the fall of the Soviet Union, the world has had only one superpower, the United States.
And there were some people who thought that that's how it was going to be for much of the 21st century.
I don't think so. I think we're moving back toward a bipolar, and perhaps one may even say a multipolar world.
The way the world looked like for most of human history, with not one but multiple kind of nuclei of real power.
And China's rise is something that has occurred stealthily, quietly.
A rise of both economic power and terrifying military power.
Deng Xiaoping, going back to the 70s and 80s, said that China should hide our capacity and bide our time.
Hide our capacity and bide our time.
In other words, conceal our power and let time work for us.
Remember, the Chinese have the largest population in the world, well over a billion people, and that makes a huge difference.
Population, by and large, for a country equates to power.
Bigger countries have more power.
That hasn't been true for China, but it's becoming increasingly true.
By the way, kind of a funny aside, a pastor friend of mine many years ago, we were at dinner and somebody asked him, they said to the pastor, Hey, Pastor X, why do you only have two children?
He goes, I had to stop it, too.
I read somewhere that every third child born in the world is Chinese.
So, the guy was applying that if he had a third kid, it would be a Chinaman.
Of course, he was being witty.
But the point is that population does translate to power.
A very interesting book by Martin Jacques called When China Rules the World spells out some unique aspects of of China's role in the world.
Not just the role today, but the role that is coming.
First, Martin Jacques says that it's quite possible that by the year 2050 or so, China will overtake the United States in terms of GDP, in terms of wealth.
And that would put the United States in a sort of position in which it would be facing a power stronger than itself, stronger than itself in terms of numbers, but also in terms of wealth.
Decline is not something countries take very well.
Think of how grumpy the Europeans are even now at having seen the great decline of power of, say, France and England, which at one point, between the two of them, controlled about 85% of the real estate on the planet.
I want to identify what Martin Jacques calls some of the distinctive features So, the first thing that Martin Jacques says...
Is that China is not a nation state, it's a civilization state.
In other words, it is a state that coincides with an entire civilization, an entire way of life.
And this goes all the way back to the early centuries, the Han Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty and so on.
A unified or largely unified civilization is now also a country.
Number two. He says, So no popular accountability.
Number three. Chinese modernity, says Jacques, is distinguished by its speed.
It's happened so fast.
It's almost like, think of it this way.
This is an example that Jacques himself gives.
He says, normally think of an adult who's moving, for example, from a typewriter to a computer.
It's going to take a while to get adjusted.
Western modernity was like that.
It took a couple of centuries.
The Chinese are more like a young kid who gets on a computer and Point number four.
China for a long time, he says, will be neither a developed nor a developing country, but really both.
In other words, you're going to have one group of Chinese, perhaps concentrated in Beijing and the cities, who are living in the 21st century.
They have all the accoutrements of modern technology.
You'll have other Chinese peasants who are living basically in the 16th century.
So in the same place, China, you have people literally who are living in different centuries.
Then, says Jacques, and now we're getting into more troubling territory, there is a distinctively Chinese attitude toward race and ethnicity.
Yes. The Chinese believe the Han Chinese are the best people in the world.
They're the greatest. God made them special.
And other people are actually inferior.
Inferior in ability, inferior in rights.
And here we can begin to see why the Chinese have such a sort of harsh view of various religious and ethnic minorities.
They believe that these minorities have to be whipped into shape.
Here's a little clip of the Chinese indoctrinating the Uyghur children and making them literally sing hymns to Mother China.
Listen. So that's a disturbing aspect of Chinese modernity.
It brooks no dissent.
It tries to force everybody into a singular mold.
And finally, says Martin Jacques in this book, When China Rules the World, He goes, China historically has had not a system of equality among states.
It has never treated other states as being its equal.
It believes in what can be called the tributary system.
The tributary system is, I'm the greatest.
Everybody else has to bow down to me.
So yes, we'll deal with you, but it's sort of, you have to kind of kiss our feet before we get started.
And so, by and large, people who would visit the ancient dynasties of China would have to not only show obeisance, but pay tribute.
Now, what's scary about all this, and Jacques does not hesitate in bringing out the conclusions, is he basically says that's the system the Chinese may want for the whole world.
They may want world leaders not to deal with them on a plane of equality, but once they have sufficient power to establish a kind of global tributary system, which if you want to do business with China, you want favors out of China, you're going to have to kiss the feet of Xi Jinping.
We have to learn to play second fiddle if we allow that world to come into place.
I think we should do everything to prevent it, not just for the sake of American interests, but for the sake of the welfare of the world's people.
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What has enabled the extraordinary rise of China?
Very oddly, the answer can be given in this phrase, the benefit of backwardness.
What? The benefit of backwardness?
Yes. The Chinese basically figured out that in a rapidly changing era, but in a global capitalist market, the winner is the guy who can make stuff the cheapest.
And the Chinese figured out, we're really poor, but we do have well over a billion people.
And that means that the hourly rate of our typical worker is extremely low, one of the lowest in the world.
So if we can create factories within the infrastructure of global capitalism, and we can establish what can be called, what in fact is known in stock markets around the world, as the China price.
If we can make stuff from steel to shoes to clothes cheaper than anyone else in the world and deliver it through using modern communications efficiently to companies like Walmart, we will become the world's manufacturer.
We'll become the world's supplier.
We'll be able to put tons of other people out of business.
And that's exactly what the Chinese have done.
Now, the Chinese are aware of what an historic opportunity they are seizing.
And they're also aware about how history gave them a chance to do exactly this once before.
And they failed.
Now, this requires a little bit of a dive into Chinese history.
And here in this country, we have amnesia about our own history.
We have progressive indoctrination and distortion of history.
But let's remember that in other countries people do know their history. They know it pretty well Just walk into Europe and talk to an ordinary Italian not even an educated guy and he's gonna tell you something about the chapel over there and the Cathedral in Rome and a little bit about Roman history and a little bit about where Dante's houses and who Dante was So other than other cultures, they're aware of their own past now interestingly
we have been living through a half millennium 500 years in which Western civilization has been dominant and America dominant for the last hundred or so years within it We're so used to the world being this way that it's hard for us to imagine it being any other way.
But if you and I lived in the year 1500 and we looked around the world, this is a half a millennium ago, the most significant and important civilization in the world would not be the West.
In fact, it would be the civilization of China, the most advanced.
Advanced in what? Advanced in wealth?
Advanced in power? Advanced in learning?
Advanced in knowledge? Advanced in invention?
Pretty much advanced in everything.
The second most powerful civilization in the world was the civilization of the Arab Islamic world.
Not a single civilization, but not a single empire.
The Muslim empires were multiple.
There were like five of them.
The Safavid dynasty in Persia, the Mongol civilization, the Mughals in India, the Mamluk Sultans in Egypt.
So this was a spectacular civilization from Baghdad to Damascus to Constantinople.
India was probably third, and Western civilization a kind of relative backwater.
Now, it wasn't that the other civilizations went down, but Western civilization came up because of a series of developments from the Renaissance to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution.
Much of that, by the way, made possible by the Great Age of Exploration.
Western explorers, Magellan, going around the coast of Good Hope.
Columbus coming, of course, to the Americas.
Now, here's a remarkable fact that not a whole lot of people know.
The Chinese had very advanced ships in the 15th century.
This was, by the way, under the Ming Dynasty.
And I'm drawing this from Jacques Journet's great book called The History of Chinese Civilization.
He points out that in the Ming period, the Chinese had much better ships than the West.
They had junks from the Song Age, big sailing ships with four or six masks, Twelve sails, four decks, capable of carrying a thousand men.
The Chinese ships would put the Pinta and the Santa Maria to shame.
And they were run by this very strange Chinese character named Cheng Ho, who was, by the way, a eunuch.
A eunuch is a castrated male.
Cheng Ho ran the Chinese fleet.
He took the Chinese fleet to Africa.
He took it to India.
But here's something very interesting.
The Chinese sent ships to India to look for animals for the Chinese zoo.
They found some exotic Indian animals.
They took them with them. And here's the interesting thing.
No ship came back.
Why? Because the Chinese figured, what else are we going to get out of India?
Those people are useless. So the Chinese, because they were so self-oriented and partly because they were so strong, didn't think they had a whole lot to, quote, discover about other cultures.
They made some early voyages and then they stopped.
It was a disastrous mistake.
Had the Chinese come first to the Americas?
Think about it. The whole civilization of the Americas would be Chinese.
A Western civilization would have remained a backwater.
So the Chinese kind of know this.
They know that they had an historic opportunity in the 15th century.
They blew it. And Western civilization took over the world and really reduced China to begging.
So the Chinese are determined that won't happen again.
They're determined that if they take over this time, it's going to be for keeps.
They're going to rule the world for the next thousand years.
And that's how they think.
It's not how we think. We think in terms of, like, next year, perhaps the next decade.
That's about as far out as we go.
But the Chinese think not just in terms of decades, but in terms of eras, eons, centuries, millennia.
So this is Chinese history.
They were on top of the world.
They got knocked off their pedestal.
And now they're slowly but surely making their way back.
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It's not the first time Elon has taken a risk.
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The Biden administration has been making calls to leading foreign Canadian European leaders.
But you know what's interesting? The calls are being taken or made not by Joe Biden.
No. Kamala Harris.
Yes. Oh my gosh, is Joe Biden's tenure in the White House already over?
Is it time to move Kamala in and Joe out?
Was this the plan all along?
Well... I want to focus a little bit here on Kamala Harris, because she has been playing the identity politics card like there's no tomorrow.
Let's look. Here is a conversation.
She talks with Emmanuel Macron of France, and I'm reading from the readout.
The Vice President thanked President Macron for his leadership on the issue of gender equality.
And then we go to Kamala Harris' call with Justin Trudeau.
During the call, the two leaders spoke about COVID, climate change, and diversity issues.
So here is, of course, Kamala Harris, who is certifying this first black female in the White House vice president and all that stuff.
Except this whole pose of Kamala Harris as a kind of global victim of racism is a fraud.
Why? Because she's actually descended in a straight line from one of the largest, if not the largest, slave owners in Jamaica, a guy named Hamilton Brown, a white guy.
Now, this all came out before the election.
Kamala Harris's dad, Donald Harris, a well-known economist, actually a long-time professor of economics at Stanford University, And he published an article in a Jamaican magazine called Jamaica Online.
You can find the article online now.
And he talks about his own family history.
And he goes that his grandmother was a woman named Chrissie, or Christiana Brown, who was a direct descendant of, quote, Hamilton Brown, who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brownstown, Jamaica.
Boom! Boom!
Now, right away when this came out, it threatened to cause a scandal.
I began to look into it.
And, of course, the left did its very best to try to dispute this.
Because think about it. It means that Kamala Harris, far from being descended from slaves, is descended from the oppressor class.
She's a beneficiary of white privilege.
Now... The moment I pointed this out, there was an uproar, and of course, leftists like Nicole Hannah-Jones, the historian Kevin Levin, they start lecturing me.
Oh, Dinesh, you are unfamiliar with the terrible history of rape on the slave plantation.
Obviously, the slave owner raped one of Kamala Harris's maternal descendants, and so this is, if anything, a further reinforcement of Kamala's victim status.
Except that these guys were too lazy to go and look at Donald Harris' original article, nor to check out the genealogical charts that are available online.
I'm going to actually put one up so you can take a quick look at it.
Take a look at this chart.
This chart is also, by the way, available online.
It's Kamala Harris' genealogy.
And if you take a look, you see...
That you've got Kamala Harris, and you've got her parents, Shama Gopalan, from India, and you've got her father, Donald Jasper Harris.
Donald Jasper Harris is the grandson of Christiana Krishy Brown.
But Christiana Brown married a guy named Joseph Harris.
They're descended from a guy named Hamilton Brown.
Now, this Hamilton Brown is the son of the slave owner, Hamilton Brown.
And this Hamilton Brown, the son of the slave owner, married a free woman called Mary Malvina Brown.
So, bottom line, this is not about rape on the plantation.
There wasn't any rape on the plantation involving Kamala Harris.
Hamilton Brown, the son of the slave owner, married a free black woman, and through that line comes Kamala Harris.
Now, Hamilton Brown himself owned five plantations and over 200 slaves.
So, once I pointed this out, I showed the genealogical charts.
Historian Kevin Levin, to his credit, goes, I was wrong and Dinesh is right.
I'm deleting my tweet. As for Nicole Hannah-Jones, she deletes her tweet but says nothing.
She pretends like, and this is the way a lot of media operate these days.
They will update a story, but they never admit they were wrong.
They don't have the decency to say, hey, I got it wrong.
I accused Dinesh falsely.
They won't do that. I also happen to have at my disposal, and I put this out on Twitter, a list of the names of the 200 slaves owned by Kamala Harris's ancestor.
Think about it. These are all the true victims.
Kamala is a fake victim.
She's a pretend victim. In fact, she's the beneficiary of the stolen labor of these 200 people.
So, we'd like a little honest accounting from Kamala Harris.
I'm not saying that Kamala Harris, by the way, is to blame for her ancestors.
No. But if she doesn't deserve any blame for Hamilton Brown, nor does she deserve the fake credit of claiming to be an historical victim of racism and slavery, she's not.
She's had privilege all her life.
And... She is the beneficiary.
I don't know if you'd call it white privilege, but it's the privilege of being born into very favorable circumstances, going to private schools, having had an extraordinary education, having met a very powerful man, Willie Brown, attaching yourself to him, levitating your way up to power, ultimately making the right connections, running for DA, running for Senate, then making your way to the vice presidency.
That's not a tale of victimization.
It's actually a tale of crass opportunism.
I think you know what a huge fan I am of Mike Lindell at MyPillow.
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A number of people, not just conservatives, but even some centrists like the writer Barry Weiss, have come to the defense of Gina Carano.
This is the former MMA fighter and actress who was canceled by Lucasfilms, by Disney.
And not just by Disney.
She was cancelled by her agency, United Talent Artists.
She was cancelled by Hasbro, which makes toys from Gina's character named Cara Dune.
They've decided no more Cara Dune toys.
Amazon has removed their Cara Dune toy collection from their website.
So, wow, this is the kind of coordinated attack on Gina Carano for being basically a patriot and a conservative.
Now... Gina Carano's great sin was to make a comparison between the way Jews were treated in early Nazi Germany and the way conservatives are treated today.
I'm going to actually read Gina Carano's statement, and the reason I'm doing it is because the question I want to raise is, was Gina Carano right?
There have been a lot of defenses of Gina Carano, but they're essentially defenses that say, she was wrong, but she shouldn't be canceled.
Or, she was wrong, but the other side does it too.
I don't think those defenses go far enough.
Gina Carano was not wrong at all.
And to do this, we have to see what she said versus what people are saying.
So, Barry Weiss, writing in Substack, basically says, Gina Carano should not have been canceled.
Her intent was good. But she then goes, what Carano wrote...
Now, first of all, I agree.
The Holocaust is a singular evil.
But you know what, Barry Weiss?
Gina Carano was not comparing the situation today to the Holocaust.
Let's turn to Gina Carano herself.
Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors, even by children.
The government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
How is that different from hating someone for their political views?
Nothing about the Holocaust.
Actually, she's referring to early Nazi Germany, the era of the Nuremberg Laws, the era of the Night of the Broken Glass, the era in which people were targeted and demonized for being Jews and their neighbors turned against them.
This is long before the gas chambers, the final solution, even before World War II. Now, the other defense that some conservatives have made of Gina Carano is, hey, she might have exaggerated, but the left does it too.
And of course, they point out to leftists, here's Pedro Pascal, actually Gina Carano's own co-star, who put out a meme in which he compared Jews in the camp.
So he's actually making a kind of Holocaust analogy with kids in cages under Trump.
So, the conservative argument is, look, I mean, if Gina Carano does it, they do it, so why not cancel him too?
Or, he hasn't been cancelled, so why cancel Gina?
Now, this is not where I'm going with this.
Where I'm going with this is basically into the material of my book called The Big Lie, In which I show, and by the way, that was, for me, one of my most eye-opening books.
Normally when I write a book, I kind of know what's going to go in it in advance.
I know the landscape of the argument.
But with The Big Lie, I started out with Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.
And of course, Jonah does a good job in tracing the connections between the left, the Democratic Party, and fascism, early fascism, particularly in Mussolini's Italy.
But then Jonah stopped short when it comes to Nazi Germany.
I think Jonah was a little perhaps just even scared to go there.
But when you go there, that's when actually the sky opens up and you begin to realize the deep connections between Nazism.
And American progressivism.
The Nazis are using, actually, the models of people like Margaret Sanger, American progressive eugenic solutions, for their eugenic program.
The Nazis are basing the Nuremberg laws on the segregation laws of the Democratic Party.
The Nazi newspapers are wildly praising FDR. All of this that occurred before World War II has been largely buried by progressive scholarship.
But back to Gina Carano and her analogy.
Is it not a fact that the Nazis held in their time that everything is political?
Sounds familiar? Is it not a fact that the Nazis, the early Nazis, talked about the fact that sports is political?
Everything should be judged by a political calculus.
Is it not a fact that the Nazis decided that science could be politicized also?
Science could be deployed to Nazi racist ends.
And listen to the science was kind of a Nazi slogan in promoting Nazi racism.
Is it not a fact that the Nazis created, you may say, street gangs?
Now, we're not talking about random street gangs.
We're talking about street gangs called the Brown Shirts, And under Mussolini the Blackshirts, which were an extension of a political party, the fascist party or the National Socialist Party.
And isn't that parallel to Antifa and other street gangs in the United States?
And again, these aren't random criminals.
They're operating at the behest or on behalf of.
The Antifa website even links to Joe Biden.
It takes you straight to the White House.
So Antifa obviously sees itself as an extension, if you will, of the progressive state.
The Jews were demonized not just for being Jews.
They were demonized for their beliefs, for who they were.
They were seen as symbols of capitalism.
And the Nazi move was, yes, the final solution at the end, but at the beginning, what was it?
To stigmatize these people.
To make them wear, if you will, the gold star on their face or on their heads so that everybody would recognize this is a being that is ostracized, not part of our community.
Now, don't you see that happening with conservatives in America today?
The effort at stigmatization and ostracism.
And finally...
We see this happening even now.
That begins to morph into calls to target these people, consider them as domestic enemies, enemies of the state, subversives.
You're not even against using the police agencies of the government to round them up, chase them down, hunt them.
And extermination is the final point of this macabre line of reasoning.
So I think Gina Carano was on to something.
What she was saying is that these things can get pretty bad pretty fast.
So ultimately she was cancelled, not for saying what is false, but for saying what is true.
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I've always been a fan of comedy, and I found myself laughing out loud recently reading an article basically saying that the problem with comedy in the United States today is that it is too, quote, right-wing.
Yes, most comedians aren't right-wing.
But according to this writer, this is Seth Simmons writing in The New Republic, The title of his article says it all.
The comedy industry has a big alt-right problem.
Right away you can sort of tell a little bit about Seth Simmons.
I mean, I don't know the guy. Kind of envisioned some sort of guy with glasses and a bow tie, you know, sitting at his office at the New Republic.
Guys, I'm going to be writing a sternly worded article pointing out that the comedy industry is getting too alt-right.
Right? Everyone goes, great idea, great idea.
And now, so, Seth Simmons claims to be an expert on comedy.
He says he spent five years writing about the comedy industry.
So, he's not a comedian.
He writes about the comedy industry.
Kind of funny by itself if you think about it.
And he says he focuses on the inequality and extremism within comedy.
Yeah, so apparently Seth Simmons wants to put a leash on comedy.
Call it the Seth Simmons censorship standard.
But he's a little worried that these people are a little too out of control.
Now, his article itself focuses on people like Gavin McInnes and Milo Yiannopoulos and a guy, Anthony Cumia.
And these aren't exactly the big names of comedy.
So I think Seth Simmons knows that he's gonna have a hard time making a case based upon Gavin McInnes or Milo Yiannopoulos.
So he goes, these guys have been known to go to bars and hang out with other mainstream comedians.
So guilt by association.
These guys are alt-right.
They hang out with some really big-name comedians and the big-name comedians are picking up their stuff.
Now, I think what makes this whole thing so kind of preposterous is that comedy is one of the last places where the things that cannot be said in society are said.
Or the secret thoughts that people have that are somehow ostracized or repressed are brought out.
And the humor is in the realization of that fact.
It's in the realization that what the guy is saying is largely true.
For example, one of the things comedians trade in is stereotypes.
And the reason that their comedy is so effective is not because stereotypes are false, but because stereotypes sometimes contain a grain of truth.
It's the grain of truth that makes us laugh.
Now, comedy has always been, you may say, against the grain.
This is kind of why there's so little good comedy today, because a lot of comedians are scared to go against the grain.
I mean, try watching Saturday Night Live.
It's really difficult, even if you want to, to crack a smile.
Try watching Jimmy Fallon.
I mean, this guy has just gone flat.
Why? Because he's essentially a moral coward.
He won't take on the author.
Or Trevor Noah, another guy who has a lot of talent.
Bill Maher every now and then is funny.
And it's funny because there still is a little bit of, only a little bit, but there is a little bit of residual boldness in Bill Maher.
Every now and then he'll take on the radical Muslims.
He'll say the kind of thing you can't say and you go, at first you're shocked he said it, and then you laugh.
We're seeing the really good comedians, the comedians that are breaking new ground today are the people who do take on taboos.
And so they are politically incorrect.
I guess they are right-wing in that sense.
But in that sense, Richard Pryor was right-wing because he was transgressive.
He took on taboos.
Chris Rock was right-wing.
Because he was influenced by Richard Pryor.
He took on taboos.
George Carlin, who was obviously politically on the left, but he would be considered, I'm sure, Seth Simmons would be like, I'm very disturbed by George Carlin's diatribe on climate change.
He doesn't know the science.
He needs to listen to the science.
And then there's Bill Burr.
The thing about Bill Burr is that he...
Bill Burr actually, I think, pushes things about as far as you can push them.
And for that reason, he's one of the funniest comedians around.
Here's Bill Barr taking on a real taboo and speaking, well, a little frankly about it.
Listen. We were watching it the other day.
You know, Oprah's on there. She's interviewing some clam, you know.
And, uh... She's giving her this big, ridiculous intro.
Like, she's done this, she's done that, she's done this, and she does the most difficult job on the planet.
She's the mother. And continues on immediately.
I just look at my girlfriend like...
Like, really?
Being a mother is the most difficult job on the planet?
Oh, yeah, all those mothers who die every year from black lung, from inhaling all that coal dust.
LAUGHTER Dude, women are just constantly patting themselves on the back about how difficult their lives are.
So there you go.
This is Barr going where no man dares to go.
And essentially what Barr is doing is he's engaging in, you may almost call it the gender wars.
Listen, there are arguments about men and women that occur in every household.
We all have them. Debbie and I have them.
But they are taboo on the public stage because of, well, let's call it feminaziism.
In other words, the effort to sort of suppress what everybody knows to be true.
Or even the simple fact that there are two sides to every case.
It can't be said.
And the beauty of Bill Barr is he goes and says it.
And that's what makes the guy one heck of a funny guy.
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It's always fun for me to cross swords with atheists to kind of expose what complete fools they are.
Now, this may seem to some people to be a certain kind of mean-spiritedness on my part to kind of enjoy dunking on these people, but it's kind of a noble mean-spiritedness because it's really important to tame their arrogance.
Now, about a decade ago, I did a series of high-minded debates with leading atheists, people like the writer Christopher Hitchens, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and also some lesser lights.
But these were esoteric debates conducted ultimately about things like the arrow of evolution and so on, the fine-tuning of the universe.
In some ways, the ordinary atheism that people believe isn't that.
The ordinary atheist is a kind of a village atheist, you may say.
In other words, an atheist based upon, in some cases, not even a disbelief in God, but a quarrel with God.
I don't like God. God's wronged me in some way.
But I discovered, just kind of perusing social media the other day, a kind of website...
It's called Atheist Forum.
And here you've got, I think, an atheist who probably reflects much more the ordinary type of atheism.
And I want to sort of zoom into a couple of these comments and analyze them, because I want to show how fundamentally illogical they are.
The atheist always fancies himself a champion of reason, a champion of logic.
He's expecting the Christian to come back with Bible verses.
But I don't do that.
In fact, I debate in secular language.
I debate in terms of reason alone.
So let's apply reason alone to what the atheists are saying.
I'm going to now read. This is from Atheist Forum.
Christianity, colon, belief that one God created a universe 13.79 billion And here's the punchline.
Now...
Besides the lol, which is kind of cultural attitudinizing, what's the logic here?
The logic here basically is, why would God take the trouble to do and build all this, this giant universe extending over all this...
Space and time.
Why do it if his goal was kind of narrow, kind of simple, to have a relationship with that special type of human being called Homo sapiens?
If God just wanted that, why didn't God kind of economize on the process?
Why didn't God just make an earth and just make human beings and relate to them?
Now, what I want to point out here is that this logic Appeals to a kind of hidden, and I'm going to call it, anthropomorphized definition of God.
In other words, it treats God like He's a human being.
In other words, the idea here is that if I were a human being, why would I waste my time?
Why would I expend all these resources to build this giant universe?
But first of all, let's step back.
God isn't a human being.
God is God. And if God exists, then God has the qualities attributed to God.
Let's name two of them.
He's omnipotent.
And He's also eternal.
Now what does that mean? He's omnipotent?
He has unlimited means at His disposal.
The reason we generally want economies in construction, we're going to build something small, is because we don't have the resources.
We don't have unlimited resources.
We're not God. And second, God has infinite time on His hands.
God is, in fact, outside of time.
God has, you may say, all the time in the world.
And so the idea, why would God build all this if He wanted to relate to us?
Maybe it's because God is infinitely fecund.
He's infinitely creative.
He wanted to build all this.
He's got the resources. He's got the time.
So the atheist argument comes down to sort of like a little ant who crawls into the cathedral of Notre Dame and goes, man, what a waste of effort!
Why the gargoyles?
Why all the tall ceilings?
Why all this expensive gold and silver?
These guys could have just built an anthill like I would build if it was up to me!
Yeah, that's the difference.
The distance from an ant to a human being doesn't even begin to represent the distance of human beings to God.
So the atheist here is suffering from kind of a lack of imagination, and the lack of imagination makes him stupid.
But let's keep going.
I want to now focus on a second tweet.
The earth we live on is just a giant magnet that absorbs energy from our sun and converts that energy into temporary biological life forms.
Life forms, including the human species, are just biological manifestations of energy expressing itself in an infinite array of biology.
Now, my quarrel here is with the word, repeated word, just.
The Earth is just this.
Life forms are just that.
What is the work that Just is doing here?
Just is basically assuming the thing he wants to prove.
Because no one denies that the Earth is a giant magnet.
No one denies that life forms express themselves in energy.
But the question is, is that all they are?
Is that all that they represent?
Let me give you an example. If I were to put...
A pot of water on the stove and start turn on the heater and the water starts boiling.
Of course, someone could come along and say, hey, that's just the molecules of water being agitated by the heat.
But my point is, it's not just that.
It is that, but it's also Dinesh making a pot of tea.
So in other words, there is a purpose to the venture that the scientific description of what's happening doesn't do justice to.
It's not just about the molecules, it's also about Dinesh having a cup of tea.
So the point I want to make here again, is that these atheists, by saying things like this, Act as if by simply declaring, the universe has no purpose, it's just a giant ball.
Even if you look at their own language, the sun converts that energy into temporary life forms.
He talks about life forms are biological manifestations of energy expressing itself.
Now let me ask you this, do inanimate objects express themselves?
No, that sounds awfully like a human or purposeful way of speaking.
So what ultimately happens is when atheists deny purpose to God, they end up infusing that purpose into inanimate objects.
But the purpose is not in the objects themselves.
The purpose is in what the objects were made for.
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Hey, it's time for the mailbox.
Before I get to that, I want to say a big happy birthday to Debbie's mom, Mitzi Sestero.
Debbie, Mitzi, 85?
She's 85 today.
Wow. Mitzi, happy birthday.
We wish you the best. We love you.
Moving on to our question.
We have one, and it's actually from Maddie Schlenker, our research assistant, who wants to weigh in with it.
Hi, Dinesh. First, I would like to thank you so much for all of the work that you and Debbie do to make this podcast happen.
It is truly a blessing.
And second, I have a question that's really been burning on my mind that I would like to ask you.
So, how do we avoid falling into a culture that is riddled with skepticism and that favors anti-religious ideas over religious ideas?
I have heard that the demise of nations is often due to skepticism and disbelief in God.
So how can Christians or believers in God preserve these God-centered values?
And where's the best form to do that?
Thank you! Well, I certainly agree that moral values need to have some sort of an anchor.
They can't just be anchored in the fact that these are my values and those are your values, because that gives them a certain arbitrary quality.
They become similar to, for example, your taste in food.
So a society depends upon certain shared moral values, and typically those values are anchored in some transcendent Belief in God.
Now, for the founders, they believed that there were people who might not be religious who could nevertheless find these values anchored in nature, in what the founders would have called natural right or natural law.
This is sort of the law of universal human conscience, the idea that there are certain things that we all know are right and wrong.
Now, skepticism is not a bad thing depending on how you look at it.
There's a certain kind of operational skepticism, which is the basis of inquiry, of discovery, of truth.
It's the skepticism that refuses to take things simply on authority.
It's the skepticism that wants to investigate.
The Greeks were skeptics in that sense.
But the Greeks were not skeptics in the sense that they believed that there is no truth, there is no justice.
The Greeks investigated the mores and manners of different cultures to find out what is true.
What ultimately are the universals that manifest them through these different particularities?
Bottom line, I think a healthy culture has an operational skepticism, but also accepts not only the possibility, but the existence of universal and enduring truths.
Truths that are, if they are found in nature perhaps, but also, as the founders put it, in nature's God.
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