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Feb. 19, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza

01:03:13

TED DOES CANCUN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep30

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	Ted Cruz does Cancun.
	Hey, why wasn't I invited?
	Plus Trump vs.
	McConnell. And should we pay reparations for slavery?
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	Hey, I hope you're enjoying the podcast.
	It's really fun doing it for me.
	I hope you'll subscribe, hit the like button, and share the podcast with other people as well.
	I'd really appreciate it.
	For most of my life, I thought a pillow is a pillow is a pillow.
	There's nothing special about a pillow, that is, until I discovered my pillow.
	What Mike Lindell taught me is that a pillow, like a watch, a phone, or a car, can be a work of art.
	I think you know we love our pillow, but my research assistant, Addie, just sent us a photo of her dog, Oakley.
	Hey, check it out. He seems like he, too, is a big fan of MyPillow.
	Addie says she may have to get him one of Mike's dog beds.
	Mike's trademark has always been, of course, his pillows, and for a limited time, he's offering these amazing premium MyPillows for his lowest price ever.
	You can get a queen-size premium MyPillow for $29.98.
	It's normally $69.98, so that's $40 off the price.
	King Pillow is only $5 more.
	So you're getting the lowest price ever, $29.98 for the queen-size premium, and Mike is extending his 60-day money-back guarantee.
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	America needs this voice.
	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.
	Hey, I want to make it really clear I am not happy with Ted Cruz.
	He and his wife Heidi did not, I repeat, not invite Debbie and me to join them in Cancun.
	Now, I'm not saying that I could have gone.
	In fact, the reason I can't go is, well, I have to blame you.
	It's the podcast. I got to be here.
	I got to do the podcast. That means no Cancun for me, no Cancun for Debbie.
	And I also blame Mike Lindell, because I have to sell some of his pillows and his sheets.
	So between you and Mike Lindell, that's the reason I'm not in Cancun.
	But in any case, Ted didn't invite me.
	Now Ted's vacation was unbelievably short.
	I think he, I don't even know if he got in the water.
	He's back. And by the way, since he's been back, pretty amazing.
	The storm has passed.
	Unbelievable. Ted comes back, the storm passes.
	I don't know how he does it.
	But this guy makes it happen.
	I gotta say, I don't know how we can survive one day in this state, Texas, without Ted Cruz.
	We rely on him.
	Now, of course, I'm being ironic.
	I'm being sarcastic.
	And the reason I'm being sarcastic is because there is so much fakery surrounding this whole event.
	All this bloviating and anger about Ted Cruz.
	Can't believe that when Texans are in trouble.
	Now, Texans are genuinely in trouble.
	There has been a massive failure at the level of the power grid.
	There was inadequate preparation for this, admittedly a black swan event, but nevertheless this idea of being able to supply power to people.
	Remember, this is not something that people can do for themselves.
	This is something that we have a government to do.
	Government is supposed to protect us in situations where we can't protect ourselves.
	And so there's a real failure here, and I know that I heard Dan Patrick just a day or so ago.
	He's all over it.
	He wants to pull up the guys, the ERCOT people, who are the people who manage the power grid.
	He thinks something very fishy and nefarious has been going on over there.
	There needs to be an investigation.
	They need to get to the bottom of it.
	But here I think we do have to make a distinction between what congressmen and senators do and what lieutenant governors and governors do.
	By and large, and I guess the ordinary guy may not know this, but governors run the state.
	In Texas, actually, it's the lieutenant governor who runs the state.
	The governor is kind of a little more ceremonial, but the point is there is an executive branch in Texas to run Texas.
	Now, the job of congressmen and senators, and it seems a little odd to say this, but by and large, their job is to vote.
	This is what they do.
	And so the idea that Ted Cruz, after the fact, could be doing something really significant is, quite frankly, bogus.
	Now, my proof is I want to look at some of these critiques of Ted Cruz.
	Now, here's one, and this one is in Slate Magazine.
	What should Ted Cruz have done?
	Crews might not have a statutory role in on-the-ground disaster response.
	Translation, there's not much he could have done from the point of view of actual statutory authority.
	But he could have made himself useful by communicating state-level needs to contacts in the federal government.
	In other words, Ted Cruz could make some phone calls from Texas to Washington D.C. Now, couldn't he do that from Cancun?
	Can his staff do it? Guiding his staff's response to incoming requests.
	How do you guide your staff's response?
	Isn't your staff trained to respond?
	Publicizing volunteer efforts and charitable fundraising amplifying public safety messages.
	Ted Cruz should be retweeting public safety messages, which, again, he can do from Cancun.
	He could even set an example by, like, volunteering himself.
	Wow. So these are all the things he could have done.
	The basic idea here is they're demanding that Ted Cruz produce the right optics.
	If Ted Cruz, for example, had put on like seven coats and started shoveling the driveways of all his neighbors, it'd be like, oh man, this is amazing.
	Look at what Ted Cruz is doing.
	The media is wildly praising Beto O'Rourke.
	And Beto O'Rourke tweeted out, we, this is my favorite word, we, have made 100,000 phone calls to a lot of seniors around the state.
	Now here's my question. How many calls did Beto make?
	Probably like two. When he says we, he means, this is what he means.
	Let's hit the phone, guys!
	And this is being praised, you know, gaga.
	This is leadership. Take a look at Beto.
	He's showing what true leadership is.
	What we're getting at here, and this is a little bit of why, sometimes people would ask me over the years, you know, Dinesh, do you want to run for office?
	Would you like to run? And I said, no, I don't think I would.
	And the reason is I hate all the posturing.
	I hate all the fakery.
	It's not about what you actually do.
	It's kind of what you appear to be doing.
	And what you appear to be doing substitutes for real effort.
	It's less important to actually help people than to be sort of perceived to care.
	Now, of course, there's a wild double standard here.
	By the way, if you just took Ted Cruz and substituted Obama, and let's say right at this time, in an emergency, Obama went golfing in Hawaii.
	The media would be like, of course, of course he's golfing.
	Why not? He's under so much stress, Dinesh.
	Are you saying that a black man doesn't have the right to golf?
	So what I'm getting at is with Obama, suddenly all these same arguments that are made against Cruz evaporate immediately.
	Suddenly it's perfectly understandable, his behavior.
	And if this seems like a hypothetical example, it's not.
	Why? Because the country has been in an emergency for almost a year.
	We've been in this major lockdown.
	We've had this pandemic. Are you telling me that no Democratic politicians have taken a vacation?
	None of them have made a getaway.
	None of them have said, wow, we hate being locked down.
	Let's get out of here. Let's move.
	Let's go to some place where we can actually breathe a little more freely.
	Get outside. Of course they have.
	So, the bottom line of it is Ted Cruz.
	Actually did nothing wrong.
	Now, the only thing he did wrong, in my opinion, is he kind of apologized.
	Oh, I made a mistake. And Ted Cruz needs to realize two things.
	One, his apology feeds their aggression.
	The moment he shows any kind of weakness, he shows that he caves, the left goes, we got him.
	He's one of ours. We can control him from now on.
	Let's keep bashing him because we know he's going to start groveling.
	And we hope that he's on a path to becoming, you may say, Mitt Romney.
	The reason that they fear Ted is they fear that Ted will be the next Trump.
	That's the point. But if you want to be the next Trump, you've got to start acting like Trump.
	And part of the great strength of Trump is to realize, don't play into the fakery.
	Don't give in. Don't apologize.
	Why? Because the people who are trying to make you apologize are frauds.
	They know it and you know it.
	So the main thing is to recognize that you can fight back.
	You must fight back.
	You must ridicule their hypocrisy.
	They're calling you the hypocrite.
	These are the biggest hypocrites of all.
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	From the left, there is an unseemly excitement, even jubilation, over the death of Rush Limbaugh.
	There's an article I have in front of me which assembles the tweets of various celebrities.
	These are Hollywood celebrities talking about, really, the tone of it is Rod in Hell.
	They talk about John Cusack.
	Never speak ill of the dead, the poet tells us, but the truth demands recognition of some facts.
	There's been no more destructive a practitioner of the big lie for profit in U.S. history.
	Ron Perlman has sympathies for the devil.
	Bette Midler. Rush Limbaugh has gone to his reward.
	I hope he's hot.
	And so it goes on like that.
	Enjoy Hell, Billy Baldwin.
	It's all very disgusting.
	And it's a window. It actually doesn't tell you anything about Rush.
	It tells you everything about who these people are.
	And their kind of chronic mean-spiritedness.
	Their deep wellspring of hate.
	And so, what surprised me, however, is National Review.
	National Review, which, by the way, Rush has spoken at National Review events.
	He was once on the cover of National Review, leader of the opposition, and yet, on the occasion of his death, National Review publishes, this is an article by this guy, Michael Brendan Doherty, basically bashing Rush.
	Essentially saying that Rush pushed away people from conservatism.
	Yes, Rush might have appealed to some kind of working class rubes.
	This is kind of the message of the article.
	But for me and other fellow intellectual types, says Michael Dougherty, we prefer a little more refined taste.
	Rush was sort of cheap beer.
	We prefer the fine wine.
	I mean, this article just drips and reeks with snobbery.
	And according to Michael Dougherty, far more sophisticated and preferable to Rush was a guy named Roger Scruton.
	This was basically a kind of obscure British philosopher type.
	I met him years ago.
	Kind of an eccentric guy, mildly amusing, but uninfluential would be putting it mildly.
	And yet Michael Brendan Dougherty thinks that this Scruton guy sort of has it all over Rush.
	In fact, he gives an example of what he considers to be Scruton's genius prose.
	Scruton is talking about the philosopher Peter Singer, and Peter Singer had been called the most influential living philosopher, to which Scruton wittily responds, After all, there was a sense in which Mao was the most influential living poet, and Hitler the most influential living painter.
	Huh? To which Michael Dougherty goes, I'm not sure Limbaugh ever achieved an insult so insulting as that.
	Actually, that's not true.
	Limbaugh was far more effective.
	This insult doesn't even work.
	Mao was not the most influential living poet, at least not as a poet.
	Hitler is not the most influential living painter, not as a painter.
	So this is the kind of pseudo-intellectual jibe that implodes on itself.
	It's not even funny. You try to smile, but you really can't.
	But of course, Michael Dougherty is like Chuck Rose.
	I'm so clever. I got that one.
	Oh, gosh.
	Well, the thing about Rush is not just that Rush related to people.
	Here's an interesting quote.
	Line from one of the obituaries.
	Bill Buckley was smart, but no one's dad played him on the radio while they were putting up houses, making pizzas, or cleaning the shop.
	They played Rush.
	So the point here is that Rush is much more accessible than Buckley.
	People can figure out what Rush is saying.
	Half the time with Buckley, you couldn't.
	I mean, even I couldn't. You know, Buckley, I'm just going to read a few lines, a line or two from God and Man at Yale.
	This is, by the way, Buckley's most famous book.
	Authority is licitly and illicitly acquired by the democratic canon, and once acquired is then licitly and illicitly exercised.
	The authority, in quotes, to apprehend, try, and punish a lawbreaker is licitly acquired in the democratic circumstances of a society which, after popular consultation, makes its own laws, prescribes its own judicial procedures, and stipulates its own punishments, all subject to the rule of law, end quote.
	Pure gobbledygook.
	You can read that. I've read that about four times.
	It makes absolutely no sense.
	Now, this is not to deride Buckley.
	I was a fan of Buckley's.
	I wanted to be like Buckley when I was 17 years old.
	I admire Buckley. But Buckley was no Rush Limbaugh.
	In a way, Limbaugh was far, far more effective in what he did.
	Why? Not just because he spoke a colloquial language that people can understand.
	His arguments were far superior.
	This is the crusher. Rush was more intellectual at the end of the day.
	Let me give a small example of that, an interview that Rush did with me, at least the beginning of it, which I want to play now.
	This is in the immediate aftermath of my movie called Death of a Nation.
	Listen. We are talking with Dinesh D'Souza.
	His latest movie opens tonight in a thousand screens across the fruited plain, Death of a Nation.
	We talked to you about the art of persuasion.
	this is a uh...
	a provocative scene at perp provocative portrayal in your movie and it is true it yes you said it's been suppressed it's not been taught it's not widely known uh... even even today we were one of the greatest tricks in modern day america has been the democrat party shifting away the blame from themselves as the true segregation is in races to the republican party when in fact as you just mentioned every democrat in the south everybody who shot a university door turned a
	fire hose in the dogs on african-american was a democrat they They were the segregationists, and they've been able to erase that.
	Now, to understand the power of what's going on here, Rush is grabbing onto an argument that I've developed now in a couple of books that the Democratic Party is the party of racism.
	In other words, America didn't do it.
	The Democrats did it.
	They are the evil ones.
	We should point the finger at them.
	Let's spin the racist tail on the Democratic donkey.
	Now, compare the kind of sheer effectiveness of that Putting the onus on the guy who actually did it with what National Review and Bill Buckley have been doing with civil rights over the past 30 years.
	Here are some of their classic arguments, or should I say non-arguments.
	Going back to the 60s, Let's go a little slow on civil rights.
	Countries don't change very fast.
	So, yes, we acknowledge the need for reform, but let's move at a glacial pace.
	Really? You expect to convince people with that?
	Number two. America is not as racist as people think.
	Yeah, there's a lot of racism.
	Yeah, we're racist, but we're not as racist as you say.
	We're less racist than you're making it out to be.
	That's a winner. Number three.
	We have to have a respect for tradition.
	We've got to realize that conservatism is all about conserving traditions.
	Yeah, but slavery is a tradition.
	Anti-Semitism is a tradition.
	Aren't there good traditions and bad traditions?
	What kind of argument do you hope to achieve with just invoking tradition?
	And finally, you've got to judge people by the standards of the day.
	Let's not be too hard on Thomas Jefferson.
	He was a man of his time.
	This is a horrible argument.
	Because even in Jefferson's time, there were people who were emancipationists.
	So there were people in Jefferson.
	Were they not men of their time?
	In every time, you have people of all stripes.
	And the real question is, not are people...
	A product of their time.
	We are, too, now.
	The point is, are there enduring standards of right and wrong that we can use as a yardstick, as a measure, to be able to look at people and judge and understand what they're doing?
	So, one horrible argument on top of another, and then here comes Rush, boom, with an effective argument that has mobilized blacks and made them comfortable in the Republican Party, which they never were before.
	They were never comfortable with the National Review conservatism, but they are comfortable with Russia's conservatism.
	So Michael Brandon Doherty couldn't be more wrong.
	National Review couldn't be more wrong.
	The solution is not this pointy-headed intellectual conservatism that isn't just pointy-headed.
	It makes bad arguments.
	Russia ultimately was better even on the intellectual plane.
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	The feud between Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell continues to heat up.
	I'm sure that Mitch McConnell was kind of hoping that Donald Trump would play Richard Nixon.
	Once Richard Nixon was sort of ostracized, and by the way, not even with impeachment, with the threat of impeachment, Nixon resigned.
	He essentially retreated.
	He backed out of public life.
	He went on to write some interesting books, Real Peace, and so on.
	But he never set foot, you may say, in the public square, at least as a politician again.
	That's not Trump.
	And Mitch McConnell, of all people, should have known that by blasting Trump, to my mind, somewhat gratuitous blast, he voted to acquit Trump, and then he had this nasty statement basically saying Trump is practically and morally responsible for everything that happened.
	I mean, just ridiculous.
	And Trump, being Trump, fires back.
	And Trump, of course, fires back in equally, you may say, bright and nasty colors.
	And he attacks McConnell.
	And he basically says the guy's a complete failure, that anybody like McConnell is going to drag down, be a millstone around the neck of the Republican Party.
	He can never again be respected or strong.
	And so Trump has sort of declared war on McConnell, which McConnell should have predicted.
	McConnell has the reputation of being sort of this Machiavellian politician, but if that's the case, he strikes me as kind of a naive or even a dumb Machiavellian.
	I remember many years ago seeing a really funny cartoon with Sherlock Holmes and Watson, and Sherlock Holmes is telling Watson, you know, the bad guys are coming, but not to worry, I've got it all figured out, and Watson's Like, what are we going to do?
	What are we going to do? And Sherlock Holmes goes, well, see, look over here.
	When the guys come in, they're going to look through the window, but I have a mirror set up over here, which will deflect to another mirror over there, which deflects to a third mirror on the ceiling, so they're going to be utterly confused, and all their attempts to get us are going to go nowhere.
	Their shots are just going to ricochet from one mirror off the other, and we're going to be completely safe.
	So Watson is a little unsure, but he goes, oh, yeah, okay.
	Then the bad guys come in.
	They commence firing.
	Grrr, grrr, grrr. And then at the end of it, you see basically Sherlock Holmes and Watson come out and they're both totally riddled with bullets.
	Why? Because their ultra-clever scheme never worked.
	Well, McConnell's a bit like that because on the one hand, with Trump, his agenda is sort of clear.
	Trump's agenda is root out rhino types, root out anti-MAGA types from the Republican Party.
	Primary them. Run against them.
	And clearly Trump is going to play a role in doing that.
	On the balance, I think that's good for the Republican Party.
	Now, there are some rhinos who are in purple states that I would keep.
	I would keep them on the basis that they're the lesser evil.
	They're better than having a Democrat.
	So if the rhino is more electable, that has to be taken into account.
	Now, that's Trump's agenda.
	What I find harder to figure out is McConnell's agenda.
	First of all, even if McConnell lives in a hole, even if he lives in a cubicle, even if he doesn't really know what's going on, the simple truth is, number one, he knows he needed Trump to come campaign for him to get re-elected.
	Number two, he can see that six of the seven Republican senators who voted for Trump's conviction have all been chastised or censured in their home states.
	What does that tell you? That tells you that the idea, because McConnell keeps talking about, I'm really concerned about electability.
	And what he seems to be saying is that the most electable future for the Republicans is to have a traditional Republican Party without Trump.
	What he doesn't realize is that Trump has largely taken over the traditional Republican Party.
	Can you get that through your thick head, McConnell?
	The simple truth of it is 80-90% of Republicans, traditional Republicans, are with Trump.
	Now, not all of them, but most of them.
	So, what kind of a party do you want to have going forward?
	Well, it may be a party without Trump, but you can't have a party without the Trump spirit, without some sort of allegiance to the issues and ideas and even fighting style that Trump represents.
	So, Mitch McConnell strikes me as a very foolish, imprudent man.
	If he was prudent, let's even say that he had honest concerns that Trump was too reckless, was too provocative, should have foreseen what was coming, take over the Capitol, totally objectionable.
	If it were Mitch, if I were Mitch, I would have kept that quiet.
	I would have discussed it inside the Republican conference.
	I would have perhaps taken it up with Trump himself.
	In other words, I would have, instead of going public and inviting this skirmish, this distasteful attack, in which kind of one of the least popular Republicans in the country, McConnell, is attacking one of the most popular.
	Is there any doubt how that one's going to come out?
	So Mitch McConnell strikes me as on a quixotic, windmill-charging, ultimately destructive, not just naive, but foolish crusade.
	A crusade that can't end well for the Republican Party, and it certainly isn't going to end well for him.
	Do you think there's a coincidence between Biden signing over 40 executive orders in his first couple of weeks of office and the price of silver skyrocketing?
	No. No coincidence.
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	I see some news reports that the Supreme Court might, might.
	Take some of these election fraud cases in various states and finally hear them.
	Now, these cases have been sort of on the docket.
	They've been making their way.
	They're up for consideration.
	The Supreme Court, to my knowledge, hasn't said yes, we're on it.
	But they might be.
	They might take up these cases.
	But in a way, I have a very mixed feeling about that because on the one hand, I have sort of a relief.
	I want to know whether these claims of irregularities, of massive coordination, of fraud are valid.
	I want to know the truth of the matter.
	It seems to me there hasn't been a proper forum to hear that.
	We keep hearing things like Baseless claims of fraud or unproven claims of fraud.
	Well, maybe they aren't proven, but do they have a chance to be proven?
	Maybe they're baseless, but is it the case that something is baseless only until a base is supplied?
	Now, On the other hand, I ask myself, why now?
	I mean, what's the point?
	It seems a little crazy with Biden in office.
	I mean, is the Supreme Court going to say, well, you know, after all, there really was fraud.
	Biden, back it up.
	Biden, get back to Delaware.
	Trump's in, you're out. No.
	I mean, I think we know that that is a done deal.
	So, the question here is what is up with the Supreme Court?
	Why is the Supreme Court, why did they not see the extreme importance at the outset of dealing with this issue?
	Do they realize how much they have through inaction contributed to the poisonous atmosphere of division and distrust, an institutional, a perceived institutional failure In our country.
	The Supreme Court these days is characterized, it seems, in many cases, by inaction.
	Even on the Senate trial, where was the Chief Justice?
	The Constitution talks about if there's going to be an impeachment of a president, and let's leave aside the issue of whether an ex-president can be impeached, the Chief Justice shall decide.
	But in this case, of course, Roberts was sort of nowhere to be found.
	He sort of skipped out. He was out of town, so to speak.
	And we might think that this is all just a case that the court is full of these kind of timid creatures and wimps, and they don't have the spine, Dinesh, to step up to the plate.
	But I think it's a deeper problem than that.
	The problem really is the conservative philosophy of judicial restraint that our own side has been peddling for almost 40 years.
	So let me explain.
	If we go back to the original appointments of, say, Scalia and Bork to the Supreme Court.
	The Bork nomination, of course, went down.
	The Scalia nomination went forward.
	But Bork and Scalia had the same mind in believing that, by and large, the court's job in a democratic society is to play a very modest role.
	The basic idea here is that in a democracy, and Bork, by the way, outlines this extravagantly in a very good book that I recommend to you called The Tempting of America.
	It outlines Bork's judicial philosophy, and Bork basically says, look, in a democratic society, who should make the rules?
	Who should run the show? The people.
	And how? Through their elected representatives.
	So it's the people's job to make rules, kind of like the rules in a baseball game.
	The job of a court is very modest, to be the umpire.
	Not to make the rules, but just to call the plays, the ball in or out.
	The umpire's job is ultimately one of exercising this kind of adjudication, but in any case of doubt or ambiguity, deferring to the superior wisdom and authority of the legislature.
	So this is the philosophy of judicial restraint.
	And this philosophy, by the way, is not exclusive to Bork and Scalia.
	It continues with Justice Thomas.
	It goes all the way right through Alito and all the way to Amy Coney Barrett.
	So this is the conservative way of thinking.
	Defer to the legislature.
	Admittedly, in the voter fraud cases, you should defer to the legislature.
	By the way, not the Congress or the Senate, but the state legislatures.
	Why? Because the Constitution could not be more clear in assigning to state legislatures the procedures and control of the process of running elections in those particular states.
	But here's my point. We've also been dealing with serious threats to basic constitutional liberties.
	Threats to the First Amendment, both free speech and religious freedom.
	Threats to the Second Amendment, threats to freedom of assembly.
	Now, COVID is the pretext for a lot of these threats.
	But nevertheless, governments, both federal and state governments, have been putting in lockdowns and jeopardizing enumerated constitutional rights.
	And my point is this. Should the court be deferential to the legislature in those cases?
	No. The job of the court is to be vigilant in those cases, and it's to be vigilant against the legislature.
	The court actually needs to be, you may almost say activist, to use that kind of scare word, activist in protecting liberty where the Constitution enumerates those rights and liberties to be protected.
	And so it's not enough to invoke democracy and the rights of the majority.
	Courts also exist to be a hedge against democracy, to protect against the tyranny of the majority, to secure individual rights when the majority is all too willing, at least through elected representatives, to run roughshod over them.
	We need a modified constitutional philosophy in which the Supreme Court is deferential when the Constitution says so.
	But the Supreme Court is vigorous, active, and forceful where the Constitution requires.
	The left has been trying to cancel Mike Lindell of MyPillow everywhere.
	All these retail stores have stopped selling his merchandise.
	And why? Just because the guy speaks out.
	Just think about it. If Mike Lindell would have none of these troubles if he just kept his mouth shut, if he just was silent.
	So it's Mike's patriotism, it's his Christianity, and it's also his sheer bravery that is why he is being targeted.
	I don't know if you've seen Mike's latest video.
	He's made a short version of his original movie that he's calling The Absolute Proof Trailer.
	You can see it at lindeltv.com.
	Now, we've had some crazy cold temperatures in Texas and my wife Debbie, who was raised in the tropics, I sometimes call her Island Girl, is going berserk.
	We've been sleeping not only on Mike's flannel sheets, but also on the MyPillow blankets and yes, even the MyPillow comforter.
	Let's just say that at a difficult time and a very frigid time for Texas, we've been kind of toasty.
	Mike is offering deep discounts on all his products, up to 60% off on 100 or more products.
	So let's get right on it.
	Let's stay warm. Let's support Mike.
	Call 800-876-0227 or just go to MyPillow.com.
	But make sure that whatever you buy to get the full discount, make sure you use the promo code Dinesh.
	Slavery in the United States ended in 1865.
	That's over 150 years ago.
	And yet to this day, and in a sense simmering now, we hear continuing calls for reparations for slavery.
	Now, recently, Jen Psaki, the press secretary, was asked about this, and she said that Biden, quote, would certainly support a study of reparations.
	Now, she doesn't say if Biden would take any kind of legislative or executive action.
	She just says, we'll see where Congress moves on this issue.
	But clearly, you know, as often happens here, you have an intellectual movement in the universities It's amplified by the media, it gains steam through the culture, and then it's pressed on the Congress.
	So the Congress is kind of the latecomer to this, but they've become the vehicle for taking these ideas and giving them legislative or executive expression.
	I want to talk a little bit about the idea of reparations, because although we hear reparations for slavery, well, they can't be reparations for slavery because the slaves are dead.
	They've been dead for over a century.
	So the reparations is not going to the people who have actually directly suffered under slavery.
	Now, by the way, this is important to contrast with, say, reparations for the people who were unjustly interned, Japanese Americans interned in the period of World War II, because the reparations there went to the people and their families who were interned.
	So these were the actual victims, and they received reparations.
	I think if the slaves were around, we would not deny for one minute that they have been wronged, and they've been not only wronged by their slave masters, but they've been wronged through the intervention of the state.
	The states, by the way, had a whole network of slave patrols and slave laws, all kinds of ways that shored up the institution of slavery.
	So the government was implicated in it.
	By the way, these are democratic governments in the South, but nevertheless, the government was implicated.
	But we're talking about something kind of different, which is we're talking about reparations to the long-time descendants of slavery.
	And here we are faced with a little different situation.
	Now, many years ago, Muhammad Ali, after he won the so-called Rumble in the Jungle, this was the 1973 fight in Zaire against George Foreman.
	Ali won, and he took back the title, and he came back to America.
	And when he got back to America, somebody asked him, Champ, what did you think of Africa?
	And Ali replied, and this is very Ali, he goes, thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!
	Now this is Ali being his pungent kind of frank self, but I want to unpack Ali's statement because I think behind this quip there is actually a serious point.
	What Ali is basically saying is that slavery, abominable in itself, was nevertheless the transmission belt that brought Africans into the orbit of Western freedom.
	So although the slaves were worse off, says Ali, He, Ali, is better off.
	He, Ali, is really happy his granddaddy got on that boat.
	Not because his granddaddy had it easy, but because he, Ali, can live a free life in America, can become the world champion, can do things with his life that he could never have done had he stayed back, let's just say, in Benin or the Congo or in Africa.
	Now, I made a similar point myself in connection with colonialism because when I talked to my grandfather and he spoke about his father and his grandfather, my ancestors were very bitter about British colonialism for many reasons.
	But one of them was that it established a kind of rough ceiling above which no Indian could climb.
	And so these Indians chafed under the kind of, you may almost call it, glass ceiling of colonialism.
	They didn't like it. But I thought to myself, although colonialism was in many ways bad for them, has it really been bad for me?
	I grew up in a country where my native language was English.
	The reason I've been able to write 18 books is because of that.
	I don't think I would have been able to write 18 books, at least not in America, if my native language were Hindustani.
	Interestingly, when the British left India in 1947, the Indians could easily have said, oh, the British were horrible.
	They've left India. You know what?
	Let's stop having ports of law.
	Let's stop having democracy.
	Let's take down all these British ports and roads that the British have built.
	Let's dismantle Western civilization in India.
	And let's go back to our old way, the way things were before, before the British came.
	Or let's build them ourselves.
	Let's create new institutions.
	We don't need separation of powers, checks and balances.
	We don't need judges in white wigs.
	What I'm trying to say is the Indians could have done all of that, but they did none of it.
	They actually embraced those institutions.
	And so what I'm getting at is many of the values of Indian democracy, the idea of human rights, the idea of dignity of people, the notion of equality of rights under the law.
	Now, these are not always respected in practice, but they do exist in principle.
	And they are the imports of Western civilization.
	I'm not saying the British came to India to give the Indians these great things.
	The British came to India to rule.
	But in the process of ruling, they couldn't help.
	They needed an infrastructure. They built the roads.
	They needed an Indian civil service.
	They taught the Indians English.
	So even though their motives might have been self-interested, the effect...
	Was to incorporate Indians into the orbit.
	This is the reason, by the way, that India is making all these advances in technology.
	Where do you think India got the scientific method?
	How do you think the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution came to India?
	They came via colonialism.
	This was why several years ago I wrote an article called Two Cheers for Colonialism.
	So my point is, think of how ridiculous it would be for me today to submit a bill to the British Parliament for reparations because of the injustices of colonialism.
	The whole point of reparations is simply this.
	Were it not for that event, I would have been worse off.
	And so, for example, I might sue for reparations if a truck comes on the sidewalk and runs over my leg.
	Why? Because had the truck not done that, I would still be able to work.
	I would not have all these medical bills.
	So, but for that event, I would have been better off.
	That's the whole point. But my point is that doesn't apply here.
	That's Muhammad Ali's point.
	Muhammad Ali's point is that the truth of the matter is, That India today embraces many of the aspects of colonialism that it found to be beneficial.
	And African Americans living in America today can appreciate American freedom, American opportunity.
	Opportunities, by the way, that are not available, not just in Africa, but not available in many other places in the world.
	And so the bottom line of it is that reparations, even though it has a certain kind of political appeal, the bottom line of it is, it makes no sense.
	Cybercrime is up 75%, and by far the most serious cybercrime to worry about is home title theft.
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	The title documents to our homes are now online.
	The thief finds your home's title and forges your signature on a quitclaim deed stating you sold your home to him.
	Then he takes out loans on your home and leaves you in debt.
	You won't know until late payment or eviction notices arrive.
	Insurance doesn't cover you, and neither do common identity theft programs.
	That's why I protect my home with Home Title Lock.
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	Go to hometitlelock.com and register your address to see if you're already a victim.
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	That's code radio at hometitlelock.com.
	Do you remember Rachel Dolezal?
	Rachel Dolezal.
	Rachel Dolezal is the white woman who was posing, or perhaps the more accurate word is, passing, as black.
	And she was kind of outed, you might say, about six years ago.
	Now, this woman, Rachel Dolezal, lived in Spokane, Washington.
	She was a professor of Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University.
	Now, I'm sure that part of the reason she got that job is that she was, quote, black.
	And she was also the president of the local chapter of the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
	And... Then it came out, some earlier pictures have surfaced, and it turned out that Rachel Dolezal is, in fact, not black.
	There was kind of a very amusing interview about this, which is worth listening to.
	Listen. Are you an African-American woman?
	I identify as black.
	You identify as black.
	Let me put a picture up of you in your early 20s, though.
	And when you see this picture, is this an African-American woman?
	Or is that a Caucasian woman?
	That's not in my early 20s, but...
	That's a little younger, I guess. I think I was 16 in that picture.
	Is she a Caucasian woman or an African-American woman?
	I would say that visibly she would be identified as white.
	Now, what's interesting about this is that when you look at the earlier picture of Rachel Dolezal...
	She's not black. And that goes based upon our idea of what it looks to be black.
	In other words, she doesn't seem to have the features that we would identify as black.
	But here's something equally interesting.
	When you look at her in the interview with Matt Lauer, she does kind of look black.
	She looks at least part black.
	She looks multiracial.
	And so, what's up if looks are what count?
	Rachel Dolezal looks black.
	Is this a matter of looks or of genes?
	Now, Rachel Dolezal said something very interesting.
	She said, I identify as black.
	And in an age where identification seems to be critical, I'm a man who identifies as a woman.
	Why not? Why can't Rachel Dolezal identify as black?
	You might say, well, that's because she doesn't have black genes.
	How do you know? Let's look at the case of my wife, Debbie.
	My wife, Debbie, doesn't look black.
	My wife, Debbie, is primarily Hispanic.
	She is Latina. Her mother is Mexican-American from the Rio Grande Valley, and her father was Venezuelan.
	But, recently, Debbie did a DNA chart.
	She traced her DNA. And here's a little picture of the result.
	I've actually got it right here in front of me.
	Take a look. So, turns out that Debbie is in fact, well, she's mainly European with roots in Spain and Italy, but she's 12% Native American.
	That's probably on her mom's side.
	She's 10% black.
	And I mean black.
	Senegal. Nigeria.
	Cameroon. Congo.
	Western Bantu peoples.
	Wow. This was kind of a shock to her.
	She doesn't look black.
	She doesn't look any different than Rachel Dolezal did in the earlier picture.
	But Gabi is in fact mixed race.
	We have all kinds of people in this country who are mixed race.
	My daughter Danielle is mixed race.
	And here's the point. Mixed race is a real threat to reified or fixed racial categories because a mixed race person is in the middle.
	They're none of the above.
	They're neither here nor there.
	They have elements of both or many.
	And in this country, unfortunately, we force people into a particular category.
	So Rachel Dolezal is either black or she's not black.
	Well, you know an interesting secret?
	Most blacks in America aren't entirely black.
	They have a large admixture of other things.
	They've got a considerable amount of Mongolian or Native American genes, and they've got a lot of white genes.
	And that's why, for example, American blacks look totally different for the most part than African blacks, because you may say that their percentage of blackness is much less.
	So America, almost exclusively in the world, operates by something called the one-drop rule.
	And that is the very perverse idea that a single drop of black blood, you might say, makes you black.
	Now this rule is, by the way, now some people think that the one drop rule comes from slavery.
	But this is not true. It doesn't come from slavery.
	It comes from segregation.
	See, under slavery, slave status passed through the mother.
	And what that means is that if you were a white plantation owner, you had sex with a black slave, and you had a mulatto child, that child would be a slave.
	So slavery passes through the mother.
	By contrast, if you were a white woman, and you had sex with a black man, even if he were a slave, And you have a child, that child would be free.
	Why? Because the white woman was free.
	Slave status passes through the mother.
	Now, under segregation, that was changed, and you had the one-drop rule.
	Any discernible lineage of blackness made you black.
	And what I find really ironic is that we stick with that today.
	We'll look at people like Jesse Jackson, Whitney Houston, people who are quite light-skinned, in many ways more white than black.
	Well, we call them black. And so what you have here, and I think the Rachel Dolezal thing to me is interesting.
	I mean, she's back in the news recently.
	There's just an article that says Rachel Dolezal says she can't find a job six years after the revelation that she's not black.
	But ironically, this revelation is coming at a time when these categories have become increasingly fluid.
	And the point I want to make is that in the end, what will kill off racism is the end of race thinking.
	And nothing is a greater threat to race thinking than the idea of miscegenation, of intermarriage, of mixed race.
	Because the mixed race people who refuse to be dropped entirely into one camp or the other defeat racial categories and defeat the entire industry of people who are making a living off of race.
	Making a living, you may say, off of being black.
	In the end, I hope that the Rachel Dolezal case is just a message to us that we should get away from racial thinking.
	The reason Rachel Dolezal wanted to be black is because that would help her pay the mortgage.
	She was playing the race game.
	And I hope that she gets the message, as all of us should, that that is just a very bad game to play.
	Want to belong to a senior organization you can trust?
	That's AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens.
	AMAC is the fastest-growing conservative 50-plus organization in America.
	Over 2 million people have joined and now carry the AMAC membership card.
	AMAC was built by folks who feel the same way we do.
	It stands up for the values that have made America great—faith, family, and freedom.
	AMAC believes in the sanctity of our Constitution, including the First and Second Amendments.
	They're fighting against the ever-expanding scope of the federal government.
	They are pro-small business, secure borders, support our military, and respect our veterans.
	AMAC works hard to deliver real value to their members, providing the best benefits, discounts, and services you can find in one place.
	Debbie and I are lifetime members, and we're taking advantage of all the great discounts that AMAC has to offer.
	Go to dineshforamac.com and join now.
	That website, again, is dineshforamac.com.
	Is there intelligent life in the universe just as there is intelligent life on Earth?
	Well, I guess the idea that there's intelligent life on Earth is somewhat debatable.
	But there is a NASA probe, a rover, that is trying to find the signature or signs of life on Mars.
	Now, Mars doesn't have life now.
	Mars is uninhabitable today.
	But it's possible that Mars was habitable at some point in the past.
	In fact, there have been some traces of water.
	on Mars in the past, millions of years ago.
	And if that were the case, did those habitable conditions give rise to life on Mars?
	So the Mars rover is trying to find out.
	And it's the best rover we've sent to Mars.
	It carries all these scientific tools.
	The rover itself is about the size of a car.
	It has sophisticated lasers and cameras.
	It can analyze the chemical makeup of Martian rocks.
	It has ground-penetrating radar.
	And the bottom line of it is scientists are trying to figure out, I'm now quoting one of them, we're looking for lifelike shapes and lifelike compositions, chemical compositions.
	So the elements, the minerals, the molecules, the organic molecules that we know are associated with life, we're looking for all those things occurring together.
	Now, All of this flashes my mind right back to Earth and the way in which life on Earth developed from molecular life through a kind of profusion of evolutionary multiplication, adaptation, changing in response to changing circumstances.
	And this notion of evolution giving rise, being the mechanism For giving rise to new life forms has created a very interesting sort of theological debate.
	And of course, some kind of arrogance on the part of atheists who go, oh, we now know that there isn't a God because we have discovered an alternative mechanism.
	This is by and large the argument of Richard Dawkins, the biologist in The God Delusion, but also in a whole bunch of other books, that because we have identified the mechanism in which life, including human life, comes to be, therefore we now know that there is no creator who is, in a sense, orchestrating the process.
	Now, if you think about that, there's kind of a logical fallacy there, isn't there?
	Many years ago, the sardonic New England poet Robert Frost, in one of his talks he describes talking to his mother, and his mother was one of these stern Puritan New England women, and his mother says, What's all this I've been reading about human beings coming from mud?
	And Robert Frost goes, Well, are you talking about evolution?
	And his mom goes, Yes! Apparently human beings came from mud.
	How can I reconcile that with my belief in God?
	And Robert Frost, in his very kind of sardonic New England fashion, goes, Mom, we're talking about prepared mud.
	In other words, we're not talking about mud pure and simple, but we're talking about the kind of mud that gives rise to cells and gives rise to creatures and gives rise to unicellular and then multicellular and then mammals and then humans.
	So who is to say...
	That there isn't a supervisory intelligence not only guiding, but creating this entire process, this directionality from simple to complex creatures ending up, of course, in not just humans, but beings that can actually understand evolution, understand the process itself.
	Francis Collins, one of the greatest living scientists, in fact, he was the head of the government-run Human Genome Project, As a book I'll recommend to you, it's called The Language of God.
	And Collins makes a beautiful argument for what he calls, very conventional term, theistic evolution.
	Evolution guided by divine intelligence.
	And there is no reason to believe that theism is in any way refuted.
	By evolution. Evolution could very well be, I believe it is, the mechanism that God chose.
	Now, God could have chose other mechanisms.
	He could have made creatures directly, I suppose.
	God is omnipotent. He could have chosen any way he wanted.
	But look at the beauty and economy of the way that God chose.
	Namely, this kind of marvelous unfolding.
	Darwin himself is kind of stunned and impressed by this.
	Now, many people think, and in fact, Dawkins makes a great deal out of the fact that Darwin was an agnostic, Darwin was not a believer.
	True, Darwin actually lost his faith, but he didn't lose it over evolution.
	Darwin didn't see any inconsistency between evolution and God.
	The reason Darwin lost his faith is twofold.
	Number one, he lost a child, a young daughter named Annie, and he was destroyed by it.
	He blamed God for it.
	And the second reason, so the second reason was that Darwin If the Christians are right, then many of these fine fellows in England, the kind of people I hang out with in the library and at the pub, many of them reject Christ.
	They reject the redemption.
	So if Christianity is true, they're going to hell.
	But Darwin could hardly believe that.
	He goes, I refuse to accept this.
	This is, I'm quoting Darwin now, a damnable doctrine.
	So the bottom line of it is that Darwin's atheism, if we call it that, was really wounded theism.
	It was anger at God for taking his beloved daughter, anger at God for setting up a world with heaven and hell in which there are penalties for refusing to be with God, Darwin's agnosticism or atheism came out of that.
	But as for evolution, a belief in evolution is in no way inconsistent with a belief in theism or Christianity.
	Today we're in a battle for truth, and 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 topics like life, death, sex, truth.
	Reflections on the Existence of God is a collection of short essays that tackles the biggest question of all, does God exist?
	The book is well-researched, easy to read, and now a bestseller on Amazon.
	Former White House aide Wallace Henley says, I've taught apologetics for many years.
	Of all the books on apologetics, Simmons is the best I've ever read.
	If you want to challenge yourself, I encourage you right now to get your copy of Reflections on the Existence of God by Richard Simmons III. Visit reflectionsdinesh.com to learn more about the book and get exclusive access to the first chapter for free.
	Go to ReflectionsDinesh.com now.
	That's reflectionsDinesh.com.
	Hey, I hope you're enjoying the podcast.
	Just remember to subscribe.
	Remember to please share the podcast with your friends.
	It's now time for the mailbox, and we have a question from Rick.
	Hi, Dinesh. Rick Daniels here.
	My question's about Facebook, and same question really on big tech in general, but there appears to be ample evidence that Facebook and its bizarre billionaire, Zuckerberg, have nefarious motives.
	For example, we know Facebook spent huge sums of money to help Biden.
	We know Facebook censors, labels, and limits conservative speech.
	And we know they're spying on their members and amassing detailed files on them.
	We know they sell this information to marketers, but what's really scary is the prospect of Facebook handing over a person's file to, say, the FBI, should that person start sounding too much like an insurrectionist.
	Now, some conservatives, like Mark Levin, have already left Facebook for other platforms like Parler, while others, such as Liz Wheeler, say that we should stick with Facebook because leaving would actually help rather than hurt them.
	But how do we justify staying with a company that habitually distorts the truth and floods the First Amendment?
	Shouldn't we divest ourselves of all things Facebook?
	Thanks, Dinesh, and God bless you and yours.
	Hey, that's a really good and not an easy question at all.
	And here's how I think about it.
	Parler is not fully up and running yet.
	Alternative platforms are in the process of germinating, multiplying.
	We're going to have a lot of those.
	We're going to have a lot of other options.
	I kind of look at these digital platforms and these digital moguls somewhat the way that Thomas Jefferson looked at slavery.
	He goes, we have a wolf by the tail.
	We can neither hold him nor safely let him go.
	Now, what that means is that we want to get rid of these platforms.
	We want to get off them. We actually want to figure out ways to knock them down, destroy them.
	Why? Because they are the vehicles of tyranny.
	So we don't want to subsidize them, at least not long term, but we can't also right now safely let them go.
	We have been suckered into them.
	We've been trapped.
	We're a little dependent on them.
	So for the present, My view is we stay on them while being fully aware and not holding back and publicizing the public threat that they represent.
	But nevertheless, we are looking for ways to dismantle them and get out of there and find genuine free speech platforms.
	It's really scary to think that we do not have free speech in America today.
	We're like one of those countries.
	We used to be the country with the freest speech in the world.
	We are not that even close.
	We're now kind of in the middle.
	We don't have flat-out tyranny, but neither do we have anything resembling genuine freedom.
	So we need to find a way out of it, but this is almost a case where you have to find a way out of it while nevertheless working with the infrastructure that you have.
	Because otherwise you're in effect silencing yourself.
	If you aren't on Twitter and there is no parlor, you're effectively silenced, at least for the moment.
	My choice is to speak for the moment while looking for ways out of this mess.
	In the end, we don't just want to let the wolf go.
	We want to put the wolf in a cage and keep him there.
	Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.

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