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Feb. 22, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza

01:04:44

ERASING TRUMP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep31

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	They're trying to erase Trump as if he never existed.
	Therapy for congressmen after January 6th.
	And Poland shows the way in zapping big tech.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	I hope you're enjoying the podcast.
	It's really fun for me to do.
	I hope it's fun for you.
	Please make sure you subscribe.
	Maybe turn on the notifications button so you'll know exactly when the podcast is uploaded.
	And tell your friends about it.
	Share the podcast with people you know.
	I'd appreciate it very much.
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	And Mike really welcomes it because he wants the truth to come out.
	He's paid a real price for speaking up, putting out his information.
	I really think it's important to support him because I'm so opposed to this cancel culture.
	Destroy a guy, destroy his business, just because he's a patriot, he's a Christian, he stands up for what he believes.
	We need to support Mike Lindell every which way we can.
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	America needs this voice.
	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.
	The left really wants to erase Trump.
	And I mean erase Trump.
	I don't just mean prevent him from running again.
	They just don't want his presence to be felt in American culture at all.
	So there's a bill now that House Democrats have introduced, H.R. 484.
	I'm kind of chuckling. It prevents Trump's name for being used on federal projects.
	To name federal buildings for any federal statues or any lands being named after Donald Trump.
	You know, it's customary to name Navy ships and highways and all kinds of things after presidents.
	They want to make sure Trump doesn't get this honor.
	They also want to ban Trump from being buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
	I mean... Trump has a way of getting to these people like I've never seen.
	He's almost like the exorcist.
	He comes in with his holy water and these people are like...
	They respond with this kind of insane derangement and ferocious, ghoulish reactions.
	I mean, it's almost fun to watch.
	Now... In my book, United States of Socialism, I kind of warned this was going to happen because I knew the effect that he had on these people.
	I wrote this. If Trump loses in 2020, the left will treat his term as a regrettable blip.
	A moment in history when Americans lost their mind and then returned to their senses, there will be a comprehensive effort to sweep away everything connected with Trump.
	To wipe away not only the Trump stain, but to discredit all of us who ever said anything positive about Trump.
	Now, the pretext, the rationale for this is that Trump is a clear danger to democracy.
	Now, it seems ironic because if Trump is a danger to democracy, why would you, the Democrats, try to prevent Trump from running again?
	You're trying to prevent the American people from having this choice on the ballot.
	And that's a strike against democracy in a very direct way.
	Now, Democrats, of course, will say, well, Trump was the guy who fomented this insurrection.
	And I want to talk for a moment about insurrection, because insurrection is a very serious business.
	And we know about insurrections, and insurrections have occurred throughout history.
	I have here my copy of Julius Caesar, and I want to talk for a moment about insurrection, because they talk specifically about it.
	Here's Brutus.
	When he is thinking about the conspiracy to go after Caesar, between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or hideous dream.
	The genius and mortal instruments are then in council, and the state of man like to a little kingdom suffers then the nature of an insurrection.
	So here's Brutus, and he is planning, you may say, the dreadful deed.
	And then Brutus and Cassius are talking about it, and they talk specifically about what's going to happen.
	Cassius, I think it is not meat.
	Meat means suitable here.
	Mark Antony, so well beloved of Caesar, should outlive Caesar.
	Let Antony and Caesar fall together.
	And then Brutus opposes that idea.
	So we see here with insurrection, there has to be this kind of explicit plotting.
	They have to decide what is it that they're going to do.
	That wasn't the case with Trump.
	And then the actual deed.
	You have these armed conspirators, Brutus Cassius, they're in with Caesar and they attack him.
	And Caesar goes, et tu, Brute!
	And you too, Brutus? Then falls Caesar.
	And then you have the celebration after Caesar falls.
	Sina, liberty, freedom, tyranny is dead, run hence, proclaim, cry it in the streets.
	So here we have coup, conspiracy, insurrection.
	This is not what happened on January 6th.
	In fact, if Shakespeare were to write about what happened on January 6th, his way would be something like this.
	Brutus and Cassius and Sinner are talking, and they decide it's time to launch a coup.
	And Brutus goes,"'Wow!
	You know what? I better put on my animal suit!' In fact, I've got a pair of old bullhorns.
	I'm going to put those on.
	And then Sina goes, I don't think any of us need any weapons.
	What's the point of weapons? Why don't we just go in there unarmed?
	We could have an unarmed coup.
	And then Cassius goes, you know what?
	It's going to be really fun. I'm kind of hoping to make off with Caesar's podium.
	It'll be really fun. And I'm going to bring my portrait painter so he can make pictures of me doing it.
	Kind of the ancient equivalent of the selfie.
	Okay. What I'm trying to get at here is that if Shakespeare were to do that, Julius Caesar would have been a comedy.
	It would be laugh out loud.
	It would be a spoof.
	It would be Saturday Night Live for the Renaissance era.
	Insurrection requires planning beforehand.
	It requires bloody and armed execution.
	It requires a certain kind of exaltation and planning for the aftermath.
	And clearly none of that was even present here.
	So it's not even a matter of Trump Fomenting an insurrection.
	It wasn't even an insurrection.
	Big tech companies do not hesitate to throw conservatives off their platforms.
	We can't trust these people one bit.
	So why exactly are we choosing to give big tech companies our personal data?
	Now is the time to take a stance.
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	expressvpn.com slash dinesh Did you know that we are being governed by a group of weenies?
	I think the evidence is in.
	I'm reading this article in the New York Post, and I'm literally kind of chortling as I read it.
	It says,"...huge amount of lawmakers and staff seeking therapy after Capitol Hill riot." First of all, there wasn't a riot.
	We've seen riots.
	We're talking about, they should say, huge amount of lawmaker staff seeking therapy after a Capitol walkthrough.
	You have a rowdy group of people similar to the people who take over a campus.
	They take over the dean's office.
	They mosey around. They push their way.
	They make a lot of noise.
	They wave a lot of flags and paraphernalia.
	And then a few minutes later, they leave.
	Evidently, this was a massively traumatic event.
	Here's Paul Tewksbury, the director of the House Office of Employee Assistance.
	He told lawmakers his office has provided 760 counseling sessions.
	Both to congressmen and congresswomen and to their staffs.
	These are people who have been shaking ever since January 6th.
	He says there have been 3,000 contacts between his office and the Capitol Hill community.
	He goes, this is a huge increase over the past.
	So, you know...
	I've been thinking about this. Therapy sessions?
	I wonder what those therapy sessions sound like.
	And here's the good news.
	Employing my massive investigative resources, I have gotten my hands on a transcript.
	Now, some may say this is a suspect transcript.
	I'm going to let you decide for yourself about its authenticity.
	But I, needless to say, have to do the voice both of the psychologist who is doing the counseling as well as the congressional staffer who is the Who is the patient?
	So, this was a recent session that was recorded and I think you're going to find it very interesting.
	Here we go. Have you been experiencing any trauma after January 6th?
	Yes, it's very distressing.
	I can't sleep.
	I have nightmares.
	I sometimes wake up shaking.
	Sounds like you feel you've been through a war.
	Exactly. You have PTSD? Oh yes, PTSD. I also, by the way, have IBS and explosive diarrhea.
	What scared you the most?
	Was it the guy in the animal suit?
	Totally scary.
	You never know what a guy like that will do to you.
	What else? All those American flags, the banners.
	These people are crazy.
	I'm telling you, I heard all about it on MSNBC. What about the guy who took off with Nancy Pelosi's podium?
	That was the worst.
	I mean, who steals a podium?
	First it's a podium. Next thing you know, they're chopping you up into small pieces.
	Did any of the protesters harm you?
	What do you mean? Well, I mean, were you harmed in any way?
	Well, I mean, the guy next to me peed his pants.
	It made a big pool of water.
	Man, I almost slipped.
	I could have really hurt myself.
	Have you ever been in a war?
	No, not exactly.
	Not exactly? Well, what I mean to say is no.
	You'd just like to send other Americans off to war.
	Exactly. Better them than me, you know what I mean?
	Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia.
	Hey, I prefer Nantucket, Kauai, the Bahamas, you know what I mean?
	Do you scare easily?
	How can you say that?
	How can you even suggest that?
	We here on Capitol Hill are some of the toughest people in America.
	How would you respond if I said, Boo!
	Hey! Stop that!
	You're scaring me! That's very triggering!
	I think I better find another shrink!
	I'm out of here! My people will be in touch with your people!
	Yes, that's what they sound like.
	These are the people who are ruling this country.
	Does this make you feel safe?
	Not me.
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	We hear a lot from the Democrats and for the left about stopping misinformation.
	But of course, this all raises the question of what is misinformation?
	Is misinformation statements that are factually untrue, verifiably untrue?
	Is misinformation simply the opinion you happen to disagree with and you're in the position to suppress?
	Who gets to say what misinformation is?
	Well, the answer is you've seen these fact-checking sites sort of sprouting up all over the place.
	One of the best known is PolitiFact.
	And supposedly these are neutral checkers that take a good, hard, objective look at things, try to separate facts, you may say, from values, and try to identify misinformation and correct it.
	Now, the main editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, Do you think Cuomo's been given an easy, easy break by the media and is that changing?
	I think the situation in New York is really complicated.
	Certainly there are things to criticize about how the Cuomo administration handled data.
	But the heart of the matter goes back to last year when the state was asking nursing homes to take in patients, COVID patients, who are ready to be discharged from the hospital.
	We don't see hard evidence that that made a significant difference in COVID deaths.
	If you look at the statistics, New York is about having the same numbers as other states around the country.
	So listen to this complete fraud.
	I say complete fraud because this is really not fact-checking at all.
	The question being posed to her has nothing to do with her reply.
	The question has to do with the Cuomo scandal.
	Let's be clear about what that is.
	Cuomo forces nursing homes to take coronavirus patients that they don't want to take.
	Why? Because the nursing homes recognize that they've got a lot of vulnerable people there, a lot of old people, people with pre-existing conditions.
	And so for them to take coronavirus patients who could be contagious is literally imposing a death sentence on people who are in the nursing homes.
	So the nursing homes say no, and Cuomo forces them.
	He makes them take these coronavirus patients.
	And as a result, there is a spike in deaths at the nursing homes.
	Literally the Cuomo policy kills people.
	And then Cuomo, in league with his staff, starts covering up the data.
	They give various reasons for doing it.
	One reason is they didn't want the feds to go after them.
	So they're covering up the data to prevent federal investigations into their malpractice.
	And they're doing it in order to not give political support to Trump.
	So look at their motives.
	This is almost like the old mafia.
	You kill guys, then you hide the bodies.
	Or you hide the data about the bodies.
	In either case, you don't want people to find out and you don't want the government to find out what you did.
	This is the actual offense.
	And we're talking not about 10 people or 50 people.
	Thousands of people are in this situation.
	Now, when asked about this, Angie Holin, who's kind of, you almost call her sort of a champion of changing the topic, in other words, concealing the facts at hand, basically says, well, there's no hard data that this made any significant difference.
	It obviously made a difference, but it apparently, to her, didn't make a significant difference.
	Notice that this is not a factual assertion, but a value claim.
	She doesn't think it was important.
	And then what she says is, basically, New York doesn't seem to have overall significantly higher coronavirus data deaths than other cities.
	What? First of all, cities are all different.
	Their demographics are different.
	If you compare, say, New York and Florida, there are a lot more old people in Florida.
	The population of New York is younger, so there could be various factors that affect overall numbers, not to mention that cities have different sizes of population in the first place.
	Now, what possible relevance is that?
	To what Cuomo did.
	Is it a fact or not that his actions resulted in unnecessary deaths?
	Imagine if someone were to say, you know, the Chinese killed 10,000 people in Tiananmen Square, but we see no significant evidence that the death rate in that region of China was any higher than in other regions of China.
	So, people can certainly criticize the Chinese government for its data-gathering system, But apart from this, I don't see what the ruckus is all about.
	Really? Imagine if...
	Ted Cruz or Ron DeSantis did this.
	If Ron DeSantis' policies resulted in thousands, if not tens of thousands of people being killed, do you think that Angie Holin would be saying, well, I don't see what the big deal is about.
	Certainly, we can criticize the data collection policies of DeSantis, but we don't see any proof that the overall death rates in Florida are substantially different from those of Illinois.
	No. No, she wouldn't be doing that.
	She'd be all over it.
	She'd be itemizing every particular case.
	She'd be calling for DeSantis to resign.
	So what I'm getting at is these fact-checking sites, whatever you call them, they're not doing fact-checking.
	They're not doing that.
	They're doing something else.
	They're more like legal advocacy.
	It's kind of like if you're an accused serial killer, you need a lawyer, and when they bring up your cases, your lawyer says things like, well, there's no significant data that the number of people that Charles Manson killed...
	That the overall death rate in California is any higher than that of Oregon.
	I mean, this is just specious.
	It's bogus. Juries can see right through it.
	It's special pleading.
	It's not even really evidence at all.
	It's certainly not fact-checking in any reliable way.
	Or look at Ted Cruz.
	We should learn a little bit from the brazen ingenuity of these leftists, it seems to me.
	Because when the media began to report about Ted Cruz being in Cancun, all these conservatives started debating, should he have been in Cancun?
	Was it good for the optics?
	Shouldn't he hurry right back?
	Now, if it was Angie Holin and if she were a right-winger, this is what she would say.
	We have found no evidence that Ted Cruz being in Cancun had any impact on making the lives of Texans worse, significantly worse, during the unfortunate weather event in Texas.
	That's it. You just put on a straight face, you keep a very calm demeanor, and you pretend like it's no big deal.
	The problem is that right-wingers don't do this.
	We're sort of always like navel-gazing on phalloskepsis.
	That's the word for navel-gazing.
	Someone who stares all day into his own navel.
	And here's a wonderful navel-gazer, Heath Mayo, on Twitter.
	He's responding seemingly to me, although he doesn't name me.
	I'm glad Ted Cruz is now helping Texans instead of vacationing in Cancun.
	And to every partisan hack who tried to defend his departure by asking, but what can he really do?
	This! This is what he can do.
	And this dude, Heath Mayo, has a picture of Ted Cruz helping an old lady put groceries into her car.
	See, Ted Cruz can do something in Texas after all.
	Now, first of all, Heath Mayo...
	No one is against Ted Cruz helping an old lady with groceries in her car.
	That's not the point. We just don't want to be part of the left's lynch mob mentality in which a differential standard is applied to our side as opposed to their side.
	If Obama takes off and goes off to Hawaii to golf in the middle of a crisis, everyone goes, well, of course, he's under so much stress.
	We totally understand. But if it's Ted Cruz, no, it becomes a media extravaganza.
	So now the media has this double standard, but the worst thing is they can convince doofuses like you to internalize this double standard and impose it on our own side.
	In other words, to treat our own side with greater prejudice.
	Than the other side.
	And so you become a useful idiot for the left by taking this pompous position when, as I say, we're not objecting to Ted Cruz helping in any way.
	We're just objecting to be victims of a two-tier system of moral evaluation.
	We want to be judged by the same standard as everybody else.
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	Big Tech has become a big menace.
	It is not only a threat to free speech, it is a threat to democracy.
	It's a threat to democracy because democracy relies on the free flow of information.
	And what Big Tech is doing across all these different platforms, and sometimes in a coordinated way, is not only trying to shut down speech, political speech, on its own platforms, But it gangs up and tries to shut down other platforms like Parler, which are offering free speech.
	So they don't want free speech on their platforms, and they will go after other platforms that want to allow it.
	Not only this, but big tech is taking its tyranny global.
	It's trying to interfere in foreign elections.
	It's trying to shut down speakers in foreign countries who are speaking up.
	It is trying to ban entire countries in some cases from having free flows of information.
	Recently, Facebook essentially banned Australia.
	Yes, the whole country.
	Because Facebook couldn't get a favorable settlement or agreement with the Australian government in terms of the fees it paid Australian publishers for using their material.
	Facebook decided we're going to shut down all these publishers, all these politicians, all this communication in Australia, and this has produced a global uproar.
	You've got people now from all these different countries, from England to Canada, bitterly complaining.
	Here is the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Stephen Goulibald.
	Canada is at the forefront of this battle.
	He goes, is Facebook going to cut ties next with Germany, with France, with us?
	So, there is these people, their arrogance, you may almost say, knows no bounds.
	And here in America, they're doing all kinds of nefarious stuff.
	So much, it's difficult to even keep track of it.
	Here's the Epoch Times.
	YouTube removes Trump lawyers' opening statement from Senate committee hearing.
	So, this is one of Trump's lawyers, Jesse Binall.
	He goes before the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
	A hearing. And he makes a statement.
	This is an official proceeding of the U.S. government.
	YouTube decides. We don't like the statement.
	It violates our policies.
	It's providing election misinformation, guys.
	Take it down. People cannot read it.
	They can't decide for themselves.
	YouTube decides for you.
	That's not the only case.
	Here we go. YouTube takes down video of testimony given during Ohio House session.
	So in Ohio, they're having a hearing on legislative oversight of orders given by the Ohio governor, Mike DeWine.
	And this is a hearing about COVID. And so an attorney, Thomas Renz, makes a statement in which he talks about the virus, its origins in China.
	He talks about the fact that the lethality rate for people who are under 19 Is very low.
	In fact, he says that no one under the age of 19 has died from COVID in the state.
	And YouTube says, now I'm going to quote YouTube, We have clear community guidelines that govern what videos may stay on YouTube, which we enforce consistently, regardless of speaker.
	We remove this video in accordance with our COVID-19 misinformation policy, which prohibits content that claims a certain age group exists.
	Cannot transmit the virus.
	Now, as far as I can see, the lawyer was not saying a certain age group cannot transmit the virus, but rather that it is much less likely to transmit the virus, which happens to be a fact.
	And moreover, the lawyer was making the point that the lethality rate in Ohio, in that region, was non-existent to low.
	So, YouTube here is heavy-handedly enforcing this policy.
	And then here we go. Here's another article.
	YouTube takes down new Trump interview.
	So, Trump did an interview with Newsmax.
	And talked about, I guess, election irregularities and his belief that he won the election.
	And Newsmax was informed that the video has been taken down.
	It violates YouTube's community guidelines.
	We have clear community guidelines that govern what videos may stay on YouTube.
	And we enforce our community guidelines...
	You're almost listening here to a robot.
	You're listening here to a kind of big brother that heavy-handedly breathes down your neck and tries to suffocate you in thinking and expressing your point of view.
	And this is all occurring in a supposedly free country.
	It's occurring in the free world.
	We're not talking about Cuba.
	And China, we're talking here, North Korea, we're talking about Australia and Canada and England, and most importantly, the source, you may almost say the head of the snake here in the United States.
	Now Poland, the little country of Poland, but not an unimportant country, has decided to do something about all this.
	Poland has a law that is now being debated, likely to pass, I'm told.
	The Poles are proposing new laws that would impose fines of $13.5 million on any big tech social media company that censors a user or removes posts for ideological reasons.
	Thank God for the Poles.
	And the Poles have had some experience with tyranny, with communism.
	They've been tyrannized not only by the Soviets, but by the Nazis.
	And so here's their minister, Matush Morawiki.
	This is what he says on Facebook.
	We are now increasingly faced with practices we believed were left in the past.
	The censoring of free speech, once the domain of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, is now back, but in a new form, run by corporations who silence those who think differently.
	So, the polls are onto it.
	You may almost say that they're hypersensitive because they have endured horrible persecutions, horrible forms of repression and censorship, and they're doing what they can to fight back.
	We need to take a lesson from the polls.
	I hope that what we see now is mobilizing a global alliance of people who speak out against big tech censorship, but also bring the tools of public policy to bear, to hold accountable these censors, to punish them if necessary, to wreck their companies in those countries, to shut them down if possible.
	Why? Because ultimately when you have a monster that's censoring you, It's better to bring down the monster because the monster itself is ultimately going to control the debate, manipulate the debate, rig the rules and make not only a less free country here in the United States, but a less free world.
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	Dad went back downstairs. Yeah, that's Mike.
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	We continue to see discussion percolating all over academia, the media, social media about reparations.
	Reparations not for slaves, because we don't have any slaves, but reparations for the descendants of slaves and of slavery.
	Evidently, Biden's position on this is that he would support a kind of commission that would look into this.
	But there's already a lot of literature popping up about it.
	I see a Harvard study was basically talking about how had there been reparations for slavery, we would not have blacks with such high coronavirus rates.
	Wow. And there's a recent book called From Here to Equality.
	Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century Long review of it in the current issue of the New York Review of Books The book is written by William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke, along with a co-author, Kristen Mullin.
	And these guys are talking about massive monetary reparations to blacks, but also, they say, a mix of non-monetary payments, which include special public services, by the way, reserved based on race, special educational opportunities reserved based on race.
	So this is a race-based remedy.
	Now, who should pay?
	One might expect they would consider the possibility that this bill should be submitted to the Democratic National Committee.
	Why? Because even progressives, scholars admit, now admit, somewhat reluctantly admit, that the Democratic Party was the party of slavery.
	But no, they want America to pay.
	In fact, in other words, they even want the descendants of people who fought on the Union side of the war to pay.
	And I'm quoting them now.
	We're not concerned about personal guilt.
	We're concerned with national responsibility.
	Yeah, the reason they're not concerned with personal guilt is that there is no personal guilt.
	There's no one alive today who's responsible for that.
	So if you actually consider what guilt is, guilt, by the way, is always personal.
	It's always personal. Because someone did it.
	And that someone is responsible.
	Now, the person who didn't do it is not responsible.
	Admittedly, there is a concept of, you could call it, stolen goods.
	If I'm responsible and I steal, let's say, for example, some valuable art, and then I give it to my son or daughter or I give it to my neighbor, it still remains stolen art.
	So I'm not saying there's no responsibility if the stolen goods are still around.
	And that's, I guess, the argument that these reparations guys are trying to make.
	But reparations all stands on a premise, and the premise is, I think, always unexamined.
	There's almost no discussion of that premise in this book.
	The premise is, I would call it, the but-for premise.
	Why? Because reparations is based on the idea that, but for this thing, this horrible thing that happened to me, I would be much better off.
	I've suffered all these damages because of this horrible incident.
	So let's say, for example, somebody drops a massive rock on me and smashes both my feet.
	I would say that but for this terrible calamity, I would have the use of my two legs.
	But for this terrible calamity, I would be able to walk and go normally to work.
	Instead, I can't work.
	Instead, I'm confined to my house.
	Instead, I have all this pain.
	Instead, I have all these medical pills, bills.
	And so my damages are measured by what my position would have been like if this had not happened.
	Now, What would the position of the descendants of slaves in America have been like If slavery had not existed or if there was no transatlantic slave trade bringing Africans into the United States.
	Well, the simple truth of it is if there had been no transatlantic slave trade, these people would not exist.
	That's the simple fact of the matter.
	But even if they did exist, they would exist in Africa.
	And what would their life and their fate have been then?
	Would it have been better than it's now or worse?
	And if it's worse...
	Then, of course, the whole logic of the whole thing collapses completely.
	Because you can't say, imagine if I were to say, but for this terrible stone falling on my feet and breaking my leg, I would have been better off!
	Well, then I don't have any claim for reparations, because I would have been better off if this never happened.
	Now, Keith Richburg, an African-American writer, writer for the Washington Post, decided to investigate this issue a number of years ago by going back to Africa to see what his life might have been like had he been raised there, had, in his own words, his ancestor not made the journey to America.
	And you can see the relevance of this right away to the reparations debate.
	So this guy goes to Africa, he spends some time there, he comes back, And he's horrified.
	He's horrified. Why?
	Because he realizes that he is much better off in America.
	And he's willing to say it.
	This is what made this book controversial when it came out.
	It's called, well, his article here is called American in Africa.
	Fascinating discussion.
	And Keith Richburg, the writer, talks about what he experiences in Africa.
	The first thing he experiences is He says he's in a remote corner of Tanzania and he's watching dozens of discolored, bloated bodies floating downstream coming from Rwanda.
	And right away he realizes, you know, Heath, you're not in Kansas anymore.
	This is a whole different place altogether.
	And then he's talking about...
	At one point, he's crossing from one country to another, and there's a man trying to examine his passport and documents, and what Keith Richburg notices sitting on the table are a whole series of severed human heads.
	Human heads! And he takes a shocked glance at this, and he basically goes again, Man, you know, I really don't think I belong here.
	This isn't me. This is not the environment I signed up for.
	So what happens to Keith Richburg is he begins to realize, and I'm now going to quote him here.
	He goes, I have been here.
	I have lived here. I've seen Africa in all its horror.
	I am terrified of Africa.
	I don't want to be in this place.
	And then the crusher.
	In my darkest heart here on this pitch black African night, I am quietly celebrating the passage of my ancestor who made it out.
	Boom. So here's a guy basically saying what Muhammad Ali said.
	When Ali, returning to America after the foreman fight, was asked, Champ, what do you think of Africa?
	And he goes, thank God my granddaddy got on that boat.
	And here's Keith Richburg saying the same thing.
	What he's basically saying is that...
	He's relieved to be in America.
	He recognizes that slavery, an evil and a crime in itself, was nevertheless the transmission belt that brought his ancestors into the orbit of Western freedom.
	Not so that they could have a better life.
	Their life I'm willing to grant was in many ways worse.
	But the descendants of the slaves who are born in free America, who enjoy opportunities now unavailable to people in Sierra Leone or the Congo, the bottom line, reparations falls on its face because the descendants of the slaves are better off for being today in America.
	Today we're in a battle for truth.
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	That's ReflectionsDinesh.com.
	I'm continuing my examination of the reparations debate and I want to do that now by highlighting, you can almost call it a significant wrinkle in the argument.
	So the argument for reparations is based upon a notion of racial Victimization and racial victimhood.
	It's very important for reparations that one racial group be the victims and one racial group be the victimizers.
	Now, right away with slavery, we know that that situation is complicated.
	Because, first of all, whites were not the only people who owned slaves in America.
	For example, American Indians were also slave owners.
	And there is a considerable literature on American Indian slave ownership.
	The Cherokee, for example, were not only slave owners themselves, but they were often used as slave catchers for runaway slaves because they were particularly, apparently, good at it.
	The Choctaw was a slave-owning tribe, which, by the way, fought on the side of the American South in the Civil War.
	Many of these tribes, by the way, continued to have slaves even after the Civil War ended.
	Finally, they made a treaty with the US government and they stopped.
	That is reasonably well known, at least for people who pay a little bit of attention to the slavery issue.
	What is not known, or much less known, and I must say, in progressive scholarship, very little taught, if at all, is the idea that there was considerable black slave ownership in the United States.
	What? Yes, I'm talking about blacks in this country, free blacks, who owned other blacks as slaves.
	Now, this may seem a little bit of a shocking idea, but the interesting truth is that in all the southern states, Free people, white or black, were allowed to have slaves.
	There was no prohibition that said, oh, only a white guy can own a slave.
	No. The slave laws permitted blacks to own slaves and very interestingly they did.
	I say very interestingly they did because it kind of shows you that there is a certain bent or warped dimension in human nature that if it is able to take advantage of somebody else and you may say, make them work for free, Human beings are going to go for it.
	There's no particular white aptitude for evil that makes white people say, oh, we're going to go do the slavery stuff and blacks go, oh no, we'd never do it.
	In fact, we see in the case of black slave owners that they were perfectly happy to do it to others like themselves.
	Now, The practice of black slave ownership apparently began somewhat benignly.
	There were black guys who would buy family members away from slavery, I guess with the intention of emancipating them.
	But, human nature being what it is, these same guys would then realize, oh, I own this guy.
	I just bought him. So, why should I free him?
	Maybe I'll put him to work.
	Maybe I'll have him do some chores in my house.
	So, the bottom line of it is what began as a mechanism to produce emancipation became a formula for blacks themselves to impose servitude on the people that they had, quote, bought. The African American historian Carter Woodson gives an example of a black shoemaker in Charleston who evidently purchased his wife for $700.
	Then he found her unsatisfactory, so he sold her a few months later for $750.
	He made a $50 profit.
	And then we see that during the first half of the 19th century, some blacks owned plantations right alongside the white Slave owners.
	And they would rent slaves back and forth with their white neighbors.
	Fascinating. You won't see this very often on the History Channel, by the way.
	Don't look it up on Wikipedia.
	I don't know what you're going to find.
	Black slaveholding was most widespread in Louisiana, fairly common in South Carolina, not unusual in Texas, Florida, Mississippi, and several other states.
	In Louisiana, I'm now quoting from my book, The End of Racism, which supplies all the footnotes, all the data on this subject, if you think.
	Here's a book. I'm going to show you.
	Black Slave Owners.
	It's written by Larry Koger.
	Actually, an MA in history from Howard University, a research specialist from the Pentagon.
	It's called Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790 to 1860.
	So he's describing South Carolina black slave ownership over 70 years.
	Now, we put a small clip of this phenomenon.
	In my movie America.
	And it caused a little bit of a stir because people were dumbfounded at what we showed.
	And yet what we showed is completely anchored in the data.
	It's indisputable. Not a single source has questioned it.
	It's fascinating for you to listen and watch.
	Here we go. Meet William Ellison.
	Born himself into slavery, Ellison was freed as a young man.
	He became a blacksmith, then a mechanic for cotton gins, and then went into farming where he eventually owned a thousand acres and sixty slaves.
	He was also known as a slave breeder, a practice shunned even by most white slave owners.
	When the Civil War broke out, Ellison supported the Confederacy, investing in Confederate bonds and supplying food and provisions for the Confederate Army.
	Thank you.
	Ellison's story is told by the African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates.
	Gates and other scholars estimate that in the period before the Civil War, there were approximately 3,500 free blacks who owned more than 10,000 black slaves.
	In South Carolina and Louisiana, Gates points out, the percentage of free blacks who owned slaves was approximately the same as the percentage of whites who owned slaves.
	You know, very interestingly, you may think that I picked the biggest black slaver in the United States to highlight, but no.
	Actually, Ellison, although he wasn't typical, neither was he the wealthiest black planter in the country, nor the owner of the most slaves.
	That distinction belonged to a Louisiana widow named C. Richard and her son, P. C. Richard.
	Together, in 1860, they owned 152 slaves.
	The point we're getting at here is not to say that this was a phenomenon that overtook the larger picture, but it does muddy the racial waters, doesn't it?
	It really shows that there's plenty of blame to go around and that a clear line of demarcation, a racial line, cannot be drawn on the slavery issue.
	The reason that progressives don't like to talk about any of this is because it spoils their narrative.
	So far from them moving from facts to a narrative, they come up with an ideological narrative and then they try to, the narrative becomes a sort of Procrustean bed, a kind of way that shuts out facts that don't fit the narrative.
	That's going on in this case.
	And so you can see my task.
	My task is to bring out the facts that spoil their narratives so that they then have to go, yeah, well, Dinesh, we have to admit this is true, but you're making us very uncomfortable by bringing it up.
	Yes, making you uncomfortable, in fact, making you miserable, is my job.
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	The website again is DineshForAMAC.com Why does God hide from us?
	In other words, how do we explain the hiddenness of God?
	Think about it. If God made himself manifest, if he sort of jumped out from behind a bush, if he was right there in front of you, kind of like a tree or like your neighbor, and God just said, here I am, here's what I want you to do, and we can see that he was God...
	It would be very hard for us to go, nah, I don't think we're going to do that.
	We would believe. We would follow God.
	We would recognize who God is because God would have made himself obvious, and you may say undeniable to us.
	Now, why doesn't God do that?
	I mean, this is a very interesting question.
	And it's interesting because the fact that God doesn't do it, the fact that God is invisible, that he's not manifesting, To us, is a great sort of supporter for atheism, because the atheist goes, where is he?
	Show me! Where's God? Produce him!
	And the believer has to struggle with building a relationship with God when God is not At least not physically or in any obvious way manifest.
	God can speak to us, you may say, in an interior way.
	But even then, we have to always ask our question, is it God?
	Are we hearing God himself?
	Or do we think we are?
	It's a challenge for the believer.
	Now, this issue of the hiddenness of God...
	Has been an issue that's been wrestled with by Jewish and Christian scholars.
	Here's a very interesting book.
	It's called The Disappearance of God.
	I recommend it to you.
	It is by the Jewish scholar Richard Elliott Friedman.
	And Friedman makes the point that in the Bible itself, you see a progression in which God is initially manifest and then slowly disappears.
	So in the beginning, it's Adam and Eve.
	And they talk to God. God is very present to them.
	And he's also present to Moses and Abraham, even though in the case of Moses, it's just a burning bush.
	Moses doesn't really see God directly, but he is able to communicate with God.
	But with the later prophets, says Friedman, you don't have that.
	When you deal with prophets, the so-called lesser prophets that come later, not Moses, not Abraham, they don't see God in the same way.
	They don't speak or relate to him quite like Moses did or Abraham.
	And then, as we move later in the Bible and come to the New Testament, God, you may say, disappears.
	That's why the book is called The Disappearance of God.
	And Friedman says, that is the world we live in now.
	So this is a very interesting sort of tracking of the disappearance of God.
	The Catholic mathematician and apologist Pascal Here's one of my favorite books, Blaise Pascal.
	It's called Pensee.
	P-E-N-S-E-E-S. And Pensee just means reflections or meditations.
	And Pascal talks about the hiddenness of God.
	Why is God hiding?
	I want to give an answer that may seem somewhat unusual to resolve, or at least partially resolve, this deep question.
	I think we get the answer by looking at the Bible itself.
	And in fact, in looking at the first book of Genesis, the story of the fall.
	Now, of course, the typical atheist is going to say, well, Dinesh, that's a story.
	Are you serious? Do you believe that the fall happened literally?
	Do you really believe that? And I'm not debating here the historicity of the fall.
	By the way, there's a long Christian tradition in which some people take the fall literally, some people take the fall metaphorically.
	Augustine, for example, being a classic example of someone interpreting the fall in a metaphorical or, as he would say, analogical sense.
	But let's leave the historical question aside.
	And by the way, the historical question is a little secondary.
	Let me give an example of what I'm talking about.
	By and large, if you turn to the early modern European philosophers, and I'm talking here of Hobbes, of Locke, of Rousseau, they explained the origins of human communities by reference to a social contract.
	So the basic idea here is that human beings used to live in a state of nature, and then they decided that we need to come together as a community.
	We need to come into a sort of pact or contract that we make with each other.
	Now, here's my question. Where's the historical evidence for that?
	Show me the social. Has anyone ever produced an actual social contract that anybody either signed or agreed to?
	No. In fact, Rousseau says very clearly, he goes, A hypothetical, Rousseau calls it, that explains how communities came to being in the first place.
	And so, you don't have atheists who fully accept the social contract, fully accept that something like that must have happened, and it helps us understand how we got things the way they are now.
	I'm using the fall in that sense.
	So, by and large, the message of the fall is something like this.
	Essentially what God is saying to Adam and Eve is that you have the option.
	In fact, I would prefer it if you were to live in my world.
	But if you live in my world, my world operates by my rules.
	Now, my rules are not severe or dictatorial.
	In fact, from the story of the fall, God's rules are unbelievably benign.
	Eat from any tree. Just don't eat from this one.
	Why not? Basically, God's answer is, because I said so, because I'm God.
	And following my will is how things work here in Eden.
	I don't have to give you a reason for why you shouldn't eat from the tree, because if I gave you a reason, you wouldn't be doing it because of the reason, not because of me, not because it is my rule, my law, in my kingdom.
	And in effect, the message of the fall is that man didn't want that.
	Man and woman, Adam and Eve both sinned.
	And their sin here is not eating an apple.
	Their sin here is basically disobeying God.
	Their sin is basically saying, God, we don't want to live by your rules.
	That is the sin of pride, by the way.
	We want to live by our rules.
	We want to decide what's right and wrong.
	We want to decide what's good and evil.
	We want to be the final adjudicator.
	And you know what? The lesson of the fall is that God agrees.
	God says, okay. If you don't want to live by my rules, I will give you a world, and it's going to be your world, in the sense that it's going to operate by natural laws and human freedom.
	And that means you will decide how you want to live in that world, including whether or not you choose to follow me.
	Now, let's return to our question.
	Why is God hiding from us?
	He is hiding from us because it is our world.
	God gave it to us.
	And, says Pascal...
	God makes Himself sufficiently manifest that people in this world that want Him and seek Him will find Him.
	But He also makes Himself sufficiently hidden or obscure that people who don't want God, who don't want any part of Him, who want to live by their own way, which is, by the way, the definition of sin, not just doing what's wrong, doing the opposite of what God wants and says.
	God's obscurity protects their freedom too.
	So God is protecting the freedom of the potential believer and the potential unbeliever.
	The hiddenness of God is there so the believer can find him and the non-believer can rest content that there is no God and he can live by his own rules in his own world.
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	If you're enjoying the podcast, make sure you subscribe, turn on your notifications, please share the podcast with others.
	It's now time for our mailbox.
	And we have a question that deals with Trump and McConnell.
	Hi, Dinesh. This is Ben.
	I wanted to get your thoughts on Mitch McConnell chastising Trump.
	You know, you talk about Mitch McConnell maybe not so bright of a Machiavellian, but the reality is that the Democrats control both...
	All the branches of the government except for the judicial branch.
	So perhaps his thought is that by chastising Trump, he might be able to get some concessions out of the Democrats.
	For example, a Joe Manchin, for example, might be more interested in compromise if Mitch McConnell plays nice.
	Thank you. Good question.
	And the question is, McConnell's in a difficult position.
	He's holding on to this razor-thin 50-50 standoff in the Senate.
	So if he can successfully peel off a Democrat or two, he could block some really bad things from coming down the pike.
	Now, the problem is that when you do a public chastisement of Trump, and let's assume that McConnell's motive is to court Senator Sinema in Arizona or Joe Manchin in West Virginia, the problem is that that criticism, the public criticism, is heard By all the Trumpsters, by all the MAGA people, and by all the Trump voters who make up, what, 70-80% of Republicans?
	So what they hear is that their leader in the Senate is bashing the man that they voted for just weeks ago.
	And so this produces a lot of dismay on the right.
	Now, McConnell needs to do one of two things.
	One is at least telegraph to the Trumpsters, hey, listen, I'm doing what I have to because I'm playing a difficult game in the Senate.
	And then we'd understand. We'd be like, okay, well, we see why he's doing it.
	But I don't get the impression that that is McConnell's motive.
	I get the impression that McConnell actually believes that Trump is a liability.
	On the Republican side, and he needs to somehow cleanse the GOP, not of Trump voters, because there'd be hardly anybody left, but cleanse the GOP of the Trump direct influence.
	And this, I think, is putting McConnell in a very difficult position.
	In fact, it's provoking blowback from Trump, which is predictable.
	You know, Trump is that way.
	You can't attack Trump without Trump attacking back.
	He has to attack back.
	Even if you're a fairly picayune character, you attack him, he's going to attack you.
	That's like a law of Trump.
	So, bottom line of it is, I think Mitch, at the end of the day, is not being a good Machiavellian.
	He's being imprudent in the way that he's going about it.
	He's sowing the seeds of division in the GOP. And even if he's able to gain some very small benefits with Sinema and Manchin, who I think, by the way, are marching to their own drummers, not really to what Mitch says or does, the bottom line of it is it's probably, on balance, a very destructive thing to do.
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