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March 12, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:02:40
UNCRITICAL RACE THEORY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep45
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The hidden premises of critical race theory.
Is the Chinese government harvesting the organs of its political opponents?
And feminist author Naomi Wolf joins me to talk about digital censorship and cancel culture.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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 Biden administration has been nominating some real kooks, some real radicals, some real extremists, to important positions in the government.
Now, happily, one of them, Neera Tanden, withdrew As Biden's nominee for the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget.
But there's a bunch of other kooks kind of all coming down the pike.
There, of course, was Javier Bequeira, Vanita Gupta.
I want to focus now on a woman named Kristen Clark, who is Biden's nominee to be the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in the Justice Department.
Now, this is a very important position because it's the DOJ's This department, division that deals with all these issues from police brutality to hate crimes to human trafficking cases, essentially civil rights issues come under this purview.
And this woman, Kristen Clark, has a very interesting history, a history that actually goes all the way back to her days as head of the Black Students Association at Harvard.
It may seem odd a little bit to talk about somebody's kind of college days, but it's actually not because very often when we think of radical ideas that we see in our culture, they were planted on the campus.
Radical professors propagandize their students.
The students begin to repeat all this sort of kookery.
It's picked up by their fellow students.
Pretty soon it becomes conventional wisdom.
And then as these students graduate, They take these ideas with them.
Now, sometimes when they get older, they recognize that it doesn't sound good to talk about things like black supremacy and melanin superiority.
You believe those things, but you cover them up with a veneer of adult sophistication.
So you begin to learn to use bureaucratic language.
But in a sense, that is only on the surface.
Underneath that, you still have, your heart is still beating with all these crackpot ideas.
And we see this all around us in the culture.
Now, recently, Kristen Clarke was criticized because she jumped, you may say, headfirst into the Jussie Smollett racial scam.
She was completely on board with Smollett.
She was criticizing the police for taking his cell phone.
Here I have a tweet from her.
She goes, Jussie Smollett subjected to a racist and homophobic attack.
Prayers to Jussie Smollett for a speedy recovery from this hate crime.
Now, of course, later it emerges that this was staged by Jussie himself.
And of course, these bogus hate crimes have now become epidemic.
They're staged, it seems, almost more often than you have real hate crimes, which shows you that there's a market for these hate crimes because it propels unknown people, not in Jussie's case, he was well-known as an actor, but he was hoping to reach a kind of totemic status as the kind of ultimate victim.
Meghan Markle was making a kind of similar play more recently.
Now, Kristen Clark has had a very interesting history.
She was a professor at Howard University.
She served in the Justice Department before.
And when she was at Harvard, she was very active in fighting in favor of the black cause.
And she wrote an interesting letter to the Harvard Crimson, which I think is actually worth quoting because it shows you where she is sort of coming from or what her formative ideas were.
She goes, first of all, she quotes a Richard King.
She talks about the fact that the human brain contains large elements of melanin.
Melanin is the coloring agent in the human body.
And she goes on to argue that blacks have a lot of melanin, which makes them intellectually and morally and emotionally superior.
And blacks and whites suffer from melanin defects that makes them such incorrigible, evil people.
I'm going to give you some more quotes here.
This is directly from Kristen Clarke.
Some scientists have revealed that most whites are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning.
And then, this is the key line, Something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.
Now, this is a key thing because what she's basically saying is that when you use these Eurocentric standards, like math tests and so on, blacks and other minorities may not score that well.
But that's because these are Eurocentric standards.
We don't need to be using them.
What we should be looking at is at melanin levels.
And blacks obviously excel.
They've got the most melanin, even more than brown people who have melanin, but not as much.
And it goes on in this vein.
Now, this is straight-out crackpottery.
Of course, the human body does have melanin, but there's no research in the world that shows that melanin does any of these things, endows you with superior mental or emotional capacities.
Not at all. And yet, there's a whole literature out there.
In fact, I stumbled on it when I was doing my book, The End of Racism.
I have several pages on this.
In fact, my section is called All About Melanin.
And this goes back to the 1990s.
In fact, I met a professor, Molefi Katie Asante, who was one of the expounders of this theory.
In fact, he talked about the fact that Africans, he said, are mentally superior and emotionally superior because they have what he called the palm tree mentality because they've been raised in sort of tropical climates.
Whereas white men, he said, whites suffer from what he calls the caveman mentality.
And it's all in the genes.
That's the key point.
The funny thing about this guy, Molefi Asante, is that he would wear massive African outfits, dashikis and so on.
He spoke with an African accent.
Finally I asked him, I said, are you from Nigeria?
He goes, no, Dinesh, I'm from Savannah, Georgia.
Turns out the guy's real name is Arthur Lee Smith.
He's not African at all.
The whole thing was a staged act.
So the point I'm trying to get at is that these melanin people are kooks.
But what they do is they've mastered this kind of language as a pseudoscientific language.
They'll talk about, you know, phonons and electromagnetic radiation, melanocytes, the pineal gland, the hypothalamus.
This is a kind of bogus scientific or pseudoscientific vocabulary that is used to justify what can only be called black supremacy.
Now, the sad thing, and Kristen Clarke is sadly part of all this, is that we've had white supremacy.
White supremacy was actually the political weapon of the Democratic Party.
And in supposedly an effort to fight white supremacy, you think the way to fight supremacy is to fight supremacy, fight this idea that there is some supremacy conferred by whiteness.
That's nonsense. But instead of going there, what these activists like Christian Clark do is they try to fight white supremacy with black supremacy.
So suddenly, whites are deprived of all these positive qualities, but they're now conferred, they're transferred to blacks.
So now suddenly your blackness makes you smart.
Your blackness makes you fast.
Your blackness makes you sophisticated.
Your blackness makes you more perceptive.
And if it's not measured by any standards that we can objectively verify, well then those standards are Eurocentric.
How we got to a stage in this country where this kind of racial kookery, this racial nutso claims have become mainstream is a whole other question.
But the sad news is we find it not just in academia, not just in culture, but now penetrating the organs of government as well.
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The prevailing leftist doctrine on race in America today is called critical race theory.
Critical race theory was behind, for example, the so-called 1619 Project.
Critical race theory is behind a lot of the efforts to cancel people on the basis of race.
And there's a very interesting article by a young black scholar, John McWhorter, On critical race theory, the article is excerpted from his new book, which is called The Elect.
Very interesting title because it refers to the sort of privileged people who sort of are in the know, a kind of a new Gnosticism, if you want to call it that.
Gnosticism here referring to secret knowledge.
And McWhorter goes on to spell out the key premises of critical race theory, which I think are worth noting.
He says first of all that the civil rights struggle seems to have moved in three phases.
The first stage was really simple.
Let's get rid of slavery and segregation.
Let's remove those laws.
The second stage, he says, is let's battle racist attitudes.
And initially that was supposed to be it.
We remove the bad laws.
We change attitudes. But now he says there's a whole new argument, critical race theory, that racism is baked in the structure of society.
And it's sort of intrinsically part of the makeup of society and the makeup of people who live in it.
And he goes on to talk about the key premises.
I just want to outline a few of them.
Because you see not only how absurd they are, but how contradictory they are.
So here we go. When black people say you've insulted them, you've got to apologize profusely and show guilt, but don't put black people in a position where you expect them to forgive you.
They're not going to. Number two, silence about racism is violence.
You can't be silent, but you must make sure not to raise your voice too much.
Make sure you elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.
These are all instructions, of course, to white people.
Number three, you have to struggle to understand the experiences of black people.
But here's the rub. You can't.
You'll never be black.
So you can't understand what it means to be black.
And if you think you can, you're a racist.
Show interest in multiculturalism, but don't culturally appropriate.
You have to be interested.
If you're not interested, you're a racist.
But if you're interested, you can't be too interested because then you may be guilty of appropriation.
And it goes on like this.
If you're white and date white people, you're a straight-out racist.
But if you're white and want to date a black person, then you're exotifying the other.
You're kind of a racist anyway.
Black people can't be held accountable for everything that black people do.
Don't try to make that case.
But all whites must acknowledge that they are personally complicit in the structure of racism and the evil history of whiteness.
Black students must be admitted to schools via adjusted grades and test scores so that you can foster diversity.
But... It's racist to assume that they don't have the same grades and test scores as whites.
And don't expect them to contribute any diversity.
Don't ask them for what's the black perspective on this or anything of that nature.
So here is McWhorter in a kind of surgical way outlining the preposterous But also the self-defeating, the self-dissolving, the inherently contradictory elements of critical race theory.
Now, as I listen to all this, and you know, it's nonsense on stilts, but when I listen to it, I think back to an essay that was written by a very courageous black pastor, Eugene Rivers.
This guy is the pastor of the Azusa Christian community in Boston.
Very influential, progressive, left-winger, civil rights leader.
He wrote an essay in Boston Magazine, Boston Review, called On the Responsibility of Intellectuals on the Race Issue.
I'm reminded here of a famous phrase by the French critic Julian Banda.
It's called the treason de cleric, the treason of the intellectuals.
And basically what Banda is saying is that intellectuals have the responsibility, particularly when an issue is fraught or divisive, to tell the truth.
To look the reality in the eye.
And when intellectuals engage in sort of gobbledygook and distractions and a whole kind of specialized vocabulary, they're steering society away from the problem staring them in the face.
And so Pastor Eugene Rivers decides, let me call this problem what it is.
And he's talking about his actual experience with inner city blacks and particularly black males.
And he has some stunning things to say which are only disturbing and riveting because they ring true and because they come out of direct experience.
So here is Pastor Eugene Rivers.
He's going to do what Banda says he should do.
He says, quote, I'm going to tell the truth about the condition of the black poor.
We are going through, he says in the inner city, a crisis of catastrophic proportions.
Life, he says, is Hobbesian.
It's genuinely, quote, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes' famous words.
He talks about deaths due to homicide, HIV, there's incarceration.
He goes on and on.
And then he says this...
Unlike many of our ancestors who came out of slavery and entered this century with strong backs, discipline, a thirst for literacy, deep religious faith, and hope in the face of monumental adversity, he goes, what we have now is, quote, a new jack generation ill-equipped to secure gainful employment even as productive slaves.
Boom. He goes, this generation which would be ineligible to qualify for slavery.
Think about it. He's saying even the slave owners wouldn't want them.
Why? Because the slaves were mechanics.
They were tinkers. They knew agriculture.
They knew crop rotation.
They could do useful stuff.
The people in the inner city today, he says, from experience, they can't even do that.
No one would want to employ them.
No one would even want forced employment for them.
And then he goes on to say, they lack the hope In other words, the slaves could at least look forward to a world in which there would be no slavery, in which their productive skills could then be used to earn money that they could keep for themselves.
He goes, these guys don't even have that hope.
There is what he calls the specter of nihilism and decay.
And then he says, in the face of all this going on, and I think here of Black Lives Matter, you know, Black Lives Matter, because, yeah, look at the case of George Floyd, Dinesh.
Now, the case of white cops who mistreat blacks does occur, but it is anomalous.
It is rare. You can actually count it kind of on two hands, occurring within a reasonable space of time.
But black-on-black crime, the nihilism of the inner city, the infestation of drugs, all of this, the ruin of black life upon black life, and the sheer brazen indifference to this on the part of Black Lives Matter.
They could literally care less.
They're raking in the money from corporate America.
You'd think they would invest in the inner city, start creating black entrepreneurship.
None of this. They don't even bother to do it.
Why? Because for them, it's all about the staging.
It's all about the dramatic incident captured on camera.
It's all about the shakedown with the big corporations.
It's all about modifying the curriculum at Yale and the Dalton School.
So this is the treason of the intellectuals.
Why? Because not only for the reasons of intellectual prestige, but also for the reasons of raking in the cash, they are averting their gaze from the real problems of race in this country and thus making it more difficult that these problems will ever be solved.
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I'm really happy to have Naomi Wolf back on the program.
Author, feminist, cultural critic.
And Naomi, the last time you were on the show, you were, in your own words, in Twitter jail.
And I thought a good topic for us to dive into today is the issue not only of digital media censorship and restrictions, but the broader issue of censorship in the culture.
So let me start by asking you, what What were you in Twitter jail for?
That's a good question.
Nominally it was for quoting directly from the Moderna vaccine website.
I'm not anti-vax but this is a huge public issue right now and I just think people should be allowed to inform each other especially directly from primary sources and that That was not only what got me put into Twitter jail for the second time, the first time for 12 hours, the second time for a week.
But subsequent to that, a video in which I provided additional sources, including from Science Direct, MIT, Google News, Apple products, you know, primary document, that was pulled from YouTube and Vimeo and briefly from Facebook.
And so since I've tweeted a lot about those issues among lots of other issues, I'm really wondering if that was the actual reason that I was deplatformed.
I can't help noticing that it directly followed my talking to Tucker Carlson and a few other conservatives and saying things like, this is not about left and right, this meaning the kind of rise of kind of biofascism or tyranny under the guise of a real medical pandemic.
This is a fight between everybody who wants to defend the Constitution and the rule of law against a few oligarchs, including big tech companies.
So it was right after that I got deplatformed.
Now, several weeks ago, I got...
I've never been banned on social media, but I got a sort of warning for posting on Facebook simply a video in which Biden was quoted saying that Antifa is merely an idea.
I guess I posted in a manner that was skeptical of this because, of course, we see Antifa guys in uniforms and batons every single day.
We've been seeing it for a year.
But essentially what I was notified is that my post was, quote, lacking context, as if to say that there was some underlying elaboration by Biden, which of course there wasn't.
The statement came in his debate with Trump.
And so I think what strikes me is, you know, it's not only that there is this sort of censorship, but the stupidity of it, the arbitrariness of it, who's doing it, the fact that there's no one to call, there's no one to appeal to, there's no one...
You know, if United Airlines just arbitrarily canceled your reservation, you'd get on the 800 number and go, guys, you're idiots, you know.
But in this case, you can't do that.
So how do you think we got to this strange point where what is in effect our public square, which is to say digital communication, has now become this cramped, arbitrary, restricted space?
How did we get here? I mean, I can tell you it's one of the most important stories of our time.
There used to be newspapers, and there were local newspapers.
And the beauty of newspapers is that they happen in what I call analog space.
Humans consume them, and it's a one-to-one relationship.
And then there can be letters to the editor or op-eds that people can write and so on.
But these were very, especially local newspapers, very grassroots...
Entities that had a lot of integrity, and they had a very robust business model, which was advertising from local businesses, the yellow pages, basically, the want ads, cars, etc.
Of course, digital technology changed all of that.
But in the last eight or 10 years, there's been a systematic effort by venture capitalists and other kind of big corporations And News Media Alliance has documented this to buy up all of these tiny local newspapers and kill them, basically. So now 200 counties lack any type of local newspaper at all.
At the same time, the big platforms arose, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and that seemed cool because you had newspapers and social media.
You could read a story written by a journalist and have your say on social media.
However, Brilliantly, the digital companies cannibalized the news process and created deals, Google especially, I've just been reading about this, but Facebook as well, in which news sites had to kind of flow their news process and their distribution process through the digital platforms and that way the digital platforms gained the market share.
And of course, news had been collapsing in its old business model because You know, with digital technology and cars.com, I don't need my local newspaper to tell me where to get a used car in my suburb, etc.
So once that happened, news platforms and social media platforms converged on these digital platforms.
And then I think rather than getting hung up on who is censoring what and what the things are that trigger, what you're seeing right now is something you see a lot in closing democracies, which is The gatekeepers, these digital platforms, are demonstrating their power to censor.
And they're doing it very dramatically and flagrantly as a message to everybody.
So it really doesn't matter if you were right or if I was right.
That's not the point.
The point is that starting out in a very benign, open way, and this is an old trick, right?
Getting us kind of hooked on communicating on Twitter, on Facebook.
Now Twitter and Facebook are saying, Look, we can boot, you know, all conservative voices.
I mean, I've been horrified to see the purge of conservatives.
Ben Shapiro, you know, Amazon servers saying we're not going to host conservative content or ideas.
The conflation of conservative ideas with, you know, terrorism or insurrectionists.
I mean, that is the oldest trick in the book when you're trying to close politics.
First Amendment rights. They tried to do it to the left, where environmentalists are terrorists.
We talked about this. Now they're doing it to the right.
Anyone who supported Trump or who votes conservative is an insurrectionist and has to be deplatformed.
Unfortunately, the tech companies are big donors to the Democrats, and they're in bed together.
I mean, the Republicans have their own bad actors who are big donors.
But there's more of an alignment there.
And so what you're seeing at the beginning of a Biden administration is this flexing of power.
We can silence conservative voices.
We can, you know, purge content.
And we have that power.
And then where do we go, right?
I mean, I think Ben Shapiro is exactly right in saying we need to create other platforms, other news outlets, other, you know, gathering places.
And I've been told, put your stuff on BitChute, put your stuff on Join Parlor, join Clubhouse, other things I'm not even familiar with.
Let's take a pause if we can.
We're going to come back and dive a little bit more into all this, right back with Naomi Wolf.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. Naomi, we were talking a moment ago about how, at the very beginning, the digital revolution appeared to be exhilarating.
I mean, if you think of it from the point of view of the ordinary guy, the ordinary guy, you know, would have trouble.
They could write a letter to their local newspaper in the old days, but of course the newspaper might print two or three letters.
So there was no easy way to jump in and have your point of view heard.
But today... Just about anyone can become a publisher.
They can have their friends on Facebook who then distribute their material.
The same on Twitter. So it all at the beginning seemed to be a boon for free speech.
And then in a kind of nasty turn, in just the way you described, you've got these digital moguls who I think you're right that their arbitrariness is part of the plan.
Because if they had to give justifications, then they would be subject to those rationales.
But the very fact that without warning, they can, in a sense, show up at your door, makes it very clear, sends the message that we are at their mercy.
And so you see it as a real social problem, don't you?
I mean, I think it's much more than a social problem.
I think it, you know, the First Amendment is first because every other right and freedom depend on it.
Freedom to speak and freedom to assemble.
And... By privatizing speech, right, and giving it into the hands of these four to six tech bros, they are able to and they are training us into what we can say and what we can't say.
I mean, there's a real conditioning aspect.
Which is very disturbing to me.
I get three strikes, right?
And, you know, I'm notified if you do this again.
So, of course, that chill speech, it's called prior restraint in civil rights law.
I should, as a publisher, as a journalist, or as a citizen, not be censoring myself in advance.
Someone can bring a cause of action against me if my speech violates the law, threatens violence, etc., There are narrow parameters in our country in which speech can be criminalized.
But by privatizing speech, these tech companies can train me to censor myself, train you to censor yourself, and demonstrate to everybody that they'd better be careful or they'll be in Twitter jail like Naomi or like Dinesh D'Souza.
I mean, isn't it in some ways the adult version of how you train both a kid or a dog?
A puppy. In other words... Right?
It's conditioning that you have good behavior and then you get rewarded.
If you do the wrong thing, you'll be wrapped on the knuckles and the next time they're going to pull a trapdoor under you.
So it's this sword of Damocles over all our heads.
I mean, I'm thinking here... I was looking back at, you know, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which is so exhilarating to read now.
I'm just going to read its key sentence.
If all of mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
And Mill goes on to, in a sense, make a point that I think answers the libertarians.
He goes, listen, This isn't just about the state doing it.
Mill says that we all have the right to develop individuality and communication and community.
That's part of what it means to be a full person.
And so even ostracism, even efforts to shut you down by private actors, if they are powerful enough, constitute, in his view, a clear and present danger to democratic discourse.
And I think that's where we are now.
Yeah, absolutely right.
God, I love Mill.
He's timeless in heat.
He always says so clearly what a free society needs and what the individual needs to be free.
Let me add another twist, if I may.
What's happening right now is the purging of conservative voices.
And I'm on the left, right?
I have nothing in this, except I know that when they start with the voices I don't agree with, pretty soon they'll come to me.
That history always shows that's the case.
But look at how tight this embraces.
The tech bros Kick the main conservative influencers off the platforms and they chill all the people who might want to engage in conservative ideas.
Well, that weakens conservatives for the midterms and for the next presidential election.
Then what happens? The tech bros get rewarded by the Biden administration or by a Democratic-led Congress with legislation to give them back, you know, the favor.
And it's a nefarious embrace that gets tighter and tighter But basically leads to our democracy being much weaker because we're not hearing from those voices that could challenge those in power.
One more thing I want to say about kind of invisible censorship that digital technology can engage in.
We're a very divided country.
I've had so many emails since I spoke to you and spoke to Tucker Carlson and other conservatives saying, thank you for this transpartisan dialogue.
We need it. Well, we rarely get it because the algorithm can invisibly separate us.
You know, my husband's kind of an independent, you know, he votes for both parties.
I'm on the left.
He sees a totally different news feed or Twitter feed than I do.
So we're not even hearing each other's voices, let alone able to engage in dialogue.
And that's intentional.
The more we're divided, the less we can unite to restrict or challenge or clean up the power of an out of control administration of any party or the tech bros who are getting way too much power.
You mentioned a moment ago the way in which, you may almost call it the clamp of tyranny gets tightened when government goes into bed with private actors to work together to create censorship.
I think another factor, and this is kind of a deep irony, because the justification for doing this is to prevent extremism, right?
It's to prevent insurgencies and violence and so on.
And of course, That was the purpose for kind of ganging up on Parler, that Parler supposedly, I mean falsely, was the kind of staging ground for the insurgency.
The point I want to make is that when you shut down legitimate debate, I'm not talking about Klan salutes or Nazi propaganda.
I'm talking about arguments about how to deal with COVID or arguments about how to deal...
And this is a point Mill makes.
He goes, one of the reasons we want these voices in the public square is because if suppressed, they begin to channel themselves into extreme outlets.
So these guys are promoting the very extremism that they claim to be trying to stop.
Absolutely right.
And let's remember, there are already laws against threatening violence, as I mentioned.
There are already laws against harassment.
There are already laws against, you know...
Planning in a way that leads to a criminal action, like the insurrection.
We don't need new laws to criminalize harmful criminal speech.
It's already criminalized.
But what I have seen for sure, and my last book, Outrage, is a history of censorship, is that censorship never makes an idea go away.
As you say, and as Mills say, it just drives the Bad ideas to kind of fester and grow in darkness.
It's such a cliche, but so true that the best disinfectant is sunlight.
And, you know, literally, my book is about how speech about homosexuality was censored in the 19th century.
People didn't become less gay.
It didn't get rid of gay people to not be able to speak about being gay, right?
Abortion has been censored.
It didn't get rid of abortion.
Contraception has been censored.
It doesn't get rid of contraception.
And, you know, extremists in the Bush administration and subsequently, you know, from the Muslim world have been censored.
It doesn't make Muslim extremism go away.
If anything, as you say, it strengthens that.
I mean, I've had thousands of people follow me since I was put into a Twitter jail that never would have heard of me.
And that's not what you want in a free society.
And also lockdown intensifies this because we can't get together in restaurants or in church or synagogue or in a town hall even to have these debates in human space, what I call analog space.
machines mediated and were kept in our basements.
So the division can only be policed and it's being policed by digital platforms with a vested interest in keeping us apart and keeping us from finding common cause about things we do agree on.
Once again, Naomi, you are absolutely right.
And thank you for spending the time and coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
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Imagine a horror movie.
This is a plot that would totally work.
You've got an evil James Bond-ian sort of dictator, and he sets up a situation in which a group of people are brought in as captives.
They are then executed, and their organs are lifted, and the organs are then transplanted into this new society that the man is trying to create.
I mean, this would totally work.
This would be a classic horror movie plot.
Well, except it isn't a horror movie.
In fact, it's not a movie at all.
It's going on in China.
Now, my attention to this was focused by a recent article.
Very interesting. A Chinese doctor's suicide casts light on forced organ harvesting in China.
Articles by Chinese guy Wang Yuquin.
And he points out that very recently, one of the most prominent doctors in China, this is Dr.
Zhang Yuzhin, a liver transplant specialist, committed suicide.
He apparently jumped off a building.
Now, the question is, why would he do that?
Now, here is his background, this guy.
He's 57 years old.
He studied in America.
He went back to China in the year 2000, and he became the head of a whole bunch of very prominent hospitals in quick succession.
The Organ Transplant Center of the Tianjin First Central Hospital.
Then he moves on to Beijing Army General Hospital.
Then he moves to the Beijing University Institute of Heptology.
He's one of the leading liver transplant guys in the world.
But... It turns out that the Chinese have been engaged in a fairly widespread practice of identifying their political opponents.
And this is a group called the Falun Gong, their adherence of a sort of Chinese spiritual discipline of sorts.
The government hates them and has been kind of rounding them up.
But what wasn't previously known was the degree to which the government is executing The Falun Gong and taking their organs and using their organs for transplants to other Chinese citizens.
So now in liver transplantation, there's no such, not like taking out a lung where you've got another one that keeps you going.
You take out a guy's liver, you kill him.
There's no other way to do it.
So this has been going on on large scale.
There's been suspicion of it worldwide.
Human rights groups around the world are calling for investigations.
Of course, the Biden administration is not interested in putting pressure on China on these things.
So they kind of look the other way.
They pretend it isn't really going on.
Turns out that this doctor is not the first guy to commit suicide.
Four prominent Chinese doctors, all involved in organ harvesting.
Have died and died in relatively quick succession.
So what we're seeing here is we're actually beginning to see what tyranny looks like from the inside.
It was Immanuel Kant a couple of hundred years ago who talked about the fact that in free societies the human being is a subject, not an object.
The human being is an end and not a means.
But in tyrannical societies, a human being is a means.
So here's a guy. We don't like him.
And you know what? He's got a liver.
We can use his liver. There's another guy here who could use a liver.
So why don't we kill this guy, take his liver, give it to that guy?
We're not reducing the sum of human happiness because any diminution in happiness from this guy is going to now accrue to that guy because he's going to be really happy to get a liver.
So this is how tyrannical societies think.
The concept of human rights doesn't even really occur to them.
And this kind of tyranny, which was once occurring in the Soviet Union, is now occurring in the new tyrannical state of our time, China, which, by the way, exercises its tyrannical power over a billion people.
I mean, one of every seven people on the planet.
So this is the greatest human rights violation that is occurring today anywhere in the world.
And yet it's occurring while the gaze of the West is downward, is averted, is in effect, through complicity, through silence, letting it happen.
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We often hear in public discourse about the movie business, the oil business, the news business, the airline business, but you don't often hear the phrase, you don't often hear the business of politics.
But you've got to remember that politics, too, is a business.
It is a money-making operation for a lot of people.
In fact, we see prominent people from Al Gore to Biden, the Clintons, all of whom have made a lot of money through politics.
Now, one group that has raked it in, raked in the bucks, is the so-called Lincoln Project.
And it's very interesting that the left enabled all this.
They praised the Lincoln Project to disguise.
The Lincoln Project had a kind of a fan club at CNN and MSNBC and Joy Reid and Bill Kristol and New York Times.
And why?
Because these were supposed Republicans in the name of Lincoln, were restoring the...
Prestige of Lincoln were claiming that Lincoln was a man of principle and Trump is not.
So the anti-Trump thrust of the Lincoln Project made it super cool.
And the money came rolling in.
Here's a new New York Times expose.
The left is now kind of turning on the Lincoln Project, not just because of all the sex scandals, but also because of the financial corruption.
It turns out that these guys...
John Weaver, Reed Galen, Rick Wilson, figured out a system to pay themselves millions of dollars in, quote, management fees.
And they were very cunning about the way they hid it.
And they also wanted to make sure that they were the only guys who got the money, that there was a small club of people.
And so these are guys who were able to raise money.
Nearly $100 million from liberal billionaires.
They raised some of it from small donations.
And what they did was they created consulting firms and began to move the money from A to B and B to C and C to D and then right back to them so that the money trail would be hard to stay on top of.
Now, all of this is now coming to light.
And these guys have been paying off their mortgages, buying yachts, all kinds of stuff like that.
The donors are probably now raising eyebrows.
And by donors here, I mean billionaire Stephen Mandel, Joshua Bekenstein, the co-chairman of Bain Capital, David Geffen.
This is the guy who gave $500,000 to the Lincoln Project.
So all these guys came out of the McCain and John Kasich campaigns, but it was really ultimately, this was a racket that they knew they could run.
And by the way, when the whistle was being blown, when all this information was coming out about the sex scandals at the Lincoln Project, what these guys decided is, listen, It's time to jump off the boat.
So what did they do? They created another Lincoln Project.
This was called Lincoln Project 2024.
And their idea was, let's take the money from the Lincoln Project and move it over to Lincoln Project 2024.
That way, even if Lincoln Project goes down...
In fact, George Conway, this is Kellyanne's husband, when he said, Project Lincoln should shut down...
But these guys have thought of that.
They're like, you know what? We can shut down this ship.
Why? Because by the time this ship goes down, the money will all be on the other ship, and we can cash it in from there.
But now that their cover is blown, they had to sort of return the funds from Lincoln Project 2024 back to Lincoln Project.
And so the gig might be up.
It may be that these guys are not going to end up, well, they've taken a whole bunch of money.
They may not end up with more money.
Thank you. As I think about all this, I think to myself, what would Abraham Lincoln make of all this?
You know, here you have Lincoln, this melancholy, straight-laced guy, a guy ultimately who was motivated by the Kansas-Nebraska Act to come into politics, not a guy who was raking money or enriching himself off the political scheme, a man of principle, a man who paid a terrible price, ending up ultimately being assassinated by a pro-slavery Democrat.
And so this is Abraham Lincoln, and these are the scoundrels, I mean the dirty rotten scoundrels that have been operating, the con artists who have been operating in his name.
It's possible, I guess, for a group to have a certain kind of honorable treason.
You know, you devote yourself to a cause, you discover that the cause has sort of gone bad.
On principle, you decide I've got to repudiate the side I've been a part of.
I can understand all that, but that's not the Lincoln Project.
The Lincoln Project was always, listen, we're a bunch of losers.
We have no future in the Republican Party, our campaigns.
We've run one failed campaign after another.
Or like Bill Kristol, I'm the untalented son of talented parents.
So the basic idea is, what do a bunch of losers do?
And the answer is, they rent themselves for cash.
To the other side. I don't really feel sorry for the liberal donors, you idiots.
Thought that these guys were your saviors, you put in all this money, obviously these guys went off and bought boats.
So I don't feel sorry for the donors.
You got bilked, yes.
But you thought that you could use these guys to go after Trump, and you did.
So in that sense, you kind of got your money's worth.
It's a sordid operation full of sordid people, and I'll be really happy to see this ship at the bottom of the ocean.
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Is jealousy a virtue?
I want to argue that it is.
I want to agree with an article I just read in the magazine called First Things.
Now, First Things is a quarterly magazine that covers Christianity, Judaism, social and cultural issues, religious issues.
Very good magazine, by the way.
I recommend it to you. This is an article called The Virtue of Jealousy by Scott Yenor, and it's in the April 2021 issue of First Things.
And I've been thinking about jealousy a little bit because I'm sometimes accused of jealousy.
You know, if I bash Obama inevitably on social media and Facebook or Twitter, someone goes, Oh, Didesh, you're just doing that because you're jealous of Obama.
I'm thinking, I'm jealous of Obama?
Life with Michelle?
This is something I covet?
No, not the case.
I'm jealous of Obama because of his, what, his refined verbal distinctions.
Oh, we've got to make a distinction between ISIS and ISIL. I'm jealous of Obama because I want to go to his father's grave and weep.
My father, the anti-colonialist, the alcoholic, the guy who beat his wives.
Oh, I wish I could be him.
I wish he was here to guide me.
No, I'm not jealous of Obama.
But here's the point I want to make.
The term jealousy in that context is misused.
The correct thing I should be accused of, wrongly, but accused of, is envy.
Because jealousy and envy are two different things.
Jealousy is not envy.
Now here's the key difference.
Jealousy is to be angry about being deprived of something that you have a right to, that is yours.
Think of the phrase from the Bible where the God of Israel is a jealous God.
Why is he a jealous God?
Because praise of God is due to him.
He has a right to it. He's the creator.
So he's jealous because something to which God has a right is being taken away from him.
Or consider Othello, Shakespeare's play, where Iago is jealous.
Now he's jealous because he suspects his wife, Desdemona, of adultery.
Turns out he's wrong. He jumps to conclusions on the basis of the tenuous evidence of a handkerchief.
But the point is, Othello has the right to his wife's fidelity.
He believes that she owes it to him.
And so he's jealous because something to which he has a right is taken from him.
But that is not the same as envy.
Envy is being angry at somebody because they have something that you want To which you have no right at all.
Now Iago, the villain of Othello, is envious.
In fact, Iago says of, not of Othello, but of Cassio, this other character, Iago says, he hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.
So Iago is angry.
Why? Because Cassio is a good man.
And there's a certain kind of, you may say, natural virtue to him that's admirable.
And Iago doesn't have it.
Now, Iago has no right to it.
But his envy comes out of the fact that he begrudges it to Cassio.
And he wants to harm Cassio, just as later he wants to harm Othello.
Basically because they're better men.
There's no other motive.
Iago's motive is envy itself.
And envy is really one of the worst, one of the most destructive of all human vices.
If you think of vices, I've been trying to think of sort of the seven deadly sins.
And really all the other deadly sins have some legitimate motive.
Normally, in any kind of a sin, you get something out of it.
It may be wrong, but you're trying to gain some good for yourself, some form of benefit, some form of pleasure.
But think about it. Envy doesn't make you happy.
It actually makes you miserable.
You begin to seethe with envy.
You seethe with resentment.
The only pleasure you get is if you pull the other guy down, if you ruin his life.
It's schadenfreude. It's the pleasure taken in somebody else's misery.
Now, envy is, by the way, the driving force of socialism.
It's also the driving force of a lot of resentments in our society.
But the reason we don't hear a lot about envy, notice how rare, when is the last time you saw an article on envy?
Never. Envy is the vice that people never admit to.
They don't admit it to other people.
No one ever said to someone else, oh, you know what, I'm a really envious guy.
You admit to other vices.
You can say, I'm a really lustful guy.
But you never say, I'm a really envious guy.
In fact, people don't even admit it to themselves.
No man ever stood before a mirror and said, there stands an envious man.
So envy is something that we deny even to ourselves.
Why? Because I think deep down we all know that it is a truly wicked emotion.
It's the worst emotion.
Of all the deadly sins.
It's not the same as jealousy.
Now jealousy can be taken, as Othello takes it, to bad lengths.
Othello ultimately kills Desdemona, and then of course he regrets it.
But you can see right there that Othello at the end is a just man.
He recognizes the horror of what he has done, and his jealousy is rooted in a sense of injured merit.
Envy, by contrast, has, you may say, no color of virtue at all.
It is ultimately the worst of the deadly sins.
It's time for the mailbox, and we have a very interesting question about philosophy.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
My name is Emily. Thank you so much for your amazing podcast.
America is so blessed to have you.
I was wondering, who is your favorite philosopher and why?
You are such a great thinker, and I'd love to know whose philosophy most closely aligns with yours and has inspired you.
God bless you and Debbie.
Wow, I love this question.
I mean, I love philosophy.
I love political philosophy, and of course political philosophy is a branch of broader philosophy.
Political philosophy is about how we organize a society, but philosophy is about What's true?
How do we know what we know?
And so on. That's epistemology.
Now, I have so many philosophers I could name.
There are a few of my absolute favorites were Plato, probably number one, Immanuel Kant, also the philosopher George Berkeley, University of California at Berkeley is named after him.
But I want to talk now about another figure, not strictly speaking a philosopher.
I would call him more of an interpreter of philosophy.
And this is the German émigré, Leo Strauss.
So Leo Strauss helps us to connect philosophers one to the other, to engage in a certain sort of inter-philosophical dialogue.
And here's a man, by the way, Strauss was a refugee, came to America.
Fleeing the Nazis. He taught at the New School in New York and then the University of Chicago for most of his career.
He was so influential, his students loved him so much, they actually came to be known as Straussians.
Some of them eventually began to move to the East Coast, some to the West Coast.
Nowadays, people will talk about East Coast Straussians, West Coast Straussians.
In my opinion, Strauss is the single most influential conservative philosopher of our day, of our era.
And you might ask, what is Strauss really up to?
I mean, why would you need to engage in what I called a moment ago, inter- or intra-philosophical conversation?
Why not just read the philosophers directly?
Well, Strauss himself, in a remarkable book...
This book is called Liberalism, Ancient and Modern.
I recommend it to you. If you want to start with Strauss, so don't start here.
This is a collection of very good essays, but probably Strauss' most famous introductory book is just called Natural Right and History.
So start there. But I want to read a few lines from this book, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, where Strauss is actually talking about liberal education and about philosophy.
And he goes, philosophy is the conversation of the great minds.
It's the great minds engaging in a certain type of a dialogue.
And he goes that education is, quote...
Listening to the conversation between the great philosophers of the greatest minds.
Now, this is very important because he goes in normal daily life.
We don't meet these great minds.
It's very rare. Even if someone is a professor of philosophy, that doesn't make them a philosopher.
You might have one philosopher alive in your country in a century.
A handful of them in the world in a century.
But here's the problem that Strauss points out.
He goes, That in fact we must bring about that conversation.
Why? Because the greatest minds, he says, utter monologues.
We must transform their monologues into a dialogue.
So think about it. Here's Hegel or here's Kant.
They're basically laying out a vision.
Here's what we think.
Here's what I think. Now, education, says Strauss, is bringing all these great minds into a dialogue, which we have to do.
And he goes, it is such a great difficulty, it seems to condemn liberal education as an absurdity.
See, there are very few philosophers, Plato being one of them, where Plato does write dialogues.
But notice that Plato's dialogues are not between equals.
There's really only one philosopher there, Socrates.
And he's arguing with these various sophists, but they're not evenly matched.
Socrates, ultimately, you may almost say, is the LeBron James of philosophy, and he's just dunking the basket one time.
So Plato doesn't give you a match-up of equals.
Plato gives you...
Really, the platonic view articulated through Socrates.
Now, the beauty of Strauss is that he's able to synthesize in a very refined and sophisticated...
He's a beautiful writer, as the lines I've quoted suggest.
What Strauss is really doing is he's saying that our modern, what he calls the crisis of the West...
is a crisis of reason.
It's a crisis of relativism.
It's a crisis of the fact that we don't believe ultimately in the principles that have built our civilization.
We began ultimately, we began by relativizing values.
In other words, distinguishing facts and values and saying, well, facts are objective, but values are relative.
And we've gone from the relativism of values to the relativism of facts.
Well, those are your facts. Here are my facts.
Bottom line of it is, ultimately, we have succumbed to open the door, you might say, to nihilism.
And Strauss's great philosophical opponent from the century before, Strauss was a man of the 20th century, was Nietzsche.
And Strauss saw Nietzsche as the apostle of nihilism, Nietzsche actually celebrating at least nihilism of a certain sort.
So the bottom line of it is Strauss provides, I would say, intellectual depth, seriousness, and anchor to modern American and modern European, worldwide conservatism.
He gives a seriousness and grounding to our beliefs.
That is perhaps not for everybody, but it's certainly for people who want to know not just why I believe this, not just what I believe, I'm sorry, but also why I believe it, what are potential objections to what I believe, and at the deepest level, how I can defend against all comers the principles that I most deeply cherish.
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