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March 16, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
57:21
WOKE SUPREMACY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep47
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Is woke supremacy the new form of white supremacy?
How the Washington Post and the New York Times went full Pravda.
David Hogg wanted to start a pillow company, so what happened?
And the Chief Policy Officer of Parler joins me to let me know what's happening on that platform.
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.
Have you heard of the concept of woke supremacy?
Woke supremacy is kind of the mantra of the critical race theory movement.
And the basic idea here is that we've all been living in a kind of state of permanent slumber.
We've been asleep. But when we are woke, we have suddenly awakened to social injustice.
Now, interestingly, Senator Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina, used this phrase just a day or so ago.
He was being criticized by MSNBC's Joy Reid because Tim Scott had been in attendance at a Republican press conference opposing an increase in the minimum wage.
And Joy Reid basically goes, he's just there as a token.
He's just there to give a patina of diversity for the party.
And Tim Scott fires back and goes, that's an example of woke supremacy.
And then he says this, he goes, woke supremacy is as bad as white supremacy.
So here's Tim Scott equating white supremacy with woke supremacy.
And of course... Tim Scott's point is that in the old days, you had this notion that sort of whites are wonderful and all the minorities are bad and that's white supremacy.
Whites are elevated to the top of the totem pole.
Now, according to Tim Scott, it's sort of the reverse totem pole.
Minorities are wonderful. Everything they say is fantastic.
Whites are basically the horrible people who need to be demonized.
So in that sense, I think Tim Scott is saying that the two, white supremacy and woke supremacy, are mirror images of each other.
Now, of course, this brought a kind of angry response from Don Lemon on CNN.
And Don Lemon goes, you know, in effect, Don Lemon says, This is outrageous! I've never seen a woke supremacist lynching anybody!
I've never seen a woke supremacist denying anybody access to a separate drinking water fountain or whatever.
Well, quite frankly, I've never seen a white supremacist do those things also.
In other words, the white supremacy that Lemon is deploring is obviously a thing of the past.
So, he's comparing the past to the present, but who's the bigger danger now?
The white supremacist or the woke supremacist?
The white supremacists, as far as I can see, have no real power.
They're not running things.
The woke supremacists are.
The white supremacists are, in fact, so terrified that hardly in our whole country does anyone admit to being a white supremacist.
If you accuse someone of being a white supremacist on a campus, they run away.
They go, no, no, no, I'm not a white supremacist.
That just shows you that white supremacy is not exactly the reigning ideology of the country.
In fact, it's something that people flee from.
Now, The point I want to make...
It's a different one than Tim Scott's.
I want to make the point that white supremacy is in fact the driving force behind woke supremacy.
Or to put it differently, woke supremacy is the latest form, the newest incarnation of white supremacy.
This may seem like a bit of an outlandish case to make, but I want to begin to make it by showing you a short clip of a white girl screaming at black cops.
Listen. When you take off your uniform, are you afraid of police?
I have a question for you.
You're white and you're telling this to two black police officers.
Yeah. Do you see the problem with that a little bit?
No, I don't because, you know what, just because I'm white and I haven't experienced racism myself doesn't mean I can't fight for justice.
They're a part of the system.
They're a part of the problem.
Just because they're black doesn't mean they're not a part of the problem.
Now, this is a clip worth watching a couple of times because of what it reveals.
In fact, I've watched it a few times and it throws my mind back to a couple of scenes from the past.
Here's one scene from the past.
This I'm getting from the northern writer Frederick Law Olmsted, his great work called A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States.
This is a northern guy in the 19th century traveling through, you may say, the slave south.
And he sees a scene that really catches his eye.
He sees a black guy, a middle-aged black guy, a slave, leaving his plantation and walking down a street, and the slave is approached by a young white girl, no more than nine or ten years old, and she screams at the slave,"'Get back to your plantation!' And the slave meekly turns around and returns to his plantation.
And Frederick Law Olmsted, the writer, is stunned.
He's stunned that a girl barely old enough to be in puberty is able to order a grown man around with such confidence and such ease.
Notice the similarity between that incident and what you just saw from the white girl screaming at the black cops?
Here's another example. This comes from George Orwell's book, Burmese Days, where Orwell is sitting at a British colonial club where the waiters are all Indian.
They're middle-aged to older Indian men, typically in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.
And Orwell sees a 25-year-old white guy, just a scum of the earth, some British thug, some guy who's come out of some school, probably been thrown out of England because he was a disorderly or a bum, and he just gets up and he kicks the old Indian man in the rear end.
And Orwell is just horrified.
He's horrified at the stunning incivility of it, the rudeness, the barbarism.
But he's also stunned that the 20-year-old has the moral confidence to kick this brown-skinned guy in the butt and feel good about himself for doing it.
Notice the similarity between that and what you just saw?
So here's what I'm getting at.
When I think about this woke stuff, cancellation of this and that, I ask myself a couple of questions.
The first one is, who's doing it?
Who's leading the woke movement?
I look around and say to myself, is this a movement that's being run by Latinos and Asian Americans and blacks?
No! It's a movement that's being run from top to bottom by whites.
Consider, for example, here are a few examples I want to talk about.
Columbia University has just announced that they're going to have six graduations.
Yeah, they're going to have a general graduation, but then they're going to have a black graduation, and apparently a Latino graduation, and a gay graduation.
Now, who's deciding this?
Is this because blacks want it?
No. This is decided by a white guy, Lee Bollinger, who happens to be the president of Columbia.
But he's woke.
He's doing it. Now, let's turn, for example, to an interview just here with Gavin Newsom, talking to Joy Reid on MSNBC. Gavin Newsom goes, if Dianne Feinstein steps down, I'm going to be replacing her with a black woman.
So yeah, a black woman is being promised the job, but who's giving the job?
Not a black woman.
It's Gavin Newsom, because he's woke.
Or consider Gina Carano.
Who canceled her? Was it a bunch of black people?
No. It was the white guys who run Disney.
It was white guys making the decisions because they are woke.
Who canceled Dr.
Seuss? The white people who run the Dr.
Seuss Foundation. Who decided to humiliate and fire working class people, a cafeteria worker, a janitor at Smith College?
Ruin their lives. Who did it?
The president of Smith College, a white woman.
Who are the military top brass who are lecturing Tucker Carlson and abusing him because, oh, he's not woke enough?
By and large, it's white males.
It's white males. Who decided in San Francisco to change the name of the schools?
Get rid of Ben Franklin's Park and let's get rid of George Washington's school.
By and large, it was white people.
So the point I'm trying to make is this.
Woke supremacy is the white people's chance to take control of the so-called black movement.
It's to put themselves in the saddle.
Why? Because here's the key to woke ideology.
You don't have to be black to be woke.
In fact, look at me, I'm brown.
But I'm not woke.
Why not? Because apparently I'm still in that slumber.
I haven't awakened myself to racial injustice.
Years ago when I spoke on a campus, a guy screamed at me, Decolonize your mind!
This is some white idiot.
Decolonize my mind. He thinks he knows more about colonialism than I do.
Apparently my mind has been colonized by the British, and somehow he has Gnostic access to that fact.
So this arrogant little twerp, I mean this ignorant punk, lecturing me.
Why? Because he's woke and I'm not.
So here's the key point. It's possible for non-whites not to be woke.
And it's possible for whites to be woke.
So whites have figured that out.
And so they realize we don't have to give power away to blacks or other minorities.
No, we can simply take charge of the woke movement.
We're in power and all we have to do is mouth woke slogans.
Society is intrinsically racist.
It's not a matter of the individual.
It's the system. But guess what?
I'm in charge of the system, and guess what?
I have no intention of stepping down either.
So the bottom line of it is that the old motives of white supremacy, which is, let's keep the whites on top, let's not relinquish power...
The ideology may be different.
The ideology may be, as Tim Scott says, kind of the opposite.
But I notice that when you look a little closely, the woke decisions are being made by whites.
The woke leadership is whites.
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Has the Washington Post and the New York Times gone full Pravda?
Are we witnessing what Matt Tybee in a recent article on Substack calls the Sovietization of the American press?
Matt Taibi has been collecting copies of Pravda and Izvestia.
These are the old two Soviet publications.
And of course, they're full of the kind of over-the-top, ridiculous discussion of the great leader, a mighty demonstration of the union of the party and the people.
That's one phrase. Or when they're talking about members of the Soviet Politburo, they're always glittering, they're full-hearted, they're wise, they're courageous.
And Matt Taibbi has noticed that this kind of talk is now creeping back about Biden.
In fact, a very telling example is an article in the Washington Post That talks about how comedians typically make fun of presidents, but they can't make fun of Biden.
You know why? Because he's too morally serious.
He's a man of such stunning gravitas, a Churchillian figure, if not greater, that any attempt to make fun of him falls flat on his face.
So he is, you may say, above parody.
Now, let's just step back to think they're talking about one of the most corrupt, buffoonish characters ever to set foot on the public stage.
A walking parody.
But apparently we can't make fun of him because he's a combination of Winston Churchill and Mother Teresa.
The same kind of story in the press was covered one way about Trump and a completely different way with Biden.
So here, for example, when...
When the Saudi national Jamal Khashoggi was killed.
When Trump was talking about it, here is an article that we see in the New York Times.
In extraordinary statement, Trump stands with Saudis despite Khashoggi killing.
The basic idea is that Trump is apparently in bed with the murderers.
He won't stand up for this horrific killing of Khashoggi.
Well, is Biden going to stand up?
Apparently, Biden's position is the same as Trump's.
But here's the headline. Also, this is now coming in the New York Times.
Biden won't penalize Saudi crown prince over Khashoggi's killing, fearing relations breach.
So, same killing, but this time, the same decision by Biden, I'm not going to do anything, is now put under the diplomatic necessities of foreign policy.
We don't want to breach with Saudi Arabia, and so let's kind of let this matter go.
This was exactly Trump's reason for letting it go.
So, same incident covered in two different ways.
This is the Pravda-ization of the American press.
But, none of this gets even close to the most stunning example, which comes from the March 11th Washington Post, a correction in which the Washington Post basically very coolly observes that two months after the publication of this story...
They say, we now have an audio of Trump's call to the Georgia Secretary of State.
And now I'm going to quote, the recording revealed that the Post misquoted Trump's comments on the call based on information provided by a source.
So the Washington Post doesn't say who the source was, but it's the Washington Post now says Trump did not tell the investigator to quote find the fraud or say that he would be a or she would be a national hero if she Did so instead Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Georgia Asserting that she would find quote dishonesty there So think about this This is a huge reversal.
Trump was accused of making this intimidating call to the Georgia Secretary of State.
Raffenberger, or whatever the guy's name is, Trump basically told him to fine the ballots, and this was actually considered to be prima facie evidence of an abuse of power.
In fact, the House impeachment managers used this exact quote from the Washington Post, the quote, find the fraud quote, in their impeachment documents, and they also mentioned it at the impeachment trial.
So this was a big lie, if you will.
And here the Post just sort of blithely corrects it.
Now notice when they correct it only now.
Why? Because not only is Trump out of office, but we've also had the Georgia elections.
The Georgia elections in which the Republicans lost those two critical seats.
So the bottom line of it is they do it now when it ceases to matter.
This is, by the way, in the same dimension as the New York Times' massive lie about Brian Sicknick.
Trump supporters beat him on the head with a fire extinguisher.
That didn't happen either.
But that was only revealed much, much later.
At the time, this was used to justify the language of insurgency, riot, coup, blah, blah, blah.
So these people are flagrantly, brazenly lying.
Now, it is possible that they're not lying.
It is possible that they are making errors.
But I don't think so because the errors only fall one way.
I mean, when was the last time you saw a correction of this gravity?
This gravity as applied to Trump and Raffensperger or as applied to Brian Sicknick, but it was damaging to a Democrat.
It was damaging to someone on the left.
And then months later, they're like, oh, you know what?
We made a horrible mistake. We're really sorry.
When does that happen?
Never. So, the fact that the errors only fall, it's kind of like the tennis ball always falling on one side of the court.
You kind of know the game is rigged a little bit.
Now, very interestingly, if you go back, when the Washington Post first reported this, Liz Cheney, true to form, jumps up and down.
She goes, this is very troubling.
This is very disturbing.
So, you see what's going on?
This is, I would call it, the moronic Republican.
The moronic Republican always takes it for granted that what they read, from the left, by the way, is absolutely true.
And what you have to do now is run for cover, damage control, denounce it, disavow it, never bothering to ask, did this even happen?
Where is the audio of the phone call?
Let's hear Trump saying what you say he said.
The truth of it is, he never said it.
The Washington Post now admits it.
What they're admitting after the fact, after the damage is done, is that they are basically liars.
The New York Times, liars.
These people are in some senses worse than Pravda.
For the simple reason that not all Americans know that they're dealing with Pravda.
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I am a, well, super fan of the platform Parler because I believe it is very important to have alternative platforms that don't track you, that don't censor you, where you can have a genuinely free exchange of ideas.
And so, you can imagine my dismay and horror when a kind of digital gang of moguls got together, coordinated their strike on Parler and brought Parler down.
Took it offline. The culprits here were Google, they were Apple, they were Amazon.
And this was, I think, a just notoriously brutal attack on a competitor and on a rival platform.
I'm very happy to have Amy Pekoff, who is the Chief Policy Officer of Parler, join the podcast.
Amy, thanks for coming on.
I'm actually really excited to see that Parler is, in fact, back.
Tell us a little bit about how Parler got back on its feet after this kind of monstrous attack on it by the kingpins of digital media.
How did you survive this attempted assassination?
Well, thanks for having me on, Dinesh.
We are still in the process, actually, of showing that we have survived the The digital assassination, as you call it, because as it stands right now, we are active on the web, as you have seen.
We've gotten back up. We have found independent suppliers to serve all the needs of our stack.
But we are still in the process of trying to get back onto Apple's App Store, for example.
And we were number one on the App Store when we were taken down that weekend in January, as you know.
Let's talk about that for a I can't overstate the value of having the Apple app.
I mean, you know it as well as I do.
I have an iPhone right here in my pocket, and I have to go now online to post on Parler through the web.
I would prefer to do it through my Apple app if there were one.
What are the chances that Apple is going to kind of let you back in?
And are you worried about dependency on Apple?
Because, of course, if they did it to you once, presumably they could do it to you again.
Yes, dependency on Apple is a problem, I think, for anybody who wants to be on the App Store and who depends on the access to the millions of users that the App Store provides.
We are still in ongoing discussions with them.
If you have seen the CEO, Tim Cook, in interviews, he has characterized what has happened to Parler as a suspension.
And in particular, he had focused on Inciting and violent content.
We are now in a discussion now that we have shown that we are effectively dealing with inciting and violent content on Parler.
They are now starting to talk about what they call objectionable content.
And we also believe that we handle that sort of content in a completely appropriate way as well.
But now we are being asked to have that discussion with them and it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out.
Let's pursue that a little bit more, this notion of objectionable content, because it looks to me that once you move from inciting violence, let's just call it the fire in the crowded theater, to objectionable, you're now in a very subjective realm where you find this objectionable, I find that objectionable, so suddenly you're now trespassing, I think, on the free speech zone.
Would it be worth Parler having the app to give up The ability to basically say, listen, if something is legal, if you're not doing something that is calling people to break the law, you should be able to have a very robust debate.
Sure, people will have highly objectionable views, but so what?
I mean, go read John Stuart Mill.
Highly objectionable views have a place in free society, and there's really no good moral case for censoring them.
Yes so there is a lot to talk about here and in general I align myself with Nadine Strawson who is the former head of the ACLU. She's written a book called Hate and she talks about the fact that if you are truly concerned to resist hate and again hate can be defined in a variety of ways but if you're talking about discrimination on the basis of of race or religion,
ethnicity and other sorts of things and doing this in a way that has nothing to do with the substance or the merit of the person.
This is, you know, perhaps what you mean by that.
If you want to resist that, then the best way to do it is with more speech, not with cutting off speech.
And so at Parler, we deal with this sort of content, but we deal with it in a way that puts the control into the hands of the individual users.
I mean, that's the point, isn't it?
That if someone says something hateful, it's kind of like if you were to say something hateful on the street, people would chastise you because they would respond to it.
And so there's a built-in mechanism for checking any kind of extremism of language.
That's why people are a little careful what they say, because they know there's going to be blowback.
Now, let me ask you this about, you were talking a little bit about the negotiations with Apple and them letting you back in.
What would you say are the chances that that will in fact happen?
I'm optimistic that they will let us back on.
As I said, in the past, our discussions have focused on the inciting and violent content, and they had not raised this issue before.
But I believe that because we have provided tools for users on Parler to deal with the sort of content that they're concerned with, that they should see that we have invested resources and that we show that we care about Furthering civil productive discussions among people of competing viewpoints on Parler.
So I'm optimistic for now.
We'll see what happens. Now, isn't part of the project to convince Apple and the public that part of this was all based on a mythology, which was that Parler was the staging ground for January 6th?
I've seen a good deal of evidence, including some tabulated evidence, that places like Facebook, most of the people who had pre-planned the sort of entry into the Capitol, they were conspiring not on Parler, they were conspiring on Facebook.
Isn't that a fact? Well, we do know that that content was in abundance everywhere across the varying platforms and that Parler was not unique in that.
And we also know that a group feature like the feature that Facebook has and that Parler did not have is one that is better suited for any sort of planning or coordination.
You know, Parler has always prohibited violent and inciting content No system for dealing with that content, whether proactive and automated or otherwise, is perfect in this regard.
And we all know that in the weeks leading to January 6th that that content was proliferating everywhere.
So we do believe there was a double standard as applied to Parler.
And in part, you could notice that everyone knew that Trump was being kicked off of Facebook and Twitter and everybody suspected that he was coming over to Parler.
That is one piece of circumstantial evidence that might show the motive of this.
The other, of course, was the Twitter mobs who were tagging us and specifically calling for these big tech vendors to deplatform us.
When we come back, I want to talk further to Amy Peikoff about the broader problem of digital censorship and whether the best solution is to have some sort of regulation at the federal or state level or whether it is the market itself.
We'll be right back.
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Make it yours. We're back with Amy Peikoff, the Chief Policy Officer of Parler, and we're talking about Parler, but I think also more broadly about this problem of a digital public square.
I think the courts have even said that our public square is now electronic.
It's digital. And I think when it started, it appeared to be the promise of a decentralized public square with a lot of actors contributing to a kind of robust, you know, new type of Greek agora, if you will.
Suddenly, we realized that, like, six guys, and quite honestly, it's like six white guys...
People are running the debate, are policing the debate, not only for America, but to some degree for the world.
And I've seen a kind of blowback in Europe, European members of parliament saying, what the heck, whoever signed over the authority to have a discussion to these dudes.
Do we have a problem here, which is that somehow a public square that was supposed to be free and open has now become at least quasi-monopolistic?
I do think there's a problem, but it might not be for the reasons that you think.
I don't think it's necessarily because you have private companies, even private companies who have a large market share per se.
To me, I see the issue right now is that there is this strange relationship between government and these companies.
So under Section 230, there is a huge amount of legal immunity that is granted to these companies and which these companies have become dependent on.
At the same time, we are seeing people in Congress.
Now, of course, the whole administration in Congress is ruled by the Democrats.
And the Democrats, as you know, have repeatedly harangued these CEOs of these bigger companies to remove more content from the internet.
So if you say, okay, they're implicitly threatening maybe to do something about this immunity that they've become dependent on, And at the same time, they're encouraging them to remove more content, which maybe ideologically they weren't that objecting, you know, they weren't objecting to removing it anyway.
You start to see government play a role in this in a way that is quite disturbing.
And it's hard to tell at what point do these companies become a de facto sort of agent of government in their decisions to remove that content when there are so many carrots and sticks involved.
Now, recognizing the very low chance that a Democratic administration would remove the Section 230 immunity or would encourage these platforms to move in a more free speech direction, there's a bunch of activity going on in the states.
Ron DeSantis in Florida, the governor of Texas has now gotten behind us, there are many others, and the idea here is to pass laws at the state level.
Essentially, free speech laws that say that, hey, listen, if you censor someone running for political office in Florida, you're going to be fined.
If you try to censor someone who lives in Texas and is kicked off Twitter, you're going to get a $10,000 fine per time that you do that.
Now, I am sort of queasy about the idea of the government getting into this game, as I believe you are.
But I also don't really see another alternative when the federal government is taking one side, and you may say the side against the Constitution, should we maybe be forced to turn to the state governments to protect our free speech rights?
It's really hard to say what the proper solution is when we do have this strange mixed economy phenomenon applied to the tech sector, which had been previously so unregulated and so free.
And so I sympathize with someone like Greg Abbott, you know, who I think is doing a good job on a number of issues, wanting to step in and protect the free speech rights of Texas citizens.
It's not clear that government should be the way to do it.
Ideally, what you would do is you would recognize this horrible symbiotic relationship that I've described before between the federal government and these platforms.
And do something to decouple that so that we could actually have a free market and platforms like Parler could compete and show that really we think that our way where we don't have engagement enhancing algorithms, but we also don't, you know, censor ideas, that that's the way to deal with hateful content.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's quite obvious that whatever you think about, you know, about the right, let's say, of a Facebook or a Parler, however large, to, you know, it's their platform, right?
So presumably they have a right to kick someone off if they want to, for good reason, bad reason, or no reason at all.
But I think that's why I found the attack on Parler so creepy, because for a while there were guys on the left who were saying, oh, you don't like Twitter?
Well, you know, create your own platform.
So, hey, you know, we did.
And then they go after that.
So that showed that it wasn't that they wanted you to get on your own platform, but they didn't want the speech in the first place.
And can you assure people at this point that Parler is on a road to establishing a degree of autonomy and also effectiveness so that it actually becomes the viable platform that we all wanted it to be?
And I think its prospects, if it can do that, are absolutely, I mean, not just huge, almost limitless.
I mean, we are definitely autonomous at this stage, and then the question will be, can we convince Apple that they should, in effect, stick to the Think Different slogan that they embraced not all that long ago, or am I revealing my age, right? But we think that they should embrace the right of their customers to think differently, and they should support them in their customers' efforts to Think differently by using various apps.
You know, again, I think we all have the same goal, which is to further productive civil discourse on the internet. Parler, we have our ways of furthering that goal. It might not be exactly the way that other people would choose to further that goal.
But we think it's the right one. We think it's the right one for good reasons. And we hope to convince Apple of that. But we are certainly autonomous. And we are certainly looking for ways to provide services to customers in terms of mobile apps and everything else. So yes, we're on that path.
Amy Picoff, thanks for joining the podcast.
I really appreciate it. Thanks for inviting me.
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What is going on inside the US military?
I'm thinking here not of the ordinary servicemen.
I'm not talking about the ordinary guy who puts his life on the line for the country.
I obviously appreciate people who devote themselves to military service.
I'm thrilled to have a lot of fans of this podcast and my books in the military.
But it seems like the military, like the FBI, is an institution that the left has targeted To corrupt from the top.
And I say this because I'm seeing all kinds of military intervention in civilian matters that seems at the very best unseemly and in some ways even very counterproductive.
So you start off with the militarization of Washington, D.C. All supposedly been ginned up to fight against a threat that is clearly a fantasy, a fantasy threat.
Oh, there's going to be another assault on the Capitol.
Never happened. No one even showed up.
So this is point number one.
Point number two, there's all kinds of woke ideology going on in the military.
They assign books that are basically things like how to be an anti-racist, anti-racism training.
They subject military personnel to all kinds of propaganda on gender studies.
Here's a very amusing photograph which shows a bunch of ROTC cadets Literally being forced to wear red high heels and walk for a mile.
Why? Because apparently for men to do this, I mean embarrassing and ridiculous though it is, supposedly to sensitize you to what women go through when they wear high heels.
But wait a minute, who's forcing women to wear high heels?
Women choose to wear high heels.
These men are being forced to do this.
They're being forced to undergo something that women apparently undergo voluntarily.
And this is all over the military now.
Most recently, I was a little disturbed to see the military jumping in into a fight with Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson made some statement, I don't even hear it, about pregnant women in the military.
The point is the content of the statement is immaterial.
But one after the other, on official military websites, you have all these generals and top figures in the middle weighing in, and literally weighing in in a boisterous fashion, saying things like, you know, back off, boomer, to Tucker.
Now, since when did the military, this terrifying institution with all this power that is supposed to protect us from foes, foes of the country, when has it suddenly become involved in the culture war?
When has it suddenly become taking sides in a partisan conflict?
When is it presumed to lecture a cable TV host?
What's going on here? Recently a bunch of military guys from Guam go marching to the office of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
What the heck? You're showing up now to sort of boss around some Republican congresswoman?
Really? And then today I look on social media.
This is the U.S. Army. Extremism can tear apart cohesive teams.
Colonel Timothy Holman is the Army's Chief Diversity Officer, and his aim is clear to open a path for future Army leaders and make the force as diverse as the nation it defends.
This is more woke ideology.
And you know what's going on here is the military is taking sides with, in a sense, one half of the country, the left, against the side that has actually most supported the military, against the side that actually has the back of the military.
It's almost as if the cops all went woke.
Which is to say, siding with the very people who want to destroy them, defund the cops, let's take you over, let's burn down the precinct, but nevertheless, the cops go, we're on your side.
We want to take on these bad guys who want to actually fund the cops and back the blue and support us.
So, how does it, to use the military's own term, produce cohesive teams for the military to jump in and side with the left against a lot of soldiers who are undoubtedly conservative?
Are you going to make them feel like fools?
Are you going to basically launch a campaign of deprogramming them of their conservative ideology?
This, it seems to me, is not what the military is even for.
The purpose of the military is to create a lethal fighting force to protect the country.
And instead of doing that, it looks like the military is now becoming some sort of a social, cultural, and civic institution that is trying to promote leftist ideological purposes.
This is a deep disappointment, and in the end, it produces a more divided, less cohesive, weaker United States military.
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Remember when David Hogg, the left-wing activist, said that he was going to found a company called GoodPillow that would put Mike Lindell's MyPillow out of business?
Well, it looks like GoodPillow has turned out to be not so good.
And I suppose we should have seen it coming.
Now, David Hogg is a sort of, well, I guess he's a survivor.
Of the Parkland shooting.
Now, I put that word in sort of quote marks because he's a survivor in the same sense that I am a survivor.
Neither of us was there.
He wasn't at the school at the time, but he's really capitalized on this survivor business to sort of create a name for himself.
And with great fanfare, he announced, I'm going to see to it.
Mike Lindell is this right winger and he's got this company.
I'm going to make a better pillow.
I'm going to make sure this guy's run out of business.
And look at the mentality.
This is like cancel culture at its work.
Not only is Mike Lindell a bad guy, I don't agree with him, but because he makes a pillow, I've got to run him out of the pillow business.
This is how the left thinks.
And of course, all kinds of media jumped on this.
This is from about a month ago, Washington Post.
Parkland survivor David Hogg launches his own company.
NBC News. David Hogg launching pillow company to, quote,"...put my pillow out of business." Another news report, David Hogg says he's going to take on Mike Lindell.
Here's a short media clip talking about how David Hogg is going to, quote, engage in a pillow fight with Mike Lindell.
Listen. Parkland School shooting survivor and March for Our Lives co-founder David Hogg says he's starting his own pillow company.
He's calling it a pillow fight against Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow, who gained notoriety for his support of President Donald Trump.
So it's kind of time to check in with David Hogg to see how it's going.
Now, first of all, when he first did this, you know, one of the Parkland survivors, this was a real survivor, this is a kid named Cameron Kasky.
He said, wow.
He goes, this is what that whole Parkland thing has turned out to be about a money-making racket.
I'm quoting him now. I spent so much time promising people this wasn't going to turn into a cash grab.
He goes, I'm now putting on my clown makeup with the shame that I deserve.
To those of you who marched, donated, lobbied, and called for change, I'm sorry this is what it's turned into.
It's embarrassing.
So he's referring to David Hogg trying to sort of Rake it in.
But I don't think that this kid needs to worry about David Hogg is not going to rake in anything.
You know why? Because he doesn't know how to make a pillow.
Let's follow the track of his so-called company.
First of all, you can see with all this publicity, he gets incredible marketing.
A+. But of course, people are going to ask, well, where's the pillow?
And David Hogg is like, well, I don't have a pillow, but I have an idea for a pillow.
It's like, well, yeah, but you can't sleep on an idea.
I kind of like Mike Lindell at least made a pillow.
Where's your pillow? And David Hogg is like, well, I don't have a pillow, and I don't think he's ever going to.
He put out a request.
This is all, again, several weeks ago, offering 200 bucks to the public to find somebody to design his logo.
So, evidently, the guy doesn't even have a logo.
He doesn't know how to design a logo.
You can get an idea of the value of his company.
I paid $200 to design a logo for a company to take on my pillow.
Now, Newsweek decided to go check the patent office to see if GoodPillow, this new company, has been registered.
And Newsweek said, we can't find it.
There's no record of such a company even existing.
Well, the funny thing is that shortly after the news broke about this GoodPillow company, another guy...
This is a guy unrelated to David Hogg named Robert Holland of North Carolina.
He decided, everyone's talking about this good pillow idea.
You know what? I'll go get the patent.
I'll go get the copyright.
So this dude, probably a drugster, unrelated to Hogg decided, I'll take over the name.
And he owns it now. It's his pillow.
So the bottom line of it is, and you see here how leftists are.
They think it's so easy to start a company.
Oh, you know what? I'll just tweet out about it.
A company will mushroom into existence.
No. It's hard to start a company.
And Mike Lindell has done something amazing in building this massive, successful company.
David Hogg wants to run him out of business, but it doesn't look like David Hogg is going to be, even anytime soon, getting in business at all.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. What would an honest atheism look like?
I want to suggest that we have very little of it in our own time and our own era.
We almost have to go back to the Middle Ages to the work of a Persian poet called Omar Khayyam to get a feeling for what honest atheism is.
I say this because any honest atheism would come to terms with death.
Debbie and I were I was startled recently to find out that one of our neighbors died suddenly.
We got a text from her husband.
She had cancer.
But she didn't tell anyone and she didn't tell us.
So that's why it hit us with such a shock.
And when death hits you with a shock, it makes you think about death itself because death is a bit of a taboo in our culture.
It's rarely talked about, but it obliterates everything.
It shows that the apparent normalcy of ordinary life is a sham because we go around our normal life, we're doing this project and that project, but of course we know As beings who know we're going to die, that these plans were going to be sort of washed away by the ocean, you might say. Now, of course, teenagers live in a certain denial about death.
They all think they're invincible. I can drive at 90 miles an hour.
Nothing's going to happen to me. But, of course, as you get older, you have at least a more dim awareness that this, at some point, is going to come to an end.
Here's my point. For the atheist, this is a real problem.
Not for the believer so much, because for the believer, death is not, it's an end.
It does terminate all human projects, but it's not the final end.
It's in fact a gateway to another, perhaps different, but nevertheless continuing form of awareness, of consciousness, of life.
But for the atheist, that's it.
That's the end of the story.
Death is a disaster because it turns even the most successful life into a failure.
All your projects become abandoned.
All your relationships are irrevocably terminated.
A guy who's standing on a ship and the ship is basically sinking.
And you know it. So what should your attitude be?
It seems to me that most atheists today say, well, my attitude's the same.
It's no big deal.
I'm just going to go about living life the normal way.
But it seems to me that there's a certain kind of form of denial there.
You're sort of like the musicians playing the...
Playing the music on the Titanic as the ship is slowly going under the ocean and you're supposed to know it.
You're just pretending like you don't.
Well, the musicians did know it.
But these atheist fools of today pretend to a certain type of indifference, which is not really taking death or even atheism seriously.
Now, the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, and it's worth reading the Rubaiyat, obviously not written in English, but translated by Edward Fitzgerald in a beautiful translation.
You get a sense of the transitoriness of life.
I mean, listen to this.
The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.
The idea here that you go from one thing to the next and you never return.
There's no way to go back.
And he talks about, for example, even the greatest of kings will pass one to the other.
And they might be remembered for a generation or two, but not after that.
After that, they just, you may say, return to the sand from which they came.
I'm going to read now.
They say the lion and the lizard keep the courts where Jumshed gloried and drank deep.
So at one point you had this great ruler, Jomshed.
Now the lion and the lamb are walking around there.
And Bahram, the great hunter, the wild ass, stamps over his head and he lies fast asleep.
So Bahram is the great killer of the ram, of the ass.
But now where's Bahram?
He's dead. Asses are walking all over his grave.
That's how it goes.
And Omar Khayyam goes, So he's saying, look, life is really short.
We have small snatches of happiness, you know, wine and song to tide us through.
But you have this pessimistic awareness.
That in the end, it's death, it's destruction, it's nothingness, it's the end of all projects.
And so an honest atheism would be, I think, a little less cocky, if I can put it that way.
Why? Because if we are just material creatures in a material world, then like every other material object, at some point we will be smashed into smithereens and we will be no more.
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Hey, it's time for our mailbox.
But before we go there, I want to urge you, if you're enjoying the podcast, to subscribe.
Hit the notifications button so that you'll be notified when the next one goes up.
And also share the podcast with other people you know.
Help me get the word out.
If you want to send in a question, an audio question or a video question, which are preferred, send it to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Let's go to our question for today.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
My name is Vinny LaMolinara.
I'm a recently retired Navy pilot and cyberwarrior living in Maryland.
And I think your podcast is brilliant, it's daring, and it's risky to combine politics, religion, family, and address issues such as racism.
You have certainly been attacked in the past, and I would like to know, how do you believe you will be substantially attacked next?
And what will you do to prepare and respond for this?
Thank you very much.
By the way, I was an exchange pilot in the early 90s during the Chavez coup attempts in Venezuela, and I certainly appreciate your perspective and your wife's perspective on Venezuela.
Thank you very much. Bye.
I appreciate the question.
You know, there are certain types of attacks that I worry about.
Certainly attacks from the government or from the deep state.
I was worried, for example, you saw what happened to me with Obama.
When you have a vindictive narcissist like that in the White House, you know, the empire is going to strike back.
If Hillary had been elected, I expect, you know, I don't know if I would have...
Added to the Hillary body count.
But the fact of the matter is the Clintons are nasty, vindictive people also.
Biden, I think, is too much of a doddering fool to do anything like that.
But there are people around Biden who are very nasty and fully capable of trying to mobilize the government.
That's one type of attack. Is simply trying to sort of de-platform, digitally censor me, shut down my voice by shutting down the platforms on which I function.
So I'm constantly concerned about that because, again, that is a form of silencing.
And by the way, they only silence people who go after you if you're a danger.
I mean, you'll notice, like, no one's going after Liz Cheney.
No one's going after Mitt Romney.
Those people are seen as harmless fools.
Dangerous people get targeted because they're actually doing damage to what the left represents.
Now, the kind of attack that I get in the public square, people who want to challenge me, debate me, I actually like all that stuff.
I invite it. And to that degree, the description of me as a provocateur, I guess, is a little bit true.
Not that I'm just sort of looking for a fight, but it's more that I recognize that it's really important not to...
When dealing particularly with these sensitive issues of race and gender, even sexual orientation, these have become the strategies of bullying in our time.
In fact, they're the justifications for cancel culture.
And therefore, I think there's a particular, I would even say, obligation on people like me, who are persons of color, to speak up against this nonsense.
To defang it, to expose it, and even to ridicule it.
So that kind of attack, I'm not worried about in the slightest.
If you don't silence me, you're going to have to deal with me.
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