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March 18, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:02:45
100 CAR PILEUP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep49
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Mitch McConnell promises a 100-car pileup if the Democrats go after the filibuster.
What will that look like?
The FBI's witch hunt over January 6th, and left-wing Indian-American author Sukitu Mehta and I debate illegal immigration.
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.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, is warning the Democrats that they're going to be in for a 100-car pileup.
If they abolish the filibuster.
And this is something that Democrats are sort of desperately or many of them desperately eager to do.
Why? Because even though their majorities in the House and Senate are very narrow, just a few seats in the House, actually no seats in the Senate, they'd have to haul in Kamala Harris to break the 50-50 tie.
And the Republicans are holding very united on most of the key issues.
So the Democrats need to steamroll them and the filibuster, which is essentially an ability to block the Senate, Unless it can get 60 votes to override the filibuster.
This has been a technique for the party in the minority to be able to slow things down.
Not always stop them. Stop the really bad stuff or the really big stuff that the Democrats want to do, like change the way that voting rules are conducted throughout the country, for example.
Radical overhauls of this or that.
Those can be blocked with the filibuster.
Now, this is why the Democrats are really eager to To set aside the filibuster so they don't have this nuisance of this traditional practice in the Senate.
Now the filibuster, by the way, is not in the Constitution.
It wasn't devised by the founders.
But it's a very old practice.
In fact, it goes back to 1806.
And there have been multiple.
There were multiple efforts in the 19th century to get rid of it.
But it has basically held firm.
And both parties have by and large seen the value of it.
In part because both parties realize that at some point you end up in the minority.
American politics has been kind of a pendulum swing and it certainly has been very closely divided since at least 1980.
So no party has had a secure hold on power.
But I think the Democrats want to get rid of the filibuster because they have legislation, including H.R. 1, that they think will give them a secure hold on power for the future.
Now, of course, on this issue, and Mitch McConnell pointed this out in his speech, here's a tiny clip of that speech, and then I want to talk a little bit more about what was in it.
Listen.
There's an ironic element to this whole conversation.
Some Democratic senators seem to imagine this would be a tidy trade-off.
If they could just break the rules on a razor-thin majority, sure, it might damage the institution, but then nothing would stand between them and their entire agenda, a new era of fast-track policymaking.
Now, today, it's Democrats like Dick Durbin who talk about getting rid of the filibuster.
Yet, in April of 2017, this is really just three months after Trump took office.
It's very interesting. A majority of Democrats and Republicans sent a letter supporting the filibuster.
And signing the letter, 33 Democrats signed it.
Lots of familiar names, by the way.
Senator Chris Coons, Joe Manchin, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Maisie Hirono, Kamala Harris, Sheldon Whitehouse, And so these are the Democrats who saw the value of having a filibuster when Republicans controlled the House and the Senate and the presidency.
But what's interesting here is it wasn't just the Republicans who signed the letter.
I'm sorry, it wasn't just the Democrats.
A majority of Republicans did too.
So in a way, this is not just a case of, yeah, the Democrats wanted the filibuster then...
And they want to get rid of it now that they have the power and Republicans are just as hypocritical.
Hey, look, the Republicans were trying to get rid of it.
No, the Republicans supported the filibuster on principle, even when it would seem to benefit the Democrats.
And the Democrats, of course, used the filibuster to defeat proposals that otherwise would have gone through if it was merely a 50-50 vote.
Today, though, the Democrats seem to be quite willing to set aside principles.
The only question is, will all the Democrats get on board?
It's not clear that Kristen Sinema of Arizona is on board.
She said she supports the filibuster.
So did Joe Manchin.
But Joe Manchin is this mercurial character.
In West Virginia, he always goes, I'm a voice of moderation.
I want everything to go through on a bipartisan basis.
But he shows a little bit of a different face in Washington, D.C. So the question is, will Joe Manchin come through for the Democrats?
Or will he actually hold firm with what he's been telling the people of West Virginia all along?
We're going to see, by and large, what kind of a snake Joe Manchin is, if indeed he is a snake.
If this is going to be a key test for his own voters.
Because, see, these are conservative West Virginia voters.
And they go, oh, Joe Manchin's a really nice guy.
We can trust him, even though he's a Democrat.
So, in Trump country...
This Democrat has been elected to represent the conservative values of West Virginia, and we're about to find out how serious he is about these things he's been saying.
Now, Mitch McConnell is also willing to play Realpolitik, which is to say, Mitch McConnell is willing to say, hey guys, listen, there's a lot of stuff in the Senate that just depends upon the collegiality of the Senate.
It's kind of like in a household.
It doesn't actually matter if, you know, the man or the woman is sort of in charge, let's say brings in the bacon, feels that they run the household.
The truth of the matter is, if the other person is miserable, if you're constantly running roughshod over them, they have ways to retaliate and make your life extremely miserable.
And that's what... Debbie's chuckling here in the background.
She's like... I have to occasionally put this to use in the D'Souza household.
Make sure to take that smile off Tanisha's face if he's trying to boss me around.
So anyway, I rarely try to boss you around.
If ever. In fact, I think you would admit the opposite is more often the case.
So you're again laughing with that recognition.
Oops, yes, I guess that's true.
So anyway, with Mitch McConnell, what he's saying is that I've got ways to gum up the Senate.
Even ordinary business, not even controversial stuff, not HR1. McConnell talks about farm bills, highway bills, defense appropriation, defense authorization bills.
These are bills that normally have large majorities of both parties.
But If you want to start messing things up, you want to take away the filibuster, you want to basically turn the Senate from a deliberative, more consensus-oriented body into a free fight, then McConnell is going to be sort of like the angry wife who decides I may not go Lorena Bobbitt on my husband, but I know lots of ways to make his day miserable.
I think this is something that McConnell is actually really good at.
He's not exactly the best speech maker.
He gets into fights with Trump.
But I think the good thing about him in this case is that deep down, he's kind of mean-spirited.
He's kind of vindictive.
Just sort of like the angry wife.
And there's a way that McConnell is going to teach these people a lesson.
So the Democrats are going to have to, I think...
Think twice, maybe even three times.
And I think Sinema and Manchin are going to want to ask, do we want to break the collegiality of the Senate and go into this free-for-all, when if the Republicans take the House in the midterms and the Senate, whatever we do to them now, they'll pretty soon be doing to us.
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Journalist Julie Kelly has been keeping track of these trials of the Trumpsters who are accused of storming the Capitol on January 6th.
And the more I read of these individual cases, the really more disturbed I become.
Just recently, a couple of days ago, FBI agents in Southern Florida showed up at the house of a guy named Christopher Worrell of Cape Coral.
Now, this is a guy whom they could have arrested in the normal way, but no, they came in full force, in sort of military fashion.
Apparently there were six or seven black vehicles, they busted down the front door, armed men with helmets, there was a tanker truck in the background.
This is like a massive FBI show of force, and just think of how terrifying it would be to have this happen at your front door.
Now you might think, oh wow, this guy Worrell, oh my gosh, he's some dangerous gangster.
You know, he's an organizer of riots and he's sort of like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Actually, no. Worrell never entered the Capitol building.
He never went in. He isn't even accused of committing a violent crime.
And yet... He's locked up in jail.
He can't even get bail.
Why? Because Democratic judges are essentially keeping these people locked up indefinitely, even though in many cases their trials aren't even scheduled.
Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, has acting like this is the Oklahoma bombing.
In fact, he compared the two.
Remember, the Oklahoma bombing killed 168 people, including 15 children.
So, what's going on about January 6th, these are highly politicized prosecutions.
They're political witch hunts.
They're all based on the idea that these guys, and in this case, again, we're talking about a guy who, yes, he may have ranted on social media, yes, he wasn't, but he didn't go in the Capitol!
What's he being arrested for?
Well, the idea here is that the government is accusing these people.
In this case, his charge is obstruction of an official proceeding.
He's evidently, by his very presence in DC, obstructed an official proceeding.
And this is a kind of a bogus charge that they use to put a felony on what otherwise would just be things like trespassing, you're in an area you're not supposed to be in.
So these are misdemeanors.
How do you get these people for felonies?
How do you try to lock them up for years?
You essentially layer on charges that are bogus, but nevertheless designed to make something appear more serious than it actually is.
The truth of the matter is that Worrell went to D.C. to speak up, to petition for grievances, to exercise his First Amendment rights, and it's the First Amendment in part that's being overrun here.
The FBI is literally saying to people, saying of people, defendants,''Oh, this guy thought that there was a lot of election fraud going on, therefore you can't release him on bail because he doesn't believe in the laws.
He can't be trusted to show up for trial.'' Now let's contrast the way in which these January 6th defendants are being treated with all the Antifa and Black Lives Matter guys.
Now these are guys who are actually bludgeoning people, actually burning churches, actually hitting cops.
These are people who actually occupy these buildings by force and in some cases hold them for long periods of time and yet routinely it's sort of catch and release.
The district attorney, for example, in Portland is notorious for arresting all these Antifa people on Monday and then they're free on Tuesday.
And no charges are even brought against them.
So, the discrepancy of treatment is part of what makes all of this so galling.
It's very clear to me that, at least in these political trials, there are two systems of justice in this country.
And when you have two systems of justice in a country, what that means...
Quite honestly, is that there is no justice at all.
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I'm very happy to have on the podcast the author and journalist Sukitu Mehta, who has written a number of books.
We're going to talk in a little bit about his new book, which is called This Land is Our Land.
A very provocative book on immigration and an illegal immigration.
But I want to begin by talking about an earlier book that Sukitu Mehta wrote that's called Maximum City.
This book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
It's won a bunch of other awards.
And it is an in-depth sort of journalistic look, close up, at the city that I grew up in, Mumbai, formerly called Bombay.
So, we're going to talk a little bit about Mumbai first, and then about immigration.
Sukito, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
We're a little bit on opposite ends, maybe, of the ideological spectrum, but I do want to say that I'm a huge fan of Maximum City.
I think this is maybe partly as someone who grew up, well, I didn't grow up in the main city of Bombay, but I grew up in Bandra, a kind of Elite suburb, you might say, of Bombay that has now been largely swallowed by the city, but it's also kind of the nerve center of Bollywood.
And so it was kind of interesting for me as a kid.
But I found your book to be extremely fascinating, showed me all kind of sides of Mumbai that I never knew about.
Let's talk for a moment about these massive megacities that we now see around the world, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City.
I mean, we're not talking about cities with five or even 10 million people, but what is the population of Bombay right now?
Well, it depends who's counting and what you define as Bombay.
The thing about these megacities is that they scroll into the countryside and there's no clearly defined boundary.
So Bombay could have 15 million, 20 million, 30 million.
It just depends. You know, the island city itself for Bombay, as you know, was composed of a series of islands.
And the sea between the islands was filled in by the Portuguese and the British.
But the point about these megacities is that the future of urban civilization on the planet, God help us, as I say in the book.
These cities signify hope and opportunity for people from the countryside and as life gets increasingly more difficult in the rural areas of these countries like India or Brazil or Nigeria, people flock into these megacities and they come looking for economic opportunity and in some cases to make it in Bollywood.
The same forces that drove Americans into American cities in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Now, if you think of the typical structure of an American city, it tends to be the so-called inner city or the downtown.
And the suburbs, although they are adjunct to the cities, I mean, I live in a suburb, for example, of Houston, but the suburb is not a city.
The suburb is actually more like a town that has access to the cultural life of the city, the restaurants of the city.
But it seems to me that in India, when you talk about Indian cities, the way they expand is You're not talking just about suburbs that kind of are around a city.
The suburbs become the city, and the city itself tends to magnify itself so that suburbs of Bombay now look exactly like Bombay.
Right. So it becomes an excerpt.
That is, you know, the sprawl is characterized by large tracts of pretty featureless buildings without a history, really.
So if you want to find a historical Bombay, you go to places like Colaba or, you know, Nariman Point.
So this is where the city, until around the 1970s, you know, that's where the Stock Exchange was.
Now, if you go to Bandra, where you grew up and where I spent part of the time researching Maximum City, it really is kind of the center of the city.
So the city sprawled out into the hinterland and it goes as far as the hills.
And I think it's rapidly going to become this kind of urban agglomeration where the city of Pune, in the hills, which used to be a totally separate city, it'll become part of this urban, you know,
larger grouping. Just as in the United States, if you look at the Northeast Corridor, New York and Washington and Boston, you know, it's characterized by larger or smaller cities and then small tracts of countryside, right? So, you know, the world as a whole is moving that way in terms of human population.
Cities, that's where the action is.
We reached a milestone in human history a few years ago where more human beings now live in cities than in villages for the first time in our history.
Let me ask you this question.
Sometimes when I experience the inner city in America, particularly some of the more desolate parts of inner city, South side of Chicago, for example, South Central LA, you get a feeling of nihilism and despair, which you can sort of see in the absence of just smiles, smiling faces.
Now, I grew up near the Dharavi slum in Bandra.
You know, very poor people.
People who would be considered ridiculously poor by American standards.
But yet, there seems to be a vibrancy.
The children are smiling.
They're playing in the water.
I wonder if there is, in fact, a division, a difference.
Between the kind of despair and nihilism in the American inner city, I'm almost raising the question of whether the inner cities in America are some of the worst places to live on the planet because they seem to be minus even the hope that you do find in Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro in the favelas or in the slums of Bombay.
Well, I've spent a lot of time in the favelas of Rio and the slums in Bombay and many other cities.
And the word slum is a pretty freighted word.
You and me don't like it, so we call it a slum.
Often it just means informal settlements.
This is shacks or shanties that the poor build up themselves.
And by now, Dharavi, these shacks are brick and mortar structures.
They just don't have title to the land.
So in Dharavi, you can find lawyers, journalists, professors living there.
And it's very dense, kind of jerry-built urban housing.
Now, the issue with American universities, and I grew up in Jackson Heights in Queens in New York, which is not exactly the ghetto, but I've spent a lot of time in places like East New York and Harlem and so forth.
So there were decades of underinvestment in these parts of American cities.
But in the 90s, something interesting started happening that as crime declined, People started moving into these formerly blighted parts of American cities.
And now, you know, condominiums in Harlem go for over a million dollars, which would have been unimaginable to me when I came to New York in the 1970s.
So there's been, at least until COVID, A kind of reimagining of the American city.
And particularly young people, they got bored of the suburbs and moved back into cities because they like walkability.
They like downtown. Older people, too, moved back into cities because they could walk to their doctors, walk to, you know, the symphony, walk to a restaurant.
So cities, American cities and European cities, became newly attractive as the crime went down.
After the pandemic, it's anyone's guess if that will continue to hold.
That is, large numbers of people have left the cities.
Will they come back?
It also depends on the economy of the cities, whether remote work will continue to be possible.
When we come back, I want to talk to Sakitu Mehta about his new book, This Land is Our Land, An Immigrant's Manifesto.
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I'm talking to the Indian-American progressive writer and author Sukitu Mehta.
His new book is This Land is Our Land.
Sukitu, you begin this book with a ringing declaration, basically saying that we, and I think by we you mean here immigrants, and I don't know if you include, it seems like you do, legal and illegal immigrants, and you basically say it's our America.
We don't need to apologize for it.
We're here. We're not going anywhere.
Now, let me start by asking you about the distinction that you seem to elide a little bit or camouflage, the distinction between the legal and the illegal.
Isn't it a fact that an illegal immigrant is not an immigrant and that a lot of the language like undocumented immigrants is camouflaging the fact that the problem isn't a lack of documentation.
It is that you are not lawfully in the country in the first place.
You are to that degree an alien.
Why? Why is the old vocabulary of illegal aliens inappropriate here?
And why dodge the issue?
Sure. Well, first of all, you know, I also mentioned in my book, ask yourself this, has the West ever asked anyone's permission to enter a country legally when the British went into India?
When Americans went into Central America, when the French went into Africa, did they ask permission?
Did they go in legally?
So what I say in my book is, people are moving like never before.
But they're moving not because they hate their countries or their languages or their families.
They're moving because of colonialism and what replaced colonialism, which is corporate colonialism.
War and climate change, the rich countries have left the poor countries no choice.
They move because the West was there first.
Now, in terms of the language, I don't think any Whether you call them legal or illegal, they are immigrants because they're here.
They have moved to pursue a better life for themselves and their children, which is the oldest human motivation.
Human beings have moved around the planet for all of our history.
It's only really since the early 20th century that this whole international system of passports and visas came into force.
During the 19th century, for example, Fully one quarter of Europe up and moved to the United States.
With what result, the US replaced Europe at the pinnacle of world wealth and power.
So immigration, you know, I am a strong proponent of migration.
And I think that migration of all kinds, both legal and illegal, is good for the countries that they move to, for the immigrants themselves, and for the countries they move from.
Let me ask you this though, I assume that you believe in the democratic idea of consent of the governed, right?
So just as a typical club would have to have a meeting and vote to decide, we're going to have some new members and this is what their qualifications are going to be, isn't it a fact that a country through its democratic system has every right to decide who gets to come to this country, who gets to be a member of this club, if you will?
And why does the desire, the understandable desire to move for a better life, trump that democratic ability of societies to figure out who they want their social compact to apply to?
Well, by that principle, an all-white country club that votes, who members vote to keep it all-white, Also, I have a right to exclude blacks.
There are some compacts that serve against the larger interests of the world, the community.
In my book, I look at the whole global migration debate from the point of view of the migrants themselves, which I believe have been really underrepresented.
That is, we talk about whether immigration is good for the United States or not, whether People should come here legally or not.
If they come here legally, what kind of skills they should have.
And I kind of go a little further.
I turn the tables. And what I ask is, why are people moving in the first place?
And again, it's not because they hate their families or their language, but they want to come here and break the law.
It's because they're left with no choice.
So let's just take one issue, which is climate change.
We Americans are 4% of the world's population, but we've put one-third of the excess carbon in the atmosphere, and European countries another quarter.
With the result that large parts of Africa and India are facing desertification and drought, according to UN estimates, a billion people will have to leave their homes because of climate change by the middle of the century.
So who bears responsibility for those emissions?
Historically, it's the rich country.
It's only fair that we take in people who've been displaced as a direct result of our actions.
Now, when you mentioned the thing about the all-white club, I think one qualification is critical here, and that is that, you know, for a whole generation now, the vast majority of people coming legally to America have been non-white.
In other words, the immigrants today and yesterday haven't come from Europe.
They're coming from Asia, from Africa, from South America.
The country takes a million legal immigrants per year, and most of those people are non-whites.
So this is not a case where America is saying, as I think it was accused of Trump, that he wanted to just bring in immigrants from Norway or something.
But the truth of it is we're taking legal non-white immigrants, and so the racial point doesn't apply, it seems to me, quite so clearly.
I want to do another segment with you, Sukita, with your permission.
So when we come back, I want to discuss a very provocative idea in your book, which is immigration as a form of reparations, a key theme in your book, which we'll discuss when we come back.
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I'm back with Indian American author Sukitu Mehta, his new book, This Land is Our Land, a kind of ringing defense of immigration.
Sukitu, you make kind of, I think, an original, at least, argument, which is that...
Immigration, including illegal immigration, should be viewed as a form of reparations.
In other words, the West has sort of wronged these countries, you may say taken their wealth, and America has wronged in particular Mexico, in part by sort of stealing half of it in the aftermath of the Mexican War of the 1840s.
And you even make the point that America owes more to the Mexicans, for example, than it would say to Asian Indians because America, you say, didn't do anything to India.
I want to press you on this a little bit more because it seems to me that while you're quite right that colonialism has been bad for the people who lived under it, the question I want to ask you is a different one.
Isn't it a fact that Indians living today, including you and me, Are better off because of British colonialism.
In other words, I'm raising the question of whether colonialism was bad for our ancestors, but good for us because number one, we speak English.
Number two, we're integrated into global technological systems.
We're integrated into global democracies.
India is very different than it was before the British.
Isn't it a fact that India, even after independence, voluntarily embraced many institutions from courts of law to separation of powers, checks and balances?
These were imports originally from the British.
So, where is the outstanding invoice, let us say, that, let's say, England owes India that needs to be settled by, let's say, open immigration from India to England?
Isn't it a fact that India today is doing well, in part, because of the benefits conferred originally, not by intention, but nevertheless by effect, by British rule?
Right. This is the argument that they gave us the railways and the language, so we should be grateful.
When the British arrived in India at the beginning of the 18th century, India's share of world GDP was about a quarter.
So a quarter of the world's GDP at the time that came out of India.
By the time the British left, 200 years later, India's share of world GDP was under 4%.
The colonial enterprise wasn't run for the benefit of Indians.
It was run for the benefit of Britain.
Among other things, three million Indians died in the Great Bengal Famine in 1943 because Churchill diverted ships carrying rice to the war effort.
There were endless massacres.
Indians weren't allowed to produce their own They had their own industries, their own clothing.
Gandhi led this non-violent movement for independence, which was an inspiration to the world, but he did it.
Not because the British had conferred this enormous favor to India, but on balance, colonialism was a bad thing for India.
Now, you know, whether or not India would be better off or worse off, we'll never know because it's a hypothetical.
What I'm saying is that it's indisputable that Whether it's India or these African countries or Latin America, they have been harmed by colonialism and what replaced it, which is corporate colonialism.
Take Guatemala, for instance.
At one point, 42% of all the land in Guatemala was owned by one company, an American company, the United Fruit Corporation.
The US-funded civil war in El Salvador cost 75,000 lives.
Illegal and unnecessary war in Iraq cost 600,000 Iraqi lives.
We sell Latin Americans guns.
Three quarters of the guns in Mexico and 98% of the guns in the Caribbean come from the United States.
We export our gangs.
Not in El Salvador, but in the presence of Los Angeles.
And we buy the one product they have left to sell with the biggest market for their drugs.
So we've caused harm.
The rich countries have caused harm to the poor countries.
Two nations, Britain and France, created 40% of all the borders on the planet.
And in many cases, these borders were atrociously bungled.
If you look at a map of Africa, It abounds in straight lines, the political map.
These maps cut through traditional tribal nations, which ensure a condition of permanent strife between the nations.
All I'm doing is connecting the dots.
History has consequences.
And these people are coming here because colonialism and corporate colonialism and war and climate change have continuing effects on these people.
So they're coming here not to rob and to rape.
Immigrants in the United States commit crimes at far lower rates than the native-born, as the Cato Institute has shown in this landmark study in Texas.
And, you know, for a large part of the 20th century, the Republican Party was a pro-immigration party.
It was Ronald Reagan who created an amnesty for illegal immigrants.
So, you know, the country was built, and this is why I love the United States of America.
This is why I'm proud to call myself an American, because it's a country made up of all the other countries.
This is the American exceptionalism.
Yeah, Suketu, well, I really appreciate this dialogue because although I have a lot to say, I actually want you to speak because as you know, in the American political debate today, even this kind of exchange where let's say my audience gets to hear from you is quite rare these days. The kind of discussion across a spectrum doesn't occur. And so the kind of debate that you and I could have very little of what you said I directly disagree with. Now, I believe
that the real wealth of the West was created internally. In other words, although you're right that in the year say 1500, India was one of the richest countries in the world. So by the way, was China. What happened is that there were internal developments in the West, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, so that even if the British had never set foot in India, Britain would have advanced. I think you would agree with this relative to India very quickly because of those internal developments
in Europe.
That later also created the military power that allowed a tiny island like Britain to subjugate, what, 60% of the real estate in the planet.
You can't do that if you don't have a massive technological advantage.
So we won't resolve these issues, Sakito, but bottom line is I take you to be saying that you love America and you want America to open its doors because it's a good place to live and lots of people want to come here.
And it's better for America.
So in my book, I lay out the economic benefits of immigration.
If it were not for immigration, in recent years, US GDP would have been 15% lower.
Over half of all the companies in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants or their children.
40% of all the life scientists, these are the people who are coming up with vaccine COVID, 40% of all the life scientists in the country are immigrants.
If you look at our universities, if you look at our farms, the country would fall apart if it were not.
You and I are immigrants.
We're here having this debate, and I believe they're contributing to the country.
And I think the US is by and large a pro-immigration nation.
We understand because all of us can trace our families, except for the Native Americans, We've all came here from somewhere else, and deep within our bones, we understand them.
I think we should have these debates.
And again, I'm not calling for open borders, I want to be very clear.
I'm calling for open hearts.
So what I'd like to ask of your audience is, you may disagree with me about the root causes of migration, you may disagree with me about immigration and reparation, but ask yourself this.
If you were a Guatemalan mother, Or a Nigerian father.
And you knew, you saw your children starving because you couldn't grow crops in the fields, or they were menaced by the gangs.
You knew that your children would grow up either impoverished or die.
What would you do?
Would you do anything in your power to pick up your child and take them and cross whatever borders, face whatever ordeal to give them a better life?
This is what everyone who came to this country, this is what their parents did.
And this is the same thing that these parents are doing today.
But Sukitu, one thing that your parents did and that I did is we also recognize that there is a line and there might be poor people from other countries who got ahead of us in the line.
And so there is a legal system by which we can have our applications considered.
And that there is something, it's understandable, but nevertheless unlawful to try to jump the line.
Hey, we'll have to leave it right here.
Sukitu Mehta, thanks for joining me on the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
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I've been reading about woke supremacy and woke theology, and as I read about it and hear people talk about it, I detect a very familiar language, a language of good and evil.
The notion, for example, that white people are all irredeemably racist and sexist and homophobic, so the kind of notion that these are the bad people.
Evil. And then, of course, the sort of moral power of victimology.
The victims are all sanctified.
These are sort of the clean people, the pure people, purified by historical oppression, you might say.
And I realize that we're dealing here not just with ideology but with theology.
There's a sort of woke theology behind this political rhetoric.
In fact, for a lot of woke people, you may almost say that being woke provides a certain moral absolution.
Let's say you're Bill Gates and you're about to buy a $100 million yacht.
You go, well, you know, I'm going to set up this yacht in a manner that reduces climate change.
So therefore, it's perfectly fine for me to have the $100 million yacht.
I'm not going to be criticized for this kind of extravagance that I otherwise might be on the defensive for because I'm woke.
I'm allowed to do it.
So woke people don't have to wear their masks.
And woke people are allowed to have fences around their homes and guns protecting them.
And woke people are allowed to even harass women.
Because after all, like Cuomo, they're woke.
I'm for women's rights.
Why are you raising this issue with me?
I should be judged by a different standard.
My name is Bill Clinton, after all.
I was for the equal rights of men.
This is woke theology.
And it's worth contrasting for a moment from...
Christian theology has such a different understanding, almost the opposite sort of understanding of human nature.
I want to focus briefly on an essay by the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
He was at Union Theological Seminary for many years.
And it's associated with a movement called Christian realism.
By Christian realism, we mean here a willingness to look realistically at what the world is actually like.
Now, Reinhold Niebuhr begins by talking about the fact that human nature has kind of a good side and a bad side.
Hard to argue with. Human nature is capable of noble deeds and great aspirations and wonderful heroic achievements.
And this, says Niebuhr, makes us optimistic about human nature.
It's the basis of optimism.
But then he says human nature also has a downside.
It is disposed to evil.
To taking advantage of other people.
There's even a kind of tyrannical impulse that wants to control and rule and confiscate the resources of others.
And this is the downside.
This is actually what Christians call original sin.
And Niebuhr, in a very striking formulation, says original sin is one of the few empirically verifiable doctrines of the Christian faith.
And this downside of human nature, what Kant calls the crooked timber of humanity, Niebuhr says that this part of human nature justifies pessimism.
So there's a reason for optimism because human nature has an upside and there's a reason for pessimism because human nature has a downside.
And so Niebuhr says any theology worth its name, any theology worth professing, should reconcile these two, should make sense of both of them.
And he says that Christianity does.
Christianity acknowledges that the world...
It is, you may say, the human playground and, in fact, is a site very often for very bad things that happen in the world because of the sinful side of human nature.
But Christianity also supplies something else.
It supplies hope. And by the way, Niebuhr says the hope is not just in the next world, that the hope will be after you die.
No, because God is also sovereign over this world.
God also supplies, you might say, this moral code.
Call it the Ten Commandments.
Call it the inner voice of conscience.
but it's basically God's adjudication occurring in this world.
So God is in a sense the creator, but he is also the judge, the judge of the world.
And so Niebuhr says that Christianity lends a certain profundity to human life. Why?
Because it makes sense of our optimism, the sense that we have a redeemer, the sense that we can live the good life, not only in the sense of prosperous, but in the sense of virtuous life.
But Christianity also looks straight in the face of suffering.
Niebuhr defended for example in politics what he called a sort of realistic view in which we recognize that we often are not choosing in the real world between like the good guy and the bad guy.
That may occur in the philosophy seminar.
But in the real world, you're sometimes choosing between the bad guy and the really bad guy.
And you've got to sometimes ally with the bad guy to get rid of the worst guy.
So this is Niebuhr.
And this Christian view, this Christian theology is so different than woke theology, which in a sense takes away this line between good and evil that runs through every human heart.
Basically, what woke theology does is it says there are wonderful people.
They're called blacks.
They're called gays. These are the most marvelous people in the world.
Even if they do bad things, you don't blame them.
You blame the system.
Why?
Because the system made them bad.
So the evil here is not in people, well, it's in white people, but otherwise it is systemic.
It's built into the structure of society.
And then you have this kind of, you may almost call it, well, Niebuhr calls it naive doctrine of progress.
And the doctrine of progress is basically, it's the root of the term progressive, the idea that evils are in the past and wonderful things are in the future.
So again, it's almost like history is taking sides.
The past is bad.
The future is better.
And so we ally ourselves with this not-really-here, non-existent future because it's supposed to be morally superior to the past.
And this is, by the way, where people look down on things like, oh, in the old days, people knew nothing and they were really dumb.
Now, Niebuhr makes the point that there has been a great deal of material progress through history.
But who would be confident enough to say that there has been dramatic moral progress?
Yeah, human beings, for example, have all these wonderful devices that make our life better.
But we also have all these lethal killing devices that have killed...
The 20th century was the bloodiest century in human history.
So the bottom line of it is that material progress doesn't necessitate moral progress.
And I think the point that Niebuhr would make if he were alive today, looking around...
Is that woke theology is really not a theology that makes sense of human nature.
It creates a drama around human nature, but it's a false drama.
It's a bogus drama.
In the end, it deserves to be called ideological and not theological.
It is a theology without transcendence, without depth.
And if we're looking for an alternative, Christian theology offers something far, far better.
And desperately searching for understanding, but when word spreads that he has risen from the dead, they realize that hope didn't die on the cross.
It lives on in them.
Here's a clip. Listen. The tomb is now open and the Nazarene is gone.
Impossible! Jesus has risen.
You will preach the gospel to all creation.
Spread his word.
This could trigger rebellion. Love down the city.
Tear the place apart!
Go! What if you've chosen the wrong man?
Believe and follow me.
The kingdom of God is coming!
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This is a very Dineshian segment coming up on the philosopher Nietzsche goes to Hollywood.
I was reading about Nietzsche's life recently and it gave me an insight into Nietzsche's writings.
Nietzsche's writings, by the way, are an affirmation of embrace life.
It's almost like the Nike motto, just do it!
Don't be constrained.
And Nietzsche carries that to great lengths.
In other words, there are times when Nietzsche would seem to justify horrific conquest, even cruelty for Nietzsche in cases is presented as a virtue.
This idea of breaking free of barriers and allowing the natural, you may almost call it virility of human nature to strike out.
This is Many people think liberating philosophy, the bracing philosophy of Nietzsche, what he called the philosophy of ice and high mountains.
But where does it really come from?
Now, interestingly, Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor, a theologian.
But his dad died when he was five years old.
So he was raised by women.
Not one, not two, not three, not four.
Five women! Who were the five?
His mom, Francesca.
His younger sister Elizabeth, his maternal grandmother, and two aunts.
This was literally a society of women, what in a very different context John Adams would call the tyranny of the petticoat.
Because apparently these women were constantly grabbing Nietzsche and giving him, they were into all kinds of medications.
And they were constantly putting castor oil in his ear and drops in his eyes and making him swallow this and eat that and drink this.
And they controlled his whole life.
He was not allowed to go out into the fresh air because he might catch something.
So, Nietzsche felt like he was literally in prison.
He was being confined by the suffocating influence of these five women.
It was female subjugation, and so it is against this backdrop of, you may almost call it social control, domestic control, that Nietzsche's view can be seen as a kind of breaking free, a getting out.
Nietzsche writes things like, this is a very interesting line,"...give no credence to any thought," says Nietzsche,"...that wasn't born outdoors." While one moved about freely.
It's almost like Nietzsche saying here, I was kept indoors, I was confined, I was constricted.
I gotta break out of this.
I need to breathe freely and the kind of immoralism.
This is Nietzsche's own word.
He calls himself an immoralist.
He wants to be able to break free even of traditional morality and break free ultimately of the tyranny of the Christian God.
Now, I was thinking about all this when I was filming the movie Trump Card, because somebody we talked to in that movie, Isaiah Washington, made a very similar point about Hollywood.
And he made the point that a lot of people who are different, bohemian, strange, gay, people who are raised in conservative households, sometimes he says, from the South.
And they begin to feel constrained.
My parents start judging me and my pastor looks me funny in the eye and I'm ostracized.
So the sense that Nietzsche felt of being in a cage.
And so they go to Hollywood and they want to do the opposite.
No limits. No morality.
I don't want to be under anyone's scrutiny.
I want to do the inverse, the opposite of what I was raised to be.
So this is the roots, you may say, of the progressive rebellion, the desire not to be in a moral cage.
But of course, here's the great irony.
In trying to escape from the cage, these progressives, and this is certainly true of Hollywood, have created their own cancel culture, and they've created their own cage.
And they want to now restrict what people say, and they want to throw you off social media, or you'll never work in this town again, you'll never get tenure.
So what they're doing is they are becoming the monsters that they try to escape from.
They're trying to establish their own forms, their own tyranny of the petticoat, except now it's not the tyranny of the pastoral ministry.
It's really the tyranny of the kind of malevolent identity politics activist who wants to shut people up and make sure that they don't say what you don't want and establish a regime of conformity through the whole society.
The lesson here, I think, is a bitter one in trying to escape from one cage.
Make sure you don't construct another.
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Hey, if you have a question you'd like me to consider on the podcast, send it in, preferably audio or video question.
Email it to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Let's go to a very interesting question that is about liberalism and illiberalism.
Listen. Hello, Dinesh.
Joshua here from Phoenix, Arizona.
I've been racking my brain and I've been extremely perplexed lately, trying to figure out and pinpoint where cancel culture originated.
Has it been around for a long time and it picked up speed in the generations beneath me?
I'm 35 years old, but the issue is it's resonating with my age group.
And I find it odd that people that were brought up on South Park and Family Guy are now these self-proclaimed liaisons to justice, fact, and truth.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
If you could possibly give me some insight, I'd really appreciate it.
And I'm a big fan of your writing, I'm a big fan of your movies, and I've listened to your podcast since the very first one, Keep Up the Great Work.
I also follow you on Instagram, and you've answered me before, which I was incredibly giddy about.
It's very nice to see somebody in the limelight reach out to a basic Joe like myself.
So, if you can give me some insight, I'd appreciate it.
Thank you.
Bye.
You know, the irony about cancel culture, we're trying to explain it as an anomaly, but it's actually not an anomaly.
It should be said that the illiberal habit of mind, the habit that wants to shut other people down, shut them up, cancel them, this is the normal course of things.
Tolerance, the liberal habit of mine, the habit that says, you know, I disagree with you, but I defend to the death of your right to say it, that is a hard-won achievement.
That is, in fact, something that has occurred very rarely in human civilization.
In fact, it's one of the glories of Western civilization and of America, the First Amendment.
If we think back through history, cancel culture was all over the place.
The ancient Greeks had a practice called ostracism where they would vote and they would pick on a guy and they would just decide to kick him out of society.
And it was often done for no reason.
One year they picked this guy.
He was called Aristides the Just, a man known for his virtue.
And they decided to throw him out of Athens, expel him for years.
And Aristides was really puzzled because he had harmed nobody.
And so he walked up to an ordinary citizen and they didn't recognize him.
And he goes, you know, he goes, why did you vote to ostracize this guy, Aristides?
And the citizen goes, because I'm a little sick of him being called the just.
In other words, the guy was actually envious of Aristides' virtue.
Now, the Catholic Church for centuries had the Index Prohibitorum, the Index of Banned Books.
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake.
The point I want to make is that cancel culture is the normal habit of mine.
In fact, it happens all over the world.
Today, if I were to go and denounce the Indian government I lived in Bombay, they'd send goons to break my legs.
Cancel culture. But tolerance, freedom, the First Amendment, this is a modern achievement of Western society.
And only educated, civilized people say things like, I disagree with you, but I'll defend your right to say it.
Savages don't say that.
And so what this means...
Sadly, is that our culture is moving away from liberalism toward illiberalism.
It is moving away from civilization toward a new type of barbarism that is all too familiar in history, but we were once in America able to say it doesn't happen here, but now it does.
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