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March 19, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:34
HOW LIBERALS BECAME ILLIBERAL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep50
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How liberals became illiberal.
What's the threat facing Asian Americans?
It's not white supremacy.
And Pastor Rafael Cruz joins to talk about Christian marriage.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza.
I am constantly struck as I look around me at the illiberal trends in American life and American culture.
Part of the reason it's so striking and so disturbing is that America never used to be like this.
But now we find that basic liberties, civil liberties, that we once took for granted in this country are threatened.
And they're at least threatened for us.
Some people may say, well, my free speech isn't threatened.
That's probably because you're on the side of the threateners.
You're on the side of the digital censors.
That's why you don't feel threatened, because they're not after you.
It's kind of like in an age of white supremacy, a white guy goes, well, I don't think our society is unjust.
The only people we seem to crush are the blacks.
Well, but if there's injustice toward the blacks, that means the society itself, its structure.
We recognize that in the racial context, but we seem not to recognize it in other contexts.
So, how did America become so illiberal as it is today?
It never used to be, and what makes all this particularly ironic is the people promoting the illiberalism used to be called, and sometimes still are, liberals!
The liberals are the ones who are illiberal, and this forces us to think about what do we mean by these terms liberal and illiberal.
Now, I wrote a book almost 30 years ago now, my first real major trade book called Illiberal Education.
What I tried to show in that book was that liberals were becoming illiberal in the educational context.
And so liberal education is about an openness to ideas, but universities were becoming more close-minded.
Liberalism is about treating people equally without regard to race.
Universities were practicing all kinds of ethnic and racial preferences and gender preferences and so on.
So this was the theme of illiberal education, but it was confined to education and it was confined to the campus.
What we see is that this liberalism is now all about us.
It's become part of the fabric of our society unless we act to root it out.
Liberalism, the term liberal, comes from a Greek word, liberalis, which refers to the free man as opposed to the slave.
The American founding was, in a sense, liberal.
It was classically liberal.
Why? Because it emphasizes freedom or liberty.
The American founding is really based upon the interconnection between different types of liberty.
There's economic liberty, there's political liberty, there's religious liberty, there's civil liberty, and for the founders, these liberties all came as sort of part of a package.
Interestingly, conservatism in America is different than conservatism in Europe or in the rest of the world.
Why? Because we are the conservators, the defenders of the American founding, which means that conservatism in America is the defense of a certain type of classical liberalism, the liberalism of the founding.
Now, conservatism also has a second element, which is a concern with civic and personal virtue.
And that has to be combined with this affection for liberty.
It's actually part of what distinguishes the conservative from the libertarian.
Libertarians, by and large, emphasize liberty, but they're not so concerned about virtue.
You can sort of see this really clearly.
If you were to say to a libertarian, what if there are 300 million Americans and they freely choose, let's say all of them, to become pornographers or porn stars?
Would America be a good society?
Well, the classic libertarian has to say yes.
Why? Because after all, nobody forced them, they chose freely, and as long as they exercised a choice, they have conformed to libertarian precepts.
But would the American founders agree?
I don't think so. Conservatives wouldn't agree either, because for us, liberty is primary, but it's also liberty to form a certain type of a decent, lawful, and I would say even virtuous society.
Now... Interestingly, starting in the 1930s, liberals, modern liberalism, which is different than classical liberalism, began to subtract one liberty from the founders list, economic liberty.
And so the government would confiscate resources and redistribute resources and rob Peter to pay Paul.
So economic liberty kind of started going down the tubes in the 1930s.
But all the way in the 1960s and continuing in the 70s and 80s and 90s, liberals defended civil liberty.
They defended the First Amendment.
They defended religious freedom.
They defended the right to assemble.
And they believed that these liberties should be protected even from the majority.
In fact, especially from the majority trampling over them.
But now we live at a time when these liberties are constantly endangered.
Think, for example, about The First Amendment, the free exercise of religion.
The Constitution specifically says that religion, Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of religion.
And yet, not only Congress, but the governors, the states trample on religious freedom all the time.
Even the Supreme Court has said, well, you know, you can't treat religion or churches worse than you treat, say, bars or nail salons.
But remember, the Constitution says nothing about bars or nail salons.
It singles out religion for protection and this protection is now in practical purposes being denied.
Censorship. It is not only bad and pervasive, but it makes no sense.
I mean, think about it. Amazon sells Hitler's Mein Kampf.
You can buy it. They also sell all kinds of swastikas and all kinds of paraphernalia.
But if you take two lines out of Mein Kampf, 240 characters, and put that on Twitter, you'll be banned on Twitter.
You'll be banned on Facebook.
So ironically, but which is more persuasive, the 240 characters or the whole book?
Which of course is available for neo-Nazis to read and get fired up on and so on.
So the censorship is senseless.
There's no logic to it.
But nevertheless, it is there.
It is pervasive. And of course, it doesn't just apply to Mein Kampf.
All kinds of people are being thrown off social media for believing the wrong thing about the elections, for believing the wrong thing about coronavirus, for believing the wrong thing about this and believing the wrong thing about that.
Ironically, liberalism, the defense of liberty, has now metamorphosed in a horrible way into the suppression of liberty.
And the same people who once stood for civil liberties are now the tramplers of civil liberties.
We are in a difficult moment in America.
I hope we get out of it.
Because if not, we are moving into the same spiral that has taken other countries down the road to despotism.
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There is a rise in violence in America against Asian Americans and we are hearing the narrative in the media and from the Democrats and from the left that this is due to Trump and this is due to white supremacy.
All of this was given heightened focus recently with the gruesome murder of eight people In Atlanta, in the massage parlors in Atlanta, six of them, six of the eight were Asian-American, and a white man, Robert Aaron Long, has been apprehended in connection with these murders.
Here is the DA of Multnomah County, Mike Schmidt, laying blame where he thinks blame is due.
Listen. The heinous murders in Atlanta are an unspeakable tragedy.
While there's still much we don't know about these murders, we do know this.
Six of the eight murder victims are Asian American.
Attacks on Asian communities are growing nationally.
Many of these instances appear to be rooted in hate, including some of the cases being prosecuted by this office.
Hate will never have a place in our society.
So there's a guy giving you the standard narrative that this episode illustrates a rising tide of hate.
And then other people are piling on.
Here's Alexander Ocasio-Cortez.
Dismantling racist anti-Asian violence means standing up to white supremacy.
So there's the culprit, white supremacy.
And here's an article in The Root.
Whiteness is a pandemic.
Whiteness itself.
And the author talks about the actions of the white supremacist who walked into three Atlanta-area massage parlors and killed six people of Asian descent.
Then he goes on to say the former president is to blame.
And then this rather chilling ending.
White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect, which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it.
So he himself, the author of this article, using kind of the language of extermination, he wants to get rid of whiteness itself.
Now, the only problem with this narrative is that when you begin to look closely, the whole thing starts unraveling.
So let's begin with Atlanta.
This guy, Robert Aaron Long, who is the apparent perpetrator, the alleged perpetrator, His motive, it turns out, he is essentially a certain kind of sexual sickness.
It has nothing to do, seemingly, and this is not my view.
This is the view coming from the cops.
The suspect apparently claims that he has a sexual addiction.
He hates these massage parlors.
So his target wasn't the Asian Americans.
He killed, after all, eight people.
He didn't choose the Asians.
Six of the eight were Asian.
The other two were not.
So it doesn't look like this particular crime has a racial motive.
And if you listen carefully to the DA, he didn't say it either.
He quickly jumped from, well, there's much we really don't know.
There's been a spate nationally.
And now there has been a rise in anti-Asian violence.
And the real question is who?
And the real question is why?
Now, according to Ted Lieu, Congressman Ted Lieu, it's, quote, the former president, because he used phrases like Kung Flu...
And that have essentially targeted the Asian American community.
Now, first of all, with regard to Trump himself, Trump said the virus came from China.
He didn't say the virus came from Chinatown.
Now, I recognize that there might be people who are sort of targeting Asian Americans because they blame them for the virus.
I mean, this is absurd.
It's absurd because these Chinese people have nothing to do with it.
They fled China in many cases.
It's the Chinese government It's the Chinese government that didn't tell the world that this was happening.
It's the Chinese government that sort of lobbied the World Health Organization to suppress information.
So, not only are the Chinese not to blame, but in some cases the anti-Asian violence doesn't even involve Chinese.
It involves people of Asian descent who are not Chinese.
It kind of reminds me of What happened after 9-11 where a poor Indian guy, a guy wearing a turban, was targeted and shot by some yahoo and he was shot because they thought he's obviously a Muslim.
No, he's not a Muslim.
Wrong country, wrong religion, wrong everything.
Now, all this being said, the FBI has been keeping some pretty good statistics on anti-Asian violence and when you look at these statistics, first of all, you notice that the anti-Asian violence is occurring Not in Red America, by the way.
It's occurring in Blue America.
It's occurring in places like New York and San Francisco.
Not exactly MAGA country.
The Red States, in fact, FBI data, represent 8% of the hate incidents against Asian Americans.
The Blue States represent 80%.
Now...
With regard to the racial issue, are these white supremacists who are doing this?
Actually, no. According to the Justice Department, 27.5% of all violent crimes against Asian Americans in 2018 were committed by blacks.
That's 50,000 incidents in a single year.
There were 43,000 incidents But think about it.
There are seven times as many whites in this country and yet fewer incidents.
That means the blacks are seven times more likely to commit violence against Asian Americans than whites.
Here are some examples. An 84-year-old Thai immigrant was violently attacked in San Francisco.
A 91-year-old Asian man was attacked and two other Asian seniors.
In Oakland, two young men attacked a 71-year-old Asian woman.
In New York City, a young man used a box cutter to slash a Filipino immigrant's face.
Now here's the key point. None of these cases involved a white assailant.
In fact, in every case, it was a minority, and typically an African American or a black minority, who did this.
Now, the point I'm trying to make is that the left actually knows this.
This whole thing is a concocted narrative to take away from a topic that has worried the left for a long time.
It's a very interesting article in Vox.
Which talks about the history of tension between the black and Asian American communities.
So the people at Vox know that the anger toward Asian Americans is coming from the political left and is coming from blacks who blame Asians for coming into black communities, inner cities.
Very often they're more successful, they start businesses, pretty soon they move out into the suburbs.
So in other words, Asians are seen as a successful community and they draw the envy, hatred and resentment So what does Vox do while acknowledging this?
Vox is kind of candid about saying that, listen, the problem is, here I'm going to quote, many of the attacks that have gained widespread attention have featured black assailants.
Which have threatened to inflame tensions between Asian Americans and blacks.
And then in the pure kind of jujitsu move, Vox turns on and says, but yeah, but the reason that the blacks are angry and the reason that the Asians themselves have to move into black communities and then move out is because of the structures put into place by white supremacy.
In other words, the whites did it anyway.
They weren't white assailants, but it's sort of the idea that minorities never, by the way, are...
Take responsibility for what they do.
Minorities are only acted upon.
The whites apparently do everything.
And even when one minority group attacks another minority group, the whites made them do it.
So we're dealing here with a certain kind of demented leftism that is divorced from facts, that is trying to sell us on a false narrative.
And my message is, don't fall for it.
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I've been a little frustrated at the way in which Indian Americans in particular, but also Asian Americans, appear utterly naive to the threat to their values and their success that is posed by the political left.
Asian Americans voted for Biden.
Asian Americans, in general, identify as Democrats.
And this, to me, is a certain kind of political stupidity, if not political suicide.
Well, in this regard, I have a piece of really good news to report.
One of the largest Chinese American organizations in America, this is the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York, has come out Forthrightly, denouncing critical race theory,
denouncing the left, and basically saying, and this is the crusher, that critical race theory is, quote,"...the real hate crime against Asians." So the Chinese have now finally, well, this is a Chinese-American awakening whose significance cannot be understated.
This group, in fact, which was formed, by the way, more than a century ago, to fight against the anti-immigration and anti-Chinese policies, the Chinese Exclusion Act.
And, in what I think is very strong language, they recall that now, and they say that critical race theory, the race theory being promoted by the left, is, quote, today's Chinese Exclusion Act.
Now, what is this Chinese group getting at?
What they're getting at is that while the left today and the media is trying to say, oh, white supremacy is the problem.
Look at all this stuff going on with Asian Americans.
These Chinese guys aren't fooled.
They're like, you know what?
Here's the problem. We Chinese and Asian Americans more generally are very successful in America.
We are, in fact, overrepresented in most elite universities.
If you look at our earnings, we're doing better than the whites.
If you had to make an economic ranking of ethnic groups in America, Asian Americans would be on the top, whites would be second, Latinos or Hispanics third, African Americans fourth.
So this would be the hierarchy.
And the Chinese know it.
They're on the top. And they know that the left is trying to overturn this hierarchy, which, by the way, is a hierarchy not of discrimination, but of merit.
The Chinese are overrepresented at Yale, not because they are discriminating against anybody, but because they are outperforming everybody.
The Chinese are doing well in the economy, as are the Asian Indians.
Why? Because Asian Indians tend to be entrepreneurs, they tend to be doctors, they tend to be well-educated.
They're succeeding through merit.
And the left's real target is merit itself.
The left is now acting, in fact this is the premise of critical race theory, that merit is the newest form of racism.
And so the left is all about changing the standards.
And let's not do normal math because normal math is racist.
Let's not look at standardized test scores because standardized test scores are racist.
Why are they racist? Because...
Some groups are doing better than others.
So the Chinese are on to this.
This is fantastic.
And what they say is one way or the other, critical race theory wants to get rid of, quote, They say critical race theory is trying to sort of take away the hard-won gains of Asian Americans.
So this, to me, represents political sophistication on the part of the Chinese Americans.
They point, for example, to the Lowell High School.
Which, by the way, recently decided we don't really want to use a merit-based admissions process.
Why not? Is it because the school is full of whites?
No, 75% of the school is minorities.
Whites are only 25%.
Whites are actually less in the school than they are in the general population.
But the group that is overrepresented are the Asians because of their academic performance.
So the real point of diversifying the Lowell School is actually more blacks, more Latinos, and fewer Asians.
And the Chinese have finally figured this out.
They have awoken from their dogmatic slumber.
I think it was, I forget who was the diplomat who said many years ago, let China sleep.
Well, the Chinese Americans have been sleeping, but not anymore.
They're now awake.
Thank God. And their political activism, if they can convince other groups, other Chinese groups, Asian Indian groups, Korean groups, and so on, to get on board, the Asian Americans might finally become the formidable political force that they should be, not for the left,
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There is a meeting going on right now, pretty much as we speak, between U.S. and Chinese officials.
It's the first high-level meeting between America and China under the Biden administration.
China is represented by two of its top diplomats and the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and the Secretary of State Anthony Blinken representing the United States.
Now, very remarkable Because the United States began, the Biden people began with their familiar pontifications about how the Chinese are mistreating the eager Muslims in the Xinjiang region.
The normal type of pompous lecture that they give, Americans give, to other countries on human rights.
But this time the Chinese struck back in a most unexpected way.
They basically said, hey, wait a minute.
But out of our affairs.
Because what about America?
What do you do to the blacks?
Look at systematic racism in your society.
Look at the way racism is embedded in the structures of America.
In other words, look at what you've been talking about in the Biden administration and confessing to.
I mean, the remarkable thing about the Chinese is they're saying, listen, we don't have to accuse you of mistreating blacks.
You're accusing yourself. You're pleading guilty.
We don't have to say that you have racism embedded in the structures of your society.
You're saying that. You're teaching that in your schools.
Now, the American officials kind of taken aback by this comeback.
They say, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Yes, we have every right to interfere in what's going on in China because it reflects the world.
But, of course, the Chinese could come back and say, wait a minute.
If there's systematic racism in America and American culture is influential all over the world, then America's actions affect the world.
So we, the Chinese, now get to intervene in America to stop racism.
So what I'm getting at is see what the left has done.
It has spread all these lies about systematic and institutional racism.
Now, the left knows that this is all bogus.
If you ask them to point, they can't.
There's no evidence for it at all.
It's all fantasy. It's ultimately a power-driven lie aimed at shifting political power structures inside of America.
But of course, the rest of the world is listening.
The rest of the world hears this.
They go, wait a minute. And they can take advantage of it.
I mean, I expect to hear more of this.
I expect now the Chinese to say things like, well, listen, wait a minute.
Why can't we violate human rights since you do?
I expect the Iranians to say, hey, listen, why can't we throw gays off buildings?
You talk about the problems of homophobia in your own society.
So, my question is, is there some merit in what the Chinese are saying?
Are they right that America should get off its moral high horse?
Not about the race issue, because as I said a minute ago, the Chinese are just taking advantage of the left's own lie.
They're taking the left's lie and they're shoving it back in the Biden administration's face.
But, but, there is an element of truth in what the Chinese are getting at.
Think of it this way. The Chinese censored the internet.
Well, so do we.
We censored the internet.
And who are the two biggest censors in the world?
I'd have to say it's Xi Jinping and Mark Zuckerberg.
So China and American digital moguls are the worst suppressors of free speech in the world.
So the truth of it is, how can you go around talking about free speech and human rights when there are real violations of free speech going on in America, by the way, with the sanction and cheering of the Biden administration?
The bottom line of it is both on the basis of lies, like the lies put out by the critical race people, but also on the basis of truth, a creeping illiberalism in American life.
America is, I think very sadly in the end, reducing its moral authority in the world.
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I'm sure you've heard about Ripley's Believe It or Not.
Robert Ripley, almost a century ago, was a guy who would travel to faraway places, distant cultures, and he would collect these kind of amazing, almost incredible anecdotes of things that would go on around the world.
I mean, just stuff that was kind of hard to get your head around.
And then he created Ripley's Believe It or Not, which was a newspaper series, and then Later it became a television show.
It was revived and remade a number of...
It became an animated show.
There are now Ripley's museums around the country.
But the idea here is that Ripley was able to pull out sort of a, can you believe this type of stories.
And they generally involved faraway countries, you know, and the stories were a little over the top, you know.
A Chinaman ate a python, you know.
An Indian guy, you know, slept the whole night on some flaming coals or, you know, an African stood on his head for two weeks.
So it was all based on the, wow, I can't really believe this.
Well, it turns out that right now on Reddit, a lot of people in other cultures are sort of doing a Ripley on America, which is to say that they're exchanging stories on outrageous things that you hear about America that happen to be true.
Bye.
So, what is the craziest rumor you heard about America that turned out to be true?
This is one Reddit user started this, and everyone is kind of weighing in.
There's an article on BuzzFeed about it, and they give you a few examples, but their examples are sort of weak.
They're weak because they don't really represent what non-Western people are saying.
They're kind of things that are sort of ho-hum, a little bit like, you know, what, Americans got only two weeks off?
They're sort of slanted a little bit to the left.
You get free soft drink refills in restaurants.
What? Higher education costs $50,000 a year.
What? American men are all circumcised.
What? So these are sort of, I would call them half-riplees because they're not really unbelievable.
They're not really out there.
In my experience, talking with people who have come from India to America, there are lots of other things.
And by the way, I noticed none of them really make their way into BuzzFeed.
Because they're a little politically incorrect.
But I want to give a few examples of my sort of Ripley episodes involving friends and family, you might say.
Well, I remember one Ripley that came from my mom was simply the idea that, wow, in America, people adopt highways.
My mom was driving with me down Highway 1 in California, and she saw the Adopt a Highway sign.
And I had to explain to her that there were civic groups that adopt highways.
And she's like, wow! Nobody in any other country would think of adopting a highway.
On a less kind of inspiring note, my brother once noticed that in America...
Parents obey their children.
In other words, there are many cases in America where the child and not the parent decides.
My brother actually once visited a friend of his who happened to be an Indian American but fully assimilated.
And they were supposed to go out for the guy's birthday and my brother was looking forward to like an American steak restaurant and so on.
But right before they go out, the guy asked his kid, he was like five, hey son, where would you like to go?
The son goes, I want to go to McDonald's and sold a whole group of adults.
Takes the brat to McDonald's.
The birthday celebration ends up being at McDonald's.
And my brother's lesson from this is that parents, you don't have to obey your children.
Make them obey you instead.
Yes, in America we do have people for various reasons.
Maybe it's partly our prosperity.
Who weigh 600 pounds.
And this is a little unbelievable to the rest of the world.
In fact, one time some family members of mine were visiting.
And I was going to introduce them to someone who weighed 600 pounds.
But I said, I better warn them before because the experience of astonishment on their face is going to be so agog.
You know, Indians don't know that they need to camouflage their incredulity.
They go, you know, they just go, ah!
You know, I didn't want them to do that.
So I was like, let me warn you, this person is 600 pounds.
So kind of conceal your surprise.
And then later a family member told me that she noticed that this person did not sit back into a couch because you can't control your weight as you lower yourself in the couch.
She literally had to fall back into the couch with a crash.
And so, you know, you have overweight people in India and all over the world, but not this overweight.
Even in France, Western countries, you'll rarely find a 600-pound Frenchman.
Finally, and this is to me clearly the most telling and maybe the most disturbing, we have in America people who live in mansions and make hundreds of millions of dollars and have domestic staff and private planes and still think of themselves as victims.
Now, we in America see this as preposterous, but try to imagine someone who is growing up in modest circumstances in a favela in Brazil or in Rio de Janeiro or Bombay, and they see an entitled LeBron James.
I'm a victim.
My domestic staff is oppressing me.
The policeman is pulling me over.
You've got from Oprah Winfrey to Meghan Markle to LeBron James, all these people who live lives of fantastic, unimaginable privilege.
And yet, to listen to them, they're like, woohoo, I'm one of the most oppressed people It's so disgusting.
It's so offensive. It violates people's ordinary sense of justice and common sense.
And so there's a certain revulsion.
People admire America in many, many ways, but the disgust of America comes very often from the kind of America that is often promoted in American popular culture by Hollywood and by the left.
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Text DDS to 88202 and help get the word out about ATP. So five years ago, I think I made one of the, if not the best decision in my life, namely to ask this wonderful woman, Debbie, to marry me. So it's our fifth wedding anniversary today.
And when I proposed to Debbie and we were kind of planning our wedding, we said to ourselves, who should we get to marry us?
And Debbie goes, how about Rafael Cruz?
This is Ted Cruz's dad, an eminent figure in his own right, a writer, a pastor, a preacher, a teacher, and of course, like both of us, an immigrant, someone who came from a different country, a country with experience of socialism and tyranny, who's been sort of sounding the warning in the United States.
I want to play a short clip from Pastor Cruz's homily at our wedding ceremony, and then we're going to bring on Rafael Cruz to say a few words.
So listen to this.
There's a wonderful passage in Ecclesiastes 2, verse 12, which says that a cord of three strands is not easily broken.
And those two strands, Dinesh is you, Debbie is you, and the third strand is Jesus.
And those three strands form a cord that is not easily broken.
So when we look at Ephesians 5.21, submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God, that means, Debbie, that you submit to Jesus in Dinesh.
In Dinesh, you submit to Jesus in Debbie.
And that cord of three strands cannot be broken.
So welcome, Rafael Cruz.
Thank you for joining us.
We really appreciate it.
As you can see, five years later, we're still together and happier than ever.
I remember from your homily at the wedding itself, this very memorable passage that we touched on here, where you talked about Well, you almost talked about marriage as involving three people, a kind of almost a menage a trois with the couple itself and Christ.
So I thought maybe I'd ask you just to share with us and our listeners what makes a Christian marriage unique and why Christian marriages are the best types of marriages.
Well, first of all, Dinesh and Debbie, it's so great to be with you.
Congratulations on five wonderful years.
And the next 50.
And I'll tell you, the one problem that we have with marriage is it's all about me.
And everybody tries to protect their turf.
And you've heard the term, marriage is a 50-50 proposition.
But that's not true.
Marriage is a 100 proposition.
You gotta put in everything into it.
And so, you know, husbands love to read the part in Ephesians 5 where it says, husband, wife, submit yourself unto your husband.
Oh, they think that means you take a whip and you go over her with a whip and she just...
One of my favorite passages.
But the key scripture in Ephesians 5, verse 21, Which says, submit yourselves one to another.
Submit yourselves one to another.
Oh, that takes a totally different perspective.
And of course, neither one wants to do that because of the ego.
And so we have to ask ourselves, how do we do that?
Ecclesiastes 4.12 tells us that an Ecclesiastes 4.12 says that a cord of three strands is not easily broken.
And those three strands are you, Debbie, you, Dinesh, and Christ, Jesus Christ.
And so if we realize, if you're both Christians, Christ is in you.
The book of Colossians It says, Christ in you, the hope of glory.
So basically what you do, Debbie, is you submit to Christ in Dinesh.
And Dinesh, what you do is you submit to Christ in Debbie.
And so they become a core that cannot be easily broken.
And in marriages that they do that, the statistics change From one out of every two marriages ending in divorce to less than one in a thousand.
Because Christ is the center of the marriage.
And then the second very important concept is that men and women are different and more than just in the looks.
They're different intrinsically.
The woman's greatest need is love.
So that's why Ephesians 5.33 says, Husbands, love your wife.
The primary need of the wife is love.
She is the tender-hearted.
She is the one that you bring flowers to and you say sweet things to and you have the nice romantic dinner.
So her need is love.
But the husband's need is different.
The husband needs respect.
Debbie, you can love Dinesh all you want, but if you don't respect him, that love will be for nothing.
His primary need is respect.
The wife's primary need is love.
When we understand that, then we can come together in one accord.
You know, This is a very interesting phrase that you find in Acts chapter 1 when the 120 were in the upper room.
It says that they were together in one accord.
See, being together is not enough.
It is together in one accord.
Then we can see the character of Christ being manifested in each of the two of you.
And therefore, you can be one in Him.
Love it. That's very profound.
I know you had a question you wanted to...
So, Rafael, I mean, you know, we respect you so much in not just your love of Christ and your preaching ability, but also in the ability for you to talk to people about what's happening in the country politically.
Rafael, this new Equality Act that they're trying to ram through right now, how does that affect pastors in the country?
And more specifically, what kind of advice do you give them right now?
Well, you know, David, that is a great question.
But, you know, I'd like you to take maybe a minute to look at our foundations because America is such a different country.
America is the only country that was founded as a Christian country.
You know, before the pilgrims got off the boat, they penned a document called the Mayflower Compact.
And it starts by stating their purpose for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.
That was their stated purpose.
And then it says, In the presence of God, we covenant and combine ourselves together to form a civic body politic.
In other words, some forming government.
Why? For our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid.
What are the ends aforesaid?
The glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.
So we have a wonderful heritage in America.
But unfortunately, Psalms 11.3 says if the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?
I think all three of us agree that we are right now under a Marxist regime.
The Biden-Harris administration is full of Marxist ideologies.
Some people call it socialist, but socialism, communism, Marxism is all the same.
And one of the fundamental tenets of communism is atheism.
Why? Because under Marxism, all loyalty must be to almighty government.
And so they must destroy all other loyalties.
You see this tremendous attack that we see against Christianity.
That is his root.
We must destroy loyalty to Christ so the loyalty could be to government.
That is why also they want to attack and destroy the family.
They don't want even loyalty to the family.
All loyalty must be focused on loyalty to government.
So that puts the church...
In a quagmire.
Because this so-called Equality Act, you know, the new word today is woke.
You have to be sufficiently woke.
That means that everything is okay.
That means morals have been thrown by the wayside.
There is no morality.
The Word of God is of no effect.
They want to destroy the Word of God.
We saw it in Portland, Oregon with these leftist burning Bibles.
Not different than that happened in many countries around the world.
It's the same thing because you must destroy the foundations.
Now what has happened is this.
Unfortunately, The church in America has had it too easy.
And if you look at the book of Jeremiah, chapter 6 and 7, Jeremiah talks about people or pastors or what they call prophets in the Old Testament preaching peace, peace where there is no peace.
And God calls them false prophets.
So for too long and many pastors are just tickling men's and women's ears, not wanting to be politically incorrect.
They have avoided the key moral issues that America is facing and trying to just please everybody.
Well, Jesus didn't come around pleasing everybody.
He told it like it was.
I think, you know, the remarkable thing is that it's one thing for these pastors to take a back seat when there are issues that are peripheral to the church or peripheral to them.
But I think not just with the Equality Act, but in other areas, we see there's a direct attempt to curb religious freedom itself.
In other words, this is the pastor's own territory, and so if the pastor won't stand up for that, You have to ask, well, what good is the pastor in that case at all?
Well, for example, we saw in California, we saw Pastor John MacArthur, big church, very well-renowned pastor.
This pastor has a very large congregation, over 3,000 in his congregation.
He was told you cannot have any more than 10 people in your church.
Now, you're not talking about six feet.
You're talking about 100 feet?
But not only that, when he refused to do that, he had been leasing a parking lot from the county for 45 years.
All of a sudden, the county revoked his lease to just force him to shut down.
Pastor Rob McCoy, again in California, has gone to prison twice for daring to open the doors of the church.
In Illinois, Five different Romanian pastors were told, if you open the church, this is the governor, we will come with bulldozers and tear down your churches.
So we're seeing a direct frontal attack on the church.
Why? Because the church has become a threat to the message that they want to portray.
See, the message of the gospel is a liberating message.
And so they want tyranny imposed upon us.
But it's gone beyond that.
Now with this Equality Act, basically what this is going to come to, and I expect we're going to see the cases come very quickly, is that people that do not adhere, that basically put a fist up against what the church stands for, are going to demand to be hired by churches.
And so the church is going to be presented with a dilemma.
Do we acquiesce and betray our values?
Or do I stand and face going to jail?
And actually, there is not much of a choice.
We must stand for the cause of Christ.
We must stand for America.
We must stand for our values.
Because I'll tell you what I've often said.
When I faced oppression in Cuba, I had a place to come to.
If we lose our freedoms here, where are we going to go?
There is no place to go.
So it is time to stand.
Proverbs 24, 16 says, The righteous may fall seven times and get up again.
Oh yes, we're going to stumble and fall.
But you know, when you stumble and fall, you've got two choices.
You can either stay down there feeling sorry for yourself, or you can wipe your bloody nose and get up with twice the determination and keep moving forward.
Well, I choose the second.
I refuse to stay down.
Oh, they may not be down, but I'm going to get up, and I'm going to get up twice as strong.
And we, each of us, need to do that.
We must not cower to the forces that are trying to silence us.
Look what happened in China when persecution against the church came.
There today, over 100 million Christians in China, meeting in underground churches, meeting in little groups of 10 or 20, facing death.
But you know why? The church will thrive on the persecution because the true Christians, the ones that put Christ first, will not cower to that persecution.
They will stand firm.
And so it is a time that I think the persecution will bring a spiritual revival to America.
I think we are on the verge of a third spiritual awakening.
And if you look at history, The first awakening gave us the American Revolution.
The second great awakening gave us the Emancipation Proclamation.
And I think we will see a third great spiritual awakening and with it will come a third political awakening where righteousness will prevail because righteousness exalts the nation.
Rafael Cruz, I want to really thank you for joining us.
You've really affirmed why we invited you to officiate our wedding in the first place.
And what a powerful and inspiring message, although in somewhat dark times.
So I really appreciate your time.
Thank you. And you need your own podcast.
For sure. We'll look forward to having you back because these issues actually have deep resonance and we can only touch upon them here, but we're going to circle back to them to quote Jen Psaki.
We'll circle back on these issues, but thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you. It is a pleasure.
Blessings to both of you.
It is so great to see you.
And again, happy, happy, happy anniversary.
Thank you so much. As many of you know, I am a fan, in fact a mega fan, of Mike Lindell's MyPillow products.
We have them all over our home, and we especially love his towels.
We are very particular about our towels.
Debbie and I want towels that actually dry us.
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So I'm here with Debbie on our fifth anniversary.
I have to say it's been a wonderful five years and it's just been so great having you as my partner starting off with a honeymoon in Kauai which was awesome and we've done so much.
We do everything together.
Pretty much 24-7 and now the show.
Well, one point I wanted to make picking up on what Rafael Cruz said was, you know, a lot of people think marriage is about compromise and they feel like because you have two people who are, you know, have ego, if I want to do X and you want to do Y, we find some midpoint In the middle.
And that way I give something up and you give something up.
But I've noticed our marriage isn't like that.
Because we don't compromise in the sense that if I want to do X and you want to do Y, I no longer want to do X. I don't want to force you to do something you don't want.
So if you want to do Y, I'm more inclined to do Y. I'm not compromising.
I would be unhappy doing X knowing that you...
So I think that this is actually a framework of what Rafael Cruz is calling mutual submission...
We're actually happier individually when the other person is happy.
And that actually makes marriage really easy.
We don't have to constantly negotiate.
There's nothing to negotiate about.
We only do things that we both are happy about and we arrive at that consensus beforehand.
Now, I wanted to ask you...
In the spirit of full disclosure, what do you think has been the most dismaying thing about me that you've discovered?
Because you can't in advance know what the other person is going to be like.
But also, give your honest sort of balance sheet of our marriage and maybe any lessons that you want to draw from it.
Well, I mean, dismaying, maybe this is not so dismaying, but it was kind of a funny quirk.
And that was, you know, when we were looking for a house, I remember that you were saying, well, does it have a big island, you know, kitchen island, right?
And I was like thinking, wow, maybe, you know, you're into the gourmet cooking or something.
I don't know. But I came to discover that the reason you were asking was Was not for cooking, but rather to put all your papers and your books and everything all over the place.
Are you talking about?
And then, you know, when you're writing or when we're doing a podcast or whatever, you just lay everything on the island.
And then, if that weren't enough, You take over the dining room table.
I take over all the tables in the house.
You pretty much took off...
Except the living room.
The living room, because it's a small table.
And then you have, of course, your office upstairs, which...
You actually neglect because you don't really go up there and use it.
And then when I ask you, why not?
You're like, because you want to be with me.
I like to be in the center of the action.
I like to be where I can get a sandwich.
I can get into the kitchen.
So I like to be plugged. Or chatting or something.
You like to kind of be in there.
But anyway, I just thought that was the funniest thing.
So, you know, it's maybe, it's one of those quirks and I have plenty, but that was just kind of an interesting one is that he loves to use any surface in the house That is large.
And especially when he's in the middle of writing a book, oh my goodness.
I mean, you know, having company come over, it's like, just don't look at the books and the papers and all of that.
We're trying to create the impression of intense intellectual work going on at all times.
That's just it. You're always doing something.
So anyway, but it's kind of cool.
But on that note, one of the things that I think is...
Like, amazing about you is your heart.
I know some of you think that, you know, when he starts tweeting and he says these things that he's probably, wow, you know, he's so mean.
Look at what he does.
That's my Twitter persona. No, but your real life persona is actually, you have a heart of gold.
And you have been, you've been so kind to...
You know, my family, not just here but in Venezuela.
Even when we were first married, you know, you wanted to help.
And you like to help people.
Even if they're complete strangers, you want to help.
And the other thing, on a personal note, is that you married kind of a woman who's going through that second phase of life, you know?
The hot flashes, the weight gain, the hair loss, the wrinkles.
And you just, you know, you just kind of take it and just...
You love on me and, you know, you don't mind.
I read all these, you know, Boards online that, you know, there's like a menopause page that I belong to on Facebook and they're always complaining about their husbands not caring and being mean to them.
Maybe not getting it. Not getting it.
Oh, they don't understand.
But you understand and you just love me no matter what.
And so that's truly the...
The idea behind a forever marriage and in sickness and in health and happiness.
I think part of the key for us, and I think for me, has been we are very gentle with each other.
I mean, I don't think in five years we've either of us raised our voice on even a single occasion.
So not that we don't have disputes, but when we do, I usually go sulk.
I think of our only dispute really is as the producer of the show when he does his segments, I get a little irritated and Been out of shape when you go over time.
So on that note, you're a little bit of a...
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