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March 25, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:06:34
BIDEN’S BRAIN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep54
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Time Text
In search of Biden's brain.
It's going to be a long search.
Why the Chinese are laughing at us.
An investigative journalist, Cheryl Atkison, at the border.
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.
I could while away the hours conferring with the flowers, consulting with the rain.
And by head I'd be a-scratchin' while my thoughts a-busy hatchin' if I only had a brain.
Yeah, Debbie's chuckling as she's talking.
She's like, Dinesh, are you trying to sing really on the podcast?
What? No, I realize it's a little embarrassing, but the theme is so appropriate.
Right out of the If I Only Had a Brain song, the Wizard of Oz song by Ray Bolger.
We're talking about Biden's brain, and I realize that this may be like an atheist talking about God, i.e., where is God?
Where is Biden's brain?
Biden is riding in the canoe, but I don't think he's manning the oars.
I think it's become increasingly obvious that They're telling him what to do.
He's not telling them what to do.
Here's just the latest little proof of that, a little clip.
Listen. Thank you, Mr.
President, for your confidence. Thank you.
Thank you for letting me do it.
Now we're going to get down to business here.
And Ron, who am I turning this over to?
Well, thank you very much, Mr.
President. I think it's time for our friends in the press to leave, though.
Thank you. Wow!
He's about to get down to business, but who am I turning it over to?
He's obviously not the one running the show, and they don't want the press to be in on it.
So Ron Klain, the chief of staff, is like, time to get the press to leave so that the people really in charge can start telling Biden what he needs to be doing.
Now, the point here is, and it's a point deeper than the fact that Biden is just sort of out of it.
It is the point that in a democratic society, we elect a president.
Now, the president, of course, is at liberty to hire assistants and aides to advise him, but he is supposed to be the one directing them rather than them directing him.
Think about it. We didn't elect Ron Klain.
We didn't elect any of these guys.
And yet it seems that Biden is surrounded by these sort of ventriloquists and puppeteers who are sort of moving him around.
Why? Because they know he doesn't have a brain.
And so you've got a guy running the most powerful country in the world, With his sort of fingers on the nuclear codes and he's not all there.
It's not a good situation.
And what makes it particularly bad is that his own side kind of knew this in advance.
They knew that if they sort of dragged him across the finish line somehow...
That they would then, in a sense, take over.
It kind of reminds me, many years ago, there was an interesting movie called Under Fire with Nick Nolte.
Kind of worth watching. It was about the Civil War in Nicaragua.
And at one point, the guerrillas were fighting against the Somoza government.
Their leader is killed.
He's dead. And yet, he's the guy who stirs up the morale of the troops.
And so what they do is they prop him up, and they start having press conferences and so on.
They take photos of the dead man.
They parade him around, at least his images.
Why? Because they have to pretend that he's alive.
They have to pretend like there's still a guerrilla leader calling the shots, even though the guerrilla leader is not with us anymore.
Now, this may seem like it's not an exact analogy with Biden, but it's not that far off.
It's not that far off.
And the reason, as I say, this is a Democratic problem is, if we turn back to what the founders had in mind, I'm looking here at...
Federalist Papers 70.
This is Alexander Hamilton talking about the presidency.
And he says one of the advantages of having a president, of having a presidential system, is you have one man whom the people have deputized to be in charge.
The phrase Hamilton uses is energy in the executive.
A committee, a congress, a legislature is going to move slowly, but the president can make important, critical decisions at the drop of a hat, at a moment's notice.
He can represent, if you will, the vigor of the intentions of the people.
Think about it. How does any of this happen when the president isn't even all there?
When the president is, you may say, living in a fog.
When the president fades in and out of consciousness.
And other people have to show this energy in the executive.
Unelected people. Making decisions on the president's behalf that are then carried out in his name and with his wobbly signature, but not really decided by him.
I think you can see this is a serious problem.
And it's a problem that I'm unnerved about.
I don't think that we know the way out of this, at least not in the short term, because Biden is going to be in there, and he's going to be in there for a while, at least until he keels over.
And so this is a bad situation, and the best I can do is return to The Wizard of Oz And in the mood of black humor, give you my own.
I have taken the song and I've written my own closing verse.
This is If I Only Had a Brain, but not Ray Bolger.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza version, and I'll close out the segment with this one.
I could make a big decision, no mental imprecision.
I even could explain.
I might even be the president, not just a White House resident, if I only had a brain.
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The recent meeting between a couple of top American officials and their Chinese counterparts I think we'll go down in history as the official end of the United States being the world's sole superpower.
The United States has been the world's sole superpower since the Soviet Union collapse, so 1992.
We've had that position for 28 years, which from the historical space of time is not very long.
And many people in the 90s thought it would last much longer.
But this meeting symbolizes the new Chinese confidence in which they dealt with the Americans almost contemptuously, laughingly, like adults deal with children.
And the Biden diplomats were not prepared for it.
They were flummoxed by it.
They thought they started things out in the driver's seat, but it turned out Not to be so.
Let's look at this a little more closely, because at this meeting, you had U.S. Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken.
You had National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.
And they sort of began by lecturing the Chinese.
We will discuss our deep concerns with actions by China, including in Hong Kong, Taiwan, blah, blah, blah.
This is the typical. This is Blinken.
The Secretary of State. And I think he thought the Chinese, as usual, would put their heads down and kind of sheepishly.
This has been the way it's gone for the past quarter century.
But the Chinese launched a surprising counterattack.
And they launched a counterattack which was devastating because it was based upon premises that the Biden team itself is committed to.
Basically what the Chinese said, and I'm now quoting one of them, he goes, everything Washington talks about is centered on the U.S. and on white supremacy.
In other words, the Chinese went on to say, hey, listen, stop lecturing us.
You, Biden people...
Admit that your society is founded on racism.
It became rich and powerful through exploitation.
It has built its wealth on the backs of slaves and minorities.
It is even now structurally racist.
And it's not that we the Chinese have to prove this.
We don't have to prove it.
Why? Because you admit it.
This is the premise of your administration.
This is the basis of what you teach in the government.
This is the ideology you're pushing on the military and on the cops and in the schools.
It's your doctrine. We're just quoting it to you.
Now, what makes the Chinese—and, of course, the Americans were like, we don't know what to say.
They were up against the wall, frankly, because there is nothing to say.
Now, the sad truth is that this ideology that the left is pushing is a lie.
And the Chinese know it's a lie.
They know the United States is not racist.
But they go, as long as these fools in America keep saying that they are, they're making a self-indictment, why don't we take advantage of it?
And why don't we take advantage of it to neutralize American criticism of human rights abroad?
Now... All of this is occurring against a sort of important backdrop.
It's not just about diplomacy and it's not just about who said what to whom and who came out on top in a verbal contest.
No. I think the bigger picture here is that the Chinese are in a serious project.
of building their economic, political, and military strength around the world.
They are cultivating their allies.
They are gaining access to minerals.
If you want to see something that will kind of unnerve you, go online and look up the construction of the China-Pakistan Highway.
They're building a highway And, you know, in this country, we talk about infrastructure.
We're trying to basically repair the Lincoln Tunnel.
The Chinese have built, largely built, a massive highway that stretches for hundreds of miles all the way from China to Pakistan.
Now, let's remember here, something kind of big is going on.
This isn't just about, well, let's just build a highway.
I mean, let's, you know, we have to build it somewhere, so why not Pakistan?
No. It's symbolic of the fact that the Chinese want to ally with the Pakistanis and check We're good to go.
Whose communist totalitarianism stretches over a billion people, and radical Islam.
So the Chinese realize, if the Americans and the Europeans are on the other side, let's make friends with the radical Muslims, and then we will now have a rival alliance that will pose a serious and significant threat.
The Chinese also realize they've been really helped by COVID. COVID has, in a sense, accelerated China's rise to power.
The Chinese economy has already roared back.
Everybody else is limping and staggering along and trying to sort of get back on their feet.
The Chinese are more than back on their feet already.
And they started it.
They released the virus, intentionally or unintentionally.
I think unintentionally. But nevertheless, they knew about it.
And they kept information about it from getting out.
The Chinese are not scared of Biden.
In fact, they're a little annoyed.
It's almost like they've got their fly swatter out.
They're a little annoyed at being lectured by this clown on human rights.
Why are they annoyed? Because they paid for Biden.
Let's think about it. They paid for Biden.
They got Biden.
And now they want to be paid back.
They expect it.
They demand it. So when Biden, in response to domestic pressures, I'm going to be tough on China, sends his two clowns to the summit, the Chinese are like, ha ha ha ha ha, let's embarrass these fools and let's send them back to the fool in the White House because we're running the show now, guys. We're not junior partners of anything.
If anything, you have now become our junior partner.
So just listening to the confidence of the Chinese, I'm thinking, I get the feeling that China thinks that it is in the same position that America was in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Think about it, what the With the world in ruins, America stepped out almost like the young kid who now takes over, the young ruler who takes over the world and goes, you know what?
The world is now our playground.
It's ours and it's ours to stay.
That was the feeling in America and everybody else in the world shared it, looking to America for leadership.
But now the Chinese think the American era is coming to an end.
Not that America will go away overnight, but America will no longer be this unipolar, world's sole superpower.
We're the world's leaders.
And the Chinese are like, think again.
The world has now changed.
We're back to having a bipolar, perhaps a multi-polar world.
And at the end of this game, the Chinese believe it's not America, but China that will be calling the shots.
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Investigative journalist Cheryl Atkinson is one of the fiercest pursuers of truth and the story in America.
She's had a long and distinguished career.
She's also had some skirmishes with the Obama administration that we'll get into.
And of late, she's been covering in-depth the Welcome, Sheryl Atkinson.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
Great having you. I'm a big fan.
Let me start by asking you about the press.
Today's Biden's first press conference.
Well, you know, I guess two months into his presidency.
And I've noticed that in the press coverage of Biden, well, I mean, who hasn't?
A dramatic switch from the way that the press was covering Trump.
So in the Trump years, it was relentlessly combative, almost abusive.
And I suppose that even if you sort of felt it was too much, at least you could say the press was trying to keep a critical check, an aggressive check on the use of power.
But I noticed that with Biden, we kind of seem to be going back to the Obama days of what you could almost call the devotional or courtier press, in which the press sees itself as an adjunct or extension, a defender of the administration, an enabler of it.
And I just want to start by asking you whether you think that that is a problem in a democratic society where the press's job is to keep a kind of skeptical eye on the government.
Of course it is.
And I think that one of the biggest problems is the unequal application of the scrutiny the press has given.
You know, it's not as if there isn't plenty to look at under President Biden.
And maybe the press in some instances were far too tough on Trump with their false reporting, and I have listed a lot of their media mistakes, pretty outrageous.
You don't want that to happen to President Biden as payback, but you do want at least some modicum of examination of the reasonable questions that should be asked.
one of the biggest things that stood out to me was when President Biden skipped the traditional address to Congress in February. That was a huge thing to me, at least as a ordinary observer.
And it kind of went almost unexamined. And if anything, I saw I saw reporters say, well, it's not required under the Constitution, which was hardly the point.
Yeah, I mean, I think there are kind of two issues here.
One is the accountability of Biden, the president, to the Congress and to the nation.
But I think in a deeper sense, what we're noticing is that in many cases, Biden appears to be not the one telling other people what to do, but to be the one who is being told what to do.
Right. Time after time, his aides push away the press, or they say, that's it, no more questions.
Or Biden himself turns around and says things like, what should I say?
Is it time for me to leave?
So the question I have is, in a democracy, when you elect a president, isn't the president supposed to be making the decisions?
Isn't he supposed to be quarterbacking what the aides do instead of the other way around?
It appears that in some cases...
It is the people around Biden who are steering the canoe, and Biden is just along for the ride.
Well, if ever there was a president in my time that I saw really taking the reins, it was Donald Trump.
But even with Donald Trump, we saw that there are persistent bureaucrats who work at places like the State Department who testified that despite what instruction the president did, I think we're good to go.
Let me ask you about the ideology of the press.
I have no idea, quite honestly, what your politics are, but you seem to be in principle committed to the idea of the independent journalist, a journalist who puts a sharp eye, you may say, on the government.
What happens, though, when you have a sociological class, the journalistic class, which is drawn from journalism schools, which comes, by the way, not distributed from the whole society, but from certain intellectual precincts of the society, a kind of homogeneity of perspective.
And I don't just mean in politics.
These are people who like to eat the same food.
They're part of the elite class that runs the government.
And so here's my question.
How can we expect...
These guys, who are sort of of the same mind as the Biden people, to really apply that kind of independent and critical perspective that it seems that our founders had in mind and that press freedoms were put into place to enable.
Well, I think in the past, although you're right about the homogenous nature of the press, and I'm part of that, I understand it, but we were still able to, in large part, although we were still somewhat criticized, we were often able to get outside of our own skin and provide fair coverage of issues and people.
What has dramatically changed, in my view, in the past five years, I hardly recognize journalism anymore.
There are still many honest journalists trying to do honest journalism.
But there's not such a market for it anymore because the propagandists and the people who have worked very hard to control information and news have taken over news organizations.
So even the honest journalists know that there's no market for a story like that in many cases.
And I just look at the case of Glenn Greenwald.
Who is pretty far left.
We see eye to eye on a lot of press issues and free speech issues.
But he had to quit his own organization that he started, his own news organization, because his own organization ended up censoring his Hunter Biden story.
So there are journalists out there who want to do fair, accurate reporting.
It's just a harder market and environment for it because of this propaganda industry that has really taken hold.
Do you think that Obama was the turning point?
And I say that because if I think back, there was plenty of negative coverage, even in the liberal press, you may say, of Clinton.
But when Obama came in, and I don't know if part of it was the first black president syndrome, it's like the press went into a genuflecting mode.
A, do you think that's true?
And B, can you say a word about your own experiences with Obama?
Because I think they contradict this idea that under Obama...
There was a kind of open access of the press.
In fact, as your experience shows, they went after you.
Well, yes, there was press worship of President Obama, but I also think part of what we saw coincided with the expansion of social media and the internet, which is still relatively young in big terms.
There were the propagandists who learned how to use and make great use of these tools under the Obama administration and to expand them so that we saw a lot more of Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That was contrary to their interests.
And that certainly happened to me at CBS. That was just the leading edge of what has now become a whole smear industry and a very well-organized and orchestrated campaign of people and groups that do this to journalists who try to follow good reporting practices.
Well, didn't it go in your case beyond that, in which they weren't just smearing you in their various sites, but they were essentially, they put you under a kind of surveillance.
They were trying to find out what's in your computer.
I mean, this was a kind of deep state operation against you, it seems, and one that suggests, I think, a real hostility to having the kind of independent journalism that you represent.
Yes, and you know, we got, when I was being surveilled and that was coming out, it sounded so foreign and crazy at the time when these intel sources first told me before we had the forensics that proved it, it sounded outlandish because it was before we knew what the Obama administration had done to Associated Press and Confiscating their phone records secretly and surveilling James Rosen at Fox News.
But it turns out they were doing quite a lot of this.
And I'm sure I wasn't the only journalist.
I just happened to have the contacts and the forensic capabilities through the contacts to prove the government intrusions.
Monitoring of me, planting classified documents deep inside my operating system, looking at my keystrokes, activating my Skype program to listen into audio when it doesn't look like the program's on.
And on and on, a long-term operation that I'm still trying to sue the Department of Justice over, now under the third administration, because what happens, and you've been part of this syndrome, what happens when those who are guilty are the ones that would have to prosecute the crimes, in this case, the computer surveillance crimes, and they're not going to do it.
In fact, they're going to defend the guilty agents.
So I've been in court, and I've learned that if the courts don't want to hear the case, Doesn't matter if you have airtight proof of the forensics that show the government did it.
It's like a tree falling in the forest and nobody hears it.
Unbelievable. When we come back, I want to talk to Cheryl Atkison about her discoveries at the border.
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There is a crisis at the border, and we're not getting a lot of good first-hand reporting about what's actually going on over there.
We've seen some Project Veritas images that seem very disturbing, but Cheryl Atkinson has been at the border multiple times, looking at things for herself, up close, talking to people.
Cheryl, what have you found?
What do we need to know about what's going on on the southern border?
I think this was my eighth trip to the border recently, and this time in Arizona for full measure.
And before for CBS News, I've been at the border because a lot of reporters report on these issues and have never been to the border and will never go, as well as some politicians who comment on them.
And I think the most common misconception is that the border is filled with Nice people who are trying to come over for humanitarian reasons and we need to be nice to them back.
But there certainly is an element of that.
But the flip side of that is what I think people don't know and what I've learned.
All of the activity at the border is planned and controlled and orchestrated by the worst elements of human traffickers and drug cartels.
Everybody who crosses all of those people coming for humanitarian reasons, they have to pay attention.
A fee, maybe $6,000, maybe $20,000.
We are feeding and funding and making the cartels more powerful by creating an environment in which these poor people think that they can come here.
And then the people are used as they are sent over so that the cartels, again, orchestrate this, to move drugs in the places where the Border Patrol is not, because they are inundated doing social work, trying to process the people.
The cartels have planned this.
they have attorneys and financiers and CPAs, and they knew well in advance of the Biden administration what was coming.
They study our policy.
This is not organic or by accident, and it's a very dangerous thing that allows the exploitation of many children, of many ordinary people, and really makes the cartels and the drug traffickers far more powerful.
So what you're saying is that there's an elaborate criminal operation on the other side, and even well-meaning people have got to be part of it because they've got to pay these people off. Who's going to...
I've always thought it a little fishy when large caravans of people are able to move over long spaces of territory.
That cannot happen without organization.
In other words, it needs an infrastructure of medical support, people to provide maps, people to tell you where to go, to provide phone cards.
So, in other words, this has got to be organized by somebody.
If it's not organized by international leftist groups who are kind of escorting these people along, it's got to be organized by coyotes and syndicate people and cartel people who are making a lot of money out of it.
So is it the left or is it the cartels or is it a combination of both?
Who's operating the mechanisms on the other side?
I don't have any firsthand information about the, as they call them, non-governmental organizations that I have heard are organizing movements up here in some cases.
So I can't speak to that, but I know from all of the people that I've interviewed on my many trips to the border, and I used to think this was sort of hyperbole, but it's actually factually, you know, to the point true. Every person that crosses with very few exceptions has had to pay and coordinate with the drug cartels and human traffickers.
They cannot cross in and out of the border illegally like they do at these places without having paid a fee. So this is orchestrated and planned in ways people I think don't understand. And when we're trying to be nice by allowing people to come in, it is inadvertently doing the opposite.
It's allowing them to be exploited and harmed.
It's giving people this kind of hope that causes them to take their lives into their hands and to trade their children.
Children who crossed the border, you know, under previous policies, if they came without a parent, all the adults who came with them were allowed to stay.
So, of course, that created a market whereby The traffickers or cartels recruited children to use them to transport sometimes the worst kind of elements over into the United States.
So we're creating these illegal markets and we're inadvertently allowing these innocent people to be exploited.
It's the opposite of humanitarian.
We've heard a lot about how illegal immigration is unfair to other immigrants who are standing in line, or it may be unfair because it drives down wages to working class people in America.
But I think you're making the point that it's also very exploitative of the migrants themselves.
Because it makes them extreme.
First of all, it imposes costs on them that they can't bear, very often having to borrow money.
In some cases, I hear they're paying like, they get credit, but it's at like 5% per month.
So these sort of minibar prices, you might say, to get across the border.
And all of this... Seemingly at the invitation of Biden, because Biden made all these statements before the election, in effect saying, I'm going to reverse the Trump policy, and are you saying that this obviously did not go unheard by the bad guys on the other side of the border who went, hey listen, our time is coming, let's get ready.
Absolutely. And, you know, there was the statement that Biden made when he was candidate at the Democratic debate where he said one of the first things he wanted to do if he were president was to bring a surge to the border to let all of those people in.
Of course, these things are heard and monitored by the drug cartels and human traffickers, the transnational terrorist organizations.
That's what they do.
They monitor all of this stuff.
So they were ready.
And one of the easiest things to monitor the impact of is border traffic based on our policies.
You can see the changes.
When President Trump made two very important policy changes last year, it dramatically impacted the illegal traffic and drugs.
When President Biden lifted one of them immediately or paused them, it dramatically changed the traffic of the border overnight.
When President Biden stopped wall construction with no wind down overnight, leaving gaps in open places across the border where there's nothing now, the cartels quickly learned to exploit those areas and spaces.
They knew that was coming. So they're very smart.
This is what they do.
And it seems like we're sort of how we could not have anticipated this.
I'm not sure because a lot of people did and certainly the law enforcement officials and townspeople and town officials who live on the border knew this would be coming.
I read a kind of a chilling statement by one of these bad guys, and he rather candidly said, you know, with the legalization of marijuana in a bunch of states in America, there's not as much money to be made anymore in that industry.
He goes, the money is now in people.
So you have this kind of, I think, almost eerie idea that human traffic, Is where the cash is.
It's almost reminiscent, at least in a broad way, of sort of the old slavery days when moving human traffic was where the money was.
Well, again, the opposite of humanitarian is to bring people here who, as you say, sometimes they owe money and they're not just borrowing to pay it off at a 5% credit rate.
Sometimes they're trading their children.
They're agreeing to move drugs and break the law to help pay off these debts.
There have been people found at farm processing plants.
We're basically being held captive, illegal immigrants here, sometimes minors underage, forced to do labor and work while their family members are threatened back home.
I mean, there are all kinds of horrible conditions created by this dynamic that are, I think, not well covered in the news many times.
Now, you said a moment ago that we should have anticipated this.
Now, let me ask you, is it possible that we, and here I mean the Biden administration, did?
And what I mean is I'm thinking about all the migrants with those T-shirts, you know, Biden, Harris, let us in.
Somebody provided those T-shirts.
Could it be that from the point of view of the Biden people, these are all potential Democratic voters?
These are all potential people who would have to be grateful for Biden letting them in.
And so he doesn't really care if they come in.
He doesn't care about them per se.
He's looking at long-term political opportunity for the Democratic Party in this country.
Well, I did see House Bill No.
1 under one analysis that I read that the Democrats are pushing would allow that people be automatically registered to vote if they have a driver's license or they do certain common things.
And in some states that includes illegal immigrants.
And then there was a provision according to this analysis that would make it where if an illegal immigrant then voted based on this automatic registration, They could not be prosecuted.
So it starts to look like, like you said, used to sound sort of far-fetched like a conspiracy theory in a way, but it does start to look like a plan.
And I think the one thing that may have surprised some in the Biden administration who may really, for reasons they, perhaps for humanitarian reasons, support a lot of people coming into this country, maybe they're surprised at Cheryl Atkinson,
thank you for coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
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Do black lives really matter?
Do black lives really matter to the people who say black lives matter?
You begin to wonder because there is tremendous publicity in the media and on the left when you have a white cop do something to a To an Asian American, to a Latino, to an African American, and then Black Lives Matter.
But when there is massive loss of life in minority communities, specifically in black communities, and the perpetrators are also black, then suddenly black lives don't matter or don't seem to matter.
Here, it's the dog that doesn't bark that tells you something.
Because you'd expect that Black Lives Matter now, which is flush with cash, it's being supported by all kinds of groups.
In fact, corporate America is pouring money into Black Lives Matter.
And we're talking about large amounts of money.
You think Black Lives Matter would be like, great, let's now take this money and put it right back into urban communities.
Let's try to invigorate education systems in the inner city.
Let's try to make those places more safe.
Let's try, for example, to prevent a lot of this black-on-black violence.
I mean, just look at these numbers.
Chicago, last year, 2020.
Over 700 murders.
In Chicago, Cook County on track to break homicide record.
So it's breaking a record that's already high.
And in the first couple of months of 2021, Chicago is on track now at this rate to break the 2020 record.
So this is going on.
Chicago is bad.
Oakland is bad.
Baltimore is bad.
But the murder capital of America happens to be St.
Louis, which means that St.
Louis is not as big a city, so the actual numbers are lower.
But if you calculate, for example, the murder rate per thousand, it is higher in St.
Louis than even in Baltimore or Oakland or Chicago.
And we don't hear about any of this.
It's become normalized.
And that's the key point, is that I was even thinking about all the hoopla surrounding the mass shootings, horrific shootings, in Atlanta, eight victims.
In Boulder, 10 victims.
But add those together, that's 18.
How does that compare with the numbers I've been talking about?
If you take the Chicago number, over 700 from last year, think of how many, quote, mass shootings that adds up to.
Think of how many mass shootings per month that adds up to.
And yet, that receives almost no coverage outside of Chicago.
And even in Chicago, it's treated kind of like traffic accidents, something that is sort of routinized, something that is normalized.
So when mass shootings are anomalous, and so we go, ah, mass shooting!
But we don't realize that normalized horror is in the aggregate worse.
It's far greater in magnitude, and yet because it's normal, because it happens on an ongoing basis, we pay no attention to it.
Now... How do we understand what's going on in the inner city?
What is causing this pathology of homicide in our inner cities?
What is the ecosystem or culture of the inner city that's giving you this?
Again, when we turn to academia, there's almost no reporting on this.
There's no description of it.
It was the anthropologist Clifford Geertz of Princeton many years ago who talked about the need for what he called thick description.
And by thick description, what he meant is don't try to sort of judge the situation.
When you are studying a culture, and actually he was talking about faraway cultures, cultures like Papua New Guinea, Tahiti, anthropologists going to distant lands, Geertz's point is instead of trying to sort of judge those cultures, they're superior, they're inferior, don't do that.
Try to look for signals and meanings inside of that culture.
Geertz gave the famous example of, in Western culture, the wink.
If you wink at somebody, this isn't just a movement of your eye up and down.
There's an inner significance in our culture to what a wink means.
And so we need this kind of description of the inner city.
And when we come back, I'm going to focus on the work of the urban anthropologist Elijah Anderson.
Who has been studying the mean streets of Philadelphia to report on what he shows is a kind of highly developed, by which I mean intricately connected, but in the end highly destructive and perverse ecosystem, and it is breaking that ecosystem, transforming it, changing it.
That is going to make the murder situation better, the entrepreneurial situation better, the situation of family life better.
Ultimately, if you care about Black Lives Matter, that's what you should be focused on.
She's one of the most powerful voices for faith, family, and freedom.
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American inner cities are, in my opinion, the worst places to live on the planet.
This may seem like a shocking statement because they're not even close to being the poorest places on the planet.
In fact, they are downright affluent compared to the favelas of Brazil, the slums of Rio de Janeiro, or Mumbai, India.
And people in those places live far more deprived, impoverished lives.
But here's the interesting point.
If you take a slum kid from Rio de Janeiro or Brazil or India and transplant that kid to America and give that kid access to American education or opportunity, that kid will thrive.
Why? Because even in those, you may say, godforsaken places in the rest of the world, you do have structures in place that imbue in the people there and the young people there a sense of hope,
a sense of hard work, in fact, the necessity of hard work to survive, and a desire to be in an environment where, if they could thrive, They would be more than willing to do this.
Now, why is it the case that in the American inner city, you've got the opposite?
You've got the absence of hope.
You've got nihilism.
And you've got conditions in which, even if you were, for example, let's say that sometimes I'll hear people like Van Jones say, well, you know, we need to have Procter& Gamble and we need to have all these companies move to the inner city and so on.
The question you have to ask is, Are people in the inner city, some of whom have had horrible educations, terrible public schools, broken families, are they in a position to show up at, let's say, Apple and say, you know what, yeah, I'd like to have that job at Apple.
In some cases, it's difficult to see people with such bad educations who have not had any kind of discipline, who never learned to punch a time clock, submit to authority, even be polite to people.
It's hard to see such people even working at McDonald's.
Now, the urban anthropologist Elijah Anderson has been studying Philadelphia, the streets of Philadelphia, which is where he grew up.
And he's written two important books.
One is called Streetwise, a very telling title, and the other, Code of the Street.
And essentially what Anderson is doing is he's approaching Philadelphia, his hometown, almost the way an anthropologist might approach New Guinea.
He's watching and describing what he sees.
And the first thing that he sees, very telling, and this relates to the crime rate, the murder rate, is he notices that the streets are full of danger.
That's why you have to be streetwise, because being streetwise is understanding that you are in a sort of a war zone.
Everybody is out to sort of get you.
And so the ordinary people, and there are many ordinary people who are not part of this war zone, but the streets are controlled by gangs, by hostile individuals who look at you up and down as you walk by, and you have to sort of watch yourself.
You need to know the code of the street.
And according to Anderson, the key to the code of the street is the issue of respect.
But he says this respect is not the normal type of respect.
Oh, I respect that guy because he went to Yale.
Oh, I respect that guy. He's a very successful realtor.
No. This is respect that is essentially cultivated through fear.
You learn to respect someone because they can knife you.
Because they can take your money.
Because they can kill you.
Even a hold-up, Anderson says, is a kind of ritual of respect.
The hold-up man is trying to make the other guy submit to him to recognize, I'm your superior.
Because just by moving my little finger here on the trigger, I can end your life.
And so part of what the guy who's being held up has to do is to completely abase himself or herself before the hold-up man to submit to his superior authority.
In that way, the hold-up man is content, and then he might let you live because you have given him respect.
So this is a very toxic situation.
Essentially, what Anderson is saying is that what's developed in the street is oppositional culture.
And by oppositional culture, he means it is a culture that is in opposition to the normal cultural requirements of success.
Normally, you succeed by working hard, but on the street, You succeed by not working hard, by turning, for example, to alternative forms of work, which is to say crime.
Crime is the way.
Crime exposes the normal hard-working guy who shows up for work as a sucker.
And the oppositional culture is all about showing that it operates in the reverse, in an upside-down To the normal rules of getting ahead in society.
In society, you get ahead by studying.
In the oppositional culture, you get ahead by not studying.
In fact, there's this kind of a phrase that essentially is act ignorant, be ignorant.
Ignorance is a mark of status, of coolness.
And then, says Anderson, these streetwise males in the inner city take pride in seducing and impregnating girls and then leaving them with children that they have no intention of supporting.
It's a very demented situation because he says that essentially the boys seduce the girls through what he calls the rap.
The rap is a kind of con artistry aimed at convincing the girls to go to bed with the boys, which they do, and then, oops, they're pregnant, and the boy is like, bye-bye, I'm out of here.
But then the girl goes, this is part of how this ecosystem, the girl goes, oh, whoops, I'm pregnant, how am I going to manage?
And then she realizes, wait a minute, I now qualify for all kinds of benefits, right?
Welfare programs, subsidies that I didn't before.
So this means I don't have to live with my mom anymore.
I can go move into my own apartment.
I can set up for myself.
And then, says Anderson, once the girl becomes an economic unit, she sets up for herself, now she begins to attract other males who Who are attracted not by her, but by the fact that she has her own apartment, she has her own money.
So the welfare check becomes not just a kind of magnet for the pregnant woman herself, but a magnet for other predatory males who have their eye on the check, not on the girl.
So the bottom line of it is, what we're talking about here is...
Dysfunction building upon dysfunction.
An oppositional culture that, on the one hand, provides temporary success.
The drug dealer is sort of the coolest cat on the street.
But on the other hand, it is a culture suffused with danger and risk.
A lot of young people will even confess to Anderson.
I don't expect to live past 30.
I may as well live at high because at some point there's going to be a bullet going through my head.
And I expect that.
So these are people who have made a Faustian bargain that they will embrace this gang culture.
They will embrace this, if you will, pseudo-brotherhood in the hope of it delivering for them in the short term even though they recognize that there may not be a long term for them Because their life in Hobbesian terms is nasty, brutish, and will end up being kind of short.
Now, we hear a lot about critical race theory, and when I read that stuff, it's nonsense upon nonsense.
It's nonsense on stilts.
It's describing an imaginary world.
White supremacy everywhere!
Hobgoblins are out to get me!
It's all rubbish. What's going on, however, in the work of Elijah Anderson is more of what we need.
Clinical descriptions of the way that things break down, the way in which dysfunctional cultures become established.
Once again, if you really think that black lives matter, minority lives matter, lives matter in the inner city and in the barrio, you'll want to understand better what happens in those places so we can develop not only sympathetic ways to think about them, But better policies to deal with them.
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I want to talk about the class structure in America.
And I want to do it because we seem to have a class of people...
Who consider themselves to be sort of above the rules, maybe even above the law.
These are people who have free speech, but we don't.
The rest of us don't. They have a sort of woke immunity to things.
So they can lecture the rest of us about our carbon footprint, but they can fly around in planes if they want.
They can drive around in gas-guzzling vehicles.
No big deal. They can live a luxury lifestyle and have walls around their homes and guns protecting them, even as they deplore guns for everybody else, even as they keep calling about walls don't work.
Well, they evidently work for them.
They're even able to get away with sexual harassment.
Look at Cuomo.
To this day, multiple accusations against his side from people who worked for him.
So people who are ideologically motivated to be on his side.
So they're obviously collectively telling the truth.
And yet, there he is.
Oh, I just like to dole out a lot of hugs.
Nobody else could get away with this.
So my question is, what class do these people belong to?
I'll come to that. The writer, Paul Fussell, who was a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania for many years, wrote a book.
This book is a little dated now, but it's still very eye-opening.
It's called Class, A Guide Through the American Status System.
And it's a little bit of a snobbish book and at times insulting.
To read it today, actually, you realize he says stuff that you wouldn't want to say today.
And he begins by talking about America's class structure.
He divides it by and large into three groups.
The lower class, which he calls the proles, kind of demeaning.
The middle class, which he sort of laughs at because they're always so silly.
And then the upper class, the rich people, whom he also derides as being wealthy, but having no taste, having no culture, and being super stupid.
So, Puzzle begins, let's talk about the rich for a second.
He goes, these rich people are just downright, it's all about show for them, and in a meaningless way.
He talks about the driveways of rich people.
And he goes, look at their curved driveways.
They go back and forth and left and right.
He goes, what's the point of that?
Why not have a driveway that goes straight to your house?
By the way, the writer Thorstein Bebelin raised the same point.
And Fussel gives kind of the same answer.
He goes, rich people like meandering driveways because it shows how rich they are.
They're just basically showing, I have a lot of land to waste.
So, curve left, curve right.
The point is to show I'm so rich that I don't need a straight driveway.
Why use land in an efficient way?
There's no need. And rich people, he says, go on all kinds of extravagant displays, but the point of it is nothing more than a sort of social preening.
This is how rich I am.
And he goes, it's not an unpleasant way to live as long as you never expect any original or intelligent thoughts to come out of the mouths of any of these people.
Then it's perfectly fine to hang out with them.
This is Paul Fussell. Then he turns to the middle class and he goes, the middle class is really all about trying to associate itself with something better than it is.
So he goes, middle class people, for example, love to sort of pretend to a sophistication they don't have.
So they will name their cat Achilles or Clytemnestra.
The idea is to show that they're educated, even though they don't really know what Achilles did or who Clytemnestra was.
Because middle class people love brand labels because they like to...
They love legible clothing.
I guess today you'd say they love tattoos because they essentially, ultimately, they're people who have nothing to say.
But by putting things on themselves, it makes them seem like they've got something important to say.
And then Fussell... Turns to the proles, and I think here he's the unkindest of all.
He goes, one of the things about the proles is that most of them, or many of them, are just unbelievably huge.
And he goes, this is completely different from the old days when rich people were huge, because they would use hugeness, 400 pounds, think of how many steaks I could eat to get here.
That was the old model.
The new model is that rich people are kind of thin, and poor people are kind of fat.
And then Fasla goes on to make fun of the clothing of poor people.
He says one of the hallmarks of a prole is to wear the baseball cap back to front.
He goes, you've got to put the adjusto strap across your forehead and maybe also have a toothpick kind of hanging out of strategically out of your mouth.
And then he talks about the fact that since proles rarely get to wear a jacket, When they wear a jacket, they always have major, what he calls, collar gape.
So, collar gape is the distance from the back of your coat to your neck.
So, a pearl jacket, he says, has collar gape of at least two inches.
When in fact your collar should be pressed against the back of your neck.
So this is Fassil and I can just see him there with a kind of glass of Chardonnay and he's laughing at all these people.
But then he says something very interesting in his last chapter and this is what I'm getting to.
He goes, is there a way out of the class system altogether?
Is it possible to belong to another class that is not...
The lower class or the middle class or even the wealthy class.
And he goes, yes, there is. He calls it Class X. And now he gives a description of Class X. And he goes, the interesting thing about Class X is you're not born into it.
You have to sort of achieve it.
Achieve it how? He goes, the people who belong to this class, he says, are former hippies, journalists, artists, There are some lawyers in it.
He goes, X people are independent-minded.
They don't really need to show off because they're sophisticated.
They actually read books.
They know who Achilles is.
They don't have to put his name.
They don't have to name their dog Achilles or put a bumper sticker because they don't do that kind of thing.
They're an aristocracy but not an aristocracy of money.
Fussell goes on to say that people in the X class don't go to church.
He goes, in fact, they don't know anyone who does.
They might go on Easter Sunday or Monday, but even when they go, they're not into it.
If they go to a funeral, everybody looks down when they start talking about the dead guy, but ex-people kind of look up to check out the faces of everybody else.
He goes, when you look at ex-people's living rooms, They're very international.
They've got a Peruvian carpet and they've got an elephant's foot umbrella.
So these are people who are into sarcasm and irony.
And the irony is kind of an exhibition of their own sophistication.
What is Fasser really saying?
Fasser is really saying that there's a certain type of American who gets to ride above the American class system by being a truly superior individual, a kind of true master of the universe, a master of the universe in sophistication and knowledge and culture.
And it's these people who are ultimately the, you may say, cultural authorities of society.
Well, I would have to say that even a couple of decades after he wrote this book, these people are with us.
They're all around us.
They are the ones who do the fake news.
They are our professors.
They are our artists.
They are the people in Hollywood.
These are people who think that they are our betters.
They're not even members of the upper class because they're above them.
And so we owe them our allegiance.
We owe them deference.
We ultimately have to have them run our institutions.
Why? Because they know better.
And why do they know better?
Because they are better.
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It's mailbox time.
Hey, don't hesitate to send me your questions.
Do it ideally either by audio or video and then just email it.
So email it to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Here's our question for today.
Listen. Hi, my name is Jessica and I wanted to ask about how to explain to somebody in an easy way how socialism is against God and how it actually hurts the church in the end.
I'm Catholic so I just want to explain this to my fellow brothers and sisters.
Thank you. So, socialism, we think of it sometimes in narrow terms as a purely economic philosophy, but let's remember that the great sort of apostle of socialism, Marx, the original expostulator of it, was a militant atheist.
Not just an atheist, but a militant atheist who saw atheism as an intrinsic part of socialism.
Marx described religion famously as, quote, the opium of the masses.
And what he meant by this is that religion is a kind of drug that numbs the senses of people and distracts them from the social injustices of the world.
It concentrates your eye on the next world.
And so religion, from Marx's point of view, collaborates with oppression and has to be overthrown and will disappear in a socialist state.
Now Marx sort of predicted that would happen and it didn't happen, but you'll notice that all actual socialist regimes The Nazis are anti-God.
They are anti-religious and there's no exception really to this rule.
Lenin and the Soviets were bitterly, they persecuted the churches, even the special form of socialism called fascism or Nazism.
The Nazis, for example, went against the churches, tried to shut them down, tried to basically cause them to come over to the Nazi cause.
And so on. Cuba, the list goes on.
And look at socialist groups in America today.
The socialist left is militantly anti-Christian and anti-religious.
So the bottom line of it is this anti-religious feeling...
Is ideological and it arises from the socialist idea that our primary loyalty, in fact our ultimate loyalty, should be to the state.
So that's the problem. God competes with the state for the ultimate allegiance of people.
And so the reason I think socialism is atheistic, it's anti-God, not only accidentally but intrinsically, is because the socialists want to replace God with the all-powerful state.
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