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March 26, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:03:55
WHO’S RUNNING THE COUNTRY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep55
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If Biden's not running the country, who is?
Who's our real president?
Discrimination against Asian Americans, who's doing it?
And Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, joins us.
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.
Who's running the country if it's not Joe Biden?
I It would be interesting to know because whoever is running the country That's our real president.
Joe Biden is in the sort of costume of president.
Of course, he appeared yesterday to do his belated press conference.
And at times, he didn't even seem to know what he was doing.
Here's a little clip.
Check it out. So the best way to get something done, if you hold near and dear to you that you like to be able to I mean, what a mess.
Now, there were times when Biden seemed a little more coherent.
But it's now come out that the reason he even was is because he was supplied with a battery of 14-point font index cards.
And every topic, he had his talking points.
So he was sort of like a human parrot.
And they told him, if the press says infrastructure, pull out your infrastructure card and start reading.
And that's basically what Biden is doing.
But the important point about a parrot is a parrot doesn't say.
The parrot is actually just repeating what somebody else has concocted or taught the parrot to mindlessly say.
The journalists, of course, were in their usual stupefied, genuflecting, devotional, embarrassing, non-critical stance.
Only one time in the whole press conference was an intelligent question even asked, and Biden seemed a little stunned and unable to at least immediately reply.
Listen. I'd like to circle back to immigration, please.
You just listed the reasons that people are coming, talking about in-country problems, saying that it happens every year.
You blamed the last administration.
Sir, I just got back last night from a reporting trip to the border where I met nine-year-old Jose who walked here from Honduras by himself along with another little boy.
He had that phone number on him.
And we were able to call his family.
His mother says that she sent her son to this country because she believes that you are not deporting unaccompanied minors like her son.
That's why she sent him alone from Honduras.
So, sir, you blame the last administration, but is your messaging in saying that these children are and will be allowed to stay in this country and work their way through this process encouraging families like Josel's to come?
Well, look. Yeah, see, it's tough for a parrot to deal with that one because that was unrehearsed.
There wasn't a note card on this kid traveling from Honduras.
Now, there's a deeper point here that goes beyond the embarrassment of having this...
Senile dude in the Oval Office, stage managed by aides and by the media.
The point is, who is calling the shots here?
Who's the real leader of this democratic society?
Now, very interesting article by Dan Galerinter in American Greatness.
It's actually called, Who's Running This Thing?
And Dan begins by invoking William F. Buckley's famous line from a while ago now, saying he would rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston phone directory I've scratched my head over this for a quarter century,
because I've been thinking to myself, what happens to a country when the Harvard faculty is actually running the country?
Is that the case now?
I don't mean literally the Harvard faculty, but I mean those types of people, an unelected elite Is calling the shots.
And I think that is the key point.
It's not that we have another president.
I mean, some people will say, of course, that, well, Obama is the real president.
This is his third term.
Ron Klain is an Obama man.
He's doing what Obama says.
Or Kamala Harris is the real president.
That's why Biden occasionally goes, oh, President Harris.
But I don't think it's that simple.
In fact, I ask myself this question.
Who is the individual or the group of people that picked Biden and Harris?
Think about it. Biden and Harris were sort of designated, you may almost say, president and vice president appointees by someone in the Democratic Party.
Some group, some committee, some team said, let's go with Biden.
Let's knock everybody else out of the race and let's pluck Harris out of obscurity.
She couldn't win anything on her own, but let's pull her in and we'll make these two.
So that person, that group, They're running the country.
And behind them, and this is Dan Galorento's point, is a kind of broader elite.
And this elite is partly in the universities, it's partly in the media, it's partly in the entertainment world.
And these are the people who think of themselves as the unofficial cabinet.
They're the cabinet for these people in power.
Now, if we pull back and look at the implications of this, they're very startling because we are in a democracy.
But in a democracy, in a representative democracy, the people don't rule directly.
This is not like ancient Athens.
In ancient Athens, if there was a question, should we raise taxes, should we pay subsidies, should we go to war...
You just call the people.
They all come to the agora, seven or eight thousand of them.
They vote. The people decide directly.
But in our type of representative democracy, the people have a say only rarely, only every two years or only every four years.
And the only say they have is on who gets to rule.
The real decisions are made by that ruling group or that ruling person, the president along with the Congress.
But what if the president isn't the president?
What if some other group, unelected, is calling the shots that the American people have not said yes to, they haven't signed off on, and yet this group, this elite, believes that it has the authority to rule.
Biden in the press conference said something very striking to me.
He said, the world is now divided into two camps.
The autocratic camp and the democratic camp.
And in the autocratic camp, he was talking about Russia and China and potentially Iran.
And of course, we are supposed to be the leader of the democratic camp.
But then I thought to myself, wait a minute, in these two camps, autocracy and democracy, Where do we really belong?
Are we really in the democratic camp?
If it is the case that we have an unelected cabal directing Biden, Biden is just taking instructions from these people, then we're not effectively a democracy.
The people have not chosen that group.
Obama, some years ago, in his first term, made a comment to the New York Times that was kind of buried by the New York Times almost strategically in an article where Obama said this.
He said, it would be so much easier to be the president of China.
This is Obama. I quote this in my book, America, and I provide all the citations.
But what Obama was expressing here, I think, is dictator envy.
Obama was saying, in a democracy, in a real democracy, you have to argue, you have to fight, you've got block and tackle, checks and balances, you've got to create consensus.
Why do all that?
What if we had a group of people, or one person, me, and we just did whatever we wanted?
Kind of like the Chinese, kind of like Xi Jinping.
So I think that we are in, you may almost call it an unrecognized crisis of democracy.
It's a crisis of democracy because the democracy we have seems to be fatally flawed, at least by the simple fact that we have unelected leaders who are making decisions for us.
Let's remember that autocracies frequently wear the camouflage of democracy.
Even in Iran, they call themselves the People's Republic of Iran.
Democracy is a sham, but they go through the motions.
Germany was a German Democratic Republic, the GDR.
They went through the motions.
So, is America moving toward a situation, not only with Biden, the president, but also with efforts to change laws and put new procedures, HR1 and others in place, that would create a false democracy?
The outward impression of democracy, but with token opposition, a single party ruling, picking its own, this guy's gonna be the president, this one's gonna be the vice president, this year it's gonna be Biden and this one's gonna be Harris, next year it'll be Harris and the next person we pick.
But who's the we that's doing the picking?
This is a crisis that we need to think about and think about how to get out of, because it may well be that in the fight between democracy and autocracy, we end up being on the wrong side.
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I want to talk about the filibuster.
In the past, Biden has said that he supports the filibuster.
But at his press conference yesterday, Biden appeared to waver a little, to leave room for efforts to limit the filibuster in a very revealing way.
Listen. Filibuster.
Fulfill the filibuster. You know, with regard to the filibuster, I believe we should go back to a position of the filibuster that existed just when I came to the United States Senate 120 years ago.
And that is that it used to be required for the filibuster.
And I had a card on this.
I was going to give you the statistics, but you probably know them.
That it used to be that from between 1917 and 1971, the filibuster existed.
There were a total of 58 motions to break a filibuster that whole time.
Last year alone, there were five times that many.
So it's being abused in a gigantic way.
Oh, well, I had a card on this.
These are the note cards I was telling you about a moment ago.
What's interesting is that Biden talks about the fact that the filibuster was used a whole bunch of times last year.
And my question is, by whom?
Answer? By the Democrats.
This was the Democrats deploying the filibuster throughout the year 2020 to block Trump initiatives.
And the Republicans went along.
By went along, I mean they basically said, yeah, that's a legitimate tool of government.
The Senate operates by consultation and there are legitimate ways to block things or at least slow them down.
So Biden is appealing in the outrages that he's talking about are evidently outrages by his own party.
So it's interesting how the Democrats have now switched around.
And suddenly the filibuster has now become something they want to get rid of.
It seems like this difference was not motivated by sort of reflections about the filibuster.
It was motivated by something else.
Now recently McConnell tweeted out, Senate Democrats spent the last four years using the legislative filibuster and talking constantly about how important it was.
Their reversals aren't about principle.
It's just raw power.
It's just raw power.
Now, the great philosopher of power was Machiavelli, and Machiavelli disturbingly makes the point that in human politics, people will talk about this principle or that principle, but Machiavelli says ignore them.
They'll talk about morality.
It's good to do this. It's bad to do that.
Machiavelli says ignore that.
Morality itself is a tactic.
Machiavelli uses the word virtue, V-I-R-T-U, virtue.
And Machiavelli inverts the meaning of virtue because virtue traditionally has meant do what's right.
And Machiavelli by virtue means do what's right for you to stay in power.
So Machiavelli is taking virtue as an end or as a goal and changing it.
The virtue is now a means, a weapon that you use to immobilize your opponents while you try to achieve more power.
Now, you may think that this is a perspective very alien to the American founders, but it's not true.
John Adams, for example, fully understood that politics is about power, quoting a couple of lines which are quoted by Bernard Balin in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
Here's John Adams. He basically, he doesn't start by using the word power, he uses the word dominion.
But by dominion, what he means is control over others, the space in which you can operate, you may say, unobstructed.
And Adam says that this power is rapacious, it's carnivorous, it never wants to stop.
It just wants more and more.
It wants to go beyond legitimate boundaries.
Adams talks about its, quote, encroaching nature.
It is, quote, grasping.
It is tenacious.
And what does power want to consume?
What does it want to take away?
It wants to take away, Adams says, three things.
Liberty, law, and right.
So it wants to take away our freedom.
It wants to take away the rule of law because the rule of law is seen as an obstruction to power.
And it wants to take away our rights.
So this is what's going on.
The founders knew about it.
They put block and tackle mechanisms to prevent power from becoming so promiscuously spread that it became a danger to our liberty and to law and to our rights.
And so the filibuster...
Which was not in the founding itself, was one of these block and tackle techniques consistent with the principles of the founding, the founding system of checks and balances.
And so what we have is a little bit of an irony, and the irony here is that in order to protect the founding system of checks and balances, in other words, to protect the filibuster itself, We need the exercise of power.
And so I hope that McConnell isn't sort of like a kid who just realizes, wow, it's really not about principles, it's about power.
Yes, it is about power.
And you, McConnell, have got to work to use your power in the Senate.
The power of persuasion, the power of cajoling, but also, if necessary, the power of threats, of disruptions, of what you yourself call the hundred-car pile-up.
You've got to use whatever means are necessary to block the Democrats from overriding these checks and balances, overriding the filibuster, and turning America, a very closely divided country with an even balance pretty much in the House and in the Senate, into a sort of unchecked one-party state.
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Who hates Asian Americans?
Who is vilifying them?
Who is discriminating against them?
Who is preventing Asian Americans from achieving, through effort and industry and merit and success, their American dream?
I guess I'm in this camp, Asian-Americans.
And if I listen to recent rhetoric, it appears like my great enemy is the white supremacists.
Now, I've talked before that in these hate crime incidents, they are not being perpetrated by white supremacists.
That is, Absolutely false narratives from the left.
They're trying to create an illusion here.
Even in the Atlanta case, they go, yeah, yeah, we got it, we got it, here's a white supremacist.
Well, that guy wasn't a white supremacist.
He was essentially a sex pervert.
And in the other cases, if you begin to look closely, you see that the vast majority of attacks, and proportionately, this is by a factor of eight to one, They're launched by Blacks, by African Americans against Asian Americans.
Remember, most of these attacks are occurring in Blue America, in the cities in which Asian Americans are concentrated.
New York City, for example, San Francisco, places like that.
Not exactly MAGA country.
So, the hate crimes narrative is totally bogus.
It's kind of funny to see these university presidents of Ivy League schools all jumping on the bandwagon and expressing their political solidarity with Asian Americans.
A recent statement from the president of Harvard, talking about the school must stand as a bulwark against hatred toward Asian Americans.
And we get pretty much the same tone.
Here is a Columbia president, Lee Bollinger.
To the many thousands in our Columbia community who are Asian or Asian American, we want to know that we too, on your behalf, feel the anguish and justifiable fear, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, all these memos sound exactly the same.
Dartmouth College, Phil Hanlon, the president, he goes, we stand in solidarity with members of our Asian American community.
The Yale Psychology Department talks about anti-Asian prejudice is horrible and goes on and on and on.
And yet I ask a simple question.
Which institutions in our society are systematically discriminating against Asian Americans?
The top eight contenders?
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Penn.
The eight Ivy League institutions and selective colleges throughout the country.
They are systematically discriminating in favor of blacks and Latinos and against Asian Americans.
Now, why are they doing this?
They're doing this because, in their view, Asian Americans are, quote, overrepresented.
Overrepresented. In other words, they are doing too well considering their numbers.
Asian Americans might be, for example, 6 or 7% in a surrounding community, but 25%, 30% at Berkeley or Oberlin or Princeton.
And so Princeton goes, let's bring down the number of Asians.
And how do they do this? They do it by creating a multiple track We're good to go.
Had a one-tenth to one-fourth chance of acceptance compared with students from racial minority groups who had the same qualifications.
So, same grades, same test scores, same extracurriculars.
The bottom line of it is if you are white or Asian-American, you're almost certain not to get in.
If you're black or Latino, you're almost certain to get in.
So, you know, the left talks a lot about the fact that we have institutional racism in this country.
And by institutional racism, I take it, racism that doesn't just involve shouting an epithet or something that happens episodically, but racism that is built into structures.
And so here we have it.
This is institutional racism.
We've got... Structures, elite structures of education, which, by the way, have a lot of impact on the kind of credentials you end up with, the kind of jobs you get, your opportunities in life.
So this is not an inconsequential institution.
That's why people struggle so hard to get in.
And yet these institutions are institutionally, systematically discriminating in favor of some ethnic groups.
Now, you might say, well, this isn't really motivated, Mesh, by any kind of animus toward Asian Americans as a group.
And my point is, who cares?
One of the things that is stressed in the race debate is that motives don't really matter.
If a bank, for example, is not giving loans to blacks, Even though it gives loans to whites and they have the same economic situation, the bank is guilty of discrimination.
You may not have the bank going, well, we feel this way.
No one cares how the bank feels.
The point is that the bank is putting practices into place, institutional practices, that have a discriminatory design and a discriminatory effect.
And so it is with the admissions policies of selective colleges in America.
So we have a massive violation of the principle of merit, massive violations of the principle of colorblindness, and all of this is coming from the left, from the Ivy League, from these university presidents and scholars, for the very people who profess to be in political solidarity with the Asian American community.
These are the people who are shutting us down.
These are the people who are keeping us out.
These are our real enemies.
They profess to be our friends, but with friends like this, who needs enemies?
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Robert Kiyosaki is an entrepreneur.
And an author, and he is the author of a book that has become a kind of classic of personal finance and investment, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which came out now, I would say, a generation ago, but has been a sensation.
It's sold, I believe, something like 40 million copies.
I'm thrilled to welcome Robert Kiyosaki to the podcast.
Robert, great to have you.
Thanks for joining us.
And let me start by asking you about The lessons of Rich Dad Poor Dad in today's environment.
It seems like we're going through kind of a bumpy political road, which might also cause a bumpy economic situation.
But would you say that some of the core lessons of Rich Dad Poor Dad are still just as relevant today as they were when the book first came out?
Correct. The book is selling more today than ever before.
And possibly it's a classic.
I can't believe it. But anyway, thanks for having me on your program.
I'm concerned because I went to military school.
I was a surfer kid in Hawaii.
I went to military school in New York.
And at military school, I had an economics teacher who had us read the Communist Manifesto, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Hitler, and all this.
And so that was in the 60s.
And for military school, I joined the US Marine Corps and I went to fight in Vietnam twice.
And I saw communism in Vietnam and I'm afraid I see it coming into America today.
I don't mean socialism, I mean communism.
And so that's why I'm concerned because the story of Rich Dad Poor Dad was written because the only way communism can come in is via poverty.
And as long as we have no financial education in schools, our gap between the rich and the poor gets wider and wider and wider.
And now I'm not Republican or Democrat, but we're giving more and more people money, which is communism.
And I think we should teach people to fish, not give them fish, you know what I mean?
And so my concern, the reason I wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad, without financial education, the US has become a socialist, communist country.
The framework of the book, of course, is to contrast your two dads, the rich dad and the poor dad.
And the poor dad was always complaining and essentially professing, I'm entitled to this and I'm entitled to that.
But the rich dad, I think as you describe him, was always concerned about how do I create more value?
How do I create value for others and thus benefit myself from Talk a little bit about the importance of this psychology, you might say, which seems to be critical for being a successful entrepreneur.
What's the mindset that you need to pull this off?
Well, poverty comes from culture.
I mean, you know that, I know that.
And if we don't change culture, so my poor dad was an academic genius, you know, Stanford, Northwestern University, Chicago, PhD, but they don't teach us anything about money at school.
So my poor dad had a resentment against capitalism, capitalists.
And my rich dad was my best friend's father.
Was a hardcore capitalist.
So at the age of nine and 10, I would catch hell because my poor dad would be angry that I'd be studying with my rich dad.
And I'm a rich man today, again, because it's culture.
I studied with my rich dad, not my poor dad.
And so I learned to be rich playing Monopoly.
I'm a real estate guy.
That's how much a father can affect a kid.
What's that? Well, I was going to say that you talk about creating value by focusing on business.
People often think that business is risky.
It's better to get a steady job where I get a steady income.
I can count on that.
I mean, I think back of my relatives in India or even my own father.
That was their psychology.
Work hard, earn money, but be reliant on someone else to provide it and then put the money in the bank and not in the market.
It drives a lot of people.
One of the points you make very startling is that it's actually sometimes less risky to start a business because, and we know this today, who can say that employment is going to be for life anymore?
Absolutely. And that's why I wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad 25 years ago.
My poor dad was an employee.
A very smart man, dad of education for the state of Hawaii.
Great guy. And my rich dad was an entrepreneur.
But what kept my poor dad an employee was a fear of failing.
But that's what they teach us in school.
Don't make mistakes.
You know, if you fail, it means you're stupid.
And when I came back from Vietnam and I asked my rich dad, I said, what should I do?
He says, well, you should be an entrepreneur.
But no, you probably failed two or three times.
That's one of the... If you're prepared to fail, you can get through it.
Well, that's to me one of the wonders of America is that in other countries, if you fail, you can't get up.
You're sort of down on your back and it's the end of you.
And I think that's why people don't do it.
In America, you can fail and you can even go bankrupt, but you can...
Scrub the slate clean.
You can get back on your feet.
So entrepreneurs, and I believe this is true of Jeff Bezos, for example, he tried many, many businesses before Amazon.
So it wasn't like he hit a home run the first time at bat.
He had a lot of failures before he found success.
Even this guy Elon Musk, his last rocket fell down.
You know, Absolutely.
That's how you learn.
We learn. Human beings learn by falling down, standing up, falling down, standing up.
But our schools punish us for making mistakes.
And so that's the culture of my poor dad.
He was so afraid of making mistakes.
Whereas my rich dad basically said to me, he says, you'll probably lose three businesses in your lifetime.
Wow. Robert, you're writing a new book.
In fact, you interviewed my wife Debbie about it.
The book, I believe, is going to be called, or at least the working title, The Capitalist Manifesto.
Kind of a great title.
What an alternative to the Communist Manifesto.
You're a guy who's been extremely successful.
You could be basically, you're in Hawaii, you could be on the beach, you don't have to be spending time working on it, but why are you doing it?
What is the important message that you're trying to convey at this stage of life by writing this kind of ringing affirmation of capitalism?
Well, like I said, I went to military school.
And the first word we're taught in military school is your mission.
And so as an entrepreneur, the mission of the Rich Dad Company is to elevate the financial well-being of humanity through financial education.
And we do it via games.
I learned to be an investor playing Monopoly.
And my wife and I created a board game called Cash Flow, and it's the only game that teaches accounting, the single most boring subject in business school, by allowing people to have fun.
And if you can, you know, Maria Montessori said, you know, we learn via our hands.
We learn by doing.
And so by teaching people to learn accounting and entrepreneurship with our hands, we create more entrepreneurs.
And that's what our country and the world needs now is more entrepreneurs, not more people expecting a government handout or stimulus.
That's going to kill us.
I mean, it almost seems like we're reaching a situation in this country in which, I mean, you had a rich dad and a poor dad, but those were two sort of alternative models.
It's almost like the Democratic Party or the left now has embraced the philosophy of the poor dad and all the entitlement and resentments that come out of that.
So the rich dad, it's almost like America's at a fork in the road.
Is it going to be rich dad or is it going to be poor dad?
I mean, is that the right way to describe it?
Is that how you see it? Well, I hope you speak Chinese, is what I'm trying to say.
You know what I mean? Those guys are coming after us.
So I'm still, I'm fourth generation Japanese-American.
I'm still fighting communism.
But we fight it via education.
I mean, you and I are in the same business, different professions, you know?
But we're fighting for capitalism.
And that's why I teach.
I teach as a capitalist.
And I think that's the most important thing The subject we can teach today.
Because I was asked this question, what does school teach us about money?
The answer is nothing. We wonder why we have problems today.
That's my mission.
I'm still a Marine.
Well, it's so much needed, it seems to me, because we're at a time when our schools are obsessed with teaching anything but.
They're trying to teach you these days about identity politics, and do you know if you're a boy or a girl?
And this is all at a time when people can't balance a checkbook.
They know nothing about taxes, nothing about investments.
They can't calculate interest rates.
We even hear that math these days is racist.
So, Robert Kiyosaki, thanks for coming on the program.
I think your message is more needed than ever.
I really appreciate it.
And tell Debbie thank you for supporting my little program also.
We're bringing people who've experienced communism to talk to people of the world.
So thank you. Thanks Debbie for me.
That's absolutely awesome. Thanks very much.
Really appreciate it. Thank you.
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We talk a lot and there's been a lot of talk in the last several years about fake news.
about the bias in the press.
And this is not just the so-called left-wing MSNBC or Salon or any of these sort of far-out outfits, but mainstream institutions, New York Times, Washington Post, have now become just rag sheets.
Now, this process was happening even in the past.
Many years ago, there was an article on me and my right-wing political cohorts at the Dartmouth Review.
It was written by Fox Butterfield, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the New York Times.
And Butterfield, in order to smear me, quoted me as saying the following, The question is not whether women should be educated at Dartmouth.
The question is whether women should be educated at all.
And this was supposed to show me to be some kind of an unconscionable sexist.
And I contacted Fox Butterfield when the article appeared and I said, Mr.
Butterfield, you have quoted me in error.
I didn't say that.
The article, that saying did in fact appear as a kind of witty quip in the Dartmouth Review, but it was another guy who said it.
And it appeared under his name, so please publish a correction.
And Fox Butterfield said, oh no, I'm not going to.
I said, well, why not?
He goes, well, because you wrote an article about the Dartmouth Review in which you quoted that line, so you said it.
And I was like, what?
He's like, yeah, it appeared in your article under your name.
You quoted it, so you said it.
And I said, well, if that's true, Mr.
Butterfield, then I can from now on attribute the line to you, because you now quoted it in the New York Times under your byline, in your article, so...
I mean, what kind of logic is this?
But the guy held firm.
He would not admit that he had quoted.
And so what I realized is I'm not dealing with error.
I'm dealing with dishonesty.
I'm dealing with a corrupt individual.
And this was a decorated, prize-winning journalist.
Now, I mention all this because things have just...
I saw that as an individual episode or incident.
And now this kind of thing is everywhere.
Corruption, bias, and the press being a sort of adjunct of a political party.
Now recently, a very prominent appellate court judge, this is Judge Lawrence Silberman, the senior judge on the D.C. Court of Appeals, perhaps the most influential appellate court in the country, made a very remarkable statement.
This was actually in a libel case.
But Silberman went on to outline and made some very striking statements, things that we know, but it's very rare for a judge to say.
He goes, we are living in, quote, a frighteningly orthodox media culture.
The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions.
He goes on to say that this is a, quote, long-term secular trend going back at least to the 1970s.
And that was my point with Butterfield.
I saw this even in the early 90s.
And he goes, one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy.
I continue with a couple more lines from Silverman.
He goes, the New York Times and Washington Post are, quote, virtually Democratic Party broadsheets.
We know this to be true, but here he says it.
He adds, Nearly all television, network, and cable is a Democratic Party trumpet.
Even the government-supported national public radio follows along.
This is very strong stuff.
Now let's point out that Silberman is a Republican, but he's a Nixon Republican.
He had important posts in the Nixon administration.
And he comes out of, I would call it, the moderate wing of the Republican Party.
So it's very striking to see a judge...
And judges very rarely make generic comments of this sort.
Admittedly, Soberman applies it to the libel case that he's talking about.
He's basically saying a lot of these libel protections, a lot of the legal protections for the press, are based on the idea of a free press, removed from government, independent of the two parties, independent of power itself, applying a critical check on power.
And he's saying, we don't have that.
That's not our press now.
In a sense, raising the question of whether the press deserves not just its libel protections, but any protections at all.
Why? Because it's no longer a press in the traditional sense.
It's more like party-owned newspapers.
I mean, if we think back to the National Socialists in Italy and Germany, they had their own papers.
The Nazi party had the Volkischer Beobachter.
Mussolini's party had their own press.
Their press was an organ of the party.
And later became an organ of the state.
Is America moving in that direction?
This warning from a senior appellate court judge makes at least, sends a shot across the bow, is at least a certain kind of herald or prophetic announcement of how bad things are and perhaps how bad things will continue to be.
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Carolyn Maloney, the Democratic Chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, has been trying to launch an investigation of Parler.
The investigation is, is Parler a Russian asset?
Is Parler operating at the behest of the Gremlin?
Also, what was Parler's role in January 6th?
So even after this kind of big tech strike on Parler, there's an effort by Congress to get in on the act.
Congress, of course, has been pressing the big tech companies to censor more.
In other words, censor even more promiscuously on behalf of the left and of the Democratic Party.
And Parler has just sent a very telling letter to Carolyn Maloney A letter that has facts that we didn't know before.
Number one. In the days and weeks leading up to January 6th, Parler referred violent content from its platform to the FBI for investigation over 50 times.
And Parler even alerted law enforcement to specific threats of violence being planned at the Capitol.
In other words, far from being complicit, With this kind of, any kind of planning or insurrection or violence, Parler realized that if there are people who are planning something bad, we're going to let the FBI know.
And Parler was working back and forth with the FBI. They sent on December 22nd, this is long before January 6th, they sent the FBI three screenshots of particularly violent rhetoric from a user who had threatened to kill politicians and specifically threatened Bill Barr.
And then later, around January 6th, Parler pulled out people who had said things like, hang Mike Pence.
So even though this is just rhetoric, people could just say, I'm just saying.
It's like people would say, oh, I could kill you.
It doesn't mean you're going to.
But nevertheless, Parler was alarmed enough that it supplied these tweets to its FBI contact.
Parler, it turns out, has absolutely no contact with the Russians.
They have no Russian owners.
They don't even have any Russian contractors.
Now, the former CEO, John Mates, his wife happens to be of Russian origin.
And there was apparently some minor contract with one of the wife's relatives, but this has nothing to do with Putin or the Kremlin.
Interestingly, when Congress, in trying to bust Parler on this...
had made a reference to an individual.
The idea here was that Parler was somehow complicit with violence.
But it turns out that this individual was planning his nefarious activities not on Parler.
He was actually doing it apparently on Facebook.
And of course there's now been some studies of this by George Washington University and others showing that there was far more kind of conspiratorial activity on the other platforms.
Than there was on Parler at all.
So the bottom line of it is that Parler here was clearly singled out.
Parler here, here's an example.
The committee's letter to Parler mentions this guy, William McCall Calhoun, and says, this guy made some violent threats on Parler.
And then Parler points out, however, in the very same affidavit that the committee itself cites, there are far more incriminating and incendiary posts by the same user on Facebook.
Including a photo from outside the Capitol that the guy posted basically saying, we're going to get inside the Capitol before this ends.
So, what Parler is saying to Congress is, if you want to apply some sort of investigation, why are you just investigating us?
Why aren't you investigating all the other social media companies?
And of course, the answer is simple.
The other social media companies have been funneling vast amounts of money.
To Democratic candidates.
They've essentially, well, you might almost say bought off the Democratic Party.
So Congress, or at least Maloney, wants an investigation of Parler.
But when you read these documents and you read what's really going on, it almost seems like the real investigation that needs to happen is an investigation of the relationship between big tech and big tech money and the Democratic Congress.
That's what really needs to be investigated.
Now, of course, it's never going to happen.
Why? Because the Democratic Congress is not going to have an investigation into itself.
That's not going to happen.
But I hope that Parler's lesson from this is not to appeal to the sort of benign forces at Big Tech, oh, please take us back in and we'll behave ourselves, or not to appeal to the good graces of Carolyn Maloney or Congress, the Democratic Congress, hey, listen Congress, do the right thing.
We cannot count on them to do the right thing and what this means is that Parler needs to build up an infrastructure of operations, an infrastructure not only of functionality but of apps so people can get the Parler app as they used to have it.
Maybe not an Apple app, but some other kind of an app, and do it so that Parler doesn't need these guys.
It doesn't need Google.
It doesn't need Amazon.
Here's my Parler mug.
You can kind of see which side I'm on.
And I think it's vitally important that we build up these alternative platforms so that the other side not only doesn't want to hurt us, they do, but so they can't.
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We're living in a time when there is a lot of, not just disturbing, but downright chilling things going on around us.
Suppressions of basic freedoms, blatant violations of equal rights under the law, Political prisoners now in the United States.
I think, for example, of the vulnerability of a lot of these people who have been harassed and chased down over January 6th.
Some of them didn't even go in the Capitol.
And even the ones who did.
If they didn't do anything, they just milled around, they shouted a lot, they waved their signs.
Is it right that these people be put away for years and years?
I mean, how horrific. Is this happening in America?
Well, it seems like it is.
And I don't know what is in store.
Because we know from history that power corrupts.
And the more power is concentrated, the more it corrupts.
A lot of the people we're dealing with, including our elites, we can't trust them.
They're corrupted people.
They're deeply dishonest.
They're dishonest with us, but they're dishonest with themselves.
And the fact that they kind of speak in a sort of benign vocabulary, the vocabulary of democracy and caring, we really shouldn't be fooled.
But I think it's also important that we don't lose our balance.
It was the philosopher Leo Strauss who once said that in reading about the angry response of Thrasymachus in his confrontation with Socrates, We want to recognize the sort of boorishness of Thrasymachus, but we don't want to respond to Thrasymachus in a Thrasymachus mode.
So what I'm getting at here is that it's very easy for us to be suffused with anger.
It's very easy for us to be suffused with despair.
And what I'm actually recommending is that we be suffused with neither.
Why? In part because it is good at times to step back.
Step back not just from politics, but you might say step back from life itself and gain a little bit of perspective.
Ask yourself this.
Deep down, what do you believe that life is even all about?
What is its purpose?
Now, I once saw a bumper sticker, and I've seen it more than once, that the guy with the most toys Now, is that what you believe?
Is that what I believe?
No. Some years ago, I read an article by the writer Michael Kinsley, who offered a modification of this theory.
It's not the guys with the most toys who win, but he said it's the guys who live the longest who win.
In other words, Kinsley's point is that it's not the toys that matter.
The most important toy or the most important commodity that we possess is time.
And Kinsley's point is that if we can live longer, that is actually having the best toy.
That actually is proving that you got a bigger run at life, you might say, than everybody else.
So is that what you believe or what I believe?
In my case, no.
I believe, and perhaps you do, at least if you are a Jew or a Christian or even a Muslim, that our life is a short piece of a longer journey.
In fact, it is a probationary run.
We are, as is sometimes said, pilgrims on the earth.
And if you believe that, it introduces a kind of new perspective.
The perspective... It's called in Latin, subspecie eternitatis, which basically means, from the perspective of eternity.
And this is actually not a bad principle to apply.
Periodically, not all the time, but periodically to your own life.
How is your life to be seen from this, I'd almost call it God's eye view of the matter.
There's a great scene in Dante's Divine Comedy in the Paradiso.
Dante is approaching the emperor reign, the kind of inner sanctum of God himself.
And he says, at the last moment I look back And I saw the Earth.
And he goes, it was this distant ball spinning.
And Dante then says, I smiled.
Now, Dante doesn't explain.
He doesn't say why he smiled.
But the reason he smiled, I think, and a lot of Dante commentators think, is Dante is saying, I realized how petty and small and silly the Earth's standards are.
In other words, seen from the God's eye view, from the perspective of eternity, subspecie eternitatis.
The judgments over there on that little spinning ball appear narrow, provincial, not ultimate in any sense.
Now, of course, there have been philosophers through history who have attacked this point of view and said, oh, it devalues life.
The Jews, the Christians, they don't care about life.
They're always looking to the next world.
And this is simply not true.
I mean, in Judaism, this life does matter.
In fact, the rewards that are described in the Old Testament are mainly in this life.
Job doesn't have to wait to be made whole in heaven.
Job gets his camels back and he gets his wealth back.
He even gets more sons and daughters-in-law.
His family begins to multiply.
He gets his rewards on this earth.
And when Abraham and others prayed for blessings, they meant blessings in terms of flocks and sheep.
And grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they were talking about the blessings of this life.
And even if you go to the New Testament, there's no question that this life is of critical importance.
Why? Well, for one simple reason.
It is the place where your future destiny is adjudicated.
What you do in this life makes all the difference for where you will be and what your fate will be.
And it is your choice, it is your decisions in this life that determine, that decide what your fate will be in eternity.
So the bottom line of it is, As Christians, as Jews, we are called to engage with the world, to be salt and light in the world, to be active in the world.
I'm not advocating a kind of abstinence or withdrawal or isolationism from life itself, not at all.
But I think that life itself is made deeper, richer, given a sense of perspective, if from time to time we step back and say, listen, first of all, this politics is not all there is.
In fact, this life is not all there is.
We have to be able to look at things from the larger point of view, the view I've been calling subspecies eternitatis, or from the perspective of eternity.
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It's time for our mailbox.
Hey, I hope you like hearing from me, and I like hearing from you.
So if you have a question, I prefer audio or video, but you can also email it.
Either way, send it to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Let's turn to our question for today.
Listen. My name is Meg Phillips and I'm an entrepreneur in technology.
In 2020, I built School List It, a top five global winner in the call for code.
So School List It is a social media app that helps parents find what's due and when for any school anywhere.
Conservatives are typically anti-regulation.
Lately, many conservative voices are speaking out in favor of changing or eliminating Section 230 and in support of more regulation for big tech.
Section 230, in my opinion, may not be broken, but rather poorly understood and even more rarely enforced.
Do you think a change to Section 230 or more regulation over the tech sector will help or hurt small tech versus big tech?
Would that ultimately help or hurt free speech?
Not unrelated, how do you think the abundance or rather overabundance of venture capital in the tech sector affects the free market dynamic in technology?
Now, good question.
Many people think that the conservative or even the libertarian position is laissez-faire.
Laissez-faire means in effect, let them do.
No regulation, no government intervention at all.
This is actually not true.
We need government.
We need government to do what?
We need government to maintain, you may say, the rules of the game, to enforce contracts, for example, and also to play kind of neutral umpire, to resolve contract disputes, for instance.
We also need government to block monopolies.
Why? Because monopolies suppress new people from entering the market.
They buy them out or they shut them down.
They have enough market power to prevent competition.
We also want to prevent combinations, business combinations that have the same effect of suppressing trade and driving out competitors.
A really good example would be the way, for example, in which you had a kind of combination of Google And Amazon and Apple coming together to strike at Parler.
Now, Parler was a potentially serious competitor, still is, of Twitter.
And the idea of striking at Parler was so that this big tech gang could sort of drive them out of the market.
So, yes, is there an argument for regulation to break up monopolies and prevent these combinations that suppress trade?
Yes, there is. But even though there may be a legal and moral argument, the simple fact is...
The party of regulation, the Democrats that's in power, is not going to do it.
They're not going to do it because they like this suppression.
Big tech is pouring oceans of money into the Democratic Party.
In fact, some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington are places like Amazon, places like Google, and Facebook.
They're bigger lobbyists than even the defense companies now.
So the bottom line of it is the Democrats are not going to do it.
And so if regulation is going to come, it's going to have to come from the state level.
States acting to protect free speech and break up these monopolies, at least the monopolies operating in their state.
And of course the other solution is to create alternative platforms, but the key here is alternative platforms that are immune, that are insulated from this kind of big tech attack.
Self-reliant platforms with their own suppliers that cannot be shut down by Apple or Amazon or Google.
I hope that Parler is doing that and we need more of that so we can ultimately have the kind of free trade, the kind of open competition that conservatives and libertarians value.
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