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March 29, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:04:40
GROPER-IN-CHIEF Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep56
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Coming up, why the left is going berserk over Georgia.
Did the COVID-19 virus come from a Chinese lab?
And Joe Biden says that women are better than men in everything.
We're gonna find out. This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy, and 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 want to talk about the pernicious effect of these woke corporations.
But I want to talk about it from personal experience.
Before I do, I hope you're enjoying the podcast.
Please subscribe. Hit the subscribe button and also the notifications button.
If you're listening on Apple, please rate me five stars.
And please tell other people about the podcast.
Help me get the word out.
Now, turning the topic at hand, The other day I opened my mail and I get a notification from Chase Bank.
And normally I don't pay any attention to these notifications.
They're all legalese and bureaucratic nonsense.
But this one caught my eye because I realized that the point of the notification was they were canceling.
My credit card.
Now, this actually isn't my personal credit card.
It's my business credit card.
My company, D'Souza Media, which makes the movies.
They were canceling that card, which I've actually had for years.
So I thought, wow, what possible reason could there be for doing this?
And there was no reason given at all.
So... I decided to call Chase.
And I called Chase, a very nice operator on the phone.
She says, let me look in your file.
They will definitely provide the reason for why your card is being canceled.
But when they look in, she goes, wow, hmm, interesting.
There's no reason given.
All that I can tell you, Mr.
D'Souza, is that this comes from the sort of high office.
It comes from the central office of Chase.
They have directed us to close your card.
Now, interestingly, the plot in this particular episode thickens a little bit because several years ago, around 2015 or so, I had an account at the Chase Bank.
This is when I lived in La Jolla, California.
And so, this was in the thick of my case with the Obama administration, my campaign finance violations case.
I mosey into the Chase Bank and I'm depositing a check or doing something.
The manager who knew me, who was kind of a fan of mine, said, Mr.
D'Souza, would you step into my office?
I have something very important to tell you.
Chase has closed your account.
And I go, why?
And she goes, well, it's nothing to do with your banking.
You're a very good customer. You have a very good balance.
You never haven't done anything irresponsible or untoward in the banking world.
She goes, this has just come from the top people at Chase.
We've gotten a directive from the main office to close your account.
And at that time, I thought I knew the reason for it.
I thought, well, you know what?
I know what's happened here.
The FBI, as part of my case, has obtained my banking records.
I know this for a fact.
And I know that they have contacted Chase and said, please turn over Mr.
D'Souza's banking record.
So that probably freaked out the people at Chase, and so they've canceled my account.
Now, interestingly, I had accounts at the time, as now, with other banks, and they didn't do that.
So they turned over my banking records, but without closing my account.
But I thought, man, these guys at Chase are such cowards to do this, but big deal, I'll just bank somewhere else.
But what makes the new incident with the credit card more disturbing is that I've had a relationship with Chase for many years with this credit card.
I pay my bills on time.
I'm not, you know, just making the minimum payment.
In fact, as you know, the credit card companies like you to make the minimum payment so they can stick you with sort of usury, you know, minibar prices in terms of interest.
That's how they make their money.
Bottom line of it is these cancellations, both of my account some years ago and of my card now, Come with no explanation whatever.
And so the only possible explanation I can think of, since I can't get one from Chase, is they're sort of targeting me as some kind of a conservative.
And it doesn't even make sense to say, well, Dinesh, you know what?
You're a felon.
You broke the law.
Because the truth of it is, I now have a presidential pardon.
My record is clear.
It's spotless. So that's not even a plausible justification today.
But this is how these woke corporations operate.
And remember, this is not related to January 6th.
I wasn't in the Capitol. I wasn't in storm the Capitol.
I wasn't even there. So it has nothing to do with any of that.
Now, Debbie and I have discovered over the last year or so that we've been seeing a disturbing trend of corporations, these woke corporations, particularly in the film sector, doing pretty much the same thing.
Now, of course, I am not a standard part of Hollywood.
I know it's an intolerant, incestuous world.
I decided to stay out of it.
I make my movies independent of Hollywood.
But we do have some dealings with film companies.
Lionsgate, for example, has distributed a couple of my earlier films.
Universal Pictures has often sold the DVDs and the home box office rights for those films.
They place the films in various retail outlets and so on.
But when I made Trump Card...
I noticed a kind of chill wind blowing through Hollywood.
Suddenly, Lionsgate, which has always been interested, has made a lot of money with us through movies, goes, we're not going to touch this one.
Universal, which initially agreed to distribute the DVD in Homebox Office.
There was literally a revolt at Universal.
All these kind of woke activists who worked there were like, we're not working on any movie related to Trump.
No. No way! No way!
And so the managers of Universal freaked out and succumbed to this internal pressure and basically said, okay, well, we're out.
We're not going to distribute a trump card.
Now, again, we can find ways around all of this.
But I want to highlight what's really disturbing about it all, is essentially what's happening is, because of the ideology of the woke corporation, it's forcing conservatives and Republicans, in the normal course of life, to find their own outlets, in a sense, to create their own alternative universe.
And what that means is, if we can't bank with the woke banks, we've got to bank somewhere else or create our own banks.
If we're thrown off digital platforms, we have to create our own platforms.
And if we create our own platforms like Parler and they try to shut them down, we then have to recreate them completely independent of the other side.
The bottom line of it is we have to sort of create, you may almost say, a politically segregated world.
Now, just this past weekend, Debbie and I saw the movie Green Book.
A green book about a white guy and a black guy traveling through the South, and this was in the middle of the last century, the segregated South.
And it was very striking to see visually, what we already know to be the case intellectually, but to see the separate hotels and the separate restaurants and the separate water fountains, essentially blacks being forced to live in their own world, their own world of their own barber shops and their own everything.
Why? Because they were denied access.
By whites to the white world.
Now, am I saying that political segregation is identical to racial segregation?
No, but there is a similarity.
The similarity is in one case you are denied access because of your race and the other case you're denied access because of your political beliefs.
But in both cases, the victim of this discrimination is compelled by necessity to create, you may say, a segregated world of our own.
It's not de jure segregation.
It's not segregation by law, but it is de facto segregation.
And it is segregation that is not voluntary in the sense that I'd rather not do this.
I'd rather... Live in a common world where I can walk into a store, I can go to a bank, I feel like I should have the right to bank anywhere as long as I'm not violating the banking rules.
But that is, alas, not the America we live in now, and it isn't just the government, it's also the woke corporations that are to blame for it.
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The state of Georgia has just passed an important new law on voter integrity.
And this law, which has now been signed by Governor Kemp, contains all kinds of provisions that are aimed at checking and limiting fraud, abuse, Shenanigans in the voting process.
It establishes limits on mail-in voting.
It expands voters' access to in-person voting, early voting.
And it makes some important alterations to absentee voting rules.
It adds identification voter ID requirements.
The state also sets up a fraud hotline that you can call into if you see things that shouldn't be going on.
There's a requirement that ballot counting can't sort of arbitrarily stop like it did on election night.
It has to keep going once the polls close.
And also, while there is voting by mail-in ballots, state and local governments can't just blast out these ballots promiscuously.
You have to request your ballot, and then you can send it in.
Now, interestingly, the left is screaming about this.
We hear all the usual humbug.
Here's Bill Clinton. An attack on our democracy!
Very similar type of rhetoric coming from Joe Biden.
And of course, the phrase that is being thrown around is voter suppression.
Voter suppression. Now, where's the suppression?
Illegal voters are not voters, by the way.
So if you're suppressing the illegal vote, you're not suppressing the vote.
Voters without ID are de facto illegal.
This is a key point. Think of it this way.
I'm a legitimate traveler.
But if I refuse to produce a valid ID to the TSA when I'm being checked in, I'm not a valid traveler.
I might be a valid traveler, but they have no way of verifying that and therefore I can't get on the plane.
So the bottom line of it is, ID requirements are requirements that authenticate valid voters.
Now interestingly, the left in trying to ramp up the rhetoric, It's very telling that they feel the need to do this, is using the big, I would call it the Jim Crow card.
This is Jim Crow in the 21st century.
That's Biden.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Some of these voter suppression laws in Georgia and other Republican states smack of Jim Crow.
So he's clearly reading right off the script.
Washington Post editorial page echoing exactly the same thing.
They say, potentially amounting to the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction.
This is the kind of inflated nonsense we've come to expect from the media.
Now, let's think about this for a minute.
I think one reason, by the way, they're focusing on Georgia.
By the way, there's debates about election overhaul that is going on in about 20 states.
Here are some of those states, by the way.
Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Maine...
Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah.
Now, does this sound to you like the Deep South?
No. The simple fact of it is voter integrity is an important issue nationwide.
Now, what I find interesting about all this screaming on the part of the left about Georgia is...
I think it can be only explained by one simple fact.
The left knows that this is how they won.
They're screaming because they can't win again if the rules are changed.
In other words, it kind of reminds me a little bit, I don't know if you've seen the movie Tin Men, which features Danny DeVito, a bunch of guys that are running all these scams.
They con people into buying their aluminum products for the house, and they do it by staging before and after photos and so on, which are all bogus.
They're completely created... They're not real before and after houses.
And so finally, the government starts looking into it, starts fixing all these abuses, and the managers to tell these tin men, these salesmen, hey guys, you know, you can't pull off these scams.
And so Danny DeVito goes, well, what about the before and after scam?
They go, oh no, no, you can't do that one either.
And he goes, what? I can't, I can't, what's left?
So the basic idea here is if I can't cheat one way or the other, how am I going to win?
That's the basic idea, and that's the left's basic message.
How are we going to win if we can't cheat?
Now, the Georgia legislature in making these changes seems to be making an important admission or concession, and that is that things weren't done right, or at least right enough, last November.
If they were done right, why change the rules?
Why change the law? So in changing the law, you're acknowledging that, hey, there was a lot of stuff, untoward stuff that shouldn't have happened in Georgia.
We've got to fix it, hence the need for the change.
So I take this as a validation, you might say, of the anxieties of many of us.
What's going on with the election process?
But I also have to make an important qualification to that.
There were many people on the right, many MAGA types, Me included, who were wondering what's going on in Georgia.
And there were accusations, now this not from me, but from others, that the Georgia elected officials are crooks.
They're corrupt. They're in on it.
They've been bought off by Dominion.
They're part of the problem and so on.
And this does not appear to be true, or at least...
If this is true, if this were true, why would these same people, these same Georgia officials who are the bad guys who are in on it, etc., why would they be taking the initiative to change laws that they are the only ones in the power to be able to do?
So the very fact that Governor Kemp has signed this legislation, has in fact pushed it through, It's all an indication to me that we've got to be a little careful here in thinking about what did go on and what is happening in these places now.
I worry a little bit that some of these accusations made against Governor Kemp and against the Georgia Republican establishment cost us the two Senate seats in Georgia and we're paying bitterly for that.
None of the Democratic legislation could even have a chance of going through.
If this were a 52-48 Senate, but it's a 50-50 Senate, we've essentially turned the country over to the Democrats over this.
So this is not a small matter.
This is not something we can afford to get wrong.
So my conclusion from all this, of course I welcome the change in Georgia.
I'd like to see other states.
These states, by the way, have the constitutional authority and responsibility to fix the election laws.
And I'm happy, for one, to see Georgia taking the lead in doing just that.
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In a recent bombshell statement, Robert Redfield, the former director of the Center for Disease Control, the CDC, told Sanjay Gupta of CNN that he thinks that the COVID-19 virus might well have come from the Wuhan lab.
Not just from China, but from the Wuhan lab itself.
Listen. I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped.
Other people don't believe that.
That's fine. Science will eventually figure it out.
It's not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker.
Now, Redfield is...
Kind of laying this out as a suspicion, as a belief, as something that needs to be checked out.
He seems confident it will be checked out.
I'm less confident because the World Health Organization has sent research teams to China, and the Chinese have done everything that they can to block them, or at least to prevent the full information from getting out.
Here's an article in Newsweek.
This is from late last year, December.
China is suppressing research on COVID origins on Xi Jinping's orders.
Documents show.
And it's become very clear that the Chinese have ordered that any findings that have to do with the ideology, as Redfield says, of the virus have got to be cleared and monitored by a Chinese task force that is ultimately answerable to Xi Jinping's cabinet before they can be released.
Now, of course, there are alternative theories that the virus may have come from the Wuhan food market and other theories.
But the key point here is that the Chinese don't seem to want us to know.
Here's another article, AP News.
China clamps down in hidden hunt for coronavirus origins.
And all of this has gotten me thinking in a wide scale.
Did China use this pandemic?
to improve its relative position in the world.
I mean, think about what has happened as a consequence of the virus.
This has weakened not just the economies, but the political structures of governments and societies in Europe and the United States.
And China, after taking a brief hit, has come roaring back.
So China's relative position to Europe and America now is much stronger than it was a year ago.
Stronger economically, stronger politically.
And the reason is COVID. So it doesn't seem unreasonable to ask, did the Chinese sort of foresee, perhaps even intend, for this to happen?
Now, it may seem far-fetched.
To think of germs and plagues and epidemics as being sort of weapons of war.
It may seem odd to think of germs and epidemics as deciding the fate of civilizations.
But here we turn to an important book by the historian William McNeil, published now many years ago, long before COVID. It's called Plagues and Peoples.
And the theme of this book is to say that very important shifts in world history Have occurred precisely because of pandemics and plagues.
The whole point of the book is to show that plagues have had, in many cases, a big impact and in some cases, a decisive impact.
Here are just a couple of telling examples.
There was a massive plague in Rome from 165 to 180 AD. It's called the Antonine Plague.
And it decimated the Roman population and weakened the Roman legions, thus weakening the ability of Rome to hold out against barbarian invaders.
The second plague came in 251 AD. It's called the Plague of Cyprian, which had another massive death toll.
And, says MacNeil, these two plagues taken together are an important reason that the Roman Empire, which seemed...
Undefeatable, impregnable, invincible.
Suddenly Rome seemed fragile and barbarian invaders from the north, the Huns, the Lombards, the Goths, and so on, were able to defeat the Roman legions and bring about the end of Rome.
According to McNeil, China's Han Dynasty was brought down in part by an epidemic.
An epidemic that raged through China and brought down the Han Dynasty.
The Black Death in the 14th century was devastating for Europe.
Wiped out a third of the European population.
By the way, this plague came from Asia.
It was brought to Europe by the Mongols.
So, what McNeil is showing is disease has a huge impact.
When the Spanish conquistadors came to the Americas, they brought with them unwittingly these very same diseases that they had gotten from Asia, that Europe had gotten from Asia.
They brought these diseases, malaria, smallpox, to the Americas.
And the American Indians had no immunities to those diseases.
So guess what happened?
When the Europeans fought the Indians, and for many years historians would think, isn't it amazing you have this small group of European conquistadors, and they're somehow able to defeat vastly larger numbers of Aztecs.
Montezuma had hundreds of thousands on his side.
The Spanish had literally hundreds on their side.
And just because the Spanish had horses and Montezuma didn't, just because the Spanish had firing guns, but they fired very slowly, could that possibly explain the difference between the Spanish and the Mexicans?
No. So what McNeil argues, I think very plausibly, is that what really defeated Montezuma was not...
The Spanish rifles and not the Spanish horses and not even Spanish strategy.
It was the virus.
It was ultimately the diseases that the white man transmitted to the Indians.
So this was not intentionally...
The white man doesn't see this as a weapon of war.
It wasn't a biological weapon.
No, it wasn't intended that way.
But the effect was to wipe out...
The defense and thus enable the Europeans to get a hold of Mexico City and take over the great Aztec Empire.
Bottom line, circling back to today, is that we don't know and we may not know whether the Chinese deliberately did this.
We know that they knew about it.
We know that they didn't inform the world.
So in that sense, their actions were negligent and were intentional in that they did not intend to let us know.
And to this day, they are blocking ways of finding out what the sort of origin of this virus is.
So is it a biological weapon?
Often it may not have been intended that way, but it does seem that that was its effect.
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We have a groper in the White House, and he happens to be our groper in chief, Joe Biden.
During the campaign, all these embarrassing pictures surfaced of Biden pawing and groping and smearing himself onto women, and in some cases young girls, and the whole thing was very distasteful.
But Biden is now engaging in a new form of groping.
Let's think about what groping is, by the way.
Groping is a form of pandering.
It's a kind of disgusting form of appreciation.
And Biden has been engaging in a new type of pandering by making ridiculous statements that I submit even he knows are flatly untrue.
Here's his latest about men and women.
Listen. You know, I've told my daughters, granddaughters, from the time they were old enough to understand what I was saying.
I mean it. There's not a single thing a man can do that a woman can't do as well or better.
Not a single thing.
Debbie and I are actually both laughing because of the preposterousness of this statement.
And what makes it even more comical is Biden's evident sincerity.
He says, I'm serious. He even denies that he's joking.
And yet we know that he knows that it's not true.
This is what I think makes the whole thing so weird.
Let's say that Biden thought it was true.
Women are as good or better than men in everything.
Well, what follows from that?
I would say what follows from that is you need to have a cabinet that's all women because they're better at everything.
Second, you need to have an all-female military because being better at everything, they're obviously better at fighting.
So, let's have all-female platoons and get rid of men in the military.
In fact, we should only go to female doctors because, again, they're better at everything.
In fact, why is Biden even the president?
He should step down and give way to Harris.
She's better! Because she's a woman.
Women are better than everything.
Debbie goes, just wait. It's coming.
That's the part of the plan.
Now, you know, I don't...
This is the kind of thing where I think men and women, in reality, have many complementary skills.
Men are really good at certain things.
Women are clearly more...
Empathetic than men.
If our home example is any indication, they're more organized than men.
Women know how to get things done.
Women are more conscious of the most important things.
And the most important things are the simple things.
Let's make sure we go to church on Sunday.
Let's make sure that we have dinner on the table.
Let's make sure that we take care of the children and that they are properly nourished and that they look after their health.
I think women have, in general, a more balanced view of sexuality than men.
Many years ago, a priest friend of mine said to me, he goes, you know, there's a male view of sexuality and there's a female view of sexuality.
The Christian view is a lot closer to the female view.
I thought a very insightful statement.
Women in some ways are more spiritually attuned, on average, than men.
But you can't, these days, I don't want to say any of these things for the reason that you keep hearing these ridiculous statements by people like Biden.
And you want to, it pushes you to the opposite direction.
It pushes you to challenge Biden in a Socratic mode by saying the exact opposite.
And so I want to push that idea for a moment because it's not just Biden.
You know, there is Megan Rapinoe, the Female soccer player.
I demand equal pay because what I'm doing is just as great as what the men soccer players are doing.
No, it's not. It actually isn't.
You're not playing soccer as well as the men.
You're playing soccer, well, for a woman.
That's the key point.
A reasonably good high school team, a male soccer team for a high school in America, could probably beat the women's soccer team.
Now, do they deserve equal pay?
Do they deserve to make what you're making, Megan Rapinoe?
No. I've talked before on this podcast about the example of chess.
Women are not better than men in chess.
Of the top 100 players in the world, there is one woman, Wu Yifan, the Chinese player.
She's about number 85.
Now you can say, well, chess is cultural, Dinesh.
Well, yes it is, in the sense that some countries play it more than others.
Russians, for example, are really good at chess because they've been playing chess.
It's like a cultural, it's like their cultural pastime, you know, vodka and chess.
But Russian women play chess.
So this is not a male-female distinction, and it explains why there are more Russian grandmasters than there are, for example, Indian grandmasters, although the number of Indian grandmasters is going up.
Can you name a great female philosopher?
Just think about it. Tubby's laughing.
I'm thinking, but I'm coming up blank.
And I bet you are too.
You'd have to go to really, not just the second, but maybe the third rank.
Simone de Beauvoir, who was sort of the live-in housemaid of Jean-Paul Sartre, and who was an important writer in her own right, but not in the league of Plato or Kant or Mill or Nietzsche or...
Or Heidegger. Virginia Woolf, many years ago, wrote an important book.
And here it is.
I have my copy. It's a slim volume.
A room of one's own in which Virginia Woolf examines a very interesting question.
Why is there no female Shakespeare?
And her answer is that the reason is that women have not been given historically a room of their own.
They haven't had the opportunities, as men have, and they haven't been encouraged or educated, perhaps, to be writers in the mode of Shakespeare.
That's why there isn't a female Shakespeare.
But notice that while Virginia Woolf is giving a reason for why there's no female Shakespeare, she's also making kind of a...
Candid admission, there is no female Shakespeare.
So in other words, when it comes to the domain of literature and letters, at the top rank, she's saying, there aren't very many, if any, women, and here is the reason why.
I find it interesting that even in fields where women historically have focused, fields like cooking.
I don't know if I should be saying this, but the best chefs in the world, by and large, are men.
Debbie, you have to admit it's true.
I know you're laughing, but it is true that the top chefs, the top designers, they're men.
Debbie's favorite restaurant has a male chef, yes.
So, here's what it comes down to.
We're just tired, I think, and we want to push back.
the reason that this segment almost approaches misogyny is because there are many of us who are happy to vive la différence, men and women both have a lot to contribute, but we're pushed to the other extreme by a revulsion against the kind of puerile nonsense that is coming out of the leader of the free
I know he's not really all there, but if he's not all there, silence may be the best option, as opposed to uttering stupidities that make the rest of us feel like we have to go to the other extreme.
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Here's a clip. Listen. I told you if we broke attendance records, I'd get the church logo tattooed on my arm.
Skip, remember back when we first started?
All we did was preach the gospel.
Ooh, Superman works.
I like Superman. Guy, what do you think?
What happened to you? Me?
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The power of the Holy Spirit propels us!
I just want the church to get back to the gospel.
The problem is you're trying to get your message across.
The gospel? Right, right, right.
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That's S-A-L-E-M, SalemNow.com.
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I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a friend of mine, whom you may not know, Larry Taunton.
You might be saying, well, I don't know why you have him on.
Well, Larry is a very unusual character.
He's a raconteur, he's a writer, he's a Christian thinker, he's a columnist, and he's written a really interesting book called Around the World in 80 Days.
Hey Larry Taunton, welcome to the podcast.
Glad you could join me.
Let me start by talking about how we met.
Several years ago now, you organized a remarkable debate.
I believe it was in St.
Louis, if I remember, between me and Christopher Hitchens debating Christianity and the existence of God.
Say a little bit about how that came about, and also maybe a little bit of your impressions about Hitchens.
Yeah, first of all, it's great to be with you, Dinesh, and always good to talk to you.
We had done a debate between Professor John Lennox, Oxford Professor John Lennox, and another Oxford professor, the famed atheist Richard Dawkins, and you'd heard about that, and somehow, I have no idea to this day how you managed it, but you got my cell phone, and you called me and asked me about that debate, and If I could arrange one with Dawkins, I suggested that you take on Hitchens.
We did a couple of those.
We did one at the University of North Carolina, you'll recall.
I did one in Birmingham, Alabama, and in St.
Louis. Hitchens was quite a remarkable character.
I wrote a book that did very well called The Faith of Christopher Hitchens.
Remarkable guy. I don't think he'd go along with the things that we're seeing from the left today.
Very interesting. Yeah, what I thought was so cool about that debate, as I recall, is you didn't have it in a church.
You had it in the St.
Louis Museum. So it had this kind of dignified, ornate, and culturally significant milieu.
And I think that gave the debate a certain panache that it may not have otherwise had.
And I think that's what I think about with you.
You do stuff in a cool way.
Now, you conceived a remarkable project...
The project was, I think, modeled on a classic work by a character named Phineas Fogg, Jules Verne.
Am I right? The Around the World in 80 Days?
So this guy, Phineas Fogg, has a bet in which he says, I can get around the world in 80 days.
And to prove the bet, he does it.
Now, you undertook a similar journey to basically get around the world in about the same amount of time.
Why did you do that?
You know, I decided to take the left very seriously of their claim, the claim that we're, we've heard this drumbeat for years now, that America is not great.
Not only that, but it's never been great.
That the idea of American exceptionalism is not only dead, it's offensive.
And so knowing that the average American, 69% of Americans have never been outside of the country.
And I would wager that the other 31% have only been, say, drunk in Tijuana on a Fishing trip in Canada, maybe their honeymoon on a Caribbean cruise.
So I decided I'm going to take you around the world to show you what the rest of the world is like, and we'll see how the left's claim of America not being exceptional holds up.
Now, you traveled with your young son, as I recall.
The two of you went together.
And you went to a whole bunch of places.
But before you set out, you say in the book that when you look at these sort of travel guides, which supposedly rank the best places in the world...
You note that it's a little bit of a stacked agenda because America actually doesn't show up in the top of the list.
You see countries like Norway and Germany, the Netherlands, Iceland, Canada.
But when you begin to look at the criteria by which they're choosing these places for being super great, what do you discover?
Well, when, you know, we see released in these headlines annually about this time of year, in fact, I think they were released just a few weeks ago, the UN releases their World Happiness Index.
Now, you would think that that is based, Dinesh, on somebody who's coming to you and saying, hey, are you, are you and Debbie, are you happy?
Do you like living in this country?
But it isn't. What they do is they rig the data to get particular results.
And when you start looking at the data, you realize that it has to do not just simply with things like safety or healthcare or access to clean water, which are part of the criteria, but it has to do with things like, what are their policies on transgender issues?
What are the availability of gay bars?
Things of this nature.
And they use mathematics in a way that just gets the results that they want.
And so when I started looking at the World Happiness Index and the way that they were getting this, this fog of data, I realized this isn't trustworthy at all.
Even though people are seeing headlines that say Norway is the happiest country in the world or Denmark, it's all fraudulent.
Now, off you go to different places.
I think one of the few places you didn't get to because they denied your visa was China, but you did get to Singapore, which in some ways, arguably, the Chinese are loosely basing their model, and by their model, I mean, I would call it totalitarian capitalism.
They're totalitarian in politics, or at least highly controlled.
And at the same time, they have markets, and they use markets to generate prosperity, which supposedly reconciles their citizens to the political liberty that they don't have.
You said that Singapore is actually a nice place to live.
It's clean, you know, they clean up the sidewalk, they make sure that the drug addicts are locked up and so on.
But there was something about it that gave you the creeps.
What was that? Well, first of all, I had been in China, which was why the Chinese banned my entry this time.
They didn't like my activities in China.
And what you're seeing in Singapore mirrors what's happening in China.
And that is, you know, it's not actually communist.
It's actually quite fascist.
I mean, they are combining a free market economy with a totalitarian regime.
And there's a sense in which, in these countries, If you don't fall afoul of the law, it feels wonderful.
I mean, it's incredibly efficient.
The democracy can be quite clumsy.
But there's no respect for civil liberties.
And if you do fall afoul of the law, I mean, you're in trouble because they're not ruled by a constitution.
They're a government with a constitution.
And that's a very different thing, which means they just make up the rules as they go.
You go off to India and you have an interesting conversation with this Indian fellow where you ask him, what did the British contribute to India, if anything?
Was there anything good that the British did to India?
What was his answer and what was your impression of India?
Well, tea and cricket is what he said.
He was quite learned, a historian.
It was quite amusing.
And of course, I'm quite intimidated to discuss India with you, an Indian.
But, you know, India is so remarkably diverse.
In fact, I came away with the impression it's the most diverse country in the world, more than 11,000 indigenous languages.
The The country itself is often spoken up in the West as the next great superpower.
I came away with the feeling that if that's the case, India is decades away from that status, meaning that it is a country of haves and have-nots.
There's no real middle class to speak of.
The poverty is on a staggering scale.
And democracy, at least in the sense in which we understand it, really doesn't exist there because of the strict class stratification.
Now, these are my impressions.
Now, you might push back at that and say I'm wrong about all of that, but these are the impressions that I left with.
We'll be back in a moment to talk more about India, but I also want to talk to Larry about what conclusions he draws from this global adventure, what he learns not just about the world, but in the end also about America.
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I'm back with my friend Larry Taunton.
We're talking about his terrific, entertaining, but also illuminating, a book around the world in 80 Days.
We were talking a little bit about India and about whether India is destined to be a world superpower.
It's my impression, Larry, and to be honest, I lived in India until I was 17, but I haven't lived there since.
I have family there. I go back and forth.
But one reason I'm a little reluctant to comment, for example, on the nuances of Indian politics is I don't follow them.
But my impression of India is that the Indians today are very pro-American.
And even their attitude toward the British, you know, I grew up in an era of anti-colonialism.
It was sort of fashionable to denounce the British.
They stole the wealth of India and so on.
But there wasn't all that much wealth to steal.
The point that the Indians, I think, today have a much greater appreciation that what they got from the British far more than tea and cricket.
They also got laws.
They got democracy. They got the idea of human dignity.
They got technology.
All these wonderful Indian institutes all around the country which are training graduates in science and technology.
All of that began under the British and then continued under, of course, Indian governments one after the other.
Is it your impression that the Indians would make good partners for America in an effort, let's say, to block the totalitarian strain, not only coming from China, but also coming from other parts of the world, the radical Islamic regimes, for example?
Absolutely. Because they get it.
And as you indicated, you know, the guy that we were speaking of earlier, he was half joking when he said that the British only, you know, contributed tea and cricket.
He had a deep admiration and respect for what the British had bequeathed to India.
And he would admit to you that their departure has left a gap that they have yet really to fill, but I think they want to.
And so, yes, I think that India is a very logical partner for the United States.
In Nigeria, you say the following.
You founded the place overall to be quite dark, I think, in many respects.
But you say that the Nigerian Christians are joyous, they're optimistic, they're ready to defend themselves.
So I take you to be saying that Christianity, which can become kind of lethargic or sort of take it for granted in the West...
Because it is imperiled, embattled, endangered, the Christians become tougher.
And they not only become tougher under adversity, but in some ways they become weirdly, I would say, more joyous because through struggle they have a greater maybe sense of spiritual purpose and accomplishment.
Is that what you were getting at in commenting about the Christians in Nigeria?
Yeah, see, the Nigerian Christians were remarkable people.
I rate that country, you know, we gave them stars like you would on Yelp, you know, or a movie review.
The country we rated a 1 out of 10, but we rated the Nigerian Christians a 10 out of 10.
They were brave.
Nobody goes to church in Nigeria just to see and be seen.
There are risks that are inherent to being a Christian in that country.
Due to Boko Haram, the Fulani herdsmen militia, we see almost daily that there are attacks in that country against Christians.
And so, yes, it has produced a kind of pearl in those Nigerian Christians that, in many respects, as a Christian, a Western Christian, I did not feel worthy of those people.
At the end of Jules Verne's novel, he writes the following, Phineas Fogg had won his wager.
He had made his journey around the world in 80 days.
He had used every means of conveyance, steamers, railways, carriages, yachts, trading vessels, sledges, elephants.
The eccentric gentleman had displayed all his marvelous qualities of coolness and exactitude.
And then he writes, but what then?
What had he really gained by all this trouble?
What had he brought back from this long and weary journey?
And my question to you is, what did you bring back from this long and weary journey?
What is your conclusion, both about the world and about America?
Well, there are several things.
I hope I came back a somewhat wiser man.
But one of the remarkable conclusions...
First of all, I've been in 56 countries.
I traveled a lot before this.
So I kind of had a general idea of what I was going to get.
But one of the things I came back with was this sense of nervousness and anxiety in much of the rest of the world about America's current identity crisis.
That they're not liking what they're seeing.
And they... They believe America to be exceptional and they don't understand why Americans themselves cannot see that America is exceptional.
Gallup did a global poll, which I think this is very important here, rather than looking at what the World Happiness Index has to tell us.
They did a global poll to see how many people would like to immigrate around the world permanently.
14% of the world's population said that they would like to immigrate permanently.
That's 700 million people.
And of that number, 26% said they wanted to come to the United States.
Now, the next highest country was Germany at 6%.
So that tells you that the rest of the world believes America is exceptional.
And they don't want to come to America that's a socialist state.
They don't want to come to America that has They don't want to come to America that has annihilated and given away its freedoms.
Part of what you seem to be saying is that the America you're defending isn't necessarily America per se, but a certain conception or ideal of America.
Are you worried that that ideal of America is eroding in America and that some of the elements that you've actually seen, negative elements in the rest of the world, for example, you mentioned that Singapore is a surveillance state.
We're becoming increasingly a surveillance state.
You can talk about the denial of civil liberty, censorship in other countries.
You know, we're one to talk.
Probably the two biggest censors in the world today are Xi Jinping and Mark Zuckerberg.
So the fact of the matter is that some of these trends are now exhibiting themselves in America.
Are we Americans, do we have to fight to preserve the America that is in fact an example to the world?
Yes, we do have to fight to preserve it.
And those people who have come from those kinds of countries, from China, from Vietnam, from Russia, from the old East Bloc, Soviet Union, they quite readily recognize these things that are happening in the United States because they've seen this movie before.
So I think that we have to wake up and I think that we have to begin addressing these things in a very big way.
I mean, now Biden is floating this idea of a Larry, I want to thank you for coming on the podcast.
We'd love to have you back. You've been a great guest.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Dinesh.
It's been a real pleasure for me to be with you.
Let's talk about censorship on social media sites and what you can do about it.
The left wants to silence and remove any voices they don't agree with.
Twitter and Facebook were supposed to be open platforms.
I don't need their content moderators acting like the op-ed section of the New York Times.
So instead of letting social media sites revoke your right to free speech, how about revoking their right to your data?
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I know that these days pollution and climate change are said to be responsible pretty much for everything.
All bad outcomes are due to climate change.
It's getting too hot?
Climate change. It's getting too cold?
Climate change. Hurricanes?
Climate change. Fires?
Climate change. The latest one took me aback.
I think it's taken things to a bit of a new level here.
This is an article from Sky News.
Human penises are shrinking.
What? Due to pollution and climate change.
A very disturbing concept.
And initially I thought, what?
I better go to the closet and check myself out to see if this is in fact the case.
No change. No observable change at all.
Debbie's warning me I may be crossing the line here.
But my point is I came back to the article and I realized I was sort of misreading the article because the article goes on to say penises are shrinking and genitals becoming malformed.
Malformed. And there's a researcher, Dr.
Shanna Swan, Who says that humanity may be facing, if this continues, an existential crisis.
It has to do with a chemical that's called phthalates.
Apparently this is a chemical that is used in plastics.
It's used to make toys.
It's also actually used in small quantities in food.
And according to this researcher in a book that's called Countdown, she says, how our modern world is threatening sperm counts, altering male and female reproductive development, and imperiling the future of the human race.
So apparently it doesn't apply to me or you.
She's trying to say that you might be seeing this in newborn infants.
So apparently Dr. Swan's research began by looking at the effect of this chemical in rats.
And when given insufficient doses, the rats developed shrunken genitals.
And so I guess making the leap from rats to humans, she thinks that it may be that in the future, we will have infants born all over the world.
Who, well, aren't as well endowed as you and me, apparently.
And that this will have a negative impact on future populations.
I think, really, that this is ultimately...
The real motive of this sort of article is completely different.
It is to console leftists...
That the reason that they may be kind of small in that department is not because they have been cruelly endowed by nature.
Don't blame nature. Blame climate change.
Climate change is responsible so that the solution ultimately is go convince people Who use plastics?
Not to do it.
Go convince people to recycle more.
Maybe if you put the right policies in place, the Green New Deal, the effect will be that your ding-dong might get larger.
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I'm back for the last segment, which is the question, and I've got to say I've taken a little backlash here in the studio from my wife about...
Crossing the line, or at least approaching the line with the last segment.
Anyway, it's time for a question, and so let's go.
Hi, Dinesh. I was wondering what your opinion was on tolerance and what true tolerance would look like.
The other side of the aisle today is clearly more intolerant than we are, but obviously we don't want to be too tolerant, and during this clear political awakening, accept things which we don't stand for.
What is true tolerance, and how can we practice distinguishing when to be intolerant and when not to?
Thank you. Very good question.
Should we, well, part of it is, should we respond to intolerance with intolerance?
Now, earlier in this segment, I talked about the intolerance of the Chase Bank in canceling my credit card.
How should I respond?
Should I respond with kind of gentle acceptance, or should I respond in a somewhat more forceful way?
Well, I happen to have right here, this is my Chase card that I brought with me.
And I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a scissors and cut it.
There it goes. And then perhaps I'll cut it again.
And it might be a good idea if you have a Chase card.
These days, credit cards are very easy to come by and you're a little annoyed at Chase.
You might consider cutting up your card.
These people deserve to be taught a lesson.
Let me address the issue of tolerance in a maybe a little more reflective way.
Tolerance implies that you have a strong conviction behind it, because if you don't, if you don't think something is bad or wrong or evil, then there's no question of tolerance.
In fact, if you're a true relativist, a moral relativist, For example, and you think to each his own, it follows that you can't be tolerant because there's nothing to be tolerant of.
Tolerance implies that there is an original objection or even revulsion.
By the way, you might say, well, the left, they're relativists.
How can they be intolerant?
Well, they're not relativists, in fact.
There are many things that they hate.
And in the name of hating them, white supremacy and racism, fighting sexism, fighting homophobia, this provides the moral justification for their intolerance.
Now for our side, Why be tolerant?
That's kind of the question in the first place.
Why live and let live?
Is it just because we have to coexist in our society?
I would say no. Tolerance actually is a virtue.
And it's a virtue because we need to make a distinction between what is legal and what is moral.
So, for example, lying is immoral, but most forms of lying are not illegal.
Greed is immoral.
Selfishness is immoral.
But it's not always illegal.
And so you tolerate something even though it's wrong because it can be wrong and still not against the law.
Another reason to be tolerant is because we make a distinction between virtue and its enforcement.
There might be something that is wrong and someone else is doing it, but it's not my job to correct them.
Just like if I see someone take an illegal parking space, that's wrong.
That's actually against the law, but I'm not a cop.
It's not my job to enforce the law.
And so similarly, even when it comes to private action, someone is doing something that I object to, I think is wrong, and it is wrong.
But nevertheless, it is not my position.
It's not right for me to jump in and be the adjudicator, the corrector, the judge and jury, you might say.
And so I tolerate it.
Because I recognize that the other person has dignity, they have rights, they have free choices, and they can be held accountable in the proper forum.
So tolerance takes forbearance, it takes fortitude, it takes self-control.
That's what makes tolerance a virtue.
But at the same time, in situations where we are faced with massive intolerance, we may have to suspend our tolerance.
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