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April 6, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
58:30
GANG OF THREE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep62
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The gang of three, the three biggest enemies of free speech in the world.
One is Xi Jinping, the premier of China.
Can you guess who the other two are?
And why the old censors, the censors in the old days, were actually more judicious, more intelligent than these dudes?
A lot more coming up.
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.
Censorship is clearly one of the most serious problems facing our society and the world.
world.
Recently, Facebook took down an interview conducted by Laura Trump of her dad, former President Trump.
So not only has Trump himself But now it turns out that even if you do interviews with him, by the way, remember, this is the leading voice in the Republican Party.
This is the person setting the tone for the GOP for the future, and yet his conversations, even in a news context, even in an interview, are prohibited.
Recently, I interviewed attorney Sidney Powell.
I was provoked to do this by an interview I saw with Jake Tapper.
Jake Tapper was talking about the Sidney Powell case with Dominion.
And Jake Tapper was jubilant about the fact that Sidney Powell had backtracked.
She had reversed, he said, the statements that she made last year.
She was now taking it all back.
She was admitting that her statements were Pure opinion and not fact.
And I was like, wow, is this really true?
So I asked Sidney Powell to come on my podcast.
And she did. But I realized I can't post the podcast.
Why? Because if I post it on certain platforms, such as YouTube, they will take it down.
Why? On the same logic that Facebook took down President Trump's interview.
So not only do we have censorship, but now we have, in a sense, the prospect of self-censorship.
I don't want the video to be taken down.
I obviously don't want to be banned.
I don't want the podcast to be banned.
So I don't post it on YouTube at all.
Now, I did post it on Rumble, and you can watch it there.
But this is the insidious nature of censorship.
And like everything, it begins with one issue.
So initially, digital media censorship began with, you know, you can't talk, you can't say certain things about COVID-19.
You can't talk about hydroxychloroquine.
That's That's a no-no.
We'll take you down if you do that.
Then it moved to the election.
You can't talk about election fraud.
You can't talk about voter fraud.
If you do, we'll take you down.
And there's no reason to believe that this is not going to keep expanding to other issues.
So I think to myself, who are the three biggest...
Who are the people shutting speech down on the most massive scale?
Well, one of them is obviously Xi Jinping, the head of China, the dictator of China.
This guy is regulating not only the speech, but the lives of a billion people.
So that is horrific.
There are two other names that belong kind of in the same camp.
Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.
They have platforms that cover hundreds of millions if not billions of people and they are censoring kind of on the same scale.
So they're not regulating our lives but they are shutting our mouths.
They're preventing us from discussing relevant issues.
And this, I think, is a serious problem.
Now, it's not just a problem, you may say, for civil liberties.
It is. It is shutting down our free speech.
Why? Because even though these are not government entities, they are quasi-government entities.
Why? Because they enjoy government protections.
They have Section 230 protection, which immunizes them from lawsuits and vulnerability, so they are allied with the government.
They're getting special subsidies.
And they are restricting our free speech rights because they are now the new public square.
But it's more than that.
There are also threats to our democracy.
Just as Xi Jinping is a threat to democracy in China, he won't allow it.
These guys are threats to democracy.
Why? Because they are big enough that they control the flow of information that has a direct impact on democratic outcomes.
Google searches, for example, they can rig the searches so you only see certain types of information.
And a Google engineer testified recently, hey, they're able to shift Really, millions of votes in a single election.
Or think about the ways in which the digital platforms conspired, worked together, worked in coordination or tandem to shut down the Hunter Biden story.
They're still covering for Joe Biden.
In fact, when you look at Joe Biden's likes and dislikes, there are a lot of dislikes, so they take off the dislikes.
So people can't see how unpopular this guy is.
What a negative reaction, what a contemptuous reaction he provokes from people.
But the point to make about these digital censors is not just that they are threats to civil liberties or democracy.
They're threats to both.
But they're also unbelievably dumb.
They don't know what's going on.
Now, they're good at certain things.
They know how to program. But, you know, every wife knows that her husband may be good in one thing and unbelievably stupid in everything else.
You've got people who are good in one thing who don't know how to put their pants on properly.
And so I think you can see it's very obvious when these guys show up for any public hearing.
Recently, Ted Cruz, for example, was grilling Jack Dorsey of Twitter.
Here's a few moments from that exchange.
Listen. Mr.
Dorsey, does voter fraud exist?
I don't know for certain.
Are you an expert in voter fraud?
No, I'm not. Well, why then is Twitter right now putting purported warnings on virtually any statement about voter fraud?
We're simply linking to a broader conversation so that people have more information.
No, you're not. You put up a page that says, quote, voter fraud of any kind is exceedingly rare in the United States.
That's not linking to a broader conversation.
That's taking a disputed policy position, and you're a publisher when you're doing that.
You're entitled to take a policy position, but you don't get to pretend you're not a publisher and get a special benefit under Section 230 as a result.
That link is pointing to a broader conversation with tweets from publishers and people all around the country.
Wow! Look at that guy!
I mean, there are two things that strike me about him.
The first is, he's a moral coward.
He's a moral coward because he can't take responsibility for his own decisions.
He's got to say, oh, he's got to appeal to some neutral process.
Well, we're simply consulting processes out there.
I mean, the obtuseness of this statement.
Obviously, he's selecting what sources he wants to rely on.
So, he can't even take responsibility.
He has to lean on these other sources or authorities.
But the second thing, you're dealing with an absolute idiot.
You're dealing with a guy who knows nothing about voter fraud.
In fact, I would submit he knows very little about politics itself.
So the very guy regulating our political discourse, and the same could be said of Zuckerberg, you've got these two digital nerds.
And they decide what goes.
They're the ones... So, the point I want to make here is I think back to the old censors.
Because we think we've come in this modern era of free speech and civil liberties.
And in the old days, you know, there was the Catholic Church.
There was all this censorship.
You couldn't... Books were burned.
Books were prohibited.
The church, of course, had its notorious index prohibitorum.
Part of what I want to show, and I'll show this in the next segment in depth, looking at the Galileo case in particular, because we have a lot of information about that case, that the old censors, the old guys, the primitive guys, the guys from 200 years ago, were actually more refined, more judicious, more tolerant, and more sophisticated than our gang of idiots.
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We're living in an age of censorship.
Censorship you may say of heresy.
The word heresy itself simply means deviation, a deviation from orthodoxy.
The censorship we have today is political censorship, and the kind of speech it outlaws is political heresy.
In the past, of course, you had ecclesiastical institutions and other institutions that censored political heresy, but also religious heresy.
I want to talk in some depth about the Galileo case because it shows me how the old censors, the censors of two or three hundred years ago, were actually more judicious, more enlightened, smarter than the gang of idiots that we have controlling our public discourse.
The church authorities, in fact, were more enlightened than Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg and certainly Xi Jinping of China.
I'm going to talk about the Galileo case.
I have a whole chapter on it in my book, What's So Great About Christianity?
This is a book I really think you should have and read.
And, well, it's sort of my red book, kind of my answer to Mao's red book.
And Mao required that his red book be carried by Chinese people at all times.
Now, this is actually the ideal.
I'd like you to carry the book with you at all times, but I'm not going to require it.
I think at the least you should own the book and read the book.
Now, back to Galileo.
There's a lot of misinformation surrounding Galileo.
People think... Oh, Galileo stood in front of the Inquisition and said, you know, the famous words, and yet it moves, meaning the earth moves.
Actually, he didn't do that.
Or, Galileo went to the top of the Tower of Pisa and he dropped a large object and a small object, large and small here meaning less massive and more massive, and he discovered the two objects hit the ground at the same time.
First of all, that's not true.
Galileo didn't do that.
And the truth of it is, if you go to the top of the Tower of Pisa right now and you drop a large and a small object, you'll discover the large object hits the ground first.
You try, drop a feather and a baseball.
You see which one hits the ground first.
The truth of it is, the two objects will hit the ground at the same time in the absence of air resistance, but obviously there is air resistance outside the Tower of Pisa.
Now, The Galileo controversy had to do with heliocentrism, the idea that the sun and not the earth is at the center of the universe, or at least the center of the solar system.
This was not a controversy, by the way, about whether the earth is round.
There's a lot of nonsense that people believe about, oh, the church believed for centuries in the medieval era that the earth is flat.
No, not true. The ancient Greeks 500 years before Christ knew that the earth is round and the church knew that the earth was round from day one.
That's not what it was all about.
The truth of it is you don't need sophisticated instruments to figure out that the earth is round.
If you watch a ship go over the horizon, if the earth was flat, the whole ship would slowly disappear at the same time.
But in reality, the hull disappears first.
You can still see the sails.
The sails then go over.
Why? That's because the surface of the earth is curved.
Or think of an eclipse.
Here's the sun, here's the earth, here's the moon.
You can see the shadow of the earth on the moon.
Hey guys, it's round.
Everybody knew, every educated person in the West knew that the earth is round.
So the Galileo controversy had nothing to do with that.
Galileo basically maintained, contrary to the Tolmaic system, which was the prevailing idea endorsed by the church, Galileo maintained, no, it is the sun that's at the center and the earth goes around the sun.
Now, Galileo had some good arguments for why he thought this was the case.
He had looked at the moons of Jupiter.
He had also seen sunspots that convinced him that this was the case, the phases of Venus.
And so Galileo made his arguments, and he took them to the most sophisticated astronomers of his time, which were the Jesuits.
The Jesuits had their own laboratories, their own equipment, their own observatories.
And the Jesuits looked at Galileo's arguments and they said, well, these are pretty good.
They do push in the direction of your theory, but they're not convincing.
In fact, there are strong counter-arguments that the Jesuits had, and some of them were really based on common sense.
The Jesuits said, for example, listen...
If it is true that the Sun is at the center of the solar system and the Earth goes around the Sun, the Earth is moving then at a breakneck speed, if you throw an object in the air, it shouldn't land in the same place.
It should land miles away.
Why? Because the Earth has moved in the meantime.
So these kinds of commonsensical arguments were used against Galileo.
Now Galileo had his own arguments, but a number of his arguments were completely wrong.
For example, Galileo thought that because the Earth is going around the Sun, That's what causes the tides.
The Earth is sort of, by its motion, sloshing around the water in the oceans, and that's why the tides are caused.
Of course, we know now that this is completely wrong.
The tides are actually caused by the gravitational force of the Sun and the Moon acting upon the Earth.
So Galileo was completely mistaken.
Galileo also thought, by the way, that planets move in circular orbits.
Kepler had already shown that planets move in elliptical orbits.
Galileo said that Kepler was wrong, but we now know that Galileo was wrong.
Now, this argument now goes to the head of the Inquisition, a fellow named Cardinal Bellarmine.
And I want to point to Cardinal Bellarmine because he was kind of the Jack Dorsey of his own day.
He was kind of the Mark Zuckerberg, the chief censor of the Catholic Church.
And this is what Bellarmine says to Galileo.
It's very instructive. By the way, Galileo is brought to Rome.
He's not treated as a criminal.
He's actually living in the Grand Medici Villa.
He's treated as a celebrity.
In he comes to see Cardinal Bellarmine, a very educated man, by the way, and Bellarmine says to Galileo the following.
He goes, If there were a real proof that the sun is the center of the universe and that the sun does not go around the earth but the earth around the sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of scripture which appear to teach the contrary and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true.
But this is not a thing to be done in haste.
And as for myself, I shall not believe that there are such proofs until they are shown to me.
So here's what Bellarmine is saying.
Bellarmine is saying that we all know, we've been interpreting scripture, in fact a line here, a line there, to say that the earth is at the center of the universe.
But, Scripture isn't wrong, but our interpretation could be wrong.
But we've been teaching this for a long time.
So, Bellarmine says, unless we're fully convinced that this interpretation is wrong, then we're not going to change it.
In other words, we've been teaching this for hundreds of years, and you, Galileo, have shown up with a couple of arguments which are not entirely convincing, and so you want us to change several hundred years of church teaching because you have a theory?
So, Bellarmine proposes to Galileo a solution that actually is kind of a model of common sense.
He says, listen, Galileo, I'm not telling you not to continue your researches.
You're actually one of the most valued scientists in the Catholic orbit in Italy, so keep working!
Just don't publish for a popular audience.
Why? You don't want to confuse the lady.
You don't want to confuse the man in the pew.
So keep doing your work.
And so what I'm getting at here is that the old censors are approaching Galileo, not with intolerance, not with hatred, not with, we're going to kick you off our platform.
None of that. The basic idea here is that Galileo continues his theories.
Remember that the The full evidence for why Galileo, it turns out, was right, of course.
The sun is at the center, the earth goes around the sun, but the evidence for that didn't come in until 50 years later.
50 years later, there was a consensus that yes, Galileo was in fact right.
At the time, this was not a decided proposition.
What's the bottom line of all this?
The bottom line of all this is simply this.
That the old censorship, and by the way, I'm against all censorship.
I don't think it's a good idea at all to restrict people from speaking.
I believe the truth can defeat error in open debate.
I have this kind of Socratic confidence in the power of free speech and the power of debate.
But the point is that if you're going to measure the old censors against the new, it's a simple fact that the old censors were a lot better and a lot smarter.
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The New York Times is in a case with Project Veritas.
A case that is very revealing because the type of defense that the Times is adopting in this case.
So this is a case In which Project Veritas released a video, or perhaps more than one video, in which they were showing a Minneapolis Somali immigrant essentially being part of a kind of vote-buying scheme.
The guy was going door-to-door, and he was telling voters, this year you're going to vote for Ilhan.
When we sign the voting document and they fill it out, that's when they give us the money.
So he was basically saying that people are going to be paid.
For voting for Ilhan Omar, a clearly corrupt and illegal scheme depicted on camera.
So the New York Times did a series of stories on these, and two of its reporters in particular, Maggie Astor and Tiffany Zhu, HSU. And these people basically said, they call these stories lies and disinformation.
In fact, they said they were part of a coordinated disinformation effort, and they said that these were unidentified sources and no verified evidence, no verifiable evidence.
Now, of course, Project Veritas goes, they're not unidentified, they're identified in the video, and the verifiable evidence is the video itself.
And so, where's the disinformation?
So, Project Veritas sued the Times for libel, but here's where the plot thickens, because the Times basically then says, and remember, in the Times article, there was no effort to refute these videos.
The Times didn't say, no, that guy wasn't doing that, he was doing something else.
Not at all. There's no effort to show that the videos are inaccurate at all.
So, the Times goes in its defense, this is not a claim of fact.
This is only a claim of opinion.
So, the Times is now saying that their word disinformation doesn't mean, their word lies don't refer to lies.
Rather, this was merely the opinion of the two writers.
Well, if it's the opinion of two writers, Judge Charles Wood says, he goes, why didn't it appear in the opinion section?
The Times is actually putting it in the news section.
So what the Times is doing is blurring or obliterating the distinction between news and opinion.
In fact, Judge Wood, who's hearing the case, pointed out that the Times' own editorial policies, which are published on the New York Times website, prohibit news reporters from injecting their subjective opinions into news stories published by the New York Times, because then the audience, the New York Times readers, can't tell the difference.
Is the New York Times merely stating an opinion, or is it actually stating news or facts?
The judge gave a very telling example.
He says, if you're talking, for example, about a fight of the century, and you say, you know, that fight of the century was really disappointing, or that it wasn't worth the pay-per-view fee.
He goes, that is a claim of opinion.
You're saying, ah, it was overrated.
But he goes, that's completely different than reporting to the public that pay-per-view knowingly marketed the fight that was fixed.
That claim is a claim about facts.
And you can't take refuge once you accuse them of fixing the fight.
Say, oh no, that was just my opinion.
No. The judge goes, that is open for scrutiny as to whether or not you defamed this person.
So the bottom line of it is the case is moving forward.
By the way, there's another case coming up in which the New York Times...
This is involving New York Times versus Sarah Palin.
The New York Times said that Sarah Palin's incitement rhetoric...
She incited the 2011 shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.
Now, the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was done by a mentally ill guy of no known political affiliation who was completely unconnected to Sarah Palin.
Sarah Palin had nothing to do with it.
He wasn't even aware of her so-called insightful...
Her rhetoric of incitement.
So that case is coming up in August.
The bottom line of it is I think we all know that the Times is no longer a real newspaper.
The Times is now essentially New York's version of Pravda.
It's essentially a wing or an extension of the left wing of the Democratic Party.
And what's particularly interesting, and I think in a way a very positive development, is that the Times seizing to be a newspaper is now making the Times less It has less recourse to the normal libel protections that you could invoke in the past.
Hey, listen, I'm a reputable newspaper.
I'm obviously presenting facts.
No, they now admit that they're not presenting facts.
Even what appears in the news pages is actually opinion, but often tendentious opinion and lies.
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When it comes to climate change, we're often told to listen to the science, but what makes me really chuckle is how distant, how remote climate change is from any normal scientific theory.
It was the philosopher Karl Popper who said that a good scientific theory should be very narrow.
By which he meant it should make predictions that are highly specific or, in his own word, testable.
They should be predictions that are open to being refuted because then you know that your theory is wrong.
Notice that climate change scientists, they're not real scientists, most of them, they don't do that.
They essentially look at anything that happens.
It's essentially up, it's climate change.
Down, it's climate change.
Hot, climate change.
Cold, climate change.
Hurricanes, climate change.
No hurricanes, climate change.
So, this is, this reminds me not of a climate, not of science at all, but you could say the worst excesses of televangelism, in which pretty much everything is God's will.
The guy lived. That was God's will.
The guy died. That was God's will.
Now, it could be that that is God's will, in fact.
But the truth of it is, this does not satisfy the requirements of a theory that is making a prediction.
If you want to make a prediction, make narrow, accurate predictions and we'll see if they come true.
Now, very interestingly, there is a climate change conference that's going on.
And I want to talk about the Indian energy minister and how he kind of spoiled the picnic with some of the politically incorrect things that he said.
But they're important because they reflect the point of view of all developing countries.
Essentially, the West is trying to lead this climate change effort.
Oh, we're going to restrict the release of carbons.
We're going to do this. We're going to do that.
And this guy basically says, it's all nonsense, or to put it in his words, it's pie in the sky.
The Indian guy actually bothered to show up.
China hasn't even bothered to show up because I think they realize this stuff is all a comic joke and they want no part of it.
Now, here's the idea.
Basically, the idea here, and this is part of the Paris Accords, and the Biden administration has signed on to them, we've apparently got to reach net zero in terms of global temperature by 2050.
And this requires, because if we don't do that apparently, then the temperature of the Earth is going to go over 1.5 degrees centigrade, which is apparently a great danger.
The Earth has never survived something like this 1.5 degrees increase in global temperature.
Now, the net zero idea here is you have to balance out the greenhouse gas emissions.
Obviously, there are more gases released by certain things, but you've got to remove an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases in other ways so that you get net zero.
And the US is on board, the UK is on board, the EU is on board.
India is not on board.
And so the Indian Minister, the Energy Minister, Rajkumar Singh, he goes, he's talking about this net zero idea, he goes, I'm sorry to say this, but it is pie in the sky.
And here's what Mr.
Singh says, which is actually worth listening to.
He goes, listen, he goes, first of all, the developing countries are not on board with this.
The rich countries, he says, have been releasing these carbon gases into the atmosphere for a century.
And he goes, now, suddenly they've all decided, let's stop everybody from doing it.
He goes, no way. He goes, the developed world has occupied The developed world has occupied 80% of the carbon space already.
So he's saying historically the developed world has released 80% of the carbon into the atmosphere.
He goes, you now have 800 million people in the world who don't have access to electricity.
You can't say that they have to go to net zero.
They have every right to develop.
They want to build skyscrapers.
They want to have a higher standard of living.
You can't stop it.
So what he's basically saying is, we in India, and you could add we in China, are going to pay no attention to any of this nonsense.
He's saying, we in India want to develop, we're going to develop, nothing you can do is going to stop us.
And of course, John Kerry, the great sort of diplomat, realized, ah, things are getting a little out of hand.
So he basically goes, oh, listen, we're not going to impose the same carbon requirements on every country.
He just goes, we're just saying that every country needs to do more.
So this is the kind of blabbermouth irrelevancy for which this guy has made a whole career on.
We're not saying we're going to ask everyone to do the same.
You know, this kind of stuff.
The bottom line of it is, this whole climate change thing is essentially...
A power grab inside of the West.
The reason Western governments like it is it's a way to regulate their own populations.
It has nothing to do with any problems in the world.
And the good news is that the developing world is on to the scam.
And they basically realize, hey listen, we have every right to develop.
We're not going to listen to all these clowns who come to these conferences and tell us, do this, don't use plastic, don't build skyscrapers, don't drive cars.
Essentially this has become a worldwide joke.
And I think the good news is that this Rajkumar Singh fellow is actually completely right.
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The Postmaster General Louis DeJoy recently appeared before Congress and he unfurled his 10-year plan for the post office.
It involves, one, higher prices, second, longer delays, longer first-class mail delivery, and third, reduced post office hours, So, the bottom line of it is the post office is losing a deluge of money.
And his way of losing less money, I guess, is to make the post office a more scaled-back operation.
So, it'll charge more and it will do less.
And, of course, the reaction to this is from a lot of pompous people saying, oh, fire this guy, get rid of him, and so on.
If that's your attitude, if you want to fire this guy, you should fire everyone in the federal government.
Why? Because this is the way government is.
Inefficient. Even the types of government that conservatives like, oh, I like the Defense Department.
Well, in this sense, they're no different.
The Defense Department notoriously spends $300 on a coffee pot.
Why? Well, they'll say, well, it's really, Dinesh, because see, this coffee pot is on an airplane.
It's not the same as an ordinary coffee pot.
Yeah, I understand all that. But a coffee pot should still not be $300.
It is the bureaucratic procedures, the inattention to efficiency, the indifference to profits.
Notice, government doesn't have the profit motive at all.
They don't think that way.
So think about the post office.
They would never have thought of overnight delivery to this day.
If it had not been for FedEx and then later UPS. It's these private companies, FedEx and UPS, that have given the post office pretty much all the good ideas that you now see in the post office.
They just took them from these other companies.
So even though the airplane has been around for a hundred years, These guys at the post office would never have thought of overnight mail.
Why? Because their mentality is not oriented toward innovation and efficiency.
Think about it. Technology makes things so much easier.
You think the post office would be a place where Louis DeJoy's 10-year plan would be, here's how we can do more and charge less.
No, in fact, it's the exact opposite.
I mean, I have fans in the post office.
I don't have anything against people who work in the post office.
But I do think it's very interesting how government entities have a completely different atmosphere from going into, let's say, a private entity.
Compare the difference between, say, going into the DMV or the post office with going into, say, an Apple store.
And then going to an Apple store, it's like a flurry of activity.
You have a feeling like, I'm in the future.
People run up to you. Can I help you?
What can I do? What are you looking for?
Meaning you go into the DMV, you feel like you're ready to shoot yourself.
The post office is deadening.
I mean, even the phrase going postal.
I mean, why do you have that phrase?
Because post office, I guess there are people in the post office who've gone postal.
They've had enough. No, let me out of here.
I can't do it anymore. I mean, no one sort of, you know, I've never heard of someone going Walmart or going Apple.
Why? Because in the private sector, you just don't have that sense that your soul is being crushed in this environment.
This is the way that the government really is.
And if we want to have not only a more efficient, but kind of a more vibrant civic life in this country, you think the solution, not just on the federal level, but also on the state level, on the local level, is let's try shrinking the size of the government.
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I was reading the New York Post a couple of days ago and I had to do a little bit of a double take because I saw this article.
It's called Meet the Biracial Twins that No One Believes are Sisters.
And so you've got...
These biracial twins, and by biracial I mean they have a white father and a Jamaican or half-Jamaican mother.
I'm actually now going to hold up two photographs from the New York Post of these twins, and you can see it if you're listening on...
On audio, I'm going to describe what you're seeing.
You're seeing a picture of the two girls at ages maybe six or seven, and another picture of the two women now.
They're both in college.
And you kind of have to smile because they don't look like sisters at all, let alone twins.
They're obviously not identical twins, but they are fraternal twins, born at the same time, coming out of the womb at the same time.
One is black and the other one is white, at least to all appearances.
And Lucy, one of the twins, goes, no one believes we're twins because I'm white and Maria is black.
Even when we dress alike, we don't even look like sisters, let alone twins.
The mom, whose name is Donna Douglas, said that when she first had the two babies, she had to do like a double take.
And she said, why? Because she goes, it was such a shock because obviously things like skin color don't show up on the birth scan.
So scans before birth don't reveal color.
But she had no idea what she was going to get.
So Lucy has red hair and a very fair complexion, and Maria has brown hair and kind of a caramel brown complexion.
And as I mentioned, they're both in college.
Now, the reason I... Did a double take isn't just the curiosity of seeing a white girl and a black girl be twins, but I was just thinking about how this simple image, this simple fact, throws out of kilter All the prevailing doctrines of our time that seek to sort of reify or institutionalize the idea of race.
Because think about these two girls applying for example to go to college.
In any American university, the black girl would get a preference over the white girl.
What? Same genetic background, same parents, same socialization, same family structure, and yet one is seen as black and the other is seen as white, even though they're both getting half their genes from their white dad, and they're both getting half their genes from their Jamaican mom.
So, genetically, There's no difference.
The difference is merely, you may say, skin deep or at the surface level.
So I think what this really shows us is that race, or at least our categories of race, are deceptive.
They make no room for people who are mixed race, which is actually probably most people in the world today have some form of mixed race.
Even when we use categories like Latino, look at the Mexicans.
The Mexicans are mixed race.
They have some Spanish and they have some American Indian.
In fact, the amount of American Indian is much greater than the amount of Spanish.
And then as you go all through South America, you have varying proportions of white and, in this case, American Indian.
So, this whole notion of race is collapsing in reality before our eyes.
This is simply a symbol or metaphor for that.
But our racial categories, far from collapsing, as they should, Are becoming more tight, more extreme.
The idiotic one-drop rule, a legacy of segregation in the United States, one drop of black blood makes you black, is now the basis for our census.
It's the basis for the fact that if you have a kid who might be 30% black and 70% white, but most likely that kid will go, I'm black.
Why? Because that's what the culture says to her.
Obama! Obama's half white, he's half black, Obama has to be a black man.
If Obama tried to be white, He would be attacked.
There would be a social pressure gathering around Obama that would make him, that would, you may almost say, coerce him into fessing up to his blackness even though he's not fessing up to anything.
He's actually equally a member of one camp as he is of another.
In the end, I go with Frederick Douglass, who said that race is irrelevant.
Let the sun, he said, be proud of its achievement.
I think that these two girls, Maria and Lucy, would in the end agree.
This is a vanishing concept.
We would do well to be less obsessed with it.
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Should actors and entertainers and singers and athletes speak out on politics?
Well, the simple fact is that increasingly they do.
They speak out on all kinds of things.
They speak out on racism and they speak out on the Georgia election law and they speak out about amendments to the voting rights and they speak out about tax rates and all kinds of issues.
And they do this, I think, using their celebrity or their podium to influence public opinion.
Now, the actress Scarlett Johansson, who is starring in the latest Marvel superhero movie, Black Widow, Which is coming out the middle of this year.
Recently did an interview with a magazine in the UK. It's called The Gentlewoman.
And she kind of spoke out against this trend.
She did it cautiously because I think she knows the radioactive political environment we live in.
But she says, I don't think actors have obligations to have a public role in society.
Some people want to, but the idea that you're obligated to because you're in the public eye is unfair.
You didn't choose to be a politician.
You're an actor.
I want to continue with her comment.
She goes, your job, this is Scarlett Johansson speaking, is to reflect our experience to ourselves, meaning the audience.
Your job is to be a mirror, the actor's job is to be a mirror for an audience, to be able to have an empathetic experience through art.
That is what your job is.
So here's Scarlett O'Hara defining the professional meaning of what it is to be an actor.
Then the magazine asks, well, what are your political views?
And she goes, well, whatever my political views are, all that stuff, I feel most successful when people can sit in a theater or at home and disappear into a story or a performance and see pieces of themselves or are able to connect with themselves through this experience of watching this performance or story or interaction between actors or whatever it is.
That's my job.
And the other stuff, she says, is not my job.
So, I think what I find refreshing about this is you have an actress talking about what actors do and why we pay money to go see them.
It's because we identify with them, or actually we don't even identify with them.
We identify with the characters that they're playing.
And these characters often have an enduring impact in our mind.
I mean, it's very difficult for me to think of Al Pacino, let's say, apart from The Godfather, or Jack Nicholson, apart from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
And I guess some of these actors feel that they play characters that carry moral authority in movies and so they think that wow isn't it cool that I can take that moral authority that's not coming from me it's actually coming from the movie from the situation in the movie where the actor displayed heroic integrity or came to the rescue or showed super heroic skills and people still have that residual impression of the actor and then the actor comes and goes well here's what I have to say about this and here's what I have to say about that You only have to change the word politics to something else to realize how ridiculous this is.
So imagine, for example, if athletes started giving medical advice.
Here's what you should do for your appendix.
Here's what you should do in terms of which vaccine you should take.
People would be like, what?
What do you know about any of this?
Nothing. It's kind of almost idiotic for you to even step into this field.
This is not your field at all.
Now, I'm not saying that actors don't have a right to speak or to participate.
This is not an issue of rights.
It's an issue of what is appropriate, of, you may say, moral responsibility.
Take my own example.
You'll notice that I very rarely comment about Indian politics.
And people may think, well, Nesh, you're a public figure.
You're Indian. Why don't you speak out on Indian politics?
Indians will listen to you.
I'm like, I don't care if Indians will listen to me.
I don't know much about Indian politics.
I do follow it, but from a distance.
I follow it from someone who came to America at the age of 17, before I really had a political bone in my body, and for me now to weigh in on the Dalits, weigh in on Modi, weigh in on the conflicts between the Congress and the BJP and Indian politics, I mean, this would be wrong.
This would be a kind of...
Misuse of my public podium and this podcast to speak on things that I'm not qualified to speak about.
And so my silence on those topics is giving some dignity to the fact, is acknowledging that this is not my area.
I don't want to talk about things I know nothing about.
And that's kind of the way I feel when I see these actors and And boxers and jugglers step onto the public stage.
I'm thinking to myself, look, you have a right to do this, but it might be better if you went back to playing Michael in Godfather II. Chain stores have different price tiers for professional mechanics and do-it-yourselfers.
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It's time for our mailbox and we have a very interesting question about philosophy.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
This is Tracy calling from South Carolina.
Really enjoying the podcast.
I noticed that in your podcasts and in your books, you refer to philosophy or philosophers quite often.
I'm wondering about this.
Is this something you studied in university or is something you just studied on your own?
And I also wonder if you'd tell us two or three philosophers, living or dead, that have had the greatest influence on you.
Thank you very much. Well, I did not study philosophy at Dartmouth at all.
This may seem odd because I love philosophy, both political philosophy and philosophy in general.
Political philosophy, by the way, is a branch of the broader I studied English literature.
I studied some history. I got a good liberal arts education.
Interestingly, I think the only philosophical work I was exposed to in college was Plato's Dialogues.
And it was in a drama class.
We were talking about dramatic dialogue and how on a stage you have essentially visual action going on between characters.
And the professor had referred to Plato.
And we read some of Plato's dialogues, but the idea was not to read them philosophically, not even so much for the content, just more for the dramatic dialogue, for more what they contributed to The idea of drama.
So it was after college that I began to think about philosophy and read it.
Now, what turned me off on philosophy at the beginning, and I think this is what turns off many people, including many students who go into philosophy class, is that the typical philosophy lecture goes something like this.
Today we're going to talk about Kant's epistemology.
And people go, how dreary.
We're gonna get this and we're gonna get that.
We're gonna follow, Kant says this and Kant says that.
But this is actually not the way to teach philosophy.
We're not interested in Kant per se.
We're talking here, by the way, about the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who wrote in the 18th century.
We're not interested in Kant per se.
We're interested in the world.
And the thing about philosophy, if you ask me what does philosophy do, I would say philosophy illuminates the spiritual continent on which the rest of us sleepily dwell.
And what I mean by that is that we go through life and we don't think deeply about questions, even the questions that are relevant that are around us.
At least we don't think about them at the basic level.
So think, for example, about...
Now, children, by the way, do.
A child who encounters the world for the first time is going to ask the most basic questions.
I talked, I guess last week it was about Tagore's story, The Kabuli Walav, in which he talks about a character and his young daughter, Mina, who's like five years old.
And he goes, Mina's always asking me questions.
And one of the questions was, Mina comes up to her father and she goes, Tell me what is your exact relationship to my mom?
So here's a kid who's basically saying, here's dad, here's mom.
What did they really do with each other?
And so here's a kid just blurting out, you may say, the obvious question.
But as you get older, you tend to get preoccupied with things, preoccupied with life, preoccupied with family, earning a living.
And even when you hear important questions...
So let's take, for example, a simple question.
These days we hear a lot about the issue of social justice.
Social justice. And of course, so immediately the person who talks about social justice will jump to institutional racism, reparations, affirmative action, blah, blah, blah.
And then we start, we're fighting about reparations, we're fighting about affirmative action, but we don't ask what may be called the philosophical questions.
At the base level.
So imagine the quintessential philosopher, Socrates, a very good starting point, because here's Socrates, and he's a philosopher of the first rank.
You asked me who my favorite philosophers are, and I think I'd have to say Plato, which would, by the way, include Socrates, because Socrates didn't...
Everything we know about Socrates comes from a couple of characters, a couple of writers, not just Plato, by the way, but also a writer named Xenophon, and also a comic poet named Aristophanes.
But Plato is the main source.
It's Plato-Socrates that we know of as Socrates.
My other favorite philosophers, by the way, are Aristotle and Kant, Immanuel Kant.
And by the way, in this, I'm in the mainstream.
If you ask most philosophers to name the greatest three philosophers of all time, they would almost certainly go with Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.
There might be some arguments around the edges, but these are, I would say, the three consensus choices, and I agree with that selection.
Now, back to Socrates. Socrates walks into the marketplace and he encounters young people there.
Students, you might say.
They're typically young men.
But nevertheless, he engages them in conversation at the most basic level.
So imagine one guy talking about social justice, just like you might hear today on a university campus or from some Antifa type.
And Socrates right away...
It makes you stop. He goes, wait, social justice.
Now, before you start telling me about reparations and affirmative action and all the rest of it, institutional racism, knocking down the Columbus monument, before we go there, let me ask you this.
Why is justice a social phenomenon at all?
In other words, we can think of individuals being just.
You do something that's right.
You do something that's wrong.
Let's say you see your friend stomping on a dog.
That's wrong. That's cruel.
That's unjust. But what do we mean by social injustice?
Society isn't a single human being.
Society isn't even...
I mean, you can speak, I suppose, of...
Is social justice the mere sum total of individual injustices perpetrated in society?
Is that what that means? Or does social justice somehow become detached from the individual and it's something separate, something embedded in institutions, but again, institutions, again, their policies are carried out by individuals.
College admissions are carried out by deans.
How can an institution be unjust?
Isn't the institutional injustice, again, merely the sum total of the injustices of the individuals perpetrating it?
So this is the kind of thing that political philosophy asks.
And then, when Socrates has talked about that, he goes to justice itself.
And he goes, well, what is justice?
What do you mean by justice?
And then his interlocutors give an answer.
And the answer may be something like, well, justice is equality.
Justice is treating everybody the same.
And then Socrates will go, treating everybody the same?
He'll go, well, let's probe that definition.
Let's say, for example, that...
A young son is doing the wrong thing, is acting in a very bad manner.
Would it be right for the father of that son to correct him?
And the interlocutor goes, well, yeah, that would be right.
The father should do that.
And then Socrates goes, well, let's now flip the example on its head.
Let's say that the father is doing something inappropriate or wrong.
Is it the duty of the son to correct the father?
Now, this, of course, is more problematic, more controversial.
Is it the job of children to correct their parents?
And so, if the interlocutor goes, no, I'm not sure about that one, Socrates then says, well, wait a minute, you just told me a minute ago that justice is treating everybody equally.
But clearly you're now saying that no, in a given situation, the way that the father should treat a son is not the same.
It's not the same standard that we apply for how children should treat their parents.
So clearly this definition that you've given me, this blanket statement of treating everyone the same, is inaccurate.
And our definition now needs to be revised.
So, the point is, the Socratic investigation or interrogation is not aimed at like, at the end of it, wow, we've got a definition of justice, you know, that's it, we can now all go home.
It's not like that. It's that by exploring definition A and then B and then C and then D, it's like looking at a diamond from many different angles through very good lenses, through very accurate and precise lenses, and at the end of it all, you have a much Greater appreciation for the depth of the question, the depth of the problem.
So, as a conservative, when you're philosophically literate or trained or you think about these issues and you're listening to some leftist professor or antifa type, you know, speaking in this kind of fanatical ideological way...
It's not just that you want to fight back with them, it's that you begin to see the shallowness of what they're saying, the unexamined assumptions, the presumptions that they take for granted, the stupidities masquerading as intelligence, the posturing, the lies. You become, in a sense, above it all.
You can see things more clearly.
You can see the forest and the trees.
And so philosophy is a form of illumination.
It illuminates our ordinary world.
It takes up the questions about life and death and suffering and truth that we often don't think about in ordinary life.
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