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April 8, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:02:35
TORTURING TRUMPSTERS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep64
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Coming up, torturing Trumpsters.
Governor DeSantis strikes back at 60 minutes.
And Justice Clarence Thomas on cancel culture.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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 a system for torturing.
Yes, torturing.
That has now been in effect since January 6th, imposed by the Biden prosecutors.
And this is a system of solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement for people charged very often with minor offenses.
At one point, according to the government itself, all the January 6th detainees, the people arrested, were in solitary confinement.
And I'm going to get to what that means and why it's particularly horrific.
But I want to start by talking about the fact that to justify this extreme response, the left has been talking about Insurrection, sedition, riots, terrorism.
Now, all of that could have occurred on January 6th.
In fact, there's a very interesting article in American Greatness by Dan Gelernter.
It's called, What Would a Real Capitol Hill Riot Look Like?
And Galerner plays out a thought experiment.
He says, one word from Trump.
If Trump had basically just said something like, listen, our election has been stolen from us.
I want all of you to get all your weapons and come to Washington, D.C. and let's have a violent uprising.
But Dan's point, the writer, Dan Galanto, is that that would have occurred.
That would have been a real insurrection, and it would not have been pretty.
It would have actually been terrifying.
If Trump, he says, had one ounce of the authoritarian, dictatorial tendencies attributed to him, he could have done it.
Trump is one of the few people who has the ability to, in a sense, you may almost say provoke not just insurrection, but civil war.
And this is not just something that Trump could have done prior to January 6th.
Trump could do it now.
He's one of the few people who has the kind of support in the country where if he were to rally people to take to arms, they would.
But the point is that Trump is not that kind of a guy.
This is, I think, Lerner's point, that this is the left sort of fiction about Trump.
But Trump's actions, really from the outset, show that this is never what he was about.
This is not what he was seeking on January 6th.
And now there's a medical, D.C. medical examiner report about the six people who died.
I'm sorry, five people who died on January 6th.
Four were Trump supporters.
Two died of a heart attack.
One of amphetamine poisoning.
One, a Trumpster Ashley Babbitt from homicide, but the homicide was perpetrated by a Capitol Hill policeman.
The manner of death of Officer Sicknick is still unknown.
We know that he was not killed by being hit on the head with a fire extinguisher, as the New York Times and many other media outlets report.
How he died remains unknown.
The left continues to whip up a frenzy about January 6th, most recently when there was the guy who, this is the Nation of Islam supporter, who rammed his car into a barricade in Washington, D.C., killing a Capitol policeman.
And by the way, it had nothing to do with January 6th.
But right after it happens, the January 6th prosecutors go running into court and they say, we continue to have concerns about safety at the Capitol, as though this other incident, is somehow further evidence of the need to maintain maximum militarization and maximum vigilance.
Now, on top of this, we have an article in Politico That points out, it's titled, Most Capitol rioters unlikely to serve jail time.
And what they mean is that when you actually look at what many of these people did, it's essentially a big fat nothing.
Some of them walked into the Capitol unobstructed.
They did no physical damage to anything.
They milled around, essentially, waving signs, maybe shouting.
But here's Politico.
Americans outraged by the storming of Capitol Hill are in for a jarring reality check.
Many of those who invaded the halls of Congress on January 6th are likely to get little or no jail time.
A Politico analysis, almost a quarter of the 230 defendants so far charged with only misdemeanors.
Things like trespassing, being in the wrong place.
This is an unauthorized area of the Capitol.
You can't be inside. That's it.
They didn't do anything. They didn't harm anybody.
Now, given all this, it is particularly, I think, horrifying that the government has been using what in somewhat euphemistic languages called, you know, restrictive housing, these kinds of terms that are used to take people who have, by the way, they have not been tried, they have not been convicted of anything.
They are presumed innocent.
So why is the government placing them in cells, which are essentially the size of a parking space at the grocery store?
And they are in 23 hour lockdown.
And what this means is that for 23 hours, they get no access to the outdoors.
In some cases, no light.
And no reading, no social interaction with anybody except a surly guard who shows up to hand you your food and then leaves.
So this, I think, try to imagine yourself in this situation.
It is a form of torture.
Yes, there's no really getting around it.
I'm trying to mentally envision myself sitting in a room, a tiny room, with nothing in it.
And I'm sitting there for 23 hours.
I wake up, it's the same.
All day, it's the same.
And all I get for one hour is to go outside, very often in shackles with the guards.
And there's also...
So this is going on.
We see it's happened to...
The teenager, Bruno Kua.
It's happened to Lisa Eisenhardt.
It's happened to the guy who runs the group called Cowboys for Trump.
It's happened to Christopher Kuhn.
So all these guys are treated essentially...
I mean, they're like death row inmates.
Now, death row inmates are sometimes given this treatment, the 23-hour lockdown.
And it's widely understood to be much more restrictive than normal custody.
In normal custody, you mill around, you're part of this larger group of people who are incarcerated.
But it's very different.
But death row inmates have been studied, and by and large, this does tremendous psychological harm.
In fact, they even talk about something here in the literature.
It's called death row syndrome.
It's a psychological disorder.
It not only produces suicidal tendencies among death row inmates, but psychotic delusions.
Why? Because basically, human beings are social animals.
And keeping us isolated for long periods of time like this in a sort of dark cell, in a sense, where all you have is yourself to deal with.
Hour after hour after hour, it drives you nuts.
The United Nations has spoken out on this.
They talk about the fact that this kind of solitary confinement causes permanent changes to people's brains and to their personalities.
It tends to diminish your capacity to remember things even later.
There's a physical impact on your brain and on the cells that have to do with memory.
And it causes something called social pain.
And social pain is something that endures even afterwards.
It's essentially the memory of a kind of psychological pain.
Now, what I'm getting at is that this is the way to treat maybe terrorists, maybe death row inmates who have massacred a whole bunch of people.
In those cases, you say, well, listen, these are people who have forfeited their rights.
They don't have a right to decent treatment.
They have taken away the rights of others.
But in the case of the January 6 defendants, these are citizens who have not been found guilty of anything.
Some of them are charged with minor offenses.
Where it's very unlikely that they will be locked up at all.
So why are they being locked up now?
Many of these DC judges are Obama judges, they're Clinton judges, and even some of them have raised questions about what the government is trying to do.
The bottom line of it is the Biden administration, Merrick Garland, the Biden prosecutors, They're treating Trumpsters as foreign enemies, in some cases treating them as bad or worse as Islamic terrorists who were involved in 9-11 and other similar incidents.
This is a horrific way to treat your political opposition.
I think it breeds the very kind of extremism that they claim to be wanting to fight.
And quite honestly, it reminds me of something that Lincoln once said when he's talking about slavery.
He said, when I see people talking about the wonders of slavery, I feel a strong desire to see it tried on them personally.
So when I see these prosecutors, and in some cases even judges, blithely talking about torturing other people, I feel a strong desire that it happened to them.
And by the way, the political pendulum does and can shift, so there may be an opportunity for our side to grab a hold of these guys, charge them with offenses, and again, who knows if they'll be convicted, but in the meantime, lock them up in a small room the size of a parking space, turn out the lights, keep them in there for 23 hours, and then talk to them afterwards about how it feels for them.
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60 Minutes has been striped to do a hit job on Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, but Governor DeSantis isn't taking it.
Here is a little clip.
Listen. The criticism is that it's pay to play, Governor.
It's wrong. It's a fake narrative.
I just disabused you of the narrative and you don't care about the facts.
So by now, this whole 60 minutes hit.
The idea here that Governor DeSantis gave a vaccination contract to the Publix grocery store, grocery chain, in return for a $100,000 campaign donation.
This has been completely exploded or knocked down.
Publix is, of course, a grocery chain all over Florida.
It's neither the first nor is it the only vaccine distributor.
Obviously, they have 800 locations, so there's nothing wrong in using them to get the vaccine out.
The idea for using them did not originate with DeSantis.
Two prominent Democrats in the state have jumped up.
One is the Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Jared Moskowitz.
And he goes, listen, we recommended, our agency recommended that Publix get the contract.
He goes, quote, no one from the governor's office suggested Publix.
It's absolute malarkey.
Palm Beach County Mayor Dave Kerner, also a Democrat.
He goes, I watched the 60-minute segment.
I feel compelled. He goes...
He says their reporting is intentionally false.
He said that the program knew DeSantis had met with him and that his county had been the entity to request to, quote, expand the state's partnership with Publix.
Even Publix put out a statement saying this is absolute nonsense.
Now... Why are they going after DeSantis?
This is the key point. The reason is that DeSantis has proven the entire left-wing media to be wrong about COVID. He opened up the state early.
They warned him that if he did it, he would be...
Committing, quote, genocide.
Here's an interesting article going back to July of last year.
This is Adam Weinstein in the New Republic.
He goes, Ron DeSantis is leading America on, quote, a death march.
He goes on to say that DeSantis is not only an accomplice to murder...
But perhaps even genocide.
A, quote, winning accomplice to homicide on a scale that Republicans might call genocide if they saw it unfold in another century.
So this is the kind of over-the-top rhetoric.
But it wasn't just this guy.
This guy may be a kook.
But Joe Scarborough, many others were basically saying the same thing.
And then DeSantis proved them all wrong.
Proved them all wrong so spectacularly that...
Now, this is not to say that there haven't been COVID cases in Florida.
They have. But they haven't been all that different from anywhere else.
Here we go. Florida has about 9,200 cases per 100,000 people.
About 150 deaths per 100,000 people.
But let's compare that to the country as a whole.
It's 8,969 cases per 100,000, about the same.
And 163 deaths per 100,000 people, about the same.
The results in Florida...
Are comparable to, say, California.
And here's the difference.
California has been in total shutdown.
So now when you look at the other side of the coin, here we go.
The unemployment rate in Florida, 4.8%, compared to 8.8% in New York, 9% in California.
So Florida is producing roughly the same...
Cases, coronavirus cases, while having a flourishing economy.
I was down in Florida for an event to speak.
I walk into a hotel.
There's a lounge singer performing.
People are sitting around singing along.
And I was like, wow, I haven't really seen this anywhere.
It shows how Florida's cut its own path.
So this is why 60 Minutes decided, well, look, Let's go after DeSantis because let's see if we can get him on this.
The other thing, of course, is that DeSantis is lining up to be a potential 2024 GOP candidate.
He's very popular with the Trump constituency in the Republican Party and so 60 Minutes figured he's becoming dangerous.
The general rule of thumb is that when the media starts going after you, you're becoming a very dangerous guy, which is a good sign.
Interestingly, the media, even though they know that 60 Minutes is wrong, they're not saying it.
So Axios, for example, now has an article just out where instead of saying 60 Minutes should apologize, 60 Minutes completely got the facts wrong.
Even Democrats have said so.
Axios basically goes, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump ally with his eyes on the White House, is dialing up a dispute with 60 Minutes.
Seizing on a juicy chance to ingratiate himself with the GOP base by bashing the media.
So, in other words, the story is not that 60 Minutes is lying.
It's not that they tried to do this hit on DeSantis.
It's that DeSantis is taking advantage of this politically by pointing out this fact to, quote, ingratiate him with the GOP base.
Bottom line, DeSantis must be doing something right, and he is doing something right, and he should keep doing it.
And as for this chorus of critics and leftists, it's actually really a pleasant sound to hear them scream.
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We're hearing a lot about Jim Crow these days, and Jim Crow, of course, is kind of a colloquial term that refers to segregation laws, to laws that basically separated whites and blacks, laws that were passed overwhelmingly by the Democratic Party.
This is something you won't learn in school because the progressive textbooks try to hide it.
But every Jim Crow law in the American South was passed by a democratic legislature, signed by a democratic governor, and put into effect and enforced by democratic officials.
There is no exception to this rule.
Now, it's very odd to hear the party of Jim Crow wailing about Jim Crow.
They should be apologizing for the Jim Crow that they did.
But here's President Joe Biden, who is himself in his old days palling around with segregation as a- He goes, oh, these are really nice guys.
I can certainly get things done with them.
So here you have basically a segregationist cooperator, Biden, warning about Jim Crow.
Listen. It is reassuring to see that for-profit operations and businesses are speaking up about how These new Jim Crow laws are just antithetical to who we are.
So Biden is talking here about the Georgia law.
And try to think about this.
The Georgia law, which talks about...
Early voting, in fact, expands voting accessibility, but also talks about things like if you're going to get an absentee ballot, you have to provide proper identification that it is you who are actually voting now.
Where is the resemblance between this and Jim Crow?
There is none. But the reason that the left is striking out at Georgia so vehemently is they know that Georgia is leading the way on election integrity reform.
And election integrity reform is underway in like 25 states.
So if they're able to paint Georgia with a Jim Crow brush, Then it will scare all these other states into going, oh, whoa, we don't want to have to deal with these kinds of accusations, and maybe we should drop this whole idea.
This is what the Democrats are after.
What they want to do is keep the voting scrutiny as light as possible so that any kinds of shenanigans can easily go through, and they're using the Jim Crow label.
Now, the other context for Jim Crow accusations is the filibuster.
The filibuster is a legacy of Jim Crow.
So here's Elizabeth Warren talking about how the filibuster is so racist, except she used the filibuster to go against legislation precisely 128 times.
So was Elizabeth Warren being racist and doing that?
Obviously not. Historically, by the way, the filibuster...
It was apparently first used in its modern sense.
Well, in its modern sense, it was used on March 5, 1841.
And the first instance of the filibuster was in...
It had to do with the firing of Senate printers, people who did printing for the Senate.
It had nothing to do with civil rights or race.
And by and large, it's been a way to try to force...
A compromise in the Senate by using the filibuster to bring both sides together, by blocking legislation until a compromise can be sought.
There's nothing racist about it.
And again, it's particularly odd.
Democrats are saying, Biden has said, oh, the filibuster last year was just used so promiscuously.
Yeah, by whom? Who used it so promiscuously?
After all, Trump was president in 2020.
The Democrats used the filibuster a whole bunch of times.
So again, if the filibuster is a racist technique, why are Democrats using it?
The good news in all this, a little bit of a silver lining, an article by the West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin in the Washington Post yesterday, I will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.
Boom. Manchin goes on to say, and of course the left has been trying to push him every which way, say, isn't there a way to sort of redo the filibuster so it only applies in certain cases, doesn't apply in others?
How can we do an end run around the filibuster?
And in this article, which I read carefully because I wanted to see if Manchin was leaving a back door open for him to sort of skip out of later, and no, I don't think so.
Basically, Manchin says that we are not in a regime of one-party rule.
This is a very closely divided country.
Things have to be done and done the right way.
And the right way for parties for an America closely divided is to seek common ground and to seek compromise.
So the striking thing about the title of this article isn't just, I won't vote to eliminate the filibuster, but I won't vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.
So far, Georgia is holding firm, and that's fantastic.
I think we should, by the way, all reach out to people in Georgia, representatives in Georgia, strengthen their spine, tell them they're doing the right thing, tell them not to worry about, you know, the chairman of Delta Airlines and the chairman of Coke.
Not to worry.
These people are just bloviators, and they're massive hypocrites, all of them.
So pay no attention to them.
Georgia's doing the right thing.
It's actually now in the front lines of election reform around the country.
So far it looks like Georgia will hold firm.
The filibuster will hold firm.
And all the efforts to sort of cry, not wolf, but cry, Jim Crow, are going to be recognized as the scam artist techniques that they undoubtedly are.
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For a number of decades now, the Young America's Foundation has been a stalwart presence on the American campus, fighting for free speech, bringing speakers to campus to counter the entrenched influence of the left.
I've really been thrilled to have spoken on behalf of this organization from my early years, going back to my first book, Illiberal Education.
And for a long time, Young America's Foundation was run by this guy Ron Robinson, a wonderful self-effacing guy who has finally stepped aside into retirement.
And his successor, Governor Scott Walker, has now taken the helm of the organization.
And he joins me now on the podcast.
Governor Walker, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
How do you like the shift from the political world and the world of running a state to now running a campus organization with chapters on campuses across the country?
Well, it's remarkable and awfully exciting.
As you mentioned, Ron Robinson did a fabulous job of setting the table here and really coming in now as the new president.
I'm not changing what we do, but rather how many people we reach.
And it's just as critical as the work we did as governor.
You know, 10 years ago, the left tried to intimidate us.
They started the Occupy movement, not in Wall Street, but on my street in Madison, Wisconsin, with 100,000 protesters that occupied our Capitol for weeks on end.
They hope to intimidate us, to marginalize us, to ultimately try and recall us.
But we survived each of those battles, and our state is that much better because of it.
And that's exactly the same sort of thing, as you know, from being active on campus, in particular with speeches you've done for us at Young America's Foundation, that it's exactly the same thing they're trying to do, not only to speakers, but to students or anyone just with objective thought out there.
Is they're trying to cancel them as well as intimidate or marginalize them.
We're fighting back and that's what we're pushing for with the long game.
Now, did you take the helm at this organization in part because you believe that the campus is kind of the node center for this leftist?
Because it seems to me like a lot of things that I spotted on the campus in the early 90s, which at that time I thought was confined to the campus.
It was almost like the campus was a kind of asylum in the larger society.
But now I see those same ideas, restricting speech, identity politics, all this extremism that I saw in the campus is now in the media, it's in Hollywood, it's in Washington, D.C.
So is that why you give the campus priority because it is the place where these ideas get baked?
Absolutely, as you mentioned, in many ways, it was the canary in the coal mine where the warnings were already being given back then.
And I think for a while, many conservatives kind of used the words that have been paraphrased over the years from Winston Churchill that, you know, this old adage that if you're not a little liberal when you're in college, you have no heart.
If you're not a little conservative when you're older, you have no brain.
And so many people thought, well, they'll just, that'll wear out, they'll move on.
Certainly in the 80s, late in the 80s when I was in college, there was already a pretty clear bias on campus, but you could still, as a conservative, speak out.
You could engage with your professors and others.
When my kids went there later...
They're now in their mid-20s.
You could already start to see the shift, political correctness, all that that happened in the 90s going into the 2000s.
But in the last few years, what we see is exactly what you mentioned, outright cancel culture.
The idea that students who are not only conservative, just moderate to conservative, students are afraid to speak out, not just for fear of getting a bad grade, but for fellow students and activists lashing out against them.
The cancel culture really is present, and sadly, we've seen it seep from our college campuses into our schools, into our culture, even into our communications with the censorship from big tech these days.
So it is clear if we're going to fix America, we've got to do it on our campuses.
It didn't happen overnight, and so we're not going to undo it overnight.
It's going to take more than just, I think, a new cycle or even a presidential cycle.
It is going to take the long game, which is why we're putting forth this bold new agenda.
We'll get to the long game in just a moment.
Let me ask you this. Do you think that the left's scheme, if you will, to take over the campus, a scheme that seems to have been stunningly realized, was this the result of a sort of plan that they put into effect, starting perhaps going back to the 1960s, in which professors take over departments, they hire people who are like themselves, they shut out people who have different points.
How did this happen?
How did we get to a point where Because we're about the same age.
And I remember when I was at Dartmouth in the early 80s, I would look to Harvey Mansfield at Harvard and there were professors at Yale.
I had a mentor, Jeffrey Hart, at Dartmouth who was a senior editor of National Review.
So even though these conservative professors were outnumbered, they were a presence on the campus and an influential presence.
And it seems like that conservative influence is now diminished if it's not gone altogether.
Oh, absolutely. For all the talk of diversity in our college campuses, the one diversity they dearly do not celebrate is ideological.
It's thought diversity.
You look over and over again, particularly in the liberal arts and political science and other social studies, there is rarely a campus out there, even some of the private ones that have anything remotely close to a conservative voice And that has been, as you mentioned, Saul Alinsky, we spelled this out in our plan.
This goes back to the earliest parts of the 60s with a long-term plan.
They were willing to look this out over many, many years, many decades into the future, which is why it's not going to be changed overnight.
But I remember not only in college, I had a college professor, John McAdams, He was a great conservative, challenged us, taught us to think critically.
Years later Marquette University went after him because he actually challenged a teaching assistant who told a student at a Catholic institution that they could not stand up and write a paper On defending traditional marriage because it might offend other students.
At a Catholic institution, he spoke out and said that was ridiculous.
They used that as the impetus to get rid of him.
This is what they're doing, and it's even going into schools.
My son Matthews, 26, had a great teacher in high school who taught AP Government.
But as objective as she tried to be, I remember one day came back with an assignment from his textbook.
The chapter was about how Ronald Reagan's tax cuts brought about the deficits of the 1980s.
Of course, that's false. You'll appreciate this.
I actually took your book about Ronald Reagan off my shelf.
And gave that to him as an assignment to counter what he was getting from the textbook.
But even fair teachers, even teachers trying to be objective these days in curriculum and textbooks and elsewhere, it's almost impossible to do.
So that's why we've got to turn things around.
And again, that's why we're pushing the long game.
Your strategy, you call it the long game.
And I think a lot of students these days, it's not that they've rejected conservative ideas.
They've never heard them.
They've never been exposed to them, except in the description of hostile professors who are telling them why these ideas are horrible.
So how do you plan to get before the large body of young people in America today this alternative point of view that they're not even perhaps aware exists?
Well, one, you're exactly right.
That's the whole game plan of the cancel culture, is to not even expose people, anyone, but particularly young people, to these ideas.
We talk about the failures of socialism in Cuba and Venezuela.
We talk about the failures years ago.
You know, the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries of communism, they don't want to hear about that.
They want to cancel that out.
Any discussion about freedom and opportunity and the founding principles and Judeo-Christian values, those are things we want to counter with.
So we want to get to every campus in America.
Right now we're in about half Of the 4,000 campuses, we want to be on all of them.
We want to add a million more students to participate in our programs.
We understand, as you do, that you've got to go to where students are at, not just on campus with great speakers like you have been and to add more, but we've got to go on YouTube and dramatically increase our numbers.
We want to get the 5 million subscribers on YAF TV and 5 billion new views.
We've got to partner with other groups that are out there.
There's great organizations That we can work together with, and in particular on free speech, because that's become the new battleground.
We won a big case on UC, University of California, Berkeley, where they claim they were for free speech, but they put up these tremendous barriers for conservative groups to bring in speakers.
We won. We forced them to change their policy.
If we can win at Berkeley, we can win anywhere in America.
And then on top of all that, we got to start sooner.
It's not enough just in college.
It's not enough even to be in a high school.
We've got to go to junior high.
You talked about our generation.
I think of Reagan, for you and I, and others in our generation, really transforming, not just as conservatives, but as optimists.
I go back and think about 11-, 12-, 13-year-olds at that time, and what a different view they have the world than millennials had years later.
We've got to start sooner, and we've got to counter the left, particularly their efforts to teach our young people to hate America.
We need to teach them our founding values, the strength of our founders, I think what you said at the end is very important, namely the fact that we shouldn't expect young people to become conservatives out of cynicism, but really out of idealism.
We were Reaganite idealists in the 80s, and we want to bring that idealism back today for young people, so they see there's a real alternative to the leftist point of view on the campus.
Hey, Governor Walker, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
I really appreciate it. My pleasure.
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I know a lot of conservatives and Republicans are frustrated with the Supreme Court.
And they tend to place the onus of this solely upon Supreme Court justices.
Why don't the justices rally to the cause?
Why don't they recognize this?
Why don't they jump in and fix problems?
But I want to point out that the way that change comes about in the court isn't merely the result of the justices doing something.
And I want to illustrate this point by looking at a A test case.
An area in which Supreme Court jurisprudence has changed dramatically.
Changed from being, you may almost say, systematically anti-religious.
To now becoming equally systematically neutral, not only between different systems of religious belief, but between religion and no religion.
So how did the Supreme Court make this transition, this dramatic switch from hostility to neutrality?
This is how it happened. For many years, the Supreme Court interpreted the no-establishment clause of the First Amendment.
Remember, the First Amendment and dealing with religion has a free exercise clause, but it also has a no-establishment clause.
Government cannot establish religion.
And under the so-called Lemon Test from 1971, basically the Supreme Court held that no...
Assistance can be given to religion by any institution of the government or the state in any way, unless this religious symbol or this religious practice has a, quote, secular purpose.
So let's think, for example, about whether or not the government can erect a statue of Jesus or of Moses.
And the answer was no. No.
Because that's religious. Now, can the government erect a statue of Ben Franklin or Che Guevara?
Yes, because the no establishment clause doesn't apply to them.
It only applies to religious figures.
Similarly, if there was, let's say, a group of Catholic students that wanted to have a Bible reading in a public school, the Supreme Court would say no.
Why? Because that's the government supporting religion.
It would violate the No Establishment Clause.
So the Lemon Test established a kind of almost chronic hostility to religion in which the different institutions of government one by one were forbidden to give any aid or support to religion in any way.
Now, the reason that this changed is that a group of scholars, conservative scholars, led by Michael McConnell, who was, I believe he is now both an appellate court judge and a professor of law at Stanford, but McConnell at the time was at the University of Chicago.
In any event, McConnell developed a series of arguments in conjunction with other scholars, and they basically went before the Supreme Court and said this.
They said, The meaning of the No Establishment Clause is not that the government should be actively hostile to religion.
That was neither the framer's intent, nor is it the plain meaning of the language of the Constitution.
Rather, the true principle for the Supreme Court is neutrality.
In other words, to give no preference, to show neither hostility nor favoritism.
The government should play neutral.
Another way to look at it is that these scholars were urging the Supreme Court to adopt a non-discrimination principle.
Don't discriminate against religion.
And so, let's say, for example, that somebody wants to erect a statue of Jesus or Moses.
The idea would be, use the same criteria for that statue as you'd use for any other statue.
Or let's say, for example, a group of Catholic students wants to have a Bible study, ask yourself this question.
Does the school permit other types of organizations to have other types of extracurricular activity?
Does it allow the young Democrats or the young Republicans, does it allow the stamp collectors and the cheerleaders to have their own meetings?
Well, if the answer is yes, why not the Bible study as well?
In other words, don't discriminate against religion.
So this was a change.
This is a completely different principle, the principle of neutrality replacing the principle of hostility.
And what is so telling is that the Supreme Court, over time, started to go along with this.
And even more significantly, there's now a 6-3 conservative majority on the court, but even a couple of the Democratic nominees on the court are on board with this principle.
Recently, in fact, one of the leftist nominees to the court, I don't remember if it was Eleanor Kagan, Or if it was Sotomayor.
No, it's Sotomayor. She actually protested against the fact that Justice Kagan and Justice Breyer had now adopted this neutrality or non-discrimination principle, leaving Sotomayor to be the sole outlier.
So the Supreme Court on this issue is not 5-4.
It's not even 6-3.
It's 8-1 on the idea that the government should not be hostile as it used to be.
So this is really a radical shift in the way that the Supreme Court understands the No Establishment Clause.
And so the lesson I draw from it is that the way you bring about change is the Constitution is not self-interpreting.
And you can't just talk about things like, well, let's just look at the original intent of the framers.
You need to do that. But my point is you also need conservative scholars and advocates to put out novel theories of understanding, of interpretation, that contest established leftist readings of the Constitution.
The Constitution, in a way, is similar to literature or to the Bible.
It needs to be interpreted.
It needs to be understood.
And ultimately, you bring about changes of constitutional interpretation by offering new understandings deeply rooted in the constitutional history, but also in the constitutional text that prove persuasive, first and foremost, to the conservative majority on the court.
But, if you are very good at it and very successful at it, you might even bring one or two Democrats on board as well.
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In a recent case, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has articulated not only his concerns about the enormous virtually monopoly power enjoyed by digital media platforms, but also shown a legal pathway to how those platforms can be restricted or regulated, regulated in this case not to limit the access to free speech, but in fact to promote it.
Now, the case that Thomas is commenting on was actually a case that is sort of moot.
It's a case which was brought by people who had been blocked by President Trump on Twitter.
And these people go, the president is a public figure, he doesn't have the right to block me.
So this case wound itself up to the Supreme Court and ironically reaches the Supreme Court when Trump is no longer the president.
So the Supreme Court in its decision goes, well, this is kind of a moot point.
But Thomas, in considering the issue and in considering the underlying issues, realizes that there are issues raised by all this that are very pertinent today, even though Trump is no longer in the White House.
The first thing he says is, look, it's kind of funny that the plaintiffs in this case are saying that public figures should not have the right to block them.
When Trump himself has been blocked, On Twitter.
Trump is off Twitter. And so what kind of a public forum is it for Trump when Twitter itself, a private company, gets to decide if the public figure can even be on Twitter in the first place?
And then Thomas takes the discussion to a much more general level than the specifics of the Trump case.
He goes, today's digital platforms, he talks about the fact that they have unprecedented concentrated power.
Also unprecedented is the concentrated control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties.
We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms.
Now, of course, it's been a libertarian argument for some time That these are private platforms and they have every right to do what they do.
But, as Thomas points out, wait a minute.
All kinds of private platforms are, in fact, regulated.
Radio stations are regulated.
Television stations are regulated.
And the reason that they're regulated is that they involve the public airwaves.
They involve, if you will, the public space.
Now, some of those who claim that these are private platforms that don't have monopoly power make the argument that, well, you know, even though Facebook may be so dominant in this particular space, or Google or Twitter, there are some alternatives.
People do have other options.
But Thomas goes, that argument doesn't really fly.
He goes, it changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information.
And then he gives this example.
A person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail.
But in assessing whether the company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable.
For many of today's digital platforms, nothing is.
So the point being, if you're trying to decide if a toll booth...
is controlling the traffic across a river, you can't say, well, gee, you know, yeah, we are, but the guy can always swim.
No, that's not a practical or practicable alternative.
Thomas goes on to make the point that he's talking about Google here.
And he says that when a user doesn't know where to find something on the internet, and users rarely do, Google is the gatekeeper between that user and the speech of others 90% of the time.
Similarly, Facebook and Twitter can greatly narrow a person's information flow through similar means.
And then he talks about Amazon and says that a clear majority of e-books and about half of all physical books are controlled through a single distributor, Amazon.
Now let's remember that that Amazon...
It's precisely the company that removed the Clarence Thomas documentary during Black History Month.
They also censored a book by Ryan Anderson.
His book is called When Harry Became Sally.
It's kind of a critique of the transgender movement.
Very interestingly, if you go on Amazon now and you search for that book, you get a book with the opposite point of view.
In fact, you search that book and what comes up is Let Harry Become Sally responding to the anti-transgender movement.
So this is a clear case where Amazon is rigging the search.
So you're finding not the book you're looking for, but a book conveying the exact opposite message of what you're looking for.
And Thomas's point here is that these are, in his word, quote, common carriers.
And they are also, quote, places of public accommodation.
And what Thomas is getting at here is that when you're dealing with common carriers, the phone company, Places of public accommodation, let's say a hotel, they don't have a right to exclude people.
So you can't go to a hotel and they say, hey, listen, you know what?
We don't like the way you look. You can't get a room here, even though you're following all our other rules and you're willing to pay.
Or someone goes to a restaurant, you know, we don't really like Latinos, you can't really eat here, sorry.
No, yes you can.
So what Thomas is getting at is when you're dealing with common carriers, just as the phone company can't refuse service arbitrarily, just as a hotel or restaurant can't just turn people away, they can establish certain types of rules, but the rules have to be uniformly enforced.
The bottom line of it is what Thomas is laying out here is a legal rationale for the government, either at the state level or at the federal level, coming in and saying to these carriers, if you want to operate in our state, you're going to have to respect the free speech of all our citizens.
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I devoted yesterday a special edition of the podcast to Alexis de Tocqueville, focusing on his book, Democracy in America, but also talking briefly about his other book called The Ancien Regime, The Old Regime, and The French Revolution.
I want to do a segment kind of in conjunction with that today, talking about very interesting correspondence between Tocqueville and a fellow named Gobineau.
This is Joseph Arthur D. Gobineau, an aristocrat, A racist, an advocate of racial superiority, who had published an essay called The Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.
Now, Gobineau was a cultivated man, an educated man, and he was responding to the idea, which was prevalent at the time, this is in the 19th century, that the differences between races are due to factors like climate.
But not just climate, but also cultural differences, which sometimes were themselves attributed to climate.
This was often called the environmentalist thesis.
The environmentalist thesis is the idea that racial groups differ on average due to differences in the environment.
And Gobanaga's nonsense.
Now, Gobino's argument is that, and I'm quoting him now, environments differ considerably, but he goes, great civilizations have occurred in all kinds of environments, and you've had civilizations that have fallen backwards in all kinds of environments as well.
He goes, in spite of wind and rain, cold and heat, sterility and fruitfulness, the world has seen barbarism and civilization flourishing everywhere on the same soil.
Basically, what Gobino is saying is he notices that there is civilizational development only in certain cultures.
And he focuses on the West, but he doesn't mean just the West.
He goes, look at China, for example.
Look at ancient Japan.
Look at some of the areas in the Far East.
Look at India. So he's willing to concede in Persia and India.
There you have these flourishing civilizations going back to ancient times.
But then he says...
Where do you see that among the Native Americans?
He goes, those guys have been around for centuries.
They've got all the benefits of a wonderful climate here in the Americas, and they've invented basically nothing.
And then he turns to Africa and says pretty much the same thing.
He goes, where's the African or American Indian version of Caesar or Newton or Charlemagne or Homer?
And now I'm going to quote him.
And this is a little disturbing, but it's worth listening to because of Tocqueville's response to it.
This is Gobineau. He goes, We often hear of Negroes who have learned music or who are clerks in banking houses who know how to read, write, count, dance, and speak like white men.
He goes, People are astonished by this and conclude the Negro is capable of everything.
Then he adds, I will not wait for the friends of equality to show me how such and such passages in books written by missionaries or sea captains who declare that some Wolof, member of a Wolof tribe, is a fine carpenter, or some hot and tart, a good servant, or some kaffir dances and plays the violin, some bambar and knows arithmetic.
He goes, let's leave aside such puerilities, stupidities, and compare not men but groups.
So basically what Gobineau is saying is that when it comes to the red man, as Tocqueville called him, the American Indian or the black man, these are people who have never done any kind of civilization.
He goes, they've never even tried.
Quote, I will wait long for the work to be finished, says Gobineau.
I merely ask that it might be begun.
He goes, but it has never been begun.
It has never even been attempted.
Now, Gobineau sends his essay to Tocqueville.
And Tocqueville strongly objects to it, even though he treats Gobino with respect.
He writes to Gobino saying, basically, I must frankly tell you, you have not convinced me.
And he starts by talking about the practical consequences of these kinds of philosophical doctrines.
He goes, I believe that they are probably quite false.
I know that they are certainly very pernicious.
So notice here, Tocqueville isn't so much arguing the falsity, but he's saying, what kind of a message are you sending to people when you're telling them that they are naturally and in effect genetically, of course, Gobineau didn't use the word genetically, but genetically or biologically inferior.
Now, Topil again. Surely among the different families which compose the human race, there exist certain tendencies, certain proper aptitudes resulting from thousands of different causes, but that these tendencies, these capacities should be insuperable, unchangeable, has not only never been proved, but no one will ever be able to prove it.
And then he goes on to say, I'm sure, this is Tocqueville in a very Tocquevillean mode, I'm sure that Julius Caesar, had he the time, would have willingly written a book to prove that the savages he met in Britain did not belong to the same race as the Romans.
Remember that when the Romans ruled over Britain...
The Anglo-Saxons in Britain were savages.
They had invented nothing, written nothing.
They were running around like barbarians.
So Tocqueville's point is that groups change.
And this idea of attributing natural superiority or inferiority is just completely wrong.
Finally, Tocqueville again, what purpose does it serve to persuade lesser peoples?
And by lesser he means just more unfortunate, more backward in terms of wealth or learning.
So he says, I acknowledge that there's inequality in the world, says Tocqueville, but what purpose does it serve to persuade lesser peoples living in abject conditions of barbarism or slavery?
So you see here Tocqueville is attributing the backwardness to barbarism and slavery.
That such being their racial nature, they can do nothing to better themselves, to change their habits, or to ameliorate their status.
We see here not just the humanity, but the humanism of Tocqueville.
Tocqueville is a believer, ultimately, that we are all God's children.
This applies not only to us as individuals, but as groups.
There are groups that have more favorable or unfavorable circumstances, but even those change dramatically.
And so the message of racial inferiority, so says Tocqueville, is not only wrongheaded, it's also pernicious.
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Let's go to today's question.
Listen. Hey Dinesh, this is Nathan.
I work for a woke corporation that has just instituted mandatory unconscious bias training.
This is supposed to help us achieve more inclusive and equitable results as a company.
I have two questions for you.
First, can you give me a practical definition of what unconscious bias is?
And second, what is the conservative response to this topic in the workplace?
I really enjoy your podcast.
Looking forward to your response.
Thank you. Well, very good question or questions.
And in theory, an unconscious bias would be an unexamined assumption that would be somehow embedded in our psyche.
We would be not aware of it.
But we would apply it in ordinary life.
And so the purpose of the training or, let's say, Socratic inquiry is to bring out this hidden bias so that you can then go, oh, whoa, I never really realized that I sort of saw things that way.
And by the bias being identified, you'd be in a better position to correct it.
So this is kind of the theory.
But it really bears no resemblance to the anti-bias training that is actually going on because the simple fact of the matter is that this anti-bias training is not aimed at teaching you to treat people as individuals, to sort of not even pay any attention to race, to judge people by their merits, to look at what they can actually do to, as Martin Luther King said, judge them by the content of their character.
It's actually trying to foster the opposite.
So ironically, the whole program is based upon the use of conscious bias.
Now, the problem is that when you have policies that are based on conscious bias, let's take, for example, university policies.
Now, university policies, by the way, are consciously biased, not just in the racial domain, affirmative action, but they're also consciously biased in other areas.
So, for example, at Dartmouth, there's a conscious bias toward athletes.
It's much easier to get into Dartmouth if you can throw a football or jump over a hurdle.
And the athletes at Dartmouth all kind of ganged together and they all ate at the same table.
We could easily recognize them because they were like 300 pounds and ate like 17 eggs for breakfast.
But of course the stereotype at Dartmouth is that these guys were kind of a little bit on the dummy side compared to the rest of us.
And the reason we thought that was not because we had unconscious bias.
We knew that the college itself had lowered the standards to let these dudes in.
They were there basically to entertain the alumni and throw a ball.
They were actually not there to do Shakespeare or do anything that has to do with academics whatsoever.
So similarly, when it comes to affirmative action, when you have organizations that are Consciously practicing racial bias.
That racial bias creates, just as like in the athlete case, it creates a stigma.
It creates a stigma that, listen, what's happening with these guys is that when they jump up to shoot the basketball, the net is lowered six inches.
So, this conscious bias creates the stigma and then they treat...
The response to that stigma, which is the natural response, wow, the standards are lowered for these guys.
They're not as good as everybody else.
They treat that as an example of bias in the first place.
So the bottom line of it is it looks to me like this is a very confused argument.
An enterprise aimed less at helping people to recognize their own unconscious biases and more at imposing indoctrination on people, on trying to get people to be more biased, but in this case, biased against whites, to adopt, if you will, leftist ideology about structural racism and a whole bunch of other nonsense.
So bottom line of it is go into the bias training but go into it with a little bit of a sardonic
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