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April 14, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:01:34
A QUESTION OF PRIVILEGE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep68
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Who really has privilege in our society today?
Is it whites? Is it blacks?
I'm talking about cultural privilege and legal privilege.
I'll explore this question.
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I want to talk today about the issue of privilege.
Not so much the issue of personal privilege, because when we think about our lives, we could be privileged in this way or that.
I think back, for example, I'm very privileged to have good parents, parents who love me and took care of me.
And I suppose, since not everyone has that, that's a kind of privilege.
When I think of someone who's a very good athlete, they're privileged to have those inherent skills to be tall enough or strong enough or fast enough.
And that's, I suppose, a kind of personal privilege.
We can also speak of national privilege.
It's a privilege to be born in America.
That's why people try so hard to have an American passport.
An American passport counts for more than any other kind of passport, at least today, around the world.
That may not last forever, but it is true now.
So there's American privilege, but I want to talk about privilege in America, and I want to speak about kind of the two kinds of privilege that I think really matter.
The first is cultural privilege, the way that you are seen in public space, the way that you're treated by others, by the culture, the way you're represented in culture.
And the second is legal privilege, which is the law bending in your favor in various things.
I think it's very clear that although we hear interminably about white privilege, the fact of the matter seems to be that when you look at the episodes of all the stuff going on in our culture, and if you look at our laws, it's very clear that we have a lot of black privilege.
Yes, black privilege.
I know the term itself will cause some people to find it a little bit jarring, but black privilege here simply means that there is a cultural and legal preference Let's start with the legal privilege.
There are no laws in the United States that I'm aware of that prefer whites over blacks.
Not one. Whereas, there are innumerable laws, you couldn't even count them, that benefit blacks and other minorities over whites.
Let's start with laws that involve college admissions, preferences for blacks and other minorities over whites.
We also have laws that give preferential treatment in terms of jobs and promotions and government contracts.
And there are certain types of even COVID relief packages that have been structured in such a way that they give legal preferences to minorities.
Over whites. And this permeates our whole society.
Everyone kind of knows about it.
Everyone accommodates to it.
And there it is.
It is a form of legal discrimination, which another word for discrimination is, of course, privilege.
Now we can turn to cultural privilege.
And this is a big question, but it's kind of easy to investigate by zooming in to some particular incident.
So let's just look at all these incidents of shootings that have been going on around us, which I've been watching kind of carefully.
I just see a tweet here by Senator Tammy Baldwin.
Today I pay my respects to Capitol Police Officer Billy Evans, who was tragically killed doing his job protecting the Capitol.
My heart goes out to family and friends.
Blah, blah, blah. He was tragically killed.
By whom? Here Senator Baldwin is too reticent to say.
Why? Because the killer was a black guy.
He was a Nation of Islam guy.
And therefore the passive voice kicks in.
He was tragically killed.
If he had been killed by a Trumpster, by a white guy, we would have that.
Oh, I'm horrified to note that a white Trumpster did this.
So somehow for whites, they're always granted agency.
They're held responsible for what they do, particularly the bad things they do.
When it comes to blacks, there's a desire to sort of paper over that.
Look at the... Look at the perpetrators of the carjacking of the Uber driver.
By the way, a hard-working guy, an immigrant, he gets tasered and killed.
His car crashes.
And it's two black teams who do it.
What happens to them? Answer?
Pretty much nothing. They're getting a kind of sweetheart plea deal.
And they're going to avoid all prison time.
They don't even go to prison at all.
Well, what do you call that, if not black privilege?
If that, again, had been two white guys who did that, I don't think they'd be getting the same deal.
If two white guys had murdered a Pakistani immigrant, can you imagine the torrential press coverage?
So, both on the cultural front and the legal front, you notice that the fact that these teenagers are black is key to the fact that they get off easy.
Now, I turn to the Daunte Wright question.
Killing. A killing I'll discuss in a little more detail later in the podcast.
But here I just want to note that when I look at the media portraits of Daunte Wright, they're almost devotional.
You see, for example, a picture of Daunte Wright with this little kid.
Now, I've seen other pictures of Daunte Wright with a gun.
I read, and again, I've got to go over to Britain to find this out.
Daunte Wright had a warrant out for his arrest.
For attempted aggravated robbery charges after choking and holding a woman at gunpoint to rob her $820 in rent money.
Wright and another man named Emma J. Driver were trying to basically rob this woman.
And Dante Wright knew there was a warrant out for his arrest.
Now when the cops stopped him, he called over to his mom and he goes, Oh yeah, they're pulling me over for my air freshener hanging out.
On my rearview mirror, obviously lying to his mom.
And of course, his mom reports that to the media, which then goes, Unbelievable!
The guy's being pulled over for an air freshener.
No, he's not being pulled over for an air freshener.
There's an outstanding warrant for a very serious crime that he is under investigation for.
So again, the fact that this Daunte Wright is treated as if he were some kind of angel who was merely being harassed by these cops...
You know, that would not be the case if Daunte Wright wasn't black.
So the essence of being black here is you essentially become exonerated for what you do.
Even if you're a really bad guy with really bad stuff behind your belt, that gets papered over in the media coverage and you also seem to get legal preferences.
By the way, why do we know the name of the cop who shot Daunte Wright, but we still don't know the name of the cop who shot Ashley Babbitt?
Well, I happen to know the name of that cop, but you really have to dig to find it.
By the way, the guy is Lieutenant Michael Leroy Bird.
That's the guy who did it, but you'll almost not see that in a single media report.
You know why? Because he's black.
So if you see a black cop with a gun shooting a white woman through the neck, the media knows that really doesn't really fit our narrative.
Our narrative is white cops killing blacks.
So they erase it.
They don't show it. If they mention it and they try not to mention it at all, they've tried to essentially protect this man by not mentioning his name.
Now notice essentially how quickly he's been exonerated.
Where's the trial? Where's the investigation?
Where's the report on why this was a justified killing?
Ashley Babbitt, after all, was unarmed.
So, what I'm trying to get at here is that if you're black and on the left, you really have a sort of pass in our culture.
You can be a home invader and a guy who's passing out counterfeit bills.
You can be shot up with drugs, but you'll still get five funerals.
You'll still get a gold casket.
You'll still get the democratic leadership going down on one knee.
You can loot a store. You can burn a building or a church.
You can jump on top of a police car.
You can block traffic and bridges.
You can harass diners.
You can pull people out of their automobiles and haze them and beat them.
You can go into private residences and bang things.
You can go into an Asian American nail salon and harass the owners and the people who work there.
You can run through groups like Black Lives Matter as a massive extortion scheme where you're collecting all this money to fight social justice, and then you go buy five homes.
You go essentially invest in property all over America and in the Bahamas, and really the media stoop, they're not going to report it because it's okay.
Why? Because you have black privilege.
You can even shoot members of your own race or other races.
Without the slightest fear that it will be described as a hate crime or reported widely in the newspapers.
There's not going to be any national brouhaha about it.
The only time you'll be in the newspapers if you're a hardened criminal...
With a long rap sheet and a white cop pulls you over.
That's the only time you're going to find yourself in the newspaper and you're going to be lionized as a victim and the other guy is going to be the one.
You know, I could go on with this, but I think you get the picture.
The way you can sort of settle this matter about privilege is simply to ask this question.
In the old days, 100 years ago, you had a lot of mixed race people, part white, part black, who tried to pass as...
White. Why? Because the cultural privilege and the legal privilege was in doing that, in pretending, you may say, to be white.
There's a whole bunch of literature and novels, James Weldon Johnson's, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and many others that talk about this.
Charles Chestnut, The House Behind the Cedars, literature describing, if you will, mixed-race blacks, Passing as white because they're light-skinned enough to do that.
They felt that's the way for me to live a normal life.
Well, today it's the opposite, if you'll notice.
You hardly have any whites who pretend to be black, but you have lots of mixed-race people who pretend to be white, but you have lots of mixed-race people who now move in the black direction.
I'm thinking not just of the Rachel Dolezals who sort of say, you know, are really white but say I'm black.
You have that in order to advance professionally, perhaps in her case.
But you also have people like Obama, Or Kamala Harris.
Meghan Markle.
People who are mixed race, but who decide to emphasize the black side of their identity.
Why? Because they know that culturally, politically, in terms of advancing their career, it's better for them.
So the bottom line of it is, there are certain respects, I suppose, in which there is white privilege.
I think the most important respect is the privilege of the past.
And so whites, for example, have greater wealth than blacks, and that's passed on, I guess, from an era of white privilege.
But at the same time, I think we are fools not to deny the reality that in today's America, in terms of culture and in terms of law, black privilege is also a very obvious reality.
I've been talking a little bit about the issue of...
Black privilege.
But now I want to talk about something even more extreme than that, if you will, and that is the concept of black supremacy.
Now, black privilege simply means that there are structures in society, in the law or in culture, that give a preference to blacks and to other minorities over whites.
Black supremacy is totally different.
That is the doctrine that blacks are better.
Blacks are inherently superior.
So you can see that black supremacy, to the degree it exists, is a mirror image of white supremacy.
And we hear constantly about white supremacy...
But apparently, it's not that easy to find white supremacists.
I say this because I'm reading here that last Sunday, the white supremacists planned dozens of rallies in major cities.
And so there were counter-protests planned to counter these white supremacists.
Well, guess what? The white supremacists never showed up.
And so there were the counter-protesters, but they outnumbered the protesters, who in some cases numbered exactly zero.
So, for example, in Philadelphia, there was a big counter-protest, but no protest.
No White Lives Matter.
In New York City, there were counter-protesters, but they stood unopposed across the street from Trump Tower.
There was a White Lives Matter rally expected, but no rally, in fact, materialized.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a whole bunch of counter-protesters encircled a lone White Lives Matter protester.
One guy. One guy.
And similarly in Huntington Beach, pretty much the same story.
There was a big counter-protest, but the counter-protest was answering no protest at all.
So the media kind of...
Somewhat unnerved by this, tried to take up the idea that, well, you know, the effect of Trump has been to drive white supremacy underground.
It's now kind of merged with the mainstream of the Republican Party.
Anyway, this is all basically a theory that has had to be quickly come up with to make up for the fact that these white supremacists were nowhere to be found.
But what about black supremacists?
Are they nowhere to be found?
Well, it turns out, no.
The guy who slammed his car in Washington, D.C., killing...
A policeman is an active member or an enthusiastic member, you might say, of the Nation of Islam.
The guy's name was Noah Green.
And the Nation of Islam is the premier black supremacy organization in America.
Now, it turns out that it was avidly praised by Raphael Warnock.
The Georgia senator, the Democratic senator, he goes, we have needed the witness of the Nation of Islam.
It's an important voice.
In fact, he says it's made important contributions to black theology.
Representative Danny Davis, Democrat, in 2018, praised Farrakhan as an outstanding human being who has, quote, done outstanding things.
Maxine Waters has been seen, you know, hugging and supporting Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
And if the Nation of Islam seems like a little bit of an outlier, here is the woman, Kristen Clark, Joe Biden's pick to run the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.
So not exactly someone disconnected from public policy.
Well, when she was an undergraduate, she was a big champion of what she herself talks about as melanin supremacy.
I'm quoting now. Melanin endows blacks with greater mental, physical, and spiritual abilities.
So what you have here is not something that talks about—here you're actually talking about a doctrine of biological superiority evidently rooted in melanin.
I mean, scientists will tell you melanin is simply the coloring agent in the skin.
But when I did my book, The End of Racism, which I recommend to you—it's actually my most—well, it's certainly my thickest book.
It runs almost, well, 700 pages— I guess it can be used for multiple purposes, including as a doorstopper.
It's almost 2,000 footnotes.
But it's the kind of book that you want to go back to and digest and read a little at a time.
And pretty much all the issues we deal with today are anchored in that book, even though the book came out 20 years ago.
I'm now consulting that book to tell you a couple of things.
I remember many years ago, I debated this guy, Molefi Keiti Asante.
A champion of a movement called Afrocentrism.
I debated him more than once on the campus.
And this is a guy who would wear the dashiki, kind of wear the African outfit.
Turns out he's not really African.
He's from Savannah, Georgia, I believe.
But in any event, in his writings, he's an advocate of melanin supremacy.
He talks about the fact that Europeans, as a result of biology, suffer from what he calls the caveman mentality, which makes people evidently bloodthirsty, while Africans are blessed with what he calls the palm tree mentality.
So having essentially been raised in the tropics, Africans develop this gentle nature.
Their melanin is a pointer to the fact that they're just nicer people, whereas whites are basically barbarians.
Frances Kress Welsing, one of the theorists of black supremacy, says that melanin is a superior absorber of all energy.
In fact, she says it's of divine origin because, after all, God is the source of all energy.
And she goes, the color black is essential to be in touch with the God force.
Since whites lack melanin, she argues, they lack spirituality.
Another melanin theorist is the Afrocentrist Wade Nobles.
And he goes, I'm now quoting him, African psychology is based on the assumption that the African race is evolutionarily more advanced than the Caucasian.
So you might think this is a stray, a line here, a line there, but no.
There are works like Richard King's The African Origin of Biological Psychiatry, Carol Barnes' Melanin, The Chemical Key to Black Greatness.
I mean, some of this stuff has a comic element, I grant you.
But it's not comic when it begins to encrust itself in an ideology of supremacy.
It's not comic when it's taken up by powerful institutions.
The Nation of Islam, for example, is a powerful force.
It dominates certain sectors of American life, believe it or not.
For example, when I was in my confinement center in California, I realized that the Nation of Islam is a powerful force among black gangs in prison.
So these are people who are not exactly the most peaceful people in the world and they're being taught this ideology of black supremacy which drives a violent gang mentality.
So the bottom line of it is black supremacy is a force in America.
It is advocated by institutions like the Nation of Islam.
It was at least at one time championed by the woman who is Biden's pick to lead the Civil Rights Department.
If we are against racial supremacy, we should be equally against white supremacy and black supremacy.
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We have now had two police killings, both in the state of Minnesota.
It's kind of a little strange.
Not that far from each other.
There was, of course, the George Floyd killing by Chauvin, and that trial is ongoing.
And then, as if that weren't bad enough, suddenly now we have the Daunte Wright This is a shooting by a veteran of the Minnesota Police Department, Kim Potter, a female who evidently was going for her taser and pulled out her gun.
Now, the question I'm thinking about as I look at the Chauvin trial on the one hand and then this Daunte Wright shooting on the other is Who is at fault here?
Does the fault lie with the individual, the quote, bad apple, that is doing this?
Or is the fault with the system?
Now, the general assumption is that the fault is with the system.
That's the basis of defund the police.
It's not this policeman or that policeman, because then the remedy would be, let's get rid of the bad apples and bring in only good apples.
But no, the whole idea that there's something in the police training, in the system itself, that needs to be overhauled, if not gotten rid of or completely.
Here's Rashida Tlaib.
It wasn't an accident, she says.
I mean, this is unbelievable, making claims that haven't even been examined, let alone tried.
And she goes, policing in our country is inherently and intentionally racist.
And then she goes, no more policing, incarceration, and militarization.
It can't be reformed.
So I guess she's saying that there should be no cops.
Well, if there should be no cops, presumably we would all need to defend ourselves, which would mean we would all need to be probably heavily armed.
But I guess she probably means no cops and then no guns for the citizens either.
Let's take the guns away. And then how are we supposed to defend ourselves?
The criminals are the only ones who have guns.
Here's Obama. Now, Obama would, I think, not go that far.
He's too kind of graceful and sneaky for that.
And he comes out with one of his usual classic Obama-isms.
He goes, this is also a reminder of how badly we need to reimagine policing.
This is a very Obama statement.
The solution is to reimagine policing.
I mean, the police who have been doing work for decades, if not centuries, all over the world, but somehow here is Obama, kind of in his library or at his Netflix office.
You know, I have an idea for reimagining policing.
Then we're talking about the military.
Soldiers fighting. Veterans have been to Iraq multiple times.
I think I'm going to reimagine military strategy.
So this is the Obama pose.
And I think we can recognize it for its ludicrousness.
But the point I want to make here is this.
And that is that in the case of the Daunte Wright shooting, it may be that we are dealing with an institutional problem.
And I say this because the immediate defense of Kim Potter has been, oh, she didn't mean it.
It's an accident. Well, to some degree, that's even more alarming.
Because think about it.
If Kim Potter meant to shoot him, presumably she felt a sense of threat.
She felt he was a grave danger.
She felt that he was about to make a getaway.
There would be some stated reason for using the weapon.
You can agree with the reason or disagree.
Maybe the reason is persuasive or not.
But in her mind, she felt that fear and necessity that compelled her to do that.
But to say, I didn't mean to do it.
I meant to pull my taser, which is a very different object than a gun.
Debbie was saying to me, she's like, you have to actually pull the trigger to discharge a gun.
It doesn't discharge itself.
So the bottom line of it is here, something seems to be very wrong with the training if an experienced police officer, this is a woman who's been, I believe, 20 years plus at the department as a patrol officer, And for her not to be able to tell the difference between a tase and a gun, this I think is a problem. Now, no one is saying that this was motivated by race.
In fact, interestingly, in the Derek Chauvin case, there's been very little about race.
So the whole big hoopla was, you know, Black Lives Matter, this is a racial incident, it's a white cop, but...
Ironically, what we seem to be dealing with here is not a racial issue.
Presumably Derek Chauvin would have done it to someone else if he had to or if he could.
Now, let's turn to the Chauvin case because I've been really interested to see one after the other cops.
In fact, including the chief of police for his department, all coming up solemnly and saying, basically, oh no, we don't teach people to do these knee holds.
We don't tell people to put their knee on someone's neck for eight or nine minutes.
This is not part of the manual.
This is not what we train people to do.
So you can see what's going on here.
What the prosecution is doing, with the help of all these cops, is saying there is no institutional problem.
This Chauvin guy is a bad apple.
So in other words, they're kind of throwing him under the bus, but not taking responsibility as a department.
So in other words, the prosecution is putting forward a case, which is being, by the way, supported by the media.
You know, I turn on CNN every single day.
Very moving testimony!
Completely persuasive!
So here is CNN, sort of eager to believe one side, but I don't think...
I think the guys at CNN, the journalists who are gaga over the prosecution, are too dumb to see that what the prosecution is advancing is a theory totally different than the left's theory.
Their theory is the police department is fine.
The manual is fine.
The training is fine.
But... Like any organization, you get some bad guys who become part of it.
Chauvin is one of the bad guys and maybe the other couple of guys with him also.
But the bottom line of it is the problem is not institutional.
It is personal to Chauvin.
So the idea here is that by, quote, sacrificing Chauvin, the department is protecting itself.
And as for the left that's cheering on this process, they don't seem to have gotten the point that they are on board with a whole set of arguments that calls not for defunding the police, but just for making sure that guys like Chauvin aren't part of the police.
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Is it okay to make fun of Indian Americans?
Is it okay to use stereotypes to depict Indian Americans?
This issue came to the fore because of the actor Hank Azaria.
A very talented guy, by the way.
He was apparently doing an Indian character on The Simpsons.
The Indian character called Apu, or as Indians would say, Apu.
So, this Hank Azaria guy, he wasn't just doing this one Indian character.
He was doing a multiplicity of characters, apparently more than 30.
And now he has come out and said that he feels he should, quote, apologize to every single Indian person in this country.
So... Apparently Hank wants to apologize to me, and I was like, for what?
Well, let me look into this.
Now here's a short clip, by the way, of Azaria talking to Colbert about the sort of offense that has been raised.
Listen. I know you at least as Mo, Chief Wiggum, and Apu, who is an Indian-American character, who in the last couple of years, actually, and again recently, has stirred some controversy.
How would you characterize the controversy, and do you understand why some Indian-American or South Asian-American actors are offended by that character?
Well, the first thing that strikes me about all this is who exactly is offended?
It turns out that there were some Indian Americans who let Azaria know, we don't like this.
And what I love here is how a couple of guys, or maybe five guys, or ten guys at the most, claim to speak for the entire Indian American community.
We are offended.
Not I'm offended, because, you know, I just got off the boat.
I'm a little insecure. I don't like making jokes about Indian Americans, because, you know, it makes me feel inferior.
I've been... Feeling inferior for a long time and this makes me feel even more inferior.
No, it's never a personal response.
It's rather, we Indian Americans are upset.
So the first thing I say to myself is that I think that this easy woundedness, this jumping to be like, oh, I'm offended, is actually a mark of insecurity, of personal insecurity.
Because successful people and successful groups don't behave like this.
You notice that, for example, when people make jokes, people can make all kinds of jokes about whites.
And you notice that there's no white uproar, there are no spokesmen for the white community.
Why? Because whites can take a joke.
Whites don't mind you making fun of them because they're like, yeah, you know what?
So what? Laugh all you want.
We're all going to join in.
So a successful group, by and large, has confidence in itself.
Now, Indian Americans have every reason to be in this position.
Indian Americans are, by and large, the most successful ethnic group in the United States, and that includes whites.
So if you made a kind of an income list of different ethnic groups, Asian Indians are at the very top.
Very top. So why would the group at the top of the heap care about this guy, Apu?
Well, you might say, well, that's because, you know, he's a stereotype, Dinesh.
He doesn't reflect the complexity of Indians.
Well, you show me a comic character who does.
Comedy is anchored in stereotypes.
It's only funny because it's a stereotype, and it's only funny because it's recognizable in some elements of the way people actually behave.
Now, Apu's not a bad character.
He's actually very admirable.
He's hardworking.
He's smart. He's industrious.
He gets things done. He's not perfect.
He actually has flaws, but he's a family guy.
He's a patriotic guy.
He loves his own country.
So the bottom line of it is, here's a guy who's funny...
And people laugh because Indian Americans are funny.
Some groups, by the way, are funnier than others.
I'm happy to say Indian Americans as a group are kind of among the funnier ones.
And Indian Americans know that, which is why in Indian American circles, we make a lot of jokes about ourselves.
And so what I want to say about this guy, Hank Azari, is, you know, you can come apologize to me if you want, and if you want to send me 50 bucks, I'll take it.
But you don't need to.
Why? Because, and I don't think I'm alone among Indian Americans in saying that I can take a joke.
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There is both bad news and good news coming out of South America.
The continent in general is kind of at a crossroads.
Is it going to move in the socialist direction or is it going to move in the free market direction?
Well, there are a couple of important indicators.
Peru. Early polls show that the leading candidate in the Peruvian election appears to be, I'm not kidding you, a communist.
This is Pedro Castillo.
This is a hard leftist, and he is the one out in front.
This is a guy who has been linked to terrorist groups in Peru, the Sendero Luminoso, and a very bad guy.
Now, he hasn't won yet.
In fact, most likely he's going to be in a runoff.
And the runoff candidate might be Kiko Fujimori, who's the daughter of the former president, Alberto Fujimori.
That would actually be probably not a good thing.
The other candidates would be stronger in running one-on-one against this Castillo guy, against the communists.
Because if the communist wins, we have Castroism in Cuba.
He talks about, quote, closing the constitutional court.
He talks about creating a new constitution.
He goes, we're going to change the economic structure of the country in the sense that the state regulates the market.
This is actually his vice president speaking, but speaking on his behalf.
So Peru is potentially headed in a very bad direction if this guy makes it across the finish line.
Let's hope he doesn't. Better news coming out of Ecuador, which actually was under socialist control for a long time.
2007-17, Rafael Correa...
And Correa's not in the race, but he has a sort of a sidekick, Andres Arauz, who was resoundingly defeated in the recent election by a banker and conservative and free market guy, Guillermo Lasso.
So Lasso is in and this Aras guy is out.
Lasso has promised to open up Ecuador to foreign investment.
He wants a free trade alliance stretching across South America.
This is very good news.
A socialist country moving into the free market orbit.
By the way, this Arouse guy, I mean, this guy would fit right in with the Democratic Party here in America.
He tried to win the election by saying that he would give a $1,000 check to a million poor families.
And he also said that he would expand all the social welfare programs.
But by contrast, the free market guy said, look, look, we're not going to do those giveaways.
We're actually going to make sure we have...
A fast-growing economy.
So we see with Brazil, now with Ecuador, there is a conservative and free market presence in South America, but there is also the left-wing presence.
Good news from Ecuador, bad news, or potentially bad news from Peru.
And all of this is occurring, you may say, in the United States' backyard.
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So a couple of weeks ago, Debbie and I saw the movie Church People, which is a satire and a comedy.
We laughed all the way through it.
It's light. It's amusing.
It actually pokes fun at the church in some ways, while also pointing to the deeper message of the gospel.
I'm really happy to have Thor Ramsey.
He's an actor. He's a writer.
He's a comedian. He's been in a bunch of movies.
He's one of the stars of Church People.
Thor, may I call you that?
You may call me Thor, absolutely.
Absolutely. Hey, welcome to the podcast.
Tell people what this movie is.
What's the basic plot of the movie?
You play a guy. Well, your name is also Guy.
Yes. And you get caught up in a very interesting situation.
What is that? Yeah, so basically the premise of this movie, to make a long story short, back in about 2010, I was working on the script for And a friend called me up, a church planter.
He says, you're not going to believe this, what this church is doing on Good Friday.
He says, they're actually crucifying a human being.
I'm like, there's no way.
He goes, yeah, I'm looking at their social media right now.
So I'm like, I check it out.
And it turned out to be not the case, but they were doing a passion play, but it was going to be so graphic that they had so many warnings about blood and fainting and stuff that he interpreted it as they were actually going to crucify someone. But I realized at that point that American evangelical pastors, probably for the best of intentions, had done such crazy things to attract people to church that for a second, my friend and I believed that an American evangelical church would actually crucify someone on a good Friday.
And right then I knew I had a big idea for my screenplay that I was working on.
That kind of became the central idea. And that's what we really, in terms of the satire, that's what we satirize, is this idea that we have to put whistles and bells on the gospel to make it interesting, when the reality is we don't.
The gospel is the power of God, doesn't need any help from us.
I mean, in a sense, I guess what you have is you've got these churches, and some of them are mega churches, and they feel that they are in a competitive market, and they have to attract people into the pew and keep them there.
And so, as a consequence, presumably these gimmicks are sort of market-driven techniques in which entertainment sort of substitutes for the true meaning of the gospel, right?
Yeah, yeah. There's actually a couple serious books that helped inform the theme of the screenplay.
David F. Wells, who wrote a book called The Courage to be Protestant.
And that's a serious book.
But in that book, he has this, well, he writes about what you attract people with is what you have to keep them with.
So if you attract them with the show, then you have to keep Up that, you know, if you're giving something away, it has to get bigger and bigger.
If you're giving away a flat screen the next week or the next year, it has to be a car and just has to get your gimmicks, so to speak, have to keep getting bigger and bigger or you lose your audience.
And statistics show that the average evangelical switches churches every seven years.
And I think part of that is, and I'm not against big churches.
That's not the idea. It has to do with our methodology.
And that's really what the film is getting at.
I think one thing that's kind of cool is that, you know, sometimes in the Christian world, there's a stereotype that Christians are really somber, and they don't have the ability to chuckle at themselves.
And I think what's cool about this movie is that it kind of turns the camera around, it looks inwardly at the church, and it's willing to say, hey, listen, there's something slight comic stuff going on here too, and we Christians can laugh at ourselves.
Well, you hope so, because that would be a sign of humility.
The opposite would not be humility.
And I think humility lends itself to not taking yourself so seriously, or at least when someone points out a flaw in yourself, instead of rising up in defense of yourself, you Go with it.
And I think the comedians we all love the most are those comedians who are, you know, they are able to poke fun at themselves.
So I would hope the church could, because again, it's not, here's what I tell people, it's like, you can only satirize what you love.
I love Jesus. I love the church.
So the movie doesn't come across as mean, but whenever you see a satire from someone who doesn't love their subject, it comes across as mean.
And I could point out several satirical military movies made over the last five years, where you can tell these people do not, they don't love the military, and I'm not sure they love this country.
So those satires come across as mean-spirited, whereas when you love your subject, it doesn't.
I mean, it also seems like satire is very consistent with the Christian view of human nature because, of course, the Christian view of human nature is that human nature is fallen.
It's not perfect. It's not even really perfectible except through Christ.
And so satire is a way of showing that even pastors, who are kind of the leaders of the flock, you might say, Are susceptible to all kinds of weaknesses in which, in order to expand the audience, and one thing about the movie that's kind of interesting is that the pastor kind of has a good motive.
He wants to bring more people in.
So it's not that he's just this corrupt guy who's sort of trying to sell out for money.
He wants the church to do well, and so the things that he's doing come actually from a good place.
Yeah, because his character even has a redemptive moment in the script, but I think even as we see he's flawed and his methodology and his motives aren't questioned.
And I think that's an important thing because that's really what we're saying even to the church.
Again, it's not that we're against big churches making the film.
There are a lot of big churches that do great things.
But I think one of the things that hits on, a thing that's close to me, is that, you know, let's say there's 400,000 churches in America upwards of that.
You know, being gracious, let's say only 200,000 of those believe the Bible.
It's probably less than that, but just for the sake of math, which I'm not proficient at.
So only 1,000 of those are megachurches, but the megachurch mentality dominates the wider evangelical church, and all the small churches feel they have to compete, and I just feel like it's damaging overall to the methodology of the whole church, because you have small churches trying to do these same Silly things to attract people.
From my perspective, that's not a biblical view of church.
And I think that's some of the issue we have now with some of these great leaders in evangelicalism having their faults, is that we've adopted more of a CEO model of leadership rather than a servanthood model, which is the biblical model.
I mean, to me, one of the signs of a good movie is it makes you think a little beyond the movie.
And as I was watching the film, I was thinking to myself, you know, there are a lot of really good pastors who are very anchored in the gospel, but they're very reluctant to speak to the issues in our culture.
They're a little bit shy about addressing the pro-life issue and some other issues.
And I thought, I wonder if it's the same mentality.
It's the idea that, listen, I cannot possibly give offense.
Even though this teaching comes right out of the gospel, I better not go there because I might lose some people in the pew.
So when you start thinking of the church as a marketing operation, not only does it make you do gimmicks, which is what the movie satirizes, but it makes you kind of go silent on important moral issues.
Oh man. Which are related to the faith, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, I absolutely agree.
I think there is a, well, there's a pandemic in the church of speaking the truth.
I mean, I saw the stats the other day on how many pastors actually even address abortion, which you'd think would come up a lot, you know, when you're doing sermons.
And I think that's, you know, from my perspective, that's why the church is in the state she's in, is because we're afraid often to speak the truth, because we're afraid.
It's almost like In order to reach people, we feel like we can't preach the truth because we feel like we'll push them away, so we feel like there's a little dance going on.
I think it's just exactly the opposite.
I mean, I used to be one of these people that would say, you know, like, don't speak about politics from the pulpit because that's not the place for it.
I'm like, well, if God is the author of all of life and if He's sovereign over all things, then all things have a biblical point of view, and I think that's just the wrong, I think it's a wrong-headed view to take, and I think we've Actually shot ourselves in the foot with that kind of thinking.
Well, you've been part of a really good movie.
It's called Church People.
It's actually playing on the Salem platform, SalemNow.com.
And you can get a discount if you go to SalemNow.com.
Just put in the promo code Dinesh and watch the film.
It's going to be a lot of fun for the whole family.
Well, thank you, Thor Ramsey, for joining me on the podcast.
We're going to leave you with a short clip from the film.
Listen. I told you if we broke attendance records, I'd get the church logo tattooed on my arm.
Skip, remember back when we first started?
All we did was preach the gospel.
Ooh, Superman works.
I like Superman. Guy, what do you think?
What happened to you? Me?
Your dad is the one with the gimmicks.
The power of the Holy Spirit propels us!
I just want the church to get back to the gospel.
The problem is you're trying to get your message across.
The gospel. Right, right, right.
And ain't nobody listening to that. My podcast is sponsored by Dr.
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And think of who this group was made up of.
Probably the most influential literary critic of the century, Samuel Johnson, a big, corpulent guy.
The most famous biographer in the English language, James Boswell, his work on Johnson called Life of Johnson.
There was Edmund Burke, notable philosopher and political philosopher.
Edward Gibbon, arguably the greatest historian of the 18th century, the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the man who's believed to be the greatest philosopher in the English language.
Not the greatest philosopher of all time.
That would probably be between Plato and Kant.
But the greatest philosopher in the English language, David Hume, All of these guys in one room talking to each other.
But the leading figure, interestingly enough, Johnson.
And I'm a real fan of Johnson.
He always makes me chuckle.
And Boswell's Life of Johnson, I mean, every page of it has wit and insight.
So I want to talk a little bit more about Johnson just to give you an idea of the kind of character he is.
By the way, it was the writer C.S. Lewis who once said that there are only three people in history where if they walked into a room...
You and I would, if we're familiar with them, recognize them instantly.
That's actually not true of most people.
Alexander the Great walked into the room, I wouldn't know who he is and neither would you.
But the three people that Lewis pointed to, one, Socrates, two, Jesus Christ, and three, Samuel Johnson.
In other words, the portrait of Johnson so unforgettable in Boswell that if Johnson literally showed up, we would know him for who he is.
Johnson was extremely witty.
And in fact, it was witty even in a cutting way about his own friends.
Talking about the poet Thomas Gray, he says that the man is really dull.
And Boswell protests and says, well, you know, he's very famous and he's very well known and so on.
And then Johnson goes, well, he was dull in company, dull in the closet, dull everywhere.
He was dull in a new way.
And that made many people think him great.
Johnson is talking about Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels, and everyone's praising Gulliver's Travels.
Such an imaginative work, such a work of genius.
And Johnson goes, when once you have thought of big men and little men, it's very easy to do the rest.
So that was the big idea for Gulliver's Travels.
Let's have some really big guys, Gulliver, and some really little men, the Lilliputians.
The French Academy, 40 people, was writing a dictionary, a dictionary of the French language.
And so Johnson goes, well, basically since 40 Frenchmen equal about one Englishman, I'll do the job in English myself.
And not only did Johnson do it, but he did it by common acknowledgement better than the French.
Today we know Johnson's dictionary.
We don't know anything about what happened to the 40 Frenchmen putting together a French dictionary.
And then when Johnson was working on his dictionary, in those days it was customary for writers to seek patrons, to look for patronage, some wealthy nobleman who would help support you while you were doing this laborious project.
So Johnson went to the Earl of Chesterfield for help, but the Earl of Chesterfield said no.
And then when Johnson's work is about to be published and there were advanced reviews of it, very favorable, saying this is going to be a sensation in England, suddenly the Earl of Chesterfield at the last minute comes running to Johnson and goes, I'll help you.
I'll be the patron of your work because he obviously wants to be acknowledged in the work.
He wants Johnson to thank him.
He wants his name to appear on the front page.
And Johnson writes a kind of a classic sarcastic letter to Chesterfield at this point, and he has these sentences that I want to read.
It's a very respectful letter as a whole, but you can tell its tone is very cutting.
He goes,"...is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?" The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind.
But it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it.
So Johnson's point is, I'm already famous.
I don't need it now.
When I needed it, you weren't really there to help me.
Now that I don't need it, you're charging into the room with your suitcase of benefits.
Thanks, but no thanks.
So this is Johnson, well worth reading, by the way, even today.
I remember from my college days in his work, A Preface to Shakespeare, he talks about a classic.
And he asks, what is a literary classic?
What is a book that's worth reading from the past?
How do we know that this book is great?
And he goes, well, a classic is a book that survives the provinciality of its own moment in space and time.
Think of it, every book is written for a particular audience at a particular place and at a particular time.
But Johnson goes, a classic is a book that can survive that.
Even when those issues pass, that era passes, and you take the book out of England and you move it to another part of the world, India or Japan, can people in India and Japan in a different time and a different place still read that work and go, wow, this is amazing.
I can learn from this.
This speaks to me.
So for Johnson, that is the definition of a classic.
It's a book that travels outside, you may say, its own moment of space and time and speaks to all people in all generations, in all times, and all places.
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It's time for our mailbox.
Before I go there, I want to say it's been about three months since I started this podcast.
And not only do I love to have questions from you, but I'd love to have feedback from you about the podcast.
There are probably things about it that you really like.
There may be some things about it that you don't like.
There may be some things you think I can do better.
I'd like to hear about all that, so please send me your feedback.
QuestionDinesh at gmail.com.
That's the email. You can send a question or you can just send me some feedback that I will then process in trying to make this podcast better by the day.
Let's go to our question for today.
Listen. Hey, Dinesh.
My name is Ben Salka.
I'm a huge fan of the podcast.
I'm also a big fan of the Young America's Foundation compilation of you exposing liberals and making them look foolish.
But my question is about capitalism.
So I want to know what you think the moral case for capitalism is.
Seems that a lot of mainstream leftists, you know, the classic AOC, Bernie Sanders, seem to think that it's immoral, greedy, selfish, all these other kind of terms.
So I want to know what your response to that is.
Thank you. Well, that's a very good question, Ben.
And I've written quite extensively about this.
My latest book, United States of Socialism, has a whole chapter on the moral case for capitalism.
So I can only touch on it here.
Let's look just at a concrete example.
You know, this little twerp, you know, David Hogg is like, I'm going to make a pillow.
I'm going to beat Mike Lindell at his own game.
But David Hogg doesn't realize it's not only is it not so easy to do, but it's not so easy to do what entrepreneurs do in general, which is they spend a lot of time thinking about others.
They put themselves in the place of their customer.
And if you listen to Lindell talk, that's what he talks about.
He's constantly improving his products to make them more amenable to what people really want.
Now, most people don't think like that.
They're very selfish. They think of themselves, I want to beat him at his own game.
I'm going to have a pillow fight and so on.
But the problem is David Hogg lives in his own world where his eyes are firmly gazed on himself.
That's why he's a terrible entrepreneur.
That's why he's gotten out of good pillow or whatever he was trying to do because he can't do it.
He doesn't have sufficient empathy.
Now, the most successful entrepreneurs are able to envision the wants and needs of people even though the people themselves are not aware of them.
This, for example, was the genius of Henry Ford.
Henry Ford said, if I ask my customers what they want, they would tell me they want a faster horse.
But he, Henry Ford, recognized that, no, I can actually create a machine on four wheels that's available to the ordinary guy that he can actually afford.
But I've got to work to bring the cost down.
Cars in those days cost several thousand dollars, an absolute fortune.
So Henry Ford was able to bring down the cost of cars.
And pay his workers well so that they could afford those cars.
So this is essentially the moral case for capitalism.
Think of what the automobile has done.
I don't just mean for American convenience, but for American freedom.
It's a symbol really of Americans ultimately being able to move beyond their narrow provincial worlds into the larger country and see America quite literally.
So the bottom line of it is that capitalism serves the wants and needs of people and it does so in a much more responsive way than the government.
The reason the government is so plodding is they don't have a market mechanism or a profit motive to tell you what to make and what price to sell it and how to constantly attend to the needs of customers.
That's why businesses that are successful do that very well.
Whereas when you walk into a typical government entity, You get this feeling of nobody is particularly paying attention to me.
Nobody cares if I come or go.
Nobody cares if I buy or don't buy.
And the reason you think that is because they don't.
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