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April 20, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:07:07
THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 72
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Should the Chinese Communist Party pay reparations for unleashing COVID-19 on the world?
I'll make the case they should.
Also, Officer Brian Sicknick wasn't murdered.
What are the implications?
And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joins me to talk about the border.
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.
Should the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party, pay reparations to the world for unleashing COVID-19?
Bye.
Interestingly, there is relatively little discussion of this rather obvious question.
We hear a lot about reparations, but it's typically in other contexts.
We hear about reparations for slavery or reparations for racism.
In some cases, we hear about reparations for colonialism.
Now, in those cases, we are talking about reparations for typically historical events, for past offenses and crimes.
And by past, in some cases, we mean in the long time past.
Slavery in Britain was ended in the early 19th century, slavery in America at the end of the Civil War, 1865, and even segregation laws were ended, starting with the Brown decision in 1954 and then obviously with the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
So, well over half a century ago.
By and large, when we're talking about historical reparations, we're talking about making reparations to people who weren't themselves direct or actual victims.
They are the descendants of historical victims.
So, the slaves are dead, but they're Not their children, not even really their grandchildren, not even really their great-grandchildren, but their great-great-great-great-grandchildren.
Should they receive funding, money, benefits, preferences to compensate for something that was done to other people a long time ago?
Now, one of the problems with historical reparations is simply the Question of how do you assess the level of damage to someone today?
How do you trace not only the direct line through history, but ask a separate question?
What would have happened if this historical event had not occurred?
What would happen in the Americas, let's say, if Columbus never came?
What would happen to these descendants of slavery now?
Let's just say if slavery never occurred, if no Africans were brought to America in the first place.
I say all this because reparations, by and large, is measured against this kind of a what-if.
If a truck comes onto the sidewalk and runs over my feet, the way that my reparations is measured is simply by asking this question.
Well, what if the truck didn't do that?
If the truck didn't do that, my feet would be intact.
I wouldn't be in pain.
I would be able to go to work normally.
And now, the truck having done that, I am in pain and my feet aren't normal and I can't work.
And so the difference between the way things would have been and the way things are as a result of what the truck and the truck driver did, that is a measure of my harm and that is a measure of the reparations that are due or that are paid.
Now, when we're dealing with historical events, even if they're pretty close by, it's very hard to figure actual monetary reparations, especially for offenses that aren't monetary in the first place.
During the time of World War II, when FDR made an executive order that interned about 100,000 Japanese Americans in these internment camps, the idea was that they may pose some threat to the national security.
Maybe their loyalties are really with Japan.
There wasn't really any solid proof of this, but there was a suspicion or fear of it.
And so FDR ordered these internments.
And then later, under Reagan, Congress appropriated and Reagan signed off on reparations to Japanese-American families who were interned.
Now, the reparations here wasn't to quote historical victims.
You couldn't just show up and go, hey, you know, my name's Michael Wong.
I'm Japanese-American.
Where's my money? No. You actually had to be a family that was in the camps.
The reparation was paid, you may say, to actual victims and not historical victims.
But let's say $20,000 in the Japanese-American case.
Now, let's turn to the issue of China because we're not dealing with an historical event.
We're dealing with an event that has occurred basically starting in November of 2020 and continuing through all of...
Continuing through 2021, here's Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, one of the few people to sort of call out the Chinese and the Chinese Communist Party.
And DeSantis has very firm views on this.
He goes, I believe that this virus escaped from a lab.
They knew about it.
They covered it up. They didn't say anything for a long time.
They didn't provide access.
DeSantis argues that the CCP was aware of the outbreak in Wuhan for at least six weeks before they kind of blew the whistle, before they told the world what was going on.
And in the meantime, what the regime did was they arrested whistleblowers and they censored online discussions of the outbreak.
And the CCP sealed off Wuhan from the rest of China, so sort of protecting the Chinese, but allowing the international flights to go on so that essentially the virus could be carried out of China and spread to other parts of the world.
Of course, the impact of this virus has been devastating.
I mean, countries like Italy got a heavy blow.
They essentially had to completely lock down their economy.
They took massive casualties.
Their health care system was wrecked.
And this was a problem in many other parts of the world.
I remember reading a UN report that talked about biblical levels of poverty in many third world countries.
I mean, it's bad enough in the West.
It's bad enough where we have shortages of goods and are not able to function in normal life and businesses are shut down.
And all of that is horrific.
People have to struggle to cope.
But it's nothing like countries where people who, even in the past, had difficulty getting two meals a day or three meals a day and now are facing, you may say, famine, hunger, outbreaks of disease, early mortality, and so on, with healthcare systems that are not able to cope.
So shouldn't China be held responsible?
Interestingly, an Indian writer, Devash Ishgiri, has made the case that China is in blatant violation of international law.
He makes the point that when there is an outbreak that has international implications, there is a duty to inform.
So the point here being that it doesn't really matter whether the virus began in a food market or did it begin in the Wuhan lab.
The point is it began in China and the Chinese Communist Party knew about it right away.
In fact, I think you know there was a Chinese doctor named Li When Liang, who blew the whistle, he began to tell people about it.
And so what did they do?
They immediately warned him not to do that.
They got a hold of him.
They shut him up. Later, the guy contracted COVID-19 and died of it.
So he became a sort of martyr, you might say, in China.
But the government accused him of making false statements.
The Chinese government censored social media posts talking about COVID-19.
And by the way, they allowed the Chinese to celebrate the Lunar New Year, denying that there was any risk.
They talked about animal transmission, but they didn't talk about human-to-human transmission.
Now, according to international law, At least as spelled out by this Indian writer, Geary, he goes, look, if there is a public health emergency, you have to notify the World Health Organization within 24 hours and then continue to provide them with timely, accurate, and sufficiently detailed information that they can get that information out and do something about it.
This is particularly when there is a disease that could break beyond a country's borders.
Now, China told the World Health Organization, not right away, but they told them basically at the very end of 2019, that there was some unusual cases of pneumonia in Wuhan.
But they said there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission.
And they said this might be spreading from animals to humans.
So this was kind of misinformation from the Chinese government.
Not only was it not true, but they have to have known it was untrue.
So Geary concludes China failed to provide its obligations and therefore is responsible for an international wrongful act.
Now, none of this specifies what the level of reparations is, but the culpability of China in its negligence, in its refusal to act, even when they knew better, And the horrific consequences of their action, of their negligence, show that the virus is obviously the primary agent of responsibility.
The virus did it.
But the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party enabled the virus.
Had it not been, had China acted, we would not have had this level of a global pandemic.
And so China does bear, I think, responsibility.
It has the resources to be able to provide compensation.
Its economy has benefited, while other economies have suffered.
And therefore, putting all these facts together, there's a pretty good case, if the world kind of comes together on this, to go to the Chinese and say, guys, you're partly responsible for this.
Pay up. President Biden has made a fateful decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11th.
So September 11, 2021, that's exactly 20 years from 9-11.
Biden himself, in his Biden-esque way, attempted to explain what he's doing.
Listen. Our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan become increasingly unclear, even as the terrorist threat that we went to fight evolved.
Over the past 20 years, the threat has become more dispersed, metastasizing around the globe.
Al-Shabaab in Somalia.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Al-Nusra in Syria.
ISIS attempting to create a caliphate.
They want to create the caliphite.
I'm laughing because, you know, there's media outrage when, you know, Trump said the word Thailand, even though everyone in South Asia says it that way.
But nevertheless, with Trump, oh, he doesn't even know how to say the name of a country.
Here's Biden. He's talking about the caliphite.
Not the caliphate, but the caliphite.
Now, I think when Biden talks about all the other groups, you know, it reminds me of a bit like Obama.
Well, you know, this point mistakes the distinction between ISIS and ISIL. You know, here's Biden.
He's got all these names written in front of him.
He doesn't even know what they are.
But we're talking about radical Islamic terrorists.
And they are, well, they're kind of winning in Afghanistan, aren't they?
This is to say the Taliban.
The Taliban, let's remember, were the people who provided housing for the 9-11 terrorists.
The 9-11 terrorists didn't come from Afghanistan.
In fact, none of them did. They were from Saudi Arabia, they were from Egypt, from Pakistan.
But they couldn't find, I guess they needed a place to rent the monkey bars.
And the Taliban was like, hey, you know, we're on board.
So Afghanistan became the launching pad for 9-11.
I think the United States, in responding to 9-11, said, let's teach these Taliban people a lesson.
Let's kind of bomb them into the Stone Age.
Well, not really, because they're already in the Stone Age.
Well, anyway, let's just say, let's bomb them from the 13th century right back into the 7th century.
But having done that, the United States, I think, then made a critical mistake.
And this is very typical of Bush.
It's very typical of the kind of neoliberal way of thinking.
The basic idea here is, to quote Colin Powell, in one of his more cosmically inane statements, if you break it, you own it.
Why? Why?
I realize that if you go in a store and you break something, you do own it.
But with a country, that's not the standard.
It doesn't mean that the United States retaliates against the Taliban for being the quarterbacks, the commandeers of 9-11.
We somehow, what, own Afghanistan?
It's now our job to take Afghanistan from the 13th century and try to bring it into the 16th century or the 21st century.
Why? These are deeply tribal societies.
They have allegiances that go back centuries.
They have a worldview that we are very remote from.
We have real difficulty understanding.
And so you had the rather comic spectacle over all these 20 years of American diplomats.
I mean, some, you know, red-cheeked guy from Minneapolis or some, you know, John Kerry type, you know, with his monocle, going down to these shurgas and tribal meetings in Afghanistan and sort of trying to lecture these people about how they should conduct elections and whether women should wear the headscarf or the burqa.
Talking to them about gay rights.
I mean, this is subject to comedy.
This should be on Saturday Night Live.
But nevertheless, the United States, I think, thought that not only can we export democracy, but we can kind of export social liberalism.
To these Afghans.
And of course the Afghans were, they're not stupid.
They were like, listen, you know what?
We'll do this if you give us a bag full of money.
And we'll do that if you give us another bag full of money.
This was their basic approach.
And so the United States, yeah, you know what?
Let's give them bags full of money.
So bag fulls of money were going all over the place, going to the Afghan government and the tribes that were in power.
We were basically trying to use carrots and sticks.
Meanwhile, the Taliban, who's basically, I have to say, a lot more serious than the John Kerry type, they said, let's take to the mountains and it's going to take us a long time and it may not even be us, it may be our children, but we'll fight like crazy and we'll get our country back.
They were using, quite simply, I would call it the North Vietnamese model.
This was the Ho Chi Minh model, which is, by and large, these Americans, they can't make up their mind.
They don't know what they're doing.
Just look at them. They're ridiculous.
So, all we have to do is recognize they've got bigger bombs, and they can drop things on our head, and they will do that for a while, but after a while, they'll tire of it.
And if they send troops over here, we'll blow up their arms, we'll blow up their legs, we'll send them home, their moms won't be happy.
The country will then eventually say, enough, enough, let's pull out.
In other words, the Vietnam story is sort of all over again.
And I think the problem here is not really with the decision to withdraw.
Let's remember Trump. I would withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
So Biden, in this sense, is doing the same thing that Trump promised to do.
Of course, the media coverage, I should talk about that in a separate segment.
It's really remarkable to see how the media is salivating over Biden's decision, whereas the exact same decision made by Trump was met with unremitting hostility.
And so when you watch media coverage of the same event, the same event, Actual decision.
You can see the deep discrepancies between the way that the media, the left, the New York Times, MSNBC, all these familiar suspects, how they treat Biden versus Trump on a measure where you can clearly see that we're talking about the same, the actual same foreign policy.
The bottom line, I think, is that the lesson that we never seem to learn as a country is that you can't remake these societies.
You cannot remake a people.
You can't reconstitute them.
Yes, countries can embrace democracy, the Japanese, I guess.
Embrace democracy after World War II. But that was after World War II when the country had been leveled into smithereens.
Germany was reconstructed after the war.
But the same thing. These were societies that were completely destroyed and then rebuilt.
That's not the case in Afghanistan.
So the Taliban goes, you know what?
We're going to win. We're going to wait for the Americans to leave.
Obviously, if we can beat the Americans plus the local Afghans, we can obviously beat the local Afghans on our own.
I think the Biden administration knows that we're looking to see a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan.
They don't want to say that. They keep talking nonsense about, you know, negotiations.
They keep submitting idiotic plans, and the Taliban, of course, is using these plans as toilet paper.
They're out of toilet paper.
They could use the toilet paper, so why not use the US's latest plan for that purpose?
We've lost Afghanistan, but the reason we lost it is because we had a bad idea about what to do with it in the first place.
American foreign policy should be driven by the much more sensible policy.
It's the policy of the lesser evil.
You get rid of a bunch of bad guys...
You might have to ally with another bunch of bad guys and say, listen, we'll back you as a gang as long as you clobber the other gang.
We're not going to get directly involved ourselves, but if you're a gang that's favorable to us, we're going to be able to work with you and we're going to be able to make deals with you as long as you promote our interests by clobbering the bad guys as best you can.
That would have been a more modest policy, a more achievable policy.
Instead of the futile, ambitious, and now ultimately self-destructive policy that the United States did in fact apply over these past 20 years.
Might seem hard to believe, but it wasn't that so long ago that Mike Lindell wasn't even that political.
I asked him about it, and here's what he said.
Listen. Mike, I'd like to talk to you about your experiences with the media once you stepped out of the sort of business field into the political sphere.
We finally have a common sense, pragmatic, conservative president who keeps his word.
I was an ex-crack addict, as you know.
When I came out of addiction, I seen, you know, all my friends, a lot of them were unemployed, lost their houses, presidents giving money to an evil empire, and I'm going, and I'd never vote, I'm going, what did I miss?
Well, it seems every time Mike Lindell takes a stand, he's under attack.
His business is under attack.
And now his social media platform called Frank is under attack right from the get-go.
Let's all sign up on this free speech platform.
Go to frankspeech.com and sign up.
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How did police officer Brian Sicknick die?
I'm now reading from the New York Times, writing about the incident right after.
He dreamed of being a police officer, then was killed by a pro-Trump mob.
That's the actual headline.
Take a look. And then we read on, just in the copyright below it.
On Wednesday, pro-Trump rioters attacked the Citadel of Democracy, overpowered Mr.
Sicknick and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials.
With a bloody gash to his head, Mr.
Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.
He died on Thursday.
This was the narrative that was then picked up by innumerable media outlets and they ran with it and they ran with it to such an extent that this narrative made its way into the House impeachment documents of Trump.
The idea that Sticknick had been killed, he had been murdered by Trump supporters by being struck violently with a fire extinguisher.
The importance of this story to the media and to the left and to the Democrats was clear.
They needed a casualty.
They were using all this over-the-top incendiary language about sedition, about riots, about a coup attempt, about an insurrection, about a takeover of the government.
And all of this is a little hard to sustain.
Well, visually it's hard to sustain.
You've got people taking selfies with the cops and one guy running off with Nancy Pelosi's podium, you know, and a third guy in horns and animal skins.
So you really need something grave to focus the attention and go, look, this symbolizes the incident.
And Sicknick served that purpose.
He was the murder victim.
And he was the only murder victim, the only other person shot.
The only person shot was Ashley Babbitt, a Trump supporter shot by a black Capitol Police officer.
They've done their best to sort of cover up who that guy is and why he did it.
They've closed on the investigation into all that.
But the point is, it's now come out, and it's kind of odd that it's come out this late.
But three months later, we now see...
This is the headline in the Washington Post, and it must have crushed them to publish this headline, but I'm just going to read it.
Wow. He wasn't murdered.
Nobody hit him on the head with a fire extinguisher.
He had no injuries at all.
Now, of course, very interestingly, there are some media outlets that are still trying to back up and say, wait a minute, wait a minute, maybe he died of pepper spray, even though he wasn't hit.
Maybe some of the Trumpsters sprayed him.
And, oh wow, now pepper spray isn't really known to, bear spray isn't really known to kill people.
But the idea was maybe there was something, maybe he had some vulnerability in his system that reacted with the bear spray.
Actually, no. When you look at the report, you discover that they make it really clear.
We're talking here about Francisco J. Diaz, the medical examiner, and he goes, he said the autopsy found no evidence that the 42-year-old officer suffered an allergic reaction to chemical irritants.
So that theory is out the window also.
Now, think of what this means for the whole January 6th narrative.
What it really means is that the number of people killed by the Trump mob, the rioters, the insurrectionists, can now be tabulated.
And here's that number. Zero.
No one. There were two Trumpsters who died of unrelated medical conditions, but murder victims?
None. And so the whole story now begins, it's like a balloon that's kind of losing its steam.
And yet, the left is trying to push on.
They've got all these people arrested.
They're in solitary confinement.
The pretense has to be maintained.
And the journalist Glenn Greenwald, who's Who's just disgusted by the media's performance here.
Not just their brazen lies.
And the reason we call them lies is because they knew it.
It's not that they thought, you know, this really happened.
Why do they know it? Because all the events of January 6th...
We're on tape. They were videotaped.
No one ever saw a videotape of Brian Sicknick being struck with a fire extinguisher or anything else.
It was two anonymous officials who provided this information, but since it wasn't on the video, the question was where did it happen exactly?
How did it happen? Who did it?
They could never identify who did it or how it happened or where the fire extinguisher was or where his injuries were.
This was all known from the beginning.
It was a bogus narrative, but it was useful.
And Glenn Greenwald's point, and it's kind of a shocking point that he makes in his recent article, is he goes that these media outlets, we're talking about the most mainstream media outlets, he goes, they have trained their audience to want and expect lies.
In other words, it's almost like he's saying that not only is the media in on the lie, but they have trained their audiences to create a market for habitual lying.
And he goes, and this is why they never feel compelled to engage in any self-critique or accountability when they caught doing this.
Their audiences want to be lied to and are grateful for it.
Wow.
So ultimately what he's saying is we've created a culture of lying in the country in which the media is supplying a product, lies, that its audience is willingly buying because it It wants to believe that these people are villains.
And what does it mean for democracy itself when our debate is infested, is contaminated, is riddled?
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rockauto.com I'm really delighted to be joined on the podcast by the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Ken is in the middle of a lot of hot issues.
It goes back to his filing on behalf of Texas with the Supreme Court on the voter integrity issue of the election.
But he's also involved in the border crisis and issues involving COVID-19.
Ken Paxton, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.
Let me start by pivoting back to last November because in the aftermath of the election, Texas filed what seemed to everyone to be a major lawsuit joined by a lot of other states, basically calling on the Supreme Court to sort of adjudicate the issue of the integrity of the election.
And it looks like the Supreme Court almost backhandedly goes, nah, you don't really have standing.
So I must say, as a layman, not a lawyer, not the Attorney General, this baffled me a little bit.
So can you explain a little bit of what the Supreme Court was saying and why perhaps they're wrong to think that Texas had no standing?
So the founders, as you know, set up a system of three branches of government, and the idea with the judiciary was everyone would have their day in court.
And the idea was we don't want people fighting and shooting each other, so we'll address this civilly and let people have their day in court.
Everybody has that right to have a day in court.
States, however, have to file, if they're filing against another state, a lawsuit against another state like we did, filing it against four other states, We have to go directly to the Supreme Court because they don't want me filing a lawsuit in Texas against Pennsylvania because it seems unfair, whether it's state court or federal court.
So we are, by law, by the Constitution, required to go directly to the Supreme Court.
So we did that. And then the court said, well, we have discretion over whether we hear your case.
Well, that... I cannot imagine that the founders intended that because that means that states are the only entities that have no place to go.
And so what the court said by saying, oh, we're not going to hear your case because you don't have standing, cannot be correct legally because that just means we can't go to court.
We have to go fight. Now, what about logically?
I mean, it looks to me that you were sort of like...
It's almost like saying, we're going to have this kind of gambling convention.
We've got these, you know, let's call them 50 tables, where there's games going on at every table.
And what Texas is basically saying is that the presidency is the winner of the whole game, of all the tables.
And you're looking over at another table and saying, listen, I see what may be some shenanigans on the other table, and that's going to affect us, because it's going to affect the guy who gets the award at the end...
So how can the Supreme Court say that it is a matter of indifference?
You know, this table should stay out of it because what happens in the other table, i.e.
the Pennsylvania table or the Arizona table or the Michigan table, that's their business.
How can they say that when this is not a matter internal to Pennsylvania but affects the whole country, which is to say affects all the tables that are in the casino?
That's a pretty good analogy.
So that's exactly what happened in Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Now, other states like California and Oregon and Washington, you'll notice that those results were immediate.
Seven o'clock, we knew exactly what was going on here because their rules are actually set up already to be very liberal about what they count.
So everybody knows how that's going to turn out.
So that's a fixed game, I would call that.
But Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia, the legislature set the rules for those and these local areas within those states changed the rules without legislative approval, which is a violation of what is required by the Constitution, which is that the state legislature Whether the state legislature sets good rules or bad rules, it's still up to the state legislature.
And in those cases, they set up these rules about mail-in ballots and signature verification.
They were not followed throughout the state.
And our argument was, hey, the Constitution requires this.
We're affected by this because it changed the election.
The Supreme Court addressed this, please.
So you were not actually saying that Texas gets to make rules for other states.
You were saying, hey guys, listen, your own legislature specifies the rules, but according to the Constitution, it's your job to follow those rules.
And if you don't follow those rules, you're essentially going outside the Constitution and thus affecting a process that affects all of us.
Would that be a correct summary of...
That is a correct summary, as well as the equal protection argument that different people were treated differently in these states.
They were all locally determined.
So it affected the elections in a dramatic way, but we can't even address how they were exactly affected because the rules of the game, it'd be like playing at a table and everybody at the table got to use different rules.
Obviously that would advantage people that had better rules.
Now one of the things that happened after the election is that you began to have these digital companies, I'm thinking particularly of the main platforms, that essentially said There is no substantial evidence of any improprieties or fraud.
There might be isolated cases here and there, but the idea of questioning the outcome of the election is out of bounds.
Anybody who does that is going to be booted off these platforms.
My question is, how serious a problem is that constitutionally?
How do you look at that as the Texas Attorney General?
Because obviously there are people in Texas affected by this sort of censorship.
It isn't direct government censorship.
The government isn't censoring you.
But you have digital platforms that have, I would say, quasi-monopoly status that are doing this.
And it's obviously affecting the public square.
Where else can we talk about democracy if not on these technologically driven digital platforms?
What can you do and what can Texas do to try to protect the free speech rights of citizens in Texas from this digital, you can't say this?
Well, and that is exactly what we're doing in Texas.
We have lawsuits right now against Google, Facebook.
And also we've been sued by Twitter.
And it's really, our original lawsuit against Google is exactly based on this idea that they are a monopoly.
They do control the advertising market on the internet.
And through that control, they control a lot of other things.
Personal information. And they hold themselves out as being a place where you can, you know, basically have free speech.
And yet they don't deliver on that.
They decide for themselves who can speak and who cannot speak.
and it's all up to them.
And in a monopolistic way, they are controlling our free speech.
And so we don't, in Texas, we are suing them, trying to affect that monopolistic behavior so that we do have one, that consumers do know what information they have and they're compensated, and they're not taken advantage of, and that we do have a free marketplace of ideas and not a monopolistic control of who can say what.
Now, the monopolistic argument is a little different than the free speech argument, as I understand it.
The monopolistic argument is that you're so big that you're the only one sort of making the rules.
Are you actually calling for Google?
Would you like to see Google break up into 10 different companies, kind of the way the phone company used to be?
One big company was then kind of chopped into a lot of little pieces, creating all these baby bells, as I understand.
Is something like that the remedy for Google or is it simply that pressure be brought to bear on Google?
They face liability if they are using their search engines to, you may say, manipulate searches and provide only information that they want people to see.
Monetary damages will never stop what they're doing.
They'll just charge higher rates because they are a monopoly.
And so that's what they've done. European Union has fined them over and over billions of dollars.
They just make more money next year.
It's a little small tax.
Five billion to them is, you know, when you're making $130 billion a year or whatever close to that that they make.
And that number keeps going up.
So we need to structurally address the fact that they represent Almost all the buyers are advertising on the internet.
They represent almost all the sellers and they control the exchange.
It would be like if Goldman Sachs owned the only exchange, the New York Stock Exchange, there was no other competition and they knew all the information about the buy side.
They knew all the information about selling.
And they had the exchange.
They would control the price and who got what and who won what bid because they have advanced information on all of it.
And that's what's going on in the advertising side.
They control all that information and they get to decide who gets what, who pays for what, and they get to take a big cut of the profits.
And the consumers are the ones paying for it, even though everybody thinks it's free to be on the internet.
When we come back, I want to ask Attorney General Ken Paxton about what he knows about the border, the Biden administration's policies.
We'll be right back.
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I'm back with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Ken, I was going to ask you about the border, but before I do that, I want to ask you one more thing about, it seems like there have been these voter integrity laws that have been passed by Georgia, by Texas.
And we have these woke corporations that are trying to use their corporate leverage against states that are trying to regularize or maybe authenticate voters, voter ID, those sorts of things.
What do you make of this woke corporate movement?
And how does a state like Texas, or Georgia for that matter, resist this pressure from companies who go, we'll take our games out of Texas, and we'll boycott the state, and we won't invest money in the state?
Does this stuff intimidate you, and how do you plan to deal with it?
No, I find it incredibly hypocritical.
You think about the companies that criticize the Texas voting laws and election integrity here, whether it's Dell or Southwest Airlines or American.
Those are companies that are extremely concerned about their own security as it relates to their business.
They enforce all kinds of security requirements, all kinds of—they enforce photo ID requirements, and yet, for some reason, they view their business as more important than the integrity of the election.
I don't get it. They've never explained why.
And maybe they just haven't read the bills, because I know that there was—the lieutenant governor had asked their government relations person, American Airlines, had you read the bill?
His CEO read the bill and said no.
So they're criticizing without understanding the bill.
I hope that if they actually understood that we're just trying to provide the same security that they want to provide, that they might have a different view, a more sympathetic view to the fact that all we want to make sure of is the right people who are supposed to vote are voting and that there isn't fraud in our elections.
I mean, living in America, we know that there's pretty much everything you do, you have to produce ID, right?
You want to buy liquor, you need ID, you need ID to buy a gun, to go to the bank.
So it isn't just the airlines, you're constantly being asked to verify that it's you.
And I don't understand how it's possible that it could be racist in one context, voting.
And apparently not racist in the other 75 contexts in which we produce IDs every single day without even thinking about it and no one raising a protest about it.
No, it's really interesting. I had to defend at the Fifth Circuit our voter ID laws that we had passed while I was in the Texas House.
So I was now Attorney General.
When I was flying to New Orleans from Dallas, I had to show a photo ID to get on the plane.
When I got to my hotel room in New Orleans, I had to show a photo ID to get my room.
When I went to the court, the federal courthouse, where we were arguing that photo ID was discriminatory, I had to show a photo ID to get into that case.
So the irony is, it played well on me.
I mean, here we are. Every other environment, it's okay to have photo ID, but for some reason...
The integrity of our elections, that's discrimination.
It's clearly made up.
It allows for more cheating if you don't have photo ID, and that is the only rational reason that we wouldn't have photo ID. It's not discriminatory because everybody's required to do it, not just one group.
Everyone and everybody pretty much has a photo ID. Let's pivot to the border.
You are down at the border.
Now, let me ask you, we seem to have this crisis at the border.
Biden even blurted out that it's a crisis.
Do you think that this crisis is engineered by the Biden administration?
Or just the result of incompetence and negligence?
They are surprised by it.
They had no idea it was coming.
Or in some sense, has it been invited by Biden by saying, in effect, that he would reverse Trump's policies, do the exact opposite, stop building the wall?
Was Biden basically saying there's an open invitation for people all over South America and maybe from other countries to just show up?
Well, it has to be 100% engineered.
Otherwise, they're just not very smart.
Because we've already seen these policies at work in the Obama administration.
We saw the results. You know, massive migration from Central America.
It was still a problem when Trump came into office.
It took him a while to get it under control, but he did it pretty much three ways.
He encouraged border patrol and customs and immigration to do their job.
A long-term solution was building, extending the wall.
And then the stay in Mexico policy was the genius part because it created, before that there was a loophole with people, everyone claiming asylum and only 14% actually qualified but they would just come and stay.
So Biden undid all the things that work and guess what?
Shazam, it went back to the way it was.
So there's no surprise here.
They purposely told, signaled to everyone to come, He said it. You will not be deported for the first hundred days.
What do you expect except what we got?
There's no surprise on either side.
Biden wants this migration.
All these people coming in, who knows where they're going, and the effects are devastating, not just in Texas, socially and economically are devastating to this country.
No, you said Biden wants this to happen.
So it's bad for America.
It's bad for American workers.
Presumably it's bad for other immigrants who are standing in a long line when you have people cutting the line.
So here's my question. Where is the direct political benefit to Biden in doing this?
These are illegals who presumably can't vote.
So how does he benefit directly from allowing this?
Or is he looking longer term to go at some point, these guys are going to get amnesty, they're going to be grateful to me for letting them through, they're going to become democratic voters?
What is the calculation that's occurring either in Biden's head or if there's not much in Biden's head in the heads of the people around him?
Well, you're right. There's no benefit to Americans.
There's really no upside for us.
And a lot of times, there's no benefit to the people coming.
Some of them are harmed on the way.
Others are harmed once they get there.
If you look at all these children that I've seen, 2,000 children almost in San Antonio.
I went up to Midland. There were more children out there.
And that's just the beginning.
Who knows where they're going to go?
But it's not a good situation for them.
They're exposed to greater risk of disease.
They're all packed in.
They have really nothing to do right now.
And then the question is, where are we going to put all these kids?
There's no answer.
I mean, there's no answer and they're not telling us.
It's all very secretive, which is another bad sign.
But the benefit, the only benefit that I can come up with is that they think that these people eventually will get amnesty and they'll vote.
And they'll vote in favor of the Democrats.
And they're putting them mostly, from what I can tell, as much as we can figure out, in red states where they'd like to turn the tide and switch the state, like Texas, like Arizona, like Montana, like Idaho.
These are the places they want people to be sent so that they can turn the vote.
So this is, in other words, what you're saying is there is almost a conscious political strategy on the Biden side, which is, I guess, working hand-in-hand with a conscious political Criminal or financial strategy with the cartels and the kidnappers on the other side of the border.
And these two entities are working like two sides of a scissors to produce a horrific result, a result that is exploitative even of the people that it supposedly is intended to help.
No, you're actually very insightful of you to notice that it's really the Biden administration and the vote that they're looking for.
But on the other hand, there's another party that does benefit, and that's the cartels in Mexico.
So we are enabling them.
We are Creating great profit for them.
We're giving them opportunity to human traffic and drug traffic and to commit other crimes.
So the Biden administration, as far as I'm concerned, is hand in hand with cartels, because those are the only two parties that benefit, not the American people, not even for the most part, most of these people who are coming here in very unsafe conditions.
Ken Paxton, thanks very much.
Really appreciate your joining me on the podcast.
Thanks for your comments. Hey, thank you.
And thank you for covering these topics.
They're pretty important.
I appreciate it.
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Many years ago, the Polaroid company invented the digital camera.
And they didn't really know it at the time, but in doing that, They were destroying their old business model.
Their old business model, of course, was based upon Polaroid generating physical photographs.
Right away, boom, here's a Polaroid.
Just took the photo. But the digital camera, of course, changed everything and brought new competitors in the market.
And Polaroid sort of saw its relative position.
Now, I mention this analogy because it seems to me that these kind of mainstream digital platforms, by engaging in ruthless suppression, censorship, shenanigans, you know, seven guys in man buns deciding what you can say, I mean, it's freakish.
These people are loons.
And they knock you off for anything.
They started off, oh, we're gonna go after hate speech.
Pretty soon it was, we're gonna go after you if we don't like what you say about the virus.
And we don't like what you say about the election.
And we don't like what you say about China.
We don't like what you say about, you know, biological men running in the women's 200 meters.
So suddenly this has become a kind of lunatic free-for-all.
And the truth of it is, there's no long-term viability.
Who wants to be on a censored platform?
And even liberals are realizing it can happen to them next.
So the bottom line of it is there's going to be, I predict, over time, an exodus from these platforms.
Now the good news is we need alternative platforms.
We need to have places to go to.
And this is especially urgent when Congress, this is the Democrats in Congress, and look at these guys.
They bring in Jack Dorsey, they bring in Zuckerberg, and they harangue them for what?
Not for censoring speech.
For not censoring enough speech.
So we have pressure now from the congressional Democrats to censor more.
Why? Because they don't just want a one-party state.
They want essentially a controlled conversation.
They want conversation to occur where they have, you may call it, the home team advantage every single time.
So these people are tyrannical in their mindset.
We've just got to realize this about them.
Now, they had made this sort of strike on Parler.
And I was very downcast because I was a big fan of Parler.
I have 2.6 million followers on Parler.
Maybe not that many now.
But nevertheless, this was a very vigorous, active, exciting platform.
And then there was almost like a digital coordination.
Amazon, Apple, strike down Parler.
Well, the good news is that Parler now is back.
It has been back. It sometimes has a few glitches, but it is back.
And most importantly, I just saw...
Yesterday that Parler is now going back on the Apple Store.
And that's key because, of course, part of these platforms is the ease of use.
You want to be able to do it right there on your phone.
And I have the Parler app and it's just so much easier for people to use it that way.
So that's very good news.
Also very good news is that Mike Lindell has got his platform up and running.
Again, it's very new. It just went online in effect today.
And it's probably not in its full pitch, but when you look at it, It's attractive.
It's exciting. FrankSpeech.com, by the way, that's the website.
That's where you can sign up and get on these platforms.
It's really important to do.
Trump may end up starting his own platform.
I don't know. I've seen reports to that effect.
So the bottom line of it is that the monopolistic companies have created competition by their own purpose.
Actions. By driving away their own customers to look for other places to go.
It's forced people to seek new platforms.
So at the end of it all, I think we'll come out okay on all this.
This is a bad moment we're living through in which our public square, our ability to have democratic discourse is insane.
is being constricted.
It's in a kind of Python hold by a handful of very bizarre people who are trying to enforce an ideology on the whole country.
They're not gonna get away with it long term.
And I'm really thrilled to see entrepreneurs on our side building new frameworks, new platforms so that free speech, although it may not live at Twitter or YouTube or Facebook, Nevertheless, we'll live in the United States of America.
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You've probably heard of the concept of the slippery slope.
So the concept of the slippery slope is that when you allow one thing to happen, it paves the way by a kind of slippery motion for the other things, perhaps the more extreme things, those scarier things that are down the road, to also follow in the same, you may say, track or in the same train.
Now, when the gay marriage debate occurred in America, and I say occurred because the Supreme Court has sort of settled the issue by declaring gay marriage to be a constitutional right, but in the lead up to that debate, A lot of people made the point, and I made the point, that marriage has had a kind of historical definition.
And the historical definition is not just about one man and one woman, but there were several other elements to marriage.
And these could be called, you may almost call it the...
The kind of four pegs that establish what marriage is.
So marriage is, yes, between a man and a woman.
But in order to be married, you have to be a certain age.
You can't be married at the age of five.
You have to marry someone who is unrelated to you.
You can't marry your own kid.
You can't marry your own sister.
And that marriage has to be between two people.
It can't be between seven people or 34 people, for that matter.
So these are all the kind of, call it the definitional pegs of marriage.
And the question that was raised by me and others was, hey, look, you want to uproot this one peg and say, why does it have to be a man and a woman?
Well, the next we're going to have a bunch of people say, well, why does it have to be two?
Why does it have to be people who are unrelated?
So, in other words, all the other restrictions or pegs of marriage are going to be immediately called into question.
And at this point, the champions of gay marriage have said, nonsense, that is a scare tactic.
That's just designed to ultimately...
We're not calling for any of those things.
The rest of the pegs can stay securely in place.
But really, can they?
Here, I'm looking in the New York Post.
New York parent seeks okay to marry their own adult child.
Now, first of all, I'm relieved that this isn't a parent trying to marry their own seven-year-old kid, and I'm also relieved to discover that this is not a parent who's trying to have kids with their own kid.
We're talking about adults, and apparently we're talking about people who do not intend to procreate, but nevertheless, It's very interesting.
They make the argument very similar to gay marriage.
This is in court. This is in Manhattan federal court.
Through the enduring bond of marriage, two persons, whatever relationship they might otherwise have with one another, can find a greater level of expression, intimacy, and spirituality.
I love the last word, spirituality.
So I should be allowed to marry my own kid because, you know, consenting adults.
So right here we see that incest is currently a third-degree felony in New York.
Incestuous marriages are considered void.
But this couple, if I can use that term, wants the court to declare these laws unconstitutional.
And then I turn to the New Yorker, and there's a long article.
It's like 25 pages in the magazine.
It's talking about how polygamous...
A challenging family norms.
So, in the case of the New York Post, they were describing an effort to overturn the requirement that people who marry should be unrelated.
Now, we're having an attack on the idea that it should be just two.
And the New Yorker goes into this.
They talk about polygamists have become more vocal about achieving legal rights since the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide.
There you go.
That's the slippery slope.
And then when you read the rhetoric, here we go.
They say, although the adjective two is inserted when it talks about marriage, they go, there is no reason why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage should be preserved when the man-woman element is not.
In other words, hey, if you're going to uproot this peg, let's uproot our peg.
We're consenting adults after all.
Why shouldn't five consenting adults be able to come together?
And by the way, this isn't just like a bunch of Mormons in Salt Lake City who are doing this.
You've got a prominent professor at Yale Law School who is engineering this.
The point of all this is to go after the institution of marriage from all directions.
You may almost say blow it up.
And to blow it up not just on the gay side, the man-woman side, but also on the side of why shouldn't you be able to marry your relatives?
Why shouldn't you be able to marry your own kid?
Why shouldn't multiple people?
So marriage then loses all its definitional pegs and becomes ultimately meaningless because anyone...
Can be married for any reason and to anyone or to any group of people who agree to be part of this arrangement.
We create, in effect, a radical new institution bearing little or no resemblance to the old one.
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There's so much just revolting perversion in our society.
I'm thinking now specifically about the exploitation of children for sexual purposes.
I've been reading about the Ghislaine Maxwell case.
More details are coming to light.
And this whole idea of running an elaborate operation in which Maxwell was drawing in these underage girls.
And of course, they were... They were made to feel normal about it because here's an adult woman talking to them.
So it's not, you know, Jeffrey Epstein or his group of perverted cronies.
It's Maxwell who is, in a sense, playing the role of the madam, if you will, drawing these girls in, hey, wouldn't you like to get some scholarships?
Wouldn't you like to have a modeling career?
Wouldn't you like to meet some influential people who may help you go places?
And so this is just a sordid racket, but a sordid racket involving powerful people, some of whose names we know, but some of whose names we probably still don't know.
And then here in the, recently, a Milwaukee Children's Court judge.
Charged with possession of child porn.
And when you look at this guy, you discover that he's actually an influential Democrat in Milwaukee.
He's a really good friend of the mayor.
And he's also the guy who runs the Drag Queen Story Hour program.
So this guy, who has been uploading child porn into his computer, an obvious pervert, is the guy who is like, I'm going to read...
I'm sorry, Drag Queen Story Hour program.
I'm going to be reading stories about...
To give, quote, kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.
I've even seen pictures of parents, like, cheering on these sessions.
And then, of course, I would say no big surprise.
It turns out that the guy doing this has himself got a whole bunch of stuff to hide.
And he's been now arrested and charged seven counts of child pornography.
Now... How do we understand this kind of freefall, this American freefall into complete degeneracy?
I think the philosopher and thinker, Nietzsche, can help us to do this.
And he can help us to do this, weirdly enough, with this concept of the death of God.
Now, the death of God is...
Most people really don't have a good idea of what that means.
They think Nietzsche is sort of striking a blow for atheism.
God is dead, you know.
That is not actually what Nietzsche means at all.
And you can see this by really turning to...
Nietzsche's book is called The Gay Science.
It has nothing to do with gay in the modern sense.
But in the book, Nietzsche's talking about this prophet who comes down from the mountain and he starts claiming that God is dead.
And he's surrounded by people who start making fun of him.
And they go, God is dead.
Well, where'd he go?
Did he go on a voyage? Did he get lost?
And then the prophet says...
Where is God? I'll tell you.
We have killed him. You and I. We are his murderers.
And then the people around him start laughing and making fun of the prophet.
They're actually atheists.
They don't believe in God. So they're actually amused of this idea that God is dead.
But then the prophet, Zarathustra, as Nietzsche calls him, says this.
He goes, How are we able to drink up the sea?
Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon?
So... What Nietzsche is really saying is that, and he's talking really to fellow unbelievers, if you will, and what he's saying is that you don't realize that when you get rid of the idea of God, when you, quote, kill God, What you take away with that is the whole horizon.
You're not just getting rid of the sun.
You're wiping out the sky.
And what that means is that out of God, out of the Christian God, came all this morality.
The idea that children are innocent and should not be molested.
The idea that human beings have dignity.
The idea that we are created equal.
Jefferson's phrase. All of this is...
The product of a God way of thinking about the world.
And Nietzsche's point is, you want to get rid of God?
Well, what are you going to do with all the morality that you got from Christianity?
If God doesn't exist, then all of that has to kind of go too.
And so Nietzsche's point is that the atheists don't recognize.
They want to get rid of God, but they still talk about things like, it's important to respect human dignity.
It's important to have social justice.
Why? Why is it important?
If human beings are essentially random bunches of chemicals walking around if we're evolved creatures in the world with ultimately no transcendent soul, why is social justice all that important?
Why shouldn't we simply do the best for ourselves?
So, Nietzsche sees the rise of a new type of brutishness, selfishness, immorality or amorality.
People essentially are indifferent to the old codes of morality, including the sexual codes.
You should respect the dignity of children.
Don't make them into instruments of exploitation.
Nietzsche says, you'll see a lot more of this stuff.
Why? Why? Because having ceased to believe in God, slowly the morality that came into Western civilization, into the world as a result of God, will also begin to erode.
So I think in this sense we see that Nietzsche, himself an atheist, is prophetic.
Prophetic in the sense of correctly being able to call...
What the death of God, which is to say the decline of belief in God, will mean for Western society.
We're now seeing, if you will, the very sad and painful fruits of it.
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