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May 4, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:01:03
WHO’S ATTACKING OUR DEMOCRACY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 82
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Some of the very people who say our democracy is under attack are the ones attacking it.
The CIA makes a recruitment video and our enemies are laughing their heads off.
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.
Who is attacking our democracy?
We hear a lot about our democracy is under attack.
And I want to argue that some of the very people who say that are the ones attacking it.
So let's start with Joe Biden talking to a joint session of Congress.
And he goes, January 6th is, quote, the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.
So according to Biden, this is where the attack on our democracy is coming from.
And let's explore that for a while.
Because it seems to me on the first glance that look at all the people who came to Washington.
Did they come to, quote, attack democracy?
No. They actually came as an exercise of democracy.
So there was a huge rally on them all.
Was that an attack on democracy?
No. No, it was an expression of democracy.
People expressing their anxieties, their concerns, they're coming to the nation's capital to get their voices heard.
That's democracy in action.
That's not an assault on democracy.
Well, then you say, well, wait a minute, these were people who were then directed to sort of march on the capital, to march on Washington.
Yes, but isn't that what Martin Luther King did?
Didn't Martin Luther King organize a march on Washington, which is considered to be a valiant expression of democracy?
Why weren't these people marching toward the Capitol, marching toward where their leaders are to get their voices heard?
Why isn't that democracy expressing itself?
Now, I admit that there were people who sort of...
Went into the Capitol unauthorized.
You might say that those were people who were, far from being people attacking democracy, they're even more zealous about democracy than anyone else.
They're like, we won't be stopped.
We're going to push our way through.
We're going to make ourselves heard.
It seems to me, if anything, that is a kind of overzealous democracy.
Now, you might say, well, wait a minute, Dinesh.
You can't get in the Capitol.
That's not allowed. Well, first of all, it is allowed.
Citizens can get in the Capitol.
Now, I agree. You need permits.
You need to do it at the right time and the right place and so on.
So, let's put it this way.
The people who pushed their way into the Capitol, they were undocumented Democrats.
They're like the undocumented aliens.
They just lack documentation.
They just didn't get the proper permits.
But again, far from being enemies of democracy, these are people who ultimately are trying to have a forum for articulating their grievances.
Let's remember that these Trumpsters, even the ones who made their way into the Capitol, okay, they broke a window, okay, but they didn't kill anyone.
This was all part of the left's mythology about it, which, by the way, is repeated to this day.
You still have media sources talking about, yeah, you know, they killed in a police...
No, they didn't. The police officer died of natural causes.
Go look at the medical examiner's report.
Frankly, the only person intentionally killed was Ashley Babbitt, shot by a black Capitol Hill police officer whose identity has been concealed and who has not been held to account in any way.
Now... If that was not a sort of attack on democracy, the simple truth of it is that there are attacks on democracy, kind of bad ones, and they're occurring, they're coming from the left, they're coming from the Democrats, they're coming from the Biden administration.
Let's look at some of those.
Number one, a proposed law that rigs the rules of the elections, that moves power away from the states where the Constitution deputizes states to run these elections, but to federalize the election management system.
You might say, why? So the Democrats have, you could call it, the home team advantage.
Federal bureaucrats overseeing elections and making sure that they sort of come out the right way.
Number two, The packing of the courts.
That is flagrantly anti-democratic.
Now, I should pause here for a minute because when we talk about democracy, we need to be kind of clear what we're saying.
You know, we use phrases somewhat mindlessly like attacking democracy.
Well, first of all, how do you attack democracy?
How do you do that?
Well, by democracy here we mean our particular democratic system of government.
We have a democracy, but it's a certain type of a democracy.
First of all, it's not the direct democracy of the ancient Greeks.
Some people like to say that, no, we're not a democracy, Dinesh, we're really a republic.
This is a little bit of a silly parlor game with words.
We are a democracy.
We are also a republic.
We are, in fact, a democratic republic.
So we are a democracy to the degree that we do have majority rule, but we have a republican form of government in the sense that, A, we have representative democracy, not direct democracy, and B, we have a democracy structured in such a way that there are all kinds of protections for minority rights.
There's a Bill of Rights.
There are courts that act as a check on the government.
Laws have to be in sync with the Constitution.
That's the particular architecture of the American founding.
So that's loosely what we mean by democracy is the system of democratic republicanism that is our system.
Now, who's attacking that? Well, somebody who's trying to pack the courts is trying to attack that.
Why? Because they want to make sure we don't have an independent judiciary.
They're literally proposing adding four justices to the court.
Why? So Biden would have four nominees and four judges, and these four judges would now neutralize the supposed 6-3 advantage that conservatives have, thus giving the Democrats control not just of the House and the Senate, but also the Supreme Court in one stroke.
What about the suppression of free speech that is occurring, by the way, not just by private platforms, but private platforms egged on by Democrats in the House and the Senate and also the active collaboration of the Biden administration.
This attack on free speech with state cooperation is an attack on democracy.
What about the restrictions of religious freedom?
That's an attack on democracy.
Why? Because religious freedom is enshrined in our Constitution as something worthy of special protection.
What about the efforts to end the filibuster?
That's part of the checks and balances of democratic self-government.
The filibuster is a way for the minority in the Senate to make sure that its voices are heard, to make sure the Senate is a deliberative body and not just a ram the votes through body.
The effort to end the filibuster, where is that coming from?
That's coming from the left.
They are attacking democracy in that sense.
What about the attacks on voter integrity laws?
Isn't it true that every illegal vote cancels out a legal vote?
And therefore, to that degree, any effort that allows makes it easier to For voter fraud makes it easier for people not qualified to vote, people living out of state, dead people.
Any mechanism that makes that easy is an attack on democracy.
Why? Because it's essentially allowing non-voters or non-eligible voters to vote and thus crossing out or, you may say, disenfranchising legal voters.
The bottom line of it is there is no systematic attack on democracy coming from Republicans or conservatives.
January 6th, far from being an assault on democracy, was ultimately a kind of expression, even if sometimes overzealous, of democracy.
And the real systematic attacks on democratic institutions, one after the other, constitutional protections and our political architecture itself, That's not coming from the right.
That's coming from the Biden administration and from the left.
One of the favorite sort of charges that comes from the Democrats these days is that somehow Republicans are attacking democracy.
They're against democracy.
And here is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer talking about how voter integrity laws are in fact an attack on democracy.
Listen. These voter suppression laws, more than 250 proposed laws in more than 40 states, constitute a grave and immediate threat to the very core of our democracy.
In ways both large and small, they seek to restrict the franchise, often targeting minority communities, younger voters, and dense urban districts.
I cannot help chuckling at this.
They're a grave and immediate threat of border suppression laws.
It's almost as if they use language as if somehow language, which is intended, by the way, to describe reality, can somehow create reality.
So suddenly, essentially, if you have 19 days for early voting, that's a voter suppression law.
Why? Because we should have 100 days of early voting?
If you have a voter ID, that's a voter suppression law, Dinesh, because, you know, you're making people get an ID. That's not only restrictive, it's also racist.
It's going to make it really hard for blacks and, well, brown people like yourself, Dinesh, it's not easy to get an ID these days, is it?
To which I reply, well...
I do have to get an ID to purchase alcohol.
I have to get an ID to purchase cigarettes, open a bank account, apply for food stamps, apply for Medicaid or Social Security or unemployment benefits, to rent or buy a house, to apply for a mortgage, to buy a car, to buy auto insurance, to do my car registration, to get on an airplane, to get married, to purchase a gun, to adopt a pet, to rent a hotel room, to apply for a hunting license, to apply for a fishing license.
To pick up my prescriptions, to buy a cell phone, to visit a casino, to donate blood, to go to the hospital, to get a doctor's appointment, to enlist in the military.
Now, question, are all those activities, are all those demands for ID racist?
No. No one even alleges so.
Apparently, minorities who can quite intelligently go about doing all these things, and remember, some of these things are not that easy to do.
They require filling out forms.
They require a certain amount of sophistication to be able to carry out them.
Apparently, minorities are fully competent to do that.
But, when it comes to the simple act of voting, all you have to do is show your ID. And do nothing else.
In all the other transactions, you have to produce money, you have all kinds of requirements.
Here, you're just showing up.
You're showing your ID. Yeah, that's me.
Okay, I go vote.
What could be easier?
And yet, this very light task...
It's somehow said to be not only a suppression of voting, but also discriminatory.
It's complete nonsense.
And I think the people who are saying this stuff know it.
They know it's nonsense. A second point I want to make, and this is sort of an unexamined premise of all of this rhetoric, is that a right, the right to vote, is something that is not...
If it is not exercised, it is somehow someone doesn't have the right.
So, let's just say, for example, I don't vote for whatever reason.
I choose not to vote. Let's just say I say, for example, you know, I haven't been following politics for the last several years.
Many Americans are this way.
I really don't know what's going on.
And so, it's not the problem isn't that I don't have an ID. The problem is that I don't feel like I know what is being argued about, and so I'd rather let the people who do know sort out the matter, and I'd rather stay out of it.
Remember that people choose not to exercise their rights all the time.
You have a right to free speech.
You're not obliged to speak.
Nobody says,''You must speak!'' You have a right to own a gun.
You're not forced to own a gun.
Nobody says, you know, you must own a gun, otherwise the Second Amendment is meaningless.
So it's kind of funny that in this one context, voting, people have the idea everybody must vote.
We must make it such that everybody votes because somehow democracy itself is being restricted.
If someone decides, I don't want to vote.
It's not my business to vote.
I don't know enough to vote.
I'm not interested in voting.
It's raining, so I don't feel like voting.
There are all kinds of... And then the question becomes, do you want the ignoramus who knows nothing about what's going on, do you want the election to hinge on that guy?
No. So my point is, there are some people who probably shouldn't vote.
Why? Because they have not taken the trouble to inform themselves about what's going on.
They don't know if this referendum is about this or that.
They don't even know who's running.
They look at the list of people and pretty much whatever name sounds good to them, they vote for that guy.
So voting is not actually merely one of these things where you must do it no matter what.
It's something where people are supposed to inform themselves, educate themselves about issues and participate so that through this informed process, we can pick leaders who are in a sense more enlightened than ourselves.
That's the premise of democracy, of representative democracy, that the people, although unable to rule directly themselves, pick others who are wiser than themselves to rule in their stead.
Bottom line, we want informed, educated voters.
We don't just want voters who vote for the sake of voting.
I don't know if you caught Mike Lindell on the Jimmy Kimmel show, but we pulled a tiny clip from that to give you a whiff of it.
Listen. By the grace of God, he did free me of all the addictions.
Yes. And I woke up, I'm going, I'm looking around, I'm going, I was into politics.
I didn't know anything about what a conservative was, a liberal.
I didn't know a filibuster from a millibuster.
I didn't know anything. Well, you know, Debbie and I chuckled through the whole thing because Jimmy Kimmel kept trying to sort of get Lindell, but Lindell is just so normal, so real, that he actually came across great.
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Does it surprise you that...
John Kerry and the Biden State Department are not entirely to be trusted.
Probably doesn't surprise you and it shouldn't surprise you.
And I now have some confirming evidence that these people have been lying to you and to me and to all of us.
Now it was reported recently that through an audio tape, the Iran, the foreign minister of Iran, a guy named Zavad Zarif, by the way, a kind of thick pal of John Kerry.
Throughout the Trump years, John Kerry was consorting and kind of conspiring with this guy to undermine Trump's policies.
So this is a kind of radical mullah.
But John Kerry likes him, not because John Kerry is a radical mullah, but because, from John Kerry's point of view, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Now, this Zarif guy was reported to have said recently that John Kerry told him, informed him, about a number of Israeli initiatives, secret initiatives, In Syria, some 100, 200 airstrikes against Iranian interests in Syria.
And Zarif goes, Kerry told me about him.
And this created a stir.
And there were a number of Republicans who said, gee, why is Kerry revealing secret intelligence?
Israel is our ally.
That's how we got the information.
Are we now sharing it?
With an enemy of the United States that wishes not only ill to Israel, but also to America.
This is a regime whose official slogan could almost be called death to America.
Now, when this came out, Kerry said, first of all, this is not true.
I didn't tell him that. And second, the State Department came out, and kind of contradicting Kerry a little bit, basically said, yeah, Kerry might have told him that, but none of this stuff was even secret.
In other words, it was not classified.
Here, I'm going to quote now Ned Price, a State Department statesman.
He goes,"...if you go back and look at press reporting, this certainly was not secret, and governments that were involved were speaking to this publicly on the record." The next day, Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, pretty much the same message.
He goes, all of this was reported in the press at the time, so it's nonsense.
He also accused Republicans of, quote, trying to play politics with this.
Now, the Washington Free Beacon went back to the original audio tape where Zarif was talking about this.
And in that interview, Zarif was asked, Zarif says, Kerry told me that Israel had launched 200 airstrikes against you.
And the interviewer then asks, you didn't know?
And Zarif goes, no, no.
So right here we have, from the original audio tape, Zarif saying that, no, this was not something that was publicly known.
He didn't know about it.
When he learned about it from Kerry, this was new information to him.
In short... Kerry is obviously lying.
And the State Department is also lying.
So here we have a genuine scandal.
And a scandal that you can see the Biden administration knows to be a scandal.
Why? Because otherwise there's no reason to cover it up.
The reason that they're sort of saying, we didn't know, this was already information, is because they're trying to minimize the The incendiary revelation that a top diplomat on the United States side, remember John Kerry, sits on the National Security Council.
He's the climate czar, but he participates in foreign policy.
This guy, who gets access to classified information, is sharing it with the radical malocracy.
Now, interestingly, this scandal is also causing waves in Iran.
Why? Well, the Iranians are just mad that the Zarif guy disclosed it.
Because after all, think about it, he busted John Kerry's cover.
It's almost like John Kerry is carrying things too far, but from Iran's point of view, he's kind of a spy for Iran.
Why? Because he's revealing to the Iranians military secrets.
Which I'm sure Zarif was sharing with all the ruling malas of Iran.
And then for Zarif to say it on tape, and the tape got leaked.
It got leaked in the Middle East itself.
That's how we know about it.
The malas are angry with Zarif for, you may say, blowing the whistle.
Hey, man, you've outed our spy in America.
So, in that sense, we can say that John Kerry is Iran's man in America who's been delivering, you may say, sensitive secrets, selling out Israel in favor of Iran.
So, that's who these Biden people are.
I don't think it's because they're bunglers or they're incompetent.
It's part of their conscious policy, as it was for Obama.
To weaken America's allegiance with Israel and ultimately to fortify radical Islamic elements in the Middle East.
I don't think in the end of the day they even care if this is damaging to U.S. interests.
That's not even on their horizon.
The bottom line of it is they want to strengthen these forces because of domestic politics.
They want to weaken Israel's allies in America.
They want to weaken. They're fighting a domestic force.
And it's almost as if Biden's foreign policy is orchestrated out of that.
So this is a very revealing, depressing, and a little bit of a frightening development.
Many of the people who are in charge of high-level intelligence in our country clearly can't be trusted.
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I don't know if you really noticed, but these institutions that were once objects of great reverence, I mean, almost a certain sense of awe.
I'm thinking of the FBI and the CIA.
I remember when I was in India, I'd look at these.
I'd hear about these institutions, and they represented to me a kind of James Bond-ian mystique, the sense of being able to sort of figure things out and take on the bad guys on the international stage as well as domestically.
Now, as I've begun to observe more closely how these organizations function, you begin to realize that they are full of fools and incompetence and kooks.
Now, admittedly, some of these kooks have Ivy League credentials and so on, but this doesn't make them less idiotic.
This doesn't make them less wrong about everything.
Think about the way in which the FBI, by and large, has bungled just about every mass investigation, every meaningful mass investigation in the last 25 years.
Think about something so simple as the Las Vegas shooting.
Remember that horrible shooting all those people killed?
What was the cause of that?
You don't know, and I don't either.
Why? Because they've hushed it up.
And what about all these mass shooters whose identity was known?
They had been reported.
The FBI actually had their names in their possession.
Did nothing about it, evidently, because these people then went on these shooting sprees.
The CIA has gotten almost every major issue wrong since I came to the United States.
They were completely wrong about the end of the Cold War.
Caught napping, absolutely wide-eyed.
Ah, we had no idea!
They bungled 9-11.
Why? Because, again, not only the identity of bin Laden...
But the location of bin Laden was well known.
These idiots couldn't find bin Laden, even though there's Peter Arnett of CNN interviewing him.
There's a guy from Time Magazine interviewing him.
Ordinary run-of-the-mill journalist could find bin Laden, but apparently the CIA couldn't find him under Clinton.
So just think about what absolute losers these people are.
And now, on top of it, as if to sort of solve their problems, the CIA has decided to go woke.
I'm going to play a segment of a CIA recruitment ad which is enough to make you cry and is enough to make our enemies dissolve with laughter.
Listen. I can wax eloquent on complex legal issues in English while also belting Guayaquil de Mis Amores in Spanish.
I can change a diaper with one hand and console a crying toddler with the other.
I am a woman of color.
I am a mom. I am a cisgender millennial who's been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.
I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise.
I am a walking declaration, a woman whose inflection does not rise at the end of her sentences, suggesting that a question has been asked.
I did not sneak into CIA. My employment was not and is not the result of a fluke or slip through the cracks.
I earned my way in and I earned my way up the ranks of this organization.
What am I listening to?
I mean, I don't have anything against this person.
But what does this have to do with anything?
I mean, I feel like I'm in an ethnic studies class at like Portland State.
You know, if I'm listening to a recruitment ad for the CIA, I would expect to hear things like this.
I love my country.
I am willing to risk my life for my country.
My country's protection means a great deal to me.
I am very good at research.
I am able to uncover facts that other people miss.
I have a great interest in identifying and knowing who America's enemies are on the global stage.
I am an expert in foreign languages.
I know Mandarin.
I know Farsi.
And therefore, I'm well qualified to be able to do research into the radical Muslims.
None of this! We get none of this!
Instead, we get all this woke propaganda.
You just have to look, try to think of a different job.
Someone's making a recruitment video, let's just say, for being a doctor or being an engineer.
And the hospital puts out an ad where the guy goes...
I'm of partial Arab descent.
I can change a diaper with my left hand while I juggle with my right hand.
I have irritable bowel syndrome.
I feel like I'm a victim.
I've got anxiety disorder and constantly words come out of my mouth that I don't mean.
You'd be like, well, listen, your problems are kind of interesting and probably need some kind of attention.
But what does this have to do with being an engineer?
What does this have to do with being a doctor?
Absolutely nothing. So in a sense, to me, the CIA is telling the world, we're a bunch of idiots.
We look for people who have qualities completely unrelated to what the CIA is all about.
And think of what aid and comfort this gives to America's enemies.
They're like, while we are training people in intelligence, while we are looking for the best people, people who can truly advance the interests of China or radical Islam, I mean, they're literally looking for suicide bombers.
And what are we looking for?
We're looking for people who want reparations to go to the CIA. The simple truth is that these agencies have become a joke.
They need to be remade from the ground up.
Obviously that's not going to go on in the Biden administration.
They actually like these agencies to be functioning in this way.
But for earlier generations of Americans, I think looking at this, they'd be very disturbed because this is now our 21st century CIA. Do you take supplements?
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The Republican Party is clearly a party in transition, and there's some internal skirmish going on.
I like to think of this somewhat in generational terms.
I'm in a sense a member of the kind of old GOP, by which I mean I came of age in the Reagan era.
My daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill, has come of age more recently, I would say, kind of in the Trump era.
And I thought it'd be fun to have Dee on to talk about some stuff that's been going on, well, particularly with Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney.
So Dee, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Let me start by asking you, I mean, I have to confess, I had to laugh my head off when I saw...
Utah GOP convention. I mean, first of all, that was a surprising event to me because, you know, Salt Lake City, you've obviously got LDS, Mormons.
Mormons are not exactly the booing type. They're very nice, they're very restrained. I'm sure they've put up with a lot from Romney, but even they seem to have had enough and they sort of let it all out.
And there was poor Romney.
I mean, he was like, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Like, you know, kind of idiotically thanking them as they were booing him on the stage.
What did you make of the spectacle?
What a good feeling.
I hope he's booed more often because he really deserves it for voting to impeach Trump, for everything that he's done, really just to draw attention to himself, to derail everything that everyone else in the party believes in.
I think he absolutely should be punished for what he's done.
And, I mean, booing him, that's just the beginning.
But he should be embarrassed.
He was asking the crowd, you know, are you guys embarrassed by Trump?
It's like, no, we're embarrassed by you.
That's why we're booing you.
I mean, I think it's so incredible because this guy, Romney, was the standard bearer.
He was the candidate of the GOP not that long ago.
I mean, I guess 2012, you were, what, 17 years old and about to march off to college.
So look at the way in which the Republican Party is different in just a few years.
Yeah, and I think Trump really brought out a lot of people's true colors.
A lot of people that, you know, we maybe didn't realize were as bad as they are.
And so I think it's good because we've been able to let people choose, you know, Who am I going to be?
Am I going to be a Trump supporter or am I not going to be a Trump supporter?
And even just when it comes down to all of the good things Trump was doing, it's like Romney still wasn't able to be happy that he was remaking the courts and all these good things that hopefully he believed in at one point.
But I guess his true ideology came out and probably also his ego and hatred of Trump and jealousy of Trump and just the fact that he wanted Trump to fail.
Do you see Romney more in kind of ideological terms or in personal terms?
Because if you think about, say, something like Obamacare, Obamacare was loosely lifted from a very similar plan that Romney had in Massachusetts.
So Romney, in that sense, ideologically is not very far to the right.
Do you think Romney's kind of antagonism toward Trump is based on that, or...
Or do you think it's just a personal grudge that, you know, here's Romney, he lost, here's Trump, he won.
So it becomes almost that, I mean, there was a little bit of resentment that, for example, Goldwater had toward Reagan, because Goldwater always thought, I was the original kind of conservative, and yet I'm not the guy who made it to the finish line.
It was Reagan who did.
I think it is ideological because so many other people, let's say, ran even against Trump in the primary and, you know, Ted Cruz, for example, but he's someone who supported Trump and he's someone who was very happy to see Trump succeed, wanted to help him, and obviously wants what's best for the country.
So I think it is ideological.
I think Romney truly is more of a Bush type of Republican, like Liz Cheney also.
He probably doesn't care as much about the working man and doesn't care about This more populist kind of growing wing of the Republican Party.
And I think his ideology really is truly different aside from his jealousies of Trump.
Let's turn to Liz Cheney.
The Republican leadership, it now finally seems.
Recently, she survived a vote to push her out from the number three leadership position, but it now looks like her continuing kind of antagonism to Trump.
But it's more than that.
She seems to want kind of a return to the kind of neocon style of the Republican Party in which the United States gets involved in all kinds of foreign entanglements at a time when it seems that Republicans are now pulling away from those sorts of commitments What do you make of this idea of not expelling Liz Cheney from the party by any means, but basically saying that Republicans need to have leaders that reflect the will of the Republican voters?
Yeah, I mean, I think hopefully she is expelled from the party, not just her leadership position within Congress, but I think she absolutely shouldn't even be there.
So, no, but I think the fact that she was just fist pumping Biden, she's done that after she voted to impeach Trump.
She also fist pumped Biden after he gave his address to Congress.
She obviously loves Biden.
I mean, It kind of reminds me of some of the relatives of the Bush family being super big fans of Biden.
They're all best friends and hang out together and there are photos of them, you know.
As if they're all friends.
And I think that's just so disturbing.
I mean, all those people vehemently hate Trump.
They would never hang out with him, really.
It's just obvious that I think her allies actually are the Democrats.
I mean, most of the Republicans in leadership and the people who are Republicans are against her.
To me, one very telling thing, and I'd just like you to react to this, is we can almost look and see who are the left's favorite Republicans.
If the left is cheering for Romney, you know that Romney is a problem.
He's an ally, really, of their side.
It's almost as if the left and the Democrats say we should pick our opposition. We'd like to have these hollow men We'd like to have these token opponents who will kind of pretend to oppose us and then give in and then they come and hug us After we've crushed them This is the kind of Republican Party the left wants and I think what you're saying is we Republicans should be really careful that we keep these kinds of people at least away from any position even resembling leadership of the party
Exactly, and I think these you know, Romney was Cheney type of people. They always think oh, yeah, you know I'm really getting the praise of the left The media loves me so much.
But then when you look back, it's like, well, a few seconds ago, they were tearing Romney, for example, to shreds when he ran for president or McCain or whoever.
So it's like, they only like them when they're I guess in their mind, the lesser of two evils against a Trump, but they don't actually care about Romney or Liz Cheney or any of these people because they're not as radical to the left as the rest of the Democrats.
When we come back, I want to switch topics with you, Dia, a little bit and talk about something we've talked about periodically, which is to say some of the parables in Scripture and what they mean.
We'll be back. The left is pressuring the Biden administration for student debt forgiveness, more stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, a $2 trillion infrastructure plan.
The question comes to mind, who's going to pay for all this?
Clearly, the Biden administration thinks they're playing with monopoly money.
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I'm back with my daughter, Danielle.
This is a Gale author, by the way, of the book The Choice.
If you don't have it yet, please order it.
It's a fantastic book.
It breaks a lot of new ground on a very important issue, a pressing moral issue.
Dee, we often talk on the phone, and we chat about Christianity and about Scripture.
And we were talking just yesterday and the day before about one of the important parables in Scripture, namely the parable of the prodigal son.
Now, I have to say that this is a parable that although a lot of people sort of kind of know it, the story itself is pretty simple, kind of a wealthy man who has a lot of estates and has two sons.
And the younger son comes to him and goes basically, Dad, I want to get my share of the inheritance.
Give it to me now.
And the father somewhat reluctantly relents.
So the son takes the money.
He takes off. He goes into riotous and raucous living.
He basically wastes the whole inheritance.
And then he's in a miserable shape.
He cannot support himself.
He doesn't like being on his own anymore, and so he comes crawling back to his father, and the message of the story is that the father then welcomes the son back, has a big celebration, but an interesting sideline is that the older son, who has been sort of the obedient son, you may call him the good boy, becomes very resentful.
And takes the attitude that, gee, Dad, you know, I'm the son that was there for you.
I'm the one who's played by the rules.
And yet you're killing the fatted calf and having the celebration over the younger guy.
So this is a very interesting parable.
And I want you to talk about, expound it a little bit for what its relevance is for us today.
How does it speak across the centuries?
An ancient Hebrew parable.
How does this speak to us in the 21st century?
Yeah, this is one of my favorite parables.
And it puzzled me originally, too.
And I've heard a lot of commentary on it.
But I think what's interesting is the fact that the prodigal son, when he returns, he repents of his wrongdoing.
So he says, you know, Dad, I'm basically like a servant to you now.
I know I don't deserve this, but...
I'm sorry, basically.
And I think that that's really key because anytime we repent, if we look at the Father sort of like God, God rejoices anytime we repent and turn back to Him.
And of course, if we turn away from Him, He's I think when the brother is upset or resentful, it's not reflective of the fact that he's joyful for his brother's change of heart.
And I think that the change of heart is more valuable than any kind of item or amount and so on.
But I also think the father then says to the other son, the one who was obedient and stayed with him, That, you know, all of this is yours in the sense that just because the other brother has turned back doesn't mean that the other brother has lost.
And I think it's like just because in the metaphor, if more people turn to God, that doesn't mean that there's less for the other people who are following God.
We want more and more people to turn to Him.
There's no, you know, you get this, so I don't if you also choose God.
That's kind of how I read it.
I mean, it's very interesting because it mirrors the way that you find with Jesus.
Whenever Jesus deals with sinners, he's usually very gentle with them in spelling out what they did wrong.
For example, the woman in the well who had five husbands.
Jesus doesn't berate her or lash her.
What he does is he basically points out something that she is reluctant to admit.
But it also seems that Jesus is firm about the fact that you can't keep doing it.
In other words, there is a call to repentance.
And when you look to see the few times in Scripture where Jesus is very harsh, for example, with the moneylenders in the temple, Jesus does not seem to approve of the unrepentant heart or the person who sort of flagrantly persists in doing wrong and is kind of proud of themselves for doing it.
Right, and he's definitely not happy when we put forth justifications and rationalizations, sort of like Adam and Eve did, for example.
That doesn't make God joyous.
So I think that what he really asks us is that repentance, because that's just the complete opposite of justification or turning away from God.
And I think if the son, the prodigal son, for example, had never turned back to God, had not repented to him and so on, had not returned, then, of course, the father's feelings would have been different.
He would have been Very sad.
As he said, you know, my son was dead and now he's alive again.
So I think that the goal is really the repentance aspect of it.
So you're saying that the older brother was in a sense being selfish because he should have been happy, as the father was, that his own brother is now sort of back in the fold, that he's no longer, quote, a lost son.
But he's now part of the family again and will presumably resume his duties within the family.
Talk a little bit about how you think that this message today applies not just to...
Because a lot of parents may feel like, my children are ungrateful, my children are like the prodigal son, they've taken their share of the inheritance and so on, and they owe me an apology.
But... I think that part of what you were saying is that this could also apply the other way.
In some cases, children need to forgive their parents as much as parents need to forgive their children.
Yeah, of course. And I think, you know, situations could be different.
Maybe in a certain family, it's the child.
But, you know, sometimes there is a parent who has really done wrong, for example, to their children.
And so... I know that there are many people who've talked about that, and I think that if someone, our goal should be the best for that person.
If they've turned from God or they're doing a lot of wrongdoing, our goal should be, you know, how can they repent and turn back to God?
What's the best for them?
Not what's the best for me, but what's the best for them?
And I think that the Father really hoped the best for His Both of his sons.
He wanted the best for them.
And the best for all of us is with God, because God is goodness.
God is what's best for all of us.
Dee, this is great. Thanks for coming on the show.
This was a very interesting segment, and we will talk again soon.
Thank you. Debbie and I have gotten to know Dr.
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Does America face the prospect of a second civil war?
Many times when people discuss this, they do it with reference to the first civil war, the Civil War of 1861 to 1865.
I want to go in a different direction and examine this question with reference to the Spanish Civil War.
Now, for many years, I knew very little about the Spanish Civil War.
Most of my knowledge about it was confined to two things.
One is Orwell, who fought on the Republican side, actually on the leftist side in the Spanish Civil War.
And wrote about it in his book Homage to Catalonia.
And also the painter Picasso, who did a famous painting, Guernica, which was a description of a Basque Spanish town that was bombed into a kind of fiery conflagration.
I think I'm going to go.
Now, a couple of weeks ago, I had Stanley Paine on this podcast, a whole hour discussion mainly focused on fascism.
But Stanley Paine is not merely a scholar of fascism, but also of the Spanish Civil War.
He's the author of this book that is called The Spanish Civil War.
And I read it with great interest recently.
Read it not so much, well, partly to learn about the Spanish Civil War, but also partly to look for echoes that would be familiar for us today.
And there are many.
Now, the Spanish Civil War began with the end of It was a kind of despotism.
It was a dictatorship, but it...
It helped to mobilize in resistance to it a Spanish left, a very powerful Spanish left, which called itself Republican, small r.
So don't be confused by the name.
But these Spanish Republicans, these leftists, if you will, made as their main target We're good to go.
The Catholic Church.
There was a burning of the monasteries in 1931.
More than 100 churches were burned.
The left demanded that the Constitution be rewritten.
And they imposed all these restrictions.
They shut down Catholic schools.
They didn't want religious orders to be able to teach.
And so you had this kind of alliance of leftists and socialists that emerged in Republican Spain.
And it also began to attack civil rights.
The moment that the leftists came into the government, they imposed censorship on Spanish society.
And they basically said any expressions of traditionalism or any sentiment for monarchy or Catholicism, all of this was interpreted as a defense of the old regime.
And therefore, the left declared that they would use martial law to shut down this kind of dissent.
The idea was to exclude Catholics and conservatives from participation in government Sound familiar?
Well, little did the left realize that by doing this, they were activating throughout Spanish society a very powerful Spanish right.
And this right wing was now an alliance of devout Catholics.
Spain is, of course, a Catholic country.
But also traditionalist elements of the military.
People who began to see that this effort by the left...
Although supposedly fighting authoritarianism was imposing its own type of authoritarianism.
Once again, I think there are familiar echoes to our society.
But the right now began to organize and swept the subsequent election.
So the left was horrified.
They basically called the right's election victory a, quote, attack on democracy.
Sound familiar? Suddenly, expressions of democracy now get interpreted as attacks on democracy.
And so what does the left and the socialists do?
They take to street violence.
In other words, this is, you could almost call it early Antifa.
They start unleashing street thugs into the streets and begin to terrorize citizens.
This violence and mob action involves burning things, burning businesses, burning churches, intimidating and threatening people.
Another election is called.
Now you have a leftist government that comes to power.
But it makes the mistake of concluding that the right is somehow finished.
Even though the left wins a pretty narrow victory, I guess somewhat similar to the Biden victory of 2020, the left interprets this narrow victory as a mandate to completely remake all of Spain.
And so the left sets about doing this.
And in fact, they don't stop short of political assassination.
There was a prominent kind of monarchist leader in Spain, José Calvo Sotelo.
This guy is deceitfully dragged from his palace.
They tell him, oh, we're taking you to a meeting.
And they take him behind and into an alley where a group of socialists executes him.
They kill him. And this becomes the trigger for the Spanish Civil War.
Now, very interestingly, Franco, General Franco, who led the army revolt against the leftist government, Franco was actually not originally a rebel.
Franco was one of the kind of decorated members of the Spanish military.
His idea was to be a soldier and to go along with whatever regime there was In Spain, until he saw that what the left was all about is remaking the police and remaking the military.
Think about what's going on now with the left trying to remake the military, eradicate extremists, translate Trumpian elements from the military, remake the police.
All of this was going on in Spain.
And so the point that Stanley Payne makes is that he says...
Many would-be rebels, such as General Franco, committed only when they judged it literally would be more dangerous not to rebel than to rebel.
So at some point, there was a kind of tipping point, and a guy like Franco said,"...enough is enough." These people are up to no good and they need to be ruthlessly crushed.
Now, here's a leftist writer talking about the murder and kidnapping of Calvo Sotelo.
And he makes the point, he says, what happened is, had the Spanish government cracked down immediately on the violence coming from the left?
The Spanish Civil War would not have started.
The military would have gone about its business.
But when the military saw that the Spanish government was not only allowing the violence to continue, but was sort of the secret force behind it.
They were benefiting from the violence.
They suppressed an investigation into the socialists who murdered this politician.
Why? Because the murderers and the conspirators were in the ranks of the people making that decision.
So now, says Paine, quote, it now seemed more dangerous not to rebel than to rebel.
Within hours of learning the news, Franco changed his mind and thus begins a terrible and bloody civil war that absolutely leveled Spanish society.
Obviously, Franco won that war and established dictatorial rule in Spain.
That's when there was the Guernica bombing that was immortalized in Picasso's painting.
And by the way, Picasso, a great painter.
But there's no question that Guernica, pure propaganda.
Oh, this was sort of the firebombing of a whole town.
Now the simple truth of it is Guernica was actually hit by a small number of German fighters and Italian bombers.
But it wasn't the bombing, it was the fact that Guernica and the Republican, the leftist government didn't even have a proper functioning fire department.
So the bombing itself, although targeted, set off fires, nobody could put off the fires.
The fires kept burning. Everything is kind of like the Great Fire of London, which happened centuries earlier.
So Guernica was an example of a combination of an attack by the Franco forces, supported by Germany and Spain, and the inability of the local government to even put out a fire.
So it turned into a blaze, but the blaze was caused by local incompetence as much as it was by military action.
Now, at the end of the day, the bitter lesson of the Civil War is that you can't have a functioning society in which all the key elements of society are not given a certain voice or participation.
It's true that there are some people who are sort of too impoverished and too poor to rebel, but that was certainly not the case in Spain.
There were powerful elements in the church, powerful elements in the military, business elements through the society, and at some point those people said that they had enough.
And having enough for them, by the way, it wasn't just winning the Civil War.
Even after the Civil War was over, Franco began a ruthless campaign of trials and executions in which all kinds of people, I believe some 25,000 people, lost their heads after the war in a campaign of reprisal.
So the bottom line of it is that violence begets violence.
Horrible things meet the retaliation.
It's almost Newton's law. Every action brings an opposite reaction.
And I think as we look at these horrific events in other countries, this was Spain, but this is a Western country in a stage of division.
It was a divided society as ours is today.
I think that there are even today some valuable cautionary lessons that we can learn now from the Spanish Civil War.
Time for our mailbox and we have a question from Haiti.
Listen. Hi Dinesh, I'm an immigrant from Haiti.
Do you have a theory as to why most immigrants are liberals and vote for these ridiculous policies that may turn America into the countries that we live?
I even know immigrants that hate this country and talk about how better their countries of origins are.
I don't understand that mindset.
Thanks Dinesh, I love your show.
This is a very interesting question about how it could be that an immigrant who is, think about it, voluntarily, we're not talking about refugees, we're talking about immigrants, who voluntarily packs up.
And moves to another country, which he or she wouldn't do if the new country wasn't, from your own point of view, better.
You have a better prospect of life in this new country.
And yet, when you come here, there are some immigrants, I don't even think it's necessarily a majority, but there are some who then develop this weird resentment toward America.
I saw an amazing example of this myself when I was a student at Dartmouth.
There were a bunch of Iranian students on the campus, and these are people who had come to America on scholarships provided by the Shah.
And yet, they were enthusiastic supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
They thought that America was responsible for all the evils in Iran and around the world.
They developed this kind of intense anti-Americanism, which I found really puzzling, because these are people who later on stayed in the United States.
They didn't go back to Khomeini's Iran, and yet they were foreclosed.
Khomeini. So this phenomenon, I think, can only be explained by the fact that even though the immigrant deep down knows that they're coming to a country where life is better, the fact that they have some ancestral attachment to their own country, which, by the way, is normal.
I mean, Kipling talks about how we have a sort of natural attachment to our own.
And I think that the immigrants who come here...
Feel a little humiliated by the fact that, by comparison, their own countries suck.
Their own countries can't fix a manhole.
You have people, and this is true in India, they're walking and they disappear.
They fall down a manhole. Why?
Because there are open manholes on the street.
Where'd the guy go? You know, what kind of country can't fix a manhole?
But that's the way it is.
The streets are really bumpy.
I mean, when I was...
My dad would drive our admittedly old car.
It was basically like up and down, you know, even down a street.
One of the most striking things to me about America was how smooth the roads are.
Something that probably most of you don't even think about.
You just expect them to be that way.
And it's only when you see differently, then you're like, wow, smooth roads.
Who would have guessed? So the bottom line of it is that...
That it's a little difficult to turn around and pass judgment on your own country.
It's almost like passing judgment on your own parents or basically realizing that the school that you went to kind of stunk.
You didn't really get a proper education.
That's why you're such an ignoramus.
So for immigrants, it's a little difficult to come to terms with all that, to just basically go, yeah, I came to a better country.
And so it is, I think, that sense of pride and humiliation that causes people to go, well, you know...
Yeah, it's true that I'm here in America, but, you know, it's not really because America's any better than my own country and so on.
True, people don't really, you know, disappear down manholes and things, but what about systematic racism?
So you've got this sort of crackpot sensibility, which I think is rooted in psychological inferiority, in which you end up blaming America for things that America's really not guilty of.
Why? So you can feel a little bit better about yourself.
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