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May 5, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza

01:02:27

DeSantis Leads the Way Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 83

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	How Ron DeSantis is showing the way and establishing himself as one of the top contenders for 2024.
	And what if the Facebook Oversight Board were to rate the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address?
	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.
	Ron DeSantis is on a run.
	He might be on a run for 2024.
	He might be moving early to establish himself as a top contender for 2024.
	And he is off to an incredible start.
	Just recently, DeSantis got through the legislature.
	It's one thing to propose things.
	I'm the governor. I think we should do this.
	I think we should do that. It's another thing to move these through the legislature, get them passed by the State House and the Senate, and then sign the bill so it becomes a law.
	And that's what DeSantis has been doing.
	Let's go through some of his landmark pieces of legislation that have moved through at pretty much breakneck speed.
	First, DeSantis just signed legislation that bans vaccine passports for COVID-19.
	It prohibits indefinite lockdowns.
	In fact, it ends these local restrictions on small businesses.
	Because sometimes, even if you remove a statewide mandate, you can have local government moving and they go, yeah, we want a lockdown in our area.
	So DeSantis is basically establishing, you may almost call it a zone of freedom.
	Florida just looks and feels different than other places.
	Number two, an incredible piece of legislation that strikes at the digital platforms for their censorship.
	Now, this is called doing something about a problem that other people just complain about.
	Lindsey Graham...
	I'm finally going to get serious about, you know, Section 230.
	I mean, talk about loser mentality.
	When you could do something about it, you didn't.
	Now that you can't do anything, you're all ready to go.
	This is ineffective governance.
	Contrast this with Florida, which basically passed a law that says, if a social media platform deplatforms a user that they know to be a political candidate, either someone who's in office or someone who's running for office...
	$250,000 fine per day and $25,000 fine per day for a candidate who is not for statewide office, for local offices.
	So this applies to platforms with over $100 million in revenue.
	It is a real warning shot.
	I'm sure it will be contested in court.
	We expect all that. But this is a state legislature going out front and setting a model for...
	Other states to follow.
	In addition, the Florida legislature has now passed a bill banning transgender athletes from competing in girls' and women's sports.
	I mean, we all know that the transgender thing is basically a destruction of women's sports, and the left is We're good to go.
	So Florida is on the move and on the move not only in these hot-button economic and cultural issues.
	And DeSantis is at the front of all that.
	Now, this is not because DeSantis is doing this kind of under the radar, he's moving stealthily.
	No, he has been in the face of tempestuous media attack.
	A hit piece in 60 Minutes.
	The New York Times was basically doing an expose on him every day.
	And there were articles in places like The Atlantic and other places basically saying things like, no, by lifting the lockdowns early, DeSantis is risking a kind of holocaust.
	So DeSantis was facing all of this pressure.
	And how did he respond to it?
	This is the key, because Republicans, I think, today are looking for leaders who don't wilt in the face of pressure.
	Many of our leaders have proven just inadequate to the occasion.
	Think for example of Kristi Noem, whom I was actually very enthusiastic about.
	I would have put her kind of in the same camp as DeSantis, but suddenly, faced with the transgender issue, and I don't even think she was scared of the issue.
	She talks to the Chamber of Commerce.
	And those guys are like, well, you know, we're going to lose some money in South Dakota.
	You know, the NBA is going to be really angry and some of these women's sports associations.
	And Kristi Noem is, okay, well, you know, I guess it isn't a really good idea.
	Well, this is basically called disqualifying yourself for national leadership.
	And that happens. It's kind of nice it's happening early because you get to have a look at who these people are and how they deal with pressure.
	In some ways, it seems to me that DeSantis is doing, with the media, even better than Trump.
	He has the same Trump fearlessness in dealing with the media, but he doesn't strafe them in an ad hominem way.
	He doesn't go to sort of sleepy eyes Chuck Todd, which I must say I chuckled about at the time, I have to admit.
	Trump has this kind of unerring instinct for kind of getting to you.
	But one of the problems with that kind of approach with the ad hominem is you do make enemies for life.
	And one of the problems with Trump is he's made some enemies for life on his own party.
	Think of the way that, you know, Marco Rubio, little Marco, still hasn't gotten over it.
	He's still sulking. He still is sort of very reluctant to kind of get on the Trump train.
	And we see that with other people again and again.
	Now, DeSantis doesn't do that.
	He doesn't do the ad hominem.
	He says things like, have you read the report?
	Do you even bother to read the article?
	So he pushes back, but he pushes back kind of on the substance, which I think actually is the best way to go.
	Why? Because you avoid sort of Newton's law.
	Every action produces an opposite reaction.
	So when you do add hominem to people, they develop this kind of vendetta.
	They'll go to great extents to get you.
	And with DeSantis, it's not like that.
	He basically snubs the reporter on the facts...
	And then he moves on.
	You don't get the feeling that he's obsessed with the person.
	He's just obsessed with getting it right.
	And he's obsessed with the agenda.
	And he's fearless about it.
	Bottom line, we have, I think, in DeSantis, somebody who is at a time when we really need it, showing leadership.
	This is leadership.
	Leadership is formulating ideas, being able to articulate and make the case for them, moving the legislation through the Congress, and then not freaking out when the media goes berserk.
	In fact, you want them to go berserk.
	Them going berserk is a sign that you're doing something right.
	And one thing DeSantis is proving is that if you stay tough...
	And cool, savoir faire, a kind of serenity in the face of all this shouting and screaming, you'll realize that it's sound and fury.
	It amounts to nothing.
	At the end of the day, these media guys, they rely on this blitzkrieg attack, and if it doesn't work, they go and do something else.
	So DeSantis is proving this is how it's done.
	This is the pathway to the nomination.
	My message to Ron is keep it up.
	I shouldn't say old man because he's a very young man.
	You're doing great.
	We'd like to see more of this in the future.
	Does the jury system still work in this country for criminal justice?
	Well, I think it does.
	But it does not, it seems, in high-profile trials that involve the issue of race.
	Now, it's just come out that Brandon Mitchell, one of the jurors in the Derek Chauvin trial...
	It's not who he said he was.
	He's not an impartial juror.
	In fact, it's come out that this guy was at a Black Lives Matter event in Washington, D.C. last summer.
	A photo was posted on social media.
	It shows this Sir Brandon Mitchell, who's an African American.
	He went to a so-called March on Washington at which George Floyd's brother and sister...
	Phil Anise and Bridget Floyd were the speakers.
	And not only that, but Mitchell in the photo is shown wearing a t-shirt, and the t-shirt has the following phrase on it.
	Get your knee off our necks.
	In other words, here's a guy with very strong opinions and feelings about George Floyd and about the trial.
	And these are the feelings that he took in with him.
	In fact, in an interview, he even makes the point, his uncle posted the photo, by the way, and he makes the point that he...
	He, first of all, had a chance to make history.
	That's why he was at the march.
	He felt that a historical event was going on.
	And he also said that he had seen the Floyd video before the trial and, quote, didn't need to know much else.
	In other words, he was ready to find Chauvin guilty before the trial.
	And these are the views that this guy, Brandon Mitchell, took into the trial.
	Wow. Now, This, I think, is really crushing.
	By the way, Derek Chauvin's lawyers have already filed a motion for a new trial, but that was not in response to this.
	They were actually talking about the way in which the pre-trial publicity and the crowds gathered outside the courtroom created an atmosphere of prejudice and intimidation.
	So, I can only imagine what they're going to make of this.
	You have a guy, a juror, and by the way, this, Brandon Mitchell was asked these questions when he, in the voir dire, in the jury interrogation process, they asked him very specifically.
	Let's look at a couple of the questions here.
	They talk about the fact that, do you have an opinion about the trial and about Derek Chauvin?
	And basically, Mitchell goes that he was undecided.
	Yes, he could be impartial.
	They asked him, did you participate in any events that would be seen as prejudicial?
	He made no mention of having been in D.C. He made no mention about his T-shirt.
	You know, get your knee off our backs.
	I am sure he would have been thrown off the jury had he done this.
	Now, of course, he says, oh no, this wasn't really a march for Floyd.
	It was just kind of a march on Washington.
	Yeah, but it was a march on Washington for what reason to express solidarity with George Floyd, and that's why the speakers were who they were.
	Now... All of this is coming on top of another little tidbit which hasn't gotten as much publicity but is equally revealing and kind of establishes the pattern I'm trying to show here.
	This is actually from The Wrap.
	Apparently, National Public Radio interviewed one of the jurors in the O.J. Simpson case.
	This is going all the way back to 1995, I believe.
	And in this series, which came out on ESPN, by the way, it was called OJ Made in America, and an excerpt was played on public radio's Fresh Air.
	So, juror Carrie Bess, who is now in her 70s, she was asked whether there were members of the jury who voted to acquit Because of Rodney King.
	In other words, think about it.
	Jurors who voted to acquit OJ for a murder because of the completely separate Rodney King incident, the beating of Rodney King.
	And she just goes, yes.
	And not only that, but she says that she is one of them.
	Now, I want to read the transcript here because it's so telling.
	Do you think there are members of the jury that voted to acquit OJ because of Rodney King?
	Bess, yes.
	Interviewer, you do? Bess, yes.
	Interviewer, how many of you do you think felt that way?
	Bess, oh, probably 90% of them.
	90%? Did you feel that way?
	Yes. That was payback.
	Uh-huh. You think that was right?
	And then Bess throws up her hands like, there you go.
	So what does this really tell you?
	What this really tells you is we have a sort of crisis in our jury system when it comes to these high-profile trials.
	These jurors are not acting as jurors.
	Think about it. Why do we have jurors?
	We have jurors.
	Why do we trust 9 or 12 people to make a verdict on a life and death situation?
	Why would we do that? Well, we do it on the simple basis that we're finding people who are not prejudiced in the case, who are willing to look at the facts of the case, who are not going to decide based upon something else happened over there or something else happened to me and therefore I'm going to take it out on this person.
	And yet, that's exactly what we have.
	So when not in every situation, jury trials still work.
	But the key point is that when it's a race trial and it's black and white, We just cannot expect fairness.
	There's all kinds of shenanigans going on, and the two most high-profile trials of the last quarter century clearly prove that point.
	In some ways, to me, it's disturbingly evocative of the Old South.
	The South of the early 20th century, for example.
	Now, think about it. In the early 20th century, if it was an all-white jury trial in the South, no problem.
	There's no reason to believe the Southern system of justice, run by the Democrats, by the way, didn't work for whites.
	It's just that if you were a black guy accused with an all-white jury, you were basically a dead man or you were basically done.
	So when it was an interracial case in the South of the Democrats, justice essentially went out the window.
	And by the way, it's the same now.
	It's the same party.
	It's the same type of people.
	Of course, there is a little difference in that now the Democrats' priorities have shifted.
	Now they want to get the white guy before they want to get the black guy.
	But in both cases, you see the manipulation of racial politics at the expense of what?
	Due process of law, neutral arbitration of justice, impartial jurors, all the constitutional safeguards that are put into place are thrown out when it comes to the insidious politics of race.
	I'm still chuckling over the Jimmy Kimmel interview with Mike Lindell, because despite Kimmel's efforts to get him, Mike's sense of humor really comes through.
	Here's a little clip. Listen.
	Are you planning to run for governor of Minnesota?
	I wouldn't run to be a dog catcher right now if those machines are still in.
	Stop the presses. You got this guy out there.
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	You got to get this guy some blue shirts.
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	The Biden administration appears to be on a manhunt, a kind of relentless quest to identify and root out what they call domestic extremists. And by domestic extremists here, they really mean their political opponents.
	Because the views that they classify as extreme are not things like I'm going to blow up a building or I'm going to do something that is violent.
	It is people who have the wrong views.
	This guy believes that the election was stolen.
	This guy believes that the vote count in Arizona was illegitimate.
	This guy believes that Biden is not a legitimate president.
	This guy believes that the other party is too extreme.
	This guy doesn't believe that the institutions of American life are responsive or can be trusted.
	Well, these are views held by a lot of Americans, and in many cases they have good reason for holding them.
	And just to classify them as extreme is simply to insist that American politics itself, the democratic give and take, I'm sure if you go through American history at every period, Each party considered the other party to be kind of extreme.
	The Federalists thought the Jeffersonian Democrats were extreme.
	And the Jeffersonian Democrats thought the Federalists were extreme for passing the Alien and Sedition Acts, for example.
	And then later, I'm sure that the Democrats in the South thought that the Republicans under Lincoln were extreme.
	Oh, they actually want to stop slavery in the territories.
	That's extreme. And the Republicans, for their part, thought the Democrats were extreme in the South and in the North for trying to protect slavery in whatever ways that they could.
	And so it goes.
	So the most recent escalation here is the Biden administration is apparently considering now using outside firms to do surveillance on Americans.
	And they want these outside firms to be able to do things that the federal government itself is banned from doing.
	Right now, the FBI, for example, can monitor U.S. citizens, but there are some legal limits.
	They can't just go and monitor people without warrants, without justification, without having some pretext in an ongoing investigation.
	But outside firms can do that.
	And so, what you have here is a kind of farming out of surveillance, if you will.
	Similarly, the CIA and the NSA have legal limits on what they can do, particularly to American citizens in this country.
	But officials at the Department of Homeland Security are consulting with the National Security Council and the FBI. To try to farm out surveillance to research firms, nonprofit groups.
	And by the way, these are often groups that operate covertly online.
	So what they do is they establish fake identities.
	They create fake institutions.
	And they go on places like Telegram, for example, or other social media platforms.
	And their idea is to ferret out information.
	Now, FBI Director Wray...
	During recent public testimony, he said, look, the FBI doesn't really go after, it doesn't investigate ideology.
	It doesn't even investigate, quote, conspiracy theories.
	It's only social media monitoring is when they believe a crime has either been committed or is about to be committed.
	This new measure by the Department of Homeland Security is an attempt to go around this.
	To do surveillance even when they don't think there's a crime.
	To be able to essentially troll the internet in such a way, in what would seem to be a clear violation both of First Amendment rights, because we're talking about government entities.
	Remember the First Amendment is a limitation on the government.
	And these are government entities that are At least contemplating engaging in major violations of both free speech rights and also privacy rights.
	Why? Because they are invading the privacy of Americans, looking into their accounts, looking to see what they're posting, very often posting among friends on, let's just say, a Facebook chat.
	But nevertheless, they're doing this without justification.
	There's no reason to believe that this person is doing anything.
	There's no plot underway.
	There's no warrant. None of it.
	Now, in third world countries, a lot of this goes on.
	And we see it has gone on with terrorists worldwide.
	If the American government grabs a terrorist, and we want to sort of get information out of him, but we're limited by certain procedures, we can't do it.
	We turn him over to Jordan or we turn him over to some other regime which doesn't have the same qualms.
	Why? Because they can break his leg.
	They can beat him up. And they can get the information that we want, but we can't legally get.
	And so this kind of very nefarious and very suspect behavior, which, by the way, is questionable even in the domain of foreign policy.
	What becomes doubly questionable in the domain of domestic operation when you turn these underhanded tactics on American citizens.
	So we should know that we're in a precarious time where we have a government that is not unwilling to go rogue on us, that is willing to trample on First Amendment rights and Fourth Amendment rights, and a government that does not have basic respect for constitutional protections.
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	That's LegacyBox.com To no one's surprise, the Facebook Oversight Board has decided to reaffirm the banning of former President Trump.
	Well, I can't say I'm shocked.
	And they said essentially their ruling was that issue today.
	That reviewing President Trump's tweets, this was a very warranted ban under the circumstances.
	By the way, the tweets themselves, I went back and read them.
	I mean, the first one was, basically, its highlight was, we love you, you're very special.
	And the second tweet was, remember this day forever.
	So these tweets were benign.
	But according to Facebook, very troubling and offered the prospect of incitement to violence.
	Now, of course, what makes the whole thing so preposterous is that according to the indictments from the January 6th cases, if you actually survey them, there were some cases of violence.
	And guess what?
	The majority of them, more than any other social media platform, were planned on Facebook.
	In other words, Facebook was more culpable than say Parler.
	People go, oh, Parler was really a forum for...
	No, Parler wasn't.
	There was more violent activity that was plotted on Facebook.
	And Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's officer, was like lying through her teeth about this and pretending like it didn't exist.
	And then just after all, later they sort of took some responsibility.
	Well, we're reviewing our guidelines.
	Bottom line of it is if Facebook is concerned about incitement to violence based on January 6th, They should delete themselves.
	They should refer people to go to other more peaceful platforms like Gab and Telegram and Rumble and Parler.
	Because those are comparatively safer places to be than the very incendiary Facebook.
	Now, the reaction to this Facebook decision, conservatives are sort of outraged, and here's J.D. Vance, very interesting.
	The Facebook Oversight Board has more power than the United Nations.
	Conservatives were right to worry about giving away our sovereignty to some sort of multinational institution, but we just picked the wrong one.
	And all of this, I think, is kind of a sense that here you've got Facebook and we should be outraged or direct our fury toward this very unfair and unaccountable institution, which, of course, it is.
	And its oversight board is a setup.
	It's made up of all kinds of kooks and left-wing academics and, you know, 20-year-olds and man buns and so on.
	This is the Facebook oversight board, and Facebook sort of pretends a workbook.
	Let's, you know, we made a decision.
	Why don't we turn it over to our oversight board?
	The oversight board decided, oh yeah, okay, well, you know, we're going to respect the decision.
	This is all, this is institutional fakery.
	This is the kind of stuff that goes on in Iran, you know.
	The malas have made a decision.
	We're going to turn it over to these malas to review the decision.
	Oh yes, they've looked at the same surahs in the Quran.
	Yes, wonderful. Oh, we're really relieved our decision is in, you know, comports with Sharia law.
	This is what we're dealing with here.
	Now, with regard to Facebook, I think the appropriate reaction is ridicule, not indignation.
	And in that spirit, I want to consider what Facebook might do.
	I mean, we're kind of lucky we sort of didn't have Facebook at the time of the Gettysburg Address or the Declaration of Independence, because I can only imagine the sort of Those documents, or even Lincoln himself, coming before the Facebook man-bund oversight board with its little army of fake researchers.
	So here we go. We're now going to talk about the Declaration of Independence.
	Facebook's rating, false!
	The Declaration of Independence speaks of a new birth of freedom.
	Clearly that's an inappropriate reference.
	That's not really what happened.
	You see, the Civil War, Lincoln himself admitted, wasn't really about slavery.
	Lincoln said it was just to save the Union, and if he could save the Union without freeing the slaves, he would do it.
	So this man, Lincoln, with these statements on the battlefield of Gettysburg, is clearly conveying misinformation.
	He's a very dangerous man.
	He needs to be permanently banned off our platform.
	Let me turn to the Declaration of Independence and its reference to a, quote, long train of usurpations ultimately amounting to tyranny.
	Facebook rates this statement, or these statements, the entire declaration false.
	I don't know, Dinesh.
	Tyranny? I mean, that seems like a very strong word, if you ask me.
	I mean, it's true that the British had some modest tax increases, but I really don't think that those could accurately be described in such exaggerated terms.
	And the mere presence of British troops in American homes.
	I mean, that does not by itself constitute tyranny.
	In fact, I would argue, some would argue, that that might be a reasonable response under the circumstances.
	Ultimately, what really concerns me is the incendiary language of the Declaration.
	In fact, it amounts to incitement.
	It's a call to revolution.
	It reminds me of the very scary events of January 6th when I was hiding in my office even though my office wasn't even near the Capitol.
	Bottom line, the declaration is false.
	And the people responsible for it should be kicked off our platform.
	Now, you see where I'm going with all this?
	We're dealing with... Complete losers.
	People who cannot tell the difference between facts and values.
	People who cannot be trusted to honestly adjudicate or arbitrate anything.
	People who have no sense of history.
	So far from us getting all worked up over this kind of stupidity.
	We just have to realize that we are dealing with an admittedly powerful institution.
	That is irresponsible in the ultimate degree.
	And at this point, at least, while we're waiting for alternative platforms to become stronger, our best response is not necessarily just indignation or even kind of desperate objections, but the confident horse laugh against these pipsqueaks in power.
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	With the level of false information that we get from the mainstream media on a regular basis, A whole kind of critical industry has emerged which faults the media for getting it wrong, for goofing, for showing irresponsibility, for not checking its sources.
	But I want to argue that the problem is actually a lot deeper than that.
	We're not dealing with bias.
	We're not even dealing with ideology.
	We're dealing with people who are habitual liars and know that they are.
	So this is a whole different level of dishonesty.
	I'm talking about conscious lying on the part of multiple people in an industry which really shows that the whole industry is infected.
	You're basically dealing with crooks, with crooks masquerading as journalists.
	Now we saw this During the Russiagate scandal, the real scandal of Russiagate was that there wasn't a scandal.
	But it was presented as a scandal over a long period of time by multiple journalists.
	And the most important thing about all this Russiagate reporting is that someone would make a bombshell allegation.
	A bombshell allegation, say for example, here's one of them.
	This was a CNN false report.
	This was hyped as a major bombshell that Donald Trump Jr.
	had advanced access to this huge WikiLeaks archive that was somehow connected with Russia.
	So in other words, Donald Trump Jr.
	and the Trump family was directly implicated in a Russian intelligence operation dumped through, you may say, WikiLeaks.
	Now this was false. But, remarkably, even though it was false, it couldn't happen, it didn't happen, a number of outlets, this is NBC News, Ken Delanian, CBS News, both said that they had, quote, independently confirmed the story.
	Now this right away raises a very interesting question.
	How can you independently confirm something that never happened?
	One person can get it wrong.
	Someone can have a source that gives you false information.
	Let's say it's reported in one media outlet.
	Unless the other media outlets go to the same person, the same source.
	In which case, they would get the same information.
	But if they claim that they have independently confirmed it, what they're really saying is, we went to other people with knowledge of the situation and we discovered from them that it's true.
	So, in other words, corroboration is not a repetition.
	Corroboration is a second source and a second set of facts that, in a sense, affirms the first report.
	So, we saw with Russiagate that this independent confirmation is bogus.
	And we've seen it now again with the case involving Rudy Giuliani.
	So, according to the Washington Post, the FBI gave a, quote, defensive briefing to Rudy Giuliani in 2019, before he went to the Ukraine, that he was the target of a Russia disinformation campaign.
	In other words, what they're saying is that this FBI raid on Giuliani now completely warranted, in fact...
	They forewarned him before he went to the Ukraine that the Russians were manipulating the whole operation.
	Now, again, it has now come out that this never occurred.
	The Washington Post itself, and to its credit, published a prominent correction saying, we were wrong, that in fact the FBI gave no such briefing to Giuliani, and so they retracted their earlier story.
	But here's the remarkable thing.
	When the Washington Post published its story, a number of other outlets, Including the New York Times, including MSNBC and CNN, these outlets all claimed that they had, quote, independently confirmed the story.
	How? How do you independently confirm a falsehood?
	You can't. Which really shows that no independent confirmation was going on.
	And let's look at the way in which these media outlets orchestrate drama over a non-event.
	You know, first of all, the New York Times, by the way, when they were confronted with the truth, they tried to stealth edit their story.
	They didn't say, we've got it wrong.
	At first, what they did is they went back and changed their original story to hide the fact that that it was false and pretend like they got it right all along this is sort of the editing history that Orwell warns about And other outlets, MSNBC, CNN, when they get a report like this, even though it's false, they haven't independently confirmed anything, they then begin this elaborate process of convening panels, national security expert X and political analyst Y and, you know, professor so-and-so.
	What do you think about the report?
	Well, I think it's very serious.
	And so what you do is you're building a mountain of...
	Of lies on top of a molehill of deception.
	And the molehill, it turns out, is not even a real molehill.
	So the whole thing is one lie on top of another.
	Now, the journalist Len Greenwald, who is one of the few honest men left in the profession, decided to sort of test out to see whether these journalists who put out these falsehoods independently confirmed, when they are told about it, Are they honest enough to do a correction?
	And he says, Two journalists.
	And he goes, Only one, NBC White House correspondent Jeff Bennett, responded.
	Quote, He did so by blocking me on Twitter while leaving the false tweet up uncorrected.
	Only one response, and this guy digs in on his lies, blocks Greenwald, and leaves the lie up uncorrected.
	It's almost like they believe that their readers and viewers are too dumb.
	Or that their readers and viewers want lies.
	So this is almost like an industry now that's remaking itself.
	It is an industry of lies supplying lies to consumers of lies who are purchasing lies because they seek lies.
	And this is the level of our political debate.
	Greenwald approached the Daily Beast, Michael Weiss.
	No correction. CNN's senior global affairs analyst, Diana Golodriga.
	No correction. Bloomberg's columnist, Tim O'Brien.
	No correction.
	Bottom line of it is, you can tell that these are masters of deceit.
	And that is, Greenwald is driven to that conclusion.
	He goes, we basically... Have an industry that is committed to lying, that has no compunction about it.
	There's not even the qualm, okay, you've shown it to me.
	I kind of have to admit that I was wrong.
	This is not true. No, their idea is, you know, we'll hope not enough people see what you have to say.
	We'll leave our lies up there unchecked.
	And think of how difficult it is in a democracy to make decisions for the public to gain access to information, to know what to trust.
	We can't build analysis and opinions on facts when the facts as reported are not even facts.
	But this, alas, is our predicament now.
	Hi, this is Debbie D'Souza.
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	I have a lot of interests from politics to literature to theology, and I try to bring a lot of these disciplines, at least as they bear upon our current situation, onto the podcast, but one of my greatest interests is philosophy.
	Not just political philosophy, which is the philosophy of how we organize politically.
	Political philosophers would be people like Locke or Hobbes or Machiavelli, and I do talk about those.
	But philosophy in general, which goes beyond politics and asks very basic questions, things like, what is truth?
	How do we know what we know?
	Are there limits to what human reason can know?
	How do we tell what is right from what is wrong?
	Is there a way to do that?
	Or is that knowledge, you may say, culturally bound or relative to the individual?
	These are just a few kind of fundamental philosophical questions.
	I talk sometimes about this to Debbie, and she wants me to be a little careful because philosophical discussion, particularly when you deal with the abstruse philosophies of the way that some philosophers write, can be sort of, what's the guy even talking about?
	What's he even saying? What is the relevance of this to me?
	So I want to approach this topic sort of delicately, and I want to introduce a concept here, which I'm going to talk about also in the next segment, and it's the concept of materialism.
	Now, by materialism, we tend to mean, oh, this person is very materialistic.
	They own like 400 pairs of shoes.
	Debbie starts laughing.
	The guilty party is in the room!
	No! A materialist?
	No, no. Not that many.
	Although, she does love shoes.
	But I'm actually not talking about that kind of materialism.
	See, this is kind of funny how when you make an accusation, but you're talking about something different...
	The guilty party steps forward.
	No, materialism here is something different.
	It is the idea that we are material beings in a material world.
	We're made up of material stuff, of atoms and molecules at the most fundamental level.
	And the argument of the materialists is that there is material stuff in the world and there is nothing else.
	Only material stuff.
	Now, there are a lot of physicists, by the way, who sort of believe this.
	They believe that matter at its most basic level is all there is.
	And their reasoning for this is that when you break things down...
	Physics is the most fundamental discipline.
	And at the end, it's all about matter.
	You may say matter and energy.
	I mean, think about it this way.
	Chemistry is about matter, but it's about...
	Chemistry begins with the elements.
	But of course the elements themselves, if you look at the elements in the periodic table, you can break them down further, and you can break them down further into atoms and molecules, and of course you can break the atoms and molecules further, and in the end you get quarks and electrons, and this is basically the stuff that physicists work with.
	Biology. Biology is a fundamental discipline.
	But biology begins with living things.
	Biology begins with the cell.
	And everything from plants to animals to us are made up of cells.
	But of course the cell can be further broken down.
	The cell itself is a highly complex piece of, you may say, machinery.
	Almost like a supercomputer with its own intricate functioning.
	But again, it breaks down into elements.
	It breaks down into atoms and molecules.
	And those break down into quarks and electrons.
	But it's the claim of physics, or at least it's the premise of physics, the, I would say, unexamined premise of physics, that quarks and electrons are all there are.
	There's nothing else. So that's materialism.
	Materialism is the idea that in the end, there is nothing more than physical substance in the world.
	But of course, materialism has a rival.
	And the rival is not, I wouldn't call it, you know, immaterialism, or you may say spiritualism, because there's no rival group that says that, well, actually, they're There is.
	There is a philosophical school that holds that immaterial substances are all there are.
	By the way, this was the position of the great philosopher George Berkeley, who I'll talk about at another time.
	Berkeley's idea was that material things do not exist.
	Material things exist only, you may say, in our minds.
	If I see the Empire State Building, what do I mean by I see it?
	What does seeing mean?
	The Empire State Building doesn't jump out and go inside my head.
	No, my mind makes a picture of the Empire State Building.
	And in the end, all I have is the picture.
	I don't have an Empire State Building independent of the picture.
	The picture is all I have.
	And where's the picture? In my mind.
	So says Berkeley. Berkeley is a champion, you may say, of the fact that all that we know about, for sure...
	It's not some Empire State Building quote out there, but the impression or you may say experience of the Empire State Building in our minds.
	But the most prominent rival to materialism, the idea that material beings are all that exists, is I would call it the compound philosophy, which holds that yes, there are material things, things like sticks and stones and molecules and quarks, But there are also immaterial things.
	What's an example of an immaterial thing?
	E equals MC squared.
	That's an immaterial thing.
	What about ideas? They're immaterial.
	What about emotions? What about feelings?
	They're immaterial. So when you come to thoughts and feelings and emotions and ideas, you're dealing with immaterial things.
	Consciousness itself might be rooted in a material sort of system called our minds, our brains, our nervous systems, but consciousness itself is Is immaterial.
	So I mean all of this to be an introduction to the fact that in philosophy, which I think is in some ways more fundamental than physics.
	Why? Because physics ends with the idea that there are these physical objects, there are physical things, matter and energy, and that's all we know about.
	But philosophy says actually that's not true.
	That's not all we know about.
	And there is a big argument to be had over whether material things are the only things or whether in the world we have material things.
	And also some other kinds of things that could be called immaterial, if not spiritual.
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	I want to talk in this segment about the contrasting philosophies of two figures.
	One is the philosopher Lucretius, and the other is, well, I suppose you could say the philosopher Jesus Christ.
	Lucretius and Jesus lived at about the same time.
	This is kind of what makes their rival philosophies so interesting and makes the contrast between them so dramatic.
	Now, in the last segment, I talked about sort of two ideas, two rival ideas.
	On the one hand, the idea that I call materialism, which is the notion that there are only material objects in the universe, nothing else.
	Everything else is a kind of emanation from the material, but in the end, the material is all there is.
	And a rival philosophy that I loosely call the compound philosophy, which doesn't say that there are only non-material or immaterial, Things in the world, but that there are both material and immaterial things in the world.
	That the world is understood in a dual nature.
	It has material objects, for sure, but it also has immaterial objects.
	Now, we think of this, the ancient philosophy of the material plus the immaterial as old, as something that the old philosophers used to believe that.
	And then we think of modern science as resting upon this new idea that There are only material things.
	So we think of the compound philosophy as antiquated and materialism as being somehow modern, or at least modern in the sense that we've just had it around for a couple of centuries.
	But this is, in fact, untrue.
	Why? Because materialism and the compound philosophy are both ancient.
	And where I'm going with all this is the philosopher Lucretius said, Is an embodiment, was an articulator of the materialist view and Jesus Christ of the compound view.
	Let me start with Lucretius.
	If you go to the ancient world, you have three materialist philosophers who are kind of all related to each other.
	You have Democritus.
	You have Epicurus and you have Lucretius.
	And all of these guys, like I say, were kind of worked off of each other.
	Democritus was the one who came first.
	And he had this kind of brilliant idea, you might say, that at the basic level, things break down to a very simple substance that he called atoms.
	And the word atom just means indivisible.
	If you want to think of Democritus' reasoning, it kind of goes a little like this.
	Take a glass of water and pour half of it out.
	What do you have? You still have water.
	Well, pour half of it out again.
	What do you have? Water. And keep doing that.
	And Democritus' point is, at some point, will you reach something where you can't Cut it in half anymore.
	If you cut it in half, you no longer have water.
	And yes, in fact, we know that there is such a point.
	At some point, you get a molecule.
	It's an H2O molecule made up of hydrogen and oxygen, and you can't break that down.
	Well, you can break it down further, but you won't have water anymore.
	You'll now have hydrogen, and you'll now have oxygen.
	So, Democritus was, you may say, the first articulator of the idea of the atom.
	Now, Epicurus, who built his philosophy on top of Democritus, took this idea of atoms and said, since we're kind of made up of atoms, and says Epicurus, even the gods...
	This was an age of polytheism, are made up of atoms.
	And he goes, the good thing about these atoms is that they kind of bounce around, and if we make them bounce around in kind of the right way, that's the path to happiness.
	So according to Epicurus, the way to be happy is kind of to minimize the bouncing around of the atoms.
	In other words, he was a hedonist in the sense of believing in pleasure, but for Epicurus, pleasure was sort of doing as little as possible.
	Trying ultimately to, in his own words, eliminate the fear of death.
	Because, says Epicurus, death is nothing more than the atoms kind of reorganizing themselves.
	Which is, by the way, what a lot of people believe today.
	And this idea was then taken up by Lucretius...
	In a sort of an epic poem that Lucretius wrote.
	The poem is called On the Nature of Things.
	And here we get a kind of full-blown atheism presented in kind of a charming way.
	But here's Epicurus.
	I'm not quoting him. He talks about a soul serene.
	But by a soul, he doesn't mean something immaterial.
	He means a material object made up of atoms.
	A body void of pain.
	And he's talking about the fact that in death we have this kind of ultimate peace.
	So, Lucretius calls it the long good night.
	So, here are people who are, even in the ancient world, using this materialist philosophy to eliminate what they consider to be fear of death.
	And to fight what even in their time they know to be the power of religion, the power of belief in the gods, the power of moral accountability.
	So let's contrast Epicurus and Lucretius, the materialist, with Christ.
	And here I just want to make a single point about this.
	Because when we think about Christ, and by the way, Christ's view...
	Is that the world is material.
	One thing about Jesus that's so striking in the Bible is he's a very material guy.
	He's very concerned with stuff and things in front of him.
	Think about the wedding feast in Cana.
	We need more wine.
	Okay, let's make more wine.
	Well, wine is stuff. Or think about the loaves and the fishes.
	He's giving us teaching, but it's ideas.
	But wait a minute, people need to eat.
	Okay, here are two baskets of loaves and fishes.
	Let's make more. So Jesus is very concerned with the material world and people's, you may say, material needs.
	Bringing Lazarus back to life.
	Not just sending Lazarus off to heaven.
	Hey, he's doing fine, thank you.
	No, Lazarus, come out of the grave.
	This is my body.
	Touch my wounds, and you can see that I was, in fact...
	Strung up on the cross, nailed to the cross.
	So Jesus is deeply rooted in flesh and blood and food and material stuff, but at the same time, Jesus is all about the kingdom of God and is all about ultimately the soul and the spirit.
	The Holy Spirit is coming to visit you.
	Now, you might think that what Jesus is saying in the end is that, you know what?
	Lucretius, you're right.
	This is a material world, but there's an immaterial world coming like in the next world.
	The immaterial world is heaven, but no.
	Here's a very interesting passage in Scripture where Christ is asked by the Pharisees, when is the kingdom of God coming?
	And here's his incredible reply.
	Jesus basically goes, the kingdom of God is within you.
	Or to put it differently, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.
	Another way to say this is that this notion of the kingdom of God, what Augustine would later call, you know, the city of God.
	Augustine talks about the city of man and the city of God.
	And again, you may think Augustine means the city of man is this world and the city of God is heaven.
	But no! Augustine basically talks about the quarrel between the city of God and the city of man in this world.
	In other words, our priorities here and now, during our life...
	Are they with the earthly city or are they with the heavenly city?
	So, Augustine is affirming Christ's point that in a sense, eternity isn't just something that is in the hereafter.
	Eternity begins now.
	Eternity is anchored in our hearts and in our souls.
	So the point I'm trying to make here is that for Jesus, the concept of the immaterial, of the soul, and one may say even of heaven and of eternity, is something that is rooted within us.
	And I think this is really where the materialist philosophy falls short.
	If you really pay attention to yourself, look inside of you, what do you see?
	You see an awareness of self.
	You see thoughts, you experience feelings, and you know that those things are not material.
	They might depend upon a material basis in the same way that sound waves, for example, depend upon a tape recorder or depend upon some kind of a device for them to be heard.
	But that doesn't mean that the sound wave is the tape recorder.
	The tape recorder is the necessary mechanism for the sound wave to transmit itself, but the sound wave itself is distinct from the tape recorder.
	And in the same way, our brains may give rise to feelings and thoughts and ideas, but those ideas are immaterial.
	They depend on the brain, but they are not the brain itself.
	For years, actually decades, for a long time, I never invested in gold, just the stock market.
	But now I'm seriously worried about the regime we have in Washington.
	All these incredible bills with all this spending, absolutely no sense of fiscal responsibility.
	Listen, If all your investments are tied to greenbacks, to the dollar, you're sitting on a ticking time bomb.
	Invest a portion of your savings in gold and silver.
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	It's time for our mailbox, and so let's go to our question for the day.
	Listen. Hello, Mr.
	Dinesh. First off, thank you for what you do.
	I'm a Hispanic pipeline welder, Trump supporter, so hearing your podcast every morning is very refreshing, especially with all the crazy leftist ideology that's going around.
	My question is, or better yet a conversation starter, I wonder why no one has brought up that Antifa.com used to take you to Biden's campaign, now it seems it takes you to the White House.gov.
	For all those who say Antifa isn't an organization, I wonder why it takes you to Biden's administration. Again, thank you for what you do and I hope to hear what you say in the podcast.
	God bless you. Bye.
	Well, this is something that's quite remarkable and, as it turns out, completely factual.
	It may seem a little hard to believe in first glance.
	Is it really true that these ragtag, you know, uniformed thugs that are roving around in places like Seattle and Portland and they show up in Washington, D.C. on occasion, that these guys are some marauding band that operates independently Without proper leadership, without affiliation. Remember, it was Biden who said Antifa is merely an idea.
	And by the way, when I quoted that on Facebook, they were like, missing context.
	Again, we're dealing now with the Facebook bogus fact-checking operation, which is nothing more than a cover for Biden and for the left.
	So when a political party, in this case the Democratic Party, has a paramilitary operation.
	That hasn't always been the case in American politics.
	In fact, for the most part, it hasn't been the case.
	The Democrats, I mean, under Carter didn't have a paramilitary operation, but they do now.
	So in this respect, they resemble Mussolini, who had his black shirts, or Hitler, who had his brown shirts.
	These early fascists of the early 20th century felt that they needed a kind of group, a gang, that they could unleash the In order to intimidate dissenters and go after political opponents.
	So Antifa is, I would say, an adjunct of the left and of the Democratic Party.
	And yet the Democratic Party tries to conceal this fact, but Antifa doesn't.
	So it's really remarkable that Antifa on its side is blowing its cover.
	And by linking both to the Biden campaign before and now to the White House, what they're basically saying is, no, we're not anarchists.
	We're not against big government.
	In fact, we are tools of the all-powerful state.
	Ultimately, interestingly, with both Mussolini and Hitler, once they took power, they sort of dismantled their paramilitary operations and pulled them within the state.
	Interestingly, that hasn't really happened.
	We haven't had, like, the head of Antifa ends up becoming, like, the education secretary.
	No. I think the Biden people obviously still rely upon these thugs on the street to do their bidding.
	And so what you see with Antifa making this link to the WhiteHouse.gov...
	Antifa is basically saying, yes, we're thugs.
	And here are the thugs in three-piece suits that we work for.
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