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May 24, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:05:46
THE REAL ENEMY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 96
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We hear a lot about digital censorship, but what is the real motive behind it?
Dr. Fauci flip-flops again, and author David Horowitz joins me to talk about The Enemy Within.
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.
We see digital censorship marching on with absolutely no end in sight.
And the question I want to raise is what is the motive behind it?
Why are they doing it?
On the face of it they say they're doing it for two reasons.
One is to fight against hate.
Hate speech is apparently the great threat.
And so censorship is intended to, in the words of one social media type, it's a kind of harm control model.
That's one of the justifications.
And the other is to sort of prevent violence, prevent the eruption of violence, kind of like we saw on January 6th.
Now, this was the basis, by the way, of Facebook and the other digital platforms booting off Trump.
Recently, Facebook kind of re-evaluated the decision and affirmed it.
And one of the Facebook board members, this is a guy named Michael McConnell, I'm going to quote him now.
He says, President Trump issued statements as a mob was ripping through the Capitol as members of Congress were cowering in fear.
He's probably thinking of that AOC video, she's cowering in fear, even though, frankly, there's no one else in the building except the Capitol Police officer there to protect her.
He says the president made perfunctory calls for peace, but really he was just egging them on.
So even though Trump says, let's march peacefully, he's speaking in a kind of disguised language.
He's really signaling to his own supporters, supposedly in a kind of code.
Now, why are they so eager to deplatform Trump?
Interestingly, NPR... In a recent statement, kind of let the cat out of the bag.
And I want to read from NPR here.
Being on Facebook is crucial for modern-day political campaigns.
They say that a big tech blackout means probably a drop in fundraising and quote, NPR also says that this could undermine Trump in anything he tries to do in the midterm election next year.
So think about this.
NPR is basically confessing that That digital censorship has not only a political motive, but an election interference motive.
They're basically saying, hey, this is great, because this guy, the leading figure in the Republican Party, can't mobilize next year, and we're going to prevent him from having the means.
To have a real run in 2024.
So they know that digital media controls, you may say, the new public square, the way in which people communicate today through technology.
And they're saying, why don't we shut off that valve?
Very, very telling.
But I believe that there is a much larger motive afoot here.
It isn't just about Trump.
It's really about us.
It's about you. It's about me.
So let's think about this for a minute.
Even though the digital moguls say we're trying to fight hate speech and we're trying to make sure that minorities have a voice, minorities have equal dignity, minorities are respected, they're not terrorized through hate speech, a lot of their censorship has nothing to do with hate speech.
It's conservative views.
If you have the wrong point of view on COVID, boom, off you go.
You have the wrong point of view on this or that, it doesn't really matter.
It's very, very arbitrary.
Just to take my own case, I got warnings on Facebook for quoting Joe Biden saying that Antifa is merely an idea.
I didn't even comment on the quote.
It was right out of Joe Biden's mouth.
And they go, this is lacking context.
I was omitting.
There's all kinds of evidence.
Historians who challenged me on this have deleted their tweets and basically admitted I was right.
But nevertheless, Facebook takes this action.
So I want to make the point here that what they're trying to do in the name of fighting hate speech is deny conservatives and Republicans what you could call our basic right not only to speak but to have any kind of recognition.
Recognition. Now, recognition is a key part of human dignity. I mean, here, an interesting book by the philosopher Charles Taylor, it's called Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. And Taylor makes the point here that he's talking about these different minority groups and not just racial groups and ethnic groups, but groups that are fighting for national liberation, groups that are fighting for gender recognition.
And he goes, the key issue here is that you want to be recognized for who you are. In fact, a lot of the gay marriage movement is based on the idea that, hey, it's not just that I'm gay and I want to be gay sort of in private. I want some affirmation of who I am in public space. That is part of the necessary campaign for human dignity. And my question is, why doesn't this apply to conservatives? Why doesn't this apply to Republicans?
Isn't it a fact that we as conservatives are pressing arguments in the public square?
They're well-meaning arguments.
They engage all the major issues of our time.
And all we're asking for is a chance to engage these issues in debate, to have them contested.
We want to have it out over the origins of COVID-19.
And see, did it come out of a meat market?
Did it come out of a Wuhan lab?
We're perfectly willing to go toe-to-toe with the other side.
But what's happening is digital media wants to rig the debate.
They want to say, no, your side is declared out of bounds before you even get to play.
And this is the point.
And while they say that they're doing it to...
Keep the white supremacists off the platform.
The bottom line of it is, we're not white supremacists.
No, who were the white supremacists?
The Democrats. The Democrats were the party of white supremacy.
They were the party of slavery.
They were the party of segregation.
They were the party of Jim Crow.
They were the party of the Ku Klux Klan.
They had the so-called Negro barbecues with black men hanging from trees while they ate hamburgers and passed around the french fries.
They did it. So this idea of trying to take the crimes of someone else and sort of foist it onto a bunch of people like me, who come traipsing in from India on a scholarship trying to get an education in this country and go, you're the white supremacist, you've got to be kicked off social media.
I mean, what could be more preposterous?
What could be a more greater distortion, an inversion of the facts, a transplantation of responsibility?
Well, Dinesh, the two parties, as you know, switched sides.
Let's say they did. Let's say the two parties switched sides.
It doesn't mean that the crimes of one party get transferred to the other just because the two parties switched sides.
It's kind of like a murderer saying, you know, I moved across the street and my neighbor across the street moved into my house, so now my crimes go on to him.
No. Your crimes are still yours.
Why? Because you did them. So the simple truth of the matter here is that what the digital moguls are doing is engaging in a massive form of distortion.
In the name of fighting information, they're producing information.
In the name of promoting debate, they're suppressing debate.
And far from affirming the equal dignity of all Americans, they're suppressing the dignity and the drive for recognition on the part of one half of the American population.
It's really hard to believe this guy Fauci.
So here's his latest. He now thinks that the COVID virus might in fact have come out of the Wuhan lab.
Yeah, listen.
So I wanted to ask, are you still confident that it developed naturally?
No, actually, that's the point that I said.
And I think the real unfortunate aspect of what Senator Paul did is he was conflating research in a collaborative way with Chinese scientists, which was, you know, you'd almost have to say if we did not do that, we would almost be irresponsible.
Yeah. This guy is like, he's one of the world's top rhetorical tap dancers.
Because he says the important thing, it could have come out of the lab, and then he quickly moves to something totally different.
What's the totally different? He's now getting to Senator Rand Paul's point.
Where Rand Paul goes, well, isn't the United States government complicit?
Didn't we subsidize the so-called gain-of-function research?
Aren't we part of this project with China of making, making deadly viruses which have the chance of causing global pandemics?
And think about the effect of the pandemic.
Think about the lives lost worldwide.
What, three million? Almost a million in the United States, so we're going to get there.
Think of how it's touched your life and my life.
And... Rand Paul's point is who made this virus?
Where did it come from? Now, interestingly, Fauci in the past said, I'm going to read now from a May 2020 National Geographic, quote, Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that this virus evolved in nature and then jumped species, Fauci said.
And so the National Geographic article suggests that Fauci was in line with a lot of these prominent medical researchers who were trying to foist the blame for COVID-19 on some sort of a meat market.
The virus came from a bat to another animal to a human.
It spread naturally.
Nature is to blame.
And now it turns out that many of those guys were in fact participating in the so-called gain-of-function research.
In other words, they were involved in some collaborative way with the Wuhan lab, which concocts manufacturers, enhances the capacities of deadly viruses.
Now, Fauci's point... With regard to Rand Paul is, listen, we didn't directly give money to the Wuhan lab.
We gave money to American research firms that were collaborating with the Wuhan lab.
And he thinks that that technicality, that idea that we didn't give the money directly, only indirectly, is the heart of the matter.
No, the heart of the matter is that there was a powerful campaign led by people like Fauci and other top medical researchers to throw people off the scent of the origin of this virus.
And think about it.
Think of all the media, all the barraging and attacks that Senator Tom Cotton got when he simply said, let's investigate where the virus came from.
All kinds of people accusing him of spreading misinformation, being a conspiracy theorist, arguing debunked points of view.
Think of all the people, by the way, who were deplatformed, thrown off social media, their posts taken down or deleted.
Why? Because they were supposedly spreading the misinformation...
That the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab, except it's not misinformation.
It's actually a valid point of view.
It is a valid thing to investigate.
So people, think of it, in the name of...
Correcting misinformation, these digital companies are promoting misinformation.
They're actually suppressing valid debate because it's not as if true information just appears like a genie out of a bottle.
It just doesn't jump out of a toilet and show itself, I'm the correct information.
Everything else is misinformation.
No. We find out what is misinformation through debate, through argument, through examining competing theories.
And what you have here is a coordinated effort By corrupt health officials, by a media that is only too willing to play the courtier role of cheering these people on, and by digital media that's willing to throw people off the platform, not for having views that are false, but for having views that may turn out to be true.
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I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast someone who's actually a hero of mine.
Someone who started out on the far left and then moved right for reasons that we're going to explore in a moment.
He's the author of an important new book.
I'm going to hold it up here.
It's called The Enemy Within.
A very telling title, I think, that suggests that we have here in this country a different kind of enemy than we've dealt with in the past.
David Horowitz, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
David, if I think about your move right, if I remember, this was right before Reagan's election, and you, along with a colleague of yours, Peter Collier, wrote an important article called Lefties for Reagan.
Can we start by talking a little bit about, well, first of all, How did you become a lefty before we talk about how you moved right?
My parents were card-carrying communists, and everybody in our community who we trusted was a communist, wanted Stalin to win the Cold War.
And I was one of the founders of the New Left.
I edited its largest magazine, and I left the left Actually, we met about 40 years ago.
You were just out of Dartmouth.
And I was just coming out of the left.
And let me ask you how that happened.
What was it? Because you weren't a centrist that moved right.
You were, as you say, on the far left.
What opened your eyes?
I want to describe myself as a Marxist revolutionary at the time.
Well, the Black Panthers murdered a friend of mine.
I had raised a lot of money to buy a church for them with 35 classrooms that became their base of operations.
And I stupidly believed our leftist propaganda that the state, the government was fascist and racist.
So I thought they needed, I had created a tax-exempt foundation and I thought they needed A bookkeeper who would keep the books or they'd be closed down.
Little did I realize the opposite was true.
If you were Black, anti-American, violent criminals, you had a free pass, which is what the Panthers got, which is why they killed as many people as they did.
And then at the same time, as I discovered That the Panthers had murdered Betty.
Betty Van Patten was her name.
The left won its biggest victory, which is to force America out of Vietnam.
And they made the communist victory possible.
And the communists, when they came in, they proceeded to slaughter two and a half million innocent Indo-Chinese peasants.
There was not one single anti-war demonstration against the communist slaughter.
And that showed me I was in a movement that was evil, that wasn't about peace and it wasn't about justice, social or otherwise.
It was a hate America left.
They wanted to destroy America and enable our enemies to win.
Now that left is much larger, is in control of the Democrat Party, and it's enabling our enemies all over the world, as anybody with eyes open can see.
Do you think, David, that there's kind of a straight line that one can draw from the left of the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam left, the anti-war left, as they call themselves, to the left today?
Are these the same people?
And by that I mean, are they cut from the same ideological cloth?
Barack Obama?
Came out of that left.
His mentor, Billy Ayers, was a terrorist.
And then this is an unrepentant terrorist.
Then it's the identical hate America left.
These people are liars.
They're destructive. They organized a riot at the 1968 Democrat Convention to defeat Hubert Humphrey, who was a 95% ADA liberal.
But his sin was that he was an anti-communist.
The communists to win the Cold War just the way they want the terrorists to win the war that we're in now.
Now, the 60s left claimed to be, at least to listen to its rhetoric, apostles of liberation.
You remember all the rhetoric about sexual liberation.
And it seemed at that time that they were committed to civil liberties.
At least they said they were. We believe in free speech.
They presented the right as being the enemies of free speech.
And my question was, was it all a lie to the Berkeley free speech movement, all that stuff?
It wasn't about free speech.
The Berkeley Free Speech Movement was about a university rule that you couldn't conduct partisan politics on campus.
That was the rule.
And they wanted to organize, they wanted to recruit students for the Democrat Party, basically, and for their more radical agendas.
And they won. There was a time when universities were insulated from the political currents.
Now, they're basically a The academy is run by the communist left and the hate America left.
And that's where we have the problem that we have today.
They're racist. Our universities are racist in the extreme.
I mean, it's like the Ku Klux Klan.
And that's why the Democrat Party has gone from being a centrist party to a radical left party that's anti-American and dangerous.
Do you see the universities as beyond repair?
I mean, as I look at this sort of landscape of destruction, there are hundreds of universities.
Is there any hope for them, or is the only solution, in your view, to create a new form of education?
If Republicans had a spine, there would be a solution, which would be to defund the liberal arts colleges.
All those courses, like women's studies, which are ideological indoctrination courses.
They have nothing... To do with true scholarship.
Yeah, Republican legislatures could do a lot of good, but they won't.
And why is that?
I mean, one of the questions of someone like you who's seen the left from the inside, is there a psychological difference between them and us?
Why do they fight so ruthlessly and relentlessly?
And why is our side so passive?
Because it's a religion.
The left is a religious cult.
It believes that, you know, it's modeled on the Christian narrative that the world is a fallen place.
It's corrupted by corporations, racist races, oppressing innocent races, patriarchies, and so forth.
And that there's going to be a redemption, but redemption will not be led by a divinity.
It'll be led by political operatives who You know, they're murderers.
They have all the corruptions of human beings.
There can never be justice in the world, social justice, because the people who are going to administer it, the woke people, I hate the term progressives.
These are such reactionaries.
I mean, they're operating From Marxist premises, and they're stone cold racists.
But the idea that human beings who are so corrupt, who lie, cheat, steal, You know, look what we have in the White House today.
We have a criminal cartel in the Biden family, but the Bidens, the Clintons, they all made like $100 million off their political corruption and graft.
When we come back, David, in a moment, we're going to dive into this some more.
I want to explore this kind of woke ideology as an instrument of social redemption.
We'll be right back.
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I'm back with author and political commentator David Horowitz, the author of this important new book, The Enemy Within.
David, we were talking about when you were saying that in a sense what the left is up to is a kind of secular displaced version of the Christian idea, except here it's not the sinners, but it's the white people who are the sinners.
It's the black people who are apostles of virtue.
Really the left is this kind of savior class that is leading people to the promised land.
Let me start by asking you, here is Nicole Hannah-Jones, the author of the so-called 1619 Project.
One could do an analysis of pretty much everything this woman says.
I want to take one of her slogans, which you quote in your book, right out of her introduction, America wasn't a democracy until black Americans made it one.
So this is a historical and a factual claim.
What do you make of it?
It's a racist lie.
She's a pathological liar and racist.
That means that Black people wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
Even the Civil Rights Movement was funded by whites and would not have been possible without whites in the NAACP as it happens.
Black people in America are the richest, most privileged Blacks on planet Earth, including all of Black Africa and the Black West Indies.
Blacks owe a great debt to the white people who fought beside them, and 350,000 mainly white, mainly Christian males, gave their lives to free the slaves.
There's still slavery in Africa, Black slavery.
America led the world in abolishing slavery.
Nicole Hannah-Jones has got this preposterous curriculum called the 1619th Project, which is backed 100% by the President of the United States, this Alzheimer puppet, Joe Biden.
And it is all based on false claims.
In 1619, It's 1619, because 20 blacks were shipped to the Jamestown colony in that year.
They weren't slaves.
They were indentured servants.
Slavery was outlawed in Virginia at the beginning of the 17th century.
And Virginia wasn't America then.
So this is just a gigantic smear attempt.
You know, worthy of the Iranian mullahs or Putin or the Chinese communist I mean, David, you're making some very important points and you're making them almost on pass on.
I want to highlight a couple of them.
One is you're saying that in 1619, America wasn't America.
This was a British colony.
Whatever systems we had here were imposed by the British.
And so this idea that America is to blame is right there is a historical distortion.
You're also saying that the Civil War was a white man's war.
You know, I think people are given the idea, in part through movies like Glory, which is a great movie, that, oh, there was a black regiment, so blacks must have overthrown the white regime and achieved, no, this was basically a white man's fight on the North and the South, and 300,000 white guys died so that blacks could have their freedom.
There wasn't a single successful slave revolt.
And there was no tremendous, and slaves could have fled to South America.
They didn't. America is why every Black in America today owes their freedom, their privileges, their rights.
And, you know, the left says Blacks are oppressed.
Why? Because they're marginalized and underserved.
Two ridiculous statements on their face.
Blacks are the center of national attention, hardly marginalized.
You can't escape the Black liberation stories skewed to make Blacks always leaders against whites without acknowledging that they would never have...
Been liberated if it weren't for white support and white leadership.
I mean, David, if you think of today, you've got, you've had, you know, Colin Powell, you've had Condoleezza Rice, you've got all these, not to mention Barack Obama and so many others.
Let me ask you this question.
You know, are there any majority brown or black nations in the world that have put people of another race, let's just say white people?
I point that out.
There is none. There's none that's taken an oppressed minority in their midst and made them president or prime minister or what have you.
And it's also garbage that there are underserved communities.
First of all, 80% of the Black community Is in the middle of working or upper class.
They're productive people.
They're law-abiding people.
It's 19% that are in poverty.
And their poverty obviously cannot be caused by their skin color.
Otherwise, the 80% wouldn't have been so successful.
It's caused by their dysfunction, by the lack, for example, of fathers in the home, which is something the left won't allow you to discuss, because that's blaming the victim.
Well, it's also not just blaming the victim, but it's blaming the Democratic Party, which has subsidized this kind of illegitimacy.
So they are complicit in the breakdown of the black family in the inner city, right?
Your contributions to this are without parallel to this insight that the Democrat Party is the oppressor of black people and other minorities.
They control all these inner cities They support all these insurrections in our cities.
The Democrat Party is a racist party, it's a criminal party, and it's an anti-American party.
And it also wants to impose a communist order on our country.
I hate it when Republicans, they always choose the soft words, socialist.
They even call them liberals, which is ridiculous.
They're vindictive bigots.
David, before we go, I'd want to ask you about this business of blacklisting, because I didn't know this, but you have apparently been at the top of the Southern Poverty Law Center's list as a, quote, extremist, a hate monger.
They call you an anti-Muslim fanatic.
Now, I know you to be none of these things.
And I think anyone listening to this podcast can see that whether they agree or disagree with you, these labels are totally out of place.
Now, the Southern Poverty Law Center puts itself forward as kind of fighting hate and fighting bigotry.
What's going on here?
What is the...
Well, the biggest hate machine in the country and all these lies about me.
And it's not just me.
I mean, Ben Carson is one of their...
I hate mongers, if you can believe it.
Wow. Is that it's repeated, picked up by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, you know, all the outlets, CNN, MSNBC, just without checking, without needing a single sentence.
I've written millions of words like you.
And I can't find one sentence that's racist, but I'm supposed to be anti-Black, anti-Muslim.
There's videos of me on the internet saying that most Muslims are law-abiding people.
The problem is that the number of Muslims who are Jew-hating, America-hating, white-hating jihadists is in the hundreds of millions by every year.
You know, Pew poll out there, or Al Jazeera poll for that matter.
They supported Osama bin Laden.
And, of course, the white administration has just, you know, restored funding to the Islamic Nazis of Palestine.
Well, David, I love the fact that you tell it like it is, and I hope you're not demoralized by these hate campaigns.
You're speaking truth, and you have been now for 40 years.
I'm really glad to have you on our side, and thanks for joining me on the podcast.
Thank you, Dinesh.
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I talked in yesterday's podcast about the man I call the second greatest black American of our history, Booker T. Washington, second only to Frederick Douglass.
And I want to talk today about an important debate between Booker T. Washington and sort of his great intellectual adversary, a fellow named W.E.B.
Du Bois.
Now this was an argument within black America, which I think is very revealing, but revealing not just for black America.
Why?
Because they're actually arguing how does a group that starts out at the bottom make its way up the ladder?
What is the best recipe for groups that are denied opportunity to succeed?
And in this argument, Du Bois, who sort of starts it out, makes the claim that blacks in America have one big problem, racism.
Racism is, he says, and by the way, this is the racism of the Democratic Party, but nevertheless, racism is keeping blacks down.
They need to fight racism.
How? Well, the phrase that Du Bois uses, and in fact, here he is borrowing from Frederick Douglass, is agitate, agitate, agitate.
In other words, never stop struggling, fighting through politics.
To move up that way, forcing society, if you can, to yield to the demand for equal rights.
Now, Booker T. Washington, who was born a slave, founded the Tuskegee movement, both a school as well as a kind of industrial education center.
Booker T. Washington makes, I think, a very profound point.
He says blacks in America actually have two, two major problems.
The first is indeed racism.
But the second is black cultural disadvantage.
Cultural disadvantage that may come out of racism, but nevertheless takes on a kind of life of its own.
And Booker T. Washington's point is that blacks, in order to come up, have got to fight both.
Why? Because let's say you're successful in fight number one.
Let's say you're able to sort of establish equal rights under the law.
What does that mean? Well, that means nothing more than the right to participate, the right to compete.
But here's where Booker T. Washington has a second point to make.
How do you compete effectively?
Suddenly you're in a race where the prize is going to go to the guy who hits the finishing tape first.
And this is true in education.
It's true in economics.
It's true by and large in any competitive society.
And his point is that any group that's starting out behind has got to figure out ways to develop the skills, the competitive skills, that enable it to advance.
I want to read a couple of lines from Washington's Up From Slavery.
I emphasize the fact that while the Negro should not be deprived by unfair means of the franchise, of the ballot, Political agitation alone cannot save him.
And that back of the ballot, meaning in addition to the ballot, he must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence, and character, and that no race without these elements can permanently succeed.
In the same vein, here's Booker D. Washington, no race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.
It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.
Think of what he's saying. It's one thing to have the right to participate in the Olympics, but what if you can't run?
It's one thing to have the right to be a programmer at Oracle Software, but what if you don't know how to do that?
So, Booker T. Washington's point is that it's one thing to have rights, but you also need to develop the cultural skills to take advantage of those rights.
Now, all of this rhetoric greatly angered W.E.B. Du Bois, who kind of came back slashing at Booker T. Washington and said things like, I'm not going to quote Du Bois.
He goes, because Du Bois, Booker T. Washington talked about the high crime rate among particularly young black males.
And Du Bois goes, suppose today the Negroes do steal.
Who was it that for centuries made stealing a virtue by stealing their labor?
And you have to grant that Du Bois here has an important point.
He's going, listen, blacks weren't allowed to keep the fruits of their labor.
In fact, slavery itself was a massive theft operation done on them.
So where do you think they learned stealing?
And... Booker T. Washington replies, he goes, yeah, but, and I'm paraphrasing him, so what?
Booker T. Washington's point is, nevertheless, even though it is the case that oppression might have held us back in certain ways, the simple fact of it is...
We're going to have to figure out ways to get out of that.
We can't make a habit of stealing be a characteristic earmarking trait of the black community because that's going to hold us back.
That's going to make other people who come along think, wow, these blacks are thieves.
So, Booker D. Washington's point is that even if oppression is the source of the cultural disadvantage, it is in the hands of blacks to overcome that disadvantage and that must be their necessary task.
Now, I mention all this because...
It seems to me that this was a kind of fork in the road for the civil rights movement.
Du Bois, by the way, was one of the founders of the NAACP, one of the main civil rights organizations of the black community.
And the NAACP, from the beginning, adopted the Du Boisian formula of agitate, agitate, agitate.
By the way, Booker T. Washington's formula was different.
Work, work, work.
And today we may say that that was the road not taken.
That was the road not taken by the civil rights leadership of the 1960s and since.
If you think of people like Al Sharpton, you think of the leaders of the black community, they never demand of blacks that...
Hey, why are our families in this way?
Why is it that the crime rate is so high?
Why are there so many black-on-black murders in Chicago?
How do we fix this within our community?
There's almost no discussion of any of this.
And it may seem that the Booker T. Washington formula has been completely forgotten.
But I want to argue that, in fact, it is not.
There are other groups that are operating right now on the Booker T. Washington model, and in fact, that is the key to their success.
And who are those groups?
These are the non-white immigrant groups.
If you think about the Koreans, the Pakistanis, the Asian Indians, the West Indians, the Nigerians, all these immigrant groups coming to America, and ask yourself, what is the key to their success?
How is it that they're able to move into the very same inner cities in which African Americans live?
And then, 15 years later, they've moved out to the suburbs.
They've moved into Washington, D.C. Now they're living in Arlington.
And by the way, 10 years from now, they'll be living in Fairfax.
And pretty soon, they'll have a really nice house in McLean.
And their kid's gonna be going to Tulane or Vanderbilt.
How does that happen? Well, the simple truth is it happens because they're following the Booker T. Washington formula.
Work, work, work.
In other words, don't just try to get society to conform to you.
You conform to the cultural requirements of success.
And so I think as we look at the Booker T. Washington-Du Bois debate, it isn't just a debate about For African Americans.
It's a debate for all of us.
And what we realize is that you must agitate, agitate, and agitate until you get equal rights under the law.
But once you do that, society has sort of done it for you.
Now you have to do it for yourself.
By the way, there's something Martin Luther King once said, which kind of gets to the heart of the matter.
It's not the quote that most people know from Martin Luther King about the content of our character.
It's this one. The Negro will only be free, I'm now quoting Martin Luther King, when he reaches down into the inner depths of his own being and signs with pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation.
So what is King saying?
He's saying that we have a right to equal rights under the law.
We do have that right. But we don't have any more rights than that.
What we do with our rights, what we make of our liberties, the kind of person and groups that we make collectively through action, that ultimately is up to us.
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Who's going to pay for this? Clearly these Biden dudes think they're playing with monopoly money.
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And now I want to talk about one of my absolute favorite characters, Anselm.
Anselm was a medieval theologian, an abbot, actually a bishop.
And I want to talk about his famous argument, one of the strangest arguments, by the way, ever conceived for the existence of God.
Anselm's argument is called the ontological argument, and ontology means sort of the science of being, of being.
Think about our own life for a moment.
We are seen in the world by other people.
They know us, you may say, from the outside.
And they know us for the things that we do, for the way that we appear, for the things that we say.
But if you think about it, we know ourselves in a very different way because we know ourselves from the inside.
We know ourselves quite apart from the things we say.
We know what it means to just be.
What does it mean to be Dinesh?
Well, you know me from what I say and from the outside, but I know me in a different way than you know me.
That's the key. And that's ontology, the sort of the knowledge of being.
And Anselm uses this idea to develop a very ingenious concept of God and a proof for God's existence that philosophers, by the way, have been wrestling with for centuries and find notoriously difficult to refute.
In fact, some of the best philosophers alive today say that it cannot be refuted, that this is in fact a secure proof.
Now, many people over the centuries have sort of tried to advance proofs for God's existence.
Aquinas, the Catholic theologian, the author of the Summa Theologica, advanced what he famously called the five proofs for the existence of God.
But in making his proofs, Aquinas appeals to the outside world, to causality, to material things.
And he says things like, you know, everything has a cause.
Every material object that we know of has a cause.
And Aquinas sort of reasons from one cause to what he calls the first cause.
But my point is that Aquinas' proofs, which we'll talk about another day, Aquinas is appealing to the data of experience.
Anselm amazingly does not.
He does not appeal to any experience outside in the world at all.
He appeals only, you might say, he uses what you could call deductive reasoning.
Deductive reasoning is the reasoning in which you start from a premise, and the premise is like, solid.
You can only draw one straight line between two points.
That's the premise. And from that premise, you draw deductions.
And if the deductions are logical, then the conclusion follows indisputably.
And that's the nature of Anselm's proof.
I'll talk a little bit about Anselm himself in this segment.
In the next one, I'm going to dive into the proof.
Anselm was an interesting character.
He had a fight with his family when he was something like 12 or 13, and he decided to leave home.
And he began to walk all around Europe in search of a monastery where he could enroll as a young recruit.
He went in search of the monastery at Beck.
Why? Because he had heard that the monastery at Beck had the most books of any monastery at the time.
By the way, Beck at the time, and we're talking here about the 11th century, Anselm was born in 1033, Beck had 164 volumes.
The second biggest monastery in Europe was Moni Casino.
It had only 70 volumes.
I mean, think about it. Think Think about how different the world was then when 160 volumes made you basically the Harvard University of Europe.
So Anselm enrolls as a young recruit, a young monk, if you will, in training.
And over a relatively short number of years, he becomes the abbot.
He becomes in charge of the monastery at Beck.
And he's surrounded by all these monks, and they're smart characters.
And it turns out that they all have a great interest in discovering truths about God, but doing it by reason alone.
In other words, they read the scriptures, they study the scriptures.
They're not atheists, they're believers.
But they also love the idea that God has given us reason, and through reason we can learn to know Him, And then we can love him.
So reason, in other words, is a valid tool for learning about God.
Now, Anselm is very clear that when he thinks about learning about God, he uses the phrase, believe and you will understand.
So Anselm is not saying, you know, it's not important to have faith.
He's saying you should have faith.
And Anselm denies that having faith is any kind of a negative.
In fact, he makes a very telling point.
He says, quote, He says, Think of what he's saying.
It's not that they look for evidence of God and not finding any.
They become unbelievers. He's saying, no, they're unbelievers.
They don't want to believe. And so they look for rational reasons not to.
And by the same token, says Anselm, while we, for our part, do so, Look for rational reasons.
Because we do believe.
And the object of our search is one and the same.
So both the non-believer and the believer are trying to see where reason might lead.
And Anselm, in one of his prayers, he prays to God.
He says, you know, my mind is darkened by the smoke of sin.
He says to God, clear my mind so I can see you through reason more clearly.
Now what's fascinating about Anselm is that the monks are always stopping him in the hallways and asking him to prove things.
Prove God's existence. Prove that God is omnipotent.
Prove that God is all just.
Prove that God is all merciful.
And Anselm, you can see, gets a little bit annoyed.
Because it's like, one proof on Monday, another proof on Tuesday, a third proof on Wednesday.
Anselm was like, enough! So he prays to God, he says, to deliver to him a single proof.
A single proof so powerful and devastating that it will deliver not only the existence of God, but all the attributes of God.
All in one proof. It's kind of like, here's the key.
Thank you very much. Now, let's move on to something else.
So, Anselm is in search of this single crushing proof.
And the reason he doesn't want to appeal to the data of experience is Anselm is basically saying, well, you can say that this is in the world, that that's in the world, and the world is like this.
He goes, forget about all that.
We're not going to appeal to the world out there.
We're going to appeal to being itself and from being ourselves.
We're going to try to see if we can learn something about the Supreme Being that, you may say, confers being on all of us.
More about all this when we come back.
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Having introduced this interesting medieval character, Anselm, who is now the abbot of the monastery of Beck, we're going to turn to his famous ontological argument for God's existence.
And you have to kind of pay attention closely here because the argument itself requires a little bit of concentration.
Anselm begins in an almost disarmingly simple way.
He goes, let's find a definition of God that everybody can agree on.
In other words, a definition of God that the atheist, the skeptic, the agnostic, the believer, we all agree that's what we mean by God.
So we're going to agree on a definition.
And Anselm supplies a definition which I think meets his criteria.
His definition is this.
God is that... So, in every respect, God is, you may say, the greatest.
You can't even think of someone or something greater than God.
That's the definition. And Anselm goes, do you agree when we talk about God?
Would you agree that that is, in fact, a valid definition of God?
And I think the answer to that question is yes.
Now, here comes Anselm's kind of ingenious move.
Anselm says... This God, this being than that, this that than which no greater can be thought, this being either exists in the mind alone or exists in the mind and in reality.
It's possible that God exists only in the mind.
We can think of God, but there is no God.
Kind of the way you can think of a unicorn, but there isn't a unicorn.
Or, says Anselm, that than which no greater can be thought exists in the mind, or in the mind and reality both.
And then Anselm says, which is greater?
Is it greater to exist only in the mind, or is it greater to exist in the mind and in reality?
Obviously the latter.
And then Anselm says, but if that's true, then I've proven my case.
Why? Because if God is that than which no greater can be thought, and that than which no greater can be thought either exists only in the mind or in the mind, and in reality, it's obviously greater to exist in both.
Therefore, that than which no greater can be thought must exist not only in the mind, but also in reality.
Now, if this seems a little confusing to you, you may want to kind of go back and play this a couple of times.
Why? Because this is Anselm's proof.
And it's a proof that has frustrated, bewildered.
It almost seems like a sleight of hand when you first hear it.
And this was true of me too.
I was like, this is ridiculous.
This is like a magician pulling like a hat, you know, a rabbit out of a hat.
This seems a little crazy.
But when you go back and you start with the premise and you follow its logical steps, it's a little hard to say what's wrong with the argument.
A lot of people have tried to do that.
Here, by the way, is my old debating partner, Christopher Hitchens, trying to refute Anselm.
It does not go well.
This is from Hitchens' book, God is Not Great.
He gives an example of a child in a novel who is asked by its mother, why do you believe in dragons?
And the child says, well, clearly if there is a word called dragon, then dragons must exist.
So this is Hitchens' summary of Anselm.
Hitchens thinks that Anselm is saying that if you can imagine something, it must exist.
I can imagine aliens, therefore there must be aliens.
I can imagine a unicorn, therefore there must be unicorns.
Now, this is not Anselm's argument at all.
Anselm is not making a preposterous transition, you may say, from the imaginary to the existential.
Anselm isn't saying that everything we think of must exist.
Not at all. Let's deepen the inquiry by looking at a monk, Garnillo, somebody who was in a nearby monastery, who tries to refute Anselm, I think, in a much more sophisticated way than Hitchens.
You begin to see here, by the way, how ancient medieval theologians thought about these things a lot deeper, a lot better than a lot of contemporary skeptics who think they're the first ones to come up with this stuff.
So, Garnillo has an argument, very ingenious, that parallels Anselm's argument.
I want to go into it for a second. Garnillo says, let me imagine a kind of island that is the greatest of all islands.
And it exists somewhere, no one really knows where, but it's the greatest of all islands.
Now, this greatest of all islands either exists in the mind...
Or it exists in the mind and in reality.
Now, which is greater?
Obviously, it's greater to exist, not just in the mind, but also in reality.
And therefore, this, according to Anselm, says Gonelo, this greatest of all islands, since you can conceive of it, must exist.
This is the so-called lost island argument, kind of famous in philosophy, intended to be a refutation of Anselm.
Now, it's very interesting to see what Anselm thinks about this.
And Anselm, in considering this so-called Lost Island analogy, basically says no.
The Lost Island analogy doesn't really work.
Why? Because he says when you're talking about any other thing other than God, you're talking about excellence that is relative.
So the lost island may be greater because it's greener, or it has more wildlife on it, or it's a more beautiful island.
This is relative greatness.
And so something can be greater in some respects than something else.
But Anselm says that's not what God is.
When we talk about God, we agreed on a definition that God is that than which no greater can be thought in all respects.
God is sort of the greatest in every dimension.
And Anselm says, given that that's what we agree about is God, that's what it means to say the word God, I'm asking whether in this one special case, this greatest of all beings either exists in the mind or in the mind and in reality.
And since it is greater to exist in the mind and in reality than to exist in the mind alone, that than which no greater can be thought must exist, not just in the imagination or the mind, but also in fact in reality.
So what Anselm is saying is that his argument applies to this one case.
And that invocations of other examples that are greater or not greater in some respect or the other, that's not what he's talking about.
He's not saying that those things must exist.
It's kind of an amusing conclusion to Anselm's life, is that this was a guy who thought deeply about these things, and quite honestly, even when he replies to Gornillo, he spins out two or three new arguments that weren't there in his original book.
By the way, Anselm's book is called The Proslogion, right here.
And it contains this, not only his argument, but his replies to critics, notably Gornillo.
Well, here's Anselm finally on his deathbed, And he's doing what apparently was his last prayer.
And I want to read it because to me it's so kind of revealing and sort of amusing.
And he basically goes, Lord, if it is your will to take me now, I will gladly go.
He goes, my heart longs for a reunion with you.
But he goes, but Lord...
If you want to leave me on earth for a little bit longer, he goes, I've been sort of tossing in my mind this idea of the origin of the soul.
He goes, that's bewildered people for centuries.
He goes, I think I've got this one figured out.
And if you give me a little more time, I'll have this one licked as well.
So here you've got Anselm kind of making a little bit of a bargain with God.
Yeah, you can take me now. Send me to heaven.
It's going to be okay and great and all.
But, you know, kind of if you want one of your servants to figure out this business about the soul, I think I'm your man.
Just give me a little more time and I'll get it done.
So this is Anselm, a very interesting character who has a lot of things to say on a lot of topics.
But to this day, within philosophy, his ontological argument for the existence of God continues to challenge, to provoke...
And to make one think more deeply about the question of being itself.
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It's time for our mailbox.
But before we go there, I hope you're enjoying this podcast.
I hope you'll subscribe to it.
Turn on the notifications if you're listening on Apple.
Please rate me five stars and tell other people about it and help me get the word out.
I'd really appreciate it.
For today's question, here we go.
Listen. Hello, Dinesh.
Richard here. Having listened to your segment on evolution and having considered this to some extent myself, I would like to ask you about death.
How do Christian evolutionists deal with death?
Now, evolution is a, I would say, largely material explanation of, not of life.
Many people think evolution is an explanation of life.
It's not an explanation of life.
Darwin actually begins with life already there.
Darwin is exploring how one form of life Can, over time and under various adaptive pressures, give rise to a different form of life?
How you can have microevolution within species or macroevolution even between species.
But the bottom line is it's an explanation of how forms of life give rise to other forms of life.
And that's all that evolution is.
Now, there are paradoxes in evolution that the evolutionists can't go beyond.
One of them is that you start off with life, but you move toward more complex forms of life.
And then you have something totally new in the world, which is consciousness.
And not only consciousness, but consciousness of evolution itself, self-consciousness.
We, as human beings, are aware of ourselves.
We can anticipate death.
We can study evolution.
So this is a completely new dimension of being, you can say.
And now the question becomes that when our physical apparatus...
And evolution says at some point that the body sort of has not just outlived its purpose reproductively, but also the body breaks down.
But the question is this.
Does consciousness, does the mind, does the immaterial aspect of humans...
Have the possibility of living on.
Now, at first glance it may seem no, because if I think about my own consciousness, for example, my consciousness, in a sense, emanates through and from my brain.
But I think it's a great mistake to confuse the brain, which is the apparatus, with the consciousness itself.
Why? Because the brain is material.
The brain is made up of atoms and molecules.
It's made up of neurons.
But my mind is a whole different thing.
My mind is immaterial.
Think about this. How much does my mind weigh?
How much space does my mind occupy?
The mind doesn't have those kinds of dimensions.
It is of a different type than the brain itself.
And yes, while I'm alive, my mind operates through my brain, kind of in the way that sound waves, for example, operate through a tape recorder.
The tape recorder is the mechanism for the sound waves, but you'd be a real fool if you said that the tape recorder is the sound waves.
No. The sound waves are distinct.
They require the tape recorder in order to manifest themselves.
But there may be other ways they could manifest themselves even if there wasn't a tape recorder.
And that's the point that the Christian evolutionists can believe, I think, without contradiction or without being unscientific in any way, that there may be other modes beyond death.
For life, and by life here I mean consciousness, the mind, understanding to live on.
Why? Because they've been created by a superior mind.
And ultimately our mission on earth is we are in a kind of way station, you might say, toward an eternal destination in which our mind will be united with this eternal mind.
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