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June 18, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:07:43
DEFUND THE UNIVERSITIES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 114
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Time Text
Defund the police?
No, but we need to defund the universities.
Why, the left wants to forget the Alamo and my take on the Juneteenth controversy.
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.
I want to make my case in this opening segment for defunding the universities.
So not defunding the police, that's the idea from the left, but taking a page from the left, defund the American universities.
Basically, get rid of them.
But before I do that, you know, this morning Debbie and I were talking about yesterday's podcast and Debbie's like...
She's like, Dinesh, was it really necessary to bring up Joe Biden's testicles?
Didn't you think that was, you know, over the top?
And when I was like, well, you know, it was a way to illustrate the point.
I'm sure that that's one of those things that he has left that's kind of important to him.
I couldn't bring up his brain.
Where is it? That's an absence rather than a presence.
And Debbie's like... I know, but you know, you kind of went from the testicles to the holiness of God.
And I'm like, that's just a podcast.
I call it amplitude.
I call it linkage. I call it range.
That's why you listen to this, because it's got a little of everything, let's just say.
Does it ever? All right.
So we're going to talk about the university.
And I think the case against the university can be summed up in a very powerful and poignant way by a young woman whose family escaped from North Korea.
And her name is, I think, Yeonmi Park.
Yeonmi Park. That's her name.
And her family went through all kinds of ordeals to get out of North Korea.
They got out in 2007, by the way, when Yeonmi was 13 years old.
They crossed over into China over the frozen Yalu River.
They were captured by human traffickers and sold into slavery.
Can you believe this?
Yeonmi was sold for less than $300.
Her mom was sold for a hundred bucks.
I guess because she's younger.
Anyway, with the help of Christian missionaries, they were able to get out.
They got to Mongolia.
They walked across the Gobi Desert and they finally found refuge in South Korea.
She then comes to the United States.
By the way, she's written a memoir, In Order to Live, describing her ordeal.
And then she ends up, she's now 27 years old, but she ends up at Columbia University.
And at Columbia, this is when her experiences really begin.
She goes, you know, I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy to learn how to think.
And then she goes, but they're forcing you to think the way they want you to think.
She goes, I realize, wow, this is insane.
I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea.
That I started worrying. So think about the regimented life in North Korea, a whole society based on propaganda.
And Yeonmi Park is saying, that's the American University.
She goes, the themes are even the same.
The anti-Western bashing, the appeal to collective guilt, the suffocating political correctness.
She goes, it's communism.
That's what they have in North Korea.
And that's what we're introducing to our young people in America.
She goes, during her orientation, right when she got to school, she mentions to a university staff member that she likes to read Jane Austen.
She says, I love the books.
That's all she says. And then she's quoting the administrator.
Did you know that those writers had a colonial mindset?
They were racist and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you?
So Yeonmi Park said it got worse from that day by day.
She said, actually, in North Korea, they teach you America's evil, America's evil.
If you take two evil Americans and add two more evil Americans, you get four evil Americans.
Even the math classes are full of propaganda.
And she goes, that's basically what's happening now in America.
She goes, it is a, quote, regression of civilization.
Strong words. And then, my favorite quote...
Even North Korea is not this nuts.
Quote, North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.
What she's really getting at is the propaganda in America is worse.
And what this is telling you is that it's a crisis situation.
Yeonmi Park says, because I've seen oppression, I know what it looks like.
She goes, these kids keep saying how they're oppressed, how much injustice they've experienced.
They don't know how hard it is to be free.
In other words, to exercise your freedom responsibly.
And I want to say, she says, in North Korea, she literally believed that Kim Jong-un was this kind of incredibly handsome man.
Why? Because that's what she kept hearing.
And then she goes, somebody showed me a photo and said, he's really fat.
And she was like, I couldn't believe it.
And I think this means that we have to go kamikaze on the universities.
We've actually got to shut these places down.
I know that there are moms mobilizing around the country to outlaw critical race theory, and that's an important first step.
There are all kinds of second steps I could recommend.
By the way, if your kid is a student or if you're a student on a campus, blow the whistle on your left-wing professor.
Secretly record them.
In other words, you're not actually secretly recording them, because what they say is, in fact, in the public domain.
They're speaking in the classroom, so yeah, they have the academic freedom to say it, but you have the First Amendment right to put it out there.
Put it out on social media, expose these guys, humiliate them.
And use the disinfectant of sunlight.
But in the meantime, I think as Republicans, we've got to take a major theme here, and that is defund the university.
Defund the university in every way.
I'm not just talking about state universities being deprived of state funding.
I'm talking about cutting off all the Pell Grants, cutting off all government aid to private and public universities both.
And then you go, the universities, wait a minute, Dinesh, they might collapse.
And I go, excellent idea.
They should collapse.
Why? Because they're putting poison out into the American cultural bloodstream.
They are miseducating our students.
They are propagandizing them.
Essentially, we have created academic North Korea.
So it's not important to say what will replace the universities.
We'll come up with something better eventually, but who cares?
If someone is putting out poison into the minds of young people, stopping that is the imperative.
That's the first priority.
Years ago, I sent my son, my daughter Danielle, to Dartmouth, believing that she could still get a liberal education, and she did.
But you know what? I think she's probably the last one.
And of the three professors who were critical to her development, two have now retired.
There's only one guy left.
He's basically the last honest man standing at Dartmouth.
He's going to have to turn the lights out.
So if we succeed, if we can do this and we need to unify behind it, we need to really think about it.
What I do in this podcast is I put out ideas that are sort of sowing a seed.
I realize that they're outside the mainstream.
So what? That's why we're putting them into the mainstream.
So people start thinking about them.
And it's remarkable to see on issue after issue, things that we say here on this podcast, we talk about things like January 6th was not an insurrection.
Think about it. There was not one Republican congressman or senator who was on my page on this issue at the beginning.
And now a ton of them are.
most people are. Even McConnell is. Even McConnell says this was not an insurrection. So we have the ability to use the podcast as a fulcrum to really shift the debate. And so we're going to introduce this idea. I'm going to talk more about it, how we basically cut the ground out from the American university, bring it down, raise it to the ground politically, I mean, by yanking out the funding so that these parasitic structures, which at one time perhaps served a purpose, I got a good
education. But the truth of it is, these institutions are too far gone.
The termites now have basically taken over the building.
And so you need to put a bag over the building.
And if you can't get rid of the termites, which in this case you can't, you just got to let the building collapse.
This is a very important case just out from the Supreme Court.
Fulton versus Philadelphia.
It's a big victory for religious freedom.
Essentially, the case involved the city of Philadelphia denying foster care contracts to Catholic groups that, quote, discriminated against same-sex couples.
In other words, they were not willing to place foster children with A couple of significant things about this.
One, the ruling was 9-0.
And what this means is that even the so-called liberals, even the Democratic nominees, they all went the same way.
And I think that there is a deeper significance here.
The significance is that the court It's sort of slapping down the left in its insistence that the court is horribly fractured, reflects the partisan divisions of society, represents some kind of Republican effort to stack the court, justifies the Democrats from their side, packing the court.
And the court is basically saying that no, not just on Trivial issues.
By the way, the court has had a number of 9-0 rulings recently.
It's almost like they feel the need to speak as a unified group.
But in this case, it's even more significant because here we're not talking about a relatively secondary issue.
We're talking about something that matters a lot to the left.
Namely, gay rights.
And the left is very insistent that religious groups be forced, compelled, to recognize these non-discrimination laws, and if they don't, to be excluded from government programs.
But the Supreme Court has decided to not go along with that.
And I think what the court is trying to say is, number one, as a court, We can insulate ourselves from political influence.
In other words, here is a leftist, Professor Kent Greenfield.
He says, the Supreme Court has become too partisan and unbalanced to trust it with deciding the most important issues of our day.
And the court is saying, actually, we're not that fractured.
We are able to decide things as a group, Republican and Democratic nominees together.
The second thing that the court is saying, and I think this is equally important, is Is that this idea that you can use non-discrimination to cancel out the First Amendment, and we're talking here about the religious freedom clause of the First Amendment, the idea that you can use non-discrimination laws to override the Bill of Rights and tell people, religious groups, that you've got to set aside your conscience, this is not going to fly.
Religious groups have every right on the basis of conscience to act In congruence with their conscience and they do not give up, if you will, their citizenship rights by doing it.
The court, however, while making this important decision, stopped short in one respect.
It stopped short in overruling a kind of important case that we should overrule in order to truly affirm religious liberty.
And that case is called the Smith case.
It's called Employment Division v.
Smith circa 1990.
That was a case that was kind of a blow for religious freedom.
Now, you might think that that case would be authored by some unhinged leftist, but weirdly, it was authored by Justice Scalia.
The case itself involved Native American groups, and the Native American groups by and large were saying that they could not be held accountable under the drug laws because their use of the drug peyote was in fact a kind of a religious ritual, that this was part of their religion.
And Justice Scalia basically said, that's ridiculous.
Justice Scalia said, listen, religious groups have got to kind of follow the law.
And as long as the law is, quote, generally applicable, in other words, they're not being singled out to do something, no one is able to use these drugs.
They can't just say, well, gee, you know, non-religion drugs are okay.
So in this seemingly kind of exceptional case, but the problem with it is that it set a precedent.
And the precedent was that as long as a law is generally applicable, you can force religious groups to go along.
And that's basically what the city of Philadelphia was trying to do.
They're saying, you know, we're not just forcing the Catholics to follow the no discrimination against gays principle.
It's generally applicable.
We're applying this to everybody.
The court would have done well to go the full hog and overruled the Smith case and basically said, no, religious freedom, in a sense, takes precedence.
That's really what conservatives were hoping that the Supreme Court would do.
But the Supreme Court, while giving the victory...
The Catholic groups in Philadelphia nevertheless stopped short of overruling the Smith decision.
They basically said, we don't need to go there.
We're able to affirm religious freedom even within the orbit of the Smith decision.
And so, I see this as a victory for our side, but not a total victory.
It's not a total victory.
Why? Because even though we won on the facts presented, we weren't able to knock out the troublesome precedent That allows the left to try again, to try once again and in other contexts to get religious groups and try to force them to violate their conscience in order to conform with so-called anti-discrimination laws.
So guys, we're on track to break all kinds of records from Mike Lindell this month through the Dinesh book and movie giveaway.
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By the way, we're in the final stretch.
The offer ends July 4th.
Again, the number to call, 800-876-0227, or go to MyPillow.com and use promo code DINESHDINESH. The Biden administration's so-called investigation continues into the origins of COVID, but... I've argued before and I repeat now that I think this is a non-investigation.
It's a pretend investigation.
It's going to go nowhere because it's designed to go nowhere.
And of course, the Chinese aren't cooperating and the World Health Organization has basically said we can't make them cooperate.
But at least the idea that COVID came from a lab, whether negligently or by design, is now on the table.
At least now, digital media can't and won't censor people who say, who are advancing what really is the most plausible theory about the origin of the virus.
Now, I was a little disturbed to read in the Financial Times that at a time when this sort of, these biomedical labs that are doing this kind of gain-of-function research process, Playing around with viruses and making them more deadly.
At a time when we're considering that this might have launched, propelled a global pandemic.
At this time, we realize that these types of labs are sprouting up all over the world.
Wow! Turns out there are at least 59 facilities, just like the Wuhan Institute, that are either now functioning or planned across the world over the next few years.
These are the maximum security laboratories where the most dangerous type of biological research is going on.
The stated rationale for this research is to learn more about viruses, figure out ways to cure them.
But on the other hand, we also know that in many of these labs, there's active collaboration between the researchers from a given country and the military of that country.
In other words, opening up the door to the possibility that this could be used for biowarfare.
There's also obviously the risk that the more labs you have, and obviously the more lax controls that you have over these labs, the more likely it is that viruses can leak out.
Now, where are these new labs being either created or planned?
Turns out that 23, they're occurring in 23 countries, including the UK, the US, China, India, Gabon, and Côte d'Ivoire.
This is the so-called Ivory Coast.
And George Colbens, who's a professor of biodefense at George Mason University, and Philip Alenzos have been mapping these facilities, kind of tracking where these sort of very dangerous laboratories are developing.
And three-quarters of these labs are in urban centers, which basically means if a virus gets out, you've got an immediate risk of a global pandemic because you're going to infect a large number of people.
Richard Elbright, who's a professor of biology at Rutgers, goes, quote,"...the larger the number of institutions and the larger the number of individuals with access to these dangerous agents, the greater the risk." Now, interestingly, only a quarter of the countries that have these labs have the so-called high level, level four, of biosecurity preparedness.
Other countries like China have the so-called medium level, but 41% of these countries have, including South Africa, low levels of supervision.
So, what you're dealing with here, I think, is something that has the potential to be very dangerous, very irresponsible.
Let's look at Guangdong Province in China.
Guangdong Province in China announced in May it's planning to build between 25 to 30 Only one of those is going to be a BSL biosecurity level 4 lab.
All the others are going to be medium security or below.
So where I'm going with all this is that I think we can now kind of see why the community of virologists kind of quickly coalesced around a bogus narrative that, oh, this COVID-19 came from the wet market.
Why? Because they knew.
That they were planning.
It's like an industry that is in the process of rapid expansion.
They're doing more of this stuff.
And they knew that if it got out, that they were the cause of this pandemic that's killed a huge number of people worldwide, this whole thing could be shut down.
So we see here not just an ideological reason, but I would say an institutional reason.
For science to kind of huddle around and put out this bogus narrative.
It's to throw the rest of the world off the track of where this virus came from.
They don't want to take responsibility for what they may well have done, even as they proceed to build new facilities, new labs, do new types of research that could make us go through this all over again.
Court backing, it's the tool of left-wing authoritarians.
Hugo Chavez packed Venezuela's Supreme Court with his socialist cronies and paved the way for his tyrannical regime.
Now, Joe Biden and America's socialist radicals want to pack our Supreme Court with four new liberal justices.
Court backing isn't just some way to improve the courts.
No, it's a coup.
It's a coup to take away your constitutional freedoms and mine and to turn America into a socialist country.
That's why the First Liberty Institute, this is the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated to defending religious liberty in America.
You might remember we had Kelly Shackelford from First Liberty in the movie Trump Card.
Anyway, these guys are doing something about this.
They recently launched SupremeCoup.com to serve as a kind of one-stop shop in the fight against court packing and help.
like you learn the truth about what's happening in the courts.
More importantly, there's a kind of take action button that you can click to do your part to stop the Supreme Court coup.
If you want to defend our God-given freedoms and stop the left's court backing scheme, head over to SupremeCoup.com slash Dinesh.
That's S-U-P-R-E-M-E C-O-U-P dot com slash Dinesh.
Under the aegis of critical race theory, essentially making everything about race, the left is now targeting, not all that surprisingly, Texas history, and specifically the history of the Alamo.
There's an article in the Houston Chronicle just from a couple of weeks ago, which is a profile of a book called Forget the Alamo.
Forget the Alamo. And this is an attack on the way in which history is taught in Texas.
It's an attack on what the Alamo symbolizes.
And so I asked an historian, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, Gary Foreman.
Actually, Gary was one of the initial forces behind the programming for the History Channel when it started way back in 1994.
Gary is a Texan.
He's very involved with something called the Alamo Plaza Project.
Gary, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
So these three guys, Brian Burrows, Chris Tomlinson, Jason Stanford, have written a book basically saying that the Alamo is sort of a racist symbol because the breakaway of Texas from Mexico, in fact, what the Alamo represents, is an effort to protect slavery.
I want to actually read a line.
quote, Now, is that in fact true?
It can't be further than from the fact.
I mean, this is ridiculous, Dinesh, because this is not the first time Texas has been attacked in that manner.
But this is starting to be that trendy, woke agenda that's raising its ugly head.
And unfortunately, it's influencing the younger generations who are ignorant about this real story.
What's really sad about it, I'll just be brief.
The authors approached me and many other experts on the Alamo under false pretenses, and we all thought, based on the introduction we got from a reliable source, that they were interested in real history, they were interested in expanding how the Alamo should be interpreted and the story told.
Well, as we found out, that's not what it was.
They were basically doing, as you know, the old term for bad journalism, they were skimming, and they were not interested in telling the truth.
So let's focus on what the truth is.
Why, in fact, did Texas break away from Mexico?
the, as I understand it, the Texans who came into Mexico, they were kind of invited to form this sort of new region or state, came in under the Mexican Constitution of 1824, a constitution that guaranteed Texas a certain degree of autonomy, a certain degree of protection of rights.
And then what happened that caused the Texans genuine, and I would say legitimate alarm?
Well, we have to remember that the Mexican Constitution of 1824 was basically patterned after our own constitution of the United States.
So that's why Americans felt comfortable, relatively comfortable, about being in this so-called new republic.
But at the same time, it didn't take long for someone like the character of Antonio de la Pozzi Santana to take control as a dictator.
And a revolt all across Mexico erupted, not just in Texas, but first in the Mexican states.
So this was not about anything but Mexico losing itself from being a legitimate republic to now being controlled by basically a junta.
And so now...
Everyone took alarm by it, and there was a real disconnect here between the colonists, the Texan colonists, and the Mexican government because of the very things that they promised they were going to deliver as far as that autonomy.
And that was then taken away.
So the question is, Dinesh, are we really still talking about a republic if that constitution is now taken away?
Now, isn't it a fact that the vast majority of Texans who fought against Mexico, and by the way, these weren't just white guys or the so-called Texians.
There were plenty of Mexicans, Hispanics, people of Spanish and American Indian origin who joined in the Texan revolt against Mexico.
And the Texans put out a sort of Declaration of Independence in which they laid forward, these are the reasons why we're breaking from Mexico.
As I understand it, that document made no mention of slavery, so here you have the stated reason for the revolt, and it's essentially we're revolting against dictatorship, but what you have now is these leftists creeping and going, no, no, no, no, no, we don't believe a word you say.
In reality, you're just trying to break away to protect Absolutely.
In fact, to make this very current, I just completed a brand new film in Texas on the Declaration of Independence.
And you're absolutely correct, Dinesh.
There was no mention of slavery and the basic pillars of this Constitution or even in the Declaration.
So this is really...
Taking something way out of context.
Were there people involved with slavery in the colonies?
Yes. But it was such a minority.
And we had abolitionists here as well.
So slavery is really that trendy, woke, keyword, stroke word for getting people alarmed and getting people upset about something that's really way outside the real story of Texas.
And that's what we're here to address.
I mean, what I find interesting too is, and this is part of the strategy of the left, is to take the so-called heroes of the Texan revolt and then later the Republic of Texas.
These are people like Davy Crockett.
These are people like Sam Houston.
And make them all seem like they're just a bunch of racists.
Now, talk a little bit about Sam Houston and the fact that Sam Houston's relationship with the Cherokees, because I think that alone shows that this simple-minded kind of caricature of these figures, and you could say the same thing about the others as well, the idea that these were just kind of crude white supremacists is nothing short of preposterous.
Talk about Sam Houston. Well, Sam Houston, first of all, everybody who even studies a little bit about Sam knows that he was, in his youth, connected deeply with the Native American tribes.
And then he lived with the Cherokee for a number of years before coming to Texas.
And even after he was here, he helped sign a treaty with the Indians.
And when he was president, he wanted to make sure that Texas, the Republic, Was not going to invade Indian territory.
Here's the other thing about Sam Houston.
He often adopted Indian clothing and customs.
So, I mean, he is so far away from being simply labeled in that way.
And then there's another person we really have to talk about, and that is, of course, David Crockett.
Like Sam Houston, David Crockett had a story with the Indians.
He fought them in the War of 1812.
However, in Congress, he lost his seat in the next term because he had stood up against Jackson's Indian Removal Bill in 1830, which cost him his seat.
And Crockett retained a very heroic stature with all the Indian tribes after that stand against Jackson.
And later he actually did business with the Chickasaws.
So these people really didn't do their homework.
And I think, Dinesh, you can see, as part of the Olitski rules for radicals, they weren't interested in the truth.
They weren't interested in anything that you and I are talking about.
They were interested in tearing down our heritage because that's part of the plan.
And let's focus for a moment on the Mexicans who were citizens of Mexico, but when Texas broke off and then later joined the United States, became American citizens.
Now, one of the themes in Forget the Alamo is the idea that these Mexicans in America were discriminated against, that they were treated, if you will, as second-class citizens.
It seems to me that while there may be some truth to that, nevertheless, it's important to realize that even if these Mexicans in America had partial rights, did not have the full recognition of their rights, isn't it a fact that they would have had no rights?
No property rights, for example, no constitutional rights, no protection of freedom of speech, no protection of their right to dissent had they stayed in Mexico.
The point I want to make is that even if they weren't given the full recognition of their rights in America, they had more rights.
And in fact, this partly explains why so many of them fought on the Texan side or even on the American side in the war with Mexico, I believe 1845 to 1848.
They were better off in America, weren't they?
Well, there's a lot of truth to that.
Let me explain. Let's take it one step back that supports what you were saying earlier is that just prior to the revolution, Dinesh, there were about 500 ranchos in South Texas.
And they were autonomous.
They were self-reliant, independent groups of families and neighborhoods that didn't rely on the Spanish or didn't rely on the Mexican government.
And these people, their descendants live today and they're having a hard time understanding what that is about because that's been erased from their history.
But they were not victims.
But they were caught between a very interesting vice in that period.
It's not clean for either side, but you're absolutely right.
Look what's happened to Mexico over the years.
And so I think what we have to look at is a bigger picture, and that's global.
The Texas Revolution is not this John Wayne shootout.
It's a much bigger, inclusive, global story that involves the Bank of England supporting Mexico.
You've got soldiers of fortune from everywhere in the Mexican command.
So this is not what people think it is.
And that's the disappointing part of this whole book project, is they had all the ingredients to tell the real big, important story, and they failed because certainly the Texas story is inconvenient to the far left.
You know, when Debbie and I were at the Alamo, I was kind of amazed.
Debbie was showing me, you know, here's a guy who came to fight on the Texan side from Ireland, and here's another guy who came...
People came from all over the world to fight in the Texan Revolution, so it fired the imagination of people around the world.
And isn't it ironic that here, much later, you've got these kind of armchair leftists...
Who seem to have no sense of the texture of what actually happened then, trying to superimpose this Procrustean racial ideology on something that actually was much more complex and on the balance, I would say, a battle cry of freedom and not of servitude.
Well, absolutely. In fact, you know, as we're saying that the Texas story is tough for the far left because it initiates that you're seeing with all these other people, a self-reliant and can-do spirit and energy that's very contagious.
The Alamo is that Texas story.
And what we obviously know that history is not a 20-second soundbite or a simple label.
And this is what is failing us today.
What is also disturbing, and Dinesh, you talk about this all the time, but the fact that we have so much of our media today just taking everything that these people have said verbatim and not contesting it, not challenging their narrative.
And that's a sad story on, of course, the American culture and especially in American journalism.
Well, we're trying to do our small part to get things right.
I really appreciate your coming on the podcast and to point out some very necessary truths for people to know as they contemplate this distorted leftist crusade.
Thank you very much. You bet, Dinesh.
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It's a little disturbing for me to discover that cancel culture, which we think of as a largely American phenomenon, is now a worldwide phenomenon.
It's even reached the sport of cricket.
I don't know if you know about cricket.
It's a sport played in England and India and in, by and large, all the former colonies of the British Empire.
And it's a little like baseball, the general concept of cricket.
Many Americans just don't like cricket because it's sort of too much like baseball.
It's seen as a kind of peculiar mutant of baseball.
But cricket is actually extremely popular in these countries where it's played.
One Indian once commented that he was grateful to the British Empire for two things, tea and cricket.
Now, turns out the British Empire brought cricket.
A lot more to India than tea and cricket.
It brought democracy. It brought courts of law.
It brought human rights.
It abolished all kinds of social evils, including the rather charming Indian custom of when a man died, his wife's life was considered to be so useless that she was thrown burning alive onto the cremation pyre of her husband.
Wow! The British happily put a stop to that.
We also, by the way, brought us the English language.
And you've got so many Indian writers now around the world writing in English.
Well, we got that, too, from the British.
I grew up on cricket. I think like a lot of young Indian kids, I thought, you know, when I was young, oh, I'd love to be a professional cricketeer, but I wasn't alone in this.
Every Indian kind of thinks this.
And I remember as a kid, a bunch of us would...
There was only one person on our street who had a TV. It was a small black and white TV, ridiculously tiny and kind of grainy.
But there were about 20 of us young kids.
We would all bunch into a single room and huddle to watch the cricket games on TV. Well, I recently picked up the...
A copy of The Guardian.
And I see that a cricket player from England, Ollie Robinson, has now been put into a sort of psychological counseling because of tweets that the guy did as a teenager.
As a teenager. His team, which is the Sussex team...
Welcome to my show!
Apparently, the English cricket board is even looking into questionable social media posts by other cricket players.
I'm thinking to myself, what did this guy even say?
We're talking about something he said as a teenager, and so I kind of have to search for these offending tweets.
And I look at them, and I'm like, what?
This is it? So let me read some of these tweets.
They're supposed to be horrible and sensitive.
So here we go. He's making a tweet.
This is apparently his Islamophobic tweet.
He goes... My new Muslim friend is the bomb.
He's obviously trying to be funny.
My new Muslim friend is the bomb.
This is the tweet.
Oh, horrific, awful.
Here's another one. He's talking about women.
This is a supposedly anti-woman tweet.
He goes, not going to lie, a lot of girls need to learn the art of class.
And then hashtag get some.
So, big deal.
And then here's this quote about Asian Americans showing that he's an all-round bigot.
He goes, I wonder if Asian people put smileys like this, and then he's got the little smiley with the two dashes and the smile.
I guess the idea being that we're talking here about the Asian eye.
Again, gee, really?
I'm not offended. You might say, well, Dinesh, wait a minute.
You know, these tweets are a little insensitive.
So, insensitive is not the same thing as racist.
By the way, racist has a definition.
Racism is the idea that people who belong to another race are intrinsically inferior.
Anything that departs from that is not racism.
There's no other definition of racism other than that.
And so if you say things like, well, I don't like people who are Asian Indians, that's kind of not a very nice thing to say, but it's not racist.
If you say, I would never marry someone who's Chinese, that may be...
It doesn't reflect poor taste on your part, but it's not racist.
And so what I'm getting at here is that you have people here who haven't even defined their terms and they go after some guy who's really good at, you know, in cricket you're either a good bowler or you're a good batsman.
They're going after these cricketeers because working class guys, by the way, for things they said when they were like 12 or 13, when they were kids, this is absolutely ludicrous.
I want to actually argue that insensitivity of this sort It's very healthy in a free society.
Why? Because it gets things out.
It puts them in the open.
It questions taboos.
A little bit of insensitivity shows that a society is able to talk freely and honestly about how it feels, engage these feelings in public space where they are allowed to be aired.
And so there is not only a free speech defense Of insensitivity, but the argument that the insensitivity itself is a kind of venting that prevents people from concealing their emotions where they begin to sort of fester inside and then express themselves in other more harmful ways.
It's too bad to see that cricket, even cricket, is now infected with cancel culture.
It shows that this is a disease.
That is spreading worldwide.
Its own kind of ideological pandemic.
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Yesterday I had on the show Darren Beattie, the founder of The Revolver, who laid out, I thought, a very interesting, provocative theory about what might have happened January 6th.
In other words, it could be that January 6th was an FBI operation.
They planted FBI operatives and agents inside of these so-called white supremacist groups.
In other words, groups like the Three Percenters, groups like the Proud Boys.
And then they kind of fomented, hey guys, let's go take the Capitol.
Let's go break this.
Let's go do that. They got these guys worked up into a frenzy.
They orchestrated it.
And then when it occurred, they were then named as unindicted co-conspirators by the FBI, which obviously had no intention of prosecuting its own guys, but rather wanted to use them and their testimony against...
The other guys who participated in this operation that was FBI devised and FBI instigated and FBI orchestrated.
Now, if true, think of the staggering implications of this.
It means that far from this being a Trump operation, you know, Trump instigated it.
It would be that the deep state instigated it.
They were the instigators of this insurgency.
And they would be the ones who should be having accountability and not Trump.
So the left is obviously in a kind of naked panic about this.
And they're publishing all kinds of refutations.
And there are even a couple of conservatives who are raising questions.
And I want to focus on the central objection or the central refutation.
Because it is so, in my mind, so weak and so hollow.
Here's an article, supposedly, again, these articles masquerade as, quote, fact check.
This is a CNN fact check, which says that this is a conspiracy theory, and let's look at what CNN says.
CNN says, I'm not reading from the article.
This is an article written by Marshall Cohen.
He goes, it's true that indictments against members of extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys mention anonymous co-conspirators who haven't been charged.
So he admits that there are a number, and I believe Revolver said upwards of 20, Unindicted co-conspirators.
So let's just take that as a fact.
CNN goes on. It's also true, quote, So now we have a second fact.
Which is that, and this actually makes sense, the FBI has been talking about infiltrating extremist groups across the country for a long time and would be hardly surprising if these groups, which have been kind of out there in the media, kind of notorious, if you will, that the FBI wouldn't have infiltrated them.
So, CNN is admitting that those two facts could very well be true.
Then they say, but there's no evidence that these co-conspirators are secretly working for the FBI. And that can be...
I think that that revolver would agree with that.
What Darren Beattie was saying is, okay, so now it's time to bring Merrick Garland forward and the Biden administration forward and ask them directly, were any of these unindicted co-conspirators, FBI agents or FBI operatives, yes or no?
This is something that Garland, as well as the FBI, FBI Director Wray have been trying to dodge, have not, in fact, publicly answered they need to answer.
And then CNN goes on to make what it thinks is a winning point, which is that under the standards of the FBI manual, it says, quote, the manual doesn't say that anonymized persons like Person 1 and Person 2 should be used to refer to FBI agents.
In other words, it is not customary under the FBI manual to describe or to classify FBI operatives as As being, quote, unindicted co-conspirators.
Now, Andy McCarthy, the very savvy writer for National Review and a former prosecutor himself, is himself kind of taken in by this.
I'm not quoting him. He goes, not sure I understand.
He goes, So Andy McCarthy is making an important conceptual distinction between a real co-conspirator, somebody who is conspiring as part of a plot, and an FBI plant who is by definition there to observe and to figure out what's going on, and is not himself or herself a co-conspirator.
Now, all of this is true, but who the hell thinks that the FBI is following these rules to the letter?
Who thinks that the FBI follows its own manual of procedures?
I mean, let's just go back for a second to the FISA court.
They were perfectly happy to distort, lie, suppress information, in one case, even doctor a document.
In order to mislead the FISA court.
So this is a rogue operation being run by rogue agents.
And ever since Obama, it's corrupted at the top.
So why Andy McCarthy or anyone?
I mean, I can sort of see CNN because they're basically, I mean, they have former FBI agents on every single day who are basically stooges.
So CNN is basically a stooge for the deep state.
But the point is, we don't trust the FBI. We don't believe that the FBI is rigorously and scrupulously following the letter of the law.
They didn't do it in the FISA case.
They didn't do it, frankly, in my case.
And so what we need to know is not what the FBI manual says, but in this very disturbing situation involving January 6th and potential FBI complicity, what it is that the FBI in particular and in the deep state in general actually did.
In May, the U.S. inflation rate zoomed up 5%, the highest in 13 years.
It might even go higher.
And we're seeing higher fuel prices, higher food prices, higher car prices, construction costs, housing prices, the list goes on.
So inflation isn't just on its way, it's here.
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Now, for people who don't know, Juneteenth is a celebration of the end of slavery.
I guess this is when slavery finally collapsed in the Confederacy.
And the left has been pushing this as a holiday.
What is your take on all this?
Well, like everything else, I think it's just another form of pandering and another form of dividing.
As you know, I'm Hispanic, right?
And we have a Hispanic Heritage Month, which weirdly starts September 15th and goes through October 15th.
So that's not really a month.
That's like half a month here and half a month there.
But anyway, all that to say, it's ridiculous.
I think that if you are Hispanic, celebrate your heritage all year.
You don't need a month.
Yeah, let me spell out. This is what I think is the political agenda behind it.
Because by itself, I have no objection to Juneteenth.
I obviously celebrate the end of slavery and the collapse of the Confederacy.
In fact, very important to point out that the Confederacy was supported by the Democratic Party, initially in the North and the South.
And throughout the war, even the Northern Democrats were trying to do what they could to undermine Lincoln.
I think the political agenda here is this.
They don't want us to celebrate July 4th because July 4th celebrates the founders.
So they're trying to take July 4th and replace it to some degree with this idea of Juneteenth.
I think this is kind of why Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens have gotten a little bit of flack.
You know, the left is like, what are you against the end of slavery?
But they're on to something because what they've noticed is that this is a displacement strategy by the left.
So But the political context is what's so revealing.
Basically, Charlie and Candace are saying, we're still going to celebrate July 4th.
Now, I think what's interesting about this is, and I'd like to know your take on it, is July 4th is what made possible Juneteenth.
Here's what I mean. Abraham Lincoln said that the founders declared our rights.
All men are created equal. So that the enforcement could follow when the circumstances permitted.
So it was really, Juneteenth was a realization of the principle of the Declaration of Independence.
So the left wants to use Juneteenth against the founding, even though it's the founding that made possible Juneteenth.
That's the distortion I think that they're pushing, and that's the thing that we should resist.
Right. So would you be okay with them not resisting July 4th, but adding this new holiday as well?
Yeah, I have no problem with that at all.
Now, Joe Biden, interestingly, in announcing Juneteenth, he said this.
He goes, you know, a great country comes to terms with the painful aspects of its history.
Now, I don't disagree.
But here's the one thing that's missing in the entire Juneteenth controversy.
There's no mention of the Democratic Party.
In other words, the Democratic Party was the anchor of slavery.
There wasn't even that much slavery in the founding compared to what you got in the 19th century.
The massive plantation system in the South was sustained by one political party and opposed by the other political party.
So the fact that the Democrats not only promoted and sustained slavery, but even after the civil war, they opposed the 13th Amendment, freeing the slaves. They opposed the 14th Amendment.
So if you could get some honesty, I mean, notice that all the progressives who never mentioned the word Democrat in this context, they belong to the Democratic Party. So they're hiding their own party's complicity.
If you want to be honest and embrace the painful aspects of your history, the Democratic Party needs to say that as a party, we did this, we apologize for it, We take responsibility for it.
If there are any reparations to pay, we will pay them.
But good luck waiting for that.
Good luck waiting for that to happen.
We've often said it's like the firefighters setting the fire and then coming back and ousting it, right?
This is how they behave.
They cause the problem and then they act like the savior that is trying to solve that problem.
See, if progressives admitted the Democrats did this, they would have to explain, why are you now in a party that has this ugly history?
And by the way, it's not just, quote, history.
The same Democrats are in charge of the inner cities.
They are responsible for the breakdown of the black family.
They're responsible for these violent upsurges of crime that are made possible by their policies.
They're responsible for the terrible public schools.
So the burden falls on them.
And I think that the The whole game that they play with critical race theory is to shift blame around.
They want some four-year-old white kid who's coming into kindergarten, they want to blame that kid instead of blaming themselves and their party and their own ugly history.
Talk about evading responsibility.
Well, you know, they're doing it to divide.
Honey, I've often mentioned this with Hugo Chavez and what he did in Venezuela and how he declared Christopher Columbus Day null and void.
And instead, he made it Indigenous Day.
Why? Because he wants to create division.
This is the only way that these leftist socialist people retain power.
Why? Because they pit one group of people against another.
So this is no surprise to me that the left and the Democrats are doing it here in America.
So to sum up, I think what we'd have to say is that there's nothing wrong in and of itself with Juneteenth.
We're for Juneteenth.
But when you look at the context and you look at the underlying political agenda, you have to realize that it's part of a propaganda campaign not to inform, not to have honest debate, not to take responsibility, but to propagandize and to lie to young people.
And divide. And divide.
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We actually have our two young questioners, but they are joining us live.
Honey, why don't you explain?
Right, so Ari and Caitlin.
Ari, say hi. Hi.
And Caitlin, so people know.
Yes. They are probably, I would say, our youngest listeners to the podcast, and they send in questions periodically, and Dinesh has answered them on air.
So I thought it'd be really cool to, with their mom's permission, meet them.
And so Ari and Caitlin, what...
Tell us a little bit about your background.
Are you homeschooled?
What do you do on a daily basis that you get to listen to the podcast?
Yeah, so thank you for having us on.
But we lived overseas until 2019, so we thought that homeschooling was a really good option over there because we didn't want to go to public school.
And then when we came back to America, we decided that's still a good decision.
So yeah, we are homeschooled and I think that gives us a benefit over some other people who go to public school.
Ari, let me ask you, where did you live abroad, and what were your impressions of that place?
We lived in China.
I don't know. It was just home, so I didn't really compare it to America.
Okay. It wasn't really until we came to the United States that we started really analyzing the culture and comparing it and contrasting it and things like that, so yeah.
Very interesting. Tell us about the podcast.
I typically aim the podcast, you know, at someone who's either in a senior in high school or in college or adults.
And I'm struck not only by the fact that you guys listen regularly, I guess you listen in audio, but the fact that your questions are so good, they're so insightful.
So talk a little bit about how does the podcast fit into your day and when do you listen to it?
Yeah, so since we listen on audio, we can listen while we're outside or while we're doing chores or anything like that, anything that doesn't take a lot of other work from our brain.
So, yeah, I think that works out pretty well and we really enjoy listening.
Awesome. Well, this is a great time.
If you guys have a question either for Debbie or me, why don't each of you go?
Ari, maybe you start first.
If you have a question for either of us, go for it.
Yeah. A while ago, someone asked you if the Second Amendment is basically void since the military has such advanced weapons that if they turned around and attacked us, then we would be defenseless.
And you said you didn't think the military would attack its own citizens.
But isn't that basically what happened in the Civil War?
The military attacked the South?
That's a really good question, just as I expected.
And, well, the situation in the Civil War was very unique.
The southern states that seceded claimed and believed that what they were doing was constitutional.
In fact, they basically said, listen, if we thought that we could never get out of the Union, we would never have joined in the first place.
On the other hand, Lincoln's view was that the nation was formed as a compact or an agreement among the states.
It's kind of like a joint agreement to form a country.
And Lincoln's belief was that when you have a contract, one party cannot unilaterally abrogate it.
One party can't say, okay, I'm out of here, without the other party's consent.
So Lincoln's point was that, now look, there are reasons in which justify secession.
And that is when the government violates the basic rights of citizens.
So let's say, for example, that Lincoln had said, people in the South can't vote.
Or people in the South can't assemble.
Or people in the South don't have free speech.
All the basic rights that are kind of enumerated in the Bill of Rights.
But Lincoln said, tell me, have I done any of those things?
No. So in his first inaugural, Lincoln said basically, look...
You're just mad because I won a free election.
And in fact, the southerners didn't contest that Lincoln won freely.
They accepted that it was a legitimate election.
Lincoln won. And Lincoln's point was, you can't have a democracy where if you lose the election, you want to quit the country.
It's kind of like walking out because your team didn't win.
Lincoln's point was, why don't you try to win next time?
So I think the reason that the Civil War was unleashed is that you had this terrible breakdown in which the southern states decided, we're out of here, and the northern states decided, you don't get to leave unilaterally.
We have to abide by the agreements that made the country in the first place.
Thank you. That was a good answer.
Now it's your turn. Yeah, so we know that socialists in America always point to Scandinavia as the kind of socialism that they want because even statistics show that people in Scandinavia are some of the happiest people on earth.
But we also know that Venezuela and Cuba and places like that are absolutely in shambles and the living conditions are very poor.
So since they both use socialism, what's the difference?
Where's the discrepancy? I thought Debbie would maybe be able to give a little answer there.
So Scandinavia is capitalist in wealth creation and socialist in wealth distribution.
And they also pay a VAT tax, I believe is it 25% VAT tax.
And everyone pays into that.
So you're not pitting one group against another.
Peter is not... What is it?
What do they say? Well, you're not robbing Peter to pay Paul.
But in Venezuela, you are.
And when you literally drive all of the Peters out of the country, you only have Pauls left.
And that's what happened in Venezuela.
People there have absolutely no money.
The government basically took it all.
So now you have a regime that drives the entire economy on their own.
And there is no wealth creation anymore in Venezuela.
There's a really high rate of inflation.
It's about a million percent.
And so people have no money in Venezuela anymore.
And it's very sad, but that is what socialism is.
That is the reality of socialism.
It's interesting if the left wanted to follow the Scandinavian model, the corporate tax rate in Scandinavia is about 20%, which is about the same as here.
Joe Biden, interestingly, wants to raise the American corporate tax rate to 28%, almost 30%.
So that would make us more socialist, if you want to use that term, than Scandinavia, at least in the way that we tax corporations.
So the bottom line of it is Debbie's right.
It would be one thing if we were following the Scandinavian model.
By the way, the Scandinavians are also very homogenous.
They don't take a whole lot of immigrants.
So there are all kinds of ways in which we differ from them.
But we're not following the Scandinavian model.
The Biden leftists are following the Venezuelan model.
And if we don't watch it, we'll end up kind of the way they did.
Thank you. That was very helpful.
Well, girls, it's been a real pleasure.
Thanks for coming on, and thanks to your family for allowing you to come on.
We really appreciate it. Keep listening to the podcast, and most important, keep learning.
Thank you. This has been delightful.
Bye, girls. Bye, guys.
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