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June 25, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:07:26
THE END OF HISTORY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 119
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In the current issue of Harper's Magazine, a leftist Princeton historian calls me the most influential historian of the Trump era.
He's being a little sarcastic.
I'll do a dissection of his article and invite him to a public debate.
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.
The current issue of Harper's Magazine, a literary magazine, has as one of its lead stories, An essay by a Princeton historian.
This is, by the way, not the infamous Kevin Cruz with whom I've dueled in the past, but rather a guy named Matthew Karp.
And the article is called History as End.
It's ultimately a kind of attempt to vindicate progressive history.
And it's a critique of conservative history.
Now, in the article...
The author, Karp, somewhat sarcastically calls me, quote, the leading historian of the Trump era is Pundit Dinesh D'Souza.
And historian, he puts in quote marks kind of to say, well, I'm not a real historian, but nevertheless, I'm the most influential historian on the right.
Now, I don't know if this is even true, but what is true is that my claims about history have created fainting spells on the left.
Carp's own colleague, Kevin Cruz, is kind of an example when I said, really off the top of my head, that in 1860, the year before the Civil War, no Republican owned a slave.
And Cruz, after giving a couple of wrong and dubious examples, withdrew them, and then assembled a coalition of literally 150 historians to try to prove me wrong.
To find, you know, just one, just two, just a few Republicans who owned slaves, and at the end of it, they came up with about ten.
And they thought they declared victory.
Oh, Dinesh, we gotcha! Well, you got me in the sense that you found isolated exceptions of, by and large, slave-owning Democrats in the border states.
Who defected to the Republican side.
Why? Because they didn't want secession.
They didn't want civil war. They realized early on that civil war would probably mean the complete end of slavery.
So they opportunistically moved into the Republican camp.
But the point is this...
Out of 4 million slaves, you guys, with all your scholarship, could find about 10 that were Republicans.
Think of the picture that gives you of which was the party of slavery, where the vast, vast majority of slaves, the slave owners, were Democrats.
And so that really is what emerged from that debate.
Well... Here is Matthew Karp now, and he focuses his fire on the 1776 Commission.
By the way, I was invited by Trump to be on the 1776 Commission.
I didn't actually do it. It was connected in part to the fact that I was focused on the election.
I was also focused on some of the difficulties of traveling under COVID, so I didn't actually do it.
But this guy blasts the 1776 Commission.
And I noticed that when he's writing about conservatives, this Princeton historian, he has no idea what he's talking about.
He uses the most blithely dismissive language.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
He says, first of all, that I make no effort to defend or even contextualize slavery.
Well, really? Does he expect me to defend slavery?
The Confederacy or Jim Crow?
Why would I defend those things?
Those were the legacy of the Democratic Party.
He goes, states' rights play a little part in this historical narrative.
He then goes on to say, my point is, quote, simply that all these racist evils were perpetuated by Democrats.
Now, I do say that, and this is the crux of the matter, because you would think that he would come back with some sort of either acknowledgement, yes it was, or refutation.
But mysteriously, he says nothing about it.
And I think I know why.
See, by and large, these progressives who recognize that it's true that all the racial atrocities they complain about were done by their own party.
So think about it. If they teach this in class, some student is going to say, well, Professor Karp, well, Professor Cruz...
Why then are you a Democrat?
If the Democratic Party's DNA is stained from the beginning with this bigoted history that is a non-stop tale of oppression, at least stretching from the 1820s to the 1950s...
That's an awesome responsibility.
Now, of course, the progressives can say, well, you know, the party switched sides.
But of course, the student can come back and say, be that as it may, whether that's true or not, it was the Democratic Party that actually did all these things, right?
Who was the one who whipped the slaves?
Who's the one that fought the end of slavery?
Who voted against the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments?
Who started the Ku Klux Klan?
Who revived the Ku Klux Klan when the Republicans shut it down?
Who made deals to block anti-lynching laws if it wasn't FDR, the kind of icon of progressivism?
So why aren't these progressives now pulling down FDR statues, calling for the renaming of FDR Drive?
Why aren't they demanding that the Democratic Party, the DNC, officially acknowledge its role in slavery and segregation, publicly apologize for it, which it has never done, agree to pay restitution, if not reparations?
See, they don't want to go down this road.
They're scared of it. So what they want to do ultimately is quickly pass over this, and so they mention it as if it's kind of a canard that the Democratic Party is at the root of this, and then they quickly move on.
So now he goes, left-leaning historians, myself included, have sometimes been tempted to debate this argument, whose particular claims are easily reduced to rubble.
So apparently my claims can be easily reduced to rubble, and so I'm looking forward to, like, he's going to name now three of my claims.
He doesn't mention a single one.
He just goes on with this.
But this is a fool's errand since D'Souza's shtick is immune to facts and logic and frankly indifferent to ideological consistency.
So here you've got a guy who, you know, thinks I don't know anything.
He knows a lot more than me.
Well, we're going to find out very soon, I think, if that's true.
Now, very interestingly, after this literally, you know, Philistine attack on the right, I mean, just laced with stupidity, not a single example, he actually goes on to a rather sophisticated critique of the left, a rather sophisticated critique of the 1619 Project, and he makes a single point that I want to highlight and actually praise.
He makes the point that the 1619 Project spends all its energy trying to prove that slavery and oppression, racial injustice, is built into the DNA of America.
It goes back to the very beginning.
That's the whole point of 1619.
It's kind of from the womb.
But then, says Professor Karp, he says, look, we're historians, and history is really about change.
History is about continuity, things that stay the same, and some things have stayed the same since 1776 or even since 1619, but other things have changed.
And if you don't, if everything came to a standstill, if there was no change, if a country was inflexibly the same as it was from the beginning, you wouldn't need history at all.
So, I think here Professor Karp is kind of making a subtle point that the 1619 Project, far from being history, is a kind of anti-history.
And he goes on to notice, he says things like, Martin Luther King is mentioned only once in this dense, long-winded tract.
He goes in more than 100 pages of print.
He goes, Harriet Tubman, unmentioned.
Sojourner Truth, unmentioned.
Now... Unmentioned by CARP is the fact that these are Republicans.
That's part of the reason they're not mentioning them.
And this is the key point.
And this is, I think, the central fallacy of CARP's article.
If history is a record of change, as well as continuity...
Who is responsible for the change?
Well, once again, the short answer is Republicans.
Who brought the Democratic slave patrols to a halt?
Who shut down the Confederacy?
That was the Republican Party.
This is the great, you may call it, elephant in the living room.
This is the one thing that Karp cannot acknowledge because it's crippling to his whole argument.
And this is why you've got, on the one hand, this rather sophisticated critique of the left, But combined with a kind of blithe ignorance of the right, he cannot grant even an inch, because to grant an inch is to open the door to the fact that his own party,
the party that he's been voting for, his whole side has been championing, is, and I would argue not just in the past, but even now, the I've been the party of bigotry.
And said, oh no, we're not cowards around here.
We can arrange this debate.
And I was like, fantastic.
I went right on the Harper's.
I followed Harper's.
I sent them a message. And I basically said, listen, I'm happy to have a debate on this podcast.
By the way, the podcast is like...
It's live. We don't do any editing of it.
So this is not a case where we're going to doctor what he says.
It's going to be a straight out.
I said, I offer you the whole hour to debate.
Let's find out who the real ignoramus really is.
Let's find out who's actually misrepresenting facts.
And I said, Moreover, if you want to do this in person at Princeton, where this guy has the home team advantage, he has his own indoctrinated students, you know, to robotically cheer, no problem.
As long as the debate can be live-streamed nationally so that people can watch...
So I'm going to see now what Harper's Magazine does.
I think they're going to try to arrange it, and I'm going to see if Matthew Karp is up for it.
If so, we'd have a rare chance of two people on opposite sides to really put their arguments face-to-face and let the public decide.
The New York Times writer, Nicole Hannah-Jones, the kind of lead architect of the 1619 Project, has been offered a contract, a five-year contract, to teach at the Hussman School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina.
But initially they had considered offering her a tenured position, Which they decided not to do.
And Nicole Hannah-Jones is now not only suing, but she's mobilizing all kinds of leftist opposition in the school.
The typical kind of, let's intimidate them into giving me a tenured position.
And so, sure enough, some black faculty and staff are like, UNC, we're going to resign.
We're going to move to other colleges because of the racially intolerant atmosphere.
This is how the left works, guys.
Student body president Lamar Richards is discouraging potential students of college Well, first of all, she's not a historian.
She's not a professor. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative writer.
She's won a couple of awards.
The MacArthur Genius Grant, which no longer is given to anybody who could recognizably call the genius.
A Peabody Award and a George Polk Award.
But the bottom line of it is that this is a woman who traffics, by and large, in ignorance and lies.
So, ignorance.
You might remember that going back late last year I had shown some genealogy charts pointing out that Kamala Harris was descended from a slave ancestor, Hamilton Brown, one of the largest slave owners in Jamaica.
So Nicole Hannah-Jones joined by a historian named Kevin Levin. They were like, oh Dinesh, you're Don't you realize that the reason for this kind of connection is because of rape on the plantation?
So they jumped to the assumption.
Based upon their own kind of, I'd call it, fragmentary historical knowledge.
Yeah, there was rape on the plantation, therefore that's obviously where Kamala Harris' lineage came from.
Except, it's not true.
All you have to do is look at the genealogical charts, look at the testimony of Kamala Harris' own dad, who was, by the way, an economics professor at Stanford, where he points out that his grandmother, a free woman of color...
Married into this slave-owner family and in that sense became part of that lineage.
So no, rape on the plantation had nothing to do with it.
But here's the key point. Nicole Hannah-Jones slyly deletes her tweet.
She doesn't make any mention of it.
No apology. No, Dinesh was right.
Now the other guy, Kevin Levin, to his credit, at least goes, you know what, I kind of wronged Dinesh.
I jumped to conclusions and so I acknowledge my mistake.
A kind of a rare moment of honesty from a progressive...
But not from Nicole Hannah-Jones.
Now, one of the central claims of the 1619 Project, and I alluded to this in the last segment, is the idea that America is stained from the beginning with the sin of oppression, and particularly with the sin of slavery.
One of the central claims of the 1619 Project is basically, I'm going to quote it, The American founding itself, 1776, was an attempt to protect slavery.
Now, let's think about this for a moment.
In order to prove a claim like this, you'd have to show kind of two things.
One is that the British wanted to end slavery in America.
But the Americans wanted to keep it.
And so the colonists go, no, we're not going to let you end slavery.
We're going to fight to keep this institution that gives us access to free labor.
Now, none of this even happens, nor does Nicole Hannah-Jones bother to offer any proof of it.
She does point out that, you know, in the early 19th century, the British had an anti-slavery movement, which ended slavery.
There were not very many slaves in Britain, but there was an international slave trade, and Britain played a role in ending that.
The key point is, that's not what the American Revolution was about at all.
All you have to do is look at the stated causes of the revolution, which was basically, the American founders thought they were being enslaved by the British.
In fact, they thought that things like the Stamp Act and the Declaratory Act...
So here's the Declaratory Act.
Here's what it says.
It basically says that the British Crown and the Parliament have, quote, the right to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, in all cases whatsoever.
So basically, you're our slaves.
And the American founders fought against that form of what they perceived to be servitude.
Now... Let's turn to the issue of slavery.
And here's a remarkable statement by Thomas Jefferson.
This is from Jefferson's Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, shortly before the Declaration of Independence.
A very influential document in American history.
And here's Jefferson. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.
Think about this for a moment. Here's Jefferson, a Virginian, a planter, and a slave owner, saying, We, the colonies, have long wanted to get rid of slavery.
But you, the British, have introduced slavery in America and sustained the institution here.
So this is Jefferson's point of view.
By the way, Abraham Lincoln took note of this remark by Jefferson.
It was very important to Lincoln's own understanding of the founding.
I'm continuing now with Jefferson.
He says, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.
And then talking about slavery, the Almighty has no attribute, no feature, which can take side with us in such a contest.
So the point to make is that even the Southerners in America at the time of the founding had strong anti-slavery sentiments.
By the way, this was also true of Washington.
It was also true of Madison.
There were about a hundred anti-slavery societies in the South around the time of the American founding.
The point is that the kind of positive, good defense of slavery came later, came in the 19th century came with the Democratic Party.
This fact is seriously downplayed, if mentioned at all, in the 1619 Project.
Why? Because basically the 1619 Project is an effort to lift the blame off the Democratic Party and push it onto the American founders.
So America then bears the stain or the scarlet letter We're good to go.
To beat students in school.
To try to exploit the ignorance of young people who maybe don't know better, haven't read the original documents, don't know very much about...
Don't know very much about Jefferson's summary view of the rights of British America.
Why? Because it's often not assigned.
So, what we're talking about here is not UNC denying a position to a trusted, reliable, balanced, fair-minded scholar, but rather what you have is a maniacal ideologue, an apostle not of tolerance but of intolerance, And in denying her tenure, UNC is at least protecting their own students and their freedom of inquiry and their ability to learn.
So guys, I really want to thank you.
You're doing a fantastic job supporting Mike Lindell and particularly with this Dinesh book and movie deal.
We want to close out strong.
The program ends on July 4th.
Debbie and I are packing away the books and getting them addressed and getting them out the door.
Debbie goes, you should see our dining room.
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Call 800-876-0227 or go to mypillow.com and use promo code DINESH.
Now, what else do you have to do to get the books and movies?
Well, nothing. I'll get the info from the MyPillow guys.
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Don't forget to use promo code Dinesh.
Debbie and I are really happy to welcome Eva Guzman to the podcast.
Now, Eva was for 12 years on the Texas Supreme Court.
She was appointed by Governor Perry, but she stepped down, and she is running for Texas Attorney General.
I'd like to play a short clip from her campaign, and here it is.
Listen. This is a story about my Texas.
I'm Eva Guzman. I was a Texas judge for 22 years, more than half of them on the Texas Supreme Court.
But my story isn't just about this place.
It's about this place where my siblings and I went to college.
Our mom was here too.
Not here, but here.
Working hard, doing what she could to help our family of nine get ahead.
It's an amazing story, and I wanted Debbie to join me for this.
You've actually known Eva, and why don't you take it from here and introduce her in maybe a little more personal way, and then let's have a conversation.
Eva, welcome to the show, my friend.
How are you? I'm doing terrific.
Thank you for having me. It's so good to be here, Debbie and Dinesh.
Thank you so much for playing your ad campaign.
Really talks about your roots and your family.
I want you to talk a little bit more about that and your upbringing and the fact that you are very conservative and your conservative upbringing and why that's important when we vote.
Well, I think it's...
Thank you for the opportunity to talk about something that's deeply personal to me and that's legal immigration.
Legal immigration allows...
Immigrants to live the American dream.
Illegal immigration leads to the devastation that we see at the border.
It impacts American lives.
And when you think about the cost of that, you can understand why legal immigration is really the foundation of American success stories.
So I grew up in Houston's East End, and I was the middle of seven children, and my parents were legal immigrants.
My dad came. Then my mother joined him after she obtained her green card.
And my dad was a welder, smartest man I'd ever met in my life still.
But they had less than six grade educations.
But they understood one thing.
And that's that in America, if you're willing to work hard, if you are a person of faith, if you love this country, and you get an education, anything can happen.
So we did. All seven of their children went to college and have college degrees.
Eva, talk for a moment about why you've laid out a story which almost seems like the story of the Republican Party.
I mean, if I talk about my own background as an immigrant, someone who came to America at the age of 17, I would almost echo the exact words that you just used.
And so this is a multiracial story of people coming to America, starting at the bottom of the ladder, making their way up.
And yet, by and large, not just Hispanics, but Mexican Americans in particular, have been strongly wedded to the Democratic Party, which certainly seems to have a very different narrative about getting ahead.
Their idea is that you get ahead through government assistance, that people of color in particular can't make it in America.
Systematic racism keeps you down.
Has your experience, the way you view it, been a refutation of that?
Talk about Hispanic values and conservative values.
Sure. You know, growing up, of course, we honored our Hispanic heritage.
You know, we had traditional meals and the tortillas and the frijoles at every meal that we wanted to, but we lived as Americans.
We embraced American ideals and American exceptionalism.
So if I go back to my home growing up in Houston's East End and that two-bedroom home where nine of us lived, then my dad added on, then there were more bedrooms.
But we had God-honoring values, things like hard work.
I saw my dad get up at five every day.
To go to that welding job and never complained.
He was happy. Happy to have a job.
Happy to go to work. We saw accountability.
If we didn't do well in school, Dad let us know.
Devotion to family.
Devotion to God. And an allegiance to our country.
The only flag that was ever flown in our home was the American flag.
And along with those values went a commitment to serve others.
When my dad passed away, there were people that showed up at his funeral and they said, you all don't know this, but your dad was there when we were hungry, when we needed it.
So we are a family committed to service.
Eva, you chose the profession of the law and now you're running for attorney general.
Can you say a word about why the law is important to you and important in society?
And what is it about the...
Tell us a little bit about the job that you're running for.
Well, listen, I've been a judge for 22 years.
I was a judge on the trial court, then on the intermediate appellate court, and then on the Texas Supreme Court, Texas's highest court.
And when Governor Perry appointed me to the Texas Supreme Court, he described me as a strict constructionist, a principal conservative judge.
And what I know from that role is that judges...
Good judges don't legislate from the bench.
And our justice system depends on honest, capable judges who will uphold the rule of law, the Attorney General's job.
Look, Texans are hiring an Attorney General.
They need a warrior.
They need someone who has the experience, the know-how, and the integrity that Texans deserve.
And they'll find that in me.
I've served, as I said, in the judiciary, and I understand the issues that impact our families, our property, and importantly, our freedoms.
I know how to protect and defend our Constitution, and Texans deserve someone that will show up and stand up and speak up for our constitutional values, and someone that can devote themselves full-time to push against government overreach.
To stand up for the Second Amendment.
I'm married to a law enforcement officer, Houston Police.
He's retired now, but he served for 37 years.
So I understand what it's like.
I know the heart of our police officers, and I know how important it is to stand up for them and to defend them.
I know how important it is to stand up for the unborn.
And that's what I will do as Attorney General.
You have to be a lawyer to be an Attorney General.
If you've never practiced law, I wouldn't hire a lawyer who'd never practiced law, should Texas?
When we come back, we want to dive into some of the big issues that are roiling not just Texas, but the country, and get Eva Guzman's take on them.
Nothing illustrates the invidious schemes of the left more than the issue of court packing.
It's actually 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.
And now Joe Biden and America's socialist radicals want to pack our Supreme Court with four new leftist justices.
Now, court packing isn't some policy scheme to improve the courts.
It's really a coup.
A coup to take away your constitutional freedoms and turn America into a socialist country.
SupremeCoup.com to serve as a one-stop shop in the fight against court packing and help patriots like you learn the truth about what is happening in our courts.
More importantly, there's a Take Action button that you can click to do your part to stop the Supreme Court If you want to defend our God-given freedoms and stop the left's court-packing 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.
We're back with Eva Guzman, who has served on the Texas Supreme Court, is running for Attorney General.
And why don't you take it from here?
So, I really loved in the last segment when you talked about the difference between legal immigration and illegal immigration.
And both of us are Latina.
We both talk about how important it is to be a legal immigrant.
And we get hit hard on it because people say, well, how could you be that way?
It's your own people.
How can you talk about illegals that way?
But I want you to talk about a little bit more about the difference between legal immigration and illegal immigration and why it's important to advocate for legal immigration.
So I'll start here.
My entire career, over 30 years as a lawyer, I took an oath to uphold the Constitution.
First of all, legal immigration honors our American ideal, the rule of law, the Constitution.
And that's what I took an oath to do.
But then you think about the human cost.
Who's profiting from illegal immigration?
It's not benefiting the people coming over.
It's benefiting the cartels, the people that are bringing them to the border.
And you take the experiences of legal immigrants and When you don't have to hide in the shadows, and when you pay your taxes, and when you're honoring the American ideal in our justice system and the Constitution, and the outcomes are so different.
So no one benefits from illegal immigration.
Think about human trafficking.
We're celebrating the emancipation Human trafficking victims are enslaved, and as long as we allow illegal immigration, they will continue to be victims of the human trafficking trade.
That is not right, good for anyone.
The immigrant or the people on this side of the border suffering the consequences of that illegal immigration.
What would you tell Vice President Kamala Harris right now that she's visiting El Paso, and that is her idea of visiting the border for all of these months that she's been in office, and she's the czar of immigration, apparently, or of the border issue.
And they call it a border issue.
They don't like to call it a border crisis, but it is a crisis.
What would you tell her right now?
I would tell her, come down to South Texas.
Visit the border. Uphold the Constitution.
Secure our borders. You took an oath to do that.
Uphold the Constitution.
What do you think, Governor Abbott, has talked about the fact that, hey, if the federal government doesn't enforce the law, Texas will.
By and large, immigration laws tend to be national laws or federal laws.
Let's just assume that the Biden people like the porous border, that not only the cartels benefit, but they benefit politically from this phenomenon.
Are there things that you could do as Attorney General of Texas?
To work against the Biden attempt to leave the border effectively open?
Leaders lead.
Governor Abbott is leading.
And as Attorney General, I will lead.
On day one, if I need to sue the Biden administration, I'm ready to do that.
I've been in the courtroom for over 12, 20 years, really, as an appellate judge.
I've decided whether the cases the Attorney General files will Are legally correct or not.
That's been my job for 22 years.
I will show up at the Attorney General's office on day one, ready to put my experience and my know-how to work for Texans.
And I won't have distractions, my own legal problems.
I will be ready to fight for Texas.
And that includes fighting to secure that border.
It seems we're facing, even at the local level, threats that are coming to us in new ways.
By and large, the First Amendment, as you know, is a restriction on Congress.
Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech or of the press.
Well, it turns out that the most common form of restriction, suppression, censorship comes not from Congress directly, but comes from these digital platforms that now essentially control the information highway.
So we have a sort of public square, which is a necessary public square if you want to participate in democratic debate.
And yet, it is controlled at these choke points by literally five or six people and their teams, Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey at Twitter.
Now, I know that Florida has tried to pass some laws that attack this problem of digital censorship.
What do you think can be done either at the legislative level or as Attorney General to sort of say, wait a minute, if Texans are going to have meaningful free speech rights...
They can't exercise them when every time they step onto the information highway, somebody else gets to say what they get to think or express.
I've spent a lifetime upholding our First Amendment.
As Attorney General, I'll do that.
And I think there are several solutions.
We as Americans need to speak up, and we need to let our voices be heard on this issue.
Our legislatures need to speak up.
We need to rein in The five or six that are controlling how Americans receive information about issues that impact their livelihoods, their children, their children's futures, our country, our republic.
As Attorney General, I'm ready to do that.
But I also think don't be afraid as citizens to show up in community groups, you know, to speak up at the PTA, to speak up at your civic groups, Bring awareness to the issue.
There's nothing like what we can do at the ballot box.
As Attorney General, I will fight for you, but join me in this fight by speaking up every chance you get.
You can't do it from home.
We need to not be silenced as conservatives, and we need to not be afraid to show up and speak up and stand up for our values.
I think it's happening all over the country with all of these parent groups showing up at school board meetings and demanding that they erase critical race and indoctrination from the classrooms.
Because now that the parents are aware of what their children are doing, they're not going to just sit back and be the typical conservative that just goes and votes and And then thinks, oh, the country's fine.
I'm not going to do anything about it.
They never rest.
We do. And let me say something about that and how important it is that we get involved in electing judges that will interpret the Constitution with respect to the original meaning.
You know, judges who aren't creating rights out of whole cloth and judges that won't deprive people of rights Thank you so much for joining us.
We wish you the best and it's really been a pleasure having you on the podcast.
This has been so much fun.
Thank you. It's so good to see you again.
Thank you. Same.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm titling this segment, What the FBI Has Learned from Jussie Smollett.
Now, I want to convey sort of an insight that I had in putting...
Two different themes in this podcast together.
So just recently I had Darren Beattie from Revolver talking about how the FBI orchestrates these terror operations.
They instigate them, they provide the means for them, and then they quote, And of course, partly you can see the FBI trying to make itself into the good guy.
Look how great we are.
We foiled the plot that we ourselves created.
But you notice that they also do this to promote a narrative.
And in the case of January 6th, if the FBI did in fact instigate January 6th, the narrative is, look, white supremacists.
White supremacists are, that's the most, that's the gravest danger faced by the country.
This is what Christopher Wray the FBI director obtusely testified.
It's been echoed by Merrick Garland and others.
Now So there you have one thing.
Now I want to turn to what seems to be a completely different thing, and I've been talking about racial hoaxes on various high schools and campuses, and of course the prototypical hoax was the Jussie Smollett hoax.
But let's think about those hoaxes for a moment, because what are those hoaxes really doing?
Well, what the hoaxes are really doing is trying to foster a false narrative.
They're trying to prove a point When there is no evidence for it.
So Jussie Smollett believes, oh, these MAGA types are roaming America, causing havoc, going after people who are black and gay, beating them up.
But he can't find anyone who's doing that.
There are no actual MAGA people doing that.
So he goes, you know what? Let me pay two Nigerian guys to do it to me, and then I'll go to the press, and I'll kind of show the country what I believe is true, even though I can't find any evidence that it's true, so let me fake the evidence, let me create the evidence, let me, you may say, incite the incident, and then, quote, solve it, because solve it in the sense of, here we go, I've identified the perpetrators by eyewitness testimony.
I saw them, two white guys, you know, in the middle of night, 4 a.m.
in the morning. Shouting Trump slogans!
So what you see here is that the Jussie Smollett operation and the FBI operation, when you think about it, are the same operation.
In both cases, what's going on...
Is this an effort to manufacture evidence and create a narrative?
It's a false narrative. Let's think about this for a minute.
I don't have any problem, I don't think anyone does, with the FBI genuinely infiltrating terror plots.
Let's say the FBI found out there's a plot going on.
Okay, get your people into it, get your informants or get your operatives to penetrate the plot, observe the plot, record the plot, then right before the plot occurs, or maybe even in the process of having it appear, have the FBI show up, bust the plot, or prevent the plot from being carried out and hold accountable the perpetrators.
That is completely different from a different situation, which I want to describe now.
And the key question about January 6th is, was January 6th more like this second case than the first?
Here's the second case.
The FBI decides, let's pose as white supremacists.
There may not actually be any white supremacists at the January 6th, but we will be the white supremacists.
We'll show up. Let's organize the scheme.
Let's plant the idea, hey guys, let's take the Capitol.
And then when some of the guys go, well, I don't know how we're going to do that.
It's well heavily guarded.
No one can just walk into the Capitol.
You basically say, well, here's how we do it.
Here's how we can get around it.
You motivate the people to do this.
You tell them that you're right there.
You're going to be helping them. You're going to supply them with the things that they lack.
And then... In cooperating with them, you bust the scheme that you created.
You establish the false narrative that wouldn't otherwise have been established.
That's the key point. The FBI seems to have learned how to pull off these framing tactics and these lies.
Going back to the Bush era, they did it to some of the radical Muslims.
And many of us, myself included, at that time paid no notice.
Why? Because we assumed that our guys with the sunglasses were the good guys.
And then other guys named Abdullah and Abbas and Muhammad must be the bad guys.
And now we find out that we were actually wrong.
I mean, those guys might have had radical views, but they were kind of do-nothing losers.
The FBI would put them up to it, supply them with the bombs, help them make bombs, and then bust them, solving problems of the FBI itself, in a sense, instigated.
The key question here is that they wouldn't probably have done those things had it not been for the FBI that put them up to it.
So the FBI I'm coming to the view now is, from top to bottom, a Jussie Smollett operation.
It's kind of dismaying at a certain level that the top police agency in a free society or largely free society or is still perhaps free society is so thoroughly corrupted that you cannot trust it to do anything.
Our confidence in this agency literally needs to be at the point of zero.
Believe nothing that they say.
It's kind of the same as with the media.
Don't believe anything they say even if it's true.
Why?
Because there are so many lies intermixed with the truth that it's going to be too much trouble for you to disentangle the one from the other.
When you're dealing with known liars, treat them as such.
They're all a bunch of Jussie Smolletts.
Thanks for watching.
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The decision by a court to suspend Rudy Giuliani's law license in New York, it's a temporary suspension but nevertheless really shows the ruthlessness of the left.
I mean, think about it. This is a guy who was America's mayor.
This is a guy who was a hero of 9-11.
This is a guy who was the chief Law enforcement officer of New York.
And they're treating him like a common criminal.
They're going after him.
There's a criminal investigation underway.
They raided his home.
Now they have pulled his license.
Trump is outraged.
He calls Giuliani the Elliot Ness of his generation, and he says it's nothing but a witch hunt.
The idea of pulling someone's license is a very serious offense.
You might remember the two Brooklyn attorneys, I think?
Weren't pulled. They can still practice law in New York.
So apparently what Giuliani has done is worse than these guys.
So the question is, what is it that Giuliani has done?
Well, it turns out their whole case is that he has been lying about the 2020 election.
And in lying, he poses, quote, a kind of danger to society because his lies have caused incitement to violence.
And of course, this comes back again to the invocation of January 6th.
Now, when I've actually printed out the court's full analysis of this, I was looking to see, well, let's kind of do an inventory of these lies.
And it turns out that we're dealing here not with lies, but highly disputed statements, where one side claims this and another side claims that.
Let's look at an example.
Respondent, this is the Giuliani team, stated to the public...
That more than 2,500 felons voted illegally in Georgia.
And the court decides that the Secretary of State, this is Raffensperger, investigated the claim and, quote, identified a universe of 74 potential felony voters.
And then the court says, even if all 74 identified persons actually voted illegally, the number is nowhere near the 2,500.
So the bottom line of it is the court doesn't know what the actual number is.
They're just relying on the word of the Secretary of State, who himself is under scrutiny for having nefarious motives, for being a kind of rhino and anti-Trump guy.
So the bottom line of it is you have Giuliani's claim, you have a counterclaim, and the court is merely, this is sort of like the Facebook fact checkers, declaring something to be false when all they mean is another guy said it's false, or another guy has a different count.
Then they claim, here's another example, respondent Giuliani made, quote, false and misleading statements that illegal aliens voted in Arizona.
And then the court says, not that illegal aliens didn't vote, there's no way they could possibly know that, but they say this, no statewide check on undocumented citizens has been performed.
In other words, they don't know if illegal aliens voted.
And so they're claiming that since they don't know, and presumably no one knows how many illegal aliens voted, Giuliani's suggestion that illegal aliens voted is, quote, false.
It's not false. It's only false if no illegal aliens voted.
So what you have here again...
He, quote, Undeterred by the lack of any empirical evidence.
Giuliani is simply noting that there are a large number of illegal aliens in Arizona, and it would hardly be surprising if a lot of them voted.
And this is why we need audits.
And this is, I think, where we get to the heart of the matter.
What the left is trying to do, and this is the message of the suspension of Giuliani's licenses, they want to declare a question closed.
That is not closed at all.
I'm doing the Biden whisper.
It's not closed!
Witness the Maricopa audit.
Witness an emerging audit in Fulton County in Georgia.
So what's happening is that people are wisening up in some of these places.
They're going beyond the kind of perfunctory audits where you just recount the ballots without checking any ballots.
They're now beginning to look a little more closely.
And this is what is terrifying the left.
So what they're trying to do by going after Giuliani...
It's their usual, brutal intimidation tactic.
They want to send a message, not just to Giuliani, but to everyone, to all the Trump people out there, that we will go after you, we'll destroy your career, we'll ruin you, see if we can do it to Giuliani, we can do it to anyone.
This is a time where our side needs to have courage, have confidence, fight creatively, not be intimidated by all this nonsense.
I certainly am not.
Proceed with the audits.
Proceed with the voter integrity laws.
And let's see where the real facts take us.
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I want to do a couple of segments now about the philosophy of stoicism.
I was asked about it yesterday on the podcast and I gave an abbreviated sort of introduction to stoicism.
But I want to say more about it because I think it's actually a very interesting philosophy that is quite practical at a time when our culture seems to have gone in the opposite direction.
Our culture is all about passion and follow your passion and have strong feelings and parade your feelings and put them out there and how do you feel?
And Stoicism is about the rational control of passion.
Now, it's not the absence of passion.
We sometimes misunderstand stoicism as the stiff upper lip, a guy who has no feelings.
No. Very often, it is a mechanism for controlling, regulating, and properly expressing your feelings so that they are appropriate to the occasion.
Debbie sometimes calls me a stoic.
She goes, you're a stoic.
And I say, well, what do you mean?
And she goes, well, you never complain.
And, well, that's sort of true.
I mean, by and large, I try not to complain.
If I have a headache or I have a toothache, I won't say anything.
Not because I'm not feeling the pain, but because I want to exercise a certain kind of self-control.
I can manage the pain.
I'll certainly take the steps to do something about it.
I'll make an appointment to go see the dentist.
But I feel, why trouble other people with something that I can cope with, I can deal with?
I guess I would say I take a certain pride in not complaining about small things.
Now, stoicism, to that degree, was helpful to me in the confinement center.
Why? Because in a sense, I was able to, and I mentioned this yesterday, detach myself a little bit intellectually from that environment.
Obviously, I knew I'm in the environment.
I knew there were certain elements of risk.
Perhaps even danger.
Quite frankly, in the confinement center, I was a little more worried about the government planting drugs in my locker than I was about any of my so-called fellow convicts.
But nevertheless, there was an element I was concerned about all that, but at the same time, I was able to live, you might say, inside my mind and also observe.
Treat the confinement center as a kind of stage for anthropological observation.
My book, which came out of all that, called Stealing America, talks about this in some detail.
Now, back to stoicism, or zooming into stoicism.
The word itself has nothing to do with...
With the Stoic philosophy, in fact, it actually means a kind of open porch.
So the Stoics would gather together and discuss their ideas in a kind of open porch area and the porch itself is called the Stoa and that's where we get the name Stoic.
Some of the famous Stoics of the ancient world, Stoicism by the way was the most influential philosophy of the ancient world by which I mean the world of ancient Greece and Rome. As a school it was far more influential than even the Socratic philosophy although the Stoics were influenced by the Socratic philosophy.
Plato's school, Aristotle's school, they didn't last that far beyond Plato and Aristotle.
There was a kind of Neoplatonism that developed later, but the Stoics were the commanding school, you might say, and important figures.
The Roman writer Seneca was a Stoic.
The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic.
And his famous work called Meditations is an expression of the Stoic philosophy.
Now, it's interesting to know that in the Roman era, in classical antiquity, philosophy did the work that today is largely done by religion.
Today, we think of religion, the Bible, for example, as an important source, if not the primary source, of morals.
That's where we learn the Ten Commandments, do this, don't do that.
The Bible teaches us how to live.
But interestingly, in Greek and Roman philosophy, the gods didn't do that.
The gods, you made sacrifices to them, and you had certain rites that you followed, and you consulted the oracle to try to get wisdom about what might happen in the future.
But Roman and Greek religion said nothing.
Weirdly enough, about morality.
That was the job of philosophy.
And so, Stoicism, in that sense, should be understood as an ethical philosophy.
But an ethical philosophy that says what?
To what end? What is it trying to convey?
Now, yesterday I mentioned the person who is probably most famously associated with Stoicism, which is the former slave Epictetus, later freed and then formed his own school, And I want to begin by talking about two examples from Epictetus' work where he's describing what Stoicism is.
And I want to ask what we today can kind of learn from this.
So the first thing he says, he's talking about another Stoic named Agrippinus.
And he says Agrippinus was told, this is a kind of a, he was an influential figure in Rome, and he was told that Good luck, Agrippinus.
You are being tried for crimes in the Senate.
And how did Agrippinus respond?
Agrippinus said, It's 11 in the morning, and this is the hour in which I take my bath and exercise.
So let us now go off to do those things.
Amazingly, Agripenis seems unruffled that he's being tried in the Senate.
He thinks it's really important for him to follow his schedule and take his bath and do his exercise.
Then he comes back and he asks, how did it go?
How did this hearing in the Senate go?
And he said, have I been condemned to death or to exile?
And he's told, to exile.
And then Agripenis goes, and my estate, what about that?
Has it been confiscated?
And they said, no, they haven't confiscated your estate.
So AgriPenis goes, oh, well, in that case, let us go to my villa in Acrecia and let's have lunch there.
So AgriPenis responds as if...
Well, that's what they decided.
Let's come back here to Epictetus' key point.
Control your own mind.
You do not control external circumstances.
That's for other people to decide.
You do control the way that you respond to them.
And basically, Agripenis' view is, I can't control what they've decided.
By the way, the question of Agripenis' guilt or innocence should be set to the side.
We don't know. But here's Agripenis concluding this discussion.
He goes... Now, to some degree, if you read this today, you're like, this is ridiculous.
This is like, in today's culture, this would almost seem like a subject for comedy.
But no, I think what Epictetus is trying to say is that this kind of mental detachment can be very instructive and sometimes in a very difficult situation.
I'm going to give another brief example, which is a little shocking.
Epictetus says, basically, don't become permanently attached to things.
And he mentions, like a water jug or a crystal cup.
And we're likely to agree.
I don't be too attached to these things.
But then he says this.
He goes, if you kiss your child or brother, you must remind yourself that you love a mortal, and nothing you love is your very own.
It is given to you for the moment, not forever or inseparably, but like a fig or a bunch of grapes.
And then this.
So if you long for your son or your friend, when it is not given to you to have him, know that you are longing for a fig in the wintertime.
Wow.
Now many people might misinterpret this and go, Epictetus, you're so insensitive.
You're basically saying that we should treat our dearest loved ones kind of like a water jug or a crystal cup.
But this is actually not what Epictetus is saying.
He's actually describing a harsh truth in life, which is to say that...
We don't control the destiny of other people.
Horrible things can happen in the world.
Remember, first of all, Epictetus is writing at a time when people frequently lost a son or a daughter.
Even the Emperor Marcus Aurelius lost the majority of his children.
So what he's saying is that this kind of loss is a part of life.
And so, rather than simply treat this loss as something irreparable, value the time that you have with these people now.
That's really the message of the Stoicism, is recognize the fragility, the impermanence of life, and having recognized that as one of life's undeniable truths, adapt your mind to that situation and appreciate the things you have, Because you won't always have them.
You know, I have such an eerie feeling when I think about my movie, Trump Card, and how prophetic it has proved to be.
The movie is based on my book, United States of Socialism, and isn't that kind of where we're headed?
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Here's a short clip from the movie.
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He has become incredibly soft in his criticism of China.
The growth of China is overwhelmingly in our interest.
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I'm continuing my discussion of Stoicism, and I just have a few more things I want to say about it.
First of all, it's really interesting that Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, and a great Roman emperor, was highly influenced by Epictetus.
So think about it. A slave has this powerful intellectual influence, philosophical influence, on one of the greatest emperors of Rome.
And by the way, if you've seen the movie Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius is kind of the hero, or at least the sort of inspiration behind that movie.
Now, Marcus Aurelius wrote a famous book, which is called Meditations.
And interestingly, the book, its original title wasn't Meditations at all.
It was to himself.
So here you have kind of a stoic thing to do.
Marcus Aurelius, and this is after his emperorship.
Of course, in Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius was killed by his wayward son, Commodus.
But in reality, Marcus Aurelius wasn't killed that way.
And he wrote these essays or letters, if you will, to himself.
He had no intention of them.
And so they represent an interior voice.
And here you get a little different sense of Stoicism.
I would call it a more monastic Stoicism and one that influenced the Christian monastics.
Some people credit Stoicism, this idea of detaching your mind from the world, as being the insight that led Christians, the early Christians, to form monasteries.
Because the idea was that if the mind can be detached from the world, why not find a sort of venue of detachment where you can spend your time in contemplation and prayer?
Now here's Marcus Aurelius from the Meditations.
Men seek for seclusion in the wilderness...
By the seashore, that's Debbie, or in the mountains.
And then he says, but such fancies are wholly unworthy of a philosopher since at any moment you choose, you can retire within yourself.
Marcus Aurelius is saying that once you cultivate the stoic habit of mind, not don't go to the seashore, not don't go to the mountains, but you don't need to.
You actually can have that sense of inner calm, of detachment, wherever you are.
And I think this is a very powerful example.
We got on this road by someone asking, how do people like Admiral James Stockdale endure suffering?
And how can the Stoic philosophy provide any consolation, if not inspiration?
Well, here's the answer right here.
Finally, I want to close with Marcus Aurelius on the issue of fame, which is unimportant to him.
And here's why. He goes, the man whose heart is palpitating for fame after death.
He's talking about, I'll be remembered.
People will know my name.
I'll be recorded in history.
And Marcus Aurelius is trying to say, who cares?
Here's why. He goes, the man whose heart is palpitating for fame does not reflect that out of all those who remember him, everyone himself will soon be dead also.
Remember, he's writing also at a time when the culture by and large is oral.
Everyone who remembers you will also be dead.
And he goes, and so the final spark of memory becomes quenched.
And he goes, furthermore, even supposing that those who remember you were never to die at all, Nor are there memories to die either.
Or let's say that, let's suppose that your book, Marcus Aurelius' own book, is read now, so he's remembered now, 2,000 years later.
And yet, says Marcus Aurelius, quote, what is that to you?
Clearly in your grave, nothing.
So, so what if all these people down in posterity, I'm the greatest, this guy was fantastic, and Marcus Aurelius goes, you're not around to enjoy those accolades.
You're six feet under, and ultimately you will disintegrate.
So, the conclusion, and it's important, you are making an inopportune rejection of what nature has given you today, if all your mind is set on what men will say about you tomorrow.
So, this is stoicism in a nutshell.
Not a philosophy that...
is invulnerable to criticism, but one that today I think can provide a powerful counter-check to the kind of absurd emotionalism that has now become characteristic of at least our public culture.
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