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June 28, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:02:27
THE WOKE GENERAL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 120
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Time Text
The ignorance of a woke general.
Yes, I'm talking about General Milley.
And the Trump bar fallout.
Finally, is there empirical confirmation for stoicism?
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'm experiencing some brown rage against General Mark Milley.
This was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Of course, it's not rage against him per se.
It's rage against this project being led by him and others, including the Defense Secretary Austin, to kind of remake the military, to make the military woke, to remove from the military people that are seen to have, quote, extremist views.
And recently, General Milley was paraded before Congress to make his case for why he is leading Listen. And I want to understand white rage.
And I'm white. And I want to understand it.
So what is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America?
What caused that? I want to find that out.
I want to maintain an open mind here, and I do want to analyze it.
It's important that we understand that, because our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and guardians, they come from the American people.
So it is important that the leaders, now and in the future, do understand it.
I've read Mao Zedong.
I've read Karl Marx.
I've read Lenin.
That doesn't make me a communist.
So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?
And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our non-commissioned officers, of being, quote, woke or something else, because we're studying some theories that are out there.
That was started at Harvard Law School years ago, and it proposed that there were laws in the United States Antebellum laws prior to the Civil War that led to a power differential with African Americans that were three-quarters of a human being when this country was formed.
No, I wanted to play kind of a longish segment here because I wanted you to get the full flavor of this guy.
And on the surface, it's, you know, a voice of authority and reasonableness.
A guy, his whole chest plastered with medals.
He's got the uniform on.
What's wrong with understanding this?
And I want to understand that myself.
You kind of have to, first of all, demystify the uniform.
By the way, we see this uniform tactic.
Also with the health community, you notice that Fauci, whenever he shows up, is always wearing his lab coat.
So the idea here is don't question me.
You know, I am literally an apostle of science.
And similarly, this guy here is, you know, I am a decorated general.
And so I'm speaking with moral authority.
It's only when you listen to what the guy says that you realize what rank nonsense he's speaking.
You know, white rage.
I really want to understand it.
I'm white. So, first of all, he's distancing himself.
I'm white, but I'm obviously one of those superior people.
I don't experience white rage, but we've got to understand the white rage that led to the overthrow, the attempted overthrow of the Constitution.
Wait. January 6th had nothing to do with white rage.
It had nothing to do with overthrowing the Constitution.
You had a bunch of people who were frustrated, exasperated, and couldn't believe that there was no audit of the election count, went to Washington to demand...
An accurate count.
That's what that was about.
Then he turns to history.
And by the way, this guy is a graduate of Princeton.
He's got a good education. And he goes, you know, at the founding of the country, there was the three-fourths clause that declared, you know, African Americans to be worth only three-fourths of a human being.
First of all, you dummy, it's not the three-fourths clause, it's the three-fifths clause.
Every educated person knows this.
Did you really go to Princeton, General Milley?
Fess up. I don't believe you did.
And if you did, it's a horrible reflection on Princeton, unless you, of course, were the very bottom of your class, which is also not that hard to believe.
Now, the Three-Fifths Clause emerged as a debate between the North and the South, not over the intrinsic war, the blacks or anyone else, but over political representation.
And interestingly, the North wanted blacks to count for one.
No, I'm sorry. The North wanted blacks to count for zero.
So get that through your thick head, General Milley.
The South, the slave-owning section of the country, wanted blacks to count for one.
And the three-fifths was the compromise that arose out of a kind of back-and-forth.
So it said nothing about the value placed, for example, on black life.
Milley evidently doesn't know any of this.
And this is really, these are the people who are leading this pathetic project.
And apparently it's a project in the name of rooting out extremism.
But who gets to define extremism?
Who decides what extremism even is?
Now, Milley says things like, you know, I've got to read Marx in order to understand communism.
Oh, really? Well, are you reading white nationalists to understand white nationalism?
You can read about things.
It's quite different from saying we teach critical race studies, which is rooted not in learning about Marx, but in Marxist advocacy.
That's the difference.
Now... What I fear about this is not just the sheer ignorance of it.
It's the demoralizing of patriots who are in the military, who love their country, and whose love of country is interpreted as a form of extremism.
Oh, do you doubt American institutions?
Oh, do you think Trump really won the election?
Okay, you're an extremist.
I mean, who would want to join the military with kooks like this in charge?
This is the problem.
I shudder to think what the boys who stormed the beaches at Normandy would think.
If they could listen to this meddled clown, they'd probably jump back in their boats in disgust and come back home.
So the bottom line of it is, you know, Republicans for a long time have been the supporters of the military, have been unflinchingly supportive of the military, but not of a woke military, I want to say, right now.
If the military goes in this direction, the Republican support for it is going to crumble, is going to erode.
And so General Milley, in the name of promoting harmony and promoting unification and the name of promoting esprit de corps, is actually not only undermining the esprit de corps of the armed forces themselves but undermining the political base of support on which the military depends.
I want to describe the Anti-racist propaganda that's going on inside the military and also the attempt to purge the military of so-called extremists.
Interestingly enough, that campaign is being led by an extremist who is being advised by other extremists.
So when General Milley puts on this kind of peacock-like pose and implies that there's a fair-minded kind of analysis going on here, that is simply not true.
Now, here I have to credit some reporting.
Two important articles in Revolver magazine.
This is Revolver News.
And you know I've had Darren Beattie, the founder of Revolver, on a couple of times on this podcast.
The first one kind of outs this guy named Bishop Garrison.
He's a senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense for Diversity and Inclusion.
And this guy, it turns out, is a real fanatic, a real kook.
And he's the guy who's identifying so-called extremism.
And it turns out that what they do to identify this extremism, they comb through your record, they go through your social media posts.
But when you look at extremism, you discover the definitions of it are kind of suspect.
First of all, one of the things that they call one type of extremism is, quote, patriot extremism.
Oh, what's that?
When a citizen believes, quote, Yeah.
Or, quote, has overstepped its constitutional boundaries.
What? Yeah, this is probably the view of one half of the country at the minimum.
At the minimum. By the way, this patriot extremism is completely different from white supremacy.
There's no racial component to it at all.
Extremism used to mean something.
Legally, extremism used to mean, basically, you essentially have the views of a terrorist.
You want to do extra-legal or non-legal violence against the country.
That was an extremist.
Now you have this kind of one-sided definition in which left-wing extremism is completely excluded, and things that are not extreme, things that are actually quite mainstream, are classified as extreme because they're coming from the direction of the right.
This guy, Bishop Garrison, is a huge admirer of the 1619 Project.
Revolver Magazine knows this because they did exactly to him what he's doing to the soldiers.
They went through his tweets.
And it turns out this guy is basically a guy who thinks Trump's border wall is racist, deportation of illegals is racist, DACA criticism is racist, questioning transgenders is racist, and so on.
And he thinks all of this is the real threat to national security.
You might think this is a guy who's had a difficult life.
He's experienced racism everywhere.
He's found it in the military.
So he's being interviewed here.
And in an interview, this is from August 2020, with Bishop Garrison.
And they ask him, they say, have you experienced racism in the military?
And basically he goes, no.
And when they ask him for evidence of systemic racism in the military, he talks about mass shootings.
Mass shootings that are not in the military, but mass shootings occurring in society.
So here's a completely separate problem, which, by the way, is not a problem derived from white supremacy.
All you have to do is look at a list of mass shooters over the last five years.
You will see it is a very racially diverse list.
And then somebody asks him, well, what experience have you had of systemic racism?
And he goes, no, not from me, not from my personal experience.
He goes, quote, I've never had anyone directly engage me and call me an outright racist name.
I've never had anyone attack me based on any immutable traits.
Never. It's never happened to him.
So here you have, you've got a guy who is theorizing about a racism he's never experienced, he can't document, and the only, the best example that he can give for is mass shootings.
Now what's kind of insidious, I'm turning now to a second Revolver article, is how this kind of process of purging people from the military works.
And it turns out that this guy Garrison, who I've been talking about, has a sidekick.
The sidekick's name is Christopher Goldsmith.
And this guy is even more far left than Garrison.
In fact, in one of his social media posts, he says, quote, There's an Antifa guy who is advising the military.
This guy is set up, by the way, an independent corporation.
It's called Sparvarious LLC. What is it?
He says, I'm a veteran, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to search through the records of people in the military, locate extremism, and alert the militaries.
So he's outside the military, supposedly advising the military on outing extremism.
He's supposed to be some kind of an expert.
He's often profiled in the media.
And this guy is so far left, let me just quote a line from his social media.
I have the tweet right in front of me.
Quote, it's past time to start calling the national GOP what it is, the party of fascism.
So he thinks that the GOP is basically the party of fascism, and he's treating people sympathetic to the GOP as that these are basically partisans of fascism, or let's just call them partisans of Hitler.
So this is the underlying psychology with which they are approaching the military.
Now, you know, this is one thing if you do this in the Department of Black Studies, you know, at...
Purdue University is a whole different thing when you're dealing with the military, which is an institution that relies upon people who rely on each other.
And you put in all this poisonous rhetoric, and you convince soldiers that their views, patriotic views, views in defense of America, conservative views, let's just say MAGA views, are going to get them targeted, identified, rooted out of the military, demoted...
And so this horrible enterprise, which is poisoning our society, is now poisoning our military.
And it's not just rhetoric at the top level for Milley, it's the poison is seeping all the way down.
And this is, to me, a very disturbing development because it really means that the left is corrupting this institution.
By the way, the military is typically corrupted in all socialist countries.
It's corrupt because at the end And what the socialists want to do is use the military as their own weapon against their own citizens.
We're not there yet, but I'm afraid we are moving inexorably in that terrifying direction.
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I want to talk in this segment about the fallout between Trump and Bill Barr.
But before I do, Trump had a highly successful rally in Ohio in which he gave a kind of telling litany of all these different cases in which he was lambasted, but in retrospect, he turned out to be right.
Listen. They lied about so many things before the election, and it's not only what they said, it's also what they didn't say.
Like Hunter.
Remember, where's Hunter? Where's Hunter?
The virus came from a Chinese lab.
Hydroxychloroquine actually works.
Remember? Remember?
I made a mistake on hydroxy.
I should have said, hydroxychloroquine is a disaster.
Please do not use it.
They would have said it. Instead, I said it works.
And now reports are coming out that it works.
They probably destroyed a lot of lives.
Hunter Biden's laptop was real.
That was an easy one, wasn't it?
Lafayette Square was not cleared for a photo op.
It wasn't. So, you know, Trump has to give himself credit.
Why? Because no one else gives it to him.
So the media is certainly not going to.
And so I totally understand it.
But I'm also focused on a clash that has now emerged between Trump and Barr, kind of a behind the scenes.
Jonathan Karl, reporter for ABC News, has a book coming out.
He's got an interesting article in The Atlantic where he talks about the fact that, about why Barr publicly declared In the aftermath of the 2020 election, there's been no widespread fraud.
It turns out that—and here's what Barr said.
He says, Mitch McConnell was urging Barr to make this public statement.
Why? Because McConnell believed that there was no fraud in the election.
McConnell didn't want to say it publicly.
McConnell believed that the best hope for the Republicans in Georgia was for Trump not to contest the election, but just to go ahead and campaign for the two Georgian candidates who lost anyway.
And And here's McConnell.
Tabar, at least if this reporting is accurate, which I think it probably is, McConnell goes, Bill, I look around and you're the only person who can do it, meaning you're the only person who can publicly correct Trump.
Now, for these people to be so confident that there wasn't widespread fraud, you would think that there would be some Justice Department investigation of fraud that came to the conclusion, hmm, guys, no fraud.
But here's this telling line from the Atlantic article, quote, The Department of Justice ended up conducting no formal investigations of voter fraud.
They didn't look into it.
How then was Barr so sure that there wasn't fraud?
It turns out he didn't think that there was fraud from the beginning.
He expected Trump to lose.
Quote, Barr told me, this is Jonathan Cole writing, that he had already concluded it was highly unlikely that evidence existed that would tip the scales in the election.
He had expected Trump to lose and was therefore not surprised by the outcome.
So it looks like Barr made sort of this prejudgment.
Now, Barr goes on to talk about things like, he says...
You know, he doesn't see how the machines could be a problem.
He goes, quote, It's a counting machine.
There had been no discrepancy reported anywhere, and I'm still not aware of any discrepancy.
So this is a case where the, again, you have this familiar, I'm not aware of any.
Well, wait a minute. You're the head of the Department of Justice.
Shouldn't you be looking into it?
To just sit back in your chair and say, you know, for me, sitting here in my armchair, twiddling my thumbs, no evidence of fraud has come marching in front of me.
Go look for it.
That's the point about it.
Make sure that there wasn't any.
This is the very disturbing thing about this.
And then, apparently, Trump and Barr sat down, and Trump, of course, was very disappointed after Barr made this public statement, and he asked Barr a whole bunch of questions.
How come he didn't prosecute Hunter?
This is Trump. If that had been one of my kids, they'd be all over him.
Certainly true. Why hasn't Barr released Sean Durham's report?
What has Durham even found?
Dead silence from Barr.
Now, at the end of the day, I think, you've got to realize that Barr turned out to be marginally better, perhaps, than Sessions, but only marginally.
And the question I have at the end of the day is...
Why did Trump appoint these guys?
Did Trump believe, rightly, that Sessions would be good?
I know I did at the outset, so I was sideswiped by Sessions.
But it is the job of the CEO to appoint people who are going to be effective in carrying out your policies.
Trump never controlled his own Justice Department.
He should have fired Christopher Wray at the FBI. If Barr wasn't doing his job, he should have fired him at the beginning.
Now Trump has issued a kind of lashing out statement now.
It's people in authority like Bill Barr that allow the crazed radical left to succeed.
This is Trump in a rather amusing mode.
He came in with a semi-bang and went out with a whimper.
Bill Warr was a disappointment in every sense of the word.
He helped facilitate the cover-up of the crime of the century and so on.
But again, the buck stops with the president.
And I think this is an area in which Trump's either...
The fact that he was taken in or he didn't realize what he was getting or somehow he never controlled his Justice Department and that probably in retrospect will turn out to have been the most damaging failure, which ultimately came back to bite him in ways that he surely now realizes.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome Pastor Greg Locke to the podcast.
He is the pastor of Global Vision Bible Church in Mount Julia, Tennessee, right near Nashville.
and he's been very engaged in a lot of the issues that are now roiling our culture.
Greg, if I can call you that, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Let me start by asking you, you know, I've been following this kind of inner turmoil at the Southern Baptist Conference and the direction of the SBC. And I remember one of the top officials was quoted and saying in one of these articles, and he was speaking for the Southern Baptist Convention, he said, we're not here to save America. We're here to save souls for Christ.
So he's drawing an apparent distinction between political activism and getting involved in trying to kind of fix America, I think, politically or culturally.
He seems to be saying that global evangelism should be a pastor's chief mission.
I thought I'd begin by asking you to sort of comment or reflect on that sentiment.
What, if anything, is wrong with it?
Well, I think the biggest thing wrong with it is, you know, you take John the Baptist.
Here's a guy that got his head cut off for equally preaching the gospel and calling out corrupt politics.
You know, he said something to the king and he got his head cut off.
And I think the problem is we think, well, pastors should only preach the gospel and evangelize.
Well, here's what we have to understand.
If we don't call out corrupt politics, We're not going to have a platform from which to preach Jesus or to evangelize.
And so the Southern Baptist Convention has been going down that leftist route for a very, very long time.
And the proof's in the pudding because they just, you know, inaugurated and brought in the most leftist liberal president that they've ever seen.
So I don't think it's going to get any better anytime soon.
Let's go to the root of the matter when you talk about the job of the pastor and presumably of Christians in general to engage with corrupt politics.
By corrupt politics here, do you mean politics that flouts the moral rules of Christianity or are you speaking about corruption in a wider sense?
Corruption in a wider sense.
You know, and I think a lot of the corruption is from the top down because we don't have a White House problem.
The Bible says we have a God's house problem.
Judgment must begin at God's house.
And I think the silence of the pulpits as well as the pews has allowed people to have this willy-nilly idea that we're just going to let everything go the way it needs to go.
We're just waiting on Jesus to rapture us out when we need to stand and we have to push back.
We have seen in the last 15 months Unbelievable, tyrannical nonsense for which the church is going to be held accountable for not pushing back and saying something.
And so we have a cowardly pastor problem in this nation, without a doubt.
Do you think that the lockdown rules that have been imposed, particularly on churches with COVID as its justification, would you see that as a real attack on the church or an attack on religious liberty?
Because it seems that it's unprecedented.
I mean, we've had epidemics in the country before, but we've never had church lockdowns like this.
You've been pretty active in both speaking out and in fact kind of refusing to follow.
Yes. These lockdowns.
Talk about how COVID has been invoked as a way to put the churches under leash.
I think it's a thousand percent attack against Christian liberty, against, you know, religious worship in the United States.
They came to us and they said, look, you've got to shut down.
And I said, absolutely not. And so we outgrew our building so fast.
We had to meet in a tent and then we outgrew that tent and then we got another tent.
And now we have a thousand plus people coming every single weekend because we never closed.
So CNN showed up and they're like, oh, you have profited from COVID. I said, no, we profited from courage because people are sick of the nonsense and they want somebody that's going to stand up and say enough is enough.
There's a reason it's our First Amendment right, because if we lose the First Amendment, then like a domino effect, we'd lose all of the other ones.
And so the last 15 months has been one thing, a dress rehearsal.
Now they know who they can control, and now they know who's going to be a problem moving forward.
And I'm going to be a problem moving forward.
I just am, because I believe we have a right to worship.
Every church in this nation should be open 100%.
toughen up and by that I mean that you know we have we've had in this country we have not had any kind of religious persecution of the kind that for example Christians are familiar with in the Middle East even Christians in certain parts of India for example you know their their freedom and their lives are sometimes in danger do you think it is out of the question that religious persecution in its very literal meaning might come to America I believe it is and I believe this is the precursor to it.
The stage is being set.
I just recently met with a lady who was converted out of China, and she said the Chinese church is not praying for America to have revival.
We are praying for America to have persecution because that will bring the revival through the back door.
And so I don't think people understand.
We may be delivered from the wrath of God, but we are not going to be delivered from the wrath of man.
And we are going to suffer some persecution.
And we better get ready because we've raised a generation of people that say, well, we will go to jail for our faith.
And that same crowd don't even go to church for their faith.
Wow. Let me talk about the fact that our culture appears to have been taken over to a large degree by the left.
And I'm talking here about cultural institutions.
They're trying to push even into institutions like the military, institutions that were traditionally seen as somewhat conservative.
My question is this.
The church has a huge megaphone, right?
The church is a very powerful way to be able to get out the message nationwide and push back against, for example, Hollywood, or push back against some of the messaging in the media.
But the church appears to be a largely unused megaphone.
Not your church, but the church in general.
Why do you think that pastors...
Pastors who are sound theologically might be reluctant to use the megaphone that they are in full possession of.
Well, I don't think they understand how powerful of a megaphone it really is.
Again, you take John the Baptist, the guy had the personality of a rock.
You couldn't have him on a podcast, right?
But all of Jerusalem and Samaria and all the regions around about that whole area came to hear what he had to say for one reason.
The Bible said he was a voice, a voice in the wilderness.
And people are starving, as you know, for a voice, religiously, politically, in every way.
That's why Trump was so polarizing, because he was a voice.
He just said it. And I don't know about you, but I long for some mean tweets these days because this nation's in a mess, and people are just looking for somebody to stand up and say, look, enough is enough.
This is what the Bible says.
This is the freedoms we have that are given to us by God, not the government, in the Constitution, and so it's time for us to stand.
And so they're too busy counting nickels and noses.
They're afraid if they say something that, you know, the denominational hierarchy is going to fire them or people are going to leave the church.
What we're finding is people are coming from every state in the union nearly every weekend because we're saying it, because we are standing.
And so boldness is what's going to draw the people in, not being a coward.
How do you as a pastor make sense of the fact that you had guys like McCain, George W. Bush?
And George W. Bush, of course, was a publicly professed Christian.
Trump, of course, has had some shadiness in his background and in his past.
How does a Christian think about, am I going to support this guy or that guy?
Is it based on policy?
Is it based on character?
Is it based on some hybrid of the two?
Were you made anxious by Trump's background?
Or did you say, hey, look, I don't care what the guy's background is.
He is with us on the issues.
And on that basis, I have no qualms at all about supporting this guy.
Well, you know, obviously there were a few issues in his background, but as a pastor, I tell people that's my job to put your past where it belongs.
I really think he had a conversion experience with Christ.
I've been with Evangelicals for Trump on the board since the very inception with Paula White and a lot of them and Jensen.
And so I've seen the transition.
You know, I've seen the hunger in his heart and the maturity.
And I really believe that God did something great in his life.
Now, here's the interesting thing. Those people are always like, well, look at his past.
Look at his past. I want to look at his present because the left is still doing stuff in the present that they condemn him over in the past.
Once he took the presidency, I never saw that nonsense.
Yeah, he said some vulgar things about women.
He apologized for that and the whole Trump tape nonsense.
You know, that was a fall down the steps debacle, but he never went back to that.
He was always moving forward.
He was always maturing.
So God can use anybody he wants to.
Yesterday, I preached on Samson.
Samson was in bed with a harlot when the Spirit of God came upon him, and it angered his parents, but the Bible says that God was using Samson as an occasion against the Philistines.
And so I think God raised up Trump as an occasion against the Philistines, against this leftist, socialistic, communistic agenda.
So God can use who He wants to, and everybody has a past, but I really believe He is still a man that God is going to use in this nation.
Let me ask you finally about the Biden administration, because some of us have warned about it moving in a socialist direction, which many people identify as economically socialist, high taxes and economic confiscation regulation and so on.
But it appears that there is a kind of cultural agenda that they're pushing through the universities, that they're pushing with Title IX, the transgender stuff, the way in which abortion has gone from being viewed as a necessary evil on the left to now being seen almost as a positive good.
I mean, are we dealing with a bunch of people who are sort of literally doing the devil's work in our politics?
I mean, is it too much to say that as Christians, we're up not just against people who are mistaken or disagree with us but people who are actually trying to unleash some very nefarious and evil forces in our society.
Oh, without a doubt.
You know, I know as well as you know that the form of socialism that they're propagating in this culture and this climate is 100% political atheism.
That's all it is. They cannot accomplish what they want to accomplish without eliminating God.
They have to. And so it started years ago, but here they are now under the guise of generosity and giving away free stuff.
Well, Jesus rebuked Judas over that.
The only socialist in the New Testament was Judas Iscariot.
And we know how that turned out for him.
Everybody says Jesus was a socialist.
Jesus was generous, but he was not a socialist.
He even condemned people that said, the only reason you're coming to me is not for the message.
You're just here because you want to get fed.
You just want a trick and a pony show.
That's all you want.
And Jesus said of Judas, the only reason he even cares about poor people is because he cares about himself, because he's a crook.
And the Democrats, the left, care about themselves.
And so they want to give away free stuff so they can make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
And so they can get the people to have their God to be government.
And so we're dealing with full-blown political atheism.
The Biden administration, which I'm a thousand percent convinced is fraudulent, has nothing to do with God.
They do not want any Bible, any Jesus, any Constitution.
It's a free-for-all for them.
And people need to wise up because this generation has gone buckwild psychotic in believing all this socialistic nonsense.
Somebody's paying for it.
Somebody's paying for it. Pastor Locke, I want to thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it. Look forward to having you back again sometime.
Yes, sir. Thank you so much.
If inflation is the problem, gold is the solution.
Now, in May, the U.S. inflation rate, 5%, the highest in 13 years, and you're seeing it all around you.
Higher fuel prices, higher food prices, higher used and new car prices, construction costs, housing prices, and the list goes on.
So inflation is here.
Now, have you protected your savings, your investments?
If you haven't yet diversified a portion into precious metals, The answer is no.
For decades, I never wanted to invest in gold, only the stock market.
But now I'm seriously worried, as many economists are, about the regime we have in Washington.
No sense of fiscal responsibility.
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The American people these days have a very low level of trust in the mainstream media, and I argue that that level should go even lower.
In other words, the media has earned our contempt, distrust, and disbelief.
Now, there's a survey out.
It's conducted by Reuters.
It's an international survey about different levels of trust in the media, the mainstream media, in different countries.
Out of 46 countries, the U.S. comes in dead last.
The media is trusted the least.
Survey with 92,000 respondents, only 29% of Americans say that they can trust most news most of the time.
And Finland has, by the way, the highest level of trust in the media, 65%.
This survey, very, very telling.
And what I find interesting is that people don't just consider the press to be biased, getting it wrong through honest mistakes.
They consider these people to be outright liars.
56% of Americans agree with the following statement.
Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things that they know are false or gross exaggerations.
Now, the question is, is this really true?
Are people knowingly lying?
I want to give an example from my own experience that shows that they are.
Now, several years ago, a distinguished reporter for the New York Times, his name is Fox Butterfield, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, so kind of a symbol of the New York Times and its grand motto, all the news that's fit to print.
So this guy did a kind of attack job on the Dartmouth Review, the renegade conservative newspaper I used to work for eons ago when I was a student at Dartmouth.
And Fox Butterfield quoted me in the article as saying the following...
The question is not whether women should be educated at Dartmouth.
The question is whether women should be educated at all.
And the idea here, this was supposed to be like a body slam on me.
And it was picked up by a lot of other media.
Oh, Dinesh is such a sexist, he believed.
In fact, I'd go speak on campus and people would say things like, Mr.
D'Souza, the question is not whether women should be educated at Dartmouth.
The question is whether women should be educated at all.
Do you think that's funny?
And I'd go, yeah, I think it's pretty funny.
But I would go on to point out, I didn't say it.
Yes, it was published in the Dartmouth Review, but another guy, a fellow named Keeney Jones, he's the one who said it.
So I thought, look, let me call up Fox Butterfield on the telephone and tell him this.
You attributed a quotation to me that is actually false.
It's not said by me, so please publish a correction.
So I get Fox Butterfield on the phone, and I say, hey Fox, I understand you tried to do a body slam on me, but it didn't really work because the quotation you attributed to me was not said by me.
He goes, yes it was.
I go, really?
It was said by this other guy, Keeney Jones.
He goes, I know. He goes, but you wrote an article about the Dartmouth Review and Policy Review years later and you quoted that line.
And I go, yeah, but me quoting a line and attributing it to someone else doesn't make it my line.
He goes, well, yes it does. And I go, well, Fox, you've now quoted that line in your article.
Can I now say that you said it?
Dead silence. The bottom line of it was he didn't want to do a correction.
In other words, he was a knowing liar.
He wasn't a guy who made a big mistake, he was in his zeal to get me, got the wrong quote, but then was willing to correct.
No. So we're getting here the psychology of the media in a nutshell.
Coming back to the survey by Reuters, trust in government is at a kind of all-time low.
28%. But journalists at 21% are even lower.
So the media is in a very bad way in American society.
And I think we should trust them even less.
My motto in this area is don't trust them even when they're telling the truth.
Why? Because if someone is a chronic liar, a habitual liar, it's too difficult to disentangle, oh, this one time they're telling the truth.
No, don't believe them because of their track record and their kind of systematic tendency to mislead the public.
Simply disbelieve everything they say.
In fact, most of the time you'd be better off believing the exact opposite of what they say.
If they're excited, you should be demoralized.
If they're demoralized, you should be excited because what they're demoralized about is probably something very good.
I don't know the way out of this other than to have new media, better media, more reliable media, media at the end that does in fact earn the public trust.
Thank you.
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Statues are coming down around America, and statues are also going up.
In looking at who's down and who's up, you can get a little bit of an idea of what is being publicly held up, celebrated, heroized, if I can coin a word.
So here, the New York Times reports that the Teddy Roosevelt statue in front of the American Museum of Natural History is It's not being destroyed.
It's being sort of transferred to some private institution.
But it's going to lose its prominent place in front of the Museum of Natural History.
Even though Teddy Roosevelt has a long connection with the naturalist movement, he was both a historian and an environmentalist in his own time.
A major figure, obviously a prominent progressive and a Republican, a very interesting kind of combination.
He went after the cartels.
He had a brand of progressivism that we as conservatives can learn from today.
At the same time, he was, of course, a two-time elected president.
And a Renaissance man in every respect.
There's a great book by Edmund Morris, a guy who wrote an unfortunate Reagan biography, but wrote a very good biography of Teddy Roosevelt called The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which talks about this sort of adventurous erudite.
This is a guy who would have like Japanese sumo wrestlers in the Oval Office and wrestle them to the ground.
And another time he'd have scholars of ancient history and he would discuss with them all kinds of stuff.
So this is really an amazing man.
And why is the statue being taken down?
Turns out that the statue itself has Roosevelt on a steed, on a horse.
And alongside him you've got a black guy, an African man, and then you've got a Native American.
Now, they're accompanying him.
He is not demeaning them in any way, but apparently his elevated stature on the horse has convinced people at the museum and other leftists that this is a demeaning statue.
Notice there's nothing demeaning in the statue itself.
Notice that they're not saying that Roosevelt despised Africans or despised Native Americans.
The quotes here are so telling.
They say that, this is Sam Biederman of the New York Parks Department.
He goes, although the statue was, quote, not erected with malice or intent, Malice of intent, sorry.
He says its composition, quote, supports a thematic framework of colonization and racism.
Now, I would submit that these themes are being imposed on the statue.
They're not actually in the monument itself.
And while statues of Roosevelt and then Robert E. Lee and others are coming down, whose statues are going up?
Well, George Floyd!
So this really gives you the idea of the difference between a Republican and a Democrat.
Republicans admire people who did things.
People like Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave who became a great abolitionist leader, a U.S. diplomat to Haiti, and people like Teddy Roosevelt who accomplished a great deal.
And But what has George Floyd accomplished?
Let's think about it. Home invader?
I don't think that's on his resume, but it probably should be.
Regular drug addict whose body was riddled with fentanyl.
Ford's check passer?
That's really why the cops were called in the first place.
So here's a guy who's no role model, no hero.
No one should aspire to be like George Floyd.
Probably the only thing that happened to George Floyd was not due to him.
It was due to someone else. So George Floyd was a victim.
He was unjustly treated.
But in what respect does that make him someone to build a monument to?
This is the difference between Republicans and Democrats.
For Democrats, your achievement is victim status.
You achieve something basically by getting someone to put a knee on your neck.
And you notice that the democratic enthusiasm about minorities, oh, this minority was victimized, oh, that minority was victimized even more, oh, this minority was the triple victim of victimization, they're people of color, and they're women, and they're this, and they're that, and one or two of them are one-legged, and so, in other words, it literally is a kind of totem pole in which the top The opposition of the totem pole is achieved by being at the bottom of the ladder, by being the most victimized person of all.
Now, you'd have to agree that there's a perverted psychology here, a psychology that is very demeaning for any kind of civilization, because civilizations advance and succeed by celebrating excellence.
We're not celebrating excellence, at least when I say we, I mean we as a society.
The left is not celebrating excellence.
The people who control the rudders of our culture are not celebrating excellence.
In fact, they're celebrating, as in the case of George Floyd, it's very opposite.
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I've been speaking for the last couple of podcasts about the philosophy of Stoicism, and I like to introduce at least in nugget form aspects of different philosophies on this podcast.
And I want to talk now about whether these philosophies can be kind of empirically tested in any way.
Can they be checked out against experience?
How do we know if these philosophies even make any sense?
We can talk about these things in theory.
We can even look at examples, both from literature and perhaps from movies.
Thinking of stoicism, for example, I was telling Debbie that one of the, to me, very enduring images of stoicism is the soldier, the black soldier, Denzel Washington.
This is from the movie Glory, where he is being whipped by this Irish-American colonel.
And you can see Denzel Washington standing there and he's getting these thrashes across his back and they're extremely painful.
But he refuses to flinch.
He won't show any emotion.
He just kind of grips his teeth with a kind of manly dignity.
But at the end, the sheer pain and the inner humiliation and a single tear runs down his cheek.
And so you see here, this is the stoic attempt to bring emotion under the control of not only reason, but also will.
Now, I want to talk about whether we can test these philosophies like stoicism.
And by stoicism, what I mean here is simply the idea that our emotions are under control.
To put it somewhat differently, the key insight of stoicism is that good things in life...
And bad things in life are not nearly as terrible as they appear.
And the question is, is this way of thinking true to life?
Now, there's a very interesting example in a book by a social scientist named Jonathan Haidt, I believe at the University of Virginia.
His book is called The Happiness of Hypothesis.
And he asks this question. He goes, if I give you 10 seconds to name the best and the worst things that could possibly happen to you, what would you say?
And he goes, for a lot of people, the answers would go like this.
The best thing that could happen to me is if I win the lottery.
I hit the jackpot.
Powerball. And the worst thing that could happen to me is if I get paralyzed.
If I lose my legs, perhaps, and my arms, I become a paraplegic.
And... Jonathan Haidt goes on to say that, you know, we think, and this is common sense, that winning the lottery would give you unimagined freedom.
You would have a totally different life than you have now.
Your happiness would know no bounds.
And conversely, if you lost your legs or your arms, you'd have to give up all your aspirations.
You'd suddenly become dependent on other people.
Your life would be so miserable that maybe even death would be preferable.
Now... Interestingly, Haidt goes on to cite a whole bunch of studies that show that look at lottery people and look at their lives and measure their level of happiness after they win the lottery.
The most famous of these studies was done by a guy named Philip Brickman.
It's called the Brickman Study. And it shows amazingly that lottery winners, when they first win, their level of happiness surges.
It goes up a lot.
But once you come back to them a few weeks and a few months later, their happiness has dropped back to where it was before.
It might be slightly higher than it was before, but not by much.
Now, this may seem really odd, but it's not that odd.
The reason is that at first you're excited by the idea that you suddenly feel your life has changed, but pretty soon the novelty of that begins to dissipate.
Your new comforts, you bought a new house, you bought a new car, become taken for granted.
New problems arise.
Wealth now draws all kinds of opportunistic strangers and long-lost relatives.
Family members begin to squabble about issues of money.
You have to deal with taxation and inheritance laws and litigation.
So suddenly the lottery winner, who had a relatively carefree life before...
Now begins to think his life is full of hassles.
And not only that, nobody sympathizes with him.
They go, what are you complaining about?
You won the lottery! So you don't even get the kind of empathy that you would normally get from others.
Now, let's turn to the quadriplegic, because to me, this is even more interesting.
Because there are the same level of studies that look at quadriplegics.
People whose lives were changed by some terrible accident.
And again, incredibly, although their level of happiness plummets initially, Once you catch up with them a little bit later, it's pretty much the same as it was before.
It might be slightly less, but only slightly.
Now why is that?
The reason for that is because initially you're focused entirely on your disability.
Oh my gosh, I lost my legs.
Life isn't worth living and so on.
But after a while, you begin to accommodate.
This is sometimes called hedonic adaptation.
It means that your mind is sort of built in a way that adapts to a given circumstance.
And so what happens is, when you visit the quadriplegic...
Six months later, he's not talking about his wheelchair.
He's not talking about his disability.
In fact, he's much more interested in, like, the ribs special at Bob's Big Boy.
He's thinking about the movie he wants to see the forthcoming weekend.
There's an amazing study cited by the psychologist David Myers in his book called The Pursuit of Happiness.
It's a comparative study that looks at the level of happiness between people who have sight and people who are blind who had sight before.
And it turns out that between these two groups, the difference in level of happiness is exactly zero.
Zero. So what this means is that very often when we think about these people, you think about a paraplegic, you think that their life must be miserable because you think, well, what if it happened to me?
What if I lost my legs?
You don't realize that that guy has adapted to that situation.
His actual level of happiness is completely different than you think it is.
It's kind of the way that we look at people with Down syndrome.
Oh, yeah. We shouldn't bring kids with Down syndrome into the world.
Their lives are going to be horrible.
Well, first of all, have you looked at any studies of people who have Down syndrome to see if they're unhappy?
Are their lives actually horrible?
What if their level of happiness is better than yours?
So, again, people think, well, I wouldn't want to have Down syndrome.
This is a false projection that people do in which they take their immediate reaction to something and they superimpose it to other people who actually experience it completely differently.
So what I'm getting at is that this, these studies, the lottery studies and the quadriplegic studies are a stunning vindication, it seems to me, Of the Stoic philosophy.
What basically the Stoic philosophy does is it takes the long-term perspective, which is the perspective you're going to end up with anyway, and it imports it to the front.
So it tells you that the reason to have mental control over your emotions and even over your circumstances is...
It's not just because you are suppressing the unhappiness that you feel, but rather that you are recognizing in advance that these good things We'll, over time, move toward a kind of equilibrium.
And so will the bad things.
And for this reason, the calmness, the serenity, and the self-control offered by the Stoic philosophy, this theoretical philosophy, has some important empirical or practical vindication.
Want to do something about court packing?
There is something you can do.
Now, court packing is 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 leftist justices.
Now, court packing isn't some scheme to improve the courts.
It's basically a coup, a coup to take away your constitutional freedoms and turn America into a socialist country.
Now this is why the First Liberty Institute, the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated to defending religious liberty in America, is doing something about this.
First Liberty recently launched 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's happening in our courts.
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It's time now for our mailbox.
By the way, guys, if you want to send questions, audio or video, preferably, send it to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Let's go to today's question.
Listen. Hello, Dinesh.
My name is Ev Maria and I'm from Slovenia.
Thank you for taking my question.
I really enjoy your podcast.
So I would like to start with a joke about this guy who was shoveling dirt.
Now another one passes by and is curious about what is going on.
Well, the first one says, I am burying my horse.
Oh, what happened? Well, you see...
I was trying to teach my horse not to eat and the animal dropped dead right as we were on the verge of success.
So, no matter what method or what approach I would use, every time the horse breaks.
And I don't know how many more horses I can afford to lose.
So, wouldn't you say that common sense tells you that if socialism was tried many times before and every time it broke the horse, that you should stop trying socialism altogether.
Now this is something that we learned the hard way in former Yugoslavia when our horse dropped dead and then everybody started kicking and picking on the carcass.
So don't be fooled by the rhetoric of these socialists because in the end they kill the horse.
Thank you. Well, that is a beautiful statement, almost not even a question.
And what it appeals to is the verdict of experience.
Socialism hasn't been tried once or twice.
It's been tried something like 25 times.
And it's been tried across the globe, including not just small countries, but huge countries like China and Russia.
And it has produced not only scarcity and suffering, but literally a mountain of corpses.
So then the question becomes, why would people who know that still push socialism?
And I think the answer is that although socialism is always bad for a society, it is not always bad for the people who run that society.
In other words, it's not bad for the ruling class.
In the Soviet Union, as you probably know, there was a group called the nomenklatura, the kind of ruling insiders.
And they ate caviar.
They drank vodka. So at a time when the country itself was suffering and even starving, same is true in Venezuela.
The Chavistas live very well.
There's no meat shortage for them.
There's no gas shortage.
They aren't waiting in gasoline lines.
Debbie has a childhood friend who's very high up in the regime now.
She's married to one of Hugo Chavez's generals.
And she's always posting pictures on Facebook and she's got designer dresses and her kids are beautifully dressed and they've all got jewelry on.
So this is the lifestyle of the socialist class which steals it from the general population.
So the point to make here is when you say that socialism doesn't work, we've got to ask, work for whom?
It may not work for the ordinary.
And look at America. Look at the way I just saw on social media Dianne Feinstein is listing her home for sale.
Asking price? $41 million.
So I ask you, here's Dianne Feinstein.
She's been a career Democrat for most of her life.
She gets a salary in the Senate of $170,000 a year.
How does someone making $170,000 a year own a $41 million house?
And the same question could be asked about the Clintons.
It could be asked about the Bidens.
Even before Biden was elected president, he has multiple homes, multiple parking garages, multiple cars, access to private planes.
He's a centi-millionaire, if not more than that.
And these are people who...
Make good through politics.
So you can say that leftism and socialism aren't just recipes for social justice.
That's the kind of veneer, that's the facade, that's the outward rhetoric.
Beneath that or behind the scenes, you could say these people are all about the money.
They're all about fortifying their lifestyle.
They have turned politics, and in this case leftist politics, into a very successful business.
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