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June 30, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:09:55
A CONVERSATION WITH MIKE POMPEO Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 122
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An interview with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
We're going to talk about the origins of COVID and also about American foreign policy.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
At a time when the United States is bitterly divided, there are talks about these kind of unbridgeable chasm of values, not just of political parties in the United States.
How does China hold itself together?
The Chinese have launched a massive new campaign to create solidarity among the Chinese, to make them truly one nation.
Now, they're not after true solidarity.
They're not trying to include everyone.
In fact, every now and then the Chinese will launch an extermination campaign against the Muslims over here or the Falun Gong over there.
They want nevertheless to create a unified China.
And according to one source, kind of a credible source, They're succeeding.
The source is a guy named Joe Tsai, TSAI. He is one of the founders of the Chinese e-commerce giant called Alibaba, a very successful company that has helped to make Joe Tsai into a multi-billionaire.
He was interviewed recently on CNBC, and he was asked about China.
And he said, look, stop complaining about China.
The Chinese people are happy.
Very striking statement.
The Chinese people are happy.
And he said, not only that, but because they're happy, they support the government that is making them happy.
And when he was asked about what is the basis for this happiness, he said the following.
He says, the China that I see, the large numbers of the population, I'm talking about 80 to 90 percent, are very, very happy with the fact that their lives are improving every year.
He goes on to say, when I started Alibaba in 1999, the gross domestic product, the per capita GDP, was $800.
That's per Chinese family, per year.
He says today it's over $10,000.
And he says, and if you talk to Chinese parents, are your children going to have a better life than you?
He goes, most of them will say, absolutely, yes.
They're going to be educated. They're going to find good jobs.
China is getting better.
So... The argument here from Joe Tsai is based on economics, based on the idea that if a country can offer its citizens an improving economic prospects, they're going to support the country, and they're going to support the government that's in power, even if it is a communist government.
Now, this argument runs flatly athwart an argument made by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, in fact my colleague at the Hoover Institution, Also teaches at Stanford.
And Fukuyama, about 20 years ago in his book, The End of History, said that regimes like China are bound to, if not collapse, feel the tension that arises because once you give people economic success, Once you give them economic freedom and they have, you may say, more stuff, they begin to ask for other things.
Hey, now I've got a refrigerator, now I've got a microwave oven, now I've got a cell phone.
Okay, but now I want the right to free speech.
Now I want to be able to say what I think.
I want artistic expression.
I want to be able to not only espouse my religious faith at home, I want to be able to talk about it.
I want to be able to meet in a group.
So, in other words, economic rights leads to pressure for civil rights and civil liberties.
Now, that has in fact not happened in China.
While the Chinese have liberalized on the economic front, they have tightened on the political front.
And I'm thinking to myself, why is it that the Chinese people, I mean, yes, we had Tiananmen Square in 1989, ruthlessly crushed.
And since then, no mass movement in China demanding civil rights, demanding the ability to speak, any of that.
But you have to remember historically that China never had this kind of freedom.
China has always been an autocracy of one form or another.
Now, the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, and then you had the Maoist regime for about 25 years, very repressive.
Now, there was economic liberalization under Deng Xiaoping.
But that economic liberalization didn't bring any other type of liberalization.
But going even further back, before the Communist Party, China was under repressive dynasties one after the other.
I mean, if you go to ancient times, you have, of course, the Han Dynasty.
The Ming Dynasty, but then on to the Manchu Dynasty, and then even in the early years before the Communist takeover, there was repression all over China.
Now, the one force that is very powerful in China, and the Chinese know it and they're encouraging it, is the force of nationalism.
Nationalism drove Sun Yat-sen in the early 20th century.
Nationalism drove Mao.
Mao was in that sense a national socialist.
And his cultural revolution was based upon nationalism as well as communism.
The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has announced several years ago now something called the Chinese Dream.
Wow! So we have an American dream, and Xi Jinping has evidently a Chinese dream.
Now, interestingly, the Chinese dream is not like the American dream.
It's not individualistic.
It's not, you have a dream.
Dinesh has a dream for his life in America.
No. The Chinese dream is a communal dream.
It's a dream for the whole of China.
They call it a, quote, national revival or a national rejuvenation.
And so what the Chinese are doing is appealing to nationalism.
A nationalism historically, by the way, that arises out of humiliation.
There was a time some 500 years ago where the Chinese thought that they were on top of the world, the center of the world.
In fact, when the Jesuits showed the maps that put China in one corner of the world, they refused to believe it.
These maps have to be wrong.
China's at the center of the world.
But then China went into a period of humiliating decline, a decline that became really evident after World War I.
So it's interesting, but national decline can also produce a powerful attachment to your country, a sense that we have to make a comeback.
And the Chinese Communist Party, which is the ruling regime, is very clever in tapping into this vein of nationalism to give the Chinese the feeling that they are returning to greatness, a greatness that has been denied to them by history for the past 500 years.
Now, all of this is worth noting because at a time when the Chinese are emphasizing How their country is one China, how their country taps into patriotism and nationalism, we have in America the opposite trend.
We have in our schools and universities movements to convince young people to dislike America, to dislike its traditions, to dislike its symbols, to revile its flag, to take a knee for its anthem.
And this ideology is not confined to educational institutions but is permeating throughout society.
In his work, the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun said that the power of a country is based not only upon the number of people, but the way in which the people hang together, the way in which you may say they come together as one man, a sense of shared purpose, shared values, and nationalism is a way of codifying this.
So to me, it is alarming on the international front that the Chinese are able successfully to tap into this unifying force of nationalism.
By the way, Trump was appealing to American nationalism, but the left is anti-nationalist.
The left emphasizes ethnic identity, ethnic allegiance, not national allegiance.
So the left emphasizes, by the way, ethnic identity to all ethnicities except the white ethnicity.
Blacks should be proud about being black.
Latinos should be proud about being Latino.
But white people should be ashamed of being white.
So there's a kind of peculiarity to it, but the bottom line of it is it weakens the bonds of national unity and national consciousness.
And in this respect, it weakens the United States vis-a-vis its main adversary, China.
I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Mike, thanks for joining me.
It's a real pleasure to have you.
Maybe I'll start by asking you, I want to focus a little bit on the origins of COVID. For almost a year or maybe more, we were told emphatically that COVID came from a wet market in Wuhan.
It seems like inside the Trump administration, fairly early on, there was at least a rational suspicion that the facts might be otherwise.
Can you talk a little bit about when did you begin to suspect that this might have come out of the Wuhan lab, and what caused you to think that?
Well, Dinesh, thanks for having me on.
You got it right.
Sometime in the spring of 2020, We had begun to collect inside the State Department a set of, to call it data over states, but a set of facts that were leading us to believe That a very likely place that this virus might have come from was this viral institute, right? I mean, think about it. It almost sounds too ordinary, right?
A virus from Wuhan.
We knew it had come from Wuhan because you'll remember, Dinesh, we had 14 diplomats in Wuhan.
We had a consulate there. So I had people on the ground and we actually were able to get them out, sent a plane in to get them out.
So we had people on the ground working there.
So we knew about this virology lab and its existence.
We knew it had military connections.
And so immediately, it causes you to think, we need to check this out.
So we started doing that, and by spring, by April of 2020, everything that I had seen suggested that it was very likely that this was an escape, probably accidental, but we didn't know, because they were conducting all kinds of different research there, including bio-research.
But we began to see data sets, and then as time went on, so I talked about that public, I can't recall if it was April or May of 2020, was The suggestion really, Dinesh, was that we were talking about this because we were trying to cover up for the failures of the Trump administration's policies with respect to the virus here at home.
So this was the shiny object theory.
But it wasn't a shiny object.
We're trying to get the facts right.
We didn't know where it had come from, but we knew a couple of things.
We knew it mattered where it came from because we had to make sure that we understood it as quickly as we could.
HHS wanted to know.
CDC wanted to know.
Everybody wanted to find patient zero.
To find patient zero, you have to know where it came from.
And so we were trying to unpack this in the face of enormous political maelstrom at home and also in the face of incredible recalcitrance from the Chinese and the World Health Organization.
So the CCP and the WHO were clearly in cahoots, and they weren't going to have nothing that was going to upset the apple cart and make the Chinese Communist Party angry because a real investigation took place.
And so we could see the cover-up.
We knew what we knew.
And so every day that went by from the spring of 2020 until, frankly, until I sit here today, I think it's ever increasingly more likely that, in fact, this did come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Was there any evidence to the contrary?
In other words, what would be, if I were to ask you, what is the strongest evidence that it came out of the wet market by a kind of natural origin?
This is something that a number of prominent virologists had testified to early on.
Now we know in retrospect that this was somewhat of an orchestrated campaign with the medical magazines to make it seem that way.
But what I'm getting at is you had Prominent virologist saying that it came out of the wet market and not from the lab.
What is the evidence on their side, if any?
So Dinesh, they began with a couple of theories, right?
The core theory was that when you stared, and again, I'm not a virologist nor a geneticist, but when you stared at the genetics of it, their theory of the case was this did not look like it had been manmade and manipulated.
You could see no evidence of splicing.
If you go back and look at what they said, that's how, so it had to be, quote, natural, end of quote.
And that was their core argument.
The second piece, which I underlay, was that that's possible for that to happen.
So it is a plausible hypothesis as well.
And they took that, a plausible hypothesis and their theory on these genetics, and said, well, this surely must be.
And they did that to the exclusion of the enormous weight of evidence that suggested something to the contrary.
And of course, I think we now know that the likelihood that this particular genomic sequence would have made this transmission is pretty low, not impossible.
Odd things happen all the time.
Low probability events occur every day in the world, but it's pretty low probability.
And we now know, too, that this gain-of-function research that was taking place, it's not clear that you would always see that in the genetic makeup of the virus sample that you're staring at.
So they had some basic scientific facts that they, at the very least, gilded the lily on.
And for what motivation, others will have to determine.
But I know this.
They mounted a powerful case, a propaganda case.
It was supported by, I guess, the third piece of evidence is the Chinese Communist Party told us it came from the wet market.
And so I guess there would be three data points.
If you were trying to cume the evidence on the side of that hypothesis, that's what you'd stack up.
Mike, you made the comment, as did Redfield, as did Trump, that it was quite possible that this came out of the lab.
As you mentioned, you were ridiculed in the media for even suggesting this possibility.
Now, there was, as I understand it, an ongoing inquiry inside the Trump administration that carried on to the very end, and then I saw it reported that once the Biden people came in, they declared that this was kind of a politically tainted investigation, and they shut it down.
Can you talk a little bit about that process?
How far were you underway in this investigation?
How close were you to finding out anything at all?
And why would they shut something down when you think they would want to know too?
It's the strangest thing, Dinesh, that you would want to close down a scientific inquiry, which is what we were engaged in.
It was led by David Asher.
We had a big team, Tom Donano, Miles Yu was helping work on it.
We had There's no BS. We'd have people show up and tell us they had the answer.
We'd kick it out because we didn't think it was credible.
This wasn't political.
We were trying to figure this thing out.
And you saw we made real progress.
We were able to determine that there were scientists that had become ill in the fall of 2019 that were working at the laboratory.
The symptoms of their illness looked for all the world to be what we call COVID-19, the Wuhan virus.
We know they were engaged in military activity at that viral research lab.
And then we had just this amazing track of trying to get the Chinese to share just even the most basic information about what happened And instead of providing answers about the laboratory, they disappeared doctors from there.
They made journalists who were working on this go away, stole their notes, never let them communicate again.
The cover-up about this laboratory was massive, leading us to believe further that there was at least something taking place in that laboratory that they didn't want the world to know about.
I can't account for why this administration wouldn't be interested in it.
There was a hearing yesterday. The Democrats didn't show up to it.
This shouldn't be partisan.
I mean, this is serious business.
There's been almost 4 million people killed around the world.
Over half a million Americans died.
Billions of dollars in wealth destroyed.
This could happen again, Dinesh.
This laboratory, Dinesh, still operates.
I mean, we're talking here today, and someone is sitting there today in that laboratory working on something.
And the safety protocols are no different today than they were then, as best I could tell.
This is serious business.
This isn't about Democrats and Republicans.
This is about life and death.
We have to get this right.
Now you mentioned the fact that there were There was a collaboration, at least to a degree, between the Chinese military and the Chinese Communist Party and the virologists working at the Wuhan lab.
There's been a shift in the public debate, which now acknowledges the possibility of what is called a lab leak theory.
But to my knowledge, no one has even publicly seriously considered the possibility of COVID-19 as a kind of bioweapon.
I think it was Machiavelli who said a long time ago that when your enemy makes a very obvious blunder, Always suspect deception.
And I think what he was getting at is that, look, this is a virus that has had, as you just mentioned a moment ago, geopolitical and geostrategic consequences.
It has in some ways weakened the rest of the world vis-a-vis China.
Should we at least consider the possibility that it might have been used as a bioweapon?
Or do you think that that's Because, I mean, based on the history of communist parties, this is not exactly a leap of faith to think, wow, they would never do this.
They have too many scruples.
In the back of your mind, do you think that that's a possibility?
So, Dinesh, there are no scruples with the Chinese Communist Party.
You nailed it there.
They don't value human life.
You can see this in what they're doing to a million Uyghurs in the western part of the country, committing genocide as we speak.
They don't value human life.
We saw that during the virus, right?
What did they do? They locked down Hubei province and then sent sick people, knowingly sick, highly contagious with a lethal virus, they sent them on commercial aircraft all around the world knowingly.
Don't forget too, they sent folks to the White House in the middle of January of 2020 when they knew about this virus.
We were negotiating the phase one trade deal and they sent folks to the West Wing of the United States of America when they knew that they had this virus and they didn't tell anyone what was going on.
So no, I never give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to valuing human life.
So, could it be something worse than an accident?
You know, I always leave open that possibility because we can't foreclose it.
I haven't seen any evidence that would support that yet, other than what I just said.
The context in which the Chinese Communist Party exists.
They are about power, they're about power protection, they're about creating wealth for the Chinese Communist Party, and they treat human life as if it doesn't matter.
Those things we know with certainty.
We saw that squarely during this virus.
It's one of the reasons we'd love to know more about what actually happened in this lab.
Perhaps if we did more research, we'd find out it was something even more nefarious.
When we come back, I want to ask Mike Pompeo about China's global aspirations and some of the other threats facing American foreign policy.
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I'm back with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Mike, we've been hearing from the Biden administration that the great threats facing America today are coming internally from white supremacists, or if they are coming from anywhere else, it's these generic threats like climate change.
But it seems to me that if you look around the world, we've got some national actors.
So, the greatest threat, Dinesh, at home, obviously, is a weak America, divided America. But the biggest external threat by far is the Chinese Communist Party.
It is the only entity today with both the capacity and the intention Of undermining our way of life, property rights, the protection of human life, all the things that the rational thought, all the things that the West has built an edifice around.
They want to undermine that.
So this is an easy answer.
It's the Chinese Communist Party.
They are big, 1.4 billion people in the country.
They are powerful with an economy that is Very robust.
And they will stop at nothing to continue to build out their hegemonic power.
We don't have to study long.
Just listen to what General Secretary Xi Jinping says, the leader of the CCP. And when you listen to him, you will come to understand that this is something that the United States has to push back against and has to counter forcefully.
Now, would you say that when I think about the old Soviet Union and compare it with China, the Soviet Union, I think, probably in numeric terms, had a larger nuclear arsenal.
And of course, we heard a great deal about that in the 1970s and 80s.
The Chinese, however, are a lot wealthier.
And as you mentioned, they have an economic juggernaut that would be able to fuel their global aspirations, perhaps even more than the Soviet Union.
We've heard from military strategists for a while that the Chinese don't care about that.
They don't have global objectives.
Their objective may be to be the big boy in the neighborhood, to push their weight around in the South China Sea, perhaps exercise a certain kind of intimidation over Taiwan, maybe scare away South Korea and India and a couple of other players in the But they're not trying to be a global superpower.
How do you read the intentions of the Chinese and are we in, you may say, a new sort of Cold War?
Dinesh, they're very clear about their intentions.
They want to be a global superpower.
This is their objective. And they'll use every tool.
So I understand why the military folks talk about the fact that the Chinese military is focused on the first island chain and then the expansion of their power.
But there are other tools.
Their information campaign, their propaganda campaign around the world.
Indeed, right here in the United States, massive spying operations that forced us to close the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas.
They're economic tools, right?
Stealing intellectual property from us here in the United States, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wealth destroyed, and then dumping that product back here inside the United States.
No, this is a nation that views itself as an empire, right?
Historic Chinese, right?
The Middle Kingdom. So they want to be at the very center of the world.
They want the rules to be their rules.
You see it in the way they're creating their digital currency now to try and take and replace the dollar as the reserve currency around the world.
These are all focused efforts of a Chinese Communist Party that is intent on having the capacity to influence every country around the world, dominate those that are weaker, and coerce those that are a little bit stronger.
When I asked you earlier about the threats facing America, the first thing you said was actually not China, but the kind of division and weakness and sort of lack of will inside of the United States.
It looks like the Chinese are now aware of this and perhaps even trying to exploit it.
I think, for example, of the Chinese diplomats who confronted the Biden diplomats.
And the first thing they said is, hey, you can't lecture us about human rights.
You admit... That essentially you've got all this institutional racism and white supremacy in the United States.
So why don't you put your own house in order first and then start lecturing?
So I thought it was interesting how well the Chinese were able to play that diplomatic card and how befuddled the Biden people were because in a sense they were being incriminated by their own testimony.
Yeah, no, Dinesh, the problem that the Biden administration has with that line of argument from the CCP is that they believe it too.
They believe this is a racist nation.
They believe our founding was illegitimate.
They run around the world apologizing for America when we're the greatest force for good in all of history.
And so, yes, so the CCP will exploit that.
You hear CCP diplomats talking about Black Lives Matter.
You see them make references to the murder of George Floyd, right?
You see that.
And as America's chief diplomat, I saw around the world It wasn't about traveling there to go make friends with them.
We needed to be clear.
We were working for America first.
We were going to put the priorities of keeping our citizens safe and free and prosperous first.
And when we did that, we were going to deliver the goods for them too.
And if you don't understand, if you can't see the absolute absence of any parallel, any moral equivalence between the United States, with all of its challenges, between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, then you are doomed In your diplomatic efforts around the world.
You can't deliver it.
And the CCP will exploit it.
They'll tell every country around the world, look at those Americans.
Look how messed up they are.
You should be with us. We're the strong horse, right?
This is a Middle Eastern idea of the strong horse.
We're the strong horse and America is in decline.
I fear that the left in the States believes that.
They believe that this was a ill-founded nation that is now in decline and we're just going to try and manage our way through that.
I don't accept that premise.
I think they're fundamentally wrong.
And that really is the hallmark of the difference between how we thought about America and its place in the world and how this administration does.
role of radical Islam in this picture? Do we have a separate threat coming from radical Islam that is distinct from the Chinese threat? Or is it the case that America's enemies are somehow making common cause with each other? My wife Debbie is from Venezuela and she notices, for example, that you've got the Chinese in Venezuela, but you've got the Iranians in Venezuela. And in some senses they appear to be allied, at least allied in their opposition to the United States.
Talk for a moment about the sort of Chino-Islamic alliance and say a word, if you will, about Venezuela.
So that's a good point. I talked about this in Venezuela.
You have the Russians, the Chinese, and the Iranians, the Cubans, of course, in Venezuela running a police state that's destroyed millions of lives and caused over 10% of the Venezuelan people to have to flee.
It's a calamity.
You know, I think there are ideological differences between the Marxist-Leninist views of the Chinese and the Islamist views of these extremists in Iran.
But suffice it to say, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend certainly works there.
But we see it not just in Venezuela.
Look at the Iran deal.
The administration wants to go back into this failed nuclear agreement.
The Chinese want to go back into the deal, the Iranians want to go back into the deal, the Russians want to go back into the deal, and the Biden administration wants to go back into the deal.
This ought to tell you something about how those countries are prepared to align in ways that undermine the United States of America.
And so the Chinese are expanding in these Islamist places.
We have a threat that is certainly separate from Islamist terror, but one that will certainly What's a polite way to say it?
Play footsie with the Chinese and vice versa when it's in their common interest.
Just one more question, if we have time, and that is, you mentioned this kind of peculiar fact that the objectives of the Chinese, the Iranians, the Russians coincide on the Iran deal with the Biden administration.
Now, it would seem to me that this would give some of these hostile foreign powers a reason to want to interfere in American politics, because one party is more aligned with where they want to go in the world, and the other party, the Trump party, let's say, is clearly not.
Do you believe that these foreign actors have these objectives of meddling in American elections?
And if so, is that something that needs to be more carefully looked at?
Dinesh, they absolutely do.
They have preferred candidates, parties.
They have things they'd prefer that America did.
You can coerce it with your military or you can conduct information and propaganda campaigns around the world and inside the United States to undermine those beliefs, those parties, those principles that make life more difficult for you if you're the Chinese.
They are fully engaged in the propaganda war here in the United States.
We see it in our universities and schools.
We see them stealing research from them.
There's 360,000 Chinese students studying in the United States of America on any given year.
So yes, they are working to conduct information campaigns.
And by the way, they coerce, we've seen this, Dinesh, they coerce American businesses as well.
So it is a multifaceted effort to shape American culture and American politics and American thinking in an effort that is much more in line with the things that they hope to achieve around the world.
So this is an easy question.
The answer is yes. Mike Pompeo, thank you so much for this.
It's been very insightful and a little bit sobering.
I appreciate it. Dinesh, thank you, sir.
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Is the Biden administration and the Justice Department and the left undertaking a project of deprogramming the January 6th protesters?
Are they using prosecutorial power, the threats of judicial punishment, and then simply their physical captivity of these defendants In order to try to change their way of thinking.
Now, I do want to point out that this is a psychology that is not unheard of on the left.
First of all, all socialist regimes do this.
Second, I saw in my own case, a very different type of case, but campaign finance violation.
But here was my judge, Judge Berman, and part of my sentence was mandatory psychological counseling.
Now, what purpose could that have?
It was clearly not because I was, you know, Jeffrey Dahmer nutso with bodies in my refrigerator.
No, it was obviously based upon the idea that there must be something wrong with my psyche that perhaps some counseling could undo.
Now, happily for me, this counseling didn't take, so to speak.
But it's very disturbing to see what's going on with some of the January 6th protesters, and I want to focus here on one of them.
And this is a grandmother, 49 years old, a grandmother of five.
And she, her name is Lloyd, Anna Morgan Lloyd.
She issued a remarkable statement at her sentencing to the judge.
She goes, My lawyer has given me names of books and movies to help me see what life is like for others in our country.
People of all colors should feel as safe as I do to walk down the street.
Now, what's going on here?
It turns out that this woman, Anna Morgan Lloyd, has a court-appointed lawyer, a woman named Heather Shainer.
She got the court-appointed lawyer because she couldn't afford her own lawyer.
And the court-appointed lawyer is a leftist.
The court-appointed lawyer has been feeding her essentially propaganda books in order to cure her of, you may say, the Trump disease.
Now, Lloyd, by the way, has a clean record, this woman.
She pleaded guilty to one count, and look how innocuous her count is.
Quote,"...parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building." Whoop-dee-doo!
Whoop-dee-doo! But nevertheless, this is a person undergoing re-education from her own lawyer." And her lawyer, I'm now quoting her, you get a sense of what the lawyer's politics are.
This is the woman named Heather Shainer.
She says, quote, while America is a great country, quote, it was born of genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of people.
So this is the ideology they now want to push on this woman.
And let's remember that these people, a lot of these January 6th defendants are kind of vulnerable.
They're in captivity.
Their finances are ruined.
They can't afford lawyers.
So they are at the mercy of the government.
In fact, in some cases, they're even facing intimidation by the guards who feel a kind of democratic green light to abuse these prisoners.
And so, this woman, Heather Schaner, starts sending Anna Maria Lloyd, Anna Morgan Lloyd, all kinds of literature.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a kind of Native American sympathy tract, Shin We're good to go.
Anyway, the point here is not that these materials are all bad, it's rather that here is a lawyer whose job it is to defend her client, whose job it is to make her client's case before the judge, but who nevertheless sees herself as a kind of change agent to get her client to modify her views and then go hat in hand to the judge.
And sure enough, They submit a court brief where they say, quote, this is Heather Shainer writing on behalf of her client, she has worked hard to come to terms with what she believed before January 6, 2021, and what she has learned since then.
In other words, her re-education, if not complete, has nevertheless greatly advanced.
And the judge goes, okay, we'll give her a light sentence, three months probation, and a $500 fine.
While the Justice Department—I'm now quoting Joshua Rothenstein, the assistant U.S. attorney handling the Lloyd case—he says, quote, we don't prosecute people based on their beliefs.
But this is, in fact, a flat-out lie.
Because when you look at the documents submitted by the Justice Department in every single case— They talk about what they describe, in a sense, as the kooky beliefs of these defendants.
And notably, quote, their belief that the 2020 election was stolen.
So on the one hand, they say we're not prosecuting based on their beliefs.
On the other hand, they're using these beliefs to tell judges, hey, listen, you can't let this guy out.
He needs to be in solitary confinement.
He's a danger to the country because he believes that the election was stolen.
So these are ways in which...
The Biden administration is criminalizing political dissent, is taking an act of political protest that occurs all the time on the left in far more boisterous, noisy, harmful, violent, and savage manners.
And those acts are overlooked, excused, minimized.
Kamala Harris even puts up bail money where needed.
But in this case, you have people, vulnerable people, people without resources who are being harassed.
Targeted, and as it turns out, also ruthlessly propagandized.
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How can they even call it incognito?
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I talked in the last segment about how a court-appointed attorney, a left-winger, Was using her position to propagandize her own client.
You may say re-educate her own client, a January 6th protester, a grandmother of five.
And I want to talk about a different kind of lawyer, somebody I want to acknowledge as a kind of a hero.
This guy's name is Joseph McBride.
He's also a A public defender.
But he's a guy who has come, stood up, come forward to defend these January 6 protesters, and he's doing it relentlessly.
This is a guy who acknowledges that this is not easy to do.
Many of his fellow public defendants don't want to represent these people.
They don't have money, and moreover, they're seen as being, quote, on the wrong side of history.
So in the kind of left-wing public defendant community, there is an aversion to taking on these cases.
But McBride is representing Richard Barnett.
Who's Richard Barnett?
He's the infamous guy who put his feet up on Nancy Pelosi's office.
And he's come to symbolize this, well, let's call it the insurrection that wasn't really an insurrection.
Now, there's a profile of McBride in the New York Post, and he says, quote, I made my bones at Manhattan Legal Aid and the Innocence Project.
That's where he got started.
And he talks about these clients and his client, Richard Barnett.
And he goes, look, this is a guy that was put into inhuman conditions in the jail.
He said it was, quote, torture.
And he said that this guy is, in fact, a political prisoner.
He said that he's now got him out.
So Richard Barnett is now home under sort of house arrest pending his case.
So he was able to get him out of captivity.
But he says, and I'm now quoting a very disturbing statement, quote, the guards want to hurt them and feel like they have a green light from the government to do whatever they like.
So the government's own description, these are terrorists, these are Al-Qaeda types, this is like the Oklahoma City bombing.
It tells the guards...
You know what? We're going to look the other way.
And this is horrific.
But it is going on.
We shouldn't have any illusion about it.
This is kind of what goes on in a lot of third-world countries, and it is very much going on in the United States today.
Here is the lawyer, Joseph McBride, talking about what he's learned about how these prosecutions work.
He says, I learned when defending people who weren't able to afford representation that the rules of the game were changed to disadvantage them.
They were threatened with jail sentences so large they could take a plea for five years or risk going to jail for 50.
Now, I can testify from my own experience in a limited way.
This is what the U.S. government tried to do to me.
We'll add on extra charges.
Essentially, re-descriptions of what the main charge is.
Bank fraud, mail fraud, blah, blah, blah.
And the idea is you should plead, otherwise you might be facing years and years and years in prison.
And what they do, can you imagine the pressure it puts on defendants?
And I don't just mean the January 6th defendants.
I mean all defendants.
Especially indigent defendants, where the government is saying to them, okay, listen, you want to face the prospect, you're 22 years old, that you won't get out of jail until you're 60.
Or sign right here a plea deal.
And this is, by the way, and this is why the government has a 98% conviction rate.
It's not because everyone did it.
It's not because the government is such amazing prosecutors.
They used the legal bludgeoning of the plea bargaining system to force even innocent people to plead guilty to things that they never did.
This is a point that so many people don't understand.
Even on social media, people go, oh, Dinesh, well, you plead, you plead guilty.
And I'm like, well, yeah, but do you know the legal bludgeoning that goes into pleading guilty?
Did I exceed the campaign finance law?
Yeah, but I could have argued selective prosecution.
I could have argued that other people did the same thing and never got anything.
So this would be my defense before a jury, but it doesn't make any sense to go forward with it.
Why? Because of the huge risk you're taking of destroying your life if...
The jury does, in fact, side with the government.
And so, back to the Richard Barnett case, this is a guy who was accused of, quote, taking a stun gun into the Capitol.
But it turns out this stun gun doubled as a flashlight and a walking cane, and moreover, it had no batteries in it.
So it couldn't possibly stun anybody.
And this is how the government describes, quote, a deadly weapon.
A deadly weapon. And so they're trying to make people violent who are not violent.
They're trying to take small things and interpret them in such a way that they have exaggerated significance.
The government did offer Richard Barnett a plea deal.
Seven years. Seven years.
He refused it happily.
But here you get a profile of these unfortunate people who are really victims and political prisoners, and there are only a few brave men, men like Joseph McBride, who are willing to stand up and give them the vigorous legal defense that they are constitutionally entitled to.
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And here is a USA Today fact check that proclaims this whole theory, it's a theory, to be false.
And I want to look at this fact check because it kind of is a way that these fact checks work, or to put it differently, we can see how the fact check process is manipulated in order to come up with a preordained result.
So fact check. Claims of FBI role in January 6th capital attack are false.
False. So that means, according to the fact check, that the FBI was not involved in January 6th.
Now, is USA Today able to prove that?
As it turns out, absolutely not.
After talking about how there was an article in Revolver and Matt Getz is demanding that the FBI answer questions, USA Today says this.
Legal experts say that that term...
Which is unindicted co-conspirator cannot be used to describe FBI agents or undercover government operatives.
They quote Ira Robbins, an American University law professor, saying that there is a distinction between an FBI informant or operative and, quote, an unindicted co-conspirator.
Well, everyone agrees that there is a legal distinction but that doesn't mean that this legal distinction was respected by the FBI which doesn't always respect these distinctions.
And then they quote Robin saying this, while it's possible FBI agents were acting undercover in extremist organizations involved in the riot, stop right there, right there is an admission that the Revolver article might be true.
The FBI might well have penetrated these organizations and might have been involved in instigating and carrying out this, quote, riot.
Nevertheless, he says, quote, that would not necessarily mean they had instigated the insurrection.
That would not necessarily mean, it doesn't logically follow that because they were involved, they instigated it.
Well, of course it doesn't follow, but it leaves open the possibility that they did instigate it.
Cornell professor Jens Olin told the Washington Post that there was a 1985 ruling in which the U.S. Court of Appeals said that, by definition, government agents and informers can't be conspirators.
Now, again, this is completely irrelevant because everybody agrees that if somebody is genuinely a government plant inside of some sort of conspiracy, the government plant is not directly themselves a conspirator.
They're not part of the conspiracy.
They're part of exposing the conspiracy.
But the real issue here in the Revolver article is to what degree did these government informants, if they in fact penetrated the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, to what degree did they foment the action?
That's the question, and it remains completely, completely unanswered.
Now, we continue with USA Today.
While authorities are still investigating who organized and led the insurrection, in other words, it is unknown who organized and led the insurrection, leaving open, again, the possibility that the FBI was involved.
They go, nevertheless, court documents show the rioters are linked to far-right extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters.
Think of what kind of irrelevant nonsense this is.
No one denies the involvement of these groups.
The question is, did in fact the FBI get inside these groups and push them into doing it?
So merely saying, court documents show that it was in fact these groups that did it, There's no answer to the question, what role did these agencies, these deep state agencies, play in steering these groups toward the actions that they took?
Now, a USA Today review of charging documents found that all conspiracy theories, all conspiracy charges are against the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers.
Again, we know that.
The question we're asking is a different one.
Were FBI agents part of this?
The FBI vowed to penetrate these groups.
Presumably, they did.
It's not denied that they could well have been part of the January 6th operation, and the question raised by Revolver, and it's only a question...
To what degree did the government organize the effort that had then turned around and declared to be a sedition, an insurrection?
Did the government, in other words, kick off the insurrection?
And then their conclusion, which of course follows from nothing that I've said so far.
Here's the U.S. The claim that the FBI orchestrated the January 6th attack on the Capitol is false.
Notice the absurdity of this.
This is kind of like saying, based on everything I've said so far, I can conclude that God does not exist.
Have you proven that God does not exist?
Have you offered real evidence that God does not exist?
Have you shown in this case that the FBI had nothing to do with January 6th?
Or if they had penetrated these groups, they played no active role in actually fomenting what happened on January 6th?
That they didn't provide, let's say for example, access to the Capitol?
That they didn't open the doors?
They didn't draw up the planning?
They weren't in fact leaders of these plots to the degree that any plots existed at all?
No. USA Today hasn't shown this.
They don't even pretend to show it.
But having not shown it, they draw themselves up to full height and go, therefore, we conclude false.
So this is not fact-checking.
If you look at it closely, if you subject it to the simple type of analysis that you're taught to do in college when you read a document, read it critically, read it analytically, you realize that it's 99% hot air.
When inflation becomes a problem, gold and other precious metals are part of the solution.
Now, in May, the U.S. inflation rate hit 5%, the highest in 13 years.
And you see it all around.
You higher fuel prices, higher food prices, higher car prices, construction costs, housing prices.
The list goes on. So inflation isn't just coming, it's here.
Now, have you protected your savings, your investments?
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For decades, I never wanted to invest in gold, only the stock market.
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I want to talk about woke politics, especially among young people.
And the phenomenon of Gnosticism.
Gnosticism is actually an ancient Christian heresy.
And I'll come back to Gnosticism in a minute.
I was actually talking to my daughter, Danielle.
We were talking about the fact that traditionally it's parents who have been able to shape the way that their children think and their children's values.
And of course many of us as parents try to do that.
Daniel was saying we're seeing today, especially on the left, the opposite phenomenon in which leftist children are pressuring their parents to move in a leftist direction.
Leftist children are using their wokeness We're good to go.
When you have children today, think of some 19 year old or 20 year old telling their parents, you know, I'm woke and you're not.
The obvious question is, what do you, the kid, know that the parent doesn't?
What experiences have you had as a kid in your short life that put your parents to shame?
And of course, if you ask the kids that, they don't know.
They can't say. So if the parents were to say, okay, well, you're talking about institutional racism, do you have a more detailed understanding of how the institutions of America function?
Than we, the parents, do?
No, I don't really know how they function at all.
Do you know how the university functions on the inside?
Do you know how our financial industry functions?
Do you know how the mortgage industry works?
No, no, no.
So what gives you the arrogance of being able to think that you've got this kind of enlightenment?
And of course, this is the point at which the kid gives you this kind of knowing smile, like, I've got secret knowledge.
I know something that you don't, but I'm not able to say.
It's almost like I'm a member of a cult, and we've got this insider information unavailable to anyone outside the cult, and this is what brings me to the phenomenon of Gnosticism.
So, the Gnostics...
A heresy that goes back to the early centuries, the 3rd, the 4th century.
The Gnostics believed that they were a group set apart.
And they would meet in secret.
They had all kinds of passwords.
And the key to Gnosticism is that we know something that nobody else knows.
And that something could be anything.
We know the true nature of God, or we know when the world is really going to end, or we know the secret ingredients that God is going to use when He determines who's going to be saved and who's not going to be saved.
So, the Gnostics were always kind of in the know about everything, although how they knew, or what their sources were, or what their basis was for knowing, was never really disclosed.
And the knowledge also was only shared within the sect.
Now, there is an important conservative thinker by the name of Erich Vogelin.
Erich Vogelin was a refugee from Nazism.
In fact, he was a professor at the University of Vienna when Hitler came to power, and he was fired from that post, and then he fled in He came to America.
He became a professor eventually at Louisiana State University.
There's now a Vogelin Center there.
But anyway, Vogelin's famous phrase, and Vogelin in a way invoked the philosophy of Gnosticism because Vogelin believed that in the modern era, what we see in the phenomenon known as progressivism is a desire to, in Vogelin's words, Imminentize the eschaton.
Wow. Imminentize the eschaton.
But what that really means in simple English is bringing heaven down to earth.
As Vogelin saw it, the great heresy, the great modern heresy, which mirrors the heresy of Gnosticism, is to try to take the Garden of Eden, if you will, and through socialism and through leftism, sort of realize it here on earth.
And Vogelin believed that this effort, impossible to do, results in horrific tyranny.
Because, for example, if you can't get everybody to be on the same page, presumably in heaven everyone will be on the same page.
We have enormous diversity of views.
And Vogelin's view was, yeah, so what will happen is the leftists, the socialists, will try to make everybody here have the same view.
But to do that, they will have to shut people up.
They will have to silence freedom of speech.
They will have to torture people.
So Vogelin saw modern tyranny as arising out of a modern application of the ancient Gnostic impulse.
I guess what I'm saying at the end of the day is that a lot of young people think that they're smarter than their parents because...
In fact, I remember there was some young leftist who went up to Reagan at one point and said something like, You know, we know so much more than you do, Mr.
Reagan. You're an old man.
Your generation is so different than ours.
You grew up in an age without color TV, without microwave ovens, without laser surgery, without computers...
Without lunar modules to go to the moon, without heart transplants.
And Reagan goes, yeah, it's true that we grew up without all those things.
We invented them.
So the bottom line of it is this facile superiority that people have, where they think that because technology advances, because we've seen material progress in the West and in the world, that this somehow creates moral superiority.
I think this is in fact a deep fallacy and it really shows that the ancient Gnostic heresy for all its peculiarities of the 3rd and 4th century AD is still perhaps in a modified form with us today.
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Hey, I hope you're enjoying the podcast, and please make sure to subscribe to it.
And if you're listening on Apple, please rate me five stars and help me get the word out.
Tell other people about it.
The podcast has been growing really nicely, but I want it to be a podcast that really reaches widely, both through the United States, but also around the world.
It's time for our mailbox.
Let's go to today's question.
Listen. Hi Dinesh, thank you for all you and Debbie do.
I was very intrigued by your assertion on how conservatives should reconsider their purely intellectual or freedom absolutism approach to the Supreme Court.
Jonathan Haidt, the moral psychologist, has long pointed out the difference between the liberal and conservative moralities.
Both sides accept care, harm, fairness, loyalty, and to a degree authority as a baseline moral guides.
Whereas conservatives add sanctity as a dimension as well.
It seems to me that the sanctity dimension is what you're referring to in your treatise and how we should not only look at the justices and intellectual faculties, but their moral character as well.
This is the source of wisdom and understanding of a transcendent morality that our society needs so badly.
So we should ask the potential justices what moral framework they subscribe to and determine if they have the courage to act on it.
Is this approach consistent with the Constitution and the founding ideals?
Thank you for your time.
What an interesting question.
And I'm trying to peel the layers of the onion because it's a complex question.
Let me address it in a couple of different ways.
First of all, I take you to be saying that conservatives believe, and this is a dividing line between us and the left, we believe in an external moral order and they, in general, don't. We think that there is an order that comes from God or it comes from nature.
The founders actually spoke about nature's God.
But the idea is that it's not something that we come up with.
When you look, for example, at the Ten Commandments, those are God's commandments.
And even if you don't take them that way, as commandments given, quote, from above, the idea that there is right and wrong, and right and wrong is built into nature.
It's not just something subjectively, it's wrong because I say so.
No, it's wrong.
And it's my job to recognize that.
So we believe, in that sense, in this external and transcendent moral code.
The left often thinks of morality as something not only man-made, but something that each man, each individual, makes for himself or herself, or I guess I should say in today's era, itself.
And I think this is all correct.
Now, how does it apply to the court and how does it apply to the Constitution?
I do think that you're right that when you have a judge before you, it is less important for the judge to swear ritual fidelity to, oh, I will not step outside the orbit of the Constitution, because a lot of cases that come before the court, on those cases the Constitution does not speak with absolute clarity.
And this is something, by the way, that even Lincoln realized in the debates leading up to the Civil War.
For example, can a Southern state secede?
Look in the Constitution.
It doesn't say one way or the other.
It doesn't say states cannot secede, and it doesn't say they can.
The Constitution, in a sense, is silent.
Now, you can make arguments based on interpretations of the Constitution, but the idea that a mere declaration of fidelity to the Constitution sort of settles the issue, no, it's not quite that clear.
And I think what you're saying in your question is, wait a minute, isn't it just as helpful, if not more helpful, to ask the judge questions about, so what do you think about the dignity of human life?
So what do you think about...
So in other words, find out how the judge sees the world and what their compass, their understanding of right and wrong is.
And do they see right and wrong as something that is, you may say, built into nature?
Or do they see right and wrong as objective?
Or do they see it as purely subjective?
Now... Having said all this, I think that just as important as investigating the moral views of a particular judicial nominee is to ask them about the moral architecture that is built into the Constitution and the founding documents.
Because just as when you think about, you know, Shakespeare's moral universe, behind what Shakespeare writes, there is a certain moral understanding of nature and the world.
And similarly, when you look at the philosophy of the founders, it isn't just a set of rules.
You've got to be 35 years old to run for president and so on.
It is rather a set of rules informed by an underlying philosophical spirit and being familiar with what that philosophical architecture is and what it means is very helpful to applying those rules.
Because you understand what the objective of the founders was, what kind of society they were trying to build, in which these rules provide a certain type of scaffolding.
But even there are many cases in which you have to go beyond the scaffolding.
And when the rules themselves are clear, it is the underlying philosophy that provides a roadmap and a guide.
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