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July 6, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:06:40
SPIRIT OF 1776 Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 125
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Coming up, does our country need to be re-founded?
Why we need the spirit of 1776?
Now more than ever.
And the Chinese Communist Party just had a hundredth birthday.
I forgot to send a present.
And this is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We've just had the celebrations of July 4th, which causes us to think back to the founding of America and the great spirit in which this country was launched, launched out of tyranny and launched into freedom.
But for the first time, I think, this year and all the time I've been in America, my sense of excitement and celebration was tempered by a feeling of foreboding.
Not a sense of personal foreboding at all, but rather a foreboding for the country.
Has the American experiment been unwound?
Has it been subverted?
Are we living in the America that the founders would have wished?
What would the founders think if they were alive today?
So, July 4th for me had this sort of double meaning, a sense of mixed emotions, you might say, because I look around and I look at the way in which the left is trashing not just our culture, not just our founding faith, but trashing our institutions, one after the other.
And ultimately, if you think about the architecture of the American founding, it was a building of institutions.
It's so strange, but we have two fundamental concepts in the founding, the concept of civil rights, but also the concept of civil liberties.
Civil rights, of course, has to do with anti-discrimination.
It has to do with all men are created equal.
But civil liberties has to do with our basic ability to speak our mind, express and practice our faith, our freedom of conscience, our freedom of assembly, our freedom of private space, no unreasonable search and seizure.
And it is paradoxical to say the least that civil rights is being invoked now by the left to cancel civil liberties.
We're systematically racist and therefore we have to ban hate speech.
And of course hate speech here isn't really hate speech.
If you think of what the digital censors are doing, they're not censoring hate speech.
They're censoring differences of opinion.
And differences of opinion and the expression of those differences is critical to democracy.
So our founding experiment is in trouble.
Now here's Cori Bush.
One of the left-wingers, part of the gang, the squad in Congress.
She says, when they say the 4th of July is about American freedom, remember this, the freedom they're referring to is for white people.
The land is stolen land and black people still aren't free.
Now... I'm trying to wrap my head around this concept of blacks aren't free.
In what sense is Cori Bush not free?
Is she not free to go about her business?
Is she not free to speak her mind?
Is she not free to cast her vote?
She's in Congress. She has all the freedoms that the founders listed, and yet she feels unfree.
And how can that really be?
Well, I think the answer to that comes from a line in Mary Chestnut's diary.
Mary Chestnut was the wife of the South Carolina senator, James Chestnut.
This is in the period of the Civil War.
And Mary Chestnut was a defender of the Confederacy.
And she makes this startling statement, which is once the Civil War has already begun, the Northerners, the Republicans, the Yankees are talking about how terrible slavery is.
And Mary Chestnut writes this.
She goes... Now, if slavery is as disagreeable to Negroes as we think it, why don't they all march over to the border where they would be received with open arms?
It amazes me.
What she's getting at is she's basically saying, well, the slaves must be happy.
Why? Because our men are all at the front.
We can't, the women and children, by force, hold the slaves.
If the slaves wanted to leave, they could.
So from Mary Chestnut's point of view, what she's basically saying is slavery must be, these slaves must sort of like it here.
Because they could leave, but they're choosing not to.
But I think there's another way to read what she's saying.
What she's really talking about is the captivity of the mind.
What she's saying is that we have the slaves not just by fetters or chains binding them to the plantation.
We've kind of taken over their minds.
We've subjected them to a mental captivity.
So while in theory they could leave, Their minds keep them here.
They're scared to leave.
They feel dependent on the plantation.
The plantation has become a psychological prison.
And here I think we have an insight into what the Democratic Party has actually done to blacks.
They have subjected blacks to a kind of mental captivity.
And so, when Cori Bush says, I don't feel free, in a way, I guess she's right.
She is a captive of a mental prison created in the inner cities by the Democratic Party, holding, if you will, not just African Americans, but other minorities in a certain kind of subjection.
Now, in a broader sense, I think for the rest of us who are free, but who nevertheless recognize that our freedoms are being encroached upon, our Second Amendment right to bear arms, our First Amendment right to speak, our First Amendment right to go to church.
And no, the left is saying they can restrict the churches under lockdown laws, that they can block free speech in all kinds of ways.
And while they say that this is being done by private platforms, it's private platforms that are cheered on and pushed on in the censoring direction by organs of the state.
And we see the deep state being unleashed against conservatives and against patriots and against Trumpsters.
So all of this means that, to some degree, we have to keep the spirit of 1776 very much alive.
And by that I mean, quite literally, the revolutionary spirit.
I don't just mean the spirit of thinking back nostalgically to the founding, but keeping inside of us that flame that drove the founders to say enough is enough.
The founders, let's remember, responded even to relatively minor forms of subjection, confiscatory taxes, the Declatory Act, the Stamp Act.
The reason that they responded so fiercely is because they recognized that in principle, If they conceded to the Declaratory Act and the Stamp Act, it gave the British Parliament the right to subject them in all matters whatsoever.
And the founders were like, no, you're not doing it now, but this is the direction in which you are pushing.
And that's exactly what's happening in America today.
No, we aren't living in the gulag.
No, we're not living in communist China.
But the end point of where the left is pushing is in fact communist China, is in fact tyrannical Venezuela, is in fact some kind of America as a prison camp in which we become, you may almost say, an occupied people.
Now, I realize there's a part of the country that is okay with all this.
I would call that the Chavista wing of America.
Those are the people who want to subjugate the rest of us.
But there's a large part of the country that doesn't want this kind of subjection, that wants to live in the same spirit of freedom that the founders intended.
We are the true heirs of 1776, and we better not forget it.
In the immediate aftermath of July 4th, it is beyond tragic for me to reflect that many of the symbols and signs of America, the American flag, the national anthem, the things that represent the 4th of July, Have now ceased to be the common property, the common heritage of the whole of America.
And what that means is that today, if you stand up and wave the flag, there's a bunch of people who won't like it.
They think it's, oh, the flag represents racism.
Or if you, at a game or in a public ceremony, play the national anthem, someone sings it.
You have a bunch of people who sit down or turn away or take a knee.
And once again, they are rejecting these once shared symbols of Americana.
It's no longer an American flag in a sense.
It's our flag. It's not their flag.
They don't want it. It's no longer the national anthem.
It's our anthem. It's not their anthem.
They don't want to sing it. We can't make them.
Now, there's an interesting article in the tradition of critical race theory in the spirit of the so-called 1619 Project on Frederick Douglass.
And the article says, titled, Frederick Douglass had nothing but scorn for July 4th.
The black abolitionist spoke for the enslaved.
This is by Jillian Brockle in the Washington Post.
And she's recalling an event on the 4th of July, 1852, when Frederick Douglass was speaking to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society.
And it is true, Douglass began with some savage...
Questioning of the founding.
I'm going to read you a few lines by Douglass that suggest how vehement he was.
This 4th of July is yours, not mine.
You may rejoice.
I must mourn.
To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems.
We're inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.
Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?
And then a couple more lines.
What to the American slave is your 4th of July?
I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days in the year the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.
To him... Your celebration is a sham.
Your boasted liberty an unholy license.
Your national greatness swelling vanity.
Your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless.
Your denunciation of tyrants brass-fronted impudence.
Your shouts of liberty and equality hollow mockery.
And then he goes on, there is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.
So you may say a full-throated denunciation of American slavery.
But that's kind of where the article ends.
What the article leaves out is how Frederick Douglass came out on this.
And where Frederick Douglass came out on this is the exact opposite as the 1619 people, the critical race theory people.
Frederick Douglass came out of this by, at the end of the speech, talking about the American founding and the American constitution.
And he says, and I'll quote, he goes, And he goes on to say, Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered.
This is Frederick Douglass.
He goes on to say that the Constitution is an anti-slavery charter.
And now I'm quoting him.
Slavery was, quote,"...the mere scaffolding to the magnificent structure to be removed as soon as the building was completed." And then he says that the Constitution delivers, quote, the deadliest blow upon slavery that can be given at a particular time.
He goes on to say, I do not despair of this country.
There are forces in operation which must inevitably work.
The downfall of slavery.
And what he means is that it's the founding itself that has set those forces into motion.
Now, I notice that this whole side of Frederick Douglass, you may say the patriotic side, the affirmation of the founding and the Constitution as anti-slavery documents, is all left out of the Washington Post article.
And I want to tell you why.
It's because in America, there are sort of two traditions.
There is the long history of oppression.
But there is also an emancipatory tradition.
Any balanced history would try to teach both, would actually try to show what were the forces that not only created slavery in America, let's remember slavery was imported to these lands by the British.
But also what were the forces that generated anti-slavery?
But the key to the 1619 Project, the big lie of critical race theory, is to eliminate the second tradition, eliminate the emancipatory tradition, focus only on the oppression tradition.
So in other words, that's why they want to go back to 1619, because they want to find American oppression, quote, in the womb.
It's part of the American DNA. There's a kind of uninterrupted tradition of crimes visited upon one minority after another.
The emancipatory side is downplayed.
If not, ignored altogether.
Hardly any mention of Lincoln.
Hardly any mention of Sojourner Truth or Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King.
It is oppression, oppression all the time.
So what we're seeing here is that the argument is not over whether to teach about race and slavery.
Because the left goes, wait a minute, they're trying to stop us from teaching about race and slavery.
Nonsense. No one's trying to do that.
The issue is how you teach about race and slavery.
Are you actually offering the full picture?
Or are you, as in this article, presenting one half of the story and leaving the other equally vital half out?
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The Chinese Communist Party just had its 100th birthday And quite frankly, it was really disgusting to see all the American corporations that congratulated the Communist Party!
On its Happy Birthday CCP Chinese Communist Party.
Now, for almost 30 years, we've been hearing from, not just from the left, even from some of the so-called neoconservatives, this notion that China is liberalizing.
And as the doctrine goes, China must liberalize because that is the inevitable effect of Market capitalism.
Capitalism, in other words, causes people to enjoy economic prosperity.
As they enjoy more economic prosperity, they demand to get more rights.
I want the right to speak. I want the right to speak my conscience.
And so this puts pressure on the government to give you not merely economic rights and liberties, but also civil liberties.
Now, it's very instructive against this sort of mythology, I would call it, about China to see how the Chinese themselves see it.
And amidst all the deafening and massive celebrations in China, beautifully organized, I have to say, with grudging respect, I've got a transcript of Xi Jinping's speech To the Chinese.
Now, what's good about the speech is this is not a speech tailored for the Western audience.
It is aimed at the Chinese.
He's talking to his fellow Chinese, and therefore he is giving his view, the Communist Party view, of China itself.
And we think of China, we often hear in this country in articles and places like Foreign Affairs about how China broke with its kind of long-standing Marxist tradition, that beginning with Deng Xiaoping...
in the 1980s and continuing with Hu, and then now with Xi, the Chinese have moved into kind of a new direction, a direction that's more kind of harmonious with the West. The Chinese have moved away from insularity toward a kind of global involvement and all of this is seen as to the good.
But this is sort of not the Chinese view at all.
In fact, Xi begins by talking about, quote, the glorious journey of the party.
And he means not China. He means the Communist Party has traveled over 100 years of struggle.
And he talks about how the party is the leader of, quote, the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
What he means by rejuvenation is China having been a third-rate country, a backward power, humiliated time and time again going back, To the Opium War of 1840, that China is now becoming a superpower.
And I think their goal is, he doesn't say this explicitly, to become the sole superpower.
So not to share superpower status, not to have a bipolar world in which the US-Soviet rivalry is replaced by the US-Chinese, but rather to have a unipolar world in which China is sitting at the top and everybody else sits kind of around it in tribute.
He talks about the fact that the Communist Party is explicitly Marxist.
He goes, in 1917, Marxism-Leninism was brought to China.
And he talks about the fact that the Chinese have Marxism, quote, with Chinese characteristics.
So in other words, kind of a distinctive form of Marxism.
But there is no sense, as you read this, that the Chinese have repudiated either Marxism or socialism.
In fact, he says... By carrying out socialist revolution, we eliminated the exploitive and repressive feudal system that had persisted in China for thousands of years.
So he credits the socialist era, the era of Mao, for example, for having wiped out the kind of ancient tradition that went all the way back to Confucius.
And then he goes on to say that, yeah, we now have a...
Market economy, but he says nevertheless that it is, quote, a highly centralized planned economy, which is to say that this is, you may say, a state-run capitalism, almost a kind of new notion.
It is capitalism in that you have industry, you have trade, but it is trade that is being orchestrated and directed from the center and is directed by people who do not consider themselves to be capitalists but rather communists.
He takes a lot of credit, and some of it deserved, for raising the standard of living of the Chinese.
But this, he says, very clearly involves no expansion of civil liberties and no relinquishing of power by the central Communist Party committee.
In fact, he goes,"...we must uphold the firm leadership of the party." Without the Communist Party of China, there would be no new China and no national rejuvenation.
The leadership of the party constitutes the greatest strength of the system.
And then he says a little bit later, Marxism is the fundamental guiding ideology upon which our party and country are founded.
It is the very soul of our party.
We will use Marxism to observe, understand, and steer the trends of our times.
And then he ends with something very interesting.
He says, Here he's talking to the Biden administration.
Basically what he's saying is what the Chinese diplomats told the Biden diplomats a few months ago.
Back off! You're no one to lecture us about human rights.
You yourself confess that you're violating human rights in your own country.
He goes on to say, So this is tough talk coming from China,
and it suggests to me a confident tone that Chinese are no longer kind of, you may say, keeping this sort of slinking, silent, let's bide our time approach.
Rather, they feel sort of peacock-style, ready to strut upon the world stage.
And finally, he says, Xidas, we have pioneered a new and unique Chinese path to modernization and created a new model for human advancement.
Now, I think what the Chinese here are saying is this.
There are really two viable systems of organizing a society left in the world.
There is the kind of the freedom approach, the Western approach, which tries to combine economic freedom with civic liberty, civil liberty, and the kind of open society.
And he goes, look, look what the result is.
America is a kind of a mess, and Europe is a kind of a mess.
And so we in China have a better model, which combines tyranny in the political sense With economic or market freedom.
And so we're able to raise the living standards of people.
And he implies that's all the Chinese people want.
They're happy to have their standards of living improved.
They don't care about any of the other freedoms.
These are all false freedoms, so to speak, that are being offered in the West.
I think what we're seeing here is that China is now taking the place of Russia.
And in some ways, it is an even more dangerous opponent than the old Soviet Union.
It's certainly wealthier.
It has much better technology.
And quite frankly, it has more people, which is to say that while the Russians could have put 20-30 million people on a battlefield, The Chinese can put 100 million people on a battlefield, and that is a frightening thought to contemplate.
So as I look, not just at the months and years ahead, but over, let's say, the next couple of decades, I think that the United States is going to have its hands full with a very dangerous and formidable adversary, and all of this at a time when America itself is, if not in decline, in a very serious way, divided and fractured, a society, in my view, ill-equipped for this kind of challenge.
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American troops are now basically out of Afghanistan.
There are a few left, but they'll be gone soon, too.
And recently, there was a very widely publicized pullout.
Of Americans leaving the Bagram Air Force Base.
This has been a kind of node center of American activity and of American resistance to the Taliban.
So very bad news for Afghanistan.
In fact, the Afghan troops are really no match for the Taliban.
Recently, a thousand or so of them ran, fled over the Afghan border into neighboring Tajikistan, with the Taliban advancing on a number of fronts.
And so what this means quite clearly is that the Taliban will return to full power in Afghanistan.
There may be some sort of power-sharing arrangement, but even in power-sharing, there is such a thing as sort of the senior partner, and that's going to be the Taliban.
Very disappointing that America has put a lot of blood and treasure into Afghanistan, a cost of over $2 trillion, about 3,500 allied lives lost, not just American, but British and other as well.
And for what?
Just to see the very group that brought in the hijackers of 9-11 20 years ago now kind of meandering back toward Kabul and toward power.
Just as disturbing as America gets out.
The Chinese are looking to move in.
How? Well, the Chinese are trying to negotiate a deal with the Afghans.
And they don't mind doing a deal, of course, with the Taliban.
What is the deal? $62 billion.
The Chinese want to take their so-called Belt and Road Program.
Now, what's the Belt and Road Program?
It's a massive infrastructure trade and investment deal.
The Chinese make massive loans to countries all over the world.
They're doing this in Africa. They're doing it in South America.
They're doing it in Asia.
So they're creating a sort of trade network, which ultimately they're hoping will be a network of economic dependency on China.
And this is their way of locking in these countries so that they become Chinese allies.
Their economies become, to some degree, parasitic on China.
If China does things that they don't like, they're going to look the other way.
Why? Because they have too much to lose.
And so China's hoping to do this with Afghanistan.
What are they hoping to do?
Well, they want to build a land corridor from Afghanistan through Pakistan to China.
So China, in other words, would have direct access not just to Pakistan, they've been working on that for a while, but extend this through Afghanistan and this gives China a powerful foothold.
Afghanistan has been an important country through history.
Alexander the Great realized this.
Now why is Afghanistan important?
Because of its strategic location.
In some ways you could say Afghanistan connects the Middle East, Central Asia, and Europe.
It is a kind of node point for those three large land masses.
And the Chinese know this.
They're hoping to get to woo the Afghans into this deal.
Obviously, Afghanistan will be looking for ways to get foreign money and to develop.
With the United States pulling out, China kind of steps in and goes, well, we're going to help you out.
Of course, the Chinese have their own interests at stake.
Their goal here is a project that extends through 2049.
So here you begin to see how the Chinese are using their centralized control to make plans that go 20 years out.
And they're rolling out these massive infrastructure projects And really, the projects are such that if you don't pay, if you can't pay back the loans, the Chinese then have the right to take over, if not your country, parts of your country.
The Kenyans were complaining several weeks ago that if they defaulted on their loans to China, the Chinese may take the port of Mombasa.
Now, the Chinese didn't do that.
They kind of denied we're going to do that.
But it gives you the idea that when the Chinese make loans, like any other kinds of loans, they come with collateral.
They come with the idea that they are now owning part of your country.
I see that there are some Western analysts saying, oh, this is going to be very tricky for the Chinese because Afghanistan remains a highly divided society.
Nonsense. I think that as the Taliban consolidate power, they are the majority tribe in Afghanistan.
The Chinese will basically work through the Taliban.
The Chinese, as we know, have no hesitation working with tyrannical governments.
They're doing it right now in Venezuela, for example.
And so the Chinese are hoping that they can create an alternative power base to the United States.
So not only a strong China, but a strong China holding hands, holding hands and passing money through those hands through economic linkage with countries in Asia, Africa, and South America, all with a view to creating a completely rival power structure to an increasingly beleaguered United States.
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Higher fuel prices, higher food prices, higher car prices, construction costs, housing prices, the list goes on.
So, inflation isn't just on the way, it's here.
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I'm joined once again by my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill.
Danielle, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for being here.
I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your new TV show, which just started and the first episode went up on Sunday and this is going to be a weekly show.
Talk a little bit about who you're doing the show with and a little bit about what the show is about.
Yeah, so it's called Counterculture with Danielle D'Souza Gill, and it's through Epoch Times.
Epoch Times is a news outlet.
They do a lot of investigative reporting, but they also have a streaming platform called Epic TV. So if you look up Epic TV Counterculture with Danielle D'Souza Gill, you'll find it, but we also have the link in the description.
But you can find it and watch shows every week.
I'll be talking about things that the left is doing today.
And how we can fight back against their, what I would say is the predominant culture and how we can be the counterculture.
I want to talk a bit both about the culture and the counterculture, but before I do, here's a little clip about the show.
Listen. Progressive activists in academia and the media denounce the United States for neocolonialism and oppression.
This is alarming. Biden's big pitch was, I was in the Senate, so I know how to get things through the Senate.
Well, newsflash, we are not getting anything through the Senate.
America is under attack as never before, not only from the outside, but from the inside.
To bring this guy forward, to attack me, And then, when he got arrested, to use this as a legal type of cover story to lie to police officers that do not live under the traditional moral order anymore.
They are going after many people who didn't do anything on January 6th.
The American people aren't just angry, they are disappointed.
The Democrats need to take a hard, long look in the mirror and see that their policies aren't helping anyone.
You know, I'd seen that before.
So the structure of the show is that you do a commentary or a monologue, and then what?
And then I do an interview with someone.
So this first episode, I interviewed Jack Posobiec, who actually infiltrated Antifa, and we talked a lot about not just what's great about America, because the episode came out on July 4th, but what are the forces within America that are working to destroy it?
And we really focused on Antifa and what they're doing.
And normally a TV show is, you know, you have to watch it at 8pm or 9pm.
But with this, you can go on Epic TV, right?
You can subscribe. And you can watch the show anytime.
And you can even watch previous shows.
So it kind of becomes, in that sense, an archive that's accessible anytime.
Right. And you can also watch it by entering your email if you don't subscribe.
But yeah, it's every week and it'll be up at 7pm on Sundays.
And we're going to put, by the way, below the podcast, if you're watching this on YouTube or on Apple, there'll be a link, and it's kind of a designated link that will take you if you want to subscribe to Epic TV and also access the show.
Let's talk a little bit about why we need a show called Counterculture.
Would you say, is it because the left has taken over the main kind of organs and instruments of the culture, so we now become the rivals to that?
Yes, I think so. I think that the main culture is really dominated by the left because they control a lot of these streaming platforms, they control a lot of how we get our news, they control the shows that are really put out there, and so we need to provide some kind of counter to that.
I mean, you experienced this in academia, where I think the difference between my experience and yours at the same college, Dartmouth, was that the left, when I was a student, was present and was perhaps dominant, but didn't have a monopoly.
They didn't have the ability to round you up or throw you out of a fraternity or...
You know, you could sometimes be a little careful about your grades, but on the other hand, there was a very good education.
And there were prominent conservatives on the Dartmouth campus.
And when you are a student, could you name three conservative professors on this entire campus with probably two or three hundred professors total?
No, I really couldn't.
Unfortunately, when conservatives used to have control over things like academia, we ended up giving that up by hiring all of these leftist professors and saying, probably the conservatives back then, maybe in 1950, thought, well, it's okay, we can have kind of a plethora of ideas and hire these people of other views, and we'll be at this view, and that's okay for discourse, but little do they know that the other side doesn't have the same view.
So, Once those professors get tenure, they get up there.
They end up blocking all the conservatives they could hire and make it so that they only hire radical leftists from then onward.
And we ended up kind of giving up our position.
And I think that's happened in a lot of companies, too, that start out conservative, but then they end up hiring liberals to be on their board, things like that.
And the next thing they know, they're basically holding people hostage who were originally the conservatives who might have started that company.
Well, this is, I think, a key point, because if I remember in the late 60s, the term counterculture was used by the left.
They used it as an effort to say that they, the left, were the counterculture against what they took to be the right wing, but what was in fact a more classically liberal culture. So the liberal culture came under attack from a leftist counterculture, and then the counterculture became the culture itself.
And now it seems we've come full circle and we need a counterculture. So what do you think that this counterculture sort of looks like?
What does it mean for us to be a counterculture?
What are we trying to do? I think it means that in your everyday life and anything that you're doing, you're working to obstruct the left in what they're doing.
And I think a good example of this is school boards.
All of the parents who are standing up to critical race theory or pronouns being taught to young kids saying, you know, what can we do as parents in this neighborhood to organize and prevent the left from taking over?
Because once they take over, it's so hard to roll it back and then get things back to a good place.
We have to stop the infiltration from the beginning.
Even churches that are starting to move to the left, people who are in those churches who attend them or who are elders need to stand up and prevent that kind of infiltration of radical leftist ideology of taking over that institution.
So I think being the counterculture is what's key.
Are you planning on the show to do mainly a critique of leftist culture?
Or do you also see the show as like featuring people who...
Let's just say, for example, a conservative comedian.
Somebody who's politically incorrect, who's making fun of the leftist culture, but is also creating culture by standing up there and making those jokes.
I mean, is it important for us not just to be dissident critics of liberal culture or leftist culture, but also creators and practitioners of an alternative culture in which conservatives can then live?
If we have our own movies, we have our own entertainment, we offer our own educational programs, then people feel like, wow, I can live in this world and I don't have to live in that sick, demented world that those people have not only created for us, but are trying to impose on us.
Yes, definitely.
I think if someone's a conservative comedian or conservative, you know, making great products or whatever it is, they should be featured and we should support those people because we, yeah, we can't just critique the other side.
We have to be the counterculture.
Now, you're just starting this new show, and you've been, by and large, a writer, a columnist.
You've also been a speaker at rallies.
But this is kind of a new thing for you.
Well, I guess it was a new thing for me, too, with the podcast.
But it puts you behind the desk.
You've got all the cameras rolling.
So talk a little bit just about, like, what does it feel to be hosting a show?
It's really new for me.
It's really fun, though, because I think it's a great way to really put a spotlight on a lot of issues that the media doesn't talk about.
And I think with being able to go in more depth on a lot of issues is helpful because a lot of TV segments are very short.
So if they talk about Antifa, it might be just for a few minutes.
And is a kind of a short thing, but my show I think for this first one was about 35 minutes, so all are really on that topic.
So you can actually do a little bit more of a deep dive into a specific topic, which I think is really rare these days.
So guys, the show is Counterculture with Daniel D'Souza Gill.
It's on Epic TV, which is part of the newspaper network called Epic Times.
And all the best with the show.
We'll have you on to talk more about guests and the kinds of people you're having on.
But it looks like you're off to an amazing start.
The first show is already up there.
The next one will go up this Sunday.
And then every week from here on out.
Yes, the next episode is on the woke military.
So tune in for that one.
Awesome. Debbie and I have gotten to know Dr.
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The Biden administration has sued Georgia over its election integrity law.
And here's the good news.
That lawsuit is going to be heading down the abyss.
It's going nowhere fast.
Why? Well, because of the recent decision just out from the Supreme Court.
This is the decision I talked about last week.
Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee.
The Biden people kind of rushed their lawsuit before the Supreme Court decision came out.
But the Supreme Court decision basically creates a coffin for the Biden lawsuit.
Now, why is that?
Well, let's go through some of the key points decided by the Supreme Court in the Brnovich case.
Going, focusing on Justice Alito's majority decision, he goes, number one, states around the country have every interest in stopping voter fraud.
They have every right to pass laws to make such fraud either impossible or more difficult.
Point number two. In passing laws against voter fraud, states have no obligation to prove that there has been voter fraud.
So the argument that, oh, geez, you're making these laws even though there's no real need for them, which has been a staple of leftist rhetoric, the court goes...
This is irrelevant. It's kind of like saying a store that installs security devices to prevent shoplifting doesn't have to prove there's been any prior shoplifting.
You don't want shoplifting going forward, so you make it more difficult to shoplift, and that's perfectly okay.
The court decided that you can pass facially neutral laws that apply to everybody.
So, for example, if you decide, let's say, that voting will occur, but there's not going to be voting after 8 p.m.
on Sunday. This is not racist.
This is not targeting any group.
This is no voting after 8 p.m.
on Sunday for everybody.
So a facially neutral law that has no discriminatory intent...
It cannot automatically be held to be discriminatory because, well, we all know blacks like to sleep really late on Sunday, so there's a lot of black voting that occurs at 10 p.m.
on Sunday. The court basically said, no, this kind of argument doesn't really fly.
All that the law has to show, according to Justice Alito, is that taken as a whole, there's no diminution of the right to vote.
It's not that you have to prove that there's no burden, because the left keeps saying, well, they're trying to make it harder to vote.
And Alito basically goes, listen, it is hard to vote, which is to say that if you want an absentee ballot, you've got to request one.
If you want to vote on election day, you've got to put aside your other obligations and show up.
You have to show that it's you.
So voting is not something that goes without some burden.
And the only issue is whether there is an undue burden, a burden so severe that, in effect, it's disabling your right to vote.
Now, all of this is contrast with the mind-numbing nonsense that Biden has been talking about the Georgia law, It's Jim Crow and steroids.
Even the Washington Post gave that four Pinocchios.
Biden goes, quote, It's sick deciding you're going to end voting at five o'clock.
A complete lie that Georgia law does not end voting at five o'clock.
Biden also says that the, quote, Imagine passing a law saying you cannot provide water or food for someone standing in line to vote.
Can't do that. Come on!
I'm a little surprised. I was waiting for, come on, man!
But he just this time goes with, come on!
I guess his brain shot down at the come on, and the man didn't really come out.
But the law doesn't do that.
The law says you can provide water and food as long as it's from an unattended receptacle, kind of like a booth.
Why? Because you don't want campaign workers who are doing last-minute campaigning while people are in line to vote, pretending to be out there for the reasons of handing out food and water, but really, vote for Ossoff.
Vote for this guy.
Vote for Warnock.
So, in other words, this kind of sneaky campaigning under the camouflage of handing out water.
Oh, these people are really thirsty while you hand out literature.
No. It's perfectly fine for Georgia to outline that, to outlaw that kind of practice.
And so, it looks like not only is the Georgia voter integrity law intact, but other similar laws are also going to be fine.
I think this is an encouragement to Republican legislatures all over the country, but particularly in the so-called swing states.
To make sure. You might say this is all a little bit late.
Why are they locking the barn door after the horse is already gone?
Well, you know what? There are other horses in the barn.
There are other elections coming up.
There's a midterm next year.
There's a presidential election in 2024.
It's really important that we get the process fixed and we get the process right.
And it looks like the Supreme Court, which was not willing to scrutinize the election last November, is willing to to authorize voter integrity laws that are aimed at future elections and preventing future contamination Did you ever read the fine print that appears when you start browsing online in incognito or privacy mode?
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How can they even call it incognito?
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Since we've been living now for, what, 16 months in a global pandemic.
I'd like to turn to literature to look and see how things might have been similar or different in the way that they occurred or even were imagined in the past.
And to see if our peculiar experience...
I know at one time, Debbie and I were talking about walking around in the grocery store and how people seemed to be disconnected, not just from each other, but even sort of from themselves.
They looked like they were...
Zombies of a sort.
And I thought to myself, wow, this is a very peculiar sight.
And what is the precedent for it?
So here is the existentialist, the French writer Albert Camus, and his classic work just called The Plague.
And what we can find in great literature is an attempt to come to terms with something that we happen to be now experiencing, and so we can sort of compare notes.
So, The Plague is written during World War II. So, right away we have a very interesting phenomenon.
Camus writes the novel during the war.
And then publishes it right after World War II. So we have in the original readership of this novel, people who are thinking not about plague, but about the war.
And Camus, in a sense, relates the two.
He implies that plague or a pandemic is a little bit like a war.
It's like a war in two ways.
First of all, it usually starts unexpectedly.
Nobody knows, nobody predicts it.
Remember World War I and Archduke is assassinated and boom, all of Europe is in a war.
The coronavirus came really out of nowhere.
We see a few signs of the Chinese fumigating their streets and next thing you know it's in New York and it's all over the country.
So it starts unexpectedly.
It ends unexpectedly.
The plague sort of goes away or the epidemic comes to an end as wars do.
And the other thing is that, and Camus is very clear about this, that wars and epidemics often last a lot longer than people think.
People thought World War I would be really short.
People thought World War II wouldn't last that long.
People thought that we would have, you know, a two-week waiting period, and then we would be past the COVID-19.
No. Now, Camille was born in Algeria, and he situates the plague in the Algerian port town of Oran.
The plague begins because rats come into Oran through boats that are stationed at the harbor.
And the story is told by a doctor, a doctor named Ryu, who sees the rats.
He wonders where are all these rats coming from.
He doesn't really know. And then the concierge in the apartment complex he lives in dies.
And he begins to worry that something is seriously wrong, that there is something being transmitted from the rats to humans.
And it turns out the rats are releasing a type of flea that is infecting humans.
And so he notifies the authorities, but, you know, predictably they're like, oh, no, no, no, let's not worry too much about this and so on.
And it takes the death toll to start climbing.
And then the death toll becomes really serious.
And then almost out of nowhere...
There is a telegram from the prefect of Oran basically saying, I declare a plague.
Close the town. Close the town.
And that means that the whole town of Oran is shut down.
Nobody leaves.
Nobody comes in.
In fact, they won't even let people send letters.
Why? Because the letters could be contaminated.
And so you suddenly have this phenomenon of a whole town cut off from the world and now living...
With itself in isolation in a terrible plague.
Now, Camus here is in a modernist tradition of writing about isolation.
But typically, for the modernist writers, I'm thinking here of people like Kafka, Franz Kafka, the Who wrote The Trial, or thinking even of Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot.
In those cases, you have an individual, a solitary individual in the case of Waiting for Godot.
There are two guys, but nevertheless, the individual who is isolated from society.
But remarkably for Camus in The Plague, it is the whole town of Oran that is isolated.
Everybody is, in a sense, put into a kind of cemetery and facing the prospect of death.
And it's remarkable how little even medical science can do about it.
Most of the time we see Dr.
Ryu, he's trying to attend to the people who are sick, but he can't do a whole lot for them.
He's just trying, he's doing his best to comfort them, but they're going to die, many of them, anyway.
Now, there's a remarkable scene where at one point there's a French journalist, a guy named Rambert, who comes to Dr.
Ryu, and he basically says, hey, listen, he goes, you know, I'm here from Paris, and I'm here to kind of cover the Arabs.
I'm doing a kind of set of feature articles on the Arabs.
So I've got nothing to do with this plague.
I want a doctor's certificate from you.
By the way, I happen to know some people at the embassy.
They say that if I can get a doctor's certificate, I can get the heck out of here.
Dr. Ryu says, actually, no, I can't give you the certificate.
And the guy goes, what? That's ridiculous.
He goes, my wife is, well, she's not my wife, but the woman I'm living with, she's in Europe and she's back there.
She's waiting for me and so on.
Dr. Ryu doesn't say anything, but Dr.
Ryu's own wife, we happen to know, is actually in a sanitarium in a hospital outside of Iran, undergoing some serious treatment for what we don't exactly know.
But he can't see her either, so he understands the situation.
He happens to share the situation.
And then the French journalist goes something like, you're such a heartless man because you won't let me leave.
And why don't you just certify that I don't have the plague?
And Dr. Ryu says, well, I can't certify that because I don't know that you don't have it.
And moreover, even though you're in some ways different from the rest of us, you're a visitor, if you will, you just came here to cover a story, you're now kind of in the same boat with us.
You share our situation.
It is a common situation that we all have to share together.
And so this goes on until, and then I find this line on page 183, to me very poignant.
He says that the plague created a kind of zombie quality in the town.
He doesn't use that word, but he says, quote, the town was peopled with sleepwalkers.
It's almost as if people are walking around in a daze, as if they're half asleep.
And the reason is that they are taking blows from the plague And they don't really know how to cope with it or if they will ever come out of it.
And so their whole lives take on a completely new significance.
Now, I want to pivot briefly from this to the philosophical underpinning of all this.
Camus wrote a book called The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.
And the myth of Sisyphus involves a Greek character, Sisyphus, who apparently angered the gods.
And as his punishment, he was condemned to roll a stone up the hill.
But of course, the myth of Sisyphus is that when he rolls a stone up the hill, it rolls back down.
And Sisyphus' eternal punishment is to then roll it back up again, and down it comes again.
Unceasingly. And for Camus, and we see this echoed even in the plague, it's a little bit like that is a metaphor for life.
Camus is living at a time when he felt that belief in God had become impossible.
In other words, the common belief in God that had sustained Western civilization for centuries was now, quote, But life to what end?
After all, death will end all our projects.
Everything we're doing comes to a crashing, burning end.
You may say we're all living with the plague and we're all living under kind of a death sentence.
And so what's the point of it all?
Aren't we all in the position of Sisyphus?
Rolling the stone up the hill and down it comes and roll it up again.
And Camus' novel, in a sense, sort of faces up to this, what he calls, absurdity.
It's the philosophy of the absurd.
And by absurd here we mean meaninglessness.
Now, Camus says that the reason that our life is such a tragedy, the reason we're living in the absurd situation is not just because life is meaningless.
He goes, the life of a fly is meaningless.
He goes, but a fly is not conscious of that.
Meaninglessness by itself is not absurd.
But he goes with man, you have meaninglessness combined with a desperate need for meaning, a desperate search for meaning.
So, when you're searching for meaning and the meaning ultimately isn't there, then you have the situation of the absurd.
And so, Camus says, what do we do?
What do we do in this situation of godlessness?
And ultimately, the best he can offer, and to me it's a very unsatisfactory remedy, is he says essentially we have to embrace the Sisyphusian project.
We have to accept that our life is nothing more than struggle, and what is the purpose of it?
Well, there is none. Will we ever get the stone to the top of the hill?
No. And for Dr.
Ryu, attending to the plague, he's not in control.
He doesn't even really cure anyone.
At one point there's a sort of vaccine that is proposed and they give the vaccine to a kid.
It only prolongs his agony.
And so Dr. Ryu is himself Sisyphus.
He's himself rolling the stone up the hill.
But he essentially says, listen, this is all I can do.
I'm a human being. I've got to try to attend to people as best I can.
If I don't have a cure, maybe my presence will be some sort of a consolation.
This becomes, for Camus, a metaphor for life itself.
But a life lived, you may say, in the loneliness of the absence of God.
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Hey, it's time for our mailbox.
Let's go to today's question.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh and Debbie.
This is Dave from Waukesha, Wisconsin.
I'd like to ask you, as accomplished book and movie storytellers, to give us a peek behind the curtain into your creative process, motivations, habits, storytelling patterns that you might use, and persuasion techniques that we could use in our writing projects.
I look forward to your response.
Thank you. Well, Dave, I'll try to distill a few kind of axioms that might be helpful in thinking about writing both creative writing, but also script writing, but also writing nonfiction books and articles.
The first principle is write what you know about.
Now, this may seem obvious, but it's amazing how many people take on a topic that they think, you know, maybe the public wants to read or...
But they don't know much about it.
They're not, in fact, experts on that.
So ask yourself, what is the topic that I am...
I have a plausible authority on or that I have some inside knowledge that enables me to speak with confidence about that issue.
That would be number one. Number two, it's important to have a provocative title.
Titles are really important.
They're after all the part of the book that people see before they see the book itself.
And very often the title convinces you whether or not you want to see more, and the same is true of a movie title.
My book, Illiberal Education.
Good title. Why? Because it's a clever phrase.
It's a twist on the idea of liberal education.
And it summarizes the theme of the book.
Universities purport to be liberal, but in fact they are very illiberal.
They undermine the liberalism that they pretend.
Or even the end of racism.
Provocative. Why? Because we keep hearing racism, racism, racism.
And the book basically asks, what is racism?
Did it have a beginning? Is it conceivable it could have an end?
So it tackles the problem in its widest significance.
Typically, a documentary film is a journey of discovery, and so you will withhold the climax or the discovery till the end.
If you watch my film on Obama, for example, it doesn't disclose at the beginning who Obama is.
You kind of have to follow Obama along, and off you go to Hawaii and Indonesia and Kenya, and then back to America, and toward the end, it's kind of like, aha!
That's who Obama is.
I now get the picture. But a nonfiction book doesn't typically work like that.
A nonfiction book is more like a legal brief in which at the outset you go, here's what I'm going to say.
Boom. And what you say is interesting.
It should be important.
It should be novel. Don't say what everybody else is just saying.
There's no reason to write a whole book on that.
But then you use the rest of the book to support, document, and substantiate your original point.
And my last... We're good to go.
So, one reason I thought it was really fun to interview Obama's half-brother in Nairobi is because Obama was prancing around the country saying, we are our brother's keeper!
And so, juxtaposing that with the interview with Obama's brother is very effective, not only intellectually, but emotionally, because it's very satisfying to see this obvious narcissist be brought down by the concrete example that you don't have to imagine,
I'm not even just quoting in a book, but there We're good to go.
So I hope these few tips, I've just tried to distill them very quickly in my mind, are helpful to you.
They're part of, I think, the mode of thinking that goes both into my book and movie projects.
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