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July 8, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:56
THE BEST AND THE WORST Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 127
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The best presidents and the worst.
CNN has its list, and I have mine.
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.
Who are the best and worst presidents?
Not just of American history, but of recent American history.
And by recent American history, I mean let's say in the last 50 or 100 years.
Now CNN just put out the results of a survey of presidential historians.
Apparently this is 142 This is CNN's idea of a spectrum.
You know how when CNN... Well, in the old days, CNN was better.
They'd have shows like Crossfire where you'd have opposite points of view, but not anymore.
Today, if you turn on CNN, they have a panel of seven people.
They're all on the same side.
They all think the same thing.
They reinforce what each other say, and that's what you're getting from this survey of historians.
I don't want to sort of do the entire swath of American history going back to Washington and Lincoln.
I want to focus really on the recent presidents because I think here is where the ideological colors manifest themselves most vividly.
CNN, of course, has Obama up there.
He's number 10.
So he's kind of in the top 10 list.
And as for Jimmy Carter, they have kind of in the middle.
Interestingly, they have Jimmy Carter ahead of Republicans like Ford and George W. Bush and Nixon.
But Donald Trump, perhaps not surprisingly, CNN has him four from the bottom.
He's not the absolute bottom.
Franklin Pierce is below him.
Andrew Johnson is below him.
James Buchanan is below him.
But Trump is holding up of recent presidents.
He is definitely the lowest.
And there's an article accompanying the CNN survey, kind of funny, which basically asks, well, why isn't Trump the worst?
I mean, what makes these other guys like Buchanan and Pierce and Johnson worse than Trump?
So this, of course, reflects the CNN prejudice that Trump represents some kind of abnormal departure from the entire sweep of American history.
He's in a kind of category of evil all by himself.
But you can't attach much importance to this kind of thing because, first of all, CNN offers no real analysis of what is the evenly applied criteria by which these presidents are decided.
Sure, they have some broad rankings like communication skills and so on, but what makes a great communicator?
All of their criteria beg the question.
So I want to focus on my list, which I think will stand up better in history than these, let's call them fake historians.
And I want to focus on the two best and the two worst.
It is sometimes said that history remembers presidents by only one line.
And that's kind of a profound point, I think, because when we think across the midst of history, as time passes, you don't remember the minutia.
So, George Washington was the father of the country.
Lincoln freed the slaves.
And it's kind of a good question to ask, how will that kind of measure, the one-line test, apply to more recent American presidents?
I think if I had to look at the presidents of the last 75 or so years, I would probably rank Reagan at the top.
And it was Margaret Thatcher who said that Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.
I would extend that line out a little further.
Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot, but he also restored American patriotism, American morale, and American self-confidence.
This was the Reagan legacy.
I wrote a book about it, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
I've been thinking about Trump.
What is Trump's one line?
If you had to distill it to a single line, and I think with Trump, he did two things which are both extremely important.
He was the first president to fully identify with the ordinary guy, at least in my lifetime, at least that I've seen.
A president who sort of got up in the morning and thought, how do I try to do what I can to make it better for the ordinary American?
And he kept the ordinary guy in mind, thinking about trade.
It wasn't about some economic abstraction, or I'm going to go read Adam Smith.
No, it's about jobs and about people who have to go back and support their families.
And how do they get a paycheck to do that?
And if jobs go away, how do you bring them back?
This was Trump. The other thing Trump did, perhaps unwittingly, although I don't think entirely unwittingly, is he exposed the depth of corruption of our institutions, including the police agencies of government, like the FBI, which is supposed to be neutral.
Now we've seen our, have been corrupted, the apple has been rotted from the inside.
Trump exposed that.
Now, Trump was not able to defeat the deep state, at least not so far.
I don't think the battle is entirely over, but at the end of Trump's term, the very fact that the deep state was able to sort of get Trump, they got him back, shows that he was able to expose the problem.
Remember that Trump, for most of his presidency, in fact, I would argue until the very end, didn't fully control his own Justice Department.
And of course, the FBI is under the aegis of the Justice Department.
So, for me, Trump's legacy is a very strong one, and no one can deny that he is an extremely consequential president, albeit a one-term president, at least so far, again.
But I want to turn now to the downside, to the bad guys, to the two worst presidents of the last half century, and I think the second worst would have to be Jimmy Carter.
My one line for Jimmy Carter can be summarized in a kind of joke that goes back to the 1980s, but also continues through the 1990s.
It's called, lose a country, gain a restaurant.
When I came to Washington in the 80s, I noticed that there were a lot of Afghan restaurants and Persian restaurants, which is to say Iranian restaurants.
All over Washington, D.C. And I thought to myself, how interesting.
This is all very multicultural.
But then I realized that Carter had lost those two countries.
The Soviet Union essentially invaded Afghanistan with impunity.
And toward the end of the Cardios, Carter basically goes, I'm really surprised they did that.
Buffoon. And then Carter, in pushing out the Shah of Iran and pulling the Persian rug out from under him, got Khomeini.
There's another country that went down the tubes and hasn't come back since.
And so we lost those countries, but we got restaurants in exchange.
And I bet you, by the way, Carter is the first president to lose a country after he left office, Venezuela.
Why? Because he certified the corrupt election of, well, first 2004 and then subsequent elections very bad.
And so Venezuelan restaurants popping up in the United States owe, in a sense, their existence to Jimmy Carter.
Why? Because those are Venezuelans fleeing the tyranny and misery of their countries.
But I think the worst of the worst, the worst president of my lifetime, but I think this guy may go down as the worst president in all of American history, is unquestionably Obama.
And there's a lot to say about Obama, but I just want to focus on one thing, the Bergdahl trade.
Because to me, that captures the essence of Obama.
Obama wasn't a nincompoop.
I mean, he wasn't a smart guy.
He did terribly in school.
His grades were low. He was affirmative action all the way.
But he was cunning and he was malevolent.
And I would say that Obama's legacy is this, that he's the first American president To be an anti-American.
He's the first American president who sought the diminution of America, who deliberately worked for that.
And he sowed seeds of division, yes, but it was toward that end.
The reason Obama loved the Bergdahl trade, and people go, oh, you know, Obama didn't know what he was getting.
He kind of made bad judgment.
No, he actually exercised, from his point of view, good judgment.
So he liked to release the Taliban commanders.
Why? Because they were anti-American.
They were going to go right back into the field of battle and fight against America.
But he also liked Bergdahl, a military deserter.
Why? For exactly the same reason.
Bergdahl was anti-American.
And so for Obama, this was a beautiful deal all around because it promoted anti-Americanism on both sides of the deal.
We got an anti-American back to America, Bergdahl, and we released seasoned Taliban commanders into the field who would become, once again, our deadly foes.
So this guy is the worst of the worst.
Dante puts people like him in the deepest circle of hell.
And I think as we look at American presidents, we realize that it's been our privilege and our dishonor in our own lifetimes to see two of the best and two of the worst.
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I've talked previously on the podcast about the woke military, about Defense Secretary Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, and their absurd wokeness.
A wokeness, by the way, that is quite likely to undermine military morale, undermine the esprit de corps that is the Essential basis of any kind of team, and this is a fighting team.
And it now appears that the same woke ideology is permeating the defense contractors.
Let's think about who these defense contractors are.
People like Raytheon and Lockheed.
These are people who get billions of dollars in federal contracts.
And it turns out that they're deploying at least some of this money to these woke training sessions, basically re-education camps.
Now, Christopher Ruffo, who's been all over the...
The critical race theory in schools and colleges.
But he's also been ferreting out how these corporations do it.
And he's got a recent article in which he talks about Raytheon.
So Raytheon's CEO, this guy named Greg Hayes, has been organizing seminars centered on the concept of intersectionality.
And the basic idea here is that if you're, let's say, Latino, you're oppressed one way because you're a person of color, but if you're a female, Latina, you're a twofer.
You've got double credentials.
And if you're a Latina and a female and you also happen to be gay, then you're kind of climbing up the victim's totem pole.
You get the top spot.
And who are the worst? Who's at the bottom?
Well, it turns out, quote, white, straight Christian men who are supposed to, in these seminars, quote, recognize their privilege.
I want to read from one of these seminars.
It says that recognizing your privilege means recognizing when other voices are more important than your own.
Now, you might say, more important, why?
More important because they have better ideas about military strategy?
No. More important because they have a better understanding of what the military is all about?
No. More important solely because they're supposedly more oppressed.
So you're supposed to, quote, be sure to amplify others instead of attempting to speak for them.
This is what Raytheon, this is the, I think, poisonous philosophy that Raytheon is pushing on its employees.
It tells all the employees you have to identify your own race and you've got to silence yourself if you are a member of the privileged group and give the floor to people who are oppressed.
Now, Raytheon recognizes that all of this preferentialism might create, quote, discomfort for whites, but it goes, that's a fraction of what is experienced by your victimized colleagues, who are, quote...
Who are exhausted, mentally drained, frustrated, stressed, barely sleeping, scared, and overwhelmed.
So, apparently Raytheon has this kind of view that those of us who are minorities are people of color, we are just like, we can barely function.
You know, we're so tormented by racism that we can barely operate in America.
I mean, in a different age, all of this would be subjects of comedy.
Raytheon also segregates its employees by race and identity groups.
They have a little picture for Pride Month, and they've got this little guy who looks basically as thin as a palm tree, and he has the kind of super gay look in his eyes, and it's sort of like, again, what does this have to do with the military?
Nothing. Finally, and I think this is pernicious, Raytheon explicitly instructs employees to, quote, oppose equality.
Oppose equality! Why?
Because equality means treating people the same.
They're against that.
Instead of equality, they want, quote, equity.
This is the new thing, the new term.
Equity, quote, focuses on the equality of the outcome.
So here we go. You know, you have a race, and if some group comes out ahead...
That's inequitable because evidently everyone's supposed to come out the same.
And one can only imagine.
I mean, if you think about it, war is the ultimate form of competition.
War is ultimately about winners and losers, and that fact can't be camouflaged.
So how discouraging it is to see that these premier defense industries are caught up We're good to go.
What does that mean?
I've got the Norton Anthology of Collected Poems on my bookshelf.
I assume that has a lot of poems by people like Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare.
Do I need to decolonize by bookshelf, you morons?
Do you even know what you're talking about?
And so...
This is all just very dispiriting.
And it shows the penetration of the left, even in institutions that had been traditionally considered conservative.
Very worrisome development.
Kudos to Christopher Rufo for exposing it.
And if the Republicans and Congress had any sense, they would be all over this stuff, conducting hearings, asking questions, demanding to know what's going on and to what extent.
Because all of this has to do with our country's safety and security.
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Who killed Ashley Babbitt?
Trump recently put out a statement that said just those four words.
And Trump is becoming a little more outspoken about January 6th, which is, I think, very welcome and very important for him to do.
These were people, after all, who went to the mat for Trump.
Why has Trump been reluctant until now?
I think the reason mainly is this, that the left has been trying to say that Trump stirred up January 6th.
Trump was the source of the incitement.
He caused the breach of the Capitol, all of which is just factually and manifestly false.
And so I think Trump thought, the more I associate myself with the January 6th defendants and protesters, the more it will seem like I am admitting that the left was right about this.
But I think in recognition of how badly these people are being treated, the sheer dishonesty and disproportion of the whole thing, I mean, think about it this way.
We keep hearing about the violence of January 6th.
And by violence, they mean, oh, this guy brought some, you know, some insect repellent.
This guy bought some bear spray.
This guy had some, you know, some plastic ties.
And this guy brought his walking stick.
And this is all supposed to be evidence of gruesome violence.
But, in fact, the people who went to the Capitol were all unarmed, including one Ashley Babbitt.
Now, we keep hearing about violence on January 6th, as I say, but the one violence we don't hear about is the only lethal violence that was unleashed that day.
A Capitol Police officer, I believe Black, shot Ashley Babbitt in the neck and killed her.
And killed her. Now, I've been looking on social media to see what people are saying about this, and they're all saying, well, you know, she deserved to be killed.
Why is that? She deserved to be killed because, you know, she broke the law.
Well, let's think about this for a minute.
George Floyd broke the law.
George Floyd had a history.
He had a previous incident of home invasion.
He was passing forward checks.
He was using illegal drugs.
So if Ashley Babbitt, for, quote, breaking the law, deserved to be shot to death, Why didn't George Floyd deserve what came to him?
Why didn't he deserve to have a knee on his neck?
So you notice suddenly a kind of double standard is now creeping in.
One set of criteria for Ashley Babbitt, another set of criteria, not just for George Floyd, but all these other blacks who meet a bad fate at the hands of cops.
Now, the point to notice about Ashley Babbitt is, number one, she was unarmed.
Now, it may be that the Capitol Police officer didn't know that, but normally, before you shoot someone and kill them, you give some sort of a warning.
Hey, stop what you're doing.
There was no warning.
Number two, you fire a warning shot into the air.
Hey, listen, I'm armed.
If you keep coming forward, I will shoot you.
There was none of that.
Number three, if you're going to shoot, why shoot to kill?
In other contexts, where you have a white police officer and a black defendant, the left has raised the point, yeah, listen, this guy might have been rushing at the cop or trying to get away.
Biden himself said, why not shoot him in the leg?
So the left has constantly raised the issue that you can use force without having to use deadly force, without trying to permanently put this person out of business, particularly when they pose no clear and present danger to anyone. Ashley Babbitt was coming through a window.
It wasn't that Ashley Babbitt had some capital police officer in her grasp and she was choking him to death, nothing like that.
So the very quick decision to exonerate the officer, I think was based on the idea that to admit that the officer might have done something wrong is to blow up the left's narrative. To blow up the left's narrative why Why? Because then it turns out that the only unjustified force and the only unjustified deadly force used on January 6th was in fact used by the government against a Trump supporter.
And this is why it may turn out that we will never find out officially who killed Ashley Babbitt.
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especially since the Biden family seems to view the Clinton's example as a perverse how-to guide.
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Check it out. We seem to be living in economically turbulent times, and I'm really happy to welcome a friend of mine, Brian Westbury, a distinguished economist, chief economist at the First Trust Advisory LP. Brian has been on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, a whole bunch of shows, because he's just a great student of and explainer of what is happening in the economy.
Brian, I think we had you last in one of my movies.
It might have been the movie.
Maybe America, but great to have you on the podcast.
Boy, the Biden people have hit the ground running over the past six months and have been aggressively pushing on a whole bunch of fronts.
Let's start by asking you just for a kind of overall assessment of where we are economically as a country and how do you assess the Biden actions to date?
All right. Yeah.
And Dinesh, I remember sitting in front of the Ford plant outside of Detroit with you and your cameras.
That was a fun day.
And just thinking back to the entrepreneurship of America.
And that's actually bringing up Henry Ford is perfect because we remember that he actually, now he was losing workers, and so he raised their pay to $5 a day.
And one of the things that he said and others said was, Was that now they can afford the cars they're producing.
And today we're actually paying people to buy things that they aren't producing.
So that's one of the things about the Biden administration.
But it actually started back in 2020 when Trump was president as well.
And that's really throwing a wrench in the works.
And so just to kind of put this in one big perspective, the things we have done In this past year, shutting down for a pandemic, printing three, four, four trillion dollars the Federal Reserve has created, spending five trillion dollars.
These are unprecedented things.
And, you know, people like to use words and they go, oh, that means in a long time.
No, that means we have never done the things that we are doing today.
And I think we're going to pay a big price as the years ahead unfold.
Let's put those things into slow motion a little bit so we can see what their impact is.
Let's start with this notion of printing money.
The government doesn't, strictly speaking, I guess, print money and just release it into circulation, but through various devices they have the effect of doing the same thing, right?
Using treasury bonds and treasury bills.
And my question is this, what happens when you just, in a sense, print a bunch of money and put it into circulation?
Is that an automatic driver of inflation?
Is that why we have 5% inflation?
Right, I think it is, Dinesh.
And I want to make a comparison, and I hope this doesn't get too in the weeds.
But if you go back to 2008, 2009, the housing crisis, the subprime loan crisis, the Federal Reserve created a lot of monetary base.
That's their assets.
And then they went out and bought bonds, but at the same time, they were hammering banks with regulation, so that money that the Federal Reserve was creating did not turn into circulating cash in the economy.
This time, it's completely different.
Today, or this past year, the Federal Reserve has been buying bonds directly from the Treasury.
Well, they don't do it directly, but anyway, forget that.
But they've been buying Treasury bonds, giving that cash to the government.
And in many cases, the government is direct depositing it in people's bank accounts or get through PPP loans, giving money directly to small businesses.
And that money goes into circulation.
So this time is different than 08 and 09.
And right now, today, the M2 measure of money, that's all deposits in all banks, Is up 32% above where it was in February 2020, pre-pandemic.
And that is the biggest jump in the money supply over that kind of period of time that we have seen in the United States since the very beginning of World War II. And that, when you print that much money, it's kind of like having a bumper crop of corn.
If the weather conditions are perfect, you have a bumper crop of corn, The price of corn comes down.
If you have a bumper crop of dollars, the value of the dollar comes down.
So this inflation that we are seeing today, I think a lot of it really is happening, and it will continue in the years ahead.
And inflation is sometimes described, Brian, as a silent tax.
It's a silent tax because the legislature doesn't have to meet and vote on it, and yet if I had $100 at the beginning of the year, and let's just say hypothetically it's 10% inflation, I'm down to $90 because I still have the $100 bills, but they only buy what previously, I can now only buy $90 worth of stuff, right?
So in that sense, inflation is making us poorer, but without the government, quote, taking our money.
Yeah, exactly. And when you throw taxes into the mix, for example, capital games taxes, if your house price goes up by that same 10%, it's not real.
It's just because the value of money fell, but you still owe taxes On top of that inflationary gain.
So what you really want to be taxed on is a real gain in an asset value.
In this case, it's all fake.
It's all a monetary mirage, if you will.
It also makes everyone feel better.
I always think of money...
If we think of the pandemic like a car accident, which is kind of in a way the economy hit the wall, and then we pump morphine into the victim who was injured, that makes everybody feel better, but it doesn't really improve the medical condition.
And so when we back off from this morphine, The pain is going to hit.
And I think that's one of the best examples to use.
Money fools people into thinking everything is okay because you're just throwing a bunch of...
It lifts all asset values.
It makes everybody feel like they're richer when they're not because you can't get rich just by printing money.
If you could, we ought to all have our own money printing machine and be able to counterfeit all day long.
What a great point. When we come back, I want to explore this economic situation further by talking about unemployment, also talking about the national debt.
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I'm back with Brian Westbury, Chief Economist at First Trust Advisors.
Brian, we were talking about inflation.
I want to pivot a little bit to unemployment because it appears that there's such a generous package.
Of COVID plus unemployment benefits that's being doled out, that a lot of people are like, gee, you know what?
If I can get about the same, if not a little more than I was making, and I can sit on the couch and watch TV and throw the ball with my kid in the backyard, why on earth would I want to go back to work?
I want you to talk for a moment about, A, is that a correct analysis?
And B, talk about the fundamental economic principle of incentives, which I think is why people do what they do.
Yeah, absolutely.
First of all, it is a fair description of what's going on, Dinesh.
That is exactly what's happening.
So far, 26 states have said we're going to end that special supplement, which does bring the benefits down.
And in those states, we actually see employment starting to go up.
But for the nation as a whole, it's not until September of this year where these overly generous benefits wear out.
And actually, I want to make a little bit of a distinction.
I don't agree with the shutdown.
I think we will look back in history, I hope we do, and study it.
I think it was way more damaging than COVID was itself.
And let's not go into that.
But if we do close everything down and take people's jobs, the only way I can justify doing the kinds of payments that we have done is through a takings clause.
In other words, I took your land to build a highway.
I have to compensate you.
I took your job to save the world.
I have to compensate you.
And that's the only way I could justify what we have done.
But now it's over.
The vaccine has come out.
The pandemic is going away just like they all do.
And we're still spending all this money.
And what that means, it's going to take longer for the economy to come back.
It's also going to constrain supplies and lead to even more inflation, at least in the short term, because we're not producing.
You're making, I think, a very interesting point, which is that from the government's point of view, this was a crisis that it made.
I mean, I'm not saying the government made the virus, although there's a possibility that it helped to make the virus too.
But on top of that, the government is the one that shut the economy down, put people out of business.
And you're saying if the government in that sense inflicted that kind of harm, it does have some obligation to kind of make people whole.
Let's pivot for a moment to the national debt because there's been a certain irresponsibility, I think it's fair to say, in both parties.
Trump even was not all that careful with what happens to the deficit and, of course, the accumulated effect of the deficit is to add to the national debt.
We now have a national debt of about close to $30 trillion.
And what I want to ask you is this.
I mean, if Right.
Right. Yeah, and Dinesh, that's a good way to look at it.
Believe it or not, the US, now there are different ways to look at this, but through my estimates, the total private assets of America are somewhere between 200 and 300 trillion dollars.
I fly over Indianapolis, just for example.
You look down and you go, how much would it cost to rebuild all the assets in Indianapolis?
And it's probably close, who knows, probably close to a trillion dollars.
So when you extract that, expand that across the whole entire country, it's 200 to 300 trillion.
So in that regard, $30 trillion in debt.
We're not to that point.
We're not Greece. We're not Puerto Rico yet.
But we have to grow in order to pay this back.
And so the way I look at it, we have debt that's over GDP right now.
The last time that that's ever happened in the US was after World War II. And let me make a comparison.
You know, people are saying, is Biden Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
Is he Lyndon Baines Johnson?
Is this the New Deal?
Is this the Great Society?
And I would argue not yet.
Now, they have plans to spend like that, but not yet.
So we fought this pandemic, if you will.
We fought World War II. I believe the example we should use is World War II. Debt went up Straight through the roof very, very quickly.
We stopped deficits afterward, and hopefully we do that this time.
And then we were able to pay back World War II debt because we were, in a sense, the last man standing.
We had bombed the rest of the world to smithereens.
And today, what's interesting is back then we were spending all that money to build bombs to blow up.
We were also sending young men, for the most part, to die.
Today, we're paying young men not to work.
And so as we come out of this, we will not be in the kind of shape we were after World War II. So I don't believe this will take the economy down, but in the years ahead, we will have a burden through the net interest cost of that debt, through the size of government that will slow down the growth of the U.S. economy.
And that's what worries me.
Right now, we feel really good.
But once that morphine comes off, all this spending, all this money printing, we will not feel good.
We will realize that our leg is broken and it hurts.
And that's what I worry about in the years ahead.
It does seem, and maybe I can ask you as a last question, that the Biden people are trying to take the kind of things that one does in a crisis or emergency and normalize them.
Isn't that the greatest danger that you don't recognize that, hey, listen, we might have been on a wartime footing in the sense we were dealing with the pandemic.
But at some point it's important to return to normal footing and you cannot do the irresponsible things you were doing before.
You've got to start, as you say, producing again and putting some of that money away.
You know, I used to think when I heard The Great Reset that it was some kind of conspiracy.
Like I would see it on Twitter and I would hear all these things about it.
But then I went and got the book.
It's written by Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, who runs the Davos meeting.
That's what everybody should remember.
Bill Gates goes all the...
The top government officials from all around the world.
And this book says COVID is the chance to reset all of our government policies.
And that's exactly what I see today, is that if you listen to Boris Johnson in England, Or if you listen to AOC in America, and even Joe Biden, Build Back Better.
Boris Johnson has used Build Back.
We need to build back society.
We need to build back the government.
And they are... Trying to change.
It's really going into kind of a democratic socialism, if you will, maybe a little worse than that, but they're trying to use the crisis as a reason to grow the government.
You throw climate change into the mix, and that is the big worry.
So far, we spent five trillion dollars.
Vast majority of that is temporary, kind of like World War II. The infrastructure bill that we're talking about, the human infrastructure bill, what they call, I don't know what that really means, but I guess it means everything.
Those are the things that will really change America, and that's what I'm focused on right now.
How big will those things be?
Will Joe Biden be able to get them through the Senate?
Right now, I'm going to say I hope not.
We've spent $5 trillion.
We got through this pandemic.
Let's work on paying that off and think about All these other things at some other point in time.
And so, yeah, we're in an unprecedented period of time.
It's a dangerous time for the U.S. economy.
I call it the most dangerous experiment in the history of the world right now, spending five trillion dollars in four...
I mean, we had...
America is the best experiment, the most successful experiment in world history.
And now we're talking about changing its direction immensely.
And I I think that makes this a dangerous time.
Hey Brian, thank you very much for an illuminating analysis.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Dinesh, great to be with you.
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One of the things I like to do on the podcast is fact-check the fact-checkers.
And I don't even like to focus on the most egregious of the fact-checkers, some of the bogus fact-checking sites like PolitiFact and so on.
I focus a little bit on places like USA Today.
Which are left of center, but not the worst offenders.
Because here you can see mainstream media and the way that it distorts things.
Distorts things in the name of fact-checking them.
I mean, that's what makes this whole thing so Orwellian.
Here's USA Today.
Conservatives want to ban transgender athletes from girl sports.
Their evidence is shaky.
So, now, let's look in to find out why the evidence is shaky for trying to prevent biological males bigger, stronger, faster from participating in women's sports.
Let's look at what they consider to be evidence.
Number one, USA Today could find few transgender athletes participating and even fewer complaints about them.
So let's think about that for a minute.
They're saying that the problem isn't all that widespread because there aren't that many transgender people and therefore there aren't that many transgender athletes.
But if you think about it, it doesn't take that many transgender athletes to win critical competitions in, let's just say, wrestling, weightlifting, running.
You can take away cherished prizes if there's just a few men competing in women's sports.
USA Today begins to look at some cases.
They talk about in Montana a transgender runner named June Eastwood.
They say... They say she ran on the University of Montana's women's cross-country and track teams.
But they say after a year of hormone therapy, she didn't come close to her times on the men's team, to dominating the competition or to breaking any records.
So even though this transgender athlete took part in the women's cross-country and the women's track teams, she wasn't as fast as she was when she was a man, and she didn't win everything.
She merely won some things, but not everything.
And then they talk about Connecticut, about the Connecticut Athletic Conference, which basically said that transgenders can run, can participate in women's races.
And they talk about the case where four Cisgender, which is to say non-trans, high school runners, female, all challenged the presence of two transgender runners.
The transgender runners are Terry Miller and Andrea Yearwood.
But they admit, USA Today does, that these two runners, Terry Miller and Andrea Yearwood, won 15 individual state championships from 2017 to 2019.
They basically swept it.
And so they're essentially putting women's sports out of business.
So how can USA Today deal with this?
Well, they basically point out one of the plaintiffs, Chelsea Mitchell, went on to beat Miller three times after the lawsuit was filed.
So, although the transgender runners dominated a lot of races, they didn't actually dominate every single race.
One of the plaintiffs beat one of the runners three times.
And then they say that Mitchell, the plaintiff, is now competing in college, but Miller and Yearwood are not.
But, as if to say that it doesn't matter that they won all the high school prizes because they didn't go on to compete in college.
And so, the, finally USA Today makes the point that a 2015 study shows that when biological males take testosterone, or take testosterone suppression treatments, their running speeds tend to slow down.
Now, how do you summarize all of this?
This is my way of thinking about it.
It is the essence of good law to treat things that are the same the same, and to treat things that are different differently.
It's the essence of bad law and bad rules to take things that are similar and treat them differently, and it is equally bad to take things that are dissimilar and treat them the same.
So as an example of the first, which is treating things that are similar differently, you talk about, say, segregation.
Blacks and whites are similar.
And if you have separate water fountains and you say, listen, you know, blacks drink out of this fountain, whites drink out of that fountain, you're treating like things in an unlike manner.
Now, of course, I could write a USA-style article and say, well, you know, the blacks still have a fountain.
Statistics show there aren't that many blacks who really want to drink out of the white fountain.
The black fountains are actually put near black neighborhoods, and so it's not such a big deal after all.
This would be USA Today style rhetoric.
But of course the unfairness lies in the fact that you are treating like things in an unlike manner.
And I think here the injustice is really clear.
The injustice is that you are taking men and women who are dissimilar in their physique, in their ability to perform in sports, And you are treating them the same.
That's the point. Or at least you're allowing some of them, some of the biological males, to sort of participate in the...
So you are... By allowing biological men to compete in women's sports, you are treating unlike...
As if they are, in fact, the same.
And this is a scientific fact.
I noticed that the USA Today article never brings up science.
In every other context, listen to the science.
But in this context, they are weirdly silent about the science, because in this case, it's ideology that trumps science.
They don't want to listen to the science.
They want to put the science to the side.
Is atheism a problem of ignorance about God, or is it a problem of rebellion against God?
When I did, for several years, I was very active in Christian apologetics, wrote three books on the subject, and a lot of my apologetics was directed at making the case, providing, as Milton says, a justification of the ways of God to men.
But all of this is based on the idea that atheism is rooted in, I don't know, show me some evidence.
Why is it reasonable to believe in God?
And I'm beginning to wonder if that is in fact what motivates most atheists, this kind of, I don't see him, I don't see God, and therefore I can't believe in something that I don't have verifiable evidence for.
Several years ago, the British broadcaster, Malcolm Mugridge, a very colorful and interesting personality, he converted.
After a life of admitted debauchery, he converted to Christianity toward the end of his life.
And he said something very interesting when he did, which I want to read.
He said that his conversion, quote,"...gives me not so much exhilaration as a deep sense of peace." A sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.
So if you reflect on these words, you can see that what Muggeridge is really saying is that in converting to Christianity, he was, quote, coming home.
It's not so much that he didn't know about God.
It's more that he had strayed away from God in the manner that someone leaves their home and sort of breaks with their family.
And this idea of taking a place at a table that was already set for him This notion that Maghraj is saying, I kind of always knew that there was a God.
I just was in rebellion against him.
I didn't want any part of him.
But in the end, I sort of surrendered to God.
And my conversion was not so much that new knowledge came into me, but I essentially accepted God's sovereignty over my life.
In his book, Basic Christianity, the Christian writer...
John Stott.
Very nice, slim volume called Basic Christianity.
But he describes an incident where after his sermons, he said the one guy would come up to him afterward and ask him, I've got a question for you.
And they would talk and then...
A little later, the guy would come back, I've got another question for you.
And then a little later, I've got another question for you.
So after a while, John Stott said, you know, let me ask you something.
He goes, what if I sit you down, I take all the time that you need, I answer to your complete satisfaction every question you have.
Will you, at the end of that, accept Christ?
Will you surrender to God?
And he says the guy at that point gave him kind of a smile and he never saw him again.
Why? Because at the end, this was not a guy who wanted his questions.
Questions were simply a delaying tactic.
It really wasn't about the questions.
He had no intention of giving his life to God.
And looking at Romans, I'm now reading Romans chapter 1.
Verse 18, I think these are very telling lines because what Paul seems to be saying here is that even if we can't see God directly,
We can know him and about him indirectly.
His signature is so clear on the entire universe that, in a sense, no one can say...
I don't see it. There's simply no indication that this universe, this moral order, this voice of conscience in me, none of it has any supernatural or transcendent source.
And so I think what Paul is getting at is that atheism is not a problem of ignorance.
It is a problem of rejecting what you know to be true.
In Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan says, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
And I think that explains how many people pattern their lives.
They want to live their own lives.
They don't want to live God's plan for their life.
They want to live their plan for their life.
In resistance, maybe even defined in opposition to God's plan.
And if this is true, it would mean that there's a fundamental dishonesty in atheism.
The atheist isn't just being dishonest to you or me.
They're really being dishonest to themselves.
Why? Because they're pretending to a lack of knowledge that they do, in fact, possess.
They know what is true.
They just don't want it to be true.
And they just don't want to be under obligation to the truth.
They want to cut themselves free of the truth and live their own lives as they wish.
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