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July 12, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:44
THE ART OF CORRUPTION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 129
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The Biden family and the art of corruption.
The misguided genius of Robert E. Lee.
And a Yale psychiatrist worships at the altar of St.
George Floyd. This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
Hunter Biden is also an artist.
Who knew? Well, I mean, he's an artist, kind of like he's an energy expert or a Ukraine expert or a China expert or a real estate mogul.
The simple truth is that he's none of these things.
And if you look at Hunter Biden's art, well, first of all, I'm not even sure he did any of it.
It doesn't... He could, I guess, produce art in a cocaine-induced haze, but I have a feeling that he got somebody else to do this stuff.
But nevertheless, he wants to sell it.
He wants to sell it under his own name, and he wants to sell it clearly as a mode of access.
To the Biden family.
The Biden racket continues with Joe Biden in the White House.
It's not clear what percentage the old man is getting.
Pop wants his share.
I'm sure there's going to be money passed under the family table.
As you know, Hunter Biden, I've been talking about this on the podcast, has been paying his dad's bills.
Part of the way he funnels the money right back to the corrupt father, who's the mafia don, the center of the whole operation.
He was the head of ethics, the Office of Government Ethics, under Obama from 2013 to 2017.
And he's talking about the White House's arrangement to allow Hunter to sell his art and supposedly that they built a fence around Hunter so there's not going to be any impropriety.
But listen... A way that Hunter Biden could now become this great emerging artist and sell them for a price that matches the market that would not run afoul of ethics concerns.
Well, the thing is, it's just got the absolute appearance that he's profiting off of his father's fame.
He's not selling under a pseudonym.
He's not waiting till his father is out of office.
It doesn't just have the appearance that the guy is running a racket.
He has been running a racket.
He's been doing it for years.
He's the bag man for his dad.
It's really his father's racket.
Now, of course, what Walter Schaub is saying is kind of obvious.
There was a... Here's the...
The Washington Post as well as the Daily Mail have both been talking to art experts and kind of showing them Hunter Biden's art.
And here's Mark Strauss, by the way, who runs a gallery in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
He goes, quote, Nobody would ever start at these prices.
We're talking about prices, by the way, up to $500,000 a painting.
Think about that for Hunter Biden, not known as an artist previously.
Jerry Saltz, a critic at New York Magazine, author of the book How to Be an Artist, he told Artwork News that these works could be described as, quote, generic post-zombie formalism.
He's being sarcastic.
I think what he's saying is this is crap.
Scott Inrissik, who's the editor-in-chief, former editor-in-chief of Modern Painters Magazine...
I would call it very much a hotel art aesthetic.
In other words, this is the kind of thing that you see in the Holiday Inn on the wall.
It's worth probably $300, if that.
Certainly not $500,000.
Can you imagine if...
Like Donald Trump Jr.
did this when Trump was in the White House.
He starts doing paintings and the paintings are kind of gobbledygook on paper or on metal or on canvas.
This would be seen as an obvious racket, an obvious attempt to exploit the connection to Trump.
And, of course, Jen Psaki says, well, you know, we're going to make sure that the buyers of this art are confidential.
Their names will not be released.
What? This is supposed to be an attempt to fight corruption?
No, on the contrary.
This means that the public won't know who's paying all this money for the art, won't be able to monitor and see what kind of favors are those guys getting from the Biden administration.
Although this is kept confidential from the public, there's nothing to stop the guy buying the art going to the White House and saying, hey guys, listen, I've just shelled out 500 grand for a Hunter Biden painting.
I think this qualifies me for a meeting with Joe Biden, don't you think?
And of course, this is Biden's, this is his M.O. This is his modus operandi.
This is how he functions. He'd be like, sure, you know, two nights in the Lincoln bedroom and whatever you want for your business on top of that.
So this is how this stuff works.
I mean, there's the attempt to camouflage the Biden name.
Here's the George Burgess Gallery, which is going to be selling this art.
And by the way, this George Burgess guy is a shady character.
He has a criminal record.
No surprise. This guy, in his online biography of Hunter Biden, says, quote, he doesn't mention anything about Joe Biden being the president.
He calls him, quote, a lawyer by trade.
Yeah. We're good to go.
And this is only the end of it, the last installment, if you will, of this continuing saga.
So here's a clip from the movie Trump Card, my interview with the researcher and scholar Peter Schweitzer talking about the Biden crime family.
Let's turn to Hunter Biden.
In 2013, Hunter Biden accompanies his father, Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States, to China.
Hunter Biden is there because he's trying to finalize this incredible deal.
It's a private equity deal expanded to $1.5 billion.
The Chinese government is putting money into this deal.
And is it a deal to invest in the Chinese economy in ways that are not typically open to Western investors?
Yes, this is the key.
Hunter Biden has no background in private equity.
He has no background in China.
He gets a deal through the Shanghai Free Trade Zone that nobody else operating in China has.
The Chinese have had a strategy throughout the Asia-Pacific region of striking deals with the family members of political figures like Joe Biden because they expect favorable policies in return.
Now, the key point here is all of this is documented on Hunter Biden's laptop.
There's no doubt it's Hunter Biden's laptop.
You might remember when the laptop story first surfaced how 50 intelligence officers, and this just shows what deceitful crooks these people are, all said, oh yeah, this is all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
Russian disinformation?
Could they actually have sent time-coded emails under Hunter Biden's personal email?
Could they have figured all that out, rigged his whole browser history, manufactured Hunter Biden's own texts and sent them to other people with replies that would come contemporaneously?
Did the Russians do that? It was manifestly preposterous.
And yet they did it. Why?
Because it was a brazen lie.
They knew the media would go with it.
They knew that this is a way of, by and large, protecting the Biden family through the election.
That was the point. It shows the depth of corruption of these intelligence officers and how they're all really partisan hacks.
But on top of that, the laptop now shows Joe Biden's direct involvement.
Here he is in Georgetown, eating with a bunch of Ukrainian officials, who are, by the way, funneling money to Hunter Biden.
There he is meeting with some Mexican businessmen.
And of course, Hunter Biden and his business partner are making deals with Carlos Slim and Miguel Aleman Velasco.
And Biden is right there, and they're taking photos together.
and they're meeting in Biden's vice presidential home.
And all of this is right there.
It's like DNA.
It's indisputable, and yet the media won't touch it.
They're pretending like this is not a story.
It's almost like they're telling their readers that if you wish it not to be a story, we're gonna make that wish come true by not making it a story, even though they know that it is a story and it is very damning.
And precisely because it is damning, they're circling the wagons around the Biden family, not in order to expose the Biden family corruption, but to make sure it never gets out.
The media here can't acknowledge the truth.
They haven't learned anything from the past.
They're not going to.
They can't do it.
Why? Because at the end, these guys are, like the deep state 50 intelligence officers themselves, part of the deceitful Biden crime family operation themselves.
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I want to dive a little further, a little deeper into the Trump A class-action lawsuit against Facebook and against Twitter, because I'm seeing all this chortling in the media about how manifestly ridiculous this lawsuit is.
And of course, this is nothing more than echoing the talking points of the Democrats, people like Ted Lieu, who says...
If I submit an op-ed to the New York Times, they're not forced to publish it.
Or if I want to be on Fox News every day, they don't have me on.
I'm going to sue. My First Amendment rights are being violated.
So this is the level of analysis that we're getting.
Of course, let's remember, first of all, that Fox News doesn't have Section 230 protection the way that Facebook does.
And Twitter does. Let's remember that the New York Times has no prior contractual relationship with somebody who just submits an op-ed.
And these are two distinguishing factors, because when you sign up for Facebook or Twitter, you enter into a contract with them.
And the contract is mutually binding on both parties.
And moreover, these tech platforms have a special governmental immunity.
And this is the heart of the matter.
As I read through the Trump lawsuit, I kind of understand better what Alan Dershowitz said when he talked about this being a critical First Amendment case.
And Dershowitz, of course, mentioned the irony that these digital platforms are justifying their censorship by an appeal to the First Amendment.
The First Amendment gives us the right to censor whoever we want.
That's basically what they're saying.
Now, let's turn to the Trump side of the argument, because I've been looking at it beyond the statements contained in the lawsuit itself.
What Section 230 does is it essentially immunizes these social media platforms.
From being sued for the content of their platforms.
In other words, it immunizes them from being publishers.
But the point being that their censorship is directly arising out of the fact that they do see themselves as publishers.
That's what gives them the right to censor.
That's what distinguishes, say, the New York Times and Facebook on the one side with, say, the phone company on the other.
The phone company does not manipulate the content of what is said on the phone.
They don't arbitrarily throw people off and deny them phone privileges because, oh, Oh, you engaged in hate speech.
Oh, you said things that are disputed by the CDC. Or, you know, you said things that our deep state doesn't agree with.
So, basically what Trump is zooming in on here is that Section 230 here is providing a governmental immunity for censorship.
And this is the heart of the matter because the argument, and it's only an argument, but it's I think a very strong one, is that, quote, Congress cannot lawfully induce, encourage, or promote private parties to do what is constitutionally forbidden for government itself to do.
It's kind of like saying the government can't directly censor people.
That is forbidden by the First Amendment.
So how about we provide special protections to private platforms and they can do the censoring for us?
Now, of course, this raises the question of whether or not government is pushing these private platforms to do censorship.
And here, the Trump lawsuit has voluminous documentation, from Nancy Pelosi, to Mark Warner, to Senator Kamala Harris, who is, by the way, demanding that these platforms ban Trump, to Senator Blumenthal, Senator Mazie Hirono, and on and on it goes.
So these tech Adam Schiff These tech moguls show up before the Democratic Congress and they're berated.
And the Congress says, listen, we've been giving you these Section 230 protections and you better go ahead and censor more people.
Otherwise, we're going to take these protections away.
Let me quote Nancy Pelosi on this.
But I do think that for the privilege of 230, Section 230, there has to be a bigger sense of responsibility on it and it's not out of the question that it could be removed.
So, in other words, if you don't do what we say, we're going to take away your protection.
What is the legal precedent for government being forbidden to make private companies do something that is constitutionally forbidden for government itself to do?
It turns out that there's a whole body of case law on this.
Here is the Supreme Court in Norwood v.
Harris in 1973.
The government, quote, I'm now directly quoting, may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.
So the government cannot engineer censorship by others and then disclaim a responsibility for it itself.
And by the way, this is not just a precedent involving free speech or the First Amendment.
It applies generally.
In 1956, Railway Employees Department v.
Hanson, the Supreme Court said, look...
Let's say that there is an agreement between a union and an employer, and Congress passes a statute that immunizes this kind of agreement from any kind of liability under state law, then Congress, by providing this special protection to these types of agreements, Is itself responsible for the action that these private parties are taking?
In other words, if Congress is forbidden from doing it, Congress cannot engineer an agreement among private parties and then bless that agreement with government protection and government immunities.
And then the government goes, well, because we're not doing it.
That doesn't really work, says the Supreme Court.
Another little tidbit in the Trump lawsuit I found very interesting is that as Trump begins to look into Facebook's justification, one of which is that, oh, by the way, you know, we're removing posts that are false.
Trump points out, quote, the policy clarifies that what Facebook means by false is not actual or factual falsity.
But rather whether the claim contradicts or challenges the pronouncements or recommendations of authorities.
So here's what Facebook does.
Whether it comes to something like the CDC guidelines or whether it comes to whether or not the virus came from the Wuhan lab, Facebook doesn't know.
They don't know where it came from.
So what they say is, well, we're going to decide that what Peter Daszak says about this is authoritative.
And anything that contradicts that guy, even though, by the way, that guy has been funding gain-of-function research.
He has every interest, for example, in camouflaging the blame of the Wuhan lab and putting it onto a wet market.
Nevertheless, Facebook goes, we trust Daszak.
And so it's Daszak who decides what's true and false.
Not because something is true or false in itself.
But it's true or false on the say-so of certain people.
And this is kind of Trump's point.
When these private platforms are taking dictation from public authorities, whether it be Fauci or whether it be the CDC, they're not really private platforms making their own publishing judgments.
It's as if the New York Times decided to publish press releases from the White House as their own stories and go, hey, yeah, listen, we're an independent platform.
No, you're not an independent platform.
You're taking dictation from the government.
So all of this is a way of saying that Dershowitz is on to something here.
This lawsuit has a lot of meat to it.
And I think that the kind of ha-ha-ha-ha-ha response of the media is, again, wishful thinking.
They're hoping there's nothing to it.
It's manifestly ridiculous to them, but it's only manifestly ridiculous to them because they cannot see the strength of the argument on the side of a political party and a political individual, Trump, whom they so deeply despise.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. The state of Virginia, or more precisely Charlottesville, Virginia, Has now taken down the giant monument to Robert E. Lee.
And I sort of watched this happening on social media, the monument being kind of hoisted off of its base, slowly brought down and removed.
It's apparently going to be relocated somewhere, and apparently Charlottesville is looking to see if there's some sort of historical society or museum that wants it.
It's certainly not going to be right there in Charlottesville.
The City Council of Charlottesville had voted as early as 2017 to take down the monument.
You might remember the so-called Unite the Right.
It wasn't a Unite the Right.
It was organized by a leftist, Jason Kessler.
And the poster boys of that white supremacy movement, people like Richard Spencer, are by no means on the right.
I documented this in the movie, Death of a Nation.
But one of the city councilmen is quoted from Charlottesville saying, it feels good to be on the right side of history.
This is kind of what I want to talk about a little bit because what does it mean here to be on the right side of history?
This is obviously part of a broader phenomenon.
A phenomenon of taking down statues.
By the way, not just Confederate statues, but I must say as someone who has been an enthusiast of the Union side, my hero, as most of you know, is Abraham Lincoln.
The Republican Party was the party that mobilized the Union armies.
Robert E. Lee was a Democrat.
He was also a slave owner.
He inherited some slaves, but he didn't really run a plantation or manage a plantation.
In fact, he was a military guy for his entire career.
He also spoke out, by the way, against slavery.
He thought it was a bad institution, and he thought it was bad both for the master and for the slave.
But at the same time, he was a patriot of the state of Virginia, something that's kind of hard for us to understand today, when we can understand being a patriot for the country, but the idea of being attached to a state seems a little bit odd to us.
But it didn't seem odd at the time, really, to anyone.
The Northerners understood exactly what Robert E. Lee was saying.
Remember, it was the states that created the Union.
And so this idea of a loyalty to a state is not so peculiar.
By the way, I now live in Texas.
A lot of Texans are very loyal to Texas.
So I've noticed in a way that you won't see, for example, in California, a kind of patriotism to the state of Texas that doesn't exist in California.
So this is really Robert E. Lee's crime, that when Robert E. Lee was opposed, by the way, to secession, he said, I don't want secession, but if my state, against my will, chooses to secede, then I will go with it.
And that's really what he did.
This, to my view, makes Robert E. Lee...
Well, how would we sum up Robert E. Lee?
I think, actually, it was General Grant, his great adversary, the man who ultimately defeated Lee.
defeated Lee not because he was a better general by the way, but because his troops outnumbered Lee's, even at Gettysburg, where, by the way, the Union Army suffered heavy casualties, but the Confederates also suffered heavy casualties, and the point was the Confederate Army was much smaller.
They could afford much less to lose those people.
That's why Gettysburg was such a defeat.
But Grant says of Lee, he says, after Appomattox's surrender, he says, I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was unbearable.
I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.
So I think here Grant beautifully captures the ambivalence of Robert E. Lee.
He was actually a good man, and in military terms, in terms of being a general, a great man who fought in a bad cause.
And that may seem really paradoxical.
How can you actually have any hint of admiration for someone who fights in a bad cause?
Now, I want to suggest historically, if we think about it, this is actually not only possible, but has happened many times in history.
During the Crusades, the Christian Crusaders, led by Richard the Lionheart, were fighting a formidable Islamic radical foe led by a man named Saladin.
But Saladin, although in many ways he was a progenitor of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, a Muslim fanatic, a man who gave no quarter, bloodthirsty, ruthless, cruel, yes...
But he was also chivalric in his own way.
At one point, he intercepted some letters that Richard the Lionheart had written to his wife, and he returned them unopened, with even the seals unbroken.
And many Christians who have written about the Crusades have shown naked admiration for the chivalry of Saladin, even though, from their point of view, a bad guy, or at least a good guy, perhaps, fighting in a very bad cause.
And now we turn to Winston Churchill and the Nazis.
Because if you listen to what Winston Churchill said about Hitler, he was bitter and savage and angry and he wanted no good to come to him.
And he, of course, had the view that Hitler was a thoroughly bad man in a bad cause.
This was not, in fact, Winston Churchill's view of Erwin Rommel, who was the general in charge of the Nazi forces, the German forces, and the panzer divisions in North Africa.
Here's Churchill on Rommel.
His ardor and daring inflicted grievous disasters upon us, but he deserves the salute which I made him, and not without some reproaches from the public, in the House of Commons in January 1942 when I said of him, we have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and may I say, across the havoc of war, a great general.
So interestingly, Churchill does not transfer his complete hatred of Hitler to Hitler's general, Rommel, for whom he has, well, I was going to say concealed, but not so concealed admiration.
And so here we have the complexity of history.
Robert E. Lee was on the wrong side of history.
In that sense, I agree.
But he was not the same type of man as As some of the other guys who were bad men in a bad cause.
Lee remains in some ways the shining spirit of Virginia.
And I think in military terms, unarguably one of the greatest generals of all time.
Here was a guy who with a manifestly smaller force was able to frustrate, flummox, confuse and throw back Union armies much bigger than his own.
And so one can have this kind of complex admiration for Lee and feel at least a tinge of regret that much lesser men than Lee are pulling his statue down.
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Statues are coming down in America, but statues are also going up.
I mentioned just a moment ago the Robert E. Lee statue pulled down in Charlottesville.
But we also see statues of George Floyd popping up all over the place.
And very interestingly, and I suppose from some angle amusingly, here is a Yale psychiatrist, a Yale psychiatry professor, who is elevating George Floyd's sainthood, Saint George Floyd.
Here's her take on it.
Listen. One of my mentors, Dr.
Odebegde, talked about George Floyd as a saint, Saint George Floyd.
And I really appreciate that framing because really thinking about how his death will not be in vain.
And as a result of the public display of what happened, his murder, there has been a reckoning across this country This is the kind of thing which, you know, if it wasn't uttered with that kind of straight face, would be a subject of parody.
Because you get no sense that the woman is even being ironic.
She's completely dead serious about this.
And one might be tempted to dismiss her as a crank or a kook.
Plenty of kooks, by the way, at Yale.
But it looks like this is part of a broader phenomenon.
A broader phenomenon on the left...
Which treats victimization as something morally admirable in itself.
And creates, well, you'd have to say a new definition of sainthood.
This is really what interests me here.
What makes George Floyd a saint?
A saint! Historically, a saint was someone who was a moral exemplar.
Someone who did, you may almost say, superhuman things that brought forth admiration.
And not just did superhuman things, but did them for spiritual purposes.
And both the purpose and the sacrifice combined together produced the concept of sainthood.
So think of someone like Saint Peter.
Now, St. Peter was by no means a perfect guy.
In fact, he denied Jesus three times.
He, in that sense, betrayed the Lord.
But at the same time, at the end, he came through, and he came through big time.
And Jesus himself calls Peter the rock, Petra.
The name Peter comes from the Greek word meaning a slab, a stone, or a rock.
So he's the rock on which the Christian church is founded.
And at the end of his life, Peter is crucified upside down.
He goes voluntarily.
That's important.
He voluntarily becomes a martyr for Christ, showing that he underwent an enormous spiritual transformation.
Through church history, you find many examples of this.
A more recent one is Maximilian Kolbe, recently canonized.
By recently, I mean in the last century.
Why? Because during the Nazi captivity, here was this Catholic priest, and the Nazis were about to kill another guy, and that guy began to plead with the Nazis.
The Nazis were kind of killing one guy a day just to kind of make a demonstration of their own kind of ruthlessness.
And the guy pleads, and he goes, oh, I have a family.
Please spare me. I have children.
I have a wife. And this guy, Maximilian Kolbe, just stands up and he goes, hey, listen, you know what?
Kill me instead. He takes the place of the other guy.
And the Nazis go, okay.
And they shoot him dead.
By the way, the other guy survives the war and became one of the people who testified at Kolbe's canonization.
So this is what saints are.
They're people of, you may say, who make supreme sacrifices.
They're people that one can admire.
Now, think of George Floyd.
What's his resume? Home invader?
Passer of forged checks?
Resister of arrest?
Drug addict? Would you want your kid to grow up and be like George Floyd?
I don't even think the leftist, I don't even think this woman at Yale would want that.
And so you have this perverse moral totem pole on the left.
In which people are elevated based upon no accomplishment whatsoever.
I mean, it was wrong that George Floyd was killed, but that wasn't an accomplishment of George Floyd.
Because George Floyd didn't do anything, his victimization arose from what was done to him.
So he was wronged in that sense, but being wronged by itself is not an accomplishment.
And so what you have here on the left is an attempt to remove the idea of moral admiration from anything that people do, from choices made by the will or character formed through effort.
And to elevate people on a pedestal, basically for being in, you may almost say, the right place at the right time.
Obviously, George Floyd was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That's why he came to his untimely end.
But what I'm getting at here is it is this completely inverted and, I would say, depraved calculus that takes a guy like George Floyd, whom nobody would emulate or aspire to be like, and make him Saint George Floyd.
Hey, as you know, I'm pretty excited about this big tech class action lawsuit coming from Donald Trump to big tech.
It doesn't matter what your politics are, who you voted for.
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To learn more. Who killed Ashley Babbitt?
Trump tweeted that out recently, and he was also asked about it with a very interesting tidbit from Maria Bartiromo.
Listen. There is speculation that this was a security detail in a leading member of Congress's security detail, a Democrat.
Whoa! We're getting a little closer to the identity of the man who shot Ashley Babbitt through the neck, killing her.
And hey, it's time to reveal the name of the man.
It's Lieutenant Michael Byrd.
Michael Byrd. The media, by the way, knows his name.
They have known it for a while.
They refuse to report it.
They're, you may say, protecting him.
Now, this is strange because think about it.
There have been a number of police shootings over the last few years.
Can you think of a single case in which the identity of the officer has been systematically concealed by the media?
There's no such case.
So in this one case, They are preventing people from knowing what I've just told you.
Why? Partly because Lieutenant Michael Bird is black.
And so we have right away a racial incident in the sense that you've got a black cop I think?
And yet, evidently, a quote, internal investigation, which seems thoroughly bogus, by the way, has concluded that Lieutenant Michael Byrd felt he was in mortal danger.
So in other words, evidently, he wasn't even protecting anyone else.
He felt that his life was in danger.
Now, in any other circumstances, I mean, just switch the races of the people.
Switch the ideologies around and ask yourself this.
If you have an unarmed black man coming through a window and a white cop with no warning, no firing shot in the air, shoots not just to wound or to immobilize, but to kill, And then says, even though I'm standing many feet away, even though there are lots of people around me, including lots of cops, there's no evident danger, at least mortal danger.
Nevertheless, I'm going to kill this woman.
Wow. And for what?
Because she broke the law?
Well, George Floyd broke the law.
If Ashley Babbitt deserves to die just because she, quote, broke the law, why doesn't George Floyd deserve to die?
Because he broke the law. So breaking the law by itself doesn't mean that an armed officer has a right to kill you.
It means that they have a right to apprehend you, put you before a jury, put you before a judge, let the system take its course.
That's all they're empowered to do.
Now, the interesting thing about this guy, Michael Bird, first of all, it's pretty obvious it's him.
We know this because actually a sergeant at arms, Timothy Blodgett, accidentally blurted out his name in a...
In a hearing. And interestingly, C-SPAN and CNN quickly removed his name from the transfer.
But there it is on the congressional quarterly record, so we know exactly who it is.
You can also, by the way, match up photos of Byrd, Byrd himself, with the fellow that we see on the television screen.
And by the way, he's wearing the same bracelet that he normally wears, the same lapel pin.
It's quite obviously the same guy.
Now, interestingly, this guy, Mike Bird, has cleaned his own social media.
He's removed all his posts. He's taken down all his personal photos.
So he's obviously trying to conceal his identity.
Interestingly, when you look into his background, and I have to credit some reporting here from the Tampa Tribune.
One of the Tampa newspapers, they go, Byrd has a record of mishandling his weapons.
Very interesting. In fact, in February 2019, this guy took a department-issued Glock 22, by the way, the same firearm he used on Ashley Babbitt, and he left the gun loaded but unattended in a restroom on the House side of the Capitol.
And another guy was looking around, maybe coming to use the bathroom.
He finds this loaded gun.
And so this guy, Mike Byrd, is obviously a little careless, a little bit reckless.
But the reason this cordon of protection has gone around him, not only from the authorities but from the media, is they can't afford to admit that the only lethal force used on January 6th Was illicitly, inappropriately, and in violation of law used by a black male Capitol Police officer against a female unarmed Trump supporter.
Admit that and the whole January 6th narrative begins to collapse.
They don't want it to collapse. They're trying to hold up this tottering edifice of lies.
This is the big lie, by the way.
The big lie here being that, oh, there were these seditious Trump supporters trying to overthrow the Constitution, mounting an al-Qaeda-style attack.
And so they can't afford to tell the truth about Mike Babbitt.
They've got to protect him.
They've got to hide his identity.
They've got to pretend that Ashley Babbitt was some kind of Osama bin Laden or some kind of guy flying a plane into a building, although she manifestly was not.
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A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, kind of an elite school in New York, where parents had mobilized to protest against a teacher who was literally teaching pornography, teaching pornography to students who are in the 8th grade, the 9th grade, and the 10th grade.
And the question the parents are asking is, why?
Is this really necessary?
By the way, is porn so unavailable in our culture and on the internet that students need to be introduced to the concept in school?
Now, the teacher, Justine Eng Fonte, who was the one offering these classes, apparently teaches at another prep school, another very prestigious prep school in New York called the Dalton School.
And both schools were sort of taken aback by the parental protest, and I've kind of disavowed the kind of porn education.
So apparently, Justine Fonte is feeling a little bit lonely these days.
And so what does she do?
She has an adoring profile.
defense or methods. And now I want to talk about the defense because the defense is actually really what's so interesting. She has, by the way, resigned her position but the bad news is that Fonte says that having resigned now as a teacher what she's going to do is she's going to start writing children's books. Wow.
She's also going to produce a podcast.
Wow. And she's going to do consulting for TV shows.
So she's basically taking, I guess, her porn routine into the culture, out of academia and into the culture.
Now, Justine Eng Fonte claims that she's not for pornography.
She says, I'm not showing them all these images because I'm like, oh, porn is fantastic.
She says, no, she wants to teach young people because they're going to be exposed to porn anyway.
And by the way, this is a familiar argument.
Kids are going to have sex anyway, so we've got to give them all this equipment to help them to do it.
And we've got to provide the condoms because they're going to do it anyway.
So her view is just because...
Kids are going to be exposed to porn anyway.
So she says, I've got to teach them the critical faculties to be able to evaluate porn.
And what are these critical faculties?
That's the point I became curious about.
What are you actually teaching them to be critical of?
And it turns out that she wants people to be critical of what is realistic and what is not.
Two, how to deconstruct implicit gender roles and how to identify what types of behavior could be a health or safety risk.
So this is kind of the key.
This is the liberal view of sexuality.
You've got to basically ask three questions.
What I'm seeing, is that something I could actually do or is that sort of unrealistic?
You know, these kinds of trapeze acts on the part of these porn stars.
You know, normal people can't do that.
They're not healthy enough.
They're too obese. They shouldn't try that.
Don't try that at home. Number two, let's see if the men and women are being portrayed in equal light.
Are they both equally empowered?
That's the second question.
And the third one is, is this going to make you sick?
Is this going to transmit some kind of disease?
Notice that this is a totally debased view of sexuality.
It removes, first of all, the moral component completely.
It acts as if human beings are not moral beings.
It does nothing, by the way, to expose the fact that pornography is in some sense not even about sex at all.
I mean, think about it. A sex act is really between the people who participated, between the two partners who are involved in it.
But when you have porn, think of the scene of porn.
You've got a cameraman, you've got a sound man, you've got a director, you've got seven or eight observers who are laughing and joking about the whole thing.
The whole thing is a fake thing.
The two partners are not performing for each other's intimacy or to draw closer to each other at all.
They're performing for the gratification of a third party, some guy sitting in front of his computer, some freak.
So this is the ugly nature of pornography.
But instead of focusing on that, how it debases sexuality, how it strips the moral content out of it, Justine Fonte is simply concerned to make sure, let's make sure that the woman is on top of the man as often as the man is on top of the woman.
Let's make sure no sexually transmitted diseases are going on here.
Debbie's getting a little bit uncomfortable at this whole topic.
But I think you can see that I'm actually defending a wholesome and healthy view of sexuality against not only the pornographers, but in some ways the porn accessories like Justine Ang Fonte.
We are now in the era of private space exploration, or at least the first step toward that.
And I watched with some slightly transfixed on social media to see the billionaire Richard Branson, the guy who owns, by the way, Virgin Airlines and his Virgin Galactic spacecraft, Blasts him into space.
He goes right past the atmosphere.
He's 53 miles above the Earth.
And it was a moment of some exhilaration.
Listen. Uncomplete.
Unity is pointed directly up and heading to space.
Things are looking great. We are 25 seconds into the burn now, approaching Mach 2.
30 seconds, Mach 2.
Everything's looking really good and stable.
Now, apparently Branson is launching this company that is going to do space tourism.
And so if you're super rich, you can pay, I believe the amount is $250,000 to sign up for a space flight.
I am not on the list.
But Elon Musk is.
Elon Musk apparently paid his $10,000 deposit.
Wait, I guess it's only $10,000 to sign up.
You have to pay the rest later.
And Musk was on the scene when Branson took off.
But I don't know if this was a kind of admission of defeat.
And what I mean by this is that apparently you have a kind of a billionaire space race.
Three guys, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, the owner and founder of Tesla, and Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon.
All these guys apparently have a big itch to go into space.
I don't know if it's that they feel like Earth.
I mean, it's big enough, but kind of been there, done that.
And so now they go, I got the cash, so I'm going to put myself into kind of a projectile and push myself out.
I'm outside the atmosphere so I can float, you know, outside of gravity.
And, of course, this is really, there are people who are very irritated by this kind of billionaire's egotism because you can almost, for them, you can almost see the space race as a form of, I got there first, you know, because apparently people thought the race was between Musk and Bezos.
And suddenly, out of nowhere, it's kind of like in one of these Olympic races where a third guy comes from the back of the pack.
Branson! It's like, where the heck is he going?
And Branson goes and hits the finishing tape first.
So, now, Jeff Bezos is apparently due to get on the plane on his own space shuttle, let's call New Shepard, on July 20th.
So, just in a few days.
But he's going to be the second guy to do this.
It's really interesting because it used to be a governmental task, NASA. Remember the moon landing, one small step for man, one giant step for mankind.
And the idea here was that this was a kind of collective American project.
Neil Armstrong put an American flag on the moon.
Now, very interestingly, when they made the movie about it, they removed that scene.
They wouldn't show it. Why?
Because they sort of didn't want the patriotic implication.
They didn't want the idea that sort of America owns the moon.
By the way, Barack Obama, too, was very uncomfortable at the idea of putting the American flag on the moon.
Why? Because he doesn't like the idea of American dominance and American exceptionalism.
So, but NASA has sort of gotten out of, or at least partially gotten out of the space business, causing these private companies to step in and take over.
And presumably, this is something that's going to be available to, well, I won't say the public, but to a small community of very rich people who like this kind of a kick.
Now, predictably enough, and where is this?
This is coming from NBC News.
We have an article about how this is all very inequitable.
I was looking for the phrase, white privilege, because after all, Branson is white, Musk is white.
You know, they're all white guys, although admittedly, Elon Musk is African.
He's a white African guy.
Try to process that in your head.
South African. But the article goes, quote, it is unsettling to watch them flex the power to leave the planet, particularly in such troubled times.
This is... This is what passes for journalism at NBC News.
The idea is that we need these rich guys here, I guess, to pay all of our bills and fund the, you know, COVID relief package.
But instead, they might be saying sayonara to Earth, kind of in the manner of, you know, Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged, where all the entrepreneurial guys basically decide to stop working.
They go on strike, so to speak, and they decide, we're out of here!
And so these guys apparently are giving a slight hint that maybe if they feel that the estate tax rises high enough, they're going to basically take off from the earth and establish a colony in space just for themselves.
So the whole thing to me is a little inspiring because, I mean, it is amazing to see what the private sector can do when the government...
Essentially, we can't do it anymore.
I'm sure that the space travel, tentative though it is, is going to open up avenues of innovation and discovery that have all kinds of benefits in other ways.
And yet, there is something, I agree, a little bit...
Disturbing about the, you may almost call it, you know, space-sized egos of these characters who try not only to be the first at things, but to outdo each other, to have more money than each other, to have bigger homes than each other, bigger yacht than the other guy, and now to escape the atmosphere before the other guy.
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