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July 19, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:00:22
MARICOPA TRAIL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep134
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The Maricopa Trail, where does it lead?
There are some shocking claims coming out of the Maricopa County audit.
There are counterclaims by Maricopa County itself.
Where does the truth lie?
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.
There are some stunning claims that are coming out of the Maricopa audit.
There was an initial hearing laying out not final conclusions, but sort of provisional early findings.
And these findings are pretty explosive.
Now, we have to be a little careful here, by which I mean that we don't want to have either an excess of timidity or an excess of boldness.
An excess of timidity leads you to basically say, well, the election was basically fine, and unless I see smoking gun evidence right in front of me, I'm not going to do anything.
This seems to be the sort of Bill Barr approach, which leads to really inaction, not doing anything, not even pursuing a real investigation.
But there is a danger on the other side, which is that if you grab onto these findings, you trumpet them, you become wedded to them.
And in fact, here is Liz Harrington, the spokesman for Trump, and she's been trumpeting them, if I can use that phrase.
The problem is that these are not final conclusions.
They can get shot down.
There are counterclaims coming out of Maricopa County.
And we don't really want to have our hearts broken a second time.
By that I mean we don't want to latch on to things that then prove to be sort of elusive.
And then we're like, wow, at the end of it we sort of have nothing once again.
So we want to be wedded to the truth, and our boldness needs to be based on that.
Now, having said all that, let's look at some of these specific claims coming out of the audit.
Number one, apparently 11,326 voters in Maricopa County were not on the voter rolls on Election Day on 11-7-2020, but they were on the voter rolls in December and they were marked as having voted in the November 3rd election. Wow. So these are people who are seemingly ineligible to vote, who nevertheless voted, and their names magically appeared
on the voter roll later. Now, A second claim, very startling.
There was a request for mail-in ballots, but 70,000 more, 74,000 specifically, more mail-in ballots came back than were sent out in the first place.
Wow. Where did those ballots come from?
If they weren't sent out by Maricopa County, how did they turn up?
Whose ballots are they?
Who concocted them?
Who made them?
What is the source of how to explain this rather large discrepancy?
And then we go down the list, 25,000 duplicate ballots allegedly.
There were bleed through votes, which were apparently the result of something we heard about right in November, the sort of Sharpie controversy, the controversy in which apparently prior to election day, voters were told to use ballpoint pens.
But then Maricopa provided a late instruction to give voters Sharpies and the problem with a Sharpie, kind of obvious, we all know this to be true, the Sharpie bleeds through the page causing problems in the counting of the vote.
Now, All of this taken collectively raises a lot of eyebrows because even the number of votes that were certified doesn't really match the number of votes that were sent over to the audit.
So why is that?
One set of votes certified, another number given to the auditors?
What's going on here?
More questions, I have to say, than answers.
Now, just as you have the jubilant declaration on the part of Trump's side, I won, look over here, this shows it, this clinches it, you've got an equally equivalent triumphalism on the other side, here's left, this is CNN, fact check! Arizona audit chief baselessly raises suspicion about 74,000 ballots.
So now let's look at what CNN has to say.
And CNN basically goes, there's no evidence of any fraud or significant error with these ballots.
So how to account for them?
Well, here's CNN's way of accounting for them.
They say that in-person early voting accounts for those ballots.
In other words... The 74,000 votes were in-person early votes.
And those were tallied together with the mail-in ballots.
So essentially what they're saying is that the auditors have made a schoolboy error.
A schoolboy error. I find this a little hard to believe.
It seems ridiculous that this would in fact be the case.
But this is a counterclaim and we've got to take it seriously.
The auditor has also raised the issue that the verification processes in Maricopa County were gradually eased.
There was initially a so-called 20-point point of comparison verification.
After some time, it became 10 points, then became 5 points, and then, quote, eventually they were just told to let every single mail-in ballot through.
Basically, no verification. Okay.
Now, Maricopa County says that was not the case.
Our signature requirements remain the same.
But, of course, the question isn't whether your on-paper requirements remain the same, but whether, in fact, the practice that arose out of the rules, sometimes rules are not applied exactly in the way that they're made, whether there was, in fact, a loosening, in fact, an abandonment of standards altogether.
So I've been trying to follow this process.
Ping-pong of claim and counterclaim.
Here's Maricopa County responding itself to the 74,000 ballot claim.
And they say, quote, it's a kind of an enigmatic statement.
They go, Maricopa County calculated the true number of requests and returns.
So Maricopa is basically saying that the auditors can't count.
Either that, or they're saying that there is some true number that's not the kind of obvious or manifest number.
There's a kind of deeper number that they have excavated.
They don't claim how they got this so-called true number.
Maricopa County also claims that when they're talking about the...
The numbers added to the voter rolls after Election Day.
These are the 11,326 votes that I mentioned earlier.
Maricopa says this is likely referring to people who cast provisional ballots.
In other words, they cast ballots.
The ballots are in question.
They might have, for example, moved to a different part of the state.
So these ballots kind of have a question mark on them.
They are later determined to be legitimate or not legitimate.
And so it's the provisional ballots that could...
I underline the word could, account for these 11,000 names.
Because notice that Maricopa County doesn't say these are provisional ballots.
They say, quote, this is likely referring to provisional ballots.
This is, again, a question that needs to be answered.
Did the auditor somehow miss the obvious fact they just forgot about the provisional ballots?
And finally, Maricopa County says this, which I think is perhaps the strangest statement of all.
They say that at the end of the day, although with these disputes going back and forth, Maricopa County tweets out, Maricopa County election professionals have the experience and the proven processes to accurately count ballots.
Cyber ninjas, that's the firm doing the audit, do not.
So, what we seem to be getting here is that Maricopa County is claiming that vote counting is some kind of abstruse process.
It's not something that can be made transparent.
Even if you give it to professional auditors, you give it to a firm that has statisticians, there's all kinds of people with expertise looking at this, they don't have enough expertise.
Maricopa County has got the sort of true formula for vote counting.
It's evidently not a one, two, three, four, here's for Trump, here's for Biden, here's something uncertain.
This is how we decide it.
Apparently, this is a highly arcane process that requires unbelievable expertise unavailable to cyber ninjas.
Well, wait a minute. In a democracy, you've got to have a process that is somehow obvious to voters.
You can't say, well, you know, we're going to be running a...
A raffle or we're going to be running a casino.
But gee, you know, the process by which this roulette wheel spins is only known to the people sitting in the dark room upstairs.
They're the ones who manipulate.
They're the experts at it.
No one else can figure this out.
Leave it to us because we're the professionals.
This is absurd. So, all of this doesn't tip the scale completely one way or the other to me.
It only suggests how important it is that we get the full report, that there is critical debate.
Part of what frustrates me about the absence of a judicial process is we aren't able to see these claims kind of up against each other the way that you would see them in a courtroom or in a trial.
No cross-examination, no No chance for each side to challenge the other.
And so the whole issue leaves you with this kind of gnawing feeling that something terrible seems to have gone terribly wrong here, but we're not exactly sure what and in what magnitude.
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I have to confess, I don't have a whole lot of confidence in Rona McDaniel, the head of the RNC. I see her blustering tweets, social media censorship has got to stop, this kind of declaration.
But what is the RNC really doing?
Now, there's a...
Interesting clash that has emerged between Rona McDaniel and Jenna Ellis.
Jenna Ellis is a young lawyer who was on the Trump side during the election controversy.
And this has become sort of acrimonious.
Rona McDaniel blocks Jenna Ellis.
Jenna Ellis accuses Rona McDaniel of lying.
I'm actually going to get Jenna on the podcast to talk about this in more detail.
But what this has to do with is an email that was apparently sent by Justin Reamer.
Justin Reamer is the chief lawyer, the chief counsel to the RNC. And this was during the whole election fraud controversy, the aftermath of the election.
And Justin Reamer evidently said, why are we wasting our time talking about election fraud?
This is all ridiculous. The Trump people are a joke.
And this was an email that then...
Welcome to my show!
to try to document and prove election fraud.
Apparently, Rudy Giuliani called this Justin Riemer guy and said, listen, you're not going to be working for us much longer.
You're going to be out of a job.
And then they asked Rona McDaniel to get rid of this guy.
This is a guy on our side.
And by the way, let's remember that the Republican National Committee was raising an ocean of money to fight election fraud.
And this was the guy who was tasked with doing it.
Well, evidently, he had no interest in doing it.
But you know what? This guy, Justin Riemer, We're good to go.
Now, of course, what makes this kind of messy and complicated is that Trump, of course, has supported Ronna McDaniel as head of the RNC. So this is the fact of Trump, we've seen it in many other cases, dealing with people around him who don't really share his values, are not particularly loyal to him.
And my own experience with the RNC is that these people do play double games.
And for them, politics is a business.
So when I think about why the RNC, you think about it, it may seem odd, why would the RNC, sort of Trump's team, want to not look into a Republican candidate's claims and see if those claims can be vindicated?
Why would they not want to do that?
Well, the answer, and it's very insidious and it's kind of frightening, is that the RNC actually thinks it's better for Trump to lose.
Now, you might think, why would the RNC want Trump to lose?
And the simple answer in one word, fundraising.
It is a well-known sort of axiom of politics.
And by the way, this extends beyond the RNC. It extends even to, I remember that when I was in Washington, D.C., there were conservatives who would joke that their books would sell more and their careers would be in better shape when they were in opposition because they've got sort of And so it gives their kind of energy to their side.
So similarly, in the fundraising department, people give money out of fear.
Oh, the country is going down, but we better stop this Biden guy.
So the RNC knows this.
And they go, wait a minute, you know, if Trump wins, we're kind of...
We're going to, in the second term, people kind of become a little blacks.
They kind of take things for granted.
But if Biden comes in, he's threatening to ruin the country, RNC fundraising is going to skyrocket.
And sure enough, I take a look. Here it is in the Washington Examiner.
National Republican Congressional Committee.
Raises more money in the first half of 2021 than at any time in its history.
That's the first line of the article.
NRCC boasts a record $45 million in the second quarter.
By the way, that compares to $36 million for the Democrats.
And the Republicans now go into the midterms, at least as of now.
With $55 million in cash, the Democrats have $44 million.
So you see here how, even though you might think the Democrats are the party in power, can't they raise more money because they have access to the president?
No. Interestingly, being in the opposition is a very good way to raise money because it taps into the anxiety of people about the direction in which the country was going.
When I made my Obama film...
I went to the RNC and I went to the Romney campaign.
I showed them the film, which had been tested for its effectiveness in swinging independence against Obama.
And the remarkable thing is neither the RNC nor the Romney campaign, they couldn't have been less interested.
At one point, somebody on the campaign or somebody connected with the campaign said to me, well, Dinesh, you know what?
Why don't you send us your film and we'll kind of...
Take a look at it from a fundraising point of view.
In other words, if people give us, they give money to the RNC, they give $500 or $1,000, we'll maybe send them a thank you, which is going to be a DVD of your film.
And I was like, wait a minute, make the film to be a fundraising tool for the RNC. You're raising all this money.
Aren't you raising the money for something?
Aren't you raising the money to actually win the election?
But this is how these people operate.
They think of politics in terms of lining their own pockets.
They are, I have to say, a kind of corrupt operation.
In this sense, they resemble the swamp.
They're part of the swamp. They're in the swamp and they are swamp creatures themselves.
It'd be very naive if Trump didn't at some level know that.
But I think what this shows is that we've got to be really cautious where we put our money.
We want to give our money to trusted people who are really fighting the good fight, not people who are taking our money on the one side and then laughing at us and undermining the projects that we're trying to fund on the other.
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In what would seem to be a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, the Biden administration is now openly, nakedly, blatantly working with social media platforms, notably Facebook, to restrict, de-platform, ban, censor users that are promoting what the Biden team calls misinformation or disinformation.
Recently, Jen Psaki said, look, we're flagging posts, I'm quoting her, we're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.
And she goes on to say that, by the way, this isn't just about Facebook.
If you're banned on one social media platform, the government's position is that you should be banned on all platforms.
You should be prevented, essentially, from being able to disseminate your views.
And this idea has been echoed by others, notably the Surgeon General.
So all of these guys are on board, and they're kind of blithe about it.
They say this confidently.
They don't think that this is something to be embarrassed about.
In fact, when you listen to Jen Psaki talk...
You almost get the impression that she treats Facebook as like a government agency, someone that she can give direction to and they're going to take the direction because, you know, this is a kind of shared operation, a coordinated move between the government and the private sector.
Now, again, who is going to speak up here for free speech?
Who's going to speak up for the First Amendment?
Certainly not the ACLU. The ACLU, by the way, which once took a near absolutist position on free speech.
Now, no one is claiming that the First Amendment is completely absolute.
And by that, I mean that there are literally no exceptions.
The exceptions tend to be very far out.
And they tend to be, people give the famous example of shouting fire in a crowded theater.
But even shouting fire in a crowded theater is not by itself an exception because you can shout fire in a crowded theater if there's a fire.
It's just that if you can't do it as a prank to cause a stampede, the harm there is the physical harm of people running over each other.
And so the speech in this case is purely malicious, directed toward that destructive end.
So this is what we mean by an exception.
It is an exception that's so far out, it has nothing to do with the normal give and take of political debate.
And it's amazing that the ACLU, dead silent on this topic, in other words, probably secretly supportive.
I'm well aware, of course, that the First Amendment limits the government.
It doesn't limit the private sector.
This is often gleefully pointed out by leftists and by Democrats.
But here we have the government working in tandem with the private sector.
Or to put it somewhat differently, here we have the government trying to get the private sector to carry out things that it would be unconstitutional for the government itself to do.
And the question is, is that allowed?
Is that constitutional?
Now, to understand this issue a little more deeply, let's think of what I'm saying here.
Try to imagine the government, for example, hiring a private security firm and saying to them, listen, we, the government, are, according to the Fourth Amendment, prohibited from unreasonable search and seizure.
We can't unreasonably, without another probable cause, without a warrant, we can't just search somebody's car, we can't just search somebody's house.
But listen, you can.
You're a private agency, so we'll direct you to do it.
You carry it out at our instruction and on our behalf.
But this way we will be immunized from any responsibility because, quote, we didn't do it ourselves.
Or think about other constitutional rights, the right to assemble, the right to vote, equal justice under the law, all of these rights.
Can the government hire private agencies and pay them or subsidize them in some way and tell them, listen, you go undermine these rights on our behalf because we can't directly do it, but there's nothing limiting you from doing it.
Or think, for example, if the government paid Facebook and Twitter to ban people, that would clearly violate the First Amendment because the government would be directly implicated in providing a subsidy, a payment, for a private platform to carry out something that for the government would be clearly unconstitutional.
But the government in this case is doing exactly that.
Now, they're not forking over money to Facebook or to Twitter, but they have provided them with the Section 230 Which is a huge exemption.
It essentially immunizes these platforms from legal liability for content that appears on the platform.
I don't even know if you could put a dollar amount on the value of this subsidy.
And Congress, by the way, is always threatening these social media platforms.
You can hear this in the hearings.
We'll take away this subsidy if you don't do as we say.
We want you to ban more people.
We want you to regulate content.
And if you don't do what we say, so Section 230 is being used both as a carrot and as a stick.
Now, the Supreme Court has actually been really clear on this, and it's been clear on this in a series of precedents going back almost 75 years.
Cases like Norwood v.
Harrison, Railway Employees Department v.
Hanson, which is 1956.
Let me just quote from the Supreme Court in the Norwood case.
The government may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it, it here meaning the government, is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.
And that's it right there.
The government, in other words, does not escape responsibility or accountability to the Constitution because it channels its unconstitutional actions through private agencies.
I think all of this boosts the strength, gives added fire to the Trump lawsuit in particular, but more broadly suggests that there's a battery of litigation that can come out here.
If Facebook, in fact, takes orders from the Biden administration, takes the people that they flag and bans them, those people will have, I think, First Amendment claims that they are being shut down, they are being suppressed, they are being censored.
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We live in a society where racism is interminably, unceasingly talked about.
And yet, evidently, very hard to find.
At least very hard to find in any recognizable or obvious fashion.
And therefore, there's a project undertaken by the left in academia and also in the media to, you may say, ferret out racism where no racism is readily apparent.
In other words, it's a project to uncover, we could call it hidden racism.
Here's a classic example.
This is from The Atlantic.
By the way, a once-reputable magazine, I was happy many years ago, 1991, I believe, to publish the cover story in The Atlantic, a long excerpt, almost the whole magazine, from my book, Illiberal Education.
Today, The Atlantic is a joke.
It's an embarrassment. It's taken the same kind of fall that, say, the New York Times has.
Well, here's their article, The Hidden Bigotry of Crosswords.
Now, I'm going to read, I didn't bother to read the article, but I read the first line, which kind of tells you what they're saying.
The popular puzzles are largely written and edited by older white men who dictate what makes it into the grid and what is kept out.
Well... Let's say that's true.
I have no reason not to believe it's true.
How does this prove, quote, hidden bigotry?
The very fact that older white men are making this election?
What if I were to say that in the NBA, the National Basketball Association, the coaches who are basically scouting for young players, promising young players, are predominantly black?
Would that prove that these coaches are secret bigots?
They're giving preference only to blacks.
They don't want white players on the court.
It wouldn't follow at all.
So, again, what you have here is you have a claim of racism, and yet nothing is provided to actually support that claim.
Here's an even more preposterous example.
This is an article, by the way.
I see this in an article that says, a science journal claims that geology is racist.
Geology, the study of rocks, the study of the earth.
And apparently there's a group of scientists who have collected the petition saying that the reason geology is racist is that blacks are really afraid to enter the field because if they carry a hammer...
This may put their life in danger because people may think, cops may think that these people are a danger to society.
So this is so far-fetched.
We have to probe it a little bit further.
Evidently, I'm now quoting from this petition.
The petition was collected by a woman, a professor named Hendradar Ali at Fort Hayes State University Geology Department.
Let's just assume this is not a geology department that's kind of making waves worldwide.
But nevertheless, she's gotten 20 academics to sign on.
And I'm reading a quote. And then, of course, you can see the short step from here to George Floyd and blah,
blah, blah. And the petition goes on to say that there are, in the field of geology, quote, Clothing, hair, professional attire, language, and diction.
So evidently they're calling for a modification of the manners, the kind of professional etiquette.
Geologists need to be able to dress differently.
I didn't realize there was a uniform requirement.
They apparently have to be more liberal about how they can wear their hair.
I didn't realize there was a hair requirement.
And then apparently there are standards of addiction, presumably not for speaking but for publishing in the geology journals, that need to be abandoned or at least loosened.
Quote, racism thrives in geoscience.
Geoscience organizations function alongside the same racist ideologies and practices shaping society.
Now, there's a geologist who comments on this in the article and he makes the point, he goes, listen, a lot of the geology students, in fact, a lot of science students in this country are foreign students.
They come to America because they believe America is leading the world in the sciences.
They believe that there's pioneering research to be done and by coming to American universities, you can do that kind of research.
Now, these people are interested in science.
So if we take the field of science and we reduce it to this kind of, we make diversity the governing principle of science instead of experimentation, attempts to verify hypotheses, the scientific method, if we move to something else, social justice, Then the best students around the world who come here will stop coming because this is not what they come to learn.
If there's some internal American thing going on where we're trying to do something other than geology and discover the age of the earth and rock formations and what they tell us about nature, this is going to lead to a collapse of credibility of American universities.
Look, I think it's already happening to some degree.
It's already happened.
But the left quite clearly in all these cases is only making things worse.
Look, they keep talking about hidden racism, and the point I want to make is, these forms of racism are always hidden.
There's the hidden racism of traffic jams, by the way, that was in the 1619 Project.
The hidden racism of migratory birds, I read an article on that.
The hidden racism of math equations, and now, the hidden racism of rock hammers, the hidden racism of crosswords.
Well, think about it. If racism is so hidden, why is it a problem?
If it's so hidden, it means that no one really directly experiences it.
If it's so hidden, it means that no one can really find it.
It takes academic sleuthing.
It takes a kind of between-the-lines expertise to even find it.
Maybe if it's so hidden, it isn't even really there.
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I want to talk about the root of critical race theory, which is in an earlier movement, Dating back to the early part of the 20th century, which was called critical theory.
So the critical theory movement was, in a sense, the parent that gave birth to an offspring called critical race theory.
If you think about critical race theory, so-called CRT, it was merely the addition of Critical theory was basically based on class.
It sought to interpret, analyze, but also produce a revolutionary outcome based upon class division.
So I want to just trace this history because it helps us understand the offspring, critical race theory.
A little bit better. Now, Karl Marx, who was, of course, the founder, if you will, of Marxism, and Marx believed that a society was divided between an entrepreneurial class, what he called the capitalists, and a working class that would continue to become poorer and poorer over time.
By the way, Marx's view was directly contradicted by Lincoln, who said the opposite.
Let me read a quote from Lincoln.
Lincoln says there is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life.
And then Lincoln points to what's going on around him.
He goes, many independent men everywhere in these states, meaning in these United States, a few years back in their lives were hired laborers.
The prudent penniless beginner in the world labors for wages a while, saves the surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.
This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of conditions to all.
So Lincoln is actually describing how things actually happen.
Marx had no idea.
And Marx thought that the laborer would become angrier and angrier and then would foment a revolution based upon the kind of unbridgeable chasm between the two classes.
And this never really happened.
This created a kind of crisis in Marxism.
But there's one part of Marxism that lives on, and that is where Marx said that philosophers, I'm not quoting Marx, have only interpreted the world in various ways.
The point, however, is to change it.
And so you see here that Marx was not just about analysis, not just about understanding.
One of the fallacies that people have today about critical race theory, and in fact the critical race theorists exploit this, oh no, no, we're just helping people to understand racism.
We just want to show them about what happened in American history.
No, for Marxism it was never just about showing or understanding or analyzing.
It was about using knowledge as a spur to revolution.
It was, as Marx says, the point is to change the world.
The point is to change society, to restructure society.
So Marx, in this sense, turned Hegel on his head.
Hegel was trying to understand what Hegel considered to be the hidden movements of history.
Marx said, yeah, we want to understand, but that's not enough.
Now, Marx's understanding, as I mentioned, was flawed.
In fact, was fatally flawed.
And so what happened later...
It was that Marxists in the 20th century, notably the Italian communist Gramsci, said that we need to infiltrate the institutions of society.
This was Gramsci. I'm now quoting him.
His phrase was the long march through the institutions.
His idea was that what the left needs to do is they need to overcome and infiltrate the family and the school and the artistic community and the church and political parties, media outlets, even independent court systems.
So this project you can see that came out of revolutionary Marxism is very much with us today.
The key difference is that it takes critical theory.
Critical theory here is the Marxist doctrine that the point of theory is to drive wedges in society, to create and magnify divisions, to spur revolution and remaking of society.
And the only innovation that critical theory does with all of this is it infuses the new idea of race.
And it's a very cunning infusion.
Why? Because with Marx, there was always the problem that the class grievance that he kept talking about It wasn't really there.
That the working class guy wanted to improve his condition, as Lincoln says, but he didn't really want to go overthrow his boss.
He wanted to sort of become the boss.
And so Marx was building this idea of division, but building it on a little bit of a sociological fiction.
But, says the leftists in America in recent decades, racial grievance is real.
It is anchored in history.
And so it's actually easier to tap those veins of division.
Obama, I think, understood this very well.
It's much easier to set people against each other, black against white.
And ultimately, male against female, straight against gay.
You see here the full development beyond race to other forms, so-called intersectionality, multiple forms of oppression, multiple wedges of division.
But the point I want to make is that this critical race theory, CRT, has its roots in CT, critical theory.
and critical theory is itself an offspring of the failed doctrine of Marxism.
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There's a new development in the Hunter Biden story, which is that it now comes out, it's only now coming out, that the prosecutor who is looking into whether or not Hunter Biden has tax violations, all that money that he got from foreign entities, did he pay taxes on it?
And number two, did Hunter Biden violate any of our laws to deal with foreign entanglements?
So all of this is under investigation.
It's being investigated by a Delaware US attorney named David Weiss.
And David Weiss was ready to issue not just subpoenas, but search warrants on Hunter Biden to get all the information pertinent to his inquiry.
But then he realized that it was right before the 2020 election.
So what did he do?
He decided to be completely quiet about it until the election had passed.
Right away, we see here how a top official, a deep state guy, who is charged with doing a job, which is pursuing the trail of investigation, is nevertheless calibrating this job to the political exigencies of the moment.
In other words, he's trying to help Biden and he's trying to avoid helping Trump.
So you might think that this guy is a big left winger in Delaware.
And it turns out that he's a Republican.
He's a kind of moderate Republican, but he was appointed to his job by none other than Donald Trump.
Now, he was appointed by Trump apparently on the recommendation of Delaware's two Democratic senators.
Apparently they understood better whose side David Weiss was on.
And you see here the way in which Trump, I think, was careless in the kind of people that he appointed, people who subsequently turned out to do him no good.
I mean, no one is asking David Weiss to be a Trump man, Trump's wingman, in the way that, say, Eric Holder said that he was Obama's wingman.
We're just asking David Weiss to do his job.
And if it comes time to issue subpoenas, issue them.
Let the public make up its mind about what the significance of all this is.
You just do your job, but no one asked you to manipulate the schedule in order to wait for the election to be over.
Because that is a direct subsidy.
That is a direct donation, you might say, to the Biden camp.
And that's really what David Weiss was doing.
So the plot here really thickens because we are rightfully outraged at the media suppressing the Hunter Biden story.
We're rightfully outraged at the digital platforms for censoring the New York Post and others who tried to report on the Hunter Biden story.
But it turns out that the prosecutors, too, are in a way protecting not just Hunter.
Notice the protection here is to Joe Biden.
They're going to be doing the investigation of Hunter.
They just don't want it to be, to have any negative impacts on Joe making his way across the finish line.
And let's remember that this has always been a scandal.
The Hunter-Biden business dealings are not Hunter operating on his own.
They're Hunter-Biden, and the laptop confirms this in spades.
Hunter-Biden is working in collaboration with his father.
His father is kind of the mafia Don guy.
And Hunter Biden, the son, James Biden and Frank Biden, the brothers, they're the bag men of the operation.
So you see the level of protection that Democrats get.
Obama had it. The Clintons had it.
There's almost a sense in which these guys can get away with anything.
And this is why they do these shenanigans, because they know that.
They know that somehow they will get out of the noose.
They will Stay one step ahead of the posse.
The kind of rules that would floor any Republican are not applied when it comes to Democrats.
And in this case, sadly, our side and Trump himself bears at least a little bit of the responsibility for allowing these atrocities to continue.
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I want to examine, or perhaps I should say begin examining, a short story by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy.
Tolstoy is one of the, not just greatest of Russian writers, On the Russian pantheon, he would have the top rank along with just a handful of people, Chekhov, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, maybe Gogol. So there's a handful of Russian writers of the top rank, and these are writers of worldwide significance.
Now, with Tolstoy, his greatest works are two, War and Peace.
A massive, epic, and unforgettable story, although it takes a while to read it because it's 700 or so pages long, and an equally long and breathtaking and fascinating work, Anna Karenina. Sometimes it's good to be introduced to a writer, though, by looking at a shorter work that just gives you a glimpse into how this writer thinks.
And why read short stories?
Why read fiction at all?
Well, the reason is not just the kind of beauty of the language, but not just the fascination of being drawn into the writer's world.
One of the remarkable things about writers is that they create a world, and they allow you to live in it, at least for the duration of their story.
And then at the end of it, you're sort of sorry to come out of it, and you're sorry to be sort of back in the real world, so to speak.
So they create an unbelievably rich experience.
But they're also able to examine questions that are harder to examine, you may say, in the normal world, so even in the writing of nonfiction.
Writers of fiction, even though they're making it up, they're creating a story.
In that sense, they are lying.
They're able to create through a fabricated narrative a way to look more deeply at not just a single problem, but sometimes a set of problems.
And the topic that Tolstoy looks at here, a topic that resonates with me, That will resonate with you, I think, and with a lot of people, is just the topic of ambition.
And not just sort of secular ambition, the ambition to get ahead.
Which, by and large, I think is a good thing.
People need to have that spur of ambition to move forward in life.
But Tolstoy is also raising the question of whether ambition...
Again, not just secular ambition, but even what can be called spiritual ambition can be a danger, can be, he doesn't use this word in the story, but I want to use it, an idol, an idol.
I'll be getting into the story, and I'm probably going to talk about the story for a couple of days, maybe even through the week.
I'm not sure. So I'm going to move into this in a leisurely way.
I want to start by thinking about ambition, not by diving into the story right away, but by looking at the famous story in the Bible.
This is from Matthew chapter 19 about Jesus and the rich man.
You remember, many of you will remember, that the rich man comes to Jesus and he says, I want to be your follower.
What do I need to do? And Jesus says, keep the commandments.
And the man goes, well, actually I have.
I don't do murder.
I don't commit adultery.
I don't steal. I don't bear false witness.
I've kept all of them. And what do I do next?
And Jesus said, well, if you really want to be perfect, then go and sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come and follow me.
So, this is a very rich man.
And apparently, the Gospel of Matthew says, when the young man heard that, he went away sorrowful because he had great possessions.
In other words, this was too much for him.
He was not willing to do it.
But the interesting question is, what was Jesus after in asking him to do it?
If you think of what Jesus asked of the rich man, he asked the rich man three things.
Number one, go sell your possessions.
And the question is, why?
Is Jesus trying to tell us that we should sell all our stuff?
Number two, give it to the poor.
Is Jesus instructing us, if we're going to be Christians, we should basically divest ourselves of everything we own?
And number three, come and follow me.
In my view, it is number three that is the critical instruction here.
And what Jesus wants is for us to follow him.
And in this case, not in all cases, not with every rich person, but with this particular rich person, you may say his possessions have become his idol.
He was... So attached to his vast possessions that they were an obstacle to him becoming a true disciple of Christ.
So Jesus, recognizing that this was his idol, says to the rich man, you know what?
This is taking precedence over me.
In order to follow me, you've got to do one and two, because my only real demand is three.
But three is not possible if your primary attachment is to your possessions.
So therefore, sell your possessions.
Therefore, give away to the poor.
And... So this is not a condemnation of wealth or of having more than someone else.
Jesus is not here trying to be an apostle of social justice, a kind of early critical race theory man.
None of that. Jesus is keeping the focus on God coming first and the life of the pilgrim, which is the life we are all called to taking priority.
Now, This is the exact topic that Tolstoy explores in this remarkable story that is called Father Sergius.
Now, as the story begins, you've got a very handsome guy, and he's kind of a young prince.
Now, he's not the son of the king, but he's a kind of nobleman in the Russian court.
And his distinguishing quality...
Now, the guy's name is not Father Sergius.
That's a name he takes later when he becomes a monk.
But he is a guy...
His name is Stefan Kazatsky.
And it is said of him, Tolstoy says of him, that he wants to be good at everything he does.
He's the kind of guy who, whatever he takes up, he seeks to excel.
In other words, he is not only ambitious...
But he is a kind of perfectionist.
And so what he does is he comes to the attention of people at court because he's so good at what he does.
He's a kind of a young officer and he's regarded as an up-and-coming man at court.
He recognizes that part of what it means to be an up-and-coming man at court is to make the right marriage.
So he proposes to a noblewoman.
And she accepts it.
And they're on the verge of being married.
When he discovers, to his dismay, he's actually a marvelous sort of...
He's very good at courtship.
He's an excellent dancer.
He does all the things that endear him to this woman.
And she accepts his hand, as I said.
But right before they get married, he realizes that she has been a kind of...
She has been a sort of concubine of the Tsar.
And so, completely horrified at this, this is a very straight-laced guy, Prince Stephan.
He decides, that's it.
I've had it. I'm going to relinquish this life.
of being an up-and-coming young nobleman and I'm going to enter a monastery.
I'm going to pursue a different kind of ambition, not the ambition to worldly success, but the ambition to a spiritual life.
Now, as he enters the monastery, he begins to perfect, as is his nature, how do you be a good monk?
He's obedient. He's hardworking.
He does everything that is required of him.
All the other monks are amazed at him.
He's friendly. He's also self-effacing, so he's not full of heirs.
And so he's like the ideal monk.
Everybody sort of loves him and admires him.
And at one point, his reputation begins to spread for holiness and for goodness.
And there's a very sly young woman who hears about the monk, and kind of in a malevolent fashion, she decides, I'm going to test his holiness.
And so what does she do?
She pretends to be somebody lost in the snow.
She bangs on the door of the monastery.
Father Sergius, this is the young monk, doesn't want to let her in.
He says, there are only men in here.
We are monks. Go away.
And she goes, no, you're supposed to be a Christian.
You're not going to turn away somebody who's in the cold.
And so finally he lets her in.
And what does she do? She proceeds to try to tempt him.
What she does want really is not necessarily to sleep with him, but just to prove that he's human, he's fallible, that he's going to lust after her.
And so she sits in the next room and kind of woos him.
And he tries to shut out her voice, but he can't avoid hearing it.
And he is, in fact, tempted.
And I'm going to sort of leave you with this and pick up the theme tomorrow.
What does Father Sergius do?
He does something very Russian and very Tolstoyan and very over-the-top.
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