DOES BIDEN HATE AMERICA? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep135
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Is the United States becoming a third world country?
Does the Biden administration and the left want us to move in that direction?
The answer may surprise you.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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Is America becoming a third world country?
Are we headed in that direction?
And even more startling, is it possible that the Biden administration and the left are pushing us in that direction?
Now, it seems obvious to me, I think to you as well as you look around, that America in some ways is not America anymore.
Growing up in India, as I did when I'd walk to school, I would go past the slums and you'd see people, you know, urinating, defecating on the street, and they were doing it really without shame.
And now I see this in America.
You go to San Francisco, you see this going on, and it's a little shocking to me.
A second feature of life in India is corruption.
The fact that corruption pervades the agencies of government.
You are stopped by a cop on the street.
You can pay him off and get out of a ticket.
And the routinization of corruption was, again, something I thought a distinctive feature of sort of third world life.
But now we see here in America the way in which our police agencies of government, the FBI and so on, are thoroughly corrupted.
Not just corrupted at the top, but it seems also corrupted going way down.
A third feature is the dilapidation of the airports.
Look at how run-down American airports are.
You only have to travel abroad to realize that there are third-world countries that are now coming up.
The Mumbai airport, for example, used to be a wreck, but it's beautiful now.
Even the Mumbai airport can hold a candle to Singapore or a lot of the other Asian airports, which are just fantastic.
They make American airports look third-world by comparison.
Another feature that we're seeing now in America is the blurring of the line between a political party and the state.
The way in which the Biden administration, for example, thinks it is the state and doesn't mind using the powers of the state against its political opponents.
Once again, this is a feature of not just third world countries, but third world despotisms.
All of this for me is a kind of backdrop to analyze something very, I think, surprising and disturbing, which is that the Biden administration, in this case led by the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, has invited the United Nations to come to America and investigate systematic racism.
Wow. This is comic and alarming on a whole bunch of levels, but let's look at some of the details.
This is Anthony Blinken.
He says, quote, And to this end, he says that the UN needs to come to America and needs to investigate racism, not just in policing, but across the full swath of society.
He calls this quote, leading by example.
So the idea here is to posture that the United States is kind of mobilizing against systemic racism, what Blinken calls racism.
And you see what's going on is that the Biden administration itself wants to indict America.
They want to blame America.
They want to blame America first, to use the phrase that Gene Kirkpatrick made famous a generation ago.
Gene Kirkpatrick then accused the Democrats of being the blame America first party.
And here what they want to do is they want the UN to kind of ratify what the Democrats are already saying.
So this is kind of why they're calling in the UN. The UN becomes a kind of echo chamber for the blame America first policy of the Biden administration.
But think about it. Here you've got the UN. I mean, this is the worst outfit.
It's made up of all kinds of despotic regimes.
Think about it. Who sits on the Human Rights Commission of the UN? Venezuela!
And a few years ago, there was a contest.
Venezuela ran against Costa Rica for the position on the Human Rights Council.
And Venezuela won!
So here's Costa Rica, which is actually a reasonably decent society.
It doesn't have these kinds of systemic violations.
Venezuela is torturing political opponents.
It's locking people up.
It's a despotic regime.
There's no meaningful free speech in the society.
And yet... The telling point is that even though people know this, Venezuela wins the vote.
193 governments vote for Venezuela over Costa Rica, which means that those are despotisms too.
So despotic regimes hang together.
So this is the sordid record of the UN. We're calling these clowns in to sit in judgment of the United States.
Now, the UN customarily is usually summoned to, you know, go investigate human rights violations in Somalia or in Haiti or in the aftermath of civil strife in Sri Lanka or the tyrannical regime in Myanmar.
This is what the UN normally is asked to do.
So I think what the Biden administration is telling the world is The United States is no different than those countries.
The United States basically is now itself a country that is in need of this kind of international supervision and oversight.
This is a kind of extension of Obamaism.
You remember Obama was the one who said America is not exceptional.
Obama went on the apology tour.
Obama is happy to surrender American sovereignty to the UN. So this Obama principle is now embedded in the Biden administration.
You might remember just a few weeks ago, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, our UN ambassador.
Think of it. What a disgraceful successor to people like Gene Kirkpatrick or even Nikki Haley.
And here is Linda Thomas-Greenfield saying that white supremacy is, quote, weaved.
She actually means woven.
This is kind of ebonics.
Is weaved. Into the founding documents.
So we're basically putting people of the eighth grade mentality out there.
And what you see is this combination of indignation and stupidity, a kind of toxic mix.
And so, these are the people now running America.
And yes, they are running America down.
And if they are not making us into a third world country, they are certainly jostling us, cajoling us, and pushing us in that direction.
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I'm watching this drive by the Biden administration to spend money on all fronts, the COVID relief package, the infrastructure bill, the massively expanded infrastructure bill, Part 2, and the Green New Deal.
One thing on top of another, really trillions and trillions of dollars.
To give you an idea of the numbers, there was This bipartisan agreement, which I'm actually happy to say appears to be unraveling.
This is a bipartisan agreement, bipartisan here referring to a handful of Republicans, Romney types, who signed on with the Democrats to create an effective majority.
This is for a $1.2 trillion quote infrastructure proposal.
I say quote because there's a lot of stuff in there that's not infrastructure.
But the Biden administration is apparently trying to go for more.
They have a $3.5 trillion package kind of waiting in the wings.
I think the Republicans have gotten very alarmed, and they've realized that this is spending on top of spending, and they're backing out.
So it may be that this infrastructure deal, even though it was kind of agreed to by handshake, will go down.
And I hope it does go down.
And of course, the Democrats want to strong arm even more spending.
They want to actually get around the filibuster rule, use the so-called reconciliation process to push this through on a kind of pure majority vote.
Although even there, it's not clear they have a pure majority with people like Joe Manchin refusing to commit and probably going to vote against the bigger spending package.
Now, but all of this is just adding and adding to the national debt.
And that's the topic I want to think about.
It's a hard topic to talk about because for most people, the national debt is kind of abstract and almost a little difficult to get your head around.
We have a $28 trillion national debt.
I just saw an article that tries to make sense of the debt, but it does so in a manner that is not all that illuminating.
They just talk about stacking up the dollar bills.
They say if you put $100 bills on top of each other and you go to about the height of a chair, that's $1 million.
But if you keep stacking those $100 bills higher than the world's tallest building, go half a mile into the sky, that's $1 billion.
If you keep stacking those dollar bills and you go higher and higher and you actually go 631 miles above the earth, that's $1 trillion.
And you have to go 28 times that height to reach $28 trillion.
So we're talking about a great, great deal of money.
And by the way, our national debt is expected to double.
By 2050. Now, what is really going on here and why is this so dangerous?
Let's remember, we've seen an era of just big spending going on and some of it's occurred under Republicans.
Under George Bush, the national debt increased by about 80% from about $6 trillion to nearly $10 trillion.
A big jump.
Now, under Obama, an even bigger jump, Obama doubled the national debt from about $10 trillion to $21 trillion.
But even Trump was a big spender.
Under Trump, admittedly, some of this is COVID-related, but we saw the debt go up to $26 trillion.
Biden is driving it and wants to drive it much, much higher.
What do we mean when we talk about the national debt?
This is the amount of money that is owed by the country, by which I mean by the government of the country.
But let's remember, the government gets the money from the citizens.
That's who ends up ultimately bearing the burden because the government ends up raising this money at some point through taxation.
So even if they don't tax you now, We're good to go.
Why? Because it devalues the money that they already have.
By printing money, you put more money into circulation, and you have a larger amount of money chasing the same amount of goods and services that drives up inflation, and so on.
So, economists talk about all this in terms of crowding out private investment.
They talk about it in terms of the interest that you have to pay on the national debt, which creates a burden on the government.
There's less to spend on other things because you're paying so much.
We pay currently about 10% of the entire federal budget is just interest on the debt.
And all of this also has an impact on the credibility of the United States government and on the credibility of the U.S. dollar.
But I like to think of it in the simplest terms possible.
If you add up the wealth of the entire country, not just public, private wealth, all the land and all the buildings and all the cars and everything in your savings account and my savings account, you add it all up.
It comes out to maybe $150 trillion.
Economists debate what that number is, but it's somewhere in that zone.
And then you think about our government's debt, which is $30-28 trillion.
That's like We're good to go.
Obviously, at some point, you're no longer a rich country.
You owe so much more.
I mean, think of a guy who may have a big house and may have a big car, but if he owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to other people, to creditors, he's not really wealthy.
He's only wealthy in a certain superficial way, but when you actually look at his bank account and his balance sheet, he's not wealthy at all.
And the United States is clearly, in this sense, in decline, moving away from being the kind of rich, impressive, everyone wants to be like us country, to being a country that squandered its wealth, dissipated its advantages, and in that sense, destroyed its own exceptionalism.
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There is a crisis in our public school systems, a crisis on so many different levels.
The horrible academic standards and lack of basic skills.
The indoctrination that goes on in the classroom that parents are only now becoming fully alert to.
Of course, the problem with the lockdowns.
I'm delighted to welcome Corey DeAngelis to the podcast.
Corey is the National Director of Research for the American Federation for Children and he has a book out.
It's called School Choice Myths, Setting the Record Straight on Education Freedom.
Corey, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Let me start by just asking you, I mean, how did our schools reach this point?
How did they get so bad?
Is it the corruption of the teachers' unions that is the heart of the problem, or is it a broader problem?
I think it's partially a problem influenced by the teachers' unions protecting its monopoly every step of the way.
And we saw that more than ever this past year, where the private schools in the same cities were fighting to reopen, whereas the public school teachers' unions were fighting to remain closed.
And I think the main difference there, however, is one of incentives, that one of these sectors gets your money regardless of whether they open their doors for business.
In fact, the public schools knew that if they kept their doors closed, they could lobby to the government to say, well, we just need more money so that we can reopen.
And they ended up getting at least 190 billion extra dollars from the federal government.
So look, I think the one way to fix this messed up set of incentives that are baked into the American public school system is to fund the student directly.
It's what I call funding students as opposed to systems, or what most people call school choice, to provide true bottom-up accountability and incentives for the schools to listen to the needs of the families as opposed to the other way around.
I like what you said in response to Randy Weingarten, who's the head of one of the big teachers unions.
She goes, schools can fully reopen this fall in person, as long as there are, quote, ventilation upgrades, social, emotional and academic supports for students, more resources and so on.
And you just say... She's engaging in hostage negotiations.
So I guess what you're suggesting is that she's using the children as hostages and saying, you've got to give us all this stuff.
Otherwise, we're not going to be reopening the schools anytime soon.
Yeah, I mean, that's the problem here.
There's never going to be an amount of money to where the teachers unions say, oh yeah, that's great, that's enough.
I just uncovered the Chicago public school proposed budget for the 2022 school year, and it's about $27,000 per student as a conservative estimate, which is about 34% higher from just a few years ago.
The teachers union in Chicago came, this is the same teachers union that did an interpretive dance video to protest reopening of schools.
The same teachers union that had a board member vacationing in Puerto Rico while saying that it wasn't safe enough to go back to work in person.
Total hypocrisy out there in Chicago.
But then they also came back in response to this budget, a 34% increase in just a few years and said this is not enough money.
$27,000 per kid isn't enough for them.
Although in the private schools, they spend less than half of that on a per student basis.
Why don't we just give that 27 or even less than that, half of that to the families and let them seek out a private education of their choosing or even use that funding to cover homeschooling costs.
You can do it at a fraction of the price and probably get a lot better outcomes.
Now, I read somewhere that the teachers' unions were actually working in pretty close cahoots with the CDC. So instead of the CDC declaring what's safe and saying, now it's time for you, you're fine in reopening the schools, the teachers' unions were kind of backdoor lobbying the CDC, and the CDC was tailoring its statements about schools based upon what they were getting from the teachers' unions.
I mean, this is the sort of Yeah, that's absolutely the case.
I mean, the New York Post first uncovered this.
It was through a FOIA request.
It wasn't public records until people actually, interest groups actually came out and tried to request that information.
And it was found that on at least two occasions, the CDC took the teachers' union's recommendations almost verbatim.
And at least one of those cases, it could be argued that the way that the language was changed, it made it a lot easier for them to argue to keep schools closed, which again allowed them to lobby to the federal government to say, oh, we just need this, that, and the other.
And we need an additional billions of dollars in ransom payments, essentially, in order to reopen the schools.
And what's interesting here with the American Rescue Plan, the latest $123 billion that went to K-12 education, a Republican senator in Congress Proposed an amendment to make that funding actually contingent upon reopening the schools in person, given that all the teachers were vaccinated.
Every single Democrat voted against it, and the amendment failed on a partisan 50-50 vote.
So none of the funding, billions and billions of dollars, was actually contingent upon opening the schools in person, even though it was claimed that they needed the money in order to open the schools in person.
When we come back, I'm going to probe the solution, Corey's solution to all this, which is quite simply the idea of school choice.
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I'm back with Corey DeAngelis.
Corey is the man to go to on the issue of school choice, and his book is called School Choice Myths, Setting the Record Straight on Education Freedom.
Corey, you know, when the public school system got started, I guess now well over a century ago, part of the original justification for it was to create in America a common culture.
To assimilate, for example, immigrants to a kind of shared way of life and a shared understanding of America.
But isn't it a fact that that original justification is completely out the window?
Schools aren't even doing that.
If anything, they are italicizing, quote, diversity and emphasizing not assimilation, but differences.
So they're not serving the function of social cement that I guess it was part of their original justification to do.
Yeah, it seems like the public schools, if anything, are doing the opposite.
If you look at the fact that we have about 87% of kids in government-run schools today, yet we're in a period of extreme political polarization.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that we have so many kids in institutions where they're not learning how to reason with other people and to disagree peacefully and to question each other's logic rather than their backgrounds and their characters.
And their morals.
And in fact, if you look at the latest review of the evidence on this by Patrick Wolfe, which is in the book School Choice Myths, he looks at the overwhelming evidence showing that school choice, either through private schools or charter schools, leads to better civic outcomes relative to the government-run school system.
People become more tolerant of others' views, perhaps because they learn Better skills with logic and rational thinking.
And then they're more likely to volunteer and provide charitable activities as well.
Corey, how can we get school choice to work?
Is this something that can be our states, for example, at liberty to say, hey, listen, we're going to basically vote through our states.
Let's just say right here in Texas, we're going to give the money to the parents and to the students and not to the schools or to the school district.
Is that all it takes?
Or can the federal government somehow intervene and block that from happening?
Yeah, the main way that we see this happening is at the state level.
The vast majority of K-12 education funding, about 92%, comes from state and local sources.
So if you really want to get real education reform done and really move the ball forward, you want to focus at the state level.
And in fact, I would argue that over the past year, for all the bad that's happened, one of the silver linings is that the teachers unions have actually overplayed their hand and inadvertently done more to advance school choice than anyone could have ever imagined by keeping schools closed and not following the science and by showing the public their true colors.
Support for school choice is at an all-time high.
If you look at the latest Real Clear Opinion Research polling, finding that there's been a 10 percentage point jump since April of 2020 in support for school choice with about 74% of the general public in support in June of 2021.
And 17 states this year have expanded or enacted new programs to fund students directly as opposed to the government school buildings.
And we're calling it in school choice advocacy, the 2021, the year of school choice.
And so this is one of the silver linings here.
And this is the way that most states do it.
The funding that would have followed the child to their government school can still follow them there.
That option's still on the table.
But if not, for whatever reason, the families can take that money and Into either a voucher or education savings account to pay for private school tuition and fees, or homeschooling options, micro schools and pandemic pods, which is what we've seen over the past year, and any other type of government approved education expenditure.
So it's really the same kind of idea with Pell Grants for higher education, for example.
The funding doesn't go to a...
College, regardless of your choice, it goes to the student and the student can pick public or private, religious or non-religious.
Same thing with pre-K programs.
The funding follows the decision of the family.
And what's interesting to me is a lot of the opponents of school choice support funding people directly when it comes to higher education and pre-K, but then only get it all up in arms about it when it comes to the in-between years.
And I think the main difference there is one of power dynamics.
One of the issues, Corey, that has incensed a lot of parents recently is indoctrination in schools.
And obviously part of it is critical race theory.
It may be that COVID in a weird way has exposed parents to what's going on in the classroom, which they didn't know about before.
The teachers were happily doing this.
The parents were not even aware of it.
Now they know. Is school choice a solution to this problem in that, hey listen, if your school wants to do indoctrination and the parents want it, they can use their dollars to send their children there, but if they don't want it, they now have a practical alternative.
They don't just have to mobilize and take over the school board and make this a fight over what is being taught in a given public school.
You just go to a different school.
Yeah, I think school choice is not a perfect solution, but is the best solution we have in front of us.
I mean, look, if you go in and fight with the school board, it may take a long time for things to change.
You may not get the person, the person may run on saying one thing and then Actually do something when they actually get in office.
And the teachers may still just do whatever they want anyway, if you have a new school board, even if it's the right school board.
So I think the better solution is to have the funding follow the child to whatever type of educational institution aligns best with family's values.
And I would argue this whole CRT fight is very similar to any other curriculum issue that we have today.
in the public school system, whether that's Common Core or anything else, but the main heart of the issue that is being highlighted from all of this discussion is a problem with one size fits all systems where we force so many people who have differing opinions about what should be included in the public school curriculum, we force everybody to fight about the uniform set of curriculum that will be included. Instead, we should allow families to choose the curriculum that best aligns with their own values instead of forcing others.
I mean, just imagine if we were all residentially assigned to a government run grocery store where we all had to fight over what was included in the uniform basket of goods from the grocery service.
That wouldn't make any sense. Everybody would be unhappy with the final result and it would cost a lot of money. Instead, what we do with groceries is we all just pick whatever we want and we should be able to do the same thing when it comes to K-12 education. And if anything, that could incentivize the public schools to start to focus on things that the families actually care about instead of focusing on what the union bosses want in the curriculum.
Corey, I really appreciate it.
You're defending the freedom principle and you're showing how it works as well in education as it does everywhere else.
Thanks very much for coming on the podcast.
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I want to talk in the next two segments about porn, and Debbie's like, are you sure you want to talk about porn again, Dinesh?
You know, people may start thinking that you're, like, into porn.
I'm like, you know I'm not into porn.
She goes, I know, but people might think you are.
But the reason I'm talking about this topic is because there is a porn star named Brandy Love.
Now... I'm reliably informed that that is not her real name.
It's not Brandy Love.
It's really something else.
I don't know, probably Bathsheba Finkelstein, but, you know, it doesn't sound good.
Come and see this porn show starring Bathsheba Finkelstein.
No, it's Brandy Love.
And I guess this is a pattern among porn stars.
In the 1980s, there was a porn star.
I guess, was it, honey, do you remember?
It was Long Dong Silver.
And I'm reliably informed that that's not his real name.
I used to think his first name was Long and his middle name was Dong, but apparently that is not the case.
Well, anyway, back to my story.
Brandy Love was kicked out of this Turning Point USA conference when a bunch of people began to complain, hey, there's a porn star walking around.
Now, Brandy Love was evidently not a speaker at the conference, but she had bought a $500 VIP ticket, and she was posing with photos.
Here, in fact, she's standing in front of Fox Nation.
She's standing in front of the Trump bus, and she's a real Trumpster.
And she seemed to be very excited to be at the conference, but evidently people began to rail on her at the conference and on social media.
And so Turning Point USA sent her an email which she posted on social media saying, we regret to inform you that your invitation has been revoked.
The decision is final.
And now she's on the warpath, and she's basically accusing Turning Point USA of being a kind of a Christian cult.
And she says that they're sort of as bad as Antifa.
So this is really what, you know, has gotten all kinds of people.
Saurabh Amari of the New York Post and Jack Posobiec and all these social media commentators are now weighing in on this on both sides.
And there are some conservatives defending, not defending Trump.
Porn stars, but saying, hey, listen, we're supposed to be the party of the big tent, and why are we kicking someone out when they're merely an attendee at a conference?
So this is kind of what I want to examine a little bit.
You know, porn has become a very pervasive force in our society, and I think a very destructive one.
I don't frankly get its appeal.
When I was a freshman in college, I may have mentioned this on the podcast before, I was dragged by some of my friends and, you know, some people are going to say, well, dragged?
Really, Dinesh? Were you really dragged?
Are you sure you weren't dragging them?
But no, they were like, you know, they were like, there's a porn movie and you got to go and stuff.
So any event, I went to see it.
But literally, it held my interest for about 180 seconds, which is to say about three minutes.
And after that, I was literally falling asleep because it was just unbelievably monotonous, unbelievably boring.
And I'm like, what?
I mean, this is going to, like, kill my sex drive for life.
You know, it's going to injure me.
So, in any event, that was my exposure to porn at the age of 18, I guess.
Now Debbie, I gotta tell you, and I'm maybe speaking out of school here, but was actually dragged by a girlfriend, in this case I know this to be, she was dragged, to see a movie called Magic Mike.
And she had no idea what this movie is.
Now the movie is not porn.
It's about this male stripper.
And so Debbie walks into the theater and there are like 200 women.
And she looks around and she goes, this is really strange.
Only women in the theater.
What's going on? And her friend's like, you don't know what this movie is about?
And Debbie's like, no, I had no idea.
So... So, evidently, this is Debbie's exposure to the world of the male stripper.
Now, I guess the appeal of porn for people who watch porn is they think it's, you know, oh my god, it's this unbelievable variety.
You know, look at that lucky guy, all those chicks and stuff like that.
But of course, you've got to remember that all those chicks are getting paid, right?
This guy wouldn't be getting all those chicks if there wasn't money involved.
Or even, you know, I think probably for some people, they don't have deep human relationships.
And they look to porn to substitute for that.
So in a way, the benefit of porn is that you don't have to actually deal with anybody.
You don't have to actually make a human connection.
It's sort of all at the level of...
It's all at the level of fantasy.
This kind of fantasy world you immerse yourself into.
But of course, the fantasy is not what's really going on.
Because if you could just widen the angle of porn, you'd just see all these producers and all these editors.
Hey, move a little closer.
Hey, we can't see anything.
Move the camera closer. So this is really what's going on.
It's all fake. But it's all fake to create a sense of illusion for people who don't want to deal with actual human beings.
Now... I think part of the controversy here at Turning Point USA is this, as a kind of libertarian view of the right.
That is, leave us alone.
We're the leave us alone party.
And what people do in private is their own business.
And this woman may be a porn star, but so what?
In the words of one social media guru, she is a, quote, conservative porn star.
And that alone is an interesting term, a conservative porn star.
Or, quote, she's a Florida businesswoman who's just a Trumpster.
So let her be. And that's kind of the libertarian sensibility, and we've seen some of that.
And then there's the conservative view, which is that, look, you've got parents who are sending their 19-year-olds over to this conference.
This is supposed to be a group that is conservative and Christian.
It's not just a matter of, what if my son comes home and he's got all these pictures with this porn star?
A porn star, by the way, who makes no bones about being that.
But what if he then goes, wow, you know, she was really, I mean, she was really cool.
I got to go check out her work.
I put the word work here in quote marks.
So the conservative sensibility is about these conferences really establishing a certain moral custodianship of young people and not exposing them to, I mean, there's plenty of this in the culture already.
So you don't expect to have this at a conservative conference.
And I think it is the divide between the libertarian and the conservative thrust.
This is really the heart of the debate over Brandy Love.
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What's the difference between a conservative and a libertarian?
I think a good way to think about it is that for the libertarian, freedom...
Freedom is the goal.
Freedom is the political end of society.
End here referring to objective or kind of final destination.
And the libertarian, in a sense, is at least politically indifferent to what use is made of that freedom.
The idea is to maximize choice and allow individuals to make whatever use they wish of those choices.
The conservative doesn't take such a, you may say, expansive or even forgiving view.
For the conservative, freedom is a very important value, but it's not the ultimate value.
Freedom, you may say, is a means to an end.
And I think it would be fair to say of the American founders that they were great champions of freedom, but for them freedom was the means to achieve what could be called the good life, the American dream.
But the American dream was not, and is not, content neutral.
I don't think the founders would have considered any kind of life to be the good life.
Think of this thought experiment.
What if the American founders could be brought back today and you would ask them this question.
Let's say that we have 300 million people in this country and all 300 million become involved in the porn industry.
They become porn stars or pornographers or avid consumers of pornography.
That's how they spend their time.
They use their prosperity.
They use their freedom to sort of do porn.
Would you, the American founders, consider your experiment, the Novus Ordo Seclorum, the new society that you set up 200 years ago, to be a success?
And I think we know the answer to that one.
It would be no, because the American dream has content.
It's a dream to live a certain type of life.
That life does involve a lot of choice, but those choices are within, you This is the kind of deep background.
The reason I'm talking about this Brandy Love controversy is because I think those are really the issues kind of at stake.
Now here's Brandy Love. She's apparently selling t-shirts now called, I Triggered Charlie Kirk.
So she's playing up this fact that she was kicked out of this Turning Point USA conference.
And she's getting into it with the sort of social conservatives who are blasting her.
She's in no way ashamed of her lifestyle.
She actually says, quote, I get paid more than most doctors.
So she's saying, hey, listen, I'm ambitious.
This is how I... Successful.
She goes, I make my own schedule, travel the world, meet amazing people.
So she's basically saying that porn is an enabler for her to achieve a success that maybe she would not be able to achieve any other way.
Now, here's Matt Walsh.
Social conservative on social media.
And he says, hey, listen, you know, if a 48-year-old hardcore porn star wants to listen and learn to conservative ideas, there are forums to do that, but a conference for conservative young people while wearing a VIP badge is not the right forum.
Matt Walsh goes on to say, we've seen some conservatives embrace Caitlyn Jenner and now defend a hardcore porn star.
He says it's a total abandonment of biological and moral truth, a full-scale surrender.
And then this passage, which kind of hits hard, conservatives have adopted positions that would have seemed radical even to liberals 30 years ago.
So the startling idea here is that conservatism, to the degree that it kind of gives in to these cultural shifts, is ultimately nothing more than the liberal values of like the previous generation.
And conservatives kind of mount opposition, but then they kind of give in and go along.
And we've seen that in certain areas.
I think the key point here is the point, and several people have said this, the normalization of sexual degeneracy is not just one goal of the left, it's their primary goal.
It's the main thing that they have set out to do.
And a number of other people are like, let's not normalize porn.
And here's Brandy Love challenging this, and she goes, define normalize.
I guess her point is that just by having me attend a conference, I'm not exactly coming in the nude, I'm just walking around and participating in the conference as an attendee, meeting people, perhaps, yes, taking photographs and so on.
Why are you normalizing anything?
Look at all the other people here.
They're involved in all walks of life.
Are you normalizing all their professions and all their pursuits simply by having them here?
I think that here we can resolve this conflict by thinking really in terms of the example of Jesus himself.
And Jesus was actually very, you may say, gentle in dealing with all kinds of suspect characters, tax collectors, prostitutes.
Jesus didn't hesitate to present his ideas to them and even to be, quote, seen with them.
But on the other hand, it's very important to realize that he never backed off.
He never hesitated to convey his teachings to them.
And so I think that it's one thing for, let's just say, a prostitute or a porn star to go to church and sit in the pew.
And it's a whole other thing to be giving the sermon.
So the distinction I'm making here is one between being an attendee, just being there, in fact, imbibing a message that's probably important and helpful to you, and being seen as a role model, being seen as a leader, being put out front as some sort of an exemplar.
And I think that distinction helps us to recognize how the Republican Party and how conservatives can uphold and defend moral values, while at the same time recognizing that the party itself, at least in the voters that we seek to win over in court, can in fact be a big tent.
I want to continue my discussion of Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, and his short story called Father Sergis, a story that I began to talk about yesterday but kind of left you hanging.
Debbie's like, yeah, you've got to leave.
You've got to stop at a really exciting point so people are going to be like, I've got to come back and hear more about this guy.
And the short story, its theme is really ambition.
Ambition that is often a good thing, but it can sometimes be a bad thing.
Not always a good thing.
Think of the line in Julius Caesar, the noble Brutus had told you Caesar were ambitious, and you might expect him to say, man, what's wrong with that?
But he goes, if it were so, it was a grievous fault.
Grievous fault. In that case, because ambition leads to tyranny, the desire to be ambitious at the expense of others.
Now, in Father Sergius, we're talking about a young military officer named Kazatsky who relinquishes the life, the secular life of honors and of upward mobility and becomes a monk.
He changes his name to Father Sergius.
And while he is a monk, after several years in the monastery, in which his reputation is growing for holiness and devotion and integrity and service, a kind of sly woman tries to corrupt his virtue.
And she sneaks her way into the monastery, claiming to be lost in the cold.
He's kind of forced to let her in.
And then she sort of begins to tempt him and to appeal to draw out his lust, which he does feel.
And that's kind of where I left off last yesterday.
And the remarkable thing is, and this is very Tolstoyan, it's very over-the-top, it's very Russian, what Father Sergius does is, as he's feeling this passion, and he knows he has to sort of find a way to suppress it, he, I'm now actually quoting from Tolstoy, he goes out into the yard, he takes up an axe, he puts his left forefinger on the block, and he smashes it.
Wow! By the way, this is not something you want to do at home.
It does work. And it works in the case of Father Sergis because he feels this intense pain.
The blood comes rushing out.
The bottom line of it is all his passion, all his focus moves to his injury.
And then the woman shows up and she's absolutely horrified.
But Father Sergius, even in pain, is triumphant.
Tolstoy says,"...he let his eyes, shining with a quiet light of joy, rest upon her." And he said,"...Dear sister, why did you wish to ruin your immortal soul?
Temptations must come into the world, but woe to him by whom the temptation comes." And then he tells her, go away from here.
And she's so disgraced, so humiliated that she actually leaves and enters a convent.
Now, remarkably, she tells people about this episode.
It becomes part of her story, if you will.
And Father Sergius' fame spreads even more.
So here's the remarkable thing.
This is a guy who always wanted to kind of excel in everything that he did.
And now he's excelling in monkhood.
You may almost say that his ambition has moved from the secular space into the religious space, where he is sort of, you may say, going for sainthood.
He's pursuing a kind of Olympic quest to be, like, best monk ever.
And so people hear about him, and Tolstoy describes this in kind of a very sophisticated way, which is to say, people come to see Father Sergius, they want to touch the hem of his garment, they bring people who are sick, saying that his holiness can have the effect of healing them, and some of them are healed.
And Father Sergius observes this, and he doesn't think that he's the one healing them, but at the same time, he goes, wow, you know, these people came to me, and they left, and they're so happy, and they seem to be spiritually renewed.
And so, you get the sense here that Father Sergius is coming to believe in his own kind of spiritual accomplishment.
He's coming to feel this sense of being a great monk, and And this is, in a sense, his worst temptation.
I mean, this is what I think Tolstoy is getting at, that in the end, the real temptation for Father Sergius was not, in fact, lust, but rather ambition itself, spiritual ambition in this case.
And so, what happens is that Father Sergius begins to feel a kind of spiritual emptiness.
He begins to sort of lose that connection with God, which was really part of his motivation for going into the monastery in the first place.
And then, after a series of developments, at one point he...
Meets this young woman who is actually somewhat retarded.
But nevertheless, he takes a sort of almost demented interest in her, an interest that can't be all that healthy.
And so he reaches a kind of spiritual low point and then we come to the kind of climax of the story in which basically Father Sergius leaves the monastery.
He leaves the monastery and he goes and visits a relative of his, a woman who sort of is very hassled and very run down and is always plagued by demands that are being made on her by everybody, by her children, by her husband, get me this, get me that, and she's running here, she's running there.
And she can't believe when Father Sergis shows up.
He's this now famous man, famous holy man in Russia.
But Father Sergis tells her, I'm actually not holy at all, really.
And he says, I'm actually here to learn about your life and your story.
And she goes, story? I don't have any story.
I have no life. I'm running around here.
I'm running around there. I don't even have time to go to church half the time.
I have my children go, but I don't go.
My clothes are all torn.
They're all ragged. And then Father Sergis, in observing this relative of hers, comes to the amazing realization that she, and not he, is actually living the Christian life.
I'm going to actually quote this statement by Tolstoy.
He's quoting Father Sergis, and the woman's name is Pashenka.
Pashenka is what I ought to have been, but failed to be.
I lived for men, says Father Sergius, on the pretext of living for God, while she lived for God, imagining that she lives for men.
So in other words, it isn't the aspiration to holiness It isn't this sort of Olympian quest for holiness.
It's just actually living out an ordinary life of service to others, a simple peasant woman.
That Father Surgis realizes, I actually should try to be more like her.
And so what does he do?
He goes from village to village, Tolstoy says, just helping people.
And now I'm quoting, when he succeeded in helping people either by advice or by his knowledge of reading and writing or by settling some quarrel, he didn't actually wait for their gratitude.
He didn't wait for any favors, but went away directly afterwards.
And then Tolstoy says, little by little, God began to reveal himself to him once again.
And at the end of the story, we now come to the last line.
Father Sergius finds himself in Siberia.
In Siberia, says Tolstoy, he has now settled down as the hired man of a well-to-do peasant, in which capacity he works in the kitchen and in the garden, he teaches children and attends to the sick.
So here this man was always in the limelight.
Here he is a court.
Here he is courting a woman who is of royal blood.
Here he is in the monastery where everyone looks to him for an example.
But now he's on the margin of society.
He's in Siberia, the very symbol of nothingness in Russia.
And he's working for some guy no one's ever heard of.
And he's working in the garden.
And he's working in the kitchen.
And he's teaching children.
He's serving God with true humility.
And that, Tolstoy, lets us believe is the true vocation of the Christian.
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