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July 26, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:01:18
LIFE AFTER ROE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep139
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The state of Mississippi is asking the Supreme Court not just to uphold its post-15-week ban on abortion, but to overturn Roe v.
Wade. What will the court do?
What are the implications?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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.
Abortion is one of the greatest, I would say the greatest, social evil of our time.
The tragedy of abortion is not just that a woman kills a child, but that a woman kills her own child.
And for many years, there were people who said, and sometimes in good conscience, well, you know, who's to say when life begins?
But we're now living at a time when technology has advanced.
You can actually see the developing fetus in the womb.
It's very obvious that this is a being with its own DNA, with its own organs.
Yes, it subsists inside itself.
The womb of another, but it is an independent life, in that sense, on its own.
And even if there were some doubt on this point, why wouldn't we resolve the doubt in favor of the life?
It's kind of like saying if you're going, you know, hunting in Texas, you see a movement behind the bush, you know, it could be an antelope, but it could be your neighbor Bob.
You're not going to shoot, because you're going to resolve the doubt in favor of life.
You're not going to take a chance that you could be ending the life of another human being.
Now, for the past half century or so, well, since 1973, we've been living under, I would say, the tyranny of Roe v.
Wade, a kind of fanatical decision that makes the laws of the United States on abortion the most extreme in the world.
In effect, they prohibit any state regulation of abortion, really up to nine months of pregnancy.
Now initially, that's not what Roe said.
If you read the language of the decision, it merely says that there can be no state regulation of abortion in the first trimester.
And the court somewhat inconsistently went on to say that there is this point called viability.
Viability is the point at which the fetus can exist outside the womb, maybe in an incubator or in some other form.
It's not dependent in that sense on the mother.
And the court said that viability is kind of a key milestone here.
But in the language of Roe, it would appear to allow state regulation of abortion in the later stages.
But there were subsequent decisions after Roe that basically said, no, if the mother believes that this is a threat to her, not just life, but her health, and health is interpreted so broadly here that it can include emotional health, then abortion cannot be regulated.
And so state law after state law, even very modest state laws have been struck down on the basis of this so-called constitutional right.
Except it's a constitutional right that appears nowhere in the Constitution.
You know, pick up your Constitution, kind of, you know, hold it up to the light, squeeze lemon juice on it, read it upside down.
You won't find in it an abortion right.
You won't even find the generalized It's a privacy right that the Supreme Court appealed to.
Well, people have a right to privacy.
Well, people do have a right to privacy in certain specific senses.
So, for example, the Fourth Amendment is a kind of privacy right.
It prohibits the government from engaging in unreasonable search and seizure.
But you can't have an unlimited privacy right because otherwise you could take all kinds of crimes, child molestation, bribery, and say, well, you know what, that was done in private.
I have a privacy right that protects any state inquiry into what I did, because what I did was completely my own business, conducted in my own personal space.
So no, the privacy right is not only not absolute, it's in fact nowhere in the Constitution.
It appeared for a while that the state of Mississippi would merely say to the Supreme Court, hey, listen, we want to regulate abortion post-15 weeks, and so we want you to uphold our state law.
But I think it's terrific to see that Mississippi is going the whole log and telling the Supreme Court, yes, we want to regulate abortion in that way and you should uphold our law, but you should go further and strike down Roe so that all states can make up their own mind about this matter.
You can have states that can have tougher regulations than we have.
You can have states that have lesser regulations than we have.
In some states, of course, New York, maybe California, would have no regulation at all.
They would essentially affirm Roe at the local level.
This is what Mississippi is asking the court to do.
to do. Now what is the court going to do?
In my opinion, there are really three possibilities. The first one, the court upholds Roe. They basically say no, we're going to keep Roe versus Wade the way it is and this would be a terrific, I mean disastrous loss for conservatives. It would show that our whole legal strategy of the past generation or so has been wrong. And there are reasons the court could do this.
For example, the court could be scared of court packing.
They could just decide this is a very kind of uncertain time in the country's history, not the time to rock the cultural boat.
So the court could decide that.
I'm giving that about a 10% probability.
The second option, which seems to me perhaps the most likely, is that the court will uphold the Mississippi law.
Thus allowing later term regulation of abortion, but nevertheless not overturn Roe.
And this would mean that, in a sense, the court would be hanging its hat on viability.
The court would be saying that post-viability, you can impose restrictions on abortion, but in the early stages, abortion remains secure.
As a constitutional right.
And this would be at best a kind of partial win, a kind of win on, it's kind of like winning the battle, but have you actually won the war?
Of course, the third option, and I give this about a 20%, a 30% chance, the court does strike down Roe.
And that would mean that the abortion decision would be now left to the state's.
By the way, the court does not need to fear massive social convulsions.
Why? Because by and large, the court is merely deferring to the moral sensibilities of each state.
Liberals, by and large, live in liberal states and they would have liberal laws.
Conservatives would be able to have more conservative laws.
Even liberals who live in red states would be able to get abortions by crossing state lines and going to another state that has more liberal laws.
So this is actually, it seems to me, to be something that the pro-life movement has fought for, prayed for, hoped for, and I hope that the Supreme Court has the guts.
We basically have a Supreme Court that's sort of 3-3-3.
I think there are three liberals that are going to want to affirm Roe.
There are three hardline conservatives, including Justice Thomas, who are likely to want to strike down Roe.
And so the fate of this decision hangs in the middle.
It hangs, ironically, on Justice Roberts, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
And it is those three justices that will decide what the abortion landscape looks like for the foreseeable future.
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You need to use promo code DINESH. I'm really happy to welcome Jenna Ellis to the program.
Everyone kind of knows Jenna Ellis.
Jenna is a prominent attorney.
She was on the Trump team.
She's now a political commentator and contributor with Newsmax.
Jenna, thanks for coming on.
I really appreciate it. I'm a fan. Let me start by talking about what is this rather, you know, public battle you're having with Rona Romney McDaniel, the head of the RNC, and it appears to be focused on the RNC's actions, or maybe I should say inactions, following the 2020 election.
You said, I think today or yesterday, basically you used the phrase, the lying RNC that threw Trump under the bus.
So let's start there.
How did the RNC throw Trump under the bus?
Thanks, Dinesh, and thanks for having me.
You know, you and I are both advocates for the truth, and so while so many people have characterized this as me versus Rana, Romney, McDaniel, this is all about the RNC versus truth, because if they are truthful, then they will come out and say that they did not actually support the We're good to go.
That the RNC's overall strategy was to simply kind of go beyond President Trump and say, you know what, we actually raise more when a Democrat or the opposing party is in office.
And for everyone, think about this, when everyone on President Trump's side was fighting for election integrity, so many millions of Americans We're donating even small dollars to the RNC under the auspices of them saying we're fighting.
Their general counsel and other people within the RNC were actually sabotaging President Trump.
So that's what this is about, is the RNC having to face the truth that they are lying.
Right?
Right. Absolutely.
And there's more to that story too, Dinesh, because what few people realize as well is that attorneys who were supposedly working for President Trump through the RNC, they were reporting to Justin, were actually undermining Rudy Giuliani's election integrity strategy.
And the key example of this was the Pennsylvania case.
Everyone remembers Rudy going up to Pennsylvania and arguing that hearing.
That hearing was all about an amended complaint.
And let me explain briefly.
In federal court, when you file a complaint as the campaign did in Pennsylvania, if you want to amend it to correct some errors, you get one amendment as of right.
After that, you have to ask the judge for his or her discretion and ask for permission to amend the complaint back without Rudy's knowledge or authorization.
Attorneys that were working adversely to President Trump amended our complaint in Pennsylvania, sabotaged that case, and took out substantive claims that made our judicial track in Pennsylvania basically meaningless.
And that's the kind of stuff that the RNC lawyers were doing to President Trump both before and after November 2020.
Now, this seems baffling beyond belief in the sense that, to me, it's almost similar to saying that, you know, your life is on the line.
You hire an attorney to be your advocate.
I mean, I think as Republicans, we count on the RNC to be not only on our team, but in some ways the leader of our team, right?
They're the ones who give money to candidates.
They're the ones who are supposedly trying to make sure that Republicans from the presidency all the way down the ticket make it across the finish line.
So, I mean, how frightening to think that What you're suggesting is that the people who are entrusted with being the leaders of our team are, in a sense, sabotaging our team and are doing so for the worst of motives.
In other words, that far from raising money to win elections, they go through the election process to win money, and you're even suggesting that they might be better off if Our team loses because then people are more angry, they have more to lose, fear comes into play, and the RNC can tap into those fears to essentially accumulate more loot for itself.
I'm assuming this is not entirely true of the DNC. They seem to fight bitterly tooth and nail for their side.
How is it the case that the RNC has become corrupted in this way if it has?
Yeah, and I think that that goes straight to the leadership.
Justin Reamer is a never-Trumper.
Ronna McDaniel has only led the RNC in personal self-interest, in my opinion.
And I think that the RNC has shown very clearly that the Republican Party, as it is under their leadership, doesn't actually champion traditional conservative values.
The thing, Dinesh, that you and I would absolutely fight tooth and nail for, family, faith, freedom issues.
The RNC does not actually sell a product.
They're not someone who is a revenue generating institution in the sense that they provide a product that we as consumers go out and buy.
They provide a service to us or they're supposed to.
And so they are continuing to promise that they're fighting for conservative values or When they're simply raising money based on false pretenses, and then they're going just to accumulate their own power, and they're not actually fighting for the very things that you and I and so many others have given money to in the past.
And that's what makes this so incredibly, just absolutely unethical, frankly.
And why I'm blowing the whistle on them, and I'm saying, no, Ronna, you are lying on national television.
When she denied these emails even existed, Because she knows that the base wants to support these values.
They want to have warriors in D.C. But the RNC isn't doing it.
And that's why we have to show very clearly that they are not only sabotaging President Trump, they're sabotaging the values that we most cherish.
When we come back, I'm going to press the subject a little further.
I'm going to ask Jenna, what is the RNC doing to support the Maricopa audit?
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that number again text to NISH to 484848. I'm back with Jenna Ellis. We're talking about the RNC.
You know, Jenna, there's a Maricopa audit underway. The left has dozens of attorneys, Democratic attorneys trying to block the Maricopa audit on the ground. As you know, the Biden administration has sent a kind of threatening letter to sort of cease and desist and make sure your audit is in conformity with federal supervisory guidelines. What is the RNC doing on the other side, if anything, to support the Maricopa audit?
Okay, that's it.
I mean, they're doing absolutely nothing.
And I would love to know, Dinesh, where the over $220 million...
That was raised in support of election integrity is actually going because it's definitely not going to the audits.
I spoke with Senator Doug Mastriano up in Pennsylvania.
He was the one that led the initial legislative effort and the reason that we got that very first hearing in November 2020 in Gettysburg.
He's the reason for that.
And he has said openly that the RNC has never once contacted him to offer help between November 2020 and today.
That tells you where the RNC is.
Absolutely nowhere. Now, I read, you know, every day Rona McDaniel puts out a sort of a tweet.
I'm just going to read a couple of them.
The Texas Democrats who fled to D.C. are complete hypocrites.
And then she says that, you know, about Biden and the WHO. Why is he refusing to stand up to communist China?
Then she talks about the voter integrity laws.
These voting laws are common sense and widely supported.
Crime is surging in Democrat-run cities, but Biden still won't condemn the Democrats' radical defund the police agenda.
So there's a lot of just blah, blah, blah here.
And you get the idea that this is a kind of idle positioning.
You've got somebody who is just trying to sound the right flute noises, but not necessarily someone who is in the trenches doing the kind of, you may say, political warfare that it is the job of the RNC to do.
Is that too harsh of an assessment?
Not at all. In fact, I think that's spot on.
And, you know, I was there in the White House on election night, and I had been told as a member of the campaign and also President Trump's personal attorney by members of the RNC as well as the Trump campaign that there was a plan to move forward with election integrity contests if that was needed, because President Trump had seen all the mail-in ballots, everything that had gone before.
The RNC was telling him, oh, we have a plan, protect the vote.
But as you said, it was all just idle chatter.
When Rudy Giuliani took over, there was no plan.
In fact, one of the top campaign lawyers had said, well, there will be enough votes for Trump that none of this is even going to be necessary anyway.
All they did was go on TV and talk and hope for the best.
They did not actually serve President Trump.
And throughout his administration, his campaign, and also with the RNC, he is the most underserved president by his own staff, I believe, in American history.
And that's why Rudy Giuliani and I were fighting so hard for election integrity.
We had such a short window, but we fought the best that we could.
And we're still fighting for election integrity, by the way.
This isn't over. Do you think, Jenna, in fairness, if I were to look at it from their side, could it be that their view was that, look, Giuliani and Jenna have the wrong strategy, and we at the RNC have a better strategy, let's just call it strategy B, and this strategy would be more effective in achieving the goal.
Was there such an alternative strategy, or were they merely undermining your strategy while having no strategy of their own?
They were making fun of us, and they were making fun of President Trump's election integrity efforts.
Justin Reimer didn't have an alternative strategy.
What he had was a lot of choice words for the attorneys who were actually trying to help.
So if they had an alternative strategy, it was to sit on their hands and do nothing and basically say, you know what, let's let this go because we raise more money when a Democrat is in office anyway.
And I have from two different sources that Ronna McDaniel just last month at the RNC retreat told a group privately off the record that we need to just move past President Trump and we need to move forward with other candidates for 2024.
That's what she's apparently saying privately and I believe these two sources who were present there.
That's what this is all about.
The RNC is saying one thing to the American people who love President Trump.
Love conservative values and think the RNC is fighting for them.
But then truly in private, they're saying we basically don't want anything to do with Donald Trump.
That's fraudulent.
That's unethical. And I can't say strongly enough, this is why I'm no longer part of the Republican Party.
I'll be unaffiliated and just a champion for conservatism and for the truth.
Jonah, if I were a Republican billionaire, I'm far from being that, but if I were, I do know a few of them.
And they were listening to this, and they were to think to themselves, okay, well, probably at this point, I need to hold off on the RNC, but where do I deploy my resources now?
I mean, the Koch network appears to be largely defunct.
Is there some alternative place or some alternative idea that you would recommend that people think about As a way to advance conservative values through the Republican Party, but not necessarily with the help or the non-help of the RNC. Yeah, well, definitely don't donate to the RNC. Who knows where that money is going, but it's definitely not for anything that's conservative values.
And so people can donate directly to individual candidates.
They may be running as Republicans, but we need to look at individual candidates.
We can also support nonprofits that are actually doing the work of conservatism, things like Heritage Action, things like our friends at Standing for Freedom Center at Liberty University who are actually out there championing truth and American values.
You can support the Election Integrity Partners.
I'm the chairwoman of the Election Integrity Alliance.
We have over 60 organizations that are partners that are actually doing that work.
And you can also support the America First Policy Institute.
They're the organization that filed the big tech lawsuit on behalf of President Trump.
I can tell you that Brooke Rollins and her group of attorneys are actually fighting.
I mean, these are people who are in the trenches, who care.
There are so many other organizations besides the RNC. The truth of the matter is that President Trump doesn't need the RNC. They desperately need him.
And if every person who supports and loves President Trump refuses to donate to the RNC, they'd find out that truth pretty quickly.
Jenna, I want to have you back because I want to do a little bit of a deep dive with you into the various players in the post-election, you know, Mike Pence and the Supreme Court, to sort of try to dissect what really went wrong post-November of 2020, just in getting this whole thing checked out.
We'll have to do that another time, but thanks for joining me on the podcast.
I really appreciate it. This has been very eye-opening.
Thanks so much. Would love to do that with you.
See you soon. Welcome to my show!
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The world-renowned artist Hunter Biden, yes, I'm speaking sarcastically, is getting ready to attend two major art shows displaying his paintings.
The first one is in Los Angeles, and the second one is in New York City.
These are being organized by the George Burgess Gallery, and they've put out a statement saying that this is the debut of Hunter Biden.
Now, So the White House argues that they have created an ethical fence around Hunter Biden in making sure that the people who buy this art, their names are not disclosed to the public.
Wait, is that supposed to be some kind of ethical fence?
Yeah, here's Andrew Bates, Deputy White House Press Secretary.
The President has established the highest ethical standards of any administration and his family's commitment to rigorous processes like this It's a prime example.
Yeah, it is a prime example.
It's a prime example of how the corruption of the Biden family continues with Joe in the White House.
I mean, think of the staggering implications of this.
I mean, you would have thought that this crime family would have said, We have taken advantage of our public office.
We are now centi-millionaires.
We have multiple homes.
And we've got 25 garages over here and 10 parking spaces over there.
And we've got private airplanes.
And we've all got all this money.
And it's all passed through the different bag men of the Biden family.
You know what? It's time for it to go straight.
After all, our man is now the President of the United States.
I mean, think about it. Even the Corleone family talked about going straight.
Remember Michael Corleone?
He's like, listen, we've got to get out of this business because we're crooks.
But if we're going to get in the Senate, we're going to get in the White House.
We can't continue to be crooks.
Well, apparently the Biden family thinks that there's no reason to worry.
Nothing to worry about. Now, here's Obama's ethics spokesman.
And this poor guy is trying to, you know, call them on it.
And he makes some good points.
He goes, first of all, would anybody be paying half a million dollars for a piece of art if it wasn't the president's son?
Obviously, he goes, and the answer has got to be no.
Now, this guy, Walter Schaub, has tweeted out that, listen, the standard rate, and the White House talked about, you know, we're going to make sure that Hunter gets paid standard rates.
Well, the standard rate for a new artist is generally about $1,000 per painting.
And in fact, according to Shubb, even well-established artists in Virginia are selling their art for somewhere in the range of $2,000 to $5,000.
Hunter Biden's range, by the way, is $75,000 to $500,000.
Basically, if he does a scribble, that's $75,000.
And think about it. Who's going to pay this stuff?
Do they really think Hunter's a good artist?
Or are the only people who buy this art going to be people from China?
You know, people who want some kind of a deal.
Big pharma companies start exhibiting Hunter Biden's art.
Why? Because it's a Everybody knows it's kind of a way of slipping some cash to Joe Biden.
So the chutzpah of this, the kind of way that this is in your face, is almost as if the Bidens are saying, and the White House is saying, hey listen, we're going to be openly corrupt.
We know, and you know, and we know that you know.
But we don't care because what you're going to do about it?
And so what we have here is the United States under the Biden administration moving into kind of that brazenly corrupt territory that is normally reserved for third world type of governments where essentially it's just a matter of power.
If they can get away with it, they're going to do it.
And no one can do anything about it.
Otherwise, they come and break your legs.
Here, they don't have to break your legs.
They just basically do it because they know That the media knows, and yet the media doesn't care.
The media realizes we've got a crook in the White House, but no worries, it's our crook.
He's on our side.
He's doing our ideological bidding.
And therefore, if he wants to enrich himself through his son on the side, we're just going to kind of look the other way.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. On Friday last week, I had a very enjoyable conversation with my Dartmouth buddy, Ben Hart. Actually, one of the first kids I met at Dartmouth, and he was one of the founders of the Dartmouth Review.
We talked about our exploits at Dartmouth.
But then we projected forward to ways in which the Reagan years, which we were both part of, we were young Reaganites in the 1980s working at the Heritage Foundation, and how those years differ from the Trump years.
And we kind of got into it, and so I saved a couple of the segments from Friday for today.
And so let's pick it up right where we left off.
Me and Ben Hart were chatting about the Reagan years and the Trump years.
I'm here with my longtime Dartmouth pal, Ben Hart, now a political consultant.
We started on Friday talking about the Dartmouth Review, the rebel conservative newspaper we founded, ways in which the Dartmouth Review kind of teamed up and was based on National Review, which was Bill Buckley's magazine.
And also the kind of rebel spirit that persists today in talk radio.
We saw it with Rush Limbaugh.
We see it on Fox News.
We see a little bit of it with Trump.
And we're continuing the conversation because we were just literally just getting going.
And we're going to do a couple more segments today.
Ben, let's start by talking about symbols and statues because we're living in a time where, you know...
There's political correctness, there's woke ideology, you can't have the statue of Robert E. Lee and you gotta take down Frederick Douglass.
We saw a preview of this at Dartmouth with Dartmouth's mascot, which was an Indian symbol.
Dartmouth was founded. To educate and frankly to Christianize the Indians.
And the symbol was a dignified symbol, the head of an Indian brave.
Right. So what happened in the 1970s was they eliminated the Indian symbol.
And that was a big source of...
The alumni were very upset about that.
They just saw that as an assault on the institution, the history.
Dartmouth was founded to educate Indians, bring Christianity to the Indians.
That was the whole purpose of the college.
So they eliminated the Indian symbol and substituted the Big Green, which means nothing.
Let's talk about how we struck back at this.
I want to talk about two things.
The first one is, if you remember, there was an alumnus who came and met us in the Hanover Inn, and he was furious about this, and he was like, what can we do about this? And I said, listen, we can't bring the Indian back, but here's what we can do.
I said, if you give us $5,000, we will buy 1,000 t-shirts emblazoned with the head of the Indian Brave. We will stand at the gates of the football game and deliver a free t-shirt to every freshman and ask them to put it It's gone right there.
Exactly. And there will be a thousand freshmen wearing the Indian t-shirt, screaming for the Dartmouth team.
And we will fly an airplane overhead with the sign, Go Indians!
And the college will go berserk, but there's nothing they can do.
They can't expel a thousand freshmen.
So this was part of our...
I actually dressed up as an Indian.
You actually dressed up as an Indian.
Which got a lot of blowback.
The other thing that we fought back, Dinesh, was we conducted a survey of the Indian chiefs around the country.
And the poll came back.
What they thought about abolishing the Indian symbol, were they offended by this symbol?
And we showed them the symbol.
And the poll came back like...
Well, we need to say a little bit more about this.
So there was a Dartmouth alumnus, Wilkom Washburn.
If you remember, he worked at the Smithsonian.
And so I called him up and I said, can you give us a list of every existing Indian tribe?
That was his department. And so he gives us the list.
So we sent a letter to all these tribes.
This was before social media.
And we included the Indian symbol.
We made it objective.
We go, here's the symbol. What do you think?
Please fill out the enclosed survey.
And some of these tribes, by the way, I don't know if you remember, they took it really seriously.
They had a tribal council to vote on the symbol.
And so we got all these results, and they were overwhelming.
Mostly people went, we are really honored to find out that there's a college that's been started.
Right. Educate the Indians.
Why on earth would you people think of getting rid of the Indian symbol?
They found nothing offensive about it.
No, not at all. And also, Dartmouth gave scholarships to Native Americans.
As it still does. As it still does.
Because of Dartmouth's history, that's why it was founded.
No, but here's the point.
The left realized that what they needed to do is radicalize these incoming Native Americans.
Now many of these Native Americans, in fairness, didn't have the same academic preparation as the kids at Dartmouth, so they would have academic difficulties, and the left would go to them and say, listen, the reason you're having trouble on this campus is not because you don't know enough math, not because you don't know enough literature, but because there's a racist atmosphere.
There's a sense of fear.
Right.
There's an ideology here that's keeping you down as a Native American.
And so, in other words, the Columbus spirit is afoot at Dartmouth.
That's right. Well, a lot of the Native Americans on the campus were not infected with this woke ideology, and they didn't want the Indian symbol abolished either.
They liked it. And they were big fans of the paper.
So, in fact, I think a couple of them even were.
Some of them were distributing the paper.
That's right. Were helping to distribute the paper.
So it was really not offensive to anybody except the most kind of woke people, you know, the ethos, the radicalized people.
Ben, let's fast forward for a moment.
You went on to the Heritage Foundation, and you ran a program there called the Third Generation Project.
And I know tons of young people would flock to Heritage once a week.
You'd have a speaker.
You'd sometimes have a debate.
Talk a little bit about Third Generation and what it meant.
This was the young wing of the Reaganite movement.
Right. During the Reagan years, there at the Heritage Foundation, a few blocks away from the U.S. Capitol, we would have...
I ran a meeting of young conservative leaders type of thing.
Young conservatives in Washington.
Think about it.
People like Ralph Reed, who now runs the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
Grover Norquist, probably most people have heard about.
He requires all Republican politicians to sign the No New Taxes Pledge.
So that, you know, a lot of We had all kinds of people.
We had Jonas Savimbi in to speak, who was...
He was leading a revolution in Angola.
...against the communists. So we had Abdul Haq come in to speak.
He was the leader of the Mujahideen, which was in Afghanistan to overthrow the Soviets.
And he was actually a Taliban member.
And at one of our meetings with Abdul Haq, he actually brought a lot of these Mujahideen people who all looked basically like Osama bin Laden.
Because I think what the animating force back then for conservatism was to defeat the Soviet Union.
It was more anti-communist.
In other words, we're looking more at the communist threat coming from without, and we weren't really so focused on...
This is a key difference.
When we come back, I'm going to talk more with Ben about actually a debate that I did at the Third Generation Project against Chris Matthews, who then went on to become the host of Hardball, and the debate was about the Soviet Union.
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I'm back with my longtime Dartmouth pal, Ben Hart.
It's really fun to have a chance to have these kinds of conversations.
Ben, we were talking about your project at the Heritage Foundation, and you also sponsored some debates, and as I recall, I took part in two of them.
You took a couple of them. Yeah, well, you debated Chris Matthews.
Chris Matthews, the young Chris Matthews back then, he was a chief of staff for Tip O'Neill, who was the Speaker of the House at that point.
And so I guess Chris Matthews, you could say he was the most powerful staffer on Capitol Hill, probably.
So Dinesh, I set up a debate with Dinesh and Chris Matthews before my little conservative group there.
And if I remember, it was, is the policy of the Democrats from the Soviets?
Exactly. Yeah, that was the subject. Are the Democrats pro-Soviet?
And you contrasted the modern Democrats, which seem to be pro-Soviet and pro-Communist, and basically all their policies were appeasement and pro-Soviet.
Versus the Scoop Jackson old line Democrats, who were sort of New Deal Democrats, but they were anti-communist.
You know, JFK was an anti-communist.
My father voted for JFK in 1960 over Nixon because he thought that JFK was the stronger anti-communist.
And so Democrats used to be very anti-communist.
JFK, you know, Truman.
And then Scoop Jackson in the Senate, I guess, he was the leader of that movement.
But there was a serious anti-communist wing, old-line Democrats.
And so you were pointing that out.
And Chris Matthews, did I bring this point up?
Well, my strategy was pretty simple.
I just said, listen, let's just take all the major foreign policy positions and let's note what the Soviet position is.
What's the Soviet position on the MX missile?
What's the Democrat Party's position? And then what's the Democratic Party's position?
And then I calculated, I made a percentage...
Nuclear freeze. A degree of overlap between the Democrats.
And I found that essentially it was a 90% overlap.
Absolutely. So they disagreed on one or two things.
I can't think of anything they disagreed on.
Well, I mean, I think at that time they disagreed on things like, you know, should the Cubans be allowed to do torture on their dissidents?
Oh, right. Democrats go, well, probably not.
No, that's bad. But today they would probably go probably.
In fact, today they're bringing those ideas here.
AOC is concerned that the Republican Party is laying the groundwork for regime change there.
She's concerned that there might be...
She likes the regime the way it is.
She likes the regime, yeah. So anyway, on this Chris Matthews thing, so you were contrasting the modern Democrats of that period with the old-line Democrats like Scoop Jackson, who were anti-communist.
And so, Matthews lit off into this trash Scoop Jackson and that wing of the Democrat Party.
And we had this on tape because these lectures were recorded.
And so, I sent Matthews trashing of the Scoop Jackson Democrats off to the Wall Street Journal.
And they published it as sort of representative of the new direction of the Democrat Party, which is more pro-Soviet, more communist, as opposed to Scoop Jackson.
So the next day, after this item ran in the Wall Street Journal, I get this blistering call from Chris Matthews just swearing at me over the phone I had to hold it out here.
The point on here, Ben, that part of the reason we could do all this is we actually had a very powerful network.
Your dad was at National Review, so if the college did anything to us, we would actually let National Review know and publicize.
We had friends at the Wall Street Journal, so we could essentially telephone in.
Well, Greg Fossedal, who was writing editorials, he was the editor of the Dartmouth Review and went to the Wall Street Journal and became an editorial writer.
And Paul Gigo, another Dartmouth guy who is there to this day, and that is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Let's talk a little bit about the Reagan era, because we talk about how the threat came from abroad.
Mm-hmm. Today, we are sort of in a Trumpian era, by which I mean I think Trump is the guiding spirit of the Republican Party.
Talk a little bit about, I mean, in some ways Trump seems very continuous with our Dartmouth sensibilities.
Yeah, pretty outrageous. Pretty outrageous.
A lot of people do not get Trump's humor, because a lot of people don't realize when Trump is kind of joking.
Well, he's partly a comedian, and he's a performer, and when you look at him...
They aren't getting the joke.
A lot of people are not getting the joke.
He takes a certain relish in antagonizing people and in getting them, and quite frankly, we did the same thing.
We did absolutely. I mean, think about professors, and we would take great pleasure.
I remember one time... We were in a review of the professors.
We had a guide to the professors, and we had the worst professors featured, and excerpts from their classes and stuff.
Totally. Absolutely right.
So with Trump, Trump, however, is not in the way that...
Now, Reagan was not an intellectual, I think it's fair to say, but Reagan respected the intellectual life.
Reagan liked to hang out with Buckley.
But he was very influenced by National Review.
He was very influenced by National Review.
And he was very, you know, when I went to the Reagan ranch years later, I looked at his books.
You'd see, you know, Whitaker Chambers as Witness.
And Reagan had all kinds of writings.
Every third page, there'd be some Reagan mark.
And so Reagan loved ideas.
I will say this about Reagan, though.
His intellect is underrated.
So I remember seeing a debate between Reagan and Buckley on Buckley's show Firing Line.
And the debate was on the Panama Canal.
And Buckley thought we should...
Honor the agreement, I guess, and give away the Panama Canal, and Reagan didn't think we should.
And honestly, Reagan just trashed, I mean, just really just steamrolled Buckley.
And Buckley was considered like a world-class debater.
And Reagan just took him apart.
Wow. So I would say that Reagan's intellect was very underrated, but what Reagan was very good at was Communicating with the average person.
That's what he could do. Now, the thing that Reagan had that Trump never had is Reagan had pretty much the unified loyalty of the Republican Party.
And what you would call the Republican establishment became the Reagan establishment.
With Trump on the other hand, it seems like he was surrounded by treachery all around him, even in his own party.
of the executive branch of the government, I think notably of the DOJ, but it's also true more broadly that Trump was fighting his own team.
Very scary to be in that position, I think.
Right.
Well, I think with Trump, you know, he came in, his rhetoric and his overall demeanor was very polarizing in a lot of ways.
And so when he gave that speech coming, when he came down the escalator to announce his campaign, you know, that was a very polarizing speech.
So that's a double-edged sword kind of speech where it kind of sent out the call to the populist wing of the party and got them to pay attention, but it also really turned the D.C., including many in the Republican establishment and the conservative establishment, against them because it wasn't a tone that they were used to.
I mean, I was not a Trump supporter in the primaries, First I was for Scott Walker, then I was for Rubio, and then once Trump blew Rubio out by 19 points, I started to pay attention to Trump, like, what is it that he's doing that is just rallying the troops so much?
So I think Trump was a double-edged sword.
He was like a battering ram.
That got attention.
Well, he would also strafe his own side.
In other words, Reagan would not do that.
No, he never would. Reagan would strafe the other side.
But you remember, Reagan's 11th commandment was you should not speak ill of another Republican.
Exactly. And not only did Trump do that, but Trump would belittle Arubio, belittle Cruz.
The low-energy jab. Yeah, he'd just absolutely degrade these guys.
That was the greatest moniker ever that he came up with.
Well, Trump has an ability to put a tag on you that he cannot get out of.
He cannot get out of. Jeff went from the front runner down to about 3% of the polls in about 3 minutes.
And he still hasn't recovered. And I don't think he will.
So Trump was a double-edged sword politically.
He was a very polarizing figure.
But I also think... That he was an existential threat to the D.C. swamp.
And they saw him as that threat.
I mean, the government is a corporation too.
It's not just Microsoft. Government is a corporation.
Its job is to make money.
And it has an interest in enlarging itself.
It's got a profit motive and aggrandizing power to itself.
And that includes the Republican Party who are holding office and so forth.
And so the swamp really turned against him.
And the swamp includes the media and big tech and so forth.
So, and he was just like one person standing against the swamp, and that's very, very difficult to do.
Not to mention, I think, in looking back, and maybe we'll close on this, I'm not sure he even grasped the full depth of the swamp.
No, no. Every time he would think he got the bottom level, he'd realize there's a basement.
Below the bottom level and maybe two levels below that.
And so it kind of, in a way, it's alarming because it shows you the depth of the problem and it makes you a little despair of whether there will be a figure strong enough to actually drain this one.
It's going to be very difficult. And also, the other thing, too, is the changing of the media.
Now, the media back then was liberal, but it was more, at least they attempted to look objective, but it was more just slanted liberal, like the New York Times, CBS News.
But you could in those days point out to a double standard.
And the reporter, whether it be Sam Donalds, would try to defend the double standard.
Like, well, listen, yes, of course we're applying a different lens, but here's why.
Today the double standards, there's no point even pointing them out because the media is blatantly on one side.
Totally on one side. They have a single standard.
I mean, the Washington Post did a very pro...
It did a favorable profile on me when my book Poisoned Ivy came out.
It was very... Nothing.
I almost couldn't have written it better myself.
So, you know, they weren't automatically hostile, you know, and even the New York Times did some favorable stuff.
And back in those days, you could talk to certain intelligent liberals.
Like, you know, you had a debate in front of my group, the third generation, with Christopher Hitchens, and we were good friends with Hitchens, even though we disagreed on many issues.
And in fact, interesting, now, Hitchens moved right later, but the Hitchens that we...
He was a blatant socialist.
He was a far left-wing socialist.
He was for the Sandinistas.
But he was intellectually honest.
Yes, he was. He was.
And, well, this has been really fascinating.
Just a little window into the world in which we kind of came of age as conservatives.
Right. And I think for me, to sum up, it was not so much that I became a conservative.
It's more that once I was exposed to these ideas and I really took them in, I realized I've always believed these things.
These are a more refined way of putting what I already feel.
Common sense actually works.
Common sense works. Pragmatism works.
And we have a philosophy that's ultimately rooted, I think, in a correct assessment of human nature.
Right. That's what makes it, in a way, no matter what happens to the country, the ideas of conservatism remain enduringly appealing because they're the ideas that conform to reason and to human nature.
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One of the great things about the Christian intellectual tradition, and there is a powerful Christian intellectual tradition, often, by the way, and sadly ignored by pastors, not very often taught in the churches, not even to young people, and yet this intellectual tradition is important in addressing, and in some cases answering, questions that occur to the thoughtful Christians.
So here's a question to think about.
If God is omnipotent, all-powerful, and omniscient, God knows everything, then God obviously knows the future.
God knows, for example, what you would do tomorrow.
God knows if you're going to commit a sin tomorrow, for instance.
And yet, if God knows the future, God knows what you're going to do, how can you possibly have any freedom in doing it?
If God knows that you're going to commit a sin, You're going to commit a sin.
That is a fact.
Because God knows for sure.
God isn't guessing. God knows what you're going to do.
And since He knows what you're going to do, how can you possibly have the choice of whether to do it?
And to take the argument even further, if God knows everything, then He knows what everybody is going to do in the future.
And He has always known it.
And that means that nobody has any free choice because how could God know in advance what people are going to do, what everybody is going to do, what all choices are going to be made?
If God does know those things, how can people in fact have real freedom to make those choices or to reject those choices?
It would seem that they don't.
Well, this is the very problem, this is the very conundrum taken up in one of the Christian classics.
It's written by a man named Boethius, and it's called The Consolation of Philosophy.
Now, it seems like a very strange sort of Christian text, because when you first read it, it makes no references to Christianity at all.
It instead appeals to classical knowledge and classical learning.
It references Plato and Platonic ideas, but no mention of the Bible, no mention of Jesus.
The guy who wrote it, Boethius, was a very high official in the post-Roman Empire.
When I say the post-Roman Empire, the Roman Empire collapsed when the barbarians invaded Rome.
And a pagan emperor named Theodoric was the ruler.
And Boethius was one of his top officials, but he kind of fell afoul of Theodoric, and he was slammed into prison.
And it was in prison, awaiting execution, that Boethius composes this Consolation of Philosophy.
Now, this is a book full of sparkling insights on a lot of topics.
One of the topics that Boethius raises at the very beginning is he's lamenting his fortune, and he goes, oh, this is terrible.
I was kind of on top of the world, and look at me now.
Why would fortune do this to me?
How can fortune be like that?
And then Lady Philosophy, who's the person that he, Boethius, is talking to in the story, in the work.
Lady Philosophy says, Boethius, how dumb can you be?
It's the nature of fortune to be this way.
Fortune is fickle. Fortune is like a person spinning a wheel.
And so, in condemning fortune for being fickle, you're condemning fortune for doing what fortune naturally does.
So, if you accepted all the benefits of fortune before, wow, you're on top of the world.
Fortune put you up there.
That's because your wheel was at the top.
Now your wheel is at the bottom.
So, the wise man recognizes that your fate, if you will, is to a large degree in the hands of this kind of whimsical...
And then Boethius goes on to discuss, if that is the case, if you've got this kind of wheel of fortune, is it not, what about God?
Isn't there a providence that governs the universe over and above the wheel of fortune?
So anyway, the book goes into all this stuff and has very interesting things to say about fate, about chance, about providence.
But what Boethius is most famous for is addressing, and I would say resolving, the problem of Divine foreknowledge and its seeming incompatibility with free will.
So let's state the argument kind of clearly.
What God foreknows, what God knows in advance, must be the case.
That's point number one.
Point number two, what must be the case is not subject to free will.
It's going to happen anyway.
And since God foreknows all our future actions, he knows in advance what we are going to do, therefore it follows that we are not free in any respect to do any of it.
This is the problem.
And Voitya spells out the implications of the problem.
He says, listen, if this is true, if we don't have free will...
Then you can't blame someone for doing something bad because they didn't have a choice in the matter.
You can't praise someone for doing something good.
In fact, you can't even call it good or bad because ultimately the person is simply acting by necessity.
Now, before Boethius, the church father, Augustine, had tried to address this problem and addressed it in a kind of an ingenious way in which Augustine made the point that just because God knows in advance what you are going to do...
Doesn't mean that God is making you do it.
You can know in advance something while not influencing the action.
I know Debbie pretty well.
And so, for example, if I know that she's going to be given a choice tomorrow of eating, let's just say, pizza or Chinese food, knowing her, I know she's going to pick pizza.
She hates Chinese food.
So, I know that.
But I'm not making her decide that way.
My foreknowledge doesn't cause Debbie to go one way or the other.
I simply happen to know.
So, this was Augustine's solution to the problem.
But Boethius takes the solution deeper, and I think in a more profound direction.
Basically, what Boethius argues is that God doesn't have foreknowledge in the sense that we humans mean.
What Boethius is saying is that foreknowledge implies that God is embedded in time.
Think about it. The whole concept of foreknowledge, the word for, comes from before.
So, you are in time and you know now what is going to happen, let us say, tomorrow.
But Boethius says that God is eternal, and what eternal means is not just that God sort of lives forever, that God lives in the extension of time, but rather that God is outside of time.
And therefore, Boethius makes a kind of startling observation.
He says, if someone is outside of time, then the future to them is like how we would consider the present.
God doesn't have foreknowledge, He just has knowledge.
And if God just has knowledge of something, then there is no incompatibility between present knowledge and free will.
Let's say, for example, I'm standing on my balcony and I'm observing a car, and I can see that the car is turning right.
So, I have knowledge of what the car is doing.
But, am I interfering with the free will of the driver and turning right?
No, he's making the decision to turn right.
I merely am able to observe it, I know it, at the exact moment that he's doing it.
So, in this way, by, in a sense...
Presenting a new and deeper idea of eternity.
God is being not a prisoner of time, but someone who inhabits, you may say, is outside of time.
God lives in what Boethius calls the eternal present.
The eternal present. And therefore, says Boethius, God perceives everything simultaneously.
For God, there is no past, there is no present, there is no future.
I'm quoting Boethius, eternity is the whole and perfect possession of unlimited life at once.
And in this way, this becomes then a very powerful idea, not just in resolving the apparent conflict between free will and divine omnipotence, but in offering an understanding of eternity that persists through the Middle Ages all the way to the present.
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