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Aug. 2, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:28
DEFUND THE CAPITOL POLICE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep144
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I make my case for defunding the Capitol Police.
Why? Because they've become Nancy Pelosi's private militia.
The American Medical Association wants to remove sex from birth certificates.
I respond with masculine aggression.
And an article in The Atlantic claims that Mike Lindell is trying to put a pillow across the face of American democracy.
Ha! This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
A few days ago, I made a pretty scornful argument on this podcast in which I really chuckled at the crying performances of Adam Schiff, of Kinzinger.
The Capitol Hill Policeman.
I mean, a real boo-hoo fest by these characters, one on top of the other.
I mean, tough job for the Academy Awards Committee to decide which is the most outstanding thespianism here.
And the points I wanted to make in that segment were two.
One... The simple fact that these guys, the Capitol Police testifying, were putting forward a procession of lies, most notably, oh, there was a mob of people, and they were screaming the N-word at me, and they were calling my mom or my wife a whore.
Now, where's the video of that?
Remember, these Capitol Police guys wear body cam, and even in case they didn't, the whole area of the Capitol is under surveillance.
So if it happened, it would be on the video, but the video has never been released for the obvious reason that it doesn't exist, and it doesn't exist for the obvious reason that this never happened.
So this was a manufactured narrative, and I treated it, some people may say, well, Dinesh, you weren't duly harsh.
Well, no, I was duly harsh, duly harsh.
But it's provoked a very interesting reaction, which is to say one of these Never Trump groups, it's called Accountable GOP, released a video in which they intercut my chuckles and laughter with a replay of the most sort of tear-jerking testimony, as if this kind of contrast would expose me to be deeply insensitive.
In fact, Adam Kinzinger retweeted this, pushed it out.
Just watch, he says.
And then this was accompanied by an article This was by a guy named Charlie Sykes, a never-Trumper, whom I've actually known from the old days.
This is a kind of obscure radio host from the Midwest.
Right around the time I wrote my book, Illiberal Education, he published a book that sunk like a stone.
It was called Prof Scam.
He kept calling me every week, please say something about my book and the media and so on.
And I was like, your book is stupid.
I didn't say that to him, but I was thinking to myself.
So I kind of ignored him a little bit because his book was written at the ninth grade level.
The point is not that the professors are running a scam.
It's the ideological contamination of the academy, particularly of the selective schools.
But Charlie Sykes never went to one, so what would he know?
In any event, the guy has nursed a grudge over the years.
Now he's sort of one of these vicious never-Trumpers, and his point is that I'm being very cruel.
And he says he wants...
He wants Congress to say to me, as they said to McCarthy, famously, quote, have you no sense of decency, sir?
So this cliche from the 1950s is trotted out by this undereducated columnist.
And then when I said, you know, in fact, Sykes goes, I want this to be a career-ending event.
Career at the event. So he wants to override my 20 books, my movies, my long career, my White House credentials, and so on.
None of which he has, of course.
He wants to override that because, you know, I laughed at the Capitol Police.
And then when I said, you know, hey, who's, you know, who's this guy Sykes?
Pretty much... Tom Arnold.
Now, I saw this from Tom Arnold.
I'm like, who's Tom Arnold?
That name sort of vaguely rings a bell.
Now, isn't he the unfunny guy who was married to the funny woman, Roseanne Barr, for four years in the 1990s?
So this complete has-been.
I'm not going to quote him. He goes, he goes, better keep bulking up, clown.
Got a problem with Charlie Sykes.
You got a problem with me.
Apparently he's sort of threatening me.
He wants to get in the pit with me.
He wants to have a kind of a wrestling fest, I guess, or something to that effect.
And another guy on social media lashing out at me goes, Yeah, Dinesh, you know, why don't you laugh in front of the faces of these four policemen?
See what happens then!
And I'm like, what?
What's going to happen? Are you basically telling me that if I laugh in their faces, they'll go berserk and choke me to death like George Floyd?
Is that the idea? Yeah.
Now, the point I'm trying to make with all this here is that there's a massive double standard involved that is being camouflaged here.
Remember when Antifa and BLM stormed the nation's capital?
Remember when they burned St.
John's Church? Remember when they laid violent siege to the White House?
Trump actually had to be evacuated and moved to a bunker?
How did the media describe it?
A mostly peaceful protest.
Not an insurrection, not a seditious attempt, not a try to overthrow the government.
A mostly peaceful protest.
Well, by that standard, January 6th was a mostly peaceful protest.
So... I think what's going on here is you've got all these guys trying to score minor points.
Hey, Dinesh, you know, how dare you question the police?
Weren't you tweeting out back the blue earlier on?
Well, I support the police.
But on the other hand, I also know some lying characters when I see them on TV. I just measure up what they're saying.
Oh, Sicknick was killed in the riot.
No, he wasn't. He died of natural causes.
That's a lie. So I don't have to believe that every policeman is telling the truth on every occasion.
And the real point I want to make and perhaps leave you with in this segment is this.
We're hearing all this whining from the Capitol Police.
These are trained guys.
Oh, this guy pushed me.
Oh, that guy poked me in the chest.
Oh, you know, I was left with some emotional scars.
I'll never forget that day.
So measure that kind of suffering on the one hand.
With the treatment of the January 6th protesters, a guy, for example, who committed no violence, didn't even take anything, went into the Capitol, then left, is sitting in solitary confinement for months, is being charged with multiple felonies.
The government wants to put him in prison for, what, a year, two, three years, destroy his family, bankrupt him.
These are the people who are really suffering.
These are the real casualties.
These are the people whose lives are being destroyed To advance the left's bogus narrative.
So if you want to know why I'm being harsh and contemptuous toward these lying characters on the public stage, it's ultimately because of the harm that they're doing to the lives of real people.
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The dates are August 10-12.
Here's Mike talking about it.
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But I just want you to know about it.
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I'm seeing a rash of claims, both in the academic literature but also in the public media, to the effect that the Second Amendment is a racist relic of slavery.
Now, what I find really striking about this is that this is actually known and has been known for decades not to be the case.
There is a whole body of scholarly literature on the Second Amendment, and it clearly establishes why the Second Amendment was passed, in what context, which states were for it.
And this scholarship is unanimous, or virtually unanimous, that slavery and racism have nothing to do with this.
But we're living in an age of, I would call it reframing, in which essentially issues that have nothing to do with slavery are now reinterpreted to make slavery and race central to those issues.
We see this happening with the filibuster, for example.
We see this happening with the court.
Institutions that were established, for example, to provide a ballast against pure majoritarian democracy, or institutions that were intended to distribute power between the federal government and the states.
Madison says we have a partly national and a partly federal system.
All of this is now taken to be, well, this is just a kind of a Paper-thin cover for bigotry.
So the shoddiness of the scholarship, which is then, of course, amplified by the media.
And we see this now...
NPR recently, for example, had an interview, quote, historian Carol Anderson uncovers the racist roots of the Second Amendment.
So think of that title, uncovers, as if to say it was there.
And all this historian is doing is uncovering it.
And by the way, Carol Anderson is the chair of Emory University's Black Studies Department.
And we're talking about a book she wrote called The Second, Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.
Let's go back and look for a moment at the American founding, because when you look at the Second Amendment debate, you see that all the states opposed to slavery—I'm talking now about states like Vermont, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island—all of them had amendments in their state constitutions that allowed for keeping and bearing of arms.
These states were strongly supportive of the Second Amendment, so it can't be because they were pro-slavery.
We know for a fact that these states were anti-slavery.
In 1770, John Adams defended Captain Thomas Preston in the so-called Boston Massacre trial.
This was actually a British officer who had been accused of wrongdoing.
And John Adams said very clearly that British soldiers have a right to defend themselves, quote,"...since here," meaning in Boston, in New England,"...every private person is authorized to arm himself." So here's Adams making an unpopular defense of a British officer saying, hey, of course he has a right to defend himself.
Everybody else here has guns.
By the way, John Adams' second cousin and co-founding father, Sam Adams, vehemently anti-slavery, equally vehemently supportive of the right to bear arms.
Let's remember America in the...
18th century was a frontier nation.
There just wasn't much of a police force.
Law enforcement was relatively scarce.
By and large, people had to defend themselves.
And this was an important motivation for the idea of the right to bear arms.
So it wasn't just the idea of protecting the country or the community against tyranny.
It was also that you have the right to protect yourself and your family if you are endangered.
Now, As we go through history, we see, for example, that Southern states, Democratic states, in the aftermath of the Civil War, passed anti-gun ordinances.
Why? Because they wanted to disarm Blacks in the face of attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, which, remember, at the time, the Klan was, in the words of Eric Foner, progressive historian, quote,"...the military arm of the Democratic Party." So we can see here how gun control is being used directly for racist purposes.
Frederick Douglass, by the way, knew this.
And he said that blacks should have, quote, a good revolver and a steady hand.
In other words, to be able to defend themselves.
Same point was made by Ida B. Wells, one of the African-American Republicans, a prominent opponent of lynching.
And she says, quote, and I think we use this in one of my movies, quote, the Winchester rifle deserves a place of honor.
Today, approximately a quarter of African Americans own guns, and gun sales have been increasing in African American communities.
All of which is a way of saying that this notion that the Second Amendment is kind of a fig leaf, a mere cover for racism or pro-slavery sentiments is just an outright lie.
But the media, which is in a position to know this, and other scholars who do know it, are falling silent.
What is striking about the lies being promulgated now is how little public criticism they're subjected to.
And that makes scholars who know better Complicit in the lie.
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In a clear example of how far our institutions have been degraded, have been corrupted, and here we're talking about the health profession.
We've seen it with COVID. But here we have the American Medical Association saying that sex, the sexual designation on a birth certificate, should be removed.
What? Now, the AMA agrees that the sex of the newborn should be recorded.
They also agree that it should be preserved for medical, public health, and statistical use.
So in other words, to have an idea in the country how many males and how many females there are.
So it should be preserved for information purposes, statistical purposes, but it should be deleted, they say, from the birth certificate that is provided to you.
So why?
Why would they want to do this?
Well, the reason, I suppose, somewhat predictable...
Now reading, requiring it can lead to discrimination and unnecessary burden on individuals whose current gender identity does not align with their designation at birth.
So, in other words, what they're saying is that later on in life you might decide you want to be a trans and this birth certificate could be a problem.
It could actually expose you to some form of hardship or even discrimination.
Now, as a factual matter, there are 48 states, Tennessee and Ohio being the exceptions, which allow you, when you're an adult, to go back and amend or correct, change your birth certificate and reflect your sort of chosen gender identity.
But only ten states allow you to remove your gender identity and just say X, which is kind of, I suppose, neither one nor the other.
The other states make you choose.
The State Department, interestingly, does not allow you to do this on your passport.
And here is a quotation from a medical doctor who's explaining the AMA's decision.
He says that assigning sex fails to recognize the medical spectrum of gender identity.
Now, there are other doctors, of course, who disagree.
And Robert Jackson, MD, who's with the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery, says, quote, I think when a child is born, they do have physical characteristics, either male or female, and that should be on the public record.
So he's sort of stating the traditional view.
Now, the article talking about this, which appeared on WebMD, by the way, goes on to say, quote, race was once public on birth certificates.
And the truth is that race actually is counted these days, not only in birth certificates, but also in all kinds of data collection.
The census wants to know about race.
You apply to college, they want to know about race.
You apply for a government contract, they want to know about race.
So the question is, why not get rid of race?
And the answer is it's not the racists who are trying to keep the racial designation.
It's the progressives.
It's the liberals. They want race to be part of your designated identity.
Why? So they can then use it as the basis of legal discrimination.
So, very interestingly here, affirmative action is dependent on racial classification.
If you didn't know who was black or white, take someone like Debbie, who's actually white but mixed race.
She's got Native American, she's got African American.
What if Debbie did not designate her race?
Well, you wouldn't know if she's a member of a victim group or an oppressor group.
That's what the left doesn't want.
Now, turning back to sex for a minute, the simple truth is that there's no one who's born sort of a generic human being.
Everyone is born with a sexual designation.
We're born male or female.
Now, there's a very small number of people, I realize, who are sort of hermaphrodites and people who are born with different types of sexual peculiarities.
They're in between males and females and so on.
But the simple truth is...
You know, the AMA is acting as if sexual designation is a form of labeling.
As if people go, well, you know what, here's a kid, and we kind of like to pay her 70 cents on a dollar when she grows up.
Let's just call her female.
Let's just label her as female.
No! These designations, which I guess are social designations, are based upon observable biological facts.
This is listening to the science.
So it's somewhat comical that the left is all about, oh, you're going to listen to the science.
But here where the science is speaking loud and clear, we have the American Medical Association of all groups essentially allowing psychology to trump psychology.
Now, let's remember, we keep hearing that sex or gender is a social construct, but psychology is manifestly a social construct.
The way that we feel about ourselves, the way that we think we are, regardless of what we see when we kind of look down there, this is a social construct.
This is something that we develop in conversation, you may say, with society.
This is an adaptable conclusion that we come to about ourselves, and we know it's adaptable.
Why? Because people sometimes change their minds.
Oh, you know, I was born a girl, now I want to be a boy, but then I'm going to go back to being a girl.
So you have people who actually are able to transition and then transition back.
So, we see here, even the AMA, an institution once regarded as unpolitical, relatively unimpeachable, trying to make decisions based upon health considerations, here allowing the complete subordination of health and health considerations and facts in general to ideology.
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On Friday's show, I was joking about an article that just appeared in The Atlantic.
It's written by a respected writer, Ann Applebaum, called The MyPillow Guy Really Could Destroy Democracy.
And of course I quipped, hey, let's help Mike Lindell destroy democracy by, you know, taking him up on his special on his towels.
But then I thought to myself, you know, instead of just dismissing the article, let me sort of take a look.
Let me see what they're saying.
How is it possible that an entrepreneur like Lindell really could destroy American democracy?
Is American democracy so fragile over the past 200 years that one guy in the Midwest can overturn it apparently all by himself?
So, the article begins, and I'm going to sort of read a few lines and comment on them to get to the heart of what Anne Applebaum is saying.
She starts off by saying, when you think about the destruction of democracy, you think it's going to be done by some rogue general or some jackbooted thug leading a group of, quote, a horde of men in white sheets.
And she goes, well, this guy Mike Lindell is not like that.
And she actually captures an aspect of his personality.
She says he, quote, laughs good-naturedly when jokes are made at his expense.
So he's genuinely a self-deprecating guy.
Quote, he's a man who will talk to anyone willing to listen, and many aren't.
So this is a guy who's open to conversation.
He's, quote, a philanthropist.
He's a good boss.
He's a patriot. Wow.
And yet, she says, and this is the conclusion of her paragraph, she, quote, he, quote, Now, wow.
I mean, for this guy to be put into this kind of historical context, in some ways, I suppose it's kind of an honor to give Mike Lindell this kind of importance.
Now, She goes on, and there are a few kind of familiar invocations of history.
She says, it may seem odd that an entrepreneur could possibly have all this kind of a negative effect, but she goes, think of Olaf Ashberg, the Swedish banker who helped finance the Bolshevik Revolution, or Henry Ford, whose infamous anti-Semitic tract, The International Jew, was widely read in Nazi Germany.
So she's putting Lindell in the category of these...
Business figures who contributed to the rise of Bolshevism in Russia and, of course, the rise of fascism in Germany.
So how does Lindell fit this pattern?
Let's read on.
Quote, Now, this, of course, is the...
Heart of the matter. But let's think about it for a minute.
Is it that the American people, all of us, have a robust trust in the health system and American democracy and in the elections?
And then along comes this sales guy, Lindell, and he is the one who convinces us, oh, wow.
Wow, you know, there was a lot of problems in the election.
Oh, wow, there's a lot of politicization of COVID. Oh, wow, American democracy has, you may say, at the least two faces in that it treats people on one side of the aisle differently from the other side of the aisle.
Here's my point. We have come to these conclusions long before Lindell.
Lots of people believe these things and I would argue believe them for very good reason.
Our doubts about American democracy is based on the observation of the way that American democracy plays out.
Isn't American democracy based on an affirmation of free speech?
Where's your free speech?
Where's mine? Isn't it based on religious freedom?
Where's your religious freedom?
Where's mine? Isn't it based upon kind of a public and honest auditing and accounting of votes?
When has that ever occurred?
Isn't it based upon an observation?
We look around, we see the way in which the COVID-19 has been politicized from start to finish.
They give you one piece of advice here and another piece of advice there.
The Investigation into the origins of the virus, ruthlessly suppressed for over a year.
So, these are the reasons why people have distrust.
Our institutions, you may say, have earned their distrust.
So, what is Lindell doing?
He's merely, boldly echoing these sentiments.
And the reason people are responding is that that's how they feel anyway.
Now... Anne Applebaum goes on to say that even Mike Lindell is talking about suppression of freedom.
She says, I don't see anyone arresting you.
And when she's talking about him being canceled by retailers thrown off social media, she goes, quote, plenty of Americans oppose Lindell's open promotion of both election and vaccine conspiracy theories.
And here is where I think this article becomes deeply dishonest.
Because Ann Applebaum knows that the reason that Mike Lindell is cancelled by retailers is not due to some public uprising of people who voluntarily decide, hey, listen, I'm not going to go to Bed Bath& Beyond and buy his products.
That's not what happened. There's an organized campaign by the left We're good to go.
I find it a little bit disturbing and shocking that someone of Ann Applebaum's caliber, she's written, by the way, good books about the Soviet Union, about history, nevertheless gets drawn into this woke culture in which she sees even censorship as a kind of healthy public reaction to misinformation being allegedly put out by...
By Mike Lindell.
And then when we get to the claims that Lindell himself makes, she doesn't even bother to check them out.
She, in fact, confesses that she's not that familiar with them.
She's not in a position to evaluate any evidence.
She merely puts in a single phone call to Chris Krebs.
By the way, this is a figure whose name you might recognize.
This is the guy who runs the cybersecurity and infrastructure security industry.
This is a guy, by the way, who testified the election was the most secure ever.
And this is Krebs' reaction.
It's all part of the grift.
In other words, it's all part of just emotional manipulation.
And that's it. As if to say that that is a sufficient answer to all the concerns that have been raised on this podcast and elsewhere about the breakdown of our public institutions.
I think that this sort of article read carefully doesn't reflect badly on Lindell so much as it reflects badly on its creator, Anne Applebaum, and the magazine that published it, the once reputable Atlantic Monthly.
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Bye.
I've been watching the Olympics with great interest.
I've been a fan for decades.
And, of course, I was concerned and really hoping that the Olympics would be free of political statements, woke sensibilities, this kind of in-your-face politics.
And it has been. So this has actually come as a pleasant surprise.
The US Olympic Committee apparently okayed certain forms of protest, although not all forms of protest.
But the International Olympic Committee has apparently taken a tougher line.
In which they agree that you can make statements that they'll, in some cases, circulate on social media, but absolutely no displays, no kneeling, no Black Power salutes on the medal stand, which is the most visible manifestation, when the athlete really becomes the focus of world attention.
Now, here is Gwen Berry, the hammer throw athlete.
Who makes a statement in an interview that if she is on the medal stand, she is going to, quote, represent the oppressed people.
Quote, I'll represent the oppressed people.
She says, that's been my message for the last three years.
So she's, I think, in defiance of the rules, getting ready to try to make a big statement from the stand.
But here's the good news.
I mean, this is a woman who qualified third at the U.S. Olympic trials.
She's not only up against the two superior athletes who threw the hammer better than she did, but huge favorites from China, Poland, and other countries are going to be competing.
So, But realistically, there's not a whole lot of chance that she's going to be on the medal stand.
I think the reason she's giving all these interviews now, oh, wait till I get to the medal stand, is this is her only chance for attention.
She'll return to obscurity after she is soundly beaten.
Now, turning for a moment to Simone Biles, a very regrettable situation, and I think the pressure, you know, got to her.
And she's very young, and there are, of course, tremendous expectations, and the media tried to make her into kind of a woke symbol.
This is why she was, you know, on the cover of 75 magazines, the sort of Great Black Hope, and all this rhetoric aimed at elevating Simone Biles to such a Himalayan status.
That it could be that the media pressure itself is what caused her, in effect, to implode.
And so she's been withdrawing from one event after another.
And I thought, let me leave this topic alone.
But then here I see in Slate an article that now widens the discussion of this whole thing by saying, you know, it says, quote, Carrie Strug shouldn't have been forced to do that vault.
So now they're going back to an earlier Olympics where Carrie Strug, though injured, toughened up and did the vault.
And they're like, well, we shouldn't ask this of our athletes.
So what's going on here, the bigger picture, is not about Simone Biles.
They're targeting the culture of self-discipline and sacrifice both for the team.
Remember, the reason Kerry Strug did this, the reason Simone Biles' withdrawal was so damaging, is it hurts the team.
Remember, you're part of a team.
It's not just all about you.
And so you not only hurt the team, but you're part of a national team.
You're competing behind a flag.
And just by showing up, you're taking the place of somebody else who would show up if it wasn't for you.
So this is a disturbing trend, I think, which is a trend of saying that the individual matters.
Your mental health is the only thing that counts.
And the team doesn't really matter.
The country doesn't really matter.
The U.S. performance of the Olympics doesn't matter.
And it's part of the Woken version.
What's the Woken version?
Let's hear it for those who didn't win a medal.
Let's hear it for those who didn't make the team.
Let's hear it for those who didn't even try out.
And of course, where the left wants to go with all this is, most of all, let's hear it for all those who sat on the couch and did nothing and collected welfare benefits while other people did all the work.
That's why. It's in order to defend this idea of a do-nothing society of drones dependent on the government.
This is why the left attacks these standards across the board.
It's part of this larger cultural picture.
Now, On a much happier and more positive note, here is Sydney McLaughlin, the world record holder in the 400-meter hurdle.
She actually broke the world record at the Olympic trials.
And we have today, by the way, coming up the semifinals.
The finals are on Wednesday.
There's a sort of titanic contest developing between Sidney McLaughlin on the one hand and Dalila Muhammad for who's going to win the gold medal in this event.
But here's Sidney McLaughlin.
Essentially, and this is part of a pattern.
It's not an individual tweet.
She talks about the fact, all the glory to God, she told NBC. Honestly, this season, working with my new coach, my new support system, it's truly just faith and trusting the process.
Truly, it's all a gift from God.
And she goes on to talk about the fact that the biggest difference this year is my faith, trusting God and trusting that process, and knowing He's in control of everything.
As long as I put the hard work in, He's going to carry me through, and I really cannot do anything but give the glory to Him at this point.
Now, this is a woman, Sydney Miloflin, who shares her faith consistently on social media.
This isn't an isolated quotation, but rather a part of a...
So, what is Sidney McLaughlin saying?
How would we contrast Sidney McLaughlin with...
Simone Biles. Basically, Sidney McLaughlin is saying, it's not about me.
It's ultimately about something larger than me.
There's a humility here.
And it's not even all about winning.
And it's not even all about the medal.
She's giving credit for the medal to God.
But I suspect that she's the kind of person with a moral fiber where even if she lost, she would go, okay, well, I did my best.
And therefore... Since I did my best, and since all things work for the best for those who love God, even my defeat in the final is in some way something that is ordained by God for His own sometimes inscrutable purposes.
So the Olympics, by and large, it's been a marvelous display of performance, of excellence, really of human greatness.
But, when I listen to Sidney McLoughlin, I'm always reminded that there is a transcendent greatness in whose shadow we all humbly live.
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And if you like what you hear, leave a 5-star review to help Daily Wire provide a source that all Americans can wake up with and trust. Each episode will be short, with only enough room to fit the facts, so you can be sure your breakfast isn't being served with a side of someone else's agenda. Subscribe to Morning Wire as soon as you can.
Have you ever thought of writing a novel?
Producing some creative work of your own?
I think we're living at a time when conservatives need to build our own culture.
And I talked briefly at the end of last week about a very interesting book by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist.
It's called Letters to a Young Novelist.
And it talks about some of the essential features of Creating a novel, creating a work of fiction.
And I emphasized last time how novelists create, in a sense, their own world.
It's a fictional world, but they give it such verisimilitude, such a feeling of reality, that you almost feel that life is lived more intensely in that fictional world than in the ordinary world around you.
Now, I want to highlight some other aspects of the novel.
In this segment today, the first one is the issue of style, the style of the novel.
And here, Mario Vargas Llosa emphasizes the use of the perfect word, the so-called mojusti, just the right word for the occasion.
And the classic exponent of this was the writer Flaubert.
Flaubert believed that for a given sentence, There is, at critical times, the exact word and no other word will do.
And so Flaubert would sit for...
Minutes, hours, in some cases days, trying to find the word.
He'd go outside his chateau in France and he would read out his sentences to make sure that the words that he used were the perfect word, which gives you that sort of recognition.
Aha! This is the perfect word.
I got it. This is the word that fits the occasion infallibly, you might say.
That's part of style.
Now, part of style is also deciding on the narrator.
And by and large, novels have two types of narrators.
They have the so-called omniscient narrator, or you can almost call it the god's eye view.
And the omniscient narrator is able to migrate into the minds of different characters, is able to move from here to there.
Why? Because it's the omniscient point of view.
The omniscient narrator, in a sense, knows everything, at least knows everything about the story.
The other option is to use the first-person narrator.
And that's when you see this in movies as well as in novels, where one person is telling the story.
And of course, if you write a story or write a novel that way, then the only information you can provide is the information known or available to that one person.
You can't just jump out of the narrator and start telling things that that narrator couldn't possibly know.
The opening line of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice goes like this.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
One of the most famous lines, by the way, in English literature.
But the reason it's famous is, who's speaking here?
Is this Jane Austen?
No. Is it the omniscient narrator?
No. No.
It is actually the point of view of Mrs.
Bingley, who is the mother of the girls, and really a little bit of a silly or shallow individual.
She thinks that female lives exist for no purpose other than marriage, and that when men achieve success and come into a little bit of money, what else would they care about other than finding themselves a wife?
So, Jane Austen, who by the way never married herself, is being ironic here, and although ostensibly speaking in a kind of omniscient voice, is echoing a character whose views we are not expected to fully endorse, and in fact to view with some skepticism.
Now... Vargas Llosa goes on to talk about time, the important issue of time in the novel.
And we live in real time.
Time passes. But novels don't function in real time.
They function in what Vargas Llosa calls psychological time.
In other words, a concentrated moment could go on for 30 pages.
And then the novelist could skip over years, even decades, and just move to a different point in time.
So while the novelist is working, broadly speaking, within real time, what really matters in the novel is psychological time.
Vargas Llosa gives an example from a story by Jorge Luji Borges called the Secret Miracle. Now in this story a Czech poet is about to be executed and he prays to God and he asked God to give him one more year of life allowing him to complete a drama in verse that he had been planning to write all his life. He basically says God I need some more time to do this and interestingly God says
okay. He gives him the time.
He gives him the time.
He gives him one more year.
And so we go through the year.
This guy completes his ambitious work.
But when he is finished, we suddenly realize that God has granted him the year, not in real time.
But in psychological time, God has granted him the year in his own mind.
In his own mind, he was able to complete this work.
But all of this psychological time is compressed into just a few seconds.
It occurs from the time that he's standing there before the firing squad.
And the time when the order to fire is given and the bullets enter his body and he drops over dead.
And so we see here an amazing example of how, while we think we're reading this novel in real time, we're going through the year in which this Czech writer, Yarmil Tlodek, is finishing his great work.
But no, it's all occurring in a moment or two while he's standing facing his executioners.
And finally, Vargas Llosa talks about the importance of silence in the novel.
And by silence here he means not actual silence, empty pages or something like that, but rather the silence of information never given.
He gives a really telling example.
This is Hemingway's short story called The Killers.
And you have two outlaws which sawed off shotguns.
They come to a little lunchroom called Henry's in the middle of nowhere, and they wanna kill this big Swedish guy named Ole Anderson.
Nick Adams, who's one of Hemingway's narrators, warns this guy, Olanders and these killers are coming to kill him.
But interestingly, Anderson doesn't flee.
He doesn't run away. He doesn't call the police.
And so the story moves to its inexorable conclusion.
But A, you don't know exactly why these killers want to kill this guy.
And second of all, you don't know why this guy doesn't take the normal measures to save himself.
Hemingway does not answer these two critical questions.
But oddly enough, by not doing that, he makes the story even more interesting because you're constantly trying, based on what you do know, the information that is given in the story, to figure out what is the answer to the questions that are not answered in the story itself.
And so what we have here from a really one of the great writers of the 20th century, Mario Vargas Llosa, is an interesting, not just analysis of the novel, but some interesting real tips to those of us, you and me.
And when I was a kid, I always thought to myself, I'd love to write, you know, the great novel.
I didn't think of it as the great American novel because I was sitting in India, the great Indian novel.
But somehow my career pushed in the non-fiction direction.
Maybe one of these days I will write a novel, but if I do, I'm going to start by going back and reading Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa.
In May 2011, the White House leaked that SEAL Team 6 had killed Bin Laden.
And immediately, Al-Qaeda placed bounties on the heads of all Navy SEALs.
Just three months later, on August 6, 2011, a helicopter carrying many SEALs from that same elite unit was shot down in the Tangi Valley.
Now, 30 Americans died that day in the greatest single incident loss of life in the history of the Navy SEALs, U.S. Special Operations.
But huge questions remain.
Where was the black box?
And why was it missing? Did our restrictive rules of engagement contribute to this tragic outcome?
What really happened to SEAL Team 6? Learn what we know about the tragic mission.
Watch the provocative new film Fallen Angel. The full title is Fallen Angel.
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It's time finally for the mailbox.
Let's go to today's question.
Listen. Hello, Dinesh.
I have two questions.
Number one, were you and M. Night Shalaman separated at birth?
And number two, are you related to the famous American composer John Phillips D'Souza?
Thank you. Well, the answer to both questions is no.
Not John Philip D'Souza, by the way, but John Philip Sousa, the composer of all those great marches.
Not a relative. John Philip Sousa is probably a Brazilian or Portuguese descent.
That's, of course, where the name comes from.
Now, my name is, in fact, Sousa in the sense that the word D from D'Souza, it just means of.
I think originally it's D-E, Sousa.
It's shortened in my name to the apostrophe.
Now, turning to M. Night Shyamalan, it actually amusingly has happened to me, I think on two occasions in my life.
At one point I was boarding a plane in Europe and a guy comes up to me and he goes, night?
And I was like, that's an odd thing to say to someone, night?
I was like, what? He's like, Knight?
And then it hit me.
He thought I was M. Knight Shyamalan, the movie maker of The Sixth Sense and a bunch of other, well, not quite as good as The Sixth Sense movies.
So, it is a little humbling in life to be recognized but then confused with someone else.
All kinds of public figures have this experience.
I remember many years ago, Judge Bork was standing at an airport.
He told me this at lunch at the American Enterprise Institute.
And he goes, a man came up to him and said to him, Sir, we are heeding your warnings.
And Judge Bork was like, what warnings?
And then later it hit him that he was being confused with C. Everett Koop.
C. Everett Koop was the Surgeon General under Reagan.
By the way, both Bork and C. Everett Koop were kind of large, burly men with a kind of thick mustache and beard.
And by the way, C. Everett Koop, in the age of AIDS, had been giving all kinds of warnings about sexual abstinence and sex practices to be avoided by So as not to contract aid.
So apparently this guy came up to Judge Bork.
Sir, we are heeding your warnings.
And Judge Bork realized later that the comment was not intended for him.
It was actually intended for Mr.
Coop. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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