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Aug. 3, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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JUSTICE FOR SOME Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep145
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Adam Kinzinger says that there is no comparison between January 6th and the Antifa BLM riots.
And you know what? He's right.
The Antifa BLM riots were a lot worse.
Also, how the Capitol Police seem to be modeling themselves on the old KGB. Terrorism expert Jeffrey Atticott joins me to talk about U.S. foreign policy.
And finally, how the Supreme Court might in fact...
Uphold the Mississippi law restricting abortion without overruling Roe v.
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The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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I'm Dinesh D'Souza.
In any case, Adam Kinzinger insists that there is a huge difference between January 6th And the BLM and Antifa riots.
So, according to Kinzinger, the January 6th protesters are a real danger to democracy because they didn't just break the law, they reject the rule of law.
I want to probe this distinction at the outset because, first of all, it seems to me the January 6th protesters did not reject the rule of law.
They did not reject the idea that we're living in a democracy.
They don't reject the idea that the person with the most electoral votes should be in the White House.
None of that. On the contrary, their question was who did win the election?
Who did authentically get the majority of electoral votes?
That's not the same thing as rejecting the rule of law.
That is having doubts about whether the rule of law was in fact correctly or authentically applied in the 2020 election.
Now, let's turn to the Antifa BLM side of the equation.
Kinzinger says that they, quote, broke the law, but they don't reject the rule of law.
Now, my question is, how can you possibly say that?
You've got an organized movement across the country.
Remember, this is happening simultaneously in many different places.
For example, at Trump's inauguration in the aftermath of George Floyd.
This wasn't just spontaneous uprisings all over the place.
They were coordinated.
They were occurring at the same time.
And these are guys laying siege to a federal courthouse for months.
They overran multiple police stations.
They created autonomous zones.
And they basically declared that they could establish their own laws within those zones, immune from the surrounding law in places like Seattle.
So my question is, what...
What use of language is it to say that these people are not rejecting the rule of law?
They are claiming, are they not, to be a law unto themselves.
They're claiming that they use phrases like, by any means necessary.
What does that mean? If not, we're going to do whatever it takes and the law can be set aside.
Now, interestingly, there is a report, which has gotten very little media attention, by A group representing America's law enforcement officers.
This is called the Major City Chiefs Report, the MCC report.
And it looks closely at the Antifa BLM rights and gives us details about it that are very telling.
First of all, it points out...
You know, we hear often in the context of January 6th, oh, these people, you know, they attack democracy because they attack the Capitol building, as if the Capitol building is the sole symbol of American democracy.
But wait a minute. The Antifa BLM rioters attacked...
The Supreme Court.
Isn't the Supreme Court a symbol of democracy?
They also laid siege to the White House.
I mean, they burned St.
John's Church. Trump had to be evacuated to a bunker.
So why aren't the White House and the Supreme Court iconic public buildings that are equivalent symbols of democracy?
Let's remember, the January 6th protesters...
Did not bring in any guns.
They didn't set fire to the Capitol.
Their weapons, to the degree you could even talk about weapons, the FBI charging documents do talk about weapons, but what are their weapons?
Zip ties? A flagpole?
A baton? That's it.
In one case, a guy's walking stick is claimed to be, this is a weapon, it's a deadly weapon.
But contrast this with the 2020 riots by the left.
Which involved guns, in some cases automatic weapons, incendiary devices, lasers, paint bombs, fireworks all used to torch buildings, hurt police officers, and destroy significant parts of major cities.
Now, we hear about law enforcement officers who were injured on January 6th.
And of course, we saw the testimony of the officer.
Oh, this guy pushed me in the chest.
Oh, I'll have emotional scars for life.
But contrast this with the law enforcement officers.
First of all, Officer Dorn, who was killed in the Antifa BLM riots, and then more than 2,000 law enforcement officers injured during the 2020 riots.
A number of them were shot.
I mentioned David Dorn, who was brutally murdered while protecting his friend's shop.
The only person violently killed on January 6th was the unarmed protester Ashley Babbitt.
Now, the January 6th event the FBI is trying to prove was somehow coordinated, and there seemed to have been some small coordination, perhaps by groups like the Oath Keepers.
But look at the national coordination of the Antifa BLM riots.
Because remember that if you remember those riots, the peaceful protesters would show up in the afternoon while the media was there.
Oh, this is what CNN goes, mostly peaceful protests.
But then they would tactically retreat as the sun began to set.
Why?
Because the violent protesters could then come out at night, bricks would be strategically available to them.
They could smash things, they could threaten people, they could pull them out of cars, they could attack shopkeepers and business owners.
So this was organized, coordinated violence.
The simple truth is that the Antifa BLM rioters did far more damage, hurt far more people, and performed far more violence than January 6th.
It wasn't even close.
Let's remember that Kamala Harris tried to raise bail money for these people.
They were supported by powerful elements in the Democratic Party.
Contrast this with the relative silence of the GOP, with one or two exceptions, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz.
The GOP in general has offered no support to the January 6th defendants.
And finally, look at the outcomes.
It's catch and release with the Antifa and BLM riders.
The normal fine for a BLM rider, and this is for doing real violence, $50.
And this leads me to my conclusion.
If you want to give a fair, if Lady Justice truly is blind, she's not.
We're living in a society with justice for some, not justice for all.
But if you wanted to apply an equal scale of justice, here's what we do.
Take all the January 6th protesters who did not commit actual direct violence and give them a $50 fine and let them go.
That would actually be a fair penalty, fair in this case, measured by what penalty was meted out to people who did far worse.
We want to live in a society where justice is applied evenly, and this is the way to do it.
The Atlantic Monthly claims that Mike Lindell is trying to destroy democracy, and he just might do it.
Well, how's he going to destroy democracy?
Evidently by fostering discussion.
Here's Mike's latest listen.
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But if you really want to help Mike and me destroy democracy, make sure to use promo code DINESH. What's going on with the Capitol Police and January 6th?
Two little data points jump out at me.
The first one is Capitol Hill police officers committing suicide.
Now, why would they do that?
The left, of course, automatically assumes, without, by the way, a shred of evidence, that these are people who are just emotionally traumatized by the violent sedition of January 6th, and so, six months later, they're like, okay, that's it, I'm out of here.
That's one explanation, but a more plausible explanation, I think, is that some of these Capitol Police officers are pretty conservative.
Policemen in general tend to be.
And these are people who have been, ever since January 6th, hounded by Pelosi and by the left and by their own leaders for their own reasons to lie, to create a false narrative, to make something of January 6th that it really wasn't, and to destroy the lives of all the people who were involved in January 6th.
And so what's happening is that these Capitol Police officers are beginning to feel a pang of conscience.
They're beginning to feel, wow, do I want to participate as a police officer dedicated to upholding the rule of law in this scandalous depredation of law, in this police state operation that is apparently authorized by the Speaker of the House?
Now, what makes me think that we are looking at a kind of police state operation, or let's call it Nancy Pelosi's private militia?
Well, I've been very interested in the way that Pelosi has been empowering the Capitol Police and trying to provide funding for them, by the way.
There's a bill that's passed the House very narrowly, hasn't passed yet the Senate, to give the Capitol Police all kinds of money and authorization to do things that they previously haven't.
Recently, Matt Gaetz made an observation in one of his talks.
He said, quote, Very good question.
Here's the answer for it.
The Capitol Police are basically trying to expand their operations nationwide.
They're trying to get the idea, or promote the idea, this is the leadership in league with Pelosi, that we've got to prevent an event like January 6th, and to do that, we've got to monitor extremist behavior across the country.
Well, how do we do that?
The Capitol Police now are using army surveillance gear to monitor Americans and, quote, identify emerging threats.
Now, wait a minute.
Aren't the Capitol Police supposed to protect the Capitol?
And don't we have another organization?
Ever heard of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that is supposed to monitor threats on a nationwide level?
Since when does a local police turn into a national kind of militia, empowered to do all kinds of things that...
It never did before, and as we will see, without oversight.
So the Capitol Police now will start using Army surveillance equipment to monitor Americans.
They're turning the force into, quote, an intelligence-based protective agency.
Intelligence-based. What do they mean?
They've taken possession of eight of these so-called, they're called PSSG systems, Persistent Surveillance Systems.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has approved this.
And so they're able to do high-definition surveillance.
Now, by the way, this is technology that came out of the military.
This is technology that was used by the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was used to observe large areas and monitor them day and night, 24 hours a day.
So, according to the Capitol Police, this kind of surveillance, which they call, quote, state-of-the-art surveillance, is intended to, quote, enhance the ability to detect and monitor threat activity.
As if to say, we now need to turn the kind of attention that we've been giving to the Taliban and to ISIS onto fellow Americans.
And by the way, the Capitol Police are doing it.
Now, normally when federal agencies like the FBI undertake this kind of activity, they're part of the executive branch.
And so they're subject to freedom of information requests.
They're subject to certain types of court oversight to make sure that they are carrying out their functions within the bounds of the law.
But here's the difference. The Capitol Police is not bound by any of this.
They don't have to respond to FOIA, Freedom of Information Act requests.
They're not under the same kind of court oversight.
Why? Because they are a branch of the legislature.
So it's not possible for a court to say you're breaking the law.
Why? Because the legislature, which is to say under the supervision of Nancy Pelosi, makes the law.
So since the Capitol Police are directly accountable to the legislature, i.e.
to the Speaker of the House, I'm quoting here from a report that was put out by Roll Call last summer.
It says, So what we have here is a rogue agency.
Rogue in the sense that it operates at the behest of Pelosi.
It's very clear that all those lying officers that came up there and said, Oh, there was a crowd shouting racial slogans at me.
A complete made-up lie.
But these lies were scripted.
You could even see one of the officers who basically could hardly read English.
He was kind of talking at the fourth grade level, but he was...
He was reading these beautifully scripted sentences because obviously they were just put in front of him and they said, basically, read this.
So you have a pathetic, embarrassing organization, but nevertheless one that because of the power that is being given to it by the government and by Pelosi is also extremely dangerous.
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Again, text Dinesh to 484848.
I want to talk in this segment about a new shift of focus at NPR. NPR is National Public Radio.
I'm not a regular listener to National Public Radio.
I've been on a number of their shows in the past, mostly from my earlier books, Illiberal Education and The End of Racism.
Whenever I am switching the radio channels and I come across NPR, I have to laugh because, you know, NPR has a signature style.
And the signature style is a kind of erudite obscurity.
An erudite obscurity that is completely marinated in identity politics.
So I want to do my little rendition of a few NPR shows.
Today, the commentators always speak extremely slowly.
Today, on all things considered, we will follow the journey of a one-legged trans man, a Native American, as he travels through the Southwest.
Or... Today on Fresh Air, an indigenous man in the jungles of Brazil has developed a delicious beverage using his own urine.
Our own Nancy Snodgrass samples the beverage and explains why it's not only delicious, it's very good for you.
Today on Morning Edition...
Should the U.S. Army deploy gay platoons marching behind the rainbow flag, we'll talk to a professor of gay studies at Bowdoin College.
This is NPR. This is NPR! NPR has apparently decided to make explicit what a lot of us have known for a long time.
They're absolutely going full on left wing.
They're now going to let their own journalists participate in partisan left wing activist demonstrations.
Wow. So, in other words, NPR is going nakedly partisan.
And, well, first of all, this should not be permitted for the simple reason that NPR is taxpayer-funded.
This is not the same thing as CNN going fully partisan, because NPR gets government dollars.
It's part of the great shame of the GOP that the GOP has, at times, protested the activism of NPR, but never done anything about it, never defunded this agency.
Which it should do, but evidently it's not willing to do it, and I'm not even really quite sure why.
Now, the old NPR policy was really simple, and probably a standard policy that reflected journalism in general.
Its writers and staffers may not participate in marches and rallies involving causes or issues that NPR covers, nor should they sign petitions or otherwise lend their name to such causes or contribute money to them.
Pretty obvious. Even if the reporter has politics, kind of keep it to yourself.
Why? Because we have a news organization that's trying to cover issues and cover them from different angles and cover both sides.
But all of this, which reflects the old journalism, is now totally out the window.
NPR has basically decided to change this policy, and I'm now going to read the new policy.
NPR editorial staff may express support for democratic civic values that are core to NPR's work.
This is a kind of a euphemism for anything to the left is okay, such as, but not limited to, the freedom and dignity of human beings, the right of a free and independent press, the right to thrive in a society without facing discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, disability, blah, blah, blah. So clearly, identity politics is being carved out here as a permissible zone for NPR activism.
Now, you might expect that there are, you know, ethical societies, a society of professional journalists.
You think they would be up in arms about it.
But see, this is the time we're living in where not only is the press corrupted, but the watchdog agencies, the journalism schools that feed the press are supposed to keep an eye on the press.
They've been corrupted, too.
they too approve of these kinds of changes and in fact they themselves engage in the same kind of naked partisanship. So this to me is just a kind of corroboration of how far we've come.
Even from a decade or two ago when the press, although left, tried to maintain a modicum of balance, tried to deny that it was nakedly partisan.
Now it's clear, and this latest policy shift in NPR only confirms it, that we are dealing with a one-sided government agency in which some Americans are favored, some causes are elevated, and the rest of us, including quite clearly you and me, are the enemy. We've been so conditioned by our healthcare system to wait until we are sick before we work on our health.
Oftentimes we wait until it's too late and the damage has been done.
So you've got to be smart, like me and Debbie.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. Welcome to the podcast a real expert on terrorism and also on American foreign policy.
This is Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Atticott.
He's a professor of law.
He's a director of the Center for Terrorism Law.
For a good bit of his career, he was a senior legal advisor to the U.S. Army Special Forces.
He's testified multiple times before Congress.
He's been all over the media.
He's a prolific author who's written more books and monographs and articles than I can count.
His latest, Global and National Security Law, assessing the war on terror.
Thank you very much, Jeffrey.
Thank you for joining us.
Really appreciate you coming on the podcast.
You know, Debbie and I were watching, this is just a couple weeks ago, the really terrific film Fallen Angel.
And right toward the end of the movie, there's Jeffrey Atticott.
You were interviewed in the movie.
So I thought I'd start by asking you about...
I mean, that whole thing was just so bizarre and so intriguing.
The very same SEAL team that had dispatched bin Laden is conducting an operation.
Mysteriously, it appears to have veered off course...
Seems to have been in the air longer than it was supposed to.
And what was supposed to be a very brief operation becomes the catastrophe in which all these Navy SEALs and some other military guys, a couple of Afghan troops, are killed.
A disastrous event for the SEALs.
Talk a little bit about that.
Is there anything new that we know about that?
And will we ever know what really happened there?
Well, it's an outstanding film, and I encourage everybody to see it.
It's called Fallen Angel.
It happened 10 years ago.
I mean, time flies, but as you indicated, SEAL Team 6 just three months earlier had killed Osama bin Laden.
Now they're in a foreign operating base just south of Kabul, and they had a mission along with some Army Rangers to capture a top Taliban leader in a particular area, and the Rangers went on one side of the valley, the The Navy SEALs got in a Chinook, and there were 38 people in that Chinook that day, and they were coming in from the other side about 2 o'clock in the morning.
And the greatest loss of special forces in our history occurred at that time when we believe that an RPG took the...
The helicopter and all lives were lost.
There's a lot of unanswered questions, as you indicated, about what really happened.
That's what this film's about.
I did, you know, appear in the film as a subject matter expert on rules of engagement because I can speak to that.
The rest of the issues about the forensics and why were the bodies, you know, not brought back as they should have been?
Why were they cremated? The missing black box?
Was there one? These are all questions that are in that movie.
It's a fantastic movie.
Very powerful. But, you know, from my perspective, we had an opportunity because we had a C-130 gunship that was above the valley at that time.
This is at night. But they had eyes on the target of some of the bad guys that were fleeing down the valley.
These are enemy combatants.
Under the law of war, you have every right to kill them.
However, because of the rules of engagement, now rules of engagement are things that we self-layer on top of the laws of war.
They're political rules, basically.
People say, well, they're the military rules of engagement.
I guarantee you, nobody in the military wants to operate on the rules of engagement that restrict their ability to use lawful violence against the enemy.
So these are politically imposed.
But at that time, the rules required that the gunship get permission from higher headquarters to shoot at the enemy on the ground.
As unbelievable as that sounds, that's what they had to do.
permission was denied.
And therefore, the same group that they could have killed, apparently is the same individuals that shot that helic that Chinook out of the sky killing 38 people.
The majority of them Navy SEALs from SEAL Team six. So you go the what ifs, you know, what if we were able to kill those individuals in the law of war? Would that have occurred? My opinion? No, it would not have occurred because they would not be there to kill them if we kill them first.
You made a critical distinction I want to highlight and that is between the laws of war, which are international, I believe with the roots going back to early theoreticians in the Middle Ages and subsequently the idea, for example, that, you know, you can't deliberately target large numbers of civilians and vaporize them.
I mean, laws of humanity that are codified into the laws of war.
But you're saying that that is completely different from It seems like going back to the Vietnam War, we can think of various ways in which essentially the U.S. has fought wars by tying one hand behind its own back, right?
In other words, you can't cross the demilitarized zone in Vietnam.
Going on to Afghanistan and Iraq, you have to meet these conditions before you can fire back.
I mean, what Why would permission have been denied in this case?
Do we know? Well, you're very correct about the origin of the law of war.
They're rooted in moral issues, obviously.
They're rooted in practical issues.
You can go all the way back to the Bible, the rules of engagement, where the Hebrews are told not to cut down trees when you besiege a city, etc., etc.
So we have codified those, if you correctly indicated, in the law in our...
The laws of war have been codified.
They're adopted by all civilized nations.
It's the behavior that you use.
The rules of engagement are strictly political ideas, and they really got their start in the Korean War, but they went into what I call supercilious rules of engagement where A great analogy.
You tie one hand behind the back of your fighters and tell them to go out and do your job, and that's no way to win a war.
I think the premise is that somehow individuals have a disorientation to reality about how do you win a war.
They think that you win a war by being nice to the enemy, and they'll return the favor and be nice to you.
We want to win the hearts and the minds of the civilians and those types of issues.
The more reasonable approach to the law of war, and again, this is in Catholic justice, Just law theory is that you get the war over as quickly as possible.
Now, you don't target civilians in the law of war, you target the enemy.
But if you're going to win a war, you got to do three things.
You got to identify the enemy, identify their center of gravity, and kill them.
That's how you win a war.
Otherwise, as we've seen in Afghanistan, we've been there for 20 years and have not won the war.
When we come back, I want to ask Jeffrey Atticott about some of the wider issues affecting U.S. foreign policy, and in particular, what is the single greatest threat facing America in the world today?
We'll be back. You know, I was just talking about this with terrorism expert Jeffrey Atticott, and so you know all about it already.
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, 10 years ago, a helicopter carrying many SEALs from that same elite unit was shot down in Tangi Valley, Afghanistan, with no survivors.
Thirty 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, which I talked about with Atticott, contribute to this tragic outcome?
What really happened to SEAL Team 6?
Now, learn what we know about the tragic mission.
Watch the provocative new film, Fallen Angel.
The full title of the movie, Fallen Angel Call Sign Extortion 17.
The movie is showing only on SalemNow.com.
So the movie is called Fallen Angel Call Sign Extortion 17.
Go to SalemNow.com.
That's S-A-L-E-M-N-O-W.com and watch the movie Fallen Angel.
I'm back with international terrorism expert Jeffrey Atticott.
Jeffrey, let me start by asking you just to widen the scope of our discussion here.
We've been talking about Fallen Angel and SEAL Team 6.
We live in a dangerous world, and I think you made the point that Americans can sometimes be naive about that.
We think that other people are like us.
We think that they look at the world the way we do.
We've got Russia with an aggressive Putin at its head, a bad guy.
We've got China with Xi Jinping and a communist regime that stretches across a billion people.
We've got radical Islam, which has been noted for its willingness to stop at nothing.
We've got Iran greedily trying to acquire a nuclear weapon.
Here's my question. Looking at this landscape of threats, which is the single greatest threat facing America today?
I would probably have to go with China, because basically when somebody tells you on the world stage that they're going to punch you in the nose, you've got to pay attention.
They're doing a lot of saber-raveling, as we say in the military, and therefore they demand scrutiny.
Now China traditionally has kind of looked inside, but what we see in the last 30 years is they're starting to go outside.
And that's very troubling because they are a communist country.
There is no election for a new president.
He's going to be there for life.
And that's your first clue that you've got some issues here about democracy and freedom of movement.
They're building up their military, and they've made many boasts about what they want to do.
But you're right. We have a lot of threats across the globe.
One way to deal with that, in my opinion, is we can't fight everything at the same time.
But if the world understands that you are willing to use lawful violence, that will keep the other bad guys in their cages.
We've seen this under the Trump administration.
He didn't fight everybody at the same time, but he selected his targets.
For example, ISIS. He got rid of the rules of engagement.
We destroyed ISIS off the face of the planet.
It took him about seven months.
But the rest of the country, the rest of the bad guys in the world, they kind of said, whoa.
And that's what you want to do. This is called deterrence under international law.
You want to have deterrence work for you instead of trying to fight every fight at the same time.
You can't do it. Now, the Chinese, in some ways, I see their communist rule as obviously a break from ancient Chinese practice.
But also the Chinese historically have called themselves the Middle Kingdom.
They believe that they were at the center of the universe.
They believe that their relationship to other countries should be defined not by mutuality, but by tribute.
Other countries basically show up in the Chinese court.
They bow down. They pay tribute.
They accept the superiority of China.
I don't think the Chinese Communist Party has departed from that model.
They realize that they were in too weak a position to be able to restore that.
But would you agree that that's the Chinese goal?
In other words, not merely to be the big boy in the Asian neighborhood, but to supplant the United States as the world's leading superpower.
Do you think that's where they want to go?
That's what our intelligence community is telling us.
I mean, both in this administration and the previous administration, they recognize that they want to exert greater influence, particularly in the Asian theater, and then across the globe.
So I just listen to what people are telling me.
I don't have to extrapolate from my own ideas.
I just say, okay, what are you showing us?
What are you telling us? And the sad part about it is they have rebuilt Courtesy of the United States of America, because one of the greatest transfers of wealth in human history has been from our country in the last 30 years to China.
And what they cannot, you know, acquire by trade, they've acquired by other means.
And they have shown a willingness to do what it takes to advance their interests.
And so they're truly a nationalist type of mentality with a goal towards looking towards the international screen as much as they possibly can.
Is part of the solution for the United States to cement our alliances with Korea, Japan, India, sort of the other important countries in the region, so that together there can be some sort of a meaningful check on China?
Well, we do have a treaty already with the nations that have like goals in our mind that have, you know, striving towards democracy.
The question is, will we exert our blood and treasure to back up that treaty should the call come?
And the call, of course, you know what I'm talking about, Taiwan.
Because they made no bones about it that they want to take Taiwan as they did with Hong Kong and, you know, bring it back into the fold.
Will we stand up to China if they start to do that?
And that's an open question right now.
Well, isn't it an even more open question under the Biden administration?
I mean, the Biden administration has been not only praising China, talking about the fact, I think Biden said before he became president, that China was really not a threat.
Now, he's changed his right a little bit since he's been in the Oval Office.
But this is also a guy whose family has gotten a whole lot of money from China.
So I don't want to imply that his policy is entirely driven by that.
But, I mean, you're going to be a little soft in a country when tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the coffers of the Chinese into your son's bank account.
Well, you know, again, it's an issue of what is our policy, and we don't seem to have one.
It's almost like we're kind of going from day to day to day to see what we're going to do.
Under the previous administration, he made it very clear that we're going to act in our best interest And he took steps, President Trump took steps, whether you like him or not, to force China into a position that they have not seen for decades.
And that is, you know, we're going to deal with you across an open playing field.
No longer will you have the advantage.
And so we don't, I just don't know what the direction is in this administration.
I think if you ask some of their top officials, they'll give you the usual double talk, but they don't seem to know either.
For the Republicans going forward, do you think that the Trump approach, which was actually to be very hesitant to get involved in a new war, but at the same time, as you said, was willing to pulverize a group like ISIS when needed to sort of send a strong message, is that the right balance in US foreign policy between the twin poles of isolationism and interventionism?
In other words, It's a prudent interventionism that doesn't get embroiled in conflicts that last forever, that you can't really win or that you don't end up winning, but rather you pick your fights and you make sure you end them.
Exactly. I mean, that's what war is about.
And the tragedy in Afghanistan cost us 2,600 American lives and thousands and thousands of people maimed and wounded.
And 20 years later, everybody knows what will happen.
Whether we say another 20 years or leave tomorrow, we all know what's going to happen.
And so the job of the military is, again, to win a war.
Afghanistan, we won the war right after 9-11.
We drove the Taliban out of power.
We closed down the Al-Qaeda training camps.
And my opinion, we should have left then.
Now, the counterargument is, well, if you leave, they're just going to come back in five years.
Well, then we go back in five years and kill them again.
That's what life, that's reality.
You can't say that this is going to be the last war.
We'll never have another war. There's always another war.
So the purpose of the military, and that's what Trump understood, when he destroyed ISIS, the question was, do we stay?
Do we do this? He said, no, no long hot showers, to use a metaphor.
We'll help you turn on the lights and the power, but we're leaving.
And if we have to come back in five or ten years, then we'll come back in five and ten years and do what we've got to do.
That sends a strong deterrence message to the rest of the world.
That's how I would like to see foreign policy operated, with deterrence.
The Soviet Union collapsed without us firing a single bullet.
And how did that happen?
Because people look at this country, as you know, Denise, we're the best country the world has ever seen.
And people that criticize the United States, yes, nothing's perfect.
But I invite them to go to almost any other country on the planet and try living there for a while.
Wow, this is fascinating. Thank you, Jeffrey Atticott.
This has been great. We've got to have you back to go to dive some more deeply.
I mean, I meant to talk to you about Afghanistan, about radical Islam.
We're going to have to save that for another time.
Thank you very much. Thanks, Denise.
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The Mississippi abortion case comes before the Supreme Court in October.
It's a few months away.
And, of course, the court will hear it.
Each side will get 30 minutes to make its argument, and then they will render a decision.
That's probably going to come...
Well, it could come as early as the end of the year, but it might even come as late as January.
So, all of this is developing slowly, but, of course, it is a case of the highest importance.
Now... Debbie and I talk about this sometimes.
How is the court likely to rule?
Not how we want it to rule.
We would like the court to do what Mississippi says, to affirm the Mississippi law, to strike down Roe v.
Wade, to overrule Doe v.
Bolton, in fact, even to overrule the Casey decision, which is built on that flawed, fatally flawed foundation.
The Roe decision, by the way, is one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history.
It's the worst of the 20th century by far.
And is in the same league as Plessy v.
Ferguson, the decision that upheld segregation toward the end of the 19th century, and the Dred Scott decision earlier in that century, which was essentially an affirmation of slavery and a declaration that blacks had no rights, that whites were bound to respect.
Now... I went back to the Roe decision because it seems to me that what the Supreme Court might try to do, and I'm thinking here of the middle wing of the court.
In other words, not Clarence Thomas, not Alito, and not even Gorsuch, but perhaps Anthony Kennedy, perhaps Kavanaugh, perhaps Amy Coney Barrett, although this would be a huge disappointment.
Perhaps this middle faction of the court, which is the swing vote of the court, We'll want to uphold the Mississippi law and thus permit regulation, state regulation of abortion beyond 15 weeks, but at the same time do it in a way that doesn't overturn Roe vs.
Wade. And my question is, is there a way to do that?
Because it might seem that, wait a minute, if you uphold the Mississippi law, it doesn't automatically mean that Roe vs.
Wade goes down. But no, it actually does not mean that.
There is a way for the court to do it.
And I want to spell out that way, because it seems to me that it is not only possible, but maybe even probable, that the court will consider, at least seriously consider, this option.
So let's go back. I printed out the decision itself.
This is Justice Harry Blackmun, a 7-2 decision in row.
And I read carefully his opinion.
And what he says, after making some preposterous assertions that the right to privacy is somehow disguised, it's presented in a kind of penumbra, he says, of the Constitution, he then considers the question about whether or not the fetus has any rights.
Or to put it slightly differently, does the state...
Have an interest in regulating potential or unborn life that is going to develop into human beings.
Does the state have the right to do that?
And Justice Blackmun concludes, yes.
The state does have a right to do that, but that right only kicks in or becomes effective at a certain point.
Now, what is that point?
According to Blackmun, and this was the ruling in Roe, The woman has a virtually absolute right to have an abortion prior to viability.
Now viability is very clearly defined.
It's defined as, quote, the capability of meaningful life outside the mother's womb.
So once the fetus can, let's say, be put into an incubator, survive outside the mother, is not, in that sense, fully dependent on the mother, according to Blackmun, there is a state interest in regulation.
But is that state interest...
And the answer again is yes.
The state can regulate the abortion and even restrict it with one proviso.
And I'm now going to read that proviso.
If the state is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to prescribe, which means prohibit, abortion during that period, except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.
So that's the great kind of exception.
Which is to say, as long as it is necessary, the abortion is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother, the state cannot regulate it, even in the later stages.
Now, this exception has been ruthlessly exploited by subsequent court decisions and, in practice, Because essentially all the mother has to say is, well, you know, this is making me feel bad.
It's affecting my health. It's affecting my emotional health.
So even though I believe that in Roe, Blackman's decision was intended to mean if your life or your health are not gravely endangered...
The state can regulate abortion post-viability, even though I think that's what Roe meant to say.
Nevertheless, Roe has been interpreted in multiple decisions to render this health of the mother so expansive that a woman can, in effect, get an abortion for any reason just about until the ninth month of pregnancy.
This means that the Supreme Court now can reinterpret the meaning of health of the mother and say, wait a minute, we are going back to the original meaning of Roe vs.
Wade. Unless the mother's health or life are gravely endangered in a medical sense, Not in a kind of whimsical, fanciful, this is the way I feel, some vague emotional invocation of discomfort, no.
But rather, if your health is not mortally and gravely endangered, then states can regulate abortion post-viability.
Now, viability currently is closer to 21 weeks, not 15 weeks.
And so the court would have to figure out how to deal with the viability issue as specified in Roe.
But it's also a fact that technology is moving viability much earlier.
Viability, even at the time of Roe, was much later than it is now.
And it's probably going to move at least a couple of weeks earlier over the next several years.
So this is a way, in my opinion, that the Supreme Court, if it wants to, can in fact uphold the Mississippi law, uphold restrictions on abortion, enable restrictions on abortion by other states, while at the same time keeping Roe v.
Wade, intact.
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It was a good day at the Olympics yesterday.
In fact, the last couple of days.
Not only because of the victories.
There were some tremendous victories by American athletes.
America is now leading in the medal count.
In the gold medal count, China is leading by a couple.
So it's close. But the U.S. doesn't have the dominance that it used to, where it was generally way out in front on the medal counts, including the gold medals.
But I was actually happy that the United States lost a couple of medals.
Gwen Berry, the hammer thrower, who said that if she got on the medal stand, she was going to do a social justice protest.
I talked about this yesterday.
Well, I'm happy to report Gwen Berry came in 11th.
To have her throw.
She's not headed for the podium.
She'll have to do her protest kind of at home.
And then I was really happy that the U.S. women's soccer team...
By the way, these are the kneelers.
Look at the team. The whole team is kneeling.
Like, two women are standing.
And I, of course...
I mean, I stand with them.
But Megan Rapinoe was like, you know, we lost.
Canada beat the United States.
Apparently, the United States was highly favored.
But I was really happy to see the Canadians kick that penalty goal.
And there's a guy on social media, when I posted this, he goes, Don't you?
Why don't you support the United States?
And I'm like, I do support the United States.
But you know what? Megan Rapinoe doesn't.
She takes a knee for the anthem.
She's the one who's the anti-American.
So the reason I'm actually supporting Canada is because the Canadians, well, I mean, they're not American, but at least they're not anti-American.
So I'll take the non-Americans over the anti-Americans.
Now... I want to talk in this episode about the original Olympic Games.
Kind of interesting because the Olympic Games are really old.
They started in ancient Greece.
In fact, they're dated back to 775 BC. Wow.
They were held every four years.
Generally, it was kind of a religious event, a festival honoring Zeus.
And the reason that they are called the Olympic Games is that they were originally held in Olympia, which is on the coast of southern Greece.
A couple of things about the Games that are really interesting, I think.
There was no original marathon in the Olympic Games.
Kind of odd, it may seem, because we think of the marathon as something that is very...
It's attached to Greece.
But the marathon was added later in 1896, the Modern Games, and it was added to commemorate a famous run by Pheidippides, who was an ancient Greek, who apparently ran 140 miles all the way to Sparta to warn the Greeks that the Persians were landing, that the Persians were attacking Greece.
And this is described by the historian Herodotus.
So the marathon is kind of in honor of that ancient race.
Interestingly, the ancient Olympics in Greece were naked.
What? Well, first of all, it's the men.
Women didn't really compete.
There were a few women as spectators.
But it was all the men, and the men competed naked.
I mean, this is very difficult for me to envision.
I mean, I'm just thinking about even when you're not racing, you're kind of...
In the wings.
I mean, what a way to hang out.
Literally. And then there were 40,000 spectators typically watching.
They packed the stadium watching this.
By the way, if you got a false start on the track...
Corporal punishment. You were whipped.
Because the Greeks took a very serious view.
It's not just disqualification.
Public whipping. Part of the Olympics in the ancient days was the sacrifice of a hundred oxen.
Remember this, as I said, was a religious festival.
This was a mass slaughter of the oxen at the altar of Zeus.
And this was done when the sporting events were over.
Interestingly, you look at the events in the old Greek Olympics and they're similar to what we have now.
There were a bunch of foot races, both short distance and long distance.
There was wrestling, boxing, a chariot race, which we don't have now, obviously.
A pentathlon, which included jumping, discus, javelin, and wrestling.
So... Eventually, the Greeks were overrun by the Roman Empire, and the Romans continued the games for a little while, but they sort of corrupted them because, I mean, think of the Emperor Nero and the chariot races.
They became a public debauchery, not really a genuine competition.
In fact, at one point, Nero himself entered an Olympic race, and he lost.
He fell out of the chariot, but then he declared himself the winner.
Why? Because he was the emperor.
So, the Games became discredited, and when the Christians essentially took over the Roman Empire, through the conversion of Constantine starting in the 4th century, the Emperor Theodosius, who was a Christian, basically called an end to the Olympic Games.
The Olympic Games were then revived in 1896.
The big Olympics, the first truly international Olympics, was the 1924 Olympics in Paris.
In fact, that is the Olympics memorialized in the film, Chariots of Fire.
And so we have this beautiful, competitive event occurring worldwide.
And I think these little ugly displays of anti-patriotism, which, by the way, we don't see in other countries, but we regrettably do see in the United States.
And I think when we do see them, our remedy is simply to cheer for the other side.
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