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Aug. 11, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza

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MEET ASHLI BABBITT'S MOM Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep151

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	Who is Ashley Babbitt?
	The left has demonized her as an insurgent, a domestic terrorist.
	I'll be doing an exclusive interview with Ashley Babbitt's mom, Mickey.
	Also coming up, Governor Cuomo has a big idea to salvage his reputation.
	I'll explain. And why schools are getting rid of academic standards to help, help, minorities.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
	The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
	We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
	This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
	Why? Because this guy could not be more arrogant.
	He thought he was completely secure.
	He thought that because he's a Democrat, he can get away with it.
	Look at Joe Biden.
	That's a guy who's like, All these little girls, he gets away with it.
	Look at Bill Clinton, he's been getting away with it for decades with his wife as his protector.
	So I think that Andrew Cuomo thought that he had, let's just call it a progressive pass.
	And not only that, but he was feeling really great about himself because he was able to recruit LGBTQ and, you know, Me Too activists.
	And of course, you know, he recognized that these people are total frauds.
	They're posing as, oh, we're going to be looking out for the interests of women.
	Oh, yeah, Cuomo. What do you want us to do?
	You want us to get the file?
	You want us to leak the file to the media?
	You want us to crucify the accuser?
	Great! We'll do it.
	Just make sure. Just remember, we did you a big favor.
	You've got to do us one back when we call upon you.
	So, this is the politics at the dirtiest level that is being played with people who are posturing and claiming in public to be one thing, whereas behind the scenes, they're not only something different, they're the exact opposite.
	So Cuomo thought, I've got this system sewn up.
	I've got this all figured out.
	But to his dismay, the cards all came crumbling down.
	The walls collapsed around him.
	His position became untenable.
	Even the Democrats were doing their best to cover for him.
	I mean, let's remember, this is a guy that CNN was touting.
	CNN, by the way, has a horrible record.
	They started touting, Avenatti!
	Avenatti is the new Democratic presidential candidate.
	We're all behind Avenatti!
	Here's Avenatti sitting in prison, you know, worried about picking up the soap.
	And now it's like, oh, now it's Andrew Cuomo.
	He's our next guy. It's not Avenatti, but it's this guy.
	This guy's got talent, man.
	And of course, it was Cuomo's own brother there, his cheerleader.
	Not only his cheerleader, but as we now know, his co-conspirator.
	He's another guy who's giving media advice to Cuobo.
	Hey, bro, I got a couple of ideas how you can make these women look bad.
	Put the blame on them. Besides, take all the stuff you've done, all the really bad stuff.
	Make it sound really normal, really casual.
	No big deal. Everybody does it.
	You know, we hug our grandmas a lot.
	It's a Sicilian thing.
	So this is Chris Cuobo.
	And of course, CNN is obviously, you know, okay with all this, condoning it or letting it be.
	Brian Stelter was recently on TV, he's like, you know, yes, there's some discussion, there's a variety of viewpoints on CNN about the propriety of Chris Cuomo's conduct.
	Yeah, I'm sure there's also a variety of viewpoints on a lot of other things.
	Now, the thing about Cuomo is this.
	The left has to try to salvage something out of this.
	And what they're trying to salvage is, well, the lesson of the Andrew Cuomo affair, affairs, I guess I should say, is that Democrats discipline their own, but Republicans don't.
	Oh, really? The simple truth is, by and large, in the Republican Party, if you have a single offense, obviously it has to be a proven offense.
	Because the Democrats love to say, you know, well, look at Kavanaugh, you know, look at Trump.
	Well, first of all, you have to remember that with Trump, you had all these accusations, but the accusations, by and large, were coming by from political enemies who had a stated agenda.
	Oh, yeah, you know, Trump pushed me into the dressing room in Bloomingdale's.
	Yeah, the likelihood of that.
	So, ridiculously implausible nonsense.
	But here, in the case of Cuomo, you had 11 credible accusers.
	Let's remember that these were Democrats.
	These are people who worked for Cuomo.
	These are people who are still on Cuomo's side politically.
	And this is what makes their testimony, which corroborates each other's testimony, credible.
	With Kavanaugh, you have a single accuser, an ancient accusation with a political motive.
	In fact, Kavanaugh, Deborah Katz, who was Christine Blasifo's attorney, says, you know, Christine was very concerned about Roe v.
	Wade. That's partly why she came forward.
	So in those cases, the reason that the Republicans didn't go for those accusations is because they were literally unbelievable, which is to say they were not to be believed.
	So, Cuomo's case is, in that sense, a done deal, a fait accompli, a proven accusation or accusations.
	No one doubts them.
	Even Cuomo's defenders have got to say, well, yeah, he did do these things.
	And so the man is now headed for a well-deserved anonymity.
	I'm hoping that at the end of the day, his whole political career will be erased and people will essentially say, remember Hamida is a really bad guy, or they'll just say when his name comes up over some years, Andrew Hu.
	Mike Lindell's cyber symposium is in full swing, and he's unfurling all kinds of information he wants you to know about.
	Here's Mike talking about it.
	Listen. I'm having a cyber symposium on August 10th, 11th, and 12th.
	This historical event will be live streamed 72 hours straight on my new platform, frankspeech.com.
	So, Mike wants you to know, if you go on frankspeech.com, you'll get all kinds of stuff you need to know, but you'll also get all kinds of specials on MyPillow products.
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	Make sure you use promo code DINESH. We've seen the first round of hearings by the commission set up by Pelosi on January 6th.
	And these hearings on the Democratic side were defined by rhetoric about the violence of the Trump supporters.
	I'm just quoting now from Chairman Bernie Thompson, Mississippi Democrat.
	And he talks, he says, I'm going to get to the, quote, the facts of what happened on January 6th.
	He says this was, quote, a scene of violence in the citadel of democracy.
	Now, the one violence that none of the Democrats brought up that was conspicuously absent from the hearing was the shooting, the lethal shooting, the killing of Ashley Babbitt by a Capitol police officer.
	Now, why was this largely unmentioned?
	And the reason is really simple.
	Because there really are only two possibilities.
	The first is, Ashley Babbitt was a domestic terrorist.
	She was an insurrectionist.
	She posed a serious threat to the Capitol Police officer, to his life.
	And also to the lives of others.
	And therefore the shooting was necessary.
	It was done in a sense in self-defense, in defense of other lives of people there.
	Or, there's a second possibility, this was a, in a sense, a government assassination.
	This was done by An officer acting illicitly or acting under the orders of the U.S. government to carry out some sort of assassination of this sort.
	Those are the two possibilities. So where does the truth point?
	We haven't gotten the truth.
	We've simply gotten a vague statement or the officer has been cleared of any wrongdoing.
	But what is the basis for clearing him?
	Let's put it somewhat differently.
	If Ashley Babbitt was a kind of Osama bin Laden type, a Muhammad Atta type, a terrorist, And this officer gloriously saved lives and saved his own life by taking hers.
	He would be a national hero.
	Why isn't Biden giving him the Medal of Honor?
	You know why? Because when you give someone the Medal of Honor, you need to give a...
	It typically is a long description of the heroic deeds performed by the Medal of Honor winner.
	But instead of honoring this man...
	They have essentially hidden him.
	They have hidden his name. They have hidden his whereabouts.
	He's apparently not serving right now on the force, but he's essentially officially disappeared.
	So they're keeping him out of sight for a reason.
	And I think the reason might emerge.
	I hope it does emerge.
	In a lawsuit that the Babbitt family is filing against the Capitol Police officer and the Capitol Police.
	A wrongful death civil lawsuit.
	Because although the officer has been cleared of official wrongdoing and is in that sense immune from criminal investigation or criminal penalty, you can still sue him on civil grounds.
	What would such a civil lawsuit be based on? According to the Babbitt family attorney, this is a man named Terry Roberts, he says that the officer ambushed her. And what he means by that is two things. One is the officer was not in her view.
	The officer was in a sense hiding. He was away to the side. Now, an officer can be away to the side.
	But two facts are really important.
	One is Ashley Babbitt was surrounded by SWAT team guys.
	She was surrounded by people who were fully trained and fully weaponized and in every position to have restrained her.
	So the point here is that the Capitol Police officer who shot Ashley Babbitt...
	According to the Babbitt family attorney, never warned her.
	Never said, stop. Never said, if you come forward, I'll shoot.
	Never said, put your hands up.
	Never even indicated to her that he had a drawn weapon pointed directly at her.
	According to the attorney, it's not debatable.
	He says, there was no warning.
	Now, according to the Babbitt family attorney, they've got all kinds of witnesses who will testify that there was no warning given.
	And more importantly, the attorney says, if you look at the behavior of all the other security people there, they acted like there was no warning.
	Because think about it, if someone goes, warning, I'm about to shoot, everybody's going to duck, everybody's going to move to the side, everyone's going to draw their weapons out.
	They know that something is about to happen, but there's none of it.
	If you look at the reaction of the other officers, they show no indication that any warning is given.
	So this corroborates the witnesses who say, I was there, there was no warning given.
	Now, giving a warning, I don't know if it is a legal requirement, but I will say that I've heard Joe Biden say on more than one time, and he's been talking about the aftermath of George Floyd, he's talking about white police officers and black suspects.
	He's like, why do you have to shoot them dead?
	Why don't you shoot them in the foot?
	Why don't you call out a warning?
	So Biden has been essentially saying that a preferable alternative to using lethal force is A, to give a warning, and B, to attempt to disarm someone without killing them.
	The question now becomes, here's Ashley Babbitt.
	She's 110 pounds.
	She is unarmed.
	She doesn't display or brandish any weapon, not even a stick.
	What is the necessity of shooting her through the neck and thus killing her?
	Couldn't non-lethal force have been used to restrain her?
	So I think these are all the critical issues.
	And I believe that the Capitol Police knows that they have a problem on their hands.
	This is why they're hiding the guy.
	This is why they're not providing any information about the inquiry.
	And this is why Joe Biden isn't honoring the guy because...
	Evidently, what he did was not honorable.
	They want to cover it up because they can't admit that they're the only ones who killed somebody on January 6th.
	The government is the ones that use lethal force, not the Trump supporters.
	So that would totally wreck the left's narrative.
	So to protect... To cover up their lies, they've got to further victimize Ashley Babbitt by pretending like this act against her was completely justified and not even really open to serious question.
	Now, I'm looking forward in the next segment.
	I actually have Ashley Babbitt's mom, Mickey, joining me.
	We're going to talk about who is Ashley Babbitt.
	This woman has been demonized in all kinds of ways without anyone able to tell her side of the story, reveal who she was like, what her motives were, why did she go to the Capitol on January 6th.
	I'm really looking forward to it coming up next.
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	Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com I'm really pleased to be joined on this podcast, joined not by video but by audio, with Ashley Babbitt's mom, Mickey, and also her friend, Wilma Ward.
	We want to talk about Ashley Babbitt, who she was really like, And I want to humanize Ashley Babbitt because there's been a kind of, you may almost say, demonization of her by the left and by the Biden DOJ. She's certainly been sidelined in the debate on January 6th.
	The name virtually didn't come up when Nancy Pelosi's hearings were started.
	So, Miki, thank you for joining me along with your friend Wilma.
	I know this has been a terrible and difficult experience for you.
	May I start by asking you to just talk a little bit about Ashley as a person.
	What was she like even as a young person?
	Talk about Ashley's personality and about her character.
	Well, Ashley was a very outgoing person even as a child.
	She enjoyed Taking on adventure.
	She was a tap dancer, ballet, snowboarding, surfing, horses.
	Gymnastics. Gymnastics.
	All of it. She was just always an inspired, motivated child.
	I've had people tell me that I raised a strong woman and a strong patriot, but I don't know really how much I had to do with that because Ashley came out a strong, independent-minded girl.
	She potty trained herself.
	At 18 months old, she looked down at that diaper, didn't want it anymore.
	18 months old, just decided that was it.
	Wow. Mickey, I'm actually holding up a picture here that you were kind enough to send.
	This is a picture of young Ashley.
	She's probably, I don't know, 11 or 12 years old, and she seems to be holding a soccer ball or maybe a basketball.
	I'm not really sure. Soccer ball.
	That's a soccer ball.
	And she just looks like a well-adjusted, athletic and happy child.
	She absolutely was.
	Now, for her career, at least in her early career, Ashley was more than 10 years in the military.
	Air Force Active Duty, 2003 to 2008.
	Air National Guard, 2008 to 2014.
	Talk a little bit about that.
	Why was it important for Ashley to enroll in the armed services?
	Well, Ashley had to love a country from the time she was a child, and I would never consider myself political, but we were a patriotic family.
	My dad was military service, and people that she looked up to in her life were military service, and she decided at a very young age that that's what she wanted to do.
	And then when Ashley was, I would say, 16, I'm not exactly sure of my math, but that's the 9-11, which actually strengthened her conviction to fight for this country and Do what she felt was her patriotic duty and do service to this country.
	And that's how she lived her life before and after the military.
	I have a picture. I'm actually going to hold it up.
	It's the picture where Ashley is in full military uniform, full military gear, and she's smiling.
	And I have another one here that you also sent us.
	It's Ashley surrounded by a group of Well, it looks like a group of kids and she's in a jeep or she's in a vehicle and she's reaching out and they're kind of surrounding her and she's sort of, you know, kind of bantering with them.
	It seems like she had a strong kind of protective impulse, not just toward the kids, but towards her countrymen.
	Absolutely. And, you know, you see that people gravitating towards her and that's just the kind of person she was.
	You know, you couldn't help but...
	Love her if you knew her.
	And the things that this country is saying about her, that's why it's so heartbreaking, because she did serve this country and love this country.
	And for them to say the things that have been said about her, even insurrectionists, which I would like to point out to be a term that is not allowed to be used because nobody's been charged with insurrection.
	So to say that about a group of mostly patriotic people is just slander, libelous.
	I don't understand how it continues We continue to be pushed forward.
	It boggles my mind that we can still say that about people.
	Mickey, would it be accurate to say that Ashley's motive for going to Washington and even going to the Capitol was not to either overthrow the government or organize some sort of sedition?
	She was just upset at the way that things were going.
	She felt that there were things that had really gone wrong with the election.
	She wanted democratic accountability.
	She wasn't trying to overthrow democracy.
	She was trying to make sure that democracy actually took place.
	Am I missing the real motive for why Ashley actually went to Washington on January 6th?
	No, I would say that was completely articulate and accurate.
	And the fact that, you know, most of this country knows that the election was fraudulent.
	I mean, and Ashley...
	Ashley gave her life to bring...
	To bring attention to that situation.
	So I think that, you know, we need to look at the fact that, maybe the fact that more Americans weren't there, because I believe that even Biden supporters know there was a There was obviously something.
	Obviously, it's coming out.
	And if there is nothing to hide, then let's count the votes.
	Let's audit the votes. Let's audit everything.
	If there's nothing to hide, then open up the books.
	Give up the routers. I feel like accountability is key.
	And our founding fathers tried to set up the government with a system of accountability.
	And I would also, at this time, like to point out that the Capitol Police are the only agency that they don't even pretend to have accountability.
	Wow. Yeah, I was just going to say that they conducted kind of an internal investigation.
	My understanding is that they're not accountable the same way that other federal agencies are because they are sort of at the legislative discretion of Congress.
	And so, in a sense, they are operating as a sort of, well, I won't say a private militia for Nancy Pelosi, but she's the one calling the shots, isn't she?
	Absolutely. And she gives them their power.
	And they don't have any oversight on them.
	They're an investigative committee.
	The only way anybody knows if anything happened with the Capitol Police is if the Capitol Police reported it.
	If they say, oh, hey, we had a problem, then you know.
	Otherwise, they handle it internally.
	And Ashley was not the only one to die at the hands of the Capitol Police that day.
	And I feel like, you know, the 14,000 hours of footage, that's a taxpayer footage.
	That's our footage. You know, that's the footage of the people.
	We the people. And we have a right to see it.
	And if there's nothing to hide, then let us see it.
	Our prisoners that are still in jail, the reason they don't have the discovery against them is because the same...
	Footage that would exonerate them would corrupt people that are obviously corrupt, so we can't see it.
	But the American people need to know that is our footage.
	That is paid for with our government dollars.
	That's equipment bought with our government dollars.
	That's surveillance put in for our safety, so let we the people see it.
	Let us see. You know, if you have nothing to hide, then let us see it.
	Mickey, has anyone in the administration or the DOJ reached out to you to provide any kind of explanation or understanding of what happened to Ashley Babbitt exactly?
	And if not, have you made any efforts to reach out to anyone to get information and what has been the result of that?
	Well, I have had nobody other than Donald Trump on July 1st reach out to me, anybody in an official capacity.
	But I wasn't listed as the next I can, but her husband, Aaron Babbitt, was.
	So he was notified by...
	Daryl Issa in the wee hours of the night.
	But Daryl Issa was, well, I don't know why I'm the one calling you.
	Well, it's because their business was in his district.
	But he was, you know, less than compassionate in my way of thinking.
	And we had no official notification.
	I knew that my daughter had been shot, but there had been no official contact with our family as to who.
	And my son-in-law actually...
	I learned of Ashley's death by seeing it on TV. It was still hard to get confirmation from anybody.
	We called hospitals. It was just hard to get information at that time.
	So his confirmation of his wife's death came through the television.
	Did you try, Mickey, to reach out either to Pelosi's office or any of your local congressmen or senators?
	What was the outcome of that?
	Well, that was a frustrating experience.
	I'm glad you asked. You know, after about three weeks after Ashley passed, because I literally, it was hard to even process anything.
	But about three weeks in, I started making, I told myself I'd make a phone call a day.
	And I started with Nancy Pelosi.
	And I called Nancy Pelosi, and I called Dianne Feinstein.
	And this is over the course of, you know, from three weeks after Ashley's death to currently.
	I've called my local representatives.
	Nancy Pelosi, I've called no less than a dozen times.
	I have never received anything.
	Kind of corresponds with her.
	She will not call me back.
	I've emailed her. She doesn't email me back.
	I've called her, like I said, no less than a dozen times.
	I've had absolutely no response.
	Dianne Feinstein's people were just awful.
	I had one of her aides answer the phone, and first I said, I'm Ashley Babbitt's mom, and he said, who?
	And so I said, Ashley Babbitt, the woman that was shot at the Capitol, and then he ended up hanging up on me.
	Or we got disconnected, was how he put it, because I called back and he answered the phone.
	And then he was suddenly in extreme authority on Ashley Babbitt.
	And he said that...
	Although it's unfortunate, your daughter should not have stormed the Capitol and Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein will never have two minutes for you.
	So he was telling me his boss would never have two minutes to talk to me.
	And then when I asked him who I was speaking to, he was happy to inform me he did not have to give his name.
	I've called my local representatives, Dianne Jacobs, Scott Peters, Daryl Issa.
	I've contacted Carl DeMaio.
	I have not had one person.
	Not one phone call, not one email.
	So when people say that the government is for the people, by the people, unless you're trying to get in, and then nobody's opening these doors, and that's got to change.
	That's got to change because that's such an un-American way to do things.
	Mickey, why wasn't your daughter given a military burial?
	She was a veteran, she served honorably, and yet it appears that that was something that was denied to her.
	Is that true, and why?
	Well, that is true, and I would still like to know why, but...
	Lieutenant General Brian T. Kelly from the United States Air Force arbitrarily decided that because of Ashley's participation in the events on January 6th, she would not be qualified to be buried with rendering of honors.
	So, because... This is Wilma, because they said it was a discredit to the Air Force.
	Yeah, that's what they said.
	But I would also like to say that we did have a lovely service for Ashley.
	When we scattered her ashes, I had some dedicated, patriotic people.
	We did a flag ceremony for her, and taps was played for her, and we honored her with respect.
	But this was a further slap in the face because this was actually sent before the investigation was arbitrarily closed.
	And I would just like to say that that was a sham.
	The investigation into my daughter's death did not take place.
	They had my daughter mopped up like a piece of trash and out of there.
	Within a half an hour so they could continue with business.
	They didn't rope off a crime scene.
	They didn't investigate anything.
	So when they say the investigation's closed, I would like to know what investigation?
	What investigation? Show me the investigation.
	I'd like to see it. Would you say, Mickey, that if the true facts do come out about January 6th, and I mean all of it, potential FBI involvement, potential FBI orchestration of the event, if people really got to know what happened on that day, do you feel that that would give you some consolation, some closure that your daughter's life was not in vain?
	Absolutely. You know, I think people need to turn off CNN and open their eyes.
	I think that, you know, we're all believing what is told to us.
	And like, you know, why don't people know who Roseanne Boylan was?
	You know why? Because it hasn't been talked about.
	Why can I go on the streets and people not know who my daughter is?
	Everybody should know who Ashley Babbitt is.
	You know, and that's even besides the fact that she's my daughter.
	I feel like this was a huge movement.
	This just wasn't a bunch of Trump supporters going to the Capitol to raise a fuss.
	This was a million Americans exercising their American-born right to protest.
	Let's not confuse that with insurrection.
	People don't go to commit insurrection with flags and patriotic songs in their heart.
	That's not insurrection. Was there some bad behavior that day?
	Absolutely. But let's look at the Capitol Police instigating that bad behavior.
	Let's look at the culpability of the FBI and what they orchestrated to bring that day about.
	Let's look at denial of more National Guard in the city.
	Who said no to that and why?
	Let's look at the answers, the real answers to those questions.
	And let's also, I have to reiterate, let's see the footage.
	Let's see what happened.
	You know, it's coming out little by little because what Nancy Pelosi was not counting on is the fact that America was watching.
	And it might take a while for these things to come out, but they're coming out and they're coming out slowly.
	And I have faith in the American people.
	Thank you so much, Mickey, and also Wilma.
	I'm going to leave people. I'm going to hold up a photograph.
	This is actually the last photograph of Ashley Babbitt before her death, and she's draped with a Make America Great flag, and you can see the Capitol in the background.
	To me, it's a very moving photo because it suggests that whatever you want to say about Ashley Babbitt, agree or disagree with her politics.
	She was, in the end, somebody who sacrificed for her country, She was, in the end, a patriot.
	And you can't take that away from her.
	Mickey, thank you for joining me.
	I really appreciate it.
	And Wilma, you too? Can Wilma just read one statement really quick?
	Go for it. Okay.
	Ashley was a bright light and a beautiful person and a proud patriot.
	We need to unite over what's right.
	We the people are Ashley Babbitt, and we will not stand for this injustice to her or her name and to any of the happenings with the political prisoners being held.
	We need to clear her name.
	She's not an insurrectionist.
	She's a patriot.
	We need to correct history.
	Go to StopHate.com and see the video proof for yourself.
	The Capitol Police antagonized the crowd.
	And we just need to let the political prisoners out with their time served.
	And we need to change laws.
	We need to terminate autonomy.
	Capitol Police need to be accountable for their actions.
	And we just need to see the truth.
	No more impunity.
	Anyway, thank you for letting me throw that in.
	All right. I appreciate it.
	Thank you for joining us and all the best to both of you.
	Thank you. I appreciate the time to speak about my daughter and for you to continue to follow this situation.
	Much respect and gratitude.
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	Let's say that you have a basketball team, and the basketball team is made up overwhelmingly of black players.
	You have a couple of white players, but you have no Asian American players.
	They're just absent from the court.
	And let's say that your goal is to promote equity.
	Proportional representation.
	Make sure that all groups are represented on the court.
	Diversity. What do you do?
	Well, kind of what you do is you start lowering the net.
	You lower the net.
	Why? To make it easier for the groups that don't play that well to be able to put the ball in the basket.
	And by doing this, you are trying to redistribute, you might say, the ethnic proportion of who gets to play on the team.
	So at the end of the day, you can go, wait a minute, this is great.
	We now have only 40% or 30% black players and we have 30% white players and we've got four Asian Americans and we've got pretty much, we have a basketball team that looks like America.
	Now, the reason you don't want to do this is it would essentially wreck the game of Suddenly, basketball is not about who plays well, who can pass and shoot and dribble.
	It's not about excellence.
	It's not even about the game.
	You're rigging the game to produce this kind of result that you see as demanded by social justice.
	Except, no one proposes this in basketball for the simple reason that social justice does not in fact demand this.
	All that social justice demands is that people be given a chance to compete, to show what they can do on the court.
	And that's it.
	Now, all of this is a kind of preamble because exactly the same thing is going on with public schools.
	In school after school we see sly and sometimes open and sometimes covert efforts to reduce academic standards, eliminate requirements.
	Why? For the simple reason that this way underperforming groups Are able to do better.
	They do better. Why? Because the standards are lower.
	It's easier to meet lower standards than to meet higher standards.
	So if you're uncompetitive, you want the standards to be lowered.
	This improves your chances against the more competitive groups.
	Here is Clark County School District in Nevada, and they've introduced a new district-wide grading policy for public schools.
	Here's what it is. The lowest grade is 50%.
	You get 50% just for participating.
	Grades are no longer going to be influenced by A, attendance, B, school participation, C, late assignments.
	While the school district says that this is intended to, quote, create equity, let's decode what they're saying.
	They're basically saying that black and minority students Don't show up in school.
	They have very bad attendance records.
	And they are saying if we don't penalize them for that, they're going to do better.
	Second, they don't participate in class.
	They don't say anything. They just sit there.
	So if you have participation requirements, it's going to make it a little tougher for these minorities to do well.
	Apparently, blacks and Hispanics routinely turn in late assignments.
	So the way to, quote, help them out is not count if assignments are late.
	And since obviously a lot of blacks and Hispanics fall below the 50% level, they can't even get to 50%, we gotta set a minimum floor, because that way you get 50% points just for existing.
	As if to say, your very existence is half the way there.
	It's 100 to the total, so you get half the points just for basically your name appearing on the roster.
	Now, this is an academic disgrace.
	And of course, ultimately, it's going to hurt all students, minority students most of all, but it's going to hurt even the other students.
	And this is going on elsewhere.
	Here's the Oregon governor.
	Kate Brown, who just signed a new law.
	Now, it's kind of telling that she signed this new law surreptitiously.
	She signed the law. Normally, when you sign a law, it's entered into the legislative database.
	They put out a press release on it.
	In this case, they didn't put the law in the database.
	They didn't issue a press release.
	Why? Because of what the law says.
	Here's what it says, quote, It says that an Oregon high school diploma no longer guarantees that the students who earned it can A, read, B, write, or do math at the high school level.
	Wow. Essentially what they're saying is that Oregon high school diploma is a piece of toilet paper going forward, right?
	This is embarrassing.
	Now, according to Governor Kate Brown, she says in an email statement earlier when she was advocating this law, and by the way, this is a law generally supported by Democrats, generally opposed by Republicans, one or two people across the aisle, but this is a party-line vote.
	The law is, quote, intended to help, quote, Oregon's black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, tribal, and students of color.
	There you go. Once again, the idea here is that minorities can cut it.
	They just threw an Asian there to fool you, by the way.
	The Asians can do fine, but they're throwing them in as if all minorities need this kind of protection.
	Lowered standards benefits all minorities.
	So, I'm quoting you, and this is kind of sad to say, leaders from those communities have advocated time and time again for equitable graduation standards.
	Really? It's equitable to lower standards?
	That's what these tribal leaders are calling for?
	So, the game here is one of making education less educational in order that groups at the bottom can feel better about themselves and are essentially awarded points for doing nothing.
	So in order to preserve diversity and equity, we're essentially wrecking our public school system.
	It's a mess. Despite the expenditure of huge amounts of money, the U.S. educational performance is among the worst in the industrialized world.
	We're obviously taking a bad situation and making it worse.
	And all these woke nostrums of social justice and racial justice and the 1619 Project and critical race theory, they are the root of the corruption that is eroding, if not corroding, education.
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	I want to now talk about higher education and specifically about Harvard University, partly because Harvard has always had this kind of mystique surrounding it.
	By and large, the attitude of Harvard is that no student who is admitted to Harvard and to other schools will ever want to go to any other school.
	There's no reason to even think about it.
	Harvard is it, so to speak.
	And Harvard is one of the oldest, I believe the second oldest college in the United States.
	It has a litany of presidents and Nobel laureates and corporate titans, all who have passed through its corridors.
	And I want to focus on the way in which Harvard has become rotted, because it shows you that the rot starts at the top.
	If it's happening at Harvard, you know that higher education is experiencing a serious crisis of the intellect.
	And I want to focus on a case at the Harvard Theological Review, one of the premier, by the way, theological journals in the country, because I want to show that the rot isn't one of error, blunders, low academic standards.
	It's all of that. But it's combined with arrogance, deceit, cover-up, and unwillingness to face up to lies when you've put them out, and you've been negligent in doing it.
	You're not even willing to admit it.
	So, this all began...
	Several years ago in 2014, when the Harvard Theological Review published a, at that time, world-famous Harvard Divinity School professor.
	Her name was Karen King, a feminist, someone who was very chic in the Harvard community, a noted progressive.
	And she announced that she had found a new Christian manuscript, a papyrus, that evidently talked about Quote, Jesus' wife.
	What? Jesus, according to this document, was married.
	He had a wife. And Karen King, in a seminar...
	Call the seminar The Gospel of Jesus' Wife.
	I mean, this is obviously going to be an academic and a theological bombshell because it contravenes 2,000 years of Christian history.
	Now, shortly after the seminar, the Harvard Theological Review published a kind of special edition, 29 pages, with multiple essays about this discovery.
	It included reports from professors at MIT and Columbia, and this looked to be a revolutionary finding about a document that evidently no one had noticed before.
	This would be huge all over the world.
	Now, right away, there were some New Testament scholars who took a quick look at this and said, this is ridiculous.
	This document is a forgery.
	It's not a legitimate document.
	It doesn't pass muster.
	But the Harvard Theological Review stood by Karen King and by this claim that Jesus, quote, And they did it on the basis of so-called peer review.
	They said, well, we've got prominent peers who have reviewed.
	In academic journalism, when you write a paper, it's sent to other scholars, reputable scholars in the field, kind of, what do you think about it?
	And that's the process called peer review.
	Well, it turns out that the peer review process in this case was highly corrupted.
	Why? Because the sole favorable reviewer of this manuscript, of this Jesus Life document, if you will, was a guy named Roger Bagnall.
	But Roger Bagnall confessed that he was the co-author of the paper with Karen King.
	So, in other words, far from being an independent reviewer, he was someone who had collaborated with the author in writing the paper in the first place.
	It turns out that the MIT scientist who was seen as endorsing the article was an old family friend of the author, Karen King.
	They both grew up in Montana.
	In fact, the scholar was an usher at Karen King's wedding.
	And the other scholar, the Columbia scientist or social scientist who had endorsed the validity of this manuscript, was this guy, Bagnall, Roger Bagnall's Brother-in-law.
	So you get a sense here of the academically incestuous environment.
	A woman writes an article.
	She collaborates with another guy.
	This guy then pretends to be an independent reviewer.
	Oh, great article! I helped write it, of course, but I'm not going to tell you that.
	So none of these relationships are disclosed to the Harvard Theological Review.
	And they publish the article as if it's been submitted for peer review.
	It's passed muster. It's obviously valid.
	Now, soon after the article appears, other scholars begin to go, wow, we better take another look at this.
	And they discover that the real source of this papyrus is an internet pornographer.
	This is fantastic.
	What I'm getting at is that you got a guy who was apparently enrolled in an Egyptology program that he failed out of.
	And then he went into internet porn as a profession.
	And this guy cooked up this manuscript.
	It's a complete forgery.
	It's a complete fake. He made it up.
	And so once this was discovered, the cover was blown.
	There's no papyrus.
	There's no real manuscript.
	Jesus didn't have a wife. But here's where the plot becomes really insidious, because at this point, even Karen King, the author, was forced to say, okay, this is a forgery.
	Scholars cannot take this seriously.
	This is not a genuine manuscript.
	And now the question becomes, what will the Harvard Theological Review do?
	Well, at this point, there's only one thing to do.
	Repudiate the manuscript.
	Explain that it was published in error.
	Say that the peer review process failed.
	Say that the peer reviewers were not legitimate independent reviewers.
	They were basically associates or pals or cronies or relatives of the people who wrote the manuscript.
	But to this date, years later, the Harvard Theological Review has done none of this.
	They continue to pretend like this was a valid debate between two sides over this manuscript.
	Even though there's no debate left, the manuscript is now acknowledged by its author to be a forgery.
	Debate over! But nevertheless, what we have is a prominent academic journalist This is a journal, by the way, with the support of the Harvard administration.
	Harvard's former president, Drew Gilpin Faust, is supposed to have conducted a review of this matter, refused to intervene.
	The bottom line, we're now seeing the way in which journals at the Ideological journals, but we also see in other cases health journals, medical journals, journals that deal with issues of climate, are all being polluted by cronyism, corruption, ideological bias.
	And so our trust in academia, and more specifically in Harvard, takes a heavy blow.
	These people have been outed as known liars.
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	I want to conclude in this segment my discussion of one of the greatest trilogies in Greek tragedy, which is Aeschylus' great work called the Oresteia.
	Now to refresh, in the first play, we saw how the Greek king Agamemnon, upon returning after the Trojan War, Was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra.
	Kind of a story of family murder.
	And Agamemnon was being avenged.
	The murder was revenge for Agamemnon having murdered his own daughter, Iphigenia, in order to appease the gods and have favorable winds to sail to Greece.
	So that was the first story.
	Episode in the trilogy.
	In the second one, called Libation Bearers, we have Orestes with the moral support of his sister, Electra, avenging his father's murder by murdering his mother, by killing his mother and the man that she had taken up with a fellow named Augustus.
	And at the end of Libation Bearers, the second play, we have Orestes hearing, and only he can see this, no one else can, The Furies, which are these spirits of divine vengeance, and they're coming to get Orestes.
	Their point is, it is inexcusable to kill your mother.
	This cannot go unpunished.
	So just as your father was punished for murdering his daughter, Iphigenia, just as your mother was punished by being killed for what she did, now you have to be punished for what you did.
	And this is tragic in the sense that Orestes, well, he doesn't really have a choice.
	He has a choice. He can avoid his responsibility to avenge his father's death.
	But when he goes to Zeus, kind of the great god, and asks what he should do, Zeus basically says, you have to do this.
	And so Orestes will face Zeus' wrath if he doesn't do it.
	At the end of the play, Orestes is running off stage, so to speak, pursued by the Furies.
	And what does he do? He goes to Athens.
	So he goes to a different place.
	And he is met there by the goddess Athena.
	And the goddess Athena, in a sense, is now going to try to adjudicate the case and decide what is fair to do.
	What is the fair punishment, if any, for Orestes?
	And are the Furies right in trying to torment him and destroy him and not give him a moment's peace?
	Athena herself, interestingly, for a god or a goddess, says, I can't decide.
	There is right on both sides.
	Very interesting statement, by which she means that Orestes was partly right, she thinks, to do what he did, but not entirely right.
	This echoes with Orestes himself saying, At the end of Libation Bears, he says he acted, quote, not without some right.
	But Athena says that she's going to do something very unusual, kind of, in theory, never been done before.
	She's going to convene a jury of Athenian citizens, and they're going to hear the case.
	What case? Well, the Furies are going to be the prosecutors.
	They're going to make the case against Orestes.
	Orestes will also have a defense.
	He'll be able to mount his justification for why he did what he did, why he had, in a sense, no choice but to act as he did.
	And then there will be a verdict.
	And so the case is heard, and at the end of it, there's a vote.
	Now, very interestingly, the vote is a tie.
	It's a tie. The tie is broken by Athena, who votes herself.
	She too is on the jury.
	And she casts a vote to acquit So, Orestes ultimately can go.
	But the closeness of the vote is really telling, because this is not a clear-cut case.
	It's not as if the jury were all on one side.
	Oh yes, you know, Orestes, he had to do it, so he was justified.
	This is not a case of justified killing.
	The jury divides half and half.
	And because you need a majority to convict, Athena's vote is enough to have Orestes freed.
	But what's going on here?
	What's going on here is something quite interesting, which is to say that Aeschylus, writing in the 5th century BC, is describing really the first jury trial in Western civilization.
	And it's a jury trial occurring, you may say, in a...
	It's a courtroom drama for the stage.
	The first time anything like this has ever been staged.
	Now, were there courts in 5th century Greece?
	Yes, there were. And they had been recently introduced in Athens.
	What Aeschylus is doing is he's sort of giving this jury system a kind of ancient and perhaps quasi-divine origin.
	He's saying this court system, which we started recently, actually has its roots, fictional roots, of course, in the heroic age when human beings and gods interacted with each other.
	But you see here a solution that Aeschylus is providing to the problem of, you could call it the problem of individual vengeance.
	Because in the old world, if somebody wronged you, you'd have to go wrong them.
	And then somebody else would, it became a cycle.
	It became a cycle of vengeance, which in a sense has no end.
	So, Aeschylus shows us in the third play, it's called Eumenides.
	Eumenides actually is a word for the Furies.
	The Furies are given a kind of new role, which is preservers of the peace, the kindly ones, so to speak.
	And what Aeschylus is saying is let's move away from a barbaric primitive society of individual vengeance to a system in which we do have law, we do have juries, we do have courts.
	The courts aren't perfect.
	They will always not get things right.
	But it's a preferable system to vigilante justice or individual vengeance.
	So... Remarkable thing about this Greek tragedy is it's a tragedy with a happy ending.
	Happy ending in the sense that the curse on the house of Atreus, this is the Agamemnon family, is lifted.
	Orestes is finally let go.
	The cycle of vengeance comes to a halt.
	And the system of individual retribution is replaced by a system of flawed, which is to say human justice.
	But nevertheless, justice under law that is preferable to taking the law away.

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