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Aug. 12, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:07
THE ONLY HONEST DEMOCRAT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep152
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Is Joe Manchin the only honest Democrat?
Is he our best hope for stopping the worst excesses of the Biden administration?
Also, the Texas Supreme Court says that Governor Abbott can bring out the leg irons for the Texas Democrats.
I'm looking forward to it. And Debbie joins me.
We are going to talk about the hypocrisy of the Democrats from Washington DC all the way to Caracas.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Is Joe Manchin the last honest Democrat I want to talk about Manchin and his role in the infrastructure bill.
But this is a guy, by the way, who has been proving himself to break with the Democrats on a bunch of critical issues.
Every... Every Democrat voted to support taxpayer-funded abortions.
Joe Manchin was the only Democrat to join all the Republicans in voting against it.
Every Democrat voted for critical race theory.
Joe Manchin is the only Democrat to join the Republicans in supporting Tom Cotton's bid to ban a federal ban on critical race theory.
And now infrastructure.
There are two infrastructure bills.
There's a smaller, sort of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which, by the way, a bunch of Republicans voted for.
It's passed the Senate.
It's now being moved over to the House.
My guess is that this bill is likely to pass.
And pass with Republican support.
And it will be obviously a victory for Joe Biden.
He's going to go, see, you know, we can work together.
This shows that bipartisanship does work.
And of course, there are Republicans who also want it to work.
Here is John Thune, Republican from South Dakota.
He goes, quote, And my question is, why not?
If you're a Republican, you're in the opposition party, why aren't you here to oppose, to block, particularly if you think that the bill is bad?
Now, it's possible that these Republicans think that the bill is okay, or they think it is a genuine infrastructure bill, not really a Green New Deal bill, which for the most part it is.
We're talking now about the smaller infrastructure bill.
Or the Republicans think that if we pass it, it will make a larger bill more difficult to pass.
They think that by showing a gesture of bipartisanship, they will be forestalling things like getting rid of the filibuster.
The Democrats, in other words, their appetite for doing more extreme things will be curbed if they can see that small progress can be made, at least on certain things.
But I think for the Democrats, it's not about any of this.
Their goal is to use the kind of momentum of the first bill, the $1.2 trillion bill, To pass a much bigger $3.5 trillion bill.
Now first of all, this whole thing I think is demented.
Because far from talking about whether we should be spending more money or less money, we should really be talking about how to save money.
It's almost like if you're a guy and you've just gone through a kind of a family emergency, you've been spending down your savings, you've had a kind of a crisis, a COVID crisis that's lasted now over a year, you've drained some of your resources, you've put out money you didn't expect to put out, well, what do you do? You kind of go into savings mode.
You go into frugality mode.
You don't say, okay, well, now the crisis seems to be passing and my situation is far worse.
I'm going to spend even more money that I can't afford to spend.
So this is downright reckless.
But even among recklessness, there is a degree of recklessness.
And here's where Manchin, I think, comes in.
So Manchin has issued a statement saying that this new $3.5 trillion bill is just a no-go.
Now, it may seem that Manchin is kind of playing a double game here because he did vote to advance debate on the bill.
But he makes it really clear in the statement.
He goes, listen, if I advance debate on the bill, it's only so we can look at this and consider it.
He goes, I'm quoting him now, adding trillions of dollars to more than nearly $29 trillion of national debt without consideration of the negative effects on our children and grandchildren.
That's one of the decisions that's become too easy in Washington.
He goes, this will have grave consequences.
Quote, it is simply irresponsible to continue spending at levels more suited to respond to a Great Depression or a Great Recession, not an economy that's on the verge of overheating.
So, the bottom line of it is Manchin, I think here, is going to do some block and tackle, and we do need him to do that.
Why do we need him so badly?
And we also do need, by the way, be good to have Sinema along with Manchin.
But why do we need them? Well, if you think back to it, we need them because we lost those two seats in Georgia.
Had we not lost those seats in Georgia post-election, none of this would even be an issue.
So Manchin is kind of like our Spartan standing in the past, blocking, if you will, all the really bad stuff from going through.
And it looks like this is a man with honesty and with resolve.
This is a man who's going to come through.
Debbie kind of says, well...
If he's really the last honest Democrat, shouldn't he become a Republican?
He's like, send him your movies, Dinesh!
Which I probably should do.
But Manchin is also known sometimes to try to find middle ground.
And kind of my worry about Manchin is that he will drive a hard bargain with the Democrats.
They'll take their $3.5 trillion bill and probably scale it back.
But hey, would it become a responsible bill at $3 trillion?
No. At $2 trillion?
No. At $1 trillion?
No. Because we already have the other bill with $1.2 trillion of spending.
And so... My message to Manchin is don't just hang tough.
Essentially, don't just vote against this one.
It's particularly the case that if you support the more modest infrastructure bill, a bill that is aimed at bridges and tunnels and utilities and other basic infrastructure, Okay, that's it.
We've done it. Infrastructure is now done.
And it's not a matter of trying to find middle ground with these guys.
This is a, I think it was P.J. O'Rourke who said that giving the government money is like giving, you know, whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
The Democrats are in this reckless spending mode with no real attention to the welfare of the country.
And you, Joe Manchin, can be the man to stop them.
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You've got to use promo code DINESH. Some very good news out of Texas.
The Texas Supreme Court has essentially authorized Governor Abbott to bring out the handcuffs and the leg irons.
Why? To round up these Texas Democrats, the runaway Democrats, at least if they show their face in the state.
And they can't stay out of state forever.
These are people who do have lives, they do have families, they do have kids.
So yeah, they can go off to Colombia and they can go off to Europe for a week.
And I'm sure there's an elaborate democratic support structure to help these characters out.
But I think their lobbying mission to pass H.R. 1 or some comprehensive federal voting bill that would override the Texas voter law, this is not going to happen.
And I think it's dawned on them.
And so one or two of them have already returned.
And I think the rest of them will eventually come back.
And when they come back, there's going to be some marshals waiting for them.
In fact, the sergeant at arms...
has already served warrants on the offices of all these Democrats.
There's a warrant out for their arrest.
Now, interestingly, the Democrats have gone running to a Democratic judge and said, hey, you know, you've got to invalidate the governor's authority.
And the judge issued an injunction saying that for a period of time, I think it was two weeks, that the governor's motion, the governor's order would be invalid.
But Abbott appealed to the Texas Supreme Court and boom, the Texas Supreme Court vacated this judge's decision and said, look, the law empowers you to go ahead.
Now... Very interestingly, there's a kind of corollary debate going on to all this, which involves PolitiFact, the fact-checking site, the bogus fact-checking site, and Ted Cruz.
And we're going to see how deceitful PolitiFact is here, because Ted Cruz said, quote, There is clear legal authority to handcuff and put in leg irons legislators that are trying to stop the legislature from being able to do business.
PolitiFact says, quote, false.
There is no legal clarity.
So this is PolitiFact essentially taking Ted Cruz.
And remember, you know, this is the kind of stuff PolitiFact at one time was kind of the fact checker for Facebook.
So these kinds of fact checks have a very insidious purpose.
It's not just to sort of make a kind of rhetorical declaration.
It is to try to incite social media to ban people and to deplatform them.
This is what the fact checking game is about these days.
But let's look to see if what Ted Cruz said is in fact false.
Ted Cruz said, quote, there is clear legal authority to handcuff and put in leg irons the Texas Democrats.
Now, let's look at the law.
The law is actually pretty clear.
It says, quote, All absentees for whom no sufficient excuse is made may, by order of a majority of those present, be sent for and arrested wherever they may be found.
There it is. So there is, in the Texas Constitution itself and in the accompanying rules of the Constitution, clear, specified legal authority.
It's almost as if you take a provision of the U.S. Constitution, and there it is.
It says exactly what Ted Cruz said.
Now, if you read the PolitiFact article...
The PolitiFact article relies on a kind of second point that is true, but less important.
And so they say this.
They say, quote, Because the absent lawmakers aren't charged with a crime, it is unclear how the word arrest should be interpreted in this context.
This is because no Texas court has reviewed how this provision is to be enforced.
So basically what Polifact is saying is this.
They're saying, yeah, the law does say arrested, but normally people are arrested for a crime.
The Texas Democrats, strictly speaking, haven't committed a crime.
They merely absconded their legislative duty.
And no court has ever considered a similar case, so there's no precedent for this.
But this is just, you could call it, a way of disputing the meaning or the application of a law.
Even if there's some disputed interpretation like, how is the court going to rule?
We really don't know if arrested here means literally arrested.
Nevertheless, it doesn't follow that what Ted Cruz said is false.
It just follows that Ted Cruz has given the mainstream reading of the law.
Now, it's possible to read the law another way.
In other words, there may be a place for reasonable people to disagree.
But see, this is the point.
Reasonable disagreement is not factual error.
So the essence of the fact-checking game is to pretend that if they disagree with you, you are making factually false statements.
And that's not the case. And we know that Ted Cruz's interpretation of the law was sustained because the Texas Supreme Court said, we agree with Ted Cruz.
They didn't say those words, we agree with Ted Cruz.
But what they did in authorizing the governor to bring out the leg irons is they affirmed the reading, the literal reading of the law that was Ted Cruz's reading.
I think it's the most interesting. So here's Debbie pointing out the obvious, which is that you have two authorities here, right?
On the one hand, you've got some, you know, kind of ponytail, bullet-of-fact fact-shicker, you know.
Hey, Austin, why don't you devote, you know, 90 minutes to reviewing whether what Ted Cruz said here is correct?
Right? So this little pencil head is like, yeah, I'm going to review it.
I'm going to find out there's no president.
And on the other hand, you got Ted Cruz, you know, brilliant constitutional scholar.
What is it? Yale Law School.
Here's a guy who's Solicitor General of Texas.
Here's a guy who has been talked about as a nominee for the Supreme Court.
So it's not really an exact matchup of wits.
It's basically, you know...
There's no comparison between the authorities here.
And it kind of shows you how ridiculous our public debate has become when these fact-checking sites presume.
I mean, they're fact-checking Rand Paul on COVID. They're fact-checking Ted Cruz on what the Texas Constitution says.
And this is a case ultimately of the moronic student attempting to grade the teacher.
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I want to talk about Officer Mike Fanone, the Capitol Police.
And also narrative shaping by the media.
I saw this cover story in Time with Mike Fanone, you know, posing on the cover.
And you can tell when the media goes for the heroic pose.
He's in the heroic pose.
When they had Trump on the cover, he was not in the heroic pose.
So the heroic pose is, this is kind of a role model for the world.
And that's Mike Fanone.
So they're going to go into Mike Fanone's mind and show you what's been haunting this poor guy.
Now, when you see something like this, you realize, I thought to myself, why Mike Fanone?
Why him? There were a bunch of Capitol Police guys, a bunch of guys who even testified.
Why did they pick him? And the answer is, when they write these articles, they're not giving you the news.
They're spinning a morality tale.
It's very important to be able to detect what is that morality tale.
So here's their morality tale.
Mike Fanon is kind of a redneck.
And of course, all his poses are aimed at cultivating that.
He's kind of in the flannel shirt.
He's got a couple of tattoos.
He's got a beard. And in the opening scene of the story, he's in a bar, apparently hitting on the girls.
So the idea here is that this is a rough guy.
This is a kind of working class guy.
And most importantly, this is a guy who would be the kind of guy who would be for Trump.
So they create, they set this up beautifully.
And the left is really good at this stuff.
They're good at narrative shaping.
So here we go. They go for a white cop who spent his time policing black neighborhoods.
Politics became harder to ignore.
He hated the way liberal politicians and the media always made police into the bad guys.
So you're getting the idea here that this is a potential Trumpster.
And then, of course, the point of the narrative is, see, by the way, if Mike Fernand was a real Trumpster, he'd never be on the cover of Time.
So the idea here is it's a conversion story.
Even this hard-bitten, redneck, rough, working-class Trumpster realized that something went very wrong in January 6th, and therefore he turned.
So I'm now reading here, quote, Fanon was just like every other cop until after January 6th, he wasn't.
So in other words, this is the Mike Fanon's enlightenment story, in which Mike Fanon realizes that the real danger doesn't come from liberal politicians who are trying to defund the cops, but it comes from people like Trump and his supporters who are trying to overthrow democracy.
So it's almost like, you know, a redneck guy joins the cocktail party Harvard crowd.
That's the underlying text of the story.
And I'm going to read the conclusion because it kind of gives you the kind of lachrymose sob story way that they love to conclude these stories, you know, with kind of fake humility.
It's all drippingly obvious.
Quote, What does Mike Fanone deserve?
A parade? A key to the city?
A White House ceremony?
He's not asking for any of that.
You know, he's too virtuous to seek any kind of accolades.
He's not asking to be called a hero.
He just wants us to remember what his sacrifice was for.
The idea here is that Mike Fanone, who, by the way, had no sacrifice.
Basically, here's a guy, oh, I was pushed around.
Oh, I suffered psychological trauma.
No, the people who are really pushed around, who are really suffering trauma, are the people in solitary confinement.
So Mike Fanone is actually serving a narrative that is being used to create a political prisoner class in America.
So this guy is, this is the kind of cop who should be defunded.
This is basically a thug with a badge.
And yet he's posing as sort of this apostle of virtue.
Now you get a real window into Mike Fanon with a quote that he made to GOP members of Congress.
I'm going to read it. You guys don't seem to have a problem when we're kicking the SHIT out of black people, but when we're kicking the SHIT out of white people, uh-oh, that's an issue.
So let's decode this for a minute.
Mike Fanone is basically saying to the GOP that the GOP is being very selective in who they want to be kicked around.
I mean, Mike Fanone's point of view seems to be he has the right to kick around everybody.
He's a non-discriminatory kicker around guy.
But the GOP is being highly inconsistent.
You guys only want me to kick around the blacks.
You don't want me to kick around the whites.
I actually have the right to kick both around.
So this is basically the mentality of this guy.
Interestingly, Julie Kelly did some digging into Mike Fanone, and she shows that, first of all, this guy, his whole pose in the Time Magazine article is fake.
This guy is not a redneck.
He's not a working-class guy.
He was raised in the wealthy D.C. suburb.
His father is a partner in a major Democratic-leaning law firm in the D.C. area.
So he's got this elite kind of beltway pedigree.
He went to a Georgetown Prep, by the way, the same school that Kavanaugh went to.
He was then thrown out of there, who knows for what, but then he went to a main boarding school.
So here's a guy who sort of lives in a kind of leafy suburb.
His father's extremely well-connected.
The law firm has given a lot of money to Biden.
Here's a guy, by the way, who, you know...
He thinks he has the pedigree.
And in fact, he sort of does.
You know, I want to talk to GOP members of Congress.
Why won't they meet with me? Now, the ordinary cop doesn't think like that.
The ordinary cop doesn't think he has a right to an audience with Kevin McCarthy.
But the reason Fanon does is he's grown up in that kind of environment where if you want to get a meeting, your dad makes a couple of phone calls.
So this is not a guy.
And right now, what's he doing?
He's not parading.
He's not patrolling the street.
He's taking a leave of absence.
And what's he spending? He pretends, like, for health reasons.
You know, I'm sitting there.
I'm thinking. I'm reflecting.
I'm getting well after the January 6th trauma.
But no, that's not what he's doing.
In fact, he's booking media interviews.
He's running around the place.
He's on CNN. He's over here.
He's interviewing with Time magazine, posing for his cover, photograph.
So these people are complete...
And total fakers.
They're fakers and the media is in it with them.
So the media is like, okay, Fanon, let's see your tattoos.
Okay, Fanon, you know, let's put you on a flannel shirt.
No, no, no, don't wear that bow tie.
It's gonna make you look like a fruitcake, you know?
So the whole idea is to create an aura To fool the readers of Time Magazine, some of whom want to be fooled.
They're like, oh yeah, what a moving story of this redneck who became essentially a limousine liberal after he saw the horrors of January 6th.
This is how narrative is baked in the oven.
And part of our job as sensible, intelligent people in America is to be able to spot it, decode it, and then laugh our heads off over it.
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Debbie and I were chatting this morning about the just staggering hypocrisy of the Democrats on so many different fronts, and I do want to get into that, but I want to start by talking about the border.
So you just came back from the border.
Talk about why you went down there and a little bit of what you saw.
Well, my mom is, as you know, she's an elderly woman.
She's 85 years old, and she's pretty much confined to the house because of COVID. Three years ago, she got very ill with just a cold, almost died of just a common cold.
So we are making sure that she does not get COVID. And so obviously, for those reasons, she's confined to the house, and she's become very lonely and everything.
And She does have her doctors, and shout out to Dr.
Roa, her cardiologist.
Who's a fan of the podcast.
Who's a fan of the podcast. Who listens to the podcast.
It's so cool. I was kind of laughing because you were telling me that he was describing all the MyPillow products.
Oh, yeah. So he's a big supporter of MyPillow, and we love that.
Thank you. Keep it up. Keep it up.
So anyway, so I went this past weekend to see Mom, and You know, I did notice a lot of traffic, more than normal, because as you know Harlingen is a very sleepy town.
Too sleepy, in my opinion.
But anyway, all the action is happening in McAllen, which is about 30 miles, maybe 30 minutes from Harlingen.
So here's Bill Milligan. He's in McAllen.
He's a Fox LA reporter, but he's one of the best guys reporting on the border.
And he says, the city of McAllen, Texas, says the federal government has released over 7,000 COVID-positive migrants into their city since February.
Including 1,500 in the last week alone.
It's a local state of disaster.
And look at these numbers. I mean, this is the This is the number of migrants this year.
February, 100,000.
March, 173,000.
April, 178.
May, 180,000.
July, 210,000.
So we have allowed a million people into this country illegally under the fictitious pretense of, you know what, here's your kind of notice to appear in court.
Knowing that half these guys, if not more, are not going to show up anywhere.
They're disappearing. They dissolve into the population.
In fact, they're being dispersed by the Biden administration in a way that makes them impossible to really track.
And you're seeing it.
So Harlingen gets the kind of the aroma, if you will, of all those neighboring border towns.
What was the sentiment down there?
You know people down there. You talk to them a lot.
Yeah, well, I mean, really, you know, some of, I don't want to reveal who, but some people are talking to some Border Patrol agents who are ready to quit.
I mean, they, you know, why are they, you know, exposing themselves to COVID on a regular basis?
In fact, about maybe 100 workers or, you know, immigration officials have died of COVID. All because of illegals coming with COVID. How horrific is that?
And not only that, but you can't do your job.
No, they can't do their job.
They can't detain anybody.
They can't even ask, you know, have you been tested for COVID? Can we test you?
They don't even do that.
So the hypocrisy, it comes from the administration, making everybody now wear masks again and asking for people to vaccinate themselves and all of those things.
And that's a personal choice, I get that.
But at the same time, allowing all of these illegals coming in from the border with COVID.
And here my mom sits in her house, cannot leave her house because of COVID.
And then all of these people- I mean, look at these images and trucks of people just piled literally on top of each other, one on top of the other.
And the Biden administration, blithely indifferent to all this, it's...
And so think of the ordinary American watching this on the one side, and on the other side, they're lecturing you about doing this and that.
It totally dissolves their credibility.
I mean, why would you even listen Right.
When they're clearly indifferent to the very thing that they claim is a national emergency.
Right. Well, I mean, this is a real virus, but they have politicized this virus so much that people that are very hesitant already about the virus think it's all BS. Yeah, yeah.
When we come back, we're going to pivot a little bit to democratic hypocrisy of which there is a lot.
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We're back, Debbie and I, we're going to talk about the scandalous hypocrisy of the left and of the Democrats.
My favorite example here is Cori Bush, who is being interviewed and is being asked about why she thinks it's okay To promote defund the police while she is spending large amounts of money, $70,000, $100,000, $200,000 on private security for herself.
And here is her brazen response.
Listen. If I end up spending $200,000, if I spend $10 more on it, you know what?
I get to be here to do the work.
So suck it up and defunding the police has to happen.
So, I mean, let's take this in.
I mean, let's interpret what she's saying.
I mean, first of all, I take it that she's saying that security does protect you.
I mean, why would she have private security if it didn't protect her?
So she goes, yeah, it protects me.
And she is implying, you know, it's me.
I mean, here I am.
I'm special. Yeah, I'm in the arena.
I'm getting it done.
So I deserve a level of protection that the peasants don't deserve.
That's the implication of what she's saying, isn't it?
It's exactly what she's saying.
She's saying what's good for me isn't good for you.
That's what she's saying. And you would think a normal person when saying that would be like, well, I recognize that there is some apparent contradiction between defund the police.
But no, she'll talk about her own private security and defund the police in the same sentence.
And I think what that shows is that for these people, it's not really hypocrisy.
Because, see, hypocrisy would imply the ordinary person and I are on the same plane, so I can't justify treating them differently than me.
Her point is, I'm not on the same plane.
I'm a superior individual.
I'm an aristocrat.
They're peasants. No, obviously I deserve security.
Obviously they don't. And she has a lot to do.
That's why she wants to be safe.
You know, she has a lot of politicizing things to do.
So how dare us?
And she says that because she's so defund the police, like people are after her, they're threatening her.
So the security is fully justified by all that.
Let's turn to her buddy.
This is another one of the left-wing squad members.
This is Rashida Tlaib.
And she's unleashing on Rand Paul because he's against the mask.
Right. So it says, you know, that the footage was taken, was actually taken down from the...
I guess the band posted some of the footage that played at the wedding.
Right. And so this is it.
It's not that they think, you know, they think nothing of violating these ordinances.
Right. They just don't want to be seen to do so.
It's very similar to AOC, where she's like, you know, mingling, chatting, and then suddenly the photographer shows up, she whips on her mask, you know, takes the photo, and then two minutes later, mask is down.
Exactly. Well, as you know, I mean, I wear a mask, as you know, and that's my choice, right?
But I'm not a hypocrite about it.
You know, I don't tell people, you need to do this, and then I'm over there not doing it.
You know, I've been vaccinated, and I feel good about it, but that's, again, that's my choice.
Well, I mean, your point has been from the beginning that if these Democrats were serious, they would apply a standard across the board, even take Fauci, right?
Did you hear Fauci say one word about Obama's big party?
No, of course not. He doesn't say about Obama's party.
He doesn't say anything about the border.
So he's not consistent.
That's the problem.
If these people were consistent with their rhetoric, Then we would be a little bit more apt to believe them and to, you know, do what they say or let's put it this way, do what they recommend, right?
Because this is still a free country.
So, but no, but that's not what they do.
So when they blame, you know, they blame the Trumpsters.
I mean, first of all, let's be clear.
The groups that are least vaccinated are African Americans and Latinos.
If you were to identify two groups with the lowest vaccination rates, but of course the Biden administration isn't going to blast them.
Let's blast the blacks.
Let's blast the... So what they do is they pretend like there's a third group.
Trump supporters who are the least vaccinated, which is actually not the case.
And then they blast those guys.
But my point is, they don't realize, or they do realize, that their hypocrisy is contributing to a level of distrust in which they are the reason that people are skeptical of the vaccine.
They are the reason. They are the reason.
Remember when Trump came up with the term, what was it, the Operation Warp Speed, right?
People, they, the left, was like, oh, I'm not doing anything that Trump, you know, puts out.
I'm not going to take the vaccine.
Oh, no way, Jose.
And then the vaccine comes out.
Oh, now that we're in charge, the vaccine is suddenly good.
So, oh, it just really...
Let's look at John Kerry here.
There's a report that simply looked at the trips that John Kerry has taken on his private jet.
Now, it's one thing if he says, and in fact, John Kerry did say, he goes, well, listen, you know what?
I got to take my jet.
What do you want me to walk to the climate change conference?
I got to get there quickly, right?
But he has taken evidently, this year alone, more than 20 trips, and most of them are to Martha's Vineyard.
Where Kerry owns a huge, you know, obviously not exactly climate-friendly mansion.
Right. So once again...
And it's on the coast, right?
So it's going to be, like, flooded soon, right?
According to the latest UN estimates.
Yeah. I don't see them building a huge, you know, fortress to keep out the water when the oceans rise.
So once again, you've got case after case after case of these, quote, superior human beings who live by a different standard.
Right. Well, as I've said, you know, they are exactly like the Chavistas in Venezuela.
They are cut from the same exact cloth.
Not a similar cloth, but the same exact cloth.
Talk about the Chavista Hippocracia.
Oh, yeah. So I have a couple of things.
This is actually pretty old.
It's from 2012, but it's worth mentioning.
So Chavez's daughter, you know, back Hugo Chavez, before he passed away, poses with dollar bills.
She's actually here on, I guess she put it on Instagram, and people were just outraged because at the time people were really eating whatever they could find on the street.
Some people were even eating dogs, cats, whatever.
And here she was posing with all this money.
I mean, how- Slaunting it.
Flaunting it. Flaunting it.
And so they basically said, listen, this is really bad.
It shows a lack of empathy and it shows a huge hypocrisy.
But that's not all.
Then later, some of Maduro's cronies have children that have decided to live luxury abroad.
Here is, you know, shows, well, this is basically no to the dictadura, so some people are just, you know...
Are protesting this. Are protesting, right.
But it says, you know, that they've been accused of hypocrisy by Venezuelans struggling to feed themselves after it emerged that many children and cronies of senior officials are living abroad in luxury.
So, of course, it's just, you know...
It's very similar to the way that the left behaves here in America.
And I always point to it.
I say, you know what? This is the exact same thing.
And also very similar is the way the opposition reacts to it.
It's almost as though they've been defeated and there is no fighting back.
They're always caught mapping.
They're always shocked by what the left is doing, as if you can't look at a wolf and determine its character.
You're like, oh my god, it's a wolf!
Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, again, honey, it goes to the heart of who these people are and why we have to react in a way that actually...
Makes people do something about it.
We need to have to show some real fight, but we also need to kind of, and this is a tough job because of the media, because of the thick fog produced by the media, which is part of the Chavista class in this country.
So the media itself is creating a squid-like cloud of obfuscation, so people have I mean, the evidence is all around you.
You don't have to be a genius to see what's happening at the border.
You don't have to be a genius to see all these people, Obama's party, they're lording it around.
So this is, they want to establish, I think, an aristocracy in America, and they want the conservatives to be a second class or perhaps even captive population.
They're peasants, for sure. We're the peasants and they are overlords, and that's their model.
Exactly right. That's their model, yep.
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I want to talk in this segment about happiness and some very kind of interesting, perhaps odd findings about happiness that have emerged not only in our experience and human experience, but also in social science research.
Aristotle says that the ultimate purpose of life is happiness.
And what Aristotle means by that is that other things that we seek in life are normally for the sake of something else.
So, for example, we might seek money for the sake of security.
Or we seek an education for the sake of getting a job.
Or we seek a spouse in order to have companionship and a family.
So we're seeking something, but it is an intermediate good on the way to something else.
But the only good, says Aristotle, for which there's no further good, that we seek only for its own sake and there's no other reason to seek it, is happiness.
We want to be happy. We don't want to be happy in order to do something else.
We want to be happy, period.
Now, the question is, with human beings sort of relentlessly pursuing happiness at all times, you could say, how is it the case that happiness seems kind of so elusive?
I get a regular newsletter from a guy named Rob Henderson.
Rob is a really smart guy.
And he puts out a lot of social science research in his newsletters.
He doesn't really comment on it.
He's a very invisible sharer of this information.
Once in a while he'll talk about his background and so on.
But usually he's just describing what the research shows.
And so I want to talk about one of his recent newsletters.
And he's talking about the fact that, why is it the case, he says, Rob does, that human beings, when they are really trying to get something, believing that that will make them happy, and somehow it doesn't.
Oh, if I could only get that job, I'm going to be happy.
Oh, if I could only own my own house, I'd be happy.
Oh, if I could only, you know, have this relationship with this girl, my life would be changed, I would be happy.
And for some reason, even when you get there, you get the job, you get the house, But there's a little bit of a sort of a letdown, and pretty soon you're on to the next thing.
Your happiness is more of a quest than it is a destination.
Now, apparently, there's a social scientist, William von Hippel, who discusses this in a book called The Social Leap.
And essentially, William von Hippel gives an evolutionary explanation for this.
Now, don't be put off by the word evolution.
I'm not here going to get into the debate about evolution...
But there is nothing inherently in evolution that is contradictory with Christianity or the Bible.
The simple truth is that evolution, in some ways, by talking about survival of the fittest, it describes human nature as being grasping, as being striving, as being concerned primarily with itself.
How do I get by? How do I make it?
It gives a description of the selfishness of human nature that is quite similar to the description that is given by Christianity.
So, keep an open mind about it, at least for now.
And what William von Hippel is doing is he's saying, imagine two guys in ancient times, in caveman days, and they're both going out to kill a mastodon, some kind of a huge creature.
Mastodons are extinct today, but they weren't extinct when they were early humans on the earth.
And so, imagine two guys going out to kill mastodons.
And they both do. They're both successful.
But one guy says, oh, I've killed a mastodon.
That was what I wanted to do, similar to the guy who wants to get a house or get a job.
And he goes, I'm happy.
That's it for me. I'm done.
I'm content. There's nothing that can add to my happiness right now.
I don't need to go out and kill any more Mastodons because I've already done it.
Leave me alone. Another guy kills the Mastrodon and is temporarily elated.
Wow, I killed a Mastrodon!
But pretty soon his level of happiness drops and he becomes anxious and ambitious again.
And he goes, man, I kind of feel like I've got to go out and kill another Mastrodon.
Now... Essentially, the evolutionary question is this.
Which of those two guys is more likely to survive and prosper and perpetuate his genes into the next generation?
And the answer is, obviously, the second guy.
Obviously the anxious guy.
That's the guy who's more likely to find a spouse, more likely ultimately.
Why? Because he's a person who's able to provide for himself and for his family better.
The anxiety and the ambition become a motivating force to go get the next mastodon.
Now... Interestingly, Rob Henderson in this newsletter goes on to ask the question, who are the happiest people in America?
Are they the city people who live in tall buildings and have high-powered jobs and have come out of the elite schools and go to restaurants where they spend $200, including on a nice bottle of wine, or Or are they people who live in small towns and have normal jobs and, by and large, middle-class standards of living?
And it turns out it's the latter.
It is the small-town, middle-class people who are happier.
And this seems to be a little bit of a puzzle because you've got people in cities who seem to be eating a better cut of meat and veal and drinking better wine, and they make more money, and they've got friends who make more money.
But this is the key point that Rob Henderson makes.
He says, look, There's a whole body of research that shows that we don't compare ourselves to the average American.
We compare ourselves to the Americans who are right around us.
And so you might have a guy in a city and he's making $140,000 a year, and he's not comparing himself to somebody else who lives, say, in Harlingen on the Rio Grande Valley, who's making $50,000 a year.
Rather, he's comparing himself to a banker that he knows or a law guy he knows who just made partner is now making $300,000 a year.
And so the guy making $140,000 is like, man, I'm not really doing well.
I got to really up my game.
And so what happens is by making these localized comparisons, you feel a sense of discontent because you're not doing and you never will be doing.
There's always going to be someone who's going to be doing better than you, have more money, a bigger house than you do.
I mean, Debbie and I live in a very nice neighborhood, but we don't have the best house in the neighborhood.
So people could say, you know, by our neighborhood standards, we're comparatively poor.
And so this is how it is.
What happens is whereas people in small towns have a sense of community.
I think of even Debbie's mom.
Yeah, she's 85 years old, and yes, she goes to a church, and there may be a dozen or so people who go regularly to that church, but she knows all of them, and she knows a lot about their lives, and she tries to stay in touch with them, and going to a wedding, going to a funeral, these things are very important to her.
And so, she has networks that may seem kind of thin at her age.
Many of her friends, of course, have already passed away, but nevertheless, these networks are thicker.
They're more meaningful than a city guy who actually really knows nobody.
Comes back to his own apartment.
He's all by himself. Basically sleeps on his kind of, you know, unibed.
And stares up the ceiling for a while.
Does a little bit of social media.
And then has no other human contact out of kind of the immediate necessities of life.
So the lesson of all this is that happiness is often to be found in relationships, in being able to create a sense of community.
Those things are very achievable, and they're attainable pretty much to everybody.
And they produce more happiness, it seems.
And when I say small towns, I don't necessarily mean towns of a thousand people.
Harlingen has, what, honey, 50,000 or so people?
Yeah. Harlingen is a small town relative to, say, Detroit or Chicago or New York City.
So happiness, this thing that Aristotle called eudaimonia, eudaimonia, the eudaimonic pursuit, is something we're all engaged in.
But I think one of the things I find interesting about looking at the social science literature, it gives us some clues about where this happiness, this elusive thing, is in fact to be found.
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So we're going to do a question for today.
I don't do the questions every day, but I like to do them when I can.
And if you have a question, send it, preferably audio or video, send it to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Let's go to today's question.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
I wanted to ask you about natural rights.
Recently, you had Randy Barnett on your podcast talking about his book, Our Republican Constitution.
And in that book, towards the end of Chapter 1, he talks about natural rights, and he claims these are secular in nature and not religious in nature.
And I disagree with that.
When I think about the Bible where it says on the Ten Commandments, thou shalt not kill the right to life, thou shalt not steal property rights, and so on.
And I also think about a book by David Barton, Original Intent, In which David Barton quotes Richard Hooker in defining natural rights, where Richard Hooker was influential to John Locke, and in quoting Gratian, a 12th century monk, Hooker notes that natural rights are that which the books of the law and the gospel do contain.
So that's also religious in nature, and I just wanted to hear your take on it.
Thank you so much. Bye-bye.
This is a really good question and I want to try to elaborate it and dispel some confusion around all this.
You mentioned in your question about the Bible and seeing in the Bible the commandments, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, as representations of what is evil and what is wrong and what is against natural right.
Now, the interesting thing, though, if you think about it, is that when you read those commandments for the first time—I think this is certainly true of me, I'm quite sure it's true of you—you didn't learn that stealing was wrong from the Bible.
You didn't learn that adultery was wrong or murder from the Bible.
You already knew it was wrong.
When you saw it in the Bible, you were like, yeah, that's right.
In other words, the Bible is a codification, an affirmation of something that you already knew.
And the question is, how did you already know that?
Did you know it merely because your parents taught you?
Or did you know it in a sense, you may say, from conscience?
Is it the case, in other words, that there is an interior law inside of every human mind, normal human body.
Now, there are people supposedly who don't have a conscience, and those are people that we call psychopaths.
In fact, we don't even hold them accountable in courts of law.
But for normal human beings who have a conscience, there is this inner law, which is a kind of pointer to what is right and what is wrong.
Interestingly, if we think about the phrase nature, you know, natural right and natural law both come from the idea of nature.
So what is nature?
Well, nature is really divided into two parts, isn't it?
There's nature, which is to say trees and plants, animals, rocks, Then there's human nature.
Now, there are laws appropriate to both.
The laws of nature are typically called physical laws, right?
That would be, for example, gravity.
If I throw a stone, it follows a certain type of an arc before it lands on the ground.
Those are physical laws which are descriptive in nature.
But human nature, which does operate according to physical laws, if I jump up, I will come down, but human beings also have a different type of We're good to go.
What is the source of this moral law for human beings?
And the answer is there are really two sources.
The sources reinforce each other, but they are a little bit distinct.
So the first source is human nature or conscience.
People have an understanding of right or wrong just by virtue of being human.
And this is by the way why even someone who is an agnostic or an atheist can be moral.
They can be moral.
Why?
Because they too have a conscience.
You don't have to be a believer in God to realize for example that reaching into your neighbor's wallet and taking money out of it and putting it into your wallet is wrong.
Everybody knows that.
People in India know that.
They can be Hindus or they can be Buddhists or they can be nothing at all.
They know that too. So the first source of natural right, awareness of right and wrong, is conscience.
And the second source is the divine law or revelation.
That would be the Ten Commandments.
The Ten Commandments are literally revealed directly by God, given to Moses, who brings them down on tablets.
Now, the American founders, and this is one of my concluding points, We're good to go.
So, for the founders, we have nature, and you can call nature secular if you want, but they didn't, because to them, even nature is created by God.
So, when they talked about nature and nature's God, they're talking about creation and the Creator.
And separately in nature and directly from God, we get, both through reason and through revelation, both through the Bible and through conscience, that distinction between right and wrong that can be called natural.
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