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Aug. 13, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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AND THE WINNER IS… Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep153
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The Biden administration wants the Taliban to really watch it because they may not gain full acceptance from the international community.
My reaction.
Also, the racism in Biden's infrastructure project.
And I'm going to begin my examination of the Book of Job to answer the simple question we all ask.
Why is God doing this to me?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
♪♪♪ America needs this voice.
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.
The United States is facing defeat, ruin, embarrassment in Afghanistan.
A war that has now gone on for 20 years cost a lot to 2,500 or so American lives.
A real tragedy.
And at the very least, one would expect in the face of this some solemnity.
But instead, we're getting a kind of farcical silliness coming from all places in the Biden administration.
Here's a classic example from Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
Listen. The Taliban also has to make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community.
Their role in the international community?
Before I address this head-on, which I intend to, I want to talk a little bit about what's going on in Afghanistan.
So the Taliban have, with a blitzkrieg speed reminiscent of the Nazis, moved north and moved south, and they're taking over one city after another.
They took over this third largest city, Heret, a couple of days ago.
Now they claim their reports, unconfirmed but most likely true, that they've taken over Kandahar, another huge and important city in the south.
And apparently U.S. intelligence now predicts that they're about 90 days, 90 days from taking over Kabul.
And remember, Kabul has been the center of the Afghan army.
That's where the United States was based.
We were supposedly training the Afghan army to be fully capable of handling them.
The Taliban, this has been a military failure, a failure of leadership at the highest level, and the American public has been grossly misled all these years about what's going on.
Now, as the Taliban take these towns and cities, they capture all kinds of American equipment.
They capture American mortars, American Humvees, American pickup trucks, American weapons.
Apparently these have just been abandoned.
This is taxpayer paid for, very expensive equipment, and we're turning it over to our enemies, the Taliban.
Let's remember that Biden, just last month, in July, was asked about Afghanistan, and he said, quote, the jury is still out, but the likelihood there's going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.
And I'm sure here is Biden sitting around now, just basically thinking that all of this is just kind of unexpected development.
You know, come on, man!
This is not what they told me!
So, this is the goofballism that we're dealing with here.
Now, the United States, by the way, having pulled out most of its 3,500 force, We're good to go.
And we have to think about who these Taliban are.
Let's just do a little bit of a memory card here.
The Taliban, the name Taliban, comes from the word student.
Now, it's a little bit of a metaphorical term because some of these Taliban guys are like 80 years old.
They're not students in the normal sense.
The head of the Taliban, by the way, this guy Malawi Akunzadaw.
Absolutely primitive, savage, tribal leader, vicious guy.
And his main deputy is the son of Mullah Omar.
Remember, Mullah Omar is the guy who invited the 9-11 hijackers to come.
He's the former ruler of the country.
His son is apparently now one of the top guys in the Taliban.
And these are guys who ban television, they ban music, they ban movies.
They don't want women to be educated above the age of 10.
I think until 10, they think it's okay.
But after that, I think they think a little too much knowledge, you know, a little bit destructive for women.
They also go around the country knocking down ancient statues.
Remember the old Buddhist statues that they all pulled down the Bamiyan Buddha?
So these are fanatical Sharia types.
They make even the ordinary Muslim radical look like kind of a rhino, kind of a moderate.
And now I want to turn to the U.S. reaction because it is so pathetic.
It's so preposterous.
First of all, this is coming out of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
We strongly condemn the Taliban's unlawful detention of several members of the Afghan government.
We urge the immediate release, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you've got to realize that when you lose a fight on the battlefield, you can't go around making these stupid, pompous statements.
We demand this. You don't demand anything.
The Taliban is calling the shots.
They're the ones who are going to be putting forward demands.
So this is utterly unbelievable.
In the process of evacuating the embassy, these people are issuing pompous proclamations, typing out a press release before I run to the helicopter and get the heck out of their Saigon style.
And then the State Department says, you know, Taliban, you better watch it because, you know, the United States may withhold recognition from the Taliban.
What? What? As if the Taliban, oh yeah, you're not going to recognize me.
We're really worried about this one.
Maybe we should rethink our strategy, guys.
And then Jen Psaki, quote, and you heard the quote, the Taliban has to make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community.
Now, I'm just kind of imagining some sort of Taliban guy's reaction to this and their, you know, their incomprehension.
Remember, you're dealing with people, you know, from the 11th century.
I guess the United States' goal was to try to move Afghanistan into the 13th century, which would have been an improvement.
But it's a failed project, and we're going to basically go back to the 11th century.
So I can just see this Taliban guy kind of listening, you know, holding his rifle, listening to Jen Psaki.
He's probably thinking, you know...
The international community?
Yeah, I'll show up in the international community as long as I can bring my weapons, I can bring my animals, I can do some drug dealing on the side to collect some money for my Taliban buddies.
I want to make sure that before I leave, I behead everybody in the room.
That's extremely important.
And then just to show my content for the whole process, I'm going to sort of take a crap on the floor before I get out of there.
So this is the caliber of...
I'm not going to criticize the Taliban.
They are what they are. I'm actually going to fall to the kind of bovine stupidity of the Biden administration, which has produced this mess.
Now look, Trump wanted to get out of Afghanistan, and so I'm not condemning the decision to get out.
I'm condemning the way it was done.
This is sort of the most dishonorable retreat since the collapse of U.S. forces in Saigon.
It's a lasting defeat for U.S. foreign policy.
It's going to embolden our adversaries in Russia and China.
They're going to look at this, and they're And they're going to say, well, listen, this is probably the fruit of the woke military.
Yeah, General Milley, let's have some more men in high heels.
Let's have some more men listening to Ibram Kendi and worrying about the transgender bathrooms.
This is the U.S. military's priority.
It even comes out in official communiques.
So other countries are building up their fighting forces.
But when a rag-tag tribal army in Afghanistan can defeat the most powerful military in the world...
That's a sign that something has gone deeply wrong, not over there, but right over here.
So what is it about Mike Lindell that terrifies the left so much?
They say, oh no, he's having this cyber conference, there's nothing to it.
But they're doing their best to attack him in every way.
Not just canceling him by different retailers, but the latest incident, some Antifa leftist types confront Mike, and under the name of taking a photo, they actually attack the guy.
Wow. Well, we need to support Mike every way we can.
And the way to do it, the simple way to do it, is just to patronize his merchandise, which happens to be great stuff.
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To get these discounts, make sure you use promo code DINESHDINESH. I want to talk about the Biden infrastructure bill, and I want to focus on something that hasn't been focused on a lot, namely, or hardly at all, the issue of race and infrastructure, because the Biden infrastructure legislation is peppered With racial preferences.
And this notion of injecting now pretty much run-of-the-mill government projects with racial bias, this has become a kind of hallmark of the Biden administration.
Even the Obama administration didn't do this.
Now, in the infrastructure bill, a lot of the debate between the Republicans and the Democrats has focused on how much of this is really infrastructure.
Because under the broad umbrella term infrastructure, which obviously would refer to things like roads and bridges and tollways and perhaps even utilities, maybe even electronic infrastructure, but it certainly doesn't refer to things like abortion or it doesn't refer to things that are the Green New Deal, the retrofitting of private and commercial buildings.
That is infrastructure in a sense, but it's not the government's responsibility.
So, the debate is kind of focused on that area.
What has been missed largely is that if you look at the fine print of the infrastructure bill, you begin to see some very disturbing trends.
Now, first of all, I'm going to focus on the things that really are infrastructure, that you begin to see some very disturbing trends.
Now, first of all, I'm going to focus on the things that really are infrastructure that do involve government contracting.
Remember, the government, by and large, doesn't build things.
It contracts out.
It does a bidding system, and it hands out deals.
You can build this road if you're the low-bid contractor.
But now with the, you know, it used to be that Democrats would basically say, we'd like to do business with contractors that, you know, have affirmative action and that have 20% of their employees are black.
And that was kind of the old way.
The new way is just blatant.
Basically, the government says we won't give contracting deals except to minority and women-owned businesses.
So minority and women-owned businesses kind of move to the front of the line.
It's naked racial and sexual discrimination of a kind that would seem to flatly violate the language, if not also the spirit, of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
And subsequent legislation as well.
Now, Biden has been playing this game since he came into office.
In the Biden American Rescue Plan Act, this was, by the way, the coronavirus relief package, Biden basically said, I'm going to give debt relief to black farmers, but not to white farmers.
Another provision basically said, I'm going to give billions of dollars in aid to minority and women-owned restaurants.
But if you have a struggling restaurant and you're white, you know what?
Take a hike. Now, the good thing is that the white farmers and the white restaurant owners went to court.
And their cases began to climb all the way to the Supreme Court.
In some cases, they didn't get there.
They just went up to federal judges.
But in every single case...
The federal judges struck down the Biden administration's racial bias.
They basically said, no, no, no, no, no.
If you're going to hand out coronavirus relief, you can't discriminate.
Think of this. This is state-sponsored discrimination on the basis of race and sex.
If you go back and read the Civil Rights Act, this is basically what the act was intended to prohibit.
And so courts have struck this down, both in the area of restaurants and in the area of farming.
But you'd think the Biden guys would be like, you know what?
We're kind of chastened here.
We can't go about it this way to get the message.
But no, they're doubling down. They're basically saying, okay, you know what?
We can't do it with farmers.
We can't do it with restaurants. So here we go.
So now they're basically giving a built-in preference to minority and women-owned businesses for infrastructure.
This is certainly going to go to the Supreme Court.
I'm going to quote from the Supreme Court in one of its earlier rulings.
It said, quote, The court's saying no.
You know, if there is a specific case where this highway commission discriminated against blacks, you might be able to do a narrowly tailored remedy to that.
But a generalized sort of blacks and women get in the front of the line first is simply not going to work.
The underlying premise here is critical race theory.
Critical race theory looks at anything.
They can look at a stop sign, an airport, a dilapidated public building, and they essentially go, see, that's evidence of racism.
And you're like, how? How is a stop sign evidence of racism?
Well, you see, Dinesh, that's because of residential patterns and redlining that used to be practiced in the 1960s, and blacks couldn't live in these areas, and so the stop signs were designed to give a kind of peaceful movement to white communities, and therefore there's a racial stigma attached to the stop signs.
This is the mode, by the way, this is the level of intellect that you see in these kinds of arguments.
Most of these critical race theory guys are just downright stupid.
They themselves are products of affirmative action, and so they're indulging, and you could call it affirmative action reasoning.
In other words, basically reasoning for stupid people.
And they expect the rest of us to be conned by it.
Well, we're not conned. And I don't think the courts are conned.
But it is interesting that we have an administration that is so nakedly and brazenly pushing race-based preferences, attempting, you may say, to fight racism with racism, to fight an imaginary racism with real racism.
But if you really want to get rid of race in this country as a factor in decision-making, one way to do that is to get rid of race as a factor in decision-making.
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Hunter Biden is at it again.
I'm not talking about his art show, which I talked about the last time I brought up his name.
I'm actually talking not even about something Hunter Biden has done now, but more information about Hunter Biden surfacing right off his Now, let's remember that when this laptop first surfaced, the media really tried to dismiss it.
And they had some help from some just absolutely lying former intelligence.
This is obviously Russian intelligence.
It was laughable. What, the Russians came and wrote Hunter's emails and put the laptop in Hunter's possession, emails that he himself recognized.
He himself said at the end, yeah, it's probably my laptop.
It had pictures of him, video of him.
So... The point here is that this is an authentic laptop.
I think it's now reluctantly been conceded by the left-wing press that that is true, but they're still not covering what's on the laptop.
Why? Because not only does it incriminate Hunter Biden, it incriminates Joe Biden, and in a big way.
Now, the latest example is a small one, but it's very telling, and it's incriminating on its own strength.
This was, by the way, reported by the London Daily Mail, now picked up by some conservative outlets in America.
But I noticed the mainstream American press is ignoring it.
You have to turn to the foreign press to really get coverage of Hunter Biden and the Biden family racket.
So in the latest episode, we're now talking about 2018, the summer of 2018, and Hunter Biden is on a two-week, you can say, sex spree in Las Vegas.
He's going from one penthouse to the other.
He's hooking up, you may say, with one hooker after the other.
He's spending $10,000 a night.
And on this particular occasion, he's filming himself with prostitutes, and then at the end of it, he passes out.
He passes out.
And now we're actually quoting Hunter Biden, because he goes, and I went to the hot tub by myself, which hangs over the edge of the effing floor with glass.
It's ridiculous.
So I'm sitting there, and that's the last I remember.
Pause. A little bit of notice here.
This is the, according to Joe Biden, this is the smartest guy he's ever known.
Hunter Biden. Now, Hunter Biden says he woke up and there were all these people in the room.
There were two guys and a Russian woman.
And the Russian woman basically said, okay, I'm going to clean up here because if you're not well and if we have to call the ambulance, we don't want them to see all this.
Now, Hunter Biden is dumb, but he's not so dumb that he's wondering, what's a Russian doing here?
Who are these other guys who seem to be kind of in cahoots with her?
And Hunter Biden, of course, knows at this point that his dad, Joe Biden, is running for president.
He's one of the candidates.
So Hunter Biden then says, this is Hunter Biden's own words, that the Russian took his laptop.
Now, this is a different laptop than the laptop.
So we have a real irony.
Think about it. We're getting the information about the theft of Hunter Biden's other laptop from this laptop.
This is the information on the other laptop.
So here's Hunter. He goes, I think he, meaning one of the guys, he's the one that stole my computer.
I think the three of them, the three guys, were like a little group.
Hunter figures out that they're in it together.
And then he says, quote, they have videos of me doing this.
They have videos of me doing crazy effing sex.
Effing. They have videos of me doing crazy effing.
He repeats himself. Now, Think of what Hunter Biden is saying here.
Hunter Biden is basically saying that he recognizes, it dawns on him at this late stage in the game, that he and his family can be an object of blackmail.
They're taking a laptop with all this incriminating stuff.
These are Russians! I mean, think about it.
This was Donald Trump!
The outrage, the level of coverage would be just wall to wall.
And yet, from the media, dead silence.
Dead silence.
So, you have a U.S. president whose son is directly involved with Russians who are taking his stuff, and this is a hostile power.
Russia is not our friend.
We might be able to do business with Russia in certain ways, but the bottom line of it is they are a greedy, grasping power run by a thug who wants to displace the United States no differently from how the Chinese want to.
And so all of this is extremely newsworthy, and it is so telling that there is a kind of wall of media silence surrounding it.
Why? Not to protect Hunter Biden, but to protect the corrupt old crook in the White House, the lifelong mafia boss who has been running a self-enrichment racket through his children, including his smartest kid, Hunter. And that's the guy who's getting media protection.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast really an old friend.
I'd lost touch over the years, but I'm delighted to be back in touch.
Mike Johns. Mike is a political strategist, one of the founders of the Tea Party movement, also an accomplished writer.
Mike, boy, we met, I think, way back in the 1980s or early 1990s.
Oh, it was definitely the 1980s.
I would say probably our first communication was when I was still at the University of Miami and you were at Dartmouth.
During the kind of upsurge of conservative campus activism during the Reagan years, like you, you know, I was very inspired by Reagan.
And then, of course, you know, I had done a few internships in Washington and I joined Policy Review Magazine as an editor when you were managing editor, and that was in 1986.
Exactly. Right before I went to the Reagan White House, I was...
You know, I distinctly recall a conversation, don't know if you do, but you had come over.
I think maybe the offer had made or was about to be made.
I'm like, Dinesh, it's a great opportunity, but it's a short-lived one.
What we're doing here is really important.
And I tried to persuade you to stay unsuccessfully.
And part of that was admittedly a little selfishness because I benefited so much from our conversations and our interaction.
And over the years, I have cited you routinely as one of the great minds, not just of the present tense conservatism, but really in the history of our movement.
That means so much.
I really appreciate that.
I remember thinking back that you were kind of a walking encyclopedia.
Well, you are walking encyclopedia on Nicaragua, but you were also a walking encyclopedia on I think that was really your primary issue.
And you told me, I remember when people were sort of in a devotional mode toward Nelson Mandela, you were focused on Winnie Mandela and And I remember you telling me about these gruesome murders that were going on in South Africa where they would take people who were dissidents.
These were black dissidents against the African National Congress, and they would put them in a kind of a tire and set them on fire.
Remember all this? And you were writing about it.
She was a big champion of it.
Well, you know, first on Mandela...
Let me say some positive things and then point out some things that have been suppressed, really, in the recreation of his modern image.
Number one, he didn't go to jail for his political views.
He went to jail because he was engaged as a founder of the military wing of the African National Congress, which was a self-declared communist and Marxist insurgency.
He was engaged in plots to obtain munitions and recruiting other militants.
What he did, you would go to jail for, I assume, in any country in the world.
Now, he was fighting against the repressive system of apartheid.
But if you go back and even look at his trial, even at his trial, he acknowledged his militancy and attempted to defend it.
Which, you know, we might be sympathetic with, but there were other forces in South Africa, including in the Black majority population, that also supported an end to apartheid and were trying to do it peacefully.
And you may recall that I had supported Mangasudu Bunalezi.
In fact, I brought him later when I was in the Foreign Policy Department to the Heritage Foundation.
He's 92 years old now and still alive and still in Natal province on the East Coast and of course is another great figure, but he's been eclipsed by Mandela over the years.
And further on Mandela, I mean, number one, he was a self-declared communist.
When he came out of jail, one of the first things that he did was praise the South African Communist Party.
Mike, I think all of this is, in a way, pressingly relevant, even though you're evoking the past, because what we seem to be having is a politics of recrimination in South Africa, a politics of retribution.
Now, in the case of South Africa, the grievances were recent.
They obviously just dated back to the 60s, the 70s, the 80s.
Do you see any parallels between the disintegration of South Africa and the emergence of a kind of retributional racial politics in this country?
Now in this country, obviously, the grievances are far more ancestral.
It seems like some of the suffering is imagined rather than real.
Anyone who says things like, you know, I'm personally wounded by the memory of slavery is obviously talking less about slavery than the indoctrination that their professors have imbued in them.
But my question is, is South Africa kind of a warning lesson for the United States today?
Yes and no.
I mean, in some ways you have to sort of acknowledge that, you know, Mandela ascended to the presidency really very quickly after his release from prison in the 1990s.
And he probably would have run for a second term, but he was getting up in age.
But that country has been governed by the African National Congress ever since.
And the praise that existed for them upon the release, and the mainstream media especially, their unwillingness to address the communist orientation, the embrace of violence.
By the way, Amnesty International never recognized Nelson Mandela as a political prisoner.
No one is aware of that.
If you ask people why Mandela went to jail, even educated people politically, they'll often say, well, he was opposed to apartheid.
No, he was engaged in an insurgency.
And he was sentenced to life, released after 27 years.
He also had praise throughout his entire life, until the end, Gaddafi, Castro, the Soviet Union before it dissolved.
He was an extremely anti-American individual, even though it was American pressure, both diplomatic and to some extent economic, though I don't think sanctions were a constructive force.
Ultimately, I tried to make that argument.
They weren't supported by the black majority in South Africa either.
Ultimately, we were hugely influential in bringing that to an end, as was F.W. DeClerc, really, a transitional national leader in the history of South Africa who had the confidence, really, to move forward with it.
But there were a lot of trepidations.
I, as you know, visited routinely.
I lost track of how many times I've been to South Africa, but it's been enough for me to remember, you know, the beauty and complexity of the country is the way I would describe it.
And in fact, I'd always praised federalism as a solution in South Africa because you had, you know, with Budalese, a very strong political movement that comprised, you know, a third maybe of the country.
And they drew off the Zulu population.
The ANC drew off of the COSA ethnic group primarily.
And all these complexities were lost or were really not sufficiently explored.
Now you have New Yorker Magazine as recently as a This year kind of declaring that the disparities of wealth in South Africa are greater than they were during apartheid and that Mandela's dream, as they interpret it, has been lost in civil violence and in an economy that, frankly, as we had pointed out, I had pointed out routinely, was filled with potential given its mineral wealth and its strategic location on the Cape.
Maybe not a full-blown Marxist model, but certainly a heavy-handed and, more importantly, corrupt, hugely corrupt political system with billions of dollars that have gone unaccounted for.
Mike, when we come back, I'm going to pivot a little bit away from South Africa.
This has been actually very eye-opening, but I want to talk to you a little bit about America, about you're one of the founders of the Tea Party movement.
What's gone wrong?
How do we push forward from here?
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I'm back with my old buddy from the Reagan years, Mike Johns, a writer, political strategist, one of the founders, if not the founder of the Tea Party movement.
Mike, let's talk about that for a little bit.
I mean, going back to the 80s and 90s, we saw ourselves very much as part of a conservative movement.
Not so much a Republican movement, but a conservative movement that was made up of intellectuals and activists and think tanks.
It had a grassroots element, but it was also...
It had an institutional element and an intellectual element with magazines and conferences.
Now, talk a little bit about how here we fast forward now 20 or 25 years.
We're in a very different situation.
What happened and how would you describe the change?
Well, you're exactly right.
I mean, we viewed ourselves as part of a movement, and we judged our success or lack thereof on how that movement was progressing.
And it sort of started as an intellectual movement in 1955 with Buckley founding National Review magazine.
And he acknowledged that he didn't really have political influence at that time.
It evolved into Reagan and the political movement that we were very much a part of, showing we could win electorally.
And then ultimately into Trump, who I think has addressed some key overlooked issues that have especially been hurtful to the middle class of this country.
And that meant that we interacted with other people.
We routinely would pick the phone up and call.
I would do favors for anyone in the name of the cause, even people that I didn't really know particularly well.
And I do sense that that That collegial approach and that collaborative approach, so essential to political success, has been completely, almost completely lost.
And I have to say, I think it's a product of a lack of national leadership in our movement.
So you're saying we're not kind of a movement anymore.
What is the right now?
Is it essentially a group of social media personalities and organizations that kind of operate and do their own thing, each with their own signature, but not collaborating together?
Is that the problem? Is it just that we've become fractured?
Yeah. All of those things are sort of sub-products of the larger leadership crisis.
So, you know, we have a lot of people who really just documented America's incremental deterioration and documented our political losses.
And it's outraged people and it's informed people and it's probably constructive that they've done those things, but it's not the centerpiece.
And meanwhile, we have the primary institutions that are the backbone of civil society.
The things that, you know, I've gone around the world talking about how to construct.
That have been completely taken over by individuals that reject our founding principles, reject our Constitution, and have no respect for general rule of law or America's historically great role in the world.
When I think back, Mike, when I think back, it was now people talk about populism versus elitism.
When I think of the Reagan years, we didn't focus quite so much on that distinction because we wanted to advance on both fronts.
I mean, we recognize that the You need to have grassroots people who are out in the street.
You need to have parents who are putting pressure on school boards.
But at the same time, you needed to have academics who were coming over to think tanks and doing practical intelligence where they would talk about how public policies could be shaped by social science knowledge and economics and history and philosophy.
So, we understood the importance of law schools being a pipeline to the Supreme Court.
It seems now that there is an emphasis on, you could call it, conservatism from the ground up.
But the consequence of this has been to allow elite institutions to be almost totally overrun by the left.
Yeah, if I said, who is responsible in our movement for, say, making sure that academia didn't fall, what, 95% into the hands of the globalist Marxist left?
Who would we go to terminate and say, hey, you failed in your job?
I mean, I'm not even sure I could name the person.
Who is responsible for maintaining at least some degree of neutrality in American media?
Who is responsible for making sure we could run free and fair elections that aren't Or to take a more pressing example, I mean, think about it. By and large, corporate America, if you had people who were CEOs, you could safely predict that they were Republican-leaning.
You might have had a couple of outliers who were Democrats, but the idea of the overrunning of the corporate sector Leave alone the military sector by this kind of woke liberalism.
I mean, has that come as a little bit of a surprise?
And what do you think is what's caused it?
Well, you know, and I have two decades of executive and management experience in the healthcare industry, including with some big publicly traded companies.
And I'll tell you that, you know, within those companies, when you go back to kind of the 90s, you know, or that decade, They weren't essentially very political, but I think what's occurred is because the left is so aggressive and they're in there making demands of these companies and their executive management teams, and they're not hearing from our side, maybe except to ask for money periodically, we...
Our ideals, which are actually much more favored to the private sector than the left's, I mean, I don't see how they benefit from any of these ideas that are being put forward by BLM, etc.
And in fact, I go further to say one of the ideas I have is I think this $2 billion plus of street damage that was done to commercial and residential properties should be paid for by the companies that sponsored BLM to begin with.
I mean, Amazon put 10 million bucks in.
You know, they should be coughing up a multiple of that, I think, to reimburse.
Why should that fall on the taxpayers?
So, again, it's leadership crisis, Dinesh, is that no one is out making our arguments.
And, you know, then you end up having a movement that is having to rely predominantly on money that drives Washington, D.C., So, you know, we're not hearing from the major institutions that we would want to hear from, you know, the messages right now.
And two big issues.
I think, you know, November 3 has to be resolved.
And look, half the country is not comfortable with the way that, and you read the Navarro report, it's very convincing.
And I would encourage people to do that.
And then you look at China's culpability and Responsibility for this pandemic that has done $20 trillion of damage to our economy, well over a year's GDP, and taken the lives of several million globally.
The answer is not banning the moving Olympics or us not participating in the Olympics.
This is far beyond that.
They're also a genocidal regime.
We really need to begin, I think, a fairly expeditious strategic Economic decoupling that is not disruptive, but comes to the recognition of what I feared all the way back to our early days, the People's Republic of China would become because it's, you know, the Chinese Communist Party was set up by the Bolsheviks.
They took a different path, but they are ultimately communists and act completely within the spirit of that ideology.
Mike, I like the way that you think, you know, in large terms and strategically.
We're going to have to have this conversation.
Keep it going so we can press these topics because I feel we're just touching the surface.
But thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Let's do this again. Thanks for all that you have done, are doing, and I believe will do because I think our most important days are yet to come, my friend.
I appreciate it. Thanks, Mike.
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I want to talk about a free speech case that is emerging at the University of Oklahoma today.
And I'm indebted to the coverage of this by the political scientist Jonathan Turley, who has an excellent column on this, and I'm drawing most of my information from this column.
But I think when we talk about free speech, we shouldn't just speak generically.
We should look at the way in which these free speech battles play out on the ground in practical terms.
So here's the University of Oklahoma, which has a star volleyball player, a woman named Kylie McLaughlin.
Now, Kylie McLaughlin got into trouble, you might say, with her coaches.
Her coaches are named Lindsay and Kyle Walton.
It appears to be a husband and wife team, but I'm not sure.
Anyway, two coaches. And she got in trouble with her coaches for what?
Basically, for expressing conservative views.
Now, McLaughlin is not some run-of-the-mill player.
She's the team captain. But when the team showed a Netflix documentary called 13th, which was evidently all about slavery, McLaughlin apparently said, quote, that while she agreed slavery was 100% wrong, she thought the film was slanted left.
And she said particularly the film went out of its way to criticize Trump, and she said, quote, black incarceration was higher than other racial groups while representing a smaller overall race.
Percentage of the population.
In other words, an absolute factually true statement.
If you pretty much go to any of the prisons for violent inmates, you discover blacks who are about 13%, 12 to 13% of the population are like 50, 60, 75% of the prison population.
So this is hardly, to anyone who knows anything about the subject, this is hardly a controversial statement.
It's merely a statement of fact.
Now, apparently, the University of Texas wanted to get rid of its school song, The Eyes of Texas.
Who knows why? Probably because of some history of, you know, there was once a racist who sang that song!
So, anyway, they want to get rid of it.
But Lindsay Walton said, let's not do it.
She objected to it. Now, apparently, this caused a bit of a ruckus on the team.
And apparently, Lindsay Walton came to her and said, delete the tweet.
Delete the tweet. Kyle Walton told her, quote, I'm not sure I can coach you anymore.
So these are coaches intimidating their own star player for being, you may say, a right winger.
And McLaughlin wanted to be cooperative, so she deleted the tweet.
And she apologized. So she backed down, I think in the name of, not because she regretted what she said, I don't think, but to make peace.
But evidently, the coaches decided the damage was done.
So they told her, listen, you know what?
From now on, if you want to do practice, you've got to practice on your own.
You can't practice with the team.
What? So they're essentially starting to isolate her from the team, and their reasoning is that she is interfering with team spirit.
So it's not her incapacity as a player, not at all.
And she got along with the team just fine, but evidently because she has offended their politics and maybe the official politics of the University of Oklahoma administration, she's now persona non grata.
So they basically push her out of the school.
McLaughlin ultimately transfers to Ole Miss, but she now files a lawsuit against the university and against the coaches on the fact that she was denied her athletic scholarship and ultimately driven out of the university because of her speech, which seems impossible to question.
Now the university, interesting in its kind of standard deceitful fashion, is trying to pretend like it's not about the speech, and so the university basically says that McLaughlin chose herself to go to another university.
She could have stayed on the team.
And that this is basically a ruckus of her own making.
But interestingly, the coaches disagree.
The coaches who have their own lawyer have filed a statement.
And I want to read the statement because it kind of gets to what the coaches are claiming.
They're basically claiming, yeah, we have the right to throw somebody off the team because of free speech.
So here's what they...
What they say. While plaintiff was free to make bigoted statements.
Now, first of all, I pause to note that this woman, Kylie McLaughlin, has not made a single bigoted statement.
But nevertheless, the coaches think it's bigoted.
While plaintiff was free to make bigoted statements, she was not free from the consequences of how her teammates perceived those statements.
Even though there's no known revolt from the team, it's the coaches that are kind of putting the thumbscrews on her.
And then they basically say that the First Amendment cannot force her teammates, again the coaches are hiding behind the rest of the team, to trust the plaintiff or desire to play with her.
And consequently, the coaches are saying that they're within their rights to cultivate a winning team atmosphere by...
and fostering team trust by throwing, if you will, uncooperative players off the team. Wow.
So what the coaches are basically saying that in the name of esprit de corps, team spirit, which by the way, they define team spirit, this bigoted player, they define who's bigoted, can in fact be pushed off the team for her views and nothing else.
This is a straight free speech case.
And I'm really hopeful that Kylie McLaughlin here takes it all the way, fights it in court, exposes the tyrannical mindset of these two coaches.
And ignorant though the coaches may be, the administration is not ignorant.
At the end of the day, it's important to punish these administrators, expose them, Make the trustees come to terms with all this.
Maybe get some of these people rooted out.
The legal way is one way to apply pressure on these people.
So we need conservative institutions that are going to bring these cases.
We already do have some.
We need more to protect free speech in the many, many places around not just the campus, but around the culture where it is gravely imperiled.
One of my favorite books in the Bible, in the Old Testament, is the Book of Job.
And I think it's many people's favorite because it is an attempt to confront difficult problems, you may say, with divine justice itself.
And so here you have not some atheist condemning God from the outside and faulting the Bible.
Here you have the Bible itself questioning why God is the way He is.
And this is an issue that all of us face.
Now, When you read some of the Proverbs and some of the Psalms, they are affirmations of divine justice.
Here is the book of Proverbs 12.21.
Now, this is a kind of, you may say, theological restatement of something that a lot of Americans say very casually, what goes around comes around.
Kind of like if you're a bad guy, you're going to get it.
And you're going to get it not just necessarily in some future life.
You're going to ultimately pay the consequences of what you've done in this life.
So this notion of, you know, the Hindus call it karma.
This is something that we would like to believe.
We would like to believe the world is like this.
Interestingly, the term pain comes from an original term, a Latin term, which means penalty or punishment.
So you have right in the definition of the term pain this idea that pain is a worthy consequence of the wrong that someone has done.
But... If we look with clear eyes at the world, we realize that there's a problem with all this.
Which is what? Well, it's simply the fact that if you look at the distribution of pain and suffering, if you look at the distribution of hardship in the world, it doesn't correspond with the moral character of who the pain and hardship falls on.
In fact, pain and hardship appear to be distributed unrelated to whether you're a good guy or a bad guy.
Think of a cholera-stricken kid in Bangladesh.
Think about earthquakes and tsunamis, which make absolutely no distinction between the good and the bad.
They just swallow and run over everybody in their wake.
And so you have the problem that a rabbi named Harold Kushner, in a book of a few decades ago now, his book was essentially, why do bad things happen to good people?
And that remains, I think, very relevant and, for some of us, kind of a personal.
Now, one Christian answer to that is, well, you know, the reason bad things happen to good people is, well, they don't.
They don't happen to good people.
Why not? Because there are no good people.
Everybody's bad. We represent what Kant called the crooked timber of humanity.
We all have original sin.
So none of us are sort of entitled to a life of blessings because we have this kind of twisted human nature.
Now this may be true, but it doesn't quite solve the problem because obviously there are various degrees of good and evil.
Some people are far worse than others.
There's a long distance between a relatively innocent child and let's say a child molester.
And so wouldn't you want a world in which the sufferings of the world fall on the people who are the worst people and that the blessings of the world such as they are fall upon the people who are good?
And yet the world isn't really that way.
Even if you look at ordinary people who are not spectacularly good or spectacularly bad and you look at the distribution of hardship that falls on them, it's very uneven.
Someone unexpectedly gets a horrific case of cancer and why her?
Why not you?
Why not someone else?
So this is the problem that the book of Job seeks to confront and I'm only going to sort of introduce it a little bit today, pick it up in a little more depth tomorrow.
So here's Job.
And he is, by all accounts, a righteous man.
And yet, he is subjected to horrific suffering.
Now, the suffering kind of moves in stages where he, at first, begins to kind of lose his possessions.
He begins to lose his camels and his donkeys.
And he begins to lose his wealth because he had considerable wealth.
But then the suffering begins to intensify.
Because he now begins to start losing family members.
His children start dying one after the other.
And he's left bereft of this large family that he had before.
And if that weren't bad enough, then he begins to get physical diseases, ailments, sores, that make him feel the pain, the intense pain, on a constant, uninterrupted basis.
So here is Job. And of course, the tragedy of Job is not just that he has suffering, but that he was a man who was enjoying plenty and comfort and abundance.
And so he has dropped from the top of the world, you can say, to the bottom.
Now, Job has some friends, three guys in particular.
I love their names.
They're Zophar, Eliphaz, and Bildad.
And these guys show up and they're trying to console Job, but they hardly console him because they say things like, well, Job, what have you done?
In what way have you offended God?
You must have done something.
They're appealing to the idea that justice does exist in the world and that your desserts do correspond with what you deserve.
And therefore, since Job is getting all these bad desserts, he must have done something really bad.
And we are tempted to agree with these friends, and we would agree with them, except, and this is the genius of the narrative, At the same time that we see what's going on down here with Job, kind of at the human level, we can also see what's going on with God.
This is a remarkable thing.
We can kind of get this double perspective.
It's kind of like in a movie, where on the one hand you're seeing things down here, but then you can kind of move into another zone.
And here's God, and incredibly, God is having a conversation with a guy who is called, not Satan, but the Satan.
Now, in the Old Testament, the term Satan really means accuser.
And so what's going on is a kind of argument between the Satan and God.
And Satan is basically saying to God, God is sort of boasting a little bit about, look at my servant Job and how pious he is.
And Satan is going, oh yeah, really?
He's pious? He's not really pious.
God, you've given him all these blessings, but let me take these blessings away and then let's see how pious he is.
And so what you have is a remarkable thing in Scripture, which is you may call it a divine bet.
God is sort of like, okay, let's check it out.
You do what you want to Job.
Just spare his life. But short of that, you can do whatever you want to him, and then we will see.
So now we actually know the reason...
Job is actually, in fact, just as Job himself says, a righteous man.
But evidently, and this seems a little crazy, but there's some kind of a divine bet going on between, you may say, the good guy and the bad guy, and they're going to put Job to the test.
So, what you have going on here is, and I'll pick this up tomorrow to examine it more closely, you have Job saying, God, you're being unjust to me.
You! Job is literally taking the issue of injustice and charging God with it.
Job is a complainer, and Job complains at great length.
And Job, in a sense...
He believes he's right to question God because Job says, I have not done anything to deserve this.
And the amazing thing about the book of Job is that God, in a sense, agrees with Job.
And so God is going to have to meet Job.
Now, notice one thing that I do want to point out, and that is that Job is not in any sense an atheist.
At no point does Job say God does not exist.
Job's wife at one point says, curse God and die, which is basically repudiate God.
Job won't do that either.
But Job insists that he has the right to question God.
And the remarkable thing about the book of Job is that it allows this kind of questioning.
And when we take this up next time, I'm going to focus on what is God's answer?
Does God even have an answer?
Is there an adequate answer that God can give to Job?
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