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Aug. 17, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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THE NEW JIMMY CARTER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep155
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The helplessness and indignation and fury that we feel watching these images from Afghanistan is Joe Biden the new Jimmy Carter.
And how we lost hearts and minds in Afghanistan, a shocking practice condoned by the U.S. military, and I'll tell you all about it.
And how American Express, symbol of capitalism, embraced woke anti-capitalism.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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As we watch the continuing debacle in Afghanistan, the images of people jumping, being thrown out of airplanes, the airlift, as we watch the jubilant Taliban moving into the presidential palace, drinking tea, laughing victoriously.
And then of course, the inevitable chants of death to America.
Here is CNN, by the way, taking note of this and commenting on it.
Listen. They're just chanting death to America, but they seem friendly at the same time.
Yeah, they seem really nice.
They want to kill us, but they're smiling while they say it.
And this is CNN. Now, I'll comment on the media coverage of all this another time, but here I want to focus on the death to America.
Where have we heard that before?
Well... The first time I really heard it was during the hostage crisis.
Remember Jimmy Carter?
Remember the hostages in Iran?
Remember that feeling of kind of helplessness and indignation and rage that you felt?
In which this superpower, America, is just being humiliated day after day after day.
Well, those days are here again, which is another way of saying that with Joe Biden, at least in the area of foreign policy, also in some other areas, inflation and so on, but I'm focusing on foreign policy here because it's the most meaningful, we have Joe Biden playing the role of Jimmy Carter.
And think about, you know, some of you may be too young to remember Carter, but the older ones among us will remember him.
I mean, you're in the face of tragedy, sheer idiocy.
You know, here's a guy talking about the fact he was really surprised that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
He was really surprised that when he pulled American support for the Shah, we got Khomeini.
And so you got the feeling that you're dealing with an insular disaster.
Buffoon, who does not even belong on the world stage, and the idea that he's leading the United States is a global embarrassment.
Well, the same thing is going on with Biden.
You've got this hobbling Retard.
And there he is, mumbling and bumbling, and he makes a short speech and runs away to his basement.
He takes no questions.
And the whole world is looking at this and going, this is what America has put in front?
This is their commander-in-chief?
In a way, America's performance in Afghanistan, those scenes that you're seeing out of Kabul, mirror Biden himself, a kind of guy who looks like he's just ready to fall down or keel over.
Now, this isn't just a matter though of Biden's persona.
Here's the way that the U.S. Embassy in Kabul...
It puts out an alert. We are assisting U.S. citizens with their departure from Afghanistan.
How? Well, it turns out it says, please do not, all caps, come to the airport until notified by the embassy.
Yeah, so if your life is in danger, you want to run to the airport, don't do it.
Wait till you're notified by the embassy.
How do you get notified by the embassy?
Well, if you would like to register, you don't have to register, but if you'd like to register, follow this link.
So I click the link and basically what it says is it's like the DMV. It goes, here's a form that you can fill out and send it in.
And then if we want, we'll email.
So don't contact us. We'll contact you.
Fill out the form and sit tight.
Now, can you imagine the feeling of abandonment?
And here we're talking about the abandonment of Americans as well as Afghan allies that we have for 20 years built up.
We've told, we're with you.
We're going to stick by you. This is our fight, too.
We're going to do this together.
And now, hmm...
We're out of here. You're on your own.
I don't know if you've seen those images on social media, very disturbing of bodies in the street.
Now, the other thing that happens is when you have a disaster of this kind, we saw this with Vietnam, some ways we saw it with Iran, the vultures kind of move in.
And the vultures not only take advantage strategically, I've talked about how China's building this, already kind of started building this massive railway line from China.
They wanted to go through Afghanistan to Pakistan.
So that's all going on. But notice the ridicule that's coming out of the Chinese media.
This really shows what they think of the United States.
There's not even an iota of respect.
First of all, the Chinese state media organ mocks the U.S. withdrawal, quote, saying it was that the takeover of Kabul was, quote, more smooth than the presidential transition in the U.S., So you can see here, basically, a chuckling Chinese.
You know, this was a more peaceful transition of power, and to some degree, I'd have to say it's probably true.
Then they say that the lesson of Afghanistan is the United States cannot be trusted as an ally.
Wow. I don't even know who could disagree here.
But what they're basically saying is, quote, Afghanistan has been abandoned by the United States.
It's, quote, dealt a heavy blow to the credibility and reliability of the United States.
And then, of course, the final, and I think the more crushing...
This is from the Chinese state-owned media, by the way.
From what has happened in Afghanistan, Taiwan should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Taiwan-China Strait, the island's defense will collapse in hours, and the U.S. military won't come to help.
I think they're thinking specifically here of Biden.
As a result, the Taiwanese authorities will quickly surrender while some high-level officials may flee by plane.
So here's China very directly drawing the lesson and in a sense saying, you know, our war planners need to move up their schedules because we're dealing with a lame, pathetic United States that runs away.
I mean, can't beat a bunch of Afghan tribesmen.
Can't train an army over 20 years.
It's a joke.
And so what do you think is going to happen if the Chinese take Taiwan?
What's the Biden administration going to do?
A strongly worded letter?
Mobilize the indignation of the international community?
You begin to see how these kinds of things have far-reaching implications.
What Carter did in the 70s...
Had far-reaching implications that Reagan partly undid, but hey, the Iranian revolution is still with us a half century later.
Similarly, this disastrous defeat in Afghanistan, pioneered by Biden.
It's not just a matter of should we get out, it's how we get out.
And we've responded to this in Carter-like fashion, with Carter-like ineptitude and nincompoopery.
And we'll be living, I think, with the painful consequences for a long time to come.
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The Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan is very interesting to watch.
And it is clear that in some respects and in some places, the Taliban is being welcomed.
Now, this may seem like a little bit of a shock to us.
I mean, obviously, there are Afghans who hate the Taliban, who want to get out, who have been part of the United States' orbit in Afghanistan, ran to the Kabul airport.
But there are also many Afghans who are okay with the Taliban once again taking control, knowing how vicious the Taliban is, knowing that they might be subject to all kinds of radical Sharia, knowing that their daughters who are getting school education might stop getting it, knowing that street floggings and capital punishment and all of this is going to be returning with a vengeance.
So the question is this.
How is it that the United States, having undertaken a 20-year project to change hearts and minds, that's been a prevalent phrase.
Soldiers that we know, Debbie and I know, have come back, have said, you know, we were trying over there to change hearts and minds.
And do it, not just by words, but also by actions, by doing things like starting schools for girls and so on.
But there is a very unpleasant practice.
That was going on in Afghanistan.
It's been going on in Afghanistan since ancient times.
The Taliban, however, stopped it.
They outlawed it. They found it to be, I guess, against Sharia.
And then after the Northern Alliance and a group of U.S. allies overthrew the Taliban, pushed them out, the practice began to make a comeback.
And what am I talking about?
Well, In Afghanistan, it is called bacha bazi.
And what does this mean?
This refers to the so-called dancing boys.
We're talking about young boys, typically 8, 9, 10, 11 years old.
And these boys are very often either bought for cash or Or kidnapped out of their families.
And then they are turned into these sort of dancing entertainers.
What do they do? They're like traveling boys.
They go from place to place.
They sing. They dance.
And, well, you can see how this kind of thing is going to be quickly corrupted.
And sure enough, what happens is that powerful Afghan warlords, chieftains would essentially take these boys and...
Take advantage of them.
Essentially, we're talking about a sort of pedophilia.
Remember, in Afghan society, men and women are heavily segregated.
And so this kind of exploitation of young boys, like I say, although a cultural practice dating back, the Taliban did stop it.
And they were very popular for stopping it.
Why? Because although this was a, quote, cultural practice, this was also an exploitation of power, right?
Very powerful men say, OK, look, you know what?
I'm going to have these five boys are going to be, in a sense, part of a harem.
Once the Taliban were thrown out with U.S. power, this practice began to make a comeback.
And the United States now faced a very critical decision.
What are you going to do about Bacha Bazi?
What are you going to do about these so-called chai boys?
What are you going to do when this pedophilia is not just going on in Afghan society, but this time it is the U.S.-backed tribal chieftains who are doing it?
But you also have Afghan soldiers who are now on US military bases who are engaging in this kind of thing.
Wow. The New York Times reported on this in an article.
I'm going to read the title.
U.S. soldiers told to ignore sexual abuse of boys by Afghan allies.
And we need to know what we're talking about here.
And so we're going to go to the experience of a former Special Forces captain named Dan Flynn.
So Dan Flynn...
He noticed that while he was in his bunk, he would hear these screams.
And it's these Afghan men on the base taking advantage of these boys.
So he reported it. And he was told, ignore it.
It's none of our business. This is an Afghan cultural practice.
And so this guy tries to ignore it.
But then what he discovers is he discovers that An Afghan woman comes to the base and she says that her son had been abducted by one of the Afghan police commanders, a guy named Abdul Rahman, who had made him a sex slave and was chaining him every day to his bed.
This is going on at the US military base.
So Captain Quinn calls this Raman fellow, confronts him.
This Raman fellow listens to him and starts laughing, as if to say, what are you going to do about it?
So the captain basically says, quote, I picked him up and threw him on the ground.
I did this to make sure the message was understood that if he went back to the boy, it was not going to be tolerated.
Now, I'd like to tell you that this was an action supported by the U.S. military, but the opposite is the case.
What happens is the U.S. military disciplines Captain Quinn for doing this.
Quote,"...the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him out of Afghanistan.
He has since left the military." So what this is telling you is that an effort on the part of a decent guy to stop this was overturned by the military that knew this was going on and allowed it to go on apparently on the grounds that, listen, these are our allies and therefore we have to look the other way.
Now, again...
It's not enough to say, we're just basically not trying to be cultural imperialists here.
This is a part of Afghan culture.
Because let's remember, yeah, it's a part of Afghan culture in the sense that, say, corruption is a part of Indian culture.
Taking bribes is part of Indian culture.
But lots of Indians are victimized by this and hate to have to pay bribes.
And so what's happening is that in Afghan society, the mothers, the fathers of these boys became furious.
And what did they do?
Not surprisingly, they joined the Taliban.
Not surprisingly, they went to the Taliban.
So, let's pull back here for a moment and see what's going on.
The United States is making this big argument for 20 years.
We're educating the girls, you know.
In other words, our project in Afghanistan is humanitarian because we're...
We're giving these girls opportunities to make them better off.
So the Afghan society ultimately is going to be better because of our footprint.
And at the same time, and think of how contradictory this is, here's the United States taking this sort of bestial, horrific practice of pedophilia.
And saying to our own military guys, listen, if it happens, and if it happens here on the basis that we, the United States, administer and control, your job is to do precisely nothing.
So this, I think, is one reason.
And by the way, this is just not my opinion.
Here's an article in a strategic journal.
It's called, What About the Boys?
An Analysis of U.S. Withdrawal and Bachabazi in Afghanistan.
And it says, I'm quoting now, the public and aggressive nature in which militia commanders, this is US allied militia commanders, participated in pederasty in their communities, even though the practice was reviled by large portions of the population, is credited as one of the reasons for the growth and popularity of the Taliban.
If we're going to be the good guys, let's be the good guys.
Let's not just pretend to be the good guys while condoning practices that are absolutely disgusting both over here and over there.
Practices that would get you thrown in jail over here, that were allowed over there, that have no doubt fueled the rise, the return, and in some places the popularity of the Taliban.
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How does a company that is the very symbol of capitalism go woke anti-capitalist?
I'm talking here about a company that many of us use.
I use. I've got its card right now in my pocket.
American Express. And think about it.
American Express is sort of the grease of the wheels of capitalism because capitalism relies on credit, not just personal and consumer credit, but business credit, and American Express makes this possible.
So it is part of the infrastructure of modern American and global capitalism.
It's also a symbol of capitalism.
Many years ago, I was taking a guy, I think from Norway or Sweden, a scholar was visiting me, and when we went to dinner, I paid with my American Express card, and he was like,"'Hey, I notice you have a gold card.
How do you get a gold card?' And I told him, well, I said, you know, a lot of people making a decent middle-class income in America have a gold card.
And he goes, in Europe, it's really hard to get a gold card.
I can't get a gold card.
So anyway, I mention all this only because it reflected to me the way in which America Express symbolized capitalist success.
But here is American Express, and this is an article by Chris Ruffo in the New York Post, talking about that American Express now has installed a critical race theory education propaganda.
They've hired a company called Paradigm, and what they do is they bring these American Express employees into a room, and they make them fill out a form.
And the form has the following things.
Your race, your sexual orientation, your body type, your religion, your disability status...
Your age, your gender identity.
So not just your actual gender, but your gender identity.
And your citizenship and blah, blah, blah.
And once you've filled out this category, there's a point value that tells you if you're an oppressor or you're oppressed.
Yeah. So then you have to separate yourself into these two camps.
Presumably white males qualify as the real oppressed.
And if you're oppressed, what you're supposed to do is the first thing you're supposed to do is you've got to identify your intersectional allies.
So in other words, you're supposed to be, the term ally in woke speak basically means that you're an oppressor, but you have to be on the side of the oppressed.
You have to be their ally.
And so you've got to identify people who are oppressed, but intersectionality is key because one guy may only be oppressed because, say, he's Latino.
But that's just kind of like, well, that's one.
But that's not impressive enough.
What if you're like a Latina woman?
That's two. You're a twofer.
What if you're a Latina woman who has like one leg?
Then you're a threefer.
And you can go to a fourfer and so on.
So you kind of need to find who's the guy who's like the most oppressed.
And that's going to be the guy we kind of all focus on.
And And then it gives you all this sort of advice for the seminar, which is, I guess, supposed to be a guideline, not just for your career, but for life.
Say things like, well, first of all, it tells white employees, do not say things like, I don't see color.
Now, obviously, I don't see color.
It doesn't mean I don't see it. It means I don't attach importance to it.
But don't say that. Don't say things like we are all human beings.
Why? There's some, you know, there's some pandas and elephants among us.
Don't say things like everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough.
Basically, the credo of every immigrant.
These are all called, quote, microaggressions.
You're making people, you know, cutting, you're triggering them by saying, we're all human beings.
Oh, what, what, what?
So this craziness is going on in corporate America.
They even hired this guy Khalil Muhammad.
Now, he's the grandson of Elijah Muhammad, who founded the Nation of Islam.
And what does this guy do?
It's classic. He denounces capitalism.
He says, racist forms of domination have shaped Western and American society since the Industrial Revolution.
So this guy, Muhammad, I mean, just think about it.
This is basically kind of letting the fox into the henhouse.
A guy who wants to destroy capitalism is at American Express lecturing these people.
They're all like, let's take notes.
Yeah, yeah, let's see. Let's hear what Mr.
Muhammad is saying. And he goes on to say that we need to do, quote, deep redistributive and reparative, reparative referring to reparations, and lobby the government for policies that reflect your values.
Actually, if American Express had any values, they would throw this bum out and suspend this whole program.
So yeah, exactly.
If American Express is turning against capitalism, stop charging people these usurious rates of interest.
Yeah, here's American Express last October, a $1 billion, quote, action plan to increase diversity.
So all these companies are doing this, and a lot of it happened in the wake of George Floyd.
But some of it goes back to Ferguson, even earlier.
And what it does is it puts these companies on just a very destructive track, They're all undermining their own rationale.
Their own rationale is to provide good services, cultivate their customers, make money, help capitalism work better.
But they're not helping capitalism work better.
They're actually undermining it.
I don't know what I'm going to do with my American Express card.
I'm not asking you to do anything with yours.
But we should be on notice that this is one company, one more company, that has, like so many of the others, gone woke.
In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for 2021 at 2.1%.
Now in June, the actual inflation rate?
5.4%.
So the point? Inflation is here.
It's coming faster than our government is prepared for, and their solution is to stick their heads in the sand.
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I am just thrilled to welcome to the podcast Wade Burleson.
Wade is a theologian, a pastor, a writer, a historian, a kind of renaissance man.
I had the pleasure of speaking at his church, which is called Emmanuel Enid, in Oklahoma.
Wade, welcome. Great to have you.
I really enjoyed not just speaking at the church, but also just hanging around your office.
And one of the first things I noticed...
Is you've got this really remarkable paraphernalia from Henry Stanley.
Now, I only recognize the name Henry Stanley based upon a single famous line that he is believed to have been uttered in history, which is that Henry Stanley found the great British missionary, Livingston, David Livingston, in Africa, and he apparently said,"'Dr.
Livingston, I presume.'" Now let's start with that exact phrase because it's a slightly comic phrase, isn't it?
Because here's Livingston surrounded by black Africans.
There's no doubt who Livingston is.
He's the one white guy in the group.
So Dr. Livingston, I presume, is a kind of, you could almost call it English humor, as if to say, I guess you're the guy I've been looking for, right?
So now talk a little bit about who Livingston was, people may not know, and who Stanley was.
Sure. Dr.
Livingston Dinesh was a Christian missionary from England who went to Africa to share with the natives there the good news of Jesus Christ.
And he went in the 1860s.
What's interesting was he got lost.
And when I say got lost...
What I mean is the world lost him for four years.
No word from Livingston.
He was in the dark continent.
I tell people all the time, if you look at maps, and I collect maps, but if you look at maps from the 1850s and 1860s, and you show Africa, you have the coasts, But the interior is called the dark interior.
It wasn't mapped. Nobody knew anything about it.
So Livingston is there in the dark interior sharing Christ with the natives.
And for four years, England loses touch with him.
And this is where the story of Henry Stanley comes into play.
Now, let's talk about Stanley a little bit.
You've got this kind of sainted missionary out in Africa, British.
And, you know, I think a lot of people, and I did too, initially kind of assumed that Stanley was also English and that he had been dispatched in England to go find Livingston.
But no, it turns out Stanley was an American.
Tell us about Henry Stanley and a little bit about his kind of colorful story.
Well, Dinesh, you truly are a Renaissance man, and Henry Stanley was not Native American.
He was an illegal immigrant.
He came from Europe.
He was an orphan, and he was a stowaway on a ship to New Orleans.
Ended up fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
He was at the Battle of Shiloh, which is incredible.
But after the war, he went to St.
Louis to work with the newspaper in St.
Louis, and the day he arrived, The editor said, boy, you're a really kind of unusual young man.
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Well, Henry Stanley's real name is John Rowlands, and he told a little bit about himself, and the editor said, you know what, boy?
You're a brave young man.
There are some troops with the United States Army coming through tomorrow, and they're going to go out to have the First peace treaty, powwow, with the Plainsman Indians.
Why don't you go with them and dispatch stories of the treaty?
Well, that's what happened.
And Dinesh newspapers throughout America, Chicago, New York, all the big cities, took the byline of this Henry Stanley and the stories that he wrote.
And man, they were captivated.
I mean, America was captivated with this peace conference.
It's called the Medicine Lodge Peace Conference.
And so what happened was an editor in New York, the largest newspaper in the world at the time, read these stories and said, I've got to get a hold of this guy, because he wanted to send him to Africa to find Livingston.
Now, Henry Stanley, and you could almost write a book about this, goes to Africa.
He finds Livingston.
But, very interestingly, there was an aftermath of this story, which I had no idea of.
I learned it from you. And you talk about the fact that although Livingston himself was a famous missionary...
Stanley had an enduring impact in Africa.
I mean, when we look at Africa today, it appears to be sort of half-Muslim and half-Christian.
But nobody really knows how did it become half-Christian.
How did really hundreds of thousands then, but millions now, of Africans embrace the gospel?
And if Henry Stanley had something to do with this, what did he have to do with it?
Wow, Dinesh, you're exactly right.
You're the Renaissance man to even know that.
When he found Livingston, November the 10th, 1871, after four years of Livingston not being heard from, made that British humor, hey, Dr.
Livingston, I presume, the only white man that he'd seen for weeks in exploring the country looking for Livingston.
Well, what's interesting is Livingston died.
It led Henry to faith in Jesus.
And 18 months later, David Livingston died.
His heart was buried under a tree in Africa.
His body is at Westminster.
And Henry Stanley's life was changed by Livingston.
And he stayed in Africa.
And it is Henry Stanley that opened up the dark continent to the Christian gospel.
He's the one who discovered and navigated the Congo River.
And then he brought missionaries from London to Africa.
And they shared the good news of Jesus Christ.
And so, Dinesh, you know, I'm a historian and I'm a follower of Jesus.
Like you, you're an intellectual.
And I tell people all the time, I'm sometimes called a white supremacist.
No. I'm a Christ supremacist.
Christ was a man of color.
I follow him.
And that's what Henry Stanley was.
He was a Christ follower.
And so Africa became, if you will, a Christian nation and the remnants of that Christianity.
Africa's got more Christians on the continent than the United States.
The roots are through the influence of Henry Stanley.
That is downright amazing.
When we come back, I'm going to talk to Wade Burleson about another equally engaging topic, what the Cowboys and the Indians had to do with the founding of the National Football League.
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I'm back with theologian and pastor and writer and historian Wade Burleson.
Wade, when I was visiting your church, Emmanuel Enid, you told me just, I mean, I found it a little mind-blowing, a story about the origins of the NFL, and I knew nothing of this, and so I said, I gotta have you on, I gotta have you talk about this.
Talk about how the NFL got started and how it has something to do with Oklahoma and with the Cowboys and with the Indians.
Well, sure. And our theme, even from the last segment, is that in the 1800s, people unashamedly followed Jesus.
And they felt like Isaiah 49.6, where the Messiah is called the light of the world.
The Apostle Paul is an example.
He saw that as a command to take the good news of Jesus to the nations.
And he made no apology for it in Acts 13, when they tried to kick him out of Antioch and Pisidia.
Paul says, wait a minute, I'm doing what the Lord has commanded me.
I'm taking the good news of Jesus to the nations.
Well, guess what?
The last Indian battle in Oklahoma, back then it was called Indian Territory, was April the 6th, 1873.
In 71, back then they called them savages.
We would call them Native Americans or Indians in Older literature.
They were captured because they were the ones who had gone off the reservation and killed the buffalo hunters and all that.
I won't get into it. But there was a lieutenant in the United States Army who was tasked with collecting these prisoners and taking them by horseback first north to Fort Leavenworth and then by train to Florida to imprison them for what they did in killing the buffalo hunters in the Panhandle of Texas and Oklahoma and so on.
Well... We're good to go.
He gets to Florida, and these prisoners are imprisoned at Fort Marion, and then the United States Army calls on Lieutenant Pratt to stay there and to teach these Indians business principles, army discipline, and so on.
Well, guess what, Dinesh?
About four years later, The government comes down and sees these Indians from Oklahoma and they're like, oh my goodness, they're businessmen, they're smart, they're intellectuals, they speak multi-languages.
And you know what? Their art, these Indians, the art is in the Smithsonian.
You can't buy it. It's worth millions.
They are intellectuals.
Well, the army says, can you replicate what you've done with these savages?
Back then they called them savages and And by this time, Captain Pratt says, well, of course, you give me some land.
And that is the beginning of the Carlisle Indian School, where boys from Oklahoma were brought to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Captain Pratt would teach them Christian principles, business principles.
Well, he was having trouble with the boys wanting to run away, wanting to go back to Oklahoma, and so on.
And he didn't know what to do.
So finally, the boys said to him, You know, Captain Pratt, there's a new white man game called football.
And we had bowling hoop back in Indian territory.
If you teach us football, we'll keep our grades up.
We won't run away and so on.
Well, oh my goodness.
Captain Pratt didn't know anything about football, but he knew that Yale University had a guy who did.
His name was Pop Warner. And so he hired Pop Warner to come to Carlisle and he taught these boys from Oklahoma The game of football!
So, fast forward now. Over the next two decades, these boys from Oklahoma They end up beating all of the colleges.
It was only a college game. It was more like rugby.
But Pop Warner taught these boys how to throw the forward pass.
That's where it was invented, at the Carlisle Indian School.
He taught them how to run around, the tackles, and so on.
And they became really, really, really good.
So now you get to the year 1912.
Okay, the only university that refuses to play Carlisle is West Point Army.
Hmm. Until finally, the crush is so much the demand for Army, who's undefeated in football, to play the Indians from Oklahoma that they agree to at West Point and in the greatest football game ever played.
Now let's talk about the first half of the game and take us to the point where there's the halftime speech, which when you told it to me, I regard as the greatest halftime speech ever given in a football game.
Let's talk about that.
Well, At halftime, the Indians from Oklahoma and other states, but mostly from Oklahoma, are losing 6-0.
Pop Warner comes in and gives this incredible halftime speech.
You've got to remember, Jim Thorpe, his grandson, is a member of my church.
Jim Thorpe is tailback.
Dwight D. Eisenhower is tailback for Army.
Eleven future generals are playing for Army.
World War II, World War I, and so on.
Pop Warner says, boys!
25 years ago, the men you're playing football today, their fathers were killing your fathers on the fields of Indian territory.
Oklahoma, get out there and beat Army.
Well, they go out there and they end up routing Army.
Businessmen in the stands say, people pay money to see this.
And they ask Jim Thorpe, after the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, to become the new president of a league that they formed, the National Football League.
And it all begins with these Indian boys captured in Oklahoma in 1873.
That's the origin of the National Football League.
Wade, this is absolutely awesome.
What an inspiring story.
How interesting. And I don't think most Americans even know about it.
I certainly didn't.
Thank you for sharing it.
Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
Really appreciate it. Good to see you.
Good to see you. We're good to go.
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I want to talk in this segment about going to Yale and going to jail.
And how is it that some people end up at Yale, which is to say, get good educations, go on to good jobs.
And how is it that other people find themselves behind bars?
Not, you know, temporarily behind bars like me.
I didn't go to Yale, but I did go to an Ivy League college.
And I ended up behind bars.
But we're not talking about my atypical experience.
We're talking about people in communities where it's not uncommon to have a lot of people in jail.
And it's not uncommon to have not a lot of people who go to colleges like Yale.
And then there are other communities where it's normal to do those things.
Now, here's an article by a fellow named Rob Henderson in the New York Post.
And he's talking about, it's called, Why My College Pals Went to Yale While My High School Friends Went to Jail.
And he makes a couple of very interesting observations which tie into his own experience.
As I was reading his article, by the way, I was thinking about J.D. Vance and about Hillbilly Elegy because when you see the success of J.D. Vance and then you look at his upbringing, and I don't know if you've seen the movie on Netflix, Hillbilly Elegy, but, you know, his mom was a drug addict, completely dysfunctional, and I kept looking at that and thinking to myself, how is this kid, this poor kid, he's a smart kid, but how is he going to get out of this?
And And that shows the great importance of family background in what we make of our lives.
Now, this fellow, Rob Henderson, very interestingly, was born into poverty with a drug-addicted mother, kind of like J.D. Vance.
His dad abandoned him.
He grew up in foster homes and then he was adopted by a foster family.
But the foster family got divorced and the man became so angry that the mom left that the foster dad stopped speaking to him to sort of take revenge on the foster mom.
Now, Rob Henderson says, quote, my high school friends led similar lives.
None of them grew up in intact families.
None of them went to college.
Some of them did go to jail.
He goes, my best friend.
During our junior year, his great-grandmother died.
It crushed him. He started drinking.
Then he started taking drugs.
He spent some time in and out of prison.
And he's in prison right now.
But... What happened with Rob Henderson, very similar to J.D. Vance, by the way, is he went to the military.
And the military sort of straightened him out.
The military actually gave him, removed him out of this dysfunctional social environment.
And so he began to develop better study habits, punctuality, respect for authority, began to learn more.
And this is how he got to Yale.
Now, The story doesn't end there.
When Rob Henderson gets to Yale and he's talking to his Yale friends, he talks about his own experience and growing up in a...
In a messed up family, in a community of messed up families where there just aren't a lot of dads around.
And his friends at Yale go, we don't even understand what it's like to live like that.
None of us live like that.
We all have moms at home.
We all have dads at home.
Yeah, parents might be divorced, but they're remarried.
The bottom line of it is what he's getting at is that virtually everybody who goes on to a good college and has a successful life comes out of a...
Intact, and by intact here, I simply mean with a mom and a dad, family environment.
And he says that although in woke ideology, all these Yale students will talk about, you know, the poverty of the communities and the need to have better public education and so on, the one thing that they never say is it is absolutely critical to have a dad and a mom raise you.
And the reason Rob says that they don't say that is they take it for granted.
It's sort of like, Rob says it's like asking a fish about the importance of water.
It never occurs to these people, all of whom have grown up in intact families, to realize how essential that is to their own, not just intellectual, but psychological and emotional development.
And that what you have in a lot of poor communities, black and white and Latino in the United States, is this kind of intellectual and emotional impoverishment.
And then Rob closes his article out with a bunch of data.
85% of children born to upper-class families in America were raised by both of their parents.
For working-class families in America today, 30%.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics, 56% of jail inmates were raised either by single parents or non-parental guardians.
So even foster care is unfortunately a terribly high predictor of future incarceration.
All of this is a way of saying that we can't fix America without fixing not just the culture, popular culture, entertainment, movies, but also fixing that kind of moral incubator of the young, which is the family.
Ultimately, that's not just about having, quote, a wholesome family life.
It's not even just about moral education.
It's also about education generally and your chances of being able to move up the ladder and make something better of yourself.
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I've been thinking, as so many of us have, about Afghanistan these days.
And I want to talk about a movie that is about Afghanistan.
It turns out to be one of my favorite movies on my sort of top maybe 20 list.
It's kind of funny because Debbie and I saw it together and Debbie kind of...
She didn't really walk out.
That may be too much. But she's like, what is this movie even about?
She's laughing right now.
The movie is a classic.
It's called A Man Who Would Be King.
By the way, it's based on a Rudyard Kipling story.
And the movie stars Sean Connery and Michael Caine.
By the way, this is the only movie in which Sean Connery and Michael Caine are together.
And they're perfectly cast in this movie.
I'll come back to the movie.
But the reason I want to talk about the movie is it raises a very, I think, profound question that has dictated the way America has tried to approach Afghanistan for two decades, which is this idea of changing culture.
Understanding culture and changing culture.
And part of what I want to talk about is how cultures are mysterious.
Or to put it differently, they are very difficult to understand from the outside.
And I say this, by the way, as someone who's grown up in a different culture, because when I look at India, the way India is perceived by, let's say, a Frenchman or an American from the outside, that is completely and totally different from the way Indian culture is experienced by Indians from the inside.
And this is true of cultures in general, but it's especially true of remote cultures, places like Afghanistan.
And when I watched these Taliban guys walking around, I just saw this morning a video of Taliban guys, and they've come into a sort of a gym where you have all these, you know, Pelotons and everything.
You know, treadmills and they're walking on the treadmills and so here you've got like 11th century guys sort of like, you know, discovering the 21st century at least momentarily before they go back to the 11th.
And so you have these people and these are the people we were trying to change.
Hearts and minds.
I was saying to Debbie this morning as we were sipping our coffee, I said, you know, think about, you've been to India now a number of times, stand outside the Indian train station.
You see, you know, tens of thousands of people pouring out and all kind of in their own world in saris and some of them with hijabs and so on and children running around and beggars.
And ask yourself, you know, even if you spend a great deal of money, how can you change those people's hearts and minds at all?
I'm not even talking about getting them to embrace the Constitution, believe in democracy, referenda, women's rights.
Forget about all that. How do you change their minds on anything?
You can't.
You can't do it.
Now, if you do want to change their mind, show them things that they don't have.
Show them a lifestyle that they don't have that is appealing to them.
And then, over time, they're going to say, yeah, that's interesting.
I'd like some of that.
And they then aspire to it, things.
And they change from the inside.
That's really the only way.
Now, in The Man Who Would Be King...
We have these two kind of British rogues.
And they're not the top of the rungs of the British Empire.
These are like ne'er-do-wells have been kind of thrown out of Britain.
They're scam artists.
They figure out all kinds of ways to make money in India.
And they try to blackmail local officials.
In fact, at one point, they try to blackmail this British officer.
And they're completely yelled at for doing it.
I mean, the British officer basically says, you two are bums!
And then Michael Caine, who gets very indignant, he goes, well, I want to remind you that it was bums like us that built the bloody umpire!
So, it's true.
It's the ordinary kind of fighting Irishman that was responsible for projecting British power around the world.
But anyway... The story, it's an adventure story.
It's kind of a yarn. It's kind of a fairy tale, but a fantastic one in which these two guys decide, listen, India is kind of already taken by the British.
There's no real opportunity here.
So what they say is they, and they're talking to Rudyard Kipling, who's a journalist for the North Star.
They say, we're going to go to Kaffiristan.
Kind of a play on Afghanistan.
Kafir, of course, the word that originally means infidel.
We're going to go to infidelistan, this remote place through the Khyber Pass, north of India, in the mountains, and we're going to become kings.
And Rudyard Kipling goes, are you people, are you nuts?
He goes, listen, don't go there.
It's extremely dangerous.
And then a kind of a warning line that Americans would do well.
He says, no American has gone there, has gone and tried to rule over there since Alexander the Great.
And of course, these two Englishmen are unimpressed.
And one of them says, I think this was Michael Caine, too, one of my favorite lines of the movie.
Alexander the Great. He goes, well, if a Greek can do it, we can do it.
So his idea is that we're, you know, the British are obviously superior to the Greeks.
So they go on this expedition.
And it's fascinating from start to finish.
In fact, initially, well, they've got to go through horrible snows and they almost get blinded and so on.
But they eventually get to Kaffiristan.
And they become, one of them becomes, this is not Michael Caine, but...
This is Sean Connery becomes king.
How he becomes king is a story we don't have to go into, but essentially they mistake a medal that he's wearing on his chest for the return of Alexander the Great.
They think Alexander the Great has come back.
And so they begin to worship this guy and they give him all kinds of gold and precious jewels.
And Michael Caine is like, let's take the loot and get out of here.
But of course, you know, this is the temptation of godliness, you might say, or kingship.
Sean Connery likes being king.
He decides he might like to stay.
He might like to take a local wife.
He likes the idea of everybody coming to him for advice and consultation, arbitrate disputes, and so on.
Ultimately, once again through a complicated accident, The tribal people discover that they're dealing with an imposter.
No, Sean Connery is not Alexander the Great.
And then they turn and they become extremely vicious.
And these guys have to run for their lives.
And, well, let's just say only one of them makes it.
And he comes back and he's mauled and he's maimed and he hardly looks like he used to.
And he comes back to Rudyard Kipling.
And that's the beginning and the end of the story.
The movie, again, The Man Who Would Be King.
I think its lesson is that, look...
Trying to take over other cultures, understand them, transform them.
It is an interesting project when you indulge in it as a project of fantasy, as a project in movie making, as a project in short story writing.
But when you actually try to do it...
Then things don't always turn out as you expected, and very often what starts out with promise, we're going to become kings, we're going to rule the place, we're going to throw the bums out, ultimately becomes a tale of disappointment, disillusionment, and despair.
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