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Aug. 25, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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THE TALIBAN'S ANTICOLONIAL WAR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 161
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Joe Biden's policies in Afghanistan have been so disastrous.
They've imposed so much damage on the United States and so much advantage to the Taliban that you have to ask, was this just stupidity or was it deliberate?
My daughter Danielle D'Souza Gill joins me to talk about vaccine mandates.
In California, the left is calling Larry Elder, quote, the black face of white supremacy.
I'll discuss. And former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich comes on the podcast again.
He's going to talk about Afghanistan and a whole bunch else.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Joe Biden's policies in Afghanistan have been so disastrous, so catastrophic.
They've imposed so much damage on America and so much advantage to the Taliban that you have to ask, what really has driven this?
It's almost like you couldn't have planned worse.
Because if you were just careless, if you were just lackadaisical, presumably you'd forget some things, you'd miss some things.
But to plan something to cause, you may almost call it optimum disaster, to leave thousands of Americans behind, to leave equipment that you could have easily taken with you...
To not do any kind of advance organization for Afghans that you really wanted to get out and are now stranded under Taliban control.
I mean, how can you be this inept?
Now, you might say, well, Joe Biden...
Hello! But remember that it isn't just Biden who's steering the canoe here.
Biden has a whole bunch of Obama leftovers who are advising him, calling the shots.
They're the ventriloquists.
He's the puppet. And so you can't merely put this down to a kind of senility at the top level because there are all kinds of other people involved.
Now, of course, Biden thinks he's doing an amazing job.
He thinks history will look back and just see this was a statesman-like withdrawal.
Jen Psaki, of course, is sort of parrot-style repeating the same nonsense.
But it's still not clear what has driven the Biden decision to be so bad.
Is it the case that these people are just terrible at what they do?
This is a, quote, failure of understanding?
Or is it the case that there's something more invidious?
Was it in some sense deliberate?
Was it in some sense part of a continuation of the Obama anti-colonial approach?
And I want to explore this, not just by advancing and arguing for a theory, which would be easy to do, but over the next couple of segments, I want to lay out two rival theories side by side and make my case for what I think is better.
So I'm going to start by advancing the America just doesn't understand theory, which is, by the way, the theory that most conservatives, most Republicans are putting forward.
Here is a very good argument by Lee Smith in Tablet Magazine.
And he's talking about the fact that you here have two mismatched adversaries.
He goes, on the face of it, you might think, how can a kind of primitive force like the Taliban beat out the most advanced army in the world?
And Lee Smith goes, easy.
The Taliban is united.
They have what the Muslim writer Ibn Khaldun called Asabiya, which is tribal solidarity.
They have a clear sense of purpose.
They have a clear understanding of the struggle.
America is the imperialist outsider.
We Muslims need to unite and get rid of them.
They're willing to fight guerrilla war, and they're willing to take heavy casualties, and they're also willing to be patient.
So, according to Lee Smith, And he's advancing here the Ibn Khaldun theory.
Ibn Khaldun basically said that the reason that the Muslims were so successful in the Middle Ages, they were able to conquer really large parts of three continents, Africa, Europe, Asia, is because they had two things.
They had the solidarity of the Bedouins, the Taliban has that, and then they had the Muslim faith which kind of united them in a kind of singular fanaticism.
And Ibn Khaldun's theory is it's hard to beat people who are unified like that.
Now Lee Smith goes on to argue we're the opposite.
We're divided.
We're a divided country.
We have a military that's trying to make itself woke.
They're focused on domestic adversaries.
So they don't really know what they're doing.
And this is the, I would call it, the ignorance argument.
I see it also in another article, by the way, in American Greatness.
This is an article by Kyle Schittler.
It's divided in two parts.
The inability to understand the nature of the enemy.
In other words, we Americans, the Biden people in particular, but we in general, we don't get how cultures far away work.
We don't understand the tribal bases of those societies.
We don't understand that you can't just march in there and go...
All the girls are going to get an education.
Or even, we can't put up the rainbow flag, which is actually what the U.S. Embassy in Kabul did.
Hey guys, we're all for gays around here.
You don't realize the Afghans really aren't.
They don't see it the same way.
And so, number one, the failure to understand the enemy.
But here's the second part.
The inability to understand ourselves.
In other words, to understand what are the limitations of American power.
We can't fight. We're Americans.
We're not the English. We're not going to go occupy Afghanistan the way the British occupied India for 150 years.
We want to get in and get out.
That's the kind of personality stamp that Americans bear.
And then not to mention the fact that we are doing all this when American society internally is rent and is facing a kind of crisis of identity.
So this is the I think the full flowering of the we got it wrong and Biden got it wrong because we don't have a good grasp of either who they are or who we are.
This is a theory that I think has something going for it.
In fact, it has a lot of things going for it.
But it seems to me somehow incomplete because there's another theory, a rival theory.
I'm going to call it the Machiavellian theory, but it's a theory that I've advanced before in a different context.
I advanced it before in connection with Obama specifically.
But I'm going to resurrect it now.
Why? Because very clearly, Biden was Obama's vice president.
Obama's people are all around Biden right now.
Obama is there in his Calorama basement, you know, making phone calls daily to his own guys.
Yeah, tell him this. Make him do that.
So obviously, Obama's fingerprints are over Biden's policies.
And it could be that what's going on in Afghanistan isn't just a giant blunder.
But something that in some ways was an outcome intended by the Biden team.
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The United States is in a very bad way in Afghanistan right now.
Thousands of Americans stranded over there.
And we have no easy way to get them out.
In fact, we are dependent for their release on our own deadly enemies, the Taliban.
Think of it. A terrorist force that has now become, thanks to our weapons, the primary terrorist force in the world.
We need their say-so to get our guys out.
And here is Joe Biden basically admitting that.
Listen. The completion by August 31 depends upon the Taliban continuing to cooperate and allow access to the airport for those who were transporting out and no disruptions to our operations.
From the horse's mouth itself, there's Biden saying, listen, we can do it, but we can only do it if they let us do it.
So think about the helpless situation that this man has put us, his country, and his countrymen in.
So now the question is, why would Biden do it?
And why would he do it this way?
I advanced in the last segment the idea...
That a number of conservatives are putting out.
And that is the idea that we didn't know how to win.
That this is a combination of misunderstanding, of bungling, of ineptitude.
But there's another theory that is worth considering.
And that is that... We, and by we here, I mean the Biden administration, wanted to lose.
Wanted to lose this way.
Wanted to humiliate America this way.
Now, this may seem like an outrageous thing to say, but why would they want to do that?
Why would a president who is entrusted with protecting his country want to undermine his own country's interests?
Well, it turns out that this is a question I examined in the case of Barack Obama, because in time after time, Barack Obama would do things very destructive to the United States.
The Iran nuclear deal, the Bergdahl trade, the promise to the Russians, hey, listen, after the election, I can give you more stuff.
I just can't do it now.
But, you know, yes, I will relay this message to Vladimir.
So this is Obama.
And people were like, why is he doing that?
Why is he doing that? Why is he doing that?
And my answer was, he wants to take America down.
He subscribes to a theory, the anti-colonial theory, which basically says that the United States, which has taken over from Europe and from the West in general as the kind of evil superpower, is trying to rule the world, either directly or indirectly, but in the case of places like Afghanistan and Iraq, directly, by sending troops, by propping up governments in those countries.
And the anti-colonial view is that you've got to get the imperialist power out.
You've got to punish the imperialists.
You've got to teach a lesson to the United States, such a lesson that this country will never dream of doing something like this again.
We'll never dream of committing foreign troops.
We'll never dream of trying to, you may say, govern another country.
And so the Biden people, who are essentially recycled Obama types...
I've cited this before in my podcast.
It was Machiavelli who said a couple of hundred years ago, Now, I've used this in the context of the Taliban.
I said that the Taliban seem to be making a huge blunder.
They're showing up at peace talks.
They're basically winning the war.
Why would someone winning the war want to show up for peace talks?
Well, the answer is as a deflection to make the other side relax its guard.
Then you can continue the war while those guys are drawing up peace agreements.
So the Taliban was practicing deception.
But let's put the question to Biden.
Remember, we have another enemy.
It's not just the Taliban. It's the Biden administration.
They are our enemy here at home.
So let's apply this logic to them.
They've done a horrible blunder.
What's the blunder? Well, Well, they obviously can't get American troops out.
They did things the upside-down way.
Instead of getting our material out first, instead of getting American citizens out first, instead of getting our Afghan allies out first, and then closing the Bagram base, they did it the opposite way.
Close the Bagram base!
Then you can't get American citizens out.
Then you can't get the allies out.
Then you can't get your equipment out.
So the point is, this seems like a huge blunder.
But whenever your enemy does a blunder, it's such an obvious blunder, it's so obvious, it's so easy to avoid, always suspect deception.
And the deception that I suspect in this case is that they wanted to do it this way.
They wanted Americans to feel that helpless feeling of, this is what happens, guys, when you try to commit troops abroad.
This is what happens when you try to rule other countries, even radical Muslim countries.
And so the idea here is to teach the superpower, us...
A lesson, a lesson from which that we will never forget.
And for this reason, I think Biden is continuing the Obama strategy of delivering, not just at home, but also abroad, through foreign policy, mortal blows to his own country.
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I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast the former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich.
Rod, oh, Rod, by the way, is also now doing a podcast which I think has a very nice title, Lightning Rod.
So, Rod, welcome back.
Great to have you.
I see, by the way, from your Twitter, I'm now gonna read, beautiful evening in Chicago, going out for a run.
And I just love the fact that you're out there.
You're a free man. Talk a little bit about your life after Trump commuted you, made you a free man once again.
I hope you're taking full advantage.
Thank you very much. Well, of course I am.
Again, I want to express my gratitude to President Trump for doing what he did.
You know, he didn't have to do it.
He's a Republican president.
I was a Democratic governor.
I was fortunate to be a celebrity apprentice where he fired me.
And then, of course, years go by.
Who would have thought he'd be president?
Then he freed me. President Trump is historic in that he's the only guy who ever fired and freed the same guy.
Even Lincoln didn't do that.
You know, when you've been where I've been, in that deep, dark valley for eight years, separated from the people you love most in the world, my wife and daughters, made to live in a faraway place where you can't see them that often, your life has been literally brought to ruin on a big lie, because I broke no laws or crossed any lines.
Well, it's a tough thing.
It's, as the scriptures say, it's calamity that comes upon you like a whirlwind.
Now that I'm back...
Everything is better. The simplest things I noticed that I never noticed before.
And there's really very little that can actually affect me in a negative way because I feel so fortunate and blessed to have tasted the dark side of life.
And now I'm back with my wife and my daughters here at home, home sweet home.
And that night that you referenced in the tweet that I sent out, when I'm running, I can run not just in a circle, you know, 25 times, it makes And go as far and as long as I want.
I don't have to worry about coming in at a certain time because they require that.
You can run in the nighttime in the dark, which you can't do in prison.
So everything is better.
And it's just another reminder that the gift of freedom is something that we in America too often take for granted.
And I've learned a very hard lesson.
That's something that we all must be vigilant about because government, with some bad people in it, can take your freedoms away.
Rod, you've referred to yourself multiple times as a Reagan Democrat, and in fact, this may be part of the reason why you ran afoul of the Obama crowd and made a political enemy of Obama.
I sometimes wonder about Reagan, because I was a young Reaganite in the 80s, worked in the White House, and I wonder what Reagan might make of America today.
The world is so different, but there's also...
It seems so many basic principles of American politics are just out the window, institutions that once had public trust have virtually none at all.
What do you think Reagan would say if he were around today?
That's a great question to ask.
He'd say, well, I don't recognize America.
And as he used to say about his old party, the Democratic Party, I feel the same way.
And I think I speak for billions of Democrats across America.
We don't recognize today's Democratic Party.
So many of us are a The changing, almost the walking away from the traditional values that have made America a great country, giving you an opportunity to come to America, be the great success that you are, gave my father a chance to leave communism in Eastern Europe after World War II, after fighting the Nazis and being a prisoner of war for four years, coming here because it was a free place, the land of opportunity, a place where you can get a job and get ahead.
So those fundamental values.
Work, family, opportunity, love of country, faith in God, those sorts of things that Reagan spoke about, that Reagan believed.
I think he would be astonished at how things have changed.
What do you make of Biden?
I mean, here's a guy, you know, you have a tweet here about Biden's recent press conference.
And even though Biden seems completely out of it, refuses to answer questions, he still gets this kind of sycophantic treatment by the media.
In fact, you joke that if the reporters were as nice to him, if they were as nice to you as they are to him, you'd still be in office.
I would still be in office and taxes in Illinois would be lower.
But yes, he gets treated with special treatment by the media.
It's worse than that. They're allies of his, the mainstream media.
It's very obvious to anybody who's been in the business who knows and understands how the media operates and how the media covers political figures, whether you're a governor, whether you're a congressman, whether you're a president.
So he gets the treatment of someone who's not just being treated nicely by the media.
They're allies of his.
This is very dangerous to our democracy because you don't have a free press I think President Biden is in over his head, and it's not so much that he...
Well, I would put it this way.
I think what's been revealed with the way he's mishandled the evacuation from Afghanistan shows that I don't think he's in charge.
I think he's asleep at the switch, and I think those many voices that express concerns about his fitness to be president, I think they're being vindicated now based upon how terrible he's handled this evacuation from Afghanistan and how he's handling the aftermath.
When we come back, I want to plumb a little more deeply the situation in Afghanistan, why Biden got things so wrong, and perhaps what might have been able to be done differently.
Back with Rod Blagojevich in a moment.
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I'm back with former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who's now doing a regular podcast.
It's called Lightning Rod.
You gotta check it out.
Rod, we were talking about, you mentioned at the very end of the last segment, Afghanistan.
And I understand that you had someone close to you who was killed in Kabul in Afghanistan.
Say a word about that. It was my publicist.
His name was Glenn Selleck.
He's a wonderful person, a loving father, two young children, a daughter and a son, a great dad, a loving husband.
And he went to Afghanistan as part of a group that was there to try to educate some of the locals on democracy, ironically.
He was at a hotel in Kabul, and Taliban terrorists came in and started shooting The Westerners, Europeans and Americans, and killing people at will.
And my dear friend was killed that way.
And the hotel that they were in was eventually firebombed and was burned to the ground.
This happened in 2018, and it's just a reminder about how dangerous Afghanistan is.
Another reminder that, you know, when you withdraw from a place like that, I do believe the decision to withdraw is right.
You have to do it in a way that I think we'll talk about this later, Dinesh, but I would say that as the president, you have to be like Tom Brady as a quarterback.
You've got to be able to look at the field, get to the line of scrimmage, and see that things have changed, and you've got to be willing to make those adjustments and call an audible, and Biden failed dramatically to do that.
I mean, it seems very clear, even from a statement I played earlier today on the podcast, where Biden basically said, listen, we can get Americans out, but we're now relying on the Taliban to make that happen.
I mean, the Taliban clearly controls the airport.
They control access to the airport.
There are instructions to Americans not even to go to the airport.
I mean, it seems beyond tragic that the very same barbarians that you just described storming into a hotel, terrorists.
So we now have a terrorist regime, and we, the United States, are now reliant on the goodwill of that regime to get our citizens back home.
That's right. Look, this could be worse. It is worse than the hostage crisis with Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter wasn't responsible for how those hostages were taken. Now the Americans that are stuck there in Afghanistan are very much like hostages. And we'll see what happens with the Taliban. But I would bet very much they're going to use the Americans and the evacuation as a bargaining chip to either require the United States to pay billions of dollars in tribute to them. Keep an eye on that. And I predict Biden will do it behind the scenes without people knowing it, if he can get away with it. Or we're going to be required to come back in with strong
military force to reclaim, you know, a foothold and bring our citizens back home and the other Afghans who are trying to leave.
Or Biden will simply just let this drift as he has so far.
None of those options are good.
All of them were avoidable had he been the right kind of leader who recognized that you've got to be, as I said, a quarterback who's prepared to make adjustments.
And you never pull Americans out from a position of weakness.
It was he pulled the military out before he got the Americans out I mean, just imagine if there were, I don't know how many thousands of Americans still there.
Let's say we get most of them out, but we leave a thousand behind.
I mean, how do you survive that politically?
A thousand Americans who you could have gotten out, that you pulled, you closed the base, you got the troops out, and then you went back to try to get them.
I mean, it seems like even our allies are more than disappointed in us.
They're looking at us in bewilderment saying, you're supposed to be the leader of the Western alliance?
Well, here again, it goes to Biden's capacity to lead.
And I have to say, with all due respect to President Biden, I think this reveals fully that he's incapable.
My belief is, again, knowing how it works when you're in a high place in the executive branch like a governor or president, is that he was being given conflicting information from his advisors.
He was getting intelligence reports that we now know he ignored.
He was getting recommendations from the military that in many ways he ignored.
And he was also getting, I know this has to be the case, recommendations and advice from, are you ready for this, Dinesh?
Political consultants and people who've done focus groups.
And Biden chose the political route because he had locked himself into a deadline on August 31st and he felt like there'd be too much pushback politically if he changed the deadline and made some adjustments.
So therefore he made a political choice based on expediency rather than doing the necessary hard thing that good leaders are supposed to do, largely, mostly protecting our people and our citizens.
And again, recognizing that we're not fighting a nation state that has morals.
We're fighting a group of, like you say, barbarians who have no morals whatsoever.
Whenever I see a calamity of this sort, I always look to see if Obama has any fingerprints on it.
And sure enough, in this case, he does.
In fact, this is a tweet from you.
In 2014, Obama freed the terrorists Karkawa and four other terrorists from Gitmo in a swap for one deserter.
Now, at that time, if you recall, Obama gave very pompous assurances.
These people are going to Qatar.
They will be under close supervision.
They are not going to return to the battlefield.
I mean, all of these turn out to be flatly false.
And in fact, when the United States goes into negotiations with the Taliban, there's this guy, Karkawa, sitting on the Taliban side of the table.
And I understand he was one of the masterminds of the one-day conquest of Kabul.
Yes, and again, they impeached Trump over a phone call to the Ukrainian president.
The whole world is upside down.
President Obama is responsible for a ridiculously bad decision, and whatever his motivation was to do it, the fact is he did it, and he made a deal not only...
An American soldier would have deserted.
That's not a good deal for the American people, and to think that he was going to let out a top terrorist like that, and they were going to trust the promise that they would, oh, never do it again, is beyond naive.
It's childishly ridiculous, and it's amazing here again that Obama gets away with things like that, but that's because of the mainstream media that is no longer objective.
They are, in fact, part and parcel of the Democratic Party.
Rod, it's always fun to chat with you, and I'm sure your podcast is just absorbing.
I've got to check it out, and I urge people to take a look.
Tell me a little bit about what life is like for you as a podcaster.
Are you enjoying it?
And what do you hope to accomplish with it?
Well, I never knew what these things were, podcasts, when I left home on the...
14th of March, 2015, March 2012.
You know, the world keeps spinning around.
It doesn't wait for you. And so eight years later, when I finally get back in it, I've discovered all these things that have changed.
And here's the podcast reality.
And like you have one, and people of influence as you are, and other people, they all seem to have podcasts.
And so I was invited to have one of my own.
I've had a chance to do it now for over a year.
It's been a lot of fun. And it's a chance to just get on your high I'm now a member of the punditocracy that I used to make fun of when I was actually in the arena making the decisions.
So now I'm sort of like back, you know, judging how others are doing their jobs like I just did with President Obama, and it's a bit of an adjustment for me because every time I do it, Rod,
that's absolutely awesome.
Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Dinesh. All the best to you.
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Why? Because our friend Larry Elder, Larry has had a Salem radio show for a long time.
He's a marvelous pundit, a very clear thinker, African American.
And he is running neck and neck, in fact, slightly ahead of Gavin Newsom.
So, coming out of nowhere, Larry announced for the governor's race just, it seems like, days ago.
And he has surged and he's proving to be a serious candidate.
So, needless to say, a ferocious attack has opened up against him.
And my favorite from the LA Times, it says, Larry Elder is the blackface.
Wow! I mean, first of all, talk about a super racist thing to say.
The basic assumption here is that he's the black face.
It's not even like he is a black man.
It's not even conceding Larry Elder's humanity, let alone his ability to think for himself, his ability to have his own views.
He's the black face.
Of white supremacy.
Now here you're talking about a guy, by the way, who was born in Compton, grew up in South Central LA, sort of the wrong side of the track.
Somebody who would be, if elected, the first black governor of California.
Which should be exhilarating to the left.
They're always looking for the first black this and the first black that.
But no, they don't mean the first black conservative governor of California.
They've got to stop that.
And so this vicious attack...
The article, by the way, is by one of the Black Lives Matter Los Angeles co-founders, Melina Abdullah.
And she says...
The idea here is that...
is that Larry Elder is some kind of an Uncle Tom, and he is even compared by the left to David Duke.
David Duke, the white supremacist, one of the former heads of the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, what is it about Larry that is causing these accusations?
It turns out, I'm not going to quote an L.A. Times columnist, a guy named Jean, well, actually a woman named Jean Garrow.
She goes, quote, he has repeatedly twisted crime statistics to portray blacks As more violent than whites.
Twisted crime statistics.
Well, as it turns out, let's look at the crime statistics.
These are coming from Larry Elder, but they're taken, they're lifted directly from FBI data.
While only 13% of the population, blacks account for 28% of nationwide...
And 38.1% of arrests for violent crime, murders, rape, robbery, aggravated assault.
So Larry Elder is doing nothing more here than sharing government-issued data.
But apparently the truth is somehow racist.
Larry Elder's main theme, if you've been listening to his show and reading his articles, is simply this.
By and large, if you grow up with two parents, if you're raised in an intact family, if you have a mom and a dad, you are less likely to end up poor, you're less likely to end up in prison, So the idea here is that the black community is facing, as indeed some parts of the white community are, a crisis of the family.
And that is the root cause.
That, not racism, not police discrimination, not police brutality, is the root cause of the problems that are faced in the black community.
Larry, as a black man, talking about the interests of the black community, disputing the leftist interpretation of what the problem is, and disputing the leftist interpretation of what the solutions are.
And for this sin, the sin of being a dissenter, a renegade, the left can't even comprehend that they can be disagreement with their point of view.
There's a very interesting tweet that was put out.
By Nicole Hannah-Jones.
Not long ago. She deleted it quickly.
But what she says in the tweet is she says there's a difference between being racially black and being politically black.
Now think about that. What she's saying really is that blackness is not a function of race, not a function of color, not even a function of appearance.
Black is a function of politics.
Well, if black is a function of politics, then I guess it could follow that you could be a white person and still be black.
Because you may be racially white but politically black.
So suddenly this term is divorced from all obvious meaning.
And it's done so for what purpose?
Well, what Nicola Hanno-Jones wants to do is enforce complete unanimity in the black community.
She wants to force blacks in the country to march in lockstep.
And if they don't do it, they're going to be accused of being honorary whites or blacks marching around in white face.
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It's always great, guys, to be joined by my daughter, Danielle DeSouza-Gill.
She's not just the author of The Choice, the abortion divide in America, but she's also the host of a new show that is on Epoch TV. It's called Counterculture with Danielle D'Souza-Gill.
Daniel, welcome. Great to have you on.
As always, I wanted to talk, we've chatted a little bit about these vaccine mandates, and they seem to be coming down the pike.
We have, with the recent approval of the Pfizer vaccine by the FDA, it looks like the Airlines and private sector corporations also to impose vaccine mandates.
Now I understand there's kind of a vaccine mandate underway in New York.
Can you describe what that's like?
What is it like to live under a vaccine mandate in a city where you can't get things done if you can't show proof of vaccines?
Yeah, so it's a little bit different.
So with the military, for example, they're forcing you to get the vaccine.
They're mandating that you get the vaccine.
And a lot of private companies are mandating that you get the vaccine to return to the office, to return to work, things like that.
But here in the city, what they're doing is something called vaccine passports, where if you don't have the vaccine passport, it'll be really difficult for you to go to eat food, to just do regular things in your daily life.
And so a lot of people are kind of maybe being forced to even get the vaccine passport just because they can't go about their daily life without it.
So does that mean that if you show up at a restaurant, they're like, where's your passport?
And if you don't have it, you can't eat there?
You know, I guess it's up to that restaurant to enforce it.
They're supposed to. And I live here, so that has happened.
I've seen it happen. But it doesn't always happen.
So I do know some restaurant owners and many people who work at these restaurants find it very frustrating.
And some of them don't want to get the vaccine.
I mean, Dee, just to note the irony for a second, we have, you know, we have the Democrats screaming about voter ID. They think it's racist and it's oppressive to require people to have to produce an ID when they vote.
And yet, we're blindly talking about vaccine passports just to basically function in normal life, to go fly on a plane or to eat in a restaurant.
Let me talk about, do you think that there is a difference between a government-imposed mandate and private sector corporations imposing their own mandates?
I assume part of it is that some of these companies, I know United, for example, is requiring all the employees to have a vaccine.
Now, maybe United would say, hey, listen, we got to do it because we don't want our employees giving COVID. We would be vulnerable to all kinds of lawsuits if they did.
So we have good reason for doing it.
I think both are horrible.
Having the mandates come from the government is horrible.
Having the mandates come from a private company is horrible because you're really forcing people to do something that they don't want to do.
And just as you said, they might be liable.
Well, the same thing goes the other way.
If you're a company that forces your employee to get the vaccine and they have an adverse reaction or something happens to them, then they should absolutely sue that company because that company is responsible for whatever happened to that person.
So I think that really forcing people to do things like this, have these passports, it's really an infringement on our personal religious freedom.
Now, the government would say that we are trying to prevent people from getting COVID, that by and large, our goal is benign.
You may not agree with the mandate, but the mandate is benignly motivated.
My question is, where does the government get the...
I don't have constitutional authority to do this, because if I pick up my pocket constitution, I thumb through it.
The government does have all kinds of power, but it does not have, as far as I can see, the power to tell somebody, you've got to stick your arm out or your shoulder out and get a jab in it and ingest a medicine that we think is good for you, but that you don't want, but we're going to make you do it anyway.
I don't see any constitutional authority for them to do that at all.
Do you? We're good to go.
So that shows that if they actually cared about the science, which they say, then they wouldn't have been doing that really until now.
Would they only start to really even advocate for the vaccine?
Because before this, it was not fully FDA approved.
So all of this has really been used just for their benefit politically.
They've used this in order to create mail-in ballots, in order to really help a lot of leftists who run corporations and shut down small businesses.
Let me ask you about, there have been vaccine mandates, admittedly, in public schools for a long time, right?
Before you send your kid to school, hey, proof of tetanus, proof of tuberculosis, proof of...
So there are vaccine mandates that have been in existence that have nothing to do with COVID. What makes this particular mandate different from those?
Well, like I said, I don't think any of this is actually about the science and none of it is actually about health.
But I guess if we want to make it about that, the fact is just that these vaccines have not been around very long.
They have not been, I mean, literally the week that it has the full FDA approval, it's being mandated on the military, things like that.
Whereas with a lot of other vaccines, they've been around for much longer time.
And some people are anti-vaccine just when it comes to every single vaccine.
And I'm obviously not saying that, but I think that the fact that the left has jumped on this so much and has used all of this as an excuse to increase their government power, increase their control over all of their employees' lives, whether you're at a corporation or somewhere else, just shows the fact that the left, anytime they see a chance to increase their control on us, they're going to, even if something is not fully FDA approved up until now.
Hey Dee, let's close out by having you say a word about your new show.
You've been doing this now for several weeks.
What's the latest show that's up that people can go watch now?
What's that all about?
And also how can people follow you on social media?
I'm really enjoying it.
It's a lot of fun. You can follow me on social media at Danielle D'Souza Gill.
And the show is called Counter Culture with Danielle D'Souza Gill because we fight back against the left's culture and how they are taking over so many spheres of the country.
And it's through Epic Times, which is a newspaper that does a lot of investigative journalism, and the platform is Epic TV. So if you enter your email, you can watch a lot of my videos for free.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the issue of diversity.
In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's great play, a play that is, by the way, a little difficult to classify.
It's sometimes called a comedy, but you can hardly call comic the outcome of the play.
Yes, it's kind of a happy ending in which Bassanio and Portia live happily ever after.
But of course, Shylock is ruined.
Antonio, in a sense, remains forlorn.
And so it doesn't really qualify.
It doesn't have the feeling of a comedy.
It's not really a romance.
It's not even quite a tragedy.
So what is it? It seems to occupy this kind of intermediate genre.
Now, the other thing about The Merchant of Venice that many people don't notice, even having read the play more than once, and as I have, is that there is a fairy tale aspect to this play. Shakespeare, by the way, loved fairy tales, and a number of his works allude to or play with the idea of the fairy tale. Let me mention some fairy tale elements of The Merchant of Venice. Well, the first one is even the issue of the pound of flesh. I mean, it's ridiculous.
This idea that sort of, if you don't pay me back, I'm going to take a pound of your flesh.
I mean, there's something kind of almost inhuman, almost cannibalistic about this.
And think about it. This actually does occur in fairy tales.
The Brothers Grimm, a number of their fairy tales are grim, and they involve eating children and things like that.
Or, you know, if you eat this apple, you will die.
So you have this sort of sense in The Merchant of Venice right from the beginning.
Also consider the way that Portia, kind of the heroine of the story, think of how she gets married.
Her father, who's apparently a very wise man, basically says, you're going to have really no choice in your own marriage.
Here are three caskets of gold, silver, and bronze, and you're going to have suitors who are going to have to try to guess which is which.
And if they don't guess right, they can never marry again.
Wow. Wow.
And the one who guesses right is going to have your hand in marriage.
So there's a fairytale aspect to this.
Of course, Shakespeare also kind of manipulates the fairytale.
Portia actually knows which is the right casket.
She kind of gives a little hint to the man that she wants to marry, namely Bassanio.
So he picks the correct casket and so on.
Later in the play, there's a courtroom scene, kind of this great denouement of the play.
But think of how ridiculous this is.
Here's Portia and her assistant.
I think her name is Nerissa.
They show up in the courtroom.
They're dressed as men.
They have fake mustaches on.
They have men's outfits. And not only does nobody notice this...
But their own husbands are in the courtroom, and they don't notice.
It's kind of like, Debbie shows up, she's got a full-length beard, you know?
She's like, hello, I am a very learned scholar.
I'm like, I wonder who that is.
Not Debbie for sure.
It's got to be someone else.
It's obviously some learned scholar who's come in.
So this is the Merchant of Venice.
So Shakespeare is playing around with this, and what he does in this story, which I think is really fascinating, is he contrasts the real world of Venice...
Where things are actually kind of harsh.
Even though Venice is a commercial society and operates by sort of strict rule of law.
Rule of law that, by the way, applies to Jews and Christians alike.
Nevertheless... Venice can be a place of ruin, can be a place where you can't come back.
But Shakespeare also creates this other place called Belmont.
In Belmont, there was a lady, and that's Portia.
And she is rich, and she is beautiful, and she seems to have all the money in the world.
And so what you have is, in this story...
Simultaneously, what's going on in Venice, and Venice is the place in the end where Shylock will come to ruin, but then there's sort of happy outcomes in the other place, which you could almost call utopian, and that's Belmont.
Jessica, for example, Shylock's daughter, runs away with a Christian.
Now, this is not an easy life to live as a kind of...
Somebody who elopes in this way.
She elopes in a very bad way.
She actually steals her father's jewels and takes off with them.
In Shakespeare, by the way, if you disobey your parents or betray them in this way, you are almost always severely punished.
This is a rare exception, this play, where Jessica kind of gets away with it.
But why does she get away with it?
Because she's now in Belmont, and so in this kind of place where there are sort of no consequences, it's like the Garden of Eden, you have a happy contrast to the more grim environment of Venice.
And what Shakespeare seems to be saying is this, that racial diversity, religious diversity, all of this is sort of wonderful in theory.
It kind of works in Belmont, which is not a real place.
It's a made-up never-never land where everything goes right.
But in Venice, in real societies where people have deep convictions, are not willing to put up with any kind of nonsense, will not agree to go along, in those kinds of places, diversity is a much more difficult, much more problematic enterprise.
Guys, it's time for our mailbox and let's go to today's question.
Listen. Dinesh, this is Jeffrey.
I have two questions. One, you have been talking recently about the U.S. pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan after a war we fought for 20 years with nothing to show for it except thousands of Americans killed and maimed and trillions of dollars spent.
It's like our country learned nothing from our Vietnam tragedy.
Maybe after 9-11, we should have followed Israel's example after the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre and sent special forces squads around the world to hunt down the terrorists responsible for 9-11 instead of invading Iraq and Afghanistan.
What do you think would have been a better U.S. response to 9-11?
Second question. I recently read the late Vincent Bugliosi's book Outrage about the O.J. Simpson murders.
In the book, he went off on a several-page tangent about his agnostic beliefs and railed against Christianity and belief in God.
He later wrote a book called The Divinity of Doubt.
How would you debate or argue against Mr.
Bugliosi's anti-God arguments?
Thank you. Wow, Jeffrey, two very good questions.
And I'm going to do a little bit of a rain check on the second one.
And what I mean by this is I'm actually a fan of Vincent Bugliosi.
I remember reading Helter Skelter many years ago, just a fantastic account of his role in the Manson murder-prosecution.
And I didn't know about the new book, The Advocacy of Atheism.
So we've ordered the book.
It's going to come in, I think, today, Debbie, tomorrow, maybe.
Oh, next week. In any event, I'm going to read the book, formulate a response, and then do a segment assessing the book.
I know Bugliosi, I was going to actually have him on the podcast.
I didn't realize that he died a few years ago.
So we can't have Bugliosi, but we can have his argument, and I'm happy to engage it.
So I will kind of return to that, or as Jen Psaki says, I will circle back to you on that one.
Let me turn to Iraq and Afghanistan.
You make a very good point, and the approach that you suggest, I think, would be preferable, namely to have a kind of, well, let's just take SEAL Team 6 or take a handful of these Navy SEAL teams, deploy them to go get the bad guys.
That would have worked 10 times better than what we did.
I think in general, a David Petraeus or a Condoleezza Rice would say, well, yeah, but that's just too much of an episodic deployment of forces.
We're not dealing ultimately with the structure of these groups.
We're not fighting them in a systematic way.
The Taliban, after all, were not just a bunch of roving thugs.
They were an actual government running Afghanistan, controlling Kabul, controlling the provinces.
So I would take a middle position and say that, well, the...
The Reagan doctrine, which is by and large, let's say we moved in, we smashed the Taliban, mainly through air operations.
We bombed them essentially into the Stone Age, moved them into the mountains, and then basically cut a deal with the tribes, the rival tribes, the Northern Alliance, the non-Pashtun tribes, and said to them, listen guys, you know what, we're not going to stay here.
But what we are going to do is, if you're willing to fight the Taliban on your own, tribe against tribe, Then we will support you from afar.
In other words, we will give you arms and material to carry out the battle against the Taliban, but it's your country you have to fight.
Now, as you can see, the United States policy was we're going to get there, we're going to get there, but 20 years later we still hadn't gotten there, which means that this whatever training program that we were implementing was obviously ridiculous, obtuse, was generating as much opposition as it was support.
And ultimately created an army that folded kind of on day one.
So clearly what we did is sort of like the worst thing to do.
Your approach, I think, would have been better.
And maybe some form of the Reagan doctrine in which people fight for their own freedom, we don't fight, we help, might be applicable not just to this particular situation, but others that might develop in the future.
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