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Aug. 27, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:26
BIDEN’S DISASTER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 163
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Biden's disaster in Afghanistan is worse than Benghazi.
It's worse than Carter's hostage crisis.
It's time to start talking impeachment.
Also, what the Supreme Court really said in its overturning of Biden's illegal immigration policy.
And finally, an atheist conundrum.
Can God make a stone so heavy that even he can't lift it?
I'll solve that problem.
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.
The full details are now emerging on the...
Depth of the tragedy, the disaster that Biden has created in Afghanistan, this latest bomb attack.
Yes, 13 American soldiers killed, most of them Marines, but 170 plus people killed overall, including women, including children.
A lot of other people still haven't been identified, 200 people wounded.
This was a massive attack.
And it was completely something that should have been anticipated, and it should not have taken on the carnage that it did.
Now, not only is the attack disturbing enough, but Biden's response to it even more disturbing.
Here's a little clip from Biden's notorious press conference yesterday where he's asked a question by Peter Doocy.
And just watch his body language.
Remember that? I'm being serious.
No, I'm asking you a question.
Because before... No, no, no, wait a minute.
I'm asking you a question. Is that accurate, to the best of your knowledge?
Wow, instead of trying to answer Peter Doocy, Biden tries to pepper him with questions and then just simply drops his head into his hands.
And I think that becomes a kind of telling symbol of the ineptitude, the senility, the vacuity, the sheer fecklessness of this administration as a whole.
Now, to gain a sense of perspective, let's think back to the hostage crisis for Carter in 1979 and how that ended.
Well, it ended, it turns out, the exact day that Reagan was inaugurated.
The very day that Reagan was inaugurated, The sun came out and the Iranian regime released the hostages.
Why? I think because they knew.
In fact, Reagan had promised.
He says, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do, but you can be pretty confident I'm going to do something massive.
And the Iranians were like, we don't want to find out.
Here you go. Take your guys back.
Now, the reason this is important is that what we've seen in Afghanistan now is the exact opposite of that.
Or let's put it in reverse.
Because when you had Trump in office, by and large, the Taliban was, yeah, they were fighting the war.
But you had none of this, none of this disaster, none of this carnage.
And the moment Biden got in, they were like, haha!
Aha! Let's up the ante.
Let's take the country.
They've got an absolute fool sitting in the office.
He's not even going to know what hit him.
He's not going to know what's going on.
And sure enough, Biden shows no.
So here's Biden.
He's trying to put the blame on Trump.
But it's really obvious that it was Biden...
And the sort of comical ineptitude of the Biden gang, these fools.
I mean, these are people, by and large, I don't even think they would know how to load a rifle.
You know, Jake Sullivan.
You know, people who run hot dog stands and work in bookstores are now advising the Biden administration on foreign policy.
So... So, what you have is the Taliban recognizing its moment of opportunity.
And so, by the way, are all the other terrorist groups worldwide.
You can be sure Al-Qaeda is like in a major reboot.
Of course, ISIS is the driving force behind this particular attack.
This is sort of ISIS-K, ISIS-Khorasan.
Now, what's funny is that the left is, of course, trying, moving quickly to try to cover for Biden.
And they're doing it with the most, the rank, you know, The stupidity that we've come to expect from the media.
Turning on the radio the other day, I see this left-wing guy.
He goes, you've got to realize there's an important difference between the Taliban on the one hand and ISIS on the other.
The Taliban is dangerous.
ISIS is dangerous.
But ISIS doesn't like the Taliban.
So, this is sort of like a guy saying, well, listen, you know, there are two kinds of snakes in Afghanistan.
There's the rattlesnake, and there's the copperhead.
Now, we want to point out that copperheads don't like rattlesnakes.
Well, who cares?
We're talking about a snake pit, aren't we?
The remarkable thing about this is that the Biden administration is depending...
And it seems, in fact, seems to have some confidence in the Taliban.
They provided a list of the names of U.S. citizens, green card holders, and Afghan allies to the Taliban.
Here's our list. Now, how do they know that this isn't immediately going to be a kill list?
Oh yeah, great! We didn't have this list.
Thank you very much. I can't believe that this Biden administration is so stupid as to give us not only the names, but as far as they can tell, the locations of all the people.
So there's this level of trust.
Well, it's in the Taliban's interest.
They want to be members in good standing of the international community.
No, they don't. They don't care about that.
Their goal is an Islamic caliphate.
They couldn't have been more clear about the matter.
And even when Biden, this was kind of a telling moment in the press conference, he's like, I'm going to run them down.
I'm going to hunt them down and make them pay.
And he says it with such a ridiculous, first of all, implausible, unbelievable tone of voice.
I'm thinking, make them pay.
The only kind of pay that you know is to make them pay you.
Pay you with suitcases of cash.
So, I wonder if Biden's thinking, oh yeah, you know what?
I wonder if there's some money to be made here.
I made money in the Ukraine.
I made money in Russia.
I made money in China, in Costa Rica.
Time to unleash the Biden family.
Maybe the smartest guy I know, Hunter Biden, can be my collector.
Once again, try to get something out of these guys.
Make them pay! Ha ha ha!
That's the language I understand.
So what we're dealing with here is disaster on every scale.
And for Americans who voted for Biden, all I can say is, shame on you, because this guy is turning out to be worse than we thought.
Debbie was even joking. She's like, I kind of miss Obama.
And I'm thinking, well, don't say that too loudly because it could very well be Obama who's behind this one too.
So we don't miss him too much, more than you know.
But these Democrats, from Carter to Clinton to Obama to Biden, one thing they do know how to do is blow up the interests of the United States.
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There's a very interesting article in the current issue of The New Yorker, a fairly in-depth interview with David Petraeus.
Let's remember David Petraeus as the four-star general, now retired.
He was in the military almost 40 years.
He became perhaps the most famous military leader, at least not counting if we go back to World War II. And he was placed initially by Bush in charge of all troops in Iraq.
Then a little bit later, he was appointed by Obama to be in charge of all troops in Afghanistan.
And then he retired from the military a few years ago.
Now, here's Petraeus.
Now, this is a guy who's been in the field.
And even though he's thought to be a kind of a careerist general, someone who's sort of committed to American involvements abroad, nevertheless, you do have a sober guy who does understand commando warfare, who's seen it in the field, and whose views are, for this reason, worth at least paying some attention to.
Now, the first thing that comes out of the Petraeus interview is a flat-out refutation of Biden's claim that this is Trump's fault.
Because what Petraeus says is he goes, listen, no, this is not about whether to withdraw.
It's about the manner of the withdrawal.
And he goes, first of all, there were 2,500 troops in Iraq.
And he says, these were not frontline troops.
There were very few casualties in Afghanistan because these troops were in a support function.
What does that mean? They were providing, he calls them, advise and assist units.
Many of them were located at the headquarters in the Bagram Air Force Base.
They were liaison teams.
They were tactical air controllers.
So a lot of what these guys did is they provided intelligence to the Afghan military.
They also provided air support and air cover, and they provided kind of infrastructural help, as Petraeus puts it.
So what he's getting at is that the Afghans came to rely on this.
It was part of their fighting strategy, that the Afghans were like, so where's the enemy?
Okay, here they are. Okay, let's go.
All right, we're about to be attacked.
We're about to attack them.
How about a bombing raid that would help weaken or soften up the other side?
So this is how the Afghans were fighting against the Taliban.
And Patrice's point is, it wasn't just that they stopped fighting, it's that a whole element, it's kind of like a football team, and you're the quarterback, but suddenly all your receivers leave the field.
And Patrice's point is, yeah, you're going to get up and run away because you can't play anymore.
Your game was reliant on this coordinated effort, and basically Biden decided to sort of pull the rug out.
So, Patrice's point is, that's your fault.
If you do that, you can't then just turn around and say, well, you guys are horrible.
You can't play football.
We trained you. No, you didn't train them to play by themselves on the field.
You never did that. This is, I think, a key point.
Now, so Patrice defends the bravery of the Afghans.
He goes, well, don't say they won't fight for their country.
Who do you think has been fighting for their country for the past 20 years?
They have been fighting. So the problem is that we pulled out on them, and therefore they didn't feel they could fight anymore.
Essentially, they believe we let them down.
Now, that's worth paying attention to.
Now, Petraeus goes on to say, and this I think is a little more controversial, Petraeus goes on to say that the United States does need to have a long-term presence in Afghanistan.
And his reason is that, well, it's not really a new reason.
He says, quote, if you don't keep an eye on the Islamist extremism groups, they will come back.
Now, in some ways, you have to say that his prophecy is proving true.
Because with the United States having withdrawn, what do we see?
An upsurge of confidence.
I mean, here's ISIS. And you may ask, well, what's ISIS doing?
Why are they doing a suicide bombing?
Debbie and I were talking about that this morning.
And I said, listen, for ISIS, it's a matter of a window of opportunity.
They know that America is weak.
America is reeling. You've got this confused guy with his head in his hands.
And so ISIS goes, this is the time to strike.
Besides, it's much easier for us to strike in Afghanistan than it is to strike in, say, Cincinnati.
Why? Because we know the territory.
We can slip in among the population.
Nobody recognizes us. The Taliban may be, quote, our enemies, but half of them are our allies.
So the bottom line of it is we can coordinate with them to launch this kind of a devastating strike.
So, as I ponder this Petraeus article and these Petraeus reflections, I think to myself, you know, look, the United States is not good at this.
It's not that I disagree in principle with Petraeus, that the United States can and should be a force for good in the world.
My point is, if you don't know how to, don't do it.
And when I look back and I think about these clueless characters like...
Even Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell, George Bush, these are people with not a good understanding of how tribes operate, about tribal loyalties, about how people view things like the role of women.
Remember, most of the world is very traditional, and so lecturing them about women's rights and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul flying a rainbow flag, do you realize how ridiculous it is to do that in a Muslim country?
So, to do this kind of thing is to undercut your own objective.
Remember that what most people in the world want is modernization, not westernization.
And if you lose sight of the distinction between those two things, you try to impose westernization.
In the name of modernization, you end up getting a massive backlash that only ends up helping your enemy.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. The Supreme Court in a landmark decision has in effect struck down the Biden administration's remain in America policy for illegals.
This is really important because Biden has been allowing really hundreds of thousands of illegals per month to seep into the United States.
and this was all part of a policy, a reversal of the Trump policy. The Trump policy was called the Migrant Protection Protocol, MPP, and Biden basically goes down with the MPP. In fact, he overruled the MPP at least temporarily on day one and then permanently overruled it shortly thereafter and they have been, it's been an open door for illegals. Now, Texas and
Missouri filed a lawsuit against this and basically said it's not fair for the federal government to violate immigration law and do this and then impose the burden of these illegals in terms of driver's licenses and health care and education on the And so this was a lawsuit that was filed and a Trump appointee in Amarillo, Matthew Kazmarek, agreed with Texas and Missouri.
He struck down the Biden law and struck it down not just in Texas.
I mean, this is part of the boldness of Kaczmarek's decision.
He goes, listen, we're talking about a federal law.
So to strike it down here is to strike it down nationwide.
So Biden has got to stop it.
Now, of course, the Biden people panicked.
And they appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
They lost again. The Fifth Circuit said, sorry, Kaczmarek's right.
And so Biden rushed to the Supreme Court and he says, I want an injunction that allows me to continue the policy while this matter is litigated.
And the Supreme Court said, A, you're not getting the injunction, and B, you're not likely to prevail when it is litigated.
So The Supreme Court is already telegraphing that Biden's policy is kind of a goner.
Now, I went back and I read the Kasmerich legal opinion.
It's kind of interesting to read these legal opinions.
It's really a masterpiece of clear reasoning.
I want to give you a sense of what this reasoning is like.
Section 1225 of the United States Code is really clear about the matter.
It basically says... We're good to go.
If the alien says he wants to apply for asylum, quote, he shall be detained for further consideration of the application of asylum.
Now, Gassmeri goes on to point out that the law doesn't say that the illegal may be allowed into the United States.
It says that the illegal must be.
If you're going to allow them in, the government must detain them and, in a sense, keep them under government supervision, right?
Now, needless to say, this was not done.
And not only was it not done, no reason was given for the violation of the law, for the flagrant ignoring of the U.S. Code.
The Biden administration, the judge says, has, quote, not offered a single justification for suspending enrollments in the program during the period of review.
So they're supposed to be reviewing it.
They don't really review it.
They just go, temporary suspension, permanent suspension.
The Trump policy is kaput.
Now, it's one thing to say that Biden wants to reverse what Trump did.
But what Trump did was consonant with the law.
And so in trying to overrule Trump, what Biden was doing is getting away from the law.
The point the judge makes, which I think is really interesting, is that in most cases, many, many cases, these illegals don't have...
Claims of asylum that have any merit at all.
They are trained and coached by left-wing lawyers to say, oh yeah, yeah, I'm being persecuted in my country.
They don't even know what that means. They're not being persecuted.
Not to deny that they aren't hungry, not to deny that they aren't poor, but that is not a legitimate basis for claiming asylum.
So the left-wing immigration attorneys know this, and so they advise these illegals.
To say the right words about asylum, knowing that when their actual case comes up, but they're not even planning to show up for that case.
So the whole thing is a scam.
It's a racket that the Biden people have been running, and Kazmarek is totally onto it.
So, what Kazmarek basically says is, listen, the U.S. government is entitled to a certain measure of deference.
And by that, he means that since the government, the executive branch, is the enforcer of the law, he says district courts must kind of give the government some room to be able to interpret the law and use the resources available to put it into effect.
He goes, but... But, he says, And so, basically, Kaczmarek comes down hard on these guys and says, enough is enough.
Your law is essentially history.
And the beautiful thing is, the appellate court then agreed, and now the Supreme Court also agrees.
By the way, all of this highlights the importance of the judiciary because, think about it, if the Republicans are lackadaisical about the kind of judges we put in, we don't bother to vet them or screen them, and the left is diligent about bringing in left-wing judges, I'm quite confident a left-wing judge would have been like, this is my team.
We're going to let them play on the field pretty much the way they want.
And so you have judges Who pay little or no attention to the code, little or no attention to the Constitution.
This is really lawlessness that is being imposed by people who have sort of legal uniforms.
So you have a judge in robes.
It's kind of like a cop.
He's wearing a uniform, but he's not a real cop.
He's actually a faker pretending to be a cop.
We do have such people on the bench.
And I'm happy to report that Matthew Kazmarek is not one of them.
In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for 2021 at 2.1%.
In June, the actual inflation rate was 5.4%.
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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Who shot Ashley Babbitt?
Well, we all know who shot Ashley Babbitt.
I've known for a while.
I disclosed it on this show.
Previously, Lieutenant Mike Bird, Black Capitol Police Officer, And this guy has now gone public.
He was on yesterday with Lester Holt of NBC. And the whole interview was absolutely absurd.
One preposterous statement on top of the other.
I want to start with the headline of ludicrousness.
I saved countless lives.
I mean, this guy is patting himself on the back.
He saved countless lives?
What, by shooting an unarmed woman?
Now... Without warning, even though there were other uniformed officers present who could easily have subdued her, he saved countless lives.
In the interview, very revealingly, Burt admits, I'm now quoting him, I could not fully see her hands or what was in the backpack or what the intentions are.
So he knows nothing about her.
She's not armed as far as he can see.
She doesn't pose any lethal threat as far as he can see.
All that he can see...
By the way, she's not even the one who broke the glass.
She's the first one who came through.
But all he sees is a rather petite, 110-pound woman coming through a glass...
And he kills her. He uses lethal force.
Now... You have to realize, and of course I think in some ways this guy Bird recognized that he was on a little bit of dicey ground.
So of course he plays the race card.
He says, oh, I've been facing a lot of threats.
He says, quote, there were racist attacks as well.
Now I don't know if he's talking about racist attacks on the day, January 6th, or if he's talking about racist allegations that were made against him subsequent to his name coming out.
But my point with all this is always, let's see him.
Let's see the emails.
Let's see if it was racist attacks and people yelled at him.
Remember, this is also what one of the Capitol Police officers said at the hearing.
Well, we have all this on surveillance videotape.
Let's see it. So, making these claims, oh, I was subjected to all kinds of racist attacks, I don't believe a word of it.
Not without evidence.
Let's see the evidence. Now...
Point here is that there is a well-established tradition anchored in, by the way, Supreme Court rulings about when a police officer can use deadly force.
The governing case is called Tennessee v.
Garner. It goes all the way back to 1985 when Garner, a suspect, was essentially leaving the scene of a crime and a police officer shot him and killed him.
And the primary holding of the Supreme Court was really clear.
A police officer may use deadly force to Only if the officer has a good faith belief, in other words, a reasonable and honest belief, that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.
And my point is, where is the evidentiary basis?
Where are the detailed facts?
Where is all the testimony to establish that Ashley Babbitt posed that kind of threat?
You notice that the government is kind of rather, in a rather terse way, said, well, we've reviewed, we think this was completely justified.
I mean, this reminds me of my dad.
Dad, why are we doing this?
Because I said so.
My dad wouldn't give any reasons, but he was my dad, and I was seven.
In this case, we're adults.
You can't just say, we've conducted a review, we've come to the conclusion, trust us, we've looked at the, what is the evidence?
What is the basis of deciding?
I mean, think about it this way.
We all know, I think, the answer to this.
If Ashley Babbitt was black...
If this was a left-wing protest, if Mike Bird was a white guy who shot it through the neck, number one, do you think that his name would be concealed right until the time he decided voluntarily to go on TV, probably because he's looking for a book contract?
Do you think that he would have gotten the same treatment?
Don't you think that there would have been outrage across the country?
Don't you think there would be demands for information, for evidence, for justifications for why this was done, and so on?
Yes, there would be. So it's very clear that what's going on here is that there's an obvious disconnect with what's going on all around the country, all this alertness to police brutality, police engaging in unjustified shootings, Derek Chauvin, and at the same time...
With Ashley Babbitt, somehow suddenly a whole different perspective.
She was breaking the law!
Do we want to have a standard in this country now?
Is the left willing to live with a standard where the police are now authorized to use lethal force against somebody who seems to pose no imminent threat and is merely, quote, breaking the law?
Wasn't George Floyd breaking the law?
Was Chauvin authorized and using deadly force on him?
And if no in that case, what is the real difference between that case and Ashley Babbitt?
Well, the real difference, I can tell you, Chauvin was a chronic criminal, a home invader, a fentanyl, illegal drug user.
Not Chauvin. I'm sorry, I'm talking about not Chauvin.
I obviously mean George Floyd.
And by contrast, Ashley Babbitt, a veteran, someone who served two tours abroad, and yet someone who came to this very unfortunate end.
I believe we've gotten a measure of justice for George Floyd, but we also need justice for Ashley Babbitt.
Afghanistan is on our minds these days, and boy, do I have a movie that you need to see right about what's going on in the headlines.
Now, in May 2011, the White House leaked that SEAL Team 6 had killed Bin Laden, and immediately Al-Qaeda placed bounties on the heads of all Navy SEALs.
Just three months later, on August 6, 2011, a helicopter carrying many SEALs from that same elite unit was shot down in Tangi Valley, Afghanistan, with no survivors.
as 30 Americans died that day in the single greatest single incident loss of life in the history of the Navy SEALs US Special Operations.
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Where was the black box and why was it missing?
Did our restrictive rules of engagement contribute to this tragic outcome?
What really happened to SEAL Team 6?
Learn what we now know about the tragic mission.
Watch the timely and provocative new film, Fallen Angel.
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You can see it on SalemNow.com.
I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Timothy Barton.
He is the president of Wall Builders.
Wall Builders is an organization that does a lot of work in education, in history, in law, in public policy.
Founded, I believe, Tim, by your dad, David Barton.
And let me start by welcoming you.
But Debbie also mentioned to me that your dad is in the Middle East.
He's doing some important work connected with what's happened in Afghanistan.
Say a word about what your dad is up to right now.
Yes, sir. So my dad is over with Glenn Beck in the Middle East.
My dad helps run the Nazarene Fund, which has raised over $30 million to help rescue specifically Christian Afghanis out of Afghanistan.
And everybody at this point knows the debacle of what's happened under the Biden administration, what's going on at the Kabul airport on some level.
And so my dad and Glenn decided they need to be over there on the ground to do everything they could to try to help people, to bring awareness to the situation.
And so they've been working several ground operations.
They've been working with several other nations trying to get people out of Afghanistan and find host countries.
And ironically, there have been many nations who gladly and willingly said that they would take all of these Christian refugees out of Afghanistan, however many we wanted to send.
One of the nations, however, who has not been willing to accept any of the Christian Afghan refugees is the United States of America.
Because under Joe Biden's policies, even though the southern border is wide open to God only knows who, because we're not doing any kind of checks, it's not open, America's not open to these Christians from Afghanistan.
So it's shameful, nonetheless, that's where my dad has been the last several days.
They've been doing a lot of kind of underground covert things, but rescuing a lot of people.
Tim, let me pick up on what you just said a moment ago, because I think it points to a much wider phenomenon, namely, I mean, 50 years ago, the idea that you would have, let's say, Christians who are in a persecuted part of the world facing, in this case, a hostile regime of Islamic radicalism, the idea that the United States would not be open to people who share its religious heritage would be like downright unbelievable.
How is it the case that we have a regime, a government, that is in a country historically Christian with perhaps a still existing majority of Christians, but that is not only indifferent to Christianity, but is hostile to it?
Yeah, you know, and Dinesh is a great question.
One of the ironies is when the Nazarene Fund started, it was back in 2012, when President Obama was in charge and ISIS was targeting Christians in the Middle East.
And at that point, the government wasn't doing very much.
And Glenn Beck and my dad had a conversation.
They said, we want to do something.
What can we do to get involved? And that's where the organization started with the Nazarene Fund.
And it's just very interesting that specifically under these last two Democrat presidents, The position of the American government has been that we're not interested in helping Christians, persecuted Christians around the world, literally people who are being killed, who are being tortured, who are being beheaded, raped, sold into slavery, whatever the case might be, that hasn't been the position of the government.
And you're right. If you go back just a couple of decades, this would be an unthinkable position that America would be taking.
And yet, under the increasing secularism, under the increasing liberalism of the extreme left from the Democrat Party, This is the position not only being embraced, but being encouraged among their wing of this regime.
And it's certainly, it's very unchristian to say the least, from a nation that was predominantly founded on the principles of Christianity.
But it also was very un-American in the traditional sense of what America used to be about, was a land of freedom, a land of opportunity, and a nation that was certainly willing to help those in need around the world.
And that just doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
You mentioned the southern border, and I think it's really interesting that at the southern border, you have all these people who are claiming asylum.
Now, asylum has a pretty strict standard.
You have to be a victim of political or religious persecution.
Just being poor, for example, is not enough.
And yet it seems that many of these applicants are, yeah, they're fleeing poor countries.
They obviously would like to live in a richer country with more opportunity, but they don't really qualify for asylum.
And yet the Biden people are sort of wink-wink.
It's like, listen, we'll give you a hearing a year from now.
In the meantime, we'll send you to Tampa.
Go live your life in the United States, and then you may or may not show up for your hearing later.
So, I mean, it's amazing how we have this hypocrisy in which bogus asylum applicants are being let in, and as you say, real persecuted people who would qualify under our existing asylum standards and refugee standards are sort of blithely turned away.
Yeah, it is. It's ridiculous on even a grander scale because over the last couple of days, as all of this has been unfolding in Afghanistan, probably those listening remember that President Biden, one of the press conferences he gave was to talk about the serious concerns of COVID, which obviously we're trying to redirect away from Afghanistan and his administration because they don't want to talk about Afghanistan.
It's a disaster for them on every level.
But even this notion that all of a sudden Like COVID is the most serious threat for us as Americans.
Well, if COVID is the most serious threat, it's worth noting that a large portion of people coming across the southern border are people that are COVID positive and they're literally being turned loose in the nation.
They're not being made to quarantine.
They're not coming in vaccinated.
They're not even always masking, which is all of these policies the Biden administration has promoted.
And so what you are seeing is great levels of hypocrisy.
That if more Americans were aware of what the Biden administration was doing and promoting, his approval rating would be lower than the 41% we saw in one of the most recent polls.
It's utterly unthinkable and really immoral, unethical, the things that the Biden administration is doing.
And as you mentioned, when there are legitimate refugees, people who, in this case in Afghanistan, we've identified literally thousands upon thousands of Christians, not to mention even the Americans that are being left behind.
And Jen Psaki says, well, maybe all the Americans don't want to get out of Afghanistan.
Maybe that's why the government is not helping rescue those Americans.
These unthinkable things are happening under the administration.
And yet, in the midst of what's happening in Afghanistan, as you mentioned, these are people who have legitimate Refugee status concerns that America should be taking them in.
But we're turning a cold shoulder and a blind eye to them as we are really wanton blanketly opening up the southern border and letting anybody in that wants to come in.
And as you mentioned, maybe they're given a date where they say they have to come back in a year or three years, but there's no enforcement of that.
So most of the time they don't show up to these hearings and they're just loose somewhere in the nation.
We don't know who they are, where they came from, if they're COVID positive or not.
So all of these things reveal levels of great hypocrisy from the Biden administration.
When we come back, I want to ask Tim Barton about the motive for this hypocrisy and what the political benefits are for Biden to act in this way.
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I'm back with Timothy Barton, the president of WallBuilders and also the author of a terrific book about American history and the origins of America, The American Story.
Tim, let's pick it up where we left off, which is we were talking about the Biden administration's kind of anti-Christian stance as it is manifest in the kind of refugees it doesn't want.
Namely, the Christians around, the persecuted Christians.
Meanwhile, it's letting in all kinds of other characters who probably don't even qualify under refugee status.
So my question is, why?
In other words, is this a case where they have some antagonism to Christian doctrine?
Or is it that they are like, you know what?
We kind of know that people who take Christianity seriously are going to be anchored in a kind of moral perspective.
These guys are going to incline to the Republican Party over time.
And therefore, it's not that we hate Christianity per se, but we hate the kind of ballots that these Christians will end up casting.
And so our motives are entirely political.
Do you think that's what it is?
Or is there something I'm missing?
No, I think there's a lot of politics involved, as you mentioned.
I think there's a lot of political motivation for what they're doing.
I also think there's things that we will see in the coming months, maybe the coming years, that reveal even greater levels of these policies.
Obviously, when Biden became president and one of the first things he did was to shut down the Keystone pipeline, and yet we saw in the last couple of weeks he was asking foreign nations to increase their oil production for us in America.
Where he opened up the pipeline in Russia.
He's doing things to benefit other nations.
He's not benefiting America.
This pull out of Afghanistan, we already know that China is coming in.
They're making allies with the Taliban.
They want some of the resources there in Afghanistan.
What we are seeing from the Biden administration not only is anti-Christian as far as the people we are aligning ourselves with.
Obviously, when Biden said that the Taliban is who he is working with to help get Americans out.
Out of Afghanistan, utterly ridiculous.
The people we've been fighting for the last 20 years, the terrorists we've been fighting are now the people we're going to become allies with and we're entrusting them with our security.
There's stupidity on so many levels.
But even with that being said, I think there is a greater level of political motivation.
And this is something I think even has its roots back into some of the Marxist ideology.
You've done such an incredible job over the last many years.
We're exposing some of the ideology from the Obama administration or Hillary Clinton and multiple of these people who have that foundation of Marxism and part of the notion of Marxism is you want to see the destruction of the nation as it is.
And this is what we are seeing The literal policies of the Biden administration are to promote China, to promote Russia, to promote even the Taliban in this case, all while demoting America.
And this is the fundamental transformation of America they want to see.
And part of that means removing the basic principles of Christianity and then even removing the influence of Christians in America.
So I definitely think it's political motivation.
I think there's a lot of Marxist motivation in it as well for what they've done.
And I think in the coming years we'll see even a greater scale and picture of some of the levels of destruction that are happening that are even behind the scenes right now.
Tim, talk a little bit about wall builders, because you guys, and by you guys, I mean you and your dad, have just this remarkable collection of artifacts that throws light on the American founding and who the founders were.
Talk about some of the things that you have in your collection, but also talk a little bit about what the mission is of wall builders in terms of educating young people in particular about, you can almost call it, the America we have lost.
Yeah, so one of the things that we started back in the 1980s, my dad really felt kind of a call from God to help with the moral, the religious, and the constitutional position of the nation, recognizing even in the 80s there were some major problems in America.
And we've gone a long way from the problems even of the 80s, but back then my dad decided that he wanted to help recapture and retell some of the story.
So we began collecting artifacts even back then.
Now it's estimated we have more than 160,000 artifacts from American history.
We have what's considered the largest private collection of original documents from the founding era.
So we have actual letters from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Benjamin Franklin and these significant founding fathers.
And what we try to do is tell the story of America From a first-hand perspective, from the writings and letters of the guys who were there, one of the things that we see so often today is professors or different news correspondents, different personalities want to re-imagine and re-suppose the history of America And largely make America to be a great evil on a world stage when the reality was America has been the greatest force for good in the history, arguably the history of the world.
And not to say that America hasn't had issues or problems, but It's being honest and recognizing that the problems that America dealt with were the same problems every other nation in the world was dealing with, generally at that very same time, and America overcame those problems at an incredible rate.
And just to your point, actually, right here in front of me, this is a copy of Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence.
When Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, they began collecting his writings.
In 1828, those writings were largely collected.
In those writings were the original draft of the Declaration.
That was so impressive to people that they did essentially what's known as like an ink lift, where they took a document, they put it on top of the original, they put a chemical on it so they could literally lift the ink off of it, and then from that ink lift they made multiple copies.
This is one of those original copies.
And what becomes so significant, the reason we collect original artifacts is to help tell the true story of America.
If you go back to Jefferson's original copy of the Declaration, it's four pages.
This is the third and fourth page.
And on the third page, the largest grievance in the entire Declaration was a grievance against the slave trade.
Now, I would encourage everybody listening, go back and read Jefferson's original draft because you're seeing things that they cared about in early America, things that they wanted to end, and at a time when nobody else in the world, from a political standpoint, was even discussing the end of the slave trade, That was a grievance put in the Declaration.
And one of the things historically we've identified is there was at least four colonies that had tried to pass anti-slavery or anti-slave trade laws.
In 1774, King George vetoed all those laws.
And so when the Founding Fathers start putting together a list of all the reasons we want to separate from Great Britain, one of the things that made that list was the king's position against the slave trade.
And what's even more interesting about this in the original draft of the declaration is when Jefferson talks about these people who have been enslaved brought from Africa, it says, the king of Great Britain determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold.
Well, the men bought and sold were those African slaves, but the word men is fully capitalized in Jefferson's original draft.
Capital M, capital E, capital N. And the reason that matters One of the arguments people say today is that when we read the Declaration and it says that all men are created equal, people today say, well, no, no, no, that was only the white people.
Jefferson didn't care about black people because he had slaves.
And we go, now, wait a second. Let's just go back and read the original document.
Because when you start to study the original documents, you realize there's a lot more to the story, first of all, than what we've been told.
And secondly, a lot of what we've been told just isn't historically accurate.
And kind of the end of that story is when this declaration was presented before Congress, John Hancock said they were only going to put in the declaration what was unanimously agreed upon, and there were two colonies who did not think that anti-slavery grievance needed to be included, and it was Georgia and South Carolina,
because they said at the time, we haven't tried to end the slave trade, we don't think that needs to be included, but it's worth noting that 11 of the original 13 colonies were in favor of ending the slave trade in 1776, Well, that's a very different position than what we would hear from like the 1619 Project or Critical Race Theory or whatever these new academic arguments against America are.
What we try to do at WallBuilders is go back and just show from original documents the true history of America and why even though America is not perfect, we certainly are one of the greatest nations in the history of the world.
What you're saying, I believe, is the 1619 Project, one of its key premises was that the founding of the United States was orchestrated to help protect slavery.
And you're saying not only is that not true, but even in the guy who owned the most slaves – Jefferson, of course, had at one time or another of his life more than 200 slaves – You're saying that even if you take the hard case, Jefferson, you find that this guy is making a clear statement against slavery for the new regime in his original draft of the Declaration, correct? Correct.
And even as when he was a state legislator, when he was a congressman, he did things even then promoting to end slavery in America.
And a lot of people look and feel like, well, that's a contradiction.
How could Jefferson owning slaves be anti-slavery?
And the reality is a lot of us are very complex individuals.
Jefferson certainly was.
But if you just study historic documents, what we discover is that often the founding fathers were different than the modern portrayal of them, which is why we encourage people, don't just take somebody's word for history.
Go back and study for yourself.
History is knowable. It is discoverable.
It's even one of the reasons we did our book, The American Story, was just to help reintroduce people to part of the forgotten history of America.
Awesome stuff. Tim Barton, thank you so much for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
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I want to do a series on the podcast looking at the ideas and the sort of Christian apologetics of Thomas Aquinas.
Thomas Aquinas believed by many to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the Christian thinkers.
But before I do that, I thought I would say a little word about why we read and think about today medieval philosophy.
Well, the reason is that the medievals took very seriously the questions that many of us today, at least those of us who are believers, our questions are their questions.
And in a secular age where we find not only very little discussion of these important questions, we often find instead the most shallow regurgitations of arguments that the medievals refuted centuries ago.
And we see that the medievals are approaching these questions with a depth and a sophistication, a seriousness of purpose that is unmatched in almost anything you see today.
I've been doing debates for several years with these new atheists.
And they are not in the same league.
Well, they're not in the same league as me, but they're on the same league as Anselm or Augustine or Aquinas by a mile.
Now, I thought I would sort of demonstrate this a little bit because I was looking at a book by Victor Stenger.
Victor Stenger is actually a physicist, but he's one of these guys who rails against God.
His book is called The Failed Hypothesis.
So he's pretending here that God's a hypothesis.
I'm going to conduct some experiments to investigate this hypothesis.
Oh, it's a failed hypothesis.
But in it, you have not just scientific arguments, but a lot of psychobabble.
And then, of course, what I would call one of his so-called knock-down, drag-out arguments that he thinks is a real winner is a question that he poses.
Can God make a stone so heavy?
Now, this is not original with Victor Stenger.
You see it. If you Google the problem, you'll see that it's out there.
And atheists think that it's kind of a very clever way to knock out an important, well, not necessarily the existence of God, but the idea of the omnipotence of God.
And the question is crafted in such a way that sort of no matter how you answer it, it seems like there's something that God can't do.
So here's the question.
Can God make a stone so heavy that even he can't lift it?
So let's say that God can't lift the stone.
In that case, God's not omnipotent.
He can't lift that stone.
But, let's say that God can lift every stone.
If God can lift every stone, then God cannot create a stone that He can't lift.
And therefore, He's not omnipotent on that grounds.
Because there's something that God can't do.
So, either way, it appears, God's omnipotence is undermined.
Now, the medievals took a look at not this exact problem, but both Anselm and Aquinas have something to say about the meaning of God's omnipotence.
And when we look at that, it immediately solves this problem.
So this is really the benefit of medieval thought, is they think a lot about what does it mean to say that God is omnipotent.
Now, before Anselman, before Aquinas, the church father, Jerome, made the following claim that was subsequently debated for a couple of hundred years in medieval thought.
It was this. Does God have the power?
If God is omnipotent, can he take a married woman who has had children and make her into a virgin?
And Jerome answered this question, no.
Jerome's reasoning was that God cannot do things that are contradictory or ridiculous.
That is not what omnipotence means.
Now, there were some medievals who held the opposite.
Well, yes, he's God.
He really can do anything.
He can rewrite the past.
He can make 2 plus 2 equal 5.
He is, after all, God.
And so this issue went back and forth.
But what came out of it was a kind of clear definition of omnipotence, which I think is very helpful.
And that is, if you think about omnipotence, and think about the word omnipotence, omni, which means surpassingly great.
And potency, which means power.
So omnipotence doesn't mean that you can do, quote, anything.
Omnipotence means you have unlimited power.
And if you think about it that way, and now we're moving into the work of Aquinas, Aquinas' view is that God...
Can do anything that God wants to do.
Anything that is possible to do, God can do.
Why? Because God has the unlimited power to do that.
But self-contradictory things, says Aquinas, are not possible.
And so, unlimited power doesn't enable you to do what is in fact not possible to do.
So what do we draw from this?
We draw from this a couple of clear conclusions.
One, there is no stone so heavy that God can't create it.
And there's no stone so heavy that God can't either make it or lift it.
When you ask the question, can God create a stone so heavy that He can't lift?
The answer is obviously, no He can't.
Why? Because He can lift every possible stone.
So... The fact that God cannot create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it is not a problem for God's omnipotence.
It is the result of his omnipotence.
It's because God is omnipotent that he can't make a stone that he can't lift.
Because he can lift every possible stone.
So what we see here is, again, the smart-alecky modern atheists who come up with a verbal conundrum that, upon examination, kind of falls apart.
It falls apart because it is not, in fact, a refutation of God's omnipotence.
It's a demand that God do the logically impossible.
But since it is God Himself who made the rules of logic, since it is God Himself who decided these are the laws by which the universe is going to operate, then God Himself functions in the universe within and according to the laws that He Himself made.
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