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Aug. 30, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:28
ARMING THE TERRORISTS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 164
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I'll be talking today about the decency of ordinary people, a grieving mother who lost her son in Afghanistan, a brave lieutenant colonel in the Marines who's speaking up against the military leadership and got fired for it, against a sheer indifference, fecklessness, callousness, and indecency of the Biden administration.
The Supreme Court is teaching the Biden people a lesson and affirming Milton Friedman's dictum that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
And Debbie and I are going to discuss Harvard University appointing an atheist as its head chaplain.
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.
I want to talk about the decency of ordinary people.
Versus the indecency of the Biden administration really shows how American society is divided, not even straight across partisan lines so much as between people who work hard, make sacrifices, give up a lot for their country, and speak up.
They're brave. They take risks.
That is the ordinary American.
And then on the other side, you've just got these callous, indifferent Who could care less leaders?
I'm thinking here of Jake Sullivan.
I'm thinking here of Anthony Blinken.
By the way, while the Taliban was taking Kabul, guess where Anthony Blinken was?
In the Hamptons. I'm thinking of Joe Biden.
And what a shocking contrast between are people decent and are leadership not?
Here is a heart-wrenching clip of an audio.
This was called in by Kathy McCollum, the mother of a fallen U.S. Marine, Riley McCollum.
And she's calling in to the Andrew Wilkow radio show.
It's really very touching.
Listen. My son was one of the Marines that died yesterday.
Twenty years and six months old.
Getting ready to come home for frickin' Jordan to be with his wife to watch the birth of his son.
And that feckless, dementia-ridden piece of crap just sent my son to die.
I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning to Marines at my door telling me my son was dead.
Wow. You can feel here the raw emotion, the sheer disgust.
And disgust is literally an ordinary person's revolt against the sheer futility of this, the unnecessariness of it.
On a much smaller scale, here is Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller.
And this guy is in the middle ranks, but he notices that no one in the military is speaking up against this complete, I wouldn't just say failure, collapse of leadership, derogation of leadership.
The sheer almost indifference to what's happening in Afghanistan, the human catastrophe, the loss of U.S. strategic interests, the long-term impact of all this, the rise of terrorism that it stimulates and feeds.
And so Stuart Scheller speaks out against this.
And guess what? He's the one guy who gets fired.
Think about all the people who deserve to be fired.
That ridiculous General Milley, the military top brass who have been lying to us for 20 years, Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken, Biden himself.
All these are the people who should be held accountable.
But no, accountability comes to the one guy who calls them on it, who actually demands accountability.
Now, of course, the Biden administration's stance is, listen, you know, we're taking stern action.
We just got the two chief planners of ISIS-K who planned this attack.
Well, they didn't.
They're lying again.
Ask simply, well, what are their names?
Name these guys. We're not going to be releasing their names.
Show us some proof that you actually got them.
We don't really have any proof.
And then, of course, more lately, when informed about all the civilian casualties where there's plenty of evidence, people who were unnecessarily killed, collateral damage, you might call it.
And then the Pentagon goes, yeah, yeah, we're reassessing the impact of that attack.
It is unclear what may have happened.
So suddenly they now realize they maybe didn't get the two guys.
Maybe they got two camels instead.
And of course, no wonder they haven't released their names.
Camels don't have names. And then here's Biden.
I mean, think about, contrast the realism from Marine Lieutenant Trump.
Colonel Scheller or from Kathy McCollum, just the way that they're responding in a normal way against Biden.
Biden couldn't care less.
There he is at the service to honor the fallen soldiers.
He's looking at his watch. I've got better things to do.
Why am I here? Isn't it nap time already?
I mean, this is Biden. And if this seems like an anomaly, like a one-time thing, oh no, this is a guy who acts like this all the time.
I mean, here is a guy who, when he was being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, and George Stephanopoulos was talking about those horrible scenes, people falling out of planes, people desperate.
Biden goes... Well, that was four or five days ago.
It's sort of like, why are you bringing this up now?
Old news, man.
That's history. You know, come on, man.
So all of this, you know, I think the human element here, the inhuman element is coming out when you're dealing with these Democrats.
They really don't care.
Michelle Obama standing there, why are we making all this silliness about a flag?
This is their true face.
They try to hide their face, and they hide their face at election time really well, but every now and then, at critical moments, it comes out.
What we have done in Afghanistan is just very grim.
Namely, we have essentially unleashed terrorism on a previously unprecedented scale.
Biden has basically turned the Taliban, not just into the most powerful terrorist group in the world, but one of the world's biggest arms dealers.
Because they've got all this weaponry and material, they don't even need all of it.
So what are they going to do? They're going to put it on the international market.
And we see in Afghanistan already...
It reports that Al-Qaeda is mobilizing again.
Al-Qaeda goes, wait a minute, we're not out for the count.
People don't mention our name anymore, but we're training.
And they sure are.
ISIS. So ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, all these groups have now been given a kind of Hospitable regime and a clean slate to begin their operations.
From a military source, a kind of amazing graphic on what the Biden administration left behind.
And when you think of the negligence of this, ask yourself, could this even be accidental?
We left behind... 64,000 machine guns.
358,000 assault rifles.
We left behind 22,000 Humvees.
Think about that. 155...
Mind-proof vehicles.
Think of the weaponry here.
And then, 33 helicopters.
What's the excuse for that?
33 Blackhawks.
4 C-130 transport planes.
Now, think about the cost of these things.
23 Embraer's.
28 Cessna's.
Ten-strike aircraft.
I mean, the American people have paid for all this.
Hundreds of millions, well, billions of dollars.
And, you know, the military could care less.
There were also huge stashes of cash.
It's almost like it's your cash.
It's not their cash. What could they care?
They don't have to get it all out. Let the Taliban use it.
What's the big deal? We're out of here.
So this is the approach that the Biden people have taken.
And now they're working hand-in-hand with the Taliban.
They're literally directing Americans and American allies to Taliban checkpoints.
Why? Because the Americans didn't want to keep control of Kabul.
They were almost offered it by the Taliban.
You can keep control of Kabul, and Biden decided, and the military leadership conveyed this, we don't want it.
We just kind of want to get our guys through the airport.
You can keep control of Kabul.
This decision, it seems to me, is so scandalous.
It warrants hearings, investigations, possibly impeachment.
Think of it, Trump was impeached for a phone call.
These are horrific actions taken by this administration, and the consequences are right before us.
They're measurable, they're destructive, and they're long-term.
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You've got to use promo code DINESH. When I was a kid, my grandmother would sometimes say to me, Dinesh, if you do that, I will give you one tight slap across your face.
That was her actual quote.
It got my attention.
Well, the Supreme Court has given one tight slap across the face to the Biden administration.
And this is in...
It's lawless attempt.
This is the Biden administration's lawless attempt to try to get renters across the country not to pay their rent.
So we're talking here about what is called the eviction ban.
So the Biden administration decides that if you're a landlord and your renters aren't paying, you can't evict them.
Why? Because you've got to recognize that we're in a pandemic.
Seemingly, they're suffering through the pandemic.
You're not. And so, we'll let the price fall.
Not on us, not the government.
We're going to let the price fall on you.
No rents for you. Now, when we think of landlords, we sometimes think, oh, well, this guy's a slumlord who has 100 different tenements.
No, the ordinary landlords in America, for the most part, are themselves middle-class guys.
These are people who invest in real estate in part because it gives them an income that's their business to try to get by.
Here's a good example. This is Ryan David.
He lives in New York.
He bought three rental properties in 2017.
His expectation was to get $1,000 a month in rent from each of them.
And he thought, wow, that's going to give me $3,000 a month.
And now, under the Biden administration's eviction ban, his renters decided, hey, we're protected.
No need to pay. And so, this guy's unpaid rent has been piling up.
And this is what's happening to landlords.
Now, a lot of these landlords are under pressure, so what do they do?
They put their property on the market, and then huge real estate conglomerates, huge Wall Street firms swoop in and buy these properties.
So what's happening here is it's a transfer of wealth away from small businesses and small landlords toward giant corporations that seem to want to convert all of America into sort of a...
A rental scheme with handsome profits to be made at the corporate level.
Now, the Biden administration knew that this eviction ban could not stand up legally.
Biden as much as said that.
But what he basically said is, listen, we might be able to delay it a little bit longer, so let's get the CDC. See, what they did here is it wasn't that the government itself, the White House, They didn't issue an executive order.
They tried to cover this up by pretending like it's a CDC mandate.
The CDC thinks that it's going to be very good to curtail the virus for renters to stay put, to stay just where they are, because after all, if they're put on the street, who knows how quickly they could spread the virus.
Now, this fraudulent scheme was quickly exposed and shot down by the Supreme Court.
I want to just read a line or two from the Supreme Court decision written, I believe, by Kavanaugh.
By the way, this was a 6-3 decision.
All the conservatives on one side, all the liberals on the other side.
And... And before I get to Kavanaugh, Justice Breyer falls hook, line, and sinker for the good old CDC line.
He goes, you know, he includes a chart in his decision about the rising Delta variant.
And he says, oh yeah, we cannot have these evictions because it's going to have serious health consequences.
Here's a judge supposed to apply the law.
He seems to be indifferent to the law.
He makes himself into a public policy expert, Dr.
Fauci number two.
But the majority of the court is not fooled.
And they basically say this.
They say, number one, the applicants, which is to say the landlord association, this is, by the way, the Alabama Association of Realtors, have a substantial likelihood of success on the merits, meaning they're going to win this case.
It's difficult to imagine them losing because you can't have a market system of contracts where basically you just let people get out of their contracts just because the CDC says so.
And now the Supreme Court admits the CDC does have, quote, broad authority to fight the virus.
But the court is clever enough, the majority, to look and see what that means.
And they say, listen, the second sentence of this government provision for the CDC makes it very clear what this broad authority means.
Here's what it means. Inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of contaminated animals and articles.
So it was apparently under that authority that the CDC decided, well, you know what? Let's just make a rule that landlords cannot evict tenants.
And the court goes, that authority is not in the law. So if Congress wants to pass a law that says, basically, tenants don't have to pay, do it. But Congress had a chance to do it, didn't do it, doesn't have the support to do it. And therefore, the Biden administration, think about how many fronts, by the way, from the border to the eviction ban, the Biden administration, lawlessness on all fronts. And it's almost like the Supreme Court has a full-time job shooting these lawless thugs down
from one on one issue after another.
In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for 2021 at 2.1%.
Now in June, the actual inflation rate?
5.4%.
The point? Inflation is here.
It's coming faster than our government is prepared for.
And their solution is to stick their heads in the sand.
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I want to talk some more about the justification that was used by Lieutenant Mike Byrd for killing Ashley Babbitt.
I want to talk about not just why that justification is bogus, it's fraudulent.
But what would be the reason for Mike Byrd escaping any real accountability?
Why would they do so much to protect this guy?
In an era where there's a lot of attention to police brutality, defund the police, the police themselves are...
Too trigger-happy, too prone to use their guns.
How come suddenly all that's out the window?
Suddenly this guy is a hero.
This guy is basically doing his job.
Well, wasn't Derek Chauvin doing his job?
Well, yeah, but he used excessive force.
Yeah, but wasn't George Floyd breaking the law?
So exactly the same things that I hear from the left on social media about Ashley Babbitt.
Well, she should have known better.
She shouldn't have broken a window.
But she didn't break the window.
She shouldn't have gone through the window.
Yeah, she shouldn't have gone through the window.
I agree. But the question is, did that warrant a death sentence?
And who made Mike Byrd into the judge, jury, and executioner?
That's the point. Now...
Debbie and my friend Troy Nels, longtime sheriff of Fort Bend County, a guy who knows a lot about the police and the standards, has a close analysis that he shared with us.
He's issued it as a public statement, so I want to look at it a little more closely.
And he makes the point that police officers, he says, are trained to respond to different types of situations.
And there are six different levels of force.
Now, lethal force, he says, is the last resort.
And it's very clear, this is how policemen are trained.
Do not go to level six until you have exhausted levels one through five.
So, he goes, it's very clear that by his own admission...
Lieutenant Byrd moved from verbal commands, that by the way is level 2, you make a verbal command, to lethal force, level 6, without going through the proper de-escalations in between.
So here's what they are. Number 3, physical control.
Try to exercise physical control over the violator.
Pepper spray, baton, or taser.
Use other means, non-lethal means, to immobilize, you may say, the suspect.
And then, use force but less than lethal force.
So that is to say, even if you have to shoot, shoot for the leg.
Don't shoot to kill. Now, according to Lieutenant Byrd, from his public interview with Lester Holt, he said, number one, he couldn't see if Ashley Byrd was armed.
He saw her backpack, but he didn't know what was in the backpack.
I'm sorry, Ashley Babbitt.
Ashley Babbitt was armed.
He didn't know. And Troy Nell says, that's why you don't shoot if you don't know.
In other words, not knowing is not permission to go ahead and fire.
He says, Now, I think it's very telling that the government, in clearing Mike Byrd, has provided no facts.
In fact, recently on social media, someone goes, go read the report, Dinesh.
They gave a full... No, they didn't.
There's no justification. All that the report goes is, we've cleared this guy.
Basically, that's it. And that if we try to prosecute him, we don't think we have enough evidence to get him.
Now, normally a report goes into a very detailed, factual accounting of what happened.
Multiple interviews with witnesses.
By the way, no one seems to have interviewed Troy Nels.
And he was right there.
He was right there. So you've got a very...
You've got a guy who's in Congress...
But who used to be a sheriff, who's, by the way, served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here's a guy who has seen combat.
And in fact, he makes a very good point.
He says, while he was there, he heard the glass break.
And he says, a couple of officers actually ducked, thinking it was a shot.
But he goes, if someone has actually seen combat, you know the difference between a shot and breaking glass.
And so Troy Nels did not duck, because actually he was in a position to inwardly to discriminate between what's a real shot and what's a loud noise.
So what we have here is ultimately an effort to cover up and to protect this Lieutenant Mike Byrd.
And the question, and Troy Nelves doesn't get into this, is why?
And the why is really very clear.
It is essentially to cover up a leftist narrative of the whole January 6th.
I mean, try to think about it. If it turns out that this officer, by the way, a black police officer, murders...
Or negligently kills a white Trump supporter, an unarmed person, who is there in an illicit manner, shouldn't be inside the Capitol, but nevertheless is shot without, it seems, due warning and certainly without other measures taken to immobilizer.
And that's the only use of deliberate lethal force.
On January 6th, what happens to all the great sing-song about, oh, there was a coup attempt, oh, there was an insurrection, oh, there was a terrorist act?
Well, it would appear that the only lethal force is used by the U.S. government against a peaceful protester.
So in order to save that tottering narrative, to save that ridiculous lie...
Basically, Ashley Babbitt's death has to go unpunished.
And this officer, if there ever was a delinquent, derelict cop who needs to be held accountable, Lieutenant Mike Byrd is it.
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Here's a terrific article from FoxNews.com.
Minnesota mosque bomber identifies as transgender woman, seeks lower sentence due to, quote, internal conflict.
Now, let's look for the details here.
This is the founder of a militia group.
Supposedly a kind of a white supremacist group.
The guy's name is Michael Harry, H-A-R-I. And he was part of a bunch of guys, I guess, that bombed an Islamic center.
It was called the Dar al-Faruq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota.
And he got a life sentence for it, for this terrorist, domestic terrorist bombing.
Turns out that his lawyer now says that the judge needs to recognize that he's no longer Michael Harry.
He's now Emily Clay Harry.
He's decided that he's really a woman.
And you would think, oh, well, okay, so...
And this is not just a matter of using a bathroom or even being placed in the women's prison, but rather, he wants to get a lesser sentence.
In fact, his lawyer says you can't give him more than 30 years.
You can't give him a life sentence, as in fact he's up for, because his transgender problems are the reason that he did this.
So, let me read from the lawyer, because this kind of stuff is going on throughout our society.
Quote, she, this is Emily Claire Harry, she strongly desired to make a full transition, but knew she would be ostracized from everyone and everything she knew.
So, according to the lawyer, this is not about bombing an Islamic center.
It's rather that a biological man who insists that she is a woman was having internal conflicts.
While having internal conflicts, Thus, as she formed a ragtag group of freedom fighters or militiamen and spoke of missions to Cuba and Venezuela, Ms.
Harry secretly looked up sex change, transgender surgery, and post-op transgender.
The basic idea here is that this person was Wrestling with transgenderism and somehow got sort of suckered into the whole let's bomb an Islamic center idea.
In fact, organized it and carried it out, but now wants to escape accountability for it.
And I think that's really the heart of the matter.
The heart of the matter here is that this identity politics card is not a demand for equal treatment under the law.
On the surface it is.
Well, we just want to be treated the same.
We just want to make sure that our rights are respected.
We want to make sure there's a level playing field.
This rhetoric of equality, or as they now say, equity, is everywhere.
But of course, when it comes to any accountability, which is to say, look, why don't you did the You should do the time. But then suddenly, oh no!
We are mitigating circumstances.
After all, Michael Harry is now Emily Clay Harry.
That makes all the difference. So suddenly identity politics is not about treating people equally.
It's not about equal justice under the law.
It's not about you did the crime, you do the time.
It's about I'm transgender and therefore I deserve special treatment.
I need to get a leniency that may not be available to all the other defendants because of my so-called inner conflict over my, you know, my sex organs.
So this, I think, is an attempt to escape accountability, to unlevel the playing field, to demand unequal justice under the law.
And in a nutshell, isn't that what identity politics is all about?
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One of the problems with woke politics and identity politics more generally, some people kind of give in, I'll give in on this, I'll give in on that, I'll use the right pronouns, let's keep these people happy, but you soon realize that it's never enough.
These guys are never satisfied.
And recently the town of Evanston, Illinois, kind of a left-leaning suburb, of Chicago, decided they wanted to, quote, do the right thing.
And they decided, well, let's, to the degree that we can afford to, let's provide reparations for blacks because, you know, there's a very troubling history of slavery.
The descendants of slaves need to get some benefits.
The descendants of the slave owners need to pay.
Except, when you step back and think about it, Illinois was a free state.
So when you think about reparations in Evanston, Illinois, you're asking the descendants of non-slave owners to pay so the descendants of non-slaves could receive a benefit.
The whole concept of reparations is ludicrous on its face in this case.
It'd be different if, like, South Carolina decided to do it.
But here is Illinois, a free state passing reparations.
Well, nevertheless, the idea here is that, this is such a classic kind of woke program.
Evanston, Illinois apparently gets revenues from the sale of marijuana, from cannabis.
And they decided to take those revenues and put them into a kind of what they call the Restorative Housing Program Fund.
And the idea here is only blacks can apply under this fund.
Apply for what? For $25,000 cash grants to buy a house.
And since they realize that there isn't that much money in the fund, in fact, the fund currently has only $400,000.
If you think about it, do the math, divide by $25,000, that really means that only 16 families...
And Evanston would qualify.
And so Evanston decided if there are 100 families that apply, we'll have a lottery and we'll give the 16 families the 25 grand.
Now, what happens next is where the comedy starts.
Because so far you might be thinking, well, this is ridiculous.
You know, why are you doing this?
Why are you having a purely race-based program?
But it turns out that black activists in Evanston basically go, no, we oppose this.
In fact, there's a group that started.
This, I think, is absolutely fantastic.
And it's essentially Evanston citizens against reparations.
It's a group that was founded to block this reparations project, and the organizer of this group basically says, it's not enough.
He goes, this is just an absolute pittance.
He says, quote, it's a good step for the city to take, but it's not reparations.
And in fact, by calling it reparations, he says you're actually doing more harm than good.
Now, the real kind of reparations advocates are people who want a complete economic transformation of the United States.
If you look, for example, at this book called From Here to Equality, Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century, this is a book that calls for a $14 trillion reparations program.
Let's think about this for a minute.
All of COVID relief.
$5 trillion. And that's a ridiculously large number as it is.
$14 trillion would be three times that.
And think of what that would do to the country, to the national debt.
It's just a massive transfer of wealth.
And really without any showing of particular agreements.
No one shows, you know, I'm descended from a slave.
This person is descended from a slave.
And there's no attempt to do any of this.
The basic idea here is just to make the government pay.
And all you would have to do is essentially show...
And I'm just following the criteria in the book itself, that you have one ancestor, one ancestor, who was enslaved in the United States.
And that would be sufficient.
So, this is a horrible idea all the way around.
I don't think that it's going to go anywhere, but the very fact that we're talking about it just shows how dislocated and crazy our debate has become.
And the experience of one town, Evanston, Illinois, shows how even an attempt to appease the wokesters, an attempt to sort of say, okay, well, let's try to do what we can, meets with a, this is insultingly inadequate, go ahead and pay us, but there's a lot more that we want from you.
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With September right around the corner, it's back-to-school time in America.
And I have a back-to-school issue I want to discuss with Debbie.
But before I do that, I want to mention that my stepdaughter, Juliana, is starting up today, right?
Yes, yes. Go Giga Maggie's.
She's starting at Texas A&M. So, starting back at Texas A&M, I should say.
I mean, it's been a tricky time with COVID. I mean, I think the only time that she had a full, you know...
Full year was the first year that she was there.
And then after that it's kind of been on and off.
With the online and all of those things.
I want to talk to you about a remarkable development at Harvard University.
Now, as a way of background, Harvard University was, as really all the IVs except one, I believe Cornell, was started with a Christian mission.
Dartmouth was founded by a congregational minister, Eliezer Wheelock.
Harvard was started by John Harvard, a Puritan minister.
And for 70 years, the presidents of Harvard were all ministers.
But now it turns out, and I get this from the Christian Post, Harvard chaplains elect atheists as new president, meaning they have chaplains for the Catholic chaplain and so on, but they have a head chaplain who supervises all the chaplains, and that guy is an atheist and a self-described humanist.
And his name is Gregory Epstein and apparently he's the author of a book called Good Without God.
So the theme of it is that morality is sort of detached from religion and that we can be good without God.
What do you make of this remarkable development where, I mean, we're not just talking about the fact that this is a guy who's teaching at Harvard, probably a lot of the professors are like that, but this is the chaplaincy.
I mean, this is basically the organization that ministers to the religious beliefs of students, and this guy is an atheist.
Well, this is proof positive that our institutions are going away from God, and they're going more towards the secular world.
of students. They're basically telling them that they don't really need religion anymore, that the humanist in them or the self-help is what it's all about. And this is proof positive of that.
I mean, there's a sense in which what he's saying is true and obvious, but there's another sense in which I think it is very misleading.
Now, we don't deny, I don't think you would or I would, that someone who's a non-believer or even an atheist has a sense of morality.
They would recognize that murder is wrong and stealing is wrong, so it's not like they don't have a conscience.
So in that sense, no one denies you can be good without God.
But if you ask a deeper question, which is, where does morality come from?
What is its source?
Who is ultimately its author?
If we hear the voice of conscience, who puts that voice in us?
Well, according to the atheists, not God.
But their only alternative explanation, if you think about it, is evolution.
Now, the job of evolution is to make us survive and reproduce.
Creatures basically survive, and it's survival of the fittest.
So where does morality enter the picture?
It hardly enters the picture at all.
Now, of course, the atheists make elaborate efforts to cleverly say things like, well, yeah, but, you know, morality is a survival technique, and we do things to benefit our close genetic relatives and so on.
But, of course, true morality isn't limited to that.
If you get up and give your seat to an old woman in a bus, she's not your genetic relative.
You're not doing it out of some mercenary motive.
Well, you know what, tomorrow I want her to give up her seat.
No, you're just doing it because it's the right thing or nice thing to do.
And there's a little prompting in all of us that makes us do that.
We may not actually obey it, but it's there.
Now, you know, it's funny, growing up, you've actually had these clashes, it seems, and many of us do inside the family, where we've got sort of a skeptic or an atheist, and what do you have to say about those?
Because you've grown up with this stuff.
Well, I have a brother, as you know, who is a self-proclaimed atheist.
And, but, I've always had a problem with his atheism, not because he's an atheist himself, because I feel like the salvation, if he doesn't want the salvation himself, then that's kind of his problem, right?
Even though I have often offered it to him.
It's the fact that he cannot stop talking about it.
And that he tries to make me feel like I'm in the wrong for believing in God and for having faith.
And he's completely in the right.
So in other words, his know-it-all attitude He encompasses pretty much everything he does and says.
One thing I find striking is you mentioned to me that this is a guy who is pretty well versed in the Bible.
So, you know, normally you think if I don't believe in something, you know, for example, I'm not particularly a fan of, let's just say, you know, Hinduism.
Right. I mean, I'm interested in Hinduism, but the point is I'm not immersed in the Hindu scriptures.
I can't quote the laws of Manu, but he can.
So my brother's a genius.
He's got a genius low IQ. And so he treats it as a piece of literature.
So that's why he does that.
It's not based on his belief system.
It's based on his knowledge of literature and books and all that.
And so he treats it just like he does any other piece of literature.
And then probably he sees it as a weapon against the Christians, because what better than to quote their own book against them, to try to point out, let's say, contradictions, look at the God of the Old Testament, and so on.
So this is a debate in general that I've, throughout my adult life, welcomed.
Because, see, I grew up with Hindus and Muslims, so the idea of questioning is not alien to me.
One reason I jumped into Christian apologetics, I actually enjoy these sorts of debates.
But like you say, it's the know-it-all, it's the smarmy attitude.
The atheists think they're apostles of reason.
And you and I, like, we use reason in ordinary life, but when it comes to religion, our reason goes out the window.
But that's not true at all.
In fact, for us, our faith illuminates all kinds of experiences and aspects of life that would make no sense without it.
So this idea that we're sort of chucking out our brains when we step into the Christian world, if you will, I mean, it's just ridiculous.
Yeah, it is ridiculous, but that's how they operate.
And so back to this article in the Christian Post, you know, a Harvard chaplain being an atheist is kind of the way that things are going these days.
I mean, really. Yeah. Moving away from God.
I mean, listen to this guy. This kind of shows, you know, the kind of false sophistication of these people.
We don't look to God for answers.
We are each other's answers.
Now, let's pause. Let's pause for a second.
Let me pose some questions, right?
Why is there a universe?
We are each other's answers.
What comes after death?
We are each other's answers.
Well, what do you think, Austin?
What do you think, Shakita?
As if to say that these great questions of life can somehow be resolved just through mere conversation.
These are questions in some ways that go to the root of our purpose, why there's a world.
And so the notion that you can set aside philosophy Philosophical inquiries, sacred books that attempt to provide answers through revelation.
I mean, just the arrogance of it, I think, is what I find.
And I also think, look at this, it says in 2017, some 32.4% of incoming freshmen identified as either atheist or agnostic.
And by 2019, it increased.
This is very troubling.
Very troubling. Yeah, we've been seeing, and this comes from the Pew data, there's been a secularization of American society across the board.
Not just in the woke universities, but it's even occurred in ordinary precincts of life.
I don't know if it's been driven by the fact that many times I think church leaders, Protestant, Catholic alike, have been involved in these high-profile scandals.
I don't know if people feel like, gee, there's just a level of hypocrisy here.
And it's kind of turned them away to try to find answers on their own.
I'm not quite sure what exactly is driving this, but I agree with you.
This is a big problem. It's, of course, a religious problem, but it's also a social and political problem.
You know, liberal universities are pushing this, as is the media, as is Hollywood, as are all the big megaphones of culture, are going more towards secularism.
And the pastors are very timid in their response to all that.
I mean, wouldn't it be great if you had a pastor who stepped up there and said, listen, here's an article in the Washington Post, and it says this, and this is why they're wrong, or here's a professor who says that.
But it's almost like they conduct their services as though the world is in a separate bubble, and they're in a separate bubble.
Or the world is the way it was before.
Back even 30 years ago.
So they need to address what's happening now with our youth now because we're going to lose these kids.
And when they become our age, think of how the world will change if they don't address it now.
Absolutely. One of the most radical plans to reshape the future of America is happening right now, and we need to stop it.
President Biden's plan to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.
Back in April, the president launched a special judicial commission to what he calls reform the court.
But the real plan is to install four more liberal justices to gain an automatic majority and ensure favorable rulings for his radical policies.
Once the court is packed, it will end the rule of law as we know it, which is exactly what happened in Venezuela and Argentina.
So let's be clear.
America is not a banana republic.
Thankfully, First Liberty Institute is taking a stand.
They've issued a letter to the commission asking them to reject this radical court packing scheme and they're not alone.
Franklin Graham, Ed Meese, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Americans for Prosperity, American Family Association, plus 60,000 others have joined their coalition.
But we need one million.
Debbie and I have signed, so add your name now.
Go to SupremeCoup.com, that's S-U-P-R-E-M-E-C-O-U-P.com, to sign First Liberties Letter.
That's SupremeCoup.com, and may God bless America.
I'm kind of a fan of the Middle Ages, which may seem like an odd thing to say.
By the Middle Ages, I actually mean the historical period in the West between about 500 AD, right after the fall of the Roman Empire, and And about 1500 AD, which is kind of when the Renaissance really got into full swing.
So a thousand year period, very often called by some the Dark Ages, but the Dark Ages weren't all that dark, at least in many respects.
They weren't. The intellectual life and the philosophical life in the Dark Ages, although spotty, there were just a few great figures in that time, but these were truly great thinkers and they are of special interest to those of us who care about God, who care about the truths and doctrines of Christianity.
These people thought harder about those things than almost anyone we could find since then.
And so, when we look at the Middle Ages, and by the way, I should point out that the people in the Middle Ages didn't know they lived in the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages is a term that we use later that was invented, a term of classification in which the ancient world basically goes from the 5th century BC to about the 5th century AD, then the middle period of the Middle Ages from about 500 to 1500, and then the modern era from 1500 to the present.
The great Christian thinkers in that period were in the 4th century, Augustine.
In the 11th century, Anselm.
This is Anselm of Canterbury.
And then in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas.
And I'm going to talk in the next couple of segments or more about Aquinas.
Now, there were some other figures who were also important.
I might deal with them at other times.
There was Boethius, who I think I've mentioned on the podcast before.
There was Peter Abelard, and there was Duns Scotus.
So there were other important thinkers, but I think Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas are the sort of luminaries of this period.
And what do these thinkers do?
What was their goal?
Well, their goal ultimately was, you could call it, faith-seeking understanding.
So these are people who believed in the truths of the Christian faith, but they didn't stop there.
They didn't say, okay, well, I believe, and that's enough.
Their point was that we need to try to make sense of what we believe.
We need to see if faith can be reconciled with reason.
And to what degree? And even if something is beyond the bounds of reason, that doesn't mean that inquiry stops there because there may be things that reason can't adjudicate.
Let's just say, for example, and here we're talking about Aquinas.
Aquinas believes, for example, that you can prove the existence of God.
Aquinas advanced what he was famously called the Five Proofs.
Aquinas also believed that you can prove the immortality of the soul.
Now, he didn't necessarily mean that these proofs would be accepted by everyone, but he thought that the proofs would be accepted by everyone who thought hard enough and was intelligent enough to understand what was being said.
So, in other words, the proof does work.
But Aquinas thought that there are other things, for example, Christ's substitutionary atonement or the Trinity, that are beyond the bounds of reason.
They can't be proved.
But because they can't be proved doesn't mean they can't be talked about.
Because, if you take something like the Trinity, the question becomes, how can it even make sense to talk about God being one God?
And yet at the same time, three distinct persons.
Not just one God who appears in three different manifestations or guises, but a God who nevertheless is distinctly Father and Son and Holy Spirit and is yet one singular God.
And Aquinas believed that there were all kinds of ways, using reason, that one could illuminate or make sense, even of something like the Trinity, not so much to prove it, But to refute people who said that this is ridiculous, this is contradictory, this makes absolutely no sense.
And so, for Aquinas, reason serves, you almost call it two purposes.
The first purpose is constructive, to offer arguments and proofs.
But the other, you could call it...
Reason serves a different purpose, and that's defensive.
And defensive means to refute the unbeliever or the atheist or the skeptic who says, this can't be so.
And you don't have to prove it is so.
You simply have to show that it's possible for it to be so, and there's nothing inherently contradictory in it being so.
There's nothing unreasonable, in other words, in having faith on this point.
Today I just want to talk a little bit about Aquinas himself, a little bit about his life, and I'm going to get into his proofs, or I'm going to focus on one proof for the existence of God next time.
So Aquinas was born in the 13th century.
He composed his great work.
It's called the Summa Theologica between 1265 and 1273.
Now, this is an amazing work, the Summa Theologica, I have here a condensed version of Aquinas' writings.
This is the Penguin Classics.
Boy, it's a few dollars and what a priceless work to have.
In any case, the Summa Theologica, think about this, it has 38 separate tracts.
It addresses 631 questions and 3,000 articles.
He answers 1,000 objections to his positions.
He quotes from 19 Christian councils, 41 popes, 52 fathers of the church, 346 classical philosophers.
This is a magisterial work, and therefore you have to laugh almost when Aquinas says this Summa Theologica is a, quote, introductory manual for beginner students in theology and in philosophy.
What I find really marvelous about Aquinas is his mode of reasoning, a mode that even today would be considered extremely advanced, extremely progressive, and writers would do much better if they followed it.
So what does Aquinas do? He states the position.
Let's say, for example, the position that God exists.
But before he even goes any further, before he even makes any arguments for God, he lists every conceivable argument that he can make against his position.
And Aquinas is very careful to be very fair to these critiques.
He doesn't state them in a kind of straw man manner so that he can then knock them down easily.
He states them so forcefully that when you're reading the counterpoint, you're like, oh wow, this means to make sense.
In fact, there are some people who think that Aquinas states the refutations of his own position so forcefully that there's stronger ground in the refutation than in Aquinas' answer to the refutation.
I don't think so. But nevertheless, it is a testament to the fairness, the kind of intellectual scrupulousness of Aquinas that he does this.
Here's a guy, by the way, Who entered the Abbey of Monte Cassino at the age of five as a young oblet.
Later he decided he wanted to leave the Abbey and join a group of mendicant monks called Dominicans.
His family was really opposed because the Dominicans were extremely poor.
They essentially owned nothing.
They begged for food and clothing by going from place to place.
And so his family, which was actually rather well off, he came from kind of the minor nobility in Europe.
They opposed Aquinas, but he did it anyway.
He ended up as a kind of professor at one of the earliest universities in the Western world, which is the University of Paris.
And he became, in some ways, the most comprehensive, systematic, philosophical defender of Christianity.
For this reason, I think it's a great mistake that this part of our Christian intellectual tradition is sometimes ignored.
It gets lost in the battles between Catholics and Protestants.
Let's remember all of that came later.
And so there's no reason, whatever positions we take on the Reformation, to ignore the intellectual tradition of Christianity prior to that.
Why? Because it was an attempt by very serious people who devoted their entire life, literally, to it.
Aquinas, in a sense, if you want to describe his life, you would be hard-pressed to say, what were the events of his life?
What really happened to him? Well, not a whole lot.
His was a life in which the great events were thoughts.
And next time around, we're going to dive into those thoughts and try to see if Aquinas can meet the great challenge of proving, yes, proving the existence of God.
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