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Aug. 31, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza

54:06

TIME TO GO! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 165

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	Can you believe it? Biden's looking at his watch.
	It's time for him to go.
	Well, I'm looking at my watch.
	It's time for him to go.
	I'm also going to show how our other enemies, North Korea in particular, are now becoming emboldened by this demonstration of weakness on the part of the Biden administration.
	And the evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad joins me, and we're going to really lambaste woke politics.
	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 United States' defeat in Afghanistan is arguably the worst military defeat in our history.
	I guess one could say that Vietnam was a greater defeat.
	There were certainly more Americans' lives lost in Vietnam over a long But the way that this ended, and in fact ended not only with body bags, but ended with Americans being left behind.
	Remember in Vietnam we got all the Americans out.
	Later we recovered bodies, but there were no Americans left behind in Vietnam.
	And here there clearly are.
	And I'll get to that in a minute.
	What I find so dismaying is not just the defeat itself, but the preposterous effort by the Biden administration to put a kind of happy face on it.
	In fact, they're making it sound like this was amazing.
	This was a kind of a triumph of American ingenuity, a massive evacuation.
	Well, the reason the evacuation was so perilous was because the Biden administration created this problem.
	This is not a problem foisted upon it.
	This is a problem devised and orchestrated by the Biden administration.
	So I saw this on Trending Politics this morning.
	Debbie showed it to me now. It's kind of, it's so appropriate that it goes, you know, this kind of boasting by Jen Psaki and Biden and all their, you know, all their sycophantic admirers in the media, Max Boot, Jennifer, what's her name?
	But I read in Trending Politics, this is like a doctor claiming that the operation was a total success.
	Of course, it's a little regrettable that the patient died, but nevertheless, we declare this operation to be completely successful.
	Well, it's not successful, and everybody can see it.
	There are so many images that confirm it.
	Look at the Taliban flying an American helicopter with a human body, you know, dangling from it.
	It's almost like, here, this is who we are, guys.
	Take note, as if you didn't know already.
	And then there's Biden looking at his watch.
	Now, at first I thought this was Biden looking at his watch one time.
	Take a quick peek at this.
	What you see here is the austere ceremony.
	The caskets arrayed one behind the other.
	And here's Biden as if to say, you know...
	Why is this taking so long?
	I kind of got to get out of here.
	And interestingly, I see from interviews with Gold Star parents that Biden was regularly looking at his watch as if to say, you know, I can't be bothered with this nonsense.
	I'm doing it out of a sense of obligation, but I can't wait to get back to my nap or I can't wait to get back to whatever.
	And, um, other, uh, parents who met with Biden said things like, you know, if they would, if they would blast him for, for American inaction, uh, or for America's blunders, Biden would roll his eyes left to say, here we go again.
	Okay. Well, I guess I got to endure this.
	So this is our commander in chief.
	He, uh, Just doesn't care.
	To him, it's all a big nuisance.
	You know, to be honest, I'm not even sure if he cares about Bo Biden.
	He keeps bringing up Bo Biden.
	Oh, Bo Biden!
	You know, I understand because of Bo Biden.
	Well, first of all, nobody cares about Bo Biden.
	I don't even think Joe Biden cares.
	You know why? If he really cared, he wouldn't use Bo Biden as a shield to protect him from the consequences of his own decisions.
	But that's exactly what he has been doing.
	Now... Try to imagine, quite apart from the suffering of the Gold Star parents, imagine being an American left behind in Afghanistan.
	You're a guy who sort of signed up for your country.
	You wanted to fight back after 9-11.
	You went on the basis that America doesn't leave Americans behind.
	Biden said that very recently in his interview with Stephanopoulos.
	We're not going to leave any Americans behind.
	Really? Well, you just did.
	How many? Well, the government is trying to fool with the numbers here.
	And initially they said, well, the number's kind of in the low hundreds.
	Then they said, well, sort of 100 to 200.
	And then they said, well, that's the count of the Americans who want to get out.
	As if to say, we might have left back several more, but they don't really want to leave.
	Now, I'm trying to think to myself, really?
	Are you saying that there are Americans who sort of want to live under Taliban rule?
	Americans who are identified as the crusader and the infidel living under a regime where their lives will be in constant danger.
	And how do we know that their lives are in constant danger?
	Well, Here's a report in the Daily Mail.
	Taliban is going around Kabul now, pinning letters on the doors of people who are suspected to be either Americans or American allies.
	And it was Afghans who were supportive of America, basically saying, listen, we're going to give you a date to show up in a Taliban court.
	But if you don't show up in a Taliban court, you will automatically be given the death penalty.
	So this is the fate awaiting not just Afghan collaborators, but awaiting terrified Americans in Afghanistan.
	And the United States is basically, like pilot, washing our hands off the matter.
	Our last plane is already out of there.
	And then if you can believe it, and this is only intended to be sort of the cruel...
	Topping of the whole thing, we also left behind a whole bunch of military dogs.
	So these are...
	And here's the American Humane Society condemning this.
	They go, wait a minute.
	You know, these are helpless animals.
	They're now at the mercy of the Taliban.
	Are you sure you...
	Why did we do this?
	This was not something we had.
	The dogs were left in cages right at the Kabul airport.
	Like, yeah, we don't need to take the dogs.
	Let's go. So that's...
	This is basically how Biden is.
	Now... Let's think about it.
	Jimmy Carter had a hostage crisis.
	By the way, a hostage crisis that he couldn't solve himself.
	It went on and on and on.
	I don't know if you remember Walter Cronkite, the other anchors, you know, day 56, day 89.
	It goes on and on and it was only when Reagan came and it took a Republican president coming in for this crisis to end.
	Unfortunately, there's no Republican president on the horizon now.
	And what this means is that it's not clear whether those Americans that Biden left behind in Afghanistan, sadly, are ever coming home.
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	One of the unmistakable features of democratic foreign policy, you might call it, by which I mean foreign policy under the Democrats, is that it always ends up emboldening our enemies.
	Think about how the Soviet Union in 1979 said, Jimmy Carter's in office.
	The peanut farmer. Time to invade Afghanistan.
	They're not going to do very much about it.
	And, of course, Carter didn't.
	Also, the hostages.
	Let's grab the hostages. What's Carter going to do?
	And, of course, the answer was basically nothing.
	Similarly, under Clinton.
	Bin Laden. Let's test this guy's resolve.
	We don't think he's going to amount to much.
	And so, one attack after another.
	Kobar Towers. The attack on the coal.
	All the setting up for 9-11.
	The emboldening that led to 9-11 occurs under Clinton.
	And then, of course, under Obama, the Arab Spring.
	Yeah, let's basically turn the Arab street upside down.
	What's Obama going to do about it?
	Nothing, except in some ways even protect the Islamic radicals, the Muslim Brotherhood that came to power temporarily in Egypt.
	And now under Biden. We're good to go.
	North Korea is basically figuring, hey, listen, with this kind of clown in office, what's he really going to do?
	He's probably going to issue a press release.
	I mean, it was Anthony Blinken who said yesterday, now with the Taliban in control, the United States will lead with diplomacy.
	And what does diplomacy mean?
	A signed letter from 100 countries, by the way, excluding Russia and China, which are like, we're not going to sign.
	It'll be ridiculous. We're looking forward to allying with the Taliban.
	Thank you very much. Next.
	And so here's North Korea.
	The International Atomic Energy says that they've taken their nuclear complex, which is north of Pyongyang.
	They're now making plutonium.
	They're making enriched uranium.
	You can see the signs of the discharge of the cooling water.
	And so these guys are at it.
	And they're at it in the full confidence that they can do it with impunity.
	Even with Trump, although Trump tried his best to kind of talk to those guys, you know, rocket man, I'm going to...
	I'm going to try to convince him it's not in his interest to do this kind of nonsense.
	But the North Koreans now realize it's no longer Trump.
	It's no longer a guy who's basically capable of issuing the order to bomb the facilities.
	Trump even said in a statement recently, yeah, I mean, I would never have done this Afghan thing that way.
	And in fact, Trump says, bomb them now!
	Or threaten to bomb them if they don't return every single item, every single rifle, every single Humvee.
	Give it back to us.
	Or we're going to be paying you a very unpleasant visit.
	And this time, we know where to find you.
	You're in Kabul! Now, I'm very excited because next week, I believe, I'm going to have Yeonmi Park, who is an escapee from North Korea.
	Someone who actually grew up and lived in North Korea.
	She and her mom got out.
	She then came to America.
	She went to Columbia University.
	I'm really excited to have her on this podcast.
	That's coming up next week.
	But what we see here is...
	Around the world, the enemies of America are starting to roll up their sleeves because they realize that with a kind of weak, impotent, limp, senile, not-all-there man in the White House, that would seem to be a measure of a limp, weak, senile, not all there, America.
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	With the Texas Democrats having returned to Texas' tail between their legs, very good things are happening in Texas right now, and I want to talk briefly about two.
	The first one was kind of anticipated Which is the passage in the Texas House of the voter integrity law.
	This is awesome because the integrity law has been passed in the Senate.
	It's been now passed in the House.
	And by a decisive margin, by the way.
	The margin was something like 80 to 41.
	So a dramatic and not a close call at all.
	And, of course, the Washington Post is upset about it.
	It tightens the rules around mail ballots.
	Yes, it does. It, quote, empowers partisan poll watchers, which is nothing more than allowing election observers to really observe the process of votes being counted.
	You can see what the watchpost was like, oh, can't let that happen.
	It creates new rules and penalties for mistakes by election officials.
	Oh, this vote is for Trump.
	Well, let's make it for Biden.
	Yeah, you can't do that anymore.
	And people helping others vote.
	Oh, yes, in the nursing home.
	Come over here, Grandma. Let me show you.
	Let me hold the pen, you know.
	So yeah, all of these shenanigans are going to be, let's just say, history in Texas.
	And we're all the better for it.
	But I want to talk about a bigger development.
	And that is that Texas also passed, I would say, one of, if not the strictest, anti-abortion laws in the country.
	Because you remember the Mississippi law that's going before the Supreme Court.
	No abortions, basically, except in exceptional circumstances, after 15 weeks.
	That's it. The 15-week limit, you may say.
	But Texas's limit isn't that.
	Texas's limits are no abortions pretty much at all from the beginning, from the time of a heartbeat.
	Now, the left is, of course, freaking out.
	And so they ran to the court.
	20 abortion providers went to the Federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and said, you need to issue an emergency stay of this under Roe v.
	Wade. You've got to knock down this law because otherwise, effective tomorrow, Wednesday...
	Abortion will end in Texas.
	And the Federal Court of Appeals said, we're not doing it.
	So the bottom line of it is, and this is a, I think, historic event, abortion will be illegal in Texas starting tomorrow.
	Boom. Now, you might say that under the Roe precedent, at some point, this kind of thing is going to be overturned.
	But let's remember the Roe precedent is itself being called into question.
	Mississippi has asked the Supreme Court, Overturn Roe.
	So Roe right now is not secure.
	And the beauty of what Texas is doing is I think they're trying to show that, listen, we can outlaw abortion, and not just outlaw lay-term abortion, outlaw all abortion, and the world is not going to end.
	In fact, what will happen between now and the Supreme Court decision, which is the case is going to be heard in October, the decision could be later, November, maybe even January, Is that Texas will continue life as normal.
	There just won't be abortion in Texas.
	You want to get an abortion? Get out of Texas.
	So Texas is showing, I think, to the Supreme Court, through this example, through practically enforcing an abortion ban, that America can live without Roe v.
	Wade. I think this is very important because the left is going to say, there's going to be convulsions, there's going to be civil war, there's going to be uprisings.
	No, there's not. The truth of it is you have to be firm.
	You've got to recognize there's no constitutional basis for this absurd right, for this non-right masquerading as a right.
	And so I'm really delighted that the state in which we live, I mean I live, is on this very important issue at least beginning to show the way.
	The Biden administration may not be doing too much to fight inflation, but you can.
	In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for 2021 at 2.1%.
	In June, the actual rate 5.4%. So the point is, inflation is here. Our government has no solution.
	Their solution is to stick their heads in the sand. Well, don't stick your head in the sand.
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	I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast Professor Gad Saad.
	He's an evolutionary psychologist.
	He's at Concordia University in Montreal but he's taught at Cornell, at Dartmouth, other places.
	He's also a public intellectual.
	He is the author of a fascinating book that I've been reading, The Parasitic Mind.
	You can see my markings all the way through the book.
	And he also does a podcast, which is called The Saad Truth.
	I like the pun in there, Professor Saad.
	I should tell my audience that they should check out your podcast.
	They'll be glad they did.
	So, welcome to the podcast.
	Nice to have you.
	I've been looking forward to this.
	Likewise. And your book is subtitled How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.
	And it is a full-throated attack on a lot of, you know, woke orthodoxies.
	But you don't just...
	I mean, you, as someone who's ensconced in academia, you say that this is posing a...
	Maybe even an existential threat to the freedom of the mind, the idea of open inquiry, of scientific investigation.
	Say a word about the gravity of the situation, because some people may go, well, this is all crazy stuff.
	People are kind of fighting about a bunch of silly pronouns.
	But it's a lot more than that, isn't it?
	Oh, absolutely.
	I mean, I often get this kind of rebuttal from folks where they say, well, you know, you're taking the most extreme of woke examples that are restricted to some esoteric department in the humanities.
	Surely this doesn't apply to greater society.
	And of course, as we know, viruses eventually spread from outside the lab.
	They escape. By the same token, what I call idea pathogens or parasitic ideas may start in academia, but eventually they make it downstream.
	Our Prime Minister of Canada is a walking manifestation of every parasitic idea that I discuss in the book.
	So it is silly to trivialize the importance of these dreadful ideas.
	Eventually they attack our edifices of reason.
	Our commitment to science, our commitment to common sense, and so they're anything but trivial, and we should eradicate these bad ideas ASAP. We'll come back to how we should fight them, but let's diagnose the problem.
	Let's identify these viruses.
	Are they the viruses that appear in the familiar domains of race and gender and sexual orientation?
	Are those the viruses that you focus on?
	Some of the idea pathogens deal with that.
	So I discuss things like biophobia, which is the fear of using biology to explain human behavior.
	So it's perfectly acceptable for many people that we use evolution to explain the behavior of every single species other than one species called humans.
	Or it's okay to explain...
	Everything about humans, as long as it stops at the neck.
	But don't you dare, Dr.
	Saad, apply evolution or biology to explain why our brains do the things that they do.
	So certainly a lot of the gender and race and transgender activism relates to this kind of idea pathogen.
	But I would argue that the biggest idea pathogen of all, the granddaddy of them, although I discuss many of them in the book, is postmodernism.
	Because it gets at the epistemology of truth, right?
	In science, we believe that there are certain natural regularities that we can explore.
	Science has provisional truths.
	What I thought was true 300 years ago may no longer be true, but there is a truth to be discovered.
	Postmodernism completely eradicates this possibility because it says that we are completely shackled by subjectivity, by our personal biases.
	There is no objective truth.
	So you could imagine how much of a form of intellectual terrorism to espouse this kind of nonsense to students.
	What I find fascinating about the postmodern debate is when I first encountered it, this was in the 80s and 90s.
	I was a student at Dartmouth in the 80s.
	I began to write about this in the 90s.
	It was initially confined to the moral and social domain.
	So the idea was that there's a distinction between facts and values.
	And that facts have a certain kind of objective reality, but values are subjective.
	What I find really astonishing is that we have moved from the relativism of values to now the relativism of facts.
	If you are tracing this, when did that shift occur in which even facts are now held to be, in a sense, subjective?
	So just to contextualize the timeline, postmodernism is something that has existed for about 40-50 years, although the Frankfurt School could even go back earlier than that.
	But the ones that I typically focus on are the French postmodernists like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.
	So they were some of the originators of this nonsense.
	I would probably say the early 90s, so probably just after you finished at Dartmouth, by the way, I was a professor at Dartmouth for a bit, is when we started seeing the complete eradication of logic, common sense, and reason.
	And I think the reason for it is that it is liberating, right?
	It is nice for me to be able to talk about my truth and And not be shackled to anything called reality.
	It's liberating in some silly way.
	And so I argue that each of these idea pathogens start off with some noble cause because they free us from the shackles of reality, but when taken to an extreme, it becomes complete gibberish.
	Now you say it's liberating to be freed from the shackles of reality.
	Let's talk about that for a second.
	What is the appeal of being liberated from reality?
	Is it that reality imposes physical constraints?
	We are mortal human beings.
	We live, we die. Is it that reality says that there are certain givens of nature, that this is the way the world is, you know, take it or leave it, but this is the deck of cards you've been dealt with.
	Play them as well as you can.
	Is there a certain human desire to move into a realm of fantasy where we leave all this reality behind, and why?
	Yeah, great question. So depending on the idea pathogen, that which I'm trying to free myself of will vary.
	So take, for example, social constructivism, which is one of the idea pathogens that I discuss in the book.
	Social constructivism basically argues that we don't have any biological imperatives.
	We are born tabula rasa.
	And it's only our unique circumstances that cause us to be who we eventually become.
	Now in some small way, of course socialization and the environment matters, but certainly our biology also matters.
	But it is certainly a lot more freeing and hopeful to believe that my son could be the next Michael Jordan if only I were to hug him enough or not hug him enough or give him enough Big Macs or not give him enough Big Macs.
	Any of us could be the next Michael Jordan if we were given the right environmental trajectory.
	It's hopeful. It's freeing.
	It liberates me of my biological constraints, but it's rooted in complete BS. So in that sense, it's hopeful but nonsensical.
	When we come back, I want to probe with Professor Saad.
	I want to burrow into some of the specific orthodoxies of race and gender and show why they contradict both science and reality.
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	I'm back with evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad.
	And here's his book, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.
	Gad, if I may call you that, you grew up in Lebanon, and it seems like you saw...
	On the ground in Lebanon, a certain, perhaps, tribalism, a certain kind of balkanization, as people often say, and now you're seeing those very things happen in the West.
	Talk a little bit about how you came to an appreciation of what to look out for in terms of some dangerous signals here in the West.
	Sure, thank you for that question.
	In chapter one of the book, I specifically refer to my personal history because it is uniquely relevant to why I view these ideas as so execrable, right?
	So Lebanon has always been organized along tribal lines, right?
	The Lebanese constitution says that the president has to be of this religion, the prime minister has to be of that religion, the number of ministers Depend on, you know, the size of the particular tribe that you belong to.
	So everything is rooted in tribalism.
	The Lebanese Civil War, from which I escaped, we are Lebanese Jews, it wasn't very good to be Jewish in Lebanon in the mid-70s, speaks to how ugly tribalism can get.
	So imagine if 40, 50 years later, I see that in the West, there is one political party that is saying, you know what would be great?
	If we were to repeat the model of Lebanon in creating a society rooted in tribalism.
	It doesn't end well.
	It's grotesque. And we have to go back to a celebration of individual dignity rather than tribal identity.
	Let's talk a little bit about tribalism, but let's do it in the context of both race and ethnicity and religion, which I guess are all certain forms of tribalism.
	Now, we have, of course, multiple religions in the world.
	I'm from India and I grew up with Hindus and Muslims and my family is Christian.
	Here's my question. It appears that the particular religion, if I can say this, that has today the most tribal, the most fanatical, is quite clearly Islam.
	I don't mean to suggest by this that even that most terrorists are Islamic, but it does seem like Islam more than any other religion seems to motivate a certain kind of fanaticism, if not terrorism, that you don't see in other religions.
	Would you say that's an accurate statement?
	Right. So in Chapter 7 of The Parasitic Mind, I build what is called a nomological network of cumulative evidence.
	It's a fancy term.
	Let me explain it very quickly.
	If I want to demonstrate whether Islam is peaceful or not, I can build you a network of evidence, archival data, epidemiological data, terrorist databases, canonical analysis of the religious text, so I can get complete different distinct lines of evidence that either prove that Islam is peaceful or not.
	Based on that analysis, it seems quite unequivocal that Islam certainly has a problem of supremacy.
	Now, as you correctly said, This doesn't mean that the majority of Muslims are violent, to the contrary, but it certainly does mean that within the edicts of the religion, there is a complete condoning of the subjugation, if not the eradication of the other, and I am proof of that.
	This is why I live in Montreal and not Beirut.
	And you seem to derive from this that when groups differ, let's just say in this case you have important differences in the likelihood of someone, let's say, posing a terrorist threat, you say, I think that there is nothing irrational about, let's just say,
	the Israeli government in saying that as you go through the Israeli airport, I mean, you describe in the book, this has happened to you, you're a dark-skinned guy, they pull you out and they start searching you, and you go, listen, I... Should be angry, but I'm not really angry because I recognize why they're doing it.
	So why are they doing it?
	Well, because our brains have evolved to detect statistical regularities.
	Statistical regularities operate on the principle that if I take a shortcut through a dark alley, I am much more likely to have a fear-based response if I see four young men loitering around than if I see four elderly women.
	That's not because I'm ageist, that's not because I'm sexist, but because statistically speaking four young men are more likely to be violent than four elderly women, even though most young men are perfectly peaceful and kind.
	So if I am born in Lebanon, until you find out that I'm Jewish, if I look the way that I do, my mother used to always say, please shave the beard, you look like a terrorist with your dark skin and so on.
	It is perfectly reasonable for the Israeli apparatus to pay closer attention to me because all other things considered, I'm more likely to be dangerous than a two-year-old child.
	By the way, I was heading to California a few years ago.
	My daughter at the time was three years old.
	She was randomly picked for a more thorough inspection because they didn't want to be politically incorrect.
	Who is more likely to be dangerous?
	Me, who's born in Lebanon.
	They don't know I'm Jewish. Or my three-year-old daughter.
	But political correctness argues we're not going to discriminate and profile, take out the three-year-old child and pay closer attention to her.
	She might be the next Osama bin Laden.
	When we come back, I want to get into the issue of gender differences, sex differences between men and women.
	This is Professor Sadsfield.
	I'm looking forward to it. We'll be right back.
	With all that's happening in Afghanistan, here is a movie that you really got to see.
	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.
	And just three months later, on August 6, 2011, a helicopter carrying many SEALs from that same elite unit was shot down But huge questions remain.
	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 provocative new film, Fallen Angel.
	Now, the full title is Fallen Angel Call Sign Extortion 17.
	It's showing only on SalemNow.com.
	So once again, the name of the film, Fallen Angel Call Sign Extortion 17.
	To see it, go to SalemNow.com.
	That's S-A-L-E-M-N-O-W dot com.
	I'm back with Professor Gad Saad, his book, The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.
	Gad, if I may, let's jump into your field of evolutionary psychology, because we're living in an age where it seems to me the most errant nonsense is uttered about the issue of gender.
	I would agree to a point that race is a social construct, and what I mean by that is not that physical differences don't exist, but But the idea that certain races are superior or inferior, these are social meanings that have been conferred upon race.
	But when we turn to gender, is it really reasonable?
	Can one say with a straight face that men and women differ only because society insists on labeling them differently?
	Say a word just about what science has to say.
	People often say, listen to the science.
	Well, I want to listen to the science from you about whether there are some real differences between male and female.
	Well, we are a sexually reproducing species with two phenotypes, male and female.
	That doesn't mean that, for example, gender dysphoria doesn't exist, but the two phenotypes for a sexually reproducing species are male and female.
	And we are a sexually dimorphic species, which is a fancy way of saying We're good to go.
	Would be when it comes to human mating.
	If you do studies from around the world across disparately different cultures, you will find that men will look for certain things in women and women will look for certain things in men.
	Some of these are similar, kindness and intelligence, but men place a much greater premium on beauty and youth.
	Women place much greater premium on social status, on ambition, on drive.
	And this happens, as I said, across widely different cultures.
	And so the idea that men and women should be indistinguishable so that we smash the patriarchy is idiotic and invisible.
	Now, I want to draw out the significance of what you just said, because a lot of people on the face of it would say, listen, if I look at men and women, there are certain obvious differences that I would grant.
	Men are, on average, taller than women.
	Men are clearly stronger than women.
	But what you're saying is that men and women are also different individuals.
	In other words, that they have different, you can almost call it, approaches to life, in which men prefer a certain type of woman, women prefer a certain type of man, and those choices are not made on the same basis.
	Now, why is that? Why would a man prefer, let's just say, a younger, more beautiful woman, on average?
	Why would a woman, on average, prefer an older, and as you say, more established or more socially Right.
	So take, for example, a man who was uniquely attracted to postmenopausal women.
	That preference, if it is hereditary, it's going to die with him because he cannot pass on it because if he mates with a postmenopausal woman, it carries no fitness value.
	No, no, my wife is laughing heartily here because she sometimes talks on the podcast about being in this exact stage.
	So you basically declared her to be beyond the pale.
	When I go back home, I'll reconsider my options.
	Please keep going. I didn't mean to imply that.
	No, no, no. I'm joking.
	Go ahead. So we look for nubile and fertile traits.
	That's why men, for example, prefer the body shape of the hourglass in women in very different cultures rather than preferring a woman that looks like a male Olympic swimmer.
	That's not by accident.
	By the same token, so for men, it's about the propagation of their genes, and so therefore they look for certain fitness cues that relate to that particular goal.
	In the case of women, it is important to have a man who will be able to invest in her.
	Invest doesn't just mean financial investment.
	It means Ascending the social hierarchy, protecting his family, and so on.
	So women have not typically been attracted to nasal-voiced, pear-shaped, whiny guys who sit in a corner, suck their thumb in a fetal position.
	That's not because of random accidents.
	That's because they look for traits that will advance their evolutionary interests.
	On some things, men and women are perfectly aligned in their evolutionary interests.
	On others, like in mating, they are not.
	And therefore, we see that difference materialize in the types of mates that men and women prefer.
	Now, all of what you've said seems to me not only commonsensical, anchored in modern science, anchored in modern biology, and yet it's become sort of politically taboo.
	And this is why you're constantly running into people who say the exact opposite of Now, what I like about you is that you don't sit back.
	A lot of academics are like, that doesn't really make sense, but I'm not going to say a word about it because I don't want to put myself out front.
	What I love about you is that you put yourself into the battlefield and you take on these guys, not just fellow academics.
	You take on, you know, Beyonce, Ariana Grande.
	You'll take on pop culture figures who are speaking nonsense.
	Now, talk about why it's important to do that, why it's important for us to jump into the field and Fearlessly and fight this fight.
	What's at stake and how do you do it?
	Well, I do it just because I am personally injured, insulted.
	I'm morally indignant by BS. I simply can't stomach it.
	I'm allergic to BS. And therefore, my temperament causes me to just intervene whenever I see attacks on truth.
	Now, for the greater population, I usually implore them to be the penalty taker.
	What I mean by that is, in soccer...
	When there's a penalty kick, oftentimes the one who takes it is not the best player.
	It's the one that has, if you forgive the term, the greatest testicular fortitude because you have to put yourself on the line.
	I'll be the guy who takes the penalty kick.
	So don't diffuse the responsibility onto a few public intellectuals to fight the fight on your behalf.
	Be a honey badger.
	Why do I say that? Because a honey badger is the size of a small dog, and yet it could withstand the attack of six adult lions.
	How does it do it?
	It is extraordinarily fierce.
	It walks so upright in its dogged assuredness that the lions say, I don't want to mess with that.
	So if you have a set of principles that you truly can defend and that are well articulated, be a honey badger.
	Don't be a little wimp.
	We live in an age now of social censorship, censorship that hits you not just on digital media, but in the corporations you work for.
	You and I are in the intellectual sphere.
	I assume we have a little more freedom to be able to be a honey badger and hit back.
	Very often I'm walking around, people will come up to me and they go, we really appreciate you speaking out.
	And I guess the ordinary person feels that they are...
	How do we be honey badgers in a society that imposes heavy penalties on, you may say, honey badgering?
	Right. Listen, I've gotten so many death threats at one point that I had to lecture with the security coming with me to my class.
	We had to file reports with the Montreal police.
	My university came with me.
	So there is a cross to bear for everyone.
	Now, I'm not suggesting that you be a reckless martyr.
	But what I'm saying is that you could modulate your contribution to the battle of ideas in a way that is more than simply being apathetic and cowardly.
	So, for example, you might put up your hand in class and gently challenge your professor when they say it is people who menstruate rather than women who menstruate.
	If your friend on Facebook says something that is insane, you could privately engage him.
	In other words, I'm not saying that we need to all be Thank you.
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	I want to discuss in this segment, to begin discussing, because I'll probably continue this over the next couple of days, Aquinas' famous proofs for the existence of God.
	Five proofs. So what's remarkable is Aquinas, this is the medieval theologian, professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, Aquinas believes that not only can the existence of God be proven, but it can be proven five separate ways.
	It's a kind of an ironclad proof, you might say.
	But to get to this, we begin to see in Aquinas the kind of beauty and elaborate way in which he goes about his argument, a kind of model of what historians would call scholastic disputation.
	Now, the scholastic method is to lay out a proposition, what they called a questio or question, and then lay out objections to it, and then answer the objections, and you kind of make your way to the proof that way.
	A kind of model, almost an exemplary way of doing rhetoric, of discussing a disputed question.
	Now, Aquinas, before he even gets to his proof for the existence of God, which I'll probably discuss tomorrow, he discusses, can the existence of God even be proved?
	So there's a prior question before we get to the proof, is the proof even possible?
	And here Aquinas advances, before he addresses, can the existence of God be proved, two objections that say the existence of God cannot be proved.
	So the first objection is the existence of God cannot be proved because the existence of God is self-evident.
	And the second objection, which is kind of the opposite objection, is the existence of God cannot be proved because it has to be taken on faith alone.
	So let's look at these two as Aquinas does.
	The first one, the existence of God cannot be proved because it's obvious, it's self-evident.
	Now, Aquinas understands Anselm to be making this point, that when we think of God...
	And we think of God being, in a sense, not just infinitely perfect, infinitely good, infinitely powerful, and so on.
	Anselm appears to argue, and I've discussed this on another episode, Anselm seems to argue that for God to be so great, for God to be that than which no greater can be thought, He has to also exist, because otherwise he would be less than the greatest being ever, so to speak. That his greatness requires that he be great in all respects, including in the respect of existing as opposed to non-existing.
	So, this is Aquinas now looking at Anselm's argument.
	The existence of God, Anselm says, according to Aquinas, is self-evident.
	But Aquinas says, not really.
	He goes, the existence of God may be self-evident in some absolute sense, but it's not self-evident to us.
	It's not self-evident to us.
	Why? Because God is a being that so transcends us.
	That this idea that we can grasp his essence and see, oh yeah, it's just obvious that God has to exist, Aquinas goes, that goes beyond the human mind.
	So Aquinas rejects the Anselmian idea as he understands that the existence of God is self-evident.
	And this leads us to the second point, which probably more people hold today, namely that the existence of God can't be proved because it must be taken on faith.
	And here Anselm is beginning just where he left off.
	Because if you think about it, there's a very strong argument that says that you can't prove the existence of God.
	And that is simply what Anselm said a moment ago.
	If God is so great that He transcends all finite creatures, He transcends the human mind, then the idea that the human mind can kind of...
	I mean, this is ridiculous.
	How can finite minds even begin to comprehend the nature of God?
	And so, if you can't comprehend the nature of God, how are you going to be able to show that this nature is such that it must exist?
	So, Aquinas would appear to have reached a standstill.
	But Aquinas says, listen, when we make arguments in order to prove something, there are two kinds of arguments.
	The first kind of argument is the argument that looks at the thing, for example, water, and says, well, here's water.
	What are the properties of water?
	At what temperature does it boil?
	So, this is one kind of argument where you have the thing, you comprehend the thing, and then you try to discover the properties of the thing based upon the thing itself.
	But Aquinas says that there is a second type of argument that he calls the quia.
	And the second type of argument is reasoning backward to causes from their effects.
	So Aquinas agrees.
	He begins with actually a very Aristotelian proposition, which is that all knowledge that we have that comes to us from the outside world comes through our senses.
	Aquinas agrees with that.
	In fact, Aquinas says that sets the boundaries of human knowledge because we can't have knowledge that goes beyond that.
	We've got to take things in through our senses from the outside world, then reflect upon that, and that is the extent of human knowledge.
	So the line between, you may say, reason and what is outside reason can be understood right there.
	But, says Aquinas, we can, by looking at things in the world, make inferences, logical inferences, about how those things have come to be.
	And so, we can posit certain things about God.
	We can't know everything about God.
	But we can know something about God by simply looking at the world in front of us.
	A good example of this would be something like this.
	I'm walking on the street, I look in an alley, and I see a severed head.
	Now, I don't know who committed the murder, but I know that somebody cut off this man's Some event, some accident, let's say of a car, or let's say someone with a knife, chopped off this man's head.
	I may not know the identity of that person, but I'm able to draw conclusions about what happened, about causes...
	From the effects.
	By observing the effects, we can draw lessons about the causes.
	And this is the basis of Aquinas' proofs.
	His five proofs all begin with something in the world.
	They begin with an effect. And then they reason their way backward to a cause.
	And Aquinas will show that cause, in his words, we call God.
	It's time for our mailbox.
	It's always fun for me to answer questions.
	So please keep them coming.
	Send them to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
	I prefer audio or video.
	It's just more interesting to listen to or watch on the podcast.
	Hey, let's go to today's question.
	Listen. Hello, Dinesh.
	Say, my Debbie sends regards to your Debbie.
	And everybody has heard that our government is supposed to be a government of checks and balances.
	But lately we don't really see much checking and balancing going on with this new administration that's only just several months old.
	So could you enlighten us on what may have gone wrong with that checks and balances concept and how it could maybe be fixed?
	And also, we really enjoy your daughter Danielle's show on Epic TV Counterculture.
	It's really great. Thanks, Dinesh.
	Bye-bye. Great question.
	What happened to the founding system of checks and balances?
	Why does it seem not to be working?
	Well, I want to argue that to a degree it is working.
	Now, before I get to that, I want to emphasize the Biden administration is in a very lawless mode.
	And so they are, for example, there are immigration laws in place.
	They are refusing to enforce them.
	And on foreign policy, the president has a virtually free hand.
	So he can compound one disaster upon another.
	There's not a whole lot.
	I mean, Congress retains the power to declare war.
	But short of that, Biden has operating discretion over the whole landscape of foreign policy.
	The Biden people are trying to go after states that are passing laws that knock out these vaccine mandates and mask mandates.
	So the Biden administration, we're going to try to find a civil rights violation here.
	Well, there's no civil rights violation, but they're pushing on that.
	Look at the way that they're... Going after the January 6th protesters, people who have committed, in many cases, trivial offenses, but are being treated like they're Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Or I should say, worse than Al-Qaeda or ISIS because we're not treating Al-Qaeda or ISIS all that bad.
	Now, all that being said, I don't think that we need to give way to despair here because what happened to the Biden administration's, you know, come to America and dissolve into the population, remain in America policy?
	Well, the Supreme Court struck it down.
	It's gone. It's stopped.
	It can't continue.
	And so they will try to, again, push at the edges.
	But I think what's coming next is the Supreme Court is going to strike down their instructions to ICE officials that say you can't detain people who are breaking the law.
	So the court is getting a little more energized.
	Now, I realize the court was, you know, abdicated, ran away on the issue of the election.
	They were not even willing to provide that scrutiny.
	And I do think that represents a serious breakdown of checks and balances.
	It was the court's job to do that, to play umpire, to play referee.
	The court didn't do that.
	I think that History will look back very severely on the court's failure in that important regard.
	But that being said, checks and balances are in place.
	We're blocking and tackling Biden in the House and the Senate.
	And he might get through the modest infrastructure bill.
	I don't think he's going to get through the ambitious infrastructure bill.
	And his other efforts, HR1, the attempt to revamp and federalize the entire voting system.
	I don't think that's going to happen.
	Filibuster, overturn the filibuster.
	I don't think that's going to happen. Pack the court.
	Biden's going to do a tribal dance over this.
	Oh, we're going to pack the court. We're going to pack the court.
	He's not going to pack the court.
	I don't think that's going to work either.
	So on many fronts, at least so far, and let's remember that until the midterms, Biden has basically one year from now.
	So if we can keep the guy locked down, you may say, keep him strapped into his chair, we will then be able to put our case before the American people.
	And hopefully the American people are looking around and saying, this is really not the America we want to live in.
	Let's get these scoundrels out of here.
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