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Sept. 7, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:32
SAVING OUR BABIES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 169
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The left is screaming about the Texas anti-abortion law because it recruits private entities to do what the state itself is constitutionally prohibited from doing.
Does that sound familiar?
I'll explain. Also, Bette Midler is calling on women to go on a sex strike for abortion rights.
How long has she been on a sex strike? The Biden administration, the State Department, is blocking Americans from getting out of Kabul.
What could their motive be?
And Amy Peikoff, the Chief Policy Officer at Parler, joins me.
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The Texas pro-life law is in effect, and you know what?
Yep.
We're still here. The world hasn't ended.
Life goes on as normal.
And the beauty of this is it's demonstrating, I think, to the country at large and significantly to the Supreme Court that it's okay to overturn Roe v.
Wade. It's not going to produce the cataclysm that the left has constantly warned about.
Yes, there will be Red states that have some regulations on abortion, blue states that by and large have more permissive laws, people who really want could either move or simply travel from one state to the other.
So abortion will not be prohibited nationwide.
It will merely be restricted in certain parts of the country that don't want it.
Now, Very interestingly, the unique aspect of the Texas law, which is that the state itself doesn't enforce the law, the state itself doesn't shut down clinics, the state doesn't prosecute doctors or women or anyone else for that matter,
but private citizens are given standing or given sort of legitimacy under the law to be able to sue the We're good to go.
And the left is screaming.
It's kind of all over social media.
It's all over the press.
And the idea is, this is outrageous.
The state of Texas has deputized private actors to do what the state itself is constitutionally prohibited from doing.
Let's look at some of these reactions here.
Here's an article in CNN. It talks about the fact that this is unprecedented.
This is a playbook for the red states.
This is a devious scheme to create a sort of vigilante system in which essentially private, quote, vigilantes are enforcing this law that the state of Texas can't.
And that's been Biden's position.
Here's Biden. He says that the Texas law, quote, creates a vigilante system.
The Texas Tribune interviewed John Michaels, a professor at UCLA Law.
He goes, it's a way of backdooring and winking while constitutional violations are occurring.
It's compromising democracy.
Now, what I find so interesting about all this is that while the left is screaming that the state of Texas is deputizing private actors to do what the state, at least as of now, can't do, isn't this exactly what the left approves of in the case of digital censorship?
Let's think about what's going on in those cases.
The Biden administration and the government, the Democrats in Congress, in the House and the Senate, are pressuring private entities, which is to say Twitter, Facebook, Google, to use their power and shut people up and shut people down and censor them in a way that the Congress itself can't do.
Why? Because the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech or of the press.
So Congress, and by extension the government, cannot directly regulate speech.
So what does it do? It uses its leverage.
And what is the leverage? We're good to go.
So the left is kind of caught here because they're doing exactly the same thing that they condemn Texas for doing.
In fact, it's even worse. The state of Texas is not working closely with pro-life groups to say, okay, you know what?
Here's a clinic. Let's target that clinic and let's get rid of that guy.
Here's Planned Parenthood in Austin.
Let's target that clinic. Let's go sue those.
You guys go sue them because we can't sue them.
So there's not the active collaboration that you see in the censorship area, where the Biden administration, by its own admission, Jan Psaki's administration, is literally feeding the digital platforms information.
This guy's producing misinformation.
These 12 people need to be kicked off Facebook.
So there is direct collaboration here.
Now, While the two cases seem roughly analogous in the manner I've just described, there actually is one important difference, and that is this.
The right of free speech is, in fact, explicitly, firmly, unmistakably anchored in the Constitution.
Pick up the Constitution. There it is.
The right of freedom of speech or of the press shall not be abridged.
The right of abortion, however, is not in the Constitution.
In fact, happily, in my view, it is up for reconsideration.
The Supreme Court is going to be looking exactly at the legitimacy of Roe v.
Wade, and pretty much the only defense of Roe, even on the part of its advocates, is, you know, it's settled law, it's been around for 70 years.
So the fact that Roe v.
Wade's been around since 1973, for not 70, but 50 years, appears to be the only argument in its favor of Even though some of our most horrific laws or judicial precedents through the centuries, think, for example, of Plessy v.
Ferguson, the case that upheld segregation.
That case, I believe, 1898, wasn't overturned until 1954.
That was in place for more than half a century.
So bad precedents can somehow take root.
It's the job of the Supreme Court to uproot them.
So there is no abortion right in the Constitution, but there is a free speech right.
And therefore, it seems to me that what the state of Texas is doing has far greater legitimacy than what the Biden administration is doing in the area of censorship.
Can you believe that one of the January 6th defendants is being incarcerated because he was watching Mike Lindell videos?
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Don't forget to use promo code DINESH. The actress and comedian, Bette Midler, is calling for a sex strike among women, I guess, nationwide.
To protest the Texas anti-abortion law.
Now, when I'm thinking about this, I'm first thinking about it, why would somebody propose a sex strike?
Well... There are, I suppose, all kinds of reasons for it.
It could be political.
But it occurred to me, wow, look at Bette Midler.
I mean, has she been on involuntary sex strike since, I don't know, 2004?
This is, by the way, I tweeted this out on social media.
It caused a big furor of people screaming, you know, Dinesh, have you looked in the mirror lately?
Well, I'm not proposing a sex strike, guys.
Bette Midler is.
So, I mean, you know, I gotta say, and Debbie knows this, so she's kind of smiling about this, but I have this ability.
I call it a gift.
Not everybody else does.
To produce this sputtering outrage on the left in which they're like, you know, one of my delights when speaking sometimes, even on campuses, somebody would literally get up and run shrieking out of the room.
They just couldn't like take their mind was too discombobulated.
And to me, it was kind of a confirmation that I was on the right path and need to sort of ramp it up, if anything.
So in any case, here's Bette Midler.
Well, she doesn't know anything about this, but she's advocating what can be called the Lysistrata strategy.
Now, what is that? Well, it turns out there's kind of a very interesting ancient Greek precedent for this.
A play by Aristophanes called Lysistrata, in which a woman named Lysistrata...
Is very angry about the Peloponnesian War.
Why? Because all the men are away.
And so the women don't have male company.
They don't have their brothers, their fathers, their husbands.
And so she decides to get the husbands back.
Well, how? She decides, I'm going to organize all the women of Greece and we're going to go on a sex strike.
We're basically going to refuse to have sex until our husbands basically call into the war, essentially reestablish the peace and come home.
Now, you have to admit, you have to realize in Greek society, this concept of women organizing in this way, coming into public, calling for public meetings, meeting at the agora, was just considered preposterous.
And sure enough, the play plays on this and takes advantage of this, because when Lysistrata organizes it, and the women are all up for it, they're like, yeah, that's it, this is going to work.
You have this whole...
Remarkable drama of comic reversals because what you have is basically what the women are saying is, listen, that in order for us to get peace in Athens, we got to go to war.
But it's a new kind of war. We're not Athenian women fighting against Sparta.
We're Athenian and Spartan women uniting against our enemy, our husbands.
But they're not our real enemy.
Our goal is really to kind of bring them to heal.
Our real goal is to withhold sex in order to sort of restore domestic harmony.
We don't actually want to permanently expel our husbands.
We're not radical feminists here.
What we want to do is bring our husbands back home so we can have normal domestic life.
So women have to become more combative or masculine and make the men more feminine, which is to say make them surrender in order to We're good to go.
You know, to go to bed, and she keeps delaying him and saying things like, the bed is not ready, the maids are here, I can't do this, I can't do that.
So one excuse on top of the other, and finally she has to pour cold water on him to sort of settle him down a little bit.
So this is very much Aristophanes.
In the culminating scene, by the way, the magistrate says to the women, he goes, this is very disgraceful, you know, for women to get involved in these state matters.
And Lysistrata says, very powerfully, she says, listen, these state matters affect us.
They affect women. She goes, and women have more at stake in marriage than men.
And here you have Aristophanes saying things like, you know, a woman's beauty is gone with the first gray hair.
What? And Debbie's like, what?
Are you kidding me? It's not true.
Not in her case.
But in any event, I think, you know, if I may bring this back to Bette Midler, I want to make this point, that it's really ironic that Bette Midler is calling for women to go on a sex strike, which is to say, you know, let's keep our legs crossed.
Because... If women actually practice this kind of abstinence or use birth control, they wouldn't need abortions in the first place.
I don't know if that thought has crossed the mind of Bette Midler.
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As I'm thinking about the Texas pro-life law and watching it on TV being discussed...
It's particularly kind of amusing and slightly disturbing to see CNN's chief legal analyst.
And this is, of course... Jeffrey Toobin, the very man who's made important contributions to the English language.
I don't think the phrase Toobin-ing, which is now part of my normal vocabulary, can be found in the Webster's Dictionary, but it probably will be found in future editions of the Urban Dictionary.
Anyway, here's a little clip of Jeffrey Toobin commenting darkly about the Texas law.
Listen. There was no formal briefing of this case.
There was no oral argument of this case.
Roe v. Wade is sort of thrown out of the back of a caboose, you know, without any sort of ceremony here.
So, I don't want to focus here on his legal analysis.
He seems to be kind of almost grudgingly admiring that the Texas legislators, and I'm going to have a couple of the divisors of this law, by the way, on this podcast if I can get them.
We're working on it. But nevertheless...
I want to really focus on the spectacle of Tubin himself, because I think here Tubin is kind of a representative of a media class, an academic and media class of people.
And these people live, and most people don't really realize it, because they appear to have a certain kind of solemnity and dignity and intellectual pedigree.
But you've got to realize that these people are complete degenerates.
And when you bring a little closer lens, I saw it up close myself when I lived in Washington, D.C., the kind of rootless lives that these people live.
But Tubin himself is kind of a pretty good example.
The sort of debauched, shameless denizens of our political and social elite.
And these people are all puffed up.
They have this sense of entitlement.
We've been appointed to be the guardians of America.
No, these are people who really can't even regulate themselves very well, as I'm about to show in the case of Tubin.
So Tubin apparently got involved himself.
While he was married, by the way, with a girlfriend named Casey Greenfield.
And they had a relationship for 10 years.
Now, this young woman was apparently working as a first-year junior associate at a law firm.
And Jeffrey Toobin not only carries on with her, but makes her pregnant.
So then she goes to him and says, look, I'm pregnant.
And he goes, well, have an abortion.
But doesn't even offer to pay for it.
Wow. And so here's a quote by Casey Greenfield.
She goes, you know... The one time you really don't want to get pregnant is when you're single and the other person is married, Tubin, and you're working as a first-year junior associate at a law firm in a hardcore phase of trying to prove yourself to them.
So this is like, first of all, for most intelligent people, this would be obvious.
This would not be a lesson you have to learn through bitter experience.
But evidently, Casey Greenfield is sort of no genius and had to figure this out only after the fact.
Well, eventually, apparently, Greenfield sued Toobin for child support, and he agreed to a paternity test, and yes, he is the father.
And so, this is the life of these guys.
You know, it was Edmund Burke, the philosopher, who said of the French revolutionaries that lacking a single habit of decent behavior...
They all prefer moral opinions instead.
And I've thought of that quote very often, thinking about people like Bill Clinton.
I'm for women's rights.
I support empowerment for women.
Now, this is an actual sex predator, a complete degenerate, somebody who treats women in his actual experience very badly, but is all on the right side of social justice and expects to get credit And expects also to get feminists, in the case of Clinton, and I think of Tubin too, to come to his defense because politically he's marching on their side of the aisle.
What all this really shows you is that in our public culture today, we've seen a real moral shift.
It's not a shift necessarily from...
Morality to immorality, but it's a shift in what counts as morality.
In the old days, someone who did something like Jeffrey Toobin would never be allowed on CNN. In fact, would probably not allow to show their face in public.
But today, as it turns out, guys like Toobin are right there on CNN, you know, chatting away.
And who's getting fired?
Some guy who did a tweet eight years ago, who's now being called up for it.
Hey, listen, you referred to a woman as a woman.
You didn't use the right pronouns.
You know, get out of here.
Clean out your desk. So you have the same censoriousness, the same intolerance.
But the intolerance now has a different trajectory and a different target.
Today the intolerance is directed at people who, even in the past, were not sufficiently alert to woke orthodoxy.
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How many Americans are still left in Afghanistan?
The State Department won't say, claiming that it doesn't really know.
But it estimates that number very low.
And it estimates the number low in part by using the phrase Americans who want to leave, implying that there's a whole bunch of them that want to stay.
Now, other estimates say that there are considerably more, 500 perhaps, in Afghanistan.
And there seem to be two obstacles to Americans being able to get out now.
Those two obstacles are number one, the Taliban, And number two, the Biden administration.
If this seems a little hard to believe, you'd think it would be only number one.
And you might think that, wow, you know, the Taliban, this was a horrendous blunder by the U.S. government to give the Taliban control like this before getting the Americans out.
So that would be negligence of a very high order.
But that's assuming that that's the sole problem.
I'm about to show it's more than that.
Now... Representative Michael McCall of Texas has been pointing out correctly that the Taliban are holding up flights at the Kabul airport and other airports from getting out.
He says that there are six airplanes at Mazar-e-Sharif.
This is not Kabul, but Afghanistan's fourth largest city.
And the Taliban are holding those people hostage.
They're not just Americans, but also Afghan allies.
And apparently they're being held for hostages because the Taliban knows that, A, they can get money out of the Biden administration, which is to say they can get money out of you and me.
And number two, the Taliban is hoping to use this as leverage for international recognition.
Think of how What a victory it would be for them if not only Russia or China or Iran or Qatar or Venezuela recognized them, but the United States, its own enemy, that it's been fighting for 20 years, said, yeah, we recognize these guys.
I mean, who would not recognize the Taliban after that?
So the Taliban are after this very big prize of getting a grudging recognition from its own longtime adversary.
But the plot thickens because it turns out that there are reports coming from all kinds of quarters.
So remember once the U.S. government got out, a number of private actors began to work to get Americans and even Afghan allies out of Afghanistan.
Rick Clay is a guy who runs a private rescue group, which is kind of coolly named Plan B, meaning the American Plan A has failed.
The Americans, the government won't do it, so we're going to do it.
And this is a guy who has got the means.
He's raised money from donors, and he's got the names of 4,500 U.S. citizens and green card holders and Afghan refugees that are qualified, he says, to get out.
But guess who's holding them up?
Not the Taliban. The Biden State Department.
And there are two other Americans, separate from Rick Clay, who are also doing this.
And they all report that the Biden State Department is not giving prompt clearance for them to get out.
Prompt clearance, why? Because the flights that get out of Kabul and out of Afghanistan typically land somewhere in the Middle East, places like Doha.
And so the U.S. government controls the refugee centers there and controls the landing rights there.
And the U.S. government has basically been saying, we're not going to give private entities the right to do this.
Now, why would the Biden administration take this position?
Well, the answer is one.
The Biden administration is embarrassed.
They don't want to make it seem like we couldn't get Americans out, but look, here's a couple of private dudes using their own planes and getting these people out.
In other words, a task that was impossible or undoable or uninteresting to the US government is doable and is in fact being carried out by private entities.
Imagine what these Americans will say when they get to America and realize that their own government left them behind.
And what these guys are saying publicly now, the private operators, is they say, if one life is lost as a result of this, the blood is on the White House's hands.
It's not the Taliban that's holding this up, as much as it sickens me to say this, it's the United States government.
Now in one case, and I get this from Fox News.
A guy named Corey Mills, again, privately funded with a group of military veterans.
They got to Afghanistan.
They found an Afghan family that was closely allied with the United States.
And they got these guys.
They couldn't get them out by flight.
They got them to a bordering country.
They won't even say which one.
And they got them over the border.
Now, what these guys are saying, Corey Mills and his team, is that the U.S. State Department is shamelessly trying to claim credit for this, even though they had nothing to do with it.
In fact, as I mentioned, they're blocking the exit of Americans.
But of course, when this family comes across the border, who's standing there waiting to meet them?
Embassy officials! Hello!
We made this possible!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
No applause! Please hold the applause!
This is the approach of the Biden guys.
And so what they're doing is, on the one hand, They are embarrassed by their own failures.
They are envious of the success of private actors.
And when these private actors are successful, they run shamelessly to the front of the line, take a bow before an obliging media.
Flash, flash, flash, flash, flash.
Front page of the New York Times.
They do this because they're claiming essentially stolen credit, which is another form of claiming, you may say, stolen valor.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast the Chief Policy Officer of Parler, Amy Peikoff.
Amy, thanks for coming back on.
I really appreciate it.
I gotta say, I've been very active on Parler lately.
The platform appears to be kind of fully back and in full swing.
It's actually a delight to use Parler.
So I just kind of wanted to start off by congratulating you, because I know that Parler's been through so many ups and downs, but do you feel like Parler is now back in full operation, and is it time to go back into the water?
Let's put the question that way.
Well, it's definitely time to go back into the water, and thank you for having me on again, by the way.
This morning, I was struck by how necessary a platform like Parler is, which allows free and open discussion of the topics of importance to us.
You may have seen all of the coronavirus-related stories that are going around.
Was Anthony Fauci involved in gain-of-function research?
Is ivermectin actually dangerous?
Has it resulted in calls to poison control or the overloading of hospitals with overdoses of ivermectin?
We are seeing, in an unprecedented way, an agenda that's being pushed on social media, but also by media and respected authorities in our government and elsewhere.
And the antidote to that is to allow free and open discussion.
So I think Parler, not only have we now succeeded in rebuilding a lot technically so that the user experience is good and smooth, but we're also seeing how necessary our platform is at exactly this time.
I mean, isn't it obvious, Amy, that not only in the public domain, but in the academic domain, it's really important to have an open atmosphere of criticism?
because I know that there are legitimate divisions, for example, over what were the origins of coronavirus, or in what respect are these medical treatments effective or not effective?
And the least we can say is let's have it out, right?
Let's have the scholars marshal their arguments, let the scholarly community do peer review of each other, and then let the debate spill out into the public sphere.
It seems hard to believe we're talking about whether or not that debate should be suppressed, and yet our largest platforms are, in fact, suppressing that kind of debate.
I mean, say a word about how we got to this bizarre point in America on something that most of us took for granted.
So I've been involved in this issue for a very long time since before I had gotten involved with Parler.
And so, you know, I was podcasting for a long time like you're doing.
And what I've seen is that the government has been more and more involved in the tech industry.
There's been less overt regulation.
But there's been pressure that comes in through things like, for example, the FTC consent decrees with Facebook.
That's just one mechanism.
But there's all these carrots and sticks That the authorities in our culture, most of them in government, have been using to pressure these platforms to exercise their 230 immunity in the way that they see fit to remove what they want to have called misinformation.
And now you're seeing it just happen out in the open.
So Facebook on every platform, its own included, LinkedIn, everywhere else, is putting these ads out, openly calling for misinformation to be the subject of regulation of the internet now.
That is what's going on, but we've been creeping towards it for many years, and we're at this point where I hope it's not too late to stop it.
Now, let's talk about Parler and its role in January 6th, because I thought it was very significant that the FBI itself, the FBI no less, comes out and says that January 6th was not a coordinated operation.
This was not a kind of a Civil War-style mobilization to overthrow the government.
It really wasn't a coup.
It really wasn't an insurrection either.
In fact, as you know, none of the January 6th defendants are charged with any of this.
But rather, there were a few operators who wanted to storm the Capitol.
Other people were just curiosity seekers, drifters, selfie-takers.
And yet, the indictment for doing this, at least politically, was all put at the feet of Parler.
As if Parler was the organizing, the facilitator of this now non-existent plot.
I mean, do you see the FBI's admission as a kind of vindication?
And what does it say that all the people who piled on Parler...
I mean, as far as I can tell, none of them have apologized, have they?
Well, I mean, we are definitely owed an apology, as our CEO has said recently.
But with this, I was looking at the content at the time, right, in the weeks leading up to the 6th.
And I knew that this content was not just on Parler, but it was everywhere all over the internet.
So I already knew that we had been unfairly singled out.
I also knew that we didn't have group features and other sorts of things that Facebook, for example, has that could be used to coordinate something if there was to be coordination.
So yeah, I mean, the other thing, of course, is that as has been released before, Publicly posted items on Parler that were inciting or were violent were referred to law enforcement in the weeks leading up to the 6th as well.
So I knew that Parler had no role in this.
I knew that the content was everywhere.
But yeah, the narrative was that it was Parler and maybe other platforms like Parler that were responsible for the coordination that supposedly happened.
And yes, this is more vindication, certainly.
We are owed an apology.
I'm not holding my breath.
When we come back, I want to get into the impact that this coordinated big tech attack had on Parler and how Parler managed to overcome it and come right back.
We'll be back in a moment.
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I'm back with Amy Peikoff, the chief policy officer of Parler.
Amy, there was, as you know, a kind of coordinated attack on Parler that effectively put Parler on its back, and Parler had to scramble, it seems, almost from ground zero to build itself back up.
Can you talk a little bit about some of the obstacles to do that?
Because it seems like it's taken a few months to To get fully up and running.
Talk about what Parler went through and also whether Parler is now protected or immunized from future attacks of this sort.
Yes. Well, thanks.
So we were, as you know, taken completely off of our main cloud provider, which was Amazon.
Amazon, who had, by the way, of course, made a huge contract to provide services to Twitter one month before.
We were taken down.
But yeah, so we were left without our main provider that would get us onto the internet and provide those cloud services.
And as a result of Amazon and Apple and others making this, I think, unjust and wrong scapegoating decision, other vendors of ours also dropped away and were no longer providing us services.
So we had to rebuild the entire stack from the ground up All the people that provide the services that manage the data and get you onto the internet.
So we did that first.
The other thing that we did then, though, as well, is build up a whole new code base.
Because if you have a solid code base, then you can protect yourself from attacks, not necessarily by service providers, right?
So there's one thing, the service providers, but it's also the type of people who would try to subject you to malicious attacks and bots and things like that.
So it's the rebuilding of the codebase that has also taken some time.
And now what we're working on is building a better Parler than ever existed before.
For instance, we just introduced an editing feature.
I don't know if you knew that. You could edit your parlays now on Parler.
So we're slowly starting to bring in new features on this solid codebase.
And it does take a while.
We're happy that people have stuck with us and that they have patience.
If you haven't checked out Parler in a while, And you want to see how well it's working, come back and check this out because it's doing very well.
This is awesome. Yeah, I can testify just from experience that, you know, for a while there it was a little glitchy and I got frustrated and Debbie got frustrated.
And so we decided, you know what, instead of doing this, we'll wait a little bit and let Parler kind of get up and running.
And now it's just a delight to use once again, just like it was before.
So yes, absolutely. Better, Debbie says.
Let's turn, if I may, to...
Some of the efforts to rein in big tech, most notably the Trump lawsuit, which I think picks up from a theme that you've talked about, namely that this is not a case of private actors acting entirely on their own.
What Trump seems to be saying is, listen, these are people who are being leveraged by the government.
I think I saw Jen Psaki actually boast about, we hand Facebook...
You know, the names of people we want taken off.
So the idea that there is direct collusion between the government and these private entities is no longer a fiction.
It's openly, it's out there in the public for everyone to see.
That's the thing that's so breathtaking is so much of this is out in the open.
I actually call it crony censorship.
That this is what's going on right now.
We are not in a free economy.
It's nice to use concepts about private actors having their First Amendment rights to run their platforms as they see fit.
That is not what's going on right now.
We are really under a sort of fascism.
And you've got these interests in the government who have been using a series of carrots and sticks with these big tech companies And, of course, the big tech companies, to some extent, are sympathetic with respect to some of the particular targets of the censorship as well.
But, you know, it really doesn't matter exactly what the motivations are.
What you have is you have these carrots and sticks, you have the platforms complying, and that's the censorship that results from this process, right?
So I call it crony censorship.
And then you figure out, okay, some action needs to be taken.
What is the best sort of action to be taken?
And for me, what I want to do is make sure, and however we deal with this, that we don't create Big Brother if we haven't already, right?
So what can you do to excise this crony censorship cancer without making the problem worse?
And to me, the best way to do that, among all imperfect ways perhaps, is via a private lawsuit Private actors like the Trump lawsuit.
I don't know exactly where the, you know, the Trump lawsuit is going to succeed.
The last thing I heard was that Twitter is trying to have it removed over to San Francisco and then hopefully they think to get it dismissed.
But it is a lawsuit like that that I think can succeed in achieving a narrower interpretation of Section 230, one that would provide the requisite accountability We're good to go.
Big tech, what to do, any more than I want left-wingers, right?
We don't want this to be an ongoing problem.
It's like whatever administration is in place is going to control what can be said online.
We want freedom.
And the only way to have freedom is to keep government out of this.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Now, I made a point a little early in this podcast today that it's ironic because I'm hearing a lot of people on the left shrieking about the Texas abortion law.
And one of the points they make is, we can't believe that the state of Texas is licensing private actors to do something, in this case to restrict abortion, in a manner that the state itself is constitutionally forbidden from doing.
And I was thinking to myself, well, wait a minute.
Isn't that exactly what's going on in the big tech sphere where the government is essentially prodding private actors, Twitter, Facebook, Google, to do things that the government itself can't do because it faces that little obstacle called the First Amendment.
And so the left is complaining about it in the Texas context, but of course they're cheering it in the context of censorship.
Well, right. And so, actually, I disagree with you about abortion, Dinesh.
I'm sorry to say that. Hopefully we have free speech on this show, as elsewhere.
Of course. I'm consistent about both of those things.
I mean, nobody's in favor of abortion.
Abortion sounds like a horrible procedure, and I would never want to undergo one or wish it on anybody.
But, you know, it's an issue that's political.
And as a political issue, I think we disagree.
So, that being said, yeah, I don't want the government telling these private companies what they should or should not do.
I wouldn't want them telling a doctor that they have to perform an abortion any more than that they couldn't, right?
So, and same with big tech.
At Parler, we need the ability just to compete.
We need to be left free to be able to offer our product, which is a product offered in the spirit of the First Amendment, the entire First Amendment, That you can discuss anything legal on Parler.
You can discuss it. And we also want to put more and more controls into the hands of individual users The individual user should be able to curate his or her own feed.
Maybe an individual user doesn't want to have an abortion debate on their feed at all.
And ideally, we'll bring back the old feature that we had where you could just actually keep a word, a particular word, out of your discussion feed if you wanted, right?
And maybe you don't want to even get involved in that contentious issue.
So on Parler, yeah, again, we want to...
Kind of further civil discourse.
We want people to be able to have substantive discussions about important issues and not undergo any sort of censorship, especially not this crony censorship that we're seeing today.
And on that point, we fully agree.
Thank you, Amy Picoff. Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you as well. Have a good day.
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I want to...
Continue my discussion of the very fascinating lives of the medieval philosopher Peter Abelard.
And also Heloise, the woman to which he is permanently, you may say, attached.
Now, I want to talk about Abelard's ideas.
I'm going to get to his ideas about the resurrection, his ideas about atonement, but probably not today because I want to go a little deeper into Abelard's life to show what an interesting life it was and in some ways what a flawed but nevertheless admirable man Abelard was and also Heloise.
Now, With Abelard, he wrote a rather vivid, incredibly self-revealing, somewhat self-pitying, but I think also in some ways very noble account of his life.
It was called The History of My Calamities.
And in fact, he says this is going to describe, quote, the string of my calamities which has continued unbroken until the present day.
So, one disaster after another.
And Ablod is very conscious of his own brilliance and his own kind of genius, but it's a genius that antagonizes all his teachers and pretty much anyone he comes into contact with.
Talking about some of his early teachers, who were, by the way, monks of great—first of all, much older than Abelard and of great renown— But when you come closer and look again, it turns out to be barren.
So Abelard's saying he went to, he was attracted to these teachers because he thought they were really, they really thought it through, but once he got to look at them up close, he realized their ideas are completely hollow, and he was not shy about pointing it out to them and humiliating them, and obviously this made them lifelong enemies of Abelard.
By the way, after Abelard's tempestuous affair with Heloise, they both enter, take holy orders.
Heloise enters a nunnery, the nunnery of the paraclete.
And Abelard finds himself at an abbey.
It's called the Abbey of St. Denis.
Now, St. Denis is kind of the patron saint of France.
And... And the monks in the Abbey informed Abelard that St.
Denis is, in fact, Dionysus the Areopagite, a figure mentioned in the Bible.
So they believe that they've got this kind of ancient pedigree, genealogy, that goes right back into Scripture itself.
So what does Abelard do?
Well, he decides to do some of his own research, and he informs the monks.
He goes, you know, I've come across a passage in Bede's Ecclesiastical History.
This is a famous early history of the church.
And he says, and actually, this St.
Dennis character of yours is not...
Dionysus, the Areoppa.
Those were two totally different people.
And the monks are enraged and furious, and they complain to the abbot, and basically they now want to drive Abelard out of the abbey.
So this is the life of Peter Abelard.
Some of his writings are eventually condemned by an ecclesiastical council.
Now, how this happens is actually very tragic.
Abelard runs afoul of a very prominent Christian mystic named Bernard of Clairvaux.
Bernard of Clairvaux is a great mystic, somebody who sort of sits at the top of a mountain.
He suffers, he sits there in the snow.
So he's a renowned figure in Western Christendom.
But Abelard antagonizes him.
And Bernard of Clairvaux then accuses Abelard of being a heretic.
Abelard challenges Bernard of Clairvaux to show up at the church council and make his charges public.
But what Bernard of Clairvaux does, which is kind of cunning, is he shows up early.
He talks to the bishops beforehand.
He gets them to condemn Abelard in advance of the church council.
So by the time Abelard shows up, the deed is done.
And poor Abelard describes a very humiliating scene.
I'm going to read a couple lines.
He says, Forced to throw my own book into the fire with my own hands and burn it.
And then he says that he is, in order to reconcile him to the church, they tell him he has to make a confession of faith.
He's about to do it.
And he sees himself as thoroughly orthodox.
In my view, he is.
But nevertheless, the monks are like, no, no, no, no, no.
We don't even trust you to give your own profession of faith.
They hand him a copy of the creed and they make him read it.
And Abelard says...
Demanding I do nothing more or less than recite the creed, a thing a mere schoolboy could do, as if I were some duns who didn't even know the words by heart, they handed me the text and made me read.
I mean, here is this famous scholar being treated like a child, and Abelard says, I was choked with tears and sobs.
Now, despite all Abelard's sufferings, the remarkable thing is he knows his own weaknesses.
His weaknesses, as he defines them, pride and lust and a kind of a self-satisfied sense of his own brilliance.
And so, even in chronicling his own sufferings, he says at the end, quote, God's mercy brought me low and claimed me for his own.
So he says that God allowed me to go through these calamities.
Why? Because this would lessen my pride.
This would take away ultimately my lust.
This would ultimately show me that I am nothing more than a suffering servant.
Now, I turn very briefly to Heloise.
Because what's remarkable about Heloise is that she was completely enraptured, completely in love with Abelard, and then he directs her to enter a nunnery.
And so she does.
But she admits, Heloise does, that her entering the nunnery was not out of love for God, but out of love for Abelard.
She was basically doing what he said.
And then she writes these unbelievably eloquent and passionate letters to Abelard, which, interestingly, Abelard chastises her.
Abelard basically says to Heloise, he goes, stop going on and on about our relationship and our affair.
He goes, this was a great sin against God, and God owes us punishment for this.
So, basically, stop whining.
And Heloise does.
So when you're looking, we have the letters of Abelard and Heloise.
Here's a great book, edited by William Levitan, Abelard and Heloise.
So multiple letters from Heloise to Abelard.
But about the third letter, Abelard says, you know, enough.
And so all the rest of their correspondence is about philosophy.
Heloise, by the way, has become the head of her nunnery.
She has all these nuns at her disposal.
And so she discusses with Abelard how to deal with her nuns.
And so this is one of the most interesting and tragic romances in all of Western history.
And I want to close by just reading the salutation of Heloise's first letter to Abelard.
I'm actually going to read it in the Latin, but then translate it because of how interesting it is.
So, Dominus suo imopatri, conigii suo imofratri, ansila sua imophilia, ipsius uxor imosoror abelardo heloisa.
So what does this mean?
Heloise, who has initially met Abelard when she was literally handed to his care, almost like a daughter.
And then, of course, later she became his wife.
And of course, when they entered the nunnery, she was called Sister Heloise, and he was Brother Abelard.
So Heloise is playing on this, and she goes, what am I to you?
She goes, are you my lord?
She goes, no, in a way you're my father.
She goes, but in another way you're not my father, you're my husband.
But since we're both now in monasteries, we don't have those kinds of relationships.
You're not really my father, you're not my husband, you're actually my brother, because you're Brother Abelard, and I'm Sister Heloise.
And then she says at the end of it, no, no, no.
She kind of breaks down and says none of these titles even describe us.
At the end of the day, you're Abelard and I'm Heloise.
So at the end of the day, Abelardo, Heloise.
And so here we have in this tragic tale of romance gone wrong, nevertheless, one of the great philosophers of Western Christendom whose ideas about the resurrection and the atonement I will take up next time.
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