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Sept. 9, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
55:43
THE TALIBAN'S MAN IN AMERICA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 171
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Guess which American is more responsible than any other for the new Taliban government?
Hint, it's not Joe Biden.
Also, the age of American privilege is ending.
I'll tell you what that means.
Why Twitter censored Trump, but not the Taliban, even though the latter carried out a real insurrection.
And finally, Democratic activist Gloria Romero joins me to talk about her endorsement of Larry Elder and why she supports school choice.
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 Taliban has named its new government, and there are some familiar names on the list.
When I say familiar, I don't mean familiar to the ordinary person, but certainly familiar to the American who is most responsible for getting these Islamic radicals into key positions of what is now the most powerful terrorist regime in the world.
Thank you.
Now, the United States is well aware that there is a guy named Siraj Haqqani.
This is a guy who ran something called the Haqqani Network.
Very bad guy.
He's been on the FBI Most Wanted list for a long time.
He's one of the top terrorists in the world.
Well, he is now the Interior Minister of the Taliban.
And then there are several other key figures that have a familiar ring to them.
These are very bad guys with long histories.
They have ties not just to the old Taliban, but they also have ties to al-Qaeda.
And these ties are well documented and well known.
Well, how did they get these four guys into the Taliban government?
Answer? They were released out of Gitmo, Guantanamo, by Barack Obama in 2014.
You might remember the infamous Bergdahl trade.
And this was a trade, again, that was done very knowingly by Obama.
First of all, there was the whole idea that America will never leave Americans behind.
We see from the Biden administration how little they believe it, how little they act on it.
Many Americans now in Afghanistan, we have left them behind.
So it's not as if these Democrats, Obama, Biden, have great compunctions about leaving Americans behind.
Obama wanted Bergdahl back, in part because of Bergdahl's anti-Americanism.
This guy hated America.
In fact, he had tried to join the Taliban.
He had tried to sort of defect from the military.
And Obama was like, that's my kind of American.
An anti-American, like me.
And so Obama got this guy Bo Bergdahl back.
By the way, I was kind of looking to see where Bergdahl is now.
And it's very interesting.
Guess what? He fled the United States.
He lives now in Great Britain.
And he has converted to Islam.
And he's part of some kind of Islamic faction in Britain.
That's Bo Bergdahl now.
And Now, the guys that Obama released, there were five of them.
Let's go through where they are now.
They were, at that time, seasoned Taliban commanders, as I say, with deep ties to terrorism, to insurgency, to Al-Qaeda.
One of them, Mohammad Fazil, is now the Deputy Defense Minister in the Taliban's new government.
Abdul Haqbasiq, Acting Director of Intelligence.
So, their top intelligence guy.
Nurullah Nouri is the Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs.
Kairullah Karkawa, Minister of Information and Culture.
And the fifth guy, the fifth guy who is a former Guantanamo inmate, this is Muhammad Nabi Omari.
He's going to be the governor of the province of Coast.
So, all five guys.
And by the way, remember Obama's assurances?
These men are going to go to Qatar.
They're going to... We're going to keep a very close eye on them.
They're not going to have anything more to do with the battlefield.
Wrong. Obama knew fully well that they would return to the battlefield.
That's why he released them.
Now, this is the key.
What I'm getting at here is that...
Obama's behavior at the time was puzzling to many people.
Some people even said, he's a secret Muslim.
He's got to be a secret Muslim.
Why else would he want the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in the Middle East?
And my argument at the time was, no, it's not that Obama is a secret Muslim.
In fact, I don't believe Obama is any kind of a religious believer at all.
What Obama is is he has embraced an ideology according to which America is the force, the greatest force for evil in the world.
Think about it. That's why Obama went on his apology tour.
Now, I covered these themes in my movie 2016, Obama's America, and here's a short clip.
It actually begins with some comments by Daniel Pipes, a professor who is an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, and he's laying out, giving at least a hint of Obama's ideology, which helps to explain what has been happening here in Afghanistan now.
Listen. It comes out of a tradition that's highly critical of the United States.
It sees the United States internally badly set up and externally a force for malign influence.
And therefore he presumably sees his role as tempering both of those, making it better internally and reducing the bad influence of the United States abroad.
More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.
Isn't it so interesting that when you listen to what Obama says, you realize that he's not coming out of any kind of a civil rights tradition.
He's coming out of this anti-colonial, anti-American tradition, the ghost of his father.
And what a crazy dude that guy was.
I mean, one-legged, wife-beating, alcoholic, an absolute nutcase.
But somehow, even though he abandoned Obama, Obama revered him.
And so the ghost of Barack Obama's father still living in Obama, and the ghost of Obama, or maybe not even the ghost, the real fingerprints of Obama, are all over the Biden administration.
So, not only is Obama acting through Biden to produce disasters in Afghanistan, but in a sense you can argue he's acting directly to populate the new Taliban government.
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The United States has been living, really, since World War II in what can be called the age of American privilege.
Now, in America, we hear a lot of nonsense about white privilege, male privilege.
But the real privilege is the privilege of being an American.
And the question I want to ask is, is that privilege now coming to an end?
I fear that it is.
I'm not saying America's finished, but what I am saying is this idea that America is something special in the world, this idea that the American passport is better than everybody else's passport, this idea that America sets the standard, that's what the Biden administration is forfeiting.
And I'm not sure we can ever get that back.
Now, what do we mean by American privilege?
I remember many years ago, I was in the late 1990s, this was, I was on a cruise in the Middle East, a cruise that went to countries like Jordan, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
And when we got to Saudi Arabia, the people who disembarked the ship, and these were probably half Americans, but there were people from other countries, we all had to, I mean the women had to wear essentially abayas, full length black outfits with their faces largely covered.
And the Europeans were like, yeah, you know, when in Rome, do like the Romans.
And so there was sort of a no problem with doing it.
But the Americans, I noticed, balked at it.
I remember one woman saying kind of indignantly, I'm not going to do that.
I'm an American.
And while I was sort of chuckling at that sentiment, I also understood that this is what this is American privilege.
American privilege means that we as Americans are not held to the same standard as anyone else.
If we become hostages abroad, our country will come get us in a way that other countries may be like, so?
But as you can see with Biden now, that is being called into question.
Here's another example just from now.
I see a very interesting exchange on Twitter between the U.S. Navy and a Chinese communist newspaper called Global Times.
So the U.S. Navy is talking about U.S. Navy exercises in the South China Sea.
And the Navy goes, The freedom of all nations to navigate in international waters is important and especially vital in the South China Sea when nearly a third of global maritime trade transits every year.
So here's the U.S. Navy doing its usual pompous proclamation.
We have every right to patrol the South China Sea.
Now here's what the China Times replies.
Hopefully, when Chinese warships can pass through the Caribbean Sea or show up near Hawaii and Guam one day, the U.S. will uphold the same standard of freedom of navigation.
That day will come soon.
So the Chinese are basically saying, it's all very well to make these pompous proclamations, we have every right to be in your waters.
Well, does China ever have every right to be in our waters?
So suddenly you notice that the rest of the world isn't going along With these blithe assertions of American superiority, as if there's one set of rules that applies to America, another set of rules that applies to everybody else.
That day seems to be coming to an end.
And here's an interesting article by the historian Andrew Bakovich in the Washington Post, The Age of American Privilege is Over.
Now, Bakovich points out that going back to 1948, George Kennan, the U.S. State Department diplomat, very prominent figure and well-known writer as well, made the observation that the United States has 6% of the world's population, but 50% of the world's wealth.
Now, that's dominance.
And with that comes privilege.
The privilege of being, you can say, lord of the manor.
And so not only did Americans have a way of life that's the envy of the world, but America could project its influence around the world, not just through military power, but also through example.
People wanted to become more like Americans and follow American culture, watch American movies, develop a kind of American sensibility.
Now, by 2000, Bakovich points out, the United States accounts for 33% of the world's wealth, so down from 50%.
And that number has plummeted even further.
And now with this defeat in Afghanistan, Bakovich says, and I largely agree with him, quote, the age of American privilege is gone for good.
He goes, essentially, George Kennan was, at the end of the day, a realist.
George Kennan was, this is a realistic assessment of where we are in the world, and we can build our own, not only our self-understanding, but our actions in the world based on it.
But this is not 1948.
This is 2021.
And Andrew Bakkevich says, a realistic assessment is that America no longer carries that kind of clout.
And so it's time for a kind of more modest American role in the world.
We don't detach from the world.
This is not isolationism.
But America recognizes that we have serious problems at home.
Serious problems that begin with a deep political divide, a breakdown of trust in basic institutions, a level of corruption once considered inconceivable in America, a denial of basic liberties in many cases, a lack of faith even in equal justice, all these fundamental principles that once seem to define the American way of life.
No longer do. No longer do.
And what this means is that we're not that much better than other people.
When we look at Cuban political prisoners, we've got to ask, are we doing something like that over here?
We look at censorship abroad, Xi Jinping, we've got to ask, well, wait a minute, how different really is Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg from Xi Jinping?
They're operating in a different context, but isn't it the same tyrannical mindset?
What this means is that we can no longer say with confidence, at least now, we are the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Not only will other people chuckle, fight back, push back, not believe it, but at certain times and in certain moments, we ourselves don't believe it either.
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I find myself being amused and even fascinated by this character Anthony Blinken.
I've never really met Blinken, but every time I see him, the words that jump to mind are beta male.
I mean, this guy is just your major...
Your major beta.
And even his statements are so preposterous that they make you wonder how an intelligent person can let such words come out of their mouth because of what it reveals about how they think.
Now, here is Anthony Blinken commenting on the new Taliban government, noting that, number one, it's all male.
And noting that number two, it's got one guy on the FBI most wanted list.
It's got a bunch of guys with long histories with Al-Qaeda, the worst terrorist groups.
So here's how Anthony Blinken puts that.
This is sort of, this takes euphemism to a new level.
Quote, it certainly does not meet the test of inclusivity.
As of the Taliban are, you know what?
We want to make sure we meet the test of inclusivity.
They're not even thinking like this.
So here's this fool in Washington.
It doesn't meet the test of inclusivity.
Unquote. It includes people who have very challenging track records.
So, it doesn't include major terrorists, FBI most wanted list.
Yeah, we can look forward to more terrorist incidents.
When's the next 9-11? None of that.
Their track records are challenging.
But he's up to the challenge, I take it.
I'm filled with a mixture of contempt and sadness and outrage.
The sadness comes from the fact that there actually are young girls in Afghanistan who grew up after the Taliban.
I mean, think about it. The Taliban was pushed out in 2001.
You've got... Young girls who are 18 years old, who have never known Taliban rule.
These are girls who went to school, they got a normal education, or at least a normal education under Afghan conditions, but now suddenly they're going to have to live under not just an Islamic regime, but an Islamic regime that makes Iran look like it's a liberal country.
These are people far more ferocious in their imposition of Sharia law.
And then I think to myself, you know, I frequently see on social media the Taliban itself issuing statements.
And they're issuing statements on Twitter.
They're issuing statements through the various platforms.
And I'm thinking to myself, wait a minute.
Why are these guys allowed to do this?
First of all, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be free speech.
I'm applying the Twitter standard.
So the Twitter standard was very clear after January 6th is you can't promote an insurrection.
You can't question legitimate democratic procedures.
You cannot use force to get your way.
And, you know, the January 6th, the walkthrough of the Capitol, taking selfies, laughing, playing jokes with Pelosi's desk...
This was considered an insurrection.
Well, the Taliban have just carried out a real insurrection, an armed insurrection, in contrast with January 6th, an extremely violent insurrection.
They've established a dictatorship by force.
This is not democracy.
There's no pretense of democracy.
So I guess the Twitter standard is that for people who are brown and Muslim, it's perfectly okay to have these kind of bloodthirsty displays of violence.
It's all right, but we're not going to allow that kind of thing here in the United States.
Is that what Twitter is saying?
So I'm trying to make sense of the deep double standard by which...
The Taliban, even though it's right back to its old practices, isn't really getting harsh treatment, not just on Twitter.
You don't even see screams of outrage in the New York Times.
You don't see Rachel Maddow sweating on MSNBC. You know, here you have on social media pictures of the Taliban and they've got sticks and they're whipping girls who are coming out to demonstrate against them.
Nothing. You know, pretty soon there'll be buildings falling on top of gays and nothing.
So my question is, why not?
Why is it the case that that stuff is going on over there and the left doesn't care about it because it's not happening over here?
I don't think that's the full explanation.
It seems to me that their full explanation is this.
It comes back to what I was saying a little bit about Obama earlier.
The Taliban's real credential and its real attraction to the left is the Taliban is vehemently anti-American.
The Taliban was vehemently anti-Trump.
The Taliban is vehemently anti-Christian.
So you see here that the left and the Taliban have a certain common purpose.
I was thinking the other day about the close resemblance between Taliban guys and Antifa guys.
If you look at them, they even look the same.
They dress the same and they do the same kind of things.
They go out in the street and they bully and threaten and beat people.
And so what you have here, I mean, think about it.
You hear the Taliban chanting, debt to America?
You could easily go to Portland and see Antifa chanting, debt to America.
You see the radical Muslims burning an American flag?
You can easily go to an American campus and see radical leftists burning an American flag.
So there's a community of interests.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
A kind of weird alliance between these radical Islamic regimes, even terrorists, around the world.
and the Democratic left in the United States.
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I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Gloria Romero.
Gloria Romero is actually someone who has come up through the ranks of the Democratic Party.
She was in fact the Senate Democratic Caucus Chair. She was also the Senate Majority Leader of the Democratic Party in California.
She's the first woman to have that position in the history of the California State Senate.
And yet here she is endorsing Larry Elder for governor.
And so we've got a woman who's also been, by the way, a champion of school choice.
She has a scholarship prep charter school in Santa Ana, California.
And I want to talk about school choice.
But let's begin, Gloria, with Larry Elder.
First of all, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
There was a really, I think, shocking incident yesterday in which Larry Elder was confronted by someone who was, a white person evidently, in a gorilla outfit.
I mean, think of the significance of that, who threw an egg at him.
Talk a little bit about this because your daughter was on the scene.
What did she tell you about it?
What actually happened? Thank you so much for inviting me on the podcast, first of all.
Yes, I spoke with my daughter.
My daughter was there and take this, the only Latina and African-American woman who serve on the Venice Neighborhood Council invited Larry Elder to go and to basically walk in their shoes through these homeless encampments that surround and have enveloped Venice, California.
Larry Elder has spoken very passionately about the homelessness crisis as part of the reason for the recall of the governor.
When they got there, they were met by, I'm gonna just say thugs, quite frankly.
Most of the media, including the LA Times said, oh, he got a hostile reception.
An egg was thrown at him.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
There was physical assault.
My daughter described some of the vile, racist epithets.
The N-word in every variation you can imagine that was being hurled at him.
The woman in the blackface gorilla mask.
And you can imagine, if this had been a Democratic African American...
Stacey Abrams, for example, the media...
Would not have said, oh, an egg was thrown at him.
They would have led with, this was an ugly hate crime.
I'm also going to say that, sadly, it's not surprising, given what I'm going to say the LA Times has really led with their whole leading up to their fear that, oh my God, a black man that's not controlled by the political elites of California might become governor of the state of California.
So this slimy media with so much of its bigotry in the weeks leading up to this election, I think, have basically set the stage for this to occur.
My daughter said when she went home, she cried that night.
She said, Mom, she said, I can imagine, like, is this America?
And is this what it was like in the 1950s when Black people had to be escorted to safety just to be able to walk to an institute, a schoolhouse, and in this case, potentially the governor's mansion in California?
She was just horrified by what she saw.
What do you make of it, Laura?
You've been in the Democratic Party really your whole life, and here you've got a party that has positioned itself as the anti-racist party.
It embraces critical race theory, this idea that anti-racism is the core of what it's about.
That even seems more important than the old class divide that used to the rich against the poor.
Now it's more, it seems, a racial divide.
My question is this.
You know, with the LA Times, this is the very newspaper, for example, that published the article that said that Larry Elder is the black face of white supremacy.
I mean, think of what that does in terms of depriving a person of agency, the right to speak for themselves.
They somehow now become an instrument of something else.
How is it that the party of anti-racism, so-called...
is able to indulge in such open and naked bigotry against Larry Elder.
Why do they think it's okay?
Well, as you have pointed out, and it really is shameful, I think, the very sordid and ugly history, quite frankly, of the Democratic Party.
We do have a president of the United States whose own past and embracing of segregationists is really something that I think the Democratic Party has failed to really grapple with.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act, as well to looking at a very sordid history, ultimately.
So I flash forward and I look at it today.
And I think that sadly, the Democratic Party, the party that I have affiliated with for the bulk of my life, my parents were Depression-era Democrats beforehand, it really, I believe, has lost its way.
Ironically, where identity has become the checkmark, you have to fit a certain box in order to be courted or to be supported.
It really then, in the case where a black man who was assaulted yesterday in the city of the angels, a Democratic-run city, was basically just whitewashed, quite frankly.
And I think because sadly, ideology has trumped skin color.
Skin color is up there, but if it is a conservative Latina, Asian-American, if it's a conservative African-American, then suddenly, conservative ideology is, it's OK then?
It appears to go ahead and assault and tear down.
So I've really been wrestling with this.
This is not the party of JFK, the party of Bobby Kennedy, which first motivated me to become actively involved in doing what we could for our country rather than vice versa.
I do believe that there are other Democrats who are appalled by what we see happening, the wokeness of the takeover by the extreme left of this party.
And I think it takes a few good people to stand up and call this out.
But when you were met with such vile suppression of our right to be able to democratically, with a small d, assert and listen to candidates of all stripes and support the candidates of our choice.
I think it really is time for this party to re-examine what it stands for.
My daughter said she could imagine that she might have been in the den of a KKK. Wow.
When we come back, I want to talk about the role of Hispanics in this election in California and also talk about the issue of school choice with Gloria Romero.
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And how do you see the issue of Hispanics?
Of course, the Democrats have long appealed to the Hispanic vote on the basis of identity politics.
And I talked a day or two ago on the podcast about an article that your daughter wrote about the kind of fork in the road facing Hispanic America.
Say how you think about it.
How do you feel about that issue?
Certainly. The Latino community has long been thought of as sort of a captured base within the Democratic Party.
I think that's really a false notion, and many Latinos have felt very much undervalued and ignored with respect to the leadership of the current Democratic Party.
Here in California, this governor shut down our schools, yet he kept his schools open, in person, without masks, it appears, for his own children, going to a private school.
He shut down our churches.
He shut down Our businesses.
And make no doubt about it, Latinos are amongst the biggest sector of the small business community who have been very entrepreneurial and starting small businesses, be they restaurants or hair salons or whatever the issue may be.
So this very much affected our community.
Latinos very much have a very strong commitment to the work ethic, to the American dream.
Here on the eve of 9-11, if we take a look at the history of service to this country in terms of the military, you will find Latino names, you know, Sanchez, Gonzalez, Zavala, amongst those who have been killed while giving service to our country.
So there is a deep commitment to To the belief of America as the land of opportunity and education as the key to the American dream.
And for me, that's why I decided to support the recall early on because of the whole failed governance of this governor.
But I also felt very discouraged by it being painted as this right-wing extremist recall when nothing could be further from the truth.
This was about Democrats, Republicans, Independents, really a coalition of individuals who rightfully have concerns about this governor. And then secondly, I wanted to support Larry Elder specifically because of his strong stance on school choice.
It's something that I share.
And if we go back and we look at it, even looking at the congressional record and Bobby Kennedy, who was an advocate for school choice.
Elizabeth Warren, basically she wanted to run for office at one time.
She had stood up for school choice.
I am one of those Democrats who believes in opportunity scholarships.
I served in the legislature.
I have seen those reports on failing schools.
And the vast majority of kids who are trapped In these failing bureaucrat zip code education government schools are Latino and African American high poverty students.
So I believe that the only way to break the monopoly of political power held by the California Teachers Association, which is controlling Gavin Newsom, by the way, The only way we can do that is really send a shock to the system in Sacramento and get a governor who's willing to stand up for children of color, for poor children, to bring about quality educational opportunities.
You know, for a long time, and I remember this debate going back to the 80s and 90s, people would often say that the reason that the public schools are such a mess is because we aren't spending money on them in order to improve them.
But it seems like not only has the amount of money spent on the schools increased dramatically, but a state like California spends far more than other states, and yet the public schools in California are among the worst.
Is the reason for that, do you think that you've got teachers' unions that are less interested in teaching and maybe more interested in other things?
What do you think is the main reason why these public schools are such a mess?
And also, why do you think there's so much resistance to the idea of putting vouchers or money in the hands of parents and saying, listen, you picked the best school for your kid and that will create a healthy competition in the system that will probably prod all schools to become better?
The public education system in California is really more of a public works program.
It is one which basically says it provides an able-bodied sector of teachers who are able to be taxed, to be debited, to pay membership dues To the most powerful political force, California Teachers Association, which then translates into a war chest, a political war chest to perpetuate power, the stranglehold of power.
And I'm not saying rank and file teachers.
There are numerous rank and file teachers who don't like what's going on, but they too are stripped of their rights as a member of an association or the union.
So this is really about the ruling elites.
This is about the top, the Randy Wine Gardens, and also the equivalent here in California of the CTA, the California affiliate.
So many of them achieve this by basically just saying, we're going to treat children as basically debit cards.
The more bodies we have, little children in the seats, you know, cha-ching, cha-ching, you add it up.
That's money then that goes into paying pensions, paychecks, and perks that are associated.
The CTA has been responsible for fighting virtually every type of reform, whether it is looking at merit pay, in looking at trying to fire teachers who have molested children in the classroom Even President Obama, when he supported Race to the Top, and I ran the California initiative that was tied to that, they opposed that.
When children, led by a young Latina girl, brought forth a lawsuit in California, the Vergara case, the union opposed that.
So it's virtually impossible to break that stranglehold.
And sadly, I saw when I was in Sacramento that too many of the Democrats, my colleagues, were just afraid to go up and stand up to the CTA because they all wanted political careers and they were afraid that the CTA would basically just snuff them out if they took on a position contrary.
That's what I see going on in Sacramento.
That was 10 years ago when I left Sacramento.
It's worse now.
And the fact that even on the recall that no other Democratic candidate even stood up to say, I want to run against Gavin, I believe it was because, and I have some pretty good sources who have told me firsthand, these were the overt threats to their political careers if they dared challenge the political elites in Sacramento.
Let me close by asking you, what do you think is going to happen in this recall?
Do you think that Newsom's going to make it, or do you think he's going to go down?
Well, we'll have to see.
I mean, again, too, we're still a few days away until Election Day.
I think the most important thing is that California and the nation has heard the people roar.
This is something that I think is really part of a movement.
People standing up to say, you know, this rules for thee, but not for me.
It's not acceptable.
If we look just at the political party dynamics, one would think that it would go to the Democratic incumbent because of the numbers overall.
But I've been very encouraged seeing overall the vast numbers of independents and Democrats going forward.
The money has poured in.
Governor Newsom has spent, I think by the time everything's finished, it may have been 70, 80, 90 million dollars.
And of course, every major political interest Has been supporting this governor and basically calling it a right wing takeover.
And then you see the brutal physical assault that occurred yesterday as well.
That's also taking place.
To me, it speaks of desperation.
What happens, I think, is that Californians have a right to recall their governor when they have failed.
We have a right to petition our government when we think we deserve better.
The issue of school choice is on the California agenda and nationally, and that should move us forward because the school choice issue, it's not going to go away.
I believe, irrespective of what happens next Tuesday, it's going to be a clarion call.
And I want to thank Larry Elder for standing up.
I don't agree with him on many, many issues.
But to me, the most important issue was school choice.
Over half our budget goes to funding education.
And I believe it is the key to the American dream.
And that's why I stepped forward as a Democrat to say, until we're willing to take this on, we're going to keep failing generations of children in California.
Gloria Romero, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you. We're good to go.
Text Dinesh to 484848 to claim your free information kit and to speak with a precious metals expert on holding gold and silver in a tax-sheltered account.
Again, text Dinesh to 484848 and protect your savings today.
Having failed to block the Texas abortion law in the courts, the left has now pivoted to the age-old question of when does life begin?
The left is trying to assure us, appealing of all things to science, That life does not begin at the beginning.
It doesn't begin at conception.
Biden himself says he doesn't believe life begins at conception.
Well, I'd like to ask him, when does it begin?
Can you tell us when it occurs?
Now... What's so fascinating about this question of when does life begin is that we have all these efforts to see if there's life on other planets.
The extraterrestrial project, the SETI project, so-called, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
And if those guys, if this SETI project, which is now decentralized, a number of universities, laboratories are looking for signals that are coming from outer space, If they were to find on a remote planet or star a single human cell, a single cell, not even a human cell, the whole world would go berserk and there would be screams, life, life, we're not alone in the universe, and so on.
So a single cell would be taken as irrefutable evidence of life.
And yet when we look at an embryo, we look at a fetus in the womb, That is four, five, six weeks or more.
We're not talking about a single cell.
We're not even talking about fertilized ovum.
We're talking really about fast-developing beings.
Life, for sure.
But what kind of life? Obviously, human life.
It's not a reptile life.
It's not an iguana in the womb.
It is life, unmistakably, and it is also human life.
Now, What's different now, we've known this for a long time, but what we can now do with ultrasound and other technologies is see it, and we can even hear it.
And this is kind of the emotional power of these so-called heartbeat bills, is that they, in a sense, go with the clearest definition of life, and that's a beating heart, right?
Right? I mean, think about it. If someone were to tell you, his heart has stopped, it's no longer beating, you would say, wow, that guy must be dead.
And the fact that he's dead means he must have once been alive.
The beating heart is in some ways the symbol of life.
So, here is NPR trying to attack the idea of the heartbeat.
And they say, Texas law bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, but doctors say that term isn't based in science.
It's not based in science.
There's no such thing as a human heartbeat.
What an ultrasound detects is an embryo at six weeks is electrical activity from cells, not a heart.
So this is NPR weighing in, listen to the science.
It's not a heart, and that's not really a heartbeat.
And NPR quotes an OBGYN, Nisha Verma, and she says, the flickering that we're seeing on the ultrasound that early in the pregnancy is actually electrical activity.
What we're seeing is a group of cells that are initiating some electrical activity.
And then another woman, Jennifer Kearns, who is an OBGYN, also professor at University of California, San Francisco, says that even the term fetal heartbeat is, quote,"...not widely used in medicine." Now, and she even says, we really can't even talk about a fetus.
It's an embryo. The term fetus is normally not applied until eight weeks.
Now, what's going on here?
Well, first of all, let's just look at the fact of the matter because this idea that the fetal heartbeat is measuring electricity is just flat out wrong.
It's not the case.
Here's a response from a medical doctor.
The mode, which is to say the ultrasound, is measuring motion, not electrical activity.
It's literally detecting the motion of the fetus in the womb.
Now, the motion is the motion of the wall of the cardiac chamber.
Now, the cardiac chamber is not fully developed.
The heart is not fully developed.
By the way, if NPR wanted to argue, they could argue that the fetal heartbeat isn't coming from a fully developed heart, and they would be correct about that.
But instead of talking about this embryological development that the cardiac system isn't fully developed, they're going with the idea that it's measuring electrical activity and this is just flat out false.
I think the bigger picture here is that you can see the desperate effort of people.
They're very scared of the ultrasound.
They're very scared that people can look there and go, hey, that's my baby!
And the fact of the matter is, and my daughter, Danielle has pointed this out in her book, The Choice, is that when her friends who are in their 20s get pregnant, they go on Facebook and they post, here's my baby, check it out, and everybody else who comments on it, some of those people may be pro-life, but they take for granted that what's in the womb is a living human being.
And they say things like, look at the little fellow kick!
Oh my gosh, it's a boy!
You know, family of three!
Blah, blah, blah. So the bottom line of it is, and this is really interesting because it shows that when you step outside the abortion context, everybody, all parties, not just the parents, but all the friends, all the relatives, have a shared assumption that that thing that's in the stomach that's moving and kicking is...
Is, in fact, a kid.
And at the end of the day, I think it's hard to ignore that simple fact.
And this is really why I think abortion will ultimately come crashing down, not because it is consonant with the science, but because it is a barbaric act that not only violates scientific truth, it's a human being in there, but also violates basic human decency.
Many of you know I've been on Hillary Clinton's trail for a long time.
In my film Hillary's America, I detailed the dangers she posed to our country.
Fortunately, the American people got the message.
But there's still more that must be done to reveal the ugly truth about the Clintons, the Clinton Foundation, and their corrupt ways, especially since the Biden family seems to view the Clintons' example as a how-to guide.
You won't find the truth about Hillary in today's fake news media.
You have to turn to a powerful source like Capitol Research Center.
Now, my friends at Capitol Research Center exposed the left like no one else can.
Now they've released an eye-opening new report that lays bare the corruption of the Clinton crime family.
It's called By Hook or By Crook.
Want to read it? Then go to capitalresearch.org slash Dinesh.
You'll get a chance to order a free copy of By Hook or By Crook and learn the facts the mainstream media won't touch.
So again, that's capitalresearch.org slash Dinesh.
Check it out. I've been talking for the last few days about the very colorful and interesting and brilliant medieval philosopher named Peter Abelard.
And I want to begin today, and I'll continue tomorrow, to discuss his idea, his attempt to give an exposition of the Christian doctrine of the atonement.
Now, as with the resurrection, which I talked about yesterday, Abelard has no doubt about the doctrine itself.
He is completely orthodox in embracing it.
His argument is with the way it is presented, with the way it is formulated, with the way it is defended, with the way it is taught.
And in Abelard's attempt to reformulate Christian doctrine, he often falls into controversy.
And I've mentioned his rivalry with a Christian monastic, a Christian mystic named Bernard of Clairvaux.
Now, let's talk about the atonement for a minute, because atonement comes out of the idea of at-one-ment.
So, atonement doesn't actually mean penance.
Atonement refers to a reconciliation between God and man, a reconciliation that is brought about by the passion and blood and death of Christ.
But the question is, how?
How does Christ's death and passion and resurrection, how does it bring about this atonement or atonement?
Now, in this there are a number of theories, and I'm going to focus here on just one, a theory that Abelard, as it turns out, had nothing but scorn for, and yet a theory that appears to be anchored, at least in some language, in the Bible.
So, I'm going to read the language.
This is actually from Mark.
1045. And this is right out of the mouth of Jesus.
For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.
The key word here is ransom.
And in Abelard's time, it was taught frequently that Christ's death was a kind of ransom.
Now, interestingly, Abelard disputes this.
He disputes the whole concept of a ransom, and he disputes it not by quoting other passages of Scripture and then trying to reconcile this passage with the other passages.
He doesn't do that.
He just examines the concept of ransom to exacting intellectual or philosophical scrutiny, and he concludes on the basis of it, it can't be that.
It doesn't make any sense.
And this is, by the way, why Bernard of Clairvaux was so angry.
Bernard of Clairvaux saw Abelard as, in a sense, denying the atonement.
Which Abelard was not denying, but Abelard was denying that it makes sense to think of it purely in terms of some kind of ransom.
And the way that Abelard does this, the way he conducts his examination is he asks this question.
To whom is the ransom being paid?
Now on the surface it appears that the ransom is being paid to the devil.
In other words, think about this.
God supposedly owes the devil.
Owes the devil, why?
Because the devil has not only captivity of man, but it seems legitimate or just captivity of man.
Because why would you pay a ransom otherwise?
you're paying a ransom to somebody because you're literally buying back human beings for their salvation away from the devil who is supposedly holding them against God's will and would not give them up absent this ransom. Now Abelard says think about this for a minute. First of all God's will and would not give them up absent this ransom.
Now Abelard says, think about this for a minute.
First of all, the devil won over his control over human beings through sheer deception.
He says the devil tricked Eve, tricked Adam, used guile and cunning to get humans to fall.
So he goes, the devil doesn't acquire any rights over man by doing that.
In fact, if anybody's been wronged, it is human beings who've been wronged by the devil.
The devil owes us.
We don't owe him. God doesn't owe him.
And moreover, Abelard says the devil can have no power that God didn't give him.
Now, maybe God said to the devil, And, says Abelard, God could obviously take human beings back from the jailer.
The jailer is merely God's licensed agent, if you will.
So the whole idea that sort of God owes the devil and has to sort of pay the devil a price, a price of his own son, to get human beings back, Abelard said, that makes absolutely no sense.
But then Abelard considers a second and perhaps even more alarming possibility, which is that God is paying the ransom to God Himself.
Because think about it, if God is in fact the person who designated the jailer, okay, devil, you can be in charge of human beings for now, you can torment them for a while, nevertheless, so the devil's authority to do that is coming from God.
But then Abelard says, in that case, we're saying something even more preposterous, that here is God...
Who is paying a ransom at a price that is set by whom?
By God Himself. So God is literally paying Himself a price, which is His own Son.
So God is not only the ransomer, but also you may say the ransomee.
And Abelard goes, what kind of nonsense is that?
So, what you have here from Abelard is a denial of the ransom theory of the Aton.
You can see what sort of thin ice Abelard is skating on here, because these, I mean, from Bernard of Clairvaux's point of view...
That's right out of scripture.
And hey, Abelard, you're not even giving us rival scripture.
You're just giving us some philosophical theories for why this makes no sense.
For Bernard of Clairvaux, this was rank heresy.
And of course, Abelard, instead of basically sidestepping that issue, he starts mocking Bernard of Clairvaux.
Bernard of Clairvaux and another guy who had raised the issue of heresy, Abelard goes, these are our two new apostles.
He's being sarcastic.
What he means is that apparently the twelve apostles were not enough.
We've now got these two new goons who have put on the apostles' clothing.
They want to be now the new interpreters of the faith.
So Abelard here, you can see, is setting himself up for major controversy and, as it will turn out, major condemnation.
But when we return tomorrow, I want to turn to what Abelard thought is a defensible issue.
And justifiable explanation of the atonement, a justification that is based on, I'm going to call it, a penal substitution theory of God's attempt to create atonement, which is to say reconciliation with man.
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