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Sept. 10, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:49
LEGACY OF 9/11 Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 172
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Twenty years after 9-11, we most certainly haven't won and we may even have lost the war on terror.
They seem stronger now than they were before, and we seem weaker than we were then.
How did this happen?
I'll talk about that. Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley joins me.
We're going to talk about the Biden disaster in Afghanistan, also about the wider reach of American foreign policy.
The United Nations says that Texas' pro-life law constitutes sex discrimination.
I'm going to give those unwoke foreigners a bit of a lesson.
Men, too, can become pregnant.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy.
In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
20 years after 9-11, I'm...
Filled with a feeling of sadness, a sadness that is driven not just by memory, but also by a conscious awareness of how things look now and how little has been accomplished over this period of two decades.
One way to think about it is, imagine the plight of a woman who survived the collapse of the Twin Towers, who survived 9-11, whose son grew up to want to...
To fight against the radical Muslims, to fight for America, went off to Afghanistan, was wounded or was killed.
What do you think that family is feeling now as they survey this disaster, the embarrassing U.S. pullout, the stranded Americans still in Afghanistan?
The fact that we have given the Taliban an air force, basically equipped.
We've become ourselves, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps intentionally, a state sponsor of terror.
And the radical Muslims are stronger than ever.
All those arms will end up on the world market, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Iran.
So, all of this has happened making them stronger.
And meanwhile, our country seems more confused, more divided.
We've introduced in America a massive surveillance state, but to what end?
A lot of this seemed well-intentioned at the beginning and some of us, many of us, supported it.
We thought, wow, if there are some radical Islamists among us and we need to have surveillance to kind of fish them out, it's justified.
And then it'll stop.
But we've now realized, and this is a dismaying realization, that first of all, even the effort to go after those guys had a very sleazy element to it.
Some of these plots were cooked up by the FBI. They would put these people up to it.
Hey, Rashid, yes, go join ISIS. Then they bust the plot.
Wow, we're amazing.
Look what we did. Also, the way in which the Patriot Act renewed again and again and again, the way in which the surveillance state never does no end in sight.
Even to this day, it doesn't look like any of these practices are going to be lifted and normalcy restored.
And this is a very sobering lesson for us who believe in freedom, that when we allow the desire for safety, we're seeing it right now with the vaccine mandates, When we allow the desire for safety to trample on our liberties, we always think, oh wow, this is going to be short-lived, but it never is short-lived.
And you end up, afterward, less safe and also less free.
I want to talk in this segment briefly about the deformity, the toxicity of radical Islamic culture.
And then in the next segment, I'm going to talk about the toxicity of liberal or progressive culture in the United States.
Around 2006, I published a book talking about this phenomenon, the fact that you may say radical Islam and radical leftism, which appear to be two completely disconnected phenomena, nevertheless operate together.
They operate together like the two sides of a scissors.
Now, let's start by talking about radical Islam because although Bin Laden is dead, his legacy tragically lives on.
Bin Laden's dream, if you can call it that, was to inflict a mortal blow on America, a blow that America would never forget.
He wanted to dispel the myth of American invincibility.
This is almost a quotation right out of the Bin Laden papers.
By the way, a whole trove of Bin Laden papers were fished out of Abbottabad in Pakistan after the Bin Laden operation involving Robert O'Neill.
So Bin Laden's goal was to strike at what he called the great Satan, America, the head of the snake.
And they did.
But I think that their broader success is not merely the fact that the operation itself was carried out almost without flaw.
But the fact that 20 years later they can look around and say, listen, we got Afghanistan back, so we've in a sense thwarted the U.S. attack.
Iran is very close if it isn't already there in getting a nuclear weapon.
The radical Muslim states continue to be a global menace.
In fact, now they have the opportunity, and we see this in places like Venezuela, where the radical Muslims are able to ally with Chinese and with Russians and even with radical leftists in Venezuela.
And here we see in America, look at the recognition, for example, given to radical Muslims like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar.
These people were at one time so far on the margin of American politics that none of us knew their names.
Now they're in Congress.
So we have a radical Islamic element inside of America that is working in conjunction with, if not in cahoots with, radical Islamic elements abroad.
So, the war on terror, if we were to do a little bit of a balance sheet 20 years later, it's a very bad balance sheet.
Yes, we have not had massive terrorist attacks on America since 9-11.
So that, I suppose, would be on the positive side.
I mentioned yesterday there are Afghan girls who've grown up for 20 years without the Taliban.
They've been able to go to school.
So there have been these kinds of modest gains But when you set them against the fact that here the most powerful country in the world undertakes an expedition to defeat these radical Muslims who are trying to revive, think about it, a kind of 7th century Islamic caliphate?
This is their goal.
You would think that this is a goal that the whole world laughs at, rejects completely.
It has no support outside of modest pockets of the Islamic world.
We should have been able to defeat it militarily, politically, ideologically, and yet it seems that we have, in a sense, suffered major reversals on all these fronts and even lost the appetite to continue the fight at the end of it.
American attention is now turned inward.
And in some senses, I think that's okay.
That's appropriate. It's a measure of the deep problems we have at home.
And what I want to talk about in the next segment is about how today we have less to fear from the enemy abroad than we do from the enemy at home.
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The United States has been on a project now for more than 20 years of projecting American influence and American culture abroad.
Now some of this is done through the government, through official government agencies.
And I note that just about 30 days before the fall of Kabul, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was flying a rainbow flag, as if to say it was shoving in the face of the Afghans.
Hey, we America represent...
The triumph of gay rights around the world.
And by the way, this is not just something we're doing in Afghanistan in countries where we have had direct influence, but we're pushing it worldwide.
We see on Twitter there's a woman from Nigeria who's constantly complaining that the U.S. government is pushing promiscuity, sex education, and abortion in African cultures.
And these African cultures don't want it.
They're traditional. And so she says, there's nothing we can do about it.
I think this is important because in a sense the radical Muslims, I think, are reacting against The face of America that they see.
Now, this is not the face of America itself.
In America, we have two cultures.
We have a leftist, progressive, woke, radical culture, and we have a more traditional, patriotic, Christian-influenced or Judeo-Christian culture.
But which is the culture that you think people see in Cairo or Damascus or Mumbai?
I remember many years ago, my mom sitting in her living room in Mumbai, she would watch a turn on the TV and there she'd see these American movies and she'd say things like, these Americans are so disgusting.
And what she meant is not America, but Hollywood.
Because this is America's face to the world.
It's the face of a culture without honor, a culture without shame, a culture that appears to want every young woman to be sexually active, that not only condones, but sort of promotes adultery, promiscuity, homosexuality.
All of this is presented to the world as not just the face of liberation, but the face of America.
My point is that when the radical Muslims complain about America being the great Satan, yes, they are talking about American occupation, yes, they're talking about American allies, people like the Saudi Arabian regime, which are hypocritical.
These are guys who pretend to be pious Muslims, but of course pretty soon they're going to casinos in Vegas.
So that's part of it.
They're talking about the fact that you have a cultural imperialism being imposed by the left.
It's so funny. The left keeps talking about, let's not do any cultural appropriation, and so on.
But the left is fully content to shove its values down the throats of people.
Let's remember, most people in the world are very traditional.
These are cultures, by and large, in Asia, in Africa, in the Middle East.
They're patriarchal.
They value, even if they don't always practice, sexual modesty.
Homosexuality, for the most part, is in the closet.
And what they see from American culture are these practices not only presented, not only portrayed, but normalized and celebrated.
Let's remember that...
When we think of Satan in the Abrahamic tradition, which is not just the Jewish and Christian, but also the Islamic tradition, Satan is not really a conqueror.
Satan is a sly tempter.
And if you look at Bin Laden's, read his open letter to America dated, I believe, 2002.
He talks about the flagrant immodesty of America.
He talks about the fact that America is seducing the world into a way of life that the world, the traditional world and certainly the Islamic world, does not want.
I think this is part of the reason why we didn't win hearts and minds in Afghanistan, why we haven't actually won hearts and minds in most of the world.
Anti-Americanism in traditional cultures is fueled by revulsion and disgust, not against American culture, not against the American way of life, But against the liberal way of life.
And so this battle that other people are fighting around the world, we are also fighting here in America.
Liberal culture is a menace, not just to them, but also to us.
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And may God bless America.
I'm really happy to welcome on the podcast Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Nikki Haley is the author of a best-selling book, With All Due Respect.
She's also the founder of Stand for America, which is an advocacy group that promotes policies to strengthen America's economy, culture, and national security.
Nikki, what a pleasure.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
of a somber day tomorrow, the 20th anniversary of 9-11.
As you think about that, reflecting back, and then you look at this kind of Biden disaster in Afghanistan, what are your thoughts and feelings, not only about then, but about now?
Well, Dinesh, it's great to be with you and thank you so much for having me.
You know, 9-11 brings that heavy feeling every year, not just on the 20th anniversary.
Every year it gives us that heavy feeling.
I go back to where I was.
I had just given birth to our second child.
He was born five days prior.
I was home. And was watching TV and watched in real, you know, watched as the plane hit the first tower and then watched in real time as the second plane hit the second tower.
And I remember thinking, what world have I brought my son into?
And, you know, since then, I think it wasn't just, you know, the over 3,000 people who died, whose families lives changed.
America changed on that day.
And, you know, whether it was with My husband, who chose to join the military post 9-11 and ended up serving in Afghanistan and deploying there, or whether it was me who was not politically active at all and decided that we wanted to get involved and do public service and serve our country.
And so I just think about how every life changed that day.
And we, for the first time, realized we were vulnerable.
For the second time, we were united in anger as a country, and we knew that we had to make sure this never happened again.
And so I think that's why the whole Biden kiasco is so painful, is because for all of us, this was very personal.
When we think about this withdrawal, I'm not talking about the 20-year war now, but just about the getting out.
Can you make any sense of why the Biden administration would, A, leave Americans behind, and B, leave a massive armory of military equipment behind, which obviously was going to be confiscated, seized, maybe sold by the Taliban?
It almost makes the United States a state sponsor of terror, maybe against our will.
Why would... It's hard for me to get my head around the idea that this was pure incompetence.
Biden set the date.
The military was carrying it out.
Why do you think that he'd do this?
So, Dinesh, this is like infuriating from the standpoint of you look at the fact that it didn't have to be this way.
And I think that's what everybody keeps saying is it didn't have to be this way.
And what's more infuriating is Biden thinks the more he can talk about COVID and vaccines, the less We'll think about Afghanistan.
This is front and center of every American as we go into the 20th anniversary.
Never did we think the flag flying above Afghanistan was going to be the Taliban flag, and that's what's going to happen tomorrow.
But I think you have to look back at The situation.
If he wanted to get out of Afghanistan, that's fine.
But it's how you get out that matters.
And this was a true insult to every combat veteran that served and deployed in Afghanistan.
Because every one of them could tell you that the Afghans were not capable of being able to defend themselves on their own.
The fact that he chose to do this in the fighting season.
The fact that he left in the middle of the night and didn't tell our allies.
The fact that he abandoned Bagram Air Force Base, which was a NATO hub where that's literally where our allies and we made the best decisions coming out of Bagram that he would leave that.
The idea that he left $85 billion Worth of military weapons, equipment, everything there as a housewarming gift for the Taliban.
All of that is sickening.
But I'll tell you the part that really hits the personal side.
My husband and I were watching a video, and it was Taliban members.
And basically he said, those are our weapons that they were walking around with.
And he saw them riding in their vehicles.
That he had ridden on in Hellman.
And the worst part, Dinesh, was they were wearing our uniforms.
And I'll tell you, they were making fun of us.
And don't think they won't use those uniforms to come to America and we won't know that that is literally an American uniform that was left in Afghanistan.
But all of this And you went against the one moral code that we have in America.
We love life.
We love people.
We believe in human rights.
And we did the unthinkable.
We left Americans behind.
And you know, when Jen Psaki and Biden started referring to it as rescues, that means you've got hostages there.
That's what this was.
We left hostages in Afghanistan.
And for people like my husband, And his unit, you know, when they went over and they had translators that kept them safe, they would have died without those translators.
They looked them in the eye and said, we won't forget you.
We will take care of you.
And every veteran is feeling heavy because they know there were people left behind.
Most importantly, Americans left behind.
Secondly, allies that joined shoulder to shoulder.
All of this why?
This is my theory of why I think this happened.
I think that Biden was determined to do what Trump said he was going to do, and he wanted to do it as well.
He wanted to get out.
And I think his military commanders said, We can get out.
But in order to do this right, we're going to have to send more troops to do it.
That was the only way they could secure Bagram Air Force Base.
So they would have had to send 5000 troops.
They would have secured Bagram Air Force Base.
They would have gotten all the Americans, vetted the allies and gotten them out through that.
And it would have been done right.
And it would have been done safely.
And then you could bring everybody home.
What Biden did was we had 2500 troops on the ground.
He ended up having to send 5,000 carelessly anyway, 7,500 troops there, no Bagram Air Force Base, no weapons and equipment to bring back, leaving Americans behind, 13 soldiers dead, 20 wounded, and our allies don't understand what we're thinking.
This could not have gone any worse than it did.
When we come back, I want to ask Nikki Haley more about the ways in which the Afghan disaster has emboldened radical Islam around the world.
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Bye.
I'm back with former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, founder of a group called Stand for America.
Nikki, you were talking a moment ago about hostages.
You used the phrase hostages, and it flashes my mind back to the late 1970s when I first came to America.
You remember the hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter and Walter Cronkite every day intoning, it's been 10 days, it's been 39 days, it's been 45 days, a kind of Almost a daily count, keeping the hostages front and center in the American mind.
We don't have any of that now.
It almost appears as if a lot of the media wants to protect Biden on this, help him to kind of move beyond Afghanistan, and they don't even use the term hostages.
The Biden people, if you listen to their rhetoric, it makes them sound like, well, I mean, there might be a few Americans who still want to get out, but a lot evidently want to stay.
Now, does this make any sense to you, the idea that Americans want to stay and be, what, ruled by the Taliban?
Well, you know, I think that the media started to get a conscience a little bit when they saw what a cluster all of this was in Afghanistan, and they started to give Biden a hard time.
But they quickly realized this was going downhill fast, and now they see it as they have to save him.
And so, you know, whether it's them referring to the Taliban as being businesslike and professional, which was like...
Disgusting. There's nothing businesslike or professional about the Taliban.
Or whether they go and try and refer, you know, they won't say that they won't acknowledge the Taliban as the head of the Afghan government, which would be terrible.
I mean, all of these things have emboldened terrorism around the world, and they have made us weaker at home.
I think that you have, you know, when you have all of the celebrations, not only did this embolden the Taliban, We're good to go.
In Afghanistan to know what's going on, what it means, what the terrorists are planning.
We really have no plan on how we're going to keep America safe at home.
That's another issue.
And I think that Biden thinks that if he talks about infrastructure, if he talks about COVID, then the terrorists will forget and they'll move on to something else.
But keep in mind, front and center of every one of these terrorist groups is the theme of Death to America.
That has not stopped.
That is their culture.
That is their way. That's what they're going to continue to do.
And I'll tell you, in the American hearts and minds, we're still thinking about the Americans and the allies left overseas.
We're still watching as we see people We know what the terrorists are thinking.
We know those Americans need to come home.
It's Biden who's thinking if he doesn't talk about it, it's out of sight, out of mind.
And that's just not the case, no matter how much the media tries to cover for him.
You mentioned a moment ago, and I think this is important, the connection between the national security crisis and the border crisis.
I say that because it seems like part of the initial campaign in not just Afghanistan but Iraq was we kind of have to fight them over there so that we don't have to fight them over here.
This was part of the kind of justification for the relatively long-term commitment that America was making in these countries.
But if you don't fight them over there...
You've got to at least prevent them from coming over here, right?
So if you have a porous border the way Biden has had all this time, isn't it the case that not just people from South America, but people from all over the world can infiltrate the United States with the worst of motives and we're not doing a whole bunch to stop them?
Well, first of all, we don't have to fight them over there, right?
I think that we don't have to necessarily fight them over there.
As long as we have intelligence on the ground, we know exactly what's happening.
I saw that in Syria.
You know, if we had just intelligence on the ground, the Russians would let us know what they were doing before they did it.
Syria, we could always keep eyes on.
We even knew what Iran was doing before they did it.
So a small intelligence presence can go a long way.
You don't have to fight a war.
is now you look at the border.
I can tell you firsthand, President Trump had a terrible border crisis.
And I was on the National Security Council and I actually had feet on the ground in Guatemala and Honduras where we saw all of those refugees coming from.
And the one thing that President Trump said was, we knew these were American loving countries.
And he said, okay, what are the issues on the ground?
We knew they had gang trouble.
We knew they had drug issues.
We knew they had trafficking.
So Americans were over there.
We went over there. We trained them on how to deal with their gangs.
We intelligence worked with them on how to stop the drug deals that were going across the water.
What a lot of people don't realize that President Trump did was, along those lines, coming to our border, he actually put law enforcement there to make sure they were safe, and we had medical professionals there to make sure if a child got hurt, if something happened, that we could actually take care of them.
But the Trump administration's process was tough love.
We told Honduras and Guatemala, if you want to have people come here, they have to stay there.
We have to process them.
We have to vet them.
We have to do that. We will help you learn how to control your gangs.
We will help you learn how to deal with the intelligence.
But we are not going to do this if you keep allowing it to come through.
That's how President Trump stopped the border crisis.
Was in the name of Trump reversals, which is all that he's done.
He did a Trump reversal, created an entire new crisis all over again.
Now he's trying to go back and actually do what Trump did with the Made in Mexico policy, acting like it's his own policy.
This was the right one to start with.
But, you know, now there's another issue of whether it's Afghans, whether it's through the border, we have to vet these people.
We have to make sure we know who's coming into this country.
We have to properly vet and go through all the steps and make sure we do it right.
When I was governor in South Carolina, you'll remember, Dinesh, we had the whole Syrian refugee crisis.
I, as a governor, contacted the CIA and I said, okay, how is this different than our other refugees?
What do we know?
And he said, well, we don't have enough information on them.
And I said, well, I can't take them into South Carolina.
It's the same thing.
If you don't have information, you can't put American lives at risk by not vetting these people properly.
You know, what we were doing with the Afghan allies was they had to go through a 14-step process, very vigorous process, to make sure we knew exactly who they were, what they did for us, they met criteria.
Only then did we have them come over.
We have to make sure that we are doing that with everyone.
You know, you can appreciate this, and I know my parents came here from India.
They put in the time.
They put in the price.
They came here legally.
They are offended by people who come here illegally.
We are a country of laws.
The second we stop being a country of laws, we give up everything this country was founded on.
When we come back, I want to explore with Nikki Haley the wider ramifications for US foreign policy of what's happened in Afghanistan.
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I'm back with former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, author of the best-selling book With All Due Respect, and also the founder of Stand for America. Nikki, we were talking about, really, about refugees and about immigrants, and you and I both have an immigrant background.
Let me ask you, though, about the Afghan refugees, because it seems like there's 100,000 of them.
Now, they can't all be translators, I'm assuming.
And I read in the Wall Street Journal that many of the people who most actively helped America were not on those planes.
They were actually left behind.
And the Biden administration has said, yeah, we got to vet these guys in Dubai.
We got to vet them in Europe.
They don't seem to know exactly who these people are, so while I'm not against bailing out people who have bailed us out over the long term, my question is, do you think that we have a good handle on who these refugees are, and is it a good idea to just dispel them among the US population prior to proper vetting?
No, we have to vet.
I mean, you know, my husband's unit, their interpreter came here.
It was easily a three to four year process of vetting and making sure they knew everything.
I'm proud to say that now that he's here, he is now an American citizen and he helps challenge youth graduate from high school so they can come on and do great things.
But we need to make sure it is truly the allies that helps our soldiers that want to come over.
Because right now, with the Taliban in charge of Afghanistan, every Afghan wants to come over.
But that's not our role.
That's not our job. They have to vet.
This is why Bagram Air Force Base was so important.
It was an intelligence hub.
It was a place where we could have done this vetting properly.
We could have kept them protected.
What's happening now is you've got the true people that want to come over.
They can't get through a checkpoint.
If they're green card holders, if they're Americans, The Taliban are taking their passport.
They're taking their green cards.
The scary thought is, what do they do with those passports?
And what do they do with that information?
That's now the key.
We have to always properly vet.
And that's if Biden would have done this right.
Worked with our allies.
We could have made sure that none of the vetting process was compromised.
I don't know that they're doing full vetting now, but they have to always do it.
There are ways to maintain human rights, but there are ways to do it the right way, not a dumb way.
We sometimes think that the bad effect of something like this is going to just be around the ripples of Afghanistan.
But I noticed that North Korea is starting to fire up its nuclear program.
I'm sure the Iranians feel a sense of immunity in what they can do now, pushing forward.
We see very blustering comments coming out of China.
I saw a little social media exchange with the US Navy, where the US Navy was saying, hey, we have a right to be in the South China Sea.
And the Chinese were saying, well, do we have the rights to be in the Caribbean?
You want to see some Chinese ships show up at Alaska, Guam, or right off the coast of Florida?
So it appears that there's been a kind of emboldening of Turkey, of Iran, of North Korea, of China.
Are we moving as a result of Biden's actions into a more dangerous world?
And what do we do about that?
Definitely. The world is less safe.
America is less safe. And do you blame all of our adversaries for being overjoyed that this has happened?
I mean, this is not just Afghanistan, Dinesh.
I mean, if you look at the fact that Russia, you know, when we had the hacking over the pipeline and the hacking over the food processing plant, That wasn't, you know, and Russia said, oh, it wasn't us.
That was just an actor that happened to be in Russia.
No, it was Russia.
They just didn't want their fingerprints on it.
They knew exactly what that was going to happen.
But what that was, was not a full blown hacking to hurt us.
It was to test us.
They were checking to see how America would respond.
You know how Biden responded?
He wagged his finger and said, you better not let them do this.
You better get a hold of it.
They totally realized they didn't need to fear us.
He then turns around and allows them to have access to that Nord Stream pipeline that weakened Ukraine, weakened our allies, emboldened Russia and gave them everything they wanted.
They allow hackings to happen with no sanctions.
They allow them to get much more money.
He's falling over himself to do business with Iran.
China Basically, watched what happened in Afghanistan and used it as propaganda to tell Taiwan, see, this is how America handles with their allies.
This is what you can expect.
So they could start to create more threats over Taiwan, which is what they've done, and more threats in the South China Sea.
I mean, what you saw was really, in just seven months' time, Biden emboldened our adversaries and weakened America.
And it can happen just that fast.
And now, no one fears America.
Why would they? And did you ever think NATO would be talking and planning things without America now?
They see us more as a liability.
I mean, we could not have handled these last seven months worse.
And we have to start correcting things.
We have to start standing up to Russia, letting them know we've got to make sure China doesn't get Bagram Air Force base.
We can't let up on sanctions with Iran.
North Korea is now trying to test us.
We have to make sure that we hold tight to what we're doing and not let them have any flexibility on those sanctions.
And we've got to start getting strong in the world.
We've got to go meet with all of our allies again and let them know we're back on track.
I don't know that Biden's prepared to do all that.
that and you look at you know his secretary of state you look at his national security advisor it just seems like we've got some think tank people in there but they're way over their heads with this. I mean isn't it the case that we also have to alert the American people that this is kind of what happens when you vote for Democrats and I say that because I my mind flashes back to the 90s when the radical Muslims they bombed Kobar towers they had attacks on our embassies they attacked the USS Cole precisely the kind of
testing that you're describing with Russia was a bin Laden form of testing you could say as a as a rehearsal for 9-11 And when they found that America didn't pretty much do anything, they went, wow, let's go right ahead.
So it looks like we're giving them the green light all over again, doesn't it?
Elections have consequences.
And when I was at the United Nations, we spoke with a strong, loud voice.
They feared us.
They knew that they had to pay attention to what we said.
They didn't have to like us.
They didn't have to agree with us, but they respected us.
And overall, what I found was most countries really appreciated the freedoms that we had.
Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to do and be anything we wanted to be without government getting in the way.
And so while they may not have liked us, they all wanted to be us.
And most of them wanted to follow us.
They would rather follow the United States than follow Russia or China.
But now they're looking at America that left Americans behind.
They're looking at America that's begging Iran to do business with them.
They're looking at America that's really fallen so below China that China is now emboldened and believes it's the superpower of the world.
And we did this to ourselves.
And we've got to figure out how we're going to make this right and pull back so that we are strong again, because we're not right now.
Nikki Haley, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it.
It was a real pleasure.
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Some senior figures at the United Nations are speaking out against the Texas pro-life law.
This is, these are UN experts. According to the Guardian, UN experts condemn Texas abortion law as sex discrimination quote, at its worst, at its worst.
Now, they quote Melissa O'Brady, who's the chair of the UN's Working Group on Discrimination.
And she says this is quote, the Texas law is quote, structural sex and gender based discrimination at its worst.
She says it's profoundly discriminatory and violates a number of rights guaranteed under international law.
She's very critical of the U.S. Supreme Court.
And here's another individual, Reema Alsalem, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women.
She says this has not only taken Texas backward, it's taken the entire country backward.
Now, first of all, I want to focus on this phrase, at its worst, because there are horrific forms of sex discrimination going on all over the world.
In India, for example, you've got all kinds of practices where you've got bride burnings and you've got people who set their wives on fire.
In Indian villages, throughout many parts of the Muslim world, there's no education for young girls or the education is interrupted.
Women are not allowed to drive in certain places.
You've got sex trafficking and forced prostitution.
So all of this would seem to define sex discrimination at its worst.
But the United Nations evidently thinks that the Texas law is worse than all of this.
It's the ultimate extreme.
And then the question to me is...
Where is the discrimination at all?
I've got to say here that the UN is proving itself to be very un-woke, because the whole concept that the Texas law is sex discrimination is based on the idea that you've got these two sexes.
You've got men, you've got women, only women can get pregnant, only women can have babies, and therefore restrictions on abortion are a burden that falls solely upon one gender and not about the other gender.
But wait, wait, wait!
What have we been learning from the woke lexicon all this time?
We've been told that, first of all, there's no sharp distinction between men and women.
We're told that gender is a social construct.
We're told that there are 83 different genders, and there are innumerable intermediate points between male and female.
We're told that women are not the only ones who can get pregnant.
What about trans individuals, biological males who undergo all kinds of surgical...
Procedures. Can't they get pregnant as well?
So somehow the UN seems to have...
They don't seem to have gotten the woke memo.
They haven't gotten my...
I'm compiling a woke dictionary.
They haven't gotten my woke dictionary yet.
They're still acting as if there are these kind of rigid genders.
So what I'm getting at here is these people need to get with the program.
I mean, you... You know, you've got all these people, they want to wear exotic outfits and eat in fine New York restaurants.
They need to spend a little more time studying woke culture.
And then they're going to recognize that you can't call restrictions on abortion sex discrimination.
You can't call it discrimination against women because you know what?
There are no men and there are no women.
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I want to talk about the medieval philosopher Peter Abelard's remarkable theory, his exposition of the Christian doctrine of the atonement.
Now, I discussed yesterday how Abelard rejected the so-called ransom theory of the Atonement.
By the way, a theory that's been accepted by many great Christian thinkers, Origen, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and so on.
And Abelard decided, concluded that this theory made no sense.
But if he rejected that, what was Abelard's theory of the Atonement?
Well, Abelard's theory begins with an exposition of Paul's letter to the Romans, in which Paul emphasizes the centrality of grace.
And what Paul means by grace is that salvation is a gift from God.
It is an unmerited gift.
It's given by God out of God's, you may say, graciousness.
And it is not something that is achieved by human merit.
Now, Abelard completely agrees with this.
He says, without grace, no one can do the least thing.
But this raises a deep problem, and Abelard is very aware of it, which is that if redemption is entirely God's doing, and no human effort at all is required, how can you explain why some people are saved and other people are not?
How do you explain salvation and damnation?
Now, one way to explain it, and this way became very influential a little bit later during the Protestant Reformation and specifically with Calvinism, is the idea of the elect.
That God predestines certain people for salvation and he predestines other people to damnation.
In other words, God has favorites.
God chooses. He decides, yes, you, you, and you, but not you and not you and not you.
And very interestingly, Abelard is discussing this issue of God playing favorites and the issue of merit.
He's discussing this issue at least a couple of hundred years before the Reformation.
Abelot takes up a text that is referred to by Paul in Romans 9.13, but Paul is actually quoting from the book of Malachi, and here's the quote, the quote attributed to the God of the Old Testament, to God himself.
Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.
And Paul himself is a little, you can tell, startled by the quote because Paul says, Here's Avalard talking about this.
He says the apostle, meaning Paul, rightly raises an objection on the basis of the preceding words, which is, Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated.
He goes,"...it is as it were an accusation, an indictment of God, who by not predestining Esau judged him worthy of hate, even before he was able to merit anything, and withheld from him such grace as he gave the other brother, when his brother likewise had not previously merited anything." So, here's Abelard saying, wow, I mean, how could Esau be good when God never gave him the grace to be good?
How can we defend, if you will, the justice of God if God is playing favorites in this way?
Now, Abelard, this is how Abelard puts it.
He says, yes, God does have the right to choose who He chooses.
God doesn't owe us anything.
The potter has full rights over the clay.
But Avalar says that even if God is sort of vindicated on that count, God doesn't, in a sense, owe us grace.
He doesn't owe us salvation.
He hasn't wronged us if He doesn't give it to us.
Avalar says at the same time, how do you blame somebody for not doing the right thing, for ending up in hell, when God never gave them the grace that they need to get into heaven?
Here's how Abelard puts it.
He goes, If someone is not saved, what fault is it of his, since God never willed to give him the grace by which he might be saved, and he could not be saved without it?
Now, Abelard says, at the first glance, you're tempted to say, wait a minute, maybe what God does is he offers grace to the sinners and saints alike, and the saints say yes, and the sinners say no, and so it's not God who's to blame, it's we are to blame for our own damnation.
But Abelard very shrewdly says, this doesn't entirely work.
It doesn't entirely work.
Why? Because Abelard says, you need grace to choose grace.
Even though God may offer grace, it takes grace to be able to recognize what God is offering, the importance of it, and to say yes.
Even that human act of saying yes does require grace.
Abelard gives a rather chilling example of a doctor who brings a medicine to your house to cure a patient, but he says the patient is sort of too weak to take it.
The patient can't sit up.
And so Abelard says, whose fault is it that the patient doesn't get the medicine and dies?
It's not the patient's fault.
The patient didn't have the strength to sit up.
It's obviously the fault of the doctor, and the doctor can't say, wow, I brought the medicine, if the doctor doesn't sit the patient up and sort of make sure the patient takes the medicine.
It is obligatory on the doctor to administer the cure, not merely provide the means to the cure, when the patient is not in a position to avail of those means.
The way that Abelard defends the justice of God in the end is he does it this way.
Abelard says, yes, it does take grace to recognize grace.
But you know what? That grace, the grace to say yes to grace, God has given to everybody.
In other words, God has given to everybody the grace to be able to exercise a free choice.
The grace to be able to make their own decision.
If they need grace to make that decision, they have it.
But despite having the grace, they have the ability to, in a sense, say, you know what?
God has given me the grace to say yes, but nevertheless I choose to say no.
Abelard gives the example of a rich man who goes into the marketplace and there are a bunch of needy people there and he tells them all, listen, I've got a great Priceless gift to give all of you.
And all I want you to do in exchange for this gift is essentially to come under my service or to say yes to me, to give full acceptance, if you will, to this gift.
And some of the people go, yeah, I want it.
I'll take it. I agree with your offer.
I accept it. Other people say, well, you know what?
Very nice of you, but I don't really want it.
I don't want to be part of your generosity.
I don't want to draw closer to you in this way.
I don't want to accept any kind of obligation or lordship of you over my life.
And so, even though I have the grace, you're making the offer, you're giving me the means to say yes, I'm choosing to say no.
So this is really Abelard's, I think, beautiful theory of the atonement.
Why? Because it is an effort to reconcile the indispensability of grace, which Paul emphasizes in the book of Romans, with the ability of human beings at the end to be able to say yes or no to God.
God is responsible for our salvation, but we are responsible for our own damnation.
It's time for our mailbox, guys.
If you have a question, send it to me, prefer audio or video, questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Let's go to our question for today.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
Tom from Houston. I'm just trying to figure out the rationale, if any, behind abandoning Bagram Air Force Base and leaving behind $85 billion worth of weaponry.
Was this another Obama ploy to humiliate the U.S., or am I missing something?
Thank you. Very good question.
I'll try to answer briefly.
It seems to me there are three possible explanations for why we did that, why we left all that stuff behind.
The first one, which makes to me the least sense, is pure incompetence and negligence.
I say that makes no sense because It would make sense.
Let's say the United States was leaving in a kind of mad hurry, kind of the way that troops run off a battlefield.
Yeah, you leave all kinds of equipment.
It's because you're running helter-skelter.
You don't know what's going on.
But this was not the case here.
Let's remember that the United States set its own schedules.
This was a planned withdrawal on a date given by Biden.
And so it doesn't make any sense to me that when you're planning it, it's kind of like planning to move out of your house but you leave half your stuff behind.
Really? Why? Why would you do that?
The second possibility is we wanted to arm the Taliban.
I've talked before about the malevolence of Obamaism and how that's carried over into Bidenism.
This idea, we want to teach America itself a lesson, but I find it a little hard to fully embrace the idea that we wanted to become America, Biden, a state sponsor of terror.
that we actually wanted to create an even more powerful terrorist force than would be created simply by the US pulling out. So I turn to a third explanation which I haven't talked about before and this is the explanation that Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex and that's this.
Think about it, the United States leaves behind 85 billion dollars of equipment.
What's gonna happen now? Well we're gonna probably order that equipment from Raytheon and Boeing and all these defense contractors, Lockheed and so on.
So this is massive business.
And why would the generals in the military be interested in this business?
For the simple reason that when they retire, where do they go?
They become consultants and board members, and they become part of that military-industrial complex themselves.
So there's a kind of symbiotic relationship between this highly profitable defense establishment on the one hand And the generals and the Biden people on the other.
And so this provides a third possible motive, which has nothing to do with terrorism, nothing to do with Afghanistan, and more to do with helping people in uniform in the later part of their lives feed at the public trough.
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