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Sept. 13, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:04
BIDEN’S HOSTAGE CRISIS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 173
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Joe Biden has a hostage crisis in Afghanistan in much the same way that Jimmy Carter did in Iran.
The difference is that Biden thinks if you don't call it a hostage crisis, it won't be a hostage crisis.
The philosopher Nietzsche spoke about the last man, weak, effeminate, and I think this is a perfect description of both Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
Author and historian Mary Graybar joins me to talk about the falsehoods of the 1619 Project.
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.
There are still a whole bunch of Americans who want to get out of Afghanistan but can't.
That exact number is not known.
The Biden administration is minimizing it.
Why? The real difference is this.
It's not being acknowledged either by Biden or by his supporters in the media as a hostage crisis.
You remember in the Jimmy Carter days, the hostage issue was front and center.
Every single day, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Walter Cronkite, it's day 47 of the hostage crisis.
And it went on like that, keeping the reality of the situation, the crisis of it, in front of the American public.
And that put pressure on the Cardo administration to figure out what to do, because a crisis creates a sense of urgency.
When you know that you have Americans being held hostage, you've got to figure out a plan, a rescue, some sort of a way of getting them back.
A solution, perhaps an ultimatum.
And the thing about Biden is they don't want to do any of this.
And so what is their solution?
Their solution is basically, let's try to convince the American people that there is no there there.
That maybe the Americans who are there don't want to leave.
Or maybe they do want to leave, but we've kind of, this is something we're just going to be kind of working on.
Let's not use the so-called H word.
Now, There might be some people who dispute this characterization and say, well, listen, the difference, of course, was in Iran, the students, radical students were holding these people in a physical confinement.
That's not going on in Afghanistan.
Well, it is.
And it is for the simple reason that who controls Afghanistan?
The Taliban control it 100%.
Are the Taliban or are they not a bunch of terrorists?
Is this or is it not a terrorist regime?
It is. And therefore, it follows that a terrorist regime now has full control over the fate of not just American allies in Afghanistan, but of American citizens in Afghanistan.
Let's remember that Biden said to Stephanopoulos, this goes back to August 19th, we're going to stay to get them all out.
Clearly untrue. That didn't happen.
Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, he says, I'm not aware of anyone being held on an aircraft or any hostage-like situation.
What he means, I think, is simply that he hasn't seen people with the blindfolds.
He hasn't seen people with Taliban standing over them heavily armed.
And absent that physical image...
He's saying they're not hostages.
Not really. Not by my definition.
Well, by any normal definition of people who want to get out but are being held against their will, they can't get out, and their own country can't get them out, except with the consent of the terrorists who are holding them.
Well... That is about as clinical a definition of a hostage as you're going to get.
We have Americans stranded behind enemy lines.
And as I've said before, this is not the result of some kind of miscalculation.
It's not the result of getting out in a big hurry, because after all, this was a date set by the Biden administration in advance.
This is a crisis that Biden made.
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The Biden administration has a certain type of white male running American foreign policy.
I'm thinking specifically here of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
I'm thinking also of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
And if you look carefully at these guys and you look at them doing a news conference, doing a press interview, Certain characteristics sort of jump to mind, raising the question, what are we actually looking at?
So think about a guy like Jake Sullivan.
Here I'm looking at his interview with Nicole Wallace a day or two ago.
He's talking about the Taliban and he's asked straight out, would you call him an enemy?
So simple. He's been fighting them for 20 years.
This is not a tough question. Jake Sullivan is like, it's hard to put a label on it.
And I'm looking at this guy, and it's more, it's what he says, but it's how he says it.
He's got this kind of weak, effeminate voice.
I look at him, he's got these thin strands of hair, like, almost pasted onto his head.
He's got this pasty face.
He's got this kind of weak demeanor, lackluster tie.
Anthony Blinken is like a clone of Jake Sullivan.
You know, these whiny boys.
And here's Blinken.
He's talking about the Taliban.
And then they put all these terrorists in high positions.
You know, it's all male.
He goes, it certainly doesn't meet the test of inclusivity.
And it includes people who have very challenging track records.
I'm thinking to myself, you know, where do you find these people and what am I looking at?
Well, I figured out what I'm looking at.
I'm looking at... The philosopher Nietzsche's last man.
Nietzsche regarded this last man as being just one step above a kind of insect, an absolutely loathsome, despicable creature.
Now, in Nietzsche's philosophy, many people know about the sort of the zenith, Nietzsche's hero.
Nietzsche's hero is the Ubermensch, the overman, the brave figure who takes risk and is willing to even put his life on the line, a person of great artistic and creativity.
So this is Nietzsche's Superman, if you will, and people know about that, but not as many people know about Nietzsche's opposite, the antithesis of the Ubermensch.
And this is the passive nihilist.
This is basically the guy, typically male, who's not much of a man at all.
And Nietzsche has beautiful descriptions of the last man which I want to get to.
What happens with Nietzsche is he talks about the fact that even though Zarathustra, who is Nietzsche's prophet, offers people the Superman, there's a way for man to sort of rise above himself.
The crowd shuts, we don't want that!
We don't want the Superman!
We want the Last Man!
And so Nietzsche goes, let's look at who this Last Man is.
He says, sometimes a civilization becomes so decayed that it no longer produces real men.
I'm quoting Nietzsche now. One day the soil will be so poor and weak that no high tree will be able to grow from it.
Again, Nietzsche, the time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars.
Stars in the sky.
Behold, I shall show you the last man.
Now, who is this last man?
As Nietzsche describes him.
Here's Nietzsche. The last man, he says, is...
Not an individual.
He is a type.
He's part of a herd.
He wants to disappear into the herd.
His motivating aspirations are comfort, security.
He doesn't want to be bothered.
He doesn't want to take any risk.
He's not somebody who's brave.
He's the opposite of brave.
He's stagnant. He sees himself as a victim.
In fact, he sees himself as a victim among fellow victims.
He's de-individualized.
He's pathetic. Nietzsche says that the last man is popular among certain types.
He says he's a contemptible type of person that is popular among shopkeepers, cows, females, Englishmen, and other Democrats.
Nietzsche using the term Democrats here with the small d.
And Nietzsche hates all these people.
He hates Englishmen.
He's kind of misogynistic.
He's not too hot on women.
So for Nietzsche, this is a pathetic type of Somebody who actually leans to and appeals to the principle of equality.
Why? Because in any equal society, a miserable, low creature like this is lifted up.
Whereas in an individualistic or meritocratic society, this kind of pathetic individual is left behind.
Of course, the great irony of all this is that in addition to Anthony Blinken being a last man and Jake Sullivan being a last man, Nietzsche himself was also a last man.
Nietzsche himself was never married.
He once proposed to someone who rejected him emphatically.
There are rumors that Nietzsche was gay.
He had no friends. He was entirely raised by women.
So this kind of weak, effeminate character, that was also Nietzsche.
But I think the difference for Nietzsche is Nietzsche knew that that was a pathetic way to be.
And Nietzsche in his mind tried to be something bigger, stronger, more heroic than the actual Nietzsche himself.
And that's what distinguishes Nietzsche from Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken.
At least Nietzsche aspired to higher things.
But these two pathetic individuals don't.
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The Biden administration has announced a very draconian vaccine mandate policy.
This is a policy that not only mandates vaccines inside of the federal government, but also requires that businesses which have more than 100 employees must require that the employees get vaccinated or make the unvaccinated employees take weekly COVID tests.
And this is an order that covers 80 million workers, businesses that don't comply face fines.
And this is Biden, I think, grossly exceeding his constitutional authority in imposing this requirement.
But I want to talk here not so much about the legality of what Biden is doing, but the argument, the logic behind Biden's decision.
The first question you want to ask in this situation is simply this.
Why are you trying to force this upon people?
Is there a good case for getting vaccinated?
I believe there is. But if that's the case, why not make that case to the American people?
persuade them, and they will, as pretty good assessors of their own self-interest, go to an ordinary American and say, here on my left hand is a hundred dollar bill, and my right hand is a one dollar bill, which would you like to have? It's not very difficult when you make good arguments for why something benefits someone, that they would go for the better option. Now I admit that with children it's not quite the same thing.
We, for example, do require vaccines for children, other vaccines, before they can enroll, for example, in public school.
But American citizens are not children.
You can say to children, you must eat your broccoli.
That's what a parent will say on the dinner table.
But you don't really say to adults, I'm going to force you to eat your broccoli.
You say broccoli is good for you.
Broccoli is going to postpone that trip you have to make to the doctor.
So my question is, and you know, it's amazing the tyrannical streak you encounter even sometimes when you're walking around.
Even outside, you'll be approached by some like 400-pounder, you know, may I introduce you to the concept of the mask?
I'm like, may I introduce you to the concept of the salad bar?
So you've got this bullying mentality, and evidently it's now found full efficacy in the Biden administration.
Now, Biden says, let's follow his logic, we're going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers.
And then he goes on to extol the benefits of the vaccine.
I'm quoting him. As the science makes clear, if you're fully vaccinated, you're highly protected from severe illness, even if you get COVID-19.
Let's think about this for a minute.
Because if that's true, and I believe it is true, that vaccination does in fact protect you from A, hospitalization, B, serious symptoms, or C, death.
If that's true, then the first part doesn't really follow.
In other words, A can be true or B can be true, but they can't both be true.
If it is true that the vaccine is highly effective in preventing serious illness...
How can you argue that the vaccinated people are in great danger and they need to be protected from the unvaccinated?
They don't. Why?
Because the unvaccinated do not pose a mortal threat of any kind to the vaccinated.
The unvaccinated only pose a mortal threat, if you will, to themselves.
And being adults, they have the right, just as you have the right, to go on a bridge and lean over, irresponsible though that might be, you have the right to do it, Why?
Why? Because you're posing a threat only to yourself.
Again, as we enumerate the benefits of the vaccine, yes, there are breakthrough cases, but they're extremely rare.
Very few, if any, breakthrough cases have by themselves resulted in hospitalization or death.
The simple fact is, it follows, that when you take the vaccine, you have a high margin of safety.
Doesn't mean you're not going to get COVID-19.
Doesn't mean that you can't transmit it.
But it doesn't mean that your own danger of, let us say, serious illness or death...
That is approaching—that becomes negligible.
And so that's the point to make here, is that there is a very draconian policy being implemented to protect people who really aren't in grave danger, who don't need that kind of serious protection.
And therefore, it seems to me that in a free society, when you weigh the costs and benefits, you want to take the least restrictive road that you can that is compatible with public goods or with public health.
Biden is not doing that, and this is the moral case against a mandated vaccine.
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She's a resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.
We're going to talk about her new book, Debunking the 1619 Project.
Wow! Mary Graybar has taught at colleges around the country, including Emory University.
Her articles have appeared numerous places.
Mary, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
Why did you pick this topic, the 1619 Project?
Is this something that, I mean, I know the New York Times announced it with great fanfare, but has it been insidiously burrowing its way into the curricula around the country?
Is that what you found? Yes.
As a matter of fact, before the ink had dried on this special issue of the magazine, it was being shipped to 3,500 schools.
It's in over 4,500 schools.
My motivation was that I just hated the thought of indoctrination and lying to kids from K-12.
I saw this after writing my Zen book, and I decided to go for it.
So you've done a book that exposes the lives of Howard Zinn and his so-called history from below.
That's what you're referring to.
Let's focus on the 1619 Project here because it seems to me, what would you describe if you were to say, what is the single kind of big lie, if you will, the wholesale lie that runs through the 1619 Project, out of which the little retail lies come out, you might say? What's the big lie?
The Big Lie is the title of one of my chapters, Unlike Anything That Had Ever Existed Before.
So basically, that's what the lead essay says, that slavery here in America was unlike anything that had ever existed before.
You can't go farther back in history before the beginning of slavery.
It was an existence around the world All major religions have justified it and practiced it.
Now, slavery existed, as you note, in ancient China, in India, in Greece and Rome.
It existed in every known civilization.
But I think that one would have to admit that there were certain distinctive aspects to race-based slavery, right?
You'd admit that the slavery of one racial group enslaving another was, in fact, something not unique to the American experience, but unique to modern slavery.
Yes, I would say that by, you know, the 17th century, Africans, sub-Saharan Africans were seen as being, you know, people to be enslaved, but that's not to say that that's the way it was throughout history.
I'm Slavic.
I was born in Slovenia, and the Named Slav comes, you know, we get slave from Slav.
So it's all peoples have been enslaved.
Is there any mention in the 1619 Project of the fact that there were approximately 3,500 black slave owners in America between 1820 and 1860 who collectively owned more than 10,000 black slaves?
Is this brought up at any level in this entire document?
Absolutely not.
If you were to get your history from the 1619 Project, you would think that slavery was invented here in the colonies and that it was practiced only here and not anywhere else, and that only white people enslaved others.
So no mention, for example, about the Cherokee slave catchers, no mention about the fact that American Indians own slaves.
You know, it seems to me that one of the kind of wholesale lies that drives critical race theory and the 1619 Project is this, and that is that in American history, you do have a tradition of exploitation, but you have a tradition of freedom.
And if you look at the trajectory of American history, it seems that the tradition of freedom is expanding and the tradition of exploitation is contracting.
And that's why, for example, we no longer have slavery.
We no longer have segregation.
We no longer have Jim Crow.
We don't have four million members of the Ku Klux Klan knight riding over black neighborhoods.
So all of this would seem to suggest that the emancipatory side of America has triumphed largely over the other.
Again, is there any hint of this story of progress in the 1619 Project or do they portray American history as a kind of succession of uninterrupted crimes in which the situation today is just as bad as it was in 1940, which is just as bad as it was in 1840, which is just as bad as it was in 1740?
Well, no, there is no hint of that.
In fact, the only hint is the struggle of the slaves themselves and their descendants, which is a kind of a Marxist struggle.
So all disparities that we have today are traced back to slavery and to the discrimination under Jim Crow and terrorism under the Ku Klux Klan.
So, any progress was made through this Marxist struggle.
Well, Mary, isn't that absurd in the sense that we had slavery in America?
Let's just go back to 16.
Let's just say from 1619 to 1865, and that entire duration, as far as I'm familiar with, there were a few minor slave revolts, all of them squashed, not a single successful one in the United States.
I And ultimately, the end of slavery is not brought about by the slaves.
It's brought about by the largely white Union armies marching through the South and bringing to an end the institution.
So how does the Marxist model fit the description of what actually happened?
Well, it doesn't fit.
It denies what actually happened.
So the Denmark-Veisi revolt was a Quashed because, you know, a black slave owner encouraged a slave to tell his owner about what was going to happen.
So it does not, you know, it does not happen.
way. When we come back, I want to talk to Mary Graybar about some of the kind of heroes of the American tradition, Jefferson, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and how even these figures are either downplayed or villainized by the 1619 Project.
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I'm back with Mary Graybar, author of Debunking the 1619 Project, published by Regnery.
Mary, let's talk about some of the prominent figures of American history.
We're not talking here about the Confederates.
We're not even talking about Robert E. Lee.
I want to talk about the way in which the 1619 Project even targets people like Jefferson, Lincoln, perhaps even Frederick Douglass.
Let's start with I think the most problematic case of the three, namely Jefferson.
Jefferson was in fact a slave owner.
He owned a couple of hundred black slaves.
Why is Jefferson an American hero?
And why is the 1619 Project wrong in portraying Jefferson as an all-round bad guy?
Yes, he is a hero.
He has been for the longest time known as the Apostle of Freedom.
for authoring the Declaration of Independence, and that's on his tombstone, one of his great accomplishments that he thought of.
And the big lie that's told in the 1619 Project is that he never intended to abolish slavery.
So the mere fact that he owned slaves is taken as evidence of his guilt, and he is portrayed in the 1619 Project as this owner of a slave labor camp.
That's the term that's being used, meant to evoke the labor camps of the Nazis and the Communists.
The fact was Jefferson was born into a slave-owning family His earliest memory from the time he was two or three years old was of being carried on horseback by a trusted slave.
His father died when he was 14 years old.
When he came of age, he was given this responsibility of taking care of these people and his mother's estates.
He could not, just with the snap of his fingers, free these people.
This was a society where slavery was being practiced commonly.
He tried throughout his life in various ways to come up with a plan for abolishing slavery, but peacefully.
He could see the Civil War coming along.
He knew there would be violence, and so he proposed different methods And one of his great accomplishments was abolishing the international slave trade.
And he thought that that was the necessary first step.
So his approach was to do it By steps and do it peacefully.
Seems to me that Jefferson was, through much of his life, wrestling with how to deal with slavery as a public policy issue.
In his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, he says, we have a wolf by the tail.
We can't safely hold him, but we can't safely let him go.
Is any of this The latter.
Jefferson was just a slave owner.
There is no acknowledgement of the situation he was faced with, his wrestling, The attacks he suffered politically for even bringing up ending slavery by plantation owners, there was a vested interest.
His interaction with the young Edward Coles, none of this.
This is presented in literally black and white terms that he owned slaves and ipso facto he was an enslaver and that's all he was.
Let's talk about Frederick Douglass, somebody who, after he escaped from slavery, became really a lifelong Republican.
In fact, he famously said the Republican Party is the ship, all else is the sea.
So he saw the Republican Party as the only way forward.
Here's a guy who, in a famous speech, denounced the American founding, at least in the beginning.
But as the speech wound its way to its conclusion, Douglass makes a kind of remarkable U-turn And champions the American founding.
Talk a little bit about what Douglass was trying to say and then how Douglass is portrayed by the 1619 Project.
Yes, well, that is the speech that was delivered on July 5th, 1852 in Rochester, New York.
What to the slave is the 4th of July.
And I've seen this speech misrepresented in my years of teaching.
The first part of it Of course, as you mentioned, he builds up and denounces this country for enslaving people he had escaped.
He knew the cruelty of slavery firsthand.
He wrote about it in his autobiographies.
But about midway through, as he builds the audience up, that was his technique, then he points to the founding.
He speaks of the founders admirably.
He talks about the Declaration of Independence, and he calls the Constitution a glorious liberty document.
And that in the original is in all capital letters, a glorious liberty document.
But he is not mentioned other than a quotation taken out of context from a later speech.
And that, you know, his relationship with Abraham Lincoln, none of that is mentioned.
You would think that they could at least, you know, talk about his admiration for the founding, his faith in those principles which are evoked in that very famous speech, which is usually cut off.
Now, Mary, we often, when we talk about, you know, woke politics, we think about these ideas as being kind of cooked up in academia and then pushed out in the larger society through the media.
But isn't it a fact that the leading scholars of the American founding, I'm thinking here of people like Sean Wilentz or at Brown University, I forget the name of the historian now for a moment, but...
Nevertheless, you've got these prominent historians, James McPherson, for example, at Princeton.
They've been very critical of the 1619 Project, and yet this work, produced really by an activist journalist of no credentials, someone who says things like, slavery is the root of, you know, that the American founders were primarily concerned with protecting slavery, just a flat-out lie.
How is it the case that in this context, A sort of media concoction, the 1619 Project, has over the heads of prominent scholars nevertheless made its way into the curriculum.
How has that actually occurred?
Well, it's very interesting because there was a business deal made between the New York Times, a for-profit company, with the Pulitzer Center, a non-profit, which is Funded in large part by the Omidyar Network, by the billionaire, Pierre Omidyar, and the Facebook Foundation.
So it was, the lessons were prepared ahead of time.
It was amazing how quickly they got these lessons based on the 1619 Project into schools K through 12 immediately.
So this was a well thought out And Sean Wilentz, you are correct.
Gordon Wood, who was at Brown, they wrote and signed a letter with three other historians.
Other historians have objected.
Alan Gualzo over at Princeton.
But this has had no impact.
And it's outrageous that this so-called history that has not been vetted You know, unlike, say, a regular textbook or a history book, has just been put into the classrooms.
And another thing is, you know, if you look at the Pulitzer Center website, teachers are being, I call them, bribed with grants, $5,000 grants, you know, other grants, to incorporate the 1619 Project into classroom lessons and to come up with their own.
So there was a lot going on behind the scenes, a lot of money being put into this.
Mary, I want to commend you. You've done a good job here in tracing the fallacies and errors of the 1619 Project.
All the best to you, and thanks for joining the podcast.
Well, thank you. Thank you.
We seem to be just weeks away from yet another American travesty, one that could lead our country even further down the road to tyranny.
I'm talking, of course, about court backing, the far left's radical plan to rig our entire federal judiciary system by adding four new liberal justices to the Supreme Court and completely destroying the constitutional rule of law in our country as we know it.
Thankfully, my friends at First Liberty Institute, a national nonprofit law firm, are taking a stand.
They've written a letter telling the Biden Commission to reject this brazen court-packing scheme.
And now, prominent leaders, plus over 100,000 patriots like you, have joined their coalition.
Franklin Graham, former Attorney General Ed Meese, Dr.
James Dobson, plus organizations like the American Policy Association, Americans for Prosperity, American Family Association, Debbie and I, have both signed it.
So now it's up to you. Sign your name by September 15th.
Go to SupremeCoup.com.
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That's SupremeCoup.com, and may God bless America.
The current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, this is a kind of inside baseball publication for higher education.
And I read it because every now and then it has really interesting in-depth reporting on what's going on in the bowels of academia.
And this place is a real menagerie these days.
So you've got to look in there to find out all the crazy stuff they're doing.
I want to talk about a scandal at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a scandal involving a woman named Mary Boxill.
Now, Mary Boxill is a philosophy instructor, but she's also somebody who kind of insinuated herself into the athletic programs at UNC Chapel Hill.
She came to UNC Chapel Hill because her husband got a job there.
She was able to get a job there, both as a teacher, but also as the kind of liaison to the college for all these different sports teams, not just the basketball team, but field hockey team, lacrosse team, swimming team, and so on.
And in particular, she became kind of a champion of advancing the cause of African American athletes to sort of give them, in her view, kind of a shot at higher education, except The shot at higher education had nothing to do with education.
Basically, for Mary Boxall, this was an idea of coming to college, being a, quote, student-athlete.
But, of course, the student part of it had no significance.
The athlete part, as you can see, is the noun.
The student is just an adjectivial qualification to the noun.
And so for Jan Boxer, it was not important that these students study anything, take any courses, get proper grades, or even graduate according to the requirements of UNC Chapel Hill.
And so she set up, in effect, a system.
Now, the key thing about her system is that it was done in collaboration with a whole bunch of people at UNC Chapel Hill.
There was a kind of advisor for the African American Studies Department.
So let's look at this.
You had an African American Studies Department with a woman named Crowder, Deborah Crowder.
She's the department secretary.
She's not even a professor.
But what Mary Boxill does is she has these students all enroll in African American Studies courses that don't meet, that don't have any classes, that don't have any reading lists.
And when they're supposed to turn in papers, Mary Boxill looks over the paper and then and tells the African-American department secretary And there's smoking gun evidence of this in the form of emails.
Basically, Mary Box will tell here.
She sends a paper to Crowder.
Crowder, by the way, the secretary of the department is grading the paper.
Not a professor, but the department secretary.
And Crowder replies saying...
Did you say a D will do for the player?
I'm only asking because A, no sources, B, it has nothing to do with the assignments for the class, and C, it seems to me to be a recycled paper.
The student lifted the paper off the internet.
That's not even their own work.
It doesn't pertain to the class.
So Box Hill writes, quote, Yes, a D will be fine.
That's all she needs.
I didn't look at the paper but figured it was a recycled one as well, but I couldn't figure out from where.
So here's the student advisor who knows the paper is bogus.
So does the African American Studies secretary.
And essentially they're all colluding in a scheme that makes a laughingstock of UNC Chapel Hill, makes the laughingstock of academic requirements at all.
Julius Miangoro, the African American Studies department chair, he was in on it.
He's now resigned.
And he says that he was under pressure to basically just give these athletes what they want.
He says he recalls one particular situation.
This is from an academic report.
He goes,"...when he gave a women's basketball player a B +, even though he felt her paper was terrible and deserved an F." And he assigned that grade because Boxall told him, give that grade.
There are instances of Boxall adding her own work to the player's papers, in effect, writing their papers for them, at least in part.
And this is the way that these universities operate.
Finally, there was a whistleblower, by the way, named Mary Willingham, a former colleague of Boxall.
And she said, listen, Boxall is now claiming, I didn't know.
I had no idea.
My emails are taken out of context.
But Mary Willingham says, listen...
Obviously, she knew.
I knew. The department knew.
The college knew.
We all knew. So, in other words, this is a scandal, a scandal in which these universities, and to some degree, you have to say, the universities themselves are taking advantage of the athlete.
They're trying to leverage this athleticism for money.
Obviously, college sports is big bucks for American universities.
And so, you have a really cynical collaboration.
The student who wants to graduate but doesn't really care about doing the work.
The college that is eager for the same reason, to graduate the student but doesn't care about whether the student learns anything.
And you've got these so-called race activists who themselves are cynical about it because their goal is just to get the student, student in quote marks, through the process.
It is ultimately, I think it shows the full degree to which corruption, cynicism, and lack of academic merit now pervade so much of higher education.
In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for 2021 at 2.1%.
Now, the actual inflation rate, 5.4%.
The point is inflation is here, it's coming faster than our government is prepared for, and their solution is to stick their heads in the sand.
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The Biden administration's disaster in Afghanistan.
I think signals a great political shift that is going on in the world.
This shift is, as often happens in these cases, not fully apparent at the moment, but becomes increasingly clear as time goes on.
It's a shift that we are not really prepared for because it seemed not very long ago, in fact, just going back to 1989, 1991, 1992, that America was on top of the world.
Think about the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union disintegrating, the Communist Party voting to abolish itself.
It seemed then that not just America, but the American idea was triumphant worldwide and that America had emerged, and I think it did emerge, although now it turns out briefly, as the world's sole superpower.
I don't think we can really say we're the world's sole superpower anymore.
There may not be a single power now with enough power to rival us, but it's clear we're moving rapidly toward a multipolar world, and that means no single power dominates.
We have several powerful nations, and ultimately success is determined now by making the proper alliances.
China clearly is trying to make an alliance with Russia and also with the radical Islamic world.
So it's possible we're going to see a kind of Sino-Russo-Islamic alliance stretching not just to Iran but also to Turkey, another important player that often gets forgotten.
Now, when we pull back and look at the big sweep of history, Western civilization, the civilization that began in Greece and Rome 2,000 years ago, but nevertheless, Western civilization came into its full flower starting about the 15th century.
Prior to that, you had China and the Arab Islamic world.
They were the dominant civilizations prior to 1500.
China had dominated the world for almost 1,000 years.
But starting in about 1500, the West began to establish its, as we now say, hegemony, its dominance.
And this was never one single Western power.
You can almost say that the baton of Western superiority moved internally within the West from one country to another.
So the 15th century belonged to the Portuguese.
The 16th century to the Spanish.
The 17th century to the French into the 18th century.
The latter part of the 18th century and the 19th to the British.
The 20th century to the Americans.
And yet, even though you had these shifting phalanxes of power, the truth was this was all within the West.
The West remained dominant.
And America, however, is the last sign of that Western dominance, because as American power wanes, it's very difficult to see if there's anybody else in the West who can pick that up.
In fact, there clearly isn't.
I think back to the Peloponnesian War, the great war between Athens and Sparta, in which what brought about the end of the war was in fact a failed expedition by the Athenians in a faraway place.
The Athenians attacked the island of Sicily.
And this, in a sense, strategically didn't make a whole lot of sense.
Athens was at war with Sparta and its allies.
This was a kind of quixotic adventure.
And the Athenians suffered a tremendous defeat, and that was the beginning of the end for Athens.
Athens ended up losing the war, and it was never really Athens again.
What's interesting when you read Thucydides and his great work called The Peloponnesian War, there are multiple parallels between what happened then between Athens and Sparta and what's happened with America in Afghanistan.
First of all, the Afghans, the Taliban, are clearly like the Spartans.
The Spartans were... It's basically military men.
They were hardened. They didn't enjoy any luxuries.
The society was, in a sense, poor.
And yet the Spartans spent all day military training.
They were kind of professional fighters.
That's kind of all they did.
Athens, by contrast, was luxurious.
It was rich. It was cultured.
It had philosophy, art.
So America, which in a sense is not a nation made, so to speak, as a militaristic armed camp, is nevertheless facing a country, the Taliban that is.
There was a terrible plague that swept through Athens, not unlike the epidemic we're living through now, and that had the effect of changing the dynamic of the war.
It also changed the psychology of the war.
The Peloponnesian War lasted from 431 BC to 404 or 405 BC, about 25 years.
And think about it, the Afghan War for America has lasted about two decades.
And so you have these parallels.
I think the main difference was that the Athenians, at least at the beginning, had some really good generals.
They had Pericles, who was, of course, the great statesman leading Athens, later generals like Nicias, But later, in the latter part of the war, they had complete buffoons.
People who were ultimately out for themselves, who didn't really care, who were reckless.
People like Cleon.
And similarly here in America, we've got a feckless leadership, which I think we've had from the beginning.
The fecklessness of Bush giving away to the fecklessness of Obama.
Trump was trying to salvage the situation, but really couldn't.
And then, of course, we have the worst of them all, namely Biden.
So this disaster, I think, for America is not just a humiliation in a distant place.
It's a humiliation in a distant place that could signal the beginning of the end of American global dominance.
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