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Sept. 15, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:41
THE DICTATOR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 175
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If what Bob Woodward says is true, the United States was at least for a time this year under a military dictatorship for the first time in our history.
It happened. It happened here.
I'll tell you the implications.
Also, how Facebook protects its leftist VIPs while systematically going after conservatives.
The two leading architects of the Texas pro-life law joined me to talk about their playbook.
And I offer my own distinctive take on that dress that AOC wore to the Met.
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.
A new book out next week by Bob Woodward and a co-author named Robert Costa has some stunning revelations about the events of the last several months and in particular events surrounding General Mark Milley.
the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Let's go through these revelations because it's one bombshell on top of another with very troubling implications.
And its implications not just about what happened, but what could happen again.
Why? Because General Milley is still the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The bottom line of the book, the book is called Peril, is that for a time, Milley established in America a military dictatorship.
He not only went around Trump, he put himself ahead of Trump.
And he did this with the consent and collusion of Nancy Pelosi.
Now, this seems so staggering in and of itself, but on top of this treason, there is a double treason.
Namely, that Milley, in addition to making himself the commander-in-chief, let's think, in a democratic society, he's not the commander-in-chief.
He works for the commander-in-chief.
Milley was in charge, in effect, of the nuclear codes.
He was the head of government.
And on top of that, he colludes with our foreign adversary, China.
He calls up the head of China, the Chinese military, and he tells them that he will warn them if the United States decides to attack.
If Trump gives the order to attack, Milley will tip off the Chinese.
Now, I don't even know what to say about this.
I mean, it is outrageous.
It is terrifying.
I don't think anything like this has happened before in American history.
I don't think the implications can be understated.
They are huge.
And I am thinking that even though the Democrats are working hard to sort of quickly do damage control here, Milley, of course, has not said a word, and the GOP has been largely silent...
We can't be largely silent.
We have to look at what seems to have happened and then think it through.
So, let's go through some of the details here.
Apparently, Milley was concerned that the President, Trump, was going to, quote, go rogue, go rogue.
And so, he summons the top generals and he basically tells them that Trump isn't in charge, he's in charge.
Quote, No matter what you're told, I mean, no matter what Trump tells you, you do the procedure, you do the process, and I'm part of that procedure.
And then apparently Milley goes around the room and he gets all the generals.
He's taking a kind of a collective oath.
Do you swear? Do you swear?
Do you swear? And all these generals apparently gave their word that they would not do anything that Trump said without going through Milley.
Wow. Wow. Milley, in addition to this, was working with Pelosi, hand in hand.
And this may seem, well, obviously Milley's going through the democratic process, but no.
Pelosi is the head of a different branch of government.
Milley is part of the executive branch.
So Pelosi says to Milley, reportedly, from the book, you know he's crazy, referring to Trump.
He's been crazy for a long time.
Now, Pelosi here, this is not treasonous on her part.
That's her opinion. She's entitled to say it.
But what's interesting is that Milley goes, Madam Speaker, I agree with you on everything.
So Milley is basically saying you and I together can basically sidestep Trump.
We can make Trump not the president for a while.
I, Milley, will be the president in the meantime.
And then Milley calls General Li, L.I., the head of the Chinese military.
He goes, quote, General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years.
If we're going to attack ISIS, I'm going to call you ahead of time.
It's not going to be a surprise.
So Milley's sort of telling General Lee, you know, I can't take control of the nuclear codes by myself, but I can at least give you a forewarning.
I mean, think about what's going on here.
Question number one, how does Bob Woodward know any of this?
Apparently, peril is based on 200 interviews with witnesses and first-hand participants, documents, calendars, diaries, emails, meeting notes.
The key point is that Woodward and Costa claim that they have the exclusive transcript of We're good to go.
Even he says, quote, if this is true, General Milley must resign.
He usurped civilian authority.
He broke the chain of command.
He violated the sacrosanct principle of civilian control over the military.
It's an extremely dangerous precedent.
You can't simply walk away from that.
But I think it's much more than a matter of this guy resigning.
This is, as I say, not just treason.
It's treason twice over.
And think about it. Here's Milley.
You remember his testimony before the Congress?
He's worried about white rage.
He's going to go study about what made these people try to overthrow the Constitution.
You know what? The January 6th protesters didn't have an insurrection.
Milley did. We're good to go.
You know, if Biden, to some degree, is China's man in the White House, just remember the Biden family has enriched itself greatly with Chinese money.
Their lavish lifestyle is boosted by Chinese dollars, you might say.
Well, if that's the case, it doesn't seem a stretch to say that General Milley is China's general inside the U.S. military.
We're facing, I think, a very perilous situation.
And the only question I have at this point is, What is the GOP going to do about this?
This is not something you can kind of look the other way.
Is the GOP itself part of this swamp?
Are they in on it with General Milley?
I hate to say it, but these are, for me, open questions.
A lot more to come about this, but it seems clear at this point that if what Bob Woodward says is true, we had a military coup.
It was a brief coup, but it existed.
Trump may have thought he was the president, but there was a time in which he, in effect, was not.
A general was running America, a military general.
America was under military dictatorship.
And that guy, the guy who did it, is still the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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I, like a lot of conservatives, have a pretty precarious existence on social media, on Twitter, on YouTube, on Facebook.
These platforms have censorship regimes in place.
Procedures that they claim are designed to fight hate speech and correct misinformation, but in fact, Have the effect of censoring speech that they don't agree with.
Not differences of facts per se, but differences of opinion that are portrayed as differences in facts.
But Facebook has always maintained that they apply these processes neutrally.
Now, we've had the suspicion for a long time, this is not true.
Who are the prominent liberals who get censored, deplatformed, restricted, demonetized?
On Facebook, it's almost never that you hear of this.
But here's some confirmation of the bias in Facebook.
The Wall Street Journal has obtained leaked documents showing that Facebook has what they call a whitelist.
Wow! The whitelist is a kind of VIP list.
Now, it's not a VIP list with like five people, Fauci and two or three others of their favorites.
No, it's a VIP list that is vast.
That includes politicians, it includes journalists, it includes media outlets, it includes celebrities.
There are apparently 5.8 million VIP members of Facebook as of 2020.
Who knows how many today?
And what does it mean to be a VIP? It means you're not subject to the normal rules.
So what Facebook does is they apparently have a combination.
They have some algorithms, they claim, that result in some people being kicked off.
They contract with independent companies like Accenture to have employees of Accenture vet these Facebook postings to see if they violate Facebook policies.
But apparently this group of almost 6 million people, they're not subject to this kind of vetting.
Apparently, if they violate the rules, Facebook has a separate process, a kind of VIP process, which gives greater latitude, greater immunity.
Well, yeah, this guy did that, but that's okay.
That's because, you know, after all, he's a Hollywood guy.
Or this is a leading Democrat.
Oh, we don't want to be censoring, you know, Chuck Schumer.
So, Facebook is playing favorites.
Its public pretense to be applying its policies in a neutral manner is a flat-out lie.
It's giving favorable treatment, not just to celebrities, journalists, politicians, and so on, but to Facebook's favorite celebrities, Facebook's favorite journalists, and so on.
Now, this process is apparently called cross-check, or just X-check.
X is the cross in cross-check.
And these are people who are given, as I say, a kind of clean bill of health for the same violation that would get other people kicked off.
Apparently, for example, a classic example was there was a prominent athlete, a soccer star named Neymar.
He apparently had been accused of rape by a woman.
What does he do in retaliation?
He posts nude pictures of her without her consent.
Now, normally this gets you kicked off Facebook, but because this guy is Neymar and because he's on the VIP list...
He's not taken down right away.
Facebook gives him a sort of special treatment.
Now, what makes us also more insidious is that Facebook is playing favorites between incumbent politicians and other people running for office.
So let's say you're running against somebody, a Democrat who's entrenched in office, let's say Gavin Newsom, for example.
Facebook puts Newsom on the VIP list, but doesn't put the incumbents running against him on the VIP list.
And what this means, in effect, is that Facebook is giving an election advantage to one side over the other.
It's granting incumbents a benefit that is not extended to challengers.
Now, Facebook realizes that these are actually damaging revelations, and they could create all kinds of backlash and culpability.
And so, a Facebook spokesman has quickly said, well, you know, we're considering getting rid of this whitelisting process.
So Facebook apparently claims now, but claims only after this was exposed by the Wall Street Journal, to be cleaning up the process.
The simple truth of it is you cannot trust these platforms like Facebook.
They are run by highly deceitful people who employ other people to carry out their instructions.
It's almost like you've got the thugs in charge who hire other thugs to be the executives, the ones who put into effect their preferential insidious censorship regimes.
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You know, guys, I'm really happy to welcome, well, two guests to the program.
I haven't had two guests on at the same time before, so I'm kind of going Fox News on everybody here.
But these are really two heroes of mine.
Well, a hero and heroine.
They're the architects of the Texas Pro-Life Bill.
Representative Shelby Slauson, Texas Representative District 59, and Senator Brian Hughes, Texas Senator District 59.
Thank you so much for joining us.
I've been ruled to be inconsistent with Roe, but it seems that you, together with Senator Hughes, kind of figured out a totally different approach.
And let me start by asking you, are you aware of the monumental significance that we're living, all three of us now, in a state that is sort of not under Roe, in the sense that abortion is restricted in Texas for the first time since Roe Do you have a sense of the magnitude of what the Texas legislature with your initiative has accomplished?
We do. And we are so thankful at what we are seeing.
You know, ever since Roe v.
Wade, there have been a lot of technological and scientific changes where we have come to recognize life beginning at such an early state.
And we've been able to see through medicine when that heart begins beating.
And a culture shift has most thankfully been taking place in our country as well.
And you're correct.
We've seen a number of attempts over the years to respect that tiny little life and to pull back the ability to extinguish it.
And it's been a challenge trying to find the right balance there.
And we are so excited about what has happened in Texas.
In the 24 hours before that took effect, I'll tell you, it was a dark night on August 31st as we watched just shamefully gleeful reports of clinics that were aborting as many babies as possible before midnight.
But when that sun came up on September 1st and that ban went into effect to protect those heartbeats, we were overjoyed.
And that was before we even heard the Supreme Court ruling that day.
I mean, this is such awesome news.
We're actually saving lives in Texas.
Let me turn to you, Brian Hughes, if I may.
There's a kind of a radical novelty to the idea of not having direct state regulation of abortion, which of course would be vulnerable to being set aside on the basis of Roe, at least pending the Supreme Court decision coming up later this year.
My question is, who came up with the idea of, in a sense, empowering private entities to file lawsuits, an action that has successfully resulted in the effective closure of the largest clinics in Texas?
Well, as you know, the concept of KETAM litigation, right, where it goes back to English common law, where private citizens can bring suit on behalf of the people, on behalf of the common good, and be rewarded for doing that.
It shows up in consumer protection laws around America.
In Texas, our Medicaid fraud statute allows any person to sue To bring an action to right a wrong of Medicaid fraud, and they're incentivized to do that.
So the pieces were there. But you know, Dinesh, we had in late 2020, we had a number of district attorneys around the country, many in Texas, who said publicly, we will not enforce pro-life laws.
You can pass a heartbeat bill if you want to, but we're not going to enforce it.
So when you have these elected officials sworn to uphold the law, And say they're not going to when needed another way to do it.
And so we had a lot of help.
We have to give a lot of credit to Jonathan Mitchell, a very sharp lawyer, a former law clerk to Justice Scalia, Texas Lister General.
We've worked with him for years on litigation and on legislation on both.
And he wrote a law review article called The Rid of Erasure Fallacy.
That goes into this, how it works, and how all the pieces were there.
So we thought it would work, but we didn't really know for sure until September 1st came along.
So we're very thankful. I gotta say, thankful is the word.
Representative Charleston said it. It's working better than we expected so far.
Shelby, let's turn to the—I mean, it seemed to me monumental when the Supreme Court took a look at this, and I was sort of chuckling at Chief Justice Roberts because even though he came out on the wrong side of it, in the sense that he said he would have voted to stay the law, his reasoning was kind of like— You guys took me by surprise.
I didn't see this one coming.
I need some time to get my head around this.
You've outsmarted me on this one, so I need a little bit of time to kind of get my head screwed on right.
It seems like there was an ingenuity to the Texas law, and of course the left is screaming about it.
They're saying, you know, the state is empowering private entities to do what the state itself is constitutionally forbidden from doing.
But isn't that what the Biden administration is doing with the censorship laws?
They're empowering private entities.
I mean, is that irony?
Have you noticed that? And what do you think about it?
Well, I have noticed that.
And I believe I heard you speak on that not too long ago and thought at that time that was a very eloquent point.
And, you know, the left does not like to have the tables turned against them, especially when they're the ones that laid out the cards and then the game is is turned back.
In that direction, but it's an absolutely necessary mechanism to provide some enforceability to this law, and it is well supported by Texans.
This is a burgeoning issue for many of our districts in Texas and much of our constituency.
We are still a very conservative state, and so it's a tool that was...
Maybe not long-incoming, but Texans also really like it when we hear that we took the rest of the country by surprise and we've done something that nobody else has done.
What do you say, Shelby?
I saw that there's a couple of UN officials who have weighed in on this, and their basic line is that this Texas law is, quote, sex discrimination.
What's your reaction to that?
Well, the goalposts are always moving, aren't they?
Because it seems like just not that long ago we were talking about how it's birthing persons and it's not women.
But now today we're talking about this as discriminatory towards women.
And what I would say is that when you really drill down into it, and we're talking about the abortion, the extinguishing of a human life.
And the truly oppressed people in that scenario are those sons and daughters in the womb, male and female in the womb.
Let me turn to Brian for a minute.
Brian, you've heard the argument, and I think I've seen a number of Democratic congressmen and senators say this, that the Texas law is somehow an assault against democracy.
I think it was Representative Swalwell who was Swalwelling to this effect.
And my question to you is, how can someone with a straight face say this when here is a state that went through the democratic process, an elected house, an elected senate, signed by an elected governor, upheld by local courts, then the Supreme Court says it's perfectly fine to go ahead with this.
Where is the subversion of democracy?
I don't really see it.
Do you? It's hard to imagine a more democratic process for a law to follow.
And we should note that this bill passed both houses with bipartisan support in Texas.
So it is a big deal.
And, you know, they accuse us of being creative in our legal reasoning.
It's hard to imagine anything more creative than reading the due process clause.
That no person can be deprived by a state of due process of law and discovering this right to kill a little baby in her mother's womb.
The creative legal reasoning started in 1973 and states, the people of states, through democratic processes, have been trying to save lives ever since.
It shouldn't surprise the Supreme Court or the left that we're going to be creative in following the law, protecting innocent human life.
When we come back, I want to probe the issue of Roe vs.
Wade further and examine the question of whatever happens to Roe vs.
Wade, is it possible that the Texas law will survive intact?
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I'm back with my two great guests, Senator Brian Hughes, Texas Senator District 1, and Representative Shelby Slauson, Texas Representative District 59.
These are the architects of the Texas pro-life law.
Shelby, let me start with you.
I want to ask about Roe vs.
Wade because... On the one hand, the Texas law is kind of pending a major Supreme Court decision, which is not about the Texas case, but the Mississippi case, a Mississippi case that by and large imposes restrictions on abortion after 15 weeks.
My question is, do you see the Texas law and the Mississippi law Kind of running hand in hand?
Or is it possible that whatever the Supreme Court decides about Roe, let's say even though they decide to keep it intact, could the Supreme Court at the same time signal to Texas and other states that, hey, listen, here's another way to sort of do an end run around Roe, and it's possible to have, in a sense, pro-life states with Roe versus Wade still kind of officially or quasi-officially the law of the land?
Oh, absolutely. This is a multifaceted approach.
And one thing that we saw very quickly after that Supreme Court ruling was a number of other states, Florida, South Dakota, jumped up right away saying they were reevaluating what they were doing, looking at the Texas law.
We've had in our office, and I'm sure Senator Hughes as well, numerous other states reach out wanting some information on how to model the Texas bill to suit their state.
So there is a lot of interest well outside of Texas, but we're also at the same time watching for that Mississippi case to come through.
And Texas passed a trigger ban at the same day we passed the heartbeat bill so that if Roe is overturned, abortion will be eliminated in Texas upon the overturning of Roe.
We've had a number of things.
The heartbeat bill has taken a bit of the spotlight, but it is definitely multi-targeted to eliminate abortion.
I mean, to me, one of the things that's so wonderful about this law and the way that it's playing out is it's showing not only the left, but it's showing the Supreme Court that the world doesn't end, even though abortions are severely restricted in Texas right now.
Life goes on as normal.
The catastrophes, the left, oh, there'll be social convulsions.
There will be... We're good to go.
has in effect censored a live-action video, a video put out by LiveAction.
Tell us a little bit about the video, what it shows, and why it's being censored.
This is such a sad example of how the left is afraid of the truth.
They're not for free speech.
They are not liberal and certainly in the classical sense or even the literal sense.
They're not for an exchange of ideas.
They are for controlling the message and shutting down everyone who disagrees.
So what about a video that shows Development of the little baby inside her mother's womb.
Not gory pictures of a little aborted baby, but the baby developing normally inside her mother's womb.
As you know, those images are striking.
And when you see that little baby, you know it's a little baby.
You know you're in your heart and you know in your head.
And they don't want people to see that.
They don't want people to see that.
So this oligarchy we have of these social media giants in San Francisco Are trying to keep people from seeing the truth.
We're dealing with that in Texas as well, but it shows that they're afraid of a debate.
They're afraid of a real exchange of ideas.
I mean, what you're saying is that even though they claim that they are censoring misinformation, in fact, they are censoring information.
What scares them, in other words, is not lies.
What scares them is the truth that people might be able...
This is probably the same reason, by the way, that Planned Parenthood does...
If you go into Planned Parenthood and you say, I want an abortion, they're not going to show you an ultrasound of what's happening inside your womb because they're afraid that if they did, you might go, oh, wow, I had no idea.
Maybe I don't want to do this.
So it is the truth that scares them, doesn't it?
And not their stated motive.
They're doing a kind of Orwellian reversal here, aren't they?
I'm afraid that's exactly right.
You know, in Texas, when we passed the Woman's Right to Know Act, where a woman has to be given the truth about the development of her baby, also risk to her own health, that's affected the number of women choosing abortion.
And when we passed the sonogram law, in fact, our current lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, was in a Texas senator.
It was his baby... When we pass the sonogram law, which requires them to show that image to the mother, as you would imagine, hundreds, thousands of women are seeing that image and realizing that's a little baby growing inside me.
That's my baby. I'm going to think twice before I do this.
More information. If we give women more information to make better choices, they're going to choose life.
Now, Brian, you are also one of the key figures in the Texas law, a different law, that is an attempt to go after digital censorship.
Can you talk for a moment about...
Because, I mean, so many of us feel a little helpless in the face of this sword of Damocles hanging over our head.
We can be deplatformed, kicked off at any time.
No really good reason given at all.
I don't know of any other company in America that operates like this.
Airlines can't cancel your tickets without cause and just go, yeah, you know, we just decided you're unsuitable to fly even though you bought your ticket.
What I want to find out is what can states do, Florida, Texas, to sort of push back against this digital censorship?
What is the effect of the law that you are a key figure in passing?
What's that going to do to give Texans, us, the rights to push back against digital censorship?
We're excited about this.
Section 230 of the federal law, the Communications Decency Act, limits what we can do.
We've read that carefully.
We've got some good lawyers, law professors helping us.
And we believe we've threaded the needle to allow Texans to get back online.
And you get it. Many conservatives are nervous.
They say these are private companies.
Just go somewhere else. But of course, as you noted, airlines, I mean, these companies are common carriers.
Your cable company doesn't knock you off because of your religion.
They're not allowed to do that. Your cell phone company can't deny you service because of your politics.
So under this law, we are threading the needle with Section 230.
And if a social media company discriminates against you based on your religion, your politics, your free speech, you can get back online.
This was written. We know it's going to be challenged.
It was written to be challenged and to be upheld.
The companies say they're going to sue us.
We welcome the lawsuit.
We can't wait to get this in front of the Supreme Court.
Justice Thomas has already road mapped it for us.
These companies are common carriers in the English common law sense, in the modern sense, and they cannot be allowed to have that kind of market share, that kind of control, and stifle free speech.
So we're very encouraged.
Florida's law was partially enjoined, part of its own effect.
We wrote our bill, seeing what Florida did, And we believe this is going to work, and we can't wait for other states to do the same thing.
I mean, if I can quote a memorable line from Justice Thomas, he says, by and large, that if you're driving your car and there's a toll bridge that takes you across a river, it's not enough for the company to say, well, hey, listen, you don't have to go over the toll bridge.
You can swim across the river.
There are other alternatives. We're good to go.
Exactly the kind of logic.
They're the only game in town.
You're right. You could always swim the river.
But law is recognized for centuries now that when you have that kind of market share providing that kind of service, you take all coverage.
You're a common carrier.
And that makes sense here. So we're looking forward to seeing this upheld.
This is awesome. Well, Senator Brian Hughes, Representative Shelby Slauson, what a pleasure to have you both.
You're doing great work.
Keep it up. Thanks for all you're doing for Texas and indeed for the country.
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A lot of people are talking about the dress that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, wore to the Met Gala in New York. The dress was a kind of spotless white dress, but on it was written in bright red, tax the rich. You can kind of take a look at a jpeg of this dress, but it's a kind of a brazen political statement at a gala.
Now, a lot of people have sort of pointed out the massive kind of hypocrisy of this.
Here's Ted Cruz. He points out that it costs $30,000 to buy a ticket to go to this Met gala.
Over $200,000, by the way, to get a table.
Donald Trump Jr. says basically AOC is a complete hypocrite here.
And AOC is pushing back and saying, in effect, well, listen, I'm just trying to have a conversation about issues that are important.
And she says, you know, stop policing my body.
She's the one, by the way, who stuck this big message on her body.
But now she wants her body to be off limits, so to speak.
Now... It's one thing to say that this is the kind of hypocrisy that would make the Pharisees blush.
It's also, I think, worth pointing out that this tax the rich, well, we do tax the rich.
By and large, people who make under $50,000 in this country pay virtually no taxes.
No income taxes.
The rich, the top 1%, by the way, pays 40% of all the income taxes.
The top 10% pays 71%.
The top 10% pays, in fact, the lion's share of all the income tax revenue collected by the government.
So when people keep talking about the rich aren't paying their fair share, they never bother to say, well, what is that fair share?
And on what basis is it computed?
Who decides what's fair and what standard is being used to assess fairness?
I want to make an observation that—two observations, really, that have gone, I think, that have been missed here.
It's one thing to say that AOC herself is rich and that there's something ironic, perhaps hypocritical, in her behavior.
But I think you can see what she's doing here as a career move.
And what I mean by that is that she realizes that the way for her to get massive wealth is for her to become a cult figure.
Kind of like Obama.
Remember how Obama got that $50 million Netflix deal after the presidency?
Why? Because he was cool.
They want to give money to Obama.
AOC wants a Netflix deal.
30, 40, 50 million dollars.
That will catapult her from basically a bartender pouring drinks into the stratosphere.
That will enable her to have not one or two, but five or six homes, domestic staff, fantastic luxury.
So look at the way that these people trade on anti-capitalist rhetoric.
And she's not alone.
Michael Moore has done the same thing.
Al Gore has done the same thing.
These are people who essentially use, you may say, leftist politics as a form of social and financial advancement.
And there's another point. That I think when you look at the dress aesthetically, just pay attention to it, it strikes me as interesting that it's basically blood on white.
And by that I mean you've got this white dress and then written in stark red, almost like someone took a kind of sharpened knife and carved it onto the dress, taxed the rich.
And I don't think I'm being too subliminal in spotting kind of a veiled racial threat here.
It's sort of to the effect that, listen, we're coming after you, white America.
You're the ones we're really after.
It isn't just the rich.
We're basically after the white people of America.
We're going to carve this message, like it or not, on your body.
And this is, I think, the subliminal message.
The artistic message that is being delivered in AOC's infamous dress.
In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for 2021 at 2.1%.
We're getting all kinds of data on inflation.
The actual inflation rate much, much higher, over 5%.
The point is inflation's here.
It's coming faster than our government is prepared for.
Their solution is to stick their heads in the sand.
Well, don't stick your head in the sand.
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I don't normally delve into what you could call a public catfight, but there's a really funny one going on right now between the rapper Nicki Minaj and the MSNBC host Joy Reid, whose show I believe is called Readout.
Read out. So this all started when Nicki Minaj put out, admittedly, a kind of outrageous tweet.
She said that she had a cousin in Trinidad who was not going to take the vaccine because a friend of his said that he took the vaccine and his testicles became swollen.
In fact, he became impotent.
And then his fiancé called off the wedding.
So Nicki Minaj is basically saying, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Now, interestingly, Nicki Minaj got a lot of backlash for that tweet.
Debbie was actually looking through the feed and literally laughing out loud.
I want to point out a couple of the comments.
Here's one guy saying, I took the vaccine and now my areolas are as big as the moon.
What do I... I think that was a girl, honey.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
This is... No, you know, it's...
This is a woman, but she has a male Twitter name.
That's what threw me off.
Here's another guy. He goes, I got the vaccine and my car battery was completely drained the next day after I left the headlights on all night.
Coincidence? I think not.
So what's going on here is, you know, in logic, in rhetoric, there's something called the post hoc...
Propter-Hawk fallacy.
So let me explain. Post-Hawk.
Post means after. So coming after.
Ergo, therefore.
Propter-Hawk means caused by.
So it's the fallacy of thinking that because A was followed by B, therefore A must have caused B. And that's, of course, the logic that these responders to Nicki Minaj are kind of playing with.
They're basically saying that, yeah, he took the vaccine.
Yeah, he... You know, got the swollen testicles and impotency, but there could have been a lot of other causes of those things.
And, of course, there were lots of snarky people who said, well, you know, this is a guy who obviously has some sexually transmitted disease he got elsewhere.
He doesn't really want his fiancé to know about it, and therefore it's like, oh, stop!
It's the vaccine! I swear, I took the vaccine!
Look what happened! Ah!
So, now, enter Joy Reid in a kind of, you know, lecturing mode, and take a listen to Joy Reid giving Nicki Minaj kind of a piece of her mind.
Here we go. 22 million followers on Twitter!
For you to use your platform to encourage our community to not protect themselves and save their lives?
My God, sister, you could do better than that.
Yeah. I love this sister talk.
You know, my God, sister!
You know, so Joy Reid thinks that she's going to be the kind of intellectual advisor of this rapper and kind of bring her into the liberal plantation.
What I love is actually Nicki Minaj's response to Joy Reid because she's having none of it.
Nicki Minaj doesn't realize she has to be on the plantation.
She doesn't actually care about this, you know, twit Joy Reid.
And so she lashes out at her.
I mean, using all kinds of invective.
At one point, she calls her Uncle Tomiana.
I guess that's the female equivalent of an Uncle Tom.
And she also calls her a lying homophobe and then reproduces some of Joy Reid's old homophobic tweets.
By the way, Joy Reid, a year ago, expressed doubt about the vaccine under Trump.
Joy Reid basically said, who would trust a vaccine?
Nicki Minaj is on it. So this is not somebody who's like so unplugged she doesn't know what's going on.
She actually knows what's going on.
She has Joy Reid's number.
And here's her quote. This is Nicki Minaj tweeting out to Joy Reid in response.
She goes, So Nicki Minaj is basically saying, essentially...
I'm not going to be controlled by you.
Don't think that you have this kind of leverage or lasso, and just because I'm a woman, I'm black, you can kind of give me the big sister treatment.
And I think what Nicki Minaj—the reason I'm cheering Nicki Minaj here is not because of the credibility of her original tweet, but because of the fact that she refuses to be shut up.
She refuses ultimately to play ball.
She refuses to sort of go down and take a knee.
What she's basically saying, and it's so important to say this in a regime of control and regulation and restriction and censorship and critical race theory, and you can't say this and you can't say that, Nicki Minaj is saying basically, I'm a rapper.
I'm my own person.
I'm going to rap pretty much as I please.
We might 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 packing the far left's radical plan to rig our entire federal judiciary system by adding four new leftist justices to the Supreme Court, completely destroying the constitutional rule of law in our country as we know it.
Thankfully, my friends at First Liberty Institute, a national non-profit 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 Franklin Graham, former Attorney General Ed Meese, Dr.
James Dobson, plus organizations like the American Policy Association, Americans for Prosperity, and American Family Association, Debbie and I have signed.
So now it's up to you. Sign your name now.
Go to SupremeCoup.com.
That's SupremeCoup.com to sign First Liberty's letter.
That's SupremeCoup.com.
And may God bless America.
I don't know if you've noticed, but it's becoming respectable, maybe for the first time, to talk about aliens.
I'm not talking about illegal aliens.
I'm talking about space aliens.
I'm talking about living creatures in outer space.
Now, for many, many years, this was the province of I mean, science fiction, movies like E.T., wild speculation, and in fact, for sophisticated people, ridicule.
This guy believes in aliens.
This is crazy. But of late, there have been prominent figures...
Here's the physicist Mashiko Kaku, who's, by the way, a string theorist, very respectable physicist, I think, at Cornell, if I'm not mistaken.
A Harvard professor, an astronomer named Avi Loeb, thinks that there are interstellar creatures.
He doesn't know what they look like.
He thinks they could be essentially creatures that have intelligence, but that inhabit gas clouds.
But he thinks that they could also develop weaponry.
They can destroy the Earth.
Now, some of this is a little far out.
Thank you. But I'm very interested in this idea of aliens for a couple of reasons.
Not just because of the simple question, are we alone in the universe?
I mean, that's an interesting question.
Or to apply it theologically, if there are aliens, did Jesus die for them?
Would the precepts of the Bible apply to creatures who are not human beings?
I mean, a fascinating sort of theological inquiry on that one.
But the reason I'm interested in aliens is for a different reason.
And that is because it is one of the central propositions of the so-called new atheism.
And this is not just the new atheists themselves.
it's a very widespread idea in the culture, namely that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Now let's think about that for a minute.
Basically what the atheists are saying, and many people take this to be a kind of cardinal rule of logic, that if you don't have evidence for something you should not believe it. Why? Because the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
So, for example, we have no evidence that there is a sort of giant spaghetti monster living on Mars that is, let's just say, pulling the switches on everything that happens on Earth.
We have no evidence for that, and since there's no evidence for it, there is no spaghetti monster on Mars doing that.
Christopher Hitchens was one of the favorites.
I love this argument. And tried to apply it to the existence of God, to life after death, heaven, hell, the immortality of the soul.
His basic point was that, no, I can't refute it, but if there's no evidence for it, then you shouldn't believe it because the absence of evidence is evidence of God.
Now, the reason I want to apply this to aliens is let us test this theory, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, by applying it to aliens, because I would grant that, as of this point, we have no evidence that there are any creatures, any form of intelligence in the universe outside of living creatures on the Earth, and in fact, outside of our species, Homo sapiens.
There's no evidence for it. Does it follow, therefore, that A, there are no such creatures, B, there are no aliens, and C, we can safely dismiss the possibility without even looking into the question further?
Now, on the face of it, we know that that's wrong because there are leading scientists, and there's a whole project with affiliates, by the way, at multiple observatories, multiple universities called the SETI Project, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and they are actively looking for this.
So the very fact that they're actively looking for this shows that they believe that there is at least a possibility, or maybe even a probability, that it could in fact be found.
So, what is the likelihood that there are, in fact, aliens in the universe?
It may seem at the first glance that there's no way to know that.
We don't know if there are.
We don't know if there aren't. We can kind of keep an open mind.
We can look. But we don't know if the chance of it is 1% or 99.9%.
We have no way to know.
We don't even have a good way to think about it because aliens are so outside of our normal human experience.
Now, the amazing thing And I'm going to go into this in detail tomorrow, is that this idea that there's no way to think about it turns out to be untrue.
An astronomer named Frank Drake has developed a Drake equation, a Drake equation, which is a very smart...
Mathematical, but mathematical in a very simple way, way to compute, to calculate, to figure out how likely it is that there are, in fact, aliens in this vast, vast universe of ours.
And tomorrow, I'm going to probe into the Drake equation to show not only that there is a way to think about this, there is a way to search for it, But the very search itself, whatever its conclusion, is decisive proof that the absence of evidence, at least until this point, is not evidence of absence.
Time for our mailbox, guys.
And keep the questions coming. Send them audio and video, preferably to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Today's question, listen.
Hi Dinesh, I was listening to your conversation with Amy Pico from Porter.
I deleted my account after I found out that she was pro-abortion.
Unlike you, I am a pure libertarian.
However, abortion is one of those issues that I do not compromise on.
The U.S. Constitution protects our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Blacks were denied those rights during slavery.
Jews were denied those rights by the Nazis.
And now children will be denied those rights by Roe v. Wade.
Wade. I don't do business with racists, anti-Semites, or abortionists.
In my opinion, abortionists are even worse than the other two.
At least the slaves and the Jews had a chance to escape.
The baby has absolutely no chance but to wait and be killed.
Am I wrong of thinking this way?
Thanks, Dinesh. Let me know.
Well, first of all, I really admire the rigor of your thinking about this because a lot of people who will, on the one hand, talk about the fact that the unborn are human life, it is wrong to kill them, don't think through the serious implications of that because those implications are that we have created, even in this country over 50 years, really a massive abortion on a massive scale. Think of the number of casualties. Think of what's
happening. It's enough to shake your patriotism. It's enough in many ways to call into question the goodness of America. And I think this is the way that you're thinking about this.
Now I do want to say a word about libertarians, about Amy Keecoff in particular. Number one, libertarians by and large believe in the philosophy of And these rights are for everybody.
They apply to all persons.
But interestingly here, it seems that libertarians fork into two.
The pro-life libertarians say, yeah, of course, the unborn are, in fact, persons.
They have dignity. They have a right to life.
And the other libertarians, I think Amy Peekoff falls into this camp, they're not willing to concede the full personhood of the fetus.
Now, I could tell in my conversation, if you watch it carefully, Amy Peekoff was First of all, I don't know why she went there.
I wasn't trying to draw her exactly into a debate about pro-choice or pro-life.
But I felt that there was an ambivalence about her position, an openness to learning more, perhaps even an openness to being convinced.
And so my approach in these situations is not to write the person off, but rather to make all efforts, all sincere efforts, to meet well-intentioned people in the way that they think about something and try to see if there's a way to bring them over to your side. I mean, there's no question if Amy Peekoff believed honestly that this is in fact a distinct human being.
Maybe a human being in the process of development, but which of us is not?
A 13-year-old is in the process of development.
A 3-year-old is in the process of development.
So the fact that it's developing into, you may say, the full majority of humanity is certainly no excuse to declare it out of bounds, to declare it at the mercy of humanity.
Someone else who wants to end its life.
So I admire the fact that you have taken fully on board, morally, the horror of abortion.
But I would also suggest that if we're going to win this fight, we need to reach out to people who are persuadable on this issue, who are not simply just motivated by callousness and selfishness and indifference, but have genuine doubts, doubts that are open to argument and persuasion.
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