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Sept. 16, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:56
THE REAL COUP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 176
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The real coup, was it January 6th or was it Millie?
The real collusion, was it Trump or was it Millie and China colluding against Trump?
Who went rogue, Trump or Millie?
Also today, why Gavin Newsom defeated the recall.
And author Joel Rosenberg joins me to talk about the inside story of a great transformation that is going on in the Middle East.
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.
General Milley has engaged in a double treason.
Two forms of treason against the United States.
First, by usurping the legitimate power of the elected President of the United States.
By creating a procedure by which Trump was in effect sidelined from direct control over nuclear weapons.
Milley basically said, anything to do with nuclear weapons has got to go through me.
And he sat down the other generals and made them take an oath to swear that they would only go through him.
Wow. This is a flagrant violation of our system, civilian control of the military.
Essentially, the United States was, whether we are willing to fully admit it or not, at least for a brief time, under a military dictatorship.
Now, the second form of treason is Milley calling up, apparently more than once, General Li, the top general in China, and colluding with him, saying basically, listen, if Trump orders an attack, I'm going to call you and tell you beforehand.
I'm going to warn you in advance.
I'm going to give you the heads up.
I'm going to give you the tip-off.
Wow, this is the United States literally colluding with a foreign adversary against its own elected leader. And once again, the question becomes, who gave Milley the authority to do that? I'll talk about this in the next segment. I'm going to focus on the Chinese side of it in the segment to follow. But here I want to just focus on the first part of this, which is Milley's decision that Trump had somehow gone rogue. Trump could not be trusted,
and therefore he needs to arrogate to himself the responsibility over, you may say, the nuclear He makes himself, in a sense, the de facto President of the United States.
Now, Milley has issued a statement in the kind of bureaucratic language that camouflages what it is that he was doing.
This is the Defense Department's official statement.
It says, in effect, General Milley frequently conducts meetings with uniformed leaders across the services to ensure all leaders are aware of current issues.
Now, I mean, just think about the preposterousness of the statement.
Milley was not calling the other generals to say, hey, guys, you know what?
Let me give you a briefing on current issues.
No, this wasn't about a briefing.
This was soliciting from them an allegiance not to the president, but to him, to Milley.
The statement goes on, The meeting regarding nuclear weapons was to remind uniformed leaders of the Pentagon of long-established and robust procedures in light of media reporting on the subject.
So now they're acting like this meeting was Really a response to what the media was putting out false information and Milley needed to sort of go over long established procedures.
Well, is it a long established procedure that if the president gives the order that it is to be disregarded?
It is to be ignored?
Nothing should be done or acted upon until it goes through Milley?
Where is that in the established procedures?
It doesn't exist. So what you have here is that, and this is really the excuse of all despots throughout Basically, they always go, it's for the greater good of the country.
You know, in other words, I had to seize power.
Things were getting really out of control.
It had to be me.
I mean, think, for example, about a tin pot dictator like Pinochet in Chile.
Pinochet basically mounted a coup.
Of course, he stayed in power for many, many years.
But I'm sure if you confronted Pinochet and said, why'd you do it?
He'd be like, oh, things were really out of control.
You know, the democratically elected leader had no control of events.
Things were getting out of hand.
Someone had to step in.
It had to be me. So once again, this is the proof.
Now, in this case, what's interesting is that Milley tried to get some legitimacy for what he's doing by calling Nancy Pelosi.
And they have this conversation.
Of course, Milley knows that Pelosi hates Trump.
Pelosi has this kind of, you know, you saw what happened when Pelosi tore up Trump's State of the Union address.
And so sure enough, Milley calls Pelosi.
Pelosi goes, he's crazy. He's been crazy for a long time.
Again, now, while Pelosi can say, well, I'm just giving my opinion, what she's really saying is she is licensing Milley to ignore the democratic process.
To say, basically, listen, he's the leader, he's the elected leader, but you don't have to treat him that way, because we all know he's nuts.
And the point here that I want to get at is, who gets to decide if the president is out of control?
Who gets to decide, well, it turns out that we have a 25th Amendment.
Turns out that there is a way to decide.
There are extreme circumstances in which the president, let's say that Trump went completely bananas and, I don't want to lose the election.
I'm not going to stand for this.
I'm going to blow up the world. I'm going to start World War III. I'm going to launch a nuclear attack on China.
Well, the procedure is that the cabinet can meet, the cabinet can vote to depose at least temporarily the president.
There are procedures in place. But Milley decided we don't need to go through any of that.
The cabinet's probably not going to do it.
I'll do it. So this is really the despotic impulse.
This is basically Milley taking power into his own hands.
And I want to leave you in this segment with this thought.
Listen, if Trump is out of control, if Trump can't run the country, what do you think Milley thinks about Biden?
I mean, there's a lot of people around the country who might feel a little safer if somebody other than Biden was in charge of the nuclear codes, right?
Because Biden operates in this staccato, you know, this guy, this guy is capable of doing anything.
So what's to stop Milley from saying Biden can't run the country.
Biden's out of control.
Let me make a phone call to McConnell DeViro.
McConnell, he's crazy.
He's absolutely crazy.
And then Milley decides I'm the president.
And all the nuclear orders from Biden should be ignored.
It has to go through me.
What I'm getting at here is we have a very dangerous man who's the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The job of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by the way, is to coordinate the different elements of the Defense Department.
That's Milley's job.
By the way, the senior most official in the Defense Department...
It's the defense secretary, not Milley.
So here you have a guy who is truly, truly out of control.
A guy who is a danger to democracy, a danger to the republic.
It's not enough for him to resign.
This guy should be court-martialed.
This guy should be charged with treason.
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Fill your home with them. I want to talk in this segment about what General Milley did with China.
You may say, over the head of Trump.
Now, The Biden administration is coming to the defense of Milley.
The Defense Department has issued a statement basically saying that what Milley did was no big deal.
And his meetings with the Chinese, they say, was, In keeping with his duty and responsibility to convey reassurance to maintain strategic stability.
So Milley was in a sense acting within established procedures.
He was doing in a sense what he was meant to do, what he was told to do.
Let's just say he was following orders.
Joe Scarborough on MSNBC mourning Joe and then Wesley Clark, who is a general, who should know something about this, all said, or they both said, well, you know, generals talk to generals.
What's the big deal?
There's, you know, don't be naive and don't believe that this notion of like not talking to an adversary.
We do talk to adversaries.
In the era of the Cold War, the United States talked to the Soviet Union.
But the issue here is not making a call.
The issue is what was said on the call.
And I think this is really what I want to zoom in on.
I mean, think about this. Trump was impeached for making a call to the president of Ukraine.
Now, Trump has every right to make that call.
But the argument was that Trump was pressuring that guy to do an investigation into Biden.
That was not, in fact, on the call.
The issue was brought up.
But think of what Milley did compared to Trump.
Milley is actually...
Working closely with the general of the Chinese forces and saying, basically, let us make a pact to two of us that, in a sense, goes above the head of the elected democratic leader.
Milley made some statement to the effect that democracy is messy.
So because it's messy, he's the one, evidently, who's going to be cleaning it up.
Now, interestingly, Jen Psaki and John Bolton...
That's emphasizing, you know, Milley's a patriot.
We have all full confidence that he loves the Constitution.
Notice the generality of these defenses.
They don't address what it is that Milley actually said and whether Milley has the authority to do it.
Now, Milley is under the authority of the Defense Secretary.
That is Chris Miller.
Now, Chris Miller has issued a statement saying that he did not and would not ever authorize Milley to have secret calls with the Chinese counterpart.
He said that this guy has violated the inviolable principle of civilian control of the military.
He said the chain of command runs from the President to the Secretary of Defense, not through the Chairman.
He's called for Milley's resignation.
So even if Milley says, I was following procedure, I was following orders, it turns out there were no such orders.
But now let's consider the case in extremis, because whatever rules are in place, I will grant that there are situations, and I mentioned I mentioned one in the earlier segment where there's a kind of an immediate emergency.
The person you're dealing with who is in charge goes so berserk that something just has to be done and there is no time to follow the procedures.
So the question then becomes, did Trump in fact go rogue?
Is it the case that Trump was so out of control?
And the Woodward book, by the way, tries to make it look...
At least based on the reported accounts of it, that Trump was out of control.
But let's look at what this out of control means.
Here's Trump, and this is again according to Woodward's book, shouting to Kellyanne Conway, how the hell did we lose the vote to Joe Biden?
Well... That's a little bit annoyed, but it's not exactly out of control.
He can't be president.
He said, how the heck did we lose the vote?
He's wondering how he lost.
Okay. Trump to Pence.
I don't want to be your friend anymore.
Trump is angry. He feels betrayed by Pence.
He even says something like, if you don't do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago.
Don't do it. It here referring to Trump, to Pence, sending back the electoral votes to the states for them to take another look at it because of the allegations of impropriety.
So Pence is unwilling. He's reluctant.
Trump says, basically, quote, you're going to wimp out.
But this is not going rogue.
This is Trump basically having a conversation between two people who thought they were on the same page and discover that on this critical issue, they're not.
Mark Esper. Now, we're going back to June of 2020.
So, we're going back before the election.
Obviously, what Trump says there is much less relevant.
It's not a case of going rogue, but nevertheless, it's in Woodward's book.
And this, of course, has been reported elsewhere that Trump had a kind of a tirade against a defense secretary, Mark Esper, at the time, where Mark Esper had gone out and said, listen, I oppose invoking the Insurrection Act.
And this, of course, made it difficult for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, even though there was the closest thing that we've seen to an insurrection, not January 6th.
But the George Floyd protest was extremely violent, a great deal of damage, a great deal of arson, lots more people hurt and so on.
But Trump apparently shouts, you took away my authority, you're not the president.
Again, this is Trump, you know, you may say letting Esper have it, but there is nothing here.
About Trump starting a war with China.
Trump has been actually trying to basically get America out of wars.
Trump starting World War III. Trump so out of control that Milley would be warranted in saying, in effect, listen, at least for now, I got to take over because the country, the republic itself is in danger.
No, the republic was never in danger from Trump, but the republic was in danger from Milley, and it still is.
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Nothing but the truth. nbttmovie.com That's nbttmovie.com Guys, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast bestselling author Joel Rosenberg.
Joel has written, boy, 15 novels, five nonfiction books.
Here is his latest nonfiction work.
It's called Enemies and Allies.
And this is a fascinating book.
I just finished reading it.
Joel, welcome back to the podcast.
Great to have you, as always.
Thank you, Nesh. Thanks for reading the book.
Oh, I know. It was eye-opening because, well, what I love is that the book is based upon real, on-the-record conversations that you had, you know, and it's not with the, you know, the aid to this guy who's an aid to that guy, or it's not unnamed sources.
You are talking to the leaders of the major countries in the Middle East.
You're getting their direct on the record comments and you're drawing out of it a narrative.
You actually mentioned to me that you see your book as a little bit of an anti, well, it's the anti Bob Woodward approach.
So say what you mean by that.
Well, of course, Woodward's book isn't quite out as you and I recording this, and in many ways I have respect for Bob Woodward, but one of the challenges that Woodward has is that he interviews all these people that you don't know where the information is coming from.
When he reports it.
So if he says that General Milley said something horrible about Trump, did Milley tell him that?
Did a third aide to the, you know, some assistant to the assistant?
You don't know where the information is coming from.
So it becomes difficult to know, is it true?
Is it accurate? And the image that Woodward seems to paint President Trump is at odds with the image that I got from Netanyahu, from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, from UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, from Jordan's King Abdullah, and others.
In addition to sitting with Trump in the Oval Office, with talking to Pompeo and Pence on the record, my point is There's tremendous respect and admiration and appreciation among America's most important Israeli and Arab allies for what Trump did.
They didn't get into his personality.
They looked at his policies and they looked at his results.
And let's just rattle off a few, right?
I mean, there were 5 million Muslims and Christians and Yazidis living under the reign of terror of the ISIS caliphate.
Trump came in. And decimated the caliphate when Obama let it grow and lead to genocide.
It was Trump who took out Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. It was Trump who took out the top Iranian terrorist, General Qasem Soleimani.
It was Trump who ripped up the Iran nuclear deal and imposed a maximum pressure sanctions campaign on Iran because Iran is trying to get nuclear weapons.
Look, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, there's numerous books written about him.
None of those reporters have ever met him, much less got him on the record.
I did. And I spent hours with him, and he told me on the record that the Supreme Leader of Iran is, quote, the new Hitler, unquote.
Now, I'm just giving you a few examples.
But what's fascinating is our most trusted allies in the Middle East deeply appreciated President Trump and his team.
And I didn't even mention yet the biggest accomplishment, which was four Arab-Israeli peace and normalization agreements known as the Abraham Accords and some other related agreements.
That nobody in this city, Washington, where I'm speaking to you from, thought Trump was capable of.
I quote Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden and others.
On the record, John Kerry is saying Trump's going to make the situation worse in the Middle East.
In fact, he made it much better.
So this is all apparently at odds with the book that Woodward wrote.
And my book is not just some guy watching from the sidelines.
I'm in the room like he was, except I'm telling you exactly who my sources are.
Yeah, I mean, I remember John Kerry saying something to the effect of, he goes, well, you know, this idea that you can get Arab countries to cut deals, side deals with Israel is preposterous.
No such deal can occur without the involvement and concurrence of the Palestinians, without resolving the Palestinian issue.
We haven't resolved the Palestinian issue.
But you've got all these agreements in place.
So I mean, it is funny how all these establishment figures who deliver with Solomonic authority these proclamations that turn out to be not only untrue but absurd.
And I think what Trump did is he made them look stupid.
Well, it's true, Dinesh, and I describe this group of elites and establishment figures that you talk about as the peace industry.
They have made a lot of their reputation and a lot of money over many, many decades talking about how to make peace in the Middle East, except they never do it.
Some of them, well, Yasser Arafat famously won a Nobel Peace Prize.
He didn't make peace. So it's a little odd.
President Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize, but where's the peace?
President Trump probably will not win a Nobel Peace Prize, even though he should.
And I say this, Dinesh, as someone who was a never-Trumper in 2016, okay?
I'm not coming in there as a guy who was, quote, drinking the Kool-Aid or a sycophant or any of the attacks that are made.
I'm telling you, I was a brutal critic of the president when he wasn't the president, when he was just a candidate.
But when I sit with him in the Oval Office and I describe it in Enemies and Allies, I tell him, look, We still have some disagreements on some things, but you have shocked me by keeping promises I never thought you were serious about and by accomplishing things in the Middle East I never thought you could do.
And I think one of the problems of the never-Trumper world is they're not willing to say, listen, the man got a lot of stuff done.
Like, it was messy, right?
You don't want to see the sausage get made.
I don't want to see the sausage get made, but I like sausage.
You know, Trump had a messy presidency.
It was a messy process.
But he listened to his generals.
He didn't surrender to the Taliban, okay?
Yes, he wanted to draw down U.S. forces, but he listened to his generals.
He listened to Pence. He listened to Pompeo, who told him, you've got to do this in a very measured way, because if you pull out the wrong Jenga stick...
The whole thing collapses.
Trump listened. Biden did not.
So for all the critics of Trump who say, oh, he was going to make things worse in the Middle East.
Well, first of all, he didn't.
And second of all, Biden did.
And I think it's important to just look at results and say who was making America safer, who was putting the fear of God in our enemies, and who was emboldening our allies instead of the opposite.
And I got to tell you, Biden, with his 50 years of experience, has made the situation worse.
And Trump, with no experience, which worried me at the beginning, made the situation better.
And I'm one of the few that I think has been honest about saying, listen, I still have some criticism of Trump.
I didn't like every tweet.
I didn't like paying off a porn star.
I'm sorry. I'm going to be honest about that.
But when it comes to...
His impact on the world, and particularly on the area of the world that I'm focused on, where I live in Jerusalem, he made the situation a whole lot better, and he deserves credit for it.
And the leaders of the Middle East give him credit for it.
In fact, they were deeply appreciative of him.
And I think that's a story, unfortunately, Bob Woodward is not telling.
Yeah, Joel, when we come back, I want to talk about how there's been a great shift in the grand narrative of the Middle East.
It used to be one way, it's now a completely different way.
We'll be right back.
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I'm back with bestselling author Joel Rosenberg, his new book, Enemies and Allies.
Just a very engrossing reading.
And Joel, we were talking a little bit about the big story in the Middle East vis-a-vis Trump.
But let me talk about the way in which the ground has really shifted in the Middle East.
And you talk about, this is kind of the, I think, the narrative thread of your book, namely that if you go back to, say, the 67 war, you had all the Arab countries ganged up against Israel, a kind of, you may say, unified Muslim alliance.
And Israel was seen perhaps as a surrogate of the West, so it was us against them.
And you point out that in a generation or so, all of this has completely changed and we're dealing with, you may almost say, a new reality and a new narrative.
So tell us what that new reality is and what is the narrative that important Muslim leaders in the Middle East are now sharing with you?
It is fascinating, Dinesh.
And I think the last 18 months or so, Americans have been so focused on internal issues, COVID and health and the economy and elections and vaccinations and all the controversies, right, that most Americans have not had a chance to really observe or process the tectonic changes.
That are going on in the Arab Muslim world.
The Arab Muslim world, 20 years after 9-11, has decided which side it wants to be on.
It wants to be on the sign of moderation.
It wants to be against terrorism.
It wants to be against nuclear weapons.
It wants to be against the Iranian apocalyptic regime.
It wants to be pro-American, and it wants to be an ally with Israel.
That's a huge story.
You won't get it on the NBC Nightly News or on the front page of the Washington Post.
Which is crazy because, you know, for the last hundred years, the Arab-Israeli-Arab-Jewish conflict in the Middle East has been the top story.
I mean, here is Mohammed bin Sultan, MBS, the head of Saudi Arabia, Salman, sorry.
And I'm quoting him now.
He goes, have you noticed that Iran is the only country that is not attacked by Al-Qaeda or ISIS? What he's getting at here is he says that there's a kind of de facto alliance that Between these various terrorist groups, whether their roots are Sunni or Shia, right? He goes, we have enemies, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and others.
I think this is really fascinating because you've got one of the most important guys in the region, not to mention a producer of a huge portion of the world's oil, basically recognizing that there is a threat inside of Islam coming from radical elements of That's exactly right.
And this is so fascinating, because you think back 20 years ago to 9-11, Dinesh, and you're thinking, Osama bin Laden, he was a Saudi.
Al-Qaeda was invented in Saudi Arabia.
15 of the 19 hijackers, Saudis.
Now, I'm not saying that the Saudi government was doing it.
I'm saying there was a culture, religiously, ethically, sort of politically, that allowed for really radical voices, okay?
And we asked, we sat with Mohammed bin Salman and we asked him, where were you on 9-11?
How do you see this?
And he said, I was 16 years old.
My father was the governor of Riyadh.
And my mother started screaming, come to the television.
I watched, he said, the towers fall.
I watched these attacks. And he said that in the days and weeks that followed, he and his brothers and his cousins decided, and his language, not mine, he said, we're going to grow up and kick the asses of the people who did this.
And that's what he's doing.
Like, We don't get much of an insight into how Muslim leaders think today because the media isn't trusted by any of them to sit down and talk to them.
This book is the only book that has done it.
And what you find is 20 years ago we were all asking as Americans, where the hell are the Muslims that are against this stuff?
They're there now. They're leading countries and they're leading the change, including embracing Israel.
And my book is the one that tells that story where the mainstream media refuses to do it.
I mean, to put some context on this, Joel, you know, when I read about Saudi Arabia, I read about a kind of pact between al-Wahhab, the kind of fanatical Muslim cleric, and bin Sultan, in which basically Wahhab said, I'm going to let you rule the country.
But basically, the religious education belongs to me.
So the Saudis were, on the one hand, U.S. allies, and they were, of course, in the oil business.
But on the other hand, they were funding, apparently, all these radical madrasas that were producing the bin Ladens of the world.
And what you're telling me now is that the top leader of Saudi Arabia said, enough is enough.
We're not really going to do that anymore.
We're going to take sides with the moderate Muslims.
And And I think here again, the significance is we're talking about two Islams, right?
I like that you have a quotation in here where you talk about the fact that people talk about fake news.
And you're quoting here, this is the Egyptian leader, al-Sisi.
But he says to you, he goes, we have fake Islam.
And he describes the radical Muslims as fake Islam.
And that seems to be a shared theme.
Prince Abdullah in Jordan, MBZ in UAE, the United Arab Emirates, all these important Muslim thinkers identifying radical Islam as kind of a betrayal of Islam.
Would that be a correct summary?
That's exactly right.
And again, King Abdullah was the only Arab leader that was around on 9-11, and he was fighting radicals.
But President el-Sisi wasn't in power in Egypt yet.
MBS was 16 years old.
MBZ's father was around.
And in fact, Sheikh Zayed, the founder of the modern state of the United Arab Emirates, Sent Emirati military forces to join us in Afghanistan.
Think about that. An Arab Muslim leader sending Arab Muslim soldiers to fight with Americans against Arab Muslims.
These stories have not been told.
The mainstream media has just done a horrific job.
And given the significance of 9-11 and the significance of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War and the $2 trillion and all the rest, you would think that Bob Woodward and others would be spending time trying to get the inside story of this extraordinary change, right? And look, the Saudis have not been ready yet to make a full-on peace deal with Israel.
Fair enough. I think they're weighing it heavily, but look at what they've done.
They haven't stood against the Abraham Accords, whereas they actually sanctioned Anwar Sadat in 79 when he made peace with Israel.
The Saudis have allowed Israeli planes now, commercial airliners, to fly over Saudi Arabia for the first time in human history.
The Saudi crown prince met Secretly, but I confirmed it in the book, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saudi soil.
Like, okay, they're not ready to make peace formally yet, but they, the Saudis, are embracing Israel step by step.
This is front page story.
What universe is that not big today?
So this is partly a reaction I guess I'm doing against just the blindness of the media establishment and the elites who...
Because it was Trump who helped broker these things, they don't want anything to do with the story.
The story predates Trump, and it goes on beyond Trump.
But it was Trump who recognized these tectonic changes and decided not to fight against them, but to work with them.
And he built trust.
Remember, his first trip into the region wasn't to Israel.
Israel was second. He went to Saudi Arabia first.
Trump, who had called for a Muslim ban, which I had been critical of in the campaign in 16, Trump goes to Saudi Arabia and he meets with the leaders of more than 50 Arab Muslim countries and he builds trust with them.
Obama had betrayed them.
I have an Arab leader on the record in Enemies and Allies who says, when we found out that Obama and Biden were secretly negotiating with Iran behind our backs, we felt like we just found our spouse cheating on us.
That's on the record.
Amazing. When we come back, I want to talk to a short segment on what's going to happen now under Biden.
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I'm back with Joel Rosenberg.
We're talking about his important book, Enemies and Allies, in which Joel has first-hand conversations with the most important figures in the Middle East.
Joel, let's talk a little bit about Egypt, a very important country, not so much of an oil-producing country, but a country with an educated middle class, always been one of the key players in the Middle East.
Now, under Obama, you saw the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Mohamed Morsi became the leader of Egypt.
And you quote in the book, Obama's like friendly with the guy.
He's basically talking about, I'm ready to talk to the Muslim Brotherhood.
And Obama calls Morsi to congratulate him.
Obama's obviously happy to see radical Islam implanted in the Middle East.
Now... Morsi gets pushed out by the Egyptian military.
They have an election.
And we now have this guy, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, whom you talk to in the book.
Talk to us about who el-Sisi is, what he's trying to do in Egypt, and to move away from that Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt.
I think that Abdel Fasar el-Sisi is the most extraordinary leader in the modern history of Egypt and maybe the history of Egypt.
I can't think of another example, Dinesh, when I say this in Enemies and Allies, in which you can find a Muslim Arab removing a radical Islamist regime from power and putting a moderate government in its place.
The US Marines do that.
But Arabs don't usually do it in their own countries.
And when I first met President el-Sisi, the first thing I said to him, it was here in Washington, actually, and I said, I want to thank you, Mr.
President, because you rescued 100 million Egyptians from the reign of terror of the Muslim Brotherhood.
You're rebuilding the All the churches in Egypt that were burned down by the Muslim Brotherhood in that reign of terror.
You've built the largest church in the history of the Middle East, and you've given it as a gift to the Christians of Egypt on Christmas Eve.
I mean, look at what he's done.
Let's pause on that for a moment, Joel.
That is actually a little bit stunning to me.
What you have as a Muslim leader of a largely Muslim country building a Christian church and giving it as a gift to the Christian community at Christmas.
Has anything like this happened before?
Well, not like that, because it's the largest, and no.
I mean, you know, Turkey was quite moderate under, you know, once the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and there was a lot of freedom of religion for Christians.
But generally, Muslims don't build churches.
They might allow... We're good to go.
Strengthening the Christians in your country when they're the minority, that is a human rights success.
Improving the economy, fighting terrorism, creating stability, those are human rights successes.
They're not enough, but they're pretty big, and they ought to be acknowledged.
Let me ask you, Joel, it looks like around the world we're now seeing, let's call it a new axis of evil.
Russia, Iran, Turkey, China, and North Korea.
And this is happening at a time where we have Biden in the White House and what I would consider a very suspect group of characters around him.
A national security advisor who doesn't look like he knows what's going on.
Anthony Blinken, as Secretary of State.
Are you worried that much of this really radiant progress in the region, produced not just by Trump, but by the leaders of the Muslim world themselves, is going to be undermined, weakened, undone in the Biden era?
Well the way you frame that, Dinesh, let me give you a short answer.
I'm very worried about American security because of Biden.
Surrendering to the Taliban on the 20th anniversary of 9-11 and leaving Americans in enemy territory is nearly an impeachable offense.
So I'm worried about American security.
But I don't think that Biden is going to undermine the movement between Israel and the Arab world to grow closer.
In fact, I think he's ironically and inadvertently going to accelerate it because this isn't being driven by the United States.
Trump recognized it and worked to help strengthen it.
But it's happening because the Iran...
The threat is so serious.
Iran is so close now to building nuclear weapons that the Arab world, which has hated Israel and Zionism and the Jews for a hundred years, are starting to fundamentally rethink who is my friend and who is my enemy.
And they are realizing that they have treated Israel as the enemy.
But actually, Israel is the friend.
It's the ally. And if we work together, we could build a Middle East NATO of sorts to be a bulwark against the Iranian regime, not the people of Iran, who are wonderful and freedom-loving and turning, by the way, away from Islam to Christ.
But that's a different story for a different time.
But the Iranian regime is going nuclear.
And again, MBS, the Saudi crown prince, called the supreme leader of Iran the new Hitler in my book.
This tells us that I think that Biden is going against the tide of history.
And it's dangerous for America because if he's blindsided by things he doesn't understand, we could see a nuclear 9-11.
But I think Israel and the Arab world is actually coming together faster because they fear that Biden doesn't get it and that he's in full retreat.
Yeah. Wow, that's fascinating.
Joel Rosenberg, thank you so much for joining me.
I really appreciate it. A very interesting book with first-hand direct information.
Check it out. Thanks very much, Joel.
My pleasure. Thank you, Dinesh.
We asked and you responded.
Franklin Graham, former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese, Dr.
James Dobson, the Family Policy Alliance, the Heritage Foundation, they're all on board.
But we only have until September 29 to include your name before this goes to the Biden Commission.
Look, if we don't stop the radical left from installing four more justices so they can rig...
The system in their favor, it will end the rule of law as we know it in America.
So please sign your name now, like Debbie and I did.
Go to SupremeCoup.com.
That's SupremeCoup.com to sign First Liberty's letter.
That's SupremeCoup.com.
And may God bless America.
Every now and then, Debbie and I have conversations that could be described as slightly weird.
And we had one, I think yesterday, I had stopped at the grocery store and picked up some toilet paper and we were kind of taking a look at it and distributing it over the house.
And then Debbie just blurted out, I think that toilet paper is one of the great symbols of capitalism.
I was like, what?!
And, you know, I maybe think a little bit because when you think of capitalism, you think about the kind of cutting-edge innovations.
You think about, oh, capitalism is the iPhone, you know, the Wall Street IPO, the private space travel.
You don't think of a humble item, kind of a pedestrian, everyday item like toilet paper.
But, of course, when we had the lockdowns, people suddenly became aware that this ordinary item is not so ordinary.
It's something that we take for granted.
And when what we take for granted is missing, the abundance of it is missing.
Toilet paper was available, but in short supply.
We actually bought these toilet paper rolls that were like, you know, they were so minimal that it basically lasted like three days.
Debbie said, I think they were made in China.
So anyway, we were using Chinese toilet paper.
And this may seem like a funny confession for me to make, but I actually grew up without toilet paper.
Many countries of the world don't have toilet paper.
They don't use toilet paper.
Yeah. In fact, I remember when I got my first job, this was actually Adam Meyerson hiring me as the managing editor of Policy Review.
I was... I came in for my interview and Adam is a bit of a wry guy and with a sense of humor and he's like, Dinesh, he goes, first of all, he gives me the Indian namaste as an obvious kind of a joke.
But then he goes, I hope you will forgive me, but I will not be shaking your left hand because I understand that in your country people use their left hands to wipe their rear ends.
I guess I should have been offended today.
People would be like, oh, it's racist, you know.
But I sort of laughed because it was true.
And so, you know, anyway, thinking about toilet paper today.
Not for you. Not for me.
Now, I looked up the origins of toilet paper.
Do you know that toilet paper, by the way...
Toilet paper in America was invented in 1857.
Wow! Think about it.
There was no toilet paper during the Revolutionary Era.
You had toilet paper just coming into existence around the time of the Civil War.
You can be pretty sure most people didn't use it.
By the way, it was a New York guy named Joseph Gayetti.
He marketed, quote,"...medicated paper for the water closet.
500 sheets for 50 cents." We're good to go.
This is the paper on which we transcribe the sayings of the Chinese government and also of the wise men of China, people like Confucius and Mencius.
He goes, we wouldn't dare use the paper that we use for those lofty and noble purposes for the toilet.
So even though he thought of the idea, he rejected the idea.
And we still have his writing to this effect.
Now, in socialist India, toilet paper was considered a luxury.
I mean, think about how socialists operate.
In socialist India of the 1970s, when I grew up, almost everything was a luxury.
Coca-Cola, luxury.
Chocolate, luxury.
Foreign cars, luxury.
And you may ask, well, how can toilet paper be a luxury?
Well, their view is who needs toilet paper?
Or that even now, in many countries in the world, this is parts of Europe, this is India, you'll notice this when you travel.
You go to even a nice hotel, you notice the toilet paper is like sandpaper.
I mean, it's horrible. It's not good toilet paper.
And it's because in these centralized regimes, their views, well, listen, you have it.
Why are you complaining about it?
At least you got it. Toilet paper is toilet paper.
It's only in capitalist society that something so mundane as toilet paper becomes, in a sense, an object of innovation.
And what I mean by that is, today, just walk in a typical grocery giant or one of these grocery stores, you'll notice that there's all kinds of toilet paper.
First of all, there are innumerable sizes, innumerable brands.
Different degrees of softness.
You might remember from the 80s, the guy who liked to squeeze the Charmin.
Ooh, I'm squeezing the Charmin!
It's so soft!
That's the point, is people like their toilet paper soft.
Today you can get like lotion, lotion-y toilet paper.
So the old concept, Gaiety's concept of medicated paper, is now available to us in wide abundance.
So I want to do this humble example to show how capitalism really pays attention to the wants and needs of consumers.
And when we think about capitalism, we should think that this is something that's not just good for your wallet.
It's not just good for your well-being.
It's also kind of good for your butt cheeks.
In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for 2021 at 2.1%.
The actual rate, 5% plus.
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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Does it make sense to believe in the possibility of aliens?
Once again, by aliens here, I don't mean illegal aliens.
I believe in them. We're seeing a lot of them lately.
But space aliens, people who intelligent life of some sort that exists outside in other parts of the universe.
Now, there are a number of atheists who say that the absence of evidence exists Is evidence of absence.
So if we have no proof, no real evidence for aliens, that means that there are no aliens.
That means that we should not believe in aliens.
Now, I've always regarded this principle as suspect.
I mean, think of an ancient Greek in the 5th century BC. He looks up in the sky.
What does he see? He sees 10 stars.
Now, if you told that guy, hey, this is a much bigger universe, that there are other planets, there are other galaxies, there aren't just 10 stars, there are many more stars in the sky, he'd go, well, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Therefore, there must be only 10 stars, because I can only see 10 stars.
Well, if you really think about it, the absence of evidence...
Is not evidence of the absence of stars.
The absence of evidence is evidence that you can't see very far in the 5th century BC. That's what it's really evidence of.
Now... It may seem that with the absence of evidence for aliens, we shouldn't believe in aliens because we haven't seen any proof of aliens, but I think that's a very shallow way to think.
Why? Because we live in a remote suburb of an unimaginably huge universe.
Our universe, now think about this for a minute, is at a minimum 14.5 billion light-years.
That means it is 29 billion light-years in diameter.
And that is only the universe that we can, in principle, know about, because since the universe is only 14.5 billion years old, light has had only that time to travel from the most distant star to us, but there could be other stars beyond that.
We will never know about those.
So the universe could be much, much bigger than even the 29 billion light years.
So how can we make general statements when you...
It's kind of like, you know, you've lived in a small village and you've only eaten, you know, one type of vegetable.
You haven't traveled in the rest of the planet.
You're like, well, there's only one type of vegetable because that's all I've seen.
The absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
No, the absence of evidence is evidence of your provinciality.
Now... Very interestingly, the astronomer Frank Drake began to think about, what is the probability?
Is it possible to attach a mathematical way of thinking about how likely it is that we will ever, or man, not just you or I in our lifetime, but will ever be able to encounter aliens?
And Drake began to think about how do you find out things when you really don't know?
Let's say, for example, you are walking by a college and you have no idea how many students there are in the college.
But you are able to find out, let's say, how many freshmen enroll every year.
Then just by knowing how many freshmen enroll every year and how long they typically stay, four years, you can make a very good estimate for how many students there are on that campus.
It's not exact, but it's pretty close.
And using this kind of logic, Frank Drake came up with what's It's known as the Drake equation.
By the way, it's the second most famous equation in science after E equals MC squared.
And I just want to go through it in very simple terms because it shows you the ingenuity of how you can think about something for which there's no evidence that seems unbelievably abstract.
How do you even get your head around it?
So here is the Drake equation.
It basically says that in order to find an alien society or aliens, we have to know These things.
N, which is the number of civilizations in the Milky Way.
That's something we actually, by and large, do know.
R, which is the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life.
Life can't develop in any conditions.
It requires certain conditions.
And so you can find out if there are x number of stars, what proportion of those stars are suitable for the development of life.
Then, the fraction of those stars with planetary systems.
That's called Fb.
Then Ne, which is the number of planets with an environment suitable for life.
Then, the fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears.
Then, the fraction of life-bearing planets on which intelligent life appears.
So not just life, but intelligent life.
Then, and this is critically important, Fc, the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that produces detectable signs of their existence.
Because you could have intelligent life somewhere, but it has no way of putting out any signals.
How on earth are we, how on earth, how even outside of earth, are we going to ever find out about it?
And then L, the average length of time such civilizations produce such signs.
So... Now, if you look at all those numbers, and there are about 2, 4, 6, 8 of them, there's really only one of the 8 that we know.
But what Drake is doing is providing, I think, a very ingenious way to attach significance to In a sense, what you see here is long before we have found any evidence of alien life, Drake is developing a theory.
And this often happens in science.
It's happened with Newton.
Newton, by the way, predicted the existence of the possibility of putting satellites in space.
Why? I mean, it couldn't be done in Newton's time.
But Newton knew that if you look at the moon, and the moon which would normally move away from the earth in a straight line at constant speed, it's gravity that is pulling the moon toward the earth, but pulling the moon with a force that keeps the moon in its orbit.
And so Newton realized, wait a minute, if that's true, you can put other objects in space which would, like the moon, move otherwise away from Earth in a straight line at constant speed, but if the gravitational force is sufficient, it will pull those objects toward the Earth and keep them in a kind of what's called a geosynchronous orbit.
So, Newton predicted satellites long before we had satellites, and now, of course, we do.
The beauty of the Drake equation, it seems to me, this is just part of my love of science, but it's my love of science motivated not by science itself, but by thinking about questions that are raised in philosophy, in Christian apologetics.
We see here the error of the atheist idea that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
We see that there are ways to think about even a topic so remote as aliens.
I don't know, of course, if one day we will ever find them.
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