Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Sept. 17, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza

54:54

LOCK HIM UP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 177

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Is General Milley guilty of double treason?
	I'll make the case for a court martial.
	Also, there's a wider pattern of malfeasance and lies in the Biden administration.
	Where's the accountability?
	I'll talk about how Minneapolis decided to cut back on its police department and the police departments decided to cut back on Minneapolis.
	And finally, I'm going to begin a series looking at a great debate in the Reformation era between Erasmus and Luther.
	Why? Because it deals with fundamental issues of faith and good works and free will.
	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.
	I've been laying into General Milley for, well, a couple of days now and exploding with a certain kind of controlled fury about what this guy has been doing.
	Usurping the power of the elected president, in a sense making himself the de facto president, colluding with the opposition leader of the other party, that's bad enough, but even worse, colluding with a foreign adversary.
	Against his own commander-in-chief.
	Now, this is very bad stuff, but it's time for a moment to cool it down and look in a more objective way at what Milley has done and what needs to be done about it.
	Now, I don't think a whole lot is going to be done about it.
	Why? Because Biden says he has full confidence in Milley.
	And this is nothing more than a demonstration that the guy who has made a whole bunch of money in China, he You can almost call him, almost, China's man in the White House, is standing up for China's man at the top ranks of the U.S. military.
	Now, Milley has really committed two separate offenses here, and we want to itemize them a little more carefully.
	The first one is the usurpation of power.
	The oath that he extracted from other generals, basically saying to them, hey, listen, the procedure here Is for you to go through me.
	If Trump asks you to do anything, particularly in terms of attacking or nuclear weapons, don't do it.
	Basically, make sure that the process runs through me and he goes around the room and gets everyone to, in effect, swear to this.
	That's the first point.
	And the second call on January 8th, right after the January 6th events, in both cases saying the same message, everything's okay, no attack is going to be launched.
	By the way, if an attack is launched, I will tell you in advance.
	So the idea here is to work with China to, in a sense, block, or at least in this case, give forewarning of anything that Trump might consider doing.
	Now, the first question is whether these facts reported in Woodward's book are in fact accurate.
	On the one hand, we have to take note of some reporting that Jennifer Griffin has been doing at Fox News Channel where she says that, or she claims, on the basis of interviews with some people High up in the Defense Department, that these official calls with Chinese officials were not just Milley and Li Zhosheng,
	that in fact there were a number of people on the American side of the call, and that it may be that Woodward and Costa, the guys who wrote the book Peril, have taken these comments out of context.
	So there's been some questioning of the precise veracity We're good to go.
	They take the view that, well, this isn't the normal course of business.
	Well, General Milley was simply providing reassurances.
	That's part of his job.
	And no, he wasn't trying to usurp power from Trump.
	He was merely, quote, making sure that the generals around him understood the proper procedure.
	But all of this kind of anodyne narrative, I think, misses the point that General Milley is a partisan.
	This guy, I mean, even going back to...
	I'm now referring to a book by two Washington Post journalists, Carol Lennig and Philip Rucker.
	And in that book, they report that Milley treated Trump as if he was like Hitler.
	Milley says, quote, This is a Reichstag moment, the gospel of the Fuhrer.
	These are direct quotes, again, attributed to Milley.
	Once again, we have to ask, did these reporters get it right?
	But when you basically start having insider accounts that are coming from multiple sources, you can sort of check them one up against each other with appropriate caution.
	Now, let's look at these two things one by one.
	The first thing, the so-called oath.
	Let's remember that Milley himself took an oath, and that oath is to the Constitution.
	He swore to uphold and defend the Constitution.
	Now, what is the constitutional process?
	Well, it turns out there is one.
	It's called the 25th Amendment.
	And according to the 25th Amendment, the vice president and the majority of the cabinet...
	I have to sign a declaration that Trump is somehow out of control, incapable of holding office.
	Pence would then become the acting president.
	Trump would have four days to object.
	Both chambers of Congress will then have to vote, and it takes a two-thirds vote to remove Trump.
	Now, none of this happened. None of this was even going to happen.
	But the point is, if it doesn't happen, there's no alternative road.
	There's no alternative road where Milley can say, well, you know, that's really not going to happen, so therefore, I'm just going to take power by coup, and it's going to be a short-term coup.
	Don't worry about it. No, there's no provision to do that.
	That's unconstitutional.
	That is a complete violation of the constitutional process.
	So, it doesn't matter if General Milley thought that there's a reasonable...
	Let's take the extreme.
	Trump said to General Milley, attack China.
	Now, what is the law in that case?
	The law in that case is really simple.
	Milley must carry out the order as long as what Trump is asking is legal.
	So it is completely legal for the President of the United States to order an attack.
	By the way, it doesn't matter whether what Trump is doing is reasonable.
	Milley does not have the authority to say, you're doing something unreasonable.
	I get to override your authority.
	It may seem reasonable to you, but it's not reasonable.
	None of this doesn't even come into play.
	It is true that you don't have to follow any order.
	Going back to the Vietnam era, going back to the Nazi era, this idea that I'm just following orders doesn't really work.
	So if Trump gave Milley orders that were flatly illegal, then Milley had every right to say, I'm not doing it, or I'm going to resign rather than do it.
	But this idea that Milley could find his own way around Trump, tip off the Chinese leadership.
	Now, if so, the point is, did he actually do that?
	And the truth of it is we need an inquiry to find out.
	Now, so far the Republicans have been a little tentative on this matter.
	A group of Republicans, by the way, have called for a factual investigation of what exactly Milley said to China.
	I think this is just a first step because the allegations here are so serious.
	That they amount, in effect, to the United States having been, this very year, under a military coup, under a dictatorship.
	And by the way, the very guy talking about the January 6th attempt to overthrow the Constitution, if true, he overthrew the Constitution.
	He's the one who needs to be locked up, not the January 6th guys.
	Milley needs to be the one in solitary confinement awaiting a court-martial if, in fact, he did the things that he is said to have done.
	You know guys, when I roll out of bed, I'm getting out of my geezer dream sheets, and I'm getting off the MyPillow pillow, and what do I do?
	I stick my feet into MyPillow MySlippers.
	Mike has taken over two years to develop these new MySlippers.
	They're designed to wear, by the way, indoor or outdoor all day long.
	They're made with MyPillow foam and impact gel to help prevent fatigue.
	They're made with quality leather suede And they feel great.
	Now, for a limited time, Mike is offering 50% off his new MySlippers.
	The MySlippers are so comfortable, you're going to want to get some for the whole family.
	We actually did. Here's Danielle with her moccasins.
	Debbie and I just love ours.
	I got the moccasins. Debbie got the slip-ons.
	Go to MyPillow.com and use promo code Dinesh.
	By the way, deep discounts on all the MyPillow products, the Giza Dream bed sheets, the MyPillow mattress topper, the robes, Do you have the feeling sometimes that you're living in an America that has become a little bit of a twilight zone?
	That American politics has become unhinged from established and trusted institutions and procedures.
	That we are in uncharted territory, in no man's land.
	In some ways I think there's a question of whether we really still have a republic anymore, or if it is the case that we've got a kind of ruling cabal, a ruling elite that have just decided, listen, we don't really care if there's massive public opposition to what you're doing.
	What are you going to do about it? Don't come to D.C. We've got big fences erected everywhere.
	What exactly can you do?
	We have our, let's just say, knee on your neck, America.
	And now, this feeling, I think, where does it come from?
	I think it comes from the fact that you've got a government Supported by a media and a digital media that works in concert with each other, not subjecting government to scrutiny, no proper checks and balances, a cowed, defensive Republican Party that leaves huge issues untouched.
	A Democratic Party that seems not only emboldened but impervious to law and consequences.
	And if these seem like very broad and perhaps even somewhat extreme allegations, I don't think they are, but if they do, let's just look at two concrete examples of this, both dealing with agencies of the government that are supposed to be kind of neutral.
	One is the military and the other is the health establishment.
	I want to focus here a little bit on Milley, but more broadly the Defense Department.
	And I want to focus also on Fauci and more broadly the health establishment, the National Institutes of Health, and the CDC. Now, let's start with Milley for a minute and the Defense Department.
	You've got... Complete lack of accountability.
	Basically, these allegations are made about Milley and Biden and Jen Psaki are like, well, we think the guy's a patriot.
	Not, is any of this true?
	What exactly happened?
	Let's disclose to the American people.
	Let's try to see if there were transcripts of this call.
	None of that. Just a simple affirmation.
	It's almost like saying, listen, whatever Milley did, he did on our behalf.
	He's on our side. That's all we know.
	That's all we need to know.
	End of story. Look at Afghanistan.
	Where are the consequences for what was done in Afghanistan?
	I mean, it goes beyond negligence to say you're leaving all this weaponry behind.
	You're not even going to destroy it.
	You're not even going to ask for it back.
	You're acting as if, listen, this is a gift to the Taliban.
	Well, oops! You know, all these Americans are left over there.
	Notice that there's an attempt to sort of smother the facts about what's happening with them.
	Planes aren't leaving from the Kabul airport.
	The Taliban has evidently got a kind of lock on what's happening.
	The Biden administration is now beholden to at the mercy of the Taliban.
	But it looks like their focus is not on getting the Americans out.
	It's on the public optics.
	And so the idea here is if we can just get the media to kind of move on from Afghanistan, kind of the way we got the media to move on from the border, we're going to be okay.
	This is a whole smoke and mirrors performance we're putting on for the American people.
	And so Jake Sullivan, nah, he's not going to be held accountable.
	Lloyd Austin, nah, we're not going to ask anything of him.
	It doesn't matter what danger they expose Americans to.
	It doesn't matter what disastrous defeats they inflict on the American military, their own side.
	And it's going to be...
	Lack of accountability, and partly because there's lack of accountability at the top.
	Biden's not even accountable.
	Was he ever? Now, the latest outrage is the United States has announced $64 million in assistance to Afghanistan.
	The U.S. government said, we're not really giving this money to the Taliban.
	We're going to be giving it to aid agencies.
	But it is going into Afghanistan.
	And if it's going into Afghanistan, this is like sending money to Venezuela.
	Guess who controls that money?
	Maduro. Send money into Afghanistan.
	Guess who controls that money?
	The Taliban. Why? Because they control the country.
	So the truth of it is, we are now using taxpayer money to subsidize the Taliban.
	Let's turn for a moment to the health department.
	In separate testimony, both Francis Collins and Fauci have told Congress, and I'm now quoting Fauci, that the National Institutes of Health has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
	That's a Flat-out statement.
	Francis Collins made pretty much the same statement on a radio show.
	But The Intercept published a report just a few days ago basically laying out that the NIH gave grants to the EcoHealth Alliance for what?
	For bat coronavirus research, including money earmarked designated for the Wuhan Institute of Virology to, quote, identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans.
	In short, gain-of-function research.
	Now, here's Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers, and he says in a tweet this.
	He's reviewing the latest information disclosed by The Intercept, and I'm now quoting him.
	The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director Francis Collins and the NIAID Director Anthony Fauci that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV, Wuhan Institute of Virology, are untruthful.
	So, what you have here again is lying before Congress.
	What's the consequence of that?
	This is a serious crime.
	It's not just a matter of being fired.
	You can be criminally prosecuted for doing this.
	Because these are knowing lies.
	These are people who have plenty of chance to go look and see what their institute has done.
	And so the point we're trying to make here is this helpless feeling on the part of citizens.
	That there's no real democratic accountability.
	People do horrific things.
	They have horrific consequences.
	People die. Americans are left behind.
	There's a black eye on America in the world.
	And yet these guys are going on as if, well, what, what, what, what?
	Nothing really happened. No big deal.
	It's okay to be asleep at the wheel because the man asleep at the wheel, Biden, is not going to care, is not going to demand any accountability at all.
	We asked and you responded.
	Just a few weeks ago, one of America's leading non-profit law firms, this is First Liberty Institute, asked patriots like you to sign their letter to help stop President Biden's radical scheme to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.
	Since then, a quarter of a million people have signed on, with tens of thousands joining the coalition every day.
	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, this will end the rule of law as we know it in America.
	Please sign your name now, Debbie and I both have.
	Go to SupremeCoup.com.
	That's SupremeCoup.com to sign First Liberty's letter.
	That's SupremeCoup.com.
	And may God bless America.
	I've been talking about the lack of accountability on the part of the Biden administration.
	But that demand for accountability needs to come much more loudly from the GOP, from the opposition party.
	The opposition party is the check on the governing party to say, wait a minute, why, when, what, where, how?
	Now, a group of House Republicans led by Pennsylvania Representative Scott Perry Have in fact demanded what's called an AR-156 investigation, which is an army tool to figure out what the facts are in a given situation.
	And they've demanded this in terms of what Milley did with China.
	Congressman Perry, who led this effort, is himself a retired brigadier general, 38 years of army service, and he's like, let's start by just telling us what exactly happened Let's get information about it.
	That's a good first step. An even better step, Senator Josh Hawley has basically said, listen, if there's no accountability for Afghanistan, if we don't see some resignations, Jake Sullivan and Secretary Lloyd Austin I'm sorry, not Austin, but Blinken, Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State.
	If they don't resign, Hawley goes, okay, I'm going to be holding up, blocking every top-level civilian appointee to the State Department and the Defense Department.
	And this includes ambassadors.
	It includes assistant high-level officials at both departments.
	Now, this is bad news for the Democrats because senators have the ability to put these blocks.
	They cause very long delays, and it's very hard to get around them.
	Ted Cruz, by the way, has been blocking nominees for some time now.
	Ted Cruz, of course, more concerned.
	Over the Nord Stream pipeline, that was his reason for doing it.
	But with Hawley, the reason is the lack of accountability on Afghanistan.
	Right now, Biden has ambassadors that he's nominated for key countries, China, India, France, Israel.
	Hawley's like, that's not happening.
	Bob Menendez, the Senate Foreign Relations Chairman, is very angry about it.
	He goes, this will undermine U.S. security.
	Ha ha ha ha ha. It's the Biden administration that's undermining U.S. security.
	And Hawley makes a good point here.
	He goes, I'm concerned that the President of the United States is calling the Afghan operation, quote, an extraordinary success.
	He goes, wait.
	I cannot think of another example in U.S. history where a commander in chief has celebrated this kind of a catastrophe as a success.
	Hawley is not typical of the Republican Party.
	So far, there's been a great silence among a lot of other leading Republicans, nothing from Lindsey Graham, nothing from McConnell.
	And so, Hawley is going out front, but we need more leaders like this to go out front because without accountability demanded from the GOP, there will be no accountability at all.
	Inflation is upon us, so what are you going to do about it?
	In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for this year 2.1%.
	Now, the actual rate, over 5%.
	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.
	Well, don't stick your head in the sand.
	Hedge your savings against inflation by diversifying into gold and silver with Birch Gold Group.
	Now, if you haven't reached out to Birch Gold to diversify part of your IRA or 401k into a precious metals IRA, do it today.
	I buy my gold from Birch Gold.
	They have an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
	Countless five-star reviews and thousands of happy customers.
	Talk to them, have them help you safeguard your investments.
	Text Dinesh to 484848 to claim your free information kit and to speak with a precious metals expert on holding gold and silver in a tax-sheltered account.
	Again, text Dinesh to 484848 and protect your savings today.
	It may be going a little too far to say every man for himself in Minneapolis, but...
	It's pretty much every man for himself in Minneapolis right now.
	This, of course, was the center, the epicenter of the George Floyd incident and the George Floyd uproar, upheaval.
	George Floyd riots spread out from Minneapolis.
	The Minneapolis... City Council has stripped the police of some money.
	They haven't defunded the police completely, but they've ripped out, well, just more recently, $8 million from the police department.
	They've done this before. They've certainly demoralized the police.
	They've made the police into the bad guys.
	And what's interesting is that the police have decided, okay, well, here's how we respond to that.
	First of all, a whole bunch of policemen have left, creating a massive shortage.
	About a quarter of the city's uniformed police officers have either retired or quit since Floyd.
	And this has led to a huge spike in the crime rate.
	In fact, this year so far, more than 65 people murdered in Minneapolis.
	And that's nearly double the number of the previous year.
	Violent crimes are up.
	The place is becoming, well, here's a guy from Minneapolis quoted in a Reuters article, and he calls it, quote, a gangster's paradise.
	In fact, citizens in Minneapolis, some of them are taking to patrolling the streets themselves.
	Reuters interviews a guy named Marcus Smith.
	This was, by the way, a George Floyd protester, a guy who was, you know, against the police.
	And he goes, wow, I didn't really realize what this would mean, but I don't see the police anywhere now.
	So this guy puts on a Kevlar vest.
	He spends his evenings on the street corner kind of looking for bad guys.
	And so the police have decided, basically, listen, if you're going to take every incident...
	Particularly incident involving a black guy or a Latino guy, and it's going to be a racial incident.
	Well, we're just going to be really careful about approaching those guys.
	We're going to be kind of slow to respond to calls to the police.
	We're going to kind of take it easy.
	And this is now the attitude in the Minneapolis Police Department.
	So in a sense, the left is getting what it wants.
	It wants to immobilize the police force.
	And the police force realizes that when they are put under scrutiny like this, Well, maybe they should be immobilized.
	We'll let the citizens fend for themselves.
	Here's Brandy Earthman, resident of Minneapolis.
	And just this past summer...
	Bullets come flying through her window.
	One of her kids gets shot in the arm.
	And she says, quote, they don't care anymore.
	They're just going to let everybody here kill themselves.
	So what's going on here is that the left's attempt to squeeze the police department has caused the police to take kind of a hands-off approach.
	Police officers have basically stopped making traffic stops.
	If they're scouting a neighborhood and they notice people are intoxicated, they're fighting, they're involved with drugs, the police just don't even approach them.
	Remember that very often it's in approaching people in these situations that you begin to confiscate not just illegal drugs but illegal firearms.
	And one of the Minneapolis police commanders who retired this year, this is a guy named Scott Gerlicker, he says, quote, He goes, nobody in the job or working on the job can blame officers for being less aggressive.
	They're taking a kind of, you may say, absentee approach.
	And so the consequence is an emboldening of criminals.
	It is a lack of police presence on the street.
	It's lack of direct police involvement.
	It makes the citizens more vulnerable.
	And by the way, most of all, of course, the minority citizens who are the most vulnerable.
	In Minneapolis alone, if you look at the killings that have occurred this year, You find that they are disproportionately black, disproportionately Latino, and not a single one caused by a policeman's bullet.
	So if you want to look at the police not as the solution but as the problem, as a city, you're going to have a big problem.
	Are you holding on to boxes of old home movies that you'd like to share with friends and family?
	Are you actually able to watch that priceless footage?
	Send your memories to Legacy Box and they will help you preserve them for generations.
	Your audience will love to hear your experience.
	Debbie and I have had a great experience with Legacy Box, digitizing our old photos and cassette and video recordings.
	Debbie just cried when she saw my steps on Justin's beating heart in an ultrasound, and he's now 26.
	These are the kinds of priceless experiences that Legacy Box helps us preserve.
	By the way, we're about to send them another box full of our photos. Use their kit to safely send the moments you want preserved. Their team will create a digital archive by hand right here in the USA, and you'll receive your new copies stored on the cloud, a thumb drive or DVD, along with all the original media you sent them with their tracking system.
	You can follow every step of the process so you always know your originals are being taken care of.
	Visit LegacyBox.com to take advantage of this limited time offer for 40% off.
	Take advantage of this exclusive offer today and then use their kit whenever you're ready.
	That's LegacyBox.com to save 40% off.
	LegacyBox.com.
	There's some interesting information that's come out on spending on the part of members of Congress on their private security.
	So we're talking here about members of Congress going above and beyond the security that they normally get, particularly in public facilities, public buildings, and so on, and hiring private firms, often at considerable expense.
	And guess who are the biggest spenders in this department?
	Answer, the leftists, the squad.
	The people who call loudest for defund the police are the ones who spend themselves the most on private security to protect themselves.
	And so what you have here is a situation where these guys are, listen, you know, the citizens don't need protection, but we do.
	And of course, the assumption is, we're important.
	We are more deserving.
	We are people who make a difference.
	This was exactly what Representative Cori Bush said when she was asked about this.
	She basically said, well, yeah, we've got to defund the police, but that doesn't mean me.
	That doesn't mean my private security.
	I'm a really important person, after all.
	Now... Now, let's remember that this group, we're talking here about Cori Bush, we're talking about AOC, we're talking about Ilhan Omar, we're talking about Jamal Brown.
	These are people who support the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
	Which basically passed the House, but it stalled in the Senate.
	They support the BREATHE Act, which goes further than the George Floyd Act and actually calls for getting rid of a bunch of federal law enforcement agencies.
	They've also talked about ending immunity, qualified immunity for policemen, so it becomes easier for citizens to sue not just cops, but also state and local officials, but primarily the police.
	And these are the very people, while pushing these laws on the one side, who are making sure that their lives, their safety, are carefully assured on the other by putting out cash, and sometimes campaign cash, taxpayer money, or money that's donated to them.
	They're using it to protect themselves.
	Now, in the case of Jamal Bowman, he contacted the Yonkers Police Department and he basically said, listen, you know, I want added security for my house.
	You know, and this was a little too much for Keith Olson.
	Keith Olson, who's the Yonkers Police Benevolent Association president, he goes, Asking these same police officers to protect your family while creating policies that make communities of color less safe is simply disgraceful.
	So here's a guy who's pushing to cut police protection for other people, but wants more for himself.
	AOC, $45,000 on private security in the first quarter of this year.
	In fact, when she came to Houston to talk about hurricane relief, she hired a private security firm in Houston, paid them $1,500 to go around with her, make sure nothing happens to her.
	When Ocasio-Cortez went to Virginia, she hired Tullus Worldwide Protection, which is run by a guy who used to be a private military contractor with Blackwater.
	And this is a guy who's like, he says, hey, listen, you want to know who we hire?
	Well, we don't hire social workers, let me tell you that.
	AOC knows that when it comes to her own security, she basically wants the best.
	Same with Ayanna Pressley.
	Same with Ilhan Omar.
	These are people who, by and large, are very solicitous of their own security.
	Look at Cori Bush. Cori Bush is somebody who has spent the most money, $70,000, on her own protection.
	And that's about a third of her hold second quarter campaign expenses.
	And most of it goes to RS&T Security Consulting, which is basically a New York firm specializing in providing armed private security.
	So, are we dealing with hypocrisy here?
	Yes, we are, but something more than that.
	We're dealing with the idea that we are the Democrats, the squad, we are the overlords.
	To them, this is really what socialism means.
	It doesn't really mean equality.
	It means the exact opposite. It means we create two classes of people in which there's a kind of ruling elite, that's us.
	We live by one set of rules, and we ask the citizens, the lower people, the peasants, to live by another.
	We'll leave them exposed, naked, vulnerable, and we will make sure that our interests, our lives, our families are well protected.
	I'm really excited to announce a new sponsor of the show.
	If you're with Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, you're simply paying too much for your wireless.
	PureTalk uses the exact same network as those carriers.
	You get the exact same coverage, but for half the price.
	That's right, with PureTalk.
	The average family saves over $800 a year.
	How? It's simple.
	Lower overhead. You don't end up paying for thousands of retail stores, all kinds of social and political initiatives or added perks that you pay for but you never use.
	Just great coverage at a great price.
	PureTalk sent me a phone.
	Here it is. So I could try out their service, and I did.
	And you know what? It works great.
	It works exactly the same as any other provider, but it costs a whole lot less.
	Get unlimited talk, text, and 6 gigs of data for just $30 a month.
	Yep. You still want unlimited data?
	That's fine. You can get that and still save money.
	Go to puretalk.com and enter promo code Dinesh and you'll save 50% off your first month.
	That's puretalk.com, promo code Dinesh.
	Pure Talk is simply smarter wireless.
	I've talked more than once on this podcast and other people have about the comparison between what happened on January 6th And the Antifa BLM riots, on the other hand.
	And it's very clear that there is a radical difference of treatment in these two episodes, the January 6th, Treatment has been harsh, relentless, prosecutorial, hunt them down, lock them up, throw away the key, keep them incarcerated even though they haven't been found guilty of anything, and the approach with BLM and Antifa couldn't be more different.
	Now, it's one thing to say this, and of course we know it to be true by what we see around us, but I think it's useful also to systematize it, to kind of Put the facts right in front of you, side by side.
	And Real Clear Investigations has done this.
	They've done a side-by-side comparison.
	On the one hand, the so-called Capitol riot, January 6th, and on the other hand, the 2020 George Floyd riots.
	And let's look at the balance sheet, because it is pretty illuminating.
	Let's start with number of people deliberately killed.
	In the case of the Capitol riot, January 6th, one person, Ashley Babbitt.
	In fact, A Trump supporter.
	Now, there were some other people who died, but they didn't die as a result of any intentional killing.
	They died as a result of natural causes, Brian Sicknick.
	I think one guy had a heart attack, maybe caused by tension over the event, but nevertheless, this was not an intentional killing at all.
	In the case of the George Floyd riots, somewhere between 6 and 20 people intentionally killed.
	Injured in the Capitol riot, January 6th, total number of injuries reported by anyone on any side, either police or citizens, 140.
	During the George Floyd riots, 2037.
	Monetary damage on January 6th, supposedly, $1.5 million.
	George Floyd riots, somewhere between one and two billion dollars.
	Let's remember a billion is a thousand million dollars.
	The January 6th event was a single event, a single location, and what transpired there transpired in a space of five hours.
	So one place, one event, five hours.
	The George Floyd riots, 8,700 events, 574 of them involving violent acts, occurring over 140 cities.
	In January 6th, the nonviolent offenders, even without criminal histories, given months of jail time, whereas in the George Floyd riots, 90% plus of citations and charges dropped, dismissed, or otherwise not even filed.
	Look at the radical difference of treatment.
	Remember on January 6th, the damage was what?
	Broken glass, doors, graffiti.
	There was some defacement of statues and murals.
	There were some shutters that were hit with pepper spray.
	But compare this to churches burned, buildings burned, stores looted, smashed storefronts, property destruction.
	These were of course regular features of the George Floyd riots.
	And then if you look at the indictments on January 6th, very often the opinions, the political opinions of the defendants are used against them.
	This guy didn't believe the election was...
	This guy believed in election fraud.
	This guy believes Trump really won the election.
	And this alone makes them a clear and present danger.
	And so the demand is that judges keep them locked up.
	This guy can't be let loose, because after all, he believes the election was stolen.
	There's none of this when you're looking at the George Floyd riots.
	Nothing to the effect that this guy doesn't believe in the law.
	This guy believes it's okay to riot.
	This guy believes that in the name of social injustice, it's perfectly fine to pull people out of cars and beat them up and so on.
	By and large, in the George Floyd riots, the sole focus is on what did this person actually do?
	Not On what their ideological opinions are or holding them liable for, you might say, having the wrong kinds of beliefs.
	So when you put the picture together, you begin to see that there really is a two-tier system of justice in the country.
	We know that.
	We have been seeing it happen for a while.
	It started out happening to Trump and people at high levels of government, but we now see it happens to ordinary citizens.
	We do not have equal justice under the law.
	And this latest Real Clear investigation is simply a way of documenting, systematizing, giving us the empirical confirmation of something that we have long suspected.
	Here's a movie you gotta see.
	It's called Nothing But The Truth.
	And it's a new, full-length documentary that explores the full implications for us of a key question that Pilate posed to Jesus Christ.
	What is truth?
	Here's a short clip.
	Listen. What is truth?
	Is there a universal truth?
	Is there something outside of our opinions?
	The great problem in America today is truth decay, where everything is just unraveling before us.
	And if anybody stands for truth, he looks today like he's bigoted.
	We're all supposed to get along.
	But I'm going to tell you, it's better to be divided by truth than united in error.
	Wow, this is the heart of the matter.
	If truth exists, where do we find it?
	How do we recognize it?
	How do we live by it?
	Join an amazing conversation.
	Join Pastor Adrian Rogers, Dr.
	Johnny Hunt, Lee Strobel, Dr.
	Al Mohler, Mike Huckabee, Jennifer Rothschild, Dr.
	Robert Jeffress, and others in exploring this all-important topic of truth today.
	Debbie and I watched this movie. We loved it.
	Very engaging. Very thought-provoking.
	So to see it now on DVD and digital...
	Go to nbttmovie.com.
	NBTT standing for nothing but the truth.
	Go to nbttmovie.com and watch this fascinating documentary.
	I'd like now to turn to a great debate that occurred in the 16th century between Martin Luther and Erasmus on faith and My interest in this debate is not primarily historical.
	It is historically a very important debate.
	It occurred at the very beginning of the Reformation.
	Remember that this was the event that split Christianity initially into two and then into many. Today we have multiple denominations, multiple churches, and so it's not wrong to look at the Reformation as, you could almost call it Christianity's civil war. We had a civil war in America which had a powerful effect of splitting America in two.
	But let's remember that we reconciled.
	We put America back together again.
	Humpty Dumpty, if you will, was put back together again after the civil war.
	We are living in one country, although divided now on other bases.
	But Christianity has never been reunited.
	Christianity remains, is now splintered, and that has been since the Reformation.
	And of course, there remain fundamental issues that we can't ignore.
	Number one, what was that fight even about?
	Who was right? And was it even necessary?
	If we think of the church as one, if we think that Christ wanted to found one church, one body of believers, a unified church against, you might say, the currents of atheism and paganism, radical secularism of the kind that we're seeing today.
	And the effect of having many churches, the effect of having many denominations, the effect of having a church that is so radically splintered, it's very difficult to know who's right, what to believe.
	This church says X, that church says Y, who's right?
	Of course, both churches say this is what Scripture says.
	We're basing our views strictly on Scripture.
	But evidently, Scripture is not itself self-interpreting.
	And the effect of these divisions is to give aid and comfort to people outside of Christianity who say, well, you guys can't even agree among yourselves on what you believe.
	Why should we on the outside take what you say seriously?
	It was Richard Hooker, the Anglican divine, who once warned some quarreling Catholics and Protestants.
	This was in England.
	He said, listen, be careful because you're fighting each other.
	You think one of you is going to win, the other side is going to lose.
	But there is a third man, and here Hooker was thinking about radical secularism, that is kind of waiting to dance on both your graves.
	Now, in my own work, I have taken very much a kind of non-denominational approach to Christianity.
	In other words, I've focused on the things that Christians agree on, which is to say, focused on the things that are foundational to the faith.
	The importance of Scripture, the importance of the early Church, the importance of the so-called Church Fathers, of the early Nicene Creed.
	By the way, this is the common ground of certainly most, and if not all, Christian denominations.
	And the reason I've done this is because I've been arguing in secular culture against people who are fundamentally agnostics or militant atheists.
	And these are people who are not interested in finding out what the difference is, let's say, between an Anglican and a Presbyterian or the difference between a Baptist and a Catholic.
	Their view is a pox on all your houses.
	Their view is a pox on Christianity itself.
	And so it is the common fort of Christianity that I've been trying to defend.
	The reason, however, that I'm sort of departing from that a little bit here is not to sort of take sides between Luther and Erasmus, but look at the issues that divided them, look at what each of them said about these issues, and the reason to focus on these issues is that these issues are truly foundational.
	My interest here is in how one can best have faith seeking understanding, how one can best have Christian doctrine explained and defended and understood in a way that can be communicated.
	Because if you think about it, if Christian doctrine remains mysterious, remains something that is sort of beyond human understanding, Then how are we supposed to convey it to our own children?
	How are we supposed to teach them when they're going to go, well, what does this mean?
	And how does that make any sense?
	And if you don't know, and you go to your pastor and he doesn't know, and his best defense is, well, it says in the Bible over here, and then somebody else will say, well, yeah, but it says in the Bible over there.
	And you're down to this kind of dueling Bible passages without any interpretive framework that allows you to make sense of how these passages can be reconciled, are coming out, after all, from the same book, and are coming from God's Word itself.
	So this is why I think it is useful, helpful.
	Particularly when you have, as you do in the case of Luther and Erasmus, two extremely able opponents.
	And two opponents who, by the way, are not totally opposed to each other.
	Let's remember that Erasmus was, on the Catholic side, a reformer.
	He was part of a movement that was known as Christian Humanism.
	He was against indulgences, which is the sale of, you know, you've done these sins, you need to do penance.
	Well, listen, why don't you give some money to the church and that will suffice for your penance.
	You don't actually have to do any acts of contrition.
	You don't have to actually atone for your sins.
	Per se, you just need to pay.
	Well, Erasmus thought this was preposterous.
	If you read Erasmus' book, In Praise of Folly, he satirizes all these ridiculous friars and monks and abbots who, he says, are basically hypocrites.
	These are people who are living very lax lives themselves.
	Erasmus went to Rome and he was a little scandalized.
	He said, my gosh, I can't believe the irreverence, the even blasphemy, the clerical greed.
	And the interesting thing is, Luther went to Rome.
	And Luther was at the time an Augustinian monk.
	Luther was a Catholic priest.
	And Luther was scandalized by Rome.
	Luther said, oh my gosh, I can't believe this irreverence and the blasphemy and the clerical greed.
	So when it comes to issues of corruption in the church...
	Erasmus and Luther were on the same side.
	When Erasmus published his New Testament translation from the Greek, Luther welcomed it.
	Luther felt that this was a great step forward toward reform.
	And by the way, when Luther published his so-called 95 Theses which he nailed to the cathedral door in Wittenberg, Luther was a very obscure German monk.
	Nobody knew about him. So how did Luther become famous?
	It wasn't just because he goes, here I stand.
	No. It was the humanists, the Catholic humanists, who recognized that Luther was like them.
	Somebody who was protesting practices in the church.
	And so they publicized Luther.
	They began to circulate his 95 theses.
	So Luther was seen, as Erasmus was, as inside the church trying to sort of straighten the place out, trying to clean up the stables, trying to, if you will, introduce reform.
	And yet these two guys, who are, as I say, very much on the same side, initially do not end up on the same side.
	In fact, they end up really on opposite sides of the denominational divide.
	In the end, Erasmus remained a reformer, but wouldn't join the Reformation.
	Luther became radicalized over time and essentially decided that it wasn't just the excesses of It was the Catholic Church itself, even at its best, that had lost its way.
	And by looking at the debate between Luther and Erasmus, we get to not just the heart of the differences between the two of them, but the heart of the meaning of Christianity itself.
	What does it mean to be a Christian and Not only in the Reformation era, but also today.
	We're going to do a mailbox today, so let's turn to our question.
	Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
	In your opinion, what's the best way to contextualize the fall of Afghanistan?
	Does it show the futility of social engineering, as Edmund Burke might have argued?
	Is the Taliban zealotry fueled by nationalist concerns, as John J. Mersheimer has argued?
	Or is it some sort of clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, as Samuel P. Huntington and Robert P. Spencer have argued?
	Wow, that's a terrific question and let me start by talking a little bit about this clash of civilizations because there is a sense and Bernard Lewis and many others have written about this that you have the civilization of the West and of Europe and then you have the civilization of Islam and what's happened over the past 500 years is that the civilization of the West has come up Mainly due to internal events,
	the Reformation, but also the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution.
	The West has proved to be a very dynamic civilization growing in wealth and power.
	And Islam, on the other hand, which used to be a dynamic civilization that had at one time five separate empires all operating sort of at the same time and covering a fair amount of real estate on the planet, Islam has gone into a kind of downward spiral.
	That was made humiliatingly obvious when the Ottoman Empire was carved up in the aftermath of World War I. And suddenly the Muslims looked around and said, basically, we have nothing.
	In fact, if you take away oil, the Muslim world would kind of join sub-Saharan Africa as the least influential or consequential part of the planet.
	The Muslims know this and they're humiliated by it.
	And so radical Islam is one response to it.
	It's an intellectual response.
	It's a political response.
	So there is something to the clash of civilizations idea.
	But, but... And I wrote a book about this several years ago.
	We have to remember that there is a clash of civilizations inside the West.
	Think of the divide in American society between the left and the right.
	A divide, by the way, that's mirrored in Britain.
	It's mirrored in Australia.
	It's happening all over the West.
	The divide, in a sense, between the party of freedom and virtue on the one hand and the party of socialism and the party of imposed equality and the party of permissiveness on the other.
	This is a divide.
	And it can't be ignored by basically saying, yeah, well, we're all part of the West.
	And similarly, in Islam, there is a divide.
	I noticed this, by the way, growing up in India with Muslims all around me.
	But if you look at the largest Muslim countries in the world, I mean, the largest Muslim country in the world is not Iran or Iraq or even Egypt.
	It's Indonesia. And Indonesian Muslims, by and large, are different.
	Then say Taliban types.
	The Taliban is driven by two factors.
	There are tribal factors.
	Yes, this is the Pashtuns.
	They are the majority tribe in Afghanistan.
	So there's a tribal element.
	You can see that many of the things they do are driven by that.
	And Afghanistan is a deeply tribal society.
	At the same time, the Taliban is motivated by radical Islam.
	So what you have here is an intersection of tribal nationalism, you may say, and religious nationalism.
	But the religious nationalism is part of a more international movement because what the Taliban wants is they want a caliphate.
	In fact, they've renamed the country.
	It's now the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
	So they've kind of established a mini caliphate in that small country.
	But what are they looking to do?
	They're looking to see caliphates being established in Turkey and in Iran and in Egypt and throughout the Muslim world.
	And that too is a first step toward extending Muslim influence as it once was extended into Europe, into Asia.
	So the radical Muslims have never given up on their ancient quest to bring much if not all of the world under Islamic domination.
	So, the answer to your question is a little bit of all of the above.
	It's not like it's a clash of civilizations, or it is a tribal conflict, or, no, there are elements of all these things playing together.
	Now, you started out by suggesting, can America have a nation-building project?
	In that environment.
	And my answer is no.
	We can't do it because of the kind of people we are.
	Americans, by and large, are not interested.
	They just don't have the stomach to supervise the way of life of other countries.
	There's no interest in doing it.
	Now, the British, for a time, wanted to do it.
	And earlier, the Spanish wanted to do it.
	The Spanish had religious motives for doing it.
	The British, not so much religious motives, but the British had this kind of idea that there's kind of a class structure.
	Well, just as there's a class structure in British society, there's a class structure in the world, and we kind of want to be at the top of that, and we're perfectly willing to send our people to all these other countries, to Ghana, to India.
	To sort of rule those countries while using local people to do it.
	Well, Americans can't even think this way.
	We can't even get our head around it.
	So America should not build policies that are sort of out of sync with the character of the American people because as we see, we saw it in Iraq, we've now seen it in Afghanistan, these kinds of adventures are unsuited to the American temperament and are bound to come to a bad end.

▲