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Sept. 29, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:59
ESCAPE FROM DARKNESS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 185
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General Milley says he won't resign because, quote, his dad didn't resign at Iwo Jima.
Hello? Is this guy all there?
I'm going to give you my analysis.
Now, the left says parental opposition to critical race theory is evidence of whitelash.
I'll discuss. And Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea, is going to be on with me, and she's going to talk about how she discovered in America a woke culture, crazier than anything she encountered in her home country.
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.
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The critical moment in General Milley's testimony yesterday was when Senator Tom Cotton asked him, why don't you resign?
And General Milley gave an extremely bizarre answer, which I'm going to get to in a moment.
But let me start by talking about Milley, because I always have to laugh when I see this guy.
I mean, he's such a costumed peacock.
He's such a pompous, full-of-himself type of guy.
First of all, just start out with his ridiculous outfit.
What are we, looking at some Soviet general?
He's got like 400 medals.
And how long does it take for this guy to get dressed?
I mean, imagine if I were to dress like Millie.
Honey, you know, where are my myrtles?
Wait, wait, wait. I think I'm missing a ribbon.
I got that one for doing 10 push-ups at West Point with one hand.
So anyway, you got this Millie character.
And he's asked by Cotton kind of straightforwardly.
Hey, listen, all these disasters, one on top of the other.
Don't you think you should resign?
Millie goes, I'm not going to resign because...
He gives two reasons. First, let's go through them.
One, my dad didn't resign at Iwo Jima.
What? Wait a minute.
My problem with this analogy is the word because.
What does his dad's role at Iwo Jima have to do with him today?
Is he basically saying the bravery of the father excuses the incompetence of the son?
What's the connection between these two things?
The other thing that Millie says, even more bizarre, he goes...
He goes, I'm not going to resign because of those 13 boys who died in Afghanistan.
They didn't resign.
He goes, quote, I'm not going to turn my back on them.
Wait a minute. You did turn your back on them.
You left them behind.
You left them behind and they got killed.
And they got killed because you, acting in cohort with others, not alone, but you closed the Bagram Air Force Base.
You didn't make provision to get all these people out.
You played a role through negligence.
In their deaths. And are you now pretending like you're sort of, you're not going to turn your back on them?
They're dead in part because of you.
This is the fact of the matter.
I'm not being unduly harsh.
I'm actually only being duly harsh.
Now, Milley basically confirmed this call with General Li of China.
And as I'm listening to this, now, of course, Milley tried to cover it up.
He's like, I know Trump wasn't going to attack China.
I know that. And he then says, Milley does...
So I was merely relaying to General Lee what I knew to be Trump's intentions.
Now, first of all, Trump did not, in fact, okay this.
Trump didn't tell him, okay, you know what, go ahead and call General Lee.
And I'm thinking as I'm listening to this...
I know, I am certain that President Trump did not intend to attack the Chinese.
And it is my directed responsibility, and it was my directed responsibility by the Secretary to convey that intent to the Chinese.
My task at that time was to de-escalate.
My message again was consistent.
Stay calm, steady, and de-escalate.
We are not going to attack you.
I'm thinking, you know, it's, I guess, very nice of General Milley to offer to warn General Lee in case Trump orders an attack.
But would Lee do the same for him?
Would General Lee, the head of the People's Army of China, would he be so nice as to warn Milley in case the Chinese Premier, Xi Jinping, ordered an attack on America?
I think we know the answer to that one.
Now, one of the important facts that came out in the testimony is that all these generals, General McKenzie, who is the commander of U.S. Central Command, Scott Miller, who didn't testify but they referred to his views, and General Milley all told Biden, all relayed to Biden that the United States cannot withdraw in this way.
Biden not only ignored them, but lied about it.
Because when Biden was asked by George Stephanopoulos, this is now back in August, I believe, yes, he was asked, didn't people advise you not to do it this way?
And Biden goes, no. Quote, no one said that to me that I can recall.
Now, we have to make some allowances for the, that I can recall.
Biden could be saying basically, my neurons are not firing at full blast, and so I maybe forgot the whole thing.
Which is even scarier, because we have a president sitting in the saddle who really doesn't know what's going to, doesn't remember what was said to him like yesterday.
And I want to turn, however, briefly to the case of Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller.
I discussed this with Rand Paul yesterday in our interview.
This is a guy who's been thrown in the slammer, in the brig.
Why? Because he publicly questioned the US failure in Afghanistan.
Now, to excuse this guy a little bit, it is, you know, he did this right after the Marines got killed.
He did it right after US officers, 13 of them died, unnecessary deaths, I think we can all agree.
So he was actually reflecting public frustration.
Now, he was ordered by the military not to keep posting on social media.
So he did ignore that, and I'm not going to quite excuse that.
I also think that his statement that he was going to personally make sure that people like McKenzie were held accountable and prosecuted was over the top.
He shouldn't have done that. Now, that being said, if you ask what was Lieutenant...
Colonel Stuart Scheller's offense.
Well, I guess it is that he violated the chain of command.
The military is not a democracy.
It is a structure in which you have to follow orders and obey authority.
Now, this guy didn't disobey a direct order, but he did actually disobey a...
A demand that he not post on social media.
He did violate the chain of command, but so did Milley.
Because if you listen to what Milley said, even though Milley tried to cover his tracks, and of course he's probably more clever than Stuart Scheller in doing this, what Milley was basically saying is, listen...
I went around Trump, but I was still following procedures.
Milley was implying that what he did was routine.
But if you can believe anything in the Bob Woodward book, Milley was very concerned about Trump being out of control.
And Milley has repeatedly said that, and he's even said that in other books.
He's said that in other sources.
So Milley's actions are consistent with his behavior, that he sort of has to work around Trump.
That's why the backdoor call to Pelosi.
Milley, by the way, also admitted he's been having interviews with Bob Woodward, with Washington Post reporters writing a book.
So in other words, this guy is running down Trump behind Trump's back.
He's not exactly playing the good boy following the rules of authority.
This is a guy who is disloyal.
He's partisan. He's ideological.
So, in a sense, he's doing on a much larger scale what Marine Lieutenant Stuart Cello is doing on a much more minor scale.
We can live with a marine officer who speaks his mind out of turn, but what we can't live with are generals who are colluding with foreign adversaries, who are essentially usurping the chain of command and then pretending, oh, what, me, what? No, this Millie character, I think, has not only got a disconnected mind, a scrambled brain, but at some level he's also quite dangerous.
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There's a scene in the movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen movie, great movie, in which you've got Woody Allen, and he's a little bit of this sort of, you could almost call him racially paranoid character, and someone keeps talking to him in a kind of colloquial dialect, and they say things like, yeah, do you want to go eat?
And Woody Allen's like, what?
What did you say? Guy's like, well, do you want to go eat and do you want to go to a movie?
And Woody Allen's like, what, what, what?
And turns out that Woody Allen doesn't hear, do you want to go?
Do you want to go? He hears, Jew.
Jew. Jew want to go.
Jew want to go to a movie.
What Woody Allen here is doing is he's making fun of this kind of paranoid sensibility in which all you can hear is what's going on in your own brain.
In other words, here's a guy who sort of sees antisemitism everywhere, whereas in many cases, this is Woody Allen's point, it's kind of in his head.
Now... I was thinking about this scene because I'm seeing all these comments around the place that the parental mobilization, going on all around the country, by the way, against critical race theory is a form of, quote, whitelash.
I don't know if you've heard this term, whitelash.
It basically means backlash, but the idea is that whites are racially aroused by this concept of critical race theory, and so they are responding in a kind of racist fashion.
Now, it's important to realize that when parents first started mobilizing, the left was like, you know what, they're mobilizing against nothing.
We aren't really teaching critical race theory.
No, no, no, no, no, that's an abstruse idea that only goes on in a few law schools.
So the first step was sort of pure denial.
And parents were like, really? Well, what does it say in this textbook?
Well, why is Ibram Kendi coming to lecture at my kid's classroom?
Why is it the case we've got all these woke children's texts that are going on?
So the parents were like, you can't fool us.
We can see what Johnny's reading every day.
We can see the propaganda, particularly now with COVID, with the guy home.
We all have to do is speak inside his room.
We can see, there it is, critical race theory.
And so now the left needs sort of the comeback number two.
Denial doesn't really work.
So now their argument is that, and I'm now quoting NBC, that whites are responding to demographic change.
Countries becoming more diverse.
Whites can't stand it.
So they're, like, mobilizing against it.
Slate magazine, pretty much the same thing.
These people all write the same article.
It's the same language, same cliches, same kind of tropes, same banal formulations.
NBC says, quote, And the desire to, quote, protect whiteness are basically behind this white lash.
Now... Here's the problem for this.
The NBC actually tries to bring some data to bear on it.
They say, well, here's data for 33 school districts.
But you only have to look at the data a little more closely.
Unfortunately, Christopher Ruffo has an article in the City Journal.
And he goes, wait a minute. When you look at these school districts, first of all, you see that one-third of these districts have actually diversified slower than the rest of the country.
So first of all, write those off.
And then he goes, second...
Who says that the opposition to critical race theory is limited to 33 school districts?
It's actually occurred in 220 school districts, so you have created a sample to study that ignores 85% of the entire body of evidence.
This is a very selective look at what's going on in the country.
He goes, number two, let's zoom in.
You want to zoom in? All right, let's zoom in.
Let's zoom into Virginia. Suburban Virginia, Loudoun and Fairfax County.
He goes, first of all, these are two of the more diverse suburbs in the entire country.
They have diversified dramatically.
They have done exactly what the left is saying.
They've become much less white, which is to say they've become heavily Latino and Asian.
And guess who's leading the protest against critical race theory?
Latinos and Asians.
In Fairfax County, it's an Indian-American woman, Asra Numani, who's been blasting critical race theory before the school boards.
In Loudoun County, it's the Asians and Latinos who oppose critical race theory by, according to a survey, a two-to-one margin.
Same as whites. So what you're seeing here is that the more Americans hear about critical race theory, and by the way, this also applies to black Americans.
Surveys have shown, for example, that there is widespread opposition.
There are majorities that oppose CRT. In all racial groups.
So what's happening really is the left is really losing this argument.
I mean, if you look at Loudoun and Fairfax counties, these are places where Biden won, where by margins that range from 25 points to 39 points.
Biden swept these counties.
And yet in progressive America, we see a parental rebellion and the left is really nervous, not because it's white lash, But because this is a rebellion that is white, brown, and black.
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I am absolutely thrilled to welcome someone who quite honestly is a heroine of mine.
Yeonmi Park is an escapee from North Korea.
Yes, North Korea. She and her mother escaped initially to China, then to South Korea.
It's an incredible story.
She's written a very moving and powerful memoir.
It's called, In Order to Live, A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom.
Yanmi, you have an incredible story.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
I want to start by just asking you, you know, most Americans know nothing about North Korea.
You lived it. You were born in Hyasan, I believe, part of North Korea, right next to China.
Can you talk a little bit about your life in North Korea?
And what is it that Americans need to know about what that world is really like?
So when I was born in North Korea, I had no idea that I was born in an oppressed country because we didn't even have a vocabulary for oppression.
And of course, we don't know the existence of internet.
We don't have even 24 hours electricity.
I never even seen the map of the world.
The regime told me that I was Kim Il-sung race, not Asian.
And the North Korean calendar begins when Kim Il-sung was born, our first leader.
So it is a completely different planet with a different common sense and history.
Now, you said, Yanmi, I think you wrote somewhere that even the term love, in the sense that we understand it, affection between people, doesn't really exist in North Korea.
Something that I think Americans would have a hard time grasping, that love, I think you said, only exists in one specialized context.
Talk about that. So I know when I came to America, people told me about Shakespeare and all about love.
But in North Korea, the only love that we know and allow to express is our love towards leaders and in a written form.
My mom never told me that she loved me.
No lovers in North Korea tell each other they love each other because one thing only we allow to love is the leader, not the other people, ourselves.
Now, when you talk about the dear leader, the head of North Korea, is it a cult of personality or is it a cult of ideology?
And what I mean by that, is there like a Marxist doctrine that goes along with all this?
Or is it just, I'm in charge, I'm the great leader, you should love me?
Which one is it? They began the Marxist socialism and communism, but they took it to become a god.
They took so much power from people.
Eventually, they made themselves into a god.
So they told us that they know how much hair that we have.
Their body dies, like Kim Jong-il's body dies, but he's like Jesus Christ.
His spirit is with us forever.
So if you go to North Korea, there are Many, many eternal towers, this propaganda towers to people brainwashed us that they live forever.
So when I was in North Korea, even after my escape, I was even afraid to think because I knew that the leader could read my thoughts.
And so thought crime is a weird thing in North Korea.
You are not even free to think, not to mention free to speak.
Thinking is not allowed.
I mean, you're describing something that we read about in Dystopian, in George Orwell.
I mean, I'm even thinking about when Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Soviet gulag.
He was in a labor camp, but I don't even think he experienced this level of thought control.
In a certain sense, what Solzhenitsyn says is, he says,"...my body was captive, but my mind was free." And I think it was partly because he had been exposed to pre-Soviet Russia.
But you're describing someone who I think was, you're describing a nation of prisoners.
So my question to you is, how did you and your mom recognize that, wow, you know, we don't have to live this way.
There are other people in the world that live differently.
What made you want to get out?
How did you get the ability to see that there is a better way?
I think that's a good question.
Like if you read the Animal Farm by George Orwell, the first generation knew by when the new animals come, they don't even know what the life could be alternatively look like.
So that was my life.
I never knew life could be different.
And the only reason why we made escape from North Korea is if you see them during the 9-11, those men flee from the burning building, right?
They just have no option because we are so starving.
And even if we didn't escape, we are going to die from starvation.
Luckily, we are living in the border town of North Korea.
So if at night we are looking at China, they have electricity coming out.
So that's what I thought.
If I go where the lights were, I could find something to eat.
So it wasn't like we knew that if we escape, we're going to find food or there's America.
It was more like jumping out of the burning building and see what happens.
And thankfully, we're alive.
This is unbelievable. When we come back, I'm going to talk to Yeonmi Park about the escape out of North Korea, her experiences in China, and how she eventually got to South Korea and finally makes her way to the United States.
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I'm back with the young human rights activist Yeonmi Park.
Yeonmi is an escapee and a refugee from North Korea.
She's also the author of a remarkable book, In Order to Live a North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom.
Yeonmi, when we left off, we were talking about you and your mom, you know, getting out of a burning building, North Korea, to China.
But talk a little bit about how difficult that was.
I mean, I don't necessarily want you to give every detail of the kind of abuse.
I mean, you and your mom went through a great deal.
But I want people to understand what it means to get out and the kind of struggles that people have to make their way to the kind of freedom that most people today here take for granted.
Yeah, so between North Korea and China, There's like a highly electrified wire fences and the guards with the machine guns standing there ready to shoot anybody across the river.
Luckily, I had help.
Somebody wanted to help me to go to China.
She bribed the guards and took us to China.
After we crossed the frozen river into China, the first thing that I saw was my mother being raped in front of me and I was 13 years old.
And then we realized that because China had a one-child policy, 40 million men cannot find women to marry and have children with.
So they buy North Korean girls as sex slaves.
And of course, the Chinese regime also knows that we are defectors.
But they catch us and send us back to North Korea to get killed and get tortured.
So it's almost like catching a Jewish person and then send them to gas chamber.
The Chinese Communist Party does the exact same thing.
So we are extremely vulnerable.
And therefore, the human traffickers exploit us.
And they sold my mom into slavery less than $100.
And they sold me, because I was a virgin, I'm 13 years old, they sold me less than $300 and separated me from my mother.
I mean, I don't even want to begin to describe what it's like for someone to go through all that kind of trauma.
I mean, you said even later that when you were writing your book, you could hardly do it.
So talk a little bit about the process of trauma recollected in memory, the process actually of taking your life as you've lived it and as you're describing it and putting it down on paper.
What was that like? It was tough.
You know, when I was writing the North Korean part, I was starving all over again.
I was oppressed. And in China, I think, but, you know, it tricks your memory.
Your memory becomes fragmented.
And I needed a lot of help from people that I escaped together with my mother and my sister, and they helped me to write the book.
But, you know, once I lived, I mean, wrote it, it really helped me to understand my journey.
Because something so unexpeakable, when you put down the words, there's a limitation to explain what it really like being in North Korea, right?
There's no way you can actually imagine it fully.
But by doing that, it also helped me to understand my journey and come to some kind of closure with it.
Yeah, you talk about how, for example, you had to confront with the sort of notion that virginity is the most powerful thing that a woman has.
It's a tremendous sense of degradation, even when it is taken away from you against your will.
And you also talk about the fact that basically you kind of hated men because every man you came in contact with treated you so badly.
Say a word about that.
Yeah, so I mean, my introduction to sex was seeing my mom being raped.
And I never, in North Korea, there's no sex education.
So I never even seen what kiss was.
Holding hands between men and women is banned in North Korea.
So, I mean, every man that I met after North Korea was trying to rape me and raped me, of course.
So I completely lost, not just only men, I lost faith in humanity.
I couldn't believe What humans are capable of doing to each other.
And it took a while for me to gain that trust and restore my faith in humanity again.
Yanmi, how did you get away ultimately from your second group of captors which is these traffickers and end up in South Korea?
How did that occur?
So there are four things that North Korean women do when they're in China.
Right now, there are 300,000 North Korean defectors are hiding.
So one is forced marriage, like myself being bought by Chinese men.
Two is going into prostitution.
Three is becoming an organ trafficker, so they kill you and take your organs out.
The last one is putting you in a chat room and then show your body to South Korean customers.
So after two years of captivity, I found a way to get out and then join this chat group.
And in this room, of course, nobody was at least raping in person, but they told me that South Korea was a prosperous country, actually.
And if I go there, I could be free.
So I contacted missionaries who did this rescue work.
And then they helped me to cross the frozen Gobi Desert from China to Mongolia by foot.
And these were Christian missionaries?
Yes. So they came and they risked their lives and rescued us.
And so I crossed the frozen Gobi Desert in 2009.
And then once I got to Mongolia, there I claimed asylum and I told them that I wanted to go to South Korea.
That's how I got out.
And from in South Korea, tell a little bit about this.
You apparently were studying in South Korea and you also found out that there was a way for you to study in America.
How did the connection come from South Korea to America?
Because you ended up going to Columbia University.
Complete that journey for us as to how you got here.
While I was studying in South Korea, I had the opportunity to go to Dublin giving a speech.
And that speech went really vital.
So Penguin Random House wanted to write a book with me.
And then it turns out there are Asian publishing houses in New York.
So while I was writing the book, I knew there was a school like Columbia University in New York, and I transferred from South Korea to there.
And that's how I went to university in America.
When we come back, I want to explore Yeonmi Park's experience at Columbia and how, in her words, she discovered a kind of woke culture that is, in some ways, even crazier than North Korea.
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I'm back with Yeonmi Park, a refugee escapee from North Korea, human rights activist, author of a remarkable book, In Order to Live a North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom.
Yeonmi, as we're following your story, you are now, in a sense, in the orbit of freedom.
You're in America. You enroll at Columbia University.
You have an incredible story to tell.
I'm sure there was a great deal that you felt that you had to learn.
Talk a little bit about what it is that, what are the kinds of books that you came to like and appreciate?
Because I then want to talk about woke culture and the clash between woke culture and the books that you love to read.
I actually, I mean, I love your book.
Actually, I read it last year.
And then the biggest influence on me was actually reading George Orwell.
Until then, the hardest thing for me after escaping from North Korea was people told me everything that I believed in North Korea was a lie.
And then I was like, so how do I know what you're telling me is not a lie?
Right? I completely had this chaos where I don't know how to trust again.
Everything sad people told me that, you know, Kims are not gods.
They don't know how to read my mind.
They are human beings.
They don't do miracles. And I couldn't believe it.
Then why I was reading George Orwell's Animal Farm in 1984.
That's when it completely made sense to me.
And that's when I also learned the importance of the price of silence.
Until I read that book, I was resenting the Kims, the dictators.
Like, how could you have done to my family and my people and to me?
And then I was realizing, you know, the first generation of these animals, like my grandparents, knew.
They lived their life before kings.
But when this was happening because of the art of fear and they were afraid to die for freedom, they kept silent.
So when it came to me, I did not even know that I was oppressed.
If you know you're oppressed, you're not oppressed.
That's why it was bizarre to me when I came to America.
People keep saying how they're oppressed.
I'm like, you really don't even know the definition of oppression at this point.
Yeah. At one point, you describe an incident in which you were talking about why you loved Jane Austen.
And I'm assuming that part of the reason for that is that this sort of wonderfully civilized conversation among people in which you get to fall in love But it's both a rational and an emotional act, and Jane Austen explores that spiritual continent so beautifully.
So here you are, absorbed in reading Jane Austen, and you're approached by a Columbia administrator, and this could be like the voice of the college.
What did this person say to you?
So this was a, so why I love Jane Austen is also other reasons is that, of course, that and also in North Korea, history is forgotten.
So for me to read a book about love and relationship, that was like in a different century.
I did not know that humanity existed before Kim's.
They told me that humanity began with Kim Il-sung.
So that was fascinating for me that people had like knew what love was before even this time.
So reading that was really interesting for me.
And then I went to Columbia.
At the orientation, this person told me, you know, by reading Jane Austen, that's how you get brainwashed.
Because she lived through the white supremacy and colloquialism.
Therefore, That her writing embodied in the white supremacy and bigotry.
And this is how we look for hidden oppression, hidden bigotry.
And, you know, we got to be sensitive for this kind of materials that, you know, brainwashing us.
And it was exactly the same thing in North Korea.
They said that our enemies are under the tree, under the tunnel, behind the, you know, leaves, and we have to look for the enemy infiltration.
And being at Colombia, they make you the exact same way of being paranoid.
I mean, do you feel, you know, you hear these people, these students who have very luxurious lives, they have nice apartments, they go home on vacation, they never miss a meal, and here they're talking about microaggressions and safe spaces and, ooh, you know, you made me feel uncomfortable.
I mean, what does somebody like you who have lived the life you have, what do you think?
I think when you look at these spoiled brats, I mean, you feel like grabbing them and shaking them and saying, listen, let me tell you my story.
What's your emotional reaction to this kind of madness around you?
It's just so sad to see the degradation of civilization here right now.
I mean, sometimes I feel like maybe this is the end of civilization.
I mean, like you said, while I was writing my book, my editors were telling me that you're traumatized.
You need to go see a therapist.
And I was like, what is therapist?
And they were like, oh, here in New York, people get depressed, have problems, they go talk to somebody.
And I was like, if you know what trauma is, you are really fine.
You're in a good place, right?
And I think that they do not really have any perspective what your life looks like.
They are in this little bubble where they're talking about animals' rights and they become a vegan.
And 25 million in North Korea don't even know what human rights is.
They are thinking, I mean, being a vegan is the most honorable thing that you can do with your life.
So it just so saddens to see that what this prosperity, I mean, this liberty and capitalism brought to them, and they become so entitled.
And they are harming themselves being miserable, right?
They are creating their own misery.
And that's when I learned that not having a problem is actually a problem.
Now they're all day spending their time to look, creating problems and looking for problems.
I mean, you're making me understand the statement that you have here with your book.
It says, I'm most grateful for two things, that I was born in North Korea and that I escaped from North Korea.
Are you saying that the fact that you lived under what you did helped you to understand true oppression and, in a strange way, you have to have some experience of oppression to understand freedom?
Yes. And also, just be grateful for life.
I mean, this afternoon, I'm not going to worry about, am I going to be able to make it today?
Because in North Korea, every day is a struggle.
Will I leave today?
Am I going to find food tonight?
And in America, my concern is what I'm going to eat for dinner, right?
And the fact that now I have electricity, this is a miracle.
You never see this consistency of electricity.
So the fact that I went through oppression, I know what the meaning of freedom, but also I can be just grateful for what I have.
And people here lost their gratitude.
And without gratitude, you can never be happy.
And that's why they are so depressed and drug overdose and, you know, seeing these people on the street injecting themselves drugs.
And in North Korea, being a homeless is illegal.
They punish you.
And in North Korea, there is a death sentence for committing suicide.
That's how crazy the dictatorship is.
And people are telling me, oh, America is horrible.
But the thing is, freedom without discipline, freedom without responsibility, then that's what you do.
You inject yourself into drugs.
So I think people are really forgetting the meaning of freedom, what it means to be free.
Now they don't talk about the responsibility that comes with it.
So it's just seeing American generation so lost with everything that you do and then So spoiled.
And that's why I'm grateful that I was actually born in North Korea, not in America.
Yonu, you have an amazing story, and I hope you'll continue to speak out.
You have a lot to say, not just to captives in North Korea, but to people right here in America.
Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
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The FBI's direct role in January 6th, the events of January 6th, is now admitted by the New York Times.
Yes, you actually heard that right.
The New York Times now concedes, in fact reports, that an FBI informant was right in the thick of things on January 6th and was at that time constantly notifying the FBI. Notifying the FBI before, during, and after.
So, this is significant on all kinds of counts.
We have known, by the way, of the FBI's very active involvement in the Gretchen Whitmer plot, a kind of rehearsal, perhaps, for January 6th.
What do we know? And remember, even in the Whitmer plot, our information is coming from the left.
It's coming from BuzzFeed. According to BuzzFeed News, and now quoting BuzzFeed reporters Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison, They're talking about the FBI. They go, In other words, in the Whitmer plot, you've got about a dozen FBI agents.
They're concocting the plot.
They're helping carry it out.
They're bringing it to a sort of place where they can now arrest these guys.
So you might say, without them...
Would there even have been a plot?
And even BuzzFeed is saying, eh, maybe not.
Maybe not. Let's now turn to January 6th, because when you see an article in the New York Times, you've got to remember that these people are doing...
They publish articles for two reasons.
The first one is to reveal something.
But the second one is to conceal something.
In other words, if the New York Times thinks a damning allegation is going to come out, it's going to be blown as these cases go to trial, that the FBI was actively involved in January 6th, New York Times goes, well, let's soften the blow.
Let's kind of put out a little trial balloon.
Let people kind of know that there was something here.
We'll minimize what was going on.
So the reporter for the New York Times is kind of like one of these kind of FBI waterboys.
He's doing the work of the FBI, if you will.
But nevertheless, the FBI was involved.
It's now admitted. They say, you know, we didn't plan the attack.
But we don't know. Because what's interesting is when you read this Times article, there are some other admissions in it that are really that catch your attention.
I'm going to quote. The FBI also had an additional informant, not one, but more now, with ties to another Proud Boys chapter that took part in the sacking of the Capitol.
And the writer, Feuer, admits that other FBI assets, quote, may emerge, further complicating the picture of Proud Boys' activity on January.
This is a classic New York Times word.
Further complicating the picture.
What they really mean is...
The deep state might have actually orchestrated this.
That's complicated enough for you.
So, this notion of the FBI busting plots that it caused is now something I think that we all need to be onto.
This is the modus operandi of the deep state.
Julie Kelly writing about this provides an additional interesting detail.
She says that Thomas Caldwell, one of the...
One of the Trump-supporting guys who was arrested by the FBI, his home was raided on January 19th.
And right away in the complaint, there was all this evidence against him, evidence that, Julie says, could not possibly have been compiled in like 10 days or in two weeks.
In other words, it appeared that the FBI was already accumulating the evidence before January 6th.
And this is the key, that the FBI sort of was setting this guy up.
They knew what was going to come down.
They were collecting evidence, in a sense, before the crime.
And think of the implications of this for America.
Because let's remember that they started by going after Trump.
They tried to go after Trump for four years.
Now they are going after Trumpsters.
Their target now is basically all of us.
And so what we have is a police agency of government that is supposed to be neutral, that is far from neutral.
These are basically, and I've used this term before, thugs with badges.
I feel much safer with a bunch of hoodlums in a confinement center.
You know, rapists, coyotes, all kinds of bad...
than I would with a similar gang of FBI agents.
Why? Because I don't think the criminals would plant drugs in my locker, but I'm not sure if the FBI would or wouldn't.
The very fact that I have to think about it shows me that we're dealing with a deeply untrust...
So our public distrust of these guys is fully justified.
In fact, it's probably not as strong as it ought to be.
This is an agency, and by the way, if the Republicans come back to power, at least in the midterms, perhaps in 2024, cleaning out this stuff.
This is the unfinished business of Trump.
Trump, I'm sorry to say, didn't do it.
He should have done it. He should have fired all these people, cleaned out the stables.
It wasn't done then, but it needs to be done now, and the sooner the better.
Guys, my Prager University 5 video series is out on the American founding.
Five short videos, five minutes each on the leading American founders, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, and Franklin.
You can watch them individually. PragerU.com is the place to go.
Or you can watch them all at once and you get a little sense of the comprehensive architecture, the philosophical statesmanship of the American founding.
Here's a short clip from the Jefferson PragerU video.
Listen. As Jefferson himself said about the slavery issue, we have a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go.
It is not reasonable—in fact, it is downright obtuse—to ask of statesmen to do what they manifestly cannot do.
It is only reasonable to ask them to make the best choices available to them under the circumstances—to hold the wolf in Jefferson's own terms until he can safely be let go.
It's interesting stuff and it breaks new ground, in my view, on the understanding of Jefferson and of the Declaration of Independence.
Now, I don't want to go over the same ground I do in the video.
I want you to watch the video separately.
But I'm going to talk now about Jefferson's views on, well, a sensitive topic, namely race.
And conservatives who have defended Jefferson over the years have done so, in my view, by and large, in a kind of inadequate way.
They say, well, Jefferson was a man of his time.
If his views on race make you uncomfortable, that's because he was a man of the 18th century.
He was a man of the South.
So you've got to understand his views in the context of the times in which he lived.
Now, yes, that's true.
But the reason I don't think it's an adequate defense is that there are other people who lived at that time and in those same places who didn't have the same views as Jefferson.
So obviously, time and place doesn't dictate how people think about an issue.
It can help provide some context to be sure.
But in the end, we always have to ask, why did this man think this way?
And is his mode of thinking right?
Or should we sadly conclude that great as he was in other respects, Jefferson was in some respect a racist?
And I'm not afraid of this question.
I want to look at it head on.
First of all, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment.
This was a guy, by the way, you know, we often think of racial views as the product of prejudice, as though someone is, you know, jumping to a conclusion without having any knowledge, without knowing anything about it.
Now Jefferson, first of all, We're good to go.
It's drawing on this, not only experience, but scholarship on the subject.
Now, Jefferson is also familiar, by the way, with American Indians.
And one of his ways of thinking about race is to compare blacks with American Indians.
So, I'm going to start by reading a couple of things that Jefferson says about the Indians.
First of all, he says that looking at blacks, looking at Indians, looking at whites, it's obvious that there are differences between the races.
So in other words, Jefferson would have denied that race is, quote, a social construct.
Jefferson says, I do not mean to deny, meaning I mean to admit.
That there are varieties in the race of man, distinguished by their powers both of body and mind.
I believe that there are, as I see to be the case in races of other animals.
So Jefferson here sees man as part of this wider creation.
And just as you have distinctions in the animal kingdom, says Jefferson, you find some distinctions among humans as well.
But what are those?
Now, Jefferson begins to look at the American Indians.
And he says that we could kind of try to compare the civilizational achievement of the Indians with that of the early Europeans who crossed the Alps and who basically did battle with the Romans.
And he goes, can we make this comparison?
Now, admittedly, Jefferson's comparing the 18th century with people who lived, I mean, a thousand years before.
But still, Jefferson says that's not fair.
That's not an equal comparison.
Why? Because he says that the people who in Europe were meeting at a confluence of cultures.
So in other words, there were many cultures feeding into civilization and so all those people had the benefit of ideas and inventions and thoughts that had come from as far away as the Hindus and Islam. They had come from the northern parts of Africa. They had come from the northern reaches of Europe. There had been, of course, all kinds of interactions And so Jefferson goes, they had an unfair advantage.
The American Indians, if you will, were isolated.
They were on a continent, kind of all by themselves.
And so they weren't able to benefit from anyone else's knowledge.
He goes, nevertheless, he goes, I'm going to say, and he says, that American Indians are in every way, in their potential, competitive or capable of doing what whites do.
He goes, there's no difference.
And he says that American Indians are in many ways superior to the whites.
They have better sense of memory, better sense of agility.
And so he thinks that given the same education, given the same opportunities, they would in fact be able to do much of the same stuff.
Now when it comes to blacks, Jefferson begins to look at not just the travel accounts that I mentioned, but he begins to look at the slaves.
And he says, the slaves are dull.
I'm going to read Jefferson now.
He goes, comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination.
So Jefferson's really working on three counts here.
He says, in memory, they're equal to the whites.
He goes, in reason, much inferior.
And then he says this, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.
So Jefferson is applying a high standard.
He goes, by this standard, he goes, I don't know any black who could do this.
And then he goes, and that in imagination, they're dull, tasteless, and anomalous.
So they don't have, he thinks, a very good imagination.
Now he says, in music they are more generally gifted than the whites, with accurate ears for tune and music.
Now Jefferson is aware that obviously the reason that the slaves are in this condition is because of slavery.
So he goes, quote, it will be right to make great allowances for the difference of condition, of education, of conversation, and of the sphere in which they move.
In other words, there are environmental circumstances that help us understand why the blacks are behind.
But, says Jefferson, kind of turning the tables on it, He goes,"...notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their greatest artists.
They excelled too in science, insomuch as many were employed as tutors to their master's children." Jefferson gives examples.
Epictetus, Terence, Phaedrus were slaves.
So Jefferson is saying that slavery itself...
Doesn't necessarily make one intellectually backward or inferior.
It can, but then you will see, if you will, rare talents rise to the surface.
And here we come to Jefferson's conclusion, a troubling conclusion.
It's this. I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only that the blacks...
Wow. So the question I want to ask is, does this make Jefferson a racist?
And my answer to this question is no.
Why? Because this is not, for Jefferson, a settled view.
Let me read his opening line.
I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only.
Jefferson is approaching this with the mind of a kind of enlightenment investigator.
This is his hypothesis.
This is his working supposition.
He's got some evidence to back it up, some experience to back it up, but he's not sure.
And we'll see. I'll pick this up tomorrow.
That Jefferson remains unsure.
He's open to evidence on the other side of the coin.
So the bottom line of it is that even though today we would find, obviously, Jefferson's experience with blacks, he didn't know black astronomers, black doctors, the kind of people, blacks we see today excelling in many walks of life.
Based on Jefferson's experience, he draws a hypothesis, a provisional conclusion.
He's not afraid to state it, and we should not be afraid to examine it.
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