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Oct. 5, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:36
TAKEOVER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 189
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The ongoing harassment of Senators Manchin and Sinema points to one thing.
The left has taken over the Democratic Party.
Columnist David French says that the polarization of America is a myth, since both sides basically agree on everything, my take.
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life will join me.
We're going to talk about the escalating stakes on abortion.
And finally, I'm going to begin my discussion of Alexander Hamilton.
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.
It seems that the leftist harassment of Senators Manchin and Sinema continues.
And now the focus is really on Sinema and it seems like the pressure is escalating.
Now, this started, well, first of all, you had all these people who are sort of battling around Senator Manchin's yacht, kind of trying to intimidate him and get him to buckle on the infrastructure bill.
But the Manchin case is one thing.
Sinema is more problematic.
You had this activist, apparently an activist with a group called Lucha, Living United for Change in Arizona.
A person who comes up to a cinema in the bathroom where she's teaching her class at Arizona State University, and they're recording her while she's in the bathroom.
I mean, first of all, this is a very strange way to try to convince someone of anything.
I mean, I try to imagine myself in the bathroom.
Someone goes, Dinesh, you've got to change your position on colonialism.
And I'm like, you know what?
Now is not the time.
There's a right time for everything.
Well, that wasn't just it.
Now, by the way, this sort of bathroom accosting of people is not even legal.
I mean, it's a felony, and so there's some attempt to investigate it, but it seems like with these investigations of the left, nothing ever really happens.
Cinema then gets on a flight where she's making her way from Phoenix to DC, and guess what?
An illegal comes up to her in first class and begins to heckle her in her seat.
Cinema sits there very stoically.
But, I mean, think of the sense of entitlement on the part of these people.
First of all, in any other country, if you did this, you'd be immediately deported.
End of story. But in this case, this is a person who feels like Sinema's on the defensive.
And she can lecture her.
And that is the striking thing.
Then Sinema gets off the plane in D.C. There's another bunch of leftists there waiting to badger her.
Give us your reason for why.
Give us your top line number.
As if she has to negotiate with a bunch of activists in an airport lobby.
Now, all of this gets me thinking.
First of all, the left is really quite okay with all this, and so is Biden.
Here's a clip of Biden who was asked about, is it appropriate to hound people like Manchin and Sinema in this way?
Here's his response. Listen.
Joe Manchin had people on kayaks show up to his boat, T.L. Adam.
Senator Sinema last night was chased into a restroom.
Do you think that those tactics are crossing a line?
I don't think they're appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody.
The only people it doesn't happen to are people who have Secret Service standing around them.
So it's part of the process.
It's all part of the process.
Now, notice, by the way, the kind of one-sided approach that is going on here.
It's easy to miss if you're not paying attention.
Number one, Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer are putting all the pressure on Sinema and Manchin.
Now, you might think it takes two sides to compromise.
You would think they'd be putting equivalent pressure on the left, on the squad, on Bernie Sanders, on AOC. But notice they're doing none of that.
And that's a clue to the fact that the left...
The far left has now taken over the Democratic Party.
Whatever Pelosi and Schumer and Biden themselves think, this is now the audience that they play to.
These are the people who call the shots.
And by that framework, it's Manchin and Sinema that are sort of out of tune.
They're not marching in lockstep.
These are the people we have to sort of wrestle to the ground.
And with the media...
I mean, these people are just such brazen hypocrites.
Because remember when John McCain was blocking the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare?
Notice the flattering media treatment.
Oh, this guy's a maverick.
This guy is an independent thinker.
This is a guy who's sort of standing up for himself.
This is an exhibition of how democracy works.
But now, with cinema, it's the exact opposite.
Why isn't she a maverick?
Why isn't she standing up and thinking for herself, no, she's basically a big obstacle.
In fact, what I find comical is all these media reports that imply two people should not be able to overrule 48 people in the Senate.
And prevent this bill from going through.
This is a subversion of democracy.
Wait a minute. First of all, there are 100 senators.
We're not talking about two people who are blocking the $3.5 trillion infrastructure.
We're talking about two plus 50.
I was not a math major, but nevertheless, to me, that is 52-48 against the infrastructure bill.
Democracy itself dictates that this bill should not go through.
And yet the media is pretending that, no, we only have 50 people here.
We don't have to pay any attention to the Republicans.
So all of this is...
It's sleights of hand that are aimed ultimately at making a point.
And what is the point? The point which should not be lost on us.
There's no room for centrists today in the Democratic Party.
Think about that. When I first came to America in the late 70s, early 80s, there were conservatives in the Democratic Party.
I think of people like Heflin.
I think of people like Scoop Jackson in Washington State.
Not only have the conservatives been run out of the Democratic Party, but you can't even really be a moderate.
There are hardly any moderates left.
Now, you might say, well, Dinesh, that's polarization.
That's both parties.
No.
Fifteen Republicans, think of it, 15 Republican senators out of 50, that's almost a third, were willing to vote for the Biden bipartisan 1.5 trillion infrastructure bill.
And that tells you that Republicans are perfectly willing to play ball.
There is a moderate faction in the Republican Party.
What else do you call Susan Collins and Murkowski and Romney and Ben Sasse and some of the others?
So the Republican Party is the big tent.
The Democratic Party is a closed tent.
And I wish Manchin and Sinema would take a hint And basically jump the fence, come over to our side.
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Do you know who David French is?
Well, Debbie doesn't.
She goes, we got something coming.
She goes, who's David French?
I'm going to have to Google him.
Oh, David, you've got a long way to go.
My wife doesn't even know who you are.
Well, anyway, who's David French?
Turns out that this is kind of a never-Trumper, kind of a long-standing, kind of a self-righteous guy at the National Review magazine.
And he's got an article about how the culture wars and the polarization in America...
In fact, there's a rather telling University of Virginia study recently that showed that...
A majority of Trump voters, 52%, basically either agree or somewhat agree that, you know what?
It's time to split the country.
We're sick of the other side.
We hate those people. We'd rather have our own America.
And interestingly, 41%, a very significant minority of Biden voters, also agree.
So that means, if you think about it, that there's kind of a majority in the country for the two sides going our own way.
And David French is appalled, this guy.
And he thinks this is all a giant misunderstanding.
The culture wars are much ado about nothing.
In fact, he goes on to point out, he says things like...
He says things like, while the two sides view each other as an existential threat, he, David French, has kind of rustled up some data that shows that both sides are missing the point.
Apparently only David French gets the point.
Well, let's see what his point is.
His point is that he says the fundamental reality of American politics is that voters hate or fear the opposing side in part because they have mistaken beliefs about their opponents.
Right? This guy is actually a public figure.
It sounds like somebody in an insane asylum.
Anyway, French goes on to lament that American radicalism is now filtered down to the ranks of normal folks.
And he thinks it's all based on misinformation.
Misinformation, by the way, coming from people like me.
I'm named in the article.
He quotes this for me as a self-evident absurdity.
He says, I cannot understand this.
And what I tweeted out was this.
I wonder if history will view January 6th in retrospect as America's Tiananmen Square.
Desperate protesters seeking to have their voices heard.
Vicious government crackdown on prosecution.
No dissent policy enforced across society via mass censorship and one-party media.
So those are the three respects.
I'm not saying, I'm not directly, no analogy is perfect.
Obviously, more people were killed in Tiananmen Square.
There were just one, maybe two.
Ashley Babbitt, Roseanne Boylan killed in January 6th.
But the way in which the incident was, in a sense, leveraged for a massive state crackdown, that's, to me, the real analogy.
Anyway, for David French, this is, like, preposterous.
This is over the top.
And it's over the top in part only because this is a guy who can't think outside the box.
You know, he's... He's sort of reflexively, you know, Tiananmen Square, oh, horrible, horrible, January 6th, oh, the Capitol Police rallied to the occasion, they saved democracy.
So, you know, when you basically operate in this robotic mode, you're not elastic enough, you don't have the kind of intellectual malleability to say, you know, I never thought about it that way, but let me at least, let me go with Dinesh and see if there's something to it, and if not, say in what respect the analogy is flawed.
Now, The reason I think David French is fundamentally wrong is this, that the difference in American politics from, let's say, the 1980s to today isn't just that the polarization has somehow gotten worse.
The real question is, why has it gotten worse?
And here's why. Because in the past, American politics reflected an agreement on goals and a disagreement on means.
So, 30 years ago, if you were to sit down Republicans and Democrats and say to them basically this, here are our goals.
We want an America to be prosperous and innovative and the technological leader of the world.
Both sides would go, yeah.
We might disagree about the fact about how the pie should be split, but we agree.
We want to focus on making a really big pie.
We want America to be strong.
We want America to be confident.
We want America to be an example to the world.
We want America to show the world how it's done.
We want the American dream to be a kind of exemplar to other people.
We love the social equality in America.
Even if there isn't economic equality, no American is better or worse than any other.
And finally, we want to view our political opponents as misguided, but not inherently wicked.
So, I think most Americans in the 1980s would have agreed with all of this.
The disagreement, as I say, was over means.
And here the difference today is that there's a difference over goals.
And so it doesn't matter if David French can show that on the infrastructure bill there's areas of agreement about the need to build a road or a bridge.
That totally misses the point.
The point is now the Republicans want to go to Virginia, or they want to go to one place, and the Democrats want to go to San Francisco.
When that's the case in politics, then every gain for one side is a loss for the other side, and an outright win for one side is a disastrous defeat for the other side.
The two sides don't want to live in the same America.
They're pushing in opposite directions.
And this is, I think, the kind of moral logic behind what the University of Virginia study is showing.
And rather than sort of take it seriously, One way you understand people is to try to see it from their point of view.
But David French doesn't do that.
He sort of sits on a kind of Himalayan mound.
He sits in the lotus position.
And he basically surveys all the people down there.
And he goes, Oh, these misguided people on the left and the right.
They think they disagree.
But from up here, it all looks the same to me.
Of course, I can hardly see it.
I don't see anything really down there.
But it's kind of the same, isn't it?
So... Again, again, this is just intellectually, to my view, pathetic.
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The founder of Wikipedia, this is a guy named Jimmy Wales, has a great idea.
No, I'm kidding.
The founder of Wikipedia never has great ideas.
He only has really stupid ideas.
One of the stupidest of which is Wikipedia itself.
At least the way Wikipedia has played out.
The fundamental premise of Wikipedia, preposterous, is that facts are not determined by what happened.
They're not determined by any kind of demonstrable truth.
They're determined by sort of a group of people who weigh in from all over the place saying, in many cases, not what the fact is, but what they want it to be.
And then Wikipedia hires its own editors, most of them, you know, biased, you know, full of hatred and full of prejudice.
And these guys basically go, no, no, no, no, no.
We can't call Dinesh a commentator.
He's a conspiracy theorist.
Let's put in conspiracy theorist.
And then this is basically Wikipedia.
It's a complete joke.
And it's no surprise that it has no intellectual respectability anywhere in the world.
True, as a popular basis, since you want to find something, you go, what does Wikipedia say about it?
But you always got to do that with a grain of salt.
As far as I know, in no college in the country are you allowed to cite in a paper Wikipedia because it's known to be a massively inaccurate source.
Similarly with schools. You can't side with it.
It's just not a legitimate source.
It's more like a curiosity place where you can get started.
But everything you read there has to be checked.
Now, this Wikipedia guy, Jimmy Wales, thinks that Facebook and Twitter need to adopt a Wikipedia model.
And what he means is that when they do censorship, when they decide to restrict or deplatform people, he goes, why don't you use volunteer moderators?
He says you could have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of volunteer moderators all over the place, and they could all decide, you know, Throw this guy off!
Throw that guy off! So think about it.
Suddenly, this concept of individual rights, the right to speak, the right to have a say, is now at the mercy of essentially an online mob that would get to determine your fate, determine whether or not you can participate in what is now the public square.
I want to be really clear about this.
This guy doesn't like the existing system of censorship at Facebook and Twitter, but he's not proposing the elimination of censorship.
This is basically an argument on the left about what is the best way to have censorship.
And so, to me, it's all bad.
I mean, the current system is bad.
The Wikipedia system would be bad.
It's kind of like, it's Tweedledee or Tweedledum.
It's like Scylla or Charybdis.
It's like, do you want to have, you know, do you want to have lice or do you want to have fleas?
There's no good answer here.
The answer is, I don't want lice, I don't want fleas.
In other words, I don't want Twitter censorship.
I don't want Jimmy Wales' censorship.
These people are basically the, you know, they're the intellectual equivalent of thugs.
They believe in getting their way by muscling, by bullying, by having their own goons who go out and do their bidding. And what we're seeing now is that the American public square is regulated by these thugs. And this is all part of the reason why free speech, just a simple right to speak your mind, has become an endangered commodity in 21st century America.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a long-standing veteran of the pro-life wars.
This is Father Frank Pavone.
He's the National Director of Priests for Life, a position he's held since 1993.
He's also President of the National Pro-Life Religious Council.
He's the Advisor to Rachel's Vineyard, which is the world's largest ministry of healing.
After abortion.
Well, Father Pavone, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Great to have you.
It seems like the abortion debate has been stagnant for a long time.
Not that nothing was happening below the surface, but it seems like nothing substantive was happening.
But now it appears like there are two big things happening.
One is the Supreme Court has got a big abortion case.
This fall, I think they're hearing the arguments early December, probably a decision the end of December, if not January.
And at the same time, what I see is the Democrats are radicalizing on abortion.
The House recently, with almost no Democratic dissent, passed essentially a nine-month abortion election.
You can have an abortion through the entire term of pregnancy all the way up until birth, which would in fact make America's abortion laws among the most radical in the world.
Can you say, as somebody who's been kind of toiling in the vineyard for a long time on these issues, give us a sense of what you're feeling now as you survey the landscape?
Yes, well thanks, Denise.
It's a great joy to be with you here today.
And you're right, you know, we are at a new point in the abortion debate.
And one of the things, let's look at the Supreme Court first.
One of the things they're considering in this case is precisely connected to the reason why there's been, as you mentioned, apparent stagnation for such a long time.
And it's simply this.
In a nutshell, Mississippi passes a law protecting babies from 15 weeks forward.
The district court throws it out.
Not even considering the evidence the state brought forward about the life and the wound, the harm to the mother, the harm to the medical profession.
And they said, oh, we're throwing it out.
Why? Because it's before viability.
So they don't even look at all the things that have changed since Roe v.
Wade, which we can get into.
But now the court, the high court, the Supreme Court is saying, wait a minute.
Is it true that all bans on abortion before liability should be considered unconstitutional?
We're going to take a second look at that question.
So that's very big.
That moves, that changes the stagnation because now states would be more free to act and consider significant changes and evidence that has accrued since Roe v. Wade.
Now, the Mississippi case, as you mentioned, is a 15-week case.
It essentially restricts and largely bans abortion beyond 15 weeks.
But presumably, if the Supreme Court were to take Mississippi's recommendation and overturn Roe, this would open the door, would it not, to states passing all kinds of laws on abortion, including restricting it prior to 15 weeks.
That's absolutely true.
And here's the conflict that the court is looking to resolve.
In Roe v. Wade, and even more clearly in Planned Parenthood v.
Casey in 1992, the court said that the states have an interest that they can pursue in A, the health of the mother...
B, the life within her, whatever one wants to call it.
And C, the integrity of the medical profession.
That would be looked on as a respectable healing profession instead of a barbaric healing industry.
Now, at the same time as saying the states have those interests, and in Casey they said they have them from the onset of pregnancy.
So from the beginning.
And in spite of saying they have those interests, they then tied their hands...
I don't know much about those interests because, again, they threw out the window any prohibitions on abortion prior to viability.
So now that Mississippi and other states that are joining in as friends of the court are saying, look, this doesn't make sense.
If we have the interests, we should be able to pursue them, including by passing laws that actually protect those babies, even from the very beginning of pregnancy, You mentioned now more than once the word viability.
It seems like the sort of state of play with regard to fetal viability is substantially different now than it was in 1973 when Roe versus Wade was decided.
Can you talk about how viability means something else in 2021 than it did in 1973?
Yes, you know, in Roe v.
Wade, they talked about viability, and they said, well, this is, you know, about 28 weeks, and maybe it could be as early as 24.
The fact of the matter is viability is not a point.
It's a prediction.
And not only would the point of viability change as the years go on, medical professionals now in the field of neomycology will say, well, it's more like 22 weeks.
But it doesn't just differ by time.
It can differ whether the, because of a hospital, let's say, on We're good to go.
Or not. So viability literally can depend on those kinds of factors and many others as well.
So it's a prediction.
It's not a point.
And you notice that abortionists, they don't advertise their services based on viability.
They advertise their services based on specific weeks of pregnancy.
And that's it, because they know that viability is such a fluid reality.
When we come back, I want to look at the kind of Christian perspective on abortion and ask Father Pavone, is it possible to be pro-abortion or even pro-choice and still really call yourself a Christian?
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I'm back with Fr.
Frank Pavone. He's the National Director of Priests for Life, a position he's held since 1993.
Fr. Pavone, let's talk a little bit about the Christian basis for a pro-life position.
Because it's sometimes said that not just as a Catholic, but even as a Christian more generally, that if you're pro-choice, if you take a kind of optional position on abortion, or if you're aggressively pro-abortion, you're not a Christian, or you're not behaving in a Christian way.
So what is the Christian basis for holding abortion to be a kind of inexcusable evil?
You know, the next thing to look at this is, It teaches elements of natural law that we can know just by human reason.
And then, of course, Christianity teaches truths that we can only know because God reveals them.
He has spoken in His Word and through His Church.
So looking at it just from human reason, we're pro-life because we're alive, because we realize instinctively life is better than death, and you can't kill babies.
You can't kill the innocent, and it's just violence.
So on that natural level, The church actually, and many Christian churches, base their position on reason, on science, on the awareness that we know when a human life begins.
Then from Revelation, well, we realize that God loves human life.
Jesus says in the book of Revelation, To the one who gains the victory, I will sit him with me on my throne.
So this exaltation of human life, that God wants life he did not.
So, to say, okay, this life has just come into existence, we're going to stuff it out, is a slap in the face to God, is a denial of, really, the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.
Now, you mentioned natural law and the idea that as humans we can recognize what life is, we have a stake in life ourselves, and we can see that life in the womb, however you want to make distinctions about it, That's developing life.
If you leave it alone, it's going to become a human being.
Now, that would imply that everybody on the other side of the debate, the so-called pro-choicers, the so-called pro-abortion types, they know that too.
So, what do you think?
Let's take for a moment the psychology of the pro-abortion position.
Is it simply that they are sacrificing a moral truth that they know to be true on the altar of convenience and selfishness?
Or is there some kind of a moral ideal on their side?
I love this question, Dinesh, because I've often said to people that someday psychologists and psychiatrists are going to have a field day as they look back at this whole debate over pro-life and pro-choice.
Sometimes, especially if I speak to high school and college groups, I'll begin by holding up a pencil, and I'll say, now everybody, what is this?
And they'll say, of course, a pencil.
And I'll say, now mark my words, before the end of tonight's discussion, some of you will be denying that this is Is a pencil.
And what I mean by that is, you go through the science, you show them the baby, and because of a deep woundedness, and we can get into this in more detail, some will actually look at the baby and say, that's not a baby.
It is a denial of truth.
And when you think of it, the term pro-choice, it's focusing on will.
It's my choice. It's my decision.
My, my, my. But what about the reason behind it?
What about the truth that's independent of your choice?
At its core, the most radical version of the pro-choice mindset is, well, I create truth.
What I say is true is true.
And we hear the leftists talking about this all the time.
Oh, my truth. And, you know, I've got to go into my truth and respect your truth and so forth.
But there's a woundedness, too.
There's a deep pain within those that promote abortion.
Some of it is from personal involvement in this tragic action.
And some of it is simply from other wounds that they've incurred in their lives.
And pro-life psychologists and psychiatrists have done a fair amount of research showing this.
It seems to me, Father Pavone, that abortion is in some way the debris of the sexual revolution, and that even if we were to win a victory at the Supreme Court level, that would only dispatch abortion to the states, which would now decentralize the fight.
So the long-term battle of the pro-life movement, it seems to me, is only just beginning.
You have to change laws, but you also have to change culture and institutions, and at the end of the day, A lot of human hearts.
Would you agree? Yes, definitely.
And, you know, this is where, of course, in your introduction of me, you mentioned about Rachel's Vineyard.
I serve and Priests for Life helps to essentially operate this worldwide ministry for healing the wounds of abortion.
We have Silent No War where people are speaking about their stories, their experience of abortion.
We have seen that the healing of that wound is a key To not only leading that person out of the darkness of abortion, but to leading our whole society out of that darkness.
It's a process of re-humanizing the individual.
You can't dehumanize the baby without dehumanizing yourself.
And why would a person want to dehumanize themselves?
Well, again, because there's pain, there's injury in their own life from many other factors.
None of this denies the responsibility that people have.
To do the right thing and to come to know what is right.
Yes, people have responsibility and the guilt is real.
But there are these powerful psychological factors at work.
And the healing, the changing of minds and hearts that we often talk about in the work of the pro-life movement of the church is very much connected with the healing of minds and hearts.
So much pain.
That's why we always say to people, We in the pro-life movement aren't standing in front of the world pointing fingers of condemnation.
We are standing in front of the world offering hands of mercy and healing and hope and help.
The pro-life movement is about replacing despair with hope, replacing wounds with healing.
So it's not a matter of setting the child against the mother.
It's ultimately what you're saying is saving one and healing the other.
You know, it's deep in the Christian roots of this, which we were referring to earlier, is the paradox of the cross that when we give ourselves away for the other, that's when we find ourselves, the core teaching of Jesus.
And where is that more true than in that mother-child relationship?
She thinks, she's made to think by others, we should say, that I can advance, I can live, I can thrive, That child is going to thrive, and there I find my own thriving.
You know, as I often point out, the same words Jesus uses to show us the paradox of the cross and to give us life, the same words we priests say in every Mass, are the words co-opted by the abortion industry.
This is my body.
And they say, this is my body.
I can do what I want. I can kill the child.
Jesus said, this is my body, given up for you.
That you may live, not that you may die.
That's amazing. Thank you very much, Father Pavone.
I really appreciate you joining me on the podcast.
Thank you for having me.
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Gordon Klein is an accounting professor at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. And I want to briefly recount his story because I think that when we engage in generalities about what's happening in academia, there's a tone of intolerance It's not easy to know how that plays out on the ground.
What does that actually look and feel like?
And so I like on the podcast to give concrete examples because you can see putting these together that this is how it works.
Now, Gordon Klein's not a particularly political guy.
He teaches, as I say, accounting.
But following the death of George Floyd last year, he was approached by a group of students, by the way, not just white, but white and black students, who basically said that he could not administer his testing and his exams in the normal way.
And when he said, well, what does that mean?
They basically said, well, you need to establish a two-tier system with one set of rules for blacks and another set of rules for whites.
One set of rules, in other words, for persons of color, mainly blacks, and another set of rules for whites.
And what are those? Well, basically he says...
You have to give blacks a, quote, no harm final exam.
In other words, no matter how badly they do, it's not going to hurt their grade.
Number two, you've got to give, you have to shorten the length of the exam for blacks, and you've got to extend their deadlines for final assignments and projects.
So, think about this.
Blatant racial discrimination.
Now, why? According to these students, the black students had been traumatized by what happened to George Floyd.
Apparently, the students say that blacks are put in a position where they must, quote, choose, and white students must choose between actively supporting our black classmates or focusing on finishing up our spring quarter.
We believe that remaining neutral in times of injustice brings power to the oppressor, and therefore staying silent is not an option.
The professor has urged to, quote, exercise compassion and leniency.
Now this professor, who's a really smart guy, actually responds.
And he goes, well, first of all, he says, it's not easy for me to know who's black.
He goes, we're doing online education.
I'm giving an accounting course.
And so I can't, it's not easy for me to, first of all, even identify these black students since I'm not interacting with them personally.
I'm administering ultimately an accounting exam online.
Number two, he says, and this is a little wry, a little tongue-in-cheek, but clearly a valid point.
He says, what do I do with students who are half black?
What if you've got a kid who's half black and half Asian, half black and half white?
Do I give them half an extension?
And three, he says, what about whites?
Whites might be devastated by what happened to George Floyd.
He goes, think, for example, he goes, my TA is from Minneapolis.
And so let's say my TA was very traumatized what happened.
After all, this occurred in the place where he or she is from.
Another black kid who's somewhere else may be much more indifferent to what's going on.
So this is a guy who's basically...
Saying, giving reasons for why this doesn't really make any sense.
And finally, Klein quotes Martin Luther King.
Well, here's the denouement.
Here's the conclusion. The professor is punished.
He's basically sanctioned for doing this.
And although eventually UCLA takes him back, the professor goes, you've harmed my reputation.
You've made me look like a racist.
In fact, he says, I do some private consulting and I've lost clients because I've been in the past called to be an expert witness.
Now I've been tarred by this racist brush.
So Gordon Klein, God bless him, is suing UCLA. For damage to his reputation, which they have done, in my opinion.
So, this is a small window, and you could just multiply this incident, not just a hundred, a thousandfold, to get a picture of what is happening in higher education.
It's a real dilemma for parents.
What do we do with our kids?
It used to be easy. You send your kid to the best college that they can get into, that you can afford.
End of story. But now it's no longer that simple because the oppressive forces that we see in some ways in our culture but they're even more malevolent in top-down highly centralized academia.
Inflation is running hot right at the highs of the last couple of decades and now the Democrats are pushing through another massive spending plan. They want 3.5 trillion dollars. Well, here's the deal.
If you think money grows on trees like our government does, well, then you can keep living in ignorance. But if you're freaked out as I am about the impact this additional spending, this waste is going to have on already high inflation, well, it's time to protect your savings now. Diversify a portion of your savings into gold and silver with Birch Gold Group. If you haven't reached out to Birch Gold to diversify part of your IRA or 401k into a precious metals IRA, why not do it today?
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I have been doing a series on Thomas Jefferson, the first in my five-part series for PragerU.
My videos called The Making of America are now up at PragerU.com.
You can watch them individually or watch them together.
I want to move today and begin my examination of Alexander Hamilton.
But it occurred to me that this is, in a sense, not easy to do, because what Hamilton did for America is he helped make America the commercial, free market, prosperous, abundant society.
That unfortunately today most of us, many of us, take for granted.
I try not to take it for granted.
And see, today when we talk about capitalism, we talk about, in a sense, you could almost call it the problems of abundance.
With such a rich country, and so why can't everybody get a free education?
With such a rich country, so why can't everybody get free healthcare?
Simply to want something almost establishes in some people's minds a right to it.
And in doing that, they are presuming We're good to go.
It's very difficult for us to imagine a world of scarcity, a world in which America was largely made up of, you may say, farms and villages.
It was not cities and the country, it was all the country.
In the time of Alexander Hamilton, there were no large cities.
Even the so-called cities were nothing more than what we would today call medium-sized towns.
And this was true even to some degree in Europe.
Even places like London and Paris, although they were more advanced as cities, they still weren't the kind of prosperous cities that we identify with.
Today, of course, we have those cities all over the world.
So, Hamilton helped to make America the way it is.
And we take the way it is so much for granted.
We don't think about it.
That the magnitude of his accomplishment becomes diminished, becomes camouflaged.
So, I actually want to talk about the world kind of before Hamilton.
To show that prior to Hamilton...
Before the middle of the second part of the 18th century, the world operated on a completely different principle than it does now.
It operated not on the principle of wealth creation.
In fact, the whole idea that wealth could be created was considered a little bit crazy.
How do you create wealth? I mean, think of it this way.
If I'm going to school and I have 10 marbles in my pocket, Basically, the way I look at it is that I've got 10 marbles, and if I come home and I've got 15 marbles, that's because I got, I won, or I took somebody else's marbles.
If I end up with 6 marbles, it's because I gave away or somebody forcibly extracted from me 4 marbles.
But I don't know a way, no one really does, at least among the young people, to make more marbles.
Marbles is a zero-sum game.
Now... This is the point, that historically wealth was considered a zero-sum game.
Why? Because wealth was largely in land, and so more land for you means less land for me.
The other thing about it, and this seems a little bit strange, is conquest was the normal way, the expected way that people acquired wealth.
Essentially, you got something by beating up some other guy and taking it.
And that was true, really, all over history.
Think even, for example, about the tribal warfare.
One tribe raids another tribe.
That's how it gets stuff.
Think about even the Old Testament.
Where the victory of Israel over its enemies is great.
The Israelis are able to gain their independence or seize land.
And if their enemies win, they take the land of the Israelites.
It's almost like a football game.
More points for you, less points for the other side.
This is the meaning of a zero-sum game.
On top of that, not only is conquest the way of the world, conquest is considered to be ethical in a sense that trade is not.
This seems like a really surprising point, but it's really not.
Conquest is considered to be brave, manly.
You're taking on someone in open combat.
You're gaining booty through struggle.
There's a kind of heroism to it, a valor to it.
Trade is considered to be kind of disgusting, low.
Let me give you a few examples of this.
Here's Confucius in the Analects, showing that this is a global viewpoint.
The virtuous man knows what is noble.
The low man knows what is profitable.
In Japan, the social hierarchy puts the imperial family at the top, then the lords, then the warriors, then the samurai, then the farmers and artisans, and below them, the merchants.
In India, the caste system, the same.
The merchant is one step above the hated untouchable.
Again, under the priests and under the kings and under the warriors, the merchant is really a kind of low-life scum.
And the achievement of America is to kind of invert the social hierarchy, to move the entrepreneur from the bottom rung of the ladder or near the bottom to the top, to build a whole society on invention and trade.
There really are very few kind of world-changing inventions.
Fire is one of them. The wheel is another.
The invention of agriculture is a third.
But America is a society based on one of the most important, maybe the most important invention of all time, which is the invention of wealth creation.
The invention of invention.
The invention of finding a way to take 10 marbles and making it 15 marbles Without taking somebody else's marbles.
And Alexander Hamilton played a critical role in making America that kind of society.
The way he did it, I'm going to take up tomorrow.
So guys, we're going to do a question today.
A mailbox. If you'd like to send me a question for future consideration, send it to questiondinesh at gmail.com, preferably audio or video.
And let's hear today's question.
Listen. Hello, Dinesh.
Thank you for taking the time to field questions from your audience.
My question is, do you believe that modern-day wokeism could be the manifestation of the great falling away as described in the Bible?
Whoa. This is a very interesting question, and let me think aloud about it this way.
Christian wokeism.
Think of wokeism as a form of enlightenment, of awakening to a truth that you had previously not seen.
All of this is implied in the concept of being woke.
These woke characters on the left have apparently got heightened sensitivities about all the social evils around them.
Notice that they rarely locate those social evils in themselves.
It's always in society.
It's in structures.
It's outside. Somebody else is evil.
So there's a demonization of the other side.
Even whites, and whites, by the way, dominate the woke movement.
They don't consider themselves to be racist.
They never give up their privileges.
I mean, if you think, if all these whites are so bad, why don't they all go into the public square and flagellate themselves?
This would actually be fun to watch.
I'd get tickets. But they never do that.
They want to flagellate other people.
So... Now, let's try to ask what, and this is what we don't often do, and in fact, very few churches do, which is why some of these churches are sort of succumbing to the woke movement, because they never ask this question, what would it really mean?
What is the Christian equivalent of wokeness?
What does it mean to be a woke Christian?
Well, I think you'd have to go back to St.
Augustine to get the answer, and it couldn't be more clear.
To be woke as a Christian is basically to look in the mirror and And to see who the problem is, namely yourself.
To be woke as a Christian is to be able to look into your own soul and see in it something that is biased, that is warped, that is contaminated, not just by original sin, by your sin.
So, in other words, to be woke is to recognize that you are really very distant from the cleanliness and holiness of God and that there has to be some way to cross that chasm between you and God to see ultimately what a, from a spiritual point of view, worm you are compared to the place that you're trying to go.
And so, this wokeness, which involves self-examination, a self-incrimination, a need for redemption, all of this couldn't be further away from the smug, woke types in society.
Who think that none of the problems are in themselves.
All the problems are with someone else or with society.
And this puts them on a self-righteous crusade of the exact kind that Jesus hated and condemned.
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