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Oct. 6, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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PARENTS ON THE WATCH LIST Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 190
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The Biden administration is going beyond targeting January 6th protesters as domestic terrorists.
They now want to go after parents who oppose racial indoctrination and school board indoctrination.
I'll give you my take on that.
Have you been checking out this Facebook whistleblower?
Doesn't she remind you of one Christine Blasey Ford?
I mean, minus the three-year-old voice.
In both cases, you're dealing with a political pawn.
Jack Posobiec joins me to talk about his new children's book.
It's called The Island of Free Ice Cream, and I'll continue my exploration of Alexander Hamilton and how he helped overcome the ethic of conquest.
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.
The Biden administration, operating through Attorney General Merrick Garland, has issued, well, it's kind of a declaration of war against the American people.
Quite serious.
Now, as we all know, they have been targeting these January 6 protesters.
First it was Trump, then it was the Trumpsters who showed up in D.C. And we've always had the sense that they have wanted to broaden the attack to include everybody.
Everybody who's a political dissident.
They're basically going full Soviet on us.
This has come to pass now with parents who oppose racial indoctrination.
There's a parents' mobilization going on in this country.
By and large, it focuses on three issues.
One is the mask and vaccine mandates.
parents are irate about this. They believe it's an assault on their control over their own kids. They believe it's bad for their kids. And so there's a kind of social movement to oppose all this.
Number two, critical race theory. Parents have discovered, contrary to the dishonest denials by teachers unions and by left-wing activists, critical race theory and the nostrums of critical race theory, namely, America's a bad country, all whites are racist, all this kind of nonsense. People who did nothing wrong, five-year-olds should feel guilty because of what their ancestors or great ancestors did.
And this polarization and division of kids, preventing the normal social bonds developing between them.
I mean, you can see why parents are up in arms.
And finally, all this trans propaganda that is being pushed on young people at very young ages.
Do you know if you're a boy or a girl?
Have you ever thought about it?
Ever had any doubts?
Want to see a counselor?
Don't tell your parents?
So this parental mobilization is one of the more hopeful things.
And it's, by the way, it's an exercise of democracy in the very sense that Tocqueville observed 150 years ago.
In other words, it's activism at the local level, motivated not by some theoretical concerns, but by the actual beliefs of parents that their own values are being attacked and being attacked in the very public schools that they, through their tax system, pay for.
Now, the National School Board Association, very left wing, sends a kind of an emergency appeal to the Biden administration.
Dear Mr. President, quote, there's a growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation against, apparently, they say teachers, against school boards, And so what they're doing is they're calling for, I mean, pulling out all the stops.
They want the government to invoke the Patriot Act, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the Gun-Free School Zones Act, and they're calling on the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Homeland Security Department, the Secret Service to all mobilize together against who?
Against, apparently, these really scary parents.
Where are the incidents that parents have actually done anything to anybody?
Well, there are none. There's not a single one mentioned in these memos.
But sure enough, as if on cue, Merrick Garland issues a kind of order, and he calls upon all these departments of the government to have a meeting in 30 days and figure out a strategy for how to deal with this serious problem of threats.
Now, he does say that there is a legitimate right to To speak up and a right to participate, but he goes that this can cross the line into threats and intimidation.
And apparently he's looking to create a kind of task force against, what, parental extremism?
The idea here, by the way, is it's not so much that they're gonna effectively be able to go after parents, but what they want is to scare them. What they want is to deter them.
They're basically saying, hey, listen, you saw what happened to those January 6 guys.
They too thought they were just exercising their voice.
They too thought that they were merely standing up for what they believed in, but there can be consequences. Don't cross the line. And so Josh Hawley here raises a good point. He goes, you know, is there any instance in American history where the essentially the martial power of the US government through all these police aid was summoned up to deal with school board meetings getting quote out of hand?
He goes, this is really an unprecedented escalation.
Essentially, what the Biden administration is doing is they're classifying noisily expressed dissent.
As A, disinformation, and B, domestic terrorism.
They want a society in which there is no such dissent, or at least no such effective dissent.
Now, the bad news is that, you know, when we look back, look at all these Republicans who voted to confirm this guy Merrick Garland.
I don't know if they did it out of guilt or Because, you know, the guy didn't get on the Supreme Court.
In fact, we're very thankful now that McConnell did not let this extremist fanatic get on the Supreme Court.
But McConnell voted for his confirmation.
And so did many other people, including a bunch of good guys.
They, too, went along.
Lindsey Graham went along. John Cornyn went along.
Burr went along. Thune went along.
Tillis. So, all of this shows that the Republican Party is not awake to the seriousness of the threat that it faces.
I guess if there's a silver lining in all this, it's simply this, that the left has realized that they're in trouble.
Their ideas are not weak. Nobody believes they're nonsense.
This critical propaganda, they've got to deny they're even doing it.
If it was so smart, if it was so sensible, so obvious, the best they can do is say things like, well, surveys show that parents want their kids to learn about slavery.
Of course they do. Parents want their kids to learn about the civil rights movement.
Of course they do. The issue here is how is this propaganda being taught?
Because after all, what seems to be going on is essentially the replacement of knowledge and And discussion and fairness and balance with this kind of hard-edged ideological indoctrination backed up, as in this case, by the police power of the state.
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There is apparently a movement against critical race theory, or at least against the extremism of critical race theory, that is brewing even in the corporate sector.
Now, we know that there's a parental movement that's opposing critical race theory in education.
I just talked about it.
But there is also apparently now an increasing wariness, ambivalence, distancing going on in corporate America, and specifically on Wall Street.
Let's look at what's happening and why.
I'm looking at an article by Charles Gasparino, who I believe is on Fox Business, but this is an article that he wrote in the New York Post.
And he goes, large financial institutions are now staying away from critical race theory.
This woke culture is apparently now, they're beginning to see the other side of it.
Now, let's remember that, you know, at the very beginning, when...
When you had the George Floyd incident, corporate America basically just sort of fell on its face.
And by that, I mean you had all these corporate leaders taking a knee.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon takes a knee.
He goes, you know, we've got to embrace all this.
And so Robin DiAngelo, who is essentially this absolute kook who teaches what she calls white fragility, she basically goes, one day I woke up and realized I'm white.
So you're dealing here basically with someone who's probably in need of some medical attention.
But nevertheless, she has converted her own psychosis into a sort of career.
And corporate America, her phone couldn't, was ringing off the hook.
Come over here, come over there, this bank, that hedge fund.
And so this was kind of the cool thing to do.
This was corporate America going woke.
And there's still a lot of that in corporate America.
But what Gasparino says is that he says that...
A lot of the biggest banks and hedge funds are now kind of hemming and hawing and putting their distance.
He goes, at Goldman Sachs, Eleanor Teret was asked on Fox Business, she goes, are you guys doing critical race theory?
And she goes, no, no, no, no, we're not doing that.
Are you bringing in Robin DeAnne?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
We haven't hired her to do anything.
And Gasparino says this is true at Bank of America.
This is true even at Jamie Dimon's bank.
It's true at Morgan Stanley.
It's also true at Jamie Dimon's bank, which is JP Morgan.
They all say basically, no, no, no.
We're doing some diversity, but it's not critical race theory.
It's not that kind of stuff.
Now, Gasparino says that part of this was fueled by the recognition on Wall Street that American Express, which kind of jumped in head first, looked really stupid.
I mean, they were basically propagandizing their employees, stand up if you're white, you know, start sobbing.
And so this whole browbeating of white employees, every black employee can't do any wrong, you know, so...
Essentially, it's like, you know, genuflect before every black guy that goes by, even if you're his boss.
So this kind of madness made American Express look kind of stupid.
And probably there are people laughing at American Express all over Wall Street.
And so the deeper point here is that, and Gasparino makes this point in the article, is he goes, listen, basically business is about teamwork.
It's about our team against the other team.
People talk about capitalism as driven by competition, and it is.
But it's competition among teams.
There's no competition inside a team.
Obviously, the team at Bank of America, for example, is competing with the team at Morgan Stanley.
Now imagine going into each of these teams and poisoning employees against each other.
By the way, everybody over on the left side is a bad guy.
They're the demons. They're the ones who are responsible for slavery and segregation and Jim Crow, even though they had no actual role in it.
So what you're doing is you're setting employee against employee.
You're setting black against white, male against female, straight against gay.
I mean, could there be a more poisonous recipe for destroying the esprit de corps, the camaraderie that requires people to work together as a team?
So this is exhausting.
It's frustrating.
People can't say what they think.
It prevents critical thinking from surfacing.
And so here's Ilana Redstone, a professor at the University of Illinois.
She goes, I think it's changing.
There's a middle ground where those dimensions of identity matter, meaning race, gender, and so on, but so does the individual.
Not everyone sees their race, ethnicity, or gender as the most important part of who they are.
Now, this is such a statement of the obvious that it's a little pathetic that it actually has to be said.
But it has to be said because these corporations, as so much of our culture, has careened in such an out-of-control direction that it takes actually a real effort to get the car back to the middle of the road.
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What do we make of this strange new whistleblower from Facebook that is all over the media and appearing right before giving congressional testimony, has apparently a whole army of advisors and media reps.
Where did this person even come from?
All right, let's take a look at a glimpse of her recent congressional testimony.
Listen. My name is Frances Haugen.
I used to work at Facebook.
I joined Facebook because I think Facebook has the potential to bring out the best in us.
But I'm here today because I believe Facebook's products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy.
This is the most acclaimed whistleblower since Vindman.
Remember Vindman, the guy who blew the whistle on Trump's phone call with the Ukraine?
And these are, by the way, not real whistleblowers.
These are actually people who are sort of staged to play a role.
Real whistleblowers, by the way, get into trouble.
You're going up against the establishment.
You're blowing the whistle.
Even though this woman says, you know, I'm I'm doing this a great personal risk.
What's the risk? You are in TV shows.
You're basically probably negotiating a book contract on the side.
You're in 60 minutes. What is the risk?
There is no risk. But we have to look and ask an interesting question.
Who is this person? And what's going on here?
Now, first of all, watching her testimony, it's a little reminded of Christine Blasey Ford.
This is like a reincarnation of Christine Blasey Ford, minus the three-year-old voice.
I mean, it is...
He's like, no, no, no, don't go there, don't go there.
Just when I least expected it, Brett Kavanaugh jumped on me.
And I said, get away from me, you pedophile.
I realize it's a flawed routine, honey, because obviously no three-year-old would know what a pedophile even is.
But anyway, let's turn to this woman named Hogan O'Hoggin.
Because she's a whistleblower blowing the whistle on exactly what?
Well, it turns out, nothing.
She says things like, Instagram is really not good for the psyche of young girls.
Really? Hello? We've been hearing about this for years.
There's a whole psychological literature on it.
Apparently, the only news is that Facebook did a survey of teen users to ask them how their actions on Facebook were having an impact on their mental health, and one in five respondents said it made them feel worse about themselves.
So big deal.
I mean, I'm not denying that there's a problem here, but it's kind of the same problem that young people have long had with a culture that puts up role models, the kind of cool girls in school that demoralizes girls who are not so cool.
I mean, this is a problem in our society, but there's nothing new here.
That's the point. Countries like China and Iran are able to use Facebook as weapons of propaganda and to gain information about the U.S. Really?
This is news? You're here to testify?
We need you to come forward from Facebook to tell us this?
There's nothing here. Really, what's interesting is what this Hogan woman or Hogan did not say.
Did she say something like, you know, it's really distressing that we suppress the Hunter Biden story?
No, no mention of that.
In fact, turns out, she was part of the team that censored Hunter Biden.
She was part of the committee on Facebook that was in charge of kind of supervising this misinformation.
And the more you listen to her, the more you realize that her goal...
Is more suppression of information.
Essentially, her messages were not censoring conservatives enough.
And now you come to the key for why she's such a heroine.
She's such a heroine to the left because there is a resentment in mainstream media and among the government, the deep state, over the fact that it's Facebook that gets to do the censoring.
They're not against the censoring.
It's kind of like you might think, where's the problem?
Facebook is doing your work for you.
They're throwing all these people off.
They're practicing censorship.
But I think part of the point of the left is they're not doing it enough, A. And B, why should they have all the fun?
Why should they do the censorship when we could be the ones doing it?
You know, they get to pull out the whiteout, whiteout this guy, whiteout that guy.
I mean, it must be so cool.
So all these media guys go, well, listen, I mean, that's just a privilege that the government is giving Facebook.
Why don't we have a digital oversight board in which we can sit around the table and go, knock that guy off.
Knock that guy off! So what you have here is, and you know, Glenn Greenwald makes a pretty good point, because the only thing scarier than having huge private monopolies like Facebook and Google and Twitter decide this guy is in, that guy is out, essentially censoring legitimate debate, the only scarier than that is turning over that prerogative...
To one of the two political parties and allowing them to use it as a censorship weapon against the other political party.
I mean, that's basically not only just the end of democracy, it's the end of civil liberty.
And so we are reaching a point in which it is no longer out of the question to compare what's happening in America to what has been happening historically in authoritarian and perhaps even totalitarian regimes.
I'm not saying we're there, but what I am saying is we're moving in that direction.
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We all know that there's a great deal of just outright dishonesty and lying in the media.
We also know that the Washington Post is actually, along with the New York Times, two of the worst, if most influential, offenders.
But I think what is a little shocking as we look at case after case is how newspapers like the Washington Post don't even know what's going on in Washington.
They're unable to...
You'd think the Washington Post, this is a newspaper in the nation's capital, if anything, they'll be able to get things like what legislation says right.
If anything, they'll be able to read a Supreme Court decision and go, this is what it says, this is what it doesn't say, we don't like this, but nevertheless, this is what it is.
But what you find now is that you can't even count on the Washington Post to do that.
And a case in point is a recent Supreme Court decision which affirmed a decision of the DC Court of Appeals, basically about a lawsuit to give people in Washington, DC, this is in the nation's capital, a role, a vote in the country's national legislature.
So in other words, the idea here is to give DC representation in Congress.
And a whole bunch of law professors signed on to this lawsuit.
And the court was pretty much savage about it.
I mean, first of all, the D.C. Court of Appeals just went boom and said, this is a non-starter.
I'm quoting them. In fact, they say, listen, this is at odds with the entire language and history of the Constitution.
The Constitution... Very specifically says that representation is extended to, quote, the people of the several states.
And the people of the several states, it's very clear, in contrast to the people in D.C., in other words, the people in the nation's capital.
Now, the Washington Post reports this, and they basically minimize the ruling.
They say, quote,"...first of all, the ruling has little bearing on the fight for D.C. statehood." Now, D.C. statehood is a different issue, so I want to set it aside for a minute here.
But they say,"...it does not preclude Congress from passing a law that would grant the district a vote in the national legislature." Now, this is flatly wrong, because what the Post does is it relies on a couple of activists to make the point.
Here's one of them, by the way, a guy named Walter Smith, head of the D.C. Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.
And the guy goes, this is the Post writing, Smith was heartened, however, that the ruling the Supreme Court affirmed mentioned that Congress could legally grant voting rights to D.C., even though it's not constitutionally We're good to go.
The question now becomes, it's not a matter of whether Congress can do it.
The Supreme Court is saying Congress cannot do it.
Why? Because even Congress is under the superior authority of the Constitution, and the Constitution could not be more clear on the matter.
Writing about this, Jonathan Turley, who's an expert on all this, raises the point, why is the Post, which probably knows better, it's not that those guys haven't gone to college, it's not that they can't read.
They can read, but what are they doing?
And why is what they're doing so destructive?
Well, Turley makes a good point.
He goes, what's going on here is that you have these increasingly one-sided media accounts.
That look at a carefully reasoned court decision, anchored in precedent, anchored in the language and history of the Constitution, and they make it sound like, no, the court didn't decide what it in fact decided.
No, the court doesn't have any authority to do this.
So, by misrepresenting what the court is doing, they fuel the anger of people who begin to think, wait a minute.
There's nothing in the Constitution that prohibits this.
The court is simply acting in a nakedly partisan manner.
So what happens is that although the court is trying to make a principled argument, it gets blamed for making a kind of nakedly partisan decision because the Washington Post doesn't explain the legitimate legal and constitutional rationale for what the court is doing.
So this is a campaign, Turley implies, and I agree, to poison activism, poison people, Against the court and tried to bolster efforts to remake, to pack, to stack, in a sense to destroy the independence of the judiciary.
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I really feel sorry for this guy, Matthew Mazzocco.
Who's Matthew Mazzocco?
One of the January 6th defendants.
And this poor guy just got 45 days in jail for doing basically nothing.
In fact, we know that he was doing basically nothing because even the US government, the Biden administration, the DOJ, didn't want him to have jail time.
They basically proposed that he have two months of home confinement.
That's it. But the judge, and here I'm getting to my theme for this segment, the vindictive judge.
Now, who's the vindictive judge?
Well, her name is Tanya Chutkan, Obama appointee.
No surprise. And this is a woman who's angry, not at Matthew Mazzocco, because Matthew Mazzocco, as I said...
Did pretty much nothing. He pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of demonstrating in the Capitol.
How long was he in the Capitol?
Twelve minutes. What did he do?
He, quote, posted a selfie on Facebook.
He did nothing else.
He didn't harm anybody.
In fact, he's very contrite for what he did.
He says it's ruined his life.
But the judge is mad, but not at him.
So who is Judge Tanya Chutkin mad at?
She's actually mad at another judge.
She's mad at the guy I talked about yesterday or the day before, Judge Trevor McFadden.
Judge Trevor McFadden had pointed out, hey, listen, why is the DOJ going after all these January 6th guys for doing things that in many cases are far less...
Then Antifa and BLM rioters who are allowed to walk free, who are not even prosecuted, who are not even charged.
So Judge Tanya Chutkin is trying to say, oh, no, no, no, no, the two cases are not similar at all.
And the comedy of her reasoning kind of shows how pathetic this is.
So first of all, she's trying to go after this guy, Matthew Mazzocco, trying to give him a jail sentence, even though the prosecution doesn't even recommend that.
And she says the rioters who committed violence that day did so because they had the safety of numbers.
Now think about how diabolical her reasoning is.
She's blaming Matthew Mazzocco for just being there.
She's saying because he was there and there were a lot of people there, that gave the other people...
The sense that they could push and shove and riot.
So this guy is basically being blamed for his presence and adding to the numbers that cause other people to do bad things.
I mean, what happened to the idea of individual justice, of being given our just desserts for what we ourselves did and not what some other people did in a different context?
Now, in order to sort of whip up the frenzy of the whole situation, she talks about, and this is my favorite phrase, a capital siege.
A siege. Now, I'm thinking back.
I mean, I'm a student of history.
You know, the Spartans, for example, lay siege for, I think, several months to the island of Melos and eventually killed all the...
Adult males and took the women and children as captives.
A siege. But January 6th, I mean, how long was the siege?
15 minutes? 30 minutes?
What kind of a siege is it when everyone then pretty much goes home?
So this language, this martial language of warfare is being summoned knowingly.
By judges like this Tanya Chutkin, she's not really, if you think about it, a judge.
She's basically kind of a thug with robes.
She's basically somebody who has the power to lock this guy up, and so she's going to do it, even though, in a sense, if you listen to her own reasoning, she admits the guy doesn't deserve it.
She admits that this is not proportionate to what he did, but she's doing it because she's very angry at her fellow judge.
Trevor McFadden, who doesn't see January 6th the way she does.
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Well, what do you know, guys?
Jack Posobiec, who is a former intelligence officer, journalist, he's a senior editor of Human Events, he's all over social media, has now come out with a children's book.
It's called The Island of Free Ice Cream.
And I've really actually been enjoying it.
It's very lavishly illustrated.
I mean, kind of take a look at the quality of the art.
Jack, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
Let me start by asking you, I mean, this book you were telling me just a moment ago is part of a series of books aimed at young people.
Who's doing it and what's this sort of series about?
Yeah, let me give you the genesis of it.
And of course, thank you so much and God bless for having me on the show.
As everybody knows, a huge, huge fan for forever.
You know, actually, when I was living in China, I used to have my parents get your books when they would come out and then ship them over to me because they weren't allowed to actually be put out in China.
I think I was there when you did the What's So Great About Christianity and a couple of the other ones, you know, a long time ago.
But just loved them.
So we were smuggling them through the red wall.
How cool. Wow.
Yeah. So, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's cool. Sorry, just being a fanboy a little bit there.
And no, but so with the genesis of this, when people reach out to me and the group that's behind it, they're out of Houston, Texas, so you know they're good.
And they're called Brave Books.
And that's the only place you can get this series.
And it is a series, bravebooks.us.
What they're doing is, it's like, every time you, here's the situation.
Every time you go into a Barnes& Noble or a Books A Million, any one of these mainstream booksellers, you always see that table.
They hit you with it when you first walk in.
You know exactly what table I'm talking about with the children's books and Every single one of the authors is either an Obama, a Clinton, a Harris, and now a Biden, right?
And they're all aimed at children.
And so why do I have to walk by this table every single time I come in?
And now that I've got a three-year-old, I've got a 10-month-old, I start thinking about this a little bit more and I say, wait a minute, if these are the only children Things that are out there and they are being promoted so heavily for children, then at some point, you know, maybe he's going to be with a friend and they have something, whatever it is, that's going to seep in.
He's going to be confronted with that.
And so when I looked at conservatives and the way Brave Books also, and they agreed with this, they said, you know, conservatives have just kind of seeded this space and said, look, you know, we're going to just pass it off.
And hey, we've got jobs.
We've got things to do. We don't have to worry about that.
It's just kid stuff, whatever.
And there was this idea.
That, you know, even if you were indoctrinated and inculcated in this indoctrination of the left all the way through your schooling and then your college, that the campus crazy would at least go away when you entered the real world and you entered the workforce and you were, you know, gobsmacked by reality, mugged by reality, to use the Buckleyan line, right?
But that's not what happened, right?
It just, that process didn't work, that autopilot kind of idea that conservatives had for so long.
And so the campus crazies became the corporate crazies and the military crazies and everything else on and down the line.
And conservatives for so long were not even looking at this.
They were just completely seeding the battle space.
And I do look at it as an information, at least an information battle space.
Again, Navy officer, right?
So they came and they said, look, we just want to focus on not even beating people over the head with these preachy issues.
And you just showed the arc and I appreciate it because I like the art.
I think the art is great. I said to them, look, I don't want to be doing something where it's like Jack Posobiec walks on and says, well, kids, today we're going to talk about communism.
Isn't that going to be great?
They said, no, no, no, no.
Real story, real characters.
There's a fox named Asher, and he's selling ice cream in his little village, and then a group of wolves come up, and they say, don't...
Don't buy ice cream from that guy.
That guy's charging you an arm and a leg.
Well, we'll give it to you for free.
In fact, we've got a whole island of free ice cream if you guys want to just come to our island.
And then, of course, you can see where it goes from there.
They get to the island and there is free ice cream.
But of course, it's not for you. It's just for the wolves.
And then you're just working for the wolves and you might make a little gruel or something.
And then the island has sort of a, you know, like a Berlin Wall around it.
So it's sort of East Germany meets Cuba meets Congress.
Yeah, I mean, what I like about it, Jack, is you're sort of taking the traditional fairy tale in which you have villains, bad guys, right?
Except in this case, it's sort of the socialist.
And you point out that the socialist is a bad guy, not just because his idealism goes wrong.
Because there are many conservatives, socialism doesn't work because in the end, you know, it doesn't know how to transmit information or blah, blah, blah.
But you're saying, no, you've got some very cunning characters, these wolves, bad guys.
They actually want to have all the benefits for themselves.
They want to create a two-tier society with the wolves on the top.
So, in a sense, you're doing a version of Animal Farm, I would say.
A little bit, yeah. Yeah, but you're doing it with an original twist, and you're teaching a really important lesson.
And also, what I like about it is there's just a single lesson in the book.
You're not trying to give them the wealth of nations and...
You know, you're trying to take one point and you drive it home, but you do it in a kind of a mischievously cunning way.
Yeah, the idea is, you know, kind of, it's the Milton Friedman line, but for kids, right?
There's no such thing as free ice cream, right?
So, yeah, there's no such thing as free ice cream.
And just to say that to kids...
And then there's a little section in the back where it's a Q&A, and they sort of have, like, I have some quotes that I wrote out for it.
But then it's also a way, because we're working, actually, with educators.
We're working with homeschool networks to actually get this as part of the curriculum in various states to get it approved.
We're working with Christian networks as well, homeschool pods.
Like, I'm Catholic in our home parish.
We do the homeschool pods.
So to actually be able to introduce these.
And when I say it's a series, so mine...
You know, of course, it's communism. And they said, because they came to me and they said, Jack, what's something you don't like?
And I said, communism, right?
So, you know, I'm Polish, my wife's from the Soviet Union.
So, yeah, of course, that's top of my head.
He asked me about something. But we also have one that's the first one that actually came out.
It's on gender studies.
And that one, I think it has a better title.
It's called Elephants Aren't Birds.
You can see where that goes with that.
Then the second one is Little Lives Matter.
That's going to be all about pro-life issues.
And then Dan Crenshaw has one coming out later this month, and that's all about cancel culture.
And what's great is that within the stories, there's sort of a shared Marvel Universe kind of thing where maybe the villains kind of work together.
You might see a villain from one shows up in another, or one of the heroes from one will show up in another to aid something.
There's a little bit in there.
There's actually an elephant that shows up to help the fox in my book, but that elephant is the main character of book one.
So you see, and then for kids, so yeah, there's like a map that you can actually get that lays out the whole, I mean, it's really well thought out in terms of the world building.
You know, it's kind of like the Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings, where.
Oh, you have the map. I have your map.
It's awesome. You have the map. I'm going to sort of unscurl the map a little bit here because it's doing it in a small scale what Tolkien did.
It creates a little world, and that's what you're talking about, a world that kids can live in.
The other thing I like is that at the end of the book you talk about games that kids can play off of the themes in the book.
I remember when you mentioned What's So Great About Christianity, when I wrote that book, the publisher goes, did you do a study guide?
And I was like, are you kidding? Study guide?
And they're like, no. People who read a book in Bible study, they like to have a study guide with a bunch of questions.
And so it looks like what's nice is you and the publishers of this book have thought about this and have developed a whole schema, an educational schema for young people.
So Jack, congratulations.
It's really awesome. The book is called The Island of Free Ice Cream.
And just before we get started...
I got to do this.
I got to put you on the spot. I think that you should join.
I think that you should do one of the books.
I think you've definitely got a kid's book in you.
I can see it. I can see it.
What would you want your topic to be?
What do you think? Well, my wife says here, I'm a former kindergarten teacher, Debbie.
So I think she likes the idea.
And maybe with her help, I could actually pull it off.
Well, I was able to do it because I'm actually a former child myself.
So I was able to figure out what kids might be able to do.
Well, let me leave you with it.
I will just ask you to have your people contact my people so the negotiations can resume.
Jack, thanks for coming on.
It's a real pleasure. Great to have you.
Thanks so much. God bless, guys. Bye.
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I'm continuing my discussion of Alexander Hamilton and the way in which he helped America, which was largely a rural agricultural society.
To become an urban, city-driven, commercial, capitalistic society.
And I'm suggesting that this is not just a kind of natural transition that occurs through history.
It's actually an achievement.
It's something that was brought about.
Now, not single-handedly by Hamilton, but he was a key architect in helping to bring it about.
Wealth in ancient times was, as I've said before, rooted in conquest.
Rooted in taking other people's stuff.
There's a famous story, I believe that Augustine talks about this in his City of God, of Alexander the Great, who heard about a pirate who was essentially on the high seas raiding ships, confiscating people's property.
And Alexander the Great calls the pirate and basically goes, Hey, what's your idea?
Raiding other ships and seizing their possessions?
Where'd you get this idea? And the pirate goes, I got it from you!
Acts on the Greatest, what?
And the pirate goes, well, I got the same idea as you, except you do it with a large fleet that you call a navy, and that's why they call you a great emperor.
I do it in my small boat, and therefore I'm called a pirate.
The point that Augustine is getting at here and telling the story is that it's all about conquest, from the smallest level, the pirate, to the great emperors, who are called great only because they are great at conquest.
Now, Augustine's point in telling the story is to marshal against the human appetite, what he calls concupiscence, the lust for power, the lust for money, lust for women.
Against all this, Augustine emphasizes the moral virtues, which are aimed at curtailing, regulating these forms of concupiscence.
But I think what happens over the centuries is that in the early modern era, you get philosophers and thinkers who begin to worry that with the divisions in the church, the Reformation, the church being broken into pieces, the moral authority to try to convince people to regulate conquest, to regulate their passions, This is not going to come from religion alone.
You need some other way to moderate and block these kind of vicious, destructive passions from taking control.
And so, initially, the early modern philosophers thought, well, what if we set one passion against the other?
What about if we take passion A? Here's an example, by the way.
Let's take the passion, for example, for ambition and lust for power or sexual lust.
What if we set against that?
The passion of, let's say, greed, avarice, the desire to gain more stuff, and set the passions against each other so instead of spending your time doing one thing, you can equally energetically devote yourself to doing another thing.
David Hume, the philosopher, was kind of a champion of this, and so was Machiavelli.
Now, Machiavelli thought of these passions kind of in terms of politics.
He thought about, for example, when you have a king who's doing some bad thing over here, Maybe you can convince him to do some bad things over here and that would take his attention away from this bad thing that he's doing.
So, one passion set against the other.
And Alexander Hamilton, by the way, was very familiar with this world of conquest.
Here's a guy, by the way, who had a very low view of human nature.
He was raised in the West Indies.
That's where his family came from.
And the West Indies was defined by slavery.
And slavery is the ultimate form of conquest.
Because in slavery, you not only steal another man's labor, you basically steal his whole life.
So... So, Hamilton understood this.
Here, by the way, is a short clip from my PragerU video on Hamilton, just giving you a glimpse of some of the territory that I'm covering.
Listen. Alexander Hamilton, the first treasurer of the United States, had the answer.
Under his brilliant stewardship, the new nation developed a new concept of wealth creation, capitalism based on innovation, invention, and enterprise.
And it would be available to every citizen from any background with the willingness to work for it.
Now, all of this sounds very familiar to us, the idea of innovation and hard work and wealth creation.
But I'm trying to set the ground for it.
I'm kind of almost preparing the ground for Hamilton himself by showing that the early modern philosophers took this idea of destructive passions And they came up with an ingenious way to combat them.
They decided to fight the passions with what can be called the interests.
There's a book by the political scientist Albert Hirschman.
It's called The Passions and the Interests.
And Hirschman's point is that while passion is periodic, it's episodic, it's violent, it's often destructive, interest, think of interest, is stable, it's rational, it's calculating.
And Adam Smith has an important line in The Wealth of Nations where Adam Smith basically talks about the fact that our self-interest, he says, this idea of benefiting yourself, he says, this feeling comes to you from the womb and never leaves you till the grave.
And so the early modern thinkers, Adam Smith being the leading one, said, what if we try to focus men's attention not so much on On conquest, on seizure, on these violent passions, why don't we focus men's interest on things like having a bigger kitchen, or having a nice backyard, or building up your savings for retirement, or providing for your family so they can be okay even after you're gone.
In other words, the idea is, instead of engaging in these socially destructive passions, focus men's attention on something that is slow, rational, accumulating, And in this way, a society can actually become prosperous, and prosperous not at somebody else's expense.
That's the point of my analogy to the marbles.
Wealth creation allows you to generate more marbles without taking other people's marbles.
The gospel of this way of thinking, setting the interests against the passions, comes from the philosopher Montesquieu in a line that Albert Hirschman quotes, but which I think sums up the whole argument, and I want to quote it now.
Montesquieu says, He says, It is fortunate for men to be in a situation which, though their passions may prompt them to be wicked, they have nevertheless an interest in not being so.
So there you have it.
Passions are the animating force behind conquest, interest, and Which is the idea of building up your possessions, building up your belongings.
Interest is the driving force of capitalism.
I think Alexander Hamilton understood that if you can substitute for destructive passions, the passion of the slave owner, the interest of the trader, the inventor, the patent holder, the merchant, You could create a society that went beyond slavery,
that got rid of slavery and replaced the idea of stealing another man's labor with the idea of paying him for it, making new things, and creating not just a prosperous life, but a prosperous society.
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