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Oct. 21, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:53
DO IT, JOE! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep201
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Joe Manchin put out the word that he's thinking of leaving the Democratic Party and then he promptly denied it.
What possibly could be going on here?
I'll tell you my thoughts.
It's called Negotiating Strategy 101.
I'm going to celebrate some profiles and courage, people who are standing up for their beliefs and putting their careers on the line.
The case of Andrew McCabe, remember Andrew McCabe, the FBI senior official, shows that if you can get away with it, that must be proof that you're a Democrat.
Pastor Chris Thoma, a Lutheran pastor, is going to join me.
We're going to talk about religion and politics.
And finally, I'm going to answer the question, if Ben Franklin represents capitalist man, who represents socialist man?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I'm Dinesh D'Souza.
Think about the far-reaching consequences if he did.
Right away he would cost the Democrats their Senate majority.
Joe Manchin would have two options.
He could become an independent Or he could become a Republican.
If he became a Republican, wow, the Republicans would then control the Senate and that would be essentially the death knell for Biden's agenda.
But even if Manchin became an independent, he'd have a choice of caucusing either with the Republicans or the Democrats.
And if he caucused with the Republicans, that would be a de facto election.
51 to 49 majority, just as much as if Manchin had, in fact, become a Republican.
But is all of this idle speculation?
Now, there was a big hubbub on social media just yesterday because a fellow who writes for Mother Jones named David Korn.
David Korn, by the way, is a leftist.
So we're talking not about information coming from the right, but now from the left.
And Joe Manchin has told associates he's considering leaving the Democratic Party, and he already has an exit plan.
Now, let's go through David Korn's article, because David Korn says that Manchin has already raised this issue, not just with associates, who supposedly were the source for Korn to write the article, but he's also told Biden, and he's also told...
He's also told the leadership of the Democrats in the House and in the Senate, Schumer and Pelosi.
And apparently, according to the article, he was thinking about becoming an independent.
Thinking about is the key word.
The article doesn't go so far as to say he's going to do it, just that he is threatening to do it.
And the threat would take two steps.
He apparently would notify Chuck Schumer, and then the next step would be that he would actually do it.
Right away, of course, well, first of all, the tireless Manu Raju, this is the peppy Indian fellow who keeps chasing Manchin around like a dog.
He, of course, catches up with Manchin.
What are you going to do? What are you going to do, Manchin?
What are you going to do? What are you going to do? And Manchin's like, you know, he's like, this is BS. Manchin denies publicly the idea.
He says this is not true.
First of all, For Manchin to put out the word that he's thinking about it and then deny it is actually a very effective negotiating strategy.
This is, I think, what Manchin is doing, that he sort of let slip the rumor and now he's sort of pulling back from it.
But his real goal is to let the threat kind of hang out there.
Why? It's pretty much Manchin and Sinema.
It's not just that Manchin is out of step with today's Democratic Party, which is veered far left.
The deeper point is Manchin doesn't even agree with them about their philosophy of government.
If you think about the negotiations between Bernie Sanders and Manchin, they go sort of like this.
Bernie Sanders is like, listen, we'll give you all kinds of goodies for West Virginia.
We'll give you more unemployment.
We'll give you more this. We'll give you more that.
We'll basically buy off your voters.
And the philosophy here is to turn people into serfs, to turn them into dependence on the government.
And this is Manchin's point.
He has said this publicly.
He goes, I don't like this entitlement mentality.
He goes, I'm not looking for that for West Virginia.
I'm not trying to turn our people into wards of the state.
Manchin's view, and he said this again clearly...
The government should be a partner with the public and not an ultimate provider.
See, this is, I think, the chasm that separates Manchin from not just Sanders, but from Democrats as a whole.
And finally, there's another little wrinkle, which is Manchin has told Biden, listen, you have assured me that these programs are going to contain the Hyde Amendment, which means they're going to not force people to pay through the tax system for abortion.
And Manchin has made that a non-negotiable in his.
So where's all this going to come out?
I don't really know. But I think Manchin, we're going to get much closer to Manchin than we are to the Bernie Sanders number of $3.5 trillion.
Manchin's number, however, is somewhere between $1.5 trillion and his absolute ceiling that he has said is $1.75 trillion.
He said he's not going to go one penny above that.
And I think here is a guy who basically is calling the shots.
So it may be the Democrats will succumb and give him his way.
I think that's the likelier outcome.
But if they don't, I think Manchin should think about it.
In fact, Debbie was saying, hey, Dinesh, you know what?
Send this guy your books.
Send this guy your movies.
Show him the sordid history of the Democratic Party.
This is not just a case the Democrats have sort of just veered left now.
This has been the party of corruption.
This has been the party of racism.
This is the party that turned American Indians into dependents on reservations and blacks into dependents, many of them, on plantations.
So this is the party that does this habitually.
Gavi's point is kind of show him the truth and maybe he'll see the light.
Maybe he will, even at the end of all this negotiation, perhaps on the eve of the 2022 election, just say, listen, I've sort of had it with this party of thuggery.
I'm out of here.
I'm going to become not just an independent, but a Republican.
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Make sure to use promo code DINESH. I saw a clip on social media that literally made me chuckle.
This is Peter Doocy of Fox News confronting the press secretary, Jen Psaki, about the Biden administration's practice of flying illegals, dispersing them through the country by putting them on late night flights.
Take a look. Why is the administration flying thousands of migrants from the border to Florida and New York in the middle of the night?
Well, I'm not sure that it's in the middle of the night, but let me tell you what's happening here.
2.30am, 4.29am.
She's not sure it's in the middle of the night.
It's merely 2.30 a.m., 4 o'clock in the morning.
These are, by the way, very normal times.
Haven't you taken a flight at 2.30 in the morning or 4 o'clock?
Now, actually, I have, but only international flights that are taken into account.
I fly out of India, and of course, yeah, the flight leaves at 2.30.
That's normal. But domestic flights in the United States do not leave.
At 2.30 a.m.
or 4.29 a.m.
Jen Psaki, of course, with her kind of comic straight face, she goes, we are talking about early flights.
Early flights. Now, I want to talk about this, you know, this middle of the night business.
Because think about it.
By and large, things that you're proud of, you don't do in the middle of the night.
Notice that most burglaries occur in the middle of the night.
Somebody wants to hit up a 7-Eleven, they generally do it in the middle of the night.
Have you ever heard the phrase, under the cover of darkness?
So the middle of the night is a time of concealment, of lawlessness, of shame.
And so you can be sure that the reason that the Biden people are doing this is they know that this is something they don't want the American people to know about.
And so by and large, of course, they can also count on this kind of wall of press coverage to hide it from the American people.
Our media have essentially become complicit in the...
The treacheries and crimes of this regime.
But fortunately, Fox News is on the case, not just Peter Doocy, but there's some very good reporting also by the New York Post, which talks about the fact that they're looking just at New York, and they're saying plane loads of migrants are landing into small airports in New York.
These are flights originating from Texas.
They're coming in the middle of the night, and they're landing at Westchester County Airport, so this would be upstate New York.
Some of them are landing in White Plains, which is just north of New York City.
And we're talking about large numbers of people.
I mean, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, just during July and August, 37,805 unaccompanied minors were We're just, you know, deposited on our side of the border.
And so the Biden people are on the case here, but they're doing it under the cover of darkness.
These kids are then dispatched all over.
They're sent to the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Upstate Newburgh, Bridgeport, Connecticut, Danbury, Connecticut.
So this is really a strategy of taking these illegals.
And spreading them thinly all over the country.
They can't have them all in one place because they may then get popular resistance, you know, the pressure on social services and so on.
So this is another kind of, I talked yesterday about how inflation is a hidden tax on the American people.
So is illegal immigration.
Because illegal immigration, and this is a massive flouting of the law, they're doing it in flagrant disregard of the law.
They're using the excuse of sort of, well, we have some prosecutorial discretion about how to enforce the law.
It's like, it's an insult to the American people and it's a raid on the wallets of the American people because all these people cost, well, at least in the case of kids, a lot of money.
The Biden administration has to pay all kinds of contracts, not just for companies to fly and disperse them through the country, but then what?
To look after them, to provide for them, to educate them, their healthcare.
So we're taking on all of this.
And why? Not to the benefit of the country.
There's no apparent benefit.
In fact, if anything, there's a cost.
These are people, not the kids, but adults, who are going to take away jobs that other people could have.
And so what's going on here is this is essentially a political maneuver by the Biden people for their own long-term political gain.
But they're making you and me and every other American pick up the tab.
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Several decades ago, John F. Kennedy wrote a book, Profiles in Courage.
And I want to invoke that idea of Profiles in Courage to hand out my own Profiles in Courage awards.
I have four awards to hand out.
The first one goes to the NBA player.
This is for the Nets, the Brooklyn Nets, Kyrie Irving.
I also have a Profile and Courage Award for Dan Bongino, who has now a massive radio show with the Cumulus Network.
A Profile and Courage Award for Southwest Airline employees.
And finally, a Profile and Courage Award for In-N-Out Burger.
Now, why are these awards being handed out by me?
Well, because they respect the courage of these guys in standing up for mandates.
Now, there are lots of people, I don't like the mandate.
I'm not going to go along with the mandate.
But it's a whole other thing when you have to pay a serious price for it.
Because as you know, these mandates sometimes can cost you your job.
And so let's look at them.
Kyrie Irving, this is a guy, by the way, who this year makes $35 million dollars.
And by stepping out, by saying, I won't take the vaccine, I'm exercising my choice not to take it, they've essentially cut him from the team, and they've told him that he's going to forfeit one half of his $35 million salary.
Whoa! That's a 50% pay cut.
And by the way, we say, well, that's a lot of money, he's going to be fine.
But let's remember that these basketball players, they make money for, what, two, three, five years?
Just a small window of time.
And that's going to have to kind of cover you for the rest of your life.
Of course, you can become a coach and try to do other things.
But this is your sort of peak earning time.
And so right in the peak of his career, this guy Kyrie Irving is taking a huge risk.
And you have to admire the guy for it.
I mean, I saw an interview with him.
He's pretty thoughtful about it.
Now... Let's go to Dan Bongino.
Dan Bongino's case, Dan Bongino says to Cumulus, listen, you can have the vaccine mandate or you can have my show, but you're not going to have both.
Which is to say, it may seem that Dan is saying this because he doesn't want to be vaccinated, but interestingly, he is vaccinated.
So he's standing up for the principle of choice.
It's not just that he personally doesn't want to get the vaccine he has.
He wants to prevent the company from becoming a stooge of the Biden administration and enforcing the vaccine as a matter of coercion.
That takes a lot of guts because, again, this is a big show.
Dan is kind of putting it all on the line.
I do admire him for it.
I admire also the employees of Southwest Airlines.
You know, Southwest was kind of lackadaisically going along with the Biden.
Well, they have a mandate. Well, at that time, they didn't even have a mandate.
But of course, the CEO, doofus that he is, was like, yeah, I got to follow the mandate.
So they were imposing this.
And it was basically, listen, if you don't do it, you're out.
And then there was a big backlash.
Basically, the pilots, the stewardesses and stewards, the employees were like, no.
And then Southwest began to back down.
Well, we'll help you find some religious exemptions.
We'll help you find some medical exemptions.
But at the same time, they had a plan to put unvaccinated employees on unpaid leave.
But they've now scrapped that.
And that's a very good example of how pressure, when you put it on the line, can work.
It doesn't always work. And that's where the risk element comes in, but it can work.
And finally, I want to congratulate In-N-Out Burger, because In-N-Out Burger...
Now, San Francisco came to the In-N-Out Burger.
This is the one in Fisherman's Wharf.
I think I've eaten at it.
Anyway, it's a really... In-N-Out Burger is awesome, by the way, if you haven't had In-N-Out Burger.
It's awesome. It is really good.
Debbie thinks Whataburger is better.
I do not agree.
But in any event, San Francisco shut down temporarily this In-N-Out Burger because they said that they're not imposing the vaccine mandate that the city has.
And In-N-Out Burger issued a very bold statement.
They go, quote, This is a spokesman for In-N-Out Burger, a guy named Arnie Wensinger.
In-N-Out Burger also, I should tell you, is a Christian company.
It's owned by a devout Christian, Lindsey Snyder.
They have Bible verses on their drink cups and on their milkshakes, milkshake cups, and so on.
And so what's happened now is In-N-Out Burger, they had to pay a price because they're now reopened, but no indoor dining.
So you can only dine outdoors.
But this is the case of companies and individuals from Kyrie Irving to Dan to the Southwest guys to the In and Out guys, in which they really are standing up for the principle of choice and standing up for the principle of freedom.
And when it costs you, that's when it matters.
And that's why they're getting my...
Well, they're getting my rhetorical because there's no real prize that goes away.
Dinesh, what is the Profile and Courage Award?
Where's my statue?
Well, there's no statue, but I do want to acknowledge your exemplary courage.
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feel the difference. The final settlement of the Andrew McCabe case illustrates nothing more than the corruptions of power, not just the corruptions of Andrew McCabe, but now the corruption of the Biden administration.
So the way this has been reported, and Andrew McCabe of course is the former FBI deputy director, he sued the Biden administration for a kind of vindication after he had been found by the inspector general to have lied repeatedly under oath, lied to investigators on three occasions, lied I believe four times altogether.
And so McCabe, as a result of that lying, FBI agents are not supposed to lie.
And lying by FBI officials is worse than lying by ordinary people.
Why? Because the FBI is supposed to be an organization of public trust.
Just like the cops are.
If a cop lies, for example, under oath, think of what that means in falsely convicting people.
So you can't have an FBI agent who lies.
And yet here you have with Andrew McCabe a kind of, you may say, serial or habitual liar.
And as a result of that, the guy was docked.
His pension. He was on the verge of retiring, and that seems like a bit of a harsh penalty.
Probably many FBI agents were like, wow, I mean, you know, he's going to lose his entire pension, even though he served for a long time in the FBI. But that harsh penalty, I think, was warranted because of the seriousness of Andrew McCabe's lying, which was, by the way, aimed at getting rid of a sitting president.
It was essentially almost, you may say, part of a conspiracy at the highest level to go after the man that the American people had, in fact, elected.
Now, what happens in this case is that Andrew McCabe, having been docked his pension, sues the government.
In this case, that now happens to be obviously not the Trump administration, the Biden administration.
And far from this being some kind of a tussle between them back and forth in which finally a settlement is reached, that's the normal way a lawsuit goes.
In this case, it's the opposite.
Basically, the DOJ goes, oh yeah, McCabe, you're one of us.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, great.
What do you want? We'll give you whatever you want.
And so you have this case where McCabe's lies are now basically ratified by the Biden administration.
They're excused.
They're pardoned, you might say, unofficially.
Why? Because what the Biden administration decides to do is, listen, we're going to restore your full benefits.
In fact, we're going to clear your record.
We're going to sort of clean up your record so that it...
So that it removes the records from your personnel file that indicated that you were fired with good cause.
So what does this mean?
I mean, it still means McCabe doesn't escape his conviction per se, but he does escape all the consequences of his conviction.
So why, you might ask, is the DOJ doing this?
And I think here that there is an insidious explanation.
The DOJ, the Biden people, are signaling not only to McCabe, hey, listen, we've approved of this stuff.
This kind of deep state machinations that you did on our behalf, we're thankful to you, and we're going to do our best to minimize the fallout.
But I think more deeply, they're sending a kind of message to even John Durham.
Why? They're saying to Durham, hey, listen, Durham, we can't stop you.
You've got an independent counsel, an independent investigation.
You can indict people.
But then we, for our part, can do our best to minimize the consequences.
Of your indictment.
And so I think you think of people like James Comey.
Think of McCabe himself.
Think about Peter Strzok, Lisa Page.
All these guys must be sleeping a little easier.
Why? Because these are guys who have done very bad things.
They should be held accountable.
I don't even know if Durham's going to hold them accountable.
But he could. But now they have a kind of plan B. And that is if Durham goes after them and Durham even gets them, They can look to the Biden administration, hey listen, you guys can sort of open the back door and let us out.
You can remove, if not the convictions themselves, you can remove the consequences of those convictions, just like you did for Andrew McCabe.
So I think that this is a further indication of how far a country has gone now.
From basic accountability.
Particularly at the top level.
The higher you are, the less accountable you are.
And it's almost a little shameful to be living in a country where our high officials practice this kind of chicanery.
Inflation is already running hot right at the highs of the last couple of decades, and now the Democrats are trying to push through another massive spending plan, $3.5 trillion.
Are you kidding? If you think money grows on trees like our government does, I guess you can keep living in ignorance.
But if you're freaked out as I am about the impact this additional spending is going to have on already high inflation, well, it's time to protect your savings now.
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I've been looking forward to this.
I'm happy to welcome Reverend Christopher Thoma to the podcast.
He's the senior pastor of Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church in Heartland, Michigan.
He's become friends with me and Debbie because we've actually been to his conferences.
I've spoken there.
He's got a kind of intrepid band of people who are very active in social and moral and political issues.
He's also the author of a number of books.
Pastor Toma, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you. Nice to see you again, if only electronically.
It's good to see you, too. You do, you know, an annual Body of Christ in the Public Square conference.
And I want to start by asking you about that, because there are a lot of pastors, as you know, who are sort of reluctant.
To bring moral and political issues into the public square and into the church.
They feel the church is sort of not the place to do that.
Now, of course, the left-wing churches are often very active, but you're, in that sense, exceptional.
Talk about why you think that this is not just a duty as a citizen, but in a sense a theological responsibility.
Well, you're right when you say that a lot of churches, and I would argue that a lot of conservative churches are some of the ones that sort of hold back on engaging with the public square.
And now Luther did a great job of handling this.
He unpacked for the church what's called the doctrine of the two kingdoms.
And he pointed out by these two kingdoms, namely defining the kingdom of the left as the kingdom of civil government, where it holds an authority in the secular realm, etc., etc., of course governed by God.
But then he also defined the kingdom of the right as that kingdom in which the gospel goes forth unhindered, the place where Christians are actually made.
But he also made very clear that these two kingdoms do have places where they meet.
And of course, he's relying upon the Word of God as the sole source for understanding these things.
And so I think in large part, there's a misunderstanding of this two kingdoms doctrine.
They think that there's this absolute separation between church and state that exists.
And that's not necessarily the case.
There are plenty of texts in Scripture that point us to the church's duty to engage in the public square and for some very good reasons.
So to take the example of marriage and the family, for example, I mean, Luther believed that this should be something that was the province of the civil government.
But isn't it a fact that he thought marriage is in fact a holy institution, no less than, for example, taking clerical orders?
This was the meaning of the whole idea of the priesthood of the individual believer.
And so he thought that both in the public realm and in the sort of theological realm, You may say God's sovereignty and God's law should be respected.
Amen. Yeah, and in fact, to take that a little bit further, one of the points that we need to keep in mind is that when the civil government sort of transgresses God's moral law is one of those places where the scriptures would call for the church to engage, to bring it back into alignment.
Now, I don't want to be misunderstood in one sense of saying that the church is to have this dominionist theology, this dominionist presence, which is to say that only Christians can rule in the government, only Christians can run for office.
History has more than proven how that's not what works.
And yet, and yet, Christians do have that obligation that when the government begins to forsake its ordination, if you want to say that, It's the job of the kingdom of the right to push back, to bring it back into alignment.
A good place to go to learn these things, or to see it sort of unpack in a very real way, is to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's writings, where you could see he understood very clearly what it meant when the government ceased to be good, as God would define it.
it, even according to Romans 13, cease to be good in the way God would define it.
And it was the job of the Christians to come and be that stick in the wheel to stop the machine. And he knew he seemed to grasp that in his generation. So it's something that I think a lot of guys sort of miss.
What do you think, Chris, if there's a single factor that explains the reluctance of, as you say, even conservative pastors to do this, do you think that it is a kind of theological misunderstanding, or do you think it's just moral timidity?
They know that they will be attacked by the left if they do this, and so they're saying, oh, it's not our proper role, but what they really mean is I'm a little too scared myself to do it.
Well, you're nailing the idea when you say scared.
The fear is the foundation for their issues, I think, most of the time, especially with the conservative Bible-believing pastors, the guys who hold to the Word of God as the sole source for faith, life, and practice.
But the fear might not necessarily be from the left.
The fear, I believe, is from their own people.
They're afraid of their own people.
They know that if they're preaching and teaching something that makes people uncomfortable, here in this sort of radically individualized society in which we live, people show their support by staying or going.
And recognizing we have a diverse population in our congregations, Which sort of makes it paradoxical, because they should be teaching what's godly and what's true, and because they're afraid to teach what's godly and true, they're finding things cropping up in the Christian community, like pro-choice Christianity is skyrocketing today.
You've got, again, the Christian church embracing social justice issues that are completely counterintuitive to the Word of God.
You've got these things happening, and why?
Because they're not teaching it, but they're not teaching it because they're afraid that if they offend you, you're going to take your dollars.
They're going to see attendance go down in their congregations.
You're going to see these kinds of things happen.
And so they're sort of concerned for their jobs in a lot of ways.
When we come back, I want to pick this up with Chris Toma.
We're going to talk about woke Christianity, which you alluded to, and its implications.
We'll be back. Have you seen the early results of the Biden commission on the court?
Your voice is making a difference.
Just a few weeks ago, one of America's leading non-profit law firms, First Liberty Institute, asked patriots like you to sign their letter to help stop the left's radical scheme to pack the Supreme Court.
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Franklin Graham, former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese, Dr.
James Dobson, the Family Policy Alliance, the Heritage Foundation, they're all on board.
Look, if we don't stop the radical left from installing four more justices so they can rig the system in their favor, that's going to end the rule of law as we know it in America.
Please, you can make a big difference.
Sign your name now, like Debbie and I have.
Go to SupremeCoup, that's C-O-U-P dot com, to sign First Liberty's letter.
Once again, that's SupremeCoup dot com, and may God bless America.
I'm back with Pastor Chris Thoma, the Senior Pastor of Our Savior Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in Heartland, Michigan.
By the way, he's also author of a book called The Cruciform Way.
Chris, let me start by asking you about the book.
Is it an effort to lay out the way of the cross?
Say a word about what the theme of the new book is.
Well, the new book just came out not that long ago.
It's volume two in a two-volume series.
It's a devotional, essentially.
But it's not for the weak-hearted.
It steers into issues.
It steers into everyday things that are facing Christians in their life.
It goes by week.
I follow the church here, the liturgical church here, from Advent all the way to the last Sunday of the church here.
And I deal with all kinds of topics, anything that Christians might be facing off with in their daily lives.
And again, I don't sort of pull any punches either.
I want to steer into it and be very, very honest with people about what the Church believes on all of these various issues.
Now, let's talk for a bit about woke theology.
You mentioned that there's a pro-choice Christianity.
There are probably more among some young people.
And if you look at the woke philosophy, it uses the language of guilt and shame.
It talks about, you know, systemic racism.
So you get a sense that they're redefining concepts like sin and atonement, but they're following some of the recognizable rituals of Christianity.
I mean, I remember as a kid going to Sunday Mass where people would genuflect in the church, you know, take a knee.
And now you have people taking a knee.
Colin Kaepernick will take a knee in a kind of recognizably Christian way.
So talk for a moment about this attempt to...
Well, again, you're steering right into some of the critical issues.
Woke theology is, by default, counterintuitive to the Christian faith.
And one reason in particular would be that it is an effort to exchange what's objectively true with what's subjective.
And I had mentioned before that something that's happening in the Christian church is sort of this embracing of this radical, individualized self that's free to do and be anything it wants without consequence.
Well, the Word of God doesn't speak that way to us as God's people.
So that's an indicator right away.
And not to mention the Word of God is demonstrated in natural law, which a lot of these social justice issues are getting into.
So take, for example, CRT, critical race theory.
That's one of the most prominent things out there right now.
For all of its issues...
Christianity should be able to recognize right away by its Marxist fundamentals that redemption, that forgiveness of sins, is not a part of its equation.
That's fundamental to critical race theory.
There are victims and villains, and these victims and villains are immutably permanent in their stations.
And this is judged by physical human characteristics.
So if you're white, Or even worse, a white male, or horribly worse than that, a white male Christian, you are unforgivable with regard to systemic racism, with regard to all of these kinds of things that are sort of imposed upon that, while the victims are considered morally innocent.
Any system like that that does not allow for the forgiveness of sins...
Should right away be something that the church chokes on and tries to spit out because it doesn't fit into the fundamental heart of who we are as God's people.
So that's one very important piece.
What do you think about the idea of, let's call it collective guilt.
In other words, you are held responsible not for something that you did, but for something that was done by people who look like you, who lived in the past 100 or 200 years ago, but somehow through the sin of...
Through the shared property of whiteness, it transmits from them to you.
I mean, this seems to me to go even beyond the Old Testament idea that sort of the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons.
But in those cases, you add actual genealogy linking the father and the son, not simply this idea that, oh, this guy did something horrible and he's white, so you're four years old and you're white, so you're the bad guy.
I mean, this is like almost a caricature of that, isn't it?
It absolutely is.
And again, you're pointing to something very important.
This is something that's a complete imposition upon the Word of God.
The Word of God is not compartmentalizing necessarily in that sense.
The entire New Testament, St.
Paul, is making clear that we all understand, and the Lord himself, the one whom St.
Paul is interpreting for us by his epistles, is making sure that we understand that we are all sinners and we have all fallen short.
This common reality of the sinful nature is being carried along through to each and every one of us.
However, however, forgiveness of sins is possible for all.
It's been one for every single person through the person and work of Jesus Christ.
And through faith in that sacrifice, forgiveness is given.
Again, these social justice issues and this woke ideology does not allow for that.
It keeps this permanent station of guilt, which, again, for Christianity, must be rejected.
It is not complementary to what it is that we believe.
This is not how our God functions.
If you believe what the Word of God says, you can't embrace these things.
Chris Troma, it's been a real pleasure.
Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
I've got to have you back to talk about Luther, because I know you watched some of the videos I did about the debates between Luther and Zwingli.
I want to talk to you about Christian unity.
So that's going to be a topic for another podcast, but we've covered some really good ground today.
So thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for having me on.
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Over the past several days, I've been talking about Ben Franklin as the embodiment of entrepreneurship, of inventiveness, of creativity, of industry.
Ben Franklin was, in a sense, capitalist man.
But then the question arises, an amusing question at least in some senses, although depressing in others.
If Ben Franklin is capitalist man, who today would represent socialist man?
Well, I think my answer would be Bernie Sanders.
Why? Because Socialist Man, for me, is kind of the do-nothing, the loafer, the bum, the guy without any skills, the unenterprising guy who's nevertheless proud of his lack of enterprise.
Now, this kind of character, by the way, exists worldwide.
I had a cousin. Who was a lot like this.
And this is a guy who, in fact, when I was about 12, he was in his 20s at that time.
My cousin. He's actually my uncle.
But we were so close in age that I call him a cousin.
He was working for an advertising agency, which asked him to come up with jingles and slogans.
But he could never come up with any.
So he'd actually say, Dinesh, listen, I'll buy you ice cream if you can come up with slogans.
Here, I'm working for a company. And I'd say, well, how about this?
How about that? This one will rhyme.
What do you think? And he'd be like, oh man, Dinesh, that's genius.
So I was basically at 12 doing this guy's job.
Why? Because essentially here was a guy who did nothing with his time.
And this is Bernie Sanders.
The Sanders story is kind of telling.
This is a guy who...
Well into middle age, did not even have a steady job.
His main output at that time was essentially to create an illegitimate kid with a woman named Susan Campbell Mott.
When he was in college, most of his time was at the Young Socialist League, and the two big causes that he championed were sexual freedom and socialist agitation.
At one point, Bernie Sanders began to put out the idea, crazy idea, that sexual repression leads to cancer.
He got this idea from another kind of whack job, a theorist named William Reich, who ended up in prison for selling bogus sexual treatments.
So this is Sanders, an absolute crackpot, a clown, a loser.
When he turned to social activism, this is the kind of stuff he would put out.
This is from an essay that young Bernie Sanders, the revolution is life versus death.
I'm not going to quote from him. The years come and go.
Suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50, slow death, fast death, and then in all caps, DEATH. So basically, this is the kind of talk you'd basically get in an asylum from a crank.
Sanders teamed up with another socialist named Peter Diamondstone, and these guys became friends because, quote, according to Diamondstone, they, quote, all knew the same communists.
And here's Diamondstone. He goes, I would stop at his house.
I'd sleep downstairs. We'd yell at each other all night long.
And sometime around 3 o'clock in the morning, we'd say, we've got to stop this so we can get some sleep.
Five minutes later, we'd be yelling at each other again.
This is life in the socialist commune.
By the way, in 1971, Sanders actually joined a commune, but it was one of those self-sufficient, grow-your-own-food things.
And so everybody was doing a little bit of work because you had to put in the plants into the ground, you got to do the harvest and so on.
Bernie refused to do any work or any repairs.
He just wanted to sit around talking about endless political discussion.
So he was expelled for laziness from the commune.
Now, what do you do if you're so lazy that you can't even function in a commune?
Well, the obvious answer is you go into politics.
That's exactly what Bernie did.
But before he did this, he was so poor.
He listed his occupation as a journalist, but he published nothing.
Once in a while, he'd write something in some socialist rag.
Probably made 50 cents.
So he couldn't support himself.
So yeah, he's leeching off the government through unemployment.
He's also leeching off his friends.
At one point he moved next door to an artist and according to the artist, Bernie would quote, take extension cords and run down to the basement and plug them into the landlord's outlet.
So this guy didn't want to pay his utility bill.
He was trying to leech off by getting free electricity.
So this is the kind of guy he is.
He's a perfect embodiment of the socialist lifestyle.
And the point I want to make here is simply this.
Look, you know, you can have socialist man, but socialist man, and this was also the case of my cousin, is dependent on capitalist man, because capitalist man has to create the abundance that makes it possible to support the dependency of socialist man.
So another way to put it is that Ben Franklin types don't need Bernie Sanders types, but Bernie Sanders types need Ben Franklin types.
And you'd think that Bernie Sanders types would show some appreciation, but they don't.
They, in fact, shamelessly leech off the Franklin types and then denounce the Franklin types for being greedy and selfish, while they, the Bernie types, are being virtuous.
It's a complete moral inversion.
So I think at the end, you have to say that Bernie Sanders, like Ben Franklin, is a self-made man.
But if Bernie ever has the occasion to tell that to you, you should simply take it as an apology.
I've now completed over, I guess, about two or three weeks my discussions of the core ideas of the five American founders.
This is part of my Prager University series.
You can watch all the videos on prageru.com.
The last of the founders I discussed was Ben Franklin and sort of completed my look at Franklin, but I want to do a sort of postscript to Franklin.
Today. But before I do that, I'll begin by talking about a scene from Godfather 3.
I don't know if you've seen the Godfather trilogy.
3 is not as good as 1 and 2, but it's a pretty good movie.
And there's a very amusing scene in which one of the gangsters comes up to Al Pacino, Michael Corleone, and he says, And, of course, Pacino, who is Italian in the movie, too, goes, who's Meucci? And this gangster goes, Meucci?
Well, he invented the telephone exactly one year before Alexander Graham Bell.
So, of course...
The idea here is that if it's something great, it has to have been done by an Italian.
And this is the underlying mentality of identity politics.
Now, there's been an idea that has been put out now for really three or four decades by the left.
And that is that all the good ideas, there were some bad ideas that the American founders had, like slavery and so on.
At least this is in the leftist narrative.
But there were some good ideas too.
But where did those come from?
Well, the leftist answer is they came from the Iroquois Indians.
And lest you think I'm kidding, I don't know if you've heard this piece of leftist propaganda, but I assure you it is taught in schools.
Here's historian anthropologist Thomas Riley.
He goes, the League of the Iroquois, quote, served as a model for the confederation that would make up the United States.
Historian Alvin Josephi credits the Iroquois with being, quote, particularly influential on the thinking of the framers in Philadelphia.
The writer Jack Weatherford says the Iroquois supplied the blueprint, quote, by which the settler might be able to fashion a new government.
So here's the leftist doctrine that the founders kind of pirated their ideas from the Iroquois.
Now, The historian Elizabeth Tooker looked into this at some depth, but I want to summarize her findings.
She basically found that the main connection between the Iroquois and the founding is Ben Franklin.
Here's where Franklin enters the picture.
But what's so interesting is that Franklin wrote a letter in 1754.
to a friend of his name, James Parker, and I'm now going to quote the letter.
It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union and be able to execute it in such a manner that it is subsisted for ages and appears indissoluble, and yet that a like union should be impracticable for 10 or a dozen English colonies to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous and who cannot be supposed to want an equal understanding of their interests.
Now... Let's translate.
What does this mean? Franklin is basically saying, listen, the Indians do have a union, they have an Iroquois union, and they're able to sit down, even though they're barbarians, at least from our point of view, and hash out their disputes and come to some kind of agreement.
He goes, why can't we do the same?
We're not less smart than they are.
We don't need, our need for this is not less than theirs.
We too need peace.
We need concord. We need to figure out a way to live together.
So this is it. This is the sole connection between the Iroquois and the founders.
In short, there's no connection.
The founders aren't taking their ideas from the Iroquois.
This is all nonsense.
Let's talk a little bit about the Iroquois Confederacy.
It was impressive in its own right.
It was made up of six different tribes.
There were the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas.
Later the Tuscaroras also joined.
So you've got these tribes. They get together.
And they resolve disputes.
Now, Elizabeth Tooker, the historian I mentioned, looks at the structure of the Iroquois Confederacy and she goes, well, it's completely different from what the American founders came up with.
Case in point, number one.
The Iroquois League was made up of members, which were tribal chiefs, whose position was largely hereditary.
So, nothing to do with democracy or election.
They were born into their position.
Number two, only one tribe, the Onondogas, were permitted as, quote, firekeepers to present topics for consideration.
So, everybody else could discuss and, in a sense, vote on the topic, but only one could introduce the topic.
And finally, all rulings by the League required unanimous consent.
So right there you have a completely different framework from anything that the American founders had.
So I present all of this because this really shows, just as in the amusing Godfather 3 case, the extent to which people will go to substitute wishful thinking for fact.
It would be nice. I would kind of like it.
It would be a very interesting example of cultural borrowing if the American founders got some Powerful ideas, separation of powers, checks and balances from the Iroquois.
But that was, in fact, not the case.
So, in the end, history is not about what you want to be the case, but what is the case.
And history is looking squarely at the facts.
By the way, pleasant and unpleasant.
But my problem with the left is not that they want to highlight or even focus on the bad things of American history.
But the degree of misrepresentation, distortion, and outright lying that they engage in to promote the ethnic favoritism that has now become a staple of identity politics.
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