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Oct. 28, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:21
A CASE OF SELF DEFENSE? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep206
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The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial says that the prosecution may not use the word victim, referring to the people who were shot, but the defense can use the terms rioter, looter, or arsonist, if in fact that is what those guys were doing.
Now, is this a double standard?
Actually, no. I'll explain.
An Obama judge rewards a January 6th defendant for publicly repenting of his previous support for Trump.
I'll spell out the implications of what's going on.
Debbie joins me. We're going to talk about Trump's new platform.
We're also going to talk about why it's important now to sign up on alternative, genuine free speech platforms.
And author Eric Metaxas will come on the podcast.
We're going to talk about his new book, Is Atheism Dead?
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.
The Kyle Rittenhouse case is on the verge of going to trial, and there are some very interesting developments in the pre-trial stage, which kind of give us an idea of how this trial is going to go, go forward.
And this is what I want to talk about.
Just to refresh your memory, going back to last August in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the aftermath of the Jacob Blake shooting, there was major rioting going on.
Kyle Rittenhouse showed up.
He showed up. He's only 17 years old.
He was armed with a weapon.
And he said he came to protect the local people and the local businesses that were being threatened, their lives and their property.
And in the course of some events, Kyle Rittenhouse shot two people dead and one guy wounded.
So the two people killed, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and a guy named Gage Grossenkreutz was wounded.
So Rittenhouse is charged with homicide and also a bunch of other charges, and his defense is going to be self-defense.
Now, today, I'm not going to get into the actual circumstances or into even the self-defense defense.
I'd rather want to talk about the judge and some of his early rulings, which I think are quite important because the prosecution has been going all out to get this kid.
They want Kyle Rittenhouse.
If they can put him away for life, they will.
And this guy, by the way, has been for a long period of time in prison already, I mean, in jail already, awaiting trial.
Now, in a very important ruling, the judge said to the prosecution, you cannot describe either Joseph Rosenbaum or Anthony Huber or Gage Grossenkreuz as, quote, victims.
You can't use that word, victim, to describe them.
And then at the same time, and on the same day, the judge said, but the defense can describe those same three individuals if it can be shown that That they were rioters if they were rioting, they were looters if they were looting, or they were arsonists if they were setting fire to stuff.
Now, the left is sort of outraged by this because it seems on the face that the judge is engaging in, this is Judge Bruce Schroeder, District Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge.
There's a sense that this guy is biased.
He's, you know, using a horrible double standard.
Isn't it normal for a prosecution to talk about the victim?
Well, yes it is.
Actually, I've seen a number of trials on court TV and other places where the victim was this, the victim was that.
But the point here is that the judge is making a very subtle point, which is that somebody becomes a victim of a homicide if there is a homicide.
In other words, somebody becomes a victim of murder if somebody murdered them.
But that is what the purpose of the trial is to ascertain, to figure out, did, in fact, Kyle Rittenhouse murder Joseph Rosenbaum?
Did he murder Anthony Huber?
Maybe he didn't. If he was shooting in self-defense, then these wouldn't be victims.
They wouldn't be victims in the legal sense.
So that's the judge's point.
The victimhood, if you will, in the legal sense, has not been established.
On the other hand, if you can produce evidence that these guys, video evidence, let's just say these guys are running out of a store with stuff in their hands, well, in that case, they're looters.
If you can show them setting fire to stuff, in that case, they are, in fact, arsonists.
If they are participating in riots, then they are, in fact, rioters.
Now, they're not legally charged with those things, and so those become clinically accurate descriptions of who these guys are, and, of course, they establish a necessary context.
For what made Kyle Rittenhouse do what he did.
Very interestingly, the prosecution has also tried to suppress video evidence which shows cops and other people going up to Kyle Rittenhouse and thanking him for being there and also tossing Rittenhouse a bottle of water.
Now, this is important because, after all, the idea here is that Rittenhouse is sort of this lawless kid.
He's sort of this one-man vigilante.
He's out on his own, and the prosecution doesn't want it to see that the cops didn't seem to see him that way.
They saw him as somebody who's protecting citizens' property and citizens' lives.
And so this video, which is actually helpful to Rittenhouse and damning to the prosecution, they want to block it.
They want to keep it out of the trial.
But the judge said no.
The judge said it's relevant to the context of what Rittenhouse is trying to do and why he did what he did.
Also, the prosecution tried to get a hold of the list of donors to the Kyle Rittenhouse Fund.
Now think about this.
Why are they doing this?
With the obvious intention of getting the left to publicize the names of these donors, get these people maybe fired from their jobs.
So this is an attempt to go beyond Rittenhouse and punish all the people who were sympathetic to Rittenhouse, who believe that this is a guy who does deserve a vigorous legal defense.
And think about how relevant this list could be to the case.
It's not relevant at all. Why?
Because obviously the donors donated to Rittenhouse's cause after the shooting.
So what relevance could it be to Rittenhouse's state of mind or any facts that led to the shooting or to the shooting itself?
This is the aftermath of the shooting.
And so once again, to his credit, the judge goes, nah, you're not going to get that list.
So the judge so far, it appears, is doing nothing more than trying to make sure, and by the way, this is very important, it hasn't happened in other cases, I think you know the one I'm thinking of, making sure that this kid gets a fair and genuine trial.
And so the left is already nervous because, well, I'm just going to read a couple of things that are coming from sort of leftist Antifa types.
If Kyle Rittenhouse walks, the U.S. is going to effing burn down.
Absolutely no one is going to take that SH. It'll be last summer again, even worse.
And there's more of this type of talk.
Now, interesting, first of all, notice that none of these guys who say this kind of stuff get banned.
They're allowed to say it. As Debbie says, this is a one-way type of censorship that we're experiencing on social media.
She's always telling me that.
Here's another one, basically saying that he hopes someone gets the judge.
Think about this. This is someone calling for retaliation against the judge based upon only the early statements of the judge.
So this is horrific stuff going on in America.
The vigilante justice is not on the Kyle Rittenhouse side.
It's actually on the other side.
So I'm going to be watching with great interest to see to watch this trial.
It has huge implications, not just for an American teenager who has his life at stake, but has implications for the Second Amendment.
It has implications for equal justice under the law.
And it looks like what you have here is a prosecution that is out of control, but fortunately a judge who's willing to apply the reins.
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When it comes to free speech, we are living in a repressive society.
And quite frankly, the only people who deny this, or what are you talking about, are the people who are not being repressed.
Now, there's a line I just saw from Camus.
He says, the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free That your very existence is an act of rebellion.
I love that. It's almost a declaration of independence from what's going on in America today.
And this is an issue I brought Debbie on because this is an issue that we deal with.
We deal with this issue daily.
And it's become a little bit of almost daily sort of intellectual combat.
But as a producer, you know, as someone who's sort of...
You read all the guidelines on Facebook.
You read the guidelines on YouTube.
Talk a little bit about what you deal with as you go through this stuff.
Well, you know, the problem with, as I always tell you, with the YouTube censorship in particular, because that's the one that we seem to have the most issues with, Is that it's a one-sided community standard for YouTube.
Typically, only conservatives are the ones going against the guidelines because they create the guidelines so that that is the case.
And so it's extremely just aggravating to after the podcast, you know, we decide, okay, Are we meeting the community standards?
We have to check it off because if we don't check the box and they come back and check the box for us, we will be punished.
I think that they get great pressure.
And that punishment can be restricting your reach.
It can be demonetizing you.
It can even be shutting your channel permanently.
It could be. It's up to them.
We are in their playground, in their domain.
So let's talk about how this works.
Abortion. So in abortion, if we talk about it, I had a very innocent conversation with two Texas legislators who have a bill on that issue.
That was flagged. Well, their law, you know, they passed the law and it was their law.
And there was nothing, and I mean nothing in that video, that would have warranted that kind of scrutiny.
Because we weren't talking about anything graphic.
The mere mention of that So the point is that YouTube pretends like we're trying to prevent graphic imagery that will disturb people, but A, we did nothing graphic, and B, they don't find the other side talking about abortion, even though abortion remains as graphic as it is.
Well, and that's just it.
It is graphic, and it is horrific, and it is murder, but only when we talk about it is it limited or taken out or whatever.
So it's extremely one-sided and it's just, it's the time, you know, when leftists complain that we're like, oh yeah, well how come Dinesh, you have 1.2 million followers, how come you say you're being censored?
Well, you know, that's actually not the case.
The case is that even though you have those followers, you're not allowed to say what's on your mind if it doesn't meet their community standards.
Well, and a lot of my segments don't reach all those followers.
In other words, they block them from getting to our own side.
Even though people have signed up, people put on notifications, they don't always get those notifications.
So, what you have is all this is being done in the name of misinformation, but it is, as you say, it's an ideological strike.
There are certain things they don't want you to talk about, and as you know, that list of topics has expanded, the latest addition to it, climate change.
Right. Well, come on.
I have to check the box if we talk about that.
No. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous.
It is ridiculous. But we're doing something about it.
We're doing something about it.
Well, I want to say a word about what Trump's doing about it, because I realized from his latest statement that his new platform, Truth Social, isn't just going to be a kind of Twitter.
It's going to, it's a more, he's looking at an on-demand video streaming service.
He's looking at a kind of comprehensive platform that is video oriented.
So it's a little bit of Twitter meets Facebook meets YouTube, kind of all in one.
Very exciting. I mean, I'm also excited.
Now, this is my first week on Locals.
Now, we should emphasize that, I mean, the beauty about Locals is that if it's legal, you can discuss it.
And so I have my own channel on Locals, and I can, well, I can go nuts.
It's dinesh.locals.com.
Dinesh.locals.com.
And sometimes what happens is it's not just for, like, censored content.
I mean, you know, when I talked with Ian Hutchinson from MIT about, we were covering apologetics, but...
I wanted to go into the issue of miracles, and specifically into what the philosopher Hume says about miracles, why Hume says miracles are not possible, and why Hume is sort of refuted by his own book.
But I didn't get into it and have time for it, and so what do I do?
At the end of the podcast, I just go home, and then I just say, look, you know what, here's the postscript, and I'm going to talk about it.
So it's an interesting mixture of humor, sort of banned, and I won't say X-rated, but Well, yesterday it was about to be because I was filming Dinesh while he was playing chess.
He loves to do online chess.
And I thought, oh, this would be a really cute, you know, behind-the-scenes kind of private video.
Well, he was in his jammies.
And he had some really funny-looking, like, pants.
I think they were my penguin pants.
They were your penguin pants.
And so, yeah, I showed a little too much.
So we decided not to do that.
Well, here's another example. I did the interview here on the podcast with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Yep. And then I realized I want to ask her about Fauci.
Because Margie Taylor Greene has been raging.
But Fauci is like an untouchable.
You cannot discuss Fauci.
He's like the patron saint of YouTube.
And we have it reliably, in fact, from some YouTube insiders, that if you go against Fauci, you are like off of YouTube.
Now, think of how horrific this is.
Think about living in a world where you've got this minefield.
This is a good description.
We're always worried. Be careful because YouTube may come back and say this is misinformation.
What is misinformation? That they love Fauci.
Are you kidding? Well, I know.
I know. But they can say whatever they want.
And they do. But anyway, so let's move on.
As producer, we only have seven minutes for this segment.
And so... As producer.
He's always giving me the time signals.
But anyway, let me finish my point about Fauci.
So what I did was I did a separate segment with Marjorie Taylor Greene basically on Fauci.
And that's on Locals and only on Locals.
So check it out, dinesh.locals.com.
The broader point here is we're building alternative platforms.
We're making sure that we can follow this CAMU principle.
We can say What we want to say, we just have to say it in a place that is not polluted by censorship, as most of these mainstream platforms sadly are.
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There is a whole literature, both fictional and nonfiction, that deals with the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century And in those regimes, you have one characteristic, one feature is the show trial.
The show trial is the bogus trial in which a political dissident is made to publicly confess to things that they believe, to ideological crimes against the state.
They essentially plead guilty by saying, yeah, I deserve the sentence that's coming to me.
I deserve to be executed.
I deserve to be incarcerated.
And typically, they pronounce some sort of a conversion.
I've now seen the error of my ways.
So this was done in the Stalin show trials.
This has been done in Chinese show trials.
This is a staple of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
Now, I say all this as a...
A kind of background to what is happening now with, in this case, a January 6th defendant.
And this is a guy named Thomas Civic.
Thomas Sivak. He was appearing before Judge Amy Jackson, by the way an Obama appointee, a left-winger, and he wants to get some lenient treatment or I wouldn't say that lenient, but he wanted basically to get out of incarceration and be sent home pending his trial.
And Judge Jackson agrees. She releases Thomas Sivak to the custody of his parents.
He obviously is under kind of a house arrest.
He's got to stay away from DC and political rallies.
He apparently has been given some psychiatric treatment.
Whoa, that sounds a little bit familiar to me.
That was part of my sentence.
He can't watch any political TV programming or do social media.
But the idea that he's being led out of the sort of deplorables jail is the key point here.
And the question is, why?
What did this guy do to deserve this kind of leniency?
You might think, well, the judge is finally seeing the light and trying to be fair.
Not at all. It's because this guy wrote a sycophantic letter that his lawyer triumphantly submitted to the judge, declaring that he has had a political conversion.
That's the actual phrase that his lawyer used.
He's had a political conversion.
And what's very interesting is this guy, Thomas Sibic, who was an enthusiastic Trump supporter, said he now, quote, loads Trump.
He hates Trump. And two, Trump should be, quote, ostracized from society.
Trump should be made into an outcast.
Let me read the relevant sentence.
While many praise Trump, I loathe him.
His words and actions are nefarious, causing pain and harm to the world.
He is not a leader and should be ostracized from any political future.
What he honestly needs to do is go away.
So think of what music this is to the ears of the judge.
And I don't really blame Thomas Sivik.
He's actually just, you know, he's a weak individual who is basically, you know, he's just kissing the feet of the judge.
Yeah, he's saying that 2 plus 2 is 5.
I don't even know if he's sincere about the conversion, but see, for what Judge Jackson is doing is she wants the abasement.
She wants to be able to point to him and say, see, this guy has now seen the light.
And the implication here that his lawyer...
Tells the judge is that, you know, there's a very toxic environment in the jail.
Why is it toxic? It's toxic because, quote, the people in the jail, the January 6th defendants sing the Star Spangled Banner every night.
Apparently, according to Sibic's lawyer, this is the kind of indoctrination.
He needs to get away from that kind of, quote, cult-like atmosphere.
And here is again...
The Brennenwald, who is Cibic's lawyer, his mental thought process has changed a lot.
He's telling the judge.
I'm not saying he's a liberal.
I'm not saying he's an Elizabeth Warren fan, but his mindset has changed so much that he had to get out of that unit.
So the implication here is that this guy is coming over to our side.
Let's not keep him in the jail where they might actually get to him and keep him in the Trumpian world that he was before.
Let's release him so he can now be one of us.
Maybe he can be interviewed sometime on CNN or MSNBC. So this public ritual of repentance is really the whole point of what's going on here.
This is the kind of thing, as I say, it's a staple of authoritarian societies.
We should not be blind when we see the same kind of thing, maybe under a different guise.
Here it's under the guise of the formalities of law.
Yes, it is true that when you make this kind of public abasement, You get lenient treatment in return.
But notice, don't miss the ideological significance here.
What you have is a groveling individual, a kind of Winston right out of, you know, 1984, Orwell's book.
And what he's doing is he's submitting to his interrogators.
He's begging for mercy.
And the judge is granting him some mercy.
Why? Because she wants to really strike out, not against poor Thomas Sibic.
She really wants to strike out against one Donald J. Trump.
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Feel the difference. Attorney General Merrick Garland appeared before the Senate.
Where he was grilled by several Republican senators.
I'm noticing a kind of renewed energy after the sloth of the early Biden months on the part of Republicans.
They're getting more pugnacious, more confident, and all of this is to the good.
And they were grilling Garland on this idea of using the FBI, the intelligence agencies, the police, To do surveillance and monitoring of parents, parents who supposedly pose a threat to school boards and teachers by trying to be more outspoken, more active, block critical race theory, go against the idea of transgender bathrooms and all kinds of propaganda that their kids are subjected to.
So Garland is trying to militarize this.
He's trying to turn this into essentially, you may say, a federal case.
Now, in the hearing, Marsha Blackburn asked, I think very tellingly, would you honestly put parents in the same category as Timothy McVeigh?
Boom. Garland, of course, you know, this is a guy who sort of, just sort of wriggles and doesn't say much.
John Cornyn, he goes, listen, the National School Board Association has...
Essentially, withdrawn the letter that they sent you asking you to do this.
They got major pushback.
A number of the local associations, the state associations in 13 states said, listen, we never saw this.
We had nothing to do with it.
Some of the associations, by the way, have pulled out of the National School Board Association.
They've essentially quit the institution.
And so, the National School Board goes, oh, yeah, you know what, we were sorry.
We didn't consult you.
They issued a kind of retraction.
But even though they issued a retraction, Garland is pushing forward.
Now, this is very interesting because it seems that two days after this letter was sent by the National School Board Association, the group's president, Viola Garcia, was given a federal appointment by the Biden administration.
In other words, it looks like they put her up to it.
They basically said, we'll reward you with an appointment, a federal appointment, if you do this for us.
And so she obliged. To a kind of provocation or letter that he may well have helped to write.
That's the story.
The government is creating the quote report that leads to the action that it wants to take anyway.
Now, Cornyn says that if the National School Board Association has withdrawn their memo, why are you still preceding Merrick Garland with this kind of surveillance of parents?
And once again, Garland, well, I'm merely enforcing the law.
This is my job. I'm the attorney general.
Josh Hawley then gets to specific things, specific crimes that parents can be charged with.
And listen to this, one of them.
You can be prosecuted, parents can be, supposedly, for using Facebook to, quote, cause emotional distress to teachers or school board members.
Think about this. Think about the idea of prosecuting parents for this.
And Garland, of course, again, he plays dumb.
He goes, you know, I haven't seen that memo.
Now, even though it's coming out of his department, it is being sent out to law enforcement agencies as the guidelines for what they're supposed to look out for.
Garland hasn't seen it.
So Garland is kind of playing Joe Biden.
What? What? What? What's going on?
And so... The idea here is that, and Hawley then erupts and goes, thank God you're not on the Supreme Court.
You should resign in disgrace.
So I love this. This is the Republicans don't normally talk like this, but they need to.
They need to be talking like this, essentially nonstop.
Now, kind of backing up against the wall a little bit, Garland basically says, well, you know, we're not trying to interfere with parents.
We're not trying to, you know, have a chilling effect, even though that is their actual motive.
They want to scare and deter and intimidate parents to not speaking up.
He goes, our observation of these parents' meetings is going to be, quote, this is the phrase, unobtrusive.
But even if it were unobtrusive, think about it.
I mean, think of the chilling effect.
If you're a parent, you want to be involved in a school board association, you don't know if there are FBI undercover men at that meeting recording you, doing surveillance of you.
So this is a terrifying thing to contemplate in a free society.
And then, how unobtrusive are they really?
Here's Stacey Langton.
This, by the way, is an active Virginia mom who's been very outspoken against some of this sort of school indoctrination.
And Stacey Langton reports that she went to a school board meeting last night and there was a heavy federal presence. She actually posts photographs of police cars that are there.
She says there was even a helicopter circling overhead and there were DHS, Department of Homeland Security vehicles there. So this is unobtrusive?
No, it's the opposite. It's sending a message far from the parents being terrorists, which is what the government is supposedly responding to. It is the government that is trying to terrorize the parents into submission.
The terror is coming from the state, not from parents who are trying to protect their own children.
This is the insidious America that we live in now.
It's being driven self-consciously by the Biden administration and its henchmen, Merrick Garland.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast my friend Eric Metaxas.
Eric is a syndicated radio host on the Salem Network.
He also is the founder of the group Socrates in the City.
Eric, you had me come speak several years ago at Socrates in the City.
He's published articles, a whole bunch of places.
He has a number of books.
But the most recent one, I've just finished reading it.
It's great stuff. It's called Is Atheism Dead?
Eric, welcome. Let me start by asking you the title.
Is Atheism Dead?
Is this a kind of reference to Nietzsche's famous declaration, God is dead?
Are you sort of turning the tables on good old Nietzsche?
Well, it's a second generation reference to Nietzsche.
In 1966, Time Magazine, referring to Nietzsche's infamous statement, had an equally infamous and shocking cover article that asked, is God dead?
That was 1966, what I think of as the high watermark of secularism in the mid-20th century.
Science seemed...
Definitively to be pushing God out of the picture.
You hear about the God of the gaps, that more and more science was answering questions and making less room for God.
And so they asked a provocative question and put this very provocative question in the middle of American living rooms.
Is God dead?
And the funny thing Dinesh is that that caught on as a Cultural narrative that has been with us ever since we hear about science being the enemy of faith the new atheists particularly Hitchens and Dawkins Often said it like a marketing slogan over and over that there's reason on the one hand and science on the one hand and on the other hand faith and religion and Ironically because I think of God as the master ironist since
1966 evidence has been in very dramatic evidence from the world of all things science that points inevitably to a creator to an intelligent designer, whatever you want to call it, that there's not the ghost of a chance based on the new scientific evidence that That all of this came about randomly, as the materialists and the scientistic atheists have asserted.
So I thought, the evidence has piled up quietly.
It's been mostly ignored.
It's so dramatic.
I said, it's time we call the bet.
If anything, the question is no longer, is God dead?
The question is, is atheism dead?
Hence the title of the book.
Let's talk for a minute about Hitchens, because Hitchens is, first of all, now dead.
I did a series of debates, about 10 of them, with Hitchens around the country.
One thing I want to point out about Hitchens, I don't know if you know this, but you might, that when Hitchens was a teenager, when he was a young student at Oxford, His mother, who had essentially abandoned the family and ran off with an Anglican clergyman, and the two of them entered into a suicide pact together in which they went into a hotel room and jointly committed suicide.
And this news was transmitted to young Hitchens as a student.
Now, the reason I'm saying all this is that, you know, we'll read Hitchens as God is not great.
We think we're reading a kind of intellectual argument against God.
And of course, Hitchens had that debater's panache.
But what I'm suggesting is that Hitchens was a wounded theist.
And that behind his atheism, you have this deep wound caused by a kind of tragedy in his own family.
Of course, he rarely talks about any of that.
But very often, when you come across an atheist and you look more closely, you see that they are actually in some angry struggle with God rather than that they've looked at the evidence and they've been convinced by Einstein's theory of relativity that there's no God.
It's really more that they've got a beef with God, isn't it?
There is absolutely no question of that.
Now, I don't go into Hitchens in that sense per se in the book, but I do discover or at least talk about the almost astonishing shallowness of his arguments.
I mean, here you have an incredibly brilliant man who when it comes to philosophizing about God is like an eighth grader or something.
He is just vicious.
He's hyper polemical ad hominem.
He seems to wanna do anything to wound his opponent.
He doesn't seem interested in truth.
And of course you have to ask the big question.
If atheism were to be true, if there's no God, then it follows there's no meaning.
Then your life, Christopher Hitchens, and my life has no meaning and there's no such thing as truth.
Why are you debating with such passion, with such anger?
It simply makes no sense.
Your very passion proves that you can't live as an actual atheist.
So none of it makes sense.
I was truly taken aback by the shallowness of the new atheists.
And I found myself turning to the old atheists, to people like Sartre and Camus and others who took it very seriously.
And when you take it seriously, you see it is infinitely bleak and troubling.
And maybe a big headline in this book is that I discovered to my shock that both Sartre and Camus at the end of their lives came through to the other side, to faith in God.
I said, how is this possible?
I've never heard this, but it's true.
And I think it is very telling that those who look most seriously at this subject came out on the other side.
We only need to know about it and tell others.
When we come back, I want to talk to Eric Metaxas about some of these remarkable findings in biblical archeology that are a vindication not only of the old, but also of the New Testament.
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Guys, I'm back with my friend Eric Metaxas.
His new book is Atheism Dead.
It's riveting reading, great stuff.
Eric, let's zoom into the field of biblical archaeology.
because going back to the 19th century, which I think you could say was the time when modern atheism was kind of generated, they started out by going after the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments.
These documents are so old.
You know, one guy repeated them, another guy copied them.
It's like Chinese whispers, A told B who told C who told D, and who knows what came out at the end, and does it even resemble what they started out with?
So an attack on the authenticity of scripture, but why don't you address that for starters?
How do we know that the Bible that we read now is the same as the original Bible that was written by the biblical writers of the Old Testament and also of the New?
Well, for me, it's as if, I think I said it earlier, God has a sense of humor.
The timing of some of these things is nothing less than astonishing.
Imagine that for the longest time, people are questioning whether the Bible was changed in the centuries, and you hear this over and over.
They end up being lies, but you hear it so often.
Well, in 1947, a 12-year-old shepherd boy, there's a number of stories in the middle part of the book which I find hilarious, actually.
Very funny stories.
We normally don't hear the stories, but the stories I said I have to put in because they're very entertaining.
But the first one is about this shepherd boy who, long story short, finds in a monster cave and finds within it some strange...
He looks inside.
He sees some manuscripts. This is literally the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.
When people went into these caves, they found Manuscripts that were almost surreally preserved.
Nothing should ever be preserved this long.
Manuscripts cannot be preserved this long, but for various reasons, which I go into in the book, they were preserved.
And what do they find?
Among these scrolls, they find copies of almost every one I think 37 of the 39 Old Testament books.
So suddenly they have stuff from the 3rd century BC and they can compare it.
Let's crack open the King James Bible from 10 minutes ago and compare it with what they had in the centuries BC and around the 1st century AD. So 2,000 years later, what has been changed?
Answer, nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Just as Jesus said, not a jot or tittle will be changed.
In other words, not even a letter, not even the pronunciation marks over the letters.
It is sacred, sacred, sacred.
We don't change this.
But now we had archaeological proof.
And I tell you, Dinesh, this happens over and over.
The skeptics and the liberal theologians have so much egg on their faces.
At this point, this was one of those major salvos in the war on whether the Bible is historical or isn't.
But it's almost so dramatic, you feel like somebody made it up.
It's like a fairy tale.
They find a cave, and they find these things, and shazam!
Here it is. But anybody who clings to these shopworn ideas that the Bible is untrustworthy and untrue, honestly, archaeology within the last 150 years has just destroyed that idea utterly.
I mean, I love the way that you discuss, not just the Old, but the New Testament, how there's the Pilate Stone that now vindicates the idea that, hey, there was a guy named Pontius Pilate.
Yes, he was the consul.
Evidence that the Romans crucified people, which didn't exist for centuries, because as you say, the crosses on which people were crucified were obviously destroyed, being wooden through time.
The existence of Caiaphas, the Roman, the high priest who was part of the trial of Jesus.
Has been vindicated.
I think you said we even have his bones.
Caiaphas' bones. They found the ossuary of Caiaphas.
So here you have the box with his name.
It's all very clear.
And inside, we have the bones of the very man, a 60-something-year-old man.
I mean, it just gets more and more astonishing and almost...
Delightful to the point of comedy.
There's almost nothing that's not been revealed.
It goes on and on with every month that passes.
You get new news from Jerusalem or Enverons that they've discovered one more tiny thing in the scripture corroborated by something that they found in stone.
I mean, I think, Eric, it's also worth mentioning that this is not sort of Christian sleuths who are doing this kind of work.
It's archaeologists from all around the world, including Israeli archaeologists, who obviously have no vested interest in vindicating the New Testament.
So here you have these guys doing the digging, and you also point to a remarkable finding about Jesus, and in a sense, the house where Jesus may have grown up.
Talk about that in particular.
I knew nothing about that.
Well, look, Dinesh, no one knows anything about this.
And this is why sometimes I have to ask the question, has God led me to this?
Why did I get to read the article?
Why did I stumble upon the article?
And of course, I have to look into it to determine if it's true.
The fact sometimes of how things are hidden or why we don't know things...
are themselves as fascinating as the things that we learn.
It makes sense that in the first century, Jesus and all of his followers, once he rises from the grave, once these things happen, Mary's house, Jesus' house, Peter's house, all of these things become sacred ground, become revered, become part of local memory.
There is no doubt.
This is just an astonishing moment in history, and everyone knows, and they tell their friends, But then what happens?
Well, in some cases, after Constantine's mother was sent to the Holy Land, many of these places were relocated, of course, and churches were built over them to protect them as sacred places.
Sometimes second churches were built over the first churches.
These places, what could be more sacred than the place where Peter worshipped with Andrew and the disciples?
So, The strange story about Nazareth is that in 7-something AD, or yes, the Muslims came in and wiped out everything, all traces of Christians' holy sites, or at least they tried to.
So it's not until 1880 that some nuns from Belgium go to Nazareth because they worship Jesus and they want to build a convent there.
They're building a convent, they do some excavation, and they find some ruins of a church, a Crusader-era church.
Years pass, more years pass.
Bottom line is it's not until 2006 that That an archaeologist from England goes to do an excavation.
In 2015, something is published in Biblical Archaeology Review, which I stumbled on in my research, but the actual book, summing everything up, was not published until about a year ago today.
Just a year ago.
And I found this, and what it says is that, yes, they discovered the ruins of a Byzantine-era church, the ruins of a Crusader-era church, and at the bottom of all of this, in Nazareth, a first-century home.
Well, there's more to the story, but It is pretty clear why they built one giant church on another giant church in a very obscure place called Nazareth.
And then there's an account from a 7th century monk who visited there.
But to think that in our lifetime, and not just in our lifetime, five minutes ago, A book was published with the archaeological evidence of this.
But what's the most astonishing to me is that we haven't heard about it.
No one has heard about it.
There's some comedy to it.
You read it in the book. It's almost like the archaeologist was embarrassed by discovering the childhood home of Jesus.
It's like, I've discovered the Santa's workshop at the North Pole.
I don't want my colleagues to make fun of me, so I'm just going to...
I'm going to bury it. I'm going to talk about the Crusader-era church and the Byzantine-era church and then the first generation, you know, something beneath it, but we don't want to get into that.
I said to myself, this is maybe the greatest news I've read.
You can't imagine that these things exist, that they discovered them.
So there are things like that.
The biggest news in a way is that they've been hidden.
The greatest evidence for the scriptures are coming out now.
That to me is paradigm shifting along with some of the science.
And I think it's going to rattle some people, but it's time that they be rattled.
Well, it's beautifully presented in the book, and we're going to do more to talk about it.
There's just a lot here. Is Atheism Dead?
is the book. Fascinating reading, actually a great gift for Christmas.
Eric, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it. Always a pleasure.
Thanks for all you do, my friend.
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In recent years there has been a major effort on the left to cover up the true meaning of the word fascism.
Why? Because they want to pin the fascist tail, if you will, on Trump and on the right, and they want to exonerate the left of any culpability for fascism.
They don't want fascism to be seen as a philosophy of the left.
Now, one of the latest participants in this cover-up scheme, you may say one of the latest perpetrators of this big lie about fascism, to use a term attributed to Hitler himself, is a Yale philosopher.
This is a guy named Jason Stanley He has a book out about fascism, and it's very revealing because you can see how he's trying to cover up the tracks of fascism.
He was interviewed by Vox, and I want to read a few of his sentences because this is a cover-up artist kind of being caught in the act.
So the first thing is, the question that's raised to Jason Stanley is, what's fascism?
And he basically goes, well, fascism is not an ideology.
And right there, you have to hit the pause button.
What? Fascism, what he's basically implying is fascism has no real intellectual content.
Fascism is not about a platform, a series of things that the fascists want to do.
Now, let's remember, Mussolini was kind of the founder of fascism.
Fascism first came to Italy in the 1920s, a long decade before it came to Germany.
In the 1930s, Mussolini had an elaborate ideology.
He published extensively on fascism.
He had a sort of fascist philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, advising him.
I made a PragerU video about him.
So it's very clear that Mussolini had an ideology, and his ideology was the ideology of the all-powerful state.
Mussolini even liked the word totalitarianism because what it meant for him, it wasn't a negative word, what it meant for him is that the idea of the state infiltrates the whole society.
Everything and everyone is subordinate to the state.
In fact, the slogan of Gentile, everything in the state, nothing outside the state, and that is fascism.
State control of education, of healthcare, of churches, essentially of you, of your life.
Now, Jason Stanley doesn't know this.
You can't be a Yale professor of philosophy.
You can't read extensively in fascism and not know all this.
The Nazis, for their part, they had their 25-point program.
They spelled out very clearly that they wanted, and in fact, proceeded to implement, state control of Now, they weren't going to nationalize the entire private sector, but they were going to direct the private sector to do what the state wanted.
Very similar, by the way, to something we see today.
The Biden administration is using the state to try to force private sector institutions.
Think of Facebook. Think of Twitter.
They're trying to make these private platforms do the state's bidding.
This is actually fascism.
So, there is a fascist streak in what's going on in America, but Jason Stanley is going to pretend not to see it where it is.
He wants to see it someplace else.
So here's what he says. Fascism is, quote, a rhetoric, a way of running for power.
He says the signature moves of fascism are us-against-them politics.
What? Us-against-them politics?
Us-against-them politics is a feature of all politics.
All politics is us against them.
In the French Revolution, it was the people of the left...
Which is the defenders of the revolution against the defenders of the Ancien regime.
Us against them. In India, it was the Indians against the British.
Us against them. So this idea, does the left not practice us against them politics?
Do they not try to divide?
Isn't identity politics?
Isn't Marxism itself?
Aren't these forms of division?
If this were all there were to fascism, you'd have to label all of this fascist.
He also says that fascism is the idea of a leader who appeals to nationalism.
Now, the problem with this nonsense is that nationalism is not only a feature, by the way, both of the left and of the right, but in many cases, it's much more pervasive on the left than it ever has been on the right.
I mean, think, for example, let's just look at the 20th century and look at all the dozens of countries That led anti-colonial movements against Britain, against France, against the old colonial powers.
They all did it in the name of nationalism.
Now many of these guys were socialists, and this was happening in countries all across Asia and South America and Africa.
So Idi Amin was a nationalist, Castro was a nationalist, Gandhi was a nationalist, Mandela was a nationalist.
So according to Jason Stanley, Wait a minute, that's the signature hallmark of fascism.
Is Gandhi a fascist?
So this is what you see here, and you shouldn't mistake it for any kind of genuine intellectual activity.
There's no genuine intellectual curiosity.
What's going on here is you could call it the intellectual smoke signals.
It's a kind of way of creating a camouflage.
At one point, poor Jason Stanley just kind of halfway gives away the game when he's talking about fascism coming to America.
He goes, yeah, there's a fascist streak in America, even historically.
And he goes, quote, the Ku Klux Klan deeply affected Adolf Hitler.
He explicitly praised the 1924 Immigration Act.
Now here... What's really interesting, and this is what Stanley omits, is that the Ku Klux Klan was the military arm of the Democratic Party.
So yes, the Democratic Party was in bed with the fascists.
Here's Stanley. The 1920s and 30s were a very fascist time in the United States.
He means mainly the 1930s because there was explicit advocacy of fascism coming from where?
From FDR! From the New Deal, from FDR's brain trust.
There were people like Rexford Tugwell who extravagantly praised fascism.
He said the fascist machinery is so efficient.
He says, I'm kind of envious.
I'd like to bring that here to America.
So all of this is coming from the left.
It's coming from the Democratic Party.
And yet what you have after World War II, a major effort to cover up the deep complicity.
So this is in my movie, Death of a Nation.
It's also in my book, The Big Lie.
I'll give you chapter and verse.
By the way, I'm going to do a segment on locals in which I spell out some of this evidence in detail, not because it's taboo on the podcast.
It's just I don't have time to go into it here.
The bottom line is this guy Jason Stanley.
He's kind of earning his pedigree at Yale.
He's basically an intellectual fraud.
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