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Nov. 1, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
52:29
ALINSKY’S PLAYBOOK Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep208
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How the left is using Jussie Smollett-style tactics right out of the Alinsky playbook against Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin.
The party of racism is using the race card to try to pin racism on the anti-racist party.
Unbelievable. AT&T goes full woke, and I'm going to show how we can send the company a message.
Nigerian pro-life activist Obi Anuju Ekiocha joins me.
We're going to talk about the fight for human dignity around the world.
My daughter Danielle D'Souza Gill is here.
We're going to talk about the kind of artful shysters of the left.
Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah, and one Barack Obama.
I'm also going to review an essay by Benjamin Constant to explain why Australia appears to be going down the road to tyranny.
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 human snakes who work for Project Lincoln, the Lincoln Project, tried to pull a Jussie Smollett-style racial hoax on the Virginia Republican candidate for the governor, Glenn Youngkin.
Now, this shows a kind of desperation.
Youngkin, even though in a blue state, has been running not only even, but in some recent polls, markedly ahead of Terry McAuliffe.
And of course, the Democrats, when they're in this kind of a panicky situation, they always turn to the real sleazeballs.
And sure enough, there's the Lincoln Project.
We're ready! We're ready! What have we been collecting all these checks for?
So they hired five guys.
These are kind of Democratic operatives, really actors.
What makes the whole thing kind of funny is that if you look at these five so-called white supremacists, these are people who were paid to hold these ticky torches and pretend to be supporters of Glenn Youngkin.
Hey, yeah, we're here for Glenn Youngkin.
And of course, the Lincoln Project guys, they knew the media would play along.
Oh, yeah, just look. Yeah, see, the Republicans are all supported by these white supremacist kind of KKK types.
Sure enough, Eric Swalwell fell for the hoax.
He goes, yeah, that's what I always thought.
Yeah, this is absolute confirmation of what we've always suspected.
But, unfortunately, you may say the cat is out of the bag.
We now know that this was not, these weren't Youngkin supporters.
These were people posing to pin a kind of image on Youngkin that is untrue to Youngkin.
Now, what makes all of this so disgusting is the fact that the Democrats in Virginia have been the party of bigotry.
Think of Governor Blackface, Ralph Northam.
I mean, here's a photograph from the old days, and one guy's in a KKK outfit, and the other guy is in blackface, and Northam goes, you know, I'm one of those two, but I'm not going to say which one.
Well, it doesn't make it better if you're one or the other.
Either Northam was the KKK guy or he was the guy in the blackface.
And see, notice that when this first came to light, the Democrats were like, yeah, Northam's got to resign.
Yeah, this is really intolerable.
But when Northam hangs in there and sort of survives that particular controversy, now he's buddies with McAuliffe.
Now Biden's there. My old friend, Governor Northam, step forward, please.
So this is who these people are.
They're... They have serpentine political tactics, and it's right out of the Alinsky playbook.
And I don't just mean this in a general sense that, you know, Saul Alinsky spoke about the importance of political deception.
Saul Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.
All of that is true.
But there's a specific incident dating back to, I believe, 1970.
And we have a clip I want you to take a little peek of it.
We showed a little segment of this in the movie Trump Card.
Take a peek. Here we go.
An idea that would transform the tactics of the socialist left.
The people of the world agitate for free expression and free thought that only liberty allows.
Don't compare Bush to the Klan.
Come dressed up like the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, what you see here is, we just show you a little part of it, but what's going on here is a group of leftist activists, kind of anti-war types, in 1970 showed up to Alinsky, and they said, hey, Alinsky, we got a great idea.
We want to kind of seek your blessing on it.
George H.W. Bush, this is the father, was giving a speech at the United Nations.
And the idea of the activist was, we're going to show up, we're going to have all these signs that equate Republicans with the KKK. GOP equals KKK. And Alinsky was like, well, he was not impressed.
Alinsky said, listen, I have a better idea.
Why don't you guys go buy some white sheets?
Cut some holes into them.
Dress up like the KKK. Pretend to be the KKK. And whenever George H.W. Bush begins to speak, you jump up and down and cheer wildly.
We agree with Bush.
The KKK is 100% behind Bush.
And Alinsky's point is the media will do the rest.
The media will step in.
They will sort of carry out.
They will broadcast.
They will promulgate the lie that we, the Democrats, the left, can count on.
So you see here how history is replaying itself.
This exact tactic from 1970 is back.
Here in the Virginia gubernatorial campaign, fortunately, as I say, it's been busted, people know about it, and hopefully Virginia voters will be as sort of repelled by this as I am.
They'll recognize the party of bigotry for which it is, the Democratic Party, and they will teach Terry McAuliffe and the Democrats a very severe lesson in this gubernatorial election.
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There are woke corporations and then there are woke corporations.
Some are worse than others.
And one of the worst, it turns out, is AT&T. AT&T has had a relatively new CEO, this guy named John Stanky.
And this guy came in last year, 2020.
And of course, this was the year of George Floyd.
It was the year of the protests.
So John Stanky has jumped 100% behind Black Lives Matter.
And he's implemented a kind of massive indoctrination program at AT&T. Now, this indoctrination program is not for the ordinary worker, but it's for all the managers.
And so managers at AT&T are forced to go to this.
It's called the Listen, Understand Act.
That's the company that carries out this AT&T program, all based on critical race theory, intersectionality, systemic racism, white privilege, white fragility.
All these meaningless cliches are being drummed into people's heads.
Interestingly, part of the program here is not just to talk about how AT&T needs to have a kind of racism-free environment, but also to push things like, quote, systemic reforms in police departments around the country.
So here you've got a phone company getting involved in how to reform police practices.
And apparently managers at AT&T are assessed in part on how they respond to these so-called diversity issues.
So... One of the articles that AT&T managers read is all about how the United States is, quote, a racist society.
In the article, you actually read this, quote, White people, you are the problem.
Regardless of how much you say you detest racism, you are the sole reason it has flourished for centuries.
Now, just pause for a moment.
How does an ordinary white guy working at AT&T, how is he the reason racism has flourished for centuries?
Has he been around for centuries?
Is it flourished for centuries only because he is white and other white people, unconnected to him, have done things?
Is this how we operate, by the way, with other people, other groups?
Do we say, well, listen, you know, you're Oriental.
You've got to take responsibility for what Genghis Khan did in the 13th century.
Or you're Norwegian.
Have you heard of all the depredations and crimes of Eric the Red?
So all this nonsense, it's only with whites, apparently, that we have this transmitted idea of ancestral guilt.
And all of this is being with a very straight face taught to people.
And think of the demoralizing effect.
Quote, American racism is a uniquely white trait.
Quote, black people cannot be racist.
So right away you have this kind of strategy, familial strategy of division, in which essentially either you're a member of the wonderful group, blacks or people of color, or you're a member of the horrible group, whites.
Apparently, white people, but not black people, have to do, quote, one action per day for 21 days to further their understanding of power, privilege, supremacy, oppression, and equity.
So it's almost like a to-do list.
White supremacy, we hear, is baked into our country's foundation, a flat-out lie.
Whiteness is one of the biggest—the weaponization of whiteness— It creates a, quote, constant barrage of harm for minorities.
And then it pivots, of course, from the race issue to the gender issue.
And suddenly, they're actually telling you to follow and promote organizations like, quote, the Transgender Training Institute and the National Center for Transgender Equality.
Now think of how miserable and experienced it must be to work for AT&T under these conditions, unless you happen to be completely on board with this agenda.
Now, what to do about this kind of situation?
And the answer is, don't just say, well, you know, I'm going to change my phone service to something else.
You're far better off actually, on social media, pointing all this out, sharing information about it, and complaining to AT&T. These kinds of companies don't hear a whole lot from ordinary people.
And when they do, they take it seriously.
So you can have an impact.
That is out of proportion to your numbers by just letting AT&T know, hey, listen, I'm a customer of AT&T. I'm very offended by all this nonsense that I hear you're doing.
This is not your job.
Focus on providing better services.
And I think this is a way to send a message to AT&T that what they're doing here, which they're doing, by the way, in response to pressure from the left, that it can be counted to a degree by reciprocal pressure from our side.
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Feel the difference. Guys, I'm really pleased to welcome to the podcast Obianuju Ekiocha.
She is a Nigerian woman.
She lives in the United Kingdom.
She's a biomedical scientist.
And she's the founder and president of a group called Culture for Life Africa, which is dedicated to promoting human dignity and pro-life values through research and education and information dissemination.
She's also the author of a book, Called Target Africa, Ideological Neocolonialism in the 21st Century, which I want to talk about.
Uju, I believe that's what you're called, and I hope it's okay for me to call you that.
Well, first of all, I noticed you're sitting in a kind of a greenhouse.
Tell me a little bit about where you are.
Are you in London? Where are we having this interview from?
I'm outside of London. I'm in the Midlands.
So I'm a little bit south of Birmingham and I'm just sitting in my house.
It does look like a greenhouse, I think, from one side because my little garden is out this way.
But the rest of my house is this way.
And I have a lot of plants inside.
You do? Yeah. That is awesome.
Well, listen, I've been a fan of yours on social media for a while.
I love the stuff that you post on pro-life issues and also a window into how those issues are perceived in Africa and from the African perspective.
Let me start by asking you, how did you become involved as a kind of international pro-life activist and activist on behalf of human dignity?
Tell me a little bit about your life story.
Yeah, just in a nutshell, Dinesh.
By the way, thank you for having me on.
I'm also a fan of yours and I'm very glad to be here today.
So back to your question.
About maybe nine years ago or so, I was just a scientist working and a general scientist working in the UK. I had been here for a couple of years.
Just like yourself, I'm an operator from my own country, was raised in Nigeria, but I have now found myself here.
And I really didn't intend to be doing this, but one day I came into contact with some news that Melinda Gates, the ex-wife of Bill Gates now, she was doing a huge project to raise some funds to bring some kind of population control to Africa at the time she was calling family planning.
And I wrote an open letter to her, which then went viral.
And as you know, these days, when something goes viral, you either have to stand in front of the storm and weather it, or you disappear after a while.
So I decided to keep chasing after it and found out that what she was doing is she's actually the face of a whole huge movement that was very keen on bringing things like population control and other ideological I've been working along those lines, just trying to talk about Africa with regards to people who are coming with certain ideologies to us.
Now, although a lot of your posting is on the pro-life issue, it seems that what you're getting at is actually something broader, which is to say that African cultures are, by and large, traditional cultures.
They have traditional values.
They have a respect for human life.
They have a respect for the family.
And that what seems to be going on here is a kind of aggressive relationship A Western project with America in the lead role of promoting what could be called liberal and permissive values in the rest of the world.
Am I correctly summarizing what you are calling the new, let's call it the neo-colonialism of the 21st century?
Yeah, I mean, you put it perfectly.
I couldn't have put it in any better words, Dinesh, but it is actually what is happening.
Those of us who have lived in the West, I think it's easier to catch on because it was only when I came to the West that I realized there was even a left and a right.
You know, there was liberal values versus conservative values because, as you mentioned, where I came from, where I was raised, where I got to do all my education, my university and all of that, We have these traditional values that we take for granted, you know, the belief that human life is sacred and precious and worthy of protection, that the family is a father, mother, and children protecting and providing for their children within that context.
Faith is important. That, you know, the community at large is kind of a faith-loving community in general, right?
So we have these values that I took for granted.
And so when I came here to the West, to the United Kingdom, and then realized, oh my goodness, there are these other ideologies that are in fact In a way, more prevalent in culture and more forceful, you know, those who are, at least this is how I've seen it, as an outsider, that those who are more progressive and liberal want to push their ideology into all kinds of institutions we see here in the West.
We are living within that system.
So it came to me as a shock to see that on the international level, that Africa had come in to become the target, just as the title of my book, Target Africa.
The Africa has now become the focus of these people who are so forceful about pushing their ideology into all kinds of areas, including the continent of Africa.
So that's exactly what I've observed.
I mean, it seems, Uju, that this is a little bit of an irony because these same progressives say that they respect other cultures, they respect the integrity of other cultures, they don't believe that Western culture is superior to those cultures, and yet, at the same time, they are acting as if their liberal values are universal and they do not hesitate to use economic leverage.
I mean, this is part of the point of your book.
To bludgeon, to arm-twist these other cultures into going the Western way.
Isn't that what they're doing?
Using their power over these cultures to make them do something that these cultures don't want to do?
Well, absolutely.
I mean, since the last nine years, as I said, after I wrote that letter about Melinda Gates that went viral, I've been going to the United Nations every year.
And one of the things I see there, Dinesh, is how...
How superior?
A lot of the Western leaders and Western countries come at the poorer countries, and it's not just African countries.
I'm talking about developing countries in general, developing countries in Latin America, developing countries in Southeast Asia, that once the European bloc or the European voting bloc, as they call themselves at the United Nations, once they set their mind on something, With the support of the United States, depending on who is in charge, of course, and of course, most of the times, Canada is also there.
They sit so high above the developing countries.
They present themselves as equals, as partners, and then, in the same breath, they are forcing through their views and their own values and Whenever possible and whenever given the opportunity, yes, they do use a kind of a humanitarian blackmail.
A friend of mine called it humanitarian blackmail, whereby when they are giving us something or when they are saying they're helping us, at the same time they are asking in exchange that we lay down our own traditional values and allow their own values to eclipse ours.
So we're seeing it When we come back, I want to explore with you, Uju, how this actually works.
In other words, how it is the case that this cultural imperialism is carried out in practice.
We'll be right back.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with the Nigerian human rights activist Obia Nuju Ekiocha, author of the book Target Africa, Ideological Neocolonialism in the 21st Century.
Uju, you made a striking comment a moment ago.
You were saying that You know, while Africans kind of all agree about certain basic traditional values, you noticed in Great Britain, and you see this in the United States, a sharp divide.
You've got a left and you've got a right.
And it seems to me one implication of that divide is that, especially if people in other cultures don't know about it, then when America does something, they don't see the liberals as doing it, they see America as doing it, because they're not distinguishing within America.
Now, you've lived and you've been an activist under the Obama years, under the Trump years, now under the new, relatively new Biden administration.
Talk a little bit about how differences and who is sort of at the wheel driving the car, how does that make a difference in the way American policy plays out in places like Africa?
Yeah, at the beginning of our conversation, right at the beginning, Dinesh, if you remember, you did mention that, of course, the United States is at the front of what is going on.
And it's just good to reiterate that, because if you look at how humanitarian aid money or funding comes, and you break it down, the United States is by far By far, are incontrovertibly the world's largest donor.
So whenever America is given something, it's a huge chunk of the whole.
So it's always very important for us to know and note at all times that where America stands, It makes a large difference to the rest of the world.
So when I started the work that I'm doing currently with Culture of Life Africa, it was during the Obama administration and things were very difficult.
So I came into a very hostile ground and people would not give audience to us.
They weren't listening. There were some of the letters and articles that I had written at the time just saying, this is not what Africa wants.
I have traveled to various African countries and this is It's a general consensus that we did not want or we still do not want to align ourselves with some of these ideologies coming from the West, but not just the West, as you say, it's a certain side within Western politics.
But having said that, during the Trump administration, things changed dramatically.
Radically, if you can say that.
On three different occasions, I think I'll say this because, well, it's very easy to verify.
I was invited to the White House on various occasions.
The administration had listened to me.
We got very, very good audience.
Of course, your listeners would know about the Mexico City policy that many of us rejoiced about, but A lot of people within the pro-abortion movement in the West didn't rejoice over them.
But we, the Africans, whom it was affecting, we were rejoicing.
And three times I had opportunities to speak with the administration and they were always listening.
And that was, for me, quite shocking because everyone was saying in the media, these people are racist.
But when the Africans came with our values, everybody kept quiet and listened to us and listened to what we wanted.
And even recently, as you know, maybe sometime last year, the Trump administration had led in a fantastic, one of the fantastic documents that came out from Geneva, the Geneva Convention last year.
Fantastic pro-life document.
A lot of the African countries lined up behind it.
But now things have changed since January of 2021.
We're now thrust back into this very hostile environment and it's been very, very difficult for someone like myself to even get heard anywhere around the administration.
So again, the irony of it, it's the people who say they're not racist are the ones who in practice really are quite racist because when we come with our values, they believe to us and they don't even listen to us.
You allude to the fact, and you're correct about this, that in the West, one of the influences of people like Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was very much the idea that people who are poor or black or brown are undesirables.
Her term for them was human weeds.
And so it seems that part of what you're seeing is that the same ideology that was devised within America and within the West Is now exported.
The same social Darwinism, if you can call it, is now exported worldwide.
Do you think that there is, in fact, in fact, you've implied there is a kind of continuing racism that drives the idea that, hey, if you want to build a hospital in Africa, you better follow our contraception, abortion, LBGTQ policies.
Isn't this part of the same bigotry that Margaret Sanger inaugurated almost a century ago?
One and the same. It's the eugenics foundation of the entire abortion movement.
Anyone who would care to look at the history would see, as you say, where it's come from.
Margaret Sanger in the United States.
Marie Stopes here in the United Kingdom.
In fact, they were contemporaries.
And Marie Stopes left behind one of the...
Let's say one of the biggest abortion organizations working internationally.
Well, Planned Parenthood, of course, is the best known in the United States.
These were card-carrying eugenicists and their work has continued 100 years later.
And of course, whenever we stand, we, the Africans, stand next to them We can feel the toxicity that is still seeping out of the ideology that is very much incubating within the international abortion movement, of which, of course, America is like the headquarters of it.
So the current administration and the work they are doing is What they are doing is giving steam to this movement.
The movement is already there, no matter the administration.
But whoever is in charge in the United States, I'm so sorry to say, will give life to it, to the agenda.
And that's exactly what we are seeing now.
And it's a very racist movement.
Their tactics are racist.
They are very condescending to black and brown people and their work is quite poisonous and toxic as we are seeing now because everything they are doing, they are doing for a certain reason and that is to spread the ideology which in a way is kind of a culture of death because they are exporting abortion to places where we're not even asking for abortion, where we don't even want abortion.
Most of our countries don't even have legalized abortion.
Absolutely. Uju, thank you very much for joining me.
This has been very sobering, and I hope you'll come back and we can talk about these topics some more.
Thank you for having me, Dinesh.
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That was a really interesting discussion, and I want to continue the exploration of abortion.
I'm here with my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill, author of The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America, and also the host of a weekly show on Epoch TV. It's called Counterculture with Danielle D'Souza Gill.
And let's start by talking about what's happening at the Supreme Court today.
There's arguments being made by the Biden administration and by a group of abortion providers.
They're trying to get the Supreme Court to issue a sort of emergency order to block the state law in Texas, the state law that essentially is a heartbeat bill, but it's a unique law in that it gives the enforcement power not to the state itself, but to private individuals who can sue nurses and anyone who enables someone to procure an abortion is vulnerable So it's effectively shut down abortions in Texas.
What do you think is going to happen with this challenge?
How do you see this?
Well, I think that with the Supreme Court looking at this, having to make a kind of an emergency response, and also they'll be looking at the Mississippi case, which is about 15 weeks into pregnancy.
So that's completely different.
But I think it'll be interesting to see if they come out the same on the two in terms of like going in the pro-life direction.
Will they overturn Roe v.
Wade? But also say...
That private citizens have this responsibility, or will they kind of pick one that they feel like they want to make the focus?
I don't know which that will be, but I definitely think that there isn't the precedent, at least so far, when it comes to the Texas case.
Let's slow this down and say what you're saying.
You're saying that you really have two abortion cases.
One, the Texas case, which operates kind of within the Roe framework, right?
Because you can have Roe.
We have Roe right now.
Right. But essentially, abortions have been shot down by the fact that the abortion clinics don't want to take the legal risk of having their people sued.
So what you're saying is the Supreme Court can say, okay, we're going to uphold the Texas law.
But you're worried, I take it, that if they do that, they may then try to take a more moderate stance and say, well, listen, we don't need to overturn Roe v.
Wade because the states now have their own strategy modeled on Texas in which they can limit abortion even...
While keeping Roe in place, are you worried that a couple of justices, the conservative justices, might sort of wimp out and instead of essentially going hardcore on both cases, will go hardcore on one and try to sort of split the difference on the other?
Yeah, or they might be split on it, which wouldn't be good either.
You know, John Roberts, I think, has said that he doesn't like the Texas law because it's a workaround and he doesn't like that.
But then I could see maybe someone like We're good to go.
I'm not sure how they're going to come out on it, but hopefully they ended up coming out in the right direction on both of those.
Yeah. Let's turn to a larger cultural topic.
We were just talking about the cultural radicalism of the left today, but you are making the point that the way for this radicalism was paved by some very sneaky characters who were, in fact, radical Yeah,
well, I think just looking back, if we look at Ellen, we look at Oprah, we look at Obama, we see that all of them kind of tried to come across as moderate people, people who could appeal to maybe people in the center.
But then once they got more power, once they became more prominent people, we saw Really, their true colors of where they wanted to take the country.
I mean, Ellen had a very likable personality.
And you said as you watch Ellen's shows, you like Ellen.
You like the Ellen that you see on TV because she seems open-minded.
She seems easygoing.
Let's not go too far.
I don't like Ellen.
But I just mean, I think that, you know, when she started out, she was funny, kind of a comedian.
And I think people thought, oh, she's such a nice...
lesbian lady or something.
She doesn't make me feel bad that I'm a straight person or something.
So it's okay.
I can watch her on daytime TV. Now, of course, later the left has moved towards guilting you, shaming you if you're not LGBTQ, if you're not Black, if you're not this or that.
But I think back then they weren't doing that shaming as much so you could kind of still feel good while watching their You know, daytime shows, maybe watching a special on Oprah, but then we see later how woke she really is.
I mean, Oprah for decades, I mean, probably 25 years, tried to maintain, well, first of all, she stayed a little bit aloof from politics.
I don't recall her getting involved in the Clinton campaign.
She wasn't really for gore against Bush or Kerry against Bush.
It was Obama that kind of brought out Oprah kind of out of the political, into the political arena.
And since then, she's always, it seems like the race card has become heightened, and she's also more clearly on the left.
Right. But Oprah's main audience was white women.
And they liked her.
And I think this is why some people think she might be a formidable candidate.
But I don't think anymore. Maybe the old Oprah would have been.
But Oprah today is not the same deal.
Talk for a minute about perhaps Oprah and Obama.
Well, all of those three characters are all friends.
Oprah, Ellen, and Obama.
They all go to each other's birthday parties.
Obama gave Ellen the presidential medal.
So they're all friends with each other.
And I think... It just kind of shows that, you know, Oprah, Obama, they've just become much more radical over time.
Or maybe were always radical, but just had this goal of coming across as not radical so that they could move the culture.
Even shows like Modern Family, you know, they're slowly making people think that that's what's the norm and so on.
So I think through the culture, they've been able to influence people a lot.
But fortunately, I think a lot of us are seeing that that culture is not a culture we want to be part of.
Now, do you think that looking at the culture today, Obama is saying, wow, you know, these leftists today, they don't get it.
They weren't smart like I was because I was able to put on a rhetorical camouflage.
True, I pushed the LGBTQ agenda, but I acted like I was against it when I campaigned.
So the Democrats would do better today if they were more like me than being these kind of naked proponents of a kind of brazen leftism.
Do you think Obama thinks that the leftists, or do you think Obama is now on track?
He's like, I paved the way. You know what? Now we're all good. Now we don't need to be as covert as I had to be in my time.
I think he probably still thinks that the covert way is the way to do it.
Be covert, then once you get the power, force people to do what you want them to do because Now the left is losing a lot of, you know, popularity.
Biden's polling really badly.
Obviously, his strategy is not working.
Just say something and do whatever you want.
People don't really like that.
So I think Obama definitely looks down on all this because he would probably think, oh, I could handle it all much better.
These people are. We're kind of making a mess of things.
I agree. Hey guys, check out Danielle D'Souza Gill's show.
You can just go to Epic TV and check it out.
I think you'll really enjoy it.
Yes, it's called Counter Culture with Danielle D'Souza Gill.
Download the Epic Times app and you can watch it on your phone.
Awesome. Thanks! We're good to go.
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Is Australia plummeting into a kind of tyranny?
We should be careful about making that kind of a statement, partly because we're a long distance away from the land down under.
It's difficult for us, even through news reports, to know exactly what's going on there.
But some very disturbing signs coming out of Australia, and I just got really through...
Email a letter from an Australian from Victoria, a civilian, a guy named Timothy.
And he says, quote, Our city, Melbourne, is falling to a tyrant.
He uses the word tyranny.
And he's talking about something called the Public Health and Wellbeing Amendment, which gives the premier of Melbourne, a guy named Daniel Andrews, almost dictatorial powers.
This guy can shut down things.
He can deploy the police.
He can have people arrested.
He says he gets unprecedented pandemic powers.
It's gonna twist Melbourne into the martial law capital of the world, of the world.
Now, here's Australia sitting right next door to China.
So this is a fairly shocking statement to make.
And then he goes on to say, these are desperate times.
Please help us shine a light, and so on.
So you've got an ordinary man from Australia pleading with an American podcaster, namely me, to say what's going on over there.
Now, on the other side of the coin, here is Claire Lehman.
Claire Lehman is the editor of an Australian-based web magazine, kind of centrist to right-leaning called Quillette.
And she makes the point that Americans don't understand Australia.
So we have to look to see what she's getting at.
And she basically says, look, let's talk a little bit about the history of Australia.
She says, Australia is a very strange country.
People moved into the Australian wilderness, a lot of them from England and other parts of Europe as well, but mainly England.
And she says, when they got there, it was so dangerous.
It was so difficult to survive.
You just couldn't do it without the help of both the British government And then the new Australian colonial government that was set up in Australia.
So in other words, what she's saying is that while Americans see themselves as a free people who later constituted a state and created a government, she goes, you know what?
We were dependent kind of on the government, either the British government or our own government from day one.
Otherwise, we wouldn't even have made it out of the wilderness, so to speak.
And then she says the government provided land for small farmers, support for small business.
And she says Americans are captive to sort of the idea of John Locke.
Society exists first.
Society comes before the state.
And then by a kind of a social contract, people decide, look, let's agree to have a state.
Let's give the state certain limited and enumerated powers.
This is the Lockean framework of the American founding.
I've talked about this a little bit in my series on the American founding.
But Claire Lehman says, that's not Australia.
She goes, we don't have the Lockean framework at all.
In Australia, it's the opposite.
The state comes first. The state sort of creates society.
And she says, let's remember that Australia was founded when Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were kind of the governing intellectual authorities in England.
What she means is that the predominant philosophy that shaped Australia was not the British Lockean philosophy, but rather the so-called utilitarian philosophy.
Now, what's the utilitarian philosophy?
The simple idea is, quote, she describes it correctly, The greatest good for the greatest number.
And you can see how here, in the case of the pandemic, this is basically what the Australian leadership is doing.
People like Daniel Andrews, he's going, well, listen, it's the greatest good for the greatest number to get this guy to wear a mask and that guy to take a vaccine.
So it doesn't matter if we have to force him.
For the common good, the individual may, or many individuals, may need to be sacrificed.
What's the remedy for all this?
And interestingly, Claire Lehman says there's really only one, and it's the ballot box.
She says Australians have always had a kind of vigorous democracy.
Not only do they have voting, they have compulsory voting.
You have to vote. You're made to vote.
And so her point is that we take that seriously.
We exercise our democratic right.
And so if we don't like what's going on, if the government is going too far, then the majority of people will, through the ballot box, make their voices heard.
They will throw out the government.
She actually goes on to point out, I'm not quoting her, she goes, we hold elections every three years and leaders are regularly tossed out.
We've had five different prime ministers in 10 years between 2008 and 2018.
So she seems reasonably confident.
We don't need individual rights.
We don't need the kind of Lockean conception of government.
If the Australian government is doing a bad job, a majority of people will essentially say no, push them out of office, and that will be that.
In the next segment, I want to discuss an essay by Benjamin Constant, by which I hope to clarify why this, in my view, is an insufficient solution to the Australian problem.
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I've been talking about the very bizarre situation in Australia, a kind of clampdown justified by COVID that makes the American response look very mild.
And I want to illuminate the Australian problem by looking at a famous essay written in 1819.
It's called The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns.
It's written by the French political theorist Benjamin Constant.
And Benjamin Constant basically says that in the ancient world, there was one type of liberty.
And what was that liberty?
It was the democratic liberty of active participation in the government.
This liberty, says Benjamin Constant, is the liberty of choosing what your government will do.
And it's direct democracy.
It's not representative democracy.
You don't elect some other guy to decide for you.
You decide yourself by showing up.
And not only were the Spartans this type of government, but also the Athenians.
And Benjamin Constant points out that in this kind of liberty...
You have the right to participate in decisions about war and peace.
You can form alliances with other governments.
You can vote on new laws.
You can vote on taxes yourself.
You're actively involved, and it's generally these communities were small.
If I remember in ancient Athens, about 40,000 citizens, about 12,000 were qualified to vote, and typically about 6,000 to 7,000 did.
So your vote is one of that 6,000.
It's a meaningful vote.
But at the same time, says Benjamin Constant, these Athenians and Spartans did not hesitate to use this majority power to impose severe restraints on individual rights.
In fact, there was really no conception of individual rights.
And so, for example, they could confiscate your property.
They could ostracize you, which meant essentially kick you out of the society for periods of time, 7 years, 14 years.
You were essentially banished from civilized life.
They could even take your life.
And so the concept of individual rights that were somehow inviolable, outside the reach of the democratic majority, that did not even exist.
Now says Benjamin Constant, let's imagine modern liberty.
If you go today and you talk to somebody from France or England or Australia or America, they will think of liberty more in terms of personal liberty.
Liberty means I can travel wherever I want.
It means I have the right to meet up with my friends and have a cigar or have a drink.
I have the right to speak my mind.
No one can tell me what to think or what to say.
I can practice my own faith.
So modern liberty, says Constant, is the liberty of the individual to live your own life kind of the way you please.
And Benjamin Constant says, we don't have the ancient type of liberty, at least not to the same degree.
Yeah, we have democracy, but it's a totally different kind of democracy.
We have, what, 300 million people in America?
100 million plus people are voting in a presidential election.
So your vote, yeah, I mean, it counts.
But it is a tiny, tiny infinitesimal fraction.
What possible actual influence do you have on whether a law is made or whether the United States has a treaty with Iran?
Your influence is negligible.
In fairness, you'd have to say it's nothing.
It's virtually nothing. So says Benjamin Constant, we take leisure in our modern life in the modern type of liberty.
So let's call the liberty of the ancients liberty A, which is the liberty of democratic participation, and modern liberty liberty B, which is the liberty of personal freedom.
I think what we see going on in Australia is that they are using liberty A, the liberty of the ancients, democratic participation, to squash liberty Liberty be.
Liberty be. And as a result, what you have in Australia is seemingly with majority support, because as Claire Layman said in the last segment, yeah, the Australians may decide to throw the government out, but what if the majority of the Australians approve of the government?
What if they say, Our privileges over the privileges denied to other people who don't get vaccinated.
The Prime Minister of New Zealand said something very close to this.
She basically said, yeah, that's kind of what we're doing, and doing evidently with democratic support.
I think what we see here is that the American founders, unlike the Australians, did not think that liberty A, i.e.
democratic participation, is adequate.
We need liberty A, and we also need liberty B. Why?
Because personal freedom, there should be zones of personal freedom that are outside the reach of the state.
You should have the right of conscience regardless of whether or not the majority agrees.
You should have the right to speak regardless of whether or not the majority wants to curtail that right.
You should have freedom of movement, the right to To apply and secure a job if you get the job.
All of this unmolested by some majority breathing down your neck and appealing solely to the power of numbers.
I mean, think about it. The power of numbers is, in a sense, nothing more than might makes right.
It's kind of like, I'm going to school.
Here are eight guys. They're eight.
I'm only one. So they get to jump me and take my stuff.
Majority rule, which is not qualified by the notion of minority rights, becomes nothing more than mob rule, gang rule, the rule of the stronger over the weaker.
For this reason, I think Australia is, in fact, headed down a dangerous road, not perhaps the Chinese road.
It's perhaps not that bad, but the road to tyranny can be directed by a king, it can be directed by an aristocracy, and alas, it can also be directed by a majority.
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