The real story of the Durham indictments is not that the left didn't have any evidence and ran with it.
It's that the Democrats planted the evidence and then the FBI, the media, the deep state, they all ran with it.
Roe vs. Wade is now up in the dock for the Supreme Court to decide, and if the Supreme Court does not overturn it, It will represent the failure of conservative strategy over the past 40 years.
Michael Eric Dyson, leftist scholar, says that black conservatives are Uncle Tom's.
I'll try to show why he is the real Uncle Tom.
And finally, I'm being joined by the director of an amazing film, Sabina.
It is a film with a breathtakingly powerful Christian message, and the director, John Gruters, is here.
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 want to talk about what the Durham indictments really show because conservatives are responding to them by saying, first of all, you know, we're not sure about this guy Durham. He's...
He's thorough, but he's a bit of a tortoise.
And where is this really going?
How high is he going to take it?
The complicity may go all the way to the top, maybe even to Hillary Clinton.
Will Durham have the guts to pursue that?
That's a legitimate, but a bit of a separate question.
Conservatives are also saying, in effect, we were right.
The Democrats never had anything on Russia collusion.
There never was any collusion.
And there wasn't a shred of evidence that there was.
And nevertheless, even in the absence of collusion, they forged ahead.
The FBI forged ahead.
The media promulgated this.
It occupied the better part of Trump's presidency.
So this was not just an enormous expenditure of time, but it was really an irresponsible exercise of power.
And all of that is true, but it doesn't actually go far enough and it doesn't get to the heart of the matter.
This is not a case of a prosecutor who didn't have enough evidence but said, you know what, I think the suspect is guilty.
I'm just going to push ahead with the charges and I'm going to rely on the media to blacken this guy's reputation because they're going to run with it and I'll see if I can get a conviction.
No. This is something more like the prosecution working with the FBI to plant the evidence and then prosecute, knowing that there is nothing there, knowing that you are the source of the, quote, proof that you then are going to produce in court.
I mean, it's a deeply deceitful operation, and everyone, in a sense, is in on it.
The Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank, they're in on it.
The FBI, Comey, Mueller, they're in on it.
In fact, you see in retrospect that the whole Mueller investigation was a cover-up, a cover-up for Hillary.
A cover-up because they knew what was up from the beginning and this was all an effort to make this go away.
And then the media, they were in on it.
This is the real collusion.
It's a collusion in the United States among these various parties, and it's the left's control of institutions that enables them to pull this off.
One institution hands off to another.
So the Democrats hand off to the FBI, and the FBI hands off to the media, and then the media goes, truthfully, there's an FBI investigation underway without reporting that the Democrats cooked it up in the first place.
Now, At the level of detail, what we're talking about is the arrest of this guy, Igor Danchenko.
Now, Igor Danchenko may or may not be a Russian agent, but he is a leftist who was ensconced at the Brookings Institution, this kind of left-wing think tank.
And by the way, he was at Brookings with a whole bunch of other guys.
I mean, many of these Brookings analysts would then go...
On MSNBC, they go on CNN, they promulgate the Russia hoax.
Brookings also has a blog called Lawfare in which they keep suggesting different ways that Trump could be prosecuted, Trump could be convicted.
So Brookings is part of this scandal.
Anyway, this guy Danchenko is indicted by Durham for multiple cases of lying to the FBI. But let's think about why he's lying.
What is the purpose of these lies?
The real trail here is not the lies.
It is what I would call the handoff.
Who is getting information from whom?
So let's kind of follow it back.
We're talking, by the way, about information in the infamous dossier.
Now, it's been known for a while that Hillary Clinton paid for the dossier.
But see, you can pay for a dossier.
You can pay an investigative reporter.
You can pay a private investigator to dig up dirt.
And the dirt can be legitimate.
So the media has known for a while that Hillary paid for it.
But what they don't know is the Hillary campaign cooked it up.
They paid for a dossier in which the information, false information, was being developed by the campaign itself.
And this is what this Danchenko trail shows.
So supposedly the information in the dossier came from a British spy, a guy named Christopher Steele.
But where did Christopher Steele get it?
Well, Christopher Steele got it from this guy, Danchenko.
Danchenko was Christopher Steele's researcher and source.
Well, where did Danchenko get it?
Well, turns out, and this is sort of the smoking gun, Danchenko got it from a long-time, almost a lifelong Democratic operative named Charles Dolan.
Now, this guy Dolan has kind of a long history in the Democratic.
He's been involved with the Clintons.
He's been involved with the DNC. This is a guy, basically, who is a Democratic operative.
And the reason that Danchenko was lying is he wanted to hide the fact that this wasn't research that he did.
He was essentially getting a handoff from the Clinton campaign itself.
And so this was the purpose of the lies.
And then Danchenko feeds to Steele.
Steele puts it in the dossier.
The FBI uses the dossier not just to begin an investigation of Trump, but they use it also to go after Carter Page, to get FISA warrants, to do surveillance that would otherwise be completely illicit.
And so all of this is sort of coming home to roost.
I could do a whole segment separately on the role of the media because it was very clear early on that something very fishy was going on.
But the media, people like Rachel Maddow at MSNBC, people of course like the New York Times, Maggie Haberman, they did not care that this information was false.
They weren't even interested in finding out if it is false.
To them, this was sort of a weapon.
This was a harpoon that could be used against Trump, and they went at it the whole hog.
So there's an enormous amount of guilt to go around here, and you cannot expect...
There's no element with these people of shame.
The idea that they would come out and say, well, you know what?
We really got this wrong. Yeah, we were prejudiced against Trump.
A little bit of Trump derangement syndrome is valuable.
No, they're not going to do any of this.
So the only way to hold them accountable is for Durham to indict them, to bring out the handcuffs, to lock them up.
And this trail needs to keep going.
I mean, there's Mark Elias, there's Hillary Clinton, there's John Podesta.
Were there people in the media who were part of this operation?
In other words, who were part of this collusion, were knowingly disseminating false information.
I don't see any reason they shouldn't be arrested either.
So it's up to Durham.
It's in Durham's hands.
I don't know. I really don't have that much confidence that Durham will see it through.
It seems like he wants to get a guy over here and get a guy over there.
But so far, the guys he's gone after are underlings.
and the real piranhas, the real big fish, are still swimming free in the ocean.
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I'd like to stress the full magnitude of the election results, which are now, well, almost a week old.
But it's time to burrow into some of the details.
Now, the fact that Virginia went to Yunkin is significant because Virginia is.
Virginia went for Biden.
It is a blue state, although moderate to blue.
New Jersey was more hopeful and would have been staggering if the Republican had won that race, but it appears like he lost it very narrowly, although there are some demands, and I think there will be a recount.
But we can look to very liberal New York.
To see that the discontent with Biden, the discontent with the Democrats runs very deep.
I want to look at some of the local races inside of New York that are very revealing.
Turns out that from the tip of Long Island all the way to Lake Erie in upstate New York, what you see is that the Republican Party is making inroads into liberal, not moderate, but liberal strongholds.
So Nassau County, this is, prior to this election, Democrats controlled every major office, but Republicans have started winning in Nassau County.
They flipped the county comptroller, they won the district attorney's office for the first time in 15 years, and they also knocked out the county executive.
So these are local elections, but kind of telling.
Now in Colony, which is outside of Albany, Republicans won the town supervisor job for the first time in 20 years, and they also knocked out the Democrats who controlled the town board.
In New York City, remember we all know about Eric Adams.
Eric Adams is the Democrat who beat Curtis Sliwa for the mayor's position.
But people haven't looked sort of a little lower down the ticket.
Republicans are expanding their reach into city government.
And Republicans may have more seats in city government than at any time since Giuliani.
And then Southern Brooklyn, an incumbent Democratic council member who was thought to be invulnerable, is at risk of losing his seat.
It's very, very close, but it looks like he's going to lose.
And then, kind of the icing on the cake, there were two statewide measures, statewide in New York, that both were involved.
Democrats were pushing these as efforts to promote ballot access.
Which is, of course, a major priority for the party.
This is the whole impetus behind H.R. 1, the idea of changing the way elections are held.
One of these ballot initiatives would have paved the way for no-excuse absentee voting.
The other one for same-day voter registration.
A third one would revise the guidelines, giving the Democrats a better and easier way to do legislative redistricting.
And very interestingly, all three ballot measures went down to defeat.
All three. So Steve Israel, who's a former Democratic congressman, goes...
There's no way to sugarcoat this.
This was a shellacking on top of a thumping.
So what he's saying is that here in liberal New York, the Democrats are losing ground.
And that is... Let's look at the Buffalo mayor's race.
Left-wing... Leaders have pushed this woman named India Walton, by the way, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist.
And it's a pattern in New York, kind of the AOC pattern, in which a progressive leftist takes on a kind of democratic centrist or old guard guy.
In this case, the old guard guy was Byron Brown, who's apparently a moderate Democrat.
And so what happened is the Republicans jumped in behind Brown.
The Republicans jumped in behind Brown against India Walton.
And who wins? Brown wins.
The centrist wins. So another case where a progressive leftist is repudiated in New York.
I could go on in Long Island.
Ann Donnelly, the Republican, knocks out State Senator Todd Kaminsky by 20 points.
So this is a decisive victory.
And so what we're seeing here, and it's very encouraging, is that the American people are not okay with the Biden agenda.
And what is, I think, most encouraging is even Democrats are not okay.
Republicans would not be doing as well as they are in ethnic portions of New York if it wasn't even Democrats.
Now, the Democrats who are unhappy might be doing what?
Possibly nothing. They might just be like, I'm just disgusted.
I'm just going to stay home. I'm not excited about this.
I'm not on board with Biden.
Without Trump on the scene, it appears like Biden now has to take his stand on his own wind.
This is perhaps an unfortunate metaphor, given that Biden's been over in London breaking wind with such notorious cacophony that apparently everyone around him is horrified.
But nevertheless, my point is that this is good news for us.
This means that there is a groundswell underway.
Now, obviously, this is a fire that needs to be cultivated, needs to be nourished.
But if it is, it bodes very well for Republicans and conservatives in 2022.
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Will the Supreme Court in the Mississippi case overturn Roe v.
Wade? And, of course, in overturning Roe v.
Wade, it would also be overturning, most likely, the Planned Parenthood v.
Casey decision, which essentially sits on top Now, to knock those precedents out would be as decisive a move as the Brown decision in 1954, where the Supreme Court overturned It overturned Plessy v.
Ferguson, a case from the late 19th century.
The segregation precedent had lasted for over half a century, and yet the Supreme Court said there's no basis for segregation in the Constitution.
This is a bad precedent, and so we need to sort of cut it out at the root.
And that's really what the Supreme Court needs to do here.
And here is Robert George, a professor at Princeton, longtime pro-life advocate, very smart guy, arguing that Roe will go.
He writes an article, and the article ends with the line, next year, meaning early January, probably when the decision will come out, the Supreme Court will reverse Roe and Casey.
Now, when you look at Robert George's logic, it is the logic of, you may say, coherent expectation.
Basically, what Robert George says is, number one, the Supreme Court can't be worried about politicizing the court because Roe and Casey are classic examples of radical politicization.
The Supreme Court essentially decides an issue for the whole country based upon a non-existent provision or provisions in the Constitution.
There's simply no right to abortion in there, but the Supreme Court, in a sense, put it in there through interpretive ledger domain or sleight of hand.
Second, says Robert George, there's no way the Supreme Court can avoid facing the issue.
The Supreme Court has got to take on, full on, the idea that the challenge is so fundamental.
And Mississippi has made it really clear that they're not trying to chip away at Roe.
They're not trying to say... That they want to have abortion legal in the beginning and then outlaw merely late-term abortion.
Mississippi is basically saying very clearly that we're trying to outlaw abortion prior to viability.
That was the kind of standard in Roe.
And it makes it very clear that you can't really uphold Roe.
If Roe goes up or holds up, the Mississippi law has to go down.
And if you're going to sustain the Mississippi law, you have to overturn Roe and you have to knock out The criteria of viability.
Robert George goes on to say that the Supreme Court cannot make the argument that they can't do this now because they need to sort of conserve their capital, they need to build up the credibility of the court.
George says, I think correctly, that the only reason to have capital, the only reason for the court to have credibility is so it can use that credibility in hard cases where a great deal is at stake, where the fundamental integrity of the Constitution is at stake.
And so if the Supreme Court doesn't do this, says Robert George, they will have forfeited their own credibility.
People will lose confidence in the court, and rightly so.
So for these reasons, George thinks the court knows this, and they're going to step up and recognize, listen, this may seem like something that's hard to do.
I frankly don't think it's all that hard to do.
In fact, the example of Texas shows that we've essentially been in a non-ro environment now for weeks, No big deal.
The country can live with this.
It can live through this.
It can decentralize the abortion decision.
But I think that...
We have to consider that maybe the court will not do what Robert George says.
Maybe they will, in some way, try to find a way to split the difference, try to find a way to, even with some torturous readings of the Constitution and readings of the presidents, to sustain Roe, to leave Roe, you may say, unmolested.
And I think if that's the case, if that happens, and particularly if it happens with Barrett and Kavanaugh, the two Trump justices, Signing on to it, not voting straight out to knockout Roe, it will, I think, reveal the failure of conservative legal strategy for the past 40 years.
Let's say what that strategy is.
For 40 years, we've relied on conservative legal organizations like the Federalist Society to vet these justices by looking at their fidelity to original intent constitutionalism.
By looking at their fidelity to the idea that they're not going to impose their own political values.
They're going to be neutral umpires.
They're going to be adjudicators of the actual text of the Constitution.
Well, all of that will be revealed to be hollow rubbish.
And in fact, we have to note that the left doesn't do that.
The left just picks justices based on ideology.
They can count for sure on how someone like Breyer is going to vote or how someone like Eleanor Kagan is going to vote or Sotomayor.
They don't have to sort of spend their nights thinking about it.
How's Amy Coney Barrett going to come out on this one?
How's Kavanaugh? We are sort of wracked by this kind of anxiety.
There's no such anxiety on the left, which tells you that if we don't want the anxiety, we shouldn't pick justices this way.
We should pick people who are perfectly vetted.
How are you going to vote on this?
How are you going to vote on that?
How are you going to vote on this?
Once you know exactly what they're going to do, then you pick them.
Or you essentially only confirm people like senators.
Pick someone like Senator Ted Cruz.
Why? His public positions on these issues is known.
He's got a lifetime record of it.
And so you don't bring out these judges who, you know, yeah, she wrote an article 25 years ago on this.
Yeah, she once showed up at a pro-life meeting, you know, and she was carrying a candle.
So all this tea leaf reading is put to the side, and we recognize that we're in a straight-out fight with the left.
The court has, in fact, been irredeemably politicized.
And our only solution in this politicized environment is not to try to somehow step outside of it, but to ride the wave ourselves.
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I've been following the Kyle Rittenhouse case, not, you know, moment by moment or blow by blow, but it seems very clear from what I've seen that the case against Kyle Rittenhouse seems to be falling apart.
In fact, you could say it's falling apart faster than the government of Kabul fell to the Taliban.
Now, here's a little clip that captures the mood.
This is a witness on the scene testifying about one of the guys that Kyle Rittenhouse shot.
Listen. I mean, you have no idea what Mr.
Rosenbaum was ever thinking at any point in his life.
You have never been inside his head.
You never met him before.
I've never exchanged words with him, if that's what your question is.
So your interpretation of what he was trying to do or what he was intending to do or anything along those lines is complete guesswork, isn't it?
Well, he said, f*** you, and then he reached for the weapon.
Let's talk about that. I mean, isn't that fantastic?
And what makes it even more crushing is the prosecution is the one that brings this out.
This is not something that the defense introduced.
The prosecution is trying to sort of push this witness, and the witness kind of just states the heart of the matter.
Now, I think the left has an inkling that this is not going well.
Here, by the way, is George Floyd's nephew, Cortez Rice, basically already issuing threats.
He's saying, you know, he says that he knows that there are people inside the courtroom who are taking photos of the jury.
And what he means is that they're going to put the jurors' names out, kind of dox them, to put them at risk if they don't vote to convict Rittenhouse.
So this is bad stuff. The FBI should pay this guy a visit, by the way.
And now the left is just kind of pulling back and saying things like, well, you know, regardless of the circumstances, Kyle Rittenhouse should not have been there.
He just shouldn't have been there.
Now, interestingly, the left never says the looter shouldn't have been there.
The rioters shouldn't have been there.
So they're focusing just, what business did Kyle Rittenhouse have?
Well, what business did the looters have?
The good news, I think, and I've stressed this a couple of times, is Kyle Rittenhouse seems to have a good judge, by which I mean a fair judge, a judge who doesn't put up with any kind of nonsense and he cuts to the heart of the matter.
And so the lessons of the Rittenhouse trial are that if the jury plays fair, which I hope it does, I think this guy is going to walk.
And the lessons of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial are also pretty clear, which is, number one, Don't go around engaging in looting and burning.
Number two, don't chase a guy with a rifle.
Number three, don't lunge or attack a guy with a rifle.
And number four, don't try to grab the rifle.
Kyle Rittenhouse, it seems, was defending himself in a situation where you had people who were intent.
They were trying to gang up on him.
They were trying to do him harm, one hitting him with a skateboard, another guy drawing his firearm.
And it was in that atmosphere that Kyle Rittenhouse returned fire or fired, fired in defense of his own safety and his own life.
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Feel the difference. I'm titling this segment of the podcast, Will the Real Uncle Tom Please Stand Up?
I'll explain. Uncle Tom is the term that is used by the left for a sellout, somebody who is betraying the black cause.
Now, it's kind of a strange term to use because in the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, By Harriet Beecher Stowe, the real Uncle Tom, or at least the Uncle Tom of the story, isn't a sellout at all.
In fact, he is a good guy.
He is a noble guy.
He is a virtuous guy.
He doesn't sell out to anything.
He is a character that inspires admiration and compassion.
But somehow, the term Uncle Tom became adapted and twisted in the late 19th century and the early 20th century so that it came to represent this idea of being We're good to go.
100% to the critical race theory ideology.
And here you see him flaying black conservatives.
He's thinking of people like Winsome Sears, the lieutenant governor of Virginia.
He's also thinking of people like Kanye West, describing them in the most unflattering terms.
Listen. Wow!
So... So his idea is that there is a black way of thinking, and there's a white way of thinking.
And you have black people who are, you know, outwardly black, but nevertheless, they're inwardly white.
This was, by the way, this is also the origin of the insulting term Oreo.
And the idea is that white thoughts come out of a brain and then come out of a black mouth.
Now, what I find so shameful about all this is that it's the Democratic Party, That was the party of the plantation.
It was the Democrats who used white supremacy in the late 19th and early 20th century as a glue to hold the Democratic Party together, especially in the South.
It was the Democrats that mobilized the Ku Klux Klan.
So now you have guys like Michael Eric Dyson who are in the Democratic Party but don't want to hold the Democratic Party accountable.
So they are the real Uncle Toms.
They are the real sellouts to the cause of black emancipation, the cause of if black lives really matter, don't the lives of all those people lynched by the Ku Klux Klan matter?
Of course they do.
But what Michael Eric Dyson wants to do is to take independent thinking blacks, like Sears, and like Kanye West, the people who actually want to get off the plantation, and Michael Eric Dyson is essentially trying to keep them on the plantation.
And so my point is, who's the real Uncle Tom?
Is it the free-thinking blacks who say, listen, I'm going to think for myself?
Kanye West isn't really a down-the-line Republican.
Yeah, he's a MAGA guy.
That's because he likes Trump.
And I think he likes Trump because Trump himself was an independent-minded guy who sort of came in from the outside.
And no one, I think, who looks at the career of Winsome Sears—this is, by the way, a woman with a sort of a scowl and a big rifle in her hand—the idea that she's some kind Sellout to what? So I think that this is a case where, again, the Democrats are engaging in projection and the real Uncle Toms, who are people like Like Nicole Hannah-Jones, people like Joy Reid, and people like Michael Eric Dyson,
These Uncle Toms are calling the free thinkers and the independent-minded blacks Uncle Toms.
Irony upon ironies.
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Guys, a couple of weeks ago, Debbie and I got a movie that is called Sabina.
The subtitle is Tortured for Christ the Nazi Years.
And, you know, we're in the movie business.
We get a lot of movies.
We see a lot of movies. And quite honestly, when we see movies that have a sort of a conservative spin or a Christian message...
And we're good to go.
Now, this movie, Sabina, is an exception to that rule.
And I'll be honest with you, Debbie and I watched this movie, and honey, just pop in for a second, because I gotta say, I was completely taken by the movie from the beginning.
It is beautifully shot.
It is an enthralling story.
And the climax of this movie is just overwhelming.
I mean, you and I... We cried.
We literally just broke down, and it's because we have never seen the Christian message delivered in such a convincing and emotionally powerful way.
Do you agree? Yeah, amazing. I thought it was, you know, if you bring somebody to watch this movie with you that may not know the walk with Christ, I tell you what, at the end of this movie, they will be so overwhelmed with emotion, and hopefully they will want to seek Him because...
I cannot imagine anybody walking out of the movie theater and not have that feeling.
Yeah, it's an incredible movie.
By the way, it's going to be in theaters November 8th through the 10th.
But I'm assuming it's going to be today.
Oh, that's right. Okay, so today through Wednesday.
And I'm thrilled that we have the director of the movie, John Gruters, here.
John, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for joining me.
And my gosh, congratulations doesn't even say it enough.
This is an incredible... Incredible film.
I really wish people go to the theater.
I'm sure it's going to be available in other formats later, but it's in theaters now, and people should go see it.
Let me start by just asking you, you know, this movie is in fact based upon a true story.
Tell us a little bit about the story and the process of taking the story and bringing it to the big screen.
Man, I'd be delighted to, and it's such an honor to be on your show this morning.
I just want to say on the top of the story that I admire what you do and your writings and your films, so I'm really tickled to get a chance to talk to you today.
And this material that we have with Sabina and Richard Wurmbrandt, As a filmmaker, it's such a fantastic testimony.
It would be almost hard to mess it up.
You know, it's just their story was so legitimate and they suffered so greatly.
So the story began three years ago.
In 1967, Richard Wurmbrand wrote a little book called Tortured for Christ.
It was maybe the first book written by a survivor of communist prisons.
And he was tortured every day for 14 years and just held strong to the Lord and wrote this book, Tortured for Christ.
It became a bestseller.
He was asked to testify before a U.S. subcommittee in Washington.
They didn't believe him.
He took a shirt off and he showed him 18 puncture wounds in his body and then they believed him.
So we actually made this movie, Tortured for Christ, four years ago and released that one worldwide.
And it was a great entree for me into their work, into their story, into their land.
I hadn't been in Romania before, but in the production of that movie, we worked in the actual prisons and the actual places where many of it happened.
And so that movie came out. The movie was a very powerful film.
It just left me with one big question, which was, how did these people become these amazing saints?
Were they born of virgins, is really what I kept saying.
Because I wasn't.
So we get a chance, along with the Voice of the Martyrs, and I wrote another screenplay and sent it to them, and they let us greenlight the project, which is really the backstory.
So this Sabina film, which opens today in 850 theaters, is the backstory to the movie Tortured for Christ.
And by doing that, we realized, boy, they weren't born of virgins.
They were just like the rest of us, you know, and their arc was really, really large.
So I kind of saw these as bookend pieces.
We did them out of order.
We didn't know there would be a second one.
But that was the story for how we got the chance to tell this movie, Sabine and the Nazi Years.
You know, John, we have a clip from the trailer.
I want people to get a feel for the movie, so if you'll just hang with me for a second.
We're going to play about a minute of the trailer, but I think it gives you a sense of the beautiful texture and the emotional range of this film.
So, take a peek.
Listen. Hey, Braylor!
The SS came looking for you today.
I'm not hiding.
Maybe you should.
We can get you to the border if we leave now.
You know this is ridiculous. I'm collecting all the verses in the Bible that tell us not to be afraid.
I think I might need to leave on all of them.
If we stay, I'll follow the others into prison.
It will be the end of our lives together.
Whosoever will save his life shall lose it.
And whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
We believe this or we don't.
I think we have to stay.
We have a job to do.
I mean, John, I'm actually getting a little chill just watching the trailer because it's evoking for me.
I mean, it's the same emotions I feel when I watch movies like Beckett or A Man for All Seasons, Braveheart.
I mean, that sense of the soaring of the soul.
And let's talk just about the opening scene of the movie.
I mean, it's just incredible.
You've got these hardened Nazis.
And they're running away from the communists.
The Russians are now moving in to Romania.
They're taking over the Nazi territories.
And these Nazis find in this woman, who is of Jewish background, although a convert to Christianity, Someone who's actually willing to help them.
So you have this sort of preposterous thesis that opens the film.
Why would somebody who is not just a Christian, but a Christian of Jewish descent, want to help Nazis get away from the Russians?
And you're like absorbed from the first moment.
So it's a brilliant opening of the film.
And I'll have to say it just gets better from there.
Well, as a writer, you know, we've been taught to make sure that your movies have a central question that you need to answer.
And really, I just put it straight out there.
I mean, there's no beating around the bush.
She really says directly to her, why would a woman help a Nazi soldier?
You know it's a death sentence.
I would never do for you, you know, what you're doing for me.
And when the Third Reich recaptures Bucharest, don't expect the turnaround here.
And the movie answers that question.
Why would a woman risk her life and help her mortal enemy?
And I love the word you use.
It's preposterous. And so is the Gospel.
And it strikes her as preposterous when she first is encountering the idea that the Bible says, you know, if your enemy's hungry, give him something to eat.
And if your enemy's thirsty, give him water.
She says this is ridiculous.
And yet, she ends up living out that same sense of ridiculous conviction and how the equations of God in so many ways are opposite the equations of the world.
And so that is the question, and it's an interesting time in history.
You know, Romania, this little country the size of Colorado, It just takes a left hook from the Nazis, and then it switches allegiances halfway through World War II, and it joins the Allies, which you'd think would offer a little bit of respite for them, and then instead they get the Stalinist Communists, and then the right hook comes.
And so, really, the country of Romania just suffered under both of those horrid, repressive regimes.
The Holocaust was massive in Romania, second only to Germany in terms of people killed.
But if you can even imagine, you could argue that the communist era was even worse and lasted until fairly recently.
I mean, I was around in 1989.
I remember when Ceausescu was finally overthrown.
So the time in history where Richard and Sabina were placed is such an interesting time.
and it's in that crucible of high tension and high drama that when people like them came to Christ, they didn't kind of come halfway.
Halfway wasn't an option, and it isn't an option today if you're in so many places where the persecution is relevant.
And that's why it's such a powerful story is, yes, it's historic, but I think we all are smelling the salts of our modern world going, this feels imminent for so many of us, and maybe we could have the kind of fortitude and conviction to make it to the end the way these two did.
Absolutely.
They're very inspiring.
John, when we come back, I want to delve into all this deeper.
I want people to sort of meet through our conversation.
Sabina Wurmbrand, who's the central figure of this film.
We'll be right back. I want to challenge you to become a MyPillow super shopper like Debbie and me, and with Christmas around the corner, that's not hard to do.
We don't just patronize MyPillow.
We go all out to support Mike Lindell, and we're happy to do it because he also makes great products.
Now, Mike Lindell wants to make it easy for you to be a super shopper.
How? Call 800-876-0227.
That's 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com.
Make sure to use promo code Dinesh.
I'm talking about the film Sabina, which is subtitled Tortured for Christ, The Nazi Years.
It's in 850 theaters today, tomorrow, and the next day.
So November 8th through 10th.
Believe me, if you see this movie, you will not regret it.
I'm delighted to have the director, John Grutter, with me.
John, the central character of this story is Sabina Wurmbrand, a woman who is, at least at the beginning of the movie, she's ambitious, she's largely a skeptic, not somebody who is a woman of faith, she's a little bit of a hedonist.
And so you trace her journey to Christianity, which comes largely through the influence of her husband, a kind of brooding but interesting character, Richard Wurmbrand.
And then the two of them become soldiers for Christ in an incredibly tumultuous environment.
Talk a little bit about the character of Sabina because I think that she is one of the great characters, not just in this movie, but I think in movies.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I look at her as one of the great Christian women of the 20th century, and I never met her.
She and Richard ended up having a long life.
I mean, they both easily could have died in the 30s, 40s, 50s, but they actually moved into America.
They were exiled and escaped, and they lived a long, happy life.
They toured together. They never owned a home.
They never owned a car. They were the founders of the Voice of the Martyrs.
They both died in early 2000, 2001, and so I never met them personally, but I have heard stories from many people who knew them, and she is consistently described as the most generous Thoughtful, insightful woman people have ever, ever met.
So the proof is in the pudding.
Not only did they sort of star in this one moment in their lives, but if you take the evidence of their entire arc of their lives and they end happy and in love and together and in love with the Lord, it's a story that is legitimate.
And you're right, she was a...
An exceptional person.
She's in Sorbonne University at a time where not many women are there.
She's joking about wanting Madame Marie Curie to wish to be her.
She had a lot of sort of talents and so did Richard.
You know, she meets Richard in this movie and he was a brilliant young guy, very successful.
He had a photographic memory.
He spoke 14 languages.
So these were sort of exceptional people.
They would have been exceptional in the world of business.
They could have done anything they wanted.
And they were both, like you said, you know, kind of hedonistic, just about pleasure, didn't want kids, just rising up the ladder.
And it was a beautiful time in Romania.
Ninety years ago, I mean, things were good there.
And then everything changed.
And their faith journey is sort of the story of the arc of this movie, but it's not only that.
It's also the arc of the people they come in contact with.
And one of the beautiful things is that, I don't know, maybe you would know, there's not a lot of movies I can think of about married Christian women, married women who have healthy, good relationships.
And that's not the point of the movie.
That's just the background of it.
A lot of the great missionary women were single.
A lot of heroic women's stories come because they overcome the abusiveness of their husbands.
But Richard and Sabine are equally yoked.
And that is...
A beautiful thing to me, how when she comes along, she is strong.
And both in Sabina and even in the previous movie, Torture for Christ, Their team, and you can see how he has a set of gifts and talents, she has a set of gifts and talents, and put together, here we are talking about them in 2021.
Here we are still learning from them.
So I think it's kind of a beautiful story of the completion of their marriage.
They're 100%.
She says in this movie, It says here, those who would save their lives will lose it.
Those who lose their lives for his sake will find it.
We believe this or we don't.
And she's very matter-of-fact.
Are we in fact so convicted that when Jesus says, those who would even give their lives for my sake will find it?
She actually decides, we're going to believe it.
We're going to live the rest of our lives with that in mind.
And so they take crazy risks.
You know, they print Bibles and distribute them in a time when it's illegal to print Bibles and distribute them.
They reach out and walk into the camps of the Communists, and they start the underground church, and they pay a price.
Like, they didn't just get away with it.
She was in prison for three years in prison camps.
He was in prison for 14 years.
She didn't know if he was alive or dead.
They didn't, like, send postcards.
Just snatched off the streets, no idea.
In fact, the communists came and told her that he was dead.
So they went through the crucible of fire, but they emerged with such beautiful faith that they're admirable to me.
I mean, I want to talk for a moment, and without having you give it away, the kind of climactic scene of the movie where you've got this hard-bidden Romanian Nazi sympathizer, somebody who is a brute.
He has killed Jews.
He is actually killed, as it turns out, members of Sabina's own family.
And there he is with Richard, and Sabina is asleep in the next room.
And Richard says, I think in one of the great lines, he says, I'm going to prove the existence of God to you.
And this guy goes, you can't do that.
And I, as a viewer, I'm watching and Debbie's watching and we're thinking, you can't do that.
And yet, within the story of the movie, you produce something that I never would have thought possible.
You produce the context of an instant conversion.
You produce a set of events where this guy is confronted with a simple fact and a simple human reaction and it's so overwhelming that he converts on the spot.
And something that, again, would have seemed preposterous.
I mean, from a cinematic point of view, you can't deliver that.
No audience is going to believe it.
But I believe it, and Debbie believes it.
It was so powerfully done.
Talk a little bit about that climactic scene.
You do it not by anybody unfurling an apologetic proof for the existence of God.
In a sense, what you do is by demonstrating the essence of Christianity.
Well, exactly right.
And I'll say this.
I didn't write that as a fictional story.
This is what happened. Now, you know, we obviously have to put it into a context.
I don't know if that's, you know, the location.
But they really did meet this character Borilla.
Borilla the Butcher was the executioner at the Transnistria camp where hundreds of thousands of Jews were just flat out shot.
They just shot him. And this is the guy that did the shooting.
And her beloved mother, father, two sisters, little brother, uncle, are all swept up and sent to the camp at Transnistria.
And down the road, Richard actually runs into this Borilla and puts two and two together.
So the pain is very legitimate.
The struggle is very real.
This isn't a theoretical meeting.
And he does invite Borilla into their own apartment.
And he plays this crazy little wager with God and says, you know, You should be worried about God.
Barilla, there is no God.
What if I could prove to you there was?
You can't. Well, let's do an experiment.
I don't want an experiment. I'm gonna wake up my wife, I'm gonna tell her what you've done, and she'll fix for you the best supper she can make in this house.
Barilla is just intrigued enough that makes so little sense that he doesn't walk out the door.
And my goodness, what Richard has just set his wife up for, he wouldn't do that unless he was so sure she had been transformed at the deepest levels by the Holy Spirit in her life that he could predict what she would do.
And you're right, that scene isn't a scene where someone lays out the basic tenets of the atonement or theology.
It's just when confronted with the radical This idea of forgiveness, and it cracks him.
It just cracks him in a moment.
And it's fascinating in their story that this man, who was the executioner of her family, becomes a trusted family friend, and then they work together.
It's such an unbelievable story.
It almost has to be true.
And you're right. Had we made it up, I think we both would have kind of maybe held our nose and said, no, you can't go there.
But read their autobiographies.
Read Sabina's book, The Pastor's Wife, or some of Richard's writings, Wurmbrand.
And they both independently write about it.
So I think it was worth building the movie around that concept.
The heart of the gospel is forgiveness.
Absolutely. Guys, the website is just sabinamovie.com.
It's not Sabrina.
It's Sabina. S-A-B-I-N-A. Not the witch.
Movie.com. You can watch the full trailer.
Look to see if it's playing in a theater near you.
This is not a movie that you will regret.
And as Debbie said, if you have a family member or friend who's either fallen away from their faith or just thinks the whole thing is a bunch of nonsense, I assure you that this movie will have an overwhelming emotional...
At least we'll get them...
Stop in their tracks and really think about it.
John, thanks very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it. Great movie.
We love seeing it. Well, my pleasure.
Thank you so much, Dinesh.
And I appreciate all you guys do.
So God bless. Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's deeply political plays, and it gives us politics at the fundamental level, at the ground level.
So it's very illuminating in our normal political debates.
We tend to focus kind of operationally on the surface.
These guys did this to those guys, and those guys did this to those guys.
And we don't ask the fundamental questions of how do societies get organized in the first place?
How do different groups, factions, as Madison called them, get represented, have a say in the government?
And how do you control something that we're dealing with now, the urge to tyranny that seems built into society?
Human nature. Tyranny that's built into, by the way, not just monarchical government, the temptation of the king to become a tyrant, but also aristocratic government, the temptation of the few who rule to become tyrannical, and democratic government, the temptation of the many through their representatives to impose tyranny on the rest of society.
The plot of Coriolanus involves a military hero, Coriolanus, who is a genuine hero, a formidable warrior, and someone who believes that the warrior class and the aristocratic class should rule, and that the plebeian class, the ordinary people, are bums and should have no say in the government and should do exactly what they're told.
Now, unfortunately for Coriolanus, Rome, and this is the Rome of the early Republic, is not set up that way.
In fact, the Rome of the early Republic is wary of tyranny and wary of one-man rule.
Why? Because Rome in the past had a Tarquin king.
The Tarquin kings, who were, by the way, foreigners.
They were Etruscans who came to Rome, conquered Rome, were ruling Rome.
And so the expulsion of the Tarquins wasn't just getting rid of the king.
It was getting rid of the foreign king.
And for this reason, Rome had a republic that stretched for 500 years, and they hated the idea of having a king.
They don't want Coriolanus to be the king.
Quite frankly, they didn't even want later Caesar to become the king.
You might remember the scene in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar where Mark Antony says...
You all did see that on the looper call, I thrice presented him, meaning Caesar, with a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse.
Now, why did Caesar refuse the crown?
Not because he didn't want to be king.
He desperately did. But he knew that it would look bad.
He knew that the Romans had no tolerance for it, not even in his case.
Now, Coriolanus is living in the early Republic of Rome, and at this time in Rome, you have an aristocratic class that's ruling.
It's not a democracy, but the people are represented by the tribunes.
The tribunes are the sort of democratic element in what can be called a mixed society.
Aristotle says some way that the best regime is a mixed regime that has elements of monarchy, elements of aristocracy, and elements of democracy.
And this is what Rome does have.
The consul is in fact the monarchical element.
That's the guy who gets things done.
The Senate, which is made up of aristocrats, that's the aristocratic element.
And then the people are represented by the tribunes, The tribunes have very limited power.
For example, the tribunes cannot pick a council.
The council is decided, is nominated by the Senate.
But the people through the tribunes do have veto power.
And so Coriolanus has to appear before the tribunes, before the people, you might say, and get their voices or get their votes.
And Coriolanus hates these people.
He thinks that they're bread stinks.
He thinks that they're useless cobblers and carpenters.
He thinks that they should merely follow orders.
And so he's disgusted at the very idea of appearing before them.
Now, the aristocrats, who are very sly, friends of Coriolanus, and then his mother, Volumnia, who I'll talk about tomorrow, they come to Coriolanus and they basically say, Coriolanus, listen, there's an element of politics that's in effect stagecraft.
You have to sort of put on the humble face.
You have to, you may say, take a knee.
You have to play along with the tribunes, play along with the people, and get their votes.
And then, of course, you can do whatever you want.
It's just essentially a performance that you need to put on.
But the remarkable thing about Coriolanus is that he's so fiercely one-dimensional.
We come here to Aristotle's famous idea that the great hero has a tragic flaw.
And I mentioned a couple of days ago that it's hard to see a single flaw in, say, King Lear, a single flaw in Hamlet, a single flaw...
In Macbeth, these are rounded characters with a lot of dimensions, and just looking for their flaw, is it ambition, is it jealousy, doesn't do justice to those characters.
But in Coriolanus' case, Aristotle's theory applies.
Coriolanus' single flaw is this kind of aristocratic disdain and pride in which he has no appreciation for the role that the people must play in Roman society.
Let me back up for a minute here and introduce a philosophical element, which is that Plato talks about the human soul as broken up into three parts.
Logos, which is essentially reason.
Eros, which is essentially desire or appetite.
And thumos, which is basically spiritedness or courage.
Now, you can think of logos as the rule of the philosophers.
The wise men are ruling, and that never came to be in ancient Greece.
And of course, that's not the case in Rome.
So we can put that one aside.
All we have is eros and thumos.
And the people, in this case, are eros.
They are driven by appetite.
In fact, early in the play, they're like, we want food, we want corn.
Why are the aristocrats holding on to the corn?
So, the people represent desire and appetite.
Now, the aristocratic class, including Coriolanus, represents Thumos.
And Thumos is spiritedness, it's martial glory, it's warfare.
And let's remember that Thumos, like Eros, comes out of the passions.
But according to the aristocrats, and according to Coriolanus, Thumos is the nobler passions.
It's the passion for justice, it's the passion for public spiritedness.
So, essentially, Coriolanus values Thumos over Eros.
Not recognizing that in a society, you actually need both.
You need cobblers.
You need carpenters.
You need to be able to feed the people.
And so Coriolanus goes before the people.
And of course, they also know, the tribunes, who are very cunning themselves, very sly, they recognize that Coriolanus' behavior is predictable.
They know that they can easily anger him.
And when they anger him, he's going to denounce them.
And not just denounce the tribunes, he's going to denounce the people themselves.
And as I mentioned yesterday, when they decide ultimately to veto him and to banish him, Coriolanus, in this prideful rage, says, in effect, I banish you.
Because, in a sense, what Coriolanus is saying is that I am Rome.
And so you can physically kick me out, but what's left when I'm gone?
Who's going to defend you? You're going to go down to a well-deserved...
So, this is the setup of this play.
This is essentially Act 1 and Act 2.
Coriolanus, at the end, is banished out of Rome, and he vows in fury that he will go to the great enemies of Rome, the Volscians.
He will ally with them.
He will ally with his deadly enemy, Tullus Ophidius.
And the two of them will come back to Rome, destroy Rome, bring Rome to the ground, and this Coriolanus is confident will teach the Romans a lesson for what they have done to him.