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Nov. 12, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
54:22
A TALE OF THREE TRIALS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep217
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I'm going to talk today about a tale of three trials.
The Rittenhouse trial, we're winning that one.
The Charlottesville trial, which the media has been downplaying, and I'll tell you why.
And the January 6th trial that has not yet occurred, but that we need to happen.
Representative Claudia Tenney of Upstate New York, she'll join me.
I'm going to talk about the Biden report card, both in foreign policy and on the economy.
And I'm going to explore the legacy of John Calvin, the great Reformation figure who had a lot of good ideas and one very bad one.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Guys, I had a lot of fun last night, actually, on my Locals Q&A. I'm on Locals.
I do a lot of censored material there.
Some of the stuff which, sadly, I can't cover on the podcast because it'll get me banned immediately because I'm playing in the wrong sandboxes.
YouTube, for example, and Facebook.
So check it out at Locals.
I noticed there was a big surge in the number of people who were watching.
I think it was a lot of fun, a lot of back and forth.
This is a way to interact, by the way, directly with me.
And also, Debbie makes a lot of not...
I wouldn't even just say cameo appearances.
She, like, weighs in.
At times, she appears to take over.
I have to, like, step aside.
But, no, no, you'll get...
You'll really enjoy it, I think.
And it's just... Kind of like here.
Anyway, that's dinesh.locals.com.
So do check that out. Now, I want to talk about Tale of Three Trials.
One, of course, is the Rittenhouse trial, and I'll actually address that in the next segment.
And that's one that we're doing very well.
And in fact, it looks like the prosecution is starting to back off.
They might actually lower the charges against Rittenhouse.
I think a clear signal that they're losing.
And... The second trial, you hear very little about.
It's barely in the media.
I had to sort of search to find out about it.
This is the Charlottesville trial.
You might remember the Charlottesville rally.
It was falsely labeled, unite the right.
First of all, there was no unite anything.
And second of all, it wasn't even the right.
The Charlottesville rally was organized by leftists, notably Jason Kessler, a leftist who was an Obama guy, an Occupy Wall Street guy, and the other Richard Spencer.
Richard Spencer is a leftist, a progressive by his own admission, a guy who voted for Biden, voted for Harris, voted the straight Democratic ticket in 2020.
And the media is trying to hide all this.
In fact, there are whole articles on the Charlottesville trial that do not...
They mention, no, that Spencer is, you know, alt-right.
He's the leader of the alt-right movement.
And they repeat these slogans.
This is in the New York Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed.
Just distortion on top of distortion.
Here, by the way, is a clip of Richard Spencer from my movie, Death of a Nation, in which he talks candidly about his own political views.
Listen... What it means to be on the right, what it means to be a conservative, is actually deeply collectivist.
It is not individualistic at all.
So I would say as a conservative, I'm conserving the philosophy and the principles of the American founding.
You're not. I've been critical of the American founding and throughout my writings, my career.
So what was wrong with the American founding?
This notion that we will create a state to protect human rights or individual rights.
I mean, no state in the history of the world, including the United States, was ever created like that.
So all men are created equal, true or false?
False, obviously. What about the idea that...
No one actually believes that.
I mean, seriously, no one believes that.
The idea that, let's say, we have a right to life, true or false?
I don't think we have rights to really anything.
I don't think we should ever pledge allegiance or worship legal documents.
And would you agree that at the end of the day, it is the individual who serves the state and not the other way around?
No individual has a right outside of a collective community.
You have rights, not eternally or given by God or by nature.
Who gives them to us? You have them because you're a part of this community.
Ultimately, the state gives those rights to you.
So there you have it.
And this isn't just Spencer coming out for Biden.
This is him laying the underlying framework of his ideology.
It couldn't be more limpid, more clear.
Spencer and Jason Kessler and this guy named Heimbach, Matthew Heimbach, who's kind of a neo-Nazi.
Let's remember again, the neo-Nazis are national socialists.
This Heimbach guy has deep roots in the socialist movement.
Jason Kessler, I mentioned, is also a leftist.
And these guys...
are being sued by nine plaintiffs under a kind of old law.
In fact, it's an old civil war law that was passed by the Republicans.
It was called the Ku Klux Klan Act, and it basically talks about the fact that you can't incite violence Racially motivated violence against Black people and other minorities.
And so there's a federal civil trial that's been going on.
It started in late October.
It's still going on in Charlottesville.
The defendants are making a joke out of it.
And then one of the weird things about neo-Nazism today is it's laced with a certain type of irony.
So this neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach puts Richard Spencer on the stand and basically says, you know, I have difficulty seeing you as a neo-Nazi because you're too bourgeois, you're too bougie.
And Richard Spencer jokes, he goes, well, are you worried about my, you know, my polo shirts, my boat shoes?
So these are neo-Nazis who, like, get up on the stand and promote their podcasts.
I mean, in one case, they bring up Deborah Lipstadt, who's a noted scholar of Jewish history.
And she's there to testify for the plaintiffs.
And they say things like, have you ever heard an anti-Semitic joke that made you laugh?
And of course, Lipstadt is like, eh.
So there's an element of perverse theater going on.
But what stands out to me It's the fact that the media is not covering it, because I think you can see as you zoom into these characters, just as you can see in the Rittenhouse trial, that these are not really men of the right.
Not at all. Richard Spencer today despises Trump.
He liked Trump on one issue, the immigration issue.
Even there, he disagreed with Trump, as he says in the movie.
So this is a left-wing group.
And the only reason that the left hates them...
It's because they're a left-wing group that is, in a sense, socialist, but is not woke.
In other words, they haven't jumped on the racial bandwagon.
They still defend, if you will, white interests, white nationalism.
So essentially, the Democratic Party has pivoted from white nationalism to black nationalism.
And these guys haven't apparently got the memo.
And that's why the left hates them.
And so you've got this Charlottesville trial, but it's real meaning.
Once again, the left is putting out a false narrative.
They're still doing it.
I mean, here's a, I mean, I just look at line after line from these articles.
They basically say that, quote, and this is coming straight out of the BuzzFeed News.
I'm sorry, out of the New York Times.
The case will spotlight how far-right movements thrive online.
No, the case will spotlight how far-leftists actually have a lot in common with even the people who are suing them.
And that is the untold story of the Charlottesville case.
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I'm continuing my discussion of a tale of three trials.
Now, in the previous segment, I discussed why the media is concealing the truth about the Charlottesville trial.
I want to talk in this segment about the Rittenhouse trial, but let me kind of complete my thought.
The third trial is the trial that hasn't occurred.
And that is a trial of a January 6th defendant who goes to trial and uses the trial to expose the The involvement of the FBI to expose the bad conduct of the government, to expose the abuses that are going on in the jail, it puts, in a sense, the system itself on trial.
That has not occurred. Why?
Because so far, January 6th defendants have taken a plea.
When you take a plea, essentially you forfeit the right to a trial.
You give it up. You put yourself at the mercy of the judge.
And I understand why people are doing that, but we need a trial.
We need someone. Ideally, someone nonviolent, someone just accused of parading in the Capitol.
Big deal. Go to court.
Fight it out. And put the system on trial.
Make sure you have some good lawyers.
And I know one or two that I'm going to talk to about this.
Now, let me turn to Kyle Rittenhouse and make some comments based upon the latest developments.
First of all, Kyle Rittenhouse's mom appeared on Fox News.
And I was kind of looking at her and I realized, you know, wow, this is a woman who's obviously a working class, you could say lower middle class.
And I thought to myself, you know, these are really Kyle Rittenhouse's three sins, three offenses, his real crimes, as far as the left is concerned.
One, he's white. Two, he's lower middle class.
And three, he killed a couple of Antifa criminal perverts and sickos who are the darlings of the left.
Now, had Kyle Rittenhouse been black, college student, son of two Washington, D.C., progressive bureaucrats, and he killed, let's say, two Proud Boys, oh, Kyle Rittenhouse would be a national hero.
They'd be building statues to him around the country right now.
Biden would be giving a speech about him and about the rising tide of white supremacy.
So, this is a charade.
Now, one of the penultimate, well, the penultimate witness was a guy who's actually appeared on this podcast, Drew Hernandez.
You might remember him from one of my earlier podcasts.
He's a videographer.
He was on the scene, and I think he was a critical witness.
The prosecution, by the way, tried to get him.
They tried to show his bias, and it didn't really go all that well.
Here's a clip from that segment of the trial listen.
Your videos that you have captured of these incidents that you call riots, they're very slanted against the people who are rioting.
You characterize them as Antifa, Black Lives Matter rioters, correct?
Because they are rioting in the footage, yes, absolutely.
You're a little biased against the rioters, are you?
Why do you call them rioters?
Because they're rioting.
This is the voice of common sense literally destroying this freak of a prosecutor.
And it's kind of glorious to watch.
Now, the importance of the testimony itself was this.
Kyle Rittenhouse, in order to get off, has got to show that he was in, in a sense, reasonable fear of not just being killed, but of being killed or serious bodily harm.
That there was a dangerous atmosphere going on when all this went down.
And Drew Hernandez was there to say, oh, yeah, I mean...
I felt the fear.
I was there, and I was a direct observer of what was happening to the conduct of Rosenbaum and the fact that Rosenbaum was going up to people who were armed and saying, basically taunting them, pushing them, shoot me! Shoot me right here!
So this is a guy who was asking for trouble.
That's the point.
And not only was Drew Hernandez saying this, but he had video evidence to back it up.
And this is what I think was absolutely crushing to the prosecution.
So they have, in a sense, blown up their own case.
And even the little details of the case, to me, have been kind of eye-opening.
At one point, Kyle Rittenhouse offhandedly said that his dad lives in Kenosha.
And apparently he has some other relatives who live there too.
And it caught my eye because I thought, wait a minute, for a whole year straight, I've been reading leftists say something to the effect of, what's this guy even doing in Kenosha?
He's got nothing to do with Kenosha.
He came in from out of state looking for trouble, as if Kyle Rittenhouse was some sort of, well, the prosecution called him in the pretrial a chaos tourist who had no business in Kenosha.
Well, Kyle lives across the border in Illinois, but his dad lives in Kenosha, so he has a lot to do with Kenosha. He has a reasonable cause to want to protect his own community in which his own parent lives. So another example of how, again, just almost incidentally, a big leftist lie is sort of destroyed.
Now, I hear from Reuters that the prosecution, knowing that it's in a bad way, is thinking of lessening the charges, of giving the jury the option of not going for first-degree murder, which is the charge, by the way, in both the two killings, but going for maybe second-degree, maybe even just reckless endangerment of life.
And the prosecution is hoping that somehow this would, and the jury would be like, well, yeah, yeah, okay, we'll give you that one.
No, I don't think that there is second degree.
A second degree is essentially a crime of fashion, as if Kyle Rittenhouse just got suddenly worked up and killed these people.
No, that's not the case at all.
There is a clearly defined second degree, and he didn't do it.
Nor do I believe did he recklessly endanger life.
He did endanger life, but it was not reckless at all.
What I expect to happen next is for the left to start attacking the judge.
They've already started that.
And I'll pick up on that probably on Monday.
And then to start attacking the jury.
Because they have to save their narrative.
They're dug in. They've dug this pit for themselves and they can't get out of it.
They can't admit that they've been lying for a year.
Any more than they can get out of the Russia collusion narrative or any of their other false narratives.
These people are like the toy soldier who walks into the wall and they just have to keep going.
There's nowhere else for them to go.
Lying is now part of their MO. And the beauty of the Rittenhouse case is that it blows up the lies.
This is why the January 6th case needs to go to court.
We need to blow up their lies.
And because the media is kind of coordinated in its prevarication, in its misrepresentations, you have to prove the lie.
It's not enough to say they're lying.
It's not enough to imply it.
It's not even enough for it to be probable.
We have to bust them on it.
And then there's no place for them to go.
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Seaside for details. Inflation continues to skyrocket under Biden.
And I say skyrocket because we haven't seen these levels of inflation in quite some time.
You'd have to go back really to the 1990s or in some cases earlier to the 1970s to see this kind of price rise, price rise across the board.
So the latest data from October, inflation is up 6.2%.
The previous number, by the way, was somewhere in the low five.
So it's worse than the past.
And it seems to be only going up, up and up.
Prices are rising. Here are some examples.
Gas, since last year, up 49%.
Eggs, up 11%.
Fish, 11%.
Pork chops, 15%.
TVs, 10%.
Used cars and trucks, 26.4%.
Car and truck rentals, 39%.
These are increases that people are going to feel.
And you're going to notice it as your wallet starts emptying out when you pay.
This is not easy for the media to cover up.
Why? Because it's a little bit like the video evidence in the Rittenhouse trial.
There it is. And you can see it with your naked eye.
And in this case, you can feel the pain of it in your wallet or on your credit card.
The media, however, is trying to spin it.
They're trying to protect Biden and MSNBC. I almost laughed out loud when I saw an article basically saying that inflation is a good thing.
Not only get used to it, which is one thing to say, look, you know, there are reasons for it.
We've got to be patient in dealing with it.
But they go overboard and basically praise inflation as a positive.
Now, there is actually nothing positive about inflation.
It corrodes the value of money.
You can say things like, well, yeah, but that's going to mean people are going to push for a pay increase.
But even if you get the pay increase, let's say inflation is 7% or 6%, and you get a 6% Pay increase, you're not better off because that pay increase is itself subject to inflation.
You're really right back where you started.
You, at best, are treading in the same place.
And for many people, they don't get that increase.
What if you earn a fixed income?
What if you have annuities?
In many cases, you're going to get back money that's going to be now worth less to you.
Now, the Biden administration is constantly trying to show, well, you know, we're dealing with these supply chains and it's all related to COVID. And what's happening is the truckers are threatening to strike because of vaccine mandates.
Now, all of this is true.
And it would explain what you could call temporary disruptions in prices.
But it wouldn't explain the price rise across the board.
In fact, the price rise across the board has one simple explanation.
It's called printing money.
When you print money, you've got a larger amount of money chasing, so to speak, using an economic term, a larger amount of money chasing the same number of goods, and those goods then begin to rise in price in the same way that if you pour more water into a glass, you begin to see the glass level go up.
So this is inflation.
it is undermining your lifestyle and mine.
Biden is the cause of it and they know it.
They're trying to hide from it and the media is trying to hide them from it.
But I don't think it's going to work because this is a case again, where politics comes right down into human experience.
And you can see that under Trump, the economy was going very well.
Inflation was under control as it has been for some decades.
And now suddenly it's spiking and the man in the Oval Office has a lot to do with it.
you Pretty monumental news, and I've been talking about it on the podcast.
Inflation is up, up, up, over 6%.
And Social Security benefits, by the way, are increasing by 5.9% in January.
That's the largest increase in 40 years.
What's that tell you? The government is admitting inflation is out of control, and yet the left is still pushing more spending.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Congresswoman Claudia Tenney.
She's from upstate New York, New York's 22nd Congressional District.
She's also a member of the House Small Business Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Claudia, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me. It's great to have you.
Let me start by talking about this.
Thank you. This infrastructure bill.
Now, the Democrats have gotten through the first bill.
I've been calling it the small bill, although it's hardly all that small.
Now they want to push through a second bill, which has a lot of stuff that I take it as nothing to do with infrastructure.
They're determined to do it.
The progressives have been pushing for it.
Tell me, where do you think it's going and what is your take on it?
Right. Well, on the first bill, the so-called infrastructure bill, which keeps getting labeled as something about roads, bridges, and things that we think of as traditional infrastructure, everybody's kind of heard that.
But the thing that concerns me most about it is that I come from New York State government before I was here.
In the Congress and the federal government.
And what is happening with that first infrastructure bill is similar to what's going to happen in the second one.
Hopefully it won't get passed.
But what they're doing is taking basically the Highway Trust Fund and they're funding it.
This money to the tune of something like over $500 billion will go into this bankrupt Highway Trust Fund.
So now all this money gets to be decided and be determined for where it's going to go by Pete Buttigieg and other bureaucrats in Washington, not the local governments, not the states, not anyone else.
And it's going to be highly partisan because they're in control.
And that's what scares me most about this, this complete shift to a more centralized spending as opposed to the appropriations process that's supposed to originate in the House of Representatives.
Remember, this bill originally came from the Senate.
So that's another part that is why this bill is so corrupt in its formation.
And then also it doesn't include things that have to do with real infrastructure.
Equity, so-called equity, that means equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity, is mentioned 64 times.
This is not going to be a good bill for my region.
It deals a lot with Green New Deal initiatives and starting them up.
again, all being brought to the federal level to be decided there, not based on need, not based on investing. And also, it's just massive. It's $1.2 trillion.
And the fact that 13 Republicans voted for it without really understanding the major shift, the shift in the way that our government is supposed to work from a federalist, more on sort of diversified spending program to the central planning, which is what the Democrats are seeking, it's just one more step for them.
And then you add on the major big bill that's coming up, the Build Back Broke or Build Back Beijing, as we're calling it. This bill is just a massive handover to big government interests, big taxes, the highest tax increase, which actually favors the wealthiest over the middle class, huge spending.
You know, how are we going to pay for all this?
You know, China's the one that's providing all the batteries and the money.
After all the work we spent in the Trump administration with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, incentivizing people and governments and the huge amount of cash and wealth that we had sitting overseas, billions were brought back to the United States under that and thousands of jobs.
To grow our economy and to make us self-sustaining and to grow our energy sector, make our manufacturing base come back.
And that's so important to my region because my region is where the Industrial Revolution was started.
The Erie Canal was built in my district, the first shovel in the ground.
It really brought us forward as a nation to bring us the economic strength we need to achieve our global power.
And now that we're reversing that, we're sending it all back to China.
It's just unbelievable that anyone that is conservative or stands for a self-governing constitutional republic that we have could vote for something like this that's just a massive handover.
And not to mention, it looks like a lot of pork and a lot of corporatism to big interests that probably favor We're good to go.
I've been reading what some of the Republicans, this is the 19 Senate guys and the 13 House members who voted for it.
Some of them seem to have taken the view that I'm voting for it because it's sort of the small bill, it's the lesser evil, it's going to help us to stop the big bill, which is the greater evil.
It seems somehow that the Democrats are more crafty at playing this game, at whipping their troops into line.
You mentioned that some of the Republicans may not have understood how this is all playing out.
Do you think that there is a psychological difference between the two parties?
Is it a problem of leadership in the GOP? Why is it that our team is not as good at playing the game as their team?
Well, no one's going to be held accountable for taking this vote.
You know, look, we just came off of Tuesday, this huge win in Virginia, but not only Virginia, across the United States.
I mean, in my district, a lot of Republicans won seats that they might not have won in another environment after that huge Youngkin win, Meares, and also Winston Sears.
You know, that big Virginia win and the cultural win on the school districts and parents realizing that, you know, in New York, we have a very centralized control over our school districts as well.
You know, the state education department, the unions control everything.
So New York, that was like an interesting win for Virginia.
And I think it's a place where Republicans could show some solidarity.
But then we get to Friday and a couple of sore feelings, apparently.
And Republicans were supposed to wait and make Nancy Pelosi and her team pass this bill with their own votes, which they knew they didn't have the progressives, and make her work harder.
I mean, we had two open votes on Friday were the longest open votes in the congressional history, in the House history.
They held votes over for six and seven hours because Nancy was busy trying to whip votes all day to get this thing passed and then leave it to these 13 Republicans and particularly the ones that voted first before Nancy actually got the votes to literally take losses or defeat from the jaws of victory.
I mean, we were going to be able to stop this.
So I look and many of these people hold important positions in leadership.
They One is a ranker on the Homeland Security Committee.
Others have power at whether they pay the price because it was really a moment where we could stick together.
And let me tell you something, we have an enraged base that is upset that we didn't stick together.
And again, a lot of them were saying, well, this is good for my district, more spending.
And it's, again, pork over policy.
And yet, I question some of these people who...
Will you really get that money that you're promised?
And what do you have to do to get it from Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden and the insider Democrats?
So that's what concerns me about their idea and their reasons for voting for it. One of them said, well, we didn't want to just deny Nancy Pelosi a win and Joe Biden a win just to say we wanted to deny him a win. This is really about a policy issue. And if we don't stick together on policy and important issues and advance the ball, sometimes we're going to lose. But sometimes you have to go two steps forward and one step back to win and play the long game. So when you talk about, you know, the Democrats seem to be able to play the long game.
And, you know, Nancy Pelosi is in this.
She knows it's a blood sport.
That's why she's in there.
But she also gets in and we talk about governing and upholding the Constitution and freedom.
And Nancy Pelosi is all about abuse of power.
And that's really the bottom line.
So I think that's the problem we have going forward as Republicans.
But right now, more than ever, we need to regroup.
But what we've done with this massive Build Back Broke bill is we're now dependent on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to hold the line.
Two Democrats who, by the way, are cashing in all over the country by Republican donors as well.
And that's what it's come down to.
Why do we put ourselves in this position?
I think we leverage ourselves in a bad spot.
Had we taken that bill down and we made them at least pass it on their own, I think that would have been a bigger win for us.
Absolutely. When we come back, I want to pivot to foreign policy and talk to you a little bit about Afghanistan, about China.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with New York Congressman Claudia Kenney from the 22nd Congressional District.
Claudia, let's pivot a little bit to foreign policy.
You're on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
There are Americans still left behind in Afghanistan.
I realize the issue has been sort of sidelined in the national media.
Is there any way to put a kind of pressure on the Biden administration, which appears to be relatively indifferent to their fate?
Do you think that they will, and also I want to ask you, do you think that the American people will remember those images of people falling out of planes, the kind of disgrace that Biden has left us with in Afghanistan?
Yes, they have a, you know, Joe Biden was arrogantly made this decision.
Look, we attended the meetings.
There were open source media sources that said that, you know, the generals and many that were experts on the ground said, don't do this this way.
Even Joe Biden, a video has been released recently that showed that he said it would be a disaster if we pulled out of Afghanistan in exactly the way that he did it.
And we're still rehearing from American citizens Some are green card holders and some are SIVs, still interested in getting out.
So I think it's a huge problem because the media wants this story to go away and they're effectively letting it go away.
Look, people forgot about 9-11, you know, a horrible situation for many years and And all these years went by and we kind of forgot and here we are again.
I mean, I think one thing that Joe Biden wanted to do, which is why they're so tone deaf on the other side is, you know, his mission was to pull out of Afghanistan for symbolic reasons on September 11th initially.
That's when they moved it back to August 31st.
So I just think they have just no clue about the insult and the disgrace that that was while we were trying to remember the tragedy of 9-11 and they were celebrating that we're getting everybody out.
Well, It's all about political posturing.
I hope people remember.
We're still working on it, but the administration just doesn't seem to want to deal with Afghanistan at all.
They just want that ship to sail.
What about China? With China, you're dealing with one thing to lose in Afghanistan.
It's a country that is of, I suppose, ambiguous strategic significance.
It's a small country. But on the other hand, there are very formidable adversaries that America has around the world.
I'm thinking, for example, of Iran.
I'm thinking of China, perhaps the most formidable adversaries.
And when they see what happened in Afghanistan, it can only be emboldening to them.
And we've seen the Chinese take some aggressive steps, not just toward Taiwan, but also in terms of building up their hypersonic technologies.
Do you think China is going to feel that under Biden, who appears to be tottering, not just himself personally, but the administration, this is a window of opportunity for the Chinese to test the resolve of the United States?
Well, certainly they've been doing that.
Obviously, you cited the hypersonic missile that we didn't know about until we saw a press release.
That's kind of embarrassing for the United States.
And the Taiwanese have been really reaching out to us.
And the Democrats and Biden don't seem to want to defend and protect how important it is to keep the democracy going in Taiwan and just the strategic importance.
If China could go in in probably about an hour and take over Taiwan without the United States' support, And I don't know why they haven't yet at this point with Joe Biden in office, but I'm certain they're always strategic.
They have a hundred-year plan.
They have the Belt and Road Initiative.
They're Leveraging their power, their economic power, and their military might, which they're building up substantially, around the world with smaller countries and vulnerable countries.
And we're not doing that.
We need to counter China. We also need to watch them.
I have a China Watcher bill that came out of Foreign Affairs that would put a special division in the State Department to watch China for their economic, their political, and their military aggression that we see around the world, because we need to start taking them seriously.
Joe Biden describes them as a competitor.
They're not a competitor.
They want to be the world's dominant leader, and they want to take over over us.
And they have an authoritarian-style government, and they're very effective at it.
Before we close, let me ask you about election integrity, because there have been election integrity bills that have in some cases passed in states around the country.
Now, the left's position on this is that, why are you doing this?
We all know the last election was completely secure.
There's been no convincing evidence of systematic fraud.
And so these election integrity bills are seen as motivated merely by some kind of a vindictive desire to suppress voters.
Say, in brief, if you will, what do you think is the case?
for pushing forward with these election integrity bills.
Well, first of all, the most profound expression of our self-governance is our ability to vote in a free, fair, secure, and private election.
And so that's why I formed the Election Integrity Caucus after I spent a hundred days of counting through chaos in a pandemic-style election where Governor Cuomo created this online database without verification that undermined integrity, and we really couldn't determine if one person had one vote.
And so the Democrats want to ban voter ID. Recently, the FEC has allowed foreign entities now to come in and potentially donate in our elections.
That will be a complete disaster if that happens.
So we have to continue to fight this.
A lot of it is technically not legal.
It is legalized fraud.
It's intentional chaos.
It's overwhelming the bureaucracy to the points where the bureaucracy can't function.
Election integrity is undermined, and it's very hard to To kind of find out what happened in the end.
And then we, you know, that's kind of where we are this after the election of 2020.
Now what do we do? We want to make sure going forward, we don't allow a lot of these initiatives to continue to undermine that voter ID, vote trafficking, which is what I call vote harvesting, which is what it really is.
Those, you know, things need to be in place in order to protect and secure the elections.
And people care about it.
It's the number one issue that gets addressed to me.
You know, it could be because they all watch my election play out for months, you know, three months.
But it's also because people are worried about the system.
But, you know, I encourage everyone to vote, but pay attention.
Know what the rules are. Get your friends out to vote.
Watch what's happening with our local governments.
And let's make sure the federal government doesn't take over This aspect of our lives as well, because once that happens in HR1 or HR4, Nancy's signature legislation gets passed, we're done.
I mean, we'll never see a free election or a fair election again.
Wow. Claudia, Danny, thank you very much for joining me on the podcast.
Thank you. That was a great, great honor to be with you.
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That's 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. America has some of the worst academic standards in the industrialized world.
Particularly in math and science, but also across the board.
If you look at surveys of what kids know at various age levels, age 7, age 10, age 14, and so on, you find that American students are not doing well.
And yet, the left is pushing for measures that would make the situation much worse.
Here's an article about the fact, just from the LA Times, that around the country, there's a, quote, growing trend in which educators are moving away from point grading systems.
Why? Quote, aiming to close large academic gaps among racial and ethnic groups.
So basically, Hispanics and Blacks are getting a lot of Ds and Fs.
And so there's a movement to, quote, not penalize them for bad behavior, not penalize them for bad work habits, not penalize them for missed deadlines.
And all of this is being justified as a humane effort to improve learning.
Here's a quotation from Allison Yoshimoto-Towery, a LA Unified School District's Chief Academic Officer.
It's teaching students that failure is a part of learning.
So they don't mind people failing.
They don't want to penalize them for failing because failure is a part of learning.
And here's another guy, Pedro Garcia, who signed a letter basically saying that grading systems, quote, reward our most privileged students and punish those who are not.
I don't even know what to say about all this, but really the driving force of it is a 17-point academic gap between Black and Latino students on the one hand and White and Asian students on the other.
That's why you've got this move.
California is trying to basically make their math tests easier to reduce this gap.
They're talking about getting rid of calculus and replacing it with quote, data science or statistics.
Now, again, there's a parental backlash by the way against this.
And even a lot of liberal parents are listen, you know what, we may not have done so well in math ourselves, but we want our kids to know math.
We know the importance of math.
And here's Divya Chhabra, middle school math teacher in California.
And she says, we're cutting off the legs of students to make them equal to those who are not doing well in math.
So, To create equity, we're pulling down the people at the top.
We don't seem to know how to raise the people at the bottom, so we punish the successful students, the hardworking students.
Think of the message that's going to send throughout academia.
And if you think this is just in the schools, here's an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, this now applying to the colleges.
And it says, quote, it's time to cancel the word rigor.
Don't use the word rigor.
Why? Here's the subtitle of the article, which sums it up.
If it's code for some students deserve to be here and some don't, then it needs to go.
Now, what's this all about?
Well, what it's all about is really the failure of affirmative action, because what affirmative action does is it literally brings students to a college who, quote, don't deserve to be there.
That's why it's called affirmative action, because these are students who would not be admitted under the normal standards.
Remember the old definition of affirmative action, going out and recruiting more students so that they're best qualified?
All of that is now obsolete.
In fact, it's been obsolete for 40 years.
Affirmative action practice means taking Hispanic and Black kids who have weaker academic preparation Often being one or two or in some cases three years behind in academic preparation and admit them over white and Asian students who have much better academic qualifications.
So no wonder when these students show up, they're not of equal ability.
They haven't had the same preparation.
And so when professors say, let's be rigorous, I'm going to demand logical answers, I'm going to demand that you get the correct answer on the quiz or on the exam, Suddenly, the word rigor, just like the word merit, just like the word logic, just like the word reason, these have now become sort of bad words.
And the critical race theory, people don't hesitate to attack these words as essentially, quote, disguises for white supremacy.
Of course, they're not disguises for white supremacy.
They're the measure of achievement.
It's just kind of like saying, listen, I'm going to Fling the thermometer to the ground and stomp on it and crush it into small little pieces.
Why? Because it's showing that the patient has a fever.
The thermometer is not to blame.
The fever is to blame.
Instead of blaming the fever, what we have here is really a pathetic and demented leftist campaign to blame the thermometer.
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Make sure to use promo code Dinesh. A few weeks ago, I did a series in the podcast on the Reformation, focusing on some of the early ideas of Luther, his debates not just with the Catholics, but also with his fellow reformers Zwingli.
But the figure that I downplayed and didn't focus on at all was John Calvin.
Calvin and Luther are the two most important figures in the Reformation.
And I thought it'd be interesting to talk a little bit about Calvin.
I might only introduce Calvin today and then pick it up on Monday.
But I'll start by talking about how different Calvin was from Luther.
Their difference was really focused on the issue of church and state, the relationship between the church on the one hand, or let's call it the kingdom of God, and then the kingdom of man, the human kingdom, what we today call the secular world.
Now, Luther's view is that these two kingdoms, the secular world and the world of God, are separate.
Luther believed that there were certain things that had previously been assigned to the kingdom of God.
A good example of that was that marriage was seen as sacramental.
In the Middle Ages, marriages were conducted not by the state, but by the church.
They were a church function.
And Luther sort of reassigned marriage from being an ecclesiastical or church function to making it a secular function.
In fact, that's where we got this idea of the state sanctioning marriage.
Its roots are in the Reformation itself.
Luther believed that secular leaders, by the way, whether they're good or bad, were nevertheless appointed by God.
There are some lines in Scripture that support Luther on this, that God has put people in authority.
And so, regardless of whether they're competent or incompetent, good or bad, respect your rights or tyrannical, obey the figures in authority.
This was sort of the Luther doctrine.
Calvin, on the other hand, Calvin believed that the kingdom of God, although awaiting us in the next world, should also to some degree be implemented in this world.
In other words, what you need is a Christian kingdom established now.
And Calvin sought to create one, to create a model Christian kingdom in Geneva, in which secular figures, which is to say the nobility, the municipal authorities, the elected figures, would collaborate with pastors and church figures working together to To take biblical commandments and biblical prohibitions and implement them as city ordinances and city laws.
So a remarkable experiment in sort of integrating church and state.
I'll come back to that.
I want to talk a little bit about Calvin himself.
He was born in 1509 in northern France.
Kind of funny because his name doesn't convey that.
But Calvin was a Frenchman.
In 1523, he went to Paris, where he distinguished himself with his sort of intellectual ability and prowess.
He was also trained in the scholastic studies of the medievals, but he also was exposed to the new humanist learning that's associated with figures like Desiderius Erasmus.
In 1532, Calvin published a study of the Roman writer and speaker Seneca.
He wrote his doctorate on law.
And this is important because Calvin was a lawyer, very different from Luther.
Luther was a monk, and Luther's natural world was the monastery.
You can see here why Luther got this idea that sort of the religious life is totally different than the world of business and trade and law.
But for Calvin, no.
Calvin was a religious figure who...
Who came out of the legal world and he saw no reason that the two should be separated.
For Calvin, God's law is a positive guide to government and to all aspects of life.
You could almost say that for Calvin, the constitution for a society is scripture.
Scripture itself is the constitution notarized, you may say, by Christ himself.
Now, Calvin went into exile because of his Protestant views and he ultimately returned to Geneva.
He returned to Geneva where he was welcomed by the citizens of Geneva who told Calvin basically that we want you to be our lawgiver or we want you to help us to draft a constitution and a set of laws for Geneva.
Now Calvin had written a very influential work, influential to this day.
In some ways you could almost say that Calvin's work in subsequent centuries has been even more influential than Luther's.
Calvin's masterwork was called The Institutes of the Christian Religion, an incredibly comprehensive, scholarly, in many ways, brilliant work.
I think it's fair to say it's the most influential work of Protestant theology in the 16th century and maybe ever.
Now, Calvin didn't really want to come back to Geneva.
He had, even though he was sort of in exile, he had a kind of privileged life in Paris.
He loved basically hanging out with scholars and sharing ideas.
He was sort of passing through Geneva when they kind of grabbed him by the shoulder and said, hey, stay.
And Calvin basically said, you know, I'm kind of a scholar.
I'm really not a lawgiver.
I'm not accustomed to the give and take of politics.
But then Calvin prayed about it, and he felt a kind of divine calling that, no, here is an opportunity for you, Calvin, to take these ideas that you've written about and put them into practice.
And so Calvin set about to do that.
And Geneva became this kind of remarkable...
Christian Commonwealth that all through the centuries has raised the question.
We have that question today.
Is it possible in America to sort of separate biblical principles from secular society?
Do we want to To establish a Christian society?
Is that even our goal?
Or is our goal merely to have a free society in which Christian belief and faith and practice is tolerated and has, you may say, scope to operate?
What is our ultimate objective?
And I think by reflecting on Calvin's Geneva, we can raise this question with a little bit of historical resonance.
So when I come back on Monday, I'm going to pick it up with Calvin and talk about how Calvin sought to implement this Christian commonwealth and also a very controversial aspect of that commonwealth, Calvin's notorious doctrine of predestination.
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