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Nov. 18, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:17
THE RITTENHOUSE EFFECT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep221
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Today I want to talk about the Rittenhouse effect.
Now, I hear a lot of people go, well, Dinesh, you know, the one thing we don't want is vigilante justice in America.
But you know when there's a breakdown of law and order, as there was in Kenosha that night, what other kind of justice is there?
Joe Biden wants a cabinet.
He has a cabinet that, quote, looks like America, and I'm going to argue that this is exactly how he got this rainbow coalition of crooks and thugs and incompetents.
I'm going to talk about the verdict that was given to Jacob Chansley, the so-called shaman guy from January 6th.
41 months in prison, really?
And Jedediah Bila, former TV reporter for Fox and also for The View, is going to join me to talk about her formula for healing the political divide in the country.
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.
We're into day three of jury deliberations in the Rittenhouse case.
And, you know, a lot of us, I think, are asking, what is going on?
Now, what appears to be going on is holdouts.
But holdouts in which direction?
In other words, is it the case that there's a majority that wants to convict Rittenhouse and there are a couple of people or one guy just holding out?
That would be very, very bad.
Or, which I think is more likely, is it the case that there is a jury that by and large wants to acquit Rittenhouse, but there are one or two holdouts in the other direction that want him to pay, want to get him on something, and that's what's holding up the jury.
Well, either way, Debbie and I were talking about this, and I was talking about this also yesterday on my Locals Q&A. We're saying this is a measure of how divided our country is.
And even though this is not Chicago, it's not Milwaukee, even in a conservative place like Kenosha, you're going to have Democrats.
You're going to have liberals.
It could be that there's a leftist or two on the jury, and they recognize the larger significance of this.
They don't want Kyle Rittenhouse, who they see as a sort of stand-in for the Trumpsters, to quote, get away with it.
And what this means is that the idea of coming to a consensus, the idea of a jury being able to look at the evidence and go, yeah, you know, in this case, it's very clear this kid was defending himself in each of the three cases where he was confronted and in fact attacked.
We don't seem to have that kind of common ground anymore.
It's a very worrisome trend for our society.
It reflects, I think, a broader breakdown Now, what happens in this kind of a breakdown?
I mean, one of the things I see all over social media, coming mainly from the left, but a little bit also from Republicans, is, well, Dinesh, you know, we don't want to live in a society in which there's vigilante justice.
So the one concern, the kind of larger fear, goes beyond Rittenhouse.
See, Rittenhouse was not a vigilante.
Rittenhouse was defending himself.
But nevertheless, this phenomenon of Rittenhouse showing up in Kenosha, heavily armed, To protect the citizens.
And, of course, the idea here is we need to have a society of laws.
We need to have a society in which people, ordinary citizens, don't feel empowered to do this.
I agree. In principle, I agree.
But here's my question.
What happens when law and order breaks down?
What happens when there's no law and order?
What happens when you call 911 and nobody shows up?
What happens when the cops are okay, as clearly the prosecutor was?
All they were doing is burning cars.
All they were doing is rioting.
Big deal. So his point is that his office, and he himself says, I wasn't ready to go out there that night.
So here's the prosecutor basically probably sitting at home eating some vanilla ice cream while his town burns.
Unbelievable, really. Now...
When you have this kind of derogation of responsibility by the authorities, you're basically back to the Wild West.
And my question is, if you don't want vigilante justice in that situation, what kind of justice is there?
My mind flashes back to the 1960s.
In fact, somebody brought this up and got me thinking about it, but I knew about it.
In 1964, I believe it was, there were major riots in Cleveland.
And these riots were in the Little Italy section of Cleveland.
And so what did the Italian businessmen do?
Well, they basically had their nephews and their nephew's friends, mafia guys, standing on the rooftops with automatic weapons.
And the idea was, hey, guys, you want to burn down our neighborhood?
Well, you're not going to be burning down my business, or you're going to see what the outcome is.
Now, there's an element of, I suppose, vigilantism here, but I don't see the alternative to it.
If the authorities won't protect you, you have every right to protect yourself.
In fact, you are basically in the state of nature.
I'm now quoting from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, it is a war of all against all, which is to say, it is a case in which you are entrusted with your own defense.
No one else is coming to help, and you have every right in that situation to protect yourself.
So says Hobbes.
I've talked before about the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which the gunslinger, Tom Donovan, played by John Wayne, shoots kind of from the side, not even provoked and not even in self-defense, shoots the outlaw Liberty Valance, because Liberty Valance here is a symbol for the complete breakdown of law and order in the town.
Of course, the credit goes to Jimmy Stewart, this guy named Stoddard, And Jimmy Stewart goes on to become a senator.
And, of course, the Wild West is tamed.
And John Ford's movie, 1962, is about the transition from a Wild West society, from a lawless society, to a society of laws and courts and sheriffs and judges and lawyers.
But my question is, and this is sort of the Kenosha question...
What if you unwind the tape?
What if a society makes this transition, let's call it from barbarism to civilization, and then goes back to barbarism?
Aren't we back where we were before?
Don't we still need Tom Donovan, the gunslinger, to take out Liberty Valance?
Or is Liberty Valance, in this case a Liberty Valance who's basically wearing a black robe and an Antifa outfit, allowed to maraud unmolested, unchecked?
No, no.
This is why the left is so fearful of Kyle Rittenhouse, not just the one Kyle Rittenhouse, but maybe the hundreds, if not thousands of Kyle Rittenhouses.
Think about it. If you had a militia of citizens, I'm not talking about some extremist outfit, of ordinary citizens where they are 15s, The male population of Kenosha standing guard on their own city when the cops weren't around to help them.
I don't think all of this would have happened.
I don't think Antifa would be doing what it did.
I don't think there would have been a whole lot of burning and a whole lot of overturning of cars and a whole lot of trashing of businesses.
That would not be allowed.
That would not happen. The Rittenhouse effect.
That's my term for the broader reverberations of the Rittenhouse case.
I think it's going to be a far-reaching case.
Looking back on it, it's going to be one of those totemic cases similar to, say, the O.J. Simpson case, other cases that remain seared on our memory and whose consequences continue to ripple out through society.
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There's a very amusing report in Fox News.
This is by the reporter Chad Bergram about discussions at fairly high levels of the Biden administration, maybe going all the way to the top, about removing Kamala Harris as vice president.
Now, Pergrim is not one of these opinion pundits at Fox.
He's a journalist on the ground with a good reputation.
And so let's just explore this for a little bit.
First of all, it would be completely unprecedented.
I can think back to the Nixon years when the Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned.
But he resigned because he was involved in a bribery scandal and a corruption scandal.
So that's a whole different matter.
But here's Kamala Harris, and in effect, she's done nothing.
And I think that's her offense.
She's literally a zero.
She's a null set.
She is intellectually absurd.
She is, from a policy point of view, an absentee figure.
She's supposed to be in charge of the border, but nothing could be more laughable.
She doesn't show up at the border.
The people at the border don't even want to talk to her.
There's nothing she has to contribute to the conversation.
There's nothing she has to contribute to, I don't think, any conversation ever.
But still, to move someone out of office, particularly when they were picked as the heir apparent, But I think you get the picture here, and that is that Kamala Harris was picked for really two reasons.
And one is that she's a woman, and the other is that she's black.
So she kind of brought, she was a twofer.
She brought two credentials to the table, the pigment of her skin, her melanin, basically, and the other, her female reproductive organs.
And that was apparently enough.
I can't think of anything else.
It wasn't that she was a major vote-getter.
She was barely even like on the list.
They had to sort of bring her out of last place and move her up to second place and then stick her with Biden.
Now, in some ways, I think this is unfair to Kamala Harris for the simple reason that obviously the disasters of the Biden administration are the fault of Biden.
And all the people around them, all the Obama-ites who are kind of calling the shots, they're the ones who are blowing up the economy.
They're the ones who are accelerating inflation.
They're the ones who are causing the energy crisis.
They're the ones who are unable to fix the supply chains.
They're the ones who have people falling out of planes in Afghanistan.
They're the ones who have choreographed the policy that led to the open border.
But I think I detect here with Biden's team, his cabinet, and he takes so much pride.
We have a cabinet that looks like America.
And I think the problem here is with the word looks.
They're going for this cosmetic diversity.
And so they've ended up with a bunch of crooks and thugs and across the board incompetence.
I mean, let's just look at a few examples.
The guy heading Health and Human Services, who is, by the way, normally somebody who is a health official, somebody who is a doctor, somebody who is a scientist, someone who knows something about health, but instead they have Javier Becerra, basically a lawyer whose main credential is that his last name is Becerra.
First, Hispanic to head up health and human services.
Let's look at the Cuban, Mayorkas, who's running the Department of Homeland Security.
This guy, whenever he looks, you're basically a guy who's completely out of it, but willing to say anything.
I mean, I think his unscrupulousness is part of why they want him, because this guy will say anything.
He lies through his teeth.
He is a shifty Hispanic, but that's the point.
He's a Hispanic, and that's why he got the job.
Let's look at Lloyd Austin, whose main credential to be defense secretary appears to be that he majored in wokeness, probably in college.
So you've basically got this, you know, solemn-looking black guy.
And, you know, he hasn't read Clausewitz, but he's probably read Kendi.
He doesn't know anything about Sun Tzu, but he probably has read the journals of a gay Native American traveling through the Southwest on a tricycle.
So this is basically who's running our government.
People who are picked, you know, we got a black guy here, we got a Hispanic there, we got a one-legged guy over here.
Look at Pete Buttigieg.
What's his credentials? Besides the fact that he has a male partner and, you know, he takes maternal leave.
I mean, this is basically what the guy does.
He doesn't know how to fix the supply chain.
He's never seen a supply chain.
I mean, by and large, for Buttigieg, he was running a small town with, like, what?
A handful of buses that went from one end of the town to the other.
So, you know, this is a Lilliputian who's given sort of Gulliver's task.
And while the supply chains are faltering and crumbling, here's this clown, and it's all about symbolism for him.
He bikes to work.
You know, first of all, he gets driven to the bike, and then he bikes to work while the media's photographing him.
They fact-checked that.
Yeah, that's right. He didn't bike his way down the stairs from his apartment.
Fact, misinformation.
Then we have, you know, the only guy who's, you know, competent, but competent in a kind of fascist way is Merrick Garland.
I mean, that guy knows what he's doing, but he's a thug.
You know, he's basically the Adolf Eichmann of the Biden administration.
Yeah, this is a guy who's willing to basically lock anybody up.
All he needs is a memo telling him to do it.
But he's atypical.
I mean, what's striking about the Biden cabinet is even the white guys are stupid.
I mean, the white guys are incompetent.
Look at Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor.
This guy wouldn't know a national security crisis if one came out of the toilet and bit him in the butt.
Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State.
This is another guy, another clown.
So this is a clown show from start to finish.
And these are the people running the country.
It really shows you that when you go for diversity, and that's your main consideration, and Biden literally boasts about this, what you get is a rainbow coalition of fools.
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Feel the difference. I think we are all very familiar, at least pictorially familiar, with Jacob Chansley.
This is the so-called shaman guy.
You remember from January 6th, the one guy with the horns, with the animal skins.
A little bit of a ridiculous individual who lent an air of parody.
In fact, this guy is apparently a kind of aspiring actor.
It's very clear that what he was trying to do in January, he wanted to be part of this theatrical event.
Here's a little clip of Jacob Chansley being interviewed, and you get a sense here that this guy is a little bit out there.
He's a little bit of a kook.
Listen. It was my calling since I was a child, but in all honesty, I always wanted to know what the Native Americans understood.
I knew that they had something.
They didn't wear feathers, like headdresses, and they didn't dress like this, you know what I'm saying?
And drink plant medicines and, you know, know all the stars.
So this is the shaman guy talking about his, well, I guess his shamanism.
And so he marches into the capital.
And what does he do there?
Well, basically nothing.
He didn't break anything.
He didn't even really touch anything.
He didn't get into any confrontations.
He got in there and he got out.
And then, by the way, he turned himself in.
Now... 41 months in prison?
By the way, the Biden administration wanted to give him 51 months in prison.
Judge Royce Lamberth, who should have basically let him go.
Let him go. Why? Because he's already been 10 months in pretrial detention.
This guy's more than paid for his offense.
In fact, if it were me, I would give him 48 hours to think it through and then send him home, maybe put him on probation.
But this is an outrageous sentence for a non-violent offense.
By the way, you should remember that this obstruction of an official proceeding nonsense, that's the pretext, and it's a felony.
But it's a recently enacted felony.
It's post-Enron.
And it was never intended to be used against political protesters.
In fact, this is the very first time the Justice Department has...
It shows you how statutes can be, you know, RICO statutes designed for the mafia...
Can be then turned against ordinary citizens.
Statutes designed to go after ISIS can then be mobilized against political dissidents.
This is how government corrupts its own power, misuses its power in directions which were never originally intended.
And let me just read from the prosecution's notice to the judge, because it gives you the idea that even from their point of view, this guy did nothing.
They're trying to make it sound really bad.
The defendant was among the first 30 rioters to penetrate the Capitol building.
As opposed to amble into the Capitol building, he penetrated the Capitol building.
And so this guy is some kind of a, you know, what do you call him?
A kind of a, some sort of a rapist.
He penetrated the Capitol building.
Then I'm going to, let me read on because it's more parody here.
Quote, the defendant then stalked the hallowed halls of the building.
I mean, listen to this. This is like, this is like over, you know, overwrought rhetoric.
He didn't walk, he stalked.
He stalked the hallowed halls.
First of all, there are people all the time walking through the Capitol.
Think of the ordinary tourist basically opening up a wrapper, you know, eating a candy, letting out an occasional fart.
These are the hallowed halls of the Capitol.
No, that's not allowed, my friend.
No breaking wind in the Capitol.
Let me keep going on.
Riling up the other members of the Bob.
Apparently this guy, because of his outfit, he got everybody excited.
He's riling up the other members of the Bob.
And so this is the kind of thing.
Let me keep going. His month-long effort to sow disinformation about the integrity of the election.
Integrity of the election.
And, quote, his brandishing of a spear-tipped flagpole.
Now, I'm actually looking at a picture of him with the flagpole.
There's nothing threatening about it.
He didn't do anything violent with it.
So, you know, this is just...
I mean, I'm... Venturing into parody, but this is actually really sad.
This is a guy who is...
You know, I think he's got some mental issues.
And this is a guy who needs...
Not to be locked up for, you know, three years and five months over a nonviolent act of protest.
It's despicable. It's a metaphor for the cruelty of the Biden DOJ. And this cruelty, as I've said before, is not a cruelty that should go unforgotten or indeed unpunished.
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I want to talk in this segment, or actually the next couple of segments, about the ultimate issue of legality of vaccine mandates.
Now, the Biden vaccine mandate has been struck down on a temporary basis by a court of appeals.
And I just saw that the OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, has essentially declared that it will stop, it has stopped enforcing the mandate.
So the mandate is on hold.
But the mandate hasn't been permanently invalidated.
It has merely been put on the shelf pending a full court review of the mandate.
Now, a court has been selected.
To hear the arguments for and against the Biden vaccine mandate.
And we're going to be hearing a lot about this on both sides.
What I want to talk about is the constitutional precedent for vaccine mandates, because it all goes back to a single case.
There's one case, and it's a 1905 case, so it's more than 100 years old.
And that case is likely to become a real focus of discussion because, see, Supreme Courts and courts in general use the principle of stare decisis.
Stare decisis simply means precedent.
And precedent is valuable because it maintains a kind of continuity in law.
Now, precedent is not definitive.
By itself, it doesn't settle the matter.
And there have been important precedents that have been overturned.
I've talked before in the podcast about how Plessy v.
Ferguson, the segregation precedent, was overturned in Brown v.
Board of Education, 1954.
That was more than half a century after the Plessy decision.
And I'm hoping that Roe v.
Wade, 1973, will be overturned by the Supreme Court.
Another precedent down the tubes, and I think rightly so, because it's a bad precedent, a precedent unmoored, unanchored, untethered in the Constitution at all.
But the vaccine mandate issue is not so easy, and I want to zoom into the arguments for and against the mandate, focusing on this 1905 case.
Now, the justices of the Supreme Court are very well aware of this case.
In fact, they have referenced the case in recent decisions that deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
And so even though the Biden administration's policy is going to be heard at the Court of Appeals, I wouldn't be surprised if the next step, whatever the Court of Appeals decide, is whoever loses is going to appeal to the Supreme Court.
And I wouldn't be surprised at all if on a matter of this importance, I mean, think about it.
The Biden administration is basically saying they have the right to force even private employers with 100 employees or more throughout the country To essentially force people to take a vaccine with pretty dire penalties if they don't.
Now, let's talk about the precedent.
The precedent goes back to 1905.
It's called Jacobson versus Massachusetts.
And here they were dealing with a fellow named Jacobson.
He was a Lutheran evangelical minister.
And they wanted to forcibly vaccinate him.
Now, the vaccination wasn't about COVID. It was about smallpox.
But smallpox is contagious.
And Massachusetts had passed a law that said that if you don't take the vaccine, you can be fined.
And the maximum permissible fine in 1905 was $5.
$5 even then was a little bit of money.
In fact, $5 was roughly $150 today.
So it was a fine. I wouldn't say it was an insignificant fine.
But on the other hand, it was not a huge fine.
Nobody was threatening anything.
Jacobson with being forcibly locked in his home, as Debbie tells me they're actually threatening to do or maybe even doing in Austria.
Nobody was threatening to fire him from his job.
He can't serve as a minister.
He can't conduct services.
No. Essentially, he had to pay the $5 fine.
And he argued that that's too much.
Basically, Jacobson said, I don't want to pay at all because you cannot make me invade my body.
My body is, in a sense, inviolable.
And so basically, my body, my choice.
Now, before we go on, I do want to make it clear that even though my body, my choice is a slogan in the abortion context, let's remember the abortion context is radically different because in the abortion context, it's not just your body.
So what you really mean, my body and my kid and my choice to terminate the kid that I gave birth to through my own actions.
So that's a whole different matter.
I want to kind of set that aside for now, focus on the Jacobson case.
But the significant thing is Jacobson lost.
Jacobson lost. It was appealed up and up and up.
It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
And Justice John Marshall Harlan, a famous Supreme Court justice, in fact, He wrote the famous dissent in the Plessy case.
He upheld the Massachusetts statute.
He said essentially that Jacobson had to pay the fine and that it was legitimate for the government to have a vaccine mandate and enforce it by imposing a fine on Jacobson.
When we come back, I'm going to delve a little more deeply into the facts of the case, because on the surface it seems, okay, well, this is bad for us because it means that vaccine mandates are okay.
Turns out that the Jacobson decision was quite narrow, and it specified the conditions under which you could, but also could not, impose a vaccine mandate.
Pretty monumental news.
Inflation, it's now over 6%, up from 5% the previous month.
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That's the highest increase in 40 years.
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I'm continuing my discussion of vaccine mandates, focusing on the single precedent, going back to 1905, a case called Jacobson v.
Massachusetts, in which the Supreme Court held that the vaccine mandate, in this case a mandate passed by Massachusetts, to impose a fine, $5, for people who didn't get vaccinated against smallpox, was valid, was legal, was allowed under the Constitution.
Now interestingly, this precedent, Jacobson precedent, was quite narrow.
The court made careful distinctions about when you could and couldn't impose this kind of a vaccine mandate.
But those distinctions were quickly forgotten.
And in subsequent years, other justices would appeal to Jacobson to essentially allow all kinds of government interventions that were extreme, far more extreme than was the case in Jacobson.
Which is, after all, they didn't even force Jacobson to take the vaccine.
They only made him pay the fine.
Now, later on, you find that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes—now, this is 1927, so this is 20 years later—he invokes Jacobson to say this case.
To justify forcible sterilization.
Wow. Think about the infamous case of Buck v.
Bell. We, in fact, dramatized it in one of my movies in which Pearl Buck was forced to undergo sterilization.
And essentially, there was a social Darwinist rationale for it.
And Justice Oliver or Wendell Holmes said, three generations of imbeciles are enough.
Basically, sterilize her.
But he appealed to Jacobson to say, well, if they can force you to take a vaccine, sure, they can force you to tie your tubes, if the government so decides.
A very frightening precedent.
And today, the Buck v.
Bell case is recognized across the spectrum as a kind of abomination, even though the opinion was written by an eminent justice jurist, namely Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Now, Interestingly, in this Jacobson case, the court was very careful to make distinctions.
The court basically said, look, the government does not have the power to forcibly vaccinate people.
It does not. But if there is an emergency, the government can impose certain inconveniences on you.
It can impose certain conditions.
Now, the court actually appeals to the analogy of conscription or the draft.
In the case of an emergency, the country is facing an attack.
Ordinarily, the government can't have forced labor.
They can't make you join the military, but under conditions of war, they can in fact do that.
And so conscription was used as an analogy to say that, yeah, in a real public health crisis, the government can in fact enforce public health by having a vaccine requirement.
But it's very important that the court said, we want to point out here, number one, that the court is not mandating vaccination, and two, the penalty for not doing it is modest.
In other words, it's a $5 fine.
And so we're not violating Mr.
Jacobson's bodily integrity.
He can still refuse to take the vaccine.
He just has to pay the fine.
Now, I think this is all very important because today, when we look at the court now, it appears that one justice— This is an important justice because it's the Chief Justice Roberts, is sympathetic to the Jacobson reasoning.
And for this reason, it is quite possible, I won't say likely, but possible, that Roberts will vote for the vaccine mandate.
Now, Roberts has a way to avoid that.
Roberts can say, I think consistently, look...
While it might be, in theory, okay for government to impose this requirement, it can't be done unilaterally by the executive branch.
Who passes the laws in a democratic society?
Congress. So if Congress passes a vaccine mandate, that would be okay.
But for the Biden administration and executive branch to, without lawful authorization, essentially make up this rule and impose it, that's not okay.
So it's quite possible that Roberts will go there.
But other justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, including Alito, including Gorsuch, seem to interpret the Jacobson decision narrowly, which is to say the exact way that the decision itself was worded.
I'm now quoting from Justice Alito's speech to the Federalist Society, where he mentions Jacobson versus Massachusetts.
And he says, quote, Referring to the case, it did not involve sweeping restrictions imposed across the country for an extended period, and it does not mean that whenever there's an emergency, executive officials have unlimited, unreviewable discretion.
An important point to make here is this.
It is one thing for the government to impose fines on companies if they do not require their employees to be vaccinated.
It's a whole other matter.
For the government to try to force churches or to try to force restrictions on free speech.
Why? Because the Constitution actually makes a very important distinction between specified rights and the Bill of Rights.
And let's remember that those rights, like your right to free speech, your right to own a gun, your right to assemble, your right against unreasonable search and seizure, those are not up for majority invalidation.
It doesn't matter if Congress passes a law.
Congress cannot pass a law to take away your fundamental rights.
And so that means that even if there's an emergency, even if there's an epidemic, it doesn't matter.
The government is still limited in what it can do in restricting speech, in restricting churches, in restricting gun rights, and so on.
All of this, I hope, is a—I think it's useful to have these discussions beforehand.
We often wait for a court decision.
What did the court decide?
And then post facto, we try to examine the reasoning.
But this is the landscape.
This is the intellectual landscape that the Supreme Court will be wrestling with as it tries to make up its mind about whether these Biden vaccine mandates are in fact constitutional.
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Hey guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Jedediah Bila.
She's a television personality.
You've seen her on Fox.
You've seen her on The View.
She has a new book just out.
It's called Dear Hartley.
And the subtitle, Thoughts on Character, Kindness, and Building a Brighter World.
Hey Jedediah, great to see you.
Thanks for joining me.
You know, I'm trying to think back.
I was asking Debbie, I wonder, did we meet in a Fox green room today?
Years ago, I thought so.
I was trying to place when I first met you, and I think that's what it was.
We were both waiting to go on.
I forget what, but we chatted in the green room.
By the way, I enjoyed reading the book.
It's beautifully written.
It's obviously come straight from the heart.
Talk a little bit about what...
Welcome to my show!
Yeah, I mean, what inspired me was my child.
You know, I wrote this during the pandemic.
I was looking at this little boy who was about one years old when I started writing this.
And I had so much to say to him.
And I was watching a world that was increasingly divided.
And although I am a strong conservative, I always really valued conversation.
I valued being able to sit with people who saw the world very differently from me and have those important conversations.
And that was slipping away.
What I saw instead was people being shut down If they disagreed, I saw diversity of thought vanishing from school systems.
You may or may not know I taught in the school systems for six years, so I saw that up close and personal.
And I had so much I wanted to say to my son about values, regardless of your politics, values that I think are really important in building strong people and building strong countries.
First, as letters to him, and then thought about it and said, you know what, I think everyone can benefit from this.
I didn't realize quite how divided it was going to get right now, given the mandates and everything that came down the pike, but I was already seeing the start of so much division.
And I said, you know what, it's time.
It's time for a book like this right now.
How do you think we got to this point in the public debate?
I mean, my mind flashes back to when we had William F. Buckley on firing line, where he'd often have someone from the other side, and even though they might have a little bit of verbal repartee in combat, This was done in a very civil, gentlemanly way. Even CNN had this program.
Crossfire was a little bit more acerbic.
But nevertheless, you could clearly see both sides.
You could weigh the arguments and see what you agreed with.
Now, all of that seems to have vanished.
And it's vanished on an institutional basis.
In other words, today, think of how hard it is to go to the media and find the kind of engagement you're talking about.
So is part of your message that...
We can find these conversations in a coffeehouse or at home or with friends because ordinary life hasn't been politicized to the same degree.
You know, Dinesh, division is a business model for many media institutions, and they know that.
And so what happens is they wind up catering to an audience saying, okay, well, I think this is what the audience wants to hear.
And that's really not what the audience generally wants.
It's interesting. I did a view segment this week that caused all the uproar about mandates, and I got so many messages from people who said, hey, I disagree with you, but I really wanted to hear what you had to say.
So people want that conversation.
And I think that's why you hear so many people, truthfully, going into the podcasts and listening to those podcasts and turning the television off because they're tired.
They don't want to be preached to.
They want to make their own decisions about what's going on.
And I think, you know, you see what's happening in corporate media many times.
That's also happening in academia.
You always saw protests when conservatives would go to campuses, but now those speeches are completely shut down.
It's really, you know, enabled by social media.
It's you, you versus me, us versus them all the time.
And what it's creating is just people who want to live in an echo chamber.
I don't want to This wasn't a book about politics in terms of policy,
but it was a book about free thinking and freedom and recognizing there's going to be people who you agree with 90% of the time.
Don't shun them because 10% of the time they don't agree.
Invite them to talk to you about why.
Figure out where they're coming from.
Because if the goal is solutions, ultimately, and maybe it's not.
Look, maybe the goal is money.
Maybe the goal is building a cable news empire that has division as a business model.
I don't know.
But if the goal is solutions, you're not getting there if you're not listening.
If you look at your life versus the life of Hartley, you came of age in a world where you might have had a conservative mentor in school or in college.
And you had institutions in which you could flourish by arguing conservative views.
But what if your son...
What if he goes to school and is propagandized from grade one on up?
What if he goes to college in a college where conservative professors are nowhere to be found?
What if he wants to go into a media landscape that is not 60% or 80%, but 100%?
Let's say he wants to be a comedian and no improv will let him perform because it's all politically correct.
So that's, to me, a more troubling situation because all the lessons that you're teaching him about open-mindedness and listening to the other side become meaningless when you step into social media and you suddenly get a little notice, your account has been cancelled, or you said this and you're fired, clean out your desk and go home.
How do we combat that kind of institutional intolerance?
Well, I think, first and foremost, good parenting.
You need to start with good parenting.
You need to teach your kids about these values so that when they go into that world, they know that there's something wrong with being shunned for voicing your opinion.
They need to say, well, hold on a second.
What's going on here?
And challenge those systems.
From the start. Look, it's very hard.
I think that's why you see right now, parents are being told to sit down and shut up at board meetings.
Parents are making choices about their kids' schooling that's different.
When I went to college, it was like, oh, you go to college.
That's the thing to do. A lot of parents now are looking and saying, well, I don't need to pay that kind of money for my child to be indoctrinated.
This is supposed to be a place where kids learn how to think, not what to think.
They're supposed to be welcomed into discussions regardless of what their viewpoint is.
I mean, if you're not thinking in academia, what are you doing?
What is the point of the whole thing?
It's a waste of everyone's time and money.
So I think it has to come down to choices.
You see a lot of parents homeschooling now, making those decisions.
It also comes down to creating things and innovation.
People in, you know, conservatives oftentimes bash media and And it's justified, right?
It is justified in many cases.
But I always say, build something.
And you see what's happening now in the podcasting realm.
You see conservatives saying, you know what?
instead of criticizing filmmakers and saying, oh, all this stuff is biased.
Let's start a company that does X, Y and Z, where we feel like values of free thinking and freedom are espoused.
And anyone can come here and work here without being condemned for their views.
So I think a lot of it comes down to choices, parenting, good conversations with your kids and innovation, honestly, in a society where you do have big tech, big Hollywood, big media, oftentimes colluding altogether against people who just every now and then fall out of line with what is the accepted way of thinking.
When we come back, I want to probe with Jeddiah Bila the way in which we can create this sort of more this new and more hospitable culture in which real discussion and real learning can take place.
Thanks.
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You've got to use promo code DINESHDINESH. Guys, I'm back with Jedediah Abila.
We're talking about her new book.
It's called Dear Heartly.
And it is a heartfelt, beautifully written book.
And it talks about values that transcend some of the pettiness and ugliness of our time.
Jedediah, you were just on The View.
You started talking about COVID. Talk about what happened to you when you went on The View and related, if you will, to the themes and the message of your book.
Yeah, you know, I was invited as a guest.
I was actually supposed to co-host there in October.
I submitted a medical exemption for the vaccine.
You know, I have a medical exemption written by a vaccinated doctor, infectious disease doctor in New York City.
I spoke with my doctors, a team of doctors, and they advised me that this was not a good move for me, particularly because I have this sky-high natural immunity.
I was infected 19 months ago, and my natural immunity is strong and unwavering.
So I have the support of my medical team.
To make the best decision for myself.
So I wasn't able to co-host.
I originally had gotten COVID tested and was going to co-host.
They changed their policy at Disney and said, oh, by the way, you have to be vaccinated.
So they shifted me to a remote segment.
And I knew that this was a topic that was going to come up.
I did a full pre-interview where we talked about how I felt about mandates.
So I was going in saying, well, obviously they want to hear what I have to say, or they would have just canceled me altogether.
But I was wrong.
And I got there, you know, I took a question on the book, and then essentially started talking about facts, which is simply that the CDC has come out and said that vaccinated people can also get COVID and transmit COVID. That's not debatable.
That's a fact. That's why masks were brought back in for vaccinated people.
So I started to just say that and got shut down and labeled as misinformation.
Instead of challenging me on air and saying, well, hold on a second, Jed, offering statistics of their own, engaging in a conversation, let's face it, a lot of the country feels the way I do, and some may even be in the exact same predicament as I am.
Instead of having that on-air conversation, I was shut down.
I couldn't speak. I was talked up.
Dinesh, because this entire book that I was there to promote is about the ability to have these conversations with people you disagree with.
It's about encouraging my child to be able to walk into rooms full of people who disagree with him and speak his mind.
So the clip went viral and it was kind of an interesting, you know, they had a moment there where they could have made their case, where we could have had a civil exchange of ideas as a free-thinking society should do.
And they opted out. So there's a lesson in that, right?
The lesson is that that is a bad example because the problem is people see that on their televisions and oftentimes that gets mimicked in real life.
The good news, I will say, the silver lining is I got tons of messages, tons of messages from people.
People who agree, people who disagree, people who just wanted to hear us talk that through.
That gives me an incredible amount of hope for my child and the whole next generation and for this book because there is an audience out there that wants that debate and discussion and doesn't want that kind of shutdown.
I agree. For years, The View seemed to have a format in which they would have a bunch of leftists and one Republican.
So it was a rigged debate, but there was at least some effort to have a debate.
I guess Meghan McCain was the latest sort of conservative at The View.
But now when you turn to things like the CNN panel, they'll have a panel of 14 people We're good to go.
Or you realize that you're in a bubble listening to like-minded people who all, they might be black and white, but they went to the same schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, they have the same types of friends, they probably drink the same kind of white wine, and they certainly have all the same kinds of opinions.
Not a good thing, right? Well, it also looks rigged because everyone knows that real life doesn't look like that.
I mean, look at your own families.
Look at your own communities.
There's always people who disagree.
You know, the show is called The View.
It's not one view.
you know, that's like me launching a show saying perspectives only there's just one. What good is that? Why do you need that? The same people over and over again saying the same thing.
That's not representative of what's going on in the country.
So, you know, and oftentimes you'll also see, you know, on a liberal network, I noticed that they love having, you know, a bunch of liberals and then there's one conservative, only that conservative somehow feels the exact same way about everything that all the liberals do. So what good is that? There's just a closed mindedness in the industry. That's really troubling to me.
There's a closed-mindedness that's happening.
And I think that part of that is because division is a business model and they feel like this is the way to go.
But it's not. It's not reflective of the population.
It's not... Good to teach our children that.
That's not what they're going to face in the world.
Your kid's not going to go out in the world and say, oh, I'm just going to know how to exist in rooms full of people that agree with me all the time.
No. Teach your kids that that's not what the world looks like.
He's going to be challenged. He or she is going to be challenged.
They're going to have to stand up for what they believe in.
They're They're going to have to be respectful.
I mean, do we want to raise our kids every time someone says something they don't like?
They say, oh, shut down.
I need a safe space. End of story.
That's not a good lesson.
So I write about all of that.
Interestingly enough, as this unfolded for me this week, this is the book.
The book that I wrote is about this very stuff, is about this desire to shut down and not have these really important conversations and why it's so important to teach our kids to be so much bigger and better than that.
Yeah, that's what struck me about the experience on The View.
And I think you said something earlier about the fact that we need to build new institutions that are more open to creativity and to debate.
And this may be the conservative challenge of the next generation, a challenge for your son and many others coming up, is how do we do that?
because it's remarkable the degree to which we've let mainstream institutions become not just dominated but completely monopolized by the left.
So would you agree that this entrepreneurial task of new media, new forms of comedy, new mechanisms to get this out, we need to do that or else we will have to live in this starved, impoverished, intolerant culture.
That's right.
And I cannot tell you how many actors, how many athletes I heard from this week who work in the industry and are saying, this is crazy what's going on.
And maybe they don't all say it publicly because there is some fear of retribution, but they're there and they want to work, right?
Sportscasters, they want to work and they don't want to be pressured.
Andrew Breitbart was a friend of mine.
Years ago, we had some great conversations about culture.
Andrew talked about culture all the time.
He wanted to do that.
He wanted to change what people consumed.
Don't just give them one option.
Give them more than one option.
Create spaces where people have freedom.
Create spaces, if you care so much about these values, then put them on the screen.
employ people who espouse them, give people freedom to be employed, to work, to be successful, and at the same time be able to speak their minds.
Because what happens is a lot of these people exist in Hollywood, but they're quiet.
They stay silent.
And you're seeing now with these mandates, I think this is a really important time because the left and big government push too far.
You have athletes coming out and saying, I love my job, but my health comes first.
I'm not going to do this. You see a lot of people in prominent positions that have stepped forward and said, I'm going to do what's right for me and my family first and foremost.
And they're getting a lot of attention because everyone said, well, wait a second.
We weren't expecting that.
We were expecting these people to just comply.
And they're not because everyone knows when you comply with tyranny, it gets emboldened.
It doesn't shrink. So yes, entrepreneurship.
The right talks about this all the time.
Entrepreneurship, innovation.
Let's do it today.
Absolutely. Hey guys, check out Jedediah's book.
It's called Dear Heartly.
Jedediah, thanks for joining me on the podcast.
Thank you. Good work and all the best to you.
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