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Dec. 13, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:43
THE RACISM OF KARL MARX Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep236
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There's a strong vein of racism that runs through the Democratic Party and through the socialist left.
And it's no surprise.
You know why? Because Karl Marx, one of the founders of socialism, was a racist.
The scourge of inflation isn't just a matter of higher prices. The real problem, I'm going to argue, is that the Biden administration's solution to the problem is in fact the cause of the problem. John Mattingly, the police sergeant who was on the scene at the Breonna Taylor shooting, is going to join me to talk about the events of that day and about the political aftermath.
And finally, I'm going to continue exploring the issue of revenge in Shakespeare's Hamlet, asking what does it mean to have revenge in this life when this life is not the only life?
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.
There's a deep vein of racism, an assumption of racism that runs through the political left.
And if you look for it, you see it crop up in many different places.
Here's just a single example that jumped out at me.
An article, Oregon Governor Signs Bill Removing Reading, Writing, and Math Requirements for High School Kids to, quote, help students of color.
Now, think about that.
The idea, the underlying premise is that students of color can't read.
They can't write. They're unable to do math.
And so, somehow lowering standards, eliminating requirements in these areas, this is basically what education itself is.
Is somehow going to help who?
Well, the ignorant. And who are the ignorant?
Obviously, in this case, students of color.
This is, by the way, Oregon Governor Kate Brown.
But she does it kind of unthinkingly naturally, as if, you know, of course, this is kind of what we on the left do.
And in fact, it is.
Now, I want to argue, I've talked in my earlier work about the racism in the Democratic Party, a deep vein of racism that began in slavery, in which slavery in America, of course, is distinguished as racial slavery.
So there was The idea that these people aren't just unfortunates or captives, they are inferior people that we are putting to work for free.
This was the ideology of the Democratic Party.
And then even after slavery, the invention of white supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan, and so on.
Now, the Democratic Party started in 1828, and its real power was in the 1830s and 40s, in which this kind of racial ideology went into full flower.
But at the same time, Karl Marx on the other side of the pond in Europe was writing...
And here, there's a very ignored tradition of bigotry on the part of Marx.
Marx was a racist.
By the way, he was also an anti-Semite.
Seems a little paradoxical because Marx was Jewish, not religiously Jewish, but you may say culturally Jewish.
Marx hated religion in general, so he was an anti-religious bigot in that broader sense.
And Marx was also an advocate, a supporter of colonialism and for racial reasons.
So this vein of bigotry in Marx has gone hidden, camouflaged, and covered up, really, by the political left.
They don't want it to seem like socialism is rooted at its very beginning in racism.
Let's remember, for example, that Black Lives Matter, the founders, Patrice Kalors and Alicia Garza, were both trained as Marxists.
Here is Kalors talking about it.
We are trained Marxists.
Myself and Alicia, in particular, are trained organizers.
They studied under a guy named Eric Mann, who's a former weather underground guy, kind of a Bill Ayers guy, who essentially instructed them in Marxist-Leninist ideology and techniques.
Now, think about the squad, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, that group.
Have you ever heard them say anything critical of Marx?
They're always railing against dead white males, just gotta remove dead white males from the curriculum.
But you notice that one dead white male that's never questioned is Karl Marx.
He's the apostle of socialism.
He's the leading light.
And Richard Delgado, who is one of the founders of critical race theory, he has said publicly, he goes, listen, this is the Marxist enterprise.
He goes originally, quote, we were just a bunch of Marxists.
And then they fanned out into legal theory, into sociology, into literature, and they began to push this racialized ideology.
But it's all built on Marxism.
Now, of course, I want to support, in this segment and the next one, my claim that Marx was, in fact, a racist.
The left claims that he wasn't a racist because he was anti-slavery.
And, of course, Marx has a kind of a famous letter which is always trotted out.
He wrote a letter to Lincoln in which he expressed his anti-slavery sentiments.
Well, anti-slavery is not the same thing as race.
Marx actually opposed slavery, but he didn't oppose slavery because it was racial.
He didn't oppose slavery because the blacks were being enslaved.
His point was that it's not good to have people work for free because they undercut the wages of the working class.
That was really Marx's ideological objection to slavery.
He also thought that there's a kind of natural movement in society from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism.
And he thought slavery was a legacy of feudalism.
So his point was that slavery is regressive.
He had no problem with the racial dimension of it at all.
Here's Marx talking about the U.S. annexation of California.
And this is right after the Mexican-American War.
Marx was all for it.
He goes, quote, without violence, nothing is ever accomplished in history.
And then he adds, is it a misfortune, he's being sarcastic, that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?
This is Engels now adding and replying to Marx.
Engels, of course, is in total agreement and the bigotry of Marx is reflected in Engels.
Here's Engels, in America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it.
It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States. In other words, the brown people of Mexico are going to be led into towards socialism by the more enlightened white people of the United States.
Marx had a son-in-law named Paul Lafargue, and this guy, interestingly, a very interesting fellow because he is a very good way for us to test a lot of Marx's ideas toward race.
This is a guy, by the way, who was a medical student.
He married Marx's second daughter named Laura, and he was apparently one-quarter Jewish, one-quarter Carib Indian, partly a black or Negroid, and the rest French.
He was kind of a mixed-race guy.
But here is Engels talking about him.
Using the N-word, by the way, which I won't use.
Engels says that Lafarge, this guy, has, quote, And in a letter to Marx's daughter, Lafarge's wife, Engels writes, quote, Being in his quality as an N, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.
So, Lafargue is representing apparently a district with a lot of mixed race people.
And Engels is basically going, well, you know, this was the old social Darwinist idea that you had the animal kingdom and then you had the lower races.
Darwin himself spoke about the lower races.
And the idea here is that these people are of a lower race.
This is what Engels is getting at.
And you may think that Marx would repudiate all this, but on the contrary.
Marx is completely on board with all this, and he uses the most nasty terms to describe his own son-in-law, and I'll get to those in the next segment.
So we see here that socialism is founded in racism, and the great apostles of socialism, Marx and Engels, were outright bigots.
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I'm continuing my discussion of the racism of Karl Marx, something that is echoed also in Marx's sidekick or colleague Engels.
And it's a little shocking when you first encountered the magnitude of it, because it's all over the place.
It's toward blacks, it's toward Jews, it's toward Hindus, it's toward Mexicans, it's toward all kinds of groups.
Here's Engels, for example, he's talking about the defeats by the Europeans of the Asian empires.
And he says, quote, that's due to the, quote, superior enterprise of the European race.
Marx says that the Hindus suffer from, quote, a natural languor.
Langor really here means kind of slothfulness or laziness.
And Marx, writing in the Telegraph, I believe, of London, credits colonialism with transforming the Asian economies, including the economy of India.
He goes,"...England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society." And he thinks this is great.
He goes, this loss of his old world imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the Hindu.
But Marx calls colonialism, quote, a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia, a positive development that he calls, quote, a regeneration.
And there's just a lot of this kind of stuff.
Here's Marx, by the way, I mentioned earlier his comments about his own son-in-law, Paul Lafarge.
And Marx apparently routinely called him the gorilla.
The gorilla's coming over, and so on.
Here's Marx referring to his fellow German socialist, a guy named LaSalle, who was apparently very stereotypically Jewish.
Marx calls him, quote, the greasy Jew, the little kike, and the Jewish N-word.
This is Marx.
And now, very interestingly, as I say, the left knows about this, or many of them do.
The more intelligent ones do know about this, but they try to hide it.
And they go, they try to put forward Marx's letter to Lincoln, Marx's anti-slavery, to cover up Marx and Engels' views of race.
When confronted with the views on race directly, what they'll say is, well, you know, Marx, this is kind of the way Europeans kind of were in the 19th century.
Marx, in other words here, is simply reflecting European thought.
Now, notice, by the way, that this is an excuse that the left never gives to anybody else.
Oh, you know, Jefferson's views are kind of troubling, but he was a man of his time.
Let it go. But with Marx, they give him an exemption because, of course, he's the founder of their left-wing ideology.
Incidentally, this argument about he was a man of his time doesn't really work.
And why? Because there were lots of people in Marxist time who didn't hold those racist views.
Here's Marx, by the way, embracing a writer named Pierre Trameau.
Pierre Trameau apparently thought that he had done a refutation of Darwin, because Darwin talks, for example, about a kind of evolution toward what Darwin called superior races.
And this guy, Tramot, goes, well, there's also a degeneration occurring in the human type toward more inferior races.
And, of course, Tramot here was referring to blacks, referring to Africans.
Marx loved it. He says that Tramot's work is, quote, a very significant advance over Darwin.
In other words, Darwin is only describing one type of racial evolution, so you may say upward, but what about the racial evolution downward?
Marx embraced Trameau's ideas on this score.
By the way, on the Jewish question, and I may have talked about this before on the podcast, here's Marx.
What is the worldly cult of the Jew?
In other words, what is the essence of the Jew?
He goes, it's not religious. A lot of Jews aren't religious.
He goes, what's their real religion?
Quote... Money.
He goes, they're haggling.
That is their worldly God, money.
And he goes, essentially, that emancipation from haggling and money is the true emancipation that we need from Judaism.
So, it's not just a matter of getting rid of the Jewish Old Testament God.
We've got to get rid of this money-grubbing behavior that is characteristic of the Jews.
Notice here that Marx is identifying the Jews with capitalism.
So we can sum up here, and here's a scholarly article that sums it up, and I'm just going to read the conclusion because I think it gives a pretty good summary of Marx's views and Engels on the race matter.
Marx and Engels were endowing races with inferior and superior qualities all the time.
Whites were more intelligent than blacks, Aryans and Semites more capable than other races, the South Slavs were lacking in the innate energies and thrust displayed by the Magyars and the Germans, whereas the Americans could, the Mexicans could not economically develop California.
While the English industrial and colonial triumphs were partly due to the innate character of that nation, the Asians were defeated because they lacked the entrepreneurial spirit of the European races.
And so on.
I like that and so on because the author is sort of letting on that there's a lot more in this vein.
The founders of leftism and socialism, far from being enlightened champions of equality, were in fact irredeemable bigots.
And that strain of bigotry, this is my point, passes through the left, it separately passes through the Democratic Party, and then converges today in the modern Democratic left.
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I've spoken before about inflation and how inflation is an insidious kind of hidden tax.
I've spoken before about how inflation eats away at not just your income, but also at your wealth.
But I want to present inflation in a somewhat new light here and talk about what makes the response of the Biden administration to our situation particularly insidious and in some ways even frightening.
Debbie and I actually fans, every now and then when we have time, we'll We're good to go.
What caused this plane to go down?
And it's fascinating because it takes you into the intricacies of how planes are constructed, how they're flown.
You learn a lot about the airline industry, and usually the problem is pilot error.
It's, well, once in a while it is a mechanical failure, but usually, even if it is mechanical failure, the pilots usually have done something wrong to compound the problem.
Now, Pilot error is normally inadvertent.
The pilot doesn't realize what's going on and somehow makes a mistake.
But this is wholly different, and there are very few plots, just really few and far between, where you don't have pilot error, but you would have, I'd call it, pilot villainy.
Pilot villainy. In one case, I think, honey, you remember, there was a drunk pilot.
In one case, a pilot intentionally wanted to crash the plane.
This wasn't Islamic suicide bombing, but it was rather the guy wanted to commit suicide, and he was willing to take all the passengers down with him.
He waited until the captain went to the bathroom and then locked the door.
Another case, and you can see we've watched quite a few of these.
You're like, Dinoosh, you guys have a rather alarming familiarity with these episodes.
But there was one case where the pilot literally killed his fellow pilot.
He had a vendetta against him and the struggle caused the plane to go down.
Now, these are obviously rare anomalies in the history of aviation.
What does this, you may ask, have to do with inflation?
Well... Here's what it is.
Inflation now has reached intolerable levels.
In fact, the rate of increase of inflation is the highest spike since 1982.
So we're now talking about going right back to the aftermath.
This was the early Reagan, but really the aftermath of the Carter era.
And you've all seen lists of prices.
Gas is up 58%.
Propane and firewood is up 34%.
Cars and trucks are up 31%.
Hotels and motels, 25%.
And it's bad.
In fact, there was an article in Bloomberg, and they were talking about how the Argentines, who, by the way, have 50% inflation, outrageous inflation, Have some advice for the Americans.
And the advice is really all bad.
It's all sort of logical under inflation, but it shows you how inflation makes you do very destructive things.
So one thing that the Argentines advise us to do is spend your paycheck right away.
Why? Because your dollar's worth more today than it will be worth tomorrow or next month or next year.
So the faster you spend it, the greater value you get for it.
Many Argentines apparently spend their paychecks the moment they receive them.
And they buy tons of stuff and then they try to store it.
So this Argentine guy goes, don't leave your money resting under the couch.
In other words, he's saying, don't save.
Don't save. The other thing is, the other advice from the Argentines, borrow lots of money.
Why? Because by and large, inflation is going to make it easier for you to repay the loan.
The money is going to be worth less when you pay it back.
So look at the destructive, unhealthy habits that are cultivated by inflation.
Now, what I find really crazy is these panelists on CNN and talking about how inflation is a good thing.
And even worse, you have...
I mean, think about it. If inflation is a good thing, why don't we want higher inflation?
Would we be better off if inflation was 30%, 50% like in Argentina, or 75%?
If more inflation is better, at what point does inflation cease to be a bad thing?
The CNN guys, by the way, never seem to get to any of this kind of analysis.
Inflation is a good thing.
And what I find, I think, scary, and this is where the airline aspect comes into this, The Biden administration is trying to push through more spending.
Now, spending and printing money that goes with spending is the cause of inflation.
It's too much money chasing the same number of goods.
That's the definition of inflation.
And what did the Biden administration want to do?
Spend more money. Cause more inflation.
And yet, instead of looking at spending and printing money as the cause of inflation, they are, with a straight face, This is Jen Psaki.
This is Biden. This is even some of the economists in the Biden administration.
They're presenting the cause of inflation as the cure for inflation.
So this would be similar to...
I mean, we're sort of like airline passengers here.
In the care of a drunken and deranged crew.
And the very thing that's causing the plane to crash.
The plane is losing lift, for example.
And here's the pilot. Let's pull up on the throttle.
Let's pull the plane even higher.
Let's move the nose higher. That's going to cure it.
Well, that's actually going to cause the plane to go into free fall.
Yes. And so this is the point that our economy is being driven into free fall.
It's not free falling of its own.
This is not mechanical failure.
And it's not human error.
This is profound human stupidity and willful blindness on the part of the Biden administration.
And if we, the American people, don't hold them to account, if we don't clean the bums out, and I'm not talking about one or two of them, all of them, We're going to be in for a very dire situation that it will not be easy to get out of.
I've just been speaking about the horrors of inflation and breaking news.
U.S. consumer prices soared 6.8% compared to last year.
This is the biggest increase since 1982 in 30 years.
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There's an important ruling that has come down from the Supreme Court pertaining to abortion.
And it's important in two different ways.
One, it clarifies the court's position on the Texas pro-life law.
And this is the law that allows private rights of action, private lawsuits against abortion providers.
It's basically shut down the abortion industry in Texas since September when the law went into effect.
And the court's decision is directly about that, and I'll get to it in a moment.
But there's a broader implication because in watching what the justices said about the Texas law, you have some window into how they're thinking about Roe v.
Wade and how they're thinking about the Dobbs case, the Mississippi law.
That's the big abortion decision that won't come down most likely until next year, maybe the spring of next year.
But I think we have an idea of how that vote is going to go down.
So I'm going to start by kind of Giving you my read on this.
Upon reading this latest decision, I think that there are five votes, five to four, against Roe versus Wade.
Now, that is a provisional judgment unless John Roberts can win over one of those five.
I think he's going to try to do it because I don't think Roberts is going to vote to overthrow Roe.
Now, Roberts, I think, is going to vote to uphold the Mississippi law.
I think what Roberts wants to do is uphold the Mississippi law, but keep Roe versus Wade intact.
So now he, in a sense, can't do that.
He will be transforming Roe.
He'll be putting, if you will, a qualification on Roe, saying essentially that after 15 weeks, any state can pass regulations on abortion, but before 15 weeks, it can't.
That's the part of Roe that I think Roberts wants to keep in place.
But interestingly, none of the five conservatives on the court are going for it.
So I think if Roberts wants his position to prevail, he's going to have to peel off one of the five.
Now, let's turn to the Texas law.
The Supreme Court's decision appeared to be a kind of mixed decision, but by and large, it's a big win for us.
Basically, the court said this.
It said that, yes, abortion providers can go ahead and file lawsuits in the Texas courts to contest the Texas law.
They can file those lawsuits, but even then, the court said, we're limiting who you can sue.
Can you sue the Attorney General Ken Paxton?
No. Can you sue the clerk of the court and basically say, listen, we're suing you because by recording these decisions and lawsuits, you are somehow participating in them?
No. Essentially, what the Supreme Court said is there's a very narrow window into who you can sue.
But your lawsuits can proceed.
But you can't just go around promiscuously suing every state official to somehow disrupt the state's judicial machinery and shut down, if you will, The effectiveness of this abortion law.
And the second part of it is the Supreme Court dismissed the Biden administration's appeal to stay the operation of the Texas law pending its litigation.
So the Biden guy said, you've got to stop this law, you've got to arrest it in its tracks, and you've got to shut down the Texas law until the constitutionality of it has been fully determined, until these lawsuits have been decided.
And the court said, no, we're not going to do that.
And so the Texas law remains in effect.
Now, what I was alluding to earlier was what Justice Roberts said in the context.
See, Justice Roberts did vote on this with the liberals.
Justice Roberts voted to stay the Texas law.
But, of course, with the three liberals plus Roberts, they only had four.
And so there were five justices on the other side.
I think this is actually the solid majority against Roe that we're counting on.
Roberts has turned out to be, to some degree, he's conservative on some things, but he's turned out to be a little bit of an Anthony Kennedy and a little bit of an unreliable character.
He seems to think that the way to hold the credibility of the court is to play this kind of balancing act.
It's kind of like trying to stand on a stick that's going this way and this way, and you throw your weight over here, and then you have to throw your weight over here somehow to maintain the balance.
So in a way, you'd have to say that Roberts is performing a weirdly political function.
While trying to keep the court insulated from politics, he is politically balancing its decisions so that they are not necessarily anchored to the constitutional text.
They're more aimed at how these decisions will be received by the American people and by the media.
Now, one of the leftists commentating on this in an article said that this guy is really not even the chief justice anymore because he doesn't command the majority.
And I guess what I'm saying is that given this kind of, I would say, unjudicial kind of balancing act that this guy is trying to perform, it's probably a good thing.
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Folks, the huge spike in crime that we're seeing across the country, but especially in democratic cities, has been driven by a few kind of notorious high-profile cases, George Floyd, Freddie Gray, Breonna Taylor.
I want to welcome to the podcast Sergeant John Mattingly.
He's a retired 21-year veteran with the Louisville Metro Police.
He's worked in narcotics and violent crime, and he was one of the guys on the scene at the Breonna Taylor shooting.
What I want to do is talk to him a little bit about that fateful day, what actually happened, but then also about the sort of left-wing narrative that began to grow out of that almost immediately.
And how these things kind of not only take on a life of their own, but become unplugged and distorted from the original incidents themselves.
Now, I should mention John Mattingly is the author of a new book.
It's called 12 Seconds in the Dark.
I think a great title.
It kind of captures, if you will, how things can change so much in a life and in a culture based upon something that happens immediately.
This book is out in March of 2022, but you can pre-order it now on Amazon.
Hey, John Mattingly, welcome to the show.
Thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
Let's talk a little bit about, I want to walk through the incident that day, but before we do that, talk about why you became a cop and talk about your experience in the Louisville Metro Police force.
Why did you become a cop and what kind of things did you work?
All right, Dinesh, appreciate you guys having me on today.
I became a police officer because my dad was a pastor in the inner city of Volk.
And everybody told me he took a dying church that had like 65 people attended weekly, grew it to over 1,300 people a week coming in to downtown Louisville in an area that everybody said, man, you need to get out.
You got to get out. You know, the crime's up.
People are not going to come to your church here.
And he did what he thought was right.
He stayed in the West End of Louisville in the urban area.
And he had people come from like 53 different zip codes every week to hear him pastor.
But at the same time, we reached out to the inner city through bus routes.
And we constantly brought in 7 to 10 bus routes a week full of kids from the inner city.
And we constantly ministered to them to bring them along and give them some hope.
And so as I got older, we lived there.
We lived in the urban area right there in the poorest part of town.
And I saw people around me.
I saw the drug dealers. I saw the corruption that happened.
And While God didn't call me to be a pastor, I felt the call to be a police officer and to help people in that way.
And so that's what I wanted to do.
When I got on the police department, I was on late watch for five years doing patrol and probably some of the best times of my life.
After that, I went into narcotics.
It's the thing I always wanted to do because I saw so much drug activity going on in Louisville that I said, I've got to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
And so I became a narcotics officer in 2005 in our flex unit.
Did that until I got promoted to sergeant in 2009.
And, uh, I was back on patrol for a year, and then I went back to our most violent crime unit.
It's called Viper. It was a violent crime interdiction unit that went after homicide suspects, gang members, people moving guns, and the most violent in the city.
Did that until 2015.
And then I went back to our narcotics unit from 2015 up until the incident in 2020.
Alright, let's fast forward to that incident, that sort of fateful day.
Let's walk through what happened.
It started, I'm assuming, with how were you notified to go to the scene?
A couple weeks prior.
The sergeant of that unit, we're in a, it's called CID, Criminal Interdiction Division, and all the narcotics was under that.
We had a unit called Place Based, which was a program they got from Chicago that went after certain locations that were problem areas.
So two weeks prior to that, they sent out an email saying we've got a manpower intensive program Activity this night is going to require about 50 officers if people will volunteer to come in and help.
So I just reached out and said, yeah, I'll be willing to help that night.
Okay. And you get the call and you're heading over now to the apartment in which Breonna Taylor is.
And was she with her boyfriend at the time?
Let's describe the scene as it is from your point of view.
What are you? Are you running up the stairs?
Pick it up at the fateful moment and lead us through it.
Okay, I'll start. I'll go back just a little bit.
So when we did the brief, they said, as far as they knew, there was only Brianna there, a female.
Give her time to come to the door.
Knock and give her time. Even though we had no knock signed by a judge, they said, give her time to come to the door.
So we were... Obliged to do that.
So when we go there, it's dark.
I can see the TV on in her window.
I can see the blue light, ambient light flashing.
And so we go up to the door.
It's on the bottom level. So we go up, we stack up.
I start banging on the door announcing.
After a couple of bangs and hollering police, the neighbor upstairs comes out and he says, man, what are y'all doing?
We're like, man, you got to go back in your house.
You got to go back in your house. Let us take care of this.
He's like, well, I've got to leave. My car's out front.
And the detective that was encountering him was arguing back and forth with him and said, just hold on.
You know, we'll be done in a minute. You can leave.
At that point, I looked at that detective and said, just focus on what we're doing.
We continued to bang on the door, knock on the door.
After about a minute, which seems like an eternity when you're at night banging on the door, not knowing what's on the other side of that.
Then I finally said, I looked at my lieutenant.
He gave me the nod and I said, well, let's hit it.
Okay. And by that said, what you meant is we got to go in.
Correct. Yeah, there's only so long you can stand outside of a door and knock when you've got to sign a warrant.
Okay, let's take a pause, and when we come back, I want to explore what happened once you kicked in the door.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with former Sergeant John Mattingly.
John, we were talking about Breonna Taylor, and here you are, and you're up at the apartment, and you've banged on the door, no answer, and you've decided it's time to go in.
Then what happens? So as soon as the door opens, I clear to the right.
It's called cutting the pie.
I clear and see as much as I can see.
Nobody's in the doorway at this point.
Everybody's yelling, police search warrant, police search warrant.
As my visual real estate runs out on the living room, I have to step in the doorway to see down the hallway.
As soon as my body steps in that door frame area, I see Kenneth Walker and Breonna Taylor side by side.
It's almost like one person down this hallway, 25, 30 feet away.
And as soon as I turn, I see the gun and feel the pain in my leg, hear the boom, and immediately shot.
So I returned four shots, and then my leg gives out because it went through the muscle.
So I'm basically working on tendon and bone at this point.
I kind of go down behind the door and come back around and fire two more rounds.
And then I reach down and feel my leg.
And through all the years of first aid, I realized that's too much blood on my hand to be just a through and through thigh wound.
So immediately I yelled out to the guys there.
I've been shot in my femoral.
And I back away and I scoot my rear end away from the door because the guy who was protecting me, Detective Cosgrove, had stepped over me to shoot to get me to get out of the doorway.
And so when I did that, I got up and went to the parking lot, hobbled out there, fell down into the ground in the parking lot.
At that point, my lieutenant grabs my vest from behind, slides me out, and I start saying, man, I need a tourniquet.
Got to get the tourniquet on. So I get a tourniquet on my leg, and it takes about 35-40 minutes before we get to the hospital.
And I can tell you, the pain from the tourniquet is 10 times worse than the pain from the gunshot.
It's no fun. Now, just to zoom in and freeze frame for a moment on the incident itself, two factors stand out at me.
One is that Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend weren't in two separate locations.
It wasn't that you shot at one and hit the other.
You're basically saying that they were sort of joined at the hip.
They were in the same spot.
And the second thing that you said that I think is very telling is that He shot first.
And not only did he shoot, he hit you.
And then you returned fire.
And so now that, what you just described, is a little different than the sort of public narrative of the Breonna Taylor shooting.
Talk for a moment about when were you aware that there was this whole narrative, hey, the cops went storming in, They fired and killed Breonna Taylor.
She was not a criminal.
This was a case of racism.
When did that all...
Did that start immediately, or was that kind of a subsequent narrative that developed later?
Well, so we had a little reprieve because March 13th was the very day that the federal government shut down because of the coronavirus.
So in the back of my mind, I thought, well, okay, we might be good here because this thing has, you know, encapsulated America.
It's taken over. You know, this is the big thing.
And so for a while, we were kind of safe because I'll tell you what, ever since Ferguson, every white cop, nobody, you don't want to shoot anybody.
But you definitely don't want to shoot a black person.
That's just the reality of it.
And every time you hear a shooting come out, you ask, man, Before you even ask the proper question, which is, was it a good shoot?
You ask, were they black or white?
And if they say white, you go, oh, good.
And that's ridiculous.
It has to even be that way because that's not what police work's about.
So we were good for a while.
Then Ahmaud Arbery happened.
And even in this time period, her local civil attorneys before Sam, before Ben Crump got on board was throwing all this false allegations out.
She was asleep in her bed.
We had the wrong apartment.
The warrant wasn't for her house, which is all inaccurate.
And saying her boyfriend, the other boyfriend, the other guy that was involved, whose money and stuff she was holding, they're saying, well, he was already in custody, which is not true.
Everything happened simultaneously.
So all these lies were coming out.
Our department was putting its head in the sand, hoping it would go away because of coronavirus, which it didn't.
And then George Floyd happened.
But before George Floyd happened, I could feel the tension in the air starting to rise.
I started reaching out to people saying, can we please get the truth out, please?
The answer I got was, no, we don't want to set precedent for future cases.
We don't put that stuff out.
I was amazed.
said, so you'd rather our city burn than to get the truth out.
And they wouldn't do it.
Now, our mayor is ultra liberal.
He's progressive.
And he had already taken the stance of we're supporting Brianna Taylor's family, which is fine.
I don't, you know, I don't have a problem with that, but at the same time, he wasn't supporting the police in this, it was all, we're going to get to the bottom of it.
If I could fire them, I would, but they're protected under this state statute and all these things.
And so this became the crying point for the government and for our police department against its own officers.
And that was part of the corruption that you look at and you go, this doesn't make sense.
And there's some more stuff I've got in the book where the president of the Metro Council, I know personally, I reached out to him with all the facts.
He said, I'll do a press conference Monday and get them all out.
He didn't do that. He jumped on the bandwagon and actually spoke against us.
But all that's documented, which is good on our part.
And so we thought we were safe, but then it all just exploded after the George Floyd incident.
Talk about two things as we close here.
One is, did this have a demoralizing effect on you that was part of the reason you decided to step out and go, listen, I've had enough of this?
And second, is it not a fact that not just the defund the police specifically, but the broader campaign of demoralizing the police is in fact the most likely explanation for why we've seen an emboldening of the criminal class and a huge spike in crime rates nationwide?
Well, that is the main factor, what you just said right there, the emboldment of them, because you've got courts who won't hold them accountable.
They let them out. Almost every major case you look at across the country, and I've been keeping track of it, the fact that the people that are involved in it that either led to a police incident that became controversial or innocent people dying, those people should have been in jail.
They should have been held accountable.
Instead, these judges are letting them out on probation.
For instance, the entire reason we were at the House this night, Jamarcus Glover, he had five pending felony cases for drugs and guns.
Then he caught this case.
This is including the cases he had out of Mississippi already for the same type thing.
He came to Louisville. He has all these cases stacked up in court.
What did they do with him?
Two weeks ago, released him on probation for these charges.
Clear and free. Not even house arrest.
They said, oh, if you go back to Mississippi, then you're good.
You can go. And he left.
And so there's no accountability for these guys and they know it.
And so the emboldenment has come.
And you talk about defunding the police.
So the narrative of, quote, defunding the police got some backlash, right?
They got some pushback. People didn't like it.
But they've effectively done it anyway.
They already did it. They didn't have to sign any laws.
They didn't have to do anything. We're good to go.
And so, yeah, part of me, I wanted to stay.
My family's safety was in peril because we had death threats on us.
So it probably wouldn't have been smart for me to go back.
But even when I attempted to go back, our chief sent an involuntary transfer to hide me in the property room.
And that's not what I wanted to do. That's not why I'm a police officer.
And I said, well, I didn't do anything wrong.
I didn't break any laws.
I didn't violate any policy.
Why am I being punished? And they just said, well, it's for the good of the department.
So, that was my cue to say, well, I'm going to exit stage left and go somewhere where I can make a difference.
And that's one of the reasons I wrote this book, Dinesh, is because Not only to get the truth out, but then to expose the corruption that goes on, to expose some of the things behind the scenes that the average citizen just doesn't know about.
I mean, it's like pulling Oz's curtain back and going, you know, this is what's happening.
And so if I can be a voice for the guys coming after me, for the police officers, if I can help them, then I can make a difference that way and, you know, hang up the badge.
This is awesome stuff, John.
It sounds like a great book. I'm going to order it myself.
It's called 12 Seconds in the Dark.
It comes out in March, but you can order it now.
John Mattingly, thanks for joining me on the podcast.
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I want to continue my discussion of the issue of revenge in Hamlet.
And Shakespeare in this great play makes revenge into something very problematic.
And in some ways it is.
Revenge is problematic, but why?
It's problematic because in revenge you're going outside the law.
You're making yourself an instrument of the law.
But let's remember that revenge is less problematic in Hamlet for a simple reason.
Hamlet is not carrying out He isn't being asked to carry out some private revenge.
He is actually being asked to avenge his father and in the process remove the lawlessness that has installed itself as the ruling power of Denmark.
So something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Why? Because the fish rots from the head.
So tyranny has established itself.
Tyranny here referring not to tyranny versus rule of the people, but rather a bad king, an unlawful king, versus old Hamlet, who is, of course, a lawful king.
Throughout the play, Hamlet hesitates.
He postpones.
He is in anguish.
He has long monologues in which he moves into his interior life.
These monologues are so extensive and so philosophical that some people have wondered if the play itself, the plot, is just an excuse for these monologues.
So the monologues, far from being a digression from the play, appear to take on a kind of life of their own.
So you've got the narrative of the play, the revenge plot, and then you've got Hamlet's interior discussions and monologues, and occasionally he's also talking to Horatio and to others and sort of divulging his private thoughts.
I think the way to reconcile these two, the plot on the one hand and Hamlet's interior life on the other, is to look at them as pulling in opposite directions.
The plot is saying to Hamlet, do it.
To do or not to do, act.
And Hamlet is constantly thinking.
Hamlet is always to be or not to be.
That is the question. Well, that's not really the question.
The question is, what Hamlet are you going to do to rectify the rottenness that is now in Denmark?
If you contrast Hamlet with Julius Caesar, you see that in the play Julius Caesar, Brutus has no compunction in acting.
Brutus will immediately, once he decides, and Brutus doesn't decide right away.
Brutus actually has to think about it.
Here's Brutus. Since Cassius first did wet me against Caesar, I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
The genius and the mortal instruments are then in council, and the state of man, like to a little kingdom, suffers then the nature of an insurrection.
So, Brutus is having this inner convulsion, but the inner convulsion is on the purely natural plane.
Basically, Brutus is trying to think about, should I do it?
Is Caesar really a tyrant?
If he is a tyrant, how do I make it work?
And those are Brutus' main questions.
This is not to say that you don't have an element of the supernatural.
At one point, a ghost shows up.
But Brutus talks to the ghost as if the ghost is just another character in the play.
I will see thee at Philippi.
Okay, see you then!
So, there's no sense here that you are being pulled out of this world and into another world.
But contrast this with Hamlet.
When Hamlet sees the ghost, his father's ghost, the ghost old Hamlet describes himself as, quote, doomed for a certain term to walk the night and for the day confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done exist.
Old Hamlet is kind of in purgatory.
He's experiencing the flames of purgatory.
His soul is haunted.
So there's a very clear sense here that there's another life.
And our fate in this life is connected to that life.
And Hamlet is operating in this sense in a supernatural universe completely different from Brutus.
You see this right away when Hamlet goes to kill Claudius.
And what does he see Claudius doing?
Claudius is praying.
And Hamlet says, I'm not going to quote Hamlet, he goes, he says he can't do it, quote, now that he is praying.
And Hamlet goes on to say, listen, I want to sort of catch him when he is committing some sin, because that way he'll go straight to hell.
I'd like to sort of catch him when he's sort of in my mother's bed.
Great, I'll get him then, straight to hell.
Now, what Hamlet doesn't know, of course, is that Claudius, right before we've seen Claudius attempting to pray, and Claudius can't pray.
He says, quote,"'Pray can I not?' And why not?
Because he's still in possession of the fruits of his sin.
See, one of the things about repenting of a sin, hey, I'm sorry I stole it.
Well, you know what? Give it back.
If you're still in possession of it, you should divest yourself.
Otherwise, how sorry are you?
So, with Claudius, he's unwilling to give up the kingdom.
He's unwilling to give up the fruits of his crime.
And therefore, in a certain honest sense, he goes, I really can't pray.
But Hamlet doesn't know this.
So here's Hamlet.
And Hamlet, of course, I'm now going to turn to his great speech, which I'm just going to read a couple of lines of.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them.
Hamlet is contemplating suicide.
And what scares him?
What scares him is he doesn't know what's going to come after death.
Here we go. Death, the undiscovered country from whose born no traveler returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have.
Then fly to others that we know not of.
We don't know what the life to come is.
We could be actually putting ourselves in greater danger.
Why? Because death may not be the worst thing in the world.
Eternal damnation is manifestly worse.
Now, what's really interesting, if you read this speech, it talks about sort of the...
And scholars love this because it's like Hamlet's reflecting on the troubles of life.
And it takes you a moment to realize that those troubles have nothing to do with Hamlet's current situation.
Hamlet's current situation has nothing to do with the fact that, oh, life is full of troubles, oh, our body begins to break down over time, oh, it is the case that our thoughts and imaginations outrun what we can actually achieve.
None of that.
Hamlet has a simple task ahead of him, to be or not to be is not the question before him.
The question before him is, Are you going to rid Denmark of despotic Claudius?
Yes or no?
This is a political play in which Hamlet's task is not to be or not to be, but to do or not to do.
And I think what we see here and what Shakespeare depicts is the effect of Hamlet's Christian conscience in putting shackles around his action.
Now, eventually Hamlet does take action.
But notice that when he takes action, in some ways it's far worse than had he acted before.
There's Hamlet.
His negligence leads to Ophelia's death.
In some ways, Hamlet is the direct cause of Ophelia's death.
She might have committed death by suicide.
Hamlet erroneously kills Polonius, thinking that he's Claudius.
There's a man behind the curtain, Hamlet thinks it's Claudius, turns out to be Polonius.
Hamlet then, by killing Polonius, stimulates the revenge of Polonius' son, Laertes, who comes to kill Hamlet.
And there are bodies on the stage all over the place by the time the play ends.
So wouldn't Hamlet, this is the question to ask, wouldn't Hamlet have been better off had he acted first and thought later?
Not because it is a good idea to just act on impulse, but because Hamlet actually had a political mission in front of him, and in failing to carry it out, he ended up with a situation far worse.
In fact, a situation in which not Hamlet, but Fortenbras, who's coming from Norway, an external power, now inherits the throne of Denmark.
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