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Dec. 14, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:30
FACEBOOK THOUGHT POLICE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep237
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Facebook files a legal brief in which it admits that its fact-checkers aren't presenting facts at all.
They're presenting statements of opinion.
What a bunch of frauds.
I'm going to look at the recent arrest of a bunch of Antifa thugs to test Joe Biden's proposition that Antifa is merely an idea.
Former Nixon counsel Jeff Shepard will join me.
We're going to talk about Watergate and the origins of the deep state.
And I'll conclude my discussion of Hamlet by talking about Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and the art of Christian statesmanship.
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.
In his dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell introduces the concept of the thought crime.
The thought crime is enforced by what Orwell calls the thought police.
in the state of Oceania.
You've got omnipresent surveillance.
You've got telescreens.
You've got microphones and cameras.
And people are being monitored for what they think.
And the thought police is enforcing this orthodoxy on behalf of whom?
On behalf of the state, the regime, what Orwell calls Big Brother.
Now, we have thought crime in the United States, but it occurs not directly through the state, but on behalf of the state.
And it occurs through these massive social media platforms.
And now I want to focus in on one of them, namely Facebook.
One of the worst of them, by the way.
Now, I've had a sort of precarious existence on Facebook.
Most of the time, I am either demonetized or my distribution is restricted.
And it's important to know I've got well over 2 million followers on Facebook.
And most of them don't see my posts because Facebook is, in a sense, strangling me on its platform.
And Facebook has put out, rather brazenly, lots of topics that are sort of out of bounds, or at least certain things you can't say about them that make effective debate, legitimate debate on these topics, effectively impossible.
And this is an ever-growing list.
It started out with one or two.
You can talk about election fraud.
You can talk about certain things about COVID. And now it's election fraud, and it's COVID, and it's the trends, and it's climate change, and it's abortion.
And it's on and on and raising the question, what can you discuss freely?
Now, Facebook's mechanism of censorship is fact-checking.
They have this army of fact-checkers, outside organizations that they sort of ally with.
For example, on climate change, Facebook is allied with a group that is apparently called Climate Feedback slash Science Feedback.
It's a Facebook partner, and they supply, if you will, fact checks of statements made on Facebook.
And Facebook is really clear that even if you write an op-ed, a piece of opinion, they're going to fact check it.
And they're going to, if they discover that you're...
Sort of presenting misinformation, as they call it.
They'll give you strikes. They'll give you warnings.
They will demonetize your page.
In some cases, they will threaten to unpublish you, which is essentially to shut down your page.
Now, recently, I appeared on Fox.
I did a segment on the Ingram Angle, and I posted the segment on Facebook.
It was a discussion of Kyle Rittenhouse, and I made the argument that Rittenhouse was defending himself.
And Facebook gave me a strike.
I'm now going to read from their strike.
Your page is at risk of being unpublished and has reduced distribution and other restrictions.
It says that, quote, your post goes against our community standards on dangerous individuals and organizations.
It might seem from this that I was somehow advocating violence or promoting some dangerous groups.
Nothing is further from the truth.
All I was doing is defending Kyle Rittenhouse, and Facebook had structured their fact check so that that alone could The defense of Rittenhouse was, quote, the defense of a dangerous individual.
See, Facebook had bought into the narrative, kind of the lies about Kyle Rittenhouse, and there are many of them.
I mean, here's the interesting point.
If on Facebook, in all the months leading up to the Rittenhouse trial, you said that Rittenhouse was a white supremacist, for which there's no evidence, Facebook wouldn't strike you.
If you said that he chased Rosenbaum and Huber, Facebook wouldn't strike you.
If you said that he had an illegal gun, Facebook wouldn't strike you.
If you said that he shot without provocation, Facebook wouldn't strike you.
If you said he was a dangerous vigilante, Facebook wouldn't strike you.
So Facebook is good with all these, now, documented lies.
And Facebook even admits, in retrospect, that their claim that Kyle Rittenhouse is dangerous is also a lie.
In fact, it's a lie that was disproven in court and discredited by the jury, which vindicated Rittenhouse.
So here's how Facebook, these deceitful characters, when I protested this strike against my page, I want to now read from their investigation, because it's so telling.
After investigation, it appears that this post was correctly removed according to our policies at the time, says Facebook.
Then they go, since the verdict in Kenosha, we rolled back the restrictions we had in place.
They say, we will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse.
So you might think, well, okay, fine.
So now you've cleared up the matter.
You've come to realize that Rittenhouse is not dangerous.
But... Here's Facebook's fallback.
Quote, Since this was posted and removed before the verdict slash policy change, the content will not be restored.
I'm afraid there is nothing we can do.
So this is Facebook.
Now, I'm not here just to plead my own special case.
I mean, I think it's illuminating because it basically shows how corrupt these people are.
They're essentially without scruples, without any decency or morals.
But they've also been caught out by John Stossel.
Apparently has filed a lawsuit against Facebook claiming that Facebook strike against him.
Facebook apparently did a fact check on Stossel's claims about climate change.
They relied on some checking by this group called Climate Feedback.
And Stossel said that you've defamed me.
You've maligned me.
You've essentially libeled me.
Why? Because you have falsely asserted that I was wrong, and you have given public notice of this, and in fact, I'm not wrong.
I'm right. So let's see what the facts really are.
Now, here's where things get really interesting.
In its legal defense, what Facebook says, and I can read from this, is that they say that our fact-checkers aren't really fact-checkers at all.
Facebook basically goes, you can't hold us responsible for maligning you because in order to malign you, we would have had to make a factually erroneous statement about you.
But our fact-checking is merely a statement of opinion.
In fact, they say not only is our fact-checking a statement of opinion, the fact-checking we get from outside groups like the climate feedback is also a matter of opinion.
So let's step back.
Here we go. The conclusion, I guess they had put a quote, missing context claim on John Stossel.
They go, the conclusion that the video was missing context is necessarily a judgment call, one that is not capable of verification or refutation by means of objective proof.
And then Facebook goes on to say that the suit should be thrown out because, after all, fact-checkers aren't really fact-checkers.
So this is delicious stuff because it blows up the whole Facebook model.
The whole idea that Facebook is removing misinformation, Facebook is now saying, well, that's not misinformation.
That's information we disagree with.
That's information. That is opinion that clashes with our opinion.
And we want only our opinion to be on Facebook.
So it is so interesting that the whole claim of fact-checking is being exposed in court as a farce and as a fraud.
And what Facebook has really been doing, it turns out, is making false claims about its product.
I mean, it's almost like they should be sued now for false advertising because Facebook is telling its viewers, its customers, so to speak, that we are doing fact-checking.
We're actually presenting factual information on Facebook, and now they're saying in court to another audience.
We're really not doing that.
Now, I want to emphasize how important all of this is and how much it shows that we should not play the role of the wildebeest.
So many of us like, yeah, we'll keep going on Facebook.
Yeah, I don't see Dinesh's post that much anymore.
I'm just going to wait until the lion comes and eats me.
No, we need to be proactive.
And what proactive means for you is I'm not saying get off Facebook or get off Twitter, but install yourself on all the alternative platforms.
Go to Rumble and sign up.
Go to Getter.
Go to Parler. Follow me on Locals.
In fact, tonight, 7.30 Eastern, I'll be doing a live Q&A on Locals.
Just go to dinesh.locals.com.
Subscribe to my Locals channel.
And you'll get all kinds of exclusive content and censorship-free content, including content that I can't not just post on this podcast, but can certainly post on Facebook or on YouTube or, in some cases, even on Twitter.
Censorship is one of the great banes of our time.
You can be part of the solution.
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One of the strange and perhaps even laborious aspects of our time is that we have to refute things that shouldn't need refutation.
We have to attempt to prove things that are self-evident, that are right in front of us, that we can see with our eyes.
And one of those things we saw all across the country, Antifa riots.
And yet Joe Biden insists that Antifa doesn't exist.
It's not an organization.
There are no Antifa chapters or blocks.
Antifa is, in his words, merely an idea.
And it isn't just Joe Biden.
Joe Biden's known to sort of blurt out nonsense from time to time.
But here's Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI, testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee.
And he says, quote, Antifa is not a group or an organization, end quote.
Rather, he says, Antifa is, quote, an ideology.
So let's test the question of whether Antifa even exists.
Now, recently in San Diego, a prosecutorial team working with Orange County and working with the authorities in LA has arrested 11 Antifa members and charged them with felony conspiracy and felony assault, among other charges.
This involves a riot case in which Antifa showed up en masse to attack a demonstration of Trump supporters.
The demonstration was in Pacific Beach, California.
It was in January of this year.
And Antifa brought guns, they brought ammunition, they brought body armor, and all of this was confiscated by the cops and by the authorities.
Now there is an elaborate Antifa on the West Coast.
I mean, not just on the West Coast.
It also exists in Portland and Seattle and other places.
There's a New York Antifa that's very visible and very active.
But what happened is that these West Coast Antifa chapters realized that there was going to be this Trump demonstration.
And so they put out the word on social media to have, quote, direct action.
And this direct action was all captured on video.
So you could see there's Antifa, there they are, in their signature black clothing, their pro-Antifa patches.
They're working in a coordinated fashion to intercept victims, to strike them, to blind them, to hit them with pepper spray first, to kind of disable them, and then beat them up with deadly weapons, punches, kicks, projectiles.
So all of this was going on, it's all on video, and yet the left is pretending, as it has in other cases, Well, now when you read the charging documents from the San Diego District Attorney's Office, you realize that Antifa is most certainly an organization.
And are organized into two groups, one originating from Los Angeles and the other from San Diego.
ANTIFA, all caps, is known to use force, fear, and violence to further their own interests and to suppress the interests of others.
This tactic is referred to as direct action and is known to mean acts of violence such as assault, battery, assault with deadly weapons, arson, and vandalism.
To give you an idea, I've been going through the list of suspects.
Here's one of them, Samuel Ogden, charged with felony, conspiracy, and assault.
He's from Washington State, so he kind of came in for this.
If you go to his social media, he basically says that he's an anti-fascist, and one of the groups he likes on Facebook is, quote, Antifa International.
So Antifa International is obviously an organization.
It's not merely an idea.
It's not merely an ideology.
Final confirmation that Antifa is an organization is that Antifa groups on Twitter have been fundraising, quote, emergency bail for all these guys, for these 11 guys.
They're using Cash App, they're using Venmo, and they like these platforms, by the way, because these platforms allow them to operate under pseudonyms and to crowdfund for violent criminal suspects.
And so think about it.
A number of these people who are arrested have already been bonded out.
So where did the money come from?
Who raised the money?
How can you do it without some sort of an organization?
It's very obvious that Antifa is an organized group.
And it is an organized group that is doing the bidding of the left and of the Democratic Party.
And it's convenient for people like Joe Biden and apparently even for Christopher Wray to pretend and to publicly assert falsely that Antifa does not exist.
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You know, I gotta hand it to Governor Newsom in California.
I am often thought to be, and I am, a real despiser of the left.
I despise their values.
I despise a lot of them.
And I despise what they're doing to this country.
I do admire them from a distance because of their political audacity, how quickly they're on an issue.
They never let an opportunity or a crisis go to waste.
There's a lot that we can learn from them in their alacrity and in their political shrewdness.
Now, here's the latest example of this.
Right after the Supreme Court left intact the Texas law and set in effect that Texas, on abortion, can pass a law in which ordinary citizens are allowed to sue abortion clinics and sue procurers and providers of abortion.
Doctors, nurses, even the people who drive you to get your abortion.
And so this has basically shut down the abortion industry in Texas.
Very effective. One of the few kind of original and genius moves by our side.
And so what does Governor Newsom say?
He goes, why don't we steal this tactic?
If it worked for them, let's make it work for us.
So Newsom has now alerted the California legislature.
And by the way, they have a Democratic supermajority.
So basically, when he does this, it's not as good as having happened.
But you can say the wheels are already churning.
And basically what Newsom says is, quote, if that's the precedent, then we'll let Californians sue those who put ghost guns and assault weapons on our streets.
So Newsom is trying to do, essentially to the gun industry, what the right has effectively done to the abortion industry in Texas.
Now, Newsom tried, by the way, to go after assault weapons and ghost guns in the law.
They passed a law essentially outlawing AR-15s, but that law was promptly struck down by a judge who essentially said, oh no, AR-15s are good because they defend you against tyranny, and they're also good to defend your home, not to mention the fact that the Second Amendment specifically says that people have a right to bear arms, and so no law, no state law can contravene a constitutional right.
So the California law was struck down, but now...
As with abortion, Newsom wants to do an end run around that, and he wants to do it in exactly the same way by allowing private citizens to sue.
Let's remember that our constitutional rights are upheld by the state.
Our constitutional rights are against the power of the government.
Congress shall make no law, which in effect means government shall make no law, restricting freedom of the press, restricting ownership of guns, and so on.
Now, what's the difference, if you will, between the California proposal of Newsom and the Texas law?
I can think really of just one.
And that is this.
The abortion right was always a bogus right.
Yes, there was a court decision, Roe v.
Wade, upholding this right.
But it's a right nowhere to be found in the Constitution.
And therefore, the Texas end run around this abortion right was an end run around a fictitious right.
A right that was, in a sense, implanted in the Constitution by an arrogant and judicially activist Supreme Court.
The difference with the Second Amendment is the Second Amendment is an enumerated right.
Nothing could be more clear.
The right to bear arms shall not be infringed.
Full stop. End of statement.
And so, I think that the point here is that the Texas law, what the Supreme Court is saying with the Texas law is, okay, in the long term, perhaps this law is not going to stand, but we are reconsidering Roe v.
Wade itself. That's the point of the Dobbs case.
On the other hand, the Second Amendment could not be more clear.
You can hold up the Constitution, hold it upside down, even, you know, squeeze lemon juice on it.
There it is. The Second Amendment is clearly, and in fact, the fact that it's second doesn't mean it's less important than, say, the First Amendment, which is about the right to free speech.
Now, in a bitter protest against the Supreme Court leaving intact for the moment the Texas law, Justice Sotomayor said, quote, stop the madness.
Stop the madness.
And some people might say, well, Dinesh, there you go.
She was right because now California is taking up the madness and the principle that you have endorsed in the Texas case is coming back to haunt you.
But of course, the real madness here is Roe versus Wade itself.
The idea that you can discover a fundamental right nowhere present in the Constitution, that's the true madness.
That's what Texas is really trying to protest against.
And so once the Supreme Court rectifies the matter itself, overturning Roe, displacing, if you will, the precedent of this bogus right, Then I don't think we're going to need the kind of end runs that the Texas law represents.
Why? Because there won't be a right to abortion.
This will be a matter that is now decentralized, that is now left to the states.
and on the other side of it, the Second Amendment can remain secure.
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One of the striking, to some degree, even amusing aspects of the Biden administration is that even when they do something outrageous, ridiculous, preposterous, they don't back down.
They push forward.
They've done this on inflation.
They've done this on the border.
And I'm a little surprised to see Biden is still doing it on Afghanistan.
It would be so easy for Biden to say, well, you know what, guys, I was right to do the pullout.
Trump himself wanted to do the pullout.
It was mishandled.
I take some responsibility for that.
But no, Biden is digging in.
And here's his latest comment on the matter.
Listen. Like, for example, Afghanistan.
Well, I've been against that war in Afghanistan from the very beginning.
We're spending $300 million a week in Afghanistan over 20 years.
Now, everybody says you could have gotten out without anybody being hurt.
No one's come up with a way to ever indicate to me how that happens.
Wow. Think about this.
What he's saying is that the deaths of those Americans, the people falling out of the planes, all of that was inevitable.
It had to happen. There was no better way to do it.
What he's essentially saying is that if he could do it again, he'd do it the same way.
No one has had a better idea.
Well, let's just refresh your memory by going into some of the specifics here, and I'm just going to kind of check them off like little boxes.
Point number one was clearly established that the United States, by its own volition, turned Kabul over to the Taliban and held only the Kabul airport.
The Taliban actually said to the United States, would you like to keep control of Kabul?
Because the Taliban wanted America to get out.
And they wanted to facilitate and even accelerate the process.
But America said, no, no, no, you can move into Kabul.
We'll just hold on to the airport.
That's point number one. And it's a critical point because point number two, the Taliban controlled all the entry points to the airport.
In fact, the Taliban released the suicide attacker from jail and obviously let him in the pathway that led right up to the airport.
Three, the U.S. had prematurely closed the Bagram Air Force Base.
That didn't have to happen. We've had Bagram all that time.
How hard would it have been to keep the airbase a little bit longer, use that as the channeling point for the whole evacuation, then close the base, either blow up the military vehicles that were left behind and left in Taliban hands.
So, get the people out first.
And then... Let's remember that even in Vietnam, let's think about it, the United States had a far greater commitment of troops in Vietnam.
Nevertheless, we got everybody out.
There was later an issue about the MIAs.
There was an issue about getting the bodies home.
That's a whole different matter than leaving live Americans back in Vietnam, which we did not do.
No soldiers were left behind, but in Vietnam.
In Afghanistan, we not only had soldiers needlessly killed in a preventable action, but also, to this day, Americans left behind in Afghanistan.
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Christmas Day. Guys, I've been reading a fascinating book.
It's called The Nixon Conspiracy by Jeff Shepard.
Now, Jeff Shepard is a retired corporate lawyer.
He graduated from Harvard Law School.
He joined the Nixon White House staff.
He became associate director of the Domestic Council.
He also worked as deputy counsel on Nixon's Watergate defense team.
Welcome, Jeff Shepard, to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
What I find fascinating about this book, well, first of all, your level of knowledge and detail here is just mind-blowingly impressive.
But you describe a kind of intellectual journey in which you initially kind of went along with the kind of, I would call it, the all-the-presidents-men storyline that sort of Nixon was complicit in Watergate.
He was the bad guy.
He knew all about it.
He tried to cover it up.
The Watergate tapes prove it.
But now you are sort of unwinding that narrative.
You say you've discovered new information that vindicates Nixon to a degree, and you almost wish that Nixon had pushed forward and fought this out in the Senate.
Talk a little bit just about that journey of discovery, which kind of gets to, I guess, the reason for why you wrote this book.
Sure, Dinesh, and thank you for having me on.
I was a member of his staff for five years.
I was the youngest lawyer on the White House staff.
I believed in him, believed in his policies and everything else, and I was eager to work on his defense team.
But then out of nowhere came this tape, which is known fondly as the smoking gun, which surprised his lawyers and caused us to lose faith in the president.
We demanded it be made public.
And when it was made public, the president lost his remaining support and resigned.
He resigned three days after the release of the smoking gun tape.
And what you describe is absolutely true.
I totally lost faith.
But it turns out the lawyers misunderstood the tape.
Now, I'm intimately familiar with the tape.
I was the third person to hear it.
I prepared the official transcript.
And I'm the one who first called it the smoking gun.
But it turns out it was a huge mistake.
He was not involved in the cover-up.
He was trying to protect the identity of two major Democrat donors who gave money to his campaign under the absolute certainty their names would never become public.
And that's all he was trying to protect.
It was a heck of a misunderstanding, Dinesh, but the lawyers misunderstood.
Well, if you take out that tape, And then you go back and look at the case.
There is no case against President Nixon.
It was a railroad job.
I've concluded, and the book goes into it, there was a secret cabal of corrupt prosecutors, vindictive judges, and a complacent press that went along with everything that was being wrongfully accused of Nixon.
He's not exonerated.
What did happen? There was a break-in.
There really was a cover-up.
But the president was not intimately involved in the cover-up.
That's the whole point of the book.
The Nixon conspiracy describes how Nixon's enemies voided his massive re-election victory and drove him from office.
Now, I want to come back to this issue of the deep state and the orchestration of the attack on Nixon, but let me focus on Watergate itself.
There might be people, younger people watching the podcast, who don't know what the Watergate story is about at all.
And so, let's just clarify a couple of just questions.
Practical details.
Is it a fact that Nixon did not order, in fact, did not even know about the original break-in into the Watergate building and the original attempt to do espionage and get information from the Democratic headquarters?
Nixon was not involved in that, was he?
That is absolutely true and uncontroverted.
It has never been even accused.
Nixon or his top staff members of knowing about the planned break-in.
Those were mid-level people.
It was done by his campaign.
There's no question about that.
They were caught red-handed breaking into the offices of the Democrat National Committee looking for adverse information.
But they were caught red-handed.
And they were prosecuted.
The difficulty was who knew.
And it turns out some pretty senior people on the reelection campaign knew.
And there was a cover-up to try to protect them.
Now, the cover-up was run by the president's own lawyer, John Dean.
But he didn't tell his superiors, in my view, he didn't tell his superiors what he was doing.
He was causing people to lie to the grand jury.
He was participating in payoffs to the burglars for their silence.
And when the cover-up failed, and it should have failed, Dinesh, he switched sides.
And he said, oh yes, there was a conspiracy, and I'm the only one that can lead you to the senior people.
So, of course, the president's opponents glommed on to John Dean.
And made him a media hero.
But it's instructive that the original prosecutors would not grant John Dean immunity.
He was too involved in the cover-up.
It was the Senate Urban Committee that granted him immunity.
And that caused them to need to portray him as a hero.
So he emerges as a whistleblower.
That's what the media would have you believe.
But he's not.
He's the one that hired Gordon Liddy, who conducted the break-in.
He recruited him. He ran the cover-up.
And then his testimony changed as he fought harder and harder to get personal immunity.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, I'm going to ask Jeff Shepard about this interesting alliance that we saw in the Nixon case.
And I think what you're saying is just so familiar to me from more recent events, a kind of coordinated alliance.
By whistleblowers, by the FBI, by the media, by the Democrats in Congress, this has become a familiar operation.
So when we come back, I want to ask you, Jeff Shepard, whether this was in fact the birth of what we now call the deep state.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with Jeff Shepard, the author of The Nixon Conspiracy.
Jeff, we were talking about this cabal, as you put it, that went after Nixon.
And you make the point that this cabal was at a time when you didn't have Fox News.
You didn't have social media.
You essentially had a kind of...
You had the Washington Post.
You had the New York Times.
You had Time and Newsweek.
You had the three major networks.
Now, that would seem to be one leg of the cabal.
On the other hand, you have the Democrats in Congress.
And, of course, Nixon did not have a Republican House or a Republican Senate.
So he was a Republican president, but the Congress was from the other party.
Heavily so. Heavily so.
Congress was very, very much Democrat.
And then it seems that there was also a kind of partisanship in the investigative agencies and in the judiciary.
Now talk a little bit about...
How this comes together.
I'm assuming that we're talking about people who go to the same schools.
They all know each other.
There's a kind of incestuous relationships among them.
I obviously mean that politically, not in the literal sense.
Talk a little bit about the origins of the deep state as we call it today.
Sure. And, of course, the concept of deep state was not known then.
We called it the federal bureaucracy or the liberal eastern establishment.
It was all Ivy League, all liberals.
But the Democrats had been in charge since 1932.
I mean, you know, you think about it, the only president before Nixon was Eisenhower, and Eisenhower was not a political president.
He was a military leader.
So the Democrats were very much used to being in charge and had roughly a two-thirds majority in each of the houses of Congress.
And then the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, the specially recruited group of attorneys, brought in to investigate Nixon.
It was 100 people strong, at least 60 lawyers, and the top 17 had all worked together in the Kennedy-Johnson Department of Justice.
So you had what amounts to a constitutional inversion.
The very people removed from office by Nixon's election were now somehow back in charge of the investigation and the prosecution of Nixon's people.
And they targeted them, they set out to get them, those were the only ones they investigated.
There was no hint of investigating any Democrats.
They announced at their first press conference they would investigate every allegation made against the Nixon administration since it first took office.
And they followed through on that promise.
It wasn't just Watergate.
It was everything the administration had done.
And that, coupled with the complacent press, and truly vindictive judges, judges who also evidenced disdain and hatred for the Nixon administration, that the administration and its people didn't have a chance.
And then you talk about the press.
The press was not only uniform, But this term, the narrative, which has become popular, you know, you don't make it into print unless you further the narrative.
There's lots of proof, lots of documents that I've uncovered that show there was only one narrative, and the narrative was the Nixon White House were a bunch of crooks.
Now, it's not true they couldn't prove it, but they faked it.
So that's what constitutes this cabal and what my book does.
It shows the documents and it uncovers what they did behind the scenes.
See, what really makes the difference, the four top Watergate prosecutors, the specially recruited group, each of them took their internal files with them when leaving office.
So we couldn't learn what they had done.
I've uncovered those caches of files, and I've uncovered the secret grand jury report on Nixon himself.
And when you analyze that, which is what my book does, the Nixon conspiracy analyzes these documents, and you can see what happened.
And you can see that what we suspect today really was going on back then.
And, and it's been kept from the public because these documents were hidden, but that's what the book discloses.
I mean, would you say that part of what made it even more insidious then is that now the press appears to be in a more obvious way on one side or the other.
It's kind of like all cards are on the table.
But in the era of Walter Cronkite and even continuing later through Dan Rather and Peter Jennings, they always gave you the idea that they were calling it straight.
They were calling it from the middle. They were not nakedly partisan.
And yet you say that in fact they were, so that their whole middle of the road on the one hand, on the other hand was a rhetorical camouflage that in fact they were activists disguised as journalists.
Well, even Walter Cronkite is quoted as saying he couldn't believe how his liberal points of view went unchallenged.
But it was the only point of view presented.
And if you had a readership that thought the New York Times was the middle of the road, That that really was all the news that was fit to print.
The American public wouldn't get the other side.
Today, there's controversy and there's challenges and counter-challenges because there's more than one point of view.
But during Watergate, there was one narrative, and the narrative was the Nixon White House were all crooks.
Wow. I mean, this is all so telling when we think of what has happened subsequently, the two impeachments of Trump and so on.
I don't want to go there. Where I want to close on this is to ask you this.
Is all of this now simply in the archive of history?
Or are you trying to do something now to vindicate the argument of the book, to get it in a sense officially corroborated?
What steps are you taking to get these truths to now be recognized publicly?
Well, two things, Dinesh, and thank you for asking.
One, I've posted links to all of the documents I cite so the public can have access to them, and that's on my website, shepherdunderwatergate.com.
But as importantly, I recently learned that the Department of Justice has an internal affairs unit Whose only goal, its only mission, is to investigate wrongdoing by Department of Justice lawyers.
They have tremendous authority and power, but this unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility, is supposed to investigate allegations of wrongdoing, and that's what I laid on them.
And it's reproduced on my website, a formal complaint of attorney misconduct, And they've acknowledged receipt.
They have promised to launch an investigation.
I've begged them to let me come down and do presentations.
Because as you say, I go way off into the weeds on this.
But as lawyers responsible for investigating this wrongdoing, they have to hear me out.
And then we'll see what happens.
So it's not just what happened 50 years ago.
It's the meaning today when it's far more relevant to what Department of Justice lawyers are capable of doing.
Well, this book is just stunning in its depth of information.
I was telling Debbie, my wife, I mean, I feel like as I'm making my way through it, I've got to go back and reread it.
I came to America in the late 70s, so some of this I knew about, but I certainly didn't know about it with the level of thorough detail that you've done here.
So congratulations on the book.
Thank you for giving us a little window into this fascinating world, and its implications could not be more timely for what's happening today.
Thank you very much, Jeff Shepard.
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I'm going to conclude my discussion of Hamlet and the ethics of revenge.
And I'm going to do it by saying, first of all, that I'm really not a big fan of Hamlet.
Now, I'm a big fan of Hamlet, the play.
But I'm not a big fan of Hamlet, the character.
And in this, I depart from the kind of academic mainstream, which loves Hamlet, because Hamlet is a lot like a typical academic.
Hamlet is somebody who's always soliloquizing, introspecting, navel-gazing.
And it's always assumed that Hamlet is somehow raising himself to this kind of higher level.
He's operating, if you will, subspecie eternitatis.
He is looking at the transcendent significance of what he's doing.
And in this respect, I concede Hamlet is the product of a Christian universe, very different from, say, the pagan universe of Julius Caesar, in which you don't have those Christian assumptions.
Just consider, for example, the attitude, and Shakespeare is such a genius in this, when you're looking at Julius Caesar, suicide in the pagan world is a good thing.
If you commit suicide and you decide, hey, listen, I would rather, as Brutus, run on my sword than be dragged disgraced through the streets of Rome, that's considered to be a dignified and noble thing.
You're preserving your honor.
Contrast this with Hamlet, who recognizes that in the Christian world, suicide is a sin.
He says this, So Hamlet is saying, I'm kind of thinking it would be better for me not to exist.
I would kind of like to commit suicide, but you know what?
God has ordained against it.
I can't really do it.
And... And yet, so Hamlet appears to be this kind of man of high moral conscience, but I don't think there are indications in the play that that is not a complete characterization of Hamlet.
Now, here is Hamlet. In a scene in which he's about to enter into a duel with Laertes.
Now, Laertes is the son of Polonius, and Hamlet has killed Polonius.
Polonius was hiding behind a curtain.
Polonius was admittedly spying on Hamlet.
Hamlet thought it was Claudius the king, speared at Claudius, or what he thought was Claudius, and he killed Polonius.
Now, Polonius' son, Laertes, wants to avenge Polonius, his father's death.
And here's Hamlet.
Pleading his own case.
Speaking to Laertes, What have I done?
I hear proclaim, Oh, what I have done, I hear proclaim was madness.
Hamlet continues, Was it Hamlet wronged Laertes?
Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from himself be taken away, and when he's not himself does wrong Laertes, then Hamlet does it not.
Hamlet denies it.
Who does it then, his madness?
If it be so, Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged.
His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy.
Now, this is all highly dubious because Hamlet is in effect pleading the insanity defense.
He's saying, listen, I didn't kill your father.
My madness did it.
And since my madness isn't really me, I'm innocent of this.
In fact, the madness is the real enemy.
Now, what makes all of this particularly diabolical, I see here in Hamlet a hint of Claudius himself, is that Hamlet earlier in the play has been feigning madness.
He's been pretending to be mad.
And all the while he's been letting you know, he's been letting the audience know, I'm not mad.
I'm just acting.
I'm sort of, I'm pretending to be mad so that they won't know that I know what happened to my father.
So this claim of Hamlet, first of all, not only is it a denial of obvious responsibility, Hamlet could say to Laertes, hey, listen, I didn't mean to kill your dad, but nevertheless, I did do it.
I am responsible in that sense, even though I intended to kill Claudius.
That's not what he says. He actually tries to lift the blame off of himself.
Now, Hamlet, of course, in the great soliloquy to be or not be, acts as if what's at issue here is whether human life itself is worth living.
And as I tried to say yesterday, that's not the issue.
To be or not to be is manifestly not the question.
The real question is, will you, Hamlet, the designated king to be, the successor to the king, avenge your own father's death and get rid of the rottenness in the state of Denmark?
Are you willing to do it, yes or no?
Hamlet himself knows that he should do it.
Politically, he knows that is his responsibility.
At one point, in fact, he's watching an acting performance, the so-called Player's And one of the actors is full of tears.
He's doing a scene from ancient Greece involving the wife of King Priam.
This is the fall of Troy.
King Priam's wife was named Hecuba.
And the scene is so moving.
There are tears that the actor is producing, even while acting the scene.
Here's Hamlet. Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, a broken voice, his whole function, suiting with forms to his conceit, and all for nothing for Hecuba.
What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her?
Hamlet is saying, even this actor, who's only acting out a scene, he doesn't know Queen Hecuba.
Queen Hecuba's mythical anyway, and yet he's crying.
And Hamlet is basically saying, why can't I, Hamlet, motivate myself to the same level of emotion?
I'm in a real drama.
I have a real duty, and yet I can't bring myself, in a sense, to ultimately do it.
The philosopher Machiavelli regarded Christianity as, As having a fatal weakness.
And the fatal weakness in his view was not just turn the other cheek, but a kind of excess of conscience.
A kind of sickly conscience that prevents you from exercising your true responsibility.
So Shakespeare here implicitly brings out this Machiavellian critique.
Because what he brings out is that Hamlet cannot somehow bring himself to carry out his duty.
And by not doing it, what happens?
Well, by not doing it, what happens is he stabs his uncle in the confusion.
He kills Polonius.
He drives his own fiancée, Ophelia, to suicide.
He contributes to his own mother's death.
Ultimately, what happens is there are bodies, as I say, all over the stage, and Denmark is defenseless against a foreign invader, Fortenbras from Norway, who ultimately comes in and takes over the throne.
So this is a big mess that Hamlet has made.
Shakespeare's own view, I think, is not an endorsement of the Machiavellian approach at all, but rather an embrace of what I would call the concept of active Christian statesmanship, the kind of statesmanship that we see in one of Shakespeare's history plays Henry V. Henry V, for example, is a Christian king.
In some ways, Shakespeare's model Christian king.
Not a perfect man by any means, but nevertheless, a good ruler.
Why? Because he combines conscience and an element of, you may say, Machiavellianism.
In other words, he does what needs to be done. Why? Not because it is unjust. There's nothing unjust in Hamlet avenging his father's death and getting rid of an evil king who has become a tyrant and since the fish rots at the head is polluting the whole society. Hamlet would be doing not just himself a favor, but Denmark a favor if he were to have acted sooner.
He doesn't do it.
And so I close with the words that St.
Augustine, of all people, once said.
He said, pray as if everything depends on God, but act as if everything depends on you.
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