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Dec. 21, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
53:46
ABOLISH THE FIRST AMENDMENT? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep242
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A prominent academic, a law school professor, no less, wants to get rid of the First Amendment.
You know what? I think she's only saying aloud what an increasing number of progressives and leftists actually think.
I'm going to expose the attack on math as an apologia for black academic backwardness and also a surefire way for America to lose its competitive edge in the world.
Jeff Brain, the CEO of CloudHub, is going to join me.
He's going to talk about the distinctive features of this alternative social media platform.
And I'm going to make the case that Christianity is spreading worldwide.
Why? Because it answers needs that are not found in modern secular culture.
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.
One of the beautiful things about the First Amendment is its simplicity and its clarity.
Congress shall make no law.
Very clear. And Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or of the press.
Now, the former Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black used to say that...
Those words mean exactly what they say.
Not that Congress can make some laws, but Congress shall make no law.
And no law means no law.
Now, there's a University of Miami Law School professor named Mary Ann Franks, and she's published an article in the Boston Globe.
It's actually based upon a new book of hers, and the book itself is sort of a revealing title.
It's called The Cult of the Constitution.
So you get an idea that here's a person who doesn't really like the Constitution.
She thinks the Constitution is a sort of cult.
And she wants to basically abolish the First Amendment.
When I say abolish, she essentially wants to rewrite it.
She calls it a redo.
She wants to redo. Now, she wants to redo the Second Amendment, but I want to focus here on what she says about the first.
Let's take a look at her redo, so-called.
She basically says that she wants to—I'm going to read her revised version.
Every person has the right to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and petition of the government for redress of grievances— Consistent with the rights of others to the same and subject to responsibility for abuses.
So this is a modified First Amendment.
Modified, she says, in order to move it away from the concept of individual rights and toward the concept of the general welfare or, in her view, collective justice, social equality.
Now, the first thing to say is that all the rights in our Constitution are individual rights.
There are no collective rights in the Constitution at all.
And this is no less true of the First Amendment.
It's true of the Second Amendment.
You have an individual right.
To own a gun. The Fourth Amendment, you have an individual right against unreasonable searchants, an individual right to freedom of assembly, an individual right to due process of law, the Fifth Amendment.
Or you keep going.
The Fourteenth Amendment, equal rights under the law is not a collective right.
It means that you as an individual have an equal right to be treated the same as somebody else in a similar situation by the law.
The law should be, in a sense, neutral among individuals.
And even though the law might say you can't discriminate based upon race, there are no collective rights that one race gets to assert against another.
The Constitution itself frames all rights in terms of individual rights.
But clearly, there's an intellectual movement in progressivism To diminish the concept of individual rights and to try to suppress them in the name of some collective vision.
This is the premise of critical race theory.
But what's interesting I think here is it's migrating to the rewriting of the Constitution itself.
In other words, we're already seeing, we've seen in many areas, we've seen corporate censorship, we've seen digital media censorship, We've seen the browbeating of people in universities and in schools to have approved ways of thinking.
We've seen efforts to establish controls in all kinds of spheres.
But it's a whole different thing to go right to the Constitution and in a place where the Constitution is not ambiguous.
We're not talking about phrases like cruel and unusual punishment that clearly offer a certain interpretive latitude.
We're talking about One of the most clear, unmistakable parts of the Constitution, the very first of the Bill of Rights.
Now, I think that this woman, Marianne Franks, although she's going kind of out front, she is saying out loud what a lot of leftists actually think.
And what that means is that we're in grave danger as a society vis-a-vis our individual liberties, our civil liberties, because a lot of people in our elite classes don't believe in them.
And these are the people that govern our institutions.
Not just governmental institutions, but educational institutions, institutions of media, and so on.
So I think we're at a troubling place where these are people.
By the way, one of the reasons they can speak so confidently about suppressing speech Is they know that nobody's going to suppress their speech.
They feel that their speech is secure.
I'm sure this woman, Mary Ann Franks, has published a book.
If someone came to her and said, well, you know what?
You're right. Free speech really is not a right.
We're not going to let your book be published.
We're going to block it. And she'd be like, what, what, what?
So these are people who presume the very rights that they seek to take away from other people.
And that shows at bottom that they don't believe in free speech, but neither do they believe in equal treatment under the law.
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There is an attack on mathematics.
That is brewing, and maybe brewing is not even the right word, full-blown, in a number of our public schools.
And the idea here, it comes right out of critical race theory.
It's the notion that math is racist.
Math is somehow discriminatory.
Now, if this on the surface seems preposterous, the only evidence for it is that math is producing racially unequal outcomes.
I want to talk about that In its specifics in the next segment.
But in this segment, I just want to talk a little bit about mathematics because mathematics is essentially the way that you get ahead in the modern world.
Get ahead not as an individual.
In fact, I was doing a little breakfast diatribe on mathematics and I was saying, you know, I told Debbie, I'm like, this attack on mathematics is basically only to benefit stupid people who can't do math.
And Debbie goes, wait, wait, are you talking about me?
And of course, I did not mean it that way.
And I'm like, no, I'm not saying every individual has to do math.
You know, you can obviously major, as Debbie did, in political science if you take the minimum that you do in math and go on to something else.
But my point is, as a society, we need mathematics.
Mathematics is, by the way, the foundation of modernity.
It's the foundation of the developments that have caused all these enormous problems Economic gains, scientific gains, gains in innovation and discovery.
The simple fact of the matter is that, and this is, by the way, why other countries like India and China and Russia emphasize math so much because they know that math is the key to their countries becoming more competitive and, in fact, leading the world in competitiveness.
Right now, if you look at surveys, The Chinese students in math are just dominant over the American students.
So are the Indian students, by the way.
And in fact, the very best students in American universities in math tend to be Indians and Chinese.
So, now, what this means is that the attack on math in America is going to hold us back as a society, is going to cause us to lose our competitive edge in the world.
And what I find so tragic and pathetic about this is that math is...
is actually so beautiful.
Math is actually a description of the way the universe works.
There was a wonderful book years ago about what a sort of odd thing it is that our universe, a physical object outside of us, nevertheless works according to, you may say, the principles of mathematics.
So think about that. Mathematics is something you do in your head.
Two plus two is four.
You prove a theorem, and it's purely theoretical.
But nevertheless, this theory that operates, you may say, inside of our minds for some reason, and maybe we don't know the reason, or maybe the reason is God, but whatever the reason, the mathematical operations inside of our minds nevertheless mirror the actual workings of the universe.
Here's an interesting example involving Halley's Comet.
Halley's Comet...
It would appear and appeared around, I think, 1705.
It was observed by the English astronomer Edmund Halley, H-A-L-L-E-Y. And Halley, he looked at the comet and he thought, you know what?
There have been descriptions of comets that have been seen in 1531, in 1607, in 1682.
I believe that they are the same comet.
This is the same comet returning.
And so using Isaac Newton's gravitational theories, Halley studied the comet, and he said, you know what?
I believe that this comet whizzes by the Earth and the Sun once every 76 years.
And if I am right, The comet is going to reappear around 1758 or 1759.
And this is science. This is mathematics in its full operation.
I'm now going to quote Edmund Haley.
If the comet should return according to my predictions, impartial posterity will not refuse to acknowledge that this was first discovered by an Englishman.
So here's Haley taking a little bit of a patriotic bow and saying, listen, if I'm right...
I have a hypothesis, I'm making some predictions based upon it, and if the comet shows up on schedule, so to speak, then my theory will be, in a sense, confirmed.
So, this is true not just of Halley's Comet, it's true of Newton's, here's Newton's first law, F equals MA. Force equals mass times acceleration.
And that's, again, this is a law in our heads, but it mirrors the workings of the universe.
Einstein, E equals MC squared.
Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light.
And so it goes.
Pythagoras' theorem.
We think how amazing it is.
You look at different circles and different right triangles, and you can say things about those circles no matter what their size is.
If you take a small triangle, you measure a right triangle, and you measure the two sides, and you square them, and you add it up, you get the square of the hypotenuse, the long side.
And that is true of every single right triangle, no matter how large or small it is.
And Pythagoras had a beautiful proof of this.
I remember when the The philosopher Hobbes has a discussion of this, and he said when he first discovered, when he first saw the result of Pythagoras' theorem, he was like, this makes no sense.
This doesn't really add up.
It can't be true. There's no way it can be true that every right triangle produces exactly this same kind of algebraic result.
And so he goes through the proof step by step by step.
A kind of Euclidean unfolding of argument, and he realizes that if the premise is true, and if the logical steps are correct, then the outcome has to be true.
And for Hobbes, this represented the beauty of mathematics, and Hobbes even bases his philosophy, you may say, on this kind of mathematical scheme of things.
So all of this is just a way, this is my brief tribute to mathematics, to say how wonderful, if math well taught, Excites the imagination, appeals to a natural intuition that we have about math that's already inside of us, and it's also the key not only to individual success, but to the success of our society in a competitive world.
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It's all based upon really two lines of argument.
And both lines of argument are contained in a recent article in, of all places, Scientific American.
Scientific American. The article is called Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White Patriarchal Past.
Now... When I look at this, I just laugh at the idiocy of it.
First of all, mathematics was invented by the Indians and the Muslims.
That's why we talk about Arabic numerals.
Not that the Arabs invented those, but they got them from India.
There's Chinese mathematics, there's ancient Babylonian mathematics.
So the West simply formulated a sort of system of advancing mathematics in the modern era, but it hardly makes mathematics itself white.
Now, let's follow this article in Scientific American.
First of all, there is what I call the obligatory, recycled, ancient horror story argument.
And sure enough, we discover there was a guy in the early 20th century, William Claytor, Who got his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 1933.
So, in other words, the racism of today is being inferred by looking at some, as I say, recycled horror story, in this case, from 1933.
Well, apparently this dude went to the University of Michigan for a postdoctoral position, but he couldn't get it, supposedly, because he was black, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And no one really denies that there was this kind of prejudice.
That occurred 100 years ago.
I mean, Debbie, from her own example, her grandmother grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
She was a Mexican, a Hispanic in Texas, and she was denied all kinds of honors and advancements, and they wouldn't let her be valedictorian, and she was very good in math.
So there was prejudice, no denying that.
But somehow there's a kind of automatic fast-forward to the present, and now we get to argument number two, which is a little more subtle and insidious, and is actually very important.
So let me read from a Scientific American.
When Noelle Sawyer, a Bahamian student, went to Southwestern University, she said that people assumed that she couldn't do math.
She said, quote, Why is no one treating me like I'm good at learning things?
Now, there's actually an obvious answer to that, and it's affirmative action.
It's that colleges have now, for 50 years or better, been essentially accepting black and Latino students with vastly lower grades and test scores than white and Asian students.
So naturally, people think that black students and Latino students aren't as good in subjects like math.
And by the way, that assumption is usually correct.
When I was at Dartmouth, for example, I had a black roommate, and this was a kid who was having horrible problems in math.
And he'd constantly come to me for help.
And I realized, as I talked to him, that there were basic concepts in math.
I mean, what my dad would call the basics.
And he didn't know them.
And I didn't really make a kind of judgment about this, but it occurred to me, this kid is basically at the 8th or 9th grade level if he were to go to an Indian school.
So, here we are at Dartmouth, and we're doing advanced-level mathematics, and I'm not that surprised because the math assumes that you can do all kinds of stuff that this kid, a very nice guy, and not a dumb guy, but nevertheless, he just hadn't learned this stuff, didn't know how to do.
And what I found particularly telling is over the years...
He began to come to believe that Dartmouth was racist, the curriculum was racist.
Later he became kind of an activist with the Afro-Am.
And so you can see what's going on here.
You've got these students, and you've got policies that treat them as inferior.
And then they begin to internalize the effects of those policies.
And then we basically get the idea that math is somehow racist.
One of the crowning statistics in this article from Scientific American is, quote, fewer than 1% of doctorates in math are awarded to African Americans.
Now, that is a true statistic.
I've known about this, by the way, for about 40 years.
And what this means is that there are hardly any blacks at the very top level of math.
Now, why is that?
Why is that? I would argue that one reason for that is that there is not enough, well, terrible public schools, broken families, broken neighborhoods, gangs.
There's a whole bunch of reasons why culturally and socially there's a much smaller investment.
The ability of blacks to succeed in math, particularly in the inner city, is not being developed, is not being properly cultivated.
And then, when blacks do poorly in math, the left turns around and blames the system.
Equations are racist.
Algebra is rigged against Hispanics.
This is downright absurd.
So what we're doing is we're killing excellence in the name of equality.
But it's a bogus equality because if you really cared about blacks and you really cared about Latinos, you would teach them math skills and not try to pull down the tests, not try to pull down the very ladders of their potential success.
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It was just an important election in Chile, and bad news.
A leftist Gabriel Boric, quote, a former student protest leader, defeated the sort of Trumpster candidate, Jose Antonio Caste, And why this is bad is it means that Chile is now going to be moving in the socialist direction.
Chile, by the way, has had enormous success under free market policies.
It's one of the most affluent countries in South America.
Milton Friedman and the so-called Friedmanites went down there, going back, this is I think, to the 1970s, installed a kind of Chilean retirement system, guided the country in establishing free market policies, which have paid huge dividends.
And so we have here a paradox.
Why would people who have experienced the success of free market policies turn around and vote against them?
Is it not the case that in doing this they're going to be getting what they deserve?
Now, I just read an article in American Greatness.
It's by a fellow I know, a very interesting, although somewhat grumpy, political scientist.
His name is Paul Gottfried.
And this article is a slight chastisement of my own views, so that's why I find it particularly intriguing.
I want to get into it. So, Paul Gottfried basically says that, listen, conservatives often say that people who live in a mess, in blue states, for example, or in inner cities, had nothing to do with creating it.
He says people, conservatives often talk about, quote, blacks living on, quote, democratic plantations.
And this could be a direct allusion to my work because I talk this way.
And then he also says, well, I hear conservatives talking about how terrible it is that in Germany, in Australia, they're arresting people on the street.
There are these terrible lockdowns.
And Gottfried then slyly says, well, you know, how do we get these situations?
And he goes, the simple answer is, people vote for them.
People vote in Democrats in these cities.
The Australians and the Germans have voted for left-wing regimes that have imposed lockdowns.
Germany, in fact, had a moderately conservative regime, Angela Merkel, but now the Greens have been winning victories.
And the Social Democrat Party has been winning.
And so they're moving further in the direction of the left.
And then, of course, we have Chile.
Paul Godfrey talks about de Blasio.
He says, you know, I keep reading about Comrade de Blasio.
He goes, wait a minute. This guy won his second term as New York City's mayor with 65% of the vote.
Gottfried points to Kim Klesik, the young African-American who ran against Kweezy Mfume.
Now, Kweezy Mfume is a thug.
He's corrupt. He's been the longtime incumbent in Maryland's 7th District.
And Klesik ran a tough campaign.
More police protection, more tax breaks, entrepreneurial zones in the inner city.
Well, guess who won? Mfume won and won decisively.
30 to 40 point margin.
So Gottfried's point is that politicians like Mfume, Lori Lightfoot, Maxine Waters, Gavin Newsom, Bill de Blasio, he goes, it's not like people don't have a chance to vote them out.
Larry Elder ran in the recall against Newsom.
Who won? Newsom won.
And so I guess what Gottfried's point is, is that the people who live on these plantations want to live there.
And I guess what he's saying is they deserve it.
They're voting for this. The truth of it is they'll probably keep voting for it.
And then he asks an interesting question, which is why do they do that?
If it's somehow not in their long-term interest, it's not in their economic interest, not in their material interest, why would people behave that way?
And his answer is that people vote less based upon direct economic interests and more based upon conjured up fears of something that they fear or hate.
Now, Gottfried's point is that who do blacks really hate?
Well, they hate white supremacy.
And who's portrayed as the white supremacist?
Well, the Republicans.
Trump. So even though Trump increased his share of the black votes, says Gottfried, he still didn't get close to the majority of the black vote because he was the candidate tagged by We're good to go.
Is the specter of fascism.
And the left has grabbed onto the label of anti-fascism, and so they tap into German guilt, and the Germans are like, if anything is tagged fascist, we can't possibly be associated with it.
We've got to go the other way.
So... Essentially, Gottfried concludes that these voters are, quote, getting exactly what they deserve.
Now, I think that that conclusion is a little bit harsh because there are people who vote for things and they don't know.
They don't know better. The Venezuelans who voted in Hugo Chavez the first time didn't know what they were getting.
So they didn't get what they deserve, but they did get what they voted for.
They voted for Chávez and they got Chávez.
So I think that Gottfried's theory applies if people keep doing it.
Now the problem with Venezuela is once Chávez installed himself, he was able to rig the system, and so you don't have subsequent free elections in Venezuela.
But it is true in a democratic system where there are free elections and people keep choosing the bad guys, In that case, they're getting not just what they voted for, they are getting what they deserve.
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Why is the left so hostile to Elon Musk?
Well, I think it's because he exposes their inadequacy.
He exposes their ineffectiveness.
He does stuff almost single-handedly.
I mean, he has corporations that do it, but he starts these corporations.
He comes up with the idea.
And it's not just one, and it's not just two.
It's not even just Mars and cars.
It's Mars and cars.
It's Tesla and SpaceX, but it's the boring company.
It's DeepMind. I mean, this is a guy who's rethinking traffic patterns in inner cities.
He's thinking about, are there ways to use artificial intelligence to augment the human brain?
Here's a guy who defines the concept of out-of-the-box thinking.
It was the philosopher Isaiah Berlin a generation ago who talked about people falling into two categories.
He called it the fox and the hedgehog.
And the hedgehog is kind of the guy who knows one thing and focuses on one thing and lives by one thing or has one big idea and clings doggedly to it.
And the fox is the guy who never comes up with a single big idea but is kind of unbelievably varied and has a diverse interest, a jack-of-all-trades, if you will.
And we can see, even in the world of literature, some people are foxes.
One major theme, Dante would be, for example, a hedgehog.
One, a big idea. Milton, a hedgehog.
But Shakespeare, let's say, a fox.
Shakespeare's amplitude, the range of his ideas is so wide.
Now, the thing about Elon Musk is that he's really both.
He's a hedgehog in that he's able with dogged determination to build the electric cars that people talked about.
Government says, we need electric cars, but they don't know how to build them.
Well, Elon Musk builds them.
Elon Musk can build space vehicles that the government can't build or can't no longer build, and so they're now contracting with his company to build them.
Private space travel.
Elon Musk, other people talk about it.
Elon Musk figures out how to do it.
Now, interestingly, Elon Musk recently tweeted out a kind of table, a wide table of terms which intrigued me, and they're really terms that are all about the concept of cognitive bias.
Now, we hear so much today about racial bias and gender bias, and most of it is just flat-out rubbish.
But cognitive bias is something people don't like to talk about.
Why? Because cognitive bias applies to everybody.
Cognitive bias is not a white problem.
It's a human problem. And it requires a certain degree of humility because once you look at cognitive bias, you realize that all the things you talk about in terms of this bias apply to you.
So let me talk about a few forms of this bias because I think they're very interesting and they're true.
One of them is called the self-serving bias, which is that by and large, what we tend to do is we tend to blame other people's failures on their defects of judgment or character But we blame our own failures on situational defects.
So in other words, there was something wrong in the situation.
That's why I did what I did.
We apply a much greater empathy or understanding to our own failures than we do to others.
The halo effect. This is another cognitive bias.
What's the halo effect? That if you see a person having a positive trait in one area, you automatically assume that that capacity or that talent spills over into other areas.
And this is true. We think this about other people, and people think this about themselves.
I'm smart in my business.
Therefore, I'm excellent in human relations.
I'm excellent at being a husband.
I'm excellent at being a citizen.
I'm good at hedge funds.
Therefore, I'm an expert on politics.
This is the kind of false transference of one type of specialty to others.
The Dunning-Kruger effect.
I love this one.
The less you know, the more confident you are.
I want to rename this the Brian Stelter effect.
The less you know, the more confident you are.
The gambler's fallacy.
This is an important one.
By the way, this has to do with math.
We think future possibilities are affected by past events.
So true. Think of it this way.
If I take a coin and I toss it five times, I get five heads.
And I ask you, hey, I'm going to toss it the sixth time.
What do you think I'm going to get?
Heads, of course. You've got five heads in a row.
No. The sixth toss has an exactly equal chance of getting heads or tails.
It's 50-50. And just because I got five heads before has no effect on what the sixth toss is going to produce.
The framing effect. We often draw different conclusions from the same information depending on how it's presented.
I just saw an example of this today.
Someone was showing me that West Virginians actually support the Build Back Better Act.
And I read the poll question, and it's obviously framed to elicit that response.
Things like, Wouldn't it be a wonderful idea if the government could provide free this and free this and free this and free this?
No reference to the cost.
No reference to who's going to pay.
No reference to what the impact is going to be.
And people would obviously are likely to go, well, yeah, those sound like excellent things for me to have.
I'd really like to have some free stuff.
So this is the framing effect.
And this is really why polls so often get it wrong.
They frame it in a way that is intended to elicit a particular answer.
The IKEA effect.
We place higher value on things we've partially created ourselves.
I talked about this a few days ago with regard to prayer.
People go, you know, I don't really like the Lord's Prayer because that's already just a kind of a formulaic prayer.
I've come up with my own prayer, and I think it's better because I came up with it.
Well, this is called the IKEA effect.
Just because you did it doesn't mean it's a better prayer.
In fact, it's not likely to be a better prayer than the one that Jesus came up with, if you think about it.
The clustering illusion.
We find patterns and clusters in random data.
So you have random events.
A really good example of the clustering effect would be that, well, something like the Derek Chauvin case.
You have a white cop, and you have a black victim, and so the assumption is, Wait a minute.
I think I see a pattern here.
This is obviously a racial incident.
No. We've had a trial.
There was no evidence that Derek Chauvin was motivated by racism at all.
So what happens is people are superimposing a racial selection pattern on a set of data that doesn't actually suggest it.
The pattern is being located in the data rather than the data itself suggesting a pattern.
So you see, you get a window here into the subtle mind of Elon Musk.
And what he's trying to do is educate people that there are all these biases in the way that we see the world.
And I think his hope, it's an optimistic hope, because sometimes even when you recognize these biases, you still engage in them.
But I think Elon Musk's confidence is that at least if you're aware of them, it's going to create a certain sense of modesty in which people are going to say, well, listen, not only are other people's conclusions flawed in the ways that I'm likely to think, but so are my own.
And if I try to apply that equitable standard, the generous standard I apply to myself, to others as well, we might make some not only intellectual but perhaps even moral progress.
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Feel the difference. Guys, I think you know in this era of social media censorship, it is so important for us to establish ourselves on alternative platforms, free speech platforms.
And I'm delighted to welcome Jeff Brain.
Jeff is the founder and CEO of CloudHub.
CloudHub is an all-in-one social media platform, champions free speech, open discourse, and activism, gives you the tools for activism.
CloudHub was formally launched in November 2020, has more than 3 million current users.
Hey, Jeff, welcome to the podcast.
Delighted to have you.
This is a relatively new platform.
You started it in late 2020.
Talk a little bit about why you felt the need for a new platform and what makes CloudHub distinctive.
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Dinesh, for having me on.
I felt that there's tremendous opportunity in social media to do good, and it wasn't being tapped into.
It has tremendous power to bring us together, but what are we bringing people together for?
I think Facebook and the others have missed an opportunity.
My background is a civic activist, civic leader.
I was in Los Angeles for many years.
I was a commissioner for the city.
And I was involved in bringing people together, diverse people together to solve problems.
And I felt that with everything that's happening in our society, in our country, that we could build a better social media platform.
Number one, like you said, it's all in one.
You can do what you do in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Clubhouse, and more, all in one convenient platform, and people crave convenience.
And it's also, to have all those things in one platform, very powerful, because you can...
leverage them to have your videos in the same place you have your groups and your discussions.
Number two is to change the focus.
Most social media has us focused on things that don't matter.
They occupy our time, we spend 30 minutes on it, and then we go, what did we do?
But CloudHub is focused on empowering you and others to engage, connect, I'm sorry, collaborate on the issues that matter to you, whether that's your life, now your health, your freedoms, your country, your community.
And we give you the tools.
So we have groups, and our groups are very different than Facebook groups.
You can actually have subgroups in our groups.
So, like, you can have a national organization, have a subgroup by state, and then within each state by county or precinct or school district, and you can message your members in the group.
And you can specifically say, I want to message Miami-Dade County because there's a hearing tomorrow we want them to go to.
You know, so it's very... It's powerfully designed to mobilize people.
We have people engaged in the mandates, opposing the CRT, all kinds of issues, large and small across the United States.
The other thing we have, if you've heard of Clubhouse, we took that technology of Clubhouse and took it to another level.
We actually put the presenters on video.
I can get up to 15 presenters a single time on video and then I can get 100,000 people into the room as attendees and they can raise their hand and they can talk to the people in the videos and the people in the videos can answer their questions.
At the same time, the people in the audience can text chat among themselves They can also access handouts that the presenters have given them, and they can go into breakout rooms where they can, you know, hear different topics and share more deeply.
So it's incredibly powerful.
And then we also, everyone that joins CloudHub has a channel where they can get their message out and they can go live or they can upload videos.
And of course, we have a discussion timeline like Twitter.
As we move forward, my goal is to connect people to the things in life that matter most.
We'll be starting in January adding a civic hub where you can interact with your legislators at the federal, state, and local level, access election information, resources.
There'll be a faith hub where you can share and grow in your faith, all faiths.
There'll be an education hub, an entertainment hub, Health Hub, Sports Hub, Finance Hub, Business Hub, Marketplace, all the things, Dinesh, that shape our lives, determine the quality of our life, and build up society.
So if you can see, it's a very different kind of social media.
Most new social media is really an alternative to Twitter, right?
And listen, every free speech platform is important.
So I support them all, the getters, the parlors, the gabs, the others.
But what CloudHub is doing is much more We're more like a meaningful Facebook.
And that's the target we're going after is Facebook.
You know, on those other platforms, you kind of post in exchange for likes and follows.
But I think the challenges today in our society and our country are so great that that's no longer enough.
You need to be able to do, organize, mobilize, and affect change.
I might add, too, we were just named one of the top new social media platforms to watch in 2022.
We were number three on the list behind a new app by Live Nation, and number two was Clubhouse.
So we're very proud of that. Well, you know, Jeff, I mean, to me, this is very good to hear because in some ways, I guess one could look at Getter and Parler as alternatives to Twitter.
You can see Rumble as a kind of alternative to YouTube.
But there's really nothing that I know of anyway that's an alternative to Facebook.
And a lot of the censorship, at least that I've experienced, but also others, is most malevolent on Facebook.
And so the need for a kind of, not anti-Facebook, but new, better Facebook is something that we feel very keenly.
So what you're saying is, and let me just take a practical example.
You're saying, for example, that parents who want to, let's just say, mobilize both at the local level, but also at the state level, at the national level, let's say against indoctrination in schools, would find CloudHub a pretty good way to talk to each other, but also as a way to mobilize organizationally to communicate their views, not just to city officials, to school board people, and perhaps even to legislators at the
local, state, and national level, so that your voice can be leveraged to maximum effect.
You're absolutely correct.
In fact, in New York, where the leaders there are kind of almost tyranny, I can tell you that the counties across New York are organizing on CloudHub to take back local community and then take back the state.
General Flynn is on CloudHub and organizing his America's Future.
National organization, then state groups, then county groups.
So it is a place where people can come together.
They will not be censored.
We support free speech.
We don't police it. And another thing, too, is we protect your privacy.
We don't dig into your phone to look at what you're looking at.
We don't track you to what stores you're going at or doing in...
So it's private.
And also, most social media is very unhealthy.
There's been many documented studies, also Social Dilemma.
The movie shows that.
And CloudHub was designed to be healthy.
So, Jeff, I think for a lot of people, the starting is the hardest thing to do, right?
And so, if somebody just were to go to, what, cloudhub.com, could they navigate the site and get a feel for it?
Is it pretty easy to sort of get on the horse, so to speak?
Because I think that's key for people to be able to familiarize themselves with it.
And then, of course, they feel part of it.
Yeah, it's very easy to sign up.
It only takes about a minute.
We don't, like I said, ask a lot of questions.
We don't ask too much details at all.
And then once you get in, you'll see you land in the public forum.
And then across the bottom, there's a newsroom, there's groups, there's channels, there's events, and then there's connections.
And in connections, you can search for people who have similar interests to you.
Awesome. Hey Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, giving us just a little glimpse into a relatively new and important social media alternative, CloudHub.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Dinesh.
Here's some breaking news, but it's not good news.
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We gotta save what we gotta save in the right way.
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Late in the 19th century, the philosopher Nietzsche famously declared that God is dead.
And what Nietzsche meant by this is that educated people, and he was thinking particularly in the West, but he thought it would be increasingly true in the world, would find God literally unbelievable.
They would not be able to sustain their belief in God.
And Nietzsche was declaring this as a kind of prophetic announcement, an emerging fact.
But this Nietzschean prophecy has turned out to be false.
And false are Nietzsche's own terms.
Now, it is true that what Nietzsche observed was real enough, the emergence of genuine atheism and a kind of militant atheism for the first time in the 19th century in Europe.
It was Vaclav Havel, the president of the Czech Republic, who described Europe as, quote, the first atheistic civilization in the history of mankind.
And we have seen that occur.
We've also seen a radical secularism spread throughout the West.
It's even in America. In my book, What's So Great About Christianity, I use the phrase practical atheism because practical atheism is bigger than people who just call themselves atheists.
It also applies to people who just live like atheists.
These are people who might give some rhetorical allegiance to a higher power, but if you follow the way that they think and the way that they act, they act as if there is no God.
And there are even some nominal Christians who fall into this category.
They're, for all practical purposes, atheists.
This all being said, and this is the bad news, if you will, and I talk in the book, What's So Great About Christianity, I talk about the temptation of atheism.
The real appeal of atheism is not science.
It's the appeal of being able to live a life removed from divine judgment, removed from transcendent scrutiny, above the law, above the moral law in this case.
But the good news is that we're beginning to see a rapid spread of Christianity throughout the world.
A number of scholars have written about this.
Two of them are Pippa Norris and Ron Englehart.
And I'm going to quote them.
So even though parts of the West are becoming more secular, quote, the world as a whole is becoming more religious.
The new face of Christianity in the world is no longer white or blonde.
It is black and brown and perhaps even yellow.
Here's Philip Jenkins writing in an important book.
It's called The New Christendom.
If we want to visualize a typical contemporary Christian, he says, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela.
He goes on to point out that the vital centers of Christianity today are not Geneva, they're not Rome or Paris or London, not even New York.
They are Buenos Aires, Manila, Kinshasa, Addis Ababa.
He says, the era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, but the era of Southern Christianity is dawning.
I talked yesterday about the surge of Christianity in South America, in Asia.
The writer David Aikman says that there are now 100 million Christians in China.
So we have, China could be the country with the largest number of Christians in the world, or at least might become that in the next few decades.
Now, these scholars have talked about why Christianity is so appealing to so many people in the developing world, and their answer is very striking.
It's because, and this is Philip Jenkins, he says, For poor people in the world, he says, Poverty, moneylenders, lepers.
The themes of exile and persecution resonate with them.
Supernatural evil seems quite real to them.
They have little problem in understanding the concept of hell.
Some of them even expect the miracles of ancient times to be witnessed in their own lifetime.
I remember many years ago when I lived in Virginia, there was an African preacher who visited, and he would talk about all the amazing healings that were occurring in his church in Africa.
And when I seemed a little bit skeptical, I didn't say anything.
I just looked at him sort of askance.
He basically said, young man, you know what the difference is between you and me?
He goes, you see this book right here?
He's pointing to the Bible. He goes, we believe it.
And what he meant is that if you take the Bible seriously, there's no reason to believe that the events of the Bible are somehow unique to a particular place and time.
There's no reason that they can't occur even today.
I think that the reason that the secularization thesis, the idea that the world would somehow, with modernization, automatically become more secular, the reason that this is proving false is because secularization does not address the deepest human needs.
Yeah, it provides material comfort.
Yeah, it offers us opportunities and possibilities that we didn't have before.
But the biggest questions facing human beings are not answered by it.
In fact, they're not answered by science itself.
It was the philosopher Ludwig von Wittgenstein who said that even if you could answer all, all scientific questions, all imaginable scientific questions, not just all scientific questions that occur to us now, but all scientific questions that will occur in the future, he says, the largest questions of life would still remain completely untouched.
They would still be, you may say, off the table.
And so we're playing a game on the table and the biggest questions of life are off the table.
And if you want to confront those questions, there's no way to do it other than by examining the mysteries of transcendence, of God, and of faith.
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