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Jan. 17, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
59:41
KING’S DISPUTED LEGACY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep250
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Today is Martin Luther King Day, and rather than do the usual kind of tributes that are becoming kind of standard, I want to explore the question of why did the idea of colorblindness, which has been the shared aspiration of blacks and civil rights activists for a century, why did it prove so evanescent, so fragile, so temporary?
Debbie's going to join me. We're going to talk about the Trump rally.
We're also going to talk about the radical Muslim who was involved in the hostage taking in Colleyville, Texas.
I'm delighted to see Virginia's new governor, Glenn Youngkin, is a man who keeps his promises, a model for other people in the GOP. A Minnesota bank cancels Mike Lindell.
I've got some audio of the phone call that I'm going to play that and reflect upon it.
And an Indian journalist, Arti Tiku, is going to join me.
She's going to talk about how she sued Twitter and won.
this is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast. America needs this voice.
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Today is Martin Luther King Day and we're going to be treated or perhaps subjected to the usual over-the-top tributes to King.
Now, I do admire Martin Luther King.
I admire what he stood for and I admire especially what he stood for in the critical part of his career.
Early in his life, Martin Luther King was involved in some scandals.
He had a plagiarism scandal, for example, and he was in many ways a flawed man.
I don't really need to go into that.
He also became sort of radical toward the end of his life.
He wanted massive redistribution of income.
He became very close to a socialist, if not a socialist.
But the one thing he never did was he never deviated from his central idea, which is that we as a country should be judged on our merits as individuals.
In other words, in his own words, by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.
This was Martin Luther King's famous dream.
This is why we have Martin Luther King Day.
That's what defined a king.
And the left now tries to imply that somehow King gave up that idea, became an advocate of affirmative action, supported race-based preferences, and none of this is true.
In fact, I had a debate years ago with the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
And, you know, this was at Stanford University.
And I challenged the Reverend Jackson.
I said, because he was like, I knew Martin Luther King.
Yes, he would have definitely been on board with affirmative action.
And I said, well, quite apart from this kind of appeal to personal familiarity, can you point to a particular example where King does not support Compensatory justice in a particular case, but a system-wide, nationwide system of race and ethnic preferences.
Let's just say in college admissions, or in job hiring, or in government contracts.
Absent a showing of actual discrimination, show me where King advocated that.
And of course he couldn't do it, so he resorted to his usual...
Deflections, iambic pentameter, you know, this famous clearing of his throat and so on.
A point I want to make about King is that, ironically, the great success of King was based upon the fact that he put himself squarely in the American and even the Christian tradition.
He appealed to the Constitution and he appealed to the American founding.
So far from taking the left's approach of attacking the founding, King embedded himself in the founding.
When King talked about submitting a promissory note, demanding that it be cashed, he was obviously referring to the Declaration of Independence.
So you have the great paradox, the great irony, that King, a black man in the 1960s, is actually appealing to a charter written by a southern slave owner and a southern planter.
Now, the idea of colorblindness was not unique to King.
Here's Frederick Douglass as early as 1849.
I'm going to quote Douglass, and you see how Douglass, in a way, was the forerunner of Martin Luther King.
It is evident that white and black must fall or flourish together, writes Douglass.
In the light of this great truth, all laws should be enacted and institutions established, all distinctions founded on complexion, and every right, privilege, and immunity now enjoyed by the white man— Ought to be as freely granted to the man of color.
There it is. This is the Republican Frederick Douglass making the case for colorblindness in the 1840s.
And so there's a tradition going on for 100 years or more.
Of advocating for this.
And so the question I want to ask is, why is it that the colorblind ideal, which was fought for so hard and so consistently, how did it prove so fragile, so evanescent, so temporary?
How is it that we are now back to a race-drenched society?
I think the answer is this, and that is that King focused on equality of rights.
Focused on the idea, let's give everybody equal rights.
But he expected that once people were granted equal rights under the law, different racial groups would actually come out the same.
In other words, that they would hit the finishing tape at the same time.
That they would perform roughly the same in university admissions.
They would prove roughly competitive in the marketplace.
And this proved not to be true.
It proved not to be true. Why?
Well, in part because of the legacy of slavery and segregation, basically blacks were starting behind.
And so there needed to be a project of self-improvement, yes, enabled by the government, but also pursued aggressively by the black leadership, by the civil rights leaders, and essentially within the black community.
No other group can, in a sense, supervise your homework habits.
No other group can dictate your savings rates.
No other group can supervise the habits that enable you as a group to come up in the world.
Now, this project, King was aware of it.
I'm going to read a line from King.
This is not very well known, but this summarizes that King was well aware of the task.
We must not let the fact that we are victims of injustice lull us into abrogating responsibility for our own lives.
You're not going to hear this line quoted anywhere else today.
We must not use our oppression as an excuse for mediocrity and laziness.
Our crime rate is far too high.
Our level of cleanliness is frequently far too low.
We are too often loud and boisterous and spend far too much on drink.
By improving our standards here and now, we will go a long way toward breaking down the arguments of the segregationists, that blacks somehow are inferior, that they can't do it.
And then, the closing line, my favorite, this is probably my favorite line from Martin Luther King, quote, The Negro will only be free when he reaches down into the inner depths of his own being, And signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation.
So what's Martin Luther King saying here?
He's saying, look, you know, we can demand, we can agitate, we can insist upon being given equal rights under the law.
And we are entitled to those rights.
But we're not entitled to more than that.
Once we have those rights, what we do with those rights, what we make of ourselves, the kind of American dream that we're able to chart, that ultimately is up to us.
You know, this poor guy, Mike Lindell, just when you think that he's been canceled everywhere, they find a new way to cancel him.
I'm going to talk about this a little bit later.
In the podcast, but we need to support Mike and we need to support a guy who has his kind of courage.
Fortunately, he's a guy who also makes great products.
When they try to ban him, they're banning really good stuff that he does.
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Make sure to use promo code DINESH. Davi and I are chatting this morning about a couple of interesting Events going on.
Well, the first one, let's talk about Trump and his rally.
He talked about, well, let's quote him, the United States is becoming a large-scale version of Venezuela.
Trump! He's taking your message.
You've been on this since.
Oh, let me see. Well, I started doing presentations about this very thing in 2013.
That's eight years ago.
Yeah, and drawing out the parallels.
Well, one angle that you were telling me about while we were doing our lattes was how the Conservative Party was caught sort of napping, and that's how this happened.
It happened because the right was asleep at the wheel.
Talk about that. Right.
So in Venezuela, back when it was prosperous, there were two political parties that were dominant.
There were probably smaller parties, but they were not dominant at all.
They were barely even known.
The two parties were COPEI and Acción Democrática.
I don't know what the acronym is for COPEI. I don't remember.
But my family belonged to COPEI. COPE was the center-right party.
Acción Democrática was the center-left party.
And when I say center-right and center-left, they were not extremes.
But they were accused, both parties, of being corrupt.
And so the center-right party, which was the party that we belonged to, was more for free markets, They were very much into inviting America and Great Britain to come in and put their oil companies in Venezuela.
And so basically they used that to help prosper the country and propel it to the very rich oil country that it was.
Because they had oil, they just couldn't extract it from the ground.
They didn't have that ability.
So all of these companies that came in from foreign countries I helped do that.
And so it was a very prosperous time in Venezuela when I was a child.
As I've mentioned before, we were probably upper middle class, and so it was great.
However, you know, when Trump says that we are slowly becoming Venezuela, I'm not sure that he even understands how Venezuela became the hellhole that it is today.
And really, it wasn't just Hugo Chavez coming in and changing it.
It was what happened prior to that and what led to that.
And as you say, the center-right party, Gopé, fell asleep at the wheel.
And not only did they fall asleep at the wheel, but then they started Inner fighting, infighting within each other.
No, you're not conservative enough.
You're socialist too.
Blah, blah, blah. And so all of this became a point of contention for the right.
So they were never able to effectively campaign against and fight against the left.
And today they're an assortment of a dozen parties or so.
They've splintered off into many parties.
I would say 15 to 17 parties.
And so, of course, they cannot win any election, legally or illegally.
They just can't do it because they don't have the capacity to unite into a Large force to be able to beat even someone that cheats in elections like Maduro, which he does.
But if there was a massive landslide on the right, it would be a little bit more difficult for Maduro to be able to fraudulently win an election, right?
Because it would just be too overwhelming.
But unfortunately, they just don't have that force.
And every time we, as a party, start bickering, start dividing, oh, we don't like Trump, or we love Trump, or we hate Trump, or no, I think we're libertarian, no, we're actually center conservatives, or whatever. I cringe because it just makes me feel like Okay, are we going to do what the Venezuelans did?
And the reason Venezuela is in the mess it's in today is because of that.
So there was not a complicity, but a certain kind of lassitude on the part of the right.
Let's pivot to another issue.
This is in Texas. Malik Faisal Akram.
This is the guy who took hostages at the synagogue in Colleyville, Texas.
Now, interestingly, here's a headline in the Telegraph.
Man with English accent holds rabbi and congregation hostage.
Here's the FBI. The FBI is actually saying that the guy is not...
You can't assume that he was anti-Semitic.
The FBI basically says he seems to have been obsessed with an issue that is not particular to the Jewish community.
Now, think about this. I mean, this is my tweet.
I go, the FBI is really baffled.
Why would a Muslim man with radical anti-Semitic views who wants to get an Al-Qaeda terrorist out of prison target a Jewish synagogue?
It's like they're really scratching their heads over that one.
Talk about the Al-Qaeda terrorist, because you know something about her, that he wants to get her out of prison.
He calls her sister. Yes, and there was a little bit of confusion with the term sister because they thought that, her name first of all is Afiya Siddiqui, and they thought that he was her brother, her blood brother, right?
No, in religious terms you call each other sister and brother, but they're not related.
So just to get that You know, cleared up.
So Afiya Siddiqui was, she was an MIT graduate.
I'm not sure if she was a scientist or a medical doctor.
I don't remember exactly what she did in what capacity, but she apparently was in Afghanistan.
And I don't know how this happened, exactly, the details, but apparently she got a hold of a weapon from a soldier and started shooting at our soldiers.
So if that's not an act of terror, I really don't know what is.
So she's serving a long prison sentence.
86 years. There are a lot of Muslim groups in the country.
The radical Muslim element.
And they have from the beginning. So I've been following Afiya Siddiqui's story since 2010.
So we're talking 11 years ago.
And even then, when she was actually tried in New York, not in Texas, she ended up coming to Texas.
She's in a Fort Worth facility in Texas, but she was tried and she did serve time in New York.
And even then, there were groups, CARE, some of these groups all over the country, that were trying to get her out because they said that she was not guilty of what she was charged of.
And just so people get a little bit of background, she is married or was married to the nephew of What is his name?
Is it the Blind Sheikh? Yes.
Oh, yeah. Mohammed, yes.
And so she's the... Wait, do you mean Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Khalid Sheikh, not the Blind.
So the orchestrator of 9-11.
The orchestrator of 9-11.
She is related to him by marriage.
And so this is a web of terrorism, right?
And so for a long time they've been trying to get her out of jail.
They say that I think recently, and I think this whole thing here started...
Because she was in a fight with an inmate in the Texas facility, and apparently, allegedly, the inmate poured hot coffee on her face and burned her face.
And so the outcry is for human rights violations, but they want her out of prison.
I mean, think about it. They're trying to release a woman who has been nicknamed Lady Al-Qaeda for a violent terrorist attack on U.S. troops.
And the left doesn't hesitate to go to bat for these kinds of people at the same time that they're like, lock up all the January 6th protests, lock up all the grandmothers.
Where are the human rights violations outcry for them, right?
Exactly. So, yeah.
They just arrested, I believe, two teenagers in Manchester for this.
Absolutely. This has an international web of maybe...
In other words, it's suggesting an element of planning that may have gone all the way back to Britain.
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I watched a little bit of Glenn Youngkin's inauguration.
He's finally taken office.
He was elected, of course, in November.
A massive upset victory for the Republicans.
And An Indian woman named Suparna Dutta stands up to speak.
She is someone who came into the US from India.
And she had actually been trying to lobby the school board in Fairfax County to pay attention to parents, to get rid of this indoctrination, get rid of some of this perversion being pushed in the schools.
And they just ignored her.
They treated her like a pest.
And there she was at Youngkin's inauguration, doing the fist pumps, wearing a sari.
God bless the United States of America.
So, kind of a moment of great hope and light.
And of course, the question that comes up with all that is, what is Youngkin going to do exactly?
Is he going to sort of move?
Is he going to live up to the promise?
Or is he going to be the kind of...
You know, you can say standard Republican who comes in on this wave of excitement and then essentially sits around and does nothing and passes time until the other party comes and takes over again.
But Youngkin seems to be moving quickly, and I love this about him.
Number one... He's issued a series of executive orders.
The first one bans critical race theory indoctrination in all Virginia public schools.
In fact, as a kind of delicious sidelight to this, there was a whole, it's called DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
And the governor's website was full of all this.
It had, let me read, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, statewide strategic plan for diversity.
There's a lot more of this.
Strategic plan for inclusive excellence.
Inclusive excellence. Equity and action dashboard.
Governor.virginia.gov.
All of this rubbish on Northam's website.
Well, guess what? Yankin just deleted it.
Deleted the whole DEI. The left is like, what?
What? He's against diversity!
No, he's not against diversity.
He's against all your propagandistic nonsense.
He also signed an executive order allowing families to decide, families to decide whether children wear masks in schools.
So, the issue here is not masks.
It's who decides. Who has the authority over the child?
Youngkin's answer is the parents do, not the school authorities.
Now, Youngkin's new attorney general, This is the Hispanic guy.
And he has just fired the entire Civil Rights Division in the AG's office.
And he said, listen, no more of this George Soros-style avoiding prosecutions of really bad people.
No more looking the other way and letting the criminals back out in the street.
He goes, no, I'm going to start prosecuting those criminal cases.
So it looks like normalcy, or at least a vestige of normalcy, is wrong.
Returning to Virginia.
And interestingly, when this happens at the governmental level, you notice it percolates down to the decisions of other people.
So, for example, Loudoun County Public Schools, in the library, they had this sort of unbelievably perverted book called Gender Queer, a memoir.
Parents had been sort of lobbying to get rid of it.
And there was a hearing, by the way, in nearby Fairfax County Schools.
And they're like, no, no, no, this has important educational purposes.
You know, it's got all this explicit sexuality in it.
Well, evidently, the school superintendent in Loudoun County decided, well, I'm kind of getting the signals from the governor.
The book has now been removed from the Loudoun County public schools.
So, we see here with Youngkin, I think he's setting an example for other Republicans.
Now let's remember, Yunkin is not a sort of fire-breathing MAGA type.
He's actually in the mainstream of the Republican Party.
He was seen by many as a kind of establishment guy.
Here's a guy who comes out of the sort of hedge fund investment community, not seen as somebody who's sort of going to be a bull in a China shop, not at all.
And yet, here's a guy who has sort of found a way to balance the kind of MAGA enthusiasm, the Trump spirit, so to speak, together with a leaning into the values of suburban Virginia.
Once again, let's make the point that we're not going to win states like Virginia just by winning the rural areas.
That's because the urban areas are too big.
And, for example, the greater D.C., of all these people who are in some ways subservient to the government, if you want to win Virginia...
You've got to be able to win the suburbs, or at least be competitive in the suburbs, and the suburbs plus the rural areas can defeat what happens in, let's say, the greater Washington, or at least the inner Washington, D.C. area home of the bureaucrats.
Youngkin has found a winning formula in Virginia, and we do well as Republicans, and I think other Republican elected officials would do well to realize that, like him, it's a good idea to hit the ground running.
Inflation is at 40-year highs, and yet you don't see the Biden administration, like, all upset about it.
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They kind of want it. Think about this.
Right now, inflation rates are higher than the interest on Treasury bonds.
So with every day that passes, the government owes less and less on its mountain of debt.
Imagine if your mortgage had a negative interest rate.
Would you be in a hurry to pay it off?
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The cancellation of Mike Lindell continues.
I mean, you might have thought it continues.
I thought it already had reached its...
Final point. I mean, once you take this guy and you pull him out of all these box stores and you pull him out of all these different channels for selling his products, what's left?
I mean, how can you cancel his social media account?
So there's a massive effort to shut down Lindell.
I mean, think about it. A guy who makes pillows and other products has become like a national threat to the left.
And here's the latest. Minnesota Bank and Trust moves to cancel Mike Lindell's bank accounts.
Is it because, you know, he's not paying his wire fees?
Is it because he's proven to be kind of a bad customer?
He writes checks about none of it.
He's actually a very good customer, and you can imagine a large customer.
But even so, they've decided it's too dangerous to be associated with Mike Lindell.
And I want you to listen to the audio.
We got this from Lindell's guys directly.
This is audio of a phone call by a senior bank official at Minnesota Bank& Trust explaining this to the folks at MyPillow.
Listen. So you're saying, so right now, the timeline that we're kind of given is that the account needs to be closed this week for Frank's speech.
By Friday, you're saying, or just by the end?
Okay. I would say within seven days, if you could, and if you would, then I mean, there isn't, nobody's chasing you, but my boss's boss has said, Tom, would you please?
Yeah, no, I understand.
I mean, and at the end of the day, you know, that's, you know, you have to do what your job requires you to.
Can you give me any, so you said there's also potentially some bleeding going over the other accounts as well?
I would say all of them, yes.
So it just hasn't reached that height yet, but I could be getting a call next week with the same conversation.
Well, this would be the same call, to say frank speech for sure as soon as we can.
In the next month, if we could, the other accounts as well.
It's the perceived public reputation risk that if for some crazy reason somebody subpoenas and Ask for bank records.
We just don't want to have our name in the press.
Very telling. Here are the bank accounts in question.
Frank's speech. But others.
Lindell Management. Lindell Outreach.
Lindell Recovery Network.
And this is Mike's charitable account.
Lindell TV. Lindell Foundation.
Lindell Publishing. Mike Lindell Personal.
And my store.
Now, Mike Lindell tried to get a hold of this guy named Stephen Bishop.
He's the CEO of Minnesota Bank and Trust.
But Bishop, you know, this is so typical of these cowards.
He's like, I'm in a meeting.
I'm really busy. Think about it.
You're causing a scandal here.
And he's in a meeting.
What he really means is I'm sort of too timid to have to come and give a direct explanation myself.
But what really struck me was that the guy calling Millindell here is not your typical, you know, Stalinist who's like, I'm going to cancel all your accounts.
He's actually very nice about it.
He's got this kind of civilized Midwestern tone.
He's trying to be helpful.
He obviously knows that Mike hasn't done anything wrong, and he's actually friendly to Mike.
But what's going on here is he's following orders.
He got it from the boss.
He's passing it on.
So, interestingly here, and I think this is true not just of the guy calling, but it's also true of the bank in general, they have no quarrel with Mike Lindell.
It's not as if their customers are objecting.
None of this. But it's pass-through intolerance.
They're afraid that if, as they say, there's an FBI subpoena, we want your bank records, somehow the bank will be tarnished.
But why? Why would the bank be tarnished?
I mean, the banks have all kinds of customers.
If someone comes and says, listen, turn over the records for Mike Lindell, Turn him over.
Big deal. Well, it's not going to affect the reputation of Minnesota Bank and Trust.
So what I find interesting here is that you begin to see the way in which this domino effect, in which you start by canceling a guy for one reason, and the second guy doesn't really share the reason.
He doesn't have Antifa members on his board.
Nobody's actually threatening him.
No one's even raised the issue.
But they're like, well, listen, you know, that guy's a little, he's become a little radioactive, so let's cancel his bank account.
And you begin to see here, I would call it creeping totalitarianism.
And yes, today it's Mike Lindell.
I think I've talked on the podcast before, but I myself had to deal with this issue during my case with Chase Bank, where they inexplicably canceled my account.
Again, the people in the local office at Chase were like, we don't really get it.
It's a notation here inside your file, and it's coming from the very top at Chase.
So, again, what happens is that you've got nice people who work at the bank, and this guy called Mike and co-calls of MyPillow seems to be a reasonably nice guy, but he ends up becoming a henchman.
He ends up doing dirty work.
For a very bad action with very wide-reaching consequences.
And this is the way, even in the private sphere, a guy who has the wrong views, the wrong faith, the wrong outspokenness, asking the wrong kinds of questions, ultimately not just can't have a social media account, but not just can't sell his stuff in the box stores, but can't even deposit a check in a bank.
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Feel the difference. We all know that censorship, which has been very rare in American public life for almost a century now, has suddenly become pervasive.
There's way too much of it, and there are too many issues.
Again, we're not talking about epithets.
We're not talking about anti-Semitic outbursts.
We're not talking about rank obscenity.
We're talking about legitimate topics that are undiscussable.
And quite frankly, I'm bound by it.
I'm limited by it.
If I say, if I cover certain topics, you know, I'm off of Facebook, I'm off of YouTube.
By the way, you should join my channel at locals, dinesh.locals.com.
Why? Because... That's where I can speak on these exact topics freely and openly.
So, I'm in no way intimidated, but I'm careful to choose my platforms.
But I'm not staying away from any issue whatsoever.
I should also mention that Debbie and I and our film team were working on a big movie.
You'll hear more about that this week.
But it's a giant project that's going to make a huge difference and is going to wander right into the thicket of the biggest taboos of our society with very important new information.
Now here's Joe Biden. Calling, believe it or not, for more censorship.
He thinks there's not enough, and he's urging not just media outlets, cooperative media outlets, but social media companies to restrict what he calls misinformation.
Here, listen. I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets.
Please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that's on your shows.
It has to stop.
Don't be fooled by the please address this problem.
What you have here is the Democrats are applying, as the ruling party, applying leverage.
And here you see the open collaboration between the government and the private sector, because this is not just a matter of Biden doing a generic public urging.
There has been all kinds of efforts in congressional hearings to push the social media companies to do more censorship.
Jen Psaki has talked openly about how the Biden administration feeds, identifies misinformation from its point of view, of course, and says, Oh, get rid of this guy.
Censor that guy. They pass along this information.
And we also know the social media companies work in collaboration with each other.
So what you have here is kind of a quasi-fascist government-private sector partnership.
This is what renders the whole libertarian, you know, these are private companies, Dinesh.
You know, you can't tell private companies what to do.
The rank stupidity of this and the failure to recognize that these are, first of all, By the way, here's the Supreme Court.
I'm now quoting from my 1973 decision, saying that the government, quote, may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it, meaning the government, is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.
And I ask you to apply this to what Biden just said and ask, is it not a fact that he is, quote, encouraging or promoting private persons, in this case, digital companies and media companies, to do, i.e. censorship?
censorship, what it is constitutionally forbidden for the government to do.
So it doesn't matter what the issue is, whether it's COVID or whether it's this or that, it doesn't really matter.
The simple truth of it is that it is not permitted for the government to try to use The vehicle of the private sector to do unconstitutional things, to do things that if the government did them, would flatly contravene the First Amendment, which after all says that Congress, more broadly speaking government, shall make no law restricting freedom of speech or...
Of the press. Biden, I think, is in conscious violation of this.
The left is moved dramatically away from any embrace or endorsement of free speech.
And the left is now the driving engine for why we are losing, as a practical matter, free speech on critical issues in this country.
What if there was someone out there who kept a log of everything you did every minute of the day?
I think that would be, well, creepy.
Well, what if I told you that's exactly what happens every time you go online?
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They can legally sell this data to anyone, and this is why I use ExpressVPN.
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Now, you might be wondering, well, if I'm rooting my data through a VPN, doesn't that just mean the VPN can see what I'm doing and log my data instead?
Well, many VPNs claim to have a no-logs policy, but they've been caught logging customer activity themselves.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast an Indian journalist named Arti Tiku.
Now, she is in India.
We're actually Skyping across the ocean, if you will.
And she had a very interesting experience with Twitter.
Now, Arti, by way of background, she has written for a whole bunch of Indian publications.
She's been affiliated with the Times of India, the Hindustan Times, the BBC. She has a Master's in International Affairs from Colombia.
And she's the founder and editor-in-chief of The New Indian.
Arti, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
I know it's actually late at night in India.
Are you in New Delhi or where are we Skyping you?
I am in New Delhi.
I am a journalist who has worked I've been focused on conflict zones of India, which includes Kashmir and Northeast and Maoist terror belt in India.
I've been also engaged in many of the diplomatic initiatives taken by India and the US as well.
But more than that, I am also a student of international affairs from Columbia University, as you rightly pointed out.
Arati, you put out, you did a tweet, which I'm going to read, because I think it's very interesting.
It refers to your brother. My brother, Tikku Sahil, who lives in Srinagar, is being openly threatened by jihadi terrorists sitting in Kashmir, India.
But also, you say they're handlers in Pakistan, UK and US. And then you say, are we sitting ducks waiting to be shot dead by Islamists, or will you crack down on them?
And then you have a little assortment of some of the sources of the people who were evidently attacking your brother.
Now, tell us what happened when you put that tweet out.
What was the response on the part of Twitter?
For the sake of your audience, let me mention that I am a displaced Kashmiri Hindu who was driven out from Kashmir, my homeland, along with other 300,000 Kashmiri Hindus by Pakistan-sponsored Islamist terrorists in 1990.
I grew up almost in a refugee camp in the southern part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which is now a union territory within the Union of India.
And I've been a journalist for the last 20 years.
I have extensively written on the Kashmir conflict.
I have worked in Jammu and Kashmir, and I have also worked, as I pointed out earlier, in other conflict zones.
Now, on Twitter Spaces, which is a feature of Twitter, where audio is the medium of conversations and discussions around the globe, I have been noticing that Pakistan-sponsored Islamists,
Pakistan-sponsored terror groups have been given a free hand to mobilize Separatists, mobilized Islamists in Kashmir to fight against India, to take up arms against India.
And in one of the Twitter spaces where my brother, who's a businessman and who works in Jammu as well as Srinagar, these are the two capitals of Jammu and Kashmir Union Territory within the Union of India.
And as we know that Kashmir has been a conflict zone because Pakistan has had four conventional wars with India over Jammu and Kashmir and has been propagating cross-border terrorism in the last three decades.
Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Hizbul Mujahideen, which are three designated terror groups which are being backed by Pakistani military and ISI, which is their intelligence agency.
They have been operational in Jammu and Kashmir.
But it's the Kashmiri Muslim diaspora in the United States And the United Kingdom who've been backing these terror groups and who've been backing the Pakistani military and they are openly mobilizing Islamists in Kashmir against not just the Indian State,
which is Indian police and army and Indian government, but also Hindu civilians, which includes my own community, which is Kashmiri Hindu community.
As I said that we were driven out in 1990 by Pakistan-sponsored Islamists.
So in one of the Twitter spaces, There was a discussion where my brother Sahil Tiku was openly threatened and these people who, some of whom are based in the United Kingdom, some are in the US, some are in Islamabad and Rawalpindi and some are in Indian Kashmir.
They were openly threatening to kill him.
So it was My fundamental right as an Indian citizen to plead before the government of India and I tagged the Home Ministry of India, which is by the handle of HMO in my tweet, you can see that. I posted a recording of that conversation where the threat was being issued against my brother and I asked the government of India to protect my family, my brother, Because we have been vulnerable.
We have been driven out.
We've been the victims of Islamist terrorism.
I mean, Aarti, what I find incredible is that you did that, right?
And then Twitter labels your tweet as hate speech.
So, in other words, they act as if you're the one who is the danger.
And it seems to me they deleted the tweet.
They, I guess, took away your Twitter handle so you couldn't post on Twitter.
Talk a little bit about...
What you did to fight back against Twitter and how you prevailed.
So they blocked my Twitter account for almost four weeks and they blocked that tweet as well, labeling it as hateful conduct because...
For reasons best known to them, they actually did not give me any explanation.
I waited for two weeks or so.
And after making an appeal to Twitter that my conduct is not hateful, in fact, their conduct is hateful and biased against the victims of Islamist terror in India.
But the response from Twitter was very negative.
They in fact said that it was hateful conduct and they were not going to give me access to my account.
So in the end I went to court.
I spoke to my lawyer.
We filed a writ petition which essentially asked the government of India to protect my fundamental rights as an Indian citizen because Twitter is not a state.
Twitter is not a sovereign.
Twitter is not a country.
It's not a nation which provides any fundamental rights to anybody.
So I asked the Government of India to protect my fundamental rights.
And in fact, I was also challenging the Government of India, which has had an agreement with Twitter Inc.
Twitter Inc.
is liable to follow certain guidelines and rules which the government of India made mandatory last year in August.
And Twitter was violating those rules and guidelines openly.
So I had no option but to go to the court.
Fortunately, the court heard my petition and court issued a notice to Twitter Inc.
as well as the government of India.
And I think just two days later, Twitter may have calculated and recalculated their damages and they might have realized that if I go around and the court gives a very negative observation against Twitter Inc., they will lose a huge market like India because India is the largest democracy, the largest open market.
They do not have a market in China.
They don't have a market in Middle East or anywhere else.
So they might have realized that it's going to be a costly affair because they would come across as sympathizers and also supporters of Islamist terror.
That is why then they reversed their decision and they restored my account and restored the tweet which they had labeled as hateful conduct.
Arthi, I want to congratulate you.
It takes a lot of bravery to fight these kinds of battles and to see them through, and you clearly have that kind of conviction.
Listen, I'd love to have you come on the podcast another time to talk in more detail about the underlying conflicts that you cover around the world.
But thanks for joining me, and all the best to you.
Thank you. Thanks.
It's pretty funny, but Debbie and I are creating with our Balance of Nature commercials a little phenomenon because when we talk about how you can eat fruits and veggies without eating fruits and veggies, people are like, how do you do that, guys?
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You'll get a discount. You've got to use discount code AMERICA. I'm continuing my discussion of Russian literature, and I want to focus today kind of picking up on a theme I addressed last week.
The relationship between Russian literature and And Russian power, political power.
Now, this is important because in a free society, we don't explore this question with any sense of urgency.
Of course, you can write about it, but when you're thinking of figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne, In America, or later, Fitzgerald or Hemingway, you don't ask, well, what is the relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne and the U.S. government?
Or what's the relationship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway and, let's say, for example, the The FDR regime.
And the reason we don't ask those questions is because the riders are, in a sense, operating detached from, removed from.
They operate in the sphere of society.
And society is, of course, distinguished from the state.
But in Russia, it isn't like that.
Not just under communism, the kind of long night of communism stretching from the late teens all the way through 1991, 1992, so most of the 20th century, but also earlier, under the Tsars, you had, of course, an oppressive, autocratic regime, not as bad as the communist horrors to come, but bad, of course, in its own way.
And so writers in Russia are always functioning to some degree in relationship to that kind of power.
And I want to explore a little bit about what that means.
Now for Tolstoy, what it meant is that you have a man from the landed aristocratic class, a man at the upper echelon of society, writing from a position of influence and privilege.
Not someone directly connected to the czar, but somebody clearly part of this Dostoevsky was from the minor nobility, at least sort of by lineage, but he was penniless.
He didn't have any influence at the Russian court.
Most of the time he was trying to scrounge enough money to be able to write his next novel.
Remarkably, when he was writing The Gambler, he had no money at all.
He was, in fact, deeply in debt, and his publisher said to him, hey, listen, I'll give you some money, but you better work on this novel and give it to me by such and such a date, and if you don't give it to me by that date, I'm going to actually own all your literary works, not just the ones you've done, but also in the future.
Dostoevsky ended up delivering the manuscript on the exact date, not one day earlier.
He was writing, finishing it, literally on the last day.
Turgenev was from a wealthy family that owned serfs, but Turgenev had a mixed view of the aristocratic class and had a lot of close knowledge of the serfs and wrote very sympathetically of the serfs.
In fact, so much so that in his own time there were other Russians who believed that he was the writer who really understood the Russian spirit because he He took this position that there was oppression in Russia, and of course, this was at a time also when the Russian Tsar, who ended up being a kind of reformer, ended up freeing the serfs in the 1860s.
Pushkin had some kind of Came out of the landowning class also, like Tolstoy.
But interestingly, Pushkin had African blood.
Pushkin was related to Amur, who had been brought by the Tsar to Russia to serve as a military officer in the Russian court.
And Pushkin was very aware of this.
He looked different. He was darker.
His mother was sometimes called La Belle Creole, the Creole beauty, so to speak.
And with Pushkin, he also had a housekeeper who was a serf who taught him kind of ancient Russian folklore, the kind of oral tradition that somehow combined with Pushkin's The Elegant French that Pushkin learned.
This is all brought into a kind of remarkable synthesis in Pushkin's prose as well as his When we turn to the communist era, things become a little bit more dicey.
Maxim Gorky, the author of the work called Mother, as well as memoirs, short stories, Gorky was a Bolshevik.
He was a communist.
Now, he was a Bolshevik starting in the early 1900s.
This was before the Russian Revolution.
And he was trying to create a different kind of revolution.
To give you an idea of how, you know, Gorky was not a cooperative Bolshevik.
The Bolsheviks wanted to abolish God.
Well, Gorky had his own project, I think, absurd.
But nevertheless, he's like, we don't have to sort of worship God.
What we have to do is, quote, build God.
Now, this seems like a crazy idea.
Gorky's point is that man needs to sort of create a deity that would reflect the aspirations of the whole society, not the patriarchal oppressive god of the Old or perhaps even of the New Testament.
But you can see how people like Lenin regarded this as ridiculous, that communists were trying to erase God.
Not sort of build their own god.
And so here was Gorky, who was always kind of on the margins of the Bolshevik movement, but he was a friend of Lenin.
And later, when Lenin began to torment writers and lock them up and torture them, Gorky would actually lobby for their release, but lobby in the sense of repealing to his old buddy Lenin, who respected Gorky enough and would be like, okay, well, I'll let this guy go.
Okay, well, I'll let that guy go.
I'll talk a little later in the series about a Russian writer named Zoshenko.
Now, this guy lived under Soviet communism, but interestingly, he wrote stories that made fun of it.
He didn't attack the ideology of communism.
It's just that his stories reflected the ordinary problems of citizens under communism, trying to get normal things done, trying to basically You know, plant wheat or try to build a bathroom in your apartment.
And, you know, there was a massive housing shortage in the Soviet Union.
And Zoshenko would just talk about, you know, the 17 people who are living in one room and then one guy gets married.
And so, where do they put him?
Well, they decided, let's put him in the bathroom.
And so, yeah, the husband and wife now live in the bathroom.
And they're living in the bathroom, but eventually they have a kid.
Well, where are they going to put him? Well, they put him in the bathtub.
And of course, the kid, the advantage of this, as Zoshenko, is this kid really learns how to swim.
So, you've got a guy, a satirist, who is operating inside of communism, but is...
And he was always kind of on the borderline, because the authorities were always watching him to see if he went too far.
But for 25 years or so, this is a guy who made Russians laugh.
Because he was able to describe their ordinary life in ways that exposed, however gently, the contradictions of Soviet communism and socialism.
I'll talk also about the great Mikhail Sholokhov, the writer of And Quiet Flows the Dawn.
And the tragedy of Sholokhov is that at the end of his life, he did something terrible, and I would say unforgivable.
Two Russian dissidents, writers, had been imprisoned and were being tortured.
And the Russian government, because this created a worldwide outrage, And there were people, even communist parties in the West, who were like, this is inexcusable.
You've got to release these people.
You cannot torture writers.
And the Russian government was really eager to find a major literary figure or figures to sign a statement that these were bad guys, these were enemies of the state, these are people who deserve to be imprisoned, deserve to be tortured.
And they couldn't find a single Russian writer of note who would do it except one, and that's Sholokov.
He signed. And he probably signed under pressure.
He certainly signed because I think he thought it would keep him in good with the regime.
But it brought him massive worldwide castigation and castigation from the Russian community in Russia as well as worldwide.
And as one writer said to Sholokov, Russian literature will never forgive you for this because Russian literature is about taking the side of the underdog.
And I think it is fair to say that despite the aristocratic lineage of a lot of Russian writers, many of them, not all, many of them frequently did take, or at least were able to portray with great vividness the perceptions of the underdog, the ordinary penniless student.
Gorky himself would write about what he called the barefoot people.
These are kind of ragamuffins in Russia.
They walked around barefoot.
And they often had to scrounge for money, they had to do small odd jobs, they had to beg.
And Tolstoy said to Gorky, Tolstoy who lived through the early part of the 20th century, he goes, you know, you Gorky understand the ordinary Russian The Russian peasant better than I did.
Tolstoy, this man with incredible empathy and elastic sensibilities, giving a compliment to Gorky, but Gorky didn't take it as a compliment because Tolstoy regarded Gorky as this kind of Peasant himself.
He said, you must be a peasant because you really understand those people.
And for Gorky, he wasn't a representative of the working class.
He wasn't a representative of the peasant.
He was a writer who had the ability to examine and perceive and portray these different groups of people.
But he saw himself, of course, as an individual and as a writer.
I think it's fair to say of Gorky, as of another guy named Mayakovsky, who was definitely a Bolshevik and a communist, in fact called himself the Tribune of the Revolution, it's true of Boris Pasternak, it's also true of Sholokov, that in their novels they celebrate individuality.
It is said of Tolstoy that he was such an individualist that not only are no two people the same in Tolstoy, but no two horses are the same, no two dogs are the same.
Every living creature has its own distinctive individuality.
And I think it's that individuality that we see in Dostoevsky, we see in Tolstoy, and then continuing, even with the 20th century writers, writing under the controlled atmosphere of communism.
It is the individual conflicts, the individual soul that breaks through.
And I think that is what, in a general sense, is the greatness of Russian literature.
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