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Feb. 2, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:25
QUESTION DINESH Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep262
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This is a special edition of the podcast focusing on your questions.
And by the way, I love to get questions, preferably audio or video.
Send them to questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Questiondinesh at gmail.com.
Here are some of the questions I'll be answering today.
Hey, Dinesh, why don't you talk about certain topics on your podcast or certain topics off-limits?
What's the difference between a living cell and a software program?
What distinguishes Christian apologetics from what pastors do every Sunday?
What happened to the conservative intellectual tradition that we don't hear about so much today, and why does it seem largely defunct now?
How do you feel about America's gun culture?
How do you and your family cope with your incarceration?
How can you say that Robert E. Lee was a great military general when the South, after all, lost the war?
I'll answer these questions.
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.
Our first question has to do with what issues can and cannot be addressed on the podcast and why.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
I'm a big fan of your show, but I was wondering why aren't you talking about certain issues like COVID, vaccines, and election fraud?
Do you not think these issues are important or do you have some other reason for not talking about them?
Thanks. Now, it is a fact of life, a tragic fact of life, but a fact of life nevertheless, that in today's America, we do not have in the, let's call it, the new public square, which is digital media, social media, we don't have free speech.
We don't have free speech, not just on one issue.
It started out with one issue or two issues, COVID, election fraud.
And then that spread or metastasized to a whole bunch of other issues.
You can't speak candidly about the trans issue.
You can't speak candidly to some degree about abortion.
You can't speak candidly about climate and climate change.
So, as a result, we now have a rigged public debate.
Now, for those of us who are in this public space, who are public intellectuals or public commentators, it forces us into a kind of dilemma.
Option number one, ignore these prohibitions.
Continue to speak publicly.
And the immediate and predictable effect, in fact, the effect that you're inviting, is to be immediately kicked off all the mainstream platforms.
Now, you might say, well, so let's do an act of courage and do that.
But the problem with that is, number one, we are shutting off the conservative voice in those arenas.
And number two, the alternative platforms.
Well, initially, we hardly had any.
We had Parler, but Parler was shut down.
Now we have Getter, but Getter is still small, approximately three to four million.
And we have Rumble, which is bigger, but Rumble is more of a video platform.
And of course, we're all awaiting the Trump platform, which I think will change the name of the game.
But in this unlevel playing field environment, we have this difficult choice.
So my choice is this.
And that is that I use the podcast to speak about all the issues I can.
I take things on the podcast as far as I can.
And then I look at alternative forums.
So for example... If you join me on Locals, you'll discover there are no taboos.
In fact, I do a kind of freewheeling Q&A every week.
And if you will become a subscriber or a supporter of my Locals channel, you can weigh in.
So you can have a kind of open dialogue with me back and forth once a week on Tuesdays, 7.30.
And so if you want to check all that out, go to dinesh.locals.com.
You can also access locals, by the way, from my Rumble channel.
There's a button there. Rumble recently purchased locals.
So that's an avenue to check out both Rumble and locals.
Now look, I want to make it really clear that there is no issue I am shying away from.
On the contrary, I have been working...
On in-depth investigations of some of the most important issues that are on our minds, that are completely taboo, but nevertheless, I am fearlessly grabbing a hold of these issues, but doing it in a way that I think really busts the subject,
because it's not enough here to put out insinuations and suggestions, and I think this is what happened, and this must be what occurred, and I can't really believe that the outcome was the way it was In other words, you have to go beyond possibilities and probabilities to certainties.
You have to go to, this is what happened, and you know what?
I can prove it.
And that's very much my approach.
I want to go into this from a position of strength so that no matter what the forces arrayed against me are, I mean, I love the quotation from Winston Churchill where he says, in effect, this is not the exact quote, I'm paraphrasing it, but he goes, when it comes to reality, when it comes to the truth, you can ignore it.
You can revile it.
You can disregard it.
You can suppress it.
You can do whatever you want, but at the end of the day, there it is.
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Never to be one to duck a difficult question, I now take a question that has to do with what is the difference between a living cell on the one hand and a software program on the other.
Listen. Mr.
D'Souza, I love when you talk about philosophy.
I just finished your episode where you spoke with Mr.
Meyer about life and its beginnings.
It made me wonder, what exactly is the difference between a single-celled organism and a software program?
For example, neither have a heart, neither have blood, neither have a brain, neither have lungs, neither make their own decisions about what they will do or what they won't do.
But one is considered a life form and one is not.
They both do exactly what they're programmed to do, exactly when they're programmed to do it.
So why are the two things different from one another?
I'd love your input on this matter.
Thank you for all you do.
Keep up the great work. Wow, what a question.
Well, let's begin by noting that there is an important difference between a software program and a living cell.
A software program is not a thing.
And what I mean by that is that a software program is, well, you can almost compare it to pure mathematics.
It's a series of ideas or instructions, whereas a cell is an object.
It is a material thing in the world.
And what that means is that cells take up space.
They have length, they have width, they have weight, even though the weight is very small.
The cell is a material object and a software program is not.
Now, my knowledge of the cell comes largely from a single book, which is actually a terrific book.
It's written by a molecular biologist named Franklin Harold, University of Colorado, I believe.
It's called The Way of the Cell.
And Harold makes some remarkable observations about the cell.
He begins by describing it as a very complex piece of machinery.
And let me read a couple of lines that he says about it.
He says that even the simplest cell is an exceedingly complex mixture containing thousands of different molecules.
He says the cell's molecular machinery works in a way that suggests purpose.
He goes, quote, cell components as we know them are so thoroughly integrated that one can scarcely imagine how one function could have arisen in the absence of others.
He goes on to say that by themselves, cells do the following.
They break down foodstuffs, they extract energy, they manufacture precursors, they assemble constituents, they note and execute genetic instructions, and keep all this frantic activity coordinated.
Now, it's that last part.
They note and execute genetic instructions.
That's the similarity right there to a cell and a software program.
Because you could almost say that a cell is a little bit more like an electronic bit or an electronic object that contains software.
And Harold goes on to draw a close analogy between the very elaborate The software, you may say.
The DNA instructions inside of a cell.
And reading all this, by the way, you're struck with a sense of wonder.
Why? Because think about it.
All living creatures.
And I don't just mean humans and animals.
But this also includes plants.
All living creatures and plants are all made up of cells.
And it is the same cell.
If you burrow down to the bottom, it's the same cell.
That makes up plants and animals and humans.
Now, to me, the take-home value, if you will, of this question is the following.
Even if you grant the close similarity between the genetic instructions of a cell, the analogy of that to a software program, which I say, Franklin Harrell says, yeah, it does function exactly like that, an extremely complex software program.
Here's the point. How do you get a software program?
Software programs don't create themselves.
They require what?
They require a software programmer.
Absent a programmer, you can't really get a program.
And I think this is the point that Harold is getting to.
He's writing as a secular scientist.
He wants to stay within the mechanistic view of life that is the foundation of modern secular science.
But at the same time, he knows that there is mystery around the cell.
Because think about it.
You can't, by the way, say that the cell is a product of evolution.
No. The cell precedes evolution.
Evolution is a way of explaining how some kinds of living creatures are transmuted into others, but it doesn't account for life in the first place.
It doesn't account for the cell.
The cell is taken for granted.
And I think what Harold is getting at and what I'm getting at is just as a software program requires a programmer.
The incredibly complex machinery of the living cell, which incorporates, you may say, its own software code, that requires some kind of a programmer also.
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Feel the difference. The next question is about Christian apologetics.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
You sometimes talk about Christian apologetics on the podcast, but I was wondering what exactly Christian apologetics is.
How is it related, if at all, to what pastors do at church on Sunday or priests in their homilies?
Very good question. I think I'd answer it this way.
What a pastor does or a priest on Sunday is deliver an interpretation, an instruction, a clarification, a lesson, an application from the Bible.
Now, the Bible is the revealed Word of God.
And just as the word revealed suggests, the Bible comes out of the province of revelation.
God reveals Himself.
And the Bible itself is full of, you would say, declaratory sentences.
In the beginning. God did this, or in the beginning, God did that.
Jesus is the Son of God.
The Bible doesn't really try to prove things.
It, in a sense, declares them from on high, almost like Moses coming down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments.
This is no attempt to sort of rationalize or justify a moral code.
It's just like, God gave it to me.
Here it is. So, priests and pastors go to divinity school, they study the book of Revelation, not just the book of Revelation, but the Bible as a book of Revelation, and this is what they do on Sunday.
Now, apologetics is completely different.
And the need for apologetics is generated, I would say, by the fact that we live today in secular culture.
So, if we all lived in a society where everybody accepted the authority of the Bible, And said, yeah, the Bible is the revealed Word of God.
If you want to know what should be done for salvation, how we should live our lives, let's just see what God says.
And let's just do that. Why would we do anything else?
But in secular society, people are like, well, I don't know if the Bible was the Word of God.
Wasn't it written by a bunch of different people at different times?
And isn't it true that the Bible provides instructions for certain types of society?
And what if society now is completely different?
We're dealing with different issues.
And so what you have are not just atheists who reject God, but agnostics who say, I don't know.
And then you've got seekers who are like, I want to know, but I don't really know.
How can I know?
And so what apologetics does, and again, apologetics doesn't try to prove things that can't be proven.
There are certain things that are outside the orbit of human reason, and apologetics should not be foolish enough to try to prove them.
What apologetics tries to do is meet the obstacles and objections that secular people and atheists and even seekers.
They may have stumbling blocks like, how can I believe in God if?
Or, how can I believe in God when?
You've got such an angry God in the Old Testament, or there's so much suffering in the world that makes the existence of a benign, loving God almost impossible to conceive.
So what apologetics does is it takes these objections and meets them on their own terms, and by that I mean deals with them in the vocabulary of reason alone.
And you might say, well, wait a minute, where's the Christian sanction for even doing this?
Well, the answer is, here, I'll give it to you.
It's, open your Bible to 1 Peter 3, 15.
I'm now going to read. Always be prepared, always be prepared to give an answer.
Sometimes to give a reason to everyone who asks you to explain or to justify the hope that is within you.
So here, the Bible is saying, we have within us this Christian hope.
Other people can go, where does that come from?
What's the point of that?
How can you say that that's from God?
Well, the Bible itself is pointing us to apologetics and say, listen, don't just have, you may say, a thoughtless faith.
And by the way, this is important, not just if you're a citizen, but if you're a parent.
Look, we all live in a time today when our children, we try to inculcate our faith into them.
But there is a time where they have to make it their own.
And they're going to come to you and ask you questions.
Hey, Mom. Hey, Dad.
You know, how do we know that Jesus was an actual historical person?
Leave aside the miracles. Leave aside whether He's the Son of God.
How do we know that Jesus was a real guy that walked in the world?
I mean, there are, we hear about Greek mythology.
We know, for example, that Jupiter and Zeus and Diana, these weren't real people.
These were part of what we now call Greek and Roman mythology.
How do we know that Christ wasn't mythological in that sense?
Well, it's surprising, but I've actually posed this question to a couple of pastors, and they're like, I don't know.
I mean, because they're so tutored in the Bible, they cannot give you the historical.
They can't show you that not only was Jesus' existence attested to by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and of course, a little later, Paul, But there are a number of Greek sources and Roman sources and Jewish sources, sources that were in no way looking to ratify the existence of Jesus but nevertheless attest to it,
which is why historians, whether they're religious or secular, have little doubt that Jesus was like Socrates, a real person who really walked on the streets And lived as a human being.
So this is apologetics.
Apologetics is not, in a sense, a replacement for the church.
I would say it clears the underbrush.
It clears the obstacles that brings people to the church door.
And then having, in a sense, met the objections of reason, they can move into a world of revelation, move into a world of faith, understand also the reasonableness of faith so that ultimately we have a Christianity that can Find its place and defend itself against all that the world has to throw at it.
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You've got to use discount code AMERICA. Our next question is about guns and the Second Amendment, and so I decided to have Second Amendment authority, Professor Deborah D'Souza, also a concealed carry holder, and someone who knows a little bit more about guns than I do to help me deal with this one.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
I'm a staunch Second Amendment advocate, and I also have always loved guns.
I've grown up around them my whole life.
Guns have always been a part of my life, and I wonder, how do you feel about gun culture in America, this kind of connection Americans have always had, especially Southerners with guns and hunting and recreational use of them in comparison to just for self-defense or stuff like that?
Well... I'm going to have you weigh in on this, but, you know, I grew up in a culture without guns.
I not only didn't own a gun, I didn't know anyone who did.
And the only time I heard about guns was when I would read about police encounters with gangs or actually see guns in the movies.
When I came to America, one of the first things, a guy with the Park Service says, I'm going to take you hunting, and I kind of expected guns, but believe it or not, we went hunting with a bow and arrow.
Yeah. No guns.
Wow. But you know something about guns.
You've had experience with guns. And interestingly, there were guns in Venezuela.
Your family had guns. Talk a little bit about guns there and here.
And then let's say a word about the gun culture of America, particularly, as he says, in the South.
Right. So personally, the first time that I owned a gun, I was 48 years old.
So, you know, eight years ago, I bought my first gun, and I didn't do it until after I got my concealed carry license, which I'll talk about in a little bit.
So my family did own guns in Venezuela, as did most law-abiding citizens.
Of course, criminals do too, as we know.
But I do believe that law-abiding citizens in Venezuela, That carried guns posed a great threat to the democracy.
Well, I would say not the democracy, the tyranny.
Yes, the tyranny of the government that came in under Hugo Chavez.
So they started little by little doing campaigns to, one of them, it was called Desarma la Violencia, meaning disarm the violence.
And they weren't really trying to disarm the violence.
They were trying to disarm the citizen, right?
Yes. So they started doing that in about 2010.
And then soon after, instead of it becoming voluntary because they were doing all sorts of campaigns, you know, showing commercials of people going to, you know, zipping up their coat because they're going to a party and they happen to grab their gun.
And then they superimpose that into a morgue where they're zipping up the body bag or unzipping the body bag of that same person.
So they're trying to make it appear as though if you carry a gun, you're going to end up dead.
And so this kind of went on and on.
And so people started voluntarily giving up their guns.
And then I think they soon woke up to the fact that, uh-oh, this doesn't look good.
And then it was not voluntary anymore.
I mean, as I think about the U.S., you know, this is a frontier society.
It was settled by people who moved out west and they moved out into dangerous circumstances.
I mean, think about people even today who live in, say, Alaska.
In some places in Alaska, it is mandatory that if you travel in certain ways, you have to have a gun because a gun is essential for protection.
And hunting. Hunting is a big sport in this country, and not only in this country.
I mean, I was telling Debbie that as I'm reading Tolstoy these days, he talks about war and peace.
And of course, by war, he means war.
But by peace, he doesn't mean the absence of war.
He's actually talking about the domestic sphere, which can be, by the way, as turbulent as the hostilities on the battlefield.
But then what happens is when Tolstoy wants to take a respite, people go off on a hunt.
And the hunt is a kind of strangely spiritual event, a communing with nature, an ability to sort of get out of the world as it normally is.
And so you get this sense that hunting is not just an ordinary sport akin to say, you know, ping-pong or something like that but rather it is a it is an effort to give life itself a sort of interval and Then you sort of return to it in normal ways. So I understand the mystique of guns. I understand the appeal of guns I of course was a super fan of war movies as well as Westerns. Yeah, all of which prominently feature guns Yeah, but I have to say though
After I learned how to handle a weapon, I have a couple of guns and I got my CHL. I was very much, when I would watch a movie and I would see the actors manipulate these weapons, I was like, God, they don't know how to hold a gun.
Right. You've got to say that Gabi didn't just do her CHL, but she did tactical training classes in which they...
Because the idea is it's one thing to be able to shoot a stationary target.
What about if you have a moving target that is trying to shoot you?
And so in your tactical training, they would...
You'd have essentially a simulated home invasion.
Right, right. Yeah, you'd go into an apartment, a pretend apartment, and then all of these pop-ups would come up.
You know, you didn't know whether you were shooting, who you were shooting, but you had to be prepared with rubber bullets.
But anyway, I have to say, September 1st of 2021, so a few months ago, Texas allows now for people to carry without a concealed carry license.
And I wondered what that was going to do to my license because I have a license to carry.
It doesn't really do anything to my license.
In fact, there are some places that do not allow people that don't have a license to carry a weapon.
So my license is still very much in play.
And also, it's called a law of reciprocity, which...
Other states recognize law-abiding concealed carry licenses of a certain particular state.
I can tell you right now that California with a K is not one of them.
It doesn't recognize my license in Texas, but there are other states that do.
Obviously, if you don't have a license, you cannot take a weapon across state lines.
So it still comes into play.
And I still recommend it for people, especially because I do believe that it's extremely important to learn how to handle your weapon and be responsible.
Because in the event of an emergency, you want to make sure you don't shoot your foot.
Yeah. I mean, unfamiliar though I may be with guns and gun culture, it's very clear to me that the socialist left targeting guns with the kind of vehemence and determination that they do makes it really clear that for a law-abiding citizen to own guns is a part of the way in which you affirm freedom in America.
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Here's a question about the conservative intellectual tradition and, well, what happened to it.
Listen. Hey Dinesh, I've heard you speak sometimes about the conservative intellectual tradition, but we see pretty little of that in modern politics and lifestyles, so I was wondering if you could expand more on what traditional conservatism is and how somebody could learn more about it.
Wow. Well, it is true that we're living at a time when there's very little appeal, not just to the philosophical tradition of conservatism, there's very little appeal to the intellect at all.
What you have is simply assertion, And assertion unsubstantiated by context, by history, by even any kind of sophisticated argument.
So we're going through a kind of, you'd have to say, a little bit of a low era.
Now, what is it that American conservatism is trying to conserve?
I've mentioned this before, we're trying to conserve the principles of the American founding.
But see, that only begs the question, because we can study the founding.
When you do that, you realize quickly enough that the American founding itself is based on a tradition.
And so the conservative intellectual tradition incorporates that pre-existing tradition.
Well, what is that tradition?
As it turns out, that tradition is, well, you could call it twofold or threefold, depending on how you want to think about it.
If you want to call it twofold, it's the tradition of the ancients and the moderns.
And the ancients, of course, fork into two.
The tradition of the ancients forks into Athens, which is the tradition of classical reason of ancient Greece and pre-Christian Rome, and Jerusalem.
Jerusalem, of course, is the tradition of Judaism and Christianity.
And then the moderns has to do with a more modern tradition that is defined by figures like Locke and Hobbes and Machiavelli and Montesquieu.
And so what you have in the American founding is an attempt to bring together in a very interesting and unique way all these elements, which is Athens and Jerusalem and the emerging currents of modernity, as reflected, for example, in Locke, and to weave those together into what we now call a constitutional republic or a constitutional democracy.
Now we can study each of these elements and it would take, you know, I wouldn't say not even a course, not even a year, not even four years, more of a lifetime to kind of get a full grasp of all the deep roots of this tradition.
And this is why the conservative intellectual tradition is in a sense so rich.
This is not simply a matter of finding one particular thinker and reading, you know, Jefferson's notes on the state of Virginia or even the Federalist Papers.
The Federalist Papers itself has, as I say, multiple references that go back to the ancients and also go to the moderns and the traditional modern philosophy in Europe.
So what you really need in this situation is a kind of guide.
You need a sort of philosophical guide similar to, say, Virgil in Dante's Inferno.
Virgil is Dante's guide leading him through the Inferno.
Well, here we need a guide.
And I would propose for that guide, at least for me, it's been the philosopher Leo Strauss, a German emigre who came to America in the 1930s or 40s, wrote a series of books.
I'll do sometime on the podcast a kind of mini-course or tour through some of Strauss' works, but here I'll just mention one, kind of a good place to start.
It's this book right here by Leo Strauss, probably his most famous work.
It's called Natural Right and History.
What do we mean by natural right?
We mean the distinction between right and wrong that might be given originally by God, but, says Strauss, and says a very old tradition, it is inscribed in nature itself.
In other words, there is a natural...
The understanding of the line between right and wrong.
Think of someone, for example, who doesn't believe in God or doesn't know anything about Christianity.
They still can tell the difference between right and wrong.
And Strauss's question is, how?
How do they know that difference if it's not being given by God himself?
Well, this is a fascinating book, Natural Right in History.
And here are a few other books I'd recommend.
These represent sort of, I would call them, the classics of the The 20th century conservative tradition.
I'd love to point to a 21st century conservative tradition, but alas, there is none.
So here are some books I'd recommend, and they deal with different topics.
There's, of course, Hayek's Road to Serfdom.
There's Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
Now, Nozick is offering a kind of philosophical libertarianism, but argued with great tenacity and wit.
There's Alexander Solzhenitsyn, you can read The Gulag Archipelago, or An Easy Place to Start, a much shorter, slimmer volume, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
There's Whitaker Chambers, Witness, a book about Chambers' own experiences, defection away from communism and toward the West, but put in the most grandiose philosophical terms by an extremely good writer.
And then I've also mentioned, of course, Strauss's Natural Right in History.
So a couple of other works I'd recommend.
This, of course, moving closer to the direct tradition of the American founding I mentioned before, but I'll mention now.
The Federalist Papers, an excellent kind of primer on the constitutional mechanics of government.
Also, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which is a two-volume but an excellent work.
And finally, just the speeches of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln was himself anchored in this great tradition.
His speeches, although about issues of the moment, have a kind of deep philosophical current running through them.
And Lincoln was able, in a very folksy way, to invoke that current.
And so the speeches of Lincoln, I think, a very handy way to get an understanding of American philosophical conservatism.
I asked my daughter, Danielle D'Souza-Gill, to join because this next question actually pertains to incarceration, but it also pertains to her.
Listen. I've always wondered how you felt the moment that you realized you were going to have to serve prison or jail time or wherever it was that you ended up having to go for your sentence.
Because I know that you're a dad, and I'm a mom with children, and I cannot even imagine how that felt.
I would love to hear your answer.
For sure. I'll kind of give it from my point of view, and then it'll be interesting.
In fact, I don't know if I've even heard Danielle give it from her point of view.
But, you know, I was talking to my attorney, Ben Brafman, before the sentencing, and he was actually telling me that federal prison, this is, by the way, white-collar prison, he said he was almost, I don't know if he was trying to cheer me up, but he's like, it's actually no big deal.
He goes, you know, first of all, he goes, you'll meet some very interesting people in there.
He goes, you'll meet a mayor or two and a city alderman and some business guys and some salesmen.
And he goes, and the facilities are actually quite good.
He goes, you can play chess.
He goes, they... Sometimes I have a tennis court.
There's, of course, television facilities.
So he was giving me the idea that this would be almost like a little bit of quiet time for me.
But one of the definite costs, and a very heavy one, is you have very little communication with the outside world.
And here was Danielle, and she had just gotten into Dartmouth.
I think she had finished her freshman year.
And so my communication with her would have been limited to none for the duration, which could be, I don't know, six months, a year.
My sentence could have been up to two years, although that would have been a little bit, perhaps a little unlikely.
And so I got the other alternative, which was the confinement center, which has, well, that has criminals of every stripe.
Not just white-collar, but blue-collar guys.
I mean, coyotes, drug smugglers, people who were in there for rape.
Typically, people at the end of their sentence who were about to be released.
But nevertheless, it was a far more, well, let's say, mixed crowd.
But the good news was that I got out in the day.
I'd only stay overnight, check in at 7, check out typically at 6 or 6.30 in the morning.
And that meant that my family communications were uninterrupted, at least uninterrupted for the most part.
So that's, you know, that's my short account.
I think in that sense, I was relieved that I got the confinement center instead of federal prison because I think it would have been hard on me and obviously hard on family.
How do you see all that?
Because you lived through it just the way I did.
Yeah, I mean, I think it was a crazy time.
Literally so much happening.
All of a sudden, you know, the house was being checked by those people who raided the place to look through everything.
Of course, before this, you know, definitely wasn't expecting anything like that.
And then, yeah, I would say my experience was kind of dual.
It was partly, you know, when I was with you and then partly when I was in college.
So I guess I would say, at least for the college part, how it was, was really honestly just...
Crazy. I don't know how else to describe it because one of my professors called me out in front of my whole class and he would call me little felon.
And he would say like, oh, you know, we just saw this in the paper.
We just saw this and that.
And so I think that made me really tough in school because a lot of the other kids never really had to deal with that.
Sometimes you might have other students be rude to you, but I had more professors being rude to me.
So I actually had a different professor I talked to about this issue and he kind of scolded the other professor like that's kind of too far.
So yeah, I think in college that was difficult because I was very worried about it and I wasn't there.
But then I think when I took an off term from school, I was able to be back.
So I was able to drive you there and see what was happening and I think we went the first day when you started.
We drove there and that was kind of scary because we didn't know what to expect.
Yeah, I think that was probably...
I was the most apprehensive the very first time because I was walking into an environment that I knew would have been unlike any I had experienced before.
I mean, try to imagine going into a facility and then they lock the doors and you're sort of locked inside and you look around and you realize, wow, this is a...
This is a whole different world that, quite honestly, I never thought I would have any experience with.
But I think you're making the point that there's a way in which you come out not only mentally, not only psychologically, but even spiritually stronger because you see that you've sort of been in it and you've endured it and you've emerged.
I wouldn't say unscathed, but in some ways stronger.
Yeah. No, definitely. I mean, I just felt like, you know, those professors were so rude.
I didn't care about them. I think I was mostly worried about you being there, especially at the beginning, because we weren't, again, like, sure what it was going to be like.
And you had your confinement outfit.
He'd wear normal clothes when he would, you know, be at home.
But then when you go to the confinement center, he'd wear kind of this, like...
You know, like he didn't want to draw attention.
So he wouldn't go looking like Professor Dinesh here.
He would go dressed in a hoodie and he kind of had his alternate clothing.
So that was kind of strange.
And then I think, yeah, he had a Christmas, a little Christmas show.
He used to do this community service teaching English to people.
So when they did their little Christmas thing, he had to wear the little Christmas hat.
So I remember going to that and being like, yeah, go, you know, Class, go team Tanesh.
The class would typically end at 9 p.m., but in the summer, no class.
And so I show up at my usual sign-in time, 7 p.m., to check in, and they're like, what are you doing here?
I'm like, well, see, the class is out of session.
We don't have it in the summer, so instead of coming in at 9 as normal, I'm coming in at 7 because I don't have class.
The guy's like, Well, it says right here you're supposed to come in at 9.
So I realized I'm dealing with a robot.
There's no point trying to explain.
There's no mind.
You're talking to a wall.
And so I'm like, what do you want me to do?
They're like, come back at 9.
So I basically went to the local Starbucks and sort of had a venti latte.
Came back two hours later after doing some reading because I realized I'm dealing with complete robots.
And... Surviving in that environment takes a certain set of skills.
And now I have them.
Yeah. And I think the craziest time was the unknown time.
The time when there was a trial.
The time when we didn't really know what was going to happen.
But I think once the confinement...
Once we knew what it was, and once the system was kind of started, the routine, and we knew what that was like, that was a little bit better.
Because even though, of course, it was horrible that you had to go there at all, be in the confinement center, do all the community service, do the psychological testing, all of that was crazy.
But I think the court time was a crazy time because, you know, the judge had it out for you, and I just wasn't sure what was going to happen.
Well, I mean, this is the lesson of it all looking back.
Do not put your fate in the hands of bad people who can then do their will with you.
So I realized looking back that I should have steered clear of all this instead of letting them put a target on my back.
But unfortunately, I was not cautious about it.
I didn't know you, honey, Debbie, at the time.
Debbie ran a pack.
She would have given me the red alert, don't do this.
But happily, having done it, I came through with it, not only okay, but in some ways, better than ever.
Our final question concerns the enigmatic genius of Robert E. Lee.
Listen. Hi, Dinesh.
I just listened to your episode 129 in which you stated that you thought that Robert E. Lee was one of the best generals of all time.
I wanted to bring your attention to a book called Lost Victories, The Military Genius of Stonewall Jackson by Bevan Alexander.
He makes a compelling argument that Stonewall Jackson, while he was in the Shenandoah Campaign, he separately fought three different Union armies and defeated all three of them.
And then he joined Robert E. Lee's staff.
And Robert E. Lee wasn't doing too good before that.
He was really impressed with Stonewall Jackson and listened to his counsel and followed his advice, and that's where all the victories came from.
So it's just a well-researched, just excellent written book, and I hope you have time to take a look at it.
Take care. This is fascinating and my answer is not really going to disagree so much as to try to fill out the argument that I think you're making.
A couple of words about Stonewall Jackson.
Stonewall Jackson, this is by the way General Joseph Jackson, A great military tactician, a strange man.
Apparently, he was highly superstitious.
He believed that when he rode a horse, he needed to keep one of his arms outstretched to the side in order to sort of maintain his spiritual balance.
He was unrelenting.
He was merciless.
He was once asked, what should we do with the Yankees?
And his answer was, kill them all.
Kill them all. We're good to go.
He was able to move from point to point, take on different segments of the Union Army, thrash them, and move to another spot and do exactly the same thing.
And you're also right that Robert E. Lee saw him as indispensable when Stonewall Jackson was eventually killed.
I believe Robert E. Lee said literally something to the effect of, I've lost my right arm.
So all of this, I think, is true.
And it raises the question of where then is the military genius of Robert E. Lee?
Well, part of it is you actually pointed it out yourself when you said that Lee recognized the tactical wisdom of Stonewall Jackson.
Remember, that's part of what a general does, right?
Part of what made Eisenhower a good general was Eisenhower recognized, for example, at a time when many people were ridiculing Patton, they thought Patton was crazy, Patton was out of control, let's rein Patton in, Eisenhower was like, no, this is a guy who knows how to kill the Nazis.
And so what Eisenhower did was he deployed Patton to maximum effect.
Having mentioned Patton, I think I would compare Robert E.
Lee to the great German general, Erwin Rommel.
Rommel was obviously fighting on the wrong side, on a bad side, and I would say that Rommel was a good man who fought in a bad cause.
Same with Robert E. Lee.
He was a good man. Who was fighting in a bad cause.
Now, Robert E. Lee wasn't fighting to defend slavery.
He was actually opposed to slavery.
He inherited some slaves on his wife's side, but he wasn't a plantation guy.
In fact, his whole career was in the military.
He went to West Point. He became a big star at West Point.
Lincoln offered him the command of the Union Army, which he turned down.
So this is Robert E. Lee.
And you can be a great general even if you ultimately lose.
And why did Robert E. lose?
He lost because he was outnumbered.
I mean, the Union Army was much bigger than the Army of Northern Virginia, and in fact, the North was much bigger than the Confederacy.
Not only was the North bigger in terms of population, but the North also had all the ammunitions factories, the North had all the industrial potential, the North was able to build better roads and create infrastructure for the army to operate in, so the South was fighting at a tremendous disadvantage.
Part of the genius of Robert E. Lee was to recognize the only way that the war could be won.
Now, for a lot of the Confederate leaders, Jefferson Davis, primary among them, they were hoping that the way that the South could prevail is that Britain and the European powers would come and fight or join And support the Southern side.
And of course, Britain was dependent on Southern cotton.
The textile mills of Manchester ran on Confederate cotton.
And so Britain had an economic interest in supporting the South, but there had just been a huge anti-slavery movement in Britain.
Britain had abolished the slave trade.
It was very difficult for Britain to side with a side, in this case the South, that was seen as the side championing slavery.
So this is really what kept Now, Robert E. Lee knew this.
He knew that the South was not going to get the support of Europe.
And the only way to win the war was actually to divide the North.
Robert E. Lee was counting on Democrats in the North to undercut Lincoln and ultimately to defeat Lincoln in the 1864 election.
And you know what? They almost did.
They almost did to the point where Lincoln himself was virtually convinced he was going to lose the election, and it was only huge military victories in Atlanta by Grant and by Sherman that turned the tide of the war, turned the tide of public opinion.
Lincoln was re-elected, and that sealed the fate of the Confederacy.
But Robert E. Lee knew that if I can somehow...
Pry the North into two.
If I can somehow break the will of the North.
This, by the way, is why Robert Lee was constantly planning campaigns.
I'm gonna invade Maryland.
I'm going to invade Pennsylvania.
I'm going to bring the war to the North, because he knew that in the end, wars are won, not just by the proportion of actual force on the two sides, but by the proportion of actual force multiplied by that unknown factor, that X factor, which is military will.
And Lee's strategy was to try to undermine the will of the North, and in doing so, give the South its only chance, maybe a fragile chance, what turned out to be ultimately an ephemeral chance that evaporated, evaporated at Gettysburg, evaporated with Lincoln's victory in 1864.
But the genius of Robert E. Lee is that even though he failed, he saw a path to victory, and he tried.
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