All Episodes
Previous Next
April 27, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:31
WHY FREE SPEECH? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep319
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Elon Musk makes the case that free speech is consistent with democracy, and here's why I agree with him.
I want to talk about Kevin McCarthy to make the larger point that our biggest problem doesn't seem to even necessarily be the left.
In some ways, it's the GOP establishment.
I'll expose how Democrats gerrymander while they can and cry voter suppression when their opponents do it.
I'll reveal how the Supreme Court can crush the equity craze in three swift steps, and I'm going to now take you into the magical realm of Dante's Paradiso.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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.
Vijaya Gade is the chief lawyer at Twitter.
This is the woman who was responsible for kicking Trump off the platform.
This is also the woman who suppressed the Hunter Biden story.
A very powerful attorney at Twitter.
She's been at Twitter a long time, and she's in charge of the whole content moderation operation.
Well... Delightful report yesterday in Politico.
Twitter's top lawyer reassures staff cries during meeting about Musk takeover.
She's crying. Oh, it's horrific.
It's horrible. Now, let's pause for a moment and think about this.
She's not crying because she is being restricted.
She's not crying because any of her friends are being restricted or suppressed.
She's crying because she's being prevented from restricting and banning other people.
In other words, this is not the weeping of the victim.
It's the weeping of the perpetrator.
Kind of reminds me of the scene in the Shawshank Redemption.
You remember that vicious prison guard who would beat people up and enjoyed it, took a certain kind of sadistic pleasure in it.
But when he's busted at the end of the movie, suddenly this big strong man is reduced to tears.
Well, that's basically the political, Vijayagade is the political equivalent of this guy.
And if you remember, this is a woman I mentioned on the podcast before.
She came up with a fabulous, fabulous here in the sense of made-up story about her family's encounter with the KKK. And I went on the podcast and went, hey, Vijaya, you know what?
Give me the contact information.
I'll verify it. Whether this story is true, dead silence, not a word.
Why? Because she was obviously trying to get some civil rights points for herself and make it sound like she's some budding Martin Luther King and her family was like struggling for racial justice in the style of Montgomery and Selma.
Now, interesting changes already at Twitter.
Conservative accounts are surging.
In fact, some guy, this is the guy with the bulwark, so he's a never-Trumper and he's mad about this.
But he notices AOC is down 27,000 followers, Maddow's down 18,000, Colbert's down 21,000, Matt Gaetz is up.
25,000. I'm up 41,000.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is up 41,000.
He's acting like this is like very fishy as if, you know, Elon Musk is adding subscribers.
No, they're just removing the banning algorithms.
So you had all these little freaks at Twitter and what they were doing is manipulating the dials.
Let's boost Colbert.
Let's boost AOC. Let's shut down D'Souza.
And now that Musk is coming into the building, they're like, we don't want our fingerprints all over this, so let's stop doing that.
Let's get hands off the dials.
And of course, what's happening now is that people are getting the natural traction that their own posts are attracting.
Now, Elon Musk himself, who does not hesitate to tweet what is on now his own platform, very interesting couple of tweets that I want to examine for a moment.
He goes,"...the extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech says it all." And isn't that true?
These are people who are reacting like Dracula before a cross.
And no one's even throwing holy water on them, because no one's forcing them to listen to anyone.
They can block anybody they want.
It's just they hate the idea of other people being able to speak.
In other words, there's a tyrannical impulse on the left that has now invaded the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
Of course, it's all done under the pretext with suppressing disinformation.
Well, first of all, disinformation is defined as whatever they don't agree with.
That's disinformation. It's not as if they have a list of factual propositions that they're able to demonstrate with Euclidean clarity that they're upholding.
If so, I'd like to have a list of those factual demonstrations that supposedly the rest of us are denying.
This is all complete nonsense and camouflage.
The truth of it is they want to shut down their opponents from speaking.
They've been able to do that.
They're mad now that they can't do it.
And here is Elon Musk calling for a different standard, which I think is the right standard for all social media platforms, namely this.
If it's legal, You can say it.
Yeah, it might offend some people.
So what? Yeah, some people may not want to listen.
Close your ears. Don't go on Twitter.
Look somewhere else.
Read a book. So this idea that you have a right not to be offended, guess what?
You don't. I'll continue with Elon Musk here.
By free speech, I simply mean that which matches the law.
And then he goes on to make an interesting point.
He's not making the sort of civil liberties point that we have a right to free speech regardless of what the majority says.
Rather, he makes this point.
He goes, I'm against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask the government to pass laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
He's making kind of an ingenious argument, which is that if the collective will of the people was that certain types of speeches are out of bounds.
Let's just say, for example, extreme forms of obscenity or pornography.
We just don't want that in our society.
Fine. Pass a law that says that hardcore pornography can't be circulated.
And that does reflect the will of the people.
Whether or not you agree with the law, the idea here is that that was passed through the democratic process.
That's the channel for the will of the people.
And therefore, legality, Musk says, does reflect the will of the people, whereas what the left wants is not the will of the people.
What they want is essentially an elite, them, having the decision to decide, well, that guy, we don't really like what he has to say.
Let's restrict his expression.
Let's dial this guy down.
Let's shadow ban that guy.
Let's kick this guy off the platform.
All of that, that whole big sad and sick circus is now thanks to Elon Musk coming to an end.
Ordinary towels just don't seem to dry you much anymore.
They feel soft and lotiony in the store, but you take them home and they don't absorb.
Well, why not? Because towel companies typically import the product and they add softeners to make the towels feel good, but they don't dry you very well.
Now, Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, has solved this problem.
He founded the best towel company right here in the USA. They have proprietary technology to create towels that feel soft and actually work.
They're all made with USA cotton.
They come with the MyPillow 60-day money-back guarantee.
We only use MyPillow towels in our home.
For a limited time, Mike's offering a ridiculously good deal on a six-piece towel set.
That's two bath towels, two hand towels, two washcloths, all made with USA cotton.
Regularly $109.99, but now $39.99.
Wow! Call 800-876-0227.
That's 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com.
You've got this discount, deep discounts on the other MyPillow products, but to get the discounts, you need to use promo code DINESHDINESH. I want to talk about some of the interneesine fighting that's going on right now inside the Republican Party.
Not so much to take sides about it or in it, but rather to show a way to transcend it.
So there's been a series of tapes that have come out that show Kevin McCarthy bashing other members, well, of the GOP, specifically Matt Gaetz, but also Brooks,
Mo Brooks. And this is evidently because Gates and Brooks are seen as taking Trump's side on the election, and moreover, their comments about January 6th.
And here's Kevin McCarthy speaking, I guess, of Gates.
He's putting people in jeopardy, and he doesn't need to be doing this.
And then Steve Scalise, the kind of number two guy in the GOP in the House, says, quote, it's potentially illegal what he's doing.
This I find odd. He doesn't say what exactly is illegal.
And then Gates has kind of hit back and he said, quote, this is the behavior of weak men, not leaders, striking out at McCarthy and Trump.
And then Tucker Carlson on Fox basically says that we've got to stop McCarthy from being the leader next time.
We don't need a, quote, Republican Congress led by a puppet of the Democratic Party.
I want to add to this an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, which talks about the fact that there is a sentiment inside the GOP establishment that Trump should, quote, go away. I want to just read the key passages here.
He says that there's, quote, a fundamental dishonesty.
At the heart of the relationship between the Republican Party and Mr.
Trump. And the writer goes on to say, Zoe Richards is the writer, who says, there is a, quote, fervent desire of much of the Republican Party's top brass.
Its major donors, business leaders, and many of the party's most prominent supporters in the media and elsewhere is for Mr.
Trump to break the habits of a lifetime and go quietly away.
Now, the writer goes on to say that the people who feel this way, supposedly some elected officials, some GOP consultant types, some pollster types, they believe this privately, but they won't say it publicly.
And that alone raises an interesting question.
First of all, if it's true, why would they not say it publicly?
And the answer, of course, is that they don't want to face the wrath of the Republican voters.
So in other words, you've got this GOP establishment and they're like, we don't really need Trump.
We really wish he'll go away.
And these are the same people whose fear of Trump arises out of the simple fact that they know that their own base doesn't like them and likes Trump.
In other words, their own base, these are not votes that they could get.
This is not enthusiasm that they know how to stir up.
In some ways, they recognize that they themselves are losers.
But apparently they would rather be content to be losers on their own than have a figure like Trump who I guess they feel on the balance is too inflammatory, too out there, and maybe they feel in some way endangering the long-term prospects of the Republican Party.
I'm sure that is the way some of them feel.
Now, what do we make of this kind of ugly internecine conflict?
It's tempting for me to say, alright, the make America great again side is in the right and the establishment is wrong.
Let's go after the establishment.
I do think that there is a process underway of kind of remaking the GOP. And that may be part of what's going on.
The old guard, which is used to the old way.
Admittedly, old ways that were cultivated in the Reagan era and continued through the Bush era, tactics and slogans and ways of doing business that are actually quite...
It's quite obsolete now.
But nevertheless, people who are habituated to those things don't know how to do anything else.
Which is to say that they don't know how to court voters.
They don't know how to be effective in this technological era.
And they look with a certain envy and even rage at Trump and his ability to do that.
Now, this is not to say that Trump doesn't have weaknesses.
Of course, he does as we all do.
What I'd like to do, because I think one of the key issues here really is 2020, is November 2020, is take the facts and evidence in my film, which is, by the way, not shouted from the rooftops.
I'm not screaming. I present this evidence in a sort of a 60-minute Dateline NBC episode.
An unfolding, measured style.
I have all these Salem hosts with me, and they're seeing the evidence for the first time.
So what's cool about the movie is you can see them react to it in real time and give a spontaneous, unrehearsed reaction.
And so what I'm getting at is this is kind of a way for the GOP leadership, including the GOP establishment, including some of the never-Trumper types, to sit down, take a kind of stalk of what is now out there, what's definitive, what can actually be known.
Because if you don't know what happened, then you can easily go, what was the most secure election?
If you don't know what happened, you can go, I know what happened.
But there's a common body of facts that you can examine and then have the kind of discussion about a unified GOP coming together on what is known and building on this foundation of facts, making the case against Biden, making the case against the Democrats as we move into the November midterms. The global upheaval caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the crippling sanctions on Russian trade are showing to have massive ripple effects
across the world, including right here in the US. And it's not just at the gas pump. Food prices are soaring right now.
Friends, inflation continues to skyrocket. As the dollar becomes worth less every day, you need to transition some of your nest egg into something of real worth.
That's gold and silver from Birch Gold.
That's right. Birch Gold will help you convert an IRA or 401k into a tax-sheltered account in gold and silver.
Get started now. Text Dinesh to 989898.
With thousands of satisfied customers like us and an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, Birch Gold can help you protect your savings.
Text Dinesh to 989898 to get a free information kit on gold.
There's no obligation at all.
Text Dinesh to 989898 and protect your savings with gold.
I want to talk about gerrymandering and about the profound and almost comical hypocrisy of the Democrats and of the left about gerrymandering.
Basically, their position comes down to, when we do it, it's fantastic.
And when anyone else does it, even the Republicans do it, it's against democracy.
It's a form of voter suppression.
It's horrible. It can't be allowed.
And the straight-faced way in which the Democrats hold to this position, this is really what is a sight to behold.
Admittedly, gerrymandering is a kind of an approach, a process that goes to the very early days of the Republic.
In 1812, Elbridge Gerry, one of the founding fathers, by the way, former vice president, former governor of Massachusetts, he sort of signed off on this weird district.
He was a Democrat.
He was trying to benefit the Democratic Party.
And the Democrats drew this very weird snake-like district that resembled a salamander.
In fact, that's where we get the name gerrymander.
It's Elbridge Gerry plus salamander giving you gerrymander.
And so a gerrymander district is a politically awkward district.
Typically designed by the ruling party to protect and guarantee winning seats for itself.
So, drawing the map in a favorable way.
Now, this by itself is not voter suppression.
It's not voter fraud.
It's, I would say, distasteful that this is done, but it is done by both parties.
And yet, when the Republicans do it, the Democrats act like this is horrific.
This is something that can't be permitted.
So recently, a North Carolina Supreme Court struck down some legislative districts that were drawn by the GOP in North Carolina that would have benefited the Republican Party.
And when that happened, Joe Biden comes out, you know, with, this is what he goes, he says, voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around, acting as if a gerrymander is a subversion of democracy.
And sure enough, Barack Obama calls Republican gerrymandering efforts, quote, threatening democracy, the liberal Brennan Center, quote, gerrymandering is deeply undemocratic.
Well, okay. If that is the case, and a case can be made that it is, try to explain why the Democrats, even as we speak, are aggressively involved in gerrymandering in places like New York and Maryland and Wisconsin.
So recently, a New York judge struck down the new voting districts pushed through by the Democrats and And the judge said, this is unconstitutional gerrymandering.
Not that gerrymandering is unconstitutional, but it goes too far.
It is too much of an effort to sort of rig the district in such a way that it really ceases to reflect the will of the voters.
And in Maryland, an appellate court has found that the Democrats are trying to do the same thing in that state.
A five-judge panel struck down the Democratic gerrymandering plan for Maryland and And also, the Democrats lost a redistricting fight in Wisconsin, with the court ruling that their map was, quote, racially motivated and, quote, unconstitutional.
Now, interestingly, when courts make those decisions that go against the Democratic Party, the media reaction?
Silence. No discussion about suppressing democracy.
Suddenly that rhetoric kind of completely disappears.
It's portrayed in the news as some sort of a legalistic conclusion that the court came to.
And then let's move on.
But meanwhile, here's Mark Elias, one of the top lawyers for the Democratic Party.
He goes, quote,"'Republicans gerrymander like this because they do not want free and fair elections.'" Now, again, wait.
If you're going to articulate this kind of a standard, at least attempt to apply it across the board, or at least give some explanation of why democratic gerrymandering is noble and conducted with a decent respect for the opposition, whereas republican gerrymandering is just ruthless and callous and somehow...
In other words, try to show the dividing line, the moral or political sense behind why it's okay for the Democrats to do it and not okay for the Republicans to do it.
Of course, no such rationale exists.
To look at New York for a moment, the Democrats were basically trying to restore a district that Democrat Max Rose lost, this is the 11th district of New York, to Nicole Malliotakis.
And Nicole Malatakis is now in Congress.
And Democrats are like, let's try to figure out how to defeat her.
So they basically redrew her district.
They pulled in the Park Slope area, a very liberal, kind of tony, upscale area of Brooklyn.
And they thought, well, let's by putting more liberal voters into that district, we should be able to knock out Nicole Malliotakis.
So again, I'm not...
I'm not climbing on a moral high horse to say that the Republicans are right to do it, the Democrats are not.
But I'm saying that the Democrats don't have the moral high horse either.
This kind of gerrymandering, which is sort of ancient, I think is something that we should be moving away from.
We should try to have cleanly drawn districts that roughly represent the, very often, diversity of voters in a particular state.
Obviously, a democratic state is going to have more democratic-leaning seats because there are more democratic-leaning voters.
But the district shouldn't be drawn in such a way as to betray and undermine the will of the voters.
Some of us wish we could rewind the clock when it comes to our health.
Exercising, climbing stairs, all the things young people take for granted, well, these don't have to stop just because you age.
Well, neither do you have to just endure the normal aging aches and pains because now there is a 100% drug-free solution.
It's called Relief Factor.
Relief Factor supports your body's fight against inflammation and that's the source of aches and pains.
The vast majority of people who try Relief Factor order more because it works for them.
Debbie loves using Relief Factor.
When her shoulders started acting up, frozen shoulder, about a year or so ago, it was the only thing that worked for her.
And she knows if she stops taking it, well, the pain is going to come right back.
So she's like, I'm not going to be without this again.
You too can benefit. Try it for yourself.
Order the three-week quick start for the discounted price of just $19.95.
Go to relieffactor.com.
Or call 833-690-7246 to find out more about this offer.
That number again, 833-690-7246.
Or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. I want to talk broadly about what can be done and, in fact, who should do it to defeat this vicious equity mantra and equity ideology that is infecting the American campus, but it's also infecting our society generally.
I was looking at some of the briefs that are being presented or filed in the Harvard case.
This is the Supreme Court taking up the issue of affirmative action.
And you begin to see what's going on and sort of how disturbing it is.
So, if Harvard were to adopt a purely merit-based admissions policy, which is to say if Harvard were to be colorblind, not really look at the race or ethnicity of the applicant, just really look at their grades, look at their test scores, look at their academic preparation, and decide based on that.
Well, according to this documentation presented to the court, if they did that, if Harvard were colorblind, Over 50% of the admitted students would be Asian American.
Wow. 51.7% to be specific.
And similarly, well, what is the Asian American population of Harvard now?
24%. So the Asian-American population of Harvard would double.
And this group, Asian-Americans, which are, what, six, seven percent of the population, would nevertheless be half of the Harvard student body.
Again, this is not because they're discriminating or they've got a history of looking down on other people.
This is all nonsense.
It's purely because the Asian Americans have better grades, better test scores, work harder, study harder, stronger family values, put a higher importance on education.
These are the cultural and behavioral factors that explain why Asian Americans are in this, well, not privileged in the sense of fortunate, but earned position.
Now we turn to the share of whites.
Whites are currently 37.6% of the Harvard student body.
And if there was a colorblind policy, the number of whites, the proportion of whites would be, well, about the same.
In fact, it would go down very slightly from 37.6 to 35.5.
So interestingly, we see that affirmative action here is not having a dramatic effect.
On the proportion of whites at at least Harvard and perhaps also at other colleges, the Hispanic share would drop significantly from 14.9%, which is where it is now, to, wow, 2.7%.
I mean, this is just a tremendous...
Unbelievable. Would vanish from the current share, 15.8%, to 0.9%.
Blacks would be less than 1% at Harvard on the basis of merit.
So you can see here both what a true meritocracy would produce.
But you can also see why the Harvard officials would be embarrassed by that kind of a result.
In fact, it almost seems to be a result that would give fodder to racists.
Although racists can't take too much comfort from all this.
Why? Because racists always like to say, well, the white people are the smartest.
They're the greatest. They should be on top.
And obviously, no racist would want to say, well, the smartest people are Are actually the Asian Americans.
They're first. Whites may be second.
Hispanics may be third. So racist satisfaction in this outcome would have to be moderated or ambivalent.
But the point I'm trying to make is that the sheer embarrassment of these institutions of having a very small, in the case of blacks, almost negligible number of blacks, in the case of Hispanics still at a very small, I mean under 3%, This is why they do all this racial engineering.
This is why they're into this big equity thing.
And the way that they push the equity thing is that they have this idea that every racial group should roughly approximate...
It's like in the absence of discrimination, we expect...
And this is, of course, the preposterous premise.
False premise, by the way.
In the absence of discrimination, we would expect each racial group to fan out into Harvard and other elite colleges...
At roughly its proportion in the surrounding population.
Now, why is this a foolish assumption?
The reason is that groups perform differently.
I'm not saying that this is due to some intrinsic factor.
It could be due to cultural, behavioral, who knows all kinds of factors.
It's kind of like asking, why is it the case that Indian Americans in the United States...
Why is it the case that so many of them are doctors?
Why is it the case that so many of them are engineers?
Why is it the case that so many own motels stretching across the Midwest?
Why do so many Indian Americans have Indian restaurants?
Well, look, there are explanations for all those things, but the idea that, you know, Indian Americans should be present at roughly their proportion on the basketball court and Jews should be present at roughly their proportion in farming, this is all a certain kind of crazy talk.
But it's the kind of crazy talk that is now respectable in academia.
I think that while I'm happy to see a number of states passing laws about critical race theory and so on, it's really the Supreme Court's job here to step in and step in on the basis of the 14th Amendment.
Equal rights under the law is one of the core principles of America.
I mean, it was there from the beginning.
It's right there in the Declaration of Independence.
But it was constitutionally affirmed in the 14th Amendment.
And what the Supreme Court needs to do, this is probably one of the best things that they can do, this 6-3, this 5-4, this conservative Supreme Court, is strike down this stupid doctrine of proportional representation and And restore the idea, in fact it's the Martin Luther King idea, that we ought to be judged on our merits as individuals.
Imagine the lifelong impact of a journey to the Holy Land.
Surrounded by like-minded travelers, picture yourself stepping foot in iconic locations right out of Scripture.
Join Dr. Sebastian Gorka and Dinesh D'Souza on this life-enriching Israel tour, November 30th through December 9th, 2022.
For more information, call 855-565-5519 or visit StandWithIsraelTour.com The state of Florida, under the leadership of Ron DeSantis, who's really proving almost effortlessly to be one of, if not the best governor in the country, the state of Florida has decided, look, we're going to go through the textbooks in the public schools.
A lot of them have all kinds of ideological content, critical race theory, including In the math curriculum.
In the math curriculum.
So, Governor DeSantis is like, listen, you know, math is about teaching numerical skills.
It's teaching addition and subtraction and equations and algebra.
And this whole idea of trying to inject Your feelings into it and inject societal concerns, racial equity, your emotional reaction to math as if what really matters is not getting the equation right, but kind of how it makes you feel.
Florida is doing a very necessary cleanup operation here.
And look, I mean, I come out of a culture, this is of course Asian Indian culture, but it's just as true of Chinese culture.
It's the culture of the entire Far East.
And that is that math is ultimately about getting it right.
And there is a sort of exactitude in mathematics that you don't have in other fields.
If somebody asks you what you think about Hamlet, there you can have a range of subjective reactions.
You can approach Hamlet analytically from many different angles.
But although there may be more than one way to solve a problem, typically in a math problem there is one correct answer and either you get it or you don't.
And this is really the position of DeSantis.
Quote, math is about getting the right answer.
It's not about how you feel about the problem.
Touché! But here's an article in the New York Times.
A look inside the textbooks that Florida rejected.
Now, first of all, I don't even trust the New York Times.
So even though I read the article, I'm thinking to myself that the most incriminating information in these textbooks the New York Times probably left out.
So you're dealing with people who are brazen liars, completely dishonest.
You can't really trust what they say.
So I'm always reading these articles to decode them, to look at what they admit.
Let's see what they at least do admit and how they try to cover it up or justify it.
So the New York Times admits that there's a whole bunch of stuff in these textbooks that has what they call social-emotional learning content.
And then in order to give this a patina of respectability, quote, a practice with roots in psychological research that tries to help students develop mindsets that can support academic success.
So evidently academic success is not due to habits of discipline, practice, Paying attention, using your visual-spatial skills, developing a kind of math memory in which things like the ability to recite simple things.
Nine times seven, what's the answer?
Give it to me right now. Don't wait and remember the tables and start doing the nine times tables until you get to nine times seven.
You know, if you don't have those infrastructural skills, how are you going to go to the next step in math?
But of course, the New York Times is all on board with this social-emotional learning.
They pretend like there's some major distinction between social-emotional learning and critical race theory, even though the examples that they give show that there's no such distinction.
In fact, there's a ridiculous, one of the few examples that you can look at and evaluate for yourself is they have a question about Isaac Newton.
Alright, you're expecting maybe if they want to situationally locate this to give people a little bit of a narrative sense, you'd have Isaac Newton sitting under a tree.
Maybe he notices the apple fall.
Maybe he then notices that the moon is, quote, falling in the same way as the apple.
This is kind of what I expect.
But here's the actual question.
Newton is afraid of heights.
He doesn't want to cross a hanging bridge in the Belize jungle.
So, obviously, this is what I'm guessing, is somebody drafted the original anecdote involving Newton.
He's at Oxford.
They're looking at the historical anecdote, and someone goes, oh, well, you know, we can't mention Oxford.
Oxford has a legacy of being British, and the British are connected with the white people.
Why don't we put Newton in Belize?
This will give it a sort of multicultural chic.
And so, this is the kind of nonsense that these people spend their time on in the math textbooks.
And no wonder the ordinary American student is a virtual moron in math.
No wonder Americans do the worst or among the worst in the world.
No wonder that these students come to America, not just by the way from Asia.
They come from the West Indies.
They come from Trinidad. They come from Pakistan.
They come from all over. And they run circles around the American students for the simple reason, not that the American students are dumb, it's that they haven't been taught.
So I don't blame the students.
I blame the educators who have essentially immersed themselves in this kind of social ideology.
They're more concerned about programming and indoctrinating these students than they are about teaching them math.
And now the New York Times is a little mad that Florida is on to them and is actually correcting the problem.
Here's another example given by the Times, equally telling.
They talk about a rejected McGraw-Hill pre-algebra textbook, shown below, which, quote, did include mini-biographies of mathematicians through history, almost all of whom were women or people of color.
So, evidently, the mathematicians who are white, which, by the way, to be honest, in modern mathematics is the vast majority of them, are excluded.
And what they do is they find the mathematicians of color and the female mathematicians, and they put them in the textbook.
So, once again, this is an attempt here to replace math With equity indoctrination.
And Florida is having none of it, and I hope Florida proves here a model for other states to have none of it either.
Mike Lindell, the inventor and CEO of MyPillow, wants to make it easy for you to be a super shopper just like Debbie and me.
Well, how? By giving you great deals.
For example, his Giza Dream Bedsheets are now 60% off, as low as $39.99.
Plus, with any purchase using promo code Dinesh, you're going to get a free copy of Mike's inspirational book.
Mike is also offering up to 66% off a whole bunch of other products.
All the MyPillow products come with a 60-day money-back guarantee and a 10-year warranty.
Call 800-8760-227, that number, 800-8760-227, or just go to MyPillow.com, but to get the discounts, you need to use promo code Dinesh.
Does our situation in America today bear some resemblance to the situation in the Soviet Union before the fall of communism?
I'm going to let you be the judge for yourself, but I've been reading, well, not the book, I'm reading a review of a book by David Satter.
The book is called Never Speak to Strangers and Other Writings from Russia and the Soviet Union.
And what I find fascinating about the review is it talks about Satter's travels through Russia.
Apparently in 1977 this writer was going through Russia and he was told that some friends of his would arrange a meeting with some Lithuanian dissidents.
So he meets with these guys and he comes back to America.
And he talks to some of his friends and he says, oh, I had a fascinating meeting with the people that you connected me with.
And they tell him that their friends told him that he never met them.
So, this seems really strange.
So, Satter has to figure out what happened.
Well, it turns out that when he got there, the people who were posing as the Lithuanian dissidents were actually KGB agents in disguise.
So, it was a completely fake meeting.
This guy thinks, I'm meeting with dissidents, but he's actually meeting with the KGB. When I read that, I thought to myself, this sounds to me like the guys who are plotting to kidnap Governor Whitmer, and they think, oh, we're going to meet with some fellow militiamen, we're going to discuss whether this plot is viable.
They're actually meeting with FBI agents, which is basically our version of the KGB. So let's continue here.
And the theme that comes through from this review is the idea that what the Soviet Union liked to do is manufacture a reality completely different from the reality of the world.
And they then try to make you live in that reality.
Think of how this really resembles America today.
We have a media that puts forward a reality, but that's really not what's happening.
That is a highly colored, twisted, ideologically purified view of the world.
It's essentially propaganda masquerading as fact.
And facts are classified, conversely, as propaganda or as disinformation.
Oh, we've got to suppress disinformation.
Now... So, in the Soviet Union, they would have trade unions.
Even though they weren't real trade unions, these were basically unions that were put together by the state.
They would have elections. Even though they're not real elections, either the candidates themselves were screened, or the election was held, and then they just declare the winner without no one really has an idea of what the votes actually show.
In the Soviet Union, if you had a grievance, you could go to court, but there weren't real courts.
There weren't real judges. Everything was ultimately decided by the state.
And all these processes and systems, even the names, I mean, the German Democratic Republic was basically the communist regime of East Germany.
There's nothing democratic about it.
The name is purely a kind of fiction.
In 1980, the Soviet Union sponsored the Olympics.
Well, turns out it wasn't even a real Olympics.
A lot of the athletes, first of all, were professional.
At that time, athletes had to be amateurs, but this was not the case.
If you went to the Olympics and afterwards you went to a disco, there wasn't a real disco.
There was no disco there before.
The disco was created for people to get the idea that there are discos in the Soviet Union.
The people dancing on the disco floor were KGB agents.
So they were pretending to be disco guys, Michael Jackson, let's go!
But in reality, this did not reflect natural life in the Soviet Union.
And some of this surrealism, I think, in a distinctive way has now come to America.
And so... The line, and I've made this point before, the line between the free society and the totalitarian society, a line which seemed so clear, so sharp, so vivid in the 1980s, has now become muddied and blurry and not entirely trustworthy at all.
When we left off last time, I was talking about the geography of Dante's history.
And unlike the inferno, which is sort of deep in the bowels of the earth, and the purgatorial mountain, which ascends out of the ocean on the earth, Dante locates paradise not only in the planets and in the stars, but ultimately in Beyond the stars.
Dante fully recognizes that in the end we are moving beyond space and time.
And the effect of that on him as he describes this is quite striking because Dante, we'll get to that in a moment.
Now, the souls in Paradise are not where Dante encounters them.
This is very important to realize.
Dante is going to move in a sort of ascending motion.
He's going to move from the Earth to the Moon, then to Mercury, to Venus, to the Sun, to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, then to what Dante calls the fixed constellations or the fixed stars.
Then to the ninth sphere, which is the Prima Mobile, the sort of moving orb that, according to Dante, gives motion to the other planets and to the other stars.
And then beyond that is the Emperorian.
Beyond that is, if you will, the Rose.
Beyond that is the true realm where the souls are in communion, in direct communion with God.
So, what's the point then of going to the Moon and Mercury and Venus?
Well, it turns out that the souls, which are in fact in the Emperorian, nevertheless manifest themselves.
They descend, or perhaps one can say condescend, to meet Dante.
You could almost say virtually.
There's a kind of a virtual meeting with Dante in these stars and planets that for Dante represent particular...
So, faith and hope and love and then later wisdom and so on, we find the virtues embodied in each of these stars or planets, and you will find souls in the planets that in some sense are correlated with or manifest that particular virtue.
I mentioned before that you get a sense from Dante that there is a profound equality in heaven.
All the souls are before God.
They're in communion with God.
But at the same time, there's a hierarchy in heaven because there are some souls in the kind of, well, lower precincts, And then there are souls in the sort of higher orbs, which appear to be closer to the prima mobile, closer to the emperorian.
And how Dante reconciles that, are some people in heaven happier than others?
It turns out that the answer to that is yes.
But that in no way means that anyone in heaven is, quote, lacking in happiness.
One, I think, very interesting and simple way to think about it is that Think of a bunch of glasses, you know, water glasses like this one right here.
So I have kind of a big glass, but imagine a small glass right next to it.
And then imagine that the water in the glass represents our happiness, and you have a big glass and a small glass, and they're both completely full.
So it turns out that there's more water in the big glass, which is to say there's more happiness that this soul has as compared, let's say, to this soul here in my imaginary grasp.
But both souls are filled to the brim.
In other words, this soul in a smaller glass is not capable of having more water in the glass.
This is a very imperfect analogy, of course, but what Dante is getting at is it's possible to have souls that have sort of different places in heaven and yet are completely happy, are completely satisfied, in no way desire or want more.
God has given them, in a sense, all that they can accept or can imbibe.
Now, if it may seem odd that Dante has this sort of scheme of the souls are all in kind of one place, and we've got to put the word place here in question marks because there's no place, there's no time in heaven, but if these souls can sort of appear to him in another place, you may go, well, Dante, where are you coming up with this?
You know, souls are here, but they show themselves over there.
What's this notion of the souls condescending to you, the pilgrim?
And Dante goes, wait a minute.
He goes, I'm doing nothing different than the Bible does in pretty much the Old and the New Testament both.
In other words, what Dante is saying is, doesn't the Bible constantly condescend to human understanding?
Doesn't the Bible speak of God as a father, often portrayed with a kind of a long beard?
Doesn't the Bible talk about angels having swords and arms as if angels were flesh and blood creatures that were actually operating swords?
Doesn't the Bible constantly use Let's call it a humanly accessible language.
Not because angels are actually like that, because that gives us a better handle on them, makes it easier for us to understand.
So Dante says, I'm doing the same thing here.
I'm depicting what I saw and what I experienced, but I'm doing it in a way that makes sense for me, because I had to experience it this way, and I also have to communicate it that way to you.
Dante is very particular that paradise is not a descriptive journey.
It is an experience.
And he sort of warns the reader, you kind of have to be ready for the experience, by which he means you have to have fully taken on board the lessons of the Inferno and the Purgatorio.
In other words, no reading the Paradiso first and then going back because we, like Dante the Pilgrim, have to be educated along the way and bring all that sort of, not just knowledge, but wisdom to bear on what's going to happen in Paradiso.
Paradiso is more than a learning about.
It is kind of a participating in.
And Dante will say things like, listen, as I saw what I saw, words fail me.
And it's not just that I didn't know the words.
My intellect failed me.
And my memory failed me.
And so, all I can tell you is what I remember.
But Dante's kind of giving us a full warning that we're not going to be getting, even from him, the full picture.
Why? Because he's unable to give it.
He can't remember it all.
This is the kind of experience that goes beyond the realm of normal human experience.
And in that respect, it paralyzes the vocabulary, it dilutes the understanding, and it even blurs the memory.
▲
Export Selection