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Nov. 14, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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DESANTIS ALERT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep456
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Coming up, I want to expose a kind of scheme that the left is launching regarding DeSantis.
Essentially, they're using DeSantis to try to get rid of Trump.
I want to unmask that today.
I'll survey midterm results, some bad news pretty much all the way around, and talk about the kind of overhaul that needs to occur from the ground level, intellectually, institutionally, and so on.
Representative Ken Buck joins me.
We're going to talk about big tech censorship and current issues.
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.
Florida is one of the bright spots in what has turned out or is turning out to be a very dismal election.
And I'm going to talk about the details of the election a little more in the next segment.
But I want to focus here on Florida and the kind of hero of the Florida model, which is, of course, Ron DeSantis.
Now, DeSantis has shown that he has done almost everything right in Florida.
He has reflected the Trumpian or MAGA spirit, but he has also effectively converted it into public policy.
That is actually very important.
And in fact, some of the people who are champions of DeSantis over Trump make the point that on the critical issue of COVID, DeSantis was right and Trump was wrong.
Now, I can't really disagree with that because let's think about it.
DeSantis made a bet and his bet was I'm going to keep Florida open no matter what.
Had it turned out that this was the kind of pandemic where people were dropping like flies, This would have been devastating for DeSantis and he would most certainly have not been re-elected, let alone with the kind of giant margin that he won by.
Trump, by contrast, kind of went along, at least went along for a while with the idea of a national shutdown.
Now, this wasn't entirely in Trump's hands because Trump was dealing with governors in democratic states that were going to shut those states down no matter what.
And in that sense, Trump didn't have a choice in that matter.
But it's also true that Trump was convinced that this was kind of a pressing necessity.
And so Trump went in the opposite direction of DeSantis at least for a while.
And the effect of it was actually very damaging to Trump himself, why?
Because it started choking off the Trump economy.
So Trump's greatest strength was that he had governed well despite all the efforts to tie him up in knots from the left efforts to get him.
Trump showed that he knew how to run the country, which is actually by itself kind of remarkable.
Here's a guy who had come out of the business sector, seemed to have no experience in politics, and was making the experts look bad.
Made him look bad in foreign policy, where he seemed to be able to make deals basically through a visit or a phone call.
He got things done, like moving the embassy to Jerusalem that other people had just talked about, Republicans and Democrats.
And you had this kind of roaring Trump economy.
Unfortunately, that economy was attenuated, was shut down, and Trump himself was complicit in it.
Now, having said all this, and having said that there are good conservatives, good Republicans who are trying to think about who should we back for 2024— That's not really what I want to get into right now because, first of all, it seems like we have plenty of time for that.
But what I want to point out is that you see some very strange figures on the Never Trump faction or on the left really wild about DeSantis.
And this is a little bit laughable because you know that these are people who don't have the Republican Party's best interests at heart.
These are people who are, in a sense, using DeSantis as a truncheon to beat up Trump.
And it's their best truncheon because they've come up with many truncheons before.
Let's get Trump because of January 6th.
He's an insurrectionist.
Let's get Trump because of the dealings of the Trump corporation.
Let's get Trump because he's in bed with Russia.
I mean, one preposterous narrative after another, and none of it has really worked.
In other words, it has not done what it was designed to do.
I mean, if you look at what the January 6th committee is designed to do, it's designed to sever Trump off from the Trump base.
Liz Cheney is kind of the front person.
This is really why she's the vice chair of the committee, because they want a Republican to be sort of making the indictment.
It's an effort to split the Republican Party with Cheney as a willing accomplice.
But none of this has really worked.
And so all these people have realized our best bet To get MAGA Trumpsters to pull away from Trump is to offer them somebody else who's like Trump and say, go for this guy.
So as I see it, the left strategy is as follows.
Number one, use DeSantis as the weapon to politically slay Trump.
Then, once that is complete, go after DeSantis.
And if they can get rid of DeSantis, then basically they go, these guys have nothing.
Now they're going to have to rummage around.
Is it going to be Nikki Haley?
Is it going to be Pompeo?
So all of this tells me that the guy that the left really fears is still Trump.
Trump is kind of the giant in the living room.
He's the guy they don't know how to deal with.
The left's view seems to be, we know how to deal with everybody else.
Yeah, DeSantis is riding high.
Yeah, he's done well in Florida.
But at the national level, if we're looking for somebody who really scares us, who really threatens us, whom we don't quite know how to cope with, it's still Trump.
So, I just wanted to, in this segment, unmask And alert you to the fact that there is a strategy being deployed by the Democrats and the Never Trumpers and the left in which DeSantis is in some ways a pawn for their larger objective.
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Use I've got to say, this is a very dispiriting, disheartening, frustrating midterm election.
And it has a lot of people on our side really dejected and a little freaked out because for a number of reasons.
First of all, it appears to be the third bad election for us.
2018 was a bad election in which the control of Congress slipped out of our hands.
Remember, in 2016, we had both houses of Congress and the presidency.
So we didn't have that after 2018.
Then of course, there was 2020 and now 2022.
The strange thing about all this is that these have been, particularly 2020 and 2022, close elections, but close elections in which the close races seem to fall the other way.
And so if you look at 2022 and you look at the overall votes, the Republican Party got 5 million more votes than the Democratic Party.
Now, this has no kind of electoral significance.
This is like the left saying that Hillary won the popular vote.
But the reason I mention it is that when you win more votes...
And yet you lose seats, and you lose Senate seats, and you even lose House seats that you should have won.
You have to ask, why is it the case that you've got the numbers on your side, but the actual victories are going their side?
It's kind of like saying, I have more overall points, but I'm always losing sets, and I'm losing the tennis match as a result.
Now, there is a lot of scrutiny to be done and a lot of blame to go around, and I see a lot of fingers of blame being pointed in lots of directions.
First of all, we should say that almost nobody saw this coming.
I didn't. I expected that the American people would have had enough with inflation, had enough with gas prices, had enough with foreign policy disasters, had enough with the border, had enough with crime.
And that would be enough.
That would be sufficient where people would go, listen, to the party in power, no.
And in fact, that is the basis on which, by and large, ruling parties tend to lose seats in the midterms because they tend to push their advantage.
People then push back in the midterms.
And that hasn't happened here.
Now, some of the responsibility for this goes to McConnell.
That can't be avoided. His machinations.
I mean, it's one thing to fight against a formidable Democratic Party, but to have your own guy doing private maneuvers, seems like it's almost like McConnell threw the whole election to save Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.
I mean, it's a little bit of an overstatement, I think, but nevertheless, there is blame to go around there.
In some ways, there's blame, I think, to go to Trump.
And the blame focuses on picking candidates based upon the sort of...
Trumpian criteria of one, celebrity.
Trump seems to think that celebrity gets you 80% there.
So Oz is a celebrity.
Herschel Walker is a celebrity.
And this is a figure who comes out of popular culture.
So Trump, I'm not saying that celebrity is not an advantage.
In fact, in Texas, Debbie and I have just been reading this article in Texas Monthly.
They're going, how can the Democrats, you know, revive their fortunes in Texas where they get clobbered every time?
Answer, let's run Eva Longoria.
Let's run Matthew McConaughey.
Let's find a celebrity who can help us do better.
So it's not as if this is completely irrational thinking.
But I will say that Trump tends to pick people he knows that are celebrities who And the question is, are those the strongest candidates to field in those states?
That is a legitimate question.
The other question, and I'll be talking more about this in the days and weeks ahead, is do we have to change our whole view of how the game is played?
I just made a short video for locals about this, and I'm going to sort of share the main theme of it.
It's this. Imagine a tennis match in which you have two guys who play with wooden rackets or play with the old rackets.
And then coming through technology or coming through changes, new rackets come around which are lighter, more powerful, and some players...
Grab the new rackets, but there are old style players who go, listen, this is unfair.
We should outlaw the new rackets.
We don't want to play with these lighter rackets.
So the point is, that's fine.
You can actually lobby to change the rules and have everybody play with the same old racket.
The new racket is seen as something that gives you an unfair advantage.
But let's say the new rackets are accepted.
Let's say that they're being used.
Then it seems to me that you're going to lose every time if you try to be like some 21st century Bjorn Borg and go, no, no, no, I'm going to still play with the old racket.
What am I getting at? What I'm getting at is, take the example of Pennsylvania.
Fetterman was able to put over a million votes in the bank through early voting.
So even though Oz won something like 70-30 or 65-35 on Election Day, it wasn't enough to overcome the early voting advantage accumulated by Fetterman.
And that's how I was lost.
So the point being here, the Democrats have, in a sense, almost perfected a ground game of putting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of votes in the bag.
And we might see this happening also with Carrie Lake.
If Carrie Lake loses in Arizona, it'll be in part, I think, not because she's a flawed candidate, she's actually a far superior candidate to the dopey Katie Hobbs, who didn't even really campaign.
But think about it, how can Democrats who barely campaign I'm thinking of Fetterman and Katie Hobbs and even Biden.
How is it that they can get across the finish line?
And one answer, not the only answer, but one answer is the Dems have mastered the art of the game of early voting and we might have to consider playing the same game by the same rules.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. We've rightly been focused on election news, midterm results, how to make sense of them.
But there's, of course, other news that goes on.
And one of the things that's been going on is the Oath Keeper's trial in connection with sedition charges related to January 6th.
Now, from what I've been following, and I've been a little bit stepped back from the trial mainly because of my focus on the midterms, so I don't have the latest developments in court.
I will say that as you looked at the early part of the case, the government laying out its case, It seemed to be nothing more than these are big talkers who talked about exchange text messages.
Oh, yes, we're going to do this.
Yes, we're going to do that. In reality, there was no insurrection.
The Oath Keepers who came to Washington, D.C., left any weapons that they have in Virginia, where, by the way, it's legal to have those weapons.
They recognized that there were gun laws in D.C. that would make those weapons illegal.
They didn't bring them. There were Oath Keepers who went into the Capitol.
Now, Stuart Rhodes, the head of the Oath Keepers, did not go to the Capitol.
And yet he's charged with conspiracy.
And now, in theory, it's of course possible not to go to the Capitol, but you planned the whole thing.
It's kind of like saying, well, you know, Charles Manson wasn't there, but he planned the whole thing.
But the question is, did he plan the whole thing?
Was there actually anything that was planned?
Now, very interestingly, Julie Kelly reports, and this is Julie Kelly who's on the scene filling us in where we're not paying attention, and she says that it's now becoming really clear that there were, quote, at least five FBI informants involved in the Oath Keepers.
So this one organization has five, no less than five FBI informants, and...
It turns out that the informants include the Oath Keepers' vice president.
The number two guy at the Oath Keepers was an FBI informant.
And so, what does this tell you?
Well, what it's telling Julie Kelly is...
That this is the Whitmer play that is being replayed here.
By the way, Steve D'Antono, who ran the FBI maneuver out of the Detroit office in Michigan, this was the guy who had FBI agents and informants involved in every part of the so-called plot.
To kidnap Whitmer.
And then, of course, the FBI busts them.
And they were very sneaky about it.
The first time they went to trial, the defense lawyers were very effectively able to expose the FBI and say, listen, this plot would never have gone forward without the FBI. And the jury was like, yeah, of course not.
And so, the two defendants were let go, were freed.
But the other guys, for whom there was a hung jury, were tried again and convicted.
And this time, the FBI had a judge who kept a lot of the full involvement of the FBI out of the trial, as if to say, hey, listen, if these guys wanted to kidnap the governor, it doesn't matter if A, somebody else put him up to it, B, somebody else moved the plot forward, C, the plot would not have occurred without them, As long as they wanted to do it, and they participated in it, and they were in that sense willing participants, nobody held a gun to their head, they're guilty.
So framed that way, it was obviously much easier to get a conviction.
But looked at from the larger political angle, what you see here is that the framing of these defendants is a key part of what actually happened.
And the question we have to look at is, and it's an open question, Julie Kelly is like on the case, Is the same thing, did the same thing happen in January 6th?
And we can't fully answer that question, but the start of that answer is that you've got an FBI that is infiltrating these organizations beforehand.
Remember in 2000, Mules, Greg Phillips made the almost incidental observation, and we don't pursue it because the movie wasn't about January 6th.
He goes, listen, in January 6th, there was no way that the government, the Biden DOJ, could have arrested people right after January 6th.
With all this information, they'd already taken it to a grand jury.
They had already obtained all the necessary warrants.
How is this even possible?
Normally, the process takes weeks, certainly days, if not weeks.
And Greg Phillips' point is they had to have been tracking them before.
And here, boom, we now see in the Oath Keepers trial, because remember, trials have a discovery.
You have to provide, and the government's been very slow to provide full discovery to the defense, which I think is a problem.
But nevertheless, when they see this discovery, they go, oh, wait a minute.
In fact, one of the informants, Dan Chappell, was apparently involved in both the Whitmer kidnapping case and January 6th.
Same guy. Same informant.
So the ties between the Whitmer episode and January 6th become a little more clear now.
Now, very interestingly, and I think tellingly, the Steve D'Antonio guy has officially retired, and And why is this significant?
Because I think Steve D'Antonio knew that there are going to be hearings being conducted by the House.
He would be called as an FBI guy to testify.
Now we can basically say, you know, I'm out of the FBI. I don't have anything to do with that anymore.
So the retirement becomes a way, perhaps not to completely prevent him from having any accountability, but certainly to sort of diminish his accountability because his point is going to be, whatever I did, I'm no longer kind of in the game.
And so now you're not really calling somebody who is from the FBI, but only somebody who used to be with the FBI. You'll get a free information kit on gold.
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I want to talk about an FBI whistleblower named Steve Friend.
This is a really good guy.
This is a guy who actually never wanted to be a whistleblower.
He's one of those guys who, kind of like me, a big fan of the Old reputation of the FBI. These are the guys who went after the Bonnie and Clydes.
Going back to the earlier part of the 20th century, these are the guys who then busted the mafia, who have taken down a lot of crime syndicates.
This is the FBI, you may say, of the untouchables.
And Steve Friend followed this as a career.
He wanted to be the guy who got the bad guys.
And then he was put on these child pornography cases, which, by the way, is a clear case of good versus evil.
But right when he was in the middle of those, they pulled him off and told him, hey, we're going to move you to January 6th.
So this was odd for two reasons.
Number one, he realized that the FBI is now dropping and minimizing and turning away from a lot of serious crimes like child pornography and sex trafficking and putting its energy into going after insurrectionists.
So that was the first thing.
The second thing, which I think is very telling, is that this guy, Steve Friend, was in a local or regional office away from Washington, D.C. So he actually had nothing to do with January 6th.
When they told him he was going to be a kind of case officer in January 6th, he was kind of shocked because it's not his jurisdiction.
He has nothing to do with it.
And then he realized that the FBI is playing a dirty game, which is they're taking a lot of cases that are all from Washington, D.C., and they're assigning case officers in remote parts of the country.
Why? Because they want to make it look like domestic terrorism coming from the right is a national problem.
In other words, they don't want to make it seem like there was an isolated episode January 6th.
We're now dealing with the defendants from January.
They want to make it sound like there's domestic terrorism coming out of Idaho, and coming out of California, and coming out of Arizona.
And the way to do that, the way to create that smoke and mirrors, which they know, of course, the media will amplify, is to have FBI agents in local offices who are the case officers of those cases.
So this guy, Steve Friend, went and protested this and goes, this is actually nonsense.
I don't have anything to do with January 6th.
Besides, why are we moving our resources all to this one situation while ignoring all these serious crimes that are now going with diminished attention?
Well, turns out they suspend the guy.
They suspend him.
And they accuse him of being a kind of a MAGA Trumpster.
Now, he made it very clear in his complaint.
He says, quote, I'm not a Trump voter.
I'm not sympathetic.
So what he's saying is, I'm not doing it for that reason.
And that's not my motivation at all.
He also said, I'm not just complaining about January 6th.
What I'm complaining about is the fact that the FBI is now...
Routinely using tactics against people, this is the third point to be made, in which the process is the punishment.
Very interesting phrase.
In other words, the FBI realizes that they may not be able to convict somebody of something, but they go, listen, if we raid his house, if we terrorize him, terrorize his family, bring a tank, bring all this weaponry to their house...
It's going to leave them scarred for life.
So, that's the punishment.
Their punishment is the raid.
The raid is not a means to something else.
It's not because the guy poses a danger to society.
Let's raid him to terrorize him.
I mean, this is like straight out of...
This is like Soviet-style tactics.
Case in point, and this is a point that becomes part of Steve Friend's whistleblower complaint, there was a British doctor...
Who was inside the Capitol on January 6th.
Turns out the guy was not a Trumpster.
He was not there about the election.
He was a tourist. He noticed the Capitol was open.
He went inside.
He was there for a few minutes.
He didn't harm anybody. In fact, he sort of picked up a free brochure.
It just gives you the idea of the mood in there.
Here's a tourist who absolutely thought, wait a minute, it's open.
I can go in. There are cops around.
Nobody's saying anything. So this guy picks up a brochure and leaves.
So what happens is that the FBI outs this guy, and even though they don't eventually bring charges against him, he loses his medical practice.
He's no longer a doctor.
So think about it.
Without having charged him, without having convicted him, he's not an insurrectionist, he's nothing, he's a tourist.
He's a tourist who's in the wrong place.
And in justice, this is a guy who should have gotten a $50 fine, if you will.
Gee, you didn't know. You're a foreigner.
You're in the wrong place. This is a restricted building.
Okay, that's what a humane result would be.
But instead, the guy loses his livelihood.
This is ridiculous. This is what Steve Friend is complaining about.
The process being...
In another case, he talks about the FBI boasting about using a SWAT raid, even though they knew the subject was harmless, would have come in had they arranged for the guy to come in and turn himself in.
But no, they go, quote, we're going to hit this house at six o'clock in the morning, throw flashbangs and knock the door down, drive a bearcat up the front lawn.
So this is what the FBI has literally become scarier than the people that they arrest.
This is a greater danger to our security and our liberty than a lot of the so-called criminals that they're going after.
And this is the evidence, or this is the kind of behavior that inclines us to the view that the FBI needs to be completely reformed.
In some sense, I'm taking the left slogan, defund the police, and picking up my own slogan, defund the FBI. It seems to be no question America now is in decline.
Crime and inflation are skyrocketing.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Representative Ken Buck of Colorado.
He represents the 4th Congressional District, currently serving fourth term in the U.S. House of Representatives website, buck.house.gov, and you can also follow him on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, RepKenBuck.
Ken, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for joining me.
Let me start by asking you, this seems to be turning out a very disappointing midterm.
Clearly, something is going wrong, and it's highlighted by the fact that there were kind of high expectations that the American people were disgusted with the Dems, Disgusted with inflation, high gas prices, failures in foreign policy.
And it seems normal in the midterm for the American people to kind of push back against the party that's in power.
What do you think has gone wrong for the Republican side this time around?
Is it message? Is it organization?
What is it that is causing this disconnect with the American people this time around?
Well, let's back up.
First of all, I absolutely agree with you.
This should have been a historic election.
This should have been a 2010 type of election.
The wind is at our back with inflation and crime and the border and the Afghan withdrawal.
All of the things that the American people saw from the Biden administration they didn't like.
Then they saw this inflationary spending coming out of Congress.
They were sick and tired of that.
And at one point we had our leadership talking about, you know, gaining 60 seats in the House and it looked like a few weeks before the election we were going to gain the Senate and have a majority in both houses and be able to put the brakes on this terrible Biden administration.
I think what happened is people don't trust the Republicans any more than the Democrats.
We have let people down in the past.
We have not followed through on our policy promises.
And the American people are frustrated with both parties.
And we've got to rebrand ourselves, make sure that we are the party of less government, make sure that we are the party of individual responsibility and lower taxes.
And I think if we can do that in this next period where we'll have the majority in the House, it'll be a slim majority, But we'll have the majority in the House.
If we can do that in two years, we stand a chance of retaking the White House and we stand a chance of moving forward with the traditional Republican brand.
Now, with the Republicans not having the White House, Kevin McCarthy released a sort of commitment to America, saying we will do these four or five things.
Realistically, as you know, when you don't have the presidency, there's not much you can pass in terms of laws.
You can give the American people a vision, but...
The best thing you can actually do is block the Biden administration from doing bad stuff.
And I think a lot of Republicans thought that's going to be enough for the midterm, because if what Biden is doing is bad, then people are going to want to at least stop the bad things from happening, let alone, you know, We'll wait and see what good things can come out of that.
Are you saying that the Republicans need a kind of positive vision going into 2024?
And how do we resolve some of the infighting that's occurring in the Republican Party right now?
The MAGA wing of the party, the establishment wing, the moderates, everyone seems to be pointing fingers at each other.
What is the unifying way to go forward from here?
Well, I think what we need is a strong leader.
I'm not sure we have a strong leader at this point, but we need a leader that will actually take us down to the border and show the American people directly.
Sometimes the media is all over the border story and sometimes they're not.
We need to make sure that's a message.
That respecting the rule of law is a message in the United States.
We need to make sure that we are highlighting not just the crime problems in this country, but working with the states to develop solutions to those crime problems.
And if the Democrat Senate wants to undo those solutions, and if the President doesn't want to sign those bills, so be it.
But the House should be passing bills.
We know what solves crime.
You have to put criminals behind bars.
You have to offer programs that rehabilitate drug addicts so that they have a chance at a decent life.
Those are the programs that we need to move forward if we're going to deal with the crime issue.
We know what causes inflation.
We know that the spending in the last four or five years have caused a dramatic increase in inflation.
We need to give the American people confidence that a Republican administration and this Congress will do something about the overspending that we're seeing.
Let's turn to a topic that I invited you on to talk about, and that is the topic of big tech censorship.
There seems to have been some new information that's come out, some very good reporting by The Intercept of all places, that really reveals the depth of the collusion between the Biden administration on the one hand and the big tech platforms on the other.
We only have a couple of minutes, a couple of seconds before we go to the next segment.
So let me start by just having you summarize the problem and then we'll go into it in some depth when we come back.
Sure.
Well, Dinesh, the problem is that we've got four monopolies that control the flow of information to a large extent in the United States.
And when a political party colludes, conspires, agrees with those four platforms, The two can move a particular message, a political message, to the American people.
And that's exactly what happened with a lot of the COVID information that was out there.
They suppressed information that would have been helpful because it didn't fit their narrative, and they promoted information that wasn't particularly helpful.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, I want to go into more depth into the way in which the Biden administration has been working with these big tech platforms in, I think, flagrant violation of the First Amendment.
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Feel the difference. I'm back with Congressman Ken Buck of Colorado.
Ken, we were talking in the last segment about the collusion between the Biden administration and these big tech platforms.
Am I right in saying that while the First Amendment allows private platforms to set their own standards, the moment that the government becomes actively involved, and I want you to talk a We're good to go.
They're choosing a whole range of political topics that are legitimately contested between the two parties.
They're taking the Biden administration's position as, quote, facts and rival positions as sort of misinformation.
And you've got a whole censorship regime in place right here in the United States.
I mean, aren't we facing a kind of crisis?
Isn't this a very serious matter?
I think it's absolutely a crisis, and I think it threatens our democracy more than practically any other issue that's out there.
I think when you look at the First Amendment, the founders intended the First Amendment to restrict government's activity in the marketplace of ideas, in the free exchange of speech between individuals in this country, particularly as it applies to the press, but also speech in the public square.
And that's exactly where these platforms have entered.
And they have entered at their own risk, frankly, because a court may very well find that they are now acting as government actors and that they're covered by the First Amendment.
And it's a very dangerous area for them to get into because they open themselves up to lawsuits regardless of the immunity that's applied by Section 230.
They will be found, I believe, to be government actors in the public square and can be sued by individuals for suppressing that kind of speech.
But the Biden administration, what an absolutely immoral or amoral position that the Biden administration has taken by trying to really determine what types of information the American public gets.
And I haven't seen this kind of corruption in the speech area since maybe even LBJ, where he was using all kinds of government agencies or FDR with the IRS trying to intimidate his opponents.
And so we see this in the Democrat Party over and over again.
It's dangerous.
And I think that these platforms are playing right into what the left wants to do.
I mean, the two pieces of new information I pick up from the article, and some of this, by the way, is coming because of lawsuits that have been filed by the state of Missouri and other places to ferret out this information, is number one, regular meetings between the big tech representatives and We're good to go.
That this is something the courts need to take a look at.
How would that process work?
Because I know Florida and Texas have passed some laws trying to restrict big tech censorship.
What is the mechanism to get this to the attention of the courts so the courts go, yeah, clear First Amendment violation here?
Well, there are really three types of entities that can sue under the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act.
And the first is the federal government.
I doubt the Biden administration is going to be suing since it was participating in this type of activity.
The second group are the state attorney generals, and they're certainly Republican state attorney generals.
You mentioned Texas with Ken Paxton and Florida and Missouri and others that may very well bring a lawsuit along these lines.
And then the third is really the grassroots type of enforcement, and that's private parties.
And we've had individuals.
It wasn't just a meeting between the Biden administration and these platforms.
To discuss COVID issues or other types of issues.
But it was specifically targeting individuals and saying this individual should be deplatformed.
And those individuals have a right of action to bring to the courts and complain about their First Amendment rights being infringed by this collusion between big tech and big government.
I mean, I think you're making a critical point here, which is that in the past, if you tried to sue Facebook, they would say, hey, listen, look at the terms that you signed when you came on board.
We wrote those terms to be favorable to us, so you're not going to have much of a contractual case of action.
But you're saying that there's a new element here and that when the government gets involved, suddenly you have a right to say, my First Amendment rights are being infringed because the U.S. government is trying to regulate my speech, correct?
Absolutely. That's correct.
This goes beyond contract to a fundamental right.
And while you can enter into a contract that restricts your free speech, these individuals didn't because they were well outside of the agreement that was being made between government and tech.
Very interesting. Thank you so much, Representative Buck, for coming on the podcast.
Love to have you back sometime. Thank you.
This is my mini course on Christian apologetics.
The last time I talked a little bit about what apologetics is, and now we're slowly going to get into it.
The text we're using is this one here.
Hey, I notice this matches my jacket.
What's so great about Christianity?
Available. I have the hardback, but it's available in paperback.
And you might consider getting all my three apologetics books.
This one, What's So Great About Christianity?
Also, Life After Death, also in paperback.
And the third one, What's So Good About God?
That one, by the way, deals with God and suffering.
And this kind of...
This course is going to take us through sociology, a little bit of history.
It's going to take us through a basic understanding of science.
Don't worry. In all these things, philosophy, I don't presume that you...
I presume you're very intelligent, but you don't know anything about the subject.
And so my job is to explain what's going on in a manner that you can easily grasp and understand and put the pieces together.
And this is a case where we're covering a topic that is not simply sort of theoretical or about the world out there.
It's about us. It's about our own lives and living deeper and more fulfilled lives, giving us a taste of the sublime, what I later call in the book, a foretaste of eternity.
Now, let's begin by talking, in a sense, observationally or sociologically about what's going on with Christianity.
And if you look around the world, you see something kind of startling.
And that is that Christianity is doing worldwide work.
Pretty well. Now, religion in general is doing worldwide pretty well, which is to say it's really growing in large parts of the world, notably in the so-called developing world.
I don't mean in the poorest countries in the world.
In fact, some of the poorest countries in the world, think about, for example, people living in the Amazon rainforest or tribes that are kind of untouched by modernity.
We don't see a rapid growth of Christianity over there.
But we're seeing countries that are coming up in the world, countries all over Asia and South America and Africa, finding, you may say, religion, and specifically Christianity.
Now, all of this is a little bit of a surprise because if we go back a few decades, I don't know if you remember, there was in the 1960s, I believe, late 60s, a cover of Time magazine that's asked,"'Is God Dead?' And this was a reference to the famous saying by the philosopher Nietzsche, God is dead.
And it's turned out not to be true.
Well, Nietzsche is dead, but God, in a sense, is not dead, which means that we are seeing almost a comeback story in the 21st century history.
Now, if God is back, you might say, well, I don't really see it, Dinesh.
And you may not see it.
And the reason you don't see it is partly because you live in the wrong neighborhood.
By which I mean, you know, if you live in certain parts of, let's just say you live in Boston or you live in New York City, you go into one of the very nice churches or cathedrals, And you notice it's kind of empty.
I mean, you've just got some tourists mulling around.
You've got some gray-haired people there.
You see a lot of empty pews.
And this is also a reality of our time.
I don't mean to dismiss this at all.
This is a phenomenon I want to call...
Practical atheism.
So practical atheism is different from the kind of militant new atheists, you know, Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris who are raging against religion.
Practical atheism is actually a far more widespread phenomenon and it covers people, some people who would consider themselves atheists, it covers some people who consider themselves agnostic.
And here's the weird thing. It even covers some people who would call themselves Christians.
Why? Because these are nominal Christians.
They're Christians whose Christianity doesn't really matter to them.
They might show up once a year for social reasons to church, but you can't really call them Christians because the Christianity hasn't really sunk in very deep.
Another way to look at it is these are people who live as if God did not exist.
That's kind of a way to think about it.
And it's kind of a good question to pose to yourself is, do I live as if God did not exist?
And if so, you fall into this category.
This is the category of practical atheism.
And in America, in Western society, you do have a lot of this.
But this is occurring in pockets of the world.
If you look at the world as a whole, the spinning globe, we are seeing a global revival of religion.
It's happening, by the way, on every continent.
It's happening in strange places, even in Europe.
You'll go into places like Amsterdam, and you'll see a church, sometimes run by like a A preacher from Senegal or a preacher from Africa, a black guy, and it's completely full of Dutch people who are attracted to this kind of, let's call it old-time religion or traditional religion.
And we're seeing this revival occurring, and I'll go into it in more detail tomorrow.
It's occurring in Hinduism.
Hinduism is a big revival going on, particularly in India, which is the home of Hinduism.
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