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Nov. 21, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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RETURN OF THE KING Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep461
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Coming up, I'm going to talk about the significance for Trump and for the cause of free speech of having the king return to Twitter.
I'll reveal the Biden DOJ's dishonest summary of the evidence in the Oath Keeper's Sedition Trial.
I want to argue that Raphael Warnock is trying to game the Georgia early voting system, and so far he seems to be winning.
And author and TV personality Raymond Arroyo joins me.
We're going to talk about his new children's book about the Magi.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I want to talk about the enormous significance for free speech and for Trump of Elon Musk sort of opening the door and letting Trump back on Twitter.
Now, first of all, Trump isn't back on Twitter.
He hasn't done any new tweets, even though he now can.
His account is open. You can actually go there.
You can follow him. One thing I find amazing is that within 24 hours, Trump has accumulated 80 million, 80 million, I'm not kidding you, followers.
He's surpassed Biden in one day.
And when I told Debbie, he's like, Trump is beating out Biden.
She goes, again? So.
That was a little bit of a telling reaction.
Now, I think that Trump should get back on Twitter.
I realize that he might have made a deal not to do that.
He's with the Trump media company.
He has Truth Social. But here's my point.
If you're running for president...
How can you deny yourself this massive platform?
Trump has about 4 million followers on Truth Social.
And I'm not saying people can't take Trump's comments over there and duplicate them on Twitter.
But it's a whole different thing for Trump himself to take advantage of this massive platform.
Let's remember, Trump doesn't really have the other platforms.
He doesn't have YouTube. He doesn't have Meta or Facebook.
So, in my opinion, Trump needs to sort of...
Look, he can stay with Truth Social and post there first.
If it were me, I would post on Truth Social and then say, listen, two hours later or three hours later, my post is going to be uploaded onto my account on Twitter.
And that way, Truth Social retains the kind of exclusive, but Trump is at the same time...
You know, disseminating his very distinctive voice.
Look, it's kind of funny. I call this podcast The Return of the King.
And of course, people go, you know what you're saying to us?
You believe in monarchy? No, Trump is the king of Twitter.
Why? Because he's the greatest tweeter of all time.
The rest of us are competing to be the second greatest.
But Trump is in a class by himself.
He has a kind of knack for it.
Now, I think it's kind of funny that Elon Musk decided to let Trump on by having a poll.
He decided, let's let the people decide.
And lots of people voted.
I mean, several million people voted in this poll.
And Trump won sort of narrowly.
At the end, it was something like 52 to 48 votes.
But Musk goes, there you go, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, meaning the voice of the people is the voice of God.
And so Musk sort of submits to the result of the poll and Trump is back.
Now, honestly, this is not the right way to think about free speech.
Free speech doesn't depend on referenda.
I don't have my First Amendment rights because a narrow majority of the American people decided I should.
The founders had a much better understanding.
Our rights are...
They're unalienable. They're given to us by our creator.
Majorities don't have a right to run over them.
And so I think with Musk, the interesting thing about him is that he's not a true free speech guy in the sense that he's not a free speech absolutist.
He doesn't believe that, listen, if it's legal, you should be able to say it.
Rather, it's almost like he believes that there are Muskian standards for free speech.
And it's a much wider parameter than was allowed before.
And it doesn't have the left-wing ideological thrust that the old Twitter had.
I mean, the old Twitter was basically, you know, we're going to ban you, censor you, shadow ban you, restrict you if you're a conservative.
I mean, my own attraction on Twitter has just exploded in the last few weeks.
And the reason can be put down to two words.
Elon Musk. It's a whole different environment.
It's not that they're promoting me.
They're just not restricting me.
And so, you know, we're delighted.
I'm a big fan of Elon Musk because I think that what he's doing is great.
But you have to remember that what he's doing is he's basically saying, look, it's kind of my platform, so I'm going to sort of set the guardrails.
I'm going to say that these are the parameters of what you can and can't say.
I think it's kind of funny.
Somebody was lobbying Elon Musk to let Alex Jones back on Twitter.
And Musk is like, no.
And he seemed really dogmatic.
So someone's like, why are you so dogmatic?
And Musk's answer was something like, well, you know, I lost a child myself.
And so Alex Jones' insensitivity, I think he's referring to the Sandy Hook matter.
But I mean, what a personal reason.
It's kind of like, you know, I've had a traumatic experience, and so that's it.
Poor Alex Jones. Too bad for him.
Because had I not lost a child, the guy might have been back on Twitter.
So this is how Elon Musk is.
He's whimsical. He's obviously enjoying himself on the platform.
And another thing I want to point out is that some people went back to Twitter's original banning of Trump.
And look how ridiculous it is.
Because Trump had basically said something like he wasn't going to go to the inauguration.
He says, I'm not attending the inauguration.
Big deal. But here's Twitter.
President Trump's statement that he will not be attending the inauguration is being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen by him disavowing his previous claim made via two tweets.
Twitter itself, in a written statement of why they're banning Trump, is basically saying it's not even that Trump's non-attendance at the inauguration is by itself culpable.
It's being interpreted by his supporters in a way to deny the election results.
And so there you go. So the sheer arbitrariness of people like Parag Agarwal and of course at that time Jack Dorsey and the other Indian doofus Vijay Agade, thankfully all these characters have been moved out of the picture. But it gives you an idea of the kind of repressive regime that we've been living under in Twitter. And it's just a very bracing feeling now to have free speech on
I did a tweet yesterday that was liked by Elon Musk where I basically said, listen, Twitter is the place to be now.
And why? Because it's a genuine free speech platform where you have real repartee, real engagement, real debate.
There's no debate on YouTube.
There's no debate on Meta.
Those are highly regulated bulletin boards.
And I think long term, the future belongs not to the regulated bulletin board, but to the free speech platform.
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Closing arguments are underway in the Oath Keeper's Sedition Trial.
And I haven't been watching the trial, but I'm keeping track of a sort of running account of it that is being covered by two or three different people, including our friend Julie Kelly.
And And quite clearly what the government is doing, and this does not surprise me at all, is giving a completely distorted picture of what was happening.
Now, we have an adversary judicial system, so the prosecution is going to do this.
It's the defense's job to counter it.
But let's go through some of the claims that they're making in their closing statements, because I think they're on the face of it exaggerated, if not in some cases absurd.
So, the first one is, they called for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.
Now, that part, I think, is true, because you're talking about people who are given to hyperbolic rhetoric.
Oh, yes, we're going to have a new American revolution.
So, there is this kind of language.
Granted, it by itself does not amount to any kind of conspiracy.
If heated rhetoric by itself amounted to sedition, you'd have to lock up half the country at some point or the other.
What disturbs me more is when they say things like, here's the government, this is the Biden DOJ, they brought their weapons with them.
Now the implication here is that the Oath Keepers brought their weapons to Washington, D.C. But that is not true.
They brought their weapons to Virginia and they left them in a hotel room or hotel rooms in Virginia where it is legal to have those weapons.
They were very conscious, listen, we are not going to take our weapons, we will be in illegal possession of them in Washington, D.C., So, you can't have an insurrection, in my view, without weapons.
If you take the weapons and you leave them in another state where you don't have access to them, this statement, they brought their weapons with them, is false.
Then, the DOJ looks at the rhetoric of Stuart Rhodes, where he talks about, it's 1775, the eve of the American Revolution.
Again, this kind of metaphorical rhetoric is normal, it's common, and quite frankly, is the American Revolution itself now a reference to the American Revolution?
Sedition? I mean, how insane is that?
Now, the government sort of realizes that it's a little bit nuts.
And so, you have this guy, Roccozi, and he goes, well, yeah, you know, I admit that the revolution in 1776 sort of worked out, but his point is that to call for any kind of revolution appealing to that now amounts to some sort of sedition.
But really, what you have here is cherry-picked sentences strung together to make it look like there's some sort of conspiracy.
Apparently, at one point, Stuart Rhodes invoked the Declaration of Independence.
And the Declaration of Independence, again, you have this grandiose rhetoric of separation from the British— But this is now the kind of normal vocabulary of American history.
Almost all discussions of America go back to what was the country founded for?
What is the original meaning of America?
So I think that this is all barking up a wrong tree.
But again, it all depends on how the jury understands this.
One sort of, again...
Telling but not surprising detail that Julie Kelly points out.
You have all these reporters in the courtroom, I was going to say classroom, and every time the DOJ makes a point, the reporters are like, tee-hee-hee.
In other words, they're on the side of the DOJ. So think of what frauds these journalists are.
A, they're not objective. B, normally journalists are supposed to be on the side of the underdog, the guy who's accused.
Is that person getting a fair trial?
Is the jury impartial?
They don't care about any of that.
They actually want to see all these men put away.
Why? Because it vindicates the leftist narrative.
Oh, there was an insurrection. Well, here are the insurrectionists.
So this is how this works.
Tom Caldwell is invoked in the closing statements to, quote, start a rebellion when Joe Biden took office.
And he also used the word civil war.
Well, okay. But let's look at who Tom Caldwell is.
He's a disabled vet in his 60s.
He's not in a position to have any kind of...
He's not going to organize a civil war.
He's not... He took no steps to create a civil war.
He just talked about a civil war.
And again...
This is a topic that, quite frankly, in the state of Texas, people discuss all the time.
Is it time to basically secede from the union?
Well, you know, if last year the case wasn't, maybe last year we weren't ready for it, but who knows what's going to happen in the future.
And finally, the government plays videos of these defendants at a gun range.
And the government tells the jury, again, this is aimed at jurors who know nothing.
They go, they are shooting at targets that resemble human beings.
In other words, this is what all gun ranges are.
All gun rangers have these physical targets.
They're not actual human beings, but they're human-shaped objects that you shoot at.
And so either the government hasn't been to a shooting range, or they're counting on the fact that the jury hasn't been to the shooting range.
And then the biggest question of all, completely uninterested in the trial, is if you have a minimum of eight, probably more, FBI agents embedded in these groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, and they're organizing an insurrection, and the government knows there's an insurrection coming, Why didn't they stop it?
Why did they take no steps to block it?
And the answer is, they knew it was not an insurrection, but it was important for them to make it look like an insurrection so that they could then go after the so-called insurrectionists, so they could shut down discussion of topics they didn't want Americans to talk about.
And that is the true story of what happened on January 6th.
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I want to talk about how Democrats are able to push constantly to get an advantage in the voting process.
This ties into a line I used in 2000 Mules, which is that Republicans focus on campaigns and Democrats focus on elections, the actual mechanism of the election.
So here's Raphael Warnock in Georgia, and he's gone to court.
And he's gone to court to sort of have a judge alter the election laws.
Election laws passed by the Georgia legislature.
So the election laws are pretty clear.
And they say that there's going to be, in a runoff, the early voting shall...
Quote, on the fourth Monday, immediately prior to a runoff from a general election, it's talking about there shall be a period of advanced voting that shall commence.
So basically, what does that mean?
The election, the runoff is December 6th, Tuesday, December 6th.
And if you vote in person, it's that day.
But there's early voting.
That is the previous week, Monday, November 28th through Friday, December 2nd.
Five days, just as the law specifies.
So, Warnock goes to court to a friendly judge and basically says, I want you to now declare that early voting can occur starting on Saturday, the Saturday prior.
So, in other words, we're going to add in that weekend and extend the early voting period.
Now, the issue really isn't the wisdom of the law.
The point is that this is the law.
This is written in the statute.
And yet, what does a judge do?
He looks at the statute and he kind of applies, let's call it, liberal judicial reasoning, which is kind of no reasoning at all.
And he decides, I'm going to move the early voting from a Monday...
To the previous Saturday.
So he grants the Warnock request or demand that this early voting period be extended.
And this is really what happened all the time in 2020.
By and large, even though laws said one thing, you'd have secretaries of state that would do another thing and judges would decide a third thing.
And that's what's going on here in Georgia.
Now, the one difference is that this time the Republicans are like all over it.
So here is Rona McDaniel.
Tweeting out, the GOP, the NRSC, the National Republican Senate Committee, and Georgia Republicans, the Republican Party in Georgia, have already filed an immediate appeal of this judge's decision.
Republicans are simply asking for election laws to be followed and not undermined in the 11th hour.
And this is the point.
Republicans in the past have been very slow in In fact, not even recognizing these kinds of stealthy strikes that the Democrats make using the law as a tool of political warfare and using it to create all kinds of political advantages.
We're going to have the drop boxes here in places favorable to us.
We're going to try to extend the early voting, which will help our campaign because Republicans tend to vote on Election Day.
So here we see how the Democrats are ruthlessly attentive To all kinds of ways in which they can prod, cajole, and nudge the rules to their benefit.
And they rely on hospitable judges to go, wink, wink, wink, yeah, I realize I'm kind of giving a sort of advantage to your side.
So these judges are themselves frauds, and by that I mean they are referees, but they're referees that are really on one team.
And that is known to the Democrats.
That's why they go to these kinds of judges.
we don't really have a truly independent judiciary.
Now, most of the Republicans tend to be sworn to fidelity to the language of the statute, the language of the constitution, but that is not the case of their Democratic counterpart.
So it's almost like we've got a system of law in which half the umpires, the ones nominated by our side, are playing by the rules, and their umpires are not.
And we're seeing this play out right now in Georgia.
So I hope the Republicans prevail.
I hope that a higher court steps in and goes, listen, this is what the statute says.
It could not, in fact, be more clear.
No amount of judicial jujitsu can get you to a different result.
And so this is going to be a tough runoff election.
The Democrats are trying to eek whatever advantage they can out of it.
we've got to try to make sure that they don't get this kind of an unfair advantage and that the playing field remains level.
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Do it today. The key to voter integrity, we're realizing as we look at all the different ways in which voting systems are manipulated, corrupted, it all starts with the voter rolls.
Why? Because the voter rolls is the kind of registry.
It is the telephone book, if I can use a kind of antiquated analogy, of all the supposedly eligible voters, except that the voter rolls aren't really that.
Yes, they have eligible voters, but they also have all kinds of ineligible voters, people who have died, people who have graduated and moved, people who have changed jobs and now live in different states, illegals who got driver's licenses and their names ended up on the rolls even though they're not actually eligible to vote.
And these voter rolls, swollen, inaccurate, are often the basis of sending mail-out ballots.
So mail-out ballots are sent not to living persons who are eligible to vote, But to names, and in many cases you have to admit phantom names, and when I say phantom names, they do not correspond with an eligible voter.
They may be the name of a real person, except he died three years ago.
Or they may be the name of a real person, but that guy no longer lives in Arizona.
So the point being that these are real names, but they don't reflect real voters.
There's a separation between the name and the voter.
And because the ballots go out based on the names from the voter rolls, you have a distinction now between a ballot and a voter.
The ballot is simply a corresponds to the name on the voter rolls, but a voter is actually a person eligible to vote.
Now, a lot of times the Republicans have missed this distinction.
They don't pay careful attention to the voter rolls.
Democrats, of course, fight bitterly to keep these voter rolls swollen and inaccurate.
In fact, they have a whole system called ERIC, E-R-I-C, which, although it pretends to be protecting the safety and cleaning up the voter rolls, it's in fact doing the opposite.
It is staffed by leftist activists.
And what ERIC really does is it is a system of ensuring that We're good to go.
And they started looking through the voter rolls one by one by one to ask, does this guy, does John Smith, does John Doe still live in Wisconsin?
Or has John Doe moved but his name is still on the rolls?
And then you have to, again, not create a big, don't post it on social media or create a public uproar.
This isn't about scoring rhetorical points.
You go to the authorities in Wisconsin and you say, hey, listen, this guy does not appear to be living in this state anymore.
And they can look and see, oh yeah, he's actually moved.
By the way, when people move, everybody knows except the election people.
In other words, the DMV knows and the tax people know.
Not only the federal tax people know the IRS, but the local tax people know, oh, this guy's now in our state.
We're gonna hit him up for state taxes.
So there are systems for agencies that have an interest in keeping accurate records to get them.
But you think someone would automatically notify the election authorities and go, hey, listen, this guy's moved.
And so he needs to be taken off the voter rolls in, let's say, New Hampshire or in...
Or in California.
But that typically does not happen or it doesn't happen in a routine way.
Well, the good news is that what's happened in Wisconsin is that by undertaking this painstaking work of verifying names on the voter rolls.
By the way, True the Vote does a good work.
In this area as well, Truth or Vote, in fact, filed a claim with the state of Georgia saying that 300,000 people who are on the Georgia voter rolls do not appear to be eligible voters in Georgia.
Now, it's up to the authorities to verify this, to look case by case and decide, yeah, this guy, well, this guy still does live in Georgia.
And so, in other words, there needs to be a systematic process, but the systematic process is driven by citizen activism.
And This is actually where you and I can play a role because it takes a little bit of education for us to become knowledgeable about all this.
But once we do, and in an organized fashion, if we come together, we can start looking at these voter rolls in the different states.
begin to make sure that the people who are on those roles deserve to be there, because in particularly in swing states, Georgia, Arizona, even Nevada, of course, Wisconsin, this can actually make the difference in a close election.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast my longtime friend Raymond Arroyo.
He's a New York Times bestselling author.
He's host and managing editor of The World Over Live on EWTN. He's also a Fox News contributor.
And his website is Raymond Arroyo.
Now, we're going to talk about his latest book, which is called The Wise Men Who Found Christmas.
Beautiful book. I'm actually holding it in my hand.
And beautifully written, beautifully illustrated.
But Raymond, welcome to the podcast.
I want to start by talking to you about just some issues in the culture.
And let's start with all the fun stuff that's going on on Twitter.
I mean... It's just a different place, isn't it?
It's almost as if a cloud has been lifted and suddenly people can speak freely again and you just begin to realize how constrained you were before.
What do you make of the leftist meltdown over Elon Musk?
Well, Dinesh, I'm going to take a slightly contrarian view on all of this.
Message to everybody listening, I'm sure they didn't need me to tell them, Twitter is not reality.
It's okay. You know, we shouldn't get all wrapped up in the spokes of who's on Twitter, who's canceled, who's in silence.
And look, it is terrible when Particularly things that turned out to be true, like vaccination advice or election information, ends up being banned for years and years, only today being reported by the mass media.
I mean, we have the CBS story dropping today about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Well, we knew about this years ago.
But it's as if certain information was allowed and certain wasn't.
All I would say is, Pick your platforms with greater care.
And I don't think we should invest too much emotionally, politically, spiritually, or otherwise in the Twitterverse.
Twitter is only used by about 20% of people in the country.
That's probably a good thing.
And I'll say the same for the blue checkmark people.
You know, I'm one of those people.
It's only utility, I think, is to verify that, you know, somebody's not impersonating a public figure.
Other than that, It is not a validation of your life or a goal or like a Pulitzer Prize or, you know, some great esteemed honor.
It's a little blue checkmark.
You'll get over it. So I do worry about people really on both sides that are getting so wrapped up.
I mean, look, Elon Musk bought Twitter.
I'm glad he did.
He wants to liberate the platform.
That's the right move. Let's see what happens.
But to emotionally involve ourselves in every twist and turn, I just think it takes us away from the things that really matter.
Family, our communities, and the things we can be doing every day to make our little part of the universe better, not the Twitterverse.
I think that's a very profound statement.
Let me push back on my side a little bit in this way, and that is that I think you would agree that if you look at the reach of our side, and by our side here I mean very broadly people who have religious and Christian convictions, people who are conservative, people who are on the Republican side of the aisle, Our megaphones, if I can put it that way, are really small.
Even our big megaphones are not as big as their small megaphones.
If you take the reach of just NPR, for example, it is gigantic.
So as a result, a lot of conservatives, I think...
Look to social media because, hey, look, if Twitter is 20% of the country, that makes it bigger than the three networks put together.
That makes it bigger than the combined circulations of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the LA Times.
So, in other words, it remains an important platform.
But I think you're not disagreeing.
You're making a different point, and that is that- Life is not lived on Twitter.
Life is lived in your family and around the dinner table.
Debbie's vigorously nodding, by the way, and hoping that I digest what I'm saying.
She's on your side of this discussion for sure.
So, all that being said, let me ask you to assess, Raymond, where do you think we are with this whole woke stuff?
I mean, has it taken over our society, or do you think that we can find ways to combat it?
Well, look, there is no doubt that there's a movement underway to...
You can awaken, if you will, impose this woke belief system on anybody who will listen, any and all takers.
You see it in school curriculum.
You see it in the public square.
You certainly see it in the mass media.
So I'm not sure if we've reached peak woke yet.
I think we're approaching it because people have grown very tired of the whole thing.
The IGOR returning to Disney may also be an indication that the woke has gone a bit too far, and it's affecting the bottom line.
So it's not the ideology that anybody's repelling, it's the results of the ideology, which is families abandoning the brand.
That's always a bad thing for business.
So this is just survival when you look at a company like Disney.
But it's not only Disney, it's many other big and established brands out there.
I'm not sure if peak wokeness has been reached, but it doesn't matter.
The important thing is to focus on what we can positively do in the wider culture to awaken people to those eternal values, to the things that matter and last.
I do think at the end of the day, Dinesh, no matter your politics, People are still hurting.
They're looking for answers and eternal answers, I believe.
And eventually, one way or the other, they come to the realization that they need something more than the world is offering them today.
And sadly for some, it's too late at that point.
There's very little they can do to repair the damage they've already done to themselves and to others.
But you have to keep throwing out that line.
Offering hope, offering truth to people, even when they don't want to hear it.
And the truth can be attractive and beautiful, and it is.
It is when it's clearly stated.
And so I think there's still...
I haven't lost hope in the ability to bring others back and to remind them what truly matters.
What truly matters. Absolutely.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, we're going to talk about Raymond Arroyo's book, The Wise Men Who Found Christmas.
Are you watching your retirement slip through your hands every day?
Are you worried about a Black Swan market event that could be coming?
This is an event that comes out of nowhere and basically decimates your accumulated savings.
That's not all. Interest rates going up, inflation skyrocketing.
How can we protect our money?
money, how can you get ahead of what's happening with the economy?
This is not a time to wing it or go with the hunch.
You need a qualified expert on your side.
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I'm back with my longtime friend Raymond Arroyo.
We're going to talk about his new book.
It's called The Wise Men Who Found Christmas.
And it's really the story of the, well, I guess the magi.
What do you say, honey? You call it magi?
Debbie calls it Magi.
I call it Magi.
Raymond, you're going to have to begin by settling which of us is right in terms of the pronunciation.
And then talk a little bit about this book, because you say that this is a little bit of a fresh look at a story that we all sort of think we know, the three wise men from the East.
Talk a little bit. First of all, tell us what's the right pronunciation, and then talk a little bit about the book.
I'm not getting in the middle of that marital discussion.
Do you think I'm crazy?
Some say Magi, some say Magi.
I'll let you all hash that one out.
It's Magus. It comes from Magus, so maybe Magi is the proper pronunciation.
But I'm not weighing in. Tell Debbie I'm not weighing in.
You know, even the song, Dinesh, that we take for granted, we three kings of Orient are, it turns out they weren't any of those things, except from the Orient.
There were probably more than three of them.
The Gospel only mentions three gifts, not three wise men.
They were not kings at all.
That's just a latter-day creation.
Not until the sixth century, when you get to Venerable Bede, does he come up with the fact that they're kings or the suggestion that they're kings and their names.
That's all latter-day creations.
And they were from the Orient, but if you read the first-century sources, which I did, Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, they all talk about the wise men being from Arabia.
So they were from east of Judea, not the Far East.
And in time, that has transformed and changed, and we've absorbed all these legends.
I was looking for a legend about the wise men to tell to children.
I've done a book called The Spider Who Saved Christmas a few years ago, which is a great Eastern European legend.
It's really quite beautiful.
And it falls between the cracks of the Gospels, you know, a moment we don't know about.
This story is actually the historic reality of the wise men, situated in the political and historic reality in which they live.
So they very likely were wise men in the kingdom of Nabate, in Petra, modern-day Petra, Jordan.
They would have gone to the east to bring those gifts to Herod as tribute.
They imagined he had a son or a grandson when they saw There's a new king in Judea.
So that political reality right there kind of paints the picture, and those gifts give us a big indication of where they come from, Dinesh.
Frankincense and myrrh was derived from tree sap only grown in southern Arabia.
And of course the gold, the King Solomon's Mines, the Mines of Midian, same place.
Archaeologists show it, we know where that is.
That was also controlled by the Kingdom of Nabatae.
So it tells us where they came from.
But there may have been a religious impulse here in addition to the political drama that's happening on the surface.
Let's talk about what this story means, because you've got these wise men from Arabia.
Very interesting thing.
I didn't think of it this way, but you're saying that their original gifts were probably for the child of the king, King Herod.
And in some ways, what happened is that the star led them to, perhaps unwittingly, a very different kind of king.
And so that the lesson of the story, I think, is that true wisdom comes in recognizing that there is a king of kings...
Which is the child born in the manger, and that these wise men were sort of divinely led to that conclusion.
Was that a good way to think about it?
Well, remember, whoever they were, whether they were Zoroastrian priests or they were Jewish First Temple priests, which I'm rather partial to, they were immersed in these Jewish prophecies of a messiah.
Now, why a Zoroastrian priest would be interested in that, I don't know.
So I created this family adventure to show how high the stakes were, how urgent their need was to go and pursue the truth as they saw it.
They raced after it, Dinesh.
And that's really our lesson, I think, this Christmas.
When the truth presents itself, you have an obligation to boldly go after it, pursue it.
And they didn't wait. They went.
They risked everything, really.
But yes, they brought these gifts.
They imagined it was Herod's son, but they believed it was the Messiah because they saw a scepter rise out of Israel, as the prophecy goes, that star in the sky.
They went to meet him. Now, Margaret Barker, who's an amazing I'm an old testament scholar.
She believes they may have been remnants of the first temple priesthood.
They were expelled 700 years before Jesus came along and they were living in Arabia.
So it might have been possible that they go to the child and they bring gold because the gold was in the vestments of the first temple priests.
They brought myrrh, frankincense, because that was burned in the temple.
But most importantly, myrrh was kept only in the first temple, in the Holy of Holies, to anoint members of the royal priesthood, the so-called Order of Melchizedek, which Catholics will be familiar with.
It's mentioned in the Mass. So they may have been going to restore that first temple by anointing this Messiah.
That's a really fascinating way to look anew at these men that we took for granted.
But They weren't kings.
There's no way kings from the Far East could have passed through the countries they needed to pass through to get to Judea.
It's just impossible. The Romans would have stopped them or killed them.
Just reality. I mean, Raymond, what's kind of funny about all this is you have this sort of beautifully written children's book aimed at young people, and yet here you are giving us like a graduate-level account of the background, but I think that speaks to the way in which you You know, you researched this.
You didn't just say, okay, listen, you know what?
I'm going to take this book and write it, kind of dumb it down for five-year-olds.
You put in the work to understand the context, and then you've delivered it in a way that both parents, I think, and children can appreciate.
So, guys, you've got to really check this out.
It's The Wise Men Who Found Christmas.
It's by the one and only Raymond Arroyo.
His website, RaymondArroyo.com.
Raymond, as always, great to have you on the podcast.
Thank you, Dinesh. Early Merry Christmas to you.
And to you also. We're doing a sort of mini course in Christian apologetics focused on my book, What's So Great About Christianity?
I'm holding the hardback.
It's available in paper.
You can get it from Amazon, Barnes& Noble.
And what I like to do in my books is, early on, lay out with full kind of regalia the argument I am going against.
Now, this is, I think, a very important tactic or approach because I'm not trying to defeat the atheist argument at its dumbest.
I'm trying to actually defeat the secular or atheist argument at its best.
And in order to do that, you've got to know what it is.
And so sometimes in my books I'll have a whole chapter, sometimes even more, where I'm giving the other side And I'm not trying at this point to rebut it or answer it.
I'm just laying it out there.
And then slowly, meticulously, I take it piece by piece.
So that's kind of our approach here.
I'm going to start by just talking about how the secular...
Critics of religion, and specifically of Christianity, how they talk, what they sound like, what are the points they appeal to.
By and large, they make two big arguments against God and against Christianity.
The first one is the sort of the intellectual argument.
It doesn't make sense to believe in God.
And the other is the moral argument, that So, let's start by talking a little bit about the intellectual argument.
Now, Edmund Burke has an interesting quote, which opens my chapter,"...boldness was not formerly a characteristic of atheists as such, but of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious." What Burke is sort of saying is that for many centuries you probably had people who were either non-observant Christians or people who were indifferent, maybe even privately hostile to religion, but they didn't say so.
They kind of kept their quiet.
And as a result, theism and belief in God and Christianity had a dominant position in the public space of society.
But now, you have kind of naked and open aggression against Christianity.
Some of it coming from people who are explicitly atheists, but a lot of it coming from people who are just more broadly secular.
Religion, God, is just not part of their worldview, and they are against it.
Now, we've heard a lot in the last couple of decades now, I guess.
It goes back to about 2007 or 2008.
This is actually when I first started getting involved in Christian apologetics from the so-called new atheists.
People like the late Christopher Hitchens, who died of cancer a few years ago.
The Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins.
The philosopher Daniel Dennett.
The Nero scientist Sam Harris.
The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker.
This is kind of the new atheist battalion.
And these are people who explicitly advocate atheism.
Now, what does it mean to advocate for atheism is a good question unto itself.
How would you advocate for something that you sort of don't believe in?
It's a little bit if I didn't believe in, you know, unicorns or I didn't believe in mermaids, it'd be really strange for me to create a movement based upon like the denial of mermaids or the denial of unicorns.
But this is what the atheists do.
We'll explore their psychology as we get more deeply into it.
The point I want to make is that what gives the atheists and the secular critics of religion intellectual confidence is that they believe that they are the spokesmen and they are the apologists for science.
Now some of them, as you can tell from the titles I mentioned earlier, Oxford biologists, cognitive psychologists, some of these people are anchored in the sciences.
But still, by and large, they're not by themselves prominent scientists.
There are a couple of exceptions.
The physicist Lawrence Krauss, for example, and of course, Stephen Hawking, who wrote A Brief History of Time, the physicist.
But a guy like Richard Dawkins is, even though he is in the biology department, his title at Oxford is something like professor for the public understanding of science.
So he's really more of an intermediary, a kind of missionary from the world of science to the larger society.
And what the atheists do and the secular critics of religion do is they basically say science works.
Science delivers the goods.
If you pray to God, He may or may not answer.
If you ask for a miracle, it's probably not going to happen.
But you know what? If you have an ailment and you take 500 grams of tetracycline, you're going to feel better.
And so science is a tried and true method, not only for doing things and curing things and making things, but also for understanding things.
Science has given us a whole new understanding of the world.
And in some ways, this is a better way to understand the world, so say the atheists, than the sort of biblical view or relying just on traditional beliefs that go back to ancient times.
We hear from these atheists that the scientific view makes it impossible to believe particularly in the biblical account of creation.
They go, hey, listen, if you read the account of creation, the universe appears to be relatively young.
You've got this order of different types of beings who are made one after the other.
And they go, well, science gives you a much...
Different and more detailed and more accurate picture based upon carbon dating and those kinds of things.
And so you have this remarkable statement by Richard Dawkins, which I'll pick up next time.
He goes, it's really the scientific discovery of evolution and specifically Darwin.
He goes, quote, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Basically, what Dawkins is saying is that prior to Darwin, we atheists could not give an explanation of why the world seems designed in the way it does, because the world most certainly gives the appearance of design.
So do living creatures.
And his point is that Darwin has now given us a better explanation.
Now, as this book develops and my argument develops, you'll see that I have a lot to say about all this.
But all I'm doing here is trying to give you a window into, you can say, secular criticism of Christianity.
And when we come back tomorrow, we're going to go more into it.
And I'm also going to make the moral argument against Christianity.
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