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Nov. 22, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:46
ART OF RETALIATION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep462
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Coming up, I'll review Kevin McCarthy's pledge to retaliate against the Democrats by throwing some prominent leftists like Ilhan Omar off their committees.
I'll highlight what the House GOP needs to investigate regarding the Biden crime family.
Daniel D'Souza Gill joins me.
We're going to talk about a controversy at Yale Law School.
And Joel Berry of the Babylon Bee will be here.
We'll talk about the importance of satire in an age of absurdity.
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.
I want to talk about an important principle in politics, and it is the art of retaliation.
The art of retaliation.
Now, This principle came to my mind when Kevin McCarthy said recently, I, Kevin McCarthy, I'm going to remove Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, and Ilhan Omar from their House committees.
Now, we should note that this is a kind of an unprecedented...
Well, actually, no. It is a precedented step.
But it is an unusual step because the general modus operandi, the way of doing business in the Congress is this.
The majority party controls the committees.
They appoint the chairman of the committees.
And the committees, by the way, are the mechanism through which legislation passes.
Committees are very important. The Judiciary Committee, the The Ways and Means Committee and so on.
And the majority party has the majority of members on the committee, but the minority party, in this case the Democrats in the House, would have the right to appoint their own members.
But the Democrats decided last time around to violate this kind of code of etiquette, if you will, and throw prominent Republicans, notably Marjorie Taylor Greene, off her committee.
Oh, she's an extremist.
So, extremist or not, the point is, she's not being named by your side.
She was being named by the Republican side.
And the fact that the Democrats said, well, we have the power to do it, so we're going to do it.
It was very important, and it is very important for Republicans to be like, well, you know what?
Two can play at this game.
You can do it to us, but when our chance comes, we're going to do it to you.
And our chance has, in fact, come.
Because even though Republicans are going to have a narrow majority, by the way, it's no narrower than the Democrats had the last time, a majority of probably somewhere between maybe five, six or seven seats, but that's enough.
And so I am actually thrilled.
I'm not thrilled with Kevin McCarthy.
And I think, to be honest, it is our critique of McCarthy and the pressure on McCarthy.
And in fact, some talk about, you know, jettisoning McCarthy or McCarthy doesn't have the votes that is causing Kevin McCarthy to go, well, listen, you know what?
I better start doing some things that my Republican base really wants, and this will help secure and fortify my position.
As the majority leader and, in fact, the Speaker of the House.
So McCarthy, I think, is doing himself a favor by saying, I talked about this.
See, Republicans are actually kind of famous for talking about it.
We're going to defund the IRS agents.
We're going to do this.
We're going to do that. But then they don't.
Inexplicably, they do not do it.
And then the Republican base gets kind of frustrated.
It's like, wait a minute, why did we vote for you?
People start talking about the Uniparty.
People start becoming demoralized.
And, you know, Nancy Pelosi, you've got to give it to her.
She might be Vodka Nancy and so on, but she fights for her side.
She uses her power.
She's not a genius.
In a way, she's known Newt Gingrich.
Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House in the 1990s, and Newt was a comprehensive and strategic thinker.
No one would say that of Nancy Pelosi.
But you know what Nancy Pelosi is?
She's a fighter, and she's a very good vote counter.
She famously said, I'm not going to allow a bill to go to the floor without knowing exactly how the votes are going to come out.
And think about it, the house has hundreds of members, so this is not exactly an easy task to do, but she and her office were just very methodical, systematic, thorough in doing their job.
And so if I had any counsel for Kevin McCarthy, if he makes it to a speaker, is listen, take a page from Nancy Pelosi.
Be tough like her.
Count votes carefully.
Make sure that you satisfy your base.
Keep a broad coalition on your side.
Make sure you have the votes.
And so this is a very important first step.
Now, the other important step, and I'm happy again to see that the GOP is like They haven't even taken office.
This all starts in January.
But they're already moving on sending a whole series of requests and demands and letters to the DOJ, Department of Homeland Security.
It looks like they're going to open investigations into Mayorkas, open investigations into Merrick Garland.
I saw Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday, to my just delight, Talk about defunding the special counsel on Trump.
Just take away the resources of that operation and it essentially goes poof.
Or the DOJ is going to have to scramble and find a different way to sort of bankroll that.
And again, this creates a problem.
If Congress has defunded you, has not appropriated the funds, where are you going to get the funds from?
And then they're opening an investigation into Hunter Biden.
But here is where I drop an immediate cautionary note, which is that this is not an investigation into Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden might be the entry gate, the portal, but we're actually talking about the Biden crime family or the Biden family racket.
Let's remember, Biden deployed all his family members or certainly all the male family members, his brother or James Biden, his other brother, Frank Biden, they were bag men no less than Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden may have been, in a sense, been the most industrious of all the, of this little mafia family.
But even the son-in-law, Biden's son-in-law is recruited into the operation.
So this is about the big guys.
This is not about Hunter Biden.
And I hope that the House GOP, in making this investigation, it's not about getting the president's son.
Yeah, he's a coke addict.
Yeah, he's a freak. But the point is, he's part of a freakish family and a corrupt family.
And it's that gangsterism that we want to hold accountable.
And that's what the GOP needs to focus on.
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I think most of you are familiar with the very famous Asian Indian prostitute, Uruj.
Actually, no, she's not a prostitute.
She's a lawyer. I don't know if that's...
I don't know if it's a big difference.
Uruj Rahman is a public interest lawyer in New York.
And if it seems like I'm defaming her, well, it's very well deserved.
Why? Because this is the woman, the activist, who firebombed A police cruiser during the 2020 George Floyd riots.
She's one of these so-called social justice warriors.
And she was arrested and she was facing 10 years in prison, which seems appropriate if you try to firebomb a police vehicle.
But the Biden administration decided to start protecting her and pushing a judge, and this is U.S. District Judge Brian Kogan of the Eastern District of New York, liberal Democrat, To give this woman a very light sentence.
And in fact, he did.
So here's what she gets.
15 months in prison.
Wow. This is outrageous.
You've got January 6th defendants, non-violent, who've done nothing, who have comparable or worse sentences than this.
Not to mention this woman was never in solitary confinement.
In fact, left-wing activists came forward and put up money for her to be bailed.
So she was given the opportunity to have bail.
Why? This woman,
Uruj Rahman, and her accomplice, a guy named Colinford Mathis, these are people who, they've been getting these glowing media profiles, and now they evidently have this kind of sweetheart deal with the Biden DOJ and with a judge going along.
So, I mean, justice is really about proportionality.
It's not just so you get punished, but the punishment should bear some resemblance, some proportion to the offense.
And for someone who has engaged, I mean, in a very premeditated way, this woman, Uruj Rahman and Mattis, her accomplice, were exchanging texts beforehand talking about the importance of bombing all police fire stations.
In fact, here she goes, I'm now quoting, I hope they burn everything down, need to burn all police stations down and probably the courts too.
So now, isn't this domestic terrorism?
It's premeditated.
It's followed up with violent action.
And all she gets is 15 months, two years of probation, and pay a restitution fee of $30,000.
And that may seem, well, $30,000.
But this is a woman who makes over $200,000 working at a law firm.
In fact, specifically, according to the court documents, she makes $250,000.
She makes $255,000 a year.
So she's a very well paid, very well educated.
Her accomplice, by the way, is a graduate of Princeton and New York Law School.
She went to Fordham.
So these are people who know better.
Not to mention the fact that they have had legal training.
So they can't say, well, I really didn't know this was against the law.
That makes absolutely no sense.
They're trained in the law.
And so let's look at how she gets this reduced sentence.
The Biden DOJ writes a document where they basically say she's, quote, coping with unprocessed trauma.
So she's undergoing some personal difficulties.
She had apparently abusive partnership relationships.
She's having trouble with her relationships.
She was quote, taunted as a Muslim after 9-11.
What kind of nonsense is all this?
Well, there's no evidence of that.
What's exemplary about her life?
Just because she's a left-wing radical and she's been in an abusive relationship, which probably she was giving as much as she got.
She's traumatized.
Well, people who are strange and weird and get into weird relationships have trauma, very often trauma that they impose on others too or on themselves.
So there's nothing admirable here.
This is basically... A woman who's decided to use violence to achieve political ends that she can't achieve any other way, and she thinks it's okay, and they planned it.
And so the fact, you know, we say multiple times that there is a two-tier system of justice in this country, but it's not just at the highest level.
It's not just that the Clintons get away with it, or Hunter Biden gets away with it, or the Biden family gets away with it.
We see that left-wing activists on the street also get away with it.
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Says, I'm not going to hire any more clerks from Yale Law School because they're regularly suppressing free speech.
In fact, there was an event in which a conservative speaker, this is Kristen Wagoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom, was there to speak at Yale.
The students began to shout and scream and prevent her from speaking.
There was a dean of Yale in the audience who did nothing even to ask them to quiet down.
And then later, the dean of the law school...
This is Heather Gurken, said no action would be taken against any of the students.
And so this judge has mentioned that incident and others, and he goes, listen, you know, I don't really want to punish the students, but I want to punish Yale.
I like what he says here.
He goes, I don't want to cancel Yale.
I want Yale to stop canceling people like me.
So, and now, if it was just him, it'd be one thing, but other judges have joined in, and Yale is having a freakout.
Yeah, that is good because Yale should not be able to get away with this.
And the reason they get away with it is because people continue to hire them.
That's the main reason these students want to go to schools like this.
It's so that they get these Supreme Court clerkships.
It's so that they get good jobs afterwards.
So if more judges...
to hire these students, these graduates, then Yale is not going to like that because they will not be able to supply those jobs for some of those students.
So if other judges are doing the same thing, that will hurt Yale overall.
This is a key point.
I think the point you're making is it is important to exercise power in a way that makes an actual difference.
I mean, so often people will come up to us after movies.
I'm not going to renew my subscription to Disney Plus.
I'm not going to shop in Target.
And those are small gestures.
But see, here's a judge who knows that the reason Yale has all this prestige is Is that you can go on to lucrative careers in the law or you can get academic appointments and judgeships are important.
So he's withholding from Yale something that matters to them.
The other thing is he could have said, I'm going to not hire from any woke law school.
And the problem with that is then he would basically be casting his brush very widely.
But I think he decided, let me pick the worst one and spank them and And say, in effect, that Harvard and Stanford and other schools will benefit at your expense, and young kids will no longer want to go to Yale Law School.
So let's look at this.
So here's the dean, Heather Gorkin.
First of all, they appear to have fired the dean who was present in the room and said nothing.
That's number one. They didn't say she's fired.
They just go, she's no longer at Yale.
But she's out. Number two, they've invited Judge James Ho...
And another judge who said she wasn't gonna hire from Yale either to come speak at Yale.
So to me, this is an academic institution in retreat, and it's actually a nice thing to watch.
Right.
It is good that they're doing that, but also hopefully it's not just a temporary Band-Aid response because this guy is making some kind of an impact on them.
Hopefully they actually stay strong in that because otherwise they'll just go right back to doing what they were doing and canceling other speakers and not letting them talk and So I don't know if that's going to be enough.
Well, the good thing is, so these Hoenn Branch, the two judges, have issued a statement and they go, Yale Law School is among the worst when it comes to legal cancellation and referring even to the recent reforms and the invitation to them to speak.
They go, perhaps this is nothing more than parchment promises.
So the good thing is these judges are like on to this institution.
They know how they engage in these little pirouettes to kind of make the criticism dissipate and then they go right back to their business.
I think what the judges are saying is we're on to you and we're gonna start creating a judicial movement to block you if you keep this up.
So this is the kind of institutional pushback That really makes itself felt.
And it's good to see.
Yeah, especially when the other judges decide that they're going to do the same thing because, of course, they're going to be subject to feeling intimidated or like they should back down.
But if they all stand together, then they'll probably make a big difference.
I mean, some of these judges say that they are behind these two guys, but they're doing it anonymously.
But see, that's powerful, too, because then it's like, you don't know which judge is not going to hire you because you're applying from Yale.
And there are people who've made criticisms and said things like, well, you know, this is really not punishing Yale.
You're punishing students who don't really have any.
But look, a lot of these woke students are in on it.
They are, in fact, driving the culture of intolerance.
So it's not as if the Yale students are immune.
Right. Most students at Yale are pretty woke.
It may be the most woke school in the country, or certainly one of the worst ones.
Look, this wokeness is here to stay.
It's not going away anytime soon.
Quite frankly, you know, I don't know where it's all going to end, but I'm just glad to see that there is some institutional pushback, and I hope that it makes a difference.
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I'm back with Daniel D'Souza Gill and...
I want to pivot from talking about Yale Law School to this incident that I've seen on social media about, well, Kirk Cameron's sister, whose name is Candace Cameron Bure.
And she was the former co-star of Full House.
And apparently she is in some hot water with fellow actors and also with the kind of LGBTQ community.
And it seems to me utterly stupid.
So can you explain the circumstances?
Yeah. Yeah, it seems like Candace had decided she was going to be part of a new network that focused more on family values.
I think she said it would focus on traditional...
Family. Traditional outlooks on that.
And so they, of course, took this to mean, oh, she's against the LGBTQ community.
And I think she then wrote a post responding saying, you know, I love everyone.
I love all people and that sort of thing.
But some of her co-stars, I think this one woman, Jodi Sweeten, who played the sister on Full House wrote to the other side, oh, you know, you know I love you, to this LGBTQ person, as if Candace was attacking her when she never attacked her or mentioned this other person.
But this other person, I guess, got a lot of notoriety, this person named Siwa, who seems to be getting famous because she makes TikTok videos about Candace Cameron.
Saying, oh, you're the rudest celebrity I've ever met.
You're against LGBTQ people.
I've never even heard of this TikTok person, but it seems like she's kind of getting a little bit more notoriety because she's in this fake conflict with Candace.
I mean, what seems to me to be odd here is, and this is the kind of moral imperialism of the LGBTQ community, if they were to create an LGBTQ channel and do LGBTQ plays and movies and books, nobody would say anything.
It's like they've chosen their topic that they want to focus on.
So here comes Candace Cameron-Burr and she goes, listen, we have the Hallmark channel, I'm going to go with a family channel.
We're going to make traditional movies about the traditional family, and this is what we're choosing to focus on.
So for them to now kind of move in and say, well, you don't have a right to do that, and you choosing your topic is somehow an offense and an affront to us because we need to see LGBTQ stars in your movies— I mean, where do you get off doing that kind of nonsense?
Well, I think a lot of Christian people think we need to apologize or think that, oh, we need to show how we love everyone or something.
I think that she maybe felt a little bit under attack, but I don't think she should feel that way because there is nothing that she did wrong or needs to apologize for.
The left is always going to be on the attack against her and people like her and like all of us.
So there's really nothing that we can do to ever change their minds on that other than to just...
I think, ignore it and just to continue to be putting out the pro-family films and content that she's doing.
Here's the president of GLAAD, which is some sort of gay operation, Sarah Kate Ellis.
And this is very kind of telling.
Cameron Bure's comments are, quote, irresponsible and hurtful.
So you're hurtful here not because you're attacked, but because you're not mentioned.
Because she's, quote, using tradition as a guide for exclusion.
Now, the truth of it is, in any artistic endeavor, when you choose to do X, you're excluding Y, right?
You choose to do a male character, you're excluding females.
You choose to portray a traditional family, you're excluding gays.
So I think that this idea that people have a right not to be excluded...
Yeah, and the left often excludes us.
They obviously exclude characters probably like herself from movies that they want to put out because they want to make the characters more woke and they don't want to just have You know, a normal person as a character.
They want to make them all... When is the last time you saw a movie with a normal American family that, let's say on Sunday, all goes to church?
And that is not mocked.
It's just presented as a normal part of life.
Or even someone struggling with a dilemma and they focus on...
They have spiritual anguish and they turn to prayer.
This kind of thing is almost erased from...
And I don't just mean recently in the woke environment.
It's been rare in American movies now for half a century.
Right. But I think the left thinks that they're entitled to basically have the mainstream.
They're entitled to everything they want first, and then people like her have to be excluded to the corner and then get on the defensive and apologize.
And I think they definitely put you on the defense by saying, oh, well, you're a Christian, so you obviously...
You know, want to be focused only on love and so on, which of course then leads the person to say, no, I am focused on love.
I do love you. I love everyone.
And it's like sometimes it just gets to be so ridiculous because they obviously don't actually care if you love them.
That's not even the focus of the conversation.
It's really more about excluding us and making it so that no movies can ever be about a traditional relationship.
I mean, I find it ironic.
It looks like these groups have moved in a three-step maneuver.
So the first step is tolerance.
Remember, they were excluded.
So they're like, you've got to tolerate us.
And we go, okay.
And the second step is, I would call it equality.
You cannot make any distinction between you and us.
You can't say that heterosexuality is better, homosexuality is not better.
You have to treat them as the same.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think that it's just going to continue like this, which is why people should not allow this to make them apologize or put out some kind of way that they're going to back down from this because that's why we have basically no more content left.
That's why we don't have any traditional movies.
And like you were saying, this kind of content's not out there.
It's because these people decide that they're going to be intimidated.
Yeah, that's it.
We just have to treat these criticisms with a kind of a ho-hum attitude.
Ho-hum. We're good to go.
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Feel the difference. The United States media and also the Western media have kind of gone silent on Brazil following the Brazilian election.
So it's almost like the media left heaved a collective sigh of relief.
Oh, our man Lula da Silva, a socialist, has beaten Jair Bolsonaro.
And basically we are now looking forward to All of Latin and South America are falling into the hands of the left.
Which, by the way, is a dangerous possibility.
But in Brazil, the issue is not settled at all, it seems.
There have been continuing massive demonstrations, most recently a demonstration in front of the military headquarters, apparently over 2 million people.
Think about that. 2 million people in Brazil.
A big country, but nevertheless, this is one of the largest crowds that you'll see anywhere in the world.
And what are the people saying?
They're basically saying that this is an election that demands to be audited.
So in other words, you know, this is, in a sense, familiar territory.
They're saying that there was a lot of cheating in the election, particularly in the Rio de Janeiro area.
There's been some discussion of whether there was pre-programming of the machines.
And apparently there's now a divide in Brazil between the Defense Department and the Supreme Court.
Now, it should be said the Supreme Court in Brazil is very left-wing.
Most of the members of that Supreme Court were appointed by, well, none other than Lula da Silva, the victorious, I put that in quote marks, candidate.
Let's remember Lula da Silva was the president of Brazil before.
And in fact, he was there for a while, so he got to appoint.
So this is...
Very troubling, right?
You have a guy who appoints all these court members.
Then he is convicted, by the way, of embezzlement and a whole bunch of offenses.
He's jailed. He gets out of jail.
His convictions are overturned by that court.
And then he runs for election, and that court is quick to say, oh, yes, everything is okay.
Now, interestingly, in Brazil, unlike in the United States, the Defense Department has its own courts.
And so, apparently, Bolsonaro has appealed to the military courts to investigate the issue of election integrity, election improprieties.
And so, what's now happening is there appears to be kind of a skirmish going on between the Supreme Court and the Defense Department, and the Chief Justice, Alexandre de Mores, is apparently trying to get the defense minister fired.
He's accusing the defense minister of, guess what, damaging democracy.
Again, sound familiar? I mean, I find it really remarkable how we are seeing a worldwide echo of issues now.
Similar tactics, similar allegations, the left and right in Brazil, in Europe, in America, breaking out kind of the same way.
And factionalism in the country, because it appears that Brazil, again, divided right down the middle.
This, by the way, was a very close election.
At first, it seemed like Lula da Silva would win outright.
There wouldn't even be a need for a runoff, but it was really close.
So they had a runoff, and the runoff was even closer.
In other words, instead of Lula da Silva widening his margin.
So when you're talking about things that could have gone wrong in the election...
It is easy to see that a shift of votes of a relatively small amount and in a relatively focused area would produce a completely different outcome.
So I don't know where this is all going to go.
There is some talk I've seen in some of the Brazilian websites about is Brazil kind of teetering on the edge of civil strife or maybe even civil war.
There's a lot of harsh rhetoric that's flying back and forth between the Lula forces and the Defense Department.
Let's remember that this Supreme Court in Brazil is a little bit of a dubious operation.
When Jason Miller, the CEO of Getter, was in Brazil...
The police of the Supreme Court, I mean, how odd is this?
The Supreme Court has its own cops.
They apparently detained Jason Miller and accused him of being, guess what, quote, an insurrectionist.
Now, I think, I don't know if they meant he's an insurrectionist in Brazil, because I don't think Jason Miller has anything to do with Brazil.
But maybe what they meant is that Jason Miller is an insurrectionist in the United States.
Again, a completely baseless and unsupported accusation.
And of course, they were compelled to let him go.
But Brazil is in turmoil in a way that is not being recognized in the media.
And we'll be watching with interest to see.
This is actually, along with India, along with the United States, these are some of the world's largest democracies.
And they appear right now to be On somewhat unstable ground.
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Guys, I think all of you know the Babylon Bee, which is, well, in my view, it is just the funniest and best satirical site on the internet.
I'm delighted to welcome Joel Berry, who's the managing editor of the Babylon Bee.
He is...
Co-author of The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness.
He's a columnist. And the new book from The Babylon Bee is The Babylon Bee Guide to Democracy.
It's really fun.
I can't say I've read it.
I'm not even sure it's possible to read it, Joel.
But my strategy on reading this book is I open to random pages and And I start reading, I chuckle, and I put it down, I pick it up, I open.
Tell me, am I reading this book in the appropriate way, or is there a different way to read it?
No, that's a very good strategy.
We love P.J. O'Rourke and his brilliant political satire, but one criticism I always had of his writing was that there weren't enough really funny pictures.
So we filled up our book with A lot of really funny pictures and illustrations.
It's kind of one of those things where you can open up to any place in the book and there's going to be something that will make you laugh.
Yeah, I mean, you can even read the book from back to front in the Arabic style and it still works.
Now, Joel, let's start by...
I'm going to come to the book in a second, but let's talk for a moment about Twitter because I think that it was Twitter's decision.
I mean, Twitter had been banning people left and right.
James O'Keefe, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
But when Twitter banned you guys, it seemed almost like a bridge too far because it was like, how crazy is that?
You've got a satirical site and I think it seems to have been a significant factor in Elon Musk deciding enough is enough.
I'm going to actually buy this platform and rescue it from these lunatics who are running it.
I mean, is that how you guys see it?
Yeah, well, the Lord works in mysterious ways, right?
It's been quite a wild several months.
I don't know if it was the full motivation.
I think there were a lot of things that played into what Elon did.
I think maybe the Babylon Bee had a hand in it.
But I think a lot of people were shocked when we got banned because it's one thing to ban a political pundit or someone who is In Twitter's mind, spreading disinformation.
But when you're censoring comedians and people just telling jokes, I don't care what side of the aisle you're on.
I think that's jarring to a lot of people, and I think the same for Elon.
I'm really thankful for what Elon did.
It's a testament to...
The power of the free market, too.
We didn't regulate our way out of this.
We didn't end up needing to necessarily rely on government action.
This was the initiative of one man who came in and saw a problem and thankfully had the resources to do something about it, and he did.
Elon's not perfect. I'm sure he'll make many mistakes.
But I think what is really most attractive about him is he's obviously having a good time.
And he's very transparent.
You know, he's open about the fact that he's not perfect and he'll make mistakes and he seems to be really good at communicating with Twitter users.
And so I think it's an exciting new era, I think, for social media.
So we'll see. I mean, he also seems to have a really good sense of irony and satire.
I mean, the Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL attacks Elon Musk and goes, I can see your side is going to be a continuing forum of disinformation and hate.
You know, and basically Elon Musk replies, stop defaming me, you know, because of the anti-defamation league.
Stop defaming me. So...
I think with Elon Musk, he's got a wry side, and if you miss that about him, you miss what he's really up to.
Yeah, well, it's refreshing, because I think for the last six years, our entire culture, everyone in our culture, has been so serious and so upset and so worried about what's going on, on the left and right.
And I think the Babylon Bee, we've kind of had our little small part to play in kind of helping...
Everyone lighten up, you know, even when there are terrible things happening all around us.
But it is very fun to see someone in Elon's position with the power and resources that he has just making little jokes and not worrying about, you know, what is the New York Times going to say about me?
What is the Washington Post going to write about me?
I hope that kind of courage and that mischievousness is contagious, because I think we need more of it, for sure.
Joel, I've been just thumbing open to pages in the book, and I've got to say, this is a very path-breaking history of democracy, because I was kind of under the impression it started with the ancient Greeks and so on, but you say...
That democracy really began when you had, according to biologists, these seven single gray-celled critters that were in a warm pond, and they stumbled upon three orange single-celled creatures.
And after a quick seven to three vote, the seven gray creatures surrounded and ate the three orange creatures.
And then you say, brutal!
Democracy ruled by the majority was born.
So I think this is an important addition to It really started here, didn't it?
It did. Well, you know, it's kind of a funny joke, but it also, I think, makes an important point that, you know, America was never intended to be a pure democracy.
And that word democracy is thrown around kind of so sanctimoniously all the time by people who say we need to protect and defend democracy without really explaining what they mean.
But our country was founded specifically to protect against democracy, which is really just the tyranny of the majority.
When you have 51% voting against the other 49 and disenfranchising that 49%, that's tyranny.
And so our book kind of humorously talks about some of the checks and balances that were put in place to defend against that and then how those checks and balances fall apart when corrupt people get involved and hilarity ensues.
Right. Is that a group of aristocrats decided, quote, that this democracy stuff is all pretty gay.
And so they decided, let's turn Greece over to a group of strongman aristocrats.
Yeah, that's kind of the endless cycle that we see all throughout history.
You see, you know, kind of the republic becoming the democracy, becoming the tyranny of the strongman.
And you see some of those tendencies in the U.S. today.
I think that there is...
As we see the corruption in our government and we see government not working as it should and our representatives not representing us, sometimes we kind of crave the quick answer.
We want someone to go in and fix it all for us.
And that's something that I think that's a temptation that we have to definitely guard against as our situation in Washington gets more and more frustrating.
Lord willing, it will never end up that way.
Lord willing, we can preserve this Into the future.
But we'll see. Well, it's a fun book.
And as our conversation shows, it's a fun book, but there are intelligent and serious points behind it.
So it not only makes you chuckle, but it makes you think.
So the book, guys, The Babylon Bee Guide to Democracy, the website is just babylonbee.com.
And Facebook, The Babylon Bee.
Twitter, The Babylon Bee.
Hey, it's really great The Babylon Bee is back on Twitter.
And then you can find Joel Berry at Joel W. Berry.
That's his Twitter handle.
Hey, Joel, a real pleasure.
Thanks for joining me on the podcast.
Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Dinesh.
I want to lay out as clearly as possible so we understand it, the intellectual and moral critique of God and Christianity.
And I started by doing that yesterday.
I quoted Richard Dawkins saying that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Now, what does Dawkins mean by this?
What he means is that That for centuries, people would look at the design, not just in nature, but also in living creatures.
Look at the way in which creatures appear to be marvelously adapted to their environment.
And fishes have gills, and birds have wings, and we human beings have fingers and toes, which are useful for walking and holding on to things, and eyes.
And so all of this...
For many...
For a very long time, it was very difficult to give any explanation for how this could be like this.
How could this adaptation be so perfect if it wasn't divinely created?
And according to Dawkins, we now have an alternative explanation, which is that these...
These features evolved.
They evolved in response to pressures from the environment, and the way that happened is that creatures that had mutations that were beneficial, a little better way to see, a little bit of a protrusion that later became a finger, those sorts of adaptations survived.
The people, the creatures that didn't have those mutations perished, and so the more successful adaptations multiplied themselves.
So Carl Sagan, the cosmologist, said several years ago, as science advances, there seems to be less for God to do.
Whatever we cannot explain is often attributed to God, and then we do explain it, so it's no longer God's realm.
And so the argument here is that Christians resort to what can be called the God of the gaps.
When there are gaps of scientific knowledge, oh, that must be God.
God acted right here.
And then science explains that.
So this is the confidence that atheists bring and secular people bring to their critique.
They're like, we're going to eventually figure it all out.
There will be nothing left for God to do at all.
And then what about, you might ask, what about things like the immortal soul?
And the atheist argument is that, well, there really isn't one.
There is a body, and the body, it sometimes perishes.
And when the body perishes, well, that's the end of us.
Here is biologist William Provine.
We must conclude that when we die, we die, and that is the end of us.
And as for the soul, according to Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist, the soul is sort of, well, a ghost in the machine.
In other words, all we are is machines.
And religious people think that living inside this machine, this carbon-based machine, is some kind of a ghost that we give a name to called a soul.
But there's actually no ghost.
The ghost is imaginary.
So this is the atheists who think that religious people see things when there is nothing sort of there to see.
And this atheism, this whole way of thinking, this whole intellectual critique of religion and has its roots in the enlightenment.
Now, what is the Enlightenment?
The Enlightenment is a kind of a movement in the early modern era.
We're talking about in the 17th and 18th and, of course, continuing into the 19th century.
Leading figures of the Enlightenment include the French philosophes, people like Voltaire and Diderot and Dolbach.
Out of the Enlightenment came this reverence for science.
A lot of the science at the time was Newtonian science.
Voltaire, for example, was just infatuated with Newton.
This gave rise to these ideas of the universe operating like a clockwork.
Well, maybe there was a God and maybe He wound the clock at the beginning.
But once the clock is wound, well, hey, the universe operates by scientific laws.
God really doesn't intervene in any way.
Things like miracles are not really possible.
And so... We begin to now have a series of thinkers, unlike in the past.
In the past, you really don't find atheism per se.
You obviously find that the ancient Greeks didn't believe in Christianity.
In fact, Christianity hadn't come around yet.
Christ hadn't lived yet.
But ancient paganism had its own concept of gods.
In some cases, many gods.
Polytheistic ideas of gods or different ideas of gods.
Maybe a single god, but as in the case of the Zoroastrians, just a different god than the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
But starting Really in the 18th, but more in the 19th century, you start beginning to see figures who are now explicitly atheist.
I'm thinking of people like Marx.
And I'm thinking about people like Freud.
Freud, of course, in the 20th century.
Freud's book... The Future of an Illusion, which takes the view that religion is a kind of wishful thinking.
We want a world better than this one, and so we create illusions.
The way human beings create illusions even in the world.
If you think about, well, you know, I'm going to have a better life than I actually have.
People place their hopes in things that really have no realistic prospect of materializing.
In fact, Danielle and I were talking about this on the way to the podcast today.
She's coming on the podcast.
Came on the podcast earlier today.
And what Freud is really getting at is that religion is a kind of imaginary hope.
It's understandable how it developed, but it doesn't really make sense, and it doesn't really comport with reality.
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