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Dec. 9, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:44
THE ART OF LOSING Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep473
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Debbie and I are back from Israel.
Glad to be back. We have a lot to tell you about that, but I'm going to start today by talking about the art of losing.
What's up with the GOP and can it find its way back?
As we move toward 2024.
Big news from Twitter, the release of the Twitter files, the second batch.
I'll talk about the implications.
Debbie's going to join me. We're going to talk about Israel and how the stones are speaking out in confirmation of the Old and New Testaments.
And film director Cyrus Narasti joins me.
We're going to talk about his classic film, The Stoning of Soraya M, which is going up on my Locals channel today.
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'm back.
Well, back after eight missed podcast days.
I hope you enjoyed Danielle sitting in for me in my stead.
And Debbie and I had, well, we had an amazing trip.
Debbie's going to join me. We're going to talk about that a little bit later.
But big news today, I'll start with that.
Kristen Sinema. Is leaving the Democratic Party.
She's becoming an independent.
And that's really important because it subtracts one, or at least one reliable vote, from the Democrats.
Now, the Democrats won the race in Georgia, and I'll talk about that in a moment.
Very bad news for us.
But this somewhat neutralizes that.
Now, Sinema is not joining the Republican Party.
I wish she did. And I also wish that this is a prod to Joe Manchin.
I did sort of a whimsical tweet this morning.
I said, well, Sinema leaving the Democratic Party is kind of cinematic, by which I meant colorful, but Joe Manchin becoming a Republican would be, well, kind of mantastic, which is to say, great.
I hope he considers that it would actually secure his position, his future in West Virginia, which is, well, a little precarious right about now.
But let's talk about Georgia because that was a painful defeat.
Let's remember that Georgia is a red state.
Not a purple state, but a red state.
So something is very wrong when we lose the state of Georgia.
And there's a lot of finger pointing in the aftermath of the loss.
And, of course, a lot of fingers are pointing at Herschel Walker.
Flawed candidate, somebody who is not seasoned in politics, somebody who has a kind of checkered past.
Now, by the way, Warnock also has a checkered past, but guess what?
The media is going to report on Herschel Walker, not on Warnock.
That's a built-in advantage for the Democrats, and it occurs not just in Georgia, it's all over the country.
There are some people who are blaming Christian Walker because he spoke out against his dad.
I think it's very hard to blame Christian.
I wish that he had stayed out of it, but nevertheless, this is a family issue.
And Christian Walker is obviously very hurt by developments inside of the family.
He even did a kind of tweet a couple of days ago, lashing out at me.
I have no response to it.
I'm not going to have one.
I just pass over it in silence.
There are people who are pointing fingers at Trump.
And I think the issue here is twofold.
One is that Trump tends to incline towards celebrities.
That's really why he endorsed Oz, Mehmet Oz, in Pennsylvania.
And also, Herschel Walker is a big celebrity, one of the football all-time greats.
And I think Trump probably thought, wow, he's a celebrity.
This takes him sort of three-quarters of the way to the finish line.
But the celebrity advantage also comes with many disadvantages.
Oz, very unreliable in terms of voting, not someone who made the base enthusiastic, and apparently didn't effectively reach independence.
And the same with Herschel Walker.
Here's a guy who has the celebrity, to be sure.
But at least in the beginning, when he was pulled into the campaign, he just seemed to be completely at sea.
Now, later, he got a little better.
But nevertheless, this appears to have been a candidacy with insufficient vetting.
And that's the point, is whether celebrity or not, there needs to be a thorough vetting of candidates.
Additionally, the Democrats have a huge money advantage, and this is something that needs to be very frontally addressed.
Republicans in the past were at least competitive and in many cases had more money than the Democrats.
Now, this is partly the shift of the Republican Party toward a more working class party.
You may say the poor man's party.
Democrats are now quite obviously the party of the rich.
But even so, It's not just the Democrats have more money.
It is how much more money.
You know, money is the kind of fuel of politics.
And if the other side has a little bit more, you can still be competitive.
But if they have twice as much, three times as much, four times as much, suddenly you see that they can do things with their operations that you simply can't do.
And this is something that needs to be addressed.
So, the money issue.
And finally, I want to talk about Rona McDaniel and the RNC because the RNC now has a three-term record of failure.
And by that, I mean horrible results in 2018.
The Democrats see a major surge.
The 2020 election in which we lose the presidency and 2022.
I mean, look, you have to go back to like the 1930s to see a party out of power that doesn't make significant gains in seats.
So this was actually a bad result.
Yes, we got the House and that is some consolation, but we should have gotten the House by a bigger margin.
And you know what? What's this nonsense about McConnell still running for leader and he is the Senate leader?
And Kevin McCarthy is running for House Speaker, and he's probably going to get it, even though there is a dissident faction that's threatening to unseat him.
Rona McDaniel is running for re-election to the RNC and says that she has the vote.
She has 100 votes locked in out of 168.
So this, I think, is actually very bad for the GOP. It almost signals a certain kind of indifference to what happened before.
My friend Harmeet Dillon, who also went to Dartmouth, is running against Rona McDaniel.
But I think that is an uphill candidacy.
I hope that Harmeet wins.
But it looks to me, at least from the signs that I've seen, that Rona McDaniel seems to have this pretty close to being locked up.
Unless Harmeet can peel away votes that are sort of committed to Rona, but not hard committed to Rona McDaniel.
So... Republicans seem to have perfected in the last three cycles the art of losing, and it is important for the GOP to get its act together so it doesn't become a party of losers.
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Elon Musk is causing a huge stir because of what he's doing at Twitter.
And one of the things he's doing is the Twitter cleanup.
And the Twitter cleanup, as it turns out, goes much deeper than we, and perhaps even than Elon Musk suspected.
He started out by booting out Parag Agarwal, the CEO of Twitter.
And also Vijaya Ghade, two Asian Indians, by the way.
She was the chief legal officer.
They were clearly part of the problem.
But at the beginning, Elon Musk seemed to think that Jack, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was a good guy.
In fact, at one point, Elon Musk tweeted out,"...Jack has a pure heart." And then Elon didn't dig deeper into Twitter, at least not initially.
But when he released the original Twitter files, and these were the files about the Hunter Biden suppression, the suppression of the laptop, the suppression of the Biden crime racket, the effort to protect Biden before the election and even to some degree after the election— Elon Musk realized to his astonishment that these Twitter files had been handed over to a guy who's been at Twitter.
His name is James Baker.
He's formerly an FBI guy.
And what James Baker was doing was altering these files, apparently, in order to protect the FBI. So even the information being released in a kind of full disclosure to the public...
Was being itself edited by James Baker.
And so Elon Musk steps in and fires James Baker.
An excellent move.
By the way, he needs to go ahead and fire the Perkins-CoE law firm, which was hired under the old regime, to represent Twitter.
So Musk is realizing that you have to clean this place up.
It is rat infested and the rats are kind of everywhere.
Obviously, the firing of a whole bunch of Twitter employees, a very good thing, not only because of the people, the bad guys who leave, but the bad guys who remain get the message that they could be next.
Now, the latest thing, Twitter Files No.
2, being released initially by Barry Weiss, a journalist, and I think also Matt Taibibi, who's going to pick it up with Twitter Files No.
3, Revealing a systematic pattern of suppression, of shadow banning, of restriction of figures, prominent figures on the right.
I'm just waiting to see my own name on the list, but so far, Barry Weiss has disclosed that Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino, the Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya...
These are guys who had been flagged to have their reach reduced.
Now think about this. You've got these Twitter guys, and these guys are basically little tyrants, little nerds.
And who are they banning?
They're trying to protect the public from so-called COVID misinformation, and they're banning a professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford University.
What do they know that he doesn't know about the subject?
Isn't he the expert instead of them?
And yet they're acting like, no, no, no, we are the real experts and we're gonna save the public from the malign influence of Jay Bhattacharya.
This is just downright absurd.
And then as you go through the names of the people being shadow banned, you realize there's not a single Democrat, there's not a single leftist who is getting this kind of treatment.
And guess what? Jack Dorsey is in on it.
He is perhaps not the initiator.
He's not the prime driver.
He may be less of a corrupt figure and more of an invertebrate.
But either way, he knew and he went along.
In other words, he was an enabler of this censorship regime.
And the good thing is that Musk is not backing down on this.
He is, in fact, taking the view, which I think is the correct view, that public exposure is the best disinfectant.
That if you want reconciliation, you want to come to some sort of middle ground.
And of course, Musk insists that he is, at the end of the day, a centrist.
Nevertheless, Musk says the way to get to reconciliation is not by hiding facts, not by ducking under the table.
Because one of the Twitter...
Sort of engineers of all these problems, a guy named Yol.
This Yol guy goes, you know, why is he naming names?
Why is he outing us?
And by the way, there's dead silence from all these malefactors.
Dead silence from Parag Agarwal, dead silence from Vidya Agade.
These are all people like, these are almost like what happened with the Ceausescu regime once they got exposed, once their crimes were out there for the public to see.
They just went into complete...
A deep freeze. They went into complete hiding until, of course, the public basically raided Ceausescu and brought him to a really bad end.
So more to come on Twitter, but so far I think a massive detoxification going on on Twitter.
And quite frankly, I've seen my own audience on Twitter just explode.
Since Elon Musk took over, half a million new followers.
Just a few days ago, I was at 2.8 million.
I looked this morning, 2.9 million.
I've gained 100,000 followers in like three days.
At this rate, I'm going to be basically at 3 million next week.
So this shows you what happens when you're not being restricted.
When you're not being banned, it also shows you why the left is so desperate.
To restrict, to de-platform, to ban, and to censor opponents that they don't want to have to confront or debate.
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Debbie and I are back from Israel, and we are here to do our Friday Roundup, and we do want to talk about Israel, but we're going to start on a political note, and that is the Biden regime's trade of a Russian arms dealer, a very bad guy, Victor Merchant of Death Boot.
Serving a 25-year prison sentence for conspiring to kill Americans, trafficking anti-aircraft missiles, providing material support to terrorists.
So this guy is traded for Brittany Griner, the WNBA player, and she is now back on a plane, back in the United States.
And even some people on the left are, and some of the Democrats are like, wait, what is this?
What do you make of all this?
Well, I make that he likes some terrorists.
And apparently, apparently, you know, people are like, oh, why would he do that, right?
Is he not a good negotiator?
What's the deal? I think Biden has a little bit of hatred towards America.
And this is blatantly, it shows it, right?
Because this man, think about it, this man is a true terrorist.
Unlike the January 6th defendants, right?
This man is an actual terrorist who actually wanted to kill Americans.
I mean, you know, trafficked aircraft missiles, guns, AK-47s.
I thought Biden hated all that, right?
Right. I mean, there's a Marine in Russian captivity, a U.S. Marine, and Biden opted not to get that guy out, but to get Griner out.
So let's look at Griner's credentials.
What made Griner appealing to the Biden administration?
Basically, being gay?
Being, I guess, trans, being anti-American, disliking the national anthem, taking a knee, wearing Black Lives Matter shirt.
In fact, I believe that Greiner was wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt upon the return.
So everything, the antithesis of an American, right?
Well, this is very, I think, very reminiscent of the Bergdahl trade.
Think about Obama, flashback, which we give up, we meaning the United States under Obama, five seasoned Taliban commanders, at least one of which goes right back into the field.
In fact, one of them is, I believe, now in the new, relatively new Afghan government, and exchanges all these five guys for one left-wing deserter.
So for the Democrats, it's not that it's a bad trade.
They like This kind of a trade.
This is a trade that they work at.
Absolutely. And, you know, there are people who have tweeted out and said, in effect, you know, Biden keeps talking about gun control.
This is the ultimate gun dealer.
This is the ultimate non-gun control, right?
Right. This is, I mean, you can't get worse than this guy.
You really can't. I mean, you just can't.
Well, the other factor is that there's the war going on in Ukraine.
So Putin can use a big arms dealer right about now.
So obviously, while the United States is making Ukraine a kind of litmus test, shoveling all kinds of money and arms toward Ukraine.
I mean, look what the Bergdahl deal did later.
Look at those terrorists that were released and what they did taking part in the Afghan government again and the Taliban again.
And perhaps even leading to what happened to our 13 Marines or 13, I don't know, were they?
Service men. Service men with the Afghanistan pullout, right?
So what is this guy going to be responsible for doing?
See, a lot of times when we discuss these things, we kind of assume that if you went to Biden later and said, look what happened, or you went to Obama and said, look what happened in Afghanistan, look what happened to the Taliban commanders that you released, that Obama would be distraught.
Oh, I made a horrible mistake.
I don't believe this is true, and I don't think you do either.
Obama would probably chuckle because this is partly the result he intended.
Of their hatred towards America, right?
Or at least they like certain types of things in America.
There's a kind of America that they are patriotic toward.
It's the America of transsexual bathrooms.
It's the America of depravity.
It's the America of indoctrination in the schools.
This is their America.
So they're attached to it.
The socialist America?
But the patriotic America, the back the blue America, the America of traditional values, that's the America they hate.
They reject that. That's why they chose Griner over the Marine.
The Marine's been there a lot longer.
Since 2008, I believe.
Right. So this guy's rotting in a Russian jail.
They could have gotten him out. Apparently, Biden is claiming the Russians made him choose.
But look, Brittany Griner, first of all, Brittany Griner was caught with drugs.
So, and Brittany Griner has been incarcerated, what?
Just for a short amount of time.
And yet the Biden people choose, let's get Brittany Griner out.
Let the other guy, who's a Marine and a Patriot, continue to rot in a Russian prison.
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Intellectual, emotional, spiritual, it would have on both of us.
So, you know, as someone who initially was a little bit reluctant, you were like, well, let's explain why you were reluctant.
We'll talk about what you were afraid of.
Well, you know, it's not so much that I was afraid, but I really...
As you know, I don't really like to travel long distances.
I will do it.
You know, I went to India.
And you don't like big crowds. And I don't like big crowds.
And I knew that this was going to have, you know, both things, right?
It was going to be a long plane ride.
Two plane rides, actually.
A three-hour and then an 11-hour trip.
And, you know, to get there.
And so that I was not looking forward to.
But I remember I told you, I said, you know, the Holy Spirit came to me and just like jolted me and said, what are you thinking?
This is an opportunity to see my land.
You know, this is an opportunity to see the holiest of holy places on earth.
Right. I mean, I was looking forward to it, I have to say, but I've traveled very widely.
I've been to Italy maybe 20 times.
I've been to almost all of Europe.
I've obviously been born in Asia.
I've been to parts of Central America.
And so, to me, I thought this would be kind of one more thing.
I've seen Athens.
Now I'm going to see Jerusalem.
But I was a little overwhelmed by the...
Well, let's put it the way in which the kind of things that we learn about on Sunday and in the church, that world, and then the separate world of facts and history and actual stones with inscriptions on them and walking in the path that Jesus walked.
The effect of that is to kind of take these two worlds that are somewhat disconnected and bring them together.
Talk about your overall impression and then we can maybe talk about a couple of specifics.
Well, first of all, I thought that my faith was pretty solid, right?
I thought, you know, my walk with Christ, all those things, I've matured and I felt like I was really right there, right?
But like I told you this morning, there's always a little voice that I kept kind of battling with.
It's like, but what if it's not true?
You know, and I kept kind of shooshing it away.
It's like, it's true. It's true.
I believe. I believe.
Right? But now, I know.
Like, I know.
That voice is no longer there.
So I was telling Brian, our technical director, earlier, every Christian must go to Israel.
It's so important that you do that, that you complete that journey in your lifetime here on earth.
So that you have everything.
You have not only the heart, the soul, but the mind.
Everything. I mean, the impact of it can be measured in the fact that literally as Debbie and I are on the plane on the way back, we're plotting our return.
And in fact, I told Debbie, I go, listen, I'm actually thinking about doing a kind of faith and reason trip.
And I'm enthusiastic about it because I now know how that's going to play out.
And we're plotting it.
We can't do it in 2023 because these things take a lot of time to plan and promote and publicize.
So we're going to plan it for 2024.
I'm not sure if it'll be spring or maybe fall right after the 2024 election, but a faith and reason trip that we're going to lead.
We might get someone to join us on it.
Yeah, because... But it was...
Well, first of all, I'm disappointed that I didn't get to see everything.
We had to kind of pick and choose because we were there on a very limited time.
And then, of course, you spoke.
And so, you know, we would go somewhere.
But then we had to go back to the hotel to get ready for you to, you know, talk, to do a talk and...
So we didn't really have the full day.
The other thing that was interesting was that it got dark, completely pitch dark, at 4 p.m.
So we had a very short day.
Totally. Very short day. We left the day early, which we kind of regret because we missed out on some things.
The Dead Sea. Oh, yeah.
I really would have loved to have gone there.
The site of this Roman siege and mass suicide on the part of the Jewish rebels.
But what we did see, we saw things out of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and we saw things out of the New Testament.
And quite honestly, both were just mind-blowing.
Now, first of all, I'll say a word about the Old Testament.
The Old Testament is very, very old.
In other words, if you think about the biblical prophets...
These are people who lived around 12 to 1300 BC. Think about that.
The ancient Greeks, the people we talk about, Socrates and the Greek tragedians, they lived about the 5th century BC. Now, Homer is dated at about the 8th century BC. The events of the Trojan War, which some people consider mythical, about the 11th century BC. But when you're talking about Abraham and you're talking about the Hebrew prophets, that's 300 years before that.
Mm-hmm. And you would think, and I kind of thought, there's not going to be any residue in a time when society was oral.
They didn't write things down for the most part.
That you would not find in the stones and in the seals evidence.
And I'm not talking about generic evidence.
I'm talking about specific evidence naming actual figures from the Bible.
It's almost like the stones.
I mean, we got that feeling. Like they spoke to us, right?
They spoke to us, and one of our guides said, at a time when Europe and the West is becoming more secular, more atheistic, moving away from Christianity, moving away from the Judeo-Christian foundation of our civilization, it's almost as if God himself is now whispering to us and at us through his creation and through the stones.
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We're talking, Debbie and I, about our trip to Israel and the impact it had on us.
And I gotta say, for me, it was an impact that was both intellectual and spiritual, but in a way that was inextricably connected.
In other words, the history and some of the archeological detail is the intellectual side of it, but it's not as if they're teaching you about something.
It's that they are showing you that all of this is completely real.
We'll have to talk about this next week because we're not going to cover, we're not even going to touch the surface.
We're not even going to touch the surface. But let me ask you, just looking back, we saw eight or ten important things that are now imprinted on our memory.
What was the mind-blowing standout?
The mind-blowing standout for me was the pilgrimage road in Jerusalem, in the city of David.
And let's talk about what that is.
Yeah, so that was the road that the Jewish pilgrims took to go to the Temple Mount, right?
So there were two Olympic-sized pools, and I forget, did he say it was like two miles?
I don't even remember how long.
Yeah, a gigantic pool.
Yeah, two gigantic pools.
Two Olympic-sized pools or bigger than Olympic-sized pools so that they would bathe and cleanse themselves before going to the Temple Mount, right?
And it was families with children, grandparents, you know, the entire family.
They would take this road called Pilgrimage Road...
And there were shops, bazaars, right, on either side.
And so this was a tour that we took that is not open to the public.
So the general public cannot see this road yet because they are excavating it like day by day.
They're taking a little bit more and a little bit more and it's underneath the ground.
So you have to go down the And we even got to see the ash where the Romans burned down this city, right?
And so there was actual ash still in this rock or in this wall.
I mean, our guide reaches out and he gets a little black stuff and he rubs it on our hands and he goes, this is ash from when the Romans burned Jerusalem around 70 A.D. And there it is.
It's the same ash.
It's been preserved. 2000.
2,000 years. 2,000 years later.
I mean, it's just... Apparently what happened is that a sewer broke.
And when they began, when sewers break in Israel, the archaeologists show up and they started to dig around there.
And what did they find?
They found that there is this ascending path.
And by the way, the Bible speaks about ascending to the temple.
And we think of it metaphorically.
Oh, yes, the temple. So obviously there's a kind of spiritual ascent.
Well, it turns out it's also a physical ascent.
It's a little bit of a hill.
You walk up. And we were talking to the guide, this remarkable fellow named Zeb Ornstein, who represents the City of David Foundation, which manages the City of David archaeological site.
And he said, look, when you're talking about the Via Dolorosa, the place where Christ walked for his passion up to Calvary, when you're looking at the site of Calvary, when you're looking at the place where Jesus' tomb was, there is some debate.
In fact, we visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, but there's an alternative site and some people think it was over there.
The traditional site, of course, is the one we visited over here.
But what Zewornstein said is he said, look, he goes, but with regard to the Pilgrim Road, he goes, if you're asking me, what is the probability, what are the odds that Jesus of Nazareth, who we know came to the temple, would have walked, would have bathed in the pools of Siloam, would have bathed in these ritual purification pools and walked this exact road to the temple.
he goes, the chance of that is 100%.
This was the road the pilgrims took.
And I thought a little interesting detail.
I'm getting a little... Along the road, you don't just have people selling doves and food and all kinds of stuff, but there are these little podiums of stone.
Talk about that. Right.
So they're like steps, and they're higher than the road, obviously, so that whoever wants to talk or call out someone's name or give a speech can go up there, boom, boom, boom, and they're up there.
And so we touched that.
And Jesus could have very easily—there are many of them, but this particular one was the one that was excavated, right?
And Jesus could have easily gone up there to preach.
Or Joseph, apparently, when Jesus was 12 years old, he was kind of a little bit of a— Mischievous character.
Mischievous character. And so Joseph would probably go up there.
So think about it. Jesus is 12.
He just disappears. So what do you do if you're a parent?
I mean, obviously, there's no email.
There's no loudspeaker.
So you stand up on one of those little podiums, places, kind of a big rock.
A big stage.
And you shout out, has anyone seen Yeshua?
Has anyone seen my kid? And as it turns out, as we know, Jesus was actually in the temple discoursing with theologians.
And so all of this, which we learn about, which I've been learning about since I was a kid in India, you in Venezuela, and of course through our adult years, this all is given a kind of historical facticity, a kind of grounding that has a tremendous impact.
So anyway, guys, if you're...
So much so that we have to continue this.
We think that you need to kind of make a little bit of a bookmark to go with us to Israel in...
It's a little...
It's two years away from now.
It's a couple years away. But we couldn't be more excited about it.
It's like we just got away and we're ready to go back.
And we're going to plan this and make it a trip of our lifetime.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome really a buddy of ours, Debbie's and mine, Cyrus Naraste.
He's a brilliant film director.
Actually, he's a guy I had approached many years ago to direct my first film, 2016 Obama's America, but he had too many projects going, so Cyrus is like, can't do this one.
Later, Debbie and I partnered with Cyrus to do our film, our only feature film called Infidel.
But we're here to talk about one of Cyrus' earlier films, really a masterful film.
It's called The Stoning of Soraya M. It's actually going up on my Locals channel this weekend.
I mean, starting today, Friday, at 12 Eastern.
So this is a film you should plan to see this weekend.
You can check out the channel at just dinesh.locals.com.
I'll also be posting links on social media to help you access the film.
And you have two choices.
You can actually purchase the film and just watch it.
Or you can subscribe to my Locals channel and you'll get the film included.
You'll get the film for free.
Cyrus, welcome to the podcast.
Great to see you. I hope you're doing well.
Man, this is a film that you made a while ago, The Stoning of Soraya M, and yet it seems timely as ever, ripped from the headlines.
Can I start by just asking you to talk about what's happening in Iran now?
It seems like there's a new wave of ferment.
What's causing that and where's it going?
Well, first, thanks for having me.
And thanks for what you're doing for this film.
Soraya, stoning of Soraya M. Hi to Debbie.
You know, it's amazing what's going on in Iran right now because this is the longest sustained and most widespread sort of descent we've seen since the Ayatollahs came into power in 1979.
So, you know, I'm not obviously there.
So I'm not on the ground, but I'm following it as closely as I can.
And I do think that the one development that happened only a few days ago that I think is quite significant is when they were shutting down the bazaars throughout the country in a kind of a form of a strike.
And they're called bazarees.
They're basically the mercantile class But they have a huge amount of influence and power in the country.
And they were instrumental in the days of the Shah.
Once the Bazaris shut down, I think the Shah knew he was cooked.
And now they're doing the same thing to the Ayatollahs and the Islamic Republic.
I mean, Cyrus, that's very interesting because we hear a lot about the women who are protesting the veil and the hijab and so on.
But I think what you're saying is it's a broader-based movement than that.
It also includes the merchant classes, and that's very encouraging to hear.
Well, I think the women have influenced them.
I think the women, it started with them, and now it's had this snowball effect.
And, you know, to reach this point, I think, is quite, you know, significant, as I said.
But you're right. This is a women-driven movement.
One of the things you did with this film, Soraya M., is that you smuggled it, or you figured out a way to get a bunch of DVDs inside of Iran.
So this is a film that has not only had an eye-opening impact in America and in the West, But it has actually caused something of a stir inside of Iran because people see it.
It resonates with them.
It's a story about a small town in Iran and the events that happened there.
Talk a little bit about the impact of Soraya and this film in Iran.
Well, when it opened in 2009, the Iranian government under President Ahmadinejad condemned and banned the film.
They found out about it actually while we were filming in another country in the Middle East.
So what happened essentially is we wanted to get it inside of Iran.
This was a mission movie, you know, like many of the movies that you make.
So we set that as a goal.
At the time, DVDs were prominent, so we smuggled some DVDs, a few thousand DVDs into Iran, and thousands of copies were made from those.
And it became kind of an underground hit.
It was this bootleg special item that everybody wanted.
I've run into Iranians since then and told me, oh yeah, I saw your film in Iran in a basement with 30 other women.
So because it deals with oppression against women and women treated as third-class citizens, women were drawn to it.
Now, it became a crime inside of Iran to own a copy of the film.
And People have actually gone to prison.
One woman who was an activist, they invaded her home and they found that she was writing a short story about someone, you know, dispensing with their Quran after seeing the stoning of Soraya M. She just wrote about it in a story that was only on her laptop.
She was arrested.
So it became kind of a, I don't know, I wouldn't call it, it was a badge of honor to have seen the film, and women were especially drawn to it, as were Christians inside of Iran.
It's not a Christian movie, as you know.
It's about the oppression of women under Islam, but it became a rallying cry for many.
Cyrus, you have Iranian roots.
I think when Debbie and I first saw the film, and quite honestly, this was the film that convinced me that you were the perfect guy to direct the Infidel movie, is that this is not a film in which you're looking at Iran from the outside.
You take us to a small town in Iran.
We get to know the mayor, the kind of local chemistry of the town, and you describe a kind of scandal that emerges in the town in which a woman is accused of adultery.
It's just brilliantly, the story itself is riveting.
You find yourself just drawn into that world.
Let me ask you this question.
There might be people who say, and I'm sure there have been some who have, oh, the stoning of Sir I.M., do I go and see a movie about someone being stoned?
I wanna talk about, have you talk a little bit about the ingenious way in which you handle a subject that necessarily involves brutality, but you did it in a way where Debbie and I looked at each other and we go, That is actually very beautiful, a very odd word to use in connection with the stoning, but it was the way you did it.
Well, I think part of it is her dignity in the face of this mob.
I think people really responded to that.
It was an audition actress who came in, who plays Soraya, and Sharia Ogdashloo, who's Academy Award-nominated, Emmy Award-winning actress, plays the aunt, who is the only one in the village to defend her.
Now, it must be emphasized, and why I think it's important for people to watch, this is a true story.
This happened.
It's based on the account of the journalist, a French-Iranian journalist in the movie who happens upon this village, portrayed by our friend Jim Caviezel.
And Jim came at the last minute, flew all the way over to the Middle East to do that part because he thought it was such an important movie.
A previous actor had dropped out of fear.
So this story, this true story, is about a husband who basically can't afford multiple wives.
They live in a poor village.
He's interested in somebody else.
He wants to get rid of his wife.
So he conspires with the local cleric, a mullah, and the mayor of the village and says, I think she's having an affair, knowing full well that if she's found guilty, She will be stoned to death that same day.
And I wanted to show the world what a stoning really is.
I had seen a movie called Kite Runner where a gal had been hit really in the head with almost a pebble and she keels over.
That's not the way it is.
It's meant to be torture.
It's meant to be brutal.
You're not supposed to pick up stones that are too small or too large because you don't, you know, you don't want her to die too quickly.
This is a heck of a, Cyrus, this is a heck of a film.
And people, you got to see the film this weekend.
It's up on my local channel, just dinesh.locals.com.
It's The Stoning of Sarai.
Cyrus, love to have you back to talk more, but thanks for joining us.
I really appreciate it. Thank you and thank you for our wonderful time together working on Infidel and what you're doing for Stoning of Soraya Ann.
Appreciate it. I'm picking up where I left off in my discussion of Christian apologetics, the book What's So Great About Christianity, the first of my three apologetics books.
And I want to talk here about the importance of apologetics to help educate our children and also to help Because there are some people who might say, well, listen, I don't really need apologetics.
I don't really need rational arguments for the faith because, hey, I have faith.
I believe. That's enough.
I don't need anything more. Case closed.
Well... You may feel that way, but guess what?
If you have family members or you have friends who are out in the world, they're going to hear secular arguments, secular objections.
They might be tempted by sort of the secular move away from Christianity.
And what are you going to do about them?
Are you just going to say, all right, well, that's too bad for them?
Or are you going to say, look, I'm going to try to meet some of those objections?
Now, it's important to realize that That the radical secularists and the atheists are in a very conscious way targeting our children.
Here's the philosopher Daniel Dennett.
He goes, Schools need to teach children about religion, but in a perfectly, he says, natural way.
And what he means is treat religion as a set of, you could almost say, mythical beliefs.
Look at how those beliefs arose.
Examine them the same way perhaps that we would look at Greek mythology, for example, or let's say the religions of Buddhism or Shintoism.
Don't give them any presumption of truth or don't even be open to the possibility that they're true.
Here is the astronomer Carl Sagan, the late Carl Sagan, talking about the cosmos in a famous show that he did on TV called Cosmos.
He goes, the cosmos is all there is.
Now, what Sagan is saying here is, look, we have a natural world.
It's a very big world because the cosmos extends.
It's a huge cosmos.
But he goes, but that's it.
There's nothing beyond that.
Now, again, you might say, how does Sagan know that?
Answer, he doesn't.
But he's acting like he's not making a metaphysical or even a controversial statement.
He acts like he's just saying the plain scientific truth of the matter.
We got the cosmos, that's kind of all we got. What more needs to be said about it?
So here is a kind of atheism being smuggled in in the name of astronomy, in the name of science.
The writer Jonathan Rauch, actually a friend of mine from my old days in DC, but Jonathan Rauch is a real critic of Christianity.
He identifies this phenomenon that he calls apatheism, which is sort of apathy, but extended to theism.
So in other words, it's the don't care attitude.
It's sort of like, well, there may be a God or there may not be a God, but who cares?
And this may seem like a crazy attitude.
I think in the end, it is crazy.
This is not a question that we can duck or avoid or even pretend to be indifferent about.
But nevertheless, Jonathan Rauch says that this apatheism is the way our culture is going.
He says what's striking is you don't just have sort of non-religious people who are apathetic.
They don't care. But you have Christians.
You have nominal Christians and self-proclaimed Christians who sort of act as if they don't care.
So in other words, what I called earlier practical atheism.
And Jonathan Rauch says this apathism is kind of an achievement.
Now... The secularists and the atheists know that human beings are, you may say, reverent animals, which is to say that we have a disposition toward the sacred.
They know that. But they think that that can be supplied outside of religion.
We don't need Christianity. We don't need God.
Let's sort of have a reverence toward nature, toward science, toward science's ability to tell us the truth about nature.
And the whole point here is to insist that scientific truths are facts.
Whereas religious claims are subjective, they're values.
And finally, and this is a theme I'll pick up on Monday, there's this desire to sort of indoctrinate our children with these radical secularist dogmas.
I'll leave you with this quote from Daniel, actually this is from Richard Dawkins.
And then Dennett continues, Now Dennett here means teachers, outsiders.
For their guardianship, which does imply that outsiders have a right to interfere.
So what we're getting at here, and I'll pick this up next week, is the theme that we can use the schools and the universities to indoctrinate the children against their parents.
Now, the people who are doing this don't see it as indoctrination.
They see it as education.
But sometimes the line between education and indoctrination can be a very thin one.
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