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Dec. 12, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:43
EXPOSED Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep474
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Coming up, the Twitter files we're waiting for, part four.
I'll talk about the implications, and I'll talk about the gang of three that has been doing very bad stuff inside of Twitter.
What's the impact of the censorship on Meta and YouTube?
I'll explore that.
I also want to examine whether the Supreme Court will give state legislatures final authority on election rules and a little advice on how to stay happy and serene during the holidays.
This is the Denetious News 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 think the biggest story in the country right now is the Twitter files.
And it's really interesting that this is a story that the mainstream media is not covering, for the most part, pretending it doesn't exist.
New York Times, of course, did do an article on the kind of the strange politics of Elon Musk, but they're not covering the files themselves.
And let's review.
We're talking about four troves of data.
Three of them have already been uncorked.
The fourth is coming soon.
So the first wave, the first file, was the censorship of the Hunter Biden story.
And there was a long thread on that, and it devastatingly exposed the way in which Twitter, but now this by implication applies to other platforms as well, suppressed the story not because it was false, but because it was true.
And there was FBI participated in the suppression.
So there are a lot of bad actors here.
And And at Twitter, of course, the bad actors were Jack Dorsey, Parag Agarwal, who replaced him as the CEO, Vijay Agade, and this creepy character who I'll talk about a little bit more in the next segment, Yoel Roth, 35 years old, a guy right out of Swarthmore.
And these guys are making decisions for the whole country, what people can see, what they can talk about.
They're deciding whether to ban congressmen.
They're deciding whether Trump should be banned.
It's really scary when you think back about the kind of power that these strange characters exercise.
Now there's some debate. Elon Musk, I think, seems to think that Jack Dorsey is not the main culprit.
In fact, he once said that Jack has a, quote, pure heart.
And I think if this is true, then Jack is a little bit like...
Well, there's a character in Dostoyevsky that is called the Idiot.
Title, by the way, of one of Dostoevsky's books.
And by idiot, Dostoevsky doesn't mean he's a dummy.
It means he's an innocent.
He doesn't know how the world functions.
So it could be that Jack Dorsey is an idiot in that sense and being manipulated by the diabolical troika of Parag, Agarwal, Vijaya, Gade, two Asian Indians, and this creepy Yol Rath character.
Now, the impact of the story is really hard to measure because it has so many reverberations.
Let's remember, I mean, here's an article I'm holding from New York Magazine.
Twitter is not shadow banning Republicans.
This is completely now refuted by the Twitter files.
So, the Twitter files, as I say, part one was the suppression of the Biden story, the Hunter Biden story and the Joe Biden story.
Number two, the systematic shadow banning and censorship of political opponents, conservatives.
Three, the banning of Trump.
The specific banning of the sitting President of the United States.
And four, yet to come, the bans that were imposed owing to COVID. In other words, prominent figures in medicine who are shut down because...
Four Twitter executives who have no experience, no expertise, no real knowledge, but nevertheless, some of them are getting promptings from the CDC, promptings from the FBI. So there are actors outside of Twitter that are part of this regime.
At one point, the CDC had a kind of open portal to Twitter.
They could just basically put in recommendations, ban this guy, shadow ban that guy, and then Twitter would then responsibly take action.
Wikipedia. You can go look at it.
It has been for now, I think, two years referring to the accusation that Twitter shadow banned people based on Republican affiliation or conservative ideology as, quote, a conspiracy theory.
By the way, Wikipedia calls me a conspiracy theorist, even though I've never put forward a conspiracy theory in my life.
So here's Wikipedia exposed as lying, because after all, the banning of conservatives we now know is not a conspiracy theory.
It's an It's an actual conspiracy.
It's a conspiracy on the part of Twitter, exposed now by the new owner of Twitter, namely Elon Musk.
Now, you see all kinds of efforts here to sort of defend Twitter.
People like Gade and Roth genuinely don't believe they did anything wrong.
And I think this is somewhat true.
They live in an ideological bubble.
They genuinely think that their opponents are vicious enemies of democracy.
They are saviors of democracy.
By the way, fascist regimes have thought the same.
Mussolini genuinely thought that his opponents were a threat to Italy.
To Italy, the early Nazis genuinely thought that Jews were evil people who should be suppressed and forced to wear Star of David, so they should be ostracized, they should be excommunicated.
Later, of course, more deathly and murderous policies ensued.
Now, for years, leftists made themselves comfortable with systematic regimes of censorship by basically saying, Twitter's a private company.
And also, complainers should, quote, go build your own platform.
And what's so cool is that this has now become karma for these guys.
By the way, not that Elon Musk is banning them.
Elon Musk is extending free speech to them.
But even Twitter as a free speech platform is too much for them.
They want censorship. They demand censorship.
They're not going to be happy unless they have censorship.
And my message to them was simply their earlier message to me, namely, Twitter is a private company and go build your own platform.
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I want to talk about this guy, Yoel Roth, who is one of the chief censors, the guy doing the censorship at Twitter.
So here's a guy who's basically in his mid-30s.
He went to Swarthmore, political science.
He got his PhD at UPenn in communication.
And he apparently sees himself as a kind of expert on, quote, dangerous speech.
Expert on dangerous speech.
But this is a guy...
Who has been for two years or more.
I mean, he's actually worked at Twitter since his late 20s.
But this is a guy regulating the speech of the United States on one of the three mainstream platforms.
And so what millions of people see is partly due to this...
Dweeb, this weirdo.
And who is this guy?
Well, it turns out he's some sort of a gay activist, a trans activist.
And he has done all kinds of articles and so on about how underage kids or children should be able to access adult internet services.
This was actually part of his PhD thesis.
I saw an interview with him in which he's talking about the fact that, you know, he's talking about censoring the Babylon Bee.
And he goes, well, of course, they're misgendering people.
This refers to a joke on the Babylon Bee where they basically say Dr.
Rachel Levine is a man. And this is on a satirical site.
Nevertheless, he goes, we can't take this lightly.
There's been a lot of resurgence of hateful acts against trans people and so on.
So here you have this 35-year-old making decisions again about the fate of people in being able to speak, what kind of satire he thinks is okay and should be allowed.
There's a very interesting exchange of comments inside of the Twitter chain by Yole Roth about banning Matt Gaetz.
Now, in the chain, it's very obvious that Matt Gaetz has not violated any Twitter rules.
In fact, here's Yole Roth.
He's talking about Matt Gaetz.
Someone else goes, we should just ban Gaetz.
And Yulroth, SP and SI are working on that.
He then goes, it doesn't quite fit anywhere, meaning it doesn't fit one of the categories of violations.
And then Yulroth continues, but I'm trying to talk safety into treating it as incitement.
So Matt Gaetz has not, in fact, engaged in any incitement, but they think, well, if we can label it incitement, then we can kind of smuggle it into our violence section and we can ban the guy.
So again, here's a guy trying to ban a sitting congressman from communicating, again, not even in violation of Twitter's rules.
And so, this is the state of discourse in America today.
Who would have thought we'd have reached this point?
And let's remember, Yoel Roth is not alone.
There are tons of Yoel Roths right now at Google.
There are tons of Yoel Roths at Amazon, at Apple, at Facebook or Meta.
So these are the kind of people who have power, but it's power that they exercise behind closed doors.
See, what's so interesting about what Elon Musk is doing is he's raising the curtain so that, you know, to use a phrase that I'm pirating from Las Vegas, what happened at Twitter no longer stays at Twitter or inside of Twitter.
It's now being... Exposed to the world to see how these decisions were made and by whom.
And you begin to see how many times the censorship is based on a pretext.
They don't really have a reason.
Let's come up with some excuse to get this guy.
That was most certainly true of Trump.
Trump says, let's march peacefully and patriotically.
Trump says, everybody go home.
Trump says, so Trump's benign statements are interpreted not according to what Trump said, not according to the plain meaning of the words, but based upon how some people might take those words as an incentive to do bad things, and therefore, let's ban Trump from the platform.
So all this disgraceful stuff has been going on, and the question is, now that it has come to public light, now what?
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For Christmas. In a very interesting development, Kristen Sinema, the Democratic senator from Arizona, has decided to leave the Democratic Party and register as an independent.
Now, Debbie just told me this morning that Sinema is still going to caucus with the Democrats, which is to say that she's not fully breaking with the Democratic Party.
She still wants to be part of this Democratic majority in the Senate.
But this is clearly a sort of declaration of independence on Sinema's part.
And what's going on here, and what are the implications for us on the Republican or the right side of the aisle?
Well, Sinema wrote an article in an Arizona paper where she says, I'm privileged to represent Arizonans of all backgrounds.
She says, Americans are told we got to choose Republicans, Democrats.
She goes, most Arizonans believe this is a false choice.
And it sounds like she agrees.
Now, Sinema goes on to define a sort of a centrist politics in this article where she talks about the fact that she believes in rebuilding the country's infrastructure, but she also believes in protecting economic competitiveness through incentives.
She says she wants to expand veterans benefits, but she also wants to boost innovation and small business.
She wants to protect marriage for LGBTQ Americans, but she also wants to make communities safer and more vibrant places to live together and raise family.
She says Democrats don't care enough about the border.
So I think actually Sinema is defining a sort of centrist politics here.
And by the way, let's remember, she's not alone.
Elon Musk has also described himself as a free speech centrist.
So he's someone who wants to take ideas both from the left and from the right and believes that there can be a sort of I think?
There could be behind this analysis, which I think actually should be taken at face value, there's also a kind of political calculation.
And an interesting article in a socialist magazine called Jacobin, but basically it's called, And the theme of this article is this.
Christian Sinema now has, because the Democrats have moved so far left, Christian Sinema is seen as a far right-winger in the Democratic Party, which means she will almost certainly have a left-wing primary challenger.
And it could very well be this guy Ruben Gallegos, a representative.
He's a progressive Democrat, and he is flirted with the idea of challenging her.
Now, in the Democratic primary, this guy could quite likely win.
Even though not necessarily in the general election.
But the theme of this article is that Christian Sinema is essentially making it impossible for this Gallego guy to challenge her because she's saying this.
Look, I'm no longer in the Democratic Party.
I'm going to run as an independent.
So either the Democrats support me and I can win enough centrists so I can stay in power.
Or you guys can pick your own candidate.
And if you do, the center-left vote is going to be split between me and the leftist, and who's going to win?
The Republican. So if you want Democrats, you're welcome to hand over the Senate seat in Arizona to the Republicans, or you can make a prudential decision that you may not like me very much, you may think I'm far too conservative for you, but hey, I'm not too conservative for Arizona.
So this is a, in this analysis, a kind of political move by Sinema to stave off a progressive challenge.
Now, I think as a practical matter, if that is the goal, it's not likely to work for the simple reason that the Democrats, I think, are unlikely not to nominate a candidate.
They're going to nominate somebody.
And so if it's going to be this Gallego guy, it's going to be him.
So in a weird way, by making herself an independent, Sinema has virtually guaranteed that there will be a Democratic nominee.
So there will be a left-wing nominee.
Now, Sinema may decide for whatever reason.
I've kind of had it with politics.
I don't really want to run.
And so this could be a form of her creating an exit strategy.
But let's remember that in the Senate, we have other people, Angus King, by the way, from Maine, Bernie Sanders, who ran as independents, but are now in the Democratic caucus.
So it's really unclear.
We'll have to wait and see how Sinema plays out here.
But it's pretty clear from what she's saying that she's not changing her position.
She's not going to be kowtowing to the Democrats.
She apparently doesn't want to be someone that Biden can just call up and say, listen, I need you to do this, or even Chuck Schumer.
Now she has cut out on her own so she can make her own decisions.
She can make her own political calculations.
She's untethered, you may say, from both parties.
Now, Joe Manchin is another interesting character.
We haven't heard a whisper or word from him since the cinema announcement.
Debbie and I were chatting about Manchin.
We think it is in Manchin's interest to become a Republican.
He's actually endangered in a conservative, in a bright red state like West Virginia is today.
West Virginia is historically a Democratic state, but not now.
And so Manchin's only chance at survival might be for him to become a Republican.
Now, if he becomes a Republican, he's probably going to be kind of a rhino.
But you know what? Some rhinos are better than others.
We don't need a rhino like Mitt Romney in Utah where we can actually have a conservative.
Now, West Virginia is conservative, but I think Manchin would increase the chances of his political success staying in office because he's a very well-liked figure in the state.
And so for these reasons, I think that the political necessities might be whispering right about now in the ear of one Joe Manchin.
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The Supreme Court just heard the arguments in the case of Moore v.
Harper, an important case arising out of North Carolina because it has implications for the rules that govern the 2024 presidential election.
Now, whenever you have these Supreme Court arguments, people pay close attention to how the justices, what kind of questions they're asking.
They're sort of reading the tea leaves to try to figure out how these people are going to vote.
But the issue is this.
Who makes the rules?
Who's the ultimate authority in making election rules?
And this could mean gerrymandering rules that have to do with the shape of a district.
They could have to do with voter ID rules.
They could have to do with the deadline for sending in mail-in ballots.
Who is the final authority on this?
Is it the legislature, the state legislatures?
Is it the state courts?
Is it the state constitution as interpreted by the state court?
Is it officials who are running the elections, like the Secretary of State?
Does someone like that have the final and unilateral right to change the rules?
Who is it? What does the Constitution say about this?
Well, the Constitution is actually kind of clear.
And the Constitution says that the authority in determining the manner, by manner they mean the mode, of conducting elections is up to the state legislature.
So this couldn't really be more clear.
It's not quite as simple as we think for the simple reason that even though the state legislature makes a law, let's follow what happens when the state legislature makes a law.
The legislature passes a law, but that law then goes to the governor, who's the equivalent in the state of, say, the president, and the governor decides, am I going to veto the law?
So a law doesn't become a law until it is passed by the legislature and then signed by the governor.
So the governor has a say in here.
He has authority. And this is important because, by and large, the left in talking about this case acts as if giving the legislature, the state legislature, final authority somehow implies that the governor has no say, that the courts have no say.
But this is actually not what is at stake.
This is not what's at issue.
The left is sort of distorting the meaning of this case.
Hillary Clinton, one of our more irresponsible voices in public discourse, basically said the state legislatures here are going to be given the authority to overrule election results.
No, this is not about overruling election results.
This is not about changing the outcome of an actual vote.
This is determining the manner in which votes are cast in the first place.
Let's look at what happened, for example, in Pennsylvania in 2020.
By and large, a court in Pennsylvania decided that absentee ballots could come in as much as three days after the election.
This flouted what the Pennsylvania law says, what the legislature had decided, and the governor had already agreed to and signed.
So you had a valid law that went through the legal process and nevertheless was set aside by the court under the pretext of COVID and a new rule was established by the court.
So this is kind of what the Supreme Court is considering.
In North Carolina, the legislature gerrymandered.
By the way, gerrymandering is done by both parties.
The dominant political party in a state will draw election districts in a manner that favors that political party.
The Democrats do it in New York.
The Republicans do it in Texas and North Carolina.
But the North Carolina court basically said, you can't draw the district this way.
We don't like it. And the court did so by simply invoking the generic phrase, we need to have a free and fair election.
And the court evidently decided, well, we are the final adjudicators on what that is.
So, we don't like your district, we don't like its shape, we think it can be drawn a different way, we're going to send it back to you.
And North Carolina Republicans are saying, wait a minute, we're the legislature.
If the Constitution gives the legislature the authority to draw these districts and to make the rules of an election, who is the court to overturn that?
So, as the Supreme Court is debating this, it becomes clear that the justices in the middle on this are Justice Roberts and, interestingly, Amy Coney Barrett.
These two justices who will probably determine where the majority rules on this seem to be inclined to say that, yes, the Constitution does, in fact, give state legislatures the authority to make these rules, but—and it's an important but— This doesn't mean that the governor can't veto it.
If the governor vetoes the law, the law then has to pass by a supermajority to override the veto.
But once the law is passed, the courts, and we're talking here about the state courts, yes, they have a right to review these laws to make sure that they are consistent with the state constitution.
But no, these courts don't have the authority to, quote, make up the rules as they go along.
I think this is a reasonable result.
And I think this is not only the result that should happen, but I predict that this is the result that will happen in this important case of Moore versus Harper.
The result is probably not due till the spring, but when it comes out, I think it will be just as I now said.
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Every now and then, in political conversations with friends, the topic comes up, well...
Is there going to be another secession?
Is the United States, let's just say 20 or maybe 50 years from now, going to look the same geographically in its makeup as it is today?
Or could it be that the United States will break up into two or maybe even more countries?
Now, this question, which I think is not front and center, I don't think it's something that anyone would say is imminent.
to.
Obviously, we are still in the throes of fighting it out in this country.
but there is a degree of polarization now that seems to me, well, I haven't seen it in my adult lifetime.
And scholars who study political polarization say that the United States is, although there's polarization, by the way, emerging in Europe as well, it's more pronounced here by a lot.
In fact, there's an article I'm gonna discuss in the New Republic, it says that on a rank of one to four, with four being the most polarized, the most European countries are at a one to a two, but the United States is at a four.
So it is that extreme polarization.
And polarization has led in a number of cases to countries that do break up.
A classic example being the former Czechoslovakia split up.
Yugoslavia is no more.
Now, when you ask Americans about this, there's only a minority that thinks that the United States will, in fact, break up.
This is about 18% of the population.
And interestingly, about the same percentage think America should break up.
So, in other words, they're two separate questions.
Will it happen? And do you think it's a good idea for it to happen?
One is a prophecy or a prediction.
The other is an advocacy.
You're saying what you think, what you would like to see happen.
And now, as we know historically, countries that have broken up have sometimes had long-standing conflict, civil strife.
Of course, the United States had a civil war.
We're not in a Civil War scenario now in the sense that in the Civil War there was a single issue, namely slavery, which was the real rub, Lincoln called it.
That's the rub, as Lincoln put it.
But now we have what in some ways is arguably worse, which is that in the time of the Civil War...
Americans North and South were pretty similar in their general values, pretty similar in their lifestyles, pretty similar about the way they wanted the country to go, except on this singular question of slavery.
But now we're divided on a whole bunch of things.
We're divided by and large about what kind of America we want to live in, the America that the left thinks is great.
We think is horrible.
The America that we want to affirm and revive the principles of the founding, the left repudiates those principles.
So you essentially have two people who have a completely different view of what...
And this is very bad for democracy.
It's bad for democracy because democracy doesn't really work when one side of the population, even if it's a majority, is holding the other side captive.
Democracy works when you have two sides, a majority and a minority, and they by and large agree on goals while disagreeing on means.
So in that case, one can defer to the other.
Okay, we'll try it your way.
And if it doesn't work, then we'll try it our way.
But we kind of both agree about where we want to go.
If you don't agree on where you want to go, then one side, the side with the more power, and it could be a majority, it could be a minority, is dragging the other side unwilling to By the way,
Tocqueville A Frenchman coming in the early 19th century to visit America expresses the same concern.
Tocqueville's phrase is soft despotism.
But I would argue that in many ways we're not even dealing with soft despotism.
I mean, think about some January 6th defendant who hasn't even been tried sitting in solitary confinement.
Where's the soft despotism?
The FBI raids his house, they grab him.
This is for a guy who's just walking around the Capitol taking photos of himself.
And yet here he is sitting in a dark room for 23 hours a day.
That's not soft despotism.
That's actually despotism, pure and simple.
Yes, it's despotism that is behind the guise of judicial and legal procedures.
But by the way, that's also true in Iran.
The Iranian mullahs go through the formulas of legal procedure.
They go through, they have elections, albeit with preselected candidates.
So by and large, even societies that are not just authoritarian, but totalitarian, nevertheless will call themselves democracy.
Think of the German Democratic Republic in the Soviet era.
Think about the Islamic Republic.
They use the language of republicanism, even though, in fact, when you look more closely, you're dealing with theocracy, not with a genuine republic.
So what will happen to the United States?
This article doesn't say.
The author makes the case that he thinks that secession of some sort is not improbable.
Not improbable. And he says that once you reach a certain point of polarization, there's no going back.
And he also makes another interesting point, which is that if you look at history, once countries do break up, once you do have secession, then there's no going back then either.
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Feel the difference. Hey guys, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Dr.
Marina Hoffman. She's a Bible professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University.
She's the author of the award-winning book, Women in the Bible, which is actually a small group Bible study, but there's also a free video series on Women in the Bible.
It is at womeninthebible.info.
You can follow on Instagram at Marina Hoffman.
Marina, welcome to the podcast again.
And, you know, I wanted to bring you back on to talk about some themes about Christmas and about the holidays.
Because for years I read about the fact that holiday season, paradoxically, is sort of...
Well, a little depressing for people.
People get lonely. People feel left out.
You've experienced this.
Talk a little bit about your experience and then let's talk about what kind of help you can give people in becoming more happy, more serene during the holiday season.
That's right. It was a beautiful day eight years ago when an oncoming car, 70 miles an hour, we were going 70 miles an hour, hit us dead on.
So you can imagine the survival rate of that impact is zero percent.
And we had all kinds of injuries and a long road to recovery.
But you know, Dinesh, the hardest part with me was the severe anxiety, severe depression, severe PTSD. So I know what it's like to spend Christmas really alone with my husband, not wanting to go out.
And the trials and hardship that comes out of that sense of isolation and loneliness.
And then you decided, look, let me try to take some of this trauma and figure out a way to address it in a way that would help you, but also help other people.
Let's talk about some of the themes in Women in the Bible.
What... What can people do by turning to the Bible in getting inspiration, consolation, and encouragement, particularly at this time of year?
Well, one of my favorite bits, and we see it throughout Scripture, is when they have a message from the Lord.
It's almost always, do not be afraid.
And what does that tell us?
That people are afraid.
And the beauty of Scripture is sometimes you hear this idea that we can't be afraid.
But when I look at the women of the Bible, Zinesh, they do incredible things.
And they're afraid. Time after time, they're afraid.
But they're afraid to choose the way of the world or maybe the order of a king who asks them to do something not right over choosing the path of the Lord.
And even if we look at Mary, I mean, again, do not be afraid.
How could she not be afraid?
Her whole life is changed.
She is a child out of wedlock.
What does the future hold?
And yet she's willing to move forward even in fear.
And I think that's a powerful lesson for us to take in our fear that we can move forward.
We don't need to sit at home until somehow magically we overcome all our fears.
Debbie and I just got back from Israel just a few days ago, and we were in an environment where it was really easy to envision the world of the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament.
So, for example, you could picture Jesus, Mary, and Joseph making their way up the pilgrim road to the temple, then Jesus kind of disappearing and Where's Jesus?
And then later they spotted him.
He was in the temple, apparently engaged in discussions with theologians.
That world, which seems very remote, if you live in Rhode Island or you live in Texas, you seem disconnected from that world of the Bible.
But in Jerusalem, it's right there.
How can people connect with the Bible in a sort of everyday sense?
What I'm talking about is not just the Sunday sermon, but feeling like, hey, listen...
Even in a different time, in a different place, all of this is totally relevant to my life.
Absolutely, because apart from the outward details, the people in the Bible are going through the same human experiences as us.
The same challenge. Mary faces rejection.
We have all faced that.
She faces uncertainty.
I think that defines the time we're in.
And so if we acknowledge that these people also face hostility, they face the same kind of emotional challenges we do, then we can see how their simple acts of faith, and it's often not complicated, they're just willing to say yes to God, And you know, Dinesh, there's a sense of humility among so many of these characters, certainly with Mary.
She says, let the Lord's will be done.
And what a beautiful perspective that we can have.
The humility to say, Lord, like, have your way in our life, and we're going to move forward and go with your leading, even though we don't see the future, even though it seems uncertain and maybe daunting.
I think, Marina, I don't know if this is in your book or in the Bible course, but I think of the women who discovered the empty tomb.
I mean, it's interesting because certainly at that time, the credibility of women was not given much importance.
People would likely to scoff and disbelieve.
You're just making up stories.
You're circulating rumors.
But... Interestingly, the Bible leaves the discovery or describes the discovery of the Ambitum, I mean, what could be a more important event in Christianity, to a group of women who are the first people to report it.
And I'm sure that they were also hesitant, fearful of the kind of derision that would come to them, not just from the Romans, but also from the Jews.
Yes, and the disciples, the men, they don't even believe the women, right?
So on top of what you're saying, then they face rejection.
And, you know, people talk later, oh, why does Jesus only appear to the men?
Well, Dinesh, I don't see that as a put down to the woman.
It glorifies them.
They were simple, they had faith, they had humility, and they accepted the simple evidence they were given.
And they just said yes to the Lord.
They didn't need all kinds of extra appearances.
So again, another picture of these beautiful women Who have a simple faith to say yes to the Lord no matter how much they'll lose.
I mean, I know that when we were on the flight back from Israel, we were talking about the fact that there are times where we can get really worked up about small events in our life that seem, you know, to make us obsessive about them, or even political stuff like, oh my gosh, this was the result in the midterms.
I can't believe Cary Lake lost in Arizona.
And it introduces a sense, a dislocation of perspective.
And I think what you're trying to say here is, That without neglecting the ordinary acts of your life, without neglecting the political field in any way, nevertheless, keep in mind the larger picture of why we're here and what we're trying to do with our lives.
Absolutely, these issues do matter, and we need to stand up for them, and we need to stand up for what's right.
But at the end of the day, Dinesh, and my family, we have a little prayer time, and we always start each prayer with thankfulness.
And the biggest lesson to me is my four-year-old takes five minutes to list all her toys and her pretty dresses and her hair clips.
And it reminds me of what you're saying to have perspective.
All the troubles in the world, they'll be there tomorrow, no matter how hard we fight against them.
But to be thankful for the small things in life that really mean the most to us.
And hopefully everyone has someone that loves them and is there for them.
And for those that don't, I think it's a call to go out and make friends again, to be human again, to fully live life while we're engaged in the news and all these items and the fight for freedom and what's right.
But also to make sure we always prioritize what makes us most fulfilled, which is the human aspect of life and the meaning we find in relationships.
Absolutely. Great stuff.
Thank you, Marina Hoffman.
Follow her on Instagram at Marina Hoffman, H-O-F-M-A-N. The book, Women in the Bible, small group study, or you can check out, get more information at womeninthebible.info.
Marina, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you. What's so great about Christianity?
Create a kind of introductory manual, if you will, that introduces people, even people who really don't know a whole lot about Christianity.
And I want to start talking today and the next few days about the impact of Christianity in shaping our civilization.
By our civilization, I mean Western civilization, a civilization built, as it turns out, on Athens and Jerusalem.
Debbie and I just got back from Jerusalem, actually our first trip, so I knew a lot about Jerusalem, but I didn't know Jerusalem as a, well, eyewitness.
So it was really a fascinating trip for that reason.
Now, There are a lot of people today who, on the left, who don't like Western civilization.
You might remember the Stanford University chant from now a couple of decades ago, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go.
So these are people who somehow think that they can get rid of Western culture.
And there is built into that a specific antagonism against Christianity.
Now, arguably, these are people who We're good to go.
But for many centuries, Western civilization was recognized to be a massive accomplishment.
For one, it was a civilization that dominated the world, as I think it still does.
But for number two, it introduced all these Powerful new ideas and values into the world, values that, by the way, have been incorporated now by non-Western cultures, values that are, even the secular values that have come out of the Christian foundation,
are now taken for granted by secular people in the West, even though they don't recognize that even those secular values are sort of standing, you might say, on a Christian mountain or on a Christian foundation.
Now, for centuries, the main critique of Christianity came from the historian Gibbon, his book, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which basically Gibbon took it for granted that Western civilization is great.
But his point is Western civilization is not based on Christianity.
Western civilization, in fact, he said, is based on ancient Greece and Rome.
And unfortunately, he says ancient Greece and Rome collapsed, was replaced by Christianity.
What did Christianity create?
The Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, a period that is stereotypically described as backward, not a whole lot going on, not very much progress.
And then comes The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution.
So Gibbon celebrated those things, which he saw as an effort to sort of get beyond Christianity and restore Western civilization's ancient connection with pre-Christian Greece and Rome.
So that's really what I want to talk about today.
I want to show why Gibbon's thesis is, I think, very flawed.
First of all, Gibbon acts as if Greece and Rome, this wonderful civilization, was overthrown by Christianity.
But that's not true. Greece and Rome, well, Rome at that point, because Rome had supplanted Greece, Rome was overthrown by barbarians who came from the north.
Most of them were pagans.
They were not Christian. Later they became Christian.
But the Roman Empire had become rotted from within.
This is actually something we worry about with America today.
A once dominant civilization that now has all this kind of internal, institutional decay and corruption.
So the Roman legions couldn't fight very well anymore.
And no wonder that these Huns and Lombards came in from Germany and were able to easily defeat the Roman Empire.
So Rome, in a sense, sowed the seeds of its own decay.
Second, Christianity comes in and civilizes these barbarians.
The barbarians are complete savages, but they embrace Christianity and they settle down.
Suddenly you have monasteries all over Europe and you may say, well, monasteries, what's the big deal?
Well, let's remember the monasteries in Europe were the original universities.
Monasteries were centers of...
And yes, religious reflection, but they were also centers of learning and study.
They studied things like agriculture and logic, so both practical as well as theoretical sciences.
And so the point here is that Gibbon is trying to put the blame on Christianity for something that Christianity, I think, is not to blame for.
Christianity actually rescued Europe.
Here's the historian J.M. Roberts, and I'll close on this for today.
He writes in his book, The Triumph of the West, So, What Roberts is saying,
in summary, is that the Christian foundation, inaugurated, of course, by Christ, but then built by the church, this Christian foundation is essential not only to our civilization, but even to the way that we are.
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