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Dec. 15, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:47
THEIR GOLDEN BOY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep477
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Coming up, I'm going to explain the megalomaniacal delusions of the former Democratic golden boy, Sam Bankman-Fried.
I'll review the merits of Carrie Lake's important lawsuit in Arizona.
To my surprise, a Biden official admits that their targeting of pro-life groups is a direct result of the overturning of Roe v.
Wade. I'm going to also talk about this new alliance that seems to be developing between the Saudis and China.
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You've probably been reading or watching or seeing this drama unfold about this guy, Sam Bankman Freed, and his company, now bankrupt, that is called FTX. And you might be wondering, like, what is this all about?
What's really going on here?
I want to... Try to cast some light on this by unfurling the story of Sam Bankman Freed, but also getting to a kind of mystery surrounding this arrest of Sam Bankman Freed.
Now, this guy Freed is a really young guy.
I don't know if you've seen pictures of him.
He's got this sort of...
I put my hand in the electric socket type of hair.
And yet he was the subject of one after another adoring, lionizing profiles.
Why? Basically because he was a massive bank roller of the Democratic Party.
In fact, He's apparently the second largest donor to the Democratic Party in the whole country.
And I've seen different estimates, but a guy who's given tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to the Democratic Party, not a whole lot of money for him because he was at one point said to have been worth $20 billion.
Now, this guy Sam Bankman-Fried was a big talker and apparently saw himself as some kind of a visionary.
In fact, modeled himself to some degree on Bill Gates.
There's an interesting article...
Which talks about how he had...
He saw himself not just as a successful entrepreneur, not just as a kind of cryptocurrency guy or a hedge fund investment guy, but he saw himself as a problem solver of the future.
He, in fact, was setting up an outfit that he called the Center for the Future.
Think of the grandiose...
This is the center for the future.
We're going to be basically making the future happen.
And he goes, it's not about one issue or another issue.
I'm not going to dedicate myself to, like, climate change or any of the other kind of portfolio of left-wing issues.
Affinities. His point is that he wants to tackle global hunger, and he wants to tackle pandemics, and he wants to tackle really everything.
He goes, quote, rather than think about how to solve a problem in a 10 or 20 or 30 year career, think in terms of 50 to 100 years.
So this guy thought of himself as I'm going to be plotting the path to the future.
Now, of course, all of this has come crashing down.
Sam Bankman Freed has been arrested in the Bahamas.
He'll be extradited to the United States.
He faces a giant term behind bars.
In fact, over 100 years of all these charges stick.
And he's accused of a whole bunch of things.
Here are the charges. Wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, money laundering, and...
And I'll come back to this very significantly.
Campaign finance violations.
In other words, all those giant troves of cash that he was forking over to the Democratic Party, Democratic PACs, Democratic candidates.
Now, here's the interesting thing.
Sam Bankman-Fried was scheduled to testify very shortly before Congress, and he was willing to testify.
Now, this is a little bit odd because he was already facing legal vulnerability, and normally defense lawyers will tell you, don't testify.
Don't say anything that can be used against you.
But prosecutors want you to testify.
Why? Because they want you to speak freely.
They want people to ask you tough questions.
They want you to put yourself on the record because then all those statements can be used against you in trial.
And so now we come to the mystery that I promised at the beginning of this segment, and that is, why would the government—and by the way, we're talking about the Southern District of New York, the SDNY, the very outfit, by the way, that prosecuted me, the very outfit that is trying to get Trump— These are bad guys, and I think it's fair to say that they are in some ways far more dangerous than Sam Bankman-Fried.
So you have one group of gangsters, SDNY, going after another presumed gangster, Sam Bankman-Fried, and my question is, why would they arrest him before, before he testifies before Congress?
The political scientist Jonathan Turley has an op-ed about this, and he says that ordinarily it's a dream for prosecutors when somebody who's about to be charged speaks out on their own, because they get this treasure trove of statements that they can then work with.
He goes, normally it's the defense strategy to muzzle a defendant.
And yet, by arresting him, obviously now Sam Bankman-Fried is not going to testify.
Now he's going to sort of zip it up.
Now he's going to lawyer up.
Now he's going to be dealing with his case.
But what could be the motive?
Not of Sam Bankman-Fried. This guy was doing all kinds of crooked deals.
Crooked deals with crypto.
Crooked deals with moving money from one place to another to give a false impression.
You know, cheating his investor.
Some people have compared him to Bernie Madoff.
But here's my point. I think the reason that the Southern District of New York arrested Sam Mangminfried before he testified is because they want to protect all the Democrats who are getting money from this guy.
It's a little bit like what happened with Gill and Maxwell.
Notice that Gill and Maxwell is serving a big prison term.
But none of her customers, none of the people on her list, her list never even became public.
All those powerful people, all those powerful men, Bill Clinton types, are protected to this day.
I think something similar is going on here.
The SDNY, far more corrupt than Sam Bankman.
Freed is trying to protect, as it always does, the Democratic Party.
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I want to discuss Carrie Lake's lawsuit.
In Arizona to correct, as she would see it, the fraud in the Arizona gubernatorial election.
Now, I think Carrie Lake would be the first to admit it's not just in the gubernatorial election, but the focus here is on the gubernatorial election.
By the way, notice that the election is being run by her opponent, Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State, who was urged to step down but refused to.
So you've got a very bizarre situation.
You've got Katie Hobbs running the election.
You've got all kinds of election problems right on Election Day.
And Carrie Lake had specifically instructed her voters, come out and vote on Election Day.
Now, that sort of backfired because with all the problems, particularly in Maricopa County, the largest county, by the way, in Arizona, the Republican vote gets suppressed on Election Day.
Now, the Maricopa people who admit, by the way, that there were all these problems, tabulators that weren't working, people who show up to vote, who are dispatched, go vote someplace else.
Maricopa goes, well, we didn't really...
This was unintentional.
This was a glitch.
This was kind of unfortunate.
But no, this was not an organized effort at voter suppression, even though...
The officials in Maricopa County were very clear.
In some cases, a couple of them even started a pack to defeat people like Cary Lake and MAGA candidates.
So their political affinities are known, even though some of them are Republicans.
And so this is a very bad situation all the way around.
By the way, Cary Lake's lawsuit is filed against Hobbs, against the county recorder, a guy named Stephen Richer, and the county board of supervisors.
I want to focus here on one detail in the lawsuit that I think is very telling.
And it is the sudden emergence in Maricopa County after Election Day of 25,000 votes.
Now, this is kind of significant because the margin between Cary Lake and Katie Hobbs was about 20,000 votes.
So think about this.
25,000 votes, more than the margin of victory, pop up.
After Election Day.
Here we go again.
And the reason this is significant is that when courts look at these election suits, the first thing they apply is, and I think I mentioned this on the podcast before, the so-called but-for rule.
But for this alleged fraud, would the election have come out differently?
And Carrie Lake goes, yeah, this is more than enough of a margin to throw the result of the election into doubt.
And essentially the remedy that Carrie Lake is seeking is either declare me the actual winner or have another election, one or the other.
Now, this is always an uphill battle.
Courts are generally a little reluctant to offer this kind of a remedy.
They have done it before. I mentioned the 2018 North Carolina election where not the court, but an election board ordered a new election.
So what's happening here is that...
Maricopa County declared on Election Day, which is November 9, 2022, that it had scanned 275,000 ballots.
And these are the mail-in votes.
So this was the given number of mail-in votes.
And Arizona law, by the way, requires you to specify what are the number of mail-in votes by Election Day.
And then, says Kerry Lake, the next day Maricopa County election official Celia Naber contacts the county's contractor, a group called Runbeck Election Services, and tells the company it has scanned 298,000 ballots. So, 23,000 ballots are added to the Maricopa total after Election Day.
And conveniently, this happens to be kind of the number of votes that Katie Hobbs needs in order to have this margin over Cary Lake.
And this is unexplained.
It's not as Maricopa County goes, well, you know what?
They were in a bag and the bag was sitting over here and we just didn't see it.
No, without explanation, these votes are added.
Now, The Carrie Lake lawsuit has a lot more in it.
It talks about the printer and tabulator issues, which affected, by the way, 131 polling locations, 59% of the total.
And Carrie Lake goes, look, it's a fact that Republicans voted 3-1 over Democrats on Election Day.
So she goes, if you have any kind of a problem...
That is serious and that only kicks in on one day, on election day, when Republicans are outvoting Democrats three to one.
This is clear voter suppression of the Republican vote.
How else can you look at it?
And again, we're talking about a close race.
Here's Carrie Lake talking on Charlie Cook's podcast.
75% of people voting on Election Day were voting for me, and then you basically shut down or make it impossible to vote, or very difficult to vote, at roughly 60% of the locations to vote, and you're going to cut into our lead.
This is the disenfranchisement of voters in Arizona.
So we'll be watching carefully to see what happens with all this.
By the way, I haven't talked about affidavits from whistleblowers who talk about the way in which signature matching wasn't properly done.
There's a lot in this lawsuit.
And I just hope that we get a substantive hearing on the merits instead of just some kind of procedural, the court really doesn't want to get into any of this, because we need to restore...
Voter confidence and the integrity of the process.
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I've said on the podcast, speculating, that I believe that the DOJ's arrest of pro-lifers...
This is kind of a chasing down of a guy who's accused of obstructing an abortion clinic.
Even though the guy didn't really prevent anyone from getting in, He just got into an altercation with one of the volunteers at the clinic who apparently threatened or was in the face of his son.
So he pushes the guy.
The guy claims to fall down.
I mean, this is silly. This is normally just nothing more than a disagreement with a little bit of pushing and shoving like happens in seventh grade.
But no, this guy is now arrested.
He's violated the so-called FACE Act.
And the FACE Act prevents you from interfering with people getting health and reproductive services.
But I've said, I think this is an effort on the part of a very angry left now dominating the Biden DOJ to go after pro-lifers to punish them for what the Supreme Court did in overturning Roe v.
Wade. And this is basically now admitted by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta.
She was giving a talk at the Justice Department Civil Rights Division 65th Anniversary and And essentially what she says, I'm not paraphrasing, is, hey, listen, once Roe v.
Wade was overturned, women in America were placed in a position of danger.
It was, quote, a threat to women around the country.
And this created a new urgency, her word, a new urgency for the DOJ to enforce the FACE Act.
So this is another way of saying that once we got this ruling, Which we didn't like.
We decided, you know what, let's use the FACE Act to go after these guys and, in a sense, extract a price from them for what the Supreme Court has now decided on their behalf.
The DOJ has long insisted that this FACE Act, it's called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, that's the FACE Act, it prohibits threats of force, obstruction, and property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care.
And the Biden DOJ has long said, hey listen, this is not just to protect abortion clinics, the same act is also going to protect abortion.
Pro-life pregnancy centers.
Because you can't interfere with those either.
Those are also providing reproductive services.
And so the implication is that we will be neutral.
We, the Biden DOJ, will be neutral.
Now, I think whenever we hear this, we have to give it the major ha-ha-ha.
And as it turns out, there's data to support our skepticism.
What do I mean? Well, as it turns out...
Some 98 Catholic churches and 77 pregnancy resource centers or pro-life organizations have been attacked this year alone.
In fact, since May. Since the court decision.
And the DOJ has not charged one single person in connection with any of these attacks.
So how is that possible?
Is it that they are simply incapable of solving any of these cases?
Or, more likely, they're really not interested in solving them.
They give rhetorical obeisance.
Oh yeah, we're going to be looking into that one.
Well, they turn on and focus on other matters.
So the DOJ Civil Rights Division has charged 26 pro-life individuals with FACE Act violations this year alone.
So, The point here is that the DOJ is horribly partisan.
I mean, we know this.
We've seen it in other contexts, notably the context of January 6th, comparing the prosecutions of January 6th with, let's call it, the non-prosecutions of worse actors on the left in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests.
So we know this is going on.
But I think what's interesting here is, number one, we see it expanding beyond the area of the insurrection.
Notice that, you know, for a while there the left was saying, well, you know, this event of January 6th is unique.
No one before, at least going all the way back to the civil wars, tried to overthrow the government.
So if we seem to be overreacting, we're not overreacting.
We're just trying to prevent the kind of sedition and open subversion and stopping the counting of a free election.
So the event, in a sense, is sui generi.
It's in a category of its own.
But, in the pro-life case, we see no.
They're expanding the one-sidedness of, let's call it, Biden justice.
I mean, more accurately, called Biden injustice.
They're expanding it to the pro-life area.
And not only are they expanding it, they're admitting that their motivation for, you can say, turning up the screws, increasing the temperature, going more vigorously against the pro-lifers, is not anything the pro-lifers did.
But it's something the Supreme Court did.
So when you have the executive branch of government doing vengeful retribution against a Supreme Court decision, you know that we have a real problem, not just on the issue itself, but with separation of powers and with the unlawful, unlawful actions in response to a completely lawful court decision.
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I want to talk about a very positive development in connection with ESG. Now, what is ESG? Well, quite simply, ESG is a scheme by the left to force companies,
big companies, pension funds, hedge funds, investment houses, to take their massive pool of resources And use it to promote the climate change agenda of the left.
Now, this is a very, in a way, chilling development.
Why? Because it means that these huge companies can take their capital and say to private companies, we won't deal with you.
We won't invest in you.
We will kind of black mark you if you don't follow this climate change agenda that we're now giving you.
And this ESG movement has already become a formidable influence in the financial sector.
The group we're talking about here is called NZAM. NZAM stands for Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative.
And net zero, of course, is the goal of having net zero carbon emissions.
And this net zero enzyme, if you want to call it, was founded in 2020.
And it accumulated a huge number of supporters.
It had 291 members managing, get this, $66 trillion in assets.
Now, last year, this Enzam group joined an umbrella climate finance organization, which is called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.
And so what you have here is a financial, well, almost a foot on the neck of the corporate sector in America.
As I say, a very scary development.
Well, the good news is that one of the largest investment firms in the country, this is Vanguard, Vanguard Investments with over $7 trillion under management with more than 30 million customers.
By the way, Vanguard is the second largest financial firm in the country after BlackRock.
And Vanguard has basically said, We're out of here.
We are exiting the Enzam, the Net Zero Asset Managers, and we're also exiting the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.
And this has sent a shockwave through the kind of ESG movement.
Why? Because the ESG movement kind of had a lot of the other big players.
It does. It has BlackRock.
It has a huge group called State Street.
It has JP Morgan Asset Management.
And so they thought they were on a roll and they got Vanguard.
The only holdouts that they don't have, by the way, Fidelity and PIMCO. Fidelity and PIMCO never joined.
And now with Vanguard out, and in fact, Debbie and I were talking, we're like, you know what?
Two of the places we invest money, Vanguard and Fidelity.
And I've always thought of Vanguard as a very moderate...
I'm very happy that Fidelity has never been in it at all.
And Vanguard is saying, look, you know, it's not like we don't care about the climate.
We're going to be in our questionnaires finding out what companies' positions are on controlling the emissions of carbon.
But the left is saying that Vanguard is responding to the kind of pressure that is now beginning to build on the right.
And I'm talking really about three things.
One is, of course, the Republican Congress.
Two, I'm talking about states like Florida, and there are others that have said through the governor that we are not going to be doing any investments in any ESG-related financial entities.
In other words, they're putting, just as the left put pressure to advance ESG, the right is putting pressure not to.
And third, attorneys general.
Attorneys general around the country, Republicans, We're good to go.
So, what you have is, and I'm happy to see this, Republicans on the right exercising some political power to counter the political pressure on the left.
Now, the left is really mad about Vanguard making this move.
Here's Jesse Waxman from the Sierra Club.
Vanguard has never been serious about mitigating climate risk.
Here's a little secret for Jesse Waxman.
No one is. In other words, all these other companies are doing it just to make a show of it.
And in fact, when serious requirements are imposed on them...
They begin to run.
Last year, I believe it was, several Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, they said, you know what?
If you keep putting all these decarbonization requirements on the companies we do business with, we're exiting the alliance.
And so what happened is the alliance itself immediately changed its rules so that it weakened its climate requirements in order to keep these companies and banks inside of these Of these ESG alliances.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that this ESG movement is actually on much more fragile ground.
But nevertheless, it is very good news to see that one of the giant financial firms, Vanguard Investments, looking at this group that it was part of and saying, sayonara.
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I don't know if you've been noticing, we focus these days so much on domestic policy.
We tend to ignore what's happening on the international front, and me too.
I mean, I haven't done a whole lot.
I should probably do more on...
What's happening in the Ukraine war.
But I want to talk now in this segment about Saudi Arabia and China.
Now, let's remember by way of background that Saudi Arabia has been a pretty good U.S. ally for about 50 years.
This goes back to the pact that was made right around the time of World War II, the middle of the 20th century, between the United States and the Saudi royal family.
Of course, at that time, it was motivated by having a stable supply of oil for the United States, but also military and strategic protection of Saudi Arabia and of the oil fields of the Middle East.
So this was a good deal, I think, for both sides.
And it's been a fairly persistent alliance.
It was a little shaken at 9-11 because of so many of the hijackers having come from Saudi Arabia.
Although the effort to blame Saudi Arabia for 9-11, I think, was never all that credible.
Why? Because obviously, bin Laden was a deadly enemy of the Saudi regime.
In fact, A key demand of bin Laden was that the Saudi regime be overthrown.
So it's kind of hard to blame the Saudi regime for bin Laden's actions when bin Laden hated the Saudi regime as much as he hated the United States.
In fact, he hated the United States largely for supporting the Saudi regime.
But the Biden administration has gone a long way to push Saudi Arabia away, to attack not just the country, but to attack its rulers and to attack the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
And which is Mohammed bin Salman, so-called MBS. And guess what?
The Saudis have decided to thumb their nose at the United States.
They've basically been telling Biden to go take a hike.
Biden was begging them to, you know, release more oil before the midterms to help the Democrats politically.
And the Saudis go, no, we're not doing that.
But what are the Saudis doing?
And the answer is they're making closer deals now with China.
So President Xi Jinping of China was just in Saudi Arabia, and they have made a, quote, comprehensive strategic partnership agreement.
First of all, a lavish welcome for Xi, which is a sharp contrast with the very tentative, shaky, and And non-warm reception that Biden got in Saudi Arabia.
But Xi, it's the opposite.
He was escorted to the King's Palace by members of the Saudi Royal Guard riding Arabian horses carrying Chinese and Saudi flags.
There were welcome banquets galore.
Xi heralds a new era in Arab ties with China.
And the United States is now in an awkward position.
In fact, the United States goes, this is very bad because the Chinese are going to exercise influence and there are security risks that go with this big deal, technology deal that was signed between China and And Saudi Arabia to participate in all kinds of Chinese projects in Saudi Arabia.
By the way, China is already building 5G networks in most of the Gulf states.
Again, despite U.S. concerns, the U.S. has objected.
The Gulf states go, well, we're going ahead anyway.
And the Chinese deal with these countries is actually very interesting because it's basically this.
We're not going to try to interfere in the internal affairs of your country and you don't interfere in the internal affairs of ours.
And I think China has developed this very cunning scheme because it contrasts with the United States.
Basically, China is saying, unlike the United States where they're going to come and tell you to do this and do that, they're going to be flying the rainbow flag and they're going to push all kinds of perversion in your country.
Listen, we are not going to interfere in the internal affairs of your country at all.
And you agree not to...
So our dealings, in other words, are going to be, in some senses, we're not going to try to meddle.
We're just going to deal on a contractual or let's call it a transactional basis.
So happens also that China is the world's biggest energy consumer.
So they obviously need Saudi oil.
So this is very interesting.
34 deals that cover energy, they cover information technology, cloud services, transportation, construction.
These are deals worth about $30 billion between China and Saudi Arabia.
And the larger implication is that Saudi Arabia may be, well, I won't say it's exiting the Western Bloc, But we're seeing the emergence of a rival bloc.
China keeps talking about a multipolar world, but what they really mean is they want to build a sphere of influence outside and apart from and a rival to the sphere of influence of the United States.
And guess what? The Biden regime seems to be doing their best to help China in this project.
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I spoke yesterday about the impact and influence of Christianity in providing a foundation for the Western ideas of religious freedom, but also the idea of limited government.
Now I want to turn to a second Hugely important influence of Christianity on the West.
And this is, well, drawing on the philosopher Charles Taylor, I'm going to call it the affirmation of ordinary life.
The affirmation of ordinary life.
And by this I mean the life of the ordinary guy.
And I also mean the life as lived in work and In jobs and careers, in looking after your family, this suddenly becomes the focus of modern civilization.
And again, it's so normal to us, so obvious to us, that we have to step back and look at the world outside of Christianity and before Christianity to see that this is actually not, you may call it, the global norm.
This is not the way things used to be.
Christianity brought about this massive change inside of Western civilization.
Now, what Christianity does is it exalts the ordinary man, the common man, you could even say the low man.
The underdog.
And these people were not favorites in the world of ancient Greece and Rome.
Let's look at the Homeric epics.
I've mentioned this when I was discussing those epics.
They concentrate on life among the aristocratic or ruling class.
Lesser people appear, but they appear kind of as servants or as slaves.
This was actually Aristotle's solution to the problem of culture.
Aristotle says... In the politics, I believe.
He says that we need slavery.
Why? He goes, because in any civilization, there's a lot of dirty work that needs to be done.
Who's going to do that?
He goes, the big advantage of having slaves who do that, I mean, and not get paid for it, is that it frees up the time of other superior men.
Aristotle didn't add women.
He was talking really about men.
And these men now have leisure.
They have free time in which they can cultivate the higher things of life.
So they can engage, for example, in poetry or drama or philosophy.
These kind of higher pursuits, which are very difficult to have in the ancient world because it's a struggle for survival.
So Aristotle's point is, let the slaves do all that work, and the rest of us can then do, we can become what Aristotle called great-souled men.
That is an avenue, a human avenue, only available to a small portion of society.
And the great-souled man, Aristotle says, and by the way, he's not intending comedy here, has to speak in a low and measured voice, kind of like mine.
Now, the point I want to make here is that Jesus was not such a man.
Think of it. Jesus was born in a stable.
He spends his early life as a kind of apprentice to a carpenter.
He travels by foot, occasionally by donkey.
Even traveling by donkey, when Debbie and I were in Israel recently, traveling by donkey was sort of only for people who had a donkey.
It's not even clear that Joseph and Mary had one.
Now, they did have a donkey when they took Jesus away from the threat posed by Herod.
This was in the context of the census.
But it's not even clear it was their donkey.
They could have borrowed the donkey.
Hey, listen, we've got to save the young child's life.
Can we borrow your donkey?
So, the point here is I'm now quoting the literary scholar Eric Auerbach.
Christ had not come as a hero and a king, but as a human being of the lowest social station.
His first disciples were fishermen.
He moved in the everyday milieu of the humble folk.
He talked with publicans and fallen women, the poor and the sick, and children.
It can also be added, Christ ends up Not only on the cross, but he's hanged as a common criminal and he's flanked by two actual criminals.
And yet Auerbach goes on to make the point, he goes, listen, despite Christ's kind of undistinguished origin, his simple life, his lowly death, everything he does as portrayed in the Bible is imbued with the highest...
You may say dignity.
The fishermen, the Greeks would have treated as low characters.
I mean, if you look at the Greek stage, every time you see an ordinary man, he's usually the butt of jokes.
He's a subject of comedy.
Tragedy is reserved for the aristocrats.
And so, for example...
You have Oedipus.
Oedipus is a king.
And that's why the play is called Oedipus Rex.
So, the sublime quality of Christ and his disciples totally reverses the classical ideal.
Suddenly, the aristocrats and this whole notion of aristocratic dignity comes to be associated with a Christian sin, namely pride.
And to some degree, it even seems sort of posturing and a little bit ridiculous.
Christ produces what can be called a transformation of values.
Later, Nietzsche would use the term the revaluation of values, a kind of moral revolution.
What used to be up is now down, and vice versa.
So the values that were scorned in ancient Greece and Rome now come to embody, come to reflect lofty human ideals.
So suddenly, and now I'm turning back to Charles Taylor, Charles Taylor says that now, for centuries, under the influence of Christianity, we judge a society not by how it treats its richest or most wealth.
How do we know society is doing well?
because the common man has a pretty good life. In fact, that's kind of how I came to see America when I first got here. I'm like, look, every society benefits its wealthy class. The wealthy, in some ways, outside of America, live even better. But in America, the ordinary man has a really good life, and that is a measure of the success of a society.
So the point here is that Christianity creates new institutions and a new ethical and aesthetic and moral sensibility in which it is no longer just the guy on the top.
But the guy at the middle or even the guy in the bottom, whose life and whose interests and whose values become paramount.
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Feel the difference. I'm continuing my discussion of Christianity and its influence in elevating a new ideal in Western civilization, an ideal that I've called, following the philosopher Charles Taylor, the affirmation of ordinary life.
And that's the life of the ordinary citizen, but it includes marriage and the family.
And we want to talk about this a little bit because the family is now under fierce attack.
I would argue that what we're seeing is an attempt to repudiate the Christian influence on the West.
And this is why we begin to see the emergence of pre-Christian influence.
Pagan practices, the abolition of distinction among the genders, the putting forward of even homosexuality and sort of this non-binaryism.
I don't know if I'm a male or a female.
All of this stuff was there in the pre-Christian world.
This is the surprise. It's not new.
It is actually a revival of something very, very old.
To that degree, it is somewhat reactionary.
Now, Let's talk about the family.
Perhaps to our surprise, the family is not all that important in pre-Christian Greece and Rome.
What do I mean by that? Well, let's start with Plato.
If you've read Plato's Republic, Socrates outlines his ideal for the best kind of society.
And guess what? It's a society in which there's no marriage.
Children are not raised by their own parents.
They are turned over to the polis or to the state which raises them.
This Socrates presents not just—he presents it as the best kind of society.
Aristotle is a little more prudent.
Aristotle admits, you know, yeah, look, you know, children are going to be raised by the people who care about them.
And who's that? Well, that's their parents.
So we kind of need the family.
But in Aristotle, the family is not such a big deal.
It's necessary, but I'm going to call it an infrastructural good.
What's an infrastructural good?
An infrastructural good is a good that, well, you kind of need it, but you don't think about it.
So, for example, in our ordinary life, an infrastructural good is the air that we breathe.
You and I breathe the air, but we don't sit around thinking, the air, oh my, wow, unbelievable, the air, this is amazing.
No, we just take it for granted.
Yeah, of course, we need air. Without air, we can't live.
But air is not given any kind of social or cultural or even individual importance.
It's just something sort of in the background, a prerequisite for, let's call it, the good life.
And that's kind of how Aristotle saw the family.
You need the family. Again, you need the family because the family kind of organizes your life.
But the point of your life is not your family.
The point of your life is something greater, is something nobler, is, let's say, the life of contemplation, and so on.
But the family is simply, you may say, in the background a prerequisite for doing that.
Aristotle, for example, says that friendship, real friendship, is only possible among men.
Women can't even be friends, not just with men, they can't even be friends with each other.
So Debbie's kind of chuckling here in the background.
And then think of something like romantic love, which is, surprisingly enough, an invention.
It is a Christian ideal.
I say this, why?
Because although the Greeks acknowledge eros, eros is simply sexual desire, this eros takes all kinds of forms.
I mean, you have homosexuality in ancient Greece.
You have, and we saw this, by the way, in Israel also.
We were at this place called the Gates of Hell.
Interestingly, it was a place of pagan worship where people were having, like, sex with goats.
This was presented as some kind of religious offering to the god, small g, god Pan.
So, the point here to make is that this idea of romantic love between a man and a woman, which then is consummated in marriage, and marriage then reflects this idea, not just marriage to have children.
Obviously, the Greeks and Romans realized that you need marriage to have children, but marriages in ancient Greece and Rome were, for the most part, arranged.
It was only in Christianity that the idea of consent In other words, yeah, the parents can try to arrange a marriage, but it's not going to be a real marriage until both the parties themselves, the man and the woman, agree or consent to the marriage.
So you see this democratic idea of consent, the consent of the governed.
That is an enlargement of the idea that in marriage you need to have consenting parties and somehow a marriage forced on someone.
This goes back to the very beginning of Christianity.
It's seen as a kind of an illicit or illegitimate marriage.
Even today you can go and get an annulment if you can somehow show that you were forced into a marriage to which you didn't consent.
Now, Christianity makes the family really important, and this is a theme I'll pick up next time.
The family becomes the centerpiece of ordinary life, and despite all the ways in which the family is attacked today, that is still true.
So we have in Christianity the affirmation of ordinary life, and it begins to manifest itself in the ideas of romantic love and consent and the heterosexual, nuclear, Family.
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