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Dec. 20, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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FEDERAL BUREAU OF DISINFORMATION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast EP480
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walzer, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
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Coming up, the Federal Bureau of Disinformation, how the FBI coordinates to suppress, not misinformation, but true information to control the narrative.
I'll explore the ramifications of what the January 6th Committee is doing.
Are we setting up for a new show trial with Trump?
We'll consider Netanyahu's future in the wake of his astonishing comeback.
An investor and author, Michael Wilkerson, joins me.
We're going to talk about his book, Why America Matters.
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 going to talk in a couple of segments today about the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI.
Now, it's become clear from the January 6th cases and also from other cases that the FBI functions kind of like a criminal gang.
It's more dangerous than a normal gang for the simple reason that these are thugs with badges.
They have the authority to get subpoenas, they can get warrants, they can kick down your door, and it's legal.
It's legal because they are the police agency of the government.
They also have the power of getting money from the government, congressional appropriations.
They've obviously got the DOJ and the Biden regime behind them.
So this is probably the most dangerous gang in the world.
But I want to talk about a second aspect of the FBI that often goes ignored, and that is they have become the Federal Bureau of Disinformation.
Now, when I was telling Debbie about this, she's like, you mean misinformation?
I said, no, I mean disinformation.
So what's the difference between misinformation and disinformation?
Well, misinformation is when you get something wrong.
You're misinformed.
Disinformation is when you are a deliberate conduit of falsehood, when you exist like a propaganda organization to tell lies, to suppress truth, and to promote things that aren't true.
And my point is that the FBI falls into that category, the Federal Bureau of Disinformation.
And this is confirmed in the latest trove of the Twitter files.
Twitter files, I think it's seven, it might be eight.
Anyway, it's the latest sequence that's put out by Michael Schellenberger on Twitter.
And it revisits the Hunter Biden story, but with greater precision and greater detail.
So let's follow through a couple of the key points.
Number one, the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop.
They had direct access to the inner workings of the Biden crime family, the way in which this racketeering organization called the Bidens.
By the way, they probably built this on the model of the Clinton Foundation with some modifications.
Biden kind of wanted to run his more like The Gambino family, kind of like a family racket deploying the family members as bag men, including, of course, Hunter Biden.
Well, the FBI knew all this.
They also knew for a fact that the laptop was authentic.
But they began a disinformation campaign even before the New York Post published its story on the laptop in October of 2020.
they began a campaign working with social media and working with mainstream media to discredit the laptop. So think about this, the FBI is functioning and by the way this is the FBI under Trump. The FBI under Trump is functioning as an ideological disinformation operation to help Biden win the election and this is going on in the months leading up to the election. Now we can see from the
Schellenberger release that the Twitter files that the FBI is now communicating with Twitter.
And they're asked, is there any new intelligence that makes you believe that the Russians are trying to interfere with the 2020 election in the same way that the FBI had claimed that the Russians were trying to manipulate the 2016 election?
And as it turns out, FBI agent Elvis Chan admits no.
He goes, Twitter confirms to the FBI that, quote, So, Twitter tells the FBI, no, this is not a matter of foreign interference.
But... The FBI nevertheless pressures Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden story.
In fact, they go to the extent of saying, hey, Twitter, we will give some of you guys a Twitter security clearances so you can actually see our intel about foreign intervention in the election.
So, they're giving Twitter the idea that you can sort of be part of the FBI.
You can be in with the FBI.
And not to mention the fact, and this is something that I think nobody knew prior to the release of the latest Twitter files, the FBI was funneling large amounts of money to Twitter.
Twitter was actually profiting off of the FBI.
The FBI is actually paying Twitter to be a conduit for disinformation.
Here, this is actually, this is from Twitter, quote, I am happy to report that we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019.
This is James Baker.
Now, what makes all this really interesting is James Baker is himself a former FBI guy.
And this is the point. Twitter is full of these FBI guys and CIA guys and deep state guys who have been hired after they left the government.
So you have the deep state FBI working with the deep staters inside of Twitter.
This is how this operation is actually executed.
If you look at this Jim Baker guy, he's former general counsel to the FBI. He's moved in and out of government.
He did a stint at CNN. He was at the Brookings Institution.
This is how this stuff all operates.
And he wasn't, as I say, the only one.
Dawn Burton, former deputy chief of staff of the FBI. She was deputy to James Comey.
She joined Twitter in 2019 as, quote, director of strategy.
And these FBI people at Twitter were so, there were so many of them, they created their own sort of sub-channel inside of Twitter where they could communicate with each other.
In other words, it's mini-FBI inside of Twitter.
So this is how this works.
This is what the left has done to corrupt the FBI and then use the corrupt FBI to corrupt Twitter.
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And what the latest Twitter file shows is the sort of sausage-making mechanism in which how all this works, really.
And it turns out that you do have the FBI and you do have Twitter, but they're not the only players in this operation.
So... Turning to Michael Schellenberger, in September 2020, Roth, who's Roth?
Yoel Roth, the guy at Twitter, one of the chief censors at Twitter, along with Vijay Agade, and of course the CEO at the time, Parag Agarwal.
In September 2020, Roth participated in an Aspen Institute interview.
A quote, tabletop exercise on a potential hack-and-dump operation related to Hunter Biden.
The goal was to shape how the media covered it and how social media carried it.
So now we bring in the Aspen Institute, supposedly a think tank, a non-profit.
I've actually spoken a couple of times at the Aspen Institute.
In any event, the Aspen Institute here becomes part of the censorship network.
And what do they do? They have a sort of a seminar.
And they invite all the social media gurus, all the top people at Twitter, probably Facebook, Meta, and also Google and YouTube, all these guys.
And then they invite people in the mainstream media.
And then they run this kind of sort of exercise.
It's almost like we're going to run a kind of trial run.
Let's talk about Russian disinformation and what we can do as a media to make sure it's not amplified, what we can do on social media to block it.
So in other words, the rehearsing How the censorship regime can work.
So the FBI is kind of the manipulator.
And the reason all of this is important is because this is sort of the way that it works.
This tabletop exercise, by the way, was organized by Vivian Schiller, the former CEO of NPR. She's also former head of news at Twitter.
She's former general manager of the New York Times.
She's former chief digital officer at NBC News.
This is a small fraternity of corrupt people.
They organize these kinds of things and they basically...
If you're wondering how does the media coordinate, how do they all know to suppress the Hunter Biden story?
Because they go to meetings like this beforehand where they're instructed, be on the lookout for Russian propaganda.
And the fact of it, there's no Russian propaganda.
The Hunter Biden story is completely legitimate.
The FBI knows it's legitimate.
And if these media organizations even moved a toe or a finger...
They would know it's legitimate.
So they're all collectively participating in a lie.
But the reason that they can justify the lie is this.
The FBI will send, quote, intel to Twitter.
Now, what's the intel?
The intel is nothing more than a link to an article in The Hill or The Washington Post.
And I'm not just making those up.
The FBI actually linked to an article in The Hill and to The Washington Post.
The article in the Hill and the Washington Post, by the way, the Hill was quoting the Washington Post, was a complete lie.
And it basically said that, quote, the laptop, Giuliani's leak of the laptop, was basically driven by the Russians.
So either Giuliani was an agent of the Russians perhaps, or maybe the Russians had somehow planted this false information on Giuliani.
So the Hill article is a lie.
The Washington Post article that the Hill article was based on is a lie.
The FBI takes the lie, which they know to be a lie, and they send it over to Twitter saying, guys, look, check it out over here.
This shows you that we're dealing here with Russian intel.
And then Twitter goes, oh wow, Russian intel.
We can't let this on Twitter.
So they block the Hunter Biden story.
So this is a sickening, detailed account of how this stuff works.
Now, look, I do want to make the broader point that I'm not saying that everyone at the FBI or the ordinary FBI agent is themselves corrupt.
They might be. I'm not saying they're not either.
But what I'm saying is most likely they're...
The ordinary guy is just being, let's call him a good German.
By that I mean he's following orders.
These are hierarchical organizations.
I mean, we have hierarchical organizations like the military, well, frankly, the Catholic Church, the FBI. And so these are people who want to keep paying the mortgage and they don't want any trouble and they'll do what they're told.
The corruption is at the top.
And I think this is something that began with Obama.
So we have gangsterism and we have disinformation.
I really don't know if this is an organization that can be salvaged through some sort of reform.
I think the FBI needs to be taken down, dismantled, maybe rebuilt into a new type of organization.
But I don't think it's going to have, well, certainly not my trust, but the public trust if it isn't reconstructed fundamentally in this way.
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Again, that's friendofdinesh.com Well, it seems like we've reached that point where the January 6th committee does, well, kind of what everyone thought they were going to do.
Why? Because this is a committee stacked, stacked with Trump haters.
It has Democratic Trump haters.
It has a couple of Republican, never-Trump Trump haters.
People like Adam Kinzinger and, of course, the fanatical Liz Cheney.
Let's go back and remember that this is a committee that was supposed to have Republican and Democratic members.
Kevin McCarthy had nominated people like Jim Jordan to be on the committee.
And basically, Nancy Pelosi said no.
I get to pick not only the Democrats on the committee, but also the Republicans.
So Jordan withdrew those names.
And this is how the committee ended up being this kind of an ideological hit operation.
It's always been that. And so even though you read media articles, January 6th investigation, investigation is a joke.
There's no real investigation.
First of all, what does the January 6th committee say about the killing of Ashley Babbitt?
Answer, nothing. They have tried to keep that completely offstage.
What do they have to say about Roseanne Boylan?
Nothing. What do they have to say about Ray Epps?
Nothing. So the January 6th committee is really a propaganda operation, a show trial operation.
By the way, we know that former ABC News executive James Goldston has been literally...
So choreographing these public hearings as media events, knowing, of course, that there's a kind of, you know, butt-licking media that's all too eager to sort of service the January 6th committee, kind of in the manner that, you know, a dog might service a hydrant.
And so this criminal referral is kind of meaningless.
Now, of course, Debbie's like, well, it may not be meaningless.
The DOJ might jump on it because those guys are made up of the same kind of people as the January 6th committee.
But, I mean, that was true even before.
They don't need a January 6th recommendation, even though they could then point to it and go, well, the January 6th committee referred us, therefore we're proceeding with an indictment.
So, Debbie thinks it is quite likely that there will be some kind of indictment against Trump.
And I think so too.
Why? Because these people are so desperate to try to keep that guy off the ticket.
Of course, they will do everything they can politically.
They'll try to promote DeSantis.
In fact, now I've recently seen that, oh, you know, with this talk about the January 6th committee recommendation of a criminal referral, we're now seeing Chris Christie is energized.
Nikki Haley is energized.
Scott Walker is energized.
I mean... I don't know who writes this nonsense.
It is downright laughable.
The idea that any of these guys is a serious candidate at this point, I think cannot be taken with any degree of seriousness by anybody.
Nobody who knows the GOP base.
These are the people who are going to be voting in the primaries.
So I think I can claim to be a on the front line expert on this subject.
And it is very clear right now that the heart of the GOP is by and large with Trump.
It's not unambiguously with Trump.
Because there's a worry that Trump could lose it.
Trump could stumble.
Trump could go on the wrong track.
Trump could have the wrong people around him who push him on the wrong track.
So there are anxieties and concerns about Trump.
But he's the presumptive favorite.
There's a lot of goodwill toward DeSantis.
Of course, a recognition that it's early.
So all of this is...
The left is not confident that the GOP will give a thumbs down to Trump.
Therefore, they go, let's go with the indictment.
And that's really what I think for Liz Cheney, if you look at her miserable career, I mean, here's someone whose own constituents have basically told her to take a hike.
Virtually all the Republicans on the January 6th committee are exiting the stage.
Their careers are finished.
I mean, maybe they'll resurface as analysts on MSNBC. I don't know.
They could have sort of these second careers where they're handed out the left's cultural perks for their good service on the January 6th committee.
But apart from that, there's not much of a future for them.
What's going on in the DOJ? Well, the DOJ announces Merrick Garland, I'm going to appoint an independent prosecutor.
He's going to hit the ground running.
It's this guy named Jack Smith.
By the way, a guy with a kind of left-wing track record.
A guy who's clearly a Trump opponent.
But as it turns out, and Julie Kelly is the one who sort of broke this story...
Jack Smith isn't even in the country right now.
Where is he? Well, he's in the Netherlands.
What happened to him?
Well, apparently he was injured and he's recovering from surgery in the Netherlands.
So they've been creating in Washington, D.C. this false impression, which the media is going with.
We got this guy Jack Smith.
He's on the case. He's got all his team lined up.
Jack Smith is basically, as I understand it, on a bed with his knees up in the Netherlands.
Now, what's going on with the DOJ is they have transferred a bunch of their own prosecutors from inside the DOJ over to Jack Smith's office.
So they want to give the idea that we're running this independent inquiry with this guy, Jack Smith.
Jack Smith's nowhere to be found.
He'll probably show up at some point.
But it's the same gang of DOJ prosecutors doing the same kind of work.
So the Jack Smith thing appears to be an illusion.
Let's pretend like there's this new guy.
He's calling the shots.
He's going to make an independent decision.
No, it's the same old guys who've now been moved over into his office.
So this is really how the government operates, but it's also how the left operates.
It's smoke and mirrors.
It's all aimed at using the resources of the media to fool the American people.
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In really a very startling and wonderful turn of events, Benjamin Netanyahu is back.
What a comeback! This guy is forming a government in Israel, and there's a fascinating interview with him in El Arabiya, which is a Middle Eastern site.
But it gives you a lot of insight into Netanyahu, and I want to talk about some of his remarks.
He talks, first of all, about the importance of The United States to Israel, how Israel's fate is connected to the United States.
And I think this is partly because Netanyahu is worried that he has an unreliable, in fact, treacherous so-called ally in Biden.
I mean, this is just the Democrats.
This was the case with Obama, and I think Netanyahu understood this.
But nevertheless, Netanyahu goes, I'm going to reach out, I'm going to do my best to mend fences and have good We're good to go.
Pointing to a new settlement or development, it's called Trump Heights.
So Trump actually, think of it, think how odd it is to have an American president named and thanked and a whole settlement named after him.
Why? Because of all the good he did for Israel.
But this deal with Saudi Arabia is tricky.
The Saudis are like, well, we first need a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
And Netanyahu's point is that things like the Abrahamic Accords, things like a new sort of detente with Saudi Arabia, this will enable a solution to the Palestinian problem.
So far from the Palestinian problem being a prerequisite, solve that one first and then you can have peace, the idea is let's make peace.
And then let's use the environment generated by that piece to figure out how to deal with this nagging, enduring, seemingly insoluble Palestinian problem.
Now, one of the questions posed to Netanyahu, I think a very fair one is, hey, listen, you've got some of these, well, fairly fanatical parties that are in your coalition.
You do need them because they get you to 51%.
Aren't they going to be able to blackmail you?
Aren't they going to be able to control you?
And Netanyahu basically goes, no, no.
They're in the coalition for their own benefits.
But you know what? I am the leading party of this coalition.
They have endorsed me.
I haven't endorsed them.
Kind of an interesting way.
It reminds me of something Reagan once said.
And essentially, he says, it's going to be my administration, my defense minister.
We're going to be making the calls.
We're not going to be turning this kind of power over to any of the minor parties.
He makes the interesting point that one of the things, although there's a lot of talk about how the Palestinians have terrible lives, he goes, a lot of this is because of the horrible rule of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian leadership,
which is siphoning off funds for its own benefit, and which kind of wants the Palestinians to be in a state of miserable dependence, well, kind of for the same reason the Democrats like to have Inner-city blacks in a state of miserable dependence or Native American reservations in a state of miserable dependence.
And Netanyahu goes, the best I can do in this situation, because I have to work through these Palestinian leaders, is I can address problems that are problems in those communities, such as rising crime rates.
So there's... Just as we see crime in our inner cities, evidently a lot of crime in the West Bank, a lot of crime in Gaza.
And here's Netanyahu in a very practical way.
I opened 11 police stations in Arab communities in Israel in the decade between 2010 and 2020.
I think this kind of demonstration of actually improving people's lives by doing specific things is what distinguishes Netanyahu.
He also talks about the fact that he's going to encourage a partnership between Israeli and Arab entrepreneurs to do joint projects to improve the lives of Israelis and Arabs living in Israel.
By the way, there are a large number of Arab citizens in Israel.
They enjoy the rights of Israelis, they vote in elections, they are citizens.
So Israel is actually more of a multiracial society than I had anticipated before I got there and was able to see things a little bit up close.
Finally Netanyahu talks about Iran and he again makes a practical point.
He goes, listen, let's look at the lives of ordinary Iranians now versus the late 1970s when the Shah abdicated and they had their revolution.
He goes, they're living standards now?
Really, think about it.
It's more than 40 years later.
He goes, it's the same.
There's been no fundamental material improvement.
He goes, let's look at the lives of Arabs and other Middle Eastern people in the rest of the region.
It's improved dramatically.
Let's look at the lives of Israelis over the past 40 to 50 years.
Their standard of living has doubled.
So while the rest of the region is seeing all this progress, Iran is basically still confined to death to America, burn the American flag.
This kind of pathetic sloganeering when you can't really do anything for your people is the tragic legacy of the Khomeini revolution.
And the final point Netanyahu makes, Because I don't care if Iran is on the threshold of being a nuclear power.
Israel is going to protect itself.
And it's going to take the measures that it needs to, regardless, by the way, of whether the Biden administration approves or not, to protect the security of the state of Israel.
Will the absence of a red wave during the midterms lead to a more emboldened Biden and more wasteful government spending, higher taxes?
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Guys, I really want to welcome to the podcast a new guest, Mike Wilkerson.
We're going to talk about his book, Why America Matters.
Well, he's an investor.
He's a strategic advisor.
He's the founder of Stormwall.com.
That's S-T-O-R-M, Stormwall.com.
He's also the chairman of Charity Water, which is a renowned nonprofit leading the way to solve the global water crisis.
Mike holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MA in International Relations from Yale.
Mike Wilkerson, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
And this is a topic of great interest to me.
Debbie, my wife, and I are both immigrants.
She from Venezuela, me from India.
American exceptionalism is really why we're here.
But one of the themes of your book is that traditional American exceptionalism is in important ways endangered.
So Let's start by talking about what American exceptionalism means, and then let's talk about its fate right now.
Sure, happy to. It means a lot of things to a lot of people.
What is most exceptional about American exceptionalism, in my mind, are the ideas, the ideals that created this country, which were unique in the world at the time.
The idea is that we were endowed with unalienable rights, God-given rights, that could not be taken away by any sovereign, by any monarch, by any government, by any bureaucracy.
The idea is that we were all created equal.
That we had a right to freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom to be left alone.
These are the ideas that were unique at the time and are under threat today.
I mean, this is a critical point.
You're saying that the architecture of the American Revolution was something new in the world, and that a lot of the principles of the revolution which have defined our country were also new.
I mean, I don't believe that before 1800, when Jefferson defeated Adams, there had ever been a Peaceful transition of power from one regime to another in which the opponents were not exiled or killed or imprisoned.
So America created this new thing.
But let's fast forward a little bit because here we are now in the 21st century.
Many of us would say, and you probably would too, that some of these ideals are pretty badly bruised in 21st century America.
So, are we living up to those ideals or has practical life in America largely abandoned them?
Those ideals have been tested in the entire nearly three centuries of American history.
Yeah, let's move forward, but just to make the point, it took 70 years or so to affirm the basic idea that all men were created equal.
It took a lot of shedding of blood.
It took the abolitionist movement led by women in our churches and all across the country in order for that basic idea to become a reality during the 21st century.
The very ideals are under attack.
They're under attack by foreign adversaries, under attack by ideological attacks that are going on in our own country.
And what's worse, Dinesh, is that there's a whole generation of younger people who may not have even heard of these ideals or understand what they really mean.
We see it time and time again in our polls where they question the basic ideas of is democracy worthwhile?
Is capitalism a good idea?
Maybe there's something better out there that we should think about and try when the reality is what's been tried has failed everywhere around the globe, the socialist ideas, the Marxist ideas, etc.
Now, how do you make sense of this?
You've got these ideals.
Let's just take, for example, the idea of equality.
And at the time that the ideal was articulated, you could say that the ideal was ahead of the reality, right?
And so what we saw is with the suffragette movement, and we saw with the Civil War, and later, of course, with the civil rights movement, the country moving through its history toward a fuller realization of these ideals.
Now, any normal person would look at that and go, isn't this great?
Isn't this a story of progress?
We've been getting better on the equality front, on the racism front, on the slavery front, on the rights of women front.
So, how do you explain the fact that...
A whole generation of young people buy into the idea that not only has there not been this dramatic progress, but the people who articulated the ideals in the beginning are bad guys and we should take their statues down and we should have a negative view of them.
How did that happen?
Well, you understand this well, but what happened was the 1960s and 1970s, the introduction of postmodernism into our schools and universities, which aligned perfectly well with the communist playbook.
This idea started with the concept that there is no truth, there is no God, words have no meaning other than what we give them.
And aligning that with the communist ideology that said, if we want to achieve our utopian objectives of a complete overhaul of our society, we're going to have to twist the words, twist the meaning, reinvent history.
And the sad reality is it was ignored as some obscure...
Aspect of academia for many years until it infiltrated our culture, infiltrated our society, where now we're all steeped in this tea, this noxious tea of bad ideas, of misinformation, of disinformation.
But it comes from these pernicious ideas that started in our universities a generation ago.
Let's take a short pause.
When we come back, let's explore further the deterioration, if you will, of American exceptionalism and whether or not we can get it back.
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I'm back with author and entrepreneur Michael Wilkerson.
Website is stormwall.com.
We're talking about his book, Why America Matters.
And am I right in understanding you, Mike, to be saying basically that there was a kind of a progressive revolution that might have, well, I think its roots were in the early 20th century, but it really gathered force in the 1960s.
And a certain type of anti-Americanism became current that initially had its sort of home in the universities, but is now broken out into society at large and threatens to overtake American exceptionalism.
So start by spelling out what will happen if we succumb to that, if we let that run its course.
Where will we end up?
Well, we will lose everything that our predecessors gained, our heritage as a nation.
What will we lose? We'll lose those rights that were outlined in the Declaration of Independence and in the Bill of Rights, the rights of freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom to be free from surveillance.
We're seeing it now with corporate surveillance.
We're seeing it now with government surveillance.
If we give this up, then we too will go the way of Venezuela.
We too will go the way of past countries that have tried this experiment.
So that's why it is so critical that Americans understand what's going on and stand up and resist these forces.
I mean, a generation ago when I heard Reagan say, you know, liberty is one generation away from extinction.
We have to be vigilant.
I took those as kind of just slogans that we should kind of keep in the back of our mind and But I thought that there were rights—I mean, a good example is the right to free speech—that were pretty well inviolable.
You could argue at the margins about obscenity or subversion, but by and large, the right to just debate issues in the public square was unquestioned.
So isn't it a fact that now we are seeing these basic rights that we've taken for granted really for decades, if not centuries— What I find chilling is that there are powerful people in our society who do not believe in these rights.
Or to put it differently, they believe in these rights for themselves, but they don't believe in these rights for others.
And they seem to be wanting to set up a hierarchical society.
I mean, you could almost look at the Chavista regime in Venezuela as an example.
A two-tier society where they're the elite, they have rights and privileges, I know this is an issue that you focused on and covered for years, but it's something that hopefully is coming more and more into the focus of Americans overall.
I think what's happening even today with the Twitter files is important.
Although I was somewhat discouraged to see just a few days ago, 55% of Americans still have not heard of the Twitter files.
Why? Because it's just not being covered in the mainstream media.
The issues you're describing are absolutely right.
I talk about in the book that, in a way, this is no longer about right versus left.
You think about the old-school liberals of the 1960s and 70s.
What did they care about? They cared about privacy.
They cared about keeping big government out of their personal lives.
And now, those old-school liberals have more in common with populist conservatives than they do with those elites that you just described, who are all about power, all about consolidating That power and really weakening the freedoms that said, we the people, this unique idea at the time of the founding, that the people themselves were sovereign, not a monarch.
That was a revolution in time and we are at risk of losing it today.
I mean, part of what concerns me is that the America that I came to in the late 1970s was an America in which I thought that the original pilgrim ideal or the settler ideal, that there were uncharted spaces, not that there was necessarily physical land, but the physical land was a symbol of opportunity, and that those opportunities were there for the taking.
It seems like what the left is convincing the younger generation, the generation that's in school today, is that that America doesn't exist anymore.
Your lives, that you're not going to have the same opportunities your parents did.
Is that one of the forces that pushes young people more toward a kind of socialism?
Well, hey, listen, if I can't make it on my own, wouldn't it be nice for me to be dependent on the government?
At least I have some place to look when I need something.
It is absolutely one of the forces that is undermining the next generation.
This idea that there's nothing out there for you, that all these lives, by the way, don't just exist today.
They never did exist. It was all a big fiction.
And yes, ultimately, this idea of undermining basic concepts of property rights, of the individual's autonomy, freedom, this hive mentality that we're seeing being propagated, and most importantly, dependence on government.
And this is why you're seeing young people react and say, well, maybe we need something different.
Maybe the system is broken, isn't working.
And that's why the work you're doing and others are doing is so critical today to remind and for the first time educate young people about what is truly happening.
Well, I'm really happy to see that you have put these arguments into a book.
Hopefully that will be at least one of the educational tools that we need to help articulate these principles in a fresh way.
And get people to understand that there is this America.
It actually existed.
It articulated these ideals.
And we have a chance to live in that America again.
Michael Wilkerson, thank you very much for joining me.
The book, by the way, guys, Why America Matters, the website, stormwall.com.
Thanks, Nash. Thanks, everyone. Drawing on my book, What's So Great About Christianity, I'm talking about the impact of Christianity in remaking, reshaping Western civilization, introducing new ideas, new principles, even, you may say, new feelings.
But one of the ideas we've talked about is how Christianity emphasizes not only the ordinary man, the affirmation of ordinary life, but also human nature as defective, as bent, as warped.
And Christianity pushed institutions to be built based upon this recognition of the fallenness, if you will, of human nature.
And one of those institutions that emerged, well, it emerged slowly, initially just money and trade, but later a full-blown system of capitalism.
And capitalism is really based upon the idea that human nature is self-interested.
interested.
Now, let's remember that the self-interest, the left makes a big mistake here, they often think the self-interest is coming out of capitalism.
No, the self-interest is coming out of human nature.
Capitalism is a mechanism or a system for dealing with it.
In other words, for channeling self-interest in such a way that it promotes the material betterment, the common good, you might say, of society.
But it also does something else that is often missed in the process.
It makes entrepreneurs into better people.
In other words, it makes entrepreneurs draw on what you can call the better angels of their nature.
Now, how does it do that?
Well, as I say, selfishness is part of the human condition.
You can't really root it out.
Now, there have been some, well, both religious and secular attempts through various sects and, in some cases, cults.
Well, let's get the selfishness out of human nature.
I mean, communism is really a kind of preposterous and unworkable scheme to do this.
But Christianity has a more realistic view and that is that the self-interest is sort of baked in.
It's there as part of human nature.
We need to channel it, steer it, so that through the invisible hand of competition, the energies of the capitalist are going to produce abundance from which the whole society can benefit.
Capitalism encourages entrepreneurs to act with consideration for others, even if their ultimate motive is to benefit themselves.
So while the profit is the final goal, the entrepreneur is going to sit around and spend his day and week and month doing what?
Well, figuring out how to better serve the needs of both actual but also potential customers.
I want to bring in new customers.
I've got to think about what's going to make their life better, and I'm going to have to design and promote and market products that do that.
This is how I put it in the book.
I say, one may say that capitalism civilizes greed in much the same way that marriage civilizes lust.
And the point being, lust-like greed is part of the human condition.
Can't root it out. So what do you do?
You develop an institution that brings out, that channels it, steers it, in the case of marriage, obviously toward mutual love and the raising of children.
And of course, in the case of markets, it's channeling the self-interest in a way that makes...
The entrepreneur better off, his consumers better off, and society better off.
I want to talk about a second idea kind of related to this one, but not identical with it.
And that is the way in which Christianity introduced the idea of progress.
Now, the idea of progress is a huge idea.
There's a kind of a wonderful book written many decades ago by J.B. Borey.
It's just called The Idea of Progress.
So if you want to read it, it talks about how in most cultures, and in fact, even in Western culture, going back to the Greeks and the Romans...
There wasn't really an idea of progress, something we take for granted today.
And in ancient societies and ancient Greece and Rome, society was either seen as cyclical, meaning things go up, things come down, things kind of move around in a circle.
Nothing really gets better.
Some things get better, other things get worse.
But this is the way things are.
But there was a second line of thought, and we see this in some of Greek literature, the idea that things were better in the past.
So things are not better in the future, but the present is a degeneration from the past.
Think, for example, of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The idea is that the greatest people lived a long time before us.
They become a model for us.
Why? Because we are not as strong.
We are not as beautiful.
We don't have the same kind of deep moral predicaments that they do.
So the best we can do is live in a kind of pale imitation of them.
Well, Christianity introduces this new concept of progress, which is built on the religious idea of providence.
So what is providence? Providence is the idea that history has a purpose.
History is directional.
One can speak, for example, of the arrow of history.
And history is moving toward the ultimate fulfillment, which is, of course, the return of Jesus Christ to the earth.
And so, you can almost think of history as the prehistory of Christianity.
This is the Old Testament, the life before Jesus.
Then you have Jesus, and you have, you may say, the Christian era.
And then you have the ultimate return of Christ.
So this notion of a providential plan, a plan in which it's not that there aren't bad things that happen.
There is the fall. There is the submission to sin.
But there is also ultimate resurrection.
There's ultimate redemption.
And so the point here is that our modern idea of progress...
Which is that, in its most simple form, I would describe it this way, our children are going to live better than we are.
That there are going to be constant improvements, not only in the material condition of society, but in some ways even in the moral condition of society.
Think, for example, about things like...
Like dowry and bride burning and arranged marriage and even slavery, segregation.
So these are practices that were once, in various forms, widespread, commonplace, taken for granted.
But now they have been, I think, in a good way, questioned, challenged, in many cases abolished.
So this is genuine progress.
And the point is that this idea of progress, the underlying notion that we expect and work for and push for things to get better and better and better, this is in fact the secularization of a Christian idea.
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