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Jan. 5, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! Dinesh D’Souza Podcast EP489
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Coming up, I'm going to reveal the essence of the latest Twitter files which reveals how the Russians are coming was a democratic and deep state hoax from the outset.
I'll reflect on the root cause of the resistance against Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker.
I'll show how today's cancel culture extends from James Madison to Jordan Peterson and why human beings are language animals.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Debbie and I were talking about the thumbnail for today, and she's like, what do you mean by the Russians are coming?
And I'm like, well, let's go to the movie Red Dawn and show a bunch of Russian tanks, because what we have now, and by the way, this is not coming from the right, the left is using the sort of Russia scare to promote a massive hoax.
We now know this to be the Russia collusion hoax.
And it's not that the Twitter files is telling us something new about that.
We've known that this is a hoax for a while.
Even the left is now kind of grudgingly admitting, or they don't like to talk about it, that they perpetrated a massive hoax.
They tried to substantiate that hoax, the Mueller report and so on, they completely failed.
But the Twitter files gives you chapter and verse.
That's kind of what makes it really interesting.
And I'll give you the big takeaway.
The big takeaway is there was never any evidence of Russia collusion.
There wasn't even any evidence of widespread Russia involvement in U.S. elections.
The involvement was extremely minor, and Twitter provides a kind of window into how minor it was.
So the whole narrative was cooked up.
By the Democrats and by the deep state to deny that Trump won legitimately.
So interestingly enough, the Russia collusion hoax is a form of election denialism.
It's not giving Trump the legitimate presidency that he in fact won in 2016.
So it's really ironic the left is constantly accusing us, you're the election deniers.
No, in the modern, in the contemporary period, they invented election denialism.
They pursued it.
Even while Trump was in the White House.
Now, let's look at how this all works because that's really what we are finding out the technique of it, the behind the scenes of it.
And let's be aware that this has been going on and is going on in Facebook.
It's going on in YouTube.
We only know about it on Twitter thanks to Elon Musk.
Now, Going back to 2016 and early 2017, Twitter was not interested in doing this kind of shutting down of accounts by labeling them to be Russian intervention in U.S. politics.
Twitter basically said, well, listen, we're going to sort of let Facebook deal with this kind of thing.
We don't really see this as a big problem.
And the reason that Twitter didn't see it as a problem is it wasn't.
Now, Facebook, by the way, was announcing we're closing a lot of accounts that are of, quote, Russian origin or of suspected Russian origin.
And so there was some talk about whether Twitter would do the same.
But it turns out that the reason Facebook was doing that was completely political.
Facebook was currying favor with Mark Warner, Democratic Mark Warner and the House Intelligence Select Committee.
So Facebook had its own reasons for sort of, you may say, playing footsie with the Democrats in the Senate.
But of course, the media was portraying it as though Facebook was dealing with a serious national or international problem.
And Hillary Clinton, who by the way needed a big excuse for why she lost, jumped on board.
Yes, the Russians interfered with the election.
So not only are the Russians colluding with Trump, but the Russians are directly interfering with the election by trying to influence the American public debate on social media.
Now, what's interesting about the Twitter files is Twitter did not want any part of this.
And so the government began to ramp up the pressure by saying things like, well, you know, we're going to be—we need to take a harder look at Twitter.
We need to find out why Twitter is not doing more.
And then the media would pick up the narrative and amplify it.
So the media would call Twitter—say there were new studies that show extensive Russian involvement in U.S. politics— And so what you have here is the combined pressure of Democrats in the Senate plus the media.
And by the way, the media is going with stories that are brazenly and manifestly false.
Let's look at how this works.
Twitter sets up a Russia task force.
They sort of succumb to pressure.
They say, all right, we'll take a look at this.
And the Russia task force begins to look for Russian accounts, Russian bots.
And guess what they find? Nothing.
I'm not quoting Twitter.
Internal communications.
No evidence of a coordinated approach.
Of all the accounts found seem to be lone wolf type activity.
So one guy here, one guy there.
Different timing, different spend, different targeting, less than $10,000 in ad spend.
In other words, negligible, not going to affect U.S. elections in any way.
Then they go on and they say the results of their investigation, they find 15 high-risk accounts of which, quote, three have connections to Russia and And only two are specifically connected to the Russian government.
They go on and say, we built a new version of the model.
And they go, we're seeing substantially more suspicious accounts, but we expect to find under 20.
And yet, as this process goes forward, you find Twitter gradually succumbing to the lie, buying into the rhetoric that's coming out of the Democrats in Congress, succumbing to the pressure of the media.
And ultimately, you have the deep state actors, the agencies of the government, sending Twitter account after account after account to suppress and cancel In fact, there are, at one point, large numbers of accounts, over 250,000 accounts that they want shut down or repressed or censored. So look at the way in which there
is a complete mismatch between the reality of Russian intervention, or one should say non-intervention, and then Twitter mobilizing to deal with this non-problem. So censorship here becomes a kind of public fiction, sustained by the media, sustained by the Democrats in the Senate, and ultimately carried out by Twitter.
And so the fiction, or the fictional justification, has real-world consequences.
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Wow, yesterday, what, six, honey, or was it seven votes that they had?
And not only did McCarthy not pull it off, but it didn't even look like he was making any progress.
You had these initially 19, I think at one point it became 20, holdouts.
Evidently, McCarthy convinced one congresswoman to abstain or vote present, which would lower his threshold by one.
But obviously, that gimmick is not going to work.
He's still a long distance away from where he needs to be.
Now, I think one of the tactical mistakes that McCarthy made very early on is that he immediately moved into the Speaker's office.
So this is a case of, like, he just decided to occupy it.
He became, well, Matt Gaetz called him a squatter.
And Gates was like having none of it because he actually wrote the people who manage the logistics of the house saying, wait a minute, this guy's not Speaker.
He doesn't have the votes to be Speaker.
What's he doing moving into the Speaker's office?
So let's just say that I think McCarthy was not only premature, but he kind of had this arrogant idea.
It's got to be me. It's going to be me.
No, this opposition is going to dissolve.
And this is a theme that a lot of people have sort of taken up.
I saw an interesting and somewhat acrimonious, well, not acrimonious, Hannity was interviewing Lauren Boebert, and he was being, I think, a little condescending, a little rude.
And Boebert, you could tell, was really fuming.
And Hannity's point was this, which I think Hannity thought was a complete knock-down, drag-out point, kind of a complete winner.
And his point was this.
Okay, Boebert, listen.
Kevin McCarthy has over 200.
You have 20.
200 is bigger than 20.
So why are you calling on Kevin McCarthy to withdraw and give in?
Why don't you give in? You have less than he does, so what is your argument for hanging in there and refusing to budge?
Now, Boebert went on to say, in fact, listen, we've been negotiating with McCarthy.
He's not bending.
He's not yielding to our demands.
And there was some back and forth about whether he is or whether he isn't.
But Hannity's bottom line seemed to be, who cares if he does or he doesn't?
This is a democratic process.
It's done by counting heads.
McCarthy has more.
In fact, not more. He has a lot more.
He has 10 times more.
And so he ought to be speaker.
I think that this is actually, as an argument, a fallacious one.
Why? Because Lauren Boebert is not running against Kevin McCarthy.
If Lauren Boebert is running against Kevin McCarthy, then it would make sense to say, democratically, McCarthy has more votes, a lot more votes, and Boebert should yield.
But, see, Kevin McCarthy is more like a guy who's trying to get a scholarship.
And to get a scholarship, you need to have, let's just say, a minimum grade point average of A-minus.
And you don't. You have a B+. So what does that mean?
You haven't met the threshold.
It's not a matter of whether you have more than other students or you're doing better than expected or there's no alternative.
It's that you have to reach this threshold in order to get the prize, which in this case is the house speakership, and you simply don't have it.
So... I think that McCarthy recognizes that the only way for him to get there—I mean, if he doesn't get there, if he's recalcitrant and stubborn, just as stubborn as Gates and Boebert and their group are with Chip Roy and all the other guys,
Anna Paulina Luna— Then McCarthy is going to have to step aside and someone else is going to have to run, someone who can, in fact, get the very broad base of GOP support that is needed in order to make it across the threshold.
The other option, which appears to be kind of underway, I was reading several articles this morning about how McCarthy has been meeting behind closed doors with the, let's call it the Gang of 20.
And evidently he has, well, I mean, what else can he do?
He has been yielding.
He has been giving up, one by one, succumbing to the demands of this group, which are apparently fairly extensive.
And part of the problem for McCarthy is he can give in to some of these demands and maybe win over some of these votes.
But that's not going to do it.
See, McCarthy is not three votes or five votes short.
He needs to get the vast majority of these 20 holdouts.
And to do that, it would seem that he would need to do, well, almost a total surrender.
I think that's going to make him look a little weak if he were to do that.
In fact, I think part of what is annoying some of the McCarthy loyalists—the McCarthy loyalists, by the way, are a pretty diverse group, all the way from Dan Crenshaw to Marjorie Taylor Greene and many others— But I think part of what's annoying them is the idea that, wait a minute, why is McCarthy now yielding to the rebels?
Is he going to give them the best committee seats and then we're not going to get them?
So there's a little bit of...
This is a case where...
Where it's very tricky to be a McCarthy loyalist because, quite frankly, a lot of those people are getting savagely blasted by the Republican base.
Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's very well-liked among hardcore MAGA Republicans, I'm seeing quite a lot of people on social media basically saying, we're done with you, you've joined the establishment and so on.
By the way, I think the temperature of this rhetoric is a little out of control myself, and I hope in my own tone I haven't really contributed to it.
I've tried not to, because I think there are actually good reasons to.
There's a reason to say, all right, McCarthy is the best we're going to get.
True, this guy is not exactly, he's a little bit of a frat boy in a combat zone, but he does have the vast majority of the votes.
It's important to keep the Republican coalition together.
We certainly don't want to make any kind of deals with the Democrats.
We need to hold the House and have the House be a check on the Democratic Senate as well as on the Biden administration.
So, in other words, we've got to be careful before playing some of these high-risk games.
And yet, if the dissenters are able either by getting a different speaker, let's say a Jim Jordan, who would be much better, or Getting McCarthy to accede to their demands, they can rightly declare victory.
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It looks like cancel culture is coming for James Madison.
Now, we've seen cancel culture come for Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was a slave owner.
We've seen it come for George Washington.
Washington was a slave owner, even though he freed his slaves upon his death.
And, of course, James Madison was a slave owner.
But at the same time, these three men were vehemently opposed to the expansion, the consolidation, and most importantly the legitimation of slavery. I think they understood that slavery had become and was even in some of their own lives a staple feature.
But the point is that they wanted to move away from that and they wanted to create a constitution and a society that would be dedicated to anti-slavery principles.
Now, those principles might take some time to play out, but this is the kind of dual side of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.
Now, what's interesting about the cancel culture with regard to Madison is the way in which it operates.
Sometimes cancel culture operates from the outside.
So take a typical example of a university that, for example, puts up a sculpture to George Washington, and then there is a movement of dissent that comes from the media.
Or from some activists who say, oh, you need to take this sculpture down.
And so cancel culture operates by exercising an external pressure or influence on what an institution does.
What's happening in the case of Madison, very interestingly, is it appears that the cancellation is coming from the inside.
And by that I mean what the left does is they take groups like the Madison Society.
My first estate is Montpelier.
And there has been a concentrated effort on the part of activists to insinuate themselves into the board of the Montpelier Foundation.
And one guy in particular has been, this is a guy named James French.
He's a businessman.
And he's himself supposedly descended from slaves.
But this guy got himself on the board of the Montpelier Foundation.
He turns out to be a huge leftist.
And what he wants to do is not only bring, as he puts it, descendants of the victims of Madison.
So they try to find descendants of the slaves.
Who were on Madison's plantation, or even people in the area who were supposedly victimized by white supremacy and racism, and bring them on the board, the net effect of which is a sort of a takeover of the board by the left.
And then what this guy James French wants to do is he had something called a national summit on teaching slavery.
And he says it's not enough to talk about slavery.
It's not enough to talk about Madison and slavery.
He goes, it is imperative that these institutions unpack and interrogate white privilege and supremacy and systemic racism.
So here we go. We move from...
Let's recognize the ambiguous legacy of James Madison and discuss it.
Two, straight out critical race theory.
Straight out, you move really to a dogma that is excessive in that not only does it miss the complexity of Madison, but it is just false on its face.
Because, first of all, the move away from slavery to these broad concepts like racism, systemic privilege, is now you can talk about pretty much anything.
I'm reminded of one of the...
Essays in connection with the 1619 Project.
This was by the historian Kevin Cruz at Princeton.
He was talking about how traffic patterns in Atlanta today are a legacy of segregation.
Oh, there were once segregated communities.
Blacks lived over here. Whites lived over there.
That's why traffic jams today can be traced back.
So this is actually far removed from dealing with real oppression.
This is not a case of a guy who applies for a job.
He has the qualifications, but he's turned away.
No. This is basically nothing more than a sort of systemic racial indoctrination.
And this is really what's going on here.
Let's take a sample sentence.
This is coming from this same guy, Mr.
French. He goes,"...Madison relied on his slaves, quote, for everything, including his ideas." Stop right there.
It goes on to say his sustenance, his wealth, his power.
Okay, but I want to find out where is the proof, what's the evidence, that Madison got his ideas from his slaves?
He didn't. In fact, it's clearly known, the people who had influence on Madison, the books that Madison read, the books that Madison cited, Madison's ideas were Western.
They were European. One of his mentors was John Witherspoon at Princeton.
He cites figures like Polybius, the Roman historian.
He was a figure of the Scottish.
Madison was influenced by the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, which is to say David Hume, Adam Smith.
And so, somehow this is all swept to the side under the bogus idea that Madison got his ideas.
In fact, his anti-slavery ideas must have somehow come from his slaves.
No, the slaves were the subject of Madison's discussions, but they were not the source of his ideas.
And yet, all this kind of nonsense is going on, and I want to, in some ways, commend the fanaticism, the ingenuity of the left in penetrating these institutions so they can carry out cancellation and indoctrination, not just from the outside, but as in this case, from the inside.
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I now want to talk about the extension of the same cancel principle to the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson.
Not sure if you're familiar with Jordan Peterson, but Jordan Peterson sort of You may say, emerged on the scene several years ago as a psychologist who was challenging a lot of the entrenched doctrines of the left.
And specifically, the whole doctrine that there are no such thing as men and women.
There's no important distinction between the two sexes.
People can be whatever sex that they choose to be.
And Jordan Peterson was bringing a wealth of credentials, of intellectual sophistication, of understanding of human biology, but also understanding of human psychology to, you may say, call BS on this whole project.
And it became kind of a sensation, not just because he was a critic of the woke, but also because a lot of young men who themselves feel a little bit lost from They are a little confused.
They hear all this stuff about manliness.
And really what the left is doing is presenting a notion of manliness that's kind of unmanly, at least unmanly by traditional or historical standards.
And it leaves... Young boys who are growing up to be men a little befuddled.
And so it was refreshing for them to hear.
And so Jordan Peterson, he became almost kind of a rock star.
He'd have these large speaking events, almost like they were put on by Live Nation or one of these tour groups.
And you'd have large numbers of young people, mostly male, listening to him and kind of holding on to his every insight.
Then Jordan Peterson developed a kind of a serious illness.
He withdrew. But now he's back.
And he's back in a big way on Twitter.
And he posted recently, breaking the Ontario College of Psychologists has demanded that I submit myself to mandatory social media communication retraining with their experts for, among other things, Retweeting and he names a guy who's kind of a classical liberal and criticizing Justin Trudeau and his political allies.
So, you know, when we talk about governments going after their political opponents, that's going on in Canada also.
And in some ways, it seems to be even worse.
And I'm continuing here with Peterson.
I've been accused of harming people, although none of the complainants involved in the current situation were clients of mine, past or present.
He goes, I am to take a course in such training with documents documenting my, quote, progress or face an in-person tribunal and suspension of my right to operate as a licensed clinical psychologist.
And he says that this is all in response to about a dozen people who submitted complaints about his public statements on Twitter.
He also went on the Joe Rogan Show.
So this craziness is not...
It's all around us.
And evidently, it is...
I'm quite sure it's in Europe.
It's probably reached the far shores of Australia and New Zealand.
And it's very much in Canada.
Elon Musk, by the way, took notice of this and he told Jordan Peterson, he goes, this is crazy.
And he told Peterson, you need to talk about this on Twitter.
Have one of those so-called Twitter spaces where you are able to discuss it and people can listen in.
By the way, a very cool feature of Twitter where thousands, even tens of thousands of people can kind of listen in to someone having a public conversation.
I might do one of those...
So, will Jordan Peterson survive this?
I think he will. Frankly, his reputation is bigger than all the little idiots in his department or in this agency that are trying to sort of bring him down.
But isn't it tragic that you can take someone who's an established reputation as a clinical psychologist and try to put their professional credentials in jeopardy for doing nothing more than political dissent and questioning the woke orthodoxies of our time?
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I've talked before on the podcast about the phenomenon called ESG. And ESG is essentially an environmental, a climate sort of ruse.
And the idea here is to convince large financial firms, Citibank, JP Morgan, the...
These huge agglomerations of investment capital and convince them to only invest in companies that are somehow dedicated to the climate change And to boycott and put financial pressure on companies that are somehow outside that orbit.
It's a very menacing, destructive movement as a whole.
And the question is, how do you push back against it?
Well, the good news is that Republican states, one after the other, starting I believe with Florida, but there are many states now involved in this, they're basically saying, we are going to take our state resources and our pension funds And we're going to cut ties with any of these financial firms that are doing this kind of ESG manipulation.
In other words, we're going to push back against the financial industry, which is using the ESG as a bludgeon against private companies.
Now, the latest state to jump into the fray, this is very good news, Kentucky.
The background for this is that the legislature in Kentucky, Republican, of course, passed a law which authorized the state and authorized the state treasurer to start pulling state money out of any financial firms that are into the ESG nonsense.
And divest from these financial institutions that were somehow pushing an anti-fossil fuel agenda.
And the law says you have to notify them, give them 90 days to change their ways, and if they don't, pull the money.
And so, sure enough, Kentucky State Treasurer Allison Ball has basically declared, I'm not quoting her, The divestment policy is now in effect.
By the way, just in this past year, 2022, red states have divested something around $4.3 billion in BlackRock alone.
BlackRock, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, of these ESG financial conglomerates.
And basically what this woman in Kentucky has done is she's made a blacklist.
We're not going to be putting any money in any of these firms.
And now, what's interesting is IUC immediately that the firms are beginning to respond and start backpedaling and explaining themselves and saying, no, they don't really do this or they don't do it in the way that the red states are saying they do.
Here's BlackRock. BlackRock's only agenda is delivering the best financial results for our clients.
That's nonsense on the face of it, because the simple fact of it is, if you're just doing that, you don't need an ESG agenda at all.
You just find out what companies are doing well, you invest in those, and that's the end of the story.
The very fact that you're introducing this new element shows that you have some other factor, in this case an ideological factor, that is driving you.
BlackRock goes on to say, BlackRock does not boycott energy companies, and it invests in the energy sector.
By the way, the Kentucky blacklist includes JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Climate First Bank, British Bank, HSBC, Bank of Finland, a couple of Swedish banks, including Swedbank.
And again, JPMorgan, which is on the list, says, oh, no, no, no, don't boycott us.
We have investments in a number of Kentucky companies, including Louisville Gas and Electric, Kentucky Utilities.
And also other national electric companies that operate in Kentucky, including Duke Energy and Tennessee Valley Authority.
The good news here, and this is really what I'm getting at, is that pressure works.
Republican states for a long time did absolutely nothing.
They stood helplessly by as their industries were targeted.
They allowed the left to run amok, in other words.
But finally, we're seeing, and we're seeing this really across the board and across the country, Republicans are getting tougher, they're waking up, they're getting more organized, they're becoming more strategic, they're becoming more clever, and as a result, they're starting to see some results.
One of the philosophers that I like to read, one of the living philosophers, by the way, there aren't too many living philosophers worth reading.
The philosophers are rare.
You know, you go back to the 5th century BC in Greece and you'll find a handful of them, notably Plato and Aristotle.
You sweep through the entire Middle Ages and you get maybe four or five And in the 18th century, you can probably find 9 or 10, maybe a handful in the 19th century, a few in the 20th.
So philosophers should be distinguished, by the way, from professors of philosophy.
A philosopher is to a professor of philosophy kind of the way a prophet is to a Sunday school teacher.
Sunday school teachers are rather common, but they shouldn't be confused with prophets.
Now, one of the really good philosophers, I think, one of the few living philosophers worth reading is Charles Taylor, longtime philosopher at Oxford, but he's Canadian and he's now back at McGill University, professor of philosophy, emeritus. I'm reading his new book, his most recent book, and it's this one here.
It's called The Language Animal.
Not actually his best-known work.
I mean, it's new. His best-known work, which is worth studying, and I might sometime do a sort of philosophy course with it.
It's called Sources of the Self, a real masterpiece.
Now, a dense book and something that you should read slowly in pieces and sort of digest.
But The Language Animal is really about a single theme that I... very interesting.
And it is the role of language in the way that we perceive reality.
Let's think about this. We perceive reality...
But we perceive reality through the lens of language.
So we see a table and we go, that's a table!
That's how we recognize it to be a table.
Language gives us a way, if you will, to understand and to know what reality is.
So what is the relationship of language to reality?
That's really what the language animal is all about.
For many centuries, language was considered, well, I would call it unproblematic.
And it was unproblematic for the reason that language was seen to be, well, kind of a mirror of reality.
Language shows us reality the way it is.
And since language does that, language is, you could almost call it transparent.
You don't need to focus on language.
Language is just kind of the window pane through which we are able to see reality as it is.
So let's just talk about reality.
Let's forget about the language, which is merely the technique for perceiving reality.
And this is really what Charles Taylor is arguing against.
He's arguing against what he considers to be this kind of very limited, narrow, truncated view of reality.
It was a view of reality, by the way, that was advanced by Locke.
Locke talks about language as, you may say, picturing reality.
Language is almost like a camera.
And you go to the ocean and you take a picture.
And language reflects the ocean in that way.
Now, the picture is not the same as the ocean.
Obviously, the ocean isn't jumping out and going into the camera.
But the camera is giving you an accurate image of reality itself.
And Charles Taylor doesn't sort of deny this.
He accepts that language does this.
It gives us a picture of things.
But he goes, it does a lot more than that.
And he goes, when you look at the richness of language, when you look at all the different things that language does, you see that language is also a very powerful tool.
And that's a key word, tool.
For shaping the way in which we understand not just reality out there, but also ourselves.
Language changes us, in other words.
It's not this transparent windowpane.
You look through a windowpane and you're the same before you looked through the windowpane as you are really after.
But Charles Taylor goes, no, this is not like that.
Language is more of a vehicle for not only observation, but for self-expression, for self-understanding, and for transformation.
It transforms not just ourselves on the inside, but through what Taylor calls dialogic language.
In other words, language is not just for me.
I don't invent a private language and start talking to myself and go, I called us a table, I called us a chair.
No, we engage in language with others.
I'm talking to Debbie, or I'm talking to a group of students.
And so the process of engaging in language, says Taylor, has this kind of transforming effect.
The philosopher Wittgenstein, over the course of his career, wrote two books.
And the two books are interesting because they sort of contradict each other.
The first book, which was called Attractatus, is really about this notion of language picturing reality.
Language is in that sense sort of like, let's call it, like a camera.
But in a later work, which was called Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein changed his mind.
And he treated language really more like a knife and fork.
Language is like a tool.
Language is not a camera.
Language is simply something, it's a device that we make use of.
And so the meaning of words is not their identical resemblance to something out there in the world.
The meaning of words is more like tools that we use in order to achieve our purposes.
If you want to express yourself in a certain way, you choose a phrase, a metaphor, a joke, an analogy.
And so this is an interesting book, not fundamentally, you may ask what its political implications, I don't really know.
But what it's helping us do, which is I think what philosophy in general does, is take something that we use unselfconsciously.
We're all the time engaging in language, kind of from the time we wake up.
Sometimes, even when we dream, we're thinking in terms of language.
We say things in our dreams.
But we're not aware of what language is or what language does.
And that's what this book, The Language Animal, helps us to pay attention to.
I've been talking in the last several days about the way in which Christianity shaped fundamental Western values, human dignity, equality of rights, the affirmation of ordinary life.
And I want to conclude this section with a reference to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
In fact, I began the discussion of this particular chapter with a quotation from Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is famous for the saying that God is dead.
It refers to a scene in one of his books.
The book is called The Gay Science.
And you have a philosopher who comes out of the cave.
His name is Zarathustra.
And he starts announcing, proclaiming the death of God.
Now, all kinds of people come around him and they start mocking him and insulting him.
And you might think that these are religious believers who are upset by what the philosopher is saying, but no, these are actually young skeptics, young atheists.
And they think that this old man is kind of ridiculous, but he turns around and berates them.
And he goes on to say what I want to focus on.
Basically, his point is not to simply declare that God doesn't exist or that it's not possible today to believe in God.
What he's really getting at, and it's a message more for atheists than it is for Christians, You atheists are sort of fools because you believe in all these sort of values that you swear by.
You believe in social justice because, of course, you believe in human equality.
You believe in redistribution because everyone deserves a share.
And he goes, where do you get all this nonsense?
Where do you get this absurd idea of human equality, this preposterous idea of human dignity, this babbling nonsense that human life is precious or has value?
See, the point is, what Nietzsche says is, look, these values came into the West and into the world because of Christianity.
God is, in fact, the author of these values, both historically, but also philosophically, conceptually.
Think about it. If human beings are a mere extension of animals, why should human life have any more dignity than, say, animal life?
Animals don't hesitate to eat each other.
Sometimes they kill their young.
They act in ways that we as humans would consider barbaric or savage.
And Nietzsche's point is, why shouldn't humans be like that?
What is the argument against that?
Well, the argument against that is that, well, there's a divine author of the universe and he made man in his image and he gave man a special value and a dignity and therefore these kinds of things that are common in the animal kingdom should not be done by man.
So Nietzsche's point is this.
You've got to realize that if God goes, if we have the death of God, if we stop believing in Jesus and in Christianity and the Christian influence begins to subside and abate in our culture, that has consequences.
So another way to put it is that it is a preposterous illusion to believe that you can have We're good to go.
It was really focused on the Jews alone.
It was a sort of tribal God and a tribal morality, and it didn't, at least in its original conception, appear to apply universally.
Now, there was an assertion, and there is in the Old Testament, that God is universal.
But in many ways, the Jews interpreted God as their God, very different from, say, the Greek gods or the Roman gods.
So, it is Christianity that universalized the principles of Judaism while at the same time modifying them in considerable ways.
Remember that Christians, for example, don't follow Jewish dietary laws.
They don't follow a lot of the codes and even some of the commandments, not the Ten Commandments, but some of the other more elaborate commandments that are laid out in various passages of the Hebrew Scriptures.
So Nietzsche's point is that as society becomes more secular, it's going to start losing the shadows of God.
It's going to start losing not just the things that, by the way, Christians care about.
For example, you may say, well, Christians care about the dignity of human life.
So you're saying, Dinesh, that, let's say, abortion or infanticide is going to become more common.
Yeah, I am saying that.
But, says Nietzsche, there are things that atheists believe in.
Atheists care about the idea of, let's say, being nice or being compassionate or being decent to other people.
Nietzsche goes, there's really no good reason to do that.
Atheists believe that you shouldn't treat other people as objects or things and take advantage of them through an exercise of power, either sexually or brutalize people or even kill them for your enjoyment.
Nietzsche goes, why not?
Why shouldn't you? If it actually gives you more pleasure to kill somebody else, and sure, then he may suffer more pain, but that's his pain, not yours.
So the point Nietzsche's getting at is all of this kind of becomes suddenly open to question.
There's no automatic basis.
You can say that morality exists within you, but again, if you don't believe that there's some sort of conscience that's been implanted in you that we human beings all share, and if we all share the same conscience, well, where does that come from?
Who put it in us?
It certainly didn't evolve in a certain sense, because after all, evolution is based on self-interest, and conscience often militates against self-interest.
So, in sum, what Nietzsche is saying is the death of Christianity means the gradual extinction of values like human dignity, the right against torture, the rights of equal treatment asserted by women, minorities, and the poor.
Nietzsche goes, well, you're going to have to give some of those, or really all of those, up as well.
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