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Jan. 11, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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THE PFIZER CONNECTION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast EP493
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Coming up, I'll expose how a Pfizer board member played an active role in Twitter censorship of the COVID debate and specifically the efficacy of the vaccine.
While the left blames the Brazil uprising on insufficient social media censorship, I'll argue that censorship is the problem, not the solution.
Newsmax host Greg Kelly joins me.
We're going to talk about his new book, Justice for All.
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.
The latest drop of the Twitter files comes from the journalist Alex Berenson.
Now, I've had Alex on the show Some months ago now.
And Alex has been focused on science reporting and of late specifically on reporting about COVID. And what's kind of interesting about these Twitter files is that the Twitter files involve Alex himself.
So it's particularly appropriate that he be the one to blow the whistle on it.
And I think Elon Musk is being very clever, very strategic.
Matt Tybee, Barry Weiss, and now Alex Berenson.
There have been a couple of others as well.
Now, this story begins with a guy named Scott Gottlieb.
And Scott Gottlieb is a director of Pfizer.
Pfizer, the medical company.
And he's kind of a big name on Twitter.
He has about 550,000 Twitter followers.
In any event, it turns out that he sees a tweet, Gottlieb does, and he goes, whoa, this is a tweet that may not be good for Pfizer.
This is a tweet that might hurt Pfizer mRNA vaccine sales.
And the tweet was from, yeah, it wasn't from some activist, wasn't from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wasn't even from Berenson.
It was from Dr. Brett Giroir, a physician who also had been himself, as Gottlieb was, head of the Food and Drug Administration.
The tweet was not an anti-vaccine tweet.
In fact, it ended by saying, get vaccinated.
But the tweet went on to say, hey, listen, it says that the Um, the.
The immunity that you get from the vaccine may not be as great as natural immunity.
In fact, natural immunity provides more protection than vaccine immunity.
Now, this is, in fact, an accurate statement by Dr.
Girard. And, in fact, the doctor cited a prominent study, a peer-reviewed study, that showed this.
So it wasn't just that he was claiming it, it was that he was documenting it.
And it's not even that Scott Gottlieb disagreed with him.
Scott Gottlieb agreed that the factual statement being made was true.
And yet... Gottlieb, by the way, as I mentioned, former FDA commissioner.
He's even today a prominent contributor on places like MSNBC, CNBC. And he's, as I mentioned, a senior board member of Pfizer.
In fact, not just an ordinary board member.
He sits sort of on their central committee that reviews vaccines and other such topics.
In any event, what...
What Gottlieb does is he recognizes that Pfizer, which, by the way, had about $81 billion of sales in 2021, out of which half of that money came from one source— You guessed it, the vaccine. So this is big money for Pfizer.
And by the way, Gottlieb receives himself big money for Pfizer.
So what does he do? He writes, he emails Todd O'Boyle, a top lobbyist in the Twitter Washington office, and he says the post is, quote, corrosive.
Notice, not inaccurate, but corrosive.
Why? Because he says, quote, if it ends up going viral, he worries that it will, quote, end up going viral and driving news coverage.
So, Twitter takes a look at it, and they basically say, hey, listen, it doesn't violate our rules.
In fact, the tweet appears to be accurate, and yet Twitter ends up flagging the tweet, putting warning tags on it, which are themselves misleading.
This tweet is misleading tag, and prevents people from seeing the tweet, right?
And it's tagged even now, even though there have been multiple studies that have come out since the tweet confirming the accuracy of the tweet.
Now, about a week later, Gottlieb strikes again, and he goes back to Twitter and he complains about a tweet from a guy named Justin Hart.
Now, Justin Hart is one of these guys who's kind of a, you could call him a COVID vaccine skeptic, but he has 100,000 followers on Twitter.
And basically what Hart says is that...
You don't need these vaccines to be administered to children.
The mortality rate for children in dying from COVID is extremely low.
Whoop-de-doo. Accurate statement.
Whether children need or don't need vaccines is a point of view.
But there's a reasonable basis for thinking that children need these vaccines much less than anyone else.
And yet, this is the key, and yet...
Gottlieb knows that Pfizer is pushing vaccines on children.
And again, a big moneymaker for Pfizer.
In fact, very soon the Pfizer shot would be approved for children 5 to 11.
And this is a huge new market for Pfizer.
If parents can be convinced that their children need to, they can get COVID, they need to have a shot.
And so sure enough, Here is Gottlieb telling Twitter that, quote, former FDA Commissioner Gottlieb.
This is Twitter's internal communications.
They're saying, former FDA Commissioner Gottlieb thinks that this tweet is a problem.
Now, they don't say Pfizer board member Gottlieb thinks this is a problem because, of course, the Twitter people will go, well, yeah, obviously you think so because money is flowing into his pocket.
Money is flowing into Pfizer's pockets.
And so what does Twitter do?
They take a look at it. Now, in this case, they don't respond.
But they don't, in fact, ban this particular tweet.
But Gottlieb is not to be deterred.
He now takes on Alex Berenson, goes after him.
And by the way, what we're seeing here is a kind of a coordination network.
You've got people like Gottlieb, formerly in the government, now working for Pfizer, working in tandem with people in the Biden White House.
People like Andrew Slavitt.
And so you have a, you could almost call it a public-private collaboration.
It involves the government.
It involves people who migrate inside and outside a government.
It involves think tanks.
It involves nonprofit foundations.
And so this is the censorship regime.
As I mentioned before, it exists with Meta or Facebook.
It exists with YouTube and The only place it's being exposed is Twitter.
Now, Alex Berenson says he's going to file a lawsuit over this.
And I think this kind of thing is really important because we need the courts and specifically the Supreme Court to look at this massive collaboration, this public-private collaboration, epitomized by people like Gottlieb to suppress our right to free speech.
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When the uprisings began in Brazil, the takeover of the parliament and the court, a number of the federal government buildings...
There were immediate comparisons in the US media to January 6th.
And when I saw those, I was like, here it comes.
In no time, you're going to see the US media call for a similar response in Brazil to what the Biden administration did after January 6, which is not only the rounding up the expulsion of the protesters, the going after them, but also demands for a new regime of intensified censorship, shutting down of political opponents.
And sure enough, that is happening in Brazil now.
Lula da Silva, the new president, hasn't gotten on board with it, but he's, I think, figuring out how he should respond.
But here is an article in the Washington Post.
Again, this is just so predictable.
You could almost have artificial intelligence write these kinds of articles at this point.
But here it is. How Social Media Helped Drive Mayhem in Brazil.
And what do they do? They kind of go through Brazilian social media and they point out that there were posts where people said, oh, come to the Capitol.
And there were criticisms made on social media of Alexandre de Moraes, who's by and large the judge that has been protecting Lula da Silva.
In fact, this judge himself seems to have censorship powers in Brazil.
He's been shutting down prominent right-wing figures in Brazilian politics, preventing them from being able to post, preventing them from being able to speak in public.
But there's an interesting paragraph in this article that I want to highlight because it shows how things have changed at Twitter.
So here's the paragraph. Billionaire Elon Musk, who completed his acquisition of Twitter in late October, fired the company's entire staff in Brazil except for a few salespeople.
Turns out he fired eight people in Sao Paulo who were these content moderator types.
So in other words, Twitter had a censorship regime.
Its own team, its own Parag Agarwal, Vijaya Gade, all these sort of online thugs that we had here in the United States, they had their equivalents in Brazil.
And they were evidently...
What they were doing is shutting down the content of the Bolsonaro people.
So think about it. Just as there was suppression of the Hunter Biden story, just as essentially Twitter was unleveling the playing field, trying to help Biden get across the finish line, Twitter in Brazil was doing the same thing for Lula.
So the point here is not that Twitter played a part in the insurrection, blah, blah, blah.
The real point is that Twitter in Brazil seems to have helped Lula get elected in the first place.
Twitter was actually part of the problem.
So a big kudos to Elon Musk for recognizing this and basically booting out the entire Twitter staff in Brazil.
Now, of course, the Washington Post is really upset.
And they basically say, quote, they're quoting a source in Brazil.
The person said they were not aware of any team's actively moderating rule-breaking content on Twitter in Brazil.
So basically, the post is like...
Now that we've had an insurrection in Brazil, we need to have all this content moderation.
And just when we need more content moderation, along comes Elon Musk and he fires the content moderating team in Brazil.
Now look. When you have something like what happened in Brazil, same as with January 6th, you have to ask, why are so many people?
In Brazil, it's hundreds of thousands of people.
I don't know if you've seen the images of the size of these crowds, but they are mammoth crowds.
Why do so many people think that the election was corrupt and stolen?
First of all, we know that Lula was corrupt.
In fact, he served prison time for being corrupt.
So this is not exactly an honest guy.
Why not... Debate these things.
Why not inquire about them?
Why not investigate them instead of trying to shut down your opponents, which only intensifies their suspicions that you are rigging the game.
So my point is the left rigs the game.
Then when people are up to it and they start screaming, it's like, shut them down because they're on to us.
The real motive for the censorship is not to curtail hate speech, not to prevent insurections, but to shut down political opponents once and for all.
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With an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, Kevin McCarthy and the House Republicans seem to have, well, hit the ground running, and I'm really happy to see it.
And I gotta say, it is partly the consequence of the move of the House Freedom Caucus, and specifically the 20 or so members of the Freedom Caucus, people like Mary Miller, like Boebert, like Matt Gaetz, and others, who created a kind of blocking phalanx and said to Kevin McCarthy, if you want to get across the finish line, Or get past us, you're going to have to agree to some things.
And Kevin McCarthy agreed, as it turns out, to a lot of things.
And I'm happy to see that he is so far doing them and doing them in quick order.
So this is really good.
I'll be discussing the Kevin McCarthy agenda over the next several days, but I want to focus today on two things.
One is the The law that was, well, passed through the House on pretty much a straight Republican vote to defund the 87,000 IRS tax agents.
I want to talk about that, and I also want to talk briefly about Kevin McCarthy booting Adam Schiff, AOC, Swalwell, and Ilhan Omar from their committees.
So I commend the House for doing both these things.
They're excellent things to do.
But interestingly, the first one does not have the same practical consequence as the second.
So let's look at them in turn.
Defunding the 87,000 tax agents.
First of all, That doesn't stop the IRS from, A, getting the money that was allocated by the Congress and signed into law by Biden, and B, it doesn't prevent the IRS from going ahead and hiring more agents.
Now, they're not hiring 87,000 audit agents.
They're talking about hiring 87,000 people over 10 years.
I audit agents and the rest of them, all kinds of backup IRS personnel who answer the phone and do all kinds of other tasks, send out the mail, file reports, blah, blah, blah.
So, but the point is that the IRS was going to substantially ramp up its operations in the IRS euphemisms and modernize them, but go after more people.
There's no question. And not just go after more fabulously wealthy people, because there's a relatively small number of those.
You don't need thousands, let alone tens of thousands of agents to handle, let's just say, the billionaires or the centimillionaires.
No. So, they're expanding IRS audits pretty much for everybody.
Now, we've got to remember that for something to become a law, it has to pass through the House, it has to pass through the Senate, it has to be signed by the President.
You need all three. And just as you need all three to pass a law, you need all three to undo a law.
So, Kevin McCarthy is not able to.
He doesn't have the power, and we shouldn't think that the IRS agents are automatically defunded.
There are other ways that the House can put pressure on the IRS, can even demoralize people who are thinking of signing up to be agents, can demand all kinds of oversight of the IRS, can have hearings, can have investigations, can regulate the way in which the IRS operates.
And the House can do that through its oversight responsibilities alone. And I hope that that is the real follow-up to make sure that you can achieve at least to some degree the objective that is being sought here, which obviously I approve of.
Now, the other thing, which is the booting of the House Democrats from their committees, this is vital.
Let's remember that the Democrats have thrown Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene off their committees.
And this is an unprecedented thing for the Democrats to do, because by and large, when you're the majority, you have control of the committees and you can nominate who the chairman is going to be.
You can also decide who your members are going to be on the committee.
But it was unheard of for one party, the Democrats, to tell the Republicans who they could have on their committees and throw people off.
And the Democrats did that.
And so Kevin McCarthy said, even at the time, that he was going to do the same thing.
And this tit for tat is critical.
We've got to do to them, quoting myself, what they do to us, because this is the only way that they're going to stop.
And the key to payback is that it needs to be a little disproportionate.
They throw two people off the committee.
We throw four people off their committees.
And so, who are the four?
Well, basically, Ilhan Omar is going to be kicked off of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Schiff and Swalwell are going to be kicked off the House Intelligence Committee.
And McCarthy is kind of blithe about it.
He goes, hey, you have Adam Smith.
He's been lying to the American people all the time.
He doesn't need to be on the Intelligence Committee.
Basically, goodbye. Quote, Eric Swalwell can't get a security clearance in the public sector.
Why would we give him a security clearance?
Now, in the House.
So sorry, he's not going to be on the Intelligence Committee.
So this is not just McCarthy, but this is the House toughening up.
And this is the House recognizing the Democrats have sort of gone beyond the rules.
They're removing the guardrails in how government is functioning.
And so we've got to teach them a lesson, give them a taste of their own medicine, and And so I commend Kevin McCarthy for acting on this right away.
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There's a university in Minnesota called Hamline University, a small Minnesota college.
And Hamline recently refused to renew the contract of an art professor named Erica Prater.
Why? Because in class she showed two famous Islamic paintings that depict the Prophet Muhammad.
One is apparently from, well these paintings are from between the 14th and the 16th century.
Now, some Muslim students complained, initially just one, but then later the university met with the sort of Islamic alliance on the campus.
And it was the usual claim of being triggered.
There's a woman, a senior named Aram Wedatala, and this individual was in the class, this woman, and she says, I'm like, this can't be real.
As a Muslim and a black person, I don't feel like I belong, and I don't think I'll ever belong in a community where they don't value me.
Now, why don't they value her?
Well, because apparently she believes that in Islam it is not allowed to show any visual depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
Now, the professor, by the way...
Erica Prater was well aware that it is controversial in Islam to show depictions of Muhammad.
And so before she even showed these paintings, which by the way are famous paintings, as I mentioned, from between the 14th and 16th century, she said that this is controversial.
She kind of warned...
I'm showing you this image for a reason and that there is this common thinking that Islam completely forbids outright any figurative depictions or any depictions of holy personages.
And then she goes on to say, while many Islamic cultures do strongly frown on this practice, I would like to remind you there is no one monolithic Islamic culture.
In fact, What Professor Prater is pointing out is that there have been intellectual and aesthetic traditions in Islam going through the centuries that have taken diverse positions on this issue.
And yet, the school basically goes that the sensitivities of Muslims are more important than academic freedom.
I mean, this is literally said by the president of the university, Fainese Miller.
It was important that our Muslim students as well as other students feel safe, supported, and respected both in and out of our classrooms.
So, no academic freedom.
Now, very interestingly, there is a movement led by a professor of Islamic art, Christian Gruber at the University of Michigan, 7,000 signatures demanding that the Hamline Board of Trustees do an investigation, and the Foundation for Individual Rights has filed a complaint in exactly the right place.
It is with the Higher Learning Commission, which is the accreditation agency that oversees Hamline, and a Princeton professor.
This is the Princeton politics professor, Keith Whittington, wrote a letter on behalf of the Foundation for Individual Rights, and here's what he says.
If a professor of art history cannot show college students significant works of art for fear that offended students or members of the community could get that professor fired for doing so, then there is simply no serious commitment to academic freedom at that institution, and indeed, No serious commitment to higher education.
So I think this is the key point.
I don't know if Hamline University even cares about really educating its students.
Frankly, I don't even know who Hamline is.
Maybe this is just some guy who won Lotto.
Listen, I'm going to start a university.
It's going to be a joke of a university.
We're going to have joke professors, joke students, and nobody cares about learning anything.
In that case, this kind of half-baked way of operating might seem okay.
But you know what? This is a university that does come under, it is accredited, We're good to go.
I don't like what the professor said in class.
Therefore, not only do I get the professor to retract and apologize, the professor actually did.
But I'm going to get the professor to get fired so I can show my power so nobody else dreams of going down this path in the future.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast someone I think you know, Greg Kelly, anchor of the Greg Kelly Reports on Newsmax TV, host of the Greg Kelly Show on WABC, also the Greg Kelly podcast.
By the way, Greg Kelly was formerly White House correspondent for Fox News.
He's also a retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, and he has a new book, which we're going to talk about, and it's called Justice for All, Justice for All.
You can follow him on Twitter, at GregKellyUSA.
Greg, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you. I've really enjoyed coming on your shows over the years.
I've been in the interview subject and you've been doing the interview.
I want to turn the camera around and help people to get to know you better.
So, tell us a little bit about your story, just where you grew up, and a little bit about your family, a little bit about how you became interested in the kind of work that you do now.
Of course. Thank you, Dinesh, very much.
Great to be here. Thank you for 2,000 Mules, by the way.
I grew up in suburban New York City on Long Island.
My father was a police officer.
My mother was a nurse.
One sibling. Happy childhood.
My father had a very steady income.
He was a police officer.
He was increasing in rank.
I was oblivious to this.
He became ultimately the police commissioner when I was in college.
Sometimes people think I have a privileged upbringing because my dad was the chief of police.
He was very much a policeman through most of my childhood.
He had been in the Marine Corps and I was intrigued by what that gave him.
I once asked him why he joined the Marines and he said, to be with the best.
And it kind of resonated with me and I thought, wow, maybe that's for me.
And I was also very intrigued by airplanes.
Our house was about maybe six miles away from Kennedy Airport.
And back then, planes all looked different from each other.
You had 727s, 747s, 707s, DC-8s.
And they were fascinating to look at.
They were coming from all over the world.
And I fell in love with aviation and the idea of travel.
And ultimately, I became a Marine Corps pilot.
Served nine years active duty and enjoyed every moment of it.
Got to fly over Iraq, landed on aircraft carriers.
I knew I wouldn't get out of the Marine Corps at the first opportunity though.
My father spent only three years in the Corps.
I actually only spent my minimum commitment.
I owed them five years after flight school and flight school took four years.
I was more or less apolitical in terms of my ideology, fascinated by politics, particularly Richard Nixon.
I loved his story.
I loved how, through sheer ability, he achieved so much.
You know, Kennedy once said of Nixon, when he left in a huff on election night in 1960, Kennedy said, well, he left like he came in.
No class.
And somebody pointed out that when it came to ability, Nixon and Kennedy, it was actually no contest.
Nixon far exceeded Kennedy in almost every way, intellectually for sure.
And over the past 10 years, I said, I've had a political awakening.
It started in 2004 with the Iraq War, quite frankly, which I knew was a mistake.
And I was there. I had flown over Iraq.
I knew Saddam Hussein was contained, was not a threat.
And it's interesting. That was my big issue for a long time.
And I had no home in the Republican Party.
And I didn't feel comfortable in the Democrat Party.
And so many Democrats were actually for the war.
So here I am. After the Marine Corps, I went into local news, made a bit of a splash, worked my way up to Fox News, embedded during the war.
And one thing led to another, and here I am.
Now, your dad was, well, a famous guy.
He became NYPD police commissioner.
New York City was, you know, after that terrible period of the 70s, when they made all the Charles Bronson movies, it had been really cleaned up.
It was a different place in the 90s and in the 2000s.
What do you make as the son of Raymond Kelly, just looking to see the way in which it's almost like New York is now, to some degree, unraveling.
It doesn't seem to me as bad as LA or San Francisco, but it's still moving in the wrong direction, wouldn't you say?
Oh, certainly. And what's really heartbreaking is we know how to run an efficient, clean, and safe city.
You can look it up in books.
Safe Street, Safe City, a program my father initiated along with the broken windows theory.
We know how to police as a society.
We know how to do this effectively.
But something horrible happened.
The Democrats set out, I believe, to politicize police departments, number one, and to use race as a weapon to originally ensure Barack Obama's reelection back in 2012.
Here in New York, since voter turnout is so low, you can appeal to just a small number of people.
Be elected the Democrat nominee, which is tantamount to becoming mayor.
Bill de Blasio pretended the NYPD was broken.
Then he pretended to fix what wasn't broken, and now he's actually managed to break it.
One more thing on this, because my father, when he left after 12 years running the biggest police department in the world, his popularity, according to the Quinnipiac, AP, all polls, averaged about 75%, which is...
Ridiculously high. The NYPD's approval rating hovered around 70%.
It was in the low 60s among African Americans.
These are astounding numbers.
And they ruined it.
And they ruined it on purpose.
Scary. Let's take a pause.
When we come back, I want to talk, Greg, about your book, Justice for All.
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The new book, Justice for All.
Greg, talk a little bit about why you decided to write this book and what its main theme is.
Well, a year ago, I stopped riding the subway in New York City.
I couldn't go down there anymore.
It was too dangerous.
City, as you mentioned, as we talked about, falling apart.
And what really boggled my mind was that corporate America signed up for the Black Lives Matter movement so thoughtlessly and We're good to go.
Academics, liberal academics who were invited to speak at colleges and are consulting DEI programs believe in abolishing the police department, believe in abolishing prisons.
It's insanity. So I felt like there needed to be a rebuttal, a correction, and I feel like cops who are under fire...
Needed to hear from me to some degree and from all of us, more importantly, that we're still on their side.
Their job has always been tough.
Now it's been made politically toxic.
So it's a critique of Black Lives Matter and a robust defense of law enforcement, with a big exception.
I revisit January 6th.
And this is another thing that I think needed to be said, and it has not been said adequately in an organized fashion, and I do, I think, in the book, because a lot of folks feel not comfortable criticizing police officers.
They're in uniform, especially the January 6th cops, who I think were picked by For their optics.
You had the good old boy.
You had a big, tall, black guy.
You had a pretty woman.
You had a Dominican war hero from Iraq.
The people are squeamish about taking that on.
And by the way, all that's fine, but it's irrelevant.
It's what they did and what they're saying.
And I think it's approaching something akin to fascism.
When you can't question people with guns in uniform who are not elected, that's fascism.
And we're on our way there.
Well, I mean, Greg, you're saying something I think very important because what you're saying is that as conservatives, we have this strong and correct tendency to back the cops.
We recognize that society will be lawless without the cops.
We need good cops.
But there are also such a thing as bad cops.
And I want to ask you to clarify, because do you think that the bad guys on January 6th were the Capitol Police, the Capitol Police leadership?
Or do you think that the strings were being pulled higher up and they were merely carrying out what...
Other people had directed them to do, whether it's the FBI or whether it's Nancy Pelosi and her gang.
Who's responsible for the events of January 6th?
Well, number one, it was a massive security failure, obviously.
And after a day like that, you don't hand out gold medals.
You don't invite police officers to the White House and recognize them.
You don't. There were heroic cops in the aftermath of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
They were not celebrated.
And I understand why, given the situation.
So, so many questions about January 6th are unanswered, but more confusingly for me, they went unasked.
Nobody even asked these questions.
Why did those three cops walk away 30 seconds before Ashley Babbitt was shot and killed?
Why was Ashley Babbitt shot and killed?
There's not a police department in the country that would say that that was a...
They talk about good and bad shootings.
That was a bad shooting.
No doubt about it.
We saw cops waving people in.
So, number one, You don't celebrate that kind of performance.
But yes, I do think that there's the higher-ups, there's sinister forces, the FBI. Christopher Wray essentially admitted that there were FBI personnel in the crowd.
And at one point, it never occurred to me that there may have been federal law enforcement informants inside the Capitol before the protesters got there.
Never occurred to me. But a Louisiana congressman asked that question of Christopher Wray.
Can you tell us that there were not FBI? And he would not answer the question.
And he got visibly flustered and nervous.
So the Capitol Hill police is not to be celebrated at this moment.
I think it's a bad police department.
And right now you have Officer Dunn in uniform with a gun telling people, newly elected members of Congress, that he's looking forward to working with them, but you better do this, this and this right.
He's tweeted this.
He's a he is a social media force now.
That's crazy stuff.
So I know what you mean.
The rank and file, you know, we want to support them.
And obviously, I think there are about 1,800 police officers.
And some of them are great.
But they have a cultural systemic problem.
And it's also beyond the department.
Greg, this sounds like both a needed and important book, and thank you for writing it.
Guys, the book is called Justice for All, and my guest has been Greg Kelly.
Greg, thank you very much. Dinesh D'Souza, thank you very much.
An honor, sir. All the best.
I've been talking about the tradition of Christian rationalism, a rationalism that is not found, a philosophical rationalism that you don't find in other religions.
And this laid the foundation, the anchor, if you will, for modern science.
I talked yesterday about Aquinas' rational argument for the existence of God.
That's based on causation.
I now want to turn to the Christian thinker Anselm and his so-called ontological argument for the existence of God.
A startling type of proof.
But the important point I want to make is it's a proof anchored in reason alone.
At no point does Anselm appeal to supernatural revelation or even to faith.
He begins by defining God.
He says God is, quote,"...that than which no greater can be thought." And Anselm's point is that this is a definition that everyone can agree with.
Whether or not you think God exists, an atheist can go, yeah, when we say God, what we mean is that than which no greater can be thought.
It's a widely accepted definition.
And he says, look, we have to have some idea of God in our mind.
And then we can debate whether that idea of God exists only in the mind or exists also in reality.
So now Anselm proceeds to the critical part of his proof, and he says, look, that than which no greater can be thought can either exist in the mind alone, or it can exist in the mind and in reality.
And then Anselm goes, well, which is greater?
Is it greater to exist only in the mind, or is it greater to exist in the mind plus in reality?
He goes, obviously, it's greater to exist in both.
It's greater to exist in the mind and in reality.
So, for example, which is greater?
A unicorn that exists only in your mind, or a unicorn that exists in your mind and also in the world?
And Anselm's point is that if you concede this, then you concede that God exists.
And you might go, wait, wait, what?
Did I miss something? Anselm's point is, let's come back to the original definition.
God is that than which no greater can be thought.
And if that than which no greater can be thought exists only in the mind, it wouldn't be as great as that than which no greater can be thought existing both in the mind and in reality.
So this is the so-called ontological proof.
And you might have to sort of read it or play this back a couple of times to sort of take it in.
But the proof is remarkably difficult to...
We kind of feel like something might be wrong with it because, wait a minute, it doesn't seem to appeal to any evidence in the world.
But nevertheless, it's a proof that is quite hard to refute.
Many philosophers have tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to do a refutation.
And some very famous thinkers, including...
Descartes and Leibniz considered this proof by Anselm, and they themselves gave variations of it, to be valid, to be sound.
Now, some of the so-called new atheists have tried to sort of laugh off this proof.
Here, by the way, is Christopher Hitchens.
He actually gives the example of a child in a novel who's asked why the child believes in dragons.
And the child goes, if there's a word dragon, then there once must have been dragons.
And of course, Hitchens' point is, no, just the fact that you can conceive of a dragon doesn't necessarily mean that dragons exist in reality.
Now, Hitchens' argument against Anselm is not really original.
In fact, there was a monk in Anselm's own time.
His name was Gornillo.
And Gornillo accused Anselm of making a kind of illicit leap or transition from the conceptual approach.
To the existential. In other words, from the mind, something we can conceive of, to something that exists in the world.
Garnillo gave a memorable example of a kind of the greatest ever island that ever existed.
And he says, we can imagine this island, palm trees, a kind of limitless supply of coconuts, a beautiful ocean all around it.
And he goes, just because you can imagine this island doesn't prove that there is such an island.
And And so, what would Anselm say in refutation of this?
Well, I think what Anselm would say is, listen, my proof does not presume that everything that you can imagine necessarily exists.
That's a misstatement of the proof.
The proof only says that that than which no greater can be thought must exist. Why? Because it is greater for that than which no greater can be thought to exist in the mind and in reality than it is to exist only in the mind.
So the point here is that Anselm's proof only applies to one particular case. It doesn't apply to dragons.
It doesn't apply to islands. It only applies to that than which no greater can be thought.
It only applies in the singular case to God.
So the point here, the takeaway if you will, is that both from Aquinas and from Anselm, we see the effort to deploy reason alone to demonstrate the existence of God as And this deployment of reason, this facility...
Of trying to figure things out by using the mind, by using the lamp of reason, if you will.
This becomes an indispensable foundation for science, but it also helps to explain why science originated in the lands previously known as Christendom.
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