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Jan. 12, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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IT’S OUR TURN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast EP494
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Coming up, I'm going to celebrate the House GOP's creation of a new church committee to investigate the abuses and corruption of the FBI and the deep state.
The left is saying that Trump's classified documents are a lot worse than Biden's.
I'll show you why the opposite is the case.
David Brooks and Brett Stevens of the New York Times say the GOP is now the party of Dinesh D'Souza, and I'm going to explain why that's a very good thing.
And finally, I'm going to wonder why Paul Ehrlich never gets tired of being wrong.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
♪♪♪ America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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Kevin McCarthy and the House GOP have hit the ground running and they have unleashed a flurry of new rules and new proposals and new bills and new projects.
And I think tomorrow, Friday, I'm going to dive into what some of those are.
It's a pretty comprehensive package.
And if we have good follow through, things are going to be looking very good from the house for the next couple of years.
They're going to put the Biden administration, not just tie it up, but put it completely on the defensive.
And it looks like the House Republicans are also unintimidated by the media.
Today, however, I want to focus on one of these projects, namely, the House voted to establish a new committee to investigate what Republicans are now calling the weaponization of the federal government.
Now, Some people are calling this the new Church Committee.
And that's an excellent reference because the Church Committee was set up in the 70s by Democrats.
In fact, Democratic congressmen, if I remember, Frank Church.
And the idea was to investigate the abuses of the deep state, of the FBI, of the CIA. It wasn't called a deep state at that point.
But the idea was you've got these police agencies of government They don't seem accountable really to anyone.
They operate sometimes as rogue agencies.
Obviously, the FBI is tasked with functioning in the United States, the CIA abroad.
And there's a whole bunch of other ancillary agencies that are not as well known as these two, but also have tremendous power.
And the idea is let's dig into them.
Let's use our subpoena power, let's do real oversight, and let's figure out what these people are doing, and particularly with a view to protecting the privacy and the civil rights and the constitutional rights of American citizens.
And the Church Committee... Did very good work in this area.
It's so interesting that we've seen this complete switch in which the left has gone from being the party that challenged, investigated, interrogated the deep state to now being the party of the deep state.
And it's now up to Republicans to do what the left did in the 1970s.
So this is a subcommittee of the judiciary, but it's going to be a very powerful one.
It's going to have subpoena power.
It's going to be able to function autonomously.
And it's going to be one of the top priorities of the new House GOP. Here is Steve Scalise talking about it at a news conference.
We're going to set up that church committee to look at some of these federal agencies that are weaponizing government to go after families across the country based on their political views.
This is the heart of the matter here, because remember that this weaponization of the government is not just about Trump.
It's not just about the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
It's not just about the January 6th defendants, although it includes all that.
It's also about going after pro-lifers.
It's about going after parents who go to school board meetings.
So the FBI is out of control and it needs to be reined in.
And so what Scalise is saying is that, look, we're going to have this committee now.
It's not just to protect Republicans or conservatives.
It's, quote, to protect every American's constitutional rights.
And this is actually a key point.
The key point is that when the government goes after some people's free speech, Everybody's free speech is endangered.
Now, the left doesn't really get this point.
Their view is, well, no one's censoring me, so their view is it's okay to censor the other guy.
But they don't realize that once you give up the principle of free speech, then the other side can use that against you.
Because now you're conceding that free speech depends upon who controls the levers of power.
Well, you control the levers of power today, but don't make the mistake of assuming you're going to be controlling them forever.
This was a straight-line party vote.
221 Republicans on one side, 211 Democrats on the other.
And it's going to involve not just kind of one of those information-gathering type of investigations.
It's aimed at uncovering criminal activity at the highest levels of government.
And it's also aimed at uncovering constitutional violations of civil liberties.
Now, unlike the Republicans who said about the January 6th committee, you know, we're not going to get on the committee.
Democrats are agreeing to come on this committee, but it's going to have a majority of Republicans.
So 15-member committee, 9 Republicans, 6 Democrats.
By the way, the reason that Republicans boycotted the January 6th committee is not because they didn't want to participate.
It's because Nancy Pelosi insisted on being able to kick off even Republican members of that committee.
Now, Jim Jordan has not said that he would do that here.
But anyway, here's Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat in the Judiciary Committee.
He says that this will, quote, inject extremist politics into our justice system and shield the MAGA movement from the legal consequences of their actions.
So they're acting like this committee to block the weaponization of government is in fact a weaponization on the Republican side.
So this is a case where Democrats, who are the malefactors here, are trying to block a real inquiry, a real investigation into the bad stuff that they're doing.
So anyway, I think it's very good that Jim Jordan is on board with what might end up being the most consequential thing that the Republicans can do for the next two years, which is essentially to blow the lid off The deep state, exposed for the public to see.
And I realize the media is going to downplay it.
They're not really going to cover this stuff.
But look, the good news in an age of social media is that if the information is available, we see this, for example, with the Twitter files, it doesn't really matter if CNN and the New York Times doesn't cover it.
The information is out there for everyone to see.
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Make sure to use the promo code DINESH. I talked in the last segment about Kevin McCarthy's new House committee to investigate the weaponization of the deep state, a very positive and important development.
And as I think back to the skirmish between McCarthy and the House Freedom Caucus.
Now, the House Freedom Caucus has some 35 or so members.
So, while I want to give credit to the House Freedom Caucus, there were about 20 sort of hardcores in the House Freedom Caucus, and they're the ones who decided to go toe-to-toe against McCarthy.
The rest of the House Freedom Caucus kind of played along with McCarthy.
And I think it's now possible to look back and see which team was right, because there were good people on both sides of this.
In fact, not only in the House, but even in the kind of world of commentators, there were lots of guys like Hannity, even Mark Levin, basically saying, look, McCarthy has got the vast majority of the votes.
This kind of stunt by the Gang of 20 needs to stop.
They just need to sort of go along with McCarthy because he's the guy.
We're not going to get anyone else, per se.
And then there were the 20 or so holdouts, people like Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Mary Miller, others, who basically said, no, we're not going to give in because we need to make a deal with McCarthy, and a deal that is clear and some of its features need to be in writing.
Well, it turns out we can now sort of look at what this deal looks like.
It hasn't been fully fessed up to, but it's a big deal.
And it's a big deal because it changes the way that one of the branches of government works.
In other words, it's not merely a series of specific concessions.
But it is a change in the operations, you may call it the modus operandi of the House.
Now, let's think back to the House, the way it's functioned, not just under Nancy Pelosi, who kind of ruled with a, well, with a bottle of vodka and an iron fist, is perhaps a good way to put it, but also the way that Republicans have run the House in the past.
It's been run in a centralized fashion from the top.
So we think that, you know, we don't support centralized government.
We believe that decisions should be made in a decentralized way.
But here you have the House, and by the way, the Senate, not all that different, run as a kind of tyranny.
It's, as I say, ironic because you've got all these elected House representatives, all of whom represent constituencies.
But what happens is when they go to D.C., they trade in that power that their constituents have given them, and they essentially assign it all to the Speaker.
So the Speaker basically decides this is what's going to be in the bill.
The bill could, by the way, be 500 pages long or 1,000 pages long.
No one except the Speaker's staff has read it.
No one or very few people outside of the Speaker's own circle have had a role in drafting it.
Committee assignments are all kind of handed out by the speaker based upon whim.
I like this guy. I'm going to put him in judicial.
I like that guy. Ways and means for you, buddy.
And then a restricted amendment process in which they control who and what amendments get to the floor.
So this is the normal way of doing business, and it's a very bad way.
It's a very bad way because it doesn't open itself up to a wide range of viewpoints, even in the majority party.
And interestingly for conservatives, conservatives have been somewhat frozen out of this process.
You may say that you have a Republican establishment, and they're like, we're the ones who decide how things are gonna be around here, and then you conservatives can make petitions to us, and we'll decide what we're gonna sort of let through the gate.
Well, as it turns out, that's no longer the way these things are gonna work anymore, because essentially what McCarthy has agreed to is it's now gonna take just one congressman, one congressperson in a sort of Jeffersonian motion to move to, To remove the speaker if the speaker sort of goes back on a policy agenda.
So it takes one guy to put that motion on the floor.
This is kind of amazing.
Number two, there's going to be bills presented to Congress have to be now kind of on a single subject.
So not these kind of omnibus bills that include, you know, dozens if not hundreds of earmarks.
Hey, listen, we'll throw some money in for a bridge in your district.
Hey, we'll throw some money in for a school named after you, of course, in your district.
All of this stuff, all this pork that ends up in these bills and it's a big fat bill, you've got to vote yes or no.
No. The House Freedom Caucus and its key members have said we want to have bills on particular topics.
And of course the goal here is by and large to restrict spending, to have some handle on spending.
You can't just load up these bills with expenses and then just keep voting to raise the debt ceiling.
Now, there are some Republicans who have said that these efforts at sort of controlling the process of the budget is going to create problems for defense spending.
But I don't think this is actually true.
First of all, I don't think there's anything wrong in discussing and debating defense allocations, this whole idea that, you know, Zelensky shows up, so we got to write him a big fat check, money that could, of course, be used elsewhere.
And we need to have a debate. Why is the money better used in Ukraine than it is, for example, in dealing with the homeless or dealing with the drug problem in the United States?
But But look, the point is made here is that, and this is the point that was made by Chip Roy, he goes, we're setting top-level spending earmarks.
In other words, this is the amount of money available for the government to spend.
Kind of similar to the way family budgets work.
This is what the family is bringing in.
This is what we got to spend.
So it doesn't matter if you end up spending a little bit more here or a little bit less there.
You can make those choices, and Congress can make those choices.
You want to spend more in defense?
Okay, you know what? You got a little bit less to spend elsewhere.
So I think... What we're seeing here, while I wouldn't go so far as to call it a return to fiscal responsibility, but maybe the beginning of an awareness that things need to be done differently, and now finally, perhaps, they will be.
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Feel the difference. I'm really enjoying this controversy over the classified docs.
It gets not just funnier by the day, almost funnier by the minute.
Remember the outrage when Trump?
Trump is in possession of classified documents.
Classified documents are a serious crime, Dinesh.
This guy needs to be held accountable.
We need to apply. He's not above the rules.
These are the rules.
And you can't have classified documents in your possession.
This could even be treason.
Certainly this guy needs to never run for office again.
Well, as it turns out, Biden is in possession of classified docs.
And, as it turns out, not one, but two separate stashes of classified docs.
Well, the moment this came out, the left sort of jumped into, let's call it, damage control mode and the tap dance of making distinctions.
Of course, you can expect that CNN would be right in with the game, and here's CNN. There are clear distinctions between the classified documents, cases involving President Joe Biden and former President Trump.
All right, let's take a look.
Classified documents found.
Joe Biden, under 12 total.
Trump, 160 plus.
Secret. As if the Biden documents weren't secret.
They were classified, but they weren't secret.
Now, first of all, the 12 is now obsolete.
That was the first stash.
Who knows how many there are in the second stash?
Hasn't been revealed. Let's continue with CNN. Some top secret.
Donald Trump, 60 top secret.
Well, that comparison doesn't really work since we don't know what some means.
Some could mean 200. Joe Biden, cooperating.
Donald Trump, under investigation.
Ha! Now, let's look at this Joe Biden cooperating, because one of the key points the left tried to make was the big difference between Trump and Biden is that the moment Biden found out about the documents, they were immediately turned over to the government.
And this, as it turns out, is untrue.
What do I mean? Well, as it's come out, I just read Jonathan Turley's article about it.
Don't buy Biden's surprise.
Classified documents were moved at least twice.
Turns out, they knew about the documents.
In fact, even if you look at the original reporting, it's very sly because it doesn't talk about finding the documents.
It says that Biden's lawyers, quote, identified the documents.
And, you know, when you see this kind of language, you've got to realize that what's going on here is that the deep state is drafting these statements that the media is regurgitating.
And they're very careful to put it in legal language.
Well, we didn't say we found them.
Somebody else found them. We just identified them.
So you have to be these days alert because what's going on is an attempt at media prevarication, media lying to the American people.
Alright, so they've had the documents.
And let's continue.
Joe Biden, lawyers found and alerted archives.
Nonsense. The lawyers found them.
They did not alert the archives right away.
First of all, they waited for the midterm election so that no political damage would be done.
They notified the government on their own sweet time.
And now, not only is the CNN comparison breakdown in the ways I just described, but key differences are being missed.
First of all, Mar-a-Lago is a secure location.
Debbie and I have been there as a cordon of Secret Service.
You can't get in. The Secret Service protects Mar-a-Lago.
So that's a secure location, not to mention the fact that the documents were under padlock and the FBI itself requested a second padlock, which the Trump people promptly put.
So, meanwhile, the Penn Biden Center has no Secret Service protection, and no one is saying that these documents were even under lock and key.
Number two, the Biden Center, the Penn Biden Center, is heavily subsidized by the Chinese.
The Chinese government is actually the largest foreign funder of the Penn Biden Center.
And so the question that the media is pretending that is not a question, but it's a real question, have any Chinese guys taken a good look at these documents?
No, no, no. The documents are in our possession.
Yeah, we know. This is an age where you can take your phone and take pictures.
So my point is, is the information in those documents accessible and has it been accessible to any of the Chinese funders of the Biden Center?
That issue hasn't even arisen in the case of Trump.
Number three, Trump has the power to declassify documents.
Biden doesn't. Why?
Because only the president does.
Trump was the president. He can declassify documents if he wants.
Biden can't do it. Now, Here's the point.
I think the real payoff here is that I think this whole classified document thing is a red herring.
And what I mean is that I bet you that Obama's got a whole bunch of classified documents in his possession now.
Same with Clinton.
Are you telling me that the bureaucrats at the National Archives are so on it that they've tracked every classified document, made sure it's in their possession?
Look, these presidents, the classified documents pertain to them.
It's like the work that I did.
So yeah, I'm going to take some of it with me.
I'm going to separate my papers out and some classified documents could end up in there.
What we're seeing is that these are not rules that have been enforced across the board.
On the contrary, Clinton's got documents.
Obama's probably got documents.
Biden's got two stashes of documents.
No one really cared. So, what the left does is they try to enforce these rules only against Trump.
And then the question becomes, why?
What is it about Trump?
And the answer, of course, is obvious.
Trump is the only guy who's a real threat to the deep state.
The other guys are not.
They're actually partners with the deep state.
So, it's no surprise that the left is using the deep state to go after Trump for rules...
These are purported to be serious violations when it turns out they're not serious violations, they're habitual violations, and pretty much every president has done them.
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I'd like to offer a few comments on a very interesting article called The Conversation in the New York Times.
This is a conversation between the New York Times as two token conservatives.
I say token conservatives because they're conservatives who normally ratify the premises of the New York Times.
So they're conservatives who frequently take positions against, certainly against Trump, But also against the contemporary Republican Party.
This is Brett Stevens, whom actually I don't know.
Brett Stevens was kind of largely a nobody when I was at AEI and at Hoover.
David Brooks, whom I do know.
And the basic theme of this article, well, it's called The Party is Over for Us.
Where do we go now? And these two dudes are talking to each other and reproducing their conversation.
Basically, their whole point is that the GOP is no longer the party of Brett Stevens and David Brooks.
It's now sort of the party of Dinesh D'Souza.
Now, not surprisingly, I consider this to be a very good thing.
But I want to analyze some of their complaints about the contemporary Republican Party.
So David Brooks begins the conversation by saying that many, many years ago, in fact, going back to the 1980s, he had brunch with me and he discovered an important difference between him and me.
He was a conservative, whereas I was, quote, anti-left, right?
Now, for most people, this is a little bit of a, what's the distinction?
If you're anti-left, doesn't that make you a conservative?
But I think what David Brooks is getting at is he was a conservative in the positive sense.
He wanted to do only positive things.
But here's Dinesh, and he wants to, like, pull down the left.
He wants to, like, defeat the left.
He wants to undermine the socialists.
Whereas I, David Brooks, you know, I have a sort of a more thoughtful, more elevated conservatism.
Now, first of all, none of this holds up in any way.
No one thought that David Brooks was more thoughtful than I was.
In fact, I was the guy at AEI, not him.
I obviously went to better schools than he did.
But the interesting thing about David Brooks was one of the things I noticed about David Brooks was his craving for public respectability.
And this has always been...
And Bret Stephens seems to be cut from the same cloth.
These are people who are intellectually not secure.
They're insecure. But because they're insecure, they want leftist acceptance because that is the only indication to them.
Yeah, I'm smart. See, I'm smart.
I'm writing in the New York Times.
Well, the only reason you're writing in the New York Times is you're criticizing the Republican Party.
So, in other words, you don't realize that you are the useful idiot of the other side.
That's the point. But I think these people do know.
They know they're useful idiots.
They're happy to play that role, in part because it pays pretty well.
I mean, where would David Brooks be if he wasn't at the New York Times?
Who knows? He certainly wouldn't be on social media.
I mean, these guys are plotters.
And when you read their articles, the first half of the article is, you could call it, elaborate throat clearing.
They only get to the point until halfway through the article.
And in a modern age of social media, people are already like...
They've clicked you out.
They're onto something else.
They're basically watching a TikTok video.
It's far more interesting than what David Brooks has to say.
So these guys know, and far from them being, like, relevant today, they're fossils.
I mean, listen to the idiotic way in which they talk.
First of all, he's... Now, this is Brett Stevens now talking about...
About the old conservatives that he really likes.
Quote, You sort of have to tear it down in order to build something in its place.
There's a bad health care policy.
It needs to be replaced by a good health care policy.
And so to basically say, well, there's this group of people that just wants to get rid of Obamacare.
Getting rid of Obamacare is a prerequisite to having a better—getting rid of the contemporary current FBI is a prerequisite to having a police force that actually works.
And if you're in the opposition party, as we are now, it's not surprising that we tend to be more against certain things.
It's not that we haven't thought about how to fix them.
We know how to fix them.
How do you fix the tax code?
All right, I'll tell you. You basically have a 15% flat tax across the board, a tax that you can basically fill out on a postcard.
Very simple. Won't the rich pay more, Dinesh?
Yeah, the rich will pay more, but they'll pay more at the same rate.
So if you make $1, you send in $0.15.
If you make $10, you send in $1.50.
Now, think of how radically this would overhaul the tax code.
It would get rid of the IRS. It would essentially blow up the whole administrative state that's devoted to the collection of tax.
You wouldn't need 87,000 IRS agents.
You wouldn't need any. So it's not that we don't have positive solutions, but in order to get there, you've got to do a critique, a dismantling, an expose of the tax code as it is, and build, of course, public support for doing what you want to do.
I'll just close my discussion of all this where basically both Brett Stevens and David Brooks call themselves Hamiltonians.
They're like, we're Hamiltonians.
On the other side is Jeffersonian.
Now, first of all... This debate between Hamilton and Jefferson has nothing to do with the contemporary differences between the Republican and the Democratic Party.
In fact, it has nothing to do with the Republican and Democratic Party, even in Lincoln's time.
So the debate between Hamilton and Jefferson is obsolete because, well, let's just look at it.
Hamilton favored strong government.
Yeah, but there was virtually no centralized government at the time.
There was certainly no federal income tax.
And so for Hamilton to favor strong government in that situation, in the situation of 1789 or 1800, bears no resemblance to someone championing an enlargement of the federal government today.
Jefferson, on the other hand, favored decentralizing government power and having more power to the states.
To some degree, that reflects Republican policy.
But again, Republicans are divided on those kinds of issues.
So, the bottom line of it is, I just found my IQ going down and reading this kind of article.
And these are the so-called intellectuals of the never-Trump right.
They're not real intellectuals.
They're pseudo-intellectuals.
And most importantly, their only prominence is due to the fact that they are playing the fiddle for the other side and getting rewarded handsomely for their entertainment.
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I don't know if you've heard of the biologist and leftist intellectual Paul Ehrlich.
Paul Ehrlich has spent most of his career at Stanford University and he has a very remarkable distinction, which is by the way not easy to achieve.
He is wrong 100% of the time.
Now, this is, as I say, not an easy feat to accomplish.
Why? Well, partly because even random guessing would have you get it right some of the time.
And it's kind of like if you're taking the SAT. How do you get all the questions wrong?
Even if you go randomly, you're probably going to get 30-50% of the questions right, depending on, of course, how many multiple choices there are and so on.
I mean, they say even a broken clock is right two times in the day.
But, so it must take a special kind of aptitude or ability to be always wrong.
And Paul Ehrlich has managed this feat, not just over a year or even a decade, but over multiple decades, going back to like 1970.
Now, how is this possible?
How is it possible for a really smart guy?
And Paul Ehrlich is a prominent biologist.
He's a competent person.
How can a competent person be so wrong?
Well, the answer was provided by the writer and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow many years ago when he said the following.
It's a quote that stayed in my mind.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Now, what is Paul Ehrlich's need for illusion?
The illusion that he's always been chasing is the apocalyptic idea that the world is coming to an end.
It's never coming to an end because of one particular thing.
In other words, in the 70s it's this, in the 80s it's that, in the 90s it's something else.
But the conclusion is always the same.
The world is coming to an end.
And sure enough, on January 1st, 2023, there was Paul Ehrlich on CBS News' 60 Minutes, and he had a very important message for all of us.
You guessed it. The world is coming to an end.
Coming to an end right now.
I mean, imminently. Let's quote him.
He goes, we are on the cusp of a, quote, sixth mass extinction.
And that, quote, the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to.
Oh man, this is troubling stuff.
It would be even more troubling if we didn't think about the fact that in 1968, Paul Ehrlich published his book, The Population Bomb, in which he was predicting that as a result of global...
A population increase.
But here's the first line. The battle to feed all of humanity is over.
He says in the 1970s, the world will undergo mass famines.
Hundreds of millions of people are going to die.
The world death rate is going to go up.
Now, I was there.
You may or may not have been there, but this did not in fact happen.
But Ehrlich is unchastened.
He's gone on. You'd think a guy would be like, oh my gosh, I said something unbelievably stupid.
Everyone alive knows it was nonsense.
And he would back off.
No! In between 1970 and now, Ehrlich has made multiple predictions, all pointing in the same direction.
It's basically, call it ringing the apocalypse alarm bell.
And so, he's predicting mass starvation, ecological Armageddon.
Of course, he's all over the climate change issue.
None of this has ever come to pass.
And coming back to 60 Minutes, I'm continuing with Ehrlich now.
He goes, to maintain our lifestyle.
In other words, to take our lifestyle and apply it to the whole world.
He goes, quote, you need five more earths.
And it's not clear where they're going to come from.
So we're not going to have any more earths, guys.
So we might want to kind of cut back on the heavy eating, the wearing of nice clothes.
You really don't need to have, you know, four to five suits in your closet and so on.
Now... A lot of people have taken a look at these predictions and have taken a look at the analysis behind them and found that it's completely shabby for a simple reason.
It ignores human innovation.
Human innovation, which is occurring constantly, is multiplying.
Look at energy. The amount of energy that's available to the planet today is huge.
Why? Huge discoveries, not only of natural gas, but also new ways to get that energy.
So Paul Ehrlich never factors this.
He looks at the food supply right now.
He looks at the rate of growth of population.
He goes, oh, well, we're going to be running out of food.
Not figuring out that people are going to figure out how to create new forms of food, multiply the amount of food that we have, and so on.
And so this is, what I find surprising is that even though this guy is wrong every time, he still keeps showing up in the media, making new predictions, new apocalypticism.
It's almost like you can't refute him.
Why? Because, not because anything he's saying makes any sense, but because, again, the need for illusion is deep, not just in the mind of Paul Ehrlich, but also in the mind of people who are listening to him.
They too want to believe that the earth is at the edge of collapse.
So even though it isn't happening, they sort of wish it was.
These days we hear a lot about AI or artificial intelligence and the way that artificial intelligence is now being deployed to do all kinds of tasks that previously took Kind of human intelligence to do.
And artificial intelligence has been getting better and better.
Now, it can't do certain things like people say, well, you can't have artificial intelligence drive your car.
Well, part of the reason for that, of course, is that you need to have artificial intelligence there, which doesn't make a mistake at all.
In other words, it has a Can artificial intelligence write a Dinesh D'Souza book?
No, of course not.
Can artificial intelligence write an intelligent paper on the thoughts of Thomas Hobbes?
No, as it turns out.
In fact, there was a professor who tried to do this, and what she got was a lot of quotations from Hobbes that were purporting to support what Hobbes actually believed, but the artificial intelligence got it completely wrong.
But one thing artificial intelligence can do is take the thoughts of shallow people And reproduce them perfectly.
And here are a couple of really interesting examples.
Somebody asked an artificial intelligence program, quote, In the style of a Vox journalist, write a five-paragraph essay on why cucumbers are racist.
And here's what the AI generated.
And it's almost like I can see this appearing in Vox.
Cucumbers have long been a staple in the diet of many cultures around the world, but recent research has uncovered a disturbing trend.
The cultivation and consumption of cucumbers has a deep-rooted history of racism.
Why? First and foremost, the origins of cucumbers can be traced back to ancient India.
Well, they were primarily grown by indigenous people.
However, as European colonizers arrived in India, they took control of the cucumber trade.
So you can see right there, exploitation.
I'll move on. Additionally, the way cucumbers are marketed in Western culture Further perpetuates harmful racial stereotypes.
Cucumbers are often depicted as being exotic or luxurious.
And the idea here is that non-Western cultures are only interesting when they can be sold as exotic in the West.
Third. Furthermore, the way cucumbers are grown and harvested perpetuates systemic racism.
Cucumber farming is often labor-intensive, using migrant workers from Latin and South America.
Conclusion? Wow, this is good stuff in the sense that it closely mirrors the idiotic thinking of the left.
AI sort of has it down pat.
Let's try one more example.
Someone puts this in.
In the style of David French.
Now, David French is kind of the never-Trumper at the bulwark, I think, or he used to write for National Review.
I don't think he's there anymore.
Write an essay about why church potlucks are white Christian nationalism.
This is going to be good. This is generated, let's remember, by artificial intelligence.
No human wrote this.
You have to be either a computer or David French to produce this kind of garbage.
Church potlucks are a common tradition in many white Christian communities in the United States.
These gatherings, which typically involve members of a church bringing dishes to share with one another, are often viewed as a way for people to come together and build community.
However, it's important to recognize that these potlucks are not just harmless social gatherings, but an expression of white Christian nationalism.
Why? Again, notice how this mirrors the other AI product.
First and foremost, church potlucks are often dominated by white people.
So that's the first telltale clue.
And then we go down a little...
Furthermore, the very concept of a potluck is rooted in the history of white colonization and the exploitation of non-Western cultures.
The term potluck itself comes from the Native American practice of sharing a meal.
So you see right there, though, the bigotry in cultural appropriation.
And then it goes on. It is important for white Christians to recognize and challenge these dynamics within their own communities.
This may involve actively seeking out and including people of color in church potlucks and other events, as well as examining the roots and implications of these traditions.
By taking these steps, white Christians can work toward building a more inclusive and equitable society.
I mean, the funny thing is, every article ends with, in short, this is the way to build a more inclusive and equitable society.
So I think what we're getting at from all this is really how brainless these people are.
Not the artificial intelligence.
The artificial intelligence is a kind of technological parrot.
And what it's doing is it's mirroring the kind of trite, cliché-ridden, I would say thoughtless rhetoric that we're accustomed to getting from Vox and from David French.
Essentially, we don't even need Vox or David French.
All you have to do is ask your computer to do it.
I'm now in chapter 9 of my book, What's So Great About Christianity?
It's a section discussing the relationship of Christianity to modern science.
And the title of the chapter is From Logos to Cosmos, Christianity and the Invention of Invention.
Now, I begin the chapter by saying that we can make a list of some of the big ideas of modern science.
We'll find on this list Copernicus's heliocentric theory, Kepler's laws, Newton's laws, Einstein's theory of relativity, quantum mechanics.
But notice the greatest idea of physics or of science is not on this list.
In fact, it's typically not included.
It's such a big idea that it kind of makes possible the other ideas.
And it's invisible to us because the assumptions that are built into this idea are...
Rarely examined.
It's something that we take for granted.
So oddly enough, and this is the point I want to make, the greatest idea of modern science is based not on reason, as we might expect, but on faith.
Wow. Now, faith is not exactly an acclaimed, positive word in the scientific community.
Here is the physicist Richard Feynman.
I do not believe that the scientists can have the same certainty of faith that very deeply religious people have.
And a lot of scientists seem to believe this.
Here's astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson.
He says, the claims of religions rely on faith, but the claims of science rely on experimental verification.
I think what Feynman and Tyson are missing here is that there is a faith-based proposition that is no less mysterious than any religious dogma that is absolutely at the heart.
In fact, it's the presumption of modern science.
And what is that faith-based proposition?
Well, it's the proposition that the universe is rational, The universe follows, if you can say, rational laws, and that these laws are fully accessible to the human mind.
Let's look into this a little more closely.
Now, scientists take for granted that our universe is lawful.
And that the human mind can figure out these laws.
If the universe wasn't lawful, you couldn't do science.
Or if the universe was lawful but our minds couldn't figure that out, then you couldn't do science either.
So you've got two propositions here.
Science is based on what author James Treffel calls the principle of universality, which I'm now going to quote.
It says that the laws of nature we discover here and now in our laboratories are true everywhere in the universe and have been in force for all time.
Think about that. How would you go about verifying that?
How would you go about verifying for sure that all the laws we see now have always operated even in times when none of us was on the face of the earth?
Here's physicist Steven Weinberg.
All my experience as a physicist leads me to believe that there is an order in the universe.
As we've been going to higher and higher energies and as we've studied structures that are smaller and smaller, we have found that the laws, the physical principles that describe what we learn become simpler and simpler.
The rules we have discovered become increasingly coherent and universal.
And then he goes on to talk about how this simplicity and beauty is, quote, built into the logical structure of the universe at a very deep level.
Now, not only is the universe lawful, but the laws of the universe appear to be written in the language of mathematics.
The greatest scientists who think about it, a lot of scientists just kind of assume this.
Yeah, sure, why not? Because you learn it from a young age.
But the greatest scientists realize how mysterious this is.
There's an essay by the physicist Eugene Bigner, a longtime professor at Princeton University, winner of the Nobel Prize.
It's called The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics, and I'm going to quote from it.
He says that the mathematical underpinning of nature, quote, is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.
What he's really saying is it's kind of a miracle.
I mean, let's look at it this way.
Mathematics is something that you do in your head.
Two plus two equals four.
There are only three points in a triangle.
This is all occurring in your own imagination.
So why should what's going on inside your head, the mathematical rules, the logical principles inside your head, why should those match the workings of the outside world that is not in your head?
This is the point. So the universe doesn't have to be this way.
There's no special reason why the laws that we find on Earth should, for example, govern a star that is billions of light years away.
Why should they all operate according to the same laws?
It's easy to imagine a universe in which things keep changing, in which conditions change, laws change, or even a universe where things just pop in and out of existence.
There's no logical necessity that our universe had to be this way as opposed to some other way.
And yet our universe seems to be logical, seems to be rational, seems to be mathematical.
And I use the word seems because I want to emphasize that there is no way to prove that this is so.
Scientists cling to a long-held faith, a faith in the fundamental rationality of the cosmos.
Scientists are convinced in advance that rules exist, and that human reason is fully up to the task of deciphering those rules, and scientists continue to try to follow.
So these articles of faith, I want to emphasize that they're articles of faith, not articles of reason, are essential for science to function.
Without the, quote, irrational belief that we live in an ordered universe, modern science is impossible.
And science also relies on the equally unsupported belief that the rationality of the universe is, and must be, mirrored in the rationality of our human minds.
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