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Coming up, Biden Gate.
I'll examine the significance of the latest revelations about the Biden classified documents.
Today's Martin Luther King Day, the ambiguous legacy of Martin Luther King.
In the wake of the protests of January 8th, Brazil is setting up one of the most repressive censorship regimes in the world.
I'll explain. And defense intelligence analyst Rebecca Koffler joins me.
We're going to talk about Russia, Ukraine, and China.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The Biden classified document scandal continues to unfold with new twists and new developments, all of them, by the way, damaging to Biden.
And the left has gone into a kind of fierce rearguard action to try to defend and explain, and not to mention to distinguish Biden from Trump.
Now here is the meathead, Rob Reiner, which making not a legal argument, but just kind of a vent.
The difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is Joe Biden is a decent law-abiding person, and Donald Trump is a pathologically lying criminal.
So I think we can take this not really as a statement of fact or of law, but just a statement of emotion.
But of course, lots of people on the left think this.
They think that because that is the premise, basically Biden is one of the apostles and Trump is really one of the demons in league with Satan.
We don't need to investigate further.
Whatever the facts are, we just have to twist them in such a way that we indict the bad guy, Trump, and we exonerate the good guy.
But of course, there are smarter people on the left, and they're trying to sort of show that Biden did something that Trump didn't do.
I just saw today a lawyer making the point that, well, Biden promptly turned in the classified documents, whereas Trump was holding on to them and was negotiating with the authorities and did not respond promptly to a subpoena.
So the idea here is that Biden fessed up.
And this lawyer goes on to argue that that's the key.
That's intent. A crime is driven by intent.
Biden's intent was never to break the law.
Trump's intent was to break the law.
Now, first of all, this whole concept that Biden promptly fessed up is nonsense.
The truth of it is that the Biden people knew about these documents for at least two months.
And so they were figuring out how to handle this.
They knew that this was a legal problem.
It was a midterm election problem.
It was a public relations problem.
It was also a problem in the sense that it has the effect of exonerating Trump.
Obviously, if this is something that everybody does in the White House, you know, Clinton did it, Obama's hanging on to some documents, Biden's got documents everywhere in his Corvette, in his garage, at the Penn Biden Center, in his office, outside his office.
Well, then what's the big deal?
What makes Trump the...
Why single out Trump?
So the left knows all this.
And so their idea is to try to show that Biden's behavior is somehow more virtuous.
But as I say, the Biden people knew about this and they waited.
They only fessed up, by the way, once the GOP took the House.
And it's arguable, I'm not saying certain, that they thought, now this is going to come out anyway.
And it's better that we work with our friends in the media to get it out.
We give the appearance that we're behaving ourselves.
But look, this whole business of intent, I think, is completely misplaced in this case.
because what's the crime?
Let's look at the statute.
The crime is essentially, and this is from the left, not from me, the possession of classified documents.
Well, if that's the crime, then how is it that Biden is off the hook?
Well, Biden promptly reported it.
So, imagine if I rob a bank.
I then go to the cops right away and say, listen, I'm the first person to disclose to you that I robbed the bank.
Is that a defense?
Is that exculpatory?
Yeah, I killed this guy, but who told you about it?
You wouldn't have known about it if I didn't tell you.
Well, that's not really a very effective defense against the murder charge or against the homicide charge.
So the point I'm trying to make is prompt notification to the authorities of your offense doesn't really get you off the hook for the offense.
Not to mention, there are some very important differences between Trump and Biden, but they work in favor of Trump, not in favor of Biden.
Number one, Mar-a-Lago is protected by Secret Service.
It's a pretty secure location.
Not so with the Penn-Biden Center, which doesn't have that.
Now Biden goes, well, I always lock my Corvette, as if to say that's adequate protection for classifying.
I can leave documents in my car.
I lock my car. Number two, The Biden Center is heavily subsidized with Chinese government money.
Now, the New York Post reports, I'm holding the article right here, $54 million in Chinese gifts donated to UPenn, home of the Biden Center.
Now, this is a whole new twist because it suggests the possibility, perhaps even the probability, That the Chinese sponsors of the Penn-Biden Center would have access to these documents.
So national security is jeopardized in a very direct way, completely different from locked documents at Mar-a-Lago in which Trump has lock and key, and then the FBI goes put another lock and key, and so there are two locks on that storage.
The latest wrinkle, which I think is potentially very interesting, Is that Hunter Biden, in one of his legal disclosures, this has to do with his sort of illegitimate kid case, Hunter Biden disclosed that, A, he was staying at the home, the Biden home, where documents were found, classified documents.
And number two, he claims that he was a renter and that he was paying $50,000 a month, well, specifically $49,910 a month to his own dad.
Now, first of all, the house isn't even worth that much.
You wouldn't pay $49,000 a month.
The house is worth something like $1.5 to $1.7 million.
The rent should be probably around $8 or $9,000 a month.
$49,000 a month looks to me like this is a way for Hunter Biden to funnel money back to the big guy.
This is a way for the 10% to go to the big guy.
So this is a way to move money within the family so that the crimes of Joe Biden can be covered up.
Hunter's the front man, but the money ultimately gets back to the mafia boss.
So this is something that the new...
And I'm glad to see that Merrick Garland is appointed as special counsel.
Neither Debbie or I thought he would.
I think it's good that he has.
And I hope that this new guy, Robert Herr, looks at this angle to see if this is a window not just into classified documents, but the Biden crime family racket.
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In the aftermath of January 6, 2021, a vast censorship regime descended across social media in the United States.
And now it looks like in the aftermath of January 8, January 8 being the day in which protesters in Brazil took over the court, the parliament, the palace, The President's Palace.
And now we're seeing kind of the same thing.
We're seeing recriminations.
We're seeing, we've already seen a bunch of arrests, I believe about a thousand people, probably more by now.
But what's really troubling is now a senior judge in Brazil, this is Alexandra de Moraes, is apparently become the point man for censorship Not only in Brazil, but also for Brazilian commentary across the world.
And what this means is that this judge, this single guy, has taken it upon himself to ban critics of the Lula regime, defenders of the Bolsonaro claims, and also opposition members who were themselves elected and have huge followings and also huge social media followings in their own right. Now, Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who has actually been kind of
a friendly toward Lula, in fact, his reporting and the reporting at his former publication, The Intercept, was instrumental in Lula being able to defeat corruption charges, which is what cleared the way for Lula to run again. But Glenn Greenwald is very angry.
He goes, the censorship regime in Brazil is growing rapidly, virtually daily now.
He goes, this is not confined to Brazil.
And he goes, the censorship regime implemented in Brazil makes the US and EU look like bastions of liberty.
In an article...
Glenn Greenwald talks to a couple of people who have been banned in Brazil.
One of them is a Brazilian commentator and podcaster named Monark, M-O-N-A-R-K, but also a federal deputy named Nicolas Ferreira.
Ferreira is a Bolsonaro supporter who has actually criticized some of Bolsonaro's policies, but he goes, listen, I don't have an agenda.
This is a guy, by the way, with 2 million followers.
The other guy, Monark, has 1.4 million followers on Twitter.
But apparently this Brazilian judge has been communicating on a constant basis with Instagram, with Twitter, with Facebook, with TikTok.
And with good results.
I mean, good results from his point of view.
Ferreira's Instagram account is blocked.
His Facebook account is dismantled.
His TikTok account is blocked.
And it's all in the name of, quote, spreading misinformation.
Sound familiar? So, essentially, things that you don't agree with are now classified as misinformation.
And, of course, after January 8th, we had the same argument.
Well, this is going to fuel people who take the law into their own hands.
Blah, blah, blah. And whereas the real danger is the censorship itself.
The real danger is that you've got a judge in Brazil who's basically acting like the media dictator of Brazil and trying to disable, if not outlaw, key members of the opposition party.
Now, in Brazil, it seems to be even worse.
In the United States, you get banned.
They don't give you a reason for it.
You don't know what laws you've broken.
And there are other people.
José Medeiros, the federal deputy of the Brazilian state of Mato Grasso, has had his Instagram and Twitter accounts blocked.
Another guy has his Instagram account blocked.
The senator of the Brazilian state of Acre, ACRE, Alan Rick, also had his Twitter and Instagram accounts blocked.
So this is a censorship problem that is turning out to be worldwide.
And in the country of Brazil, it now appears to be as bad as pretty much anyplace else.
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Today is Martin Luther King Day.
And Joe Biden was at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
This was, by the way, the church that was pastored by King himself.
And Biden delivers a speech that was titled, A Time for Choosing...
Let's see what we're choosing about.
Quote, Are we a people who choose democracy over autocracy?
You couldn't ask that question 15 years ago, right?
You would have thought democracy was settled, not for African Americans, but democracy as an institutional structure was settled.
But it's not. It's not.
This is Biden. So what is Biden saying here?
What he's saying here is that in King's time, the issue was whether or not rights, including the right to vote, obviously the right to engage in, to be paid for your labor, to engage in economic transactions, and the right to be able to go to schools and take advantage of public facilities, the same as everyone else.
This right was established in principle, but it had to be, the franchise had to be extended to African-Americans.
But Biden is saying, now it's not like that.
Now democracy itself is on the ballot.
So you have one party, the Democrats, telling us that voting for that party is the only way to protect democracy, and that voting for the other party is undermining democracy.
Now, what does it mean when someone says that?
What does it mean for a party to tell you, you have to vote for us, that's how you save democracy.
If you vote for the other party, you're against democracy.
Well, what it means is that the party telling you that is the real threat to democracy.
Because after all, democracy is about giving the citizens multiple choice.
And in the case of a two-party system, two clear alternatives.
So one party doesn't get to sort of cancel out the legitimacy of the other party at the outset by saying, we're for democracy and they're not.
No, democracy itself means people are freely choosing between the two parties.
Now... Let's turn to Martin Luther King because we're living at a time when King is praised and perhaps even over-praised.
King was a flawed man.
He had all kinds of personal problems.
He was discovered to have been a plagiarist in his academic work that is now well established.
He was also kind of a serial philanderer.
David Garrow, the historian, has documented all this ad nauseum.
And Garrow has even gone further and documented even more troubling things in King's past.
But I think this is kind of a way of showing that.
We need to have a certain degree of historical attitude toward people, not to expect a kind of personal perfection.
I say this because the left is very tolerant toward King.
In fact, they do their best to kind of conceal King's flaws.
But at the same time, if the flaws belong to Jefferson or Lincoln or Franklin, they're magnified, they're italicized, their statues have to come down, they can't be honored anymore, look, they acted inconsistently with their principles.
And evidently with Martin Luther King, this discussion is not even really raised.
But I do think that King was a flawed man who nevertheless was championed a good cause.
Now, what was the good cause?
It was really a battle.
For equal rights under the law, and it was a battle against segregation.
Now, the battle for equal rights under the law would not have been necessary if the 14th Amendment, which was passed almost a century earlier by the Republicans, had been enforced.
But what happened in the Democratic South, the South's control by the Democratic Party, is that the 13th Amendment, Well, the 13th Amendment ended slavery, but the 14th and 15th Amendment, the 14th Amendment equal rights under the law, the 15th Amendment, the right to vote, were basically shoved aside.
They were rendered meaningless in many ways.
And so the civil rights battle of the 20th century, led by Martin Luther King, can be understood as nothing more than restoring the Republican principles of Of the 14th and 15th Amendment, which had been desecrated by the Democratic Party.
Now, when we come back, I want to talk about why King's job in achieving this goal turned out to be difficult in some respects, but also surprisingly easy in others.
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That number again, 833-690-7246 or go to I'm continuing my discussion on Martin Luther King Day of King's legacy.
And I was making the point that Martin Luther King's struggle was a struggle, first of all, against the Democrats, not against the Republicans.
After all, it was the Democrats who passed every segregation law in the South.
Passed by Democratic legislators, signed by Democratic governors, enforced by Democratic officials.
King himself, his political affiliations were kind of ambiguous.
I think in the end with Kennedy, he seems to have inclined toward the Democratic Party, which he saw as under Kennedy and then later under LBJ, trying to fix the Some of the problems the Democrats themselves had put into place.
But in some ways, the real battle against racism in America, in my view, was won after World War II. It was won really when American troops went into the concentration camps and pulled out all those Bodies and all those just emaciated figures who had been...
And in a sense, the message to Americans and to the world was simply this.
This is the fruit of doctrines of racial supremacy.
Doctrines of racial supremacy produce catastrophe, they produce genocide, they produce and produced the Holocaust. And so when Martin Luther King came along, really a decade later, starting in the mid or so 1950s, he found he really didn't have any intellectual opposition. Where were the intelligent segregationists in the 50s and 60s who said, oh, Martin Luther King, segregation is
It's wonderful. Let's give you seven reasons why we need to continue our doctrines of segregation and racial supremacy.
That simply didn't exist. King was sort of like one hand clapping, or he was like a guy who was on one side pushing and nobody really was pushing back.
And so King's job in that sense was much easier than, say, the job of Frederick Douglass in the 19th century, where when Douglass was fighting against slavery, you actually had a strong and vehement school defending slavery.
In fact, the Democrats then were defending slavery as a positive good.
Now, while King was a champion of the colorblind ideal, and in fact, he never veered from that in his life, King never supported specific race-based programs, affirmative action in the modern sense, where, let's say, a black guy and a white guy apply to school or apply to a job,
etc. And with no showing of past racial discrimination, with no showing that this guy discriminated against that guy, you give a preference to the black guy over the white guy or to the Hispanic guy over the Asian guy.
This was the kind of nonsense that King never had, never in his life supported.
In fact, years ago I was in a debate with Jesse Jackson and I told him, he was like, Martin Luther King, if he were alive, would have supported this.
And I go, well, we can all talk about what he might have or would have supported, but that's pure conjecture.
Can you point me to an actual racial preference program that Martin Luther King did support?
And of course, Jesse Jackson was like, you know, playing with his mustache.
He couldn't do it is the bottom line because it just doesn't exist.
Now, interestingly, critical race theory is a fierce attack on Martin Luther King.
It's an attack on the colorblind principle.
Now, here's Ibram Kendi in The Atlantic trying to pretend like it isn't.
The way he does it is he says, well, listen, you know, you had this colorblind stuff, but even Martin Luther King knew the job wasn't finished.
So, after Martin Luther King died, the next step...
Again, the assumption here is that Martin Luther King would have gone along with it had he lived.
Now again, there is an element of truth to the fact that Martin Luther King was moving left in the mid to late 1960s.
I think this was largely due to the Vietnam War.
As I mentioned, his civil rights battle was kind of already won.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were already in place.
But King was being radicalized by the Vietnam War.
But radicalized only to the extent of supporting what he called a poor people's campaign, more economic redistribution.
King became very close to a socialist before he died.
So to this degree, Ibram Kendi is right.
But when Kendi implies that the kind of...
Toxic race consciousness that has now come to dominate virtually all of American society.
When Kendi implies that Martin Luther King would have supported that, there's really nothing in the record, nothing in King's own philosophy, nothing that King ever wrote or said that offers really one iota of backing for that preposterous assertion.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast our friend Rebecca Koffler.
She is a Russian-born former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, expert on Russian affairs.
Her work has been featured all over the place, The Hill, The Washington Times, Daily Caller, Fox News.
She's also the author of Putin's Playbook, Putin's Playbook, and her website, Rebecca, K-O-F-F-L-E-R dot com.
Rebecca, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you. Boy, this war in the Ukraine is dragging on.
It seems that I think?
How is it that this war has dragged on?
Is it that Western support has been critical?
Talk a little bit about just the simple anomaly that Ukraine has been able to hang in there for so long, and apparently with some effectiveness.
Hi, Dinesh, and thank you for having me again.
This is a really funny analogy that you've come up with.
Very accurate, by the way.
Yes, Putin and the entire U.S. security apparatus originally underestimated Ukraine, Zelensky, their will to fight, and we all thought that the The blitzkrieg that Putin was promising to us was going to translate into reality, none of it happened.
And the real reason is this.
First is that the Russian military conventionally has always been inferior to U.S. military and And NATO militaries, okay?
Why is this important?
It's important because this is not a war between Russia and Ukraine.
This is a proxy war between Russia and NATO. The difference is that we're using Ukrainians to fight this war.
We're providing superior weaponry, very, very sophisticated military hardware, right?
Right? And this is why the Russians conventionally, and that's very important, are losing tactically.
But at the strategic level, the Russians are really doing what they've always done.
They're focusing on the big picture.
They're destroying Ukraine right now.
They are wiping it off the map, degrading infrastructure, and making sure that Ukraine does not provide any value to NATO. And this is how Putin fights this war.
This is their modus operandi.
It's no different than what Russia fought for centuries.
This is how they fight wars.
I mean, in some ways, this almost seems reminiscent of when the Nazis invaded Russia.
The Russians were like, hey, listen, if you're going to take territory, we're going to blow everything up.
So you're not going to get anything in this territory when we pull further into Russia.
So you're saying that Putin's strategy is that, in a sense, he could lose the war.
But still achieve his objective, which is to take Ukraine out of play as a Western ally.
Now, there are people in America, and I think this reflects my thinking as well, where we think, obviously, morally, strategically, we're on the side of Ukraine.
Putin is clearly the bad guy here.
And yet, sort of a blank choice.
Check to Zelensky or to the Ukraine is something that we need to think about.
And there are a lot of Americans who think, what about our domestic problems?
How should we reconcile the domestic needs and at the same time a war that seems far away and yet obviously also in the U.S. interest?
That's a very, very tough question, Dinesh.
And Americans are divided on this question.
Half of the country believes that it's very important to help Ukraine win the war.
And to do everything possible, we have already provided half of Ukraine's GDP in terms of military hardware and in terms of financial assistance, okay?
In 2021, this was $100 billion.
And so, Joe Biden requests that we continue to provide this insistence indefinitely.
And again, the elites believe that this is a viable option to continue pumping that money, to continue having this spigot open, and that could turn and is already Turning into Afghanistan 2.0, right? So they're willing for 20 years to do that.
There's the other half, and indeed 47% of Americans already recognize that mathematically it's just prohibitive for our country.
To sustain this type of endless foreign war.
And so what is the right thing?
No one knows what the right thing to do is.
As a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer who focused on Russian doctrine and strategy, I can tell you this.
This war is unwinnable in terms of...
You know, kicking out Russians out of Ukraine, which they already are occupying 20% of, is unrealistic.
And General Milley himself, I don't have much respect for General Milley because he's the one who actually colluded behind former President Trump's back with the Chinese promising them that he's going to warn them about a potential attack.
But Even he stated that there's no military path to victory.
And so that is the conundrum.
That is the checkmate that Putin has driven Washington into.
Remember, the Russians have always known that the war between NATO and Russia is inevitable.
They've done that through their military intelligence forecasting.
And as you correctly pointed out, He is now, meaning Putin, he's destroying Ukraine.
He just appointed Valery Gerasimov, who is the author of the entire strategy of indirect action.
And so there's a Russian saying, which means, if I can't have it, you're not going to have it either.
And so we are now fighting until the last Ukrainian and helping Russia effectively annihilate Ukraine by making this conflict endless.
Let's take a pause, Rebecca.
When we come back, let's dive further into this and then bring in the other big player on the global scene, namely China.
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Use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with Rebecca Kofler, Russian-born former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, expert on Russian affairs, author of the book Putin's Playbook.
Rebecca, in some ways, I think what you're describing with regard to America's strategy reminds me of the Reagan doctrine in Afghanistan, where Reagan didn't commit troops.
But he did commit resources to help the Afghans, and of course Muslims also coming from other parts of the world, to push the Soviet Union out.
But it seemed like the US commitment then was more manageable and that the Mujahideen, as they call themselves, took the bulk of the battle themselves.
It seems that Ukraine is in some ways a little bit different.
Tell me if this analogy is valid at all.
And then I want to ask you about the other player on this global landscape, namely China.
But let's talk first just about the comparison between the Reagan doctrine in Afghanistan and the Ukraine war now.
That's a valid analogy, Dinesh.
Yes, we are using Ukrainians right now to stave off Russia from advancing further into Europe, right?
Just like we used Mujahazin.
The difference is this.
What the intelligence community assesses right now and the entire national security apparatus in Washington is that Putin is not gonna stop at Ukraine.
He's gonna proceed to conquer Poland and potentially, I don't know, Finland and all these other European countries.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
First, we know And we received excellent intelligence on Russia, on Russian capability, on the Russian doctrine.
It was just a matter of understanding that intelligence and making sensible conclusions out of it.
Which the intelligence community failed to do because they were chasing the bright and shiny objects, the non-existent collusion theories, and trying to suppress the COVID origins and this sort of stuff.
So there's no plan for Putin to move towards Eastern Europe and further.
All he wants to do is reconstitute the strategic security perimeter on which Russia relied for centuries, right?
And all the former Soviet states minus the Baltics, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, okay?
Think about it this way.
If Putin is failing spectacularly, tactically, conventionally on the battlefield against a Luxembourg-type country, right, against Ukraine, how in the world do these quote-unquote experts believe that Putin is going to take on Poland-Baltics?
I mean, it's laughable.
It defies logic.
And so, therefore, you know, we need to focus on the big picture right now.
And the big picture is this, Dinesh.
Xi Jinping is popping champagne corks right now.
It's because we are eroding our own We're eroding our own combat readiness by focusing on the pronouns.
The Pentagon is, right?
And the Marxist theories.
And so this war potentially...
We'll expedite China's attempt to secure control over Taiwan.
The longer we go with Russia-Ukraine, the more likely there's going to be a two-theater war that the Russians and the Chinese are going to challenge the U.S. with.
This is very scary.
What you're saying is that while the United States is deployed in one place, the Chinese go, listen, we see an eroding U.S. defense capability.
It's already being squandered, at least to some degree, in the Ukraine.
This allows China to move on Taiwan.
So what you're saying is in a place that is far more important to our interests.
We might be disabled in being able to stop it because we have spent too much in Ukraine and maybe the American public appetite has then diminished.
True. We have already spent 13 years worth of Stinger missiles and five years worth of Javelins.
According to Raytheon's CEO, these are not my words.
There's a tremendous concern right now within the U.S. military industrial complex that That we just simply don't have the production capacity to match the needs because Zelensky feels emboldened, right? He has really hypnotized the entire Western world, including US Congress.
There's bipartisan support.
It's not just the Democrats that are supporting this.
There's a very big segment of the Republican establishment that are supporting that because they're looking at it tactically, right?
We cannot really defend Taiwan.
And China is the biggest threat.
Russia is the declining power, right?
Demographically, Russia is really on the downturn economically also.
But China, which has a strategic goal of replacing the United States...
As a superpower, both militarily and economically by 2049, they are on the march.
And while we're focusing on this one spot in the world, we have Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and possibly Saudi Arabia.
That are uniting forces.
They can challenge the United States, not only militarily, but also economically, because they're establishing their own swift alternative, their own economic architecture, their basket of currencies is combining, because we have weaponized the U.S. dollar.
So the ramifications from this war are really wide-ranging, and I don't feel that the Biden administration has the true experts and the forward-looking people To look at this and all of the strategic changes taking place in the world and to secure America both from the standpoint of our ability to be protected from the threats,
not just nuclear threat, but cyber threat, but also to ensure that America is leading the world.
They don't have that capability.
The Biden administration doesn't.
Yeah, very troubling and I think very sound analysis.
Thank you, Rebecca Koffler.
Really appreciate having you on.
Thank you for having me.
It's an honor and pleasure to be here with you and your audience, Dinesh.
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I've been talking about how Christianity supplied a rational foundation for modern science, a theme that seems somewhat counterintuitive at the first glance.
But let's think a little bit more about how modern science functions.
Now, science in its origins was a little bit of an individual project.
You'd have a scientist, generally in those days, called a naturalist.
And a scientist would make a finding, put it out there.
Many of these scientists were, well, some of them were clergy, some of them were just people operating on their own.
But certainly in the modern era, science operates institutionally.
It operates through laboratories.
And where are these laboratories housed?
Well, for the most part, they're housed in universities.
So the university is the You may say operating ground of modern science.
And now I want to talk about how Christianity was instrumental in the, well, the invention, the formation of universities.
When did universities begin?
Did they begin in the modern era?
Actually, no.
They began in the medieval period, which of course is the Christian era.
And they started, they grew out of monasteries.
You initially had monks.
We were working in monasteries, and monasteries were really the places of learning.
In fact, if you wanted to study, as St.
Thomas Aquinas did, he wandered from one place to another, and finally he ended up at a monastery where he spent most of his formative years.
And then later, when the University of Paris was founded, Aquinas ended up being an effective professor of theology at the University of Paris.
So, for centuries, monasteries were the only place where research, both theoretical research and practical research, as well as research in mathematics and logic, all took place.
Now, churches began to build schools.
First, they were schools at the lower level, but eventually the first universities began to be formed in the 12th century in Bologna and in Paris.
Oxford and Cambridge were founded in the early 13th century, followed by universities in Rome, Naples, Salamanca, Seville, Prague, Vienna, Cologne, and Heidelberg.
Now, some of these institutions, some of these universities were affiliated with the church, but nevertheless they also had a sort of separate building, separate facilities, and ultimately a certain kind of independent governance and operation.
The curriculum in the universities was both theological, but it was also what we would today call secular, and as new scientific knowledge began to develop, now some of that occurred in academies outside of the university, but a lot of it also occurred in universities.
If we think of America The major universities, think of Harvard, College of William and Mary, Yale, Northwestern, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown.
All of these began as Christian institutions.
In fact, it's really sad to see how they have so totally lost their Christian heritage.
In some ways, they have become even institutionally anti-Christian.
Now... The kind of theoretical or philosophical founder of modern science is widely understood to be a guy named Francis Bacon.
And Bacon really was a champion of the so-called inductive method.
The inductive method of reasoning is an alternative to the deductive method.
So when With the deductive method, you start with a premise, and then you reason your way from that premise.
The premise itself is the sort of starting point, and you work your way from that starting premise, but the inductive method works the other way around.
You don't start with a premise.
You start with experience.
You start with data.
You start with, in a sense, what the facts have to tell you, and from those facts, you glean out or you peel out A premise that then is subjected to further investigation, experimentation, testing, and so on.
So this is very close to, it's not a full description of the scientific method, but it's pretty close.
And in this sense, Bacon is considered to be kind of the founder, the apostle, you could call him, of the scientific method.
But Bacon saw the scientific method in Christian terms.
In fact, Bacon says that at the beginning of the Bible in the Garden of Eden, or after the Garden of Eden, God gives the earth to man as a means of providing for him.
God gives man a kind of sovereignty over the land and over the land.
And Bacon goes, well, there's a kind of divinely appointed mission here, and the mission is for man to be, in a sense, the lord and possessor of nature, and the scientific method is the means by which man can do that.
Now, we sometimes hear, and I think this is largely propaganda, science was founded in the 17th century in a kind of revolt against religious dogma.
There is a grain of truth to this.
Science was formed to fight against a certain type of dogma.
But let's remember that...
That in the medieval schools, there was deductive reasoning for the most part.
And to a degree, science was a rebellion against that.
Let's do inductive reasoning instead.
But the simple truth is that you need both.
Mathematical propositions, for example, develop largely through...
Deductive reasoning. You begin with certain axioms or givens and then you reason your way from those.
So it's not as if you need one method or the other.
It could be that the inductive method was de-emphasized and needed to be further emphasized.
But today I think scientists understand that both deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning work together to foster the development and the growth of knowledge.
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