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Jan. 23, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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SPARE ME Dinesh D’Souza Podcast EP501
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Coming up, Kevin McCarthy has an idea for replacing the income tax with the national sales tax. I'll talk about that.
I'm very excited.
CNN is closing its national headquarters in Atlanta.
I hope it's a first step to CNN closing its doors completely.
Daniel D'Souza-Gill will join me.
We're going to do a takedown of the world's two leading narcissists, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
This is an Ashes to the 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.
Kevin McCarthy and some House Republicans are floating a new and interesting idea And this is an idea that should not be considered seriously as a proposal that is going to go through and become law.
Why? Because, as we've talked about in the podcast before, the Republicans control narrowly one house of Congress.
And in order for a bill, a bill is a proposed law, to become a law, it has to go through the House and It has to go through the Senate, where it has to also survive the filibuster.
It has to pass both houses of Congress and then be signed by the President.
Now, normally there's one more step that should be added.
It has to be upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court because these days all important legislation is challenged on the grounds of its constitutionality.
So what is Kevin McCarthy's proposal good for?
What's its point? Well, I think its point is to put something on the agenda, to make it part of the Republican framework, the Republican vision for how to fix America, and ultimately the Republican platform in 2024.
So this is an idea that is worth considering.
It's called a fair tax.
And it would abolish the current tax system.
Basically, no more income tax.
It would abolish and affect the IRS. Why?
Because the IRS is needed to administer this rather complex system of taxation we have now.
So it would get rid of that. And it would impose an across-the-board sales tax.
So what's a sales tax?
Well, a sales tax is sometimes also known as a consumption tax.
When you buy stuff, You would pay a tax that would be added on to the price of the product.
Think of the difference between an income tax and a sales tax.
An income tax kicks in when you earn the money.
So you make $100 and the government will take 10 or 20 or the highest marginal tax rate, about 38%.
So at the highest level, the government is taking 38 cents on the dollar and giving you basically 62 cents to keep.
The thing that is being taxed is your productivity, your work.
In some ways, you can see why a sales tax is more appealing in principle.
Because it's not taxing productivity.
It's not taxing your work.
It's taxing your consumption or your spending.
In fact, it's providing an incentive for you not to spend the money, but to save the money.
Why? Because if you save the money, you're tax zero.
You're allowed to save all the money.
So let's just say, for example, you have a dollar and you can either spend it or you can save it.
Well, if you save it, you've saved a dollar.
But if you spend the dollar, you're going to only be able to buy a product that's worth about 70 cents.
Why? Because there'll be a 30% sales tax on top of that.
In fact, that would be the only...
The main tax of the government would be living in a replacement for the income tax.
So on everything you buy, you'd have to sort of add a 30% price tag.
Now, this is a big price tag, and obviously people would feel it because, hey, you buy a car for $30,000, You add 30% to that, that's almost $10,000 added to the price.
You go buy milk and it's what, $2.50?
You got to add 30% to that, so it's going to be about $3.25.
So, this is not to say that people wouldn't feel it, but guess what?
You get to save all that money on the income side.
And so, for example, you kind of have a choice here.
Let's just say you make $100,000.
Right now, out of the $100,000, you probably get to keep around $82,000 or $83,000.
I'm guessing that on average, you'll pay about a 17% to 20% income tax.
On the other hand, you can keep the full $100,000 and pay a 30% sales tax.
Very interestingly, we have two extremes here.
The progressive income tax, which is what we have now, is a tax that penalizes the wealthy because the wealthy pay more.
I personally would favor a flat tax of somewhere in the range of 12% to 15%.
Again, this would also get rid of the IRS, by the way.
Why? Because you'd have a simple postcard.
This is how much money you made.
Calculate 15%, send it in.
End of story. You would simply need a very minimal administration for that.
But that's progressive. Now, sales taxes tend to be regressive.
They tend to fall a little heavier on the poor and the middle class.
Why? Because the poor and the middle class spend a higher percentage of their income on consumption.
So I'm not trying to sort of adjudicate Kevin McCarthy's proposal.
I'm not saying at this point whether I'm for or against it.
I've just tried in this segment to explain it a little bit to show what it would do.
And you can sort of run the math in your own head and ask yourself, At this point, don't worry about whether the tax is good for the country or not.
You can just sort of run a little bit of math and ask the question, would this sort of a shift, a move from an income tax to a sales tax, be good for me?
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That's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
For many years, in fact, for several decades, the CNN headquarters in Atlanta has been a kind of...
Totemic symbol of the power of cable television.
I mean, let's think back. When CNN first started, there was really only one 24-hour news network.
There were the three major networks.
And then there were other TV stations devoted to movies and music and other lifestyle type of things.
But in terms of news, CNN was all there was.
And honestly, CNN was very good in those days because its approach was kind of just the news, ma'am.
It will tell you what's happening around the world.
And in fact, we will dispatch people to some of the far corners of the world, which are normally not reported or very poorly reported.
In fact, in the earlier days, I remember I would have to go to the BBC or go to foreign news outlets to find out what's happening in other countries because there was no good reporting coming from the United States.
Now, on the print side, the New York Times was the undisputed sort of champion of international reporting.
But in terms of television, CNN was it.
CNN was the standard and there was really no competition.
Now... Over the years, CNN changed.
CNN basically burned its old brand.
CNN, particularly under Jeff Zucker, became a kind of sham network.
It became a grossly partisan, ideological kind of hatchet man enterprise.
Essentially, everything that the Democrats said was good and true and beautiful and everything the Republicans said was horrible and awful.
And this tendency, which actually preceded Trump, it was happening even before Trump, but it reached its sort of ugly zenith under Trump.
CNN essentially abandoned all pretense, pretense of objectivity.
They began to put on a host of characters, many of them, by the way, still at CNN, who are just sort of laughable individuals.
I mean, low room temperature IQ people.
Joy Reid, you know, people like Rachel Maddow.
These are people who, I mean, Brian Stelter was a staple at CNN, happily been, you know, booted since then.
Jim Acosta, this sort of grown, this adult fetus.
I mean, you have all these sort of peculiar characters giving us this painful drumbeat.
And you know what? Finally, the market said no.
The market said enough.
And what I mean is people just stopped watching.
CNN, of course, tried to.
They were like, well, people aren't watching because we haven't created new products.
Let's go for CNN+. So they started this paid channel, which basically crashed before it even got going.
So they shut that down.
They are in the continuing, ongoing process of swapping out some of their losers.
I mean, it doesn't really work to take a loser like Jake Tapper or Don Lemon and move him from the evening to the morning.
This is shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
I mean, essentially what you want to do with these deck chairs is throw them into the ocean.
So what Chris Lick needs to do if he wants to save CNN is fumigate the place, fire everybody, then maybe rehire two or three people, but bring in new blood, new faces.
I mean, it would be exciting, a new CNN. But it doesn't look like they're going there.
And the latest news, CNN is now shutting down.
Closing down its iconic Atlanta headquarters.
That's going to be gone. There's no longer going to be the big CNN marker there.
I think that's good news.
And I think the CNN is on a track where they're going to be shutting down not just their Atlanta headquarters, but all their headquarters.
I mean, CNN itself could go out of business, and I hope it does.
I mean, in its current format, it's unsalvageable.
So if Chris Licht is ultimately about trying to tinker on the edges, make small modifications, this is not going to work.
This is like an airplane that's not going to fly.
So either you swap out the airplane and rebuild it from scratch, or basically what you've got is not just a ratings crash, but a news crash and a crash that at some level people would be delighted to see.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Guys, it's always a delight for me to bring on to the podcast my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill.
She's the host, of course, of Counter Culture with Danielle D'Souza Gill on Epic TV. She's also the author of both the book Why God, as well as her book on abortion.
And we chat sometimes about a topic that I want to focus on today, which is the public fascination with the royals in In Britain, and also, well, let's call it the royal clash that seems to be brewing between Harry and Meghan Markle on the one side and the rest of the family on the other.
Danielle, welcome to the podcast.
You know, I gotta say, you're A bit of a royals watcher, and I'm not, so you're usually my source of information on this intrigue.
And it's a fascinating story, but let's begin by talking about why you think that this topic, the topic of the royal family, it seems to be something that mesmerizes not only people in Great Britain, but around the world.
Why do you think that is?
Yeah well I think they've really become worldwide celebrities because they're kind of the last vestige of old traditional things and they also get to be real life princesses and princes and kings and queens and travel all over the world and have you know massive weddings that are televised in most countries and they get to just do things that other people wouldn't normally get to do and I think even just Hollywood celebrities Find fascination with them.
At a lot of the royal weddings, like Oprah would go or some other famous actor, the Cloonies, people like that.
And so they feel like the royals are really cool to associate with in some way.
We don't really have that in America.
I guess maybe the Kennedys, if there's a fascination there, but it's not really the same level because we have more of a A society that's just not rooted in monarchy in that way.
So I think for them, it's just kind of this tradition and some of the people who are more monarchists, I guess, like the monarchy, but I think other people just follow it because they're kind of interesting celebrities.
I mean, I think when people think about monarchy, it's difficult for people to realize what monarchy actually meant in the ancient world.
I mean, we have nothing. Even if you take the world's richest people today, a Bill Gates or an Elon Musk, I mean, by and large, if you go into a wealthy neighborhood, Bill Gates could probably buy two dozen houses or four dozen houses in that neighborhood.
But Bill Gates couldn't, with all his wealth, buy even a small town.
On the other hand, you had monarchs that ruled over countries, nations, and in a sense, they owned everything.
All the land was, in a sense, owned by the monarch.
You could occupy it, but you were occupying it the same way you or I might occupy seats in a theater.
We were... People lived at the behest of the monarch.
Now, they didn't have technology, and so they were limited in some ways.
They sometimes depended upon dukes and earls to supply armies.
So monarchs had certain limitations, but that kind of power...
Is, I think, hard to comprehend today.
Now, not to mention the prestige of it.
The idea that even being in the monarch's presence was something that was spectacular.
We don't have that today.
So, the monarchy today appears to be what?
Is it symbolic?
Is it a tourist attraction?
Is it merely another form of celebrity?
A celebrity that goes with palaces?
How do you see... The monarchy today fitting in with all the other forms of power.
Yeah, I mean, I think because I have no particular connection to monarchy, I don't think most Americans do, I feel like it's somewhat pointless.
So I guess I would say it's mostly about tourism, but I think someone maybe like Piers Morgan, who's more Sees it as a point of national pride because of the tradition of the country and because of just their national identity.
I think there's some kind of tradition there, but they definitely don't have the power they used to.
They're not actually You know, making policy.
I think even just the fact that Charles' coronation isn't until, you know, months from now, when Queen Elizabeth died last summer, shows that, you know, in the past, if a king had died, like, the next person would have stepped up immediately because there'd be a void of power, other nations would come attack you, so he's not really the king.
I mean, I guess he will be, but obviously he doesn't run the country.
They do more charity events and things like that, so I don't really find them to be particularly powerful politically.
Also, they stay away from politics, usually.
Aside from Harry and Meghan, for the most part, they try to keep things somewhat neutral.
They don't really rock the boat.
So they're not politicians.
They don't do things like that.
There are definitely people who are more of, I think, something lost kind of from old, and now they're kind of transitioning as celebrities.
And so it's more of maybe just If you think it's part of Britain's culture, then you might support it.
But I think some people, that's why they have a fascination with it in Britain.
But they're not really politicians.
People are here who run for elections and are taking pretty hard stances on things.
They don't really do that too often.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, let's dive into the, well, Harry has a new book called Spare.
And it is part of this schism, apparently, between Harry and Meghan Markle on the one side and the royal family on the other.
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I'm back with Danielle DeSouza Gill, author of the book The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America, host of Counterculture with Danielle DeSouza Gill.
We were talking, you were talking a moment ago about the...
The fact that the royal family has sort of stayed out of politics, and it seemed that the queen, the late queen, was also stoical in her personality, tended to hold her emotions in check in that sense, reflected the personality of an earlier era.
Would you agree that it was starting with Lady Diana that we began to see a kind of a new sensibility within the royal family, which is the idea of...
Being a royal as a form of self-expression.
I say this because it seems to me some of what's going on with Harry and with Meghan Markle is an extension of what happened with Lady Diana.
Do you agree or do you think that they're actually very different?
I would say they're different.
Some people say Meghan is like Diana.
Meghan herself keeps trying to imitate Diana.
She will wear the same outfits as her.
She claims she never knew who the royals were.
She never... Followed any of this.
Other people who knew her have claimed differently.
But it's pretty clear that she has tried to put herself in that line because Harry has this kind of obsession with his mother's death.
So I think that was something that Meghan did strategically to make herself seem like a new Diana.
However, Diana was really the people's princess and she was loved by many people.
She was, even though she had a lot of problems, that was more of her, at least, brand.
Whereas Megan is more of someone who most people dislike, even before this book came out.
She really wasn't very popular.
She was popular around the time of her wedding, which is when the royals were still getting along with her, at least as far as the world thought they were getting along.
And most people were really excited about this new person joining their royal family.
People thought it was cool she was of another race and so on.
And so I think only really after that, after Meghan joined the royal family, did her popularity go down as soon as she kind of started acting in ways that were diva-esque, like things were released from her staff about her kind of being abusive towards them, other people. And then I think the pattern just continued of her sort of acting in that entitled way, which isn't really how the royals should behave.
They're supposed to be public servants and people who Dedicate their lives to you know serving the people as opposed to making everything about these Sort of petty squabbles.
And one of the first ones she aired was this squabble she had with Kate Middleton over Princess Charlotte's dresses.
It's just really silly things like that.
Apparently the press had reported that, oh, Meghan made Kate cry.
And Meghan says, no, Kate actually made me cry.
Then Harry writes in his book, actually, like, maybe they both cried.
And so it's just really silly.
So I think Meghan brought in a lot more pettiness and a lot more just kind of victimhood in the sense that people didn't really relate to.
I mean, it seems like Harry buys completely into Meghan's victimhood narrative.
He seems to be almost like the defender of that narrative in the latest book.
Although I've seen some indications also on social media that sort of Harry is a beta male who's kind of under Meghan Markle's control.
That she kind of elbows him, you know, she wants to go in front of him, he needs to step to the back.
Do you think that Harry is sort of willingly embracing the narrative, or do you think that Harry has basically been, well, you've been almost called pistol whipped by Meghan Markle into a certain kind of degrading submission?
I would say it's definitely both.
I mean, it's definitely the degrading submission, but it was his choice.
I mean, he chose to be with her, and he knew what she was about, and I think Even now, he's just continued further down that path.
So some people say, oh, maybe he has regrets and so on.
But I don't think he really has that many regrets because he's still doing interviews and still talking about all of this.
I think Harry and Meghan sort of want it both ways.
They want to be able to make millions of dollars, spilling secrets and saying all these things, bashing the royal family.
And then they say, oh, well, we would welcome an apology from them or We do want a relationship again with them as they are releasing these things.
So I think it's pretty disingenuous because if they actually wanted a relationship, then they wouldn't have done all of this in such a public manner.
But I think they just feel like they are entitled to air their dirty laundry, share their stories with the world, and the royal family should just accept their narrative and should apologize and include them in things again.
And I just think you can't really have it both ways because they don't actually submit themselves to a lot of the rules that the royal family follows and so they can't really get the benefits of those things.
But even though they actually are because the only reason people buy his book and the only reason people watch their documentaries I mean, they don't seem to have any really other talents.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, let's talk about this notion about Harry being a spare.
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I'm back with Daniel D'Souza Gill, author of The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America, host of the show Counter Culture with Daniel D'Souza Gill.
We're talking about the royal family and Harry, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
It seems like the focus on these two characters has come mainly because of the Netflix special, which was a kind of revealing, although maybe not revealing in the way they intended, series of interviews with Harry and Meghan Markle, and also Harry's new book, Spare.
Can you, first of all, Am I right in assuming that the title Spare is an implication that Harry is referring to the fact that sort of his brother is the first in line, he's the real deal, he's the legitimate heir, and Harry is kind of the spare?
I mean, Harry makes some pretty wild accusations in his book Spare, which is the only reason that it's apparently the number one selling book in the Guinness World Records beating Obama to sell the most number of copies in the first day it was released.
And it's not because he decided to share some childhood memories of playing in some kind of field in England.
It's because he wanted to really spill a lot of tea on the British family.
So some of the main accusations he made were William and him got into a physical fight.
William grabbed him by the collar, threw him on the ground, and he cut his back on a dog bowl.
Charles, when he was young, said, Oh, Diana, thanks for giving me a spare.
Harry's my spare.
He makes claims about Camilla, you know, kind of being evil stepmother.
He makes claims about Kate Middleton, mostly regarding her fights with Meghan, basically how Meghan was the good one and Kate was kind of You know, the dumb one or something.
And so he's very into kind of doing these personal jabs at each person, which is why so many people have been intrigued by the book.
I've been buying the book because they want to see what's in it.
Well, him and I guess his ghostwriter, who also wrote Andre Agassi's book as a ghostwriter, knows like what sells.
And so that's why he has all of these.
References to his todger, his down there area.
He mentions it, I think, at least 15 times.
He even talks about it, you know, being frozen, like all these things.
So I think the author knew like what is going to sell in a book and that's kind of making things very explosive.
Spare is mostly kind of that.
And I would say the Netflix documentary is a little bit more of Harry and Meghan doing damage control because they're so hated.
So even in America, Meghan Markle has a lower approval rating than Kate Middleton.
Even though most people in America know nothing about Kate Middleton, it just comes across like Megan is always playing the victim card.
And so basically, Harry and Megan released that Netflix documentary, in my opinion, to kind of say, Oh, no, we're just like two lovebirds.
And we are just against the world and all these things.
And so that was kind of more of a it doesn't really get to Some of those things with the fighting until the end because they wanted to say, like, here's my backstory.
Here's my backstory.
All of that. So I think the Netflix documentary is very sanitized, whereas I think the spare book is really intended to sell copies.
And so I obviously don't recommend watching or buying either of them, but to just hear about what's in them from things like this, because why would you want to buy one of these things?
So no, I think that they've made millions and millions of dollars, I think in the $135 million range because they have a Spotify deal, they have a multi-year Netflix deal, obviously the book deal.
So they're really the ones who are making off with a lot of money from doing these accusations.
And if they do any more projects, this is really the only topic they have to discuss.
Yeah, that's a great point.
I mean, they need the salacious accusations in order to keep the book selling, for example.
But like you say, if they really cut off ties with the royal family, if Prince Harry ceased to be Prince anything and was just Harry, then people would ask, well, what do you bring to the table?
What do you know or what can you do?
So this is a, I mean, what strikes me is this is such an anti-meritocratic enterprise.
You've got two people who are complete duds.
I mean, Meghan Markle tried to make it as an actress.
Complete failure. So they figured out that they have to navigate in the world...
And they're doing so in a very cunning and treacherous way in which they convert the smallest of slights.
I mean, let's say Prince William wrestled into the ground.
So what? I mean, imagine if you or I were to take our childhoods and begin to start reciting every little thing.
So they convert small episodes into large things.
Really what they're claiming is special treatment from beginning to end, aren't they?
Absolutely. And there are actually people who are biographers who specialize in this subject.
So Tom Bauer, who I've listened to, claims that the dog bull story is actually made up because they do not have metal dog bulls, apparently, according to his research.
And Harry was claiming that the metal went into his back.
And so there's a lot of questionable, I guess, veracity to even some of the claims that they're making.
They've actually repeatedly lied about some things, and so the facts don't actually line up with things they're saying, like, Megan will say, I never heard of this with the royal family, that her family will provide evidence that she knew exactly what it was.
Then in her Netflix documentary, she claims, oh yeah, no, I looked at his Instagram page.
And so I think it's just a constant web of lies that they get lost in telling.
So in one second, it's like, no, we were just these kinds of victims.
Then it was, no, we actually had a behind the scenes fight with them.
Then it's, you know, so I think the story continues to change.
And meanwhile, William and Kate, Charles, they haven't responded to any of these allegations.
So we're only hearing one side of the story.
And I think they feel like they can't respond because that pulls them into kind of this pit of Mudslinging and fighting.
And so how do you even respond?
Do you go through each and every lie that Harry and Meghan have told?
How do you even go down that road?
So I think they're trying to take the, you know, never complain, never explain route.
But I do think that they should not be invited to things with the royal family anymore because A, even if you take what Harry has said at face value, if you are William and think he's going to attack you, why would you want to go to these things with him?
Well, they want to go to it with him because it makes them relevant and they want to be famous.
But I think the royal family should say this is for working royals, and so you are not part of that.
You obviously have come out publicly with all of this information, and so they can enjoy their $135 million in Montecito, living in a mansion if they want.
They don't also get to then be royals, I guess, or benefit from those photo ops and so on.
So that's what I would personally do, but I don't know what Charles will decide.
He seems like he's kind of a little bit more of a weak person.
So apparently Queen Elizabeth, though, people have said she would have come out and clearly denounced Harry.
And Megan, so she had a much lower tolerance for this.
She was apparently the one who encouraged Charles and Diana to divorce because she was saying this can't really continue like this.
It's not really good for the royal family.
So I think she would have had a much more stern reaction.
But... Charles is maybe not that kind of person.
Yeah, I mean, I agree. They've opted out.
They should be booted.
This is a, wow, what a dysfunctional operation.
And there it is for the world to see.
Danielle, thanks very much for coming on to talk about it.
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I want to conclude today my discussion of the fabled clash between Galileo and the Church, which is supposedly a reflection of the clash between science and Christianity.
I've argued that is not an accurate reading of what actually happened.
Now, Galileo's book called The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published 1632, was a mixture of good and bad arguments for heliocentrism.
As I mentioned earlier, On Friday, Galileo falsely argued that the motion of the tides, the fact that the water goes back and forth, is a proof that the Earth is going around the Sun, because supposedly as the Earth moves around the Sun, it sloshes around the water in the oceans.
This is, by the way, flat-out wrong.
The reason for the tides, as was demonstrated really by Newton, And conclusively, a little bit later, was the gravitational force of the sun and the moon acting jointly on the earth.
That's the real reason for the tides.
Galileo made other errors in his book.
So the point being, it's not that Galileo was right about his conclusion, but the definitive evidence showing that didn't come out until 50 years after this debate.
Now, why did the church sort of go after Galileo?
Why did they make an example out of him?
It's pretty unique, to be honest.
It's the only case in the entire history of Christianity where the church, Catholic or Protestant, has targeted a scientist or has taken on any particular scientific theory.
It's only happened once. And so for people who think, you know, wow, there's been this ongoing clash between science and religion, you should be able to find 15 examples of Of the church going after scientists, denouncing various valid scientific theories, but you can't.
You only have one case.
And this case alone, as well, doesn't really prove the point either.
One of the problems for Galileo was that he didn't just stay with his scientific theory.
He also began to tell, really, the church how to read the Bible.
This was a huge tactical mistake.
Not that, by the way, Galileo's Bible philosophy was wrong.
Galileo was basically saying that the Bible needs to be read both literally and figuratively.
There are certain passages that are literal. There are other passages that are metaphorical.
Obviously, the Bible also has parables and so on. But Galileo included in his book a sort of theory of how to read the Bible. And the Jesuits kind of warned Galileo, listen, Galileo, you know, you're not a priest.
You're not part of the church.
This is not your job to pronounce on ecclesiastical matters.
And so, something not well known by the public, which is that Galileo began to dabble in something which the church very jealously guarded as its own jurisdiction, its own authority, that was part of the problem.
Also, interestingly, this was the age of the Reformation.
Protestant thinkers were attacking the Catholic Church and saying, the Catholic Church doesn't take the Bible seriously.
The Catholic Church doesn't pay attention sufficiently to the specific language of the Bible.
And so oddly enough, this was a case where the Pope was trying to demonstrate to the Protestants the Catholic fidelity to scripture and the geocentric interpretation, by the way, of scripture was common to the Catholics and the Protestants.
Both Catholics and Protestants read the Bible to be saying, in very conventional language, that it is the earth that is at the center of the universe and the sun goes around the earth.
So one historian, Richard Blackwell, has made the point that had the Reformation occurred like a century before or even a century after, probably the Galileo affair would not have happened, but the Catholic authorities took it as a kind of way to mend fences with the Protestants and show the Protestants.
hey, listen, we care about the Bible just as much as you.
I think what really sealed Galileo's fate in the Galileo trial was when Galileo came back to Rome in 1633, he was again a celebrity, was treated with respect, and in his trial before the Inquisition, Galileo might have prevailed, but something came out.
It's like one of these cases in a trial where a bombshell piece of evidence comes out and completely discredits your case.
In fact, even makes people who are on your side sort of go, oh well, you know what, he's guilty.
It's kind of like, you know, we have, of course, the upcoming trial.
Debbie's following this really closely in the Idaho killings.
And you can just imagine that in the middle of the trial, they produce, you know, DNA evidence and it's conclusive and everyone goes, oh, wow, yeah, the guy probably, you know, he did it.
Similarly, what happened in the Galileo trial was right in the middle of the trial, somebody went through Cardinal Bellarmine's notes and And what did they find?
They found a statement by Galileo basically saying, I will not publicly teach or advocate the heliocentric theory.
This was Galileo's own admission that he would not do this, and of course he had done exactly that.
Now, Galileo never told anybody that he had made this agreement with Cardinal Bellarmine.
He didn't tell the Inquisition.
He didn't tell anyone.
So when it emerged in the trial, even people who had supported Galileo began to feel like, well, this guy's not really being very honest.
He himself made this commitment and then reneged on it and refused to disclose that he had made the commitment in the first place.
So Galileo was found guilty, but as we'll see in the next segment, his penalty was really pretty mild.
I'm completing my discussion of the Galileo case.
Galileo was found guilty by the Inquisition, guilty of dishonesty, guilty of advocating for the heliocentric theory when he himself had made an agreement that he would not do it.
And people told Galileo, listen, just, you know, plead contrition.
Tell him you're sorry you did it, you shouldn't have done it.
Galileo refused. In fact, Galileo went before the Inquisition and said in his sort of sentencing period— Now, this is dishonest.
It's not true.
Galileo was advocating for heliocentrism.
So, in the sort of public mythology, Galileo went before the Inquisition and under his breath, he muttered, and yet it moves.
As if to say, Galileo was, you know, somewhat like Martin Luther King.
He's unshakable. He's holding to his position.
By the way, this is a completely made-up story.
There are no records anywhere.
That suggests that Galileo said anything of the kind.
This is part of the sort of fictional narrative that's invented subsequently in subsequent centuries to make Galileo into the hero that he, in fact, was not.
Now, contrary to what many people think, Galileo was not punished severely.
It was never, you know, earlier I mentioned these new atheists talking about the church, you know, torturing scientists and putting them to the rack and burning them at the stake.
Galileo was not charged with heresy.
He was never put in any kind of a dungeon.
Essentially, he was given house arrest.
And what does that mean?
Well, he was released into the custody of the Archbishop of Siena, who housed him for five months in his magnificent palace.
Then Galileo returned to his own villa in Florence, and although he was technically under house arrest, he could leave.
He went and visited his daughters who were at the convent of San Mateo.
The church allowed him to continue his work on other scientific matters other than the heliocentric theory, and Galileo died of natural causes in 1642 in his bed.
As I mentioned, in subsequent decades, this is a fact, by the way, that Thomas Kuhn points out, in subsequent decades, the evidence for heliocentrism became stronger and stronger, And essentially it became a completely accepted theory.
So, what do we conclude from all this?
Well, the traditional picture of Galileo is some kind of martyr to intellectual freedom, victim of, like, church torture.
I'm quoting now historian Gary Ferngren, This quote has been demonstrated to be little more than a caricature.
In fact, another historian, Thomas Lessell, says that the Galileo episode is actually a momentary disruption in an otherwise very harmonious relationship between Christianity and science.
In other words, the church was working cooperatively with science.
Most scientists had some affiliation, really, with the church hierarchy.
Many of them were either Catholic priests, or in some cases, they were Protestant clergymen.
Darwin, by the way, very interestingly, at one point thought about becoming a clergyman.
Obviously Darwin didn't see any radical conflict between serving in the clergy and doing his scientific work.
In fact, Darwin thought that because the clergy only works sort of once a week, he'd have plenty of time to do his work in biology and in the natural sciences.
So, the dispute that we see here was not really a dispute between religion and science, but between the new science, heliocentrism, and the science of the previous generation.
Now, this is, by the way, not unusual.
It is normal for a new scientific theory to come along to challenge an existing one.
The existing one has got some things going for it.
In fact, it seems empirically, experimentally to work, and this was true of the geocentric theory.
The new theory offers...
Problems for the old theory.
Hey, wait a minute. Why is it the case that you've got these moons of Venus?
Why is it the case that we see spots on the Sun?
Galileo's new telescopes create problems for the geocentric theory.
And yet, People are reluctant, particularly the older generation, reluctant to sort of throw over the old theory.
They're like, well, maybe there's some explanation for these things that could be reconciled with the geocentric theory.
And it's only as the evidence accumulates that a new generation of young scientists and naturalists comes along and they go, well, on the balance it seems like this new theory has a lot more going for it.
That's, by the way, the same way in which the Einsteinian theories, the special theory of relativity, 1905, and later the general theory of relativity, how did those replace the Newtonian framework?
Again, it was not immediate.
It was over time, and once there was experimental confirmation of Einstein's theories, people began to see not that Newton's theories were wrong, but that they fit into a larger framework that was now provided by Einstein.
Alfred North Whitehead, a noted historian of science, says that the Galileo case is, quote,"...the worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof." Reproof means a mild scolding.
Before dying peacefully in his bed.
And that is the true meaning of the Galileo episode.
It has been mythologized in a kind of exaggerated way.
And taking down or debunking that exaggeration has been the point of this exercise.
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