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Feb. 2, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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COMING TO LIGHT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep509
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Coming up, I'll reveal how a top investigator on the January 6th committee now confesses the committee suppressed evidence I'll tell you about what.
Hey, who needs a reason to boot Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee?
There's a search for reasons, but there's no reason to search.
I'll review Carrie Lake's new evidence on Maricopa County showing a heat map that was apparently aimed at suppressing the Republican vote.
And Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy joins me.
We're going to talk about his battle to stay on the AT&T airwaves.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The top investigator of the January 6th committee.
This is the committee, as you know, that produced a report insisting that Trump, and seemingly from the report's rhetoric, almost exclusively Trump, was to blame for what happened on January 6.
He concocted it.
He instigated it.
None of it would have happened without him.
Even the people who took actions on their own were an extension of what Trump was implicitly asking them to do.
So this is the theme of the January 6th committee report.
But here is the top investigator on that committee.
This is a guy named Tim Heafy, H-E-A-P-H-Y. And he goes along a little bit with what the report says.
He goes, yeah, I admit that Trump was, quote, the proximate cause.
But all he means by that is, quote, but for his words and deeds, it wouldn't have happened.
Now, even I agree with that in the sense that obviously if Trump had not called a rally, nobody would have come to D.C. And in that sense, Trump was the proximate cause of getting people to the Capitol in the first place.
But he goes on to say this, quote, that said, what happened at the Capitol was also affected by law enforcement failures to operationalize the ample intelligence that was present before January 6th about the threats of violence. He added, quote, law enforcement had a very direct role in contributing to the security failures that led to the violence. Now, what is interesting about this is not exactly that we don't know this.
You know this. I know this.
Politicians have spoken out about it.
Media commentators have remarked on it.
But this theme is completely missing from the January 6th report.
Not only that, the January 6th report says the exact opposite.
Here is Bernie Thompson, the chairman of the committee, in his foreword to the final report, he goes, quote, whatever weaknesses existed in the policies, procedures, or institutions, they were not to blame for what happened on that day.
So now why does the January 6th committee, which by the way, had a subcommittee devoted to studying intelligence failures and devoted to studying the law enforcement response, that subcommittee was then sidelined.
In fact, it wasn't even called to testify.
And the question is why?
The answer, of course, is that the January 6th committee wanted to tell a morality tale.
And in the morality tale, this was kind of called the Liz Cheney morality tale, the good guys were the law enforcement.
And the bad guy was Trump.
So if that's your storyline that you're trying to peddle, then it's very inconvenient for you that the law enforcement community was a complete mess.
Now, what Tim Heafy says is it's not that there was an intelligence failure.
See, there could have been... Law enforcement had absolutely no idea what was going on.
There was really no good intelligence about what was anticipated.
But the opposite is true.
In fact, Tim Heafy says that there were plenty of warnings that came into local law enforcement, that came into the FBI. Look, this could be really problematic.
It's a very large crowd.
People are really angry.
Things can get out of hand.
And there were some more specific tips that pointed to specific things that apparently people had seen on social media and so on.
So they knew. They knew about it, and yet they didn't do anything about it.
Now, Tim Heafy doesn't go so far as to say that this was a kind of a cunning scheme by Pelosi or by others to lure people into the Capitol.
I think that remains a possibility to be further investigated.
But what Tim Heafy says is it's not a failure of intelligence.
They knew. They just didn't respond to that.
So... So he says, quote, there was a lot of advanced intelligence about law enforcement, about carrying weapons, about the vulnerability of the Capitol.
The intel in advance was pretty specific, and it was enough in our view for law enforcement to have done a better job.
The January 6th committee, as I mentioned, had a so-called blue team, a committee of investigators.
In fact, it was headed up by the woman who helped prosecute El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord.
And she headed up this team, but she was never called to testify.
And when NBC News had broke the story, in fact, NBC News, to its credit, interviewed this guy, the head prosecutor, the head investigator on January 6th committee, and they called Soumya Dayananda.
No comment. She wouldn't say a word.
And the article goes on to enumerate very specific things.
The Capitol Police failed to deploy enough force to defend the building, and the FBI didn't do enough to sound the alarm about the threat.
Number three, there was confusion about which federal agency was in charge, hampering the response once the Capitol was breached.
Now, I suspect that the reason that Tim Heafy has come forward and is talking to NBC is It's simply because he knows all of this is going to come out anyway.
The GOP House, what a difference, by the way, a midterm makes.
The GOP House has an investigation that is just being launched on January 6.
They're likely to call these guys and say, wait a minute.
In your opinion, was there or was there not adequate intelligence?
Was there or was there not a sufficient response?
So I think these guys realize this is going to come out anyway.
We better put it out early as a form of damage control.
But it's a vindication of what many of us have suspected from the outset was that this wasn't just merely Donald Trump causing what happened on January 6th.
There was a massive failure of law enforcement on that day.
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It looks like today Ilhan Omar is going to be kicked off the House Foreign Affairs Committee and this also means that Ilhan Omar will no longer be the top Democrat on the Subcommittee on Africa.
This is something that she has taken great pride in.
And so this is a kind of a blow to Ilhan Omar, and she's been fighting hard against it.
Now, for several days, it looked like this might not happen.
In other words, it looked like Kevin McCarthy had the votes to boot Swalwell, to boot Adam Schiff, but not to boot Ilhan Omar for a couple of reasons.
One is that there's one Republican who thought that Ilhan Omar was doing a pretty good job on the committee.
There was another Ken Buck who's been on this podcast.
And Ken Buck, I think, was taking the principled view that, hey, listen, just because the Democrats threw Republicans off their committees doesn't mean that we, the Republicans, should throw the Democrats off their committees.
Ken Buck, I think, was joining the, let's call it, We're better than they are school of politics.
We should sort of show them by example that this is the right way to do things.
And then Nancy Mace, she's the one, I think, who was opposed to removing Ilhan Omar.
But Kevin McCarthy basically did what good leaders do, which is he started pulling these people into a back room and having a little bit of a talk with them.
And out of the three, he convinced two to swap their vote.
So Ken Buck now and Victoria Sparks have agreed to vote to remove Ilhan Omar.
They insisted upon a provision that she gets a chance to, quote, appeal her removal, which is kind of a worthless thing to do because that appeal is not going to very likely succeed.
And so Ilhan Omar is going to be out of there now.
The guy who made the resolution to remove Ilhan Omar is a Republican named Max Miller from Ohio.
By the way, Jewish guy.
And Max Miller focused on Ilhan Omar's kind of repeated pattern of anti-Semitism.
He says, listen, I've never met with Ilhan Omar, but she has been regularly spouting anti-Semitic rhetoric.
By the way, Ilhan Omar has said, I didn't really know this was anti-Semitic.
And other people have come to her defense basically saying, oh, she's Somalian.
How would she know what anti-Semitism is?
As if anti-Semitism is this very arcane thing, and it requires all kinds of study to figure out what it really is.
Ilhan Omar is no dope.
She's actually very smart in a cunning sort of way.
I don't mean she's high IQ, but I mean she's street smart.
And she knows exactly what she's doing and she knows what these anti-Semitic tropes are.
That's why she uses them, because she's communicating with her audience that, hey, listen, I'm one of you.
Now... This, as I say, is an attempt on the part of Miller, the congressman, to give a reason for removing Ilhan Omar.
But I don't think you need reasons.
You don't need good reasons.
You don't need bad reasons. You don't need any reasons at all.
In fact, here is a rather insightful statement by House Democrat Catherine Clark of Massachusetts, quote, Kevin McCarthy is acting out of revenge instead of focusing on the real issues.
Well, let's ignore the good old focusing on the real issues.
We can focus on the real issues and act out of revenge.
So yeah, this is accurate.
It's not even so much revenge as it is teaching the Democrats a lesson, as it is doing to them what they're doing to us.
And the question is, does that work?
And the answer is right here.
I'm reading an article in Politico.
It's working already.
Here's Representative Susan Wilde, Democrat of Pennsylvania.
She goes, I don't think it was the correct process when the two Republicans were booted by the Democrats.
But Susan Wilde voted for removing the two Republicans.
So she's now having second thoughts.
She's now realizing maybe it wasn't such a good idea.
And what's giving her this insight?
What's giving her this insight is the simple fact that we are doing to the Democrats What the Democrats have done to us.
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It looks like the Republican field for 2024, the presidential field, is going to have A second contender.
As we all know, Trump announced very early that he was running, and so far the field has been kind of empty.
Not surprising, most people don't actually declare this early.
Biden hasn't said for his part that he's running again.
I think he said he wants to, but he obviously hasn't declared that he's going to.
And there have been on the Republican side, a number of names floated.
Mike Pence and Pompeo, obviously Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley.
And if you watch these people, they seem to be taking the steps that you would take if you wanted to run.
Pompeo, for example, appears to be positioning himself to run.
And Pence has hinted that he's going to run.
Ron DeSantis, to my knowledge, has never said that he's running.
In fact, he has somewhat poo-pooed discussions about the presidency.
He's like, hey, listen, I just got re-elected.
I'm trying to do a good job for Florida.
So he has pushed those sorts of conversations to the side, although he is very much in the conversation.
But Nikki Haley is going to announce, and it looks like she's going to announce, February 15th in South Carolina.
She sent out an invitation to a lot of her supporters and donors.
She's picked a venue for where she's going to make this announcement.
And so this, of course, raises a question, and that is what kind of candidate are Republicans going to be looking for?
And I'd like to address that in general terms.
I have had a policy that goes back really before 2016 of not endorsing candidates in the primary.
Why? Mainly because I think the big threat to our country comes from the left.
It comes from the Democrats.
And we need a strongly unified Republican Party to push against the Democrats.
So what I'm going to be doing in the months leading up to the election is offering a kind of analysis.
And it's not that I don't have ideas of what types of themes are important or what kind of issues are critical, or even what kind of temperament is important for someone to assume leadership in In today's America, and I highlight today's America because the needs of leadership change.
And this is something that goes all the way back to Lincoln's day.
The kind of leadership that Republicans needed in the early days was very strong because from the formation of the Republican Party in 1854, the country was under a serious threat, a threat that then escalated through the 1850s leading up, of course, to the Attack on Fort Sumter and the ensuing Civil War.
So you couldn't, the Republican Party wouldn't even have gotten going if it had weak-kneed Republicans at that time.
Now, I'm not saying we are in a Civil War environment, but we are closer to a Civil War environment than we are to, I would call it, normal politics.
And Nikki Haley, in my view, is a candidate of normal politics.
She is a very nice person.
I've had her on the podcast.
I probably will try to do that again.
She cut her teeth in South Carolina politics.
She was, of course, the ambassador to the United Nations and, as far as I can tell, did a very good job.
There, she was also, what, the senator?
Or was she governor? Governor of South Carolina and seems to have done a good job in that.
It's not easy for somebody who is an Indian American, in this case a Sikh American, although I believe that she is herself a Christian, but it's not easy for someone of that background in South Carolina to be not only running and being elected, but be successful.
So there are good things to say about Nikki Haley.
The only question to think about is this.
We're in an America where the Democrats are gangsterized, they're out of control, and they prey on Republican weakness.
If they sense that the Republicans are nominating a candidate who's weak, they will throttle that person.
They will run circles around them.
They will drive them insane.
They will sit on their head.
They will feast on their carcass.
And this is something I'm worried about.
Mike Pence, in a way, is a lot like Nikki Haley, another really nice guy.
I think he did a good job supporting Trump all the way through, although you can debate his conduct in the weeks right around the 2020 election.
But the question is, is that kind of a candidate, a Pence or a Haley or a Pompeo, candidates who try to stride between the establishment on the one hand and the MAGA movement on the other, but candidates who in some ways don't want to radically challenge existing assumptions or radically take on the Democrats in a sort of, let's call it a combat mode, political combat mode,
I mean, of course, can such a candidate be the one that the Republican base is looking for in these tempestuous times?
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Carrie Lake and her legal team went before a judge in Arizona to present evidence of election malfunctions, election improprieties, and That were large enough and significant enough to have cost her the race for governor of Arizona.
And the judge set up a standard, which is, he said, you have to prove intentional wrongdoing, not just blips, not just malfunctions, not just things went wrong because things sometimes do go wrong, not just inconvenience, but you have to prove intentional wrongdoing.
And so he ruled in favor of Katie Hobbs, who is now the As a result, the sitting governor of Arizona.
Now, Carrie Lake filed an appeal, and I thought that the appeal was going to be focused entirely on the fact that the judge at the local level had applied the wrong standard.
Remember, in these kinds of cases, the standard is critical.
If you set a standard that is wrong, then you're going to be assessing the case by the wrong measurement, by the wrong criterion.
And Carrie Lake's point was, wait a minute, let's just say you have an election.
And let's say you have a uniform breakdown of 99% of all the machines, and people are not able to properly cast their vote.
And then the people who organize the election go, well, you know, we just goofed in a major way.
This was just a kind of complete breakdown, but it was unintentional.
We didn't mean to do it.
It just happened. Doesn't it make sense that you would redo the election because obviously the result is invalid?
So I thought Carrie Lake's case is going to be that the judge applied the wrong standard and the Court of Appeals, and Carrie Lake is now before...
The Court of Appeals would be asked to overrule the local judge on that basis.
But as it turns out, Carrie Lake has new evidence.
She recently had a Save Arizona rally in Scottsdale.
This was actually last Sunday.
And at that rally, she revealed something that I had not seen or heard before.
And that is she put up on the screen what she called a heat map.
And this is a map with sort of light and dark areas.
And she says that this heat map was hanging in the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center.
In other words, this exact map was displayed in the office of the people who are running the election.
Now, why is this significant?
because what Carrie Lake then did is she essentially took this heat map and she ran a comparison between this heat map, a kind of overlap between the heat map and the areas in Maricopa County that had problems where the tabulators broke down, where when you started putting things into the machine, the machine would spit them back out, votes that were not being properly counted. And she goes, you'll notice that this heat map actually identifies
the Republican areas where the breakdowns occurred.
It's almost as if, and she goes, look, this shows you, this is an indicator that this is something that was done intentionally.
In other words, that the leftists...
In league with the Never Trumpers, in the Maricopa County Election Office, decided, look, let's repress the Republican vote, and the way we do it is we have a very convenient breakdown that's going to occur in heavily Republican areas.
So, there are 132 polling locations that apparently had printer issues, overwhelmingly in, as I say, Republican areas.
Now, the Maricopa County...
Recorder Stephen Riker disputes this.
He says, no, no, no, we didn't have a breakdown in 132 locations.
He said that about 20% of 223 polling locations, so about 40 locations, had problems.
Later, Maricopa County amended this to say, no, there were actually problems in 70 locations.
So we're talking about a lot of locations.
Now, They did a study.
In fact, this was done by Rachel Alexander of the Arizona Sun-Times.
She goes that of the 70 locations that Maricopa County admits had serious problems, she says 59 are in heavily Republican areas.
Two are in Republican-leaning areas, so that's 61, and only nine were in Democratic-leaning or solidly Democratic areas.
So you see that Carrie Lake here has a point.
Whether she prevails in the suit, I'm not sure.
It's going to really depend on how seriously judges are taking the issue.
But look, the standard for election law is very simple.
It is the but-for standard.
But for these problems with the election, is the result of the election thrown into doubt?
And I think the overwhelming evidence for that is yes.
And there is proof of intentionality.
What's the proof? The proof is not only the overlap between the heavily Republican areas and, hey, the problems just happened to occur then.
By the way, at one point, Carrie Lake said, to cast my own vote, I decided to go to a Democratic area just to see if there were any problems over there.
No problems. Everything is working just fine.
So very interesting. The problems are only in the Republican areas.
And then, of course, we know about the fact that what the Maricopa County people did is they essentially configured a 19-inch image on a 20-inch ballot.
That's why the tabulators couldn't read them.
The printing was done of the wrong dimension and of the wrong size.
Now, again, Maricopa calls it, quote, a blip.
Are these really blips?
You mess up the tabulators.
You mess up the printers. They weren't messed up in early voting.
And even on election day, they weren't messed up in Democratic areas.
They're only messed up in heavily Republican areas.
And I think right there, you have a solid basis for putting this case before the Court of Appeals.
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Guys, I'm happy to welcome to the podcast my friend Chris Ruddy.
Chris and I actually go way back to the 1990s when Chris founded Newsmax.
This was in 1998.
And today he's the CEO of Newsmax Media.
And Newsmax.com consistently ranks as one of the country's most trafficked news websites.
You can follow Chris on Twitter.
It's Chris Ruddy.
NMX... Or his website, which is just, of course, Newsmax.com.
Chris, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
Boy, Newsmax has come a long way since I think you and I first talked probably in the mid or late 1990s.
You were just getting this going.
I wrote some articles for the magazine, as I recall.
Yes. Well, I thought we went...
I wanted to make a credit.
I thought we went even further back to the Spanish-American War.
I think we were in the Rough Riders with Tony Roosevelt together or something.
It feels like forever, doesn't it?
And of course, the country has changed dramatically, hasn't it?
In other words, we're talking now about the late part of the Clinton era leading into 9-11.
And what is your take on how the country is different today, you know, 22 years later, 24 years later than it was then?
I think it's sort of scary.
So much has changed culturally, politically, maybe economically, but it's very scary and frightening.
I think the change is even more since the Reagan years, let's say.
Like, my parents have both passed away.
I don't think they'd really recognize this country right now.
My dad passed away in the 1970s.
World War II veteran.
I think he'd be, like, shocked when he sees things going on.
Trans and gender stuff and...
Just the way the censorship, you can't even have dissenting viewpoints or you're closed down.
Like Newsmax was just closed down last week by DirecTV.
We were removed from 13 million homes.
And my view was a pretty blatant act of censorship.
Let's talk about that.
What can you tell us about how that came about?
Who pressured whom to make that happen?
Was this an independent decision by AT&T? Weren't there some Democratic congressmen who wrote to these providers and asked them to cancel both One America, also Newsmax, also Fox News?
How do you interpret how this occurred?
Well, I think you've got the storyline pretty accurate.
You know, Newsmax has been around as a media website since the 90s.
We started a cable news channel.
People didn't think we were going to succeed.
We went on cable news and in a few years we got on every major cable system, including DirecTV.
And then suddenly we were a power.
We're the fourth highest rated cable news channel.
We reach 25 million Americans regularly.
That's Nielsen reporting that.
So we've had a huge impact.
And a lot of people, I think, don't like it.
We know that after the 20 election, Nancy Pelosi's Democrats actually wrote a letter to all the cable companies, including the head of AT&T, John Stanky, AT&T owns DirecTV, by the way, demanding to know why they had Newsmax, One America, and Fox News. They said we were spreading misinformation about the election, and they were asking when our contract expired.
So clear implication they should remove us.
Very soon after that, DirecTV and AT&T deplatformed One America.
They said it was a cost-cutting measure.
And when they removed us from their signal last week, they said it was a cost-cutting measure.
And that's a lot of baloney.
They made $2.7 billion last year.
And we can show you, they have 22 liberal news channels that have, most of them have little ratings and get paid very high fees.
As Ron DeSantis says, they always cut conservative channels that everybody's watching, but other channels that nobody watched gets paid a lot of money.
And what is the way forward, Chris, when this sort of thing happens?
I mean, I assume that now that we have a Republican House, isn't it the case that the House can put pressure on AT&T and say, hey guys, can you account for this action?
Are there some steps underway for that to happen?
Are you optimistic it will get anywhere?
Well, let me give you the background here.
We were renewed.
We were up for cable renewals this year, and we asked for a very modest fee of $1 per cable subscriber.
CNN gets $14.
Most channels get multiples of that.
We have very high ratings.
We should be getting about $5.
So we were up for renewal last year, and we had hundreds of renewals done.
Three major agreements, including Verizon and Dish, renewed with us.
And then we were up with DirecTV, and they said, We're not going to pay Newsmax a penny.
We're not going to give you one cent.
And it was very clever.
They'll say, well, we'll keep you on for free, but we're going to give you nothing.
Well, it's very clever because they know you can't operate as a cable news channel unless you get fees.
And they knew that the minute we accepted that deal, all our other cable rates would go to zero.
So what they did was, and Kevin McCarthy has said this, Ted Cruz, they targeted Newsmax.
They said, we're going to treat you differently than all other cable news channels, and we're going to deny you the fees anyone else gets, a very modest fee.
And it was a very clever way to de-platform us, de-monetize us.
And I think our answer going forward is to do the right thing, to tell the public what they did, be very transparent, And let people decide.
You know, President Trump has come out and said he thinks it's disgusting, his work, what they did, and he's calling for Americans to cancel DirecTV and cancel their AT&T services, not just their...
TV things, but they're wireless service, the cell phones.
And we hear a lot of calls are going into both DirecTV and AT&T. And we have an easy number for people if they want to call.
It's 877-NEWSMAX, 877-NEWSMAX, and they can get connected right away.
What I find odd about all this, Chris, is that going back to the 1980s and 90s, you and I were raised in kind of the libertarian way of thinking that basically said that companies exist to make a profit.
And the common sense of that would be that companies would not want to antagonize large groups of potential customers.
It would be irrational behavior for them to do that.
So why wouldn't AT&T respond to these Democrats and go, hey, listen, we've got 16 liberal stations on here, and then we have a couple of conservative ones.
You know, go take a hike.
We're not going to accede to your demands.
Do you think it's the woke pressure inside of AT&T that is getting to the CEO and to the people on top and forcing them to succumb?
Kind of for the same reason that publishers don't want to publish conservative books, not because they don't sell, but because there's too much internal pressure not to put out that Well, you think internal pressure, I think many of the people in these companies are now woke.
They're totally disconnected.
I don't even think a lot of people at AT&T or DirecTV watch Newsmax.
They don't even know what we're doing.
You know, so they're not covering it.
They just believe what they read in the New York Times, that we're this, that, spreading misinformation.
I thought when Congress was changing and the House was becoming Republican, we would have, like, especially with big tech, we've had many similar issues of censorship.
And I thought these companies like Google would ease up, but we haven't seen that.
They're not afraid of the Republicans in Washington.
They're not afraid. They're not afraid of the public pressure.
They go ahead. They're going to lose probably hundreds of millions of dollars of equity value for dropping Newsmax, and it would cost them a tiny little fraction of that to keep us.
But they don't care.
This is a company under John Stanky.
It lost $50 billion in the acquisition of DirecTV so far.
They've lost $100 billion, according to the New York Times, in the Time Warner merger they've done.
The current CEO, John Stanke, You know, he was in charge of CNN. He oversaw it when they weaponized against Trump and the Republicans.
When he becomes CEO in 2020, the 2020 election, he immediately condemned the Republicans.
He called the protesters insurrectionists.
He banned AT&T from giving money to Republican congressmen at the time.
I mean, this is not...
I thought in the old days, you know, you had a big company.
You basically stayed out of politics.
I mean, that was the rule, whether you're woke, this or that, to stay out of it.
It's a neutral, like you said, it's just about making money, and it should be neutral.
I think most people want that.
And they're not neutral.
They're activists. They are protagonists.
They're antagonists. And it's up to the public to respond, and that's why I'm speaking out.
Well, this is, I think, just one indicator of the way in which the country has changed since the old days.
Hey, Chris Ruddy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
We'll keep you informed. Thank you.
My dad didn't really believe in the stock market. He was a put your money in the bank kind of guy.
But I discovered in the early 1990s that investing in the market makes a lot of sense if you're in it for the long term. The problem is we're in a very rocky economy with a lot of bad policy at home, a lot of instability abroad. There's always the risk of a black swan event, a single event that comes out of nowhere and basically cripples your savings. So how do we take advantage of the upside of the market and protect ourselves against the downside? We need some really good guidance here. And my friend Rebecca Walzer, she's a tax
attorney and wealth strategist with her MBA from the London School of Economics. Rebecca and her team can help protect your wealth during these unprecedented times. Go to friendofdinesh.com.
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To see if you qualify, again, that's friendofdinesh.com.
A new film about Brett Kavanaugh was recently aired at the Sundance Film Festival.
It's generated a good deal of media attention.
And the media attention is coming mainly because the Supreme Court is kind of on the rampage, by which I mean the Supreme Court is making a series of decisions.
Including, by the way, the overturning of Roe versus Wade that have completely discombobulated the left.
And so there's a kind of almost second wave of rage against the court and particularly against Brett Kavanaugh.
So this is the purpose of the film is to feed that rage and to give the idea that, you know what, this was a case where Kavanaugh should have been kept off the court.
So supposedly the film is producing new evidence.
So let's take a look at what that might be.
Let's remember that all of this goes back to Christine Blasey Ford, the, what is it, the 50-year-old who sounds like a 7-year-old.
Fred Kavanaugh threw me down and did this to me and did that to me and traumatized me so I've never been able to get my voice back.
Anyway, Ford couldn't remember when this happened and she couldn't remember where this happened and it was all decades ago.
But nevertheless, this is all the left had and so they sort of ran with it.
Now, the interesting thing is that this film, made, by the way, by filmmaker Doug Liman, and this guy, Doug Liman, is actually kind of famous or infamous for playing fast and loose with the facts.
He made an earlier film called American Maid, Which was supposedly the story of a real-life TWA pilot named Barry Seal.
But when people pointed out that there was all this misrepresentation in his film, the filmmaker goes, quote, it was, quote, a fun lie based on a true story.
So he's admitting there's really no truth to this.
I took a true story and I manipulated it and I told a bunch of lies.
But his theme here on the Kavanaugh film is that it takes great bravery for people to step forward and accuse Kavanaugh.
And of course the truth is the exact opposite, is it actually took great bravery for people to step forward and say that Christine Blasey Ford was lying.
Many people were pressured to come forward and support false accounts of Kavanaugh.
A really good example, by the way, is a woman named Lara Bazelon, who's an associate professor at the University of San Francisco.
She's a liberal, doesn't support Kavanaugh, but all kinds of people were reaching out to her in the fall of 2018 to basically see if she would back up the account of Deborah Ramirez.
Deborah Ramirez was Kavanaugh's Yale classmate.
He claims that at a gathering, Kavanaugh, you know, pulled down his pants and stuck his, you know what, in her mouth.
Kavanaugh goes, this is ridiculous.
And frankly, no one saw this so-called incident.
And so, interestingly, there was a New York Times reporter trying to pressure Lara Bezalon to support Deborah Ramirez's story.
And the New York Times reporter kept saying things like, well, why aren't you loyal to your friends?
And so, Bezalon became so disturbed that she found a bunch of other people who were there at that event and they issued a joint statement.
And I'm now reading, quote, we can say with confidence that In other words, it never happened.
And... Now, Christine Blasey Ford is not interviewed in this new film, which is kind of interesting.
I think the reason that the filmmaker gave up on Christine Blasey Ford is Christine Blasey Ford's testimony was completely debunked by the one person that Christine Blasey Ford said would corroborate her story.
Let's remember that Christine Blasey Ford was with her friend Leland Kaiser at the so-called, at the venue where Kavanaugh supposedly attacked her. And yet Leland Kaiser, who was very reluctant to speak during the period leading up to the hearings, and now we know why. Because there were many people on the left threatening Leland Kaiser. Leland Kaiser apparently had a problem with drug addiction. And so these people who knew about this said, we will out you, we will
humiliate you, we will destroy you if you don't step forward and back up the story of Christine Blasey Ford. And Leland Kaiser, to her great credit, refused to do it. She said nothing for a long time. But then later, she said, in fact, she was being interviewed by the New York Times for two reporters who wrote a book called The Education of Brett Kavanaugh.
And she said, quote, I don't have any confidence in the story.
Another way of putting it, it never happened.
This is a lie.
So this is the systematic way in which the left has now become a kind of lying machine.
We've seen it on so many different fronts.
Lies about Trump, lies about COVID, and here in this case, lies about Brett Kavanaugh.
I'm continuing my discussion of Christian apologetics, focusing on my book, What's So Great About Christianity?
And we're now talking about the Big Bang, the origin of the universe.
Now we move to a chapter that is called A Designer Planet, Man's Special Place in Creation.
Because it's one thing to say the universe was...
Created 14.5 billion years ago, but man hasn't been around for all that long.
So why create the universe that far back?
Why do we need the universe that we have so huge with so many galaxies, galaxies moving away from each other at rapid speeds?
What's the point of it?
I begin the chapter with a quotation from the physicist Lee Smolin at Princeton.
It says, We will never know completely who we are until we understand why the universe is constructed in such a way that it contains living things.
So this is a chapter about our relationship to the universe.
But our relationship to the universe examined from the point of view of science and then those findings related or matched up against what is contended for in the Bible, in the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures.
I begin with a discussion of the Copernican principle and I make the observation, this is the first line of the chapter, Copernicus is dead.
Now I say, hey look, I'm not saying the obvious thing that Copernicus died in 1543 as he did.
I go, I'm not even saying that the Copernican theory, the idea that of course the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around, I'm not saying that idea is dead.
In fact, that idea is very much alive and it's in fact true.
But it's important to realize that the Copernican Revolution isn't merely a scientific revolution.
It's also a kind of intellectual and cultural revolution that denies that man has any kind of a special place in the cosmos.
And what I want to argue in this chapter, in this section of the podcast, that new discoveries are reversing the lesson of Copernicus.
They're showing that we live in a universe where we do have a special, in fact, a critical position of importance.
The latest scientific research shows that we apparently inhabit a world specifically created for us.
Now, this is something that leading atheists and skeptics are very reluctant to admit.
And we see a familiar pattern here.
They're reluctant to admit the Big Bang.
They're reluctant to admit the origin of the universe.
Now they're reluctant to admit the idea that we live in, let's call it a designer universe, a universe designed for conscious creatures like us who can then turn around and comprehend that universe.
Think about it. There's no reason the universe had to be designed that way, but it is.
But here is the physicist Victor Stegner in his book called God, the Failed Hypothesis.
He goes, it's hard to conclude that the universe was created with a special cosmic purpose for humanity.
So this is a restatement of the Copernican idea that, hey, listen, we're...
We're no big deal. It's a giant universe.
We're just tiny specks within it.
Stop being arrogant and thinking the universe was somehow created for man.
Here's physicist Steven Weinberg, the human race has had to grow up a good deal in the last 500 years to confront the fact that we just don't count for much in the grand scheme of things.
And astronomer Carl Sagan, pretty much the same thing.
The Copernican Revolution, he says, challenges, quote, our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe.
So these are the ideas I will be arguing against.
And notice that although these are statements made by very prominent scientists, Sagan was probably the most famous living scientist of his time.
Weinberg won the Nobel Prize.
These are statements by scientists, but they're not scientific statements.
They're actually moral and cultural statements.
What we have here is a kind of a metaphysical narrative about science.
But it doesn't just shape the way scientists see the world.
It also shapes the way things are taught in schools and colleges.
It shapes the way our culture works.
Understands Copernicus and how Copernicus changed the way that we think about things.
Now, the Copernican revolution has sometimes been called the principle of mediocrity.
What does that mean? It simply means we human beings are nothing special.
We inhabit a tiny, insignificant planet in a relatively undistinguished galaxy in a distant suburb of an unimaginably large universe.
And this principle of mediocrity, which is derived from the Copernican Revolution, has had profound theological implications.
It's profound theological implications, but not for the reason that many people think.
Many people think, well, you know, the heliocentric theory was so revolutionary because it totally knocked over the biblical view that the Earth is at the center of the universe.
Well, first of all, the Bible never says that.
I challenge anybody to show me a passage in the Bible which says that the earth is at the center of the universe.
This is not even claimed in the Bible.
It's an idea that actually goes back to the ancient Greeks.
Now, the Christians, far from believing that the earth was at the center of the universe and everything, the Christians believed that if you look at creation as a whole, you have heaven, you have earth, And you have hell.
Heaven is on top, earth is in the middle, and hell is below.
So, in that sense, I suppose, you could say that earth was, quote, in the middle.
But what I'm saying is the Christians didn't have a cosmology That gave the earth a special place.
In fact, Christians have long believed that the special place that we are all destined for, that we should be destined for, is heaven.
Heaven is more important than earth.
Our life on earth is a short journey in the long expanse of eternity.
So the idea that Christians were obsessed with the earth, this is actually just a misreading of theology.
But in a deeper sense, and I'll come back to this, I think I'll pick up on this theme Tomorrow, the religious worldview was threatened by the Copernican Revolution.
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