All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 6, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:57
WHAT’S UP WITH CHINA? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep511
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com.
Coming up, the China balloon controversy.
I'll tell you what's going on.
Biden's about to give his State of the Union.
Is there any point in watching?
I'll tell you why not.
The Columbia Journalism Review calls the media to account for its Russia collusion disinformation, but will there be a reckoning on the part of the culprits?
And author Larry Correa joins me.
We're going to talk about his new book, In Defense of the Second Amendment.
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.
Not content with having given us COVID, the Chinese decided to send us a second present.
And in fact, this present is a balloon.
So most of the Chinese said, listen, we sent you a present and now we're sending you a little balloon on top of your present so you can...
Be really grateful for what great guys we are.
We like creating global pandemics, and then we also top it off by sending you a mysterious balloon.
Now, What is the point of this balloon?
What are the Chinese even doing with it?
There's actually a second balloon that is floating across Latin and South America.
So there are at least two balloons.
There have been some reports of a second balloon in America, but I've only been able to confirm one balloon.
So one balloon and then one balloon in South America.
Now, are these balloons spy satellites?
Are they a prelude, as some people have suggested, to an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse or some other form of Chinese attack?
Or are they merely a provocation?
Hey, listen, we're going to send you a balloon.
It's kind of like the way that a bully takes somebody in a playground and starts pushing him up against the wall or playing with his face.
It's just a taunt.
It's a way of testing the resolve and waiting to see if you're going to push back at all.
Because if you don't, the bully realizes, oh, wow, I'm dealing here with a complete weakling.
I can kind of get my way.
So, Biden...
Apparently knew for about a week that there was this balloon.
The balloon surfaced apparently originally in Alaska and Biden got a briefing on it.
There was Anthony Blinken.
There was General Milley.
So these guys were talking about this balloon, but they decided that they didn't want to interfere with Secretary of State Blinken's planned meeting with Xi in Beijing.
And so they realized, we don't want to spoil that.
And also, I'm quite sure this is probably a somewhat more muted motive.
We don't really want to embarrass the Chinese.
And so we're not going to tell the American people.
Now, this all changed when the balloon, which apparently drifted into Canadian airspace and then turned around and sort of came back into the United States, and it was over Montana, and the newspaper in Billings, Montana, the Billings Gazette, wrote an article about it and published photos of this floating orb.
And so it was picked up in the national media. What is this?
What's going on?
And so Biden jumps into action, but he jumps into action not because there's a balloon. He was going to ignore the balloon. He jumps into action because, and there have been a couple of articles about this quoting Biden officials, they were worried that Republicans would make hay of this.
They were worried that Republicans would, you know, get all over it and say Biden's weak on and China. Biden's collected money from China, both of which, of course, Biden wants to appease China.
The Chinese are basically showing their kind of contemptuous lordship over the United States.
And in fact, this is exactly what Republicans started to say.
And then there was sort of a remarkable report coming out of the Biden Pentagon, coming out of the Pentagon, saying that, hey, stop criticizing Biden for the balloon.
There were three balloons under Trump.
Three balloons traversing the United States.
And right away, I thought to myself, this can't be right.
First of all, the Trump people have denied it, and a long procession of people who are knowledgeable denied it.
Richard Grinnell denied it, Ratcliffe denied it, the former head of DNI, the Intelligence Agency, even people hostile to Trump like John Bolton said, that's not true, that didn't really happen.
But the reason we know it's not true, when I kept reading these reports, a report in Forbes, a report in AP, three balloons, and I thought to myself, these are news sources.
If three balloons were floating across the United States during Trump, why don't we see videos of them?
Why weren't they in the news?
Why can't we see videos of them now?
And then I saw a very interesting article in CNN today which basically says that the existence of these balloons under Trump was not discovered during the Trump years, but they only found out about it retroactively in the Biden years.
And right there I thought, this is such lying nonsense.
And by the way, the Pentagon officials who have been saying this and who are finding their views echoed in Forbes and in AP are all anonymous.
So we have to either take the anonymous word of the Pentagon, there were three balloons under Trump, Or we've got to be a little more skeptical, which is very appropriate in this age of dishonesty, prevarication, and lying, and say, if there were three balloons making their way across the country, don't you think that innumerable people would have seen them?
Don't you think that there would be innumerable videos of them?
Don't you think media sources would have those videos?
Wouldn't the Defense Department have those videos?
Why haven't we seen any of them?
And the answer is really simple.
We haven't seen any of them because there were no such balloons, it seems.
Or at least I keep an open mind.
Maybe the video will surface today or tomorrow, but I don't think so.
I've been putting it out on social media.
Let's see the videos. Hey, AP, show us the videos.
Hey, Forbes, show us the videos.
Dead silence from these outlets because they don't have the videos.
They're just going with the word of unnamed Pentagon officials for the simple reason that they get to shut down a Republican talking point this way.
Hey, just when you thought it couldn't get any better, Mike Lindell and MyPillow are launching MyPillow 2.0.
When Mike invented MyPillow, it had everything you could want in a pillow.
Now, nearly 20 years later, he's discovered a new technology that makes MyPillow even better.
The MyPillow 2.0 has the patented adjustable fill of the original MyPillow.
And now with the brand new fabric that is made with a temperature regulating thread, the MyPillow 2.0 is the softest, smoothest, and coolest pillow.
You'll ever own.
Debbie and I just got our shipment.
We're excited about it.
Say goodbye to tossing and turning and flipping your pillow over in the middle of the night.
More great news on the MyPillow 2.0.
Buy one, get one free with promo code Dinesh.
The MyPillow 2.0, machine washable and dryable.
It's made in the USA, comes with a 10-year warranty, 60-day money-back guarantee.
So go ahead, call 800-876-0227.
800-876-0227.
That's the number. Or go to MyPillow.com.
Don't forget to use the promo code to get the discount.
That's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
President Biden delivers tomorrow.
A State of the Union.
His annual State of the Union usually happens late Jan, I guess early Feb, so here we are.
And there have been some speculations about what this will be about, but I think we all kind of know what it's going to be about.
Why? Because we've been hearing Biden talking about some of this beforehand.
And it's going to be a big boast about the magnificent state of the economy and the even more magnificent job that Biden is doing in it.
Now, the problem with all this is that Biden is a brazen liar.
This guy will state things that are the flat opposite of the truth.
And I'm going to show that dramatically by focusing in on some specific statements that he's made lately.
We have created, I'm quoting Biden, more jobs in two years than any presidential team within two years.
This is the strongest two years of job growth in history by a long shot.
And then Biden was asked, hey, you take some responsibility for inflation, the highest inflation in 40 years.
Quote, do I take any blame for inflation?
No, because it was already here when I got here, man.
Biden. Now, He goes on, quote, Remember what the economy was like when I got here?
Jobs were hemorrhaging, inflation was rising, we weren't manufacturing a damn thing here.
That's why I don't.
Now, let's look at the truth of the matter.
First of all, the economy was in great shape in 2019.
This is pre-COVID. It then got hit by the COVID firestorm in early 2020.
Trump listened to health experts.
The country was shut down.
In April 2020, a hemorrhaging of jobs, 20 million jobs lost.
Economy plunges into a recession.
But then what happens is things begin to start picking up as the COVID crisis cools.
In fact, as soon as the third quarter in 2020, the GDP grows at an astonishing 38%.
So you're beginning to see already a revival of the economy.
Growth continues through the end of the year.
Now, Joe Biden assumes the presidency.
Jobs are already coming back.
The economy was already expanding at a 6% clip.
So, contrary to what Biden says, things were not really bad when he took office.
This is absolutely untrue.
Inflation was, in fact, and you can look it up yourself, 1.4% when Biden took office.
By the time we reached the end of 2021, it had increased fivefold to 7% on its way to 9%.
A few months later.
And so none of this gives Biden any introspection, any attempt to say, well, listen, we have some strong points over here.
We have some weak points over here.
No, to him, it is an uninhibited story of success.
And Now, there was a very good employment report in January showing the addition of 517,000 jobs.
That is, of course, a good thing.
But there are a lot of things that Biden leaves out and we won't hear one word about them at the State of the Union.
Number one... The huge government handouts that have come in the wake of COVID. This is a giant transfer of, what, 3.5 trillion, 3.4 trillion in relief bills.
A lot of people are getting so many benefits, they don't want to work.
And so let's remember that the unemployment numbers that Biden boasts about only count the people who want to work but can't find jobs.
But if I decide I'm getting so many benefits, I'm going to drop out of the workforce.
And this has happened to millions of people.
I'm not even counted in the unemployment numbers.
Why? Because the logic is I'm not seeking employment, so obviously I'm not unemployed.
I'm only employed if I'm trying to be employed and somehow can't find a job.
So we've created this kind of...
We already had a dependent class, but this dependent class has now been expanded to able-bodied people who had normal jobs before COVID and have now just decided not to work.
Number two... A large number of lower and middle income people have seen their real incomes clobbered, which is to say that even though they might have jobs and even though these jobs might pay better, that gain is more than undermined, is more than overcome by the rate of inflation.
And so imagine, for example, you're earning $100 and you get a pay raise from $100 to $105, but you're dealing with 9% inflation.
Well, you don't have $105 of purchasing power.
In fact, your purchasing power is below $100.
You are actually worse off.
The national debt, which admittedly was growing, was growing under Trump, has now reached alarming levels.
And yet, you would think the Democrats, far from showing, you know, they're trying to say, well, Republicans created this debt.
No, Republicans didn't create the debt.
The debt has been created by bipartisan irresponsibility on spending, by and large spending, driven by the Democrats, but sometimes with the acquiescence of the Republicans.
That's how we got here.
And it's a deep hole.
There are some people who think we can never dig ourselves out of it.
It's certainly going to take a long time to dig ourselves out of it.
Our problem is that we have bad policies and we have bad leaders.
And of all the leaders we have, there's none I can think of right now that is as bad, as incompetent, and as malevolent.
And some people go, well, Dinesh, is he malevolent or is he incompetent?
Well, think of it this way. He's 100% malevolent and he's 50% incompetent.
So that means that his malevolence is being attempted.
It doesn't always succeed.
Sometimes he falls short.
He's almost like a little devil who doesn't always succeed in his schemes.
But that's not for lack of trying.
The incompetence just comes from the fact that he doesn't really know what's going on.
He sort of has half a brain.
He forgets what he's been told.
So he's a horrible leader.
He's kind of the worst of all worlds.
You can admire a purely malevolent guy because it's like, wow, that guy's truly evil, but he's kind of effective.
This is kind of how I felt about Obama.
You can look at someone who's purely incompetent and go, well, that guy's a well-meaning guy, but he's such a fool.
That's the way I thought about Carter.
But when I think about Biden, he's a kind of disgusting hybrid of Carter and Obama.
Tubby and I started taking ReliefFactor a couple of years ago, and the difference we've seen in our joints the past two years has been nothing short of amazing. Aches and pains, which we had kind of come to accept, it's normal to be getting older, but no, they're gone thanks to this 100% drug-free solution called ReliefFactor. Now, ReliefFactor supports your body's fight against inflammation that's the source of aches and pains. The vast majority of people who try ReliefFactor love it. They order more because it works for them. Debbie
loves it too. She's now able to do all the exercises that for a long time she couldn't do. It's been a real game changer for her, her aunt, other members of our family, guys here in the studio, and for many other people. You too can benefit. Try it for yourself.
Order the three-week quick start for the discounted price of only $19.95.
Go to relieffactor.com or call 833-690-7246 to find out more.
That number again, 833-690-7246 or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. We're all familiar by now with the Russia collusion hoax, a hoax that was cooked up by the Hillary campaign, probably with Hillary's knowledge if it wasn't her idea in the first place.
Hillary campaign cooks it up.
They involve the FBI and the deep state.
The deep state then leaks false accusations of Russia collusion to the media.
The media is only too eager to collaborate.
There's massive communication traffic going on between the FBI on the one hand and other agencies of the government feeding inaccurate information to various media outlets, including in the end the New York Times, the Washington Post, really all of them, all the major media are in on this.
And all of this has now come to light.
It started to come to light with Robert Mueller looking at this and going to the astonishment, by the way, Dean Baquet, who was then the executive editor of the New York Times, he was stunned when he realized that he goes, holy S obscenity, Bob Mueller is not going to do it, meaning he's not going to find Trump guilty of any kind of Russia collusion.
And of course, this is what the media had been reporting for four years.
And so the real kind of new development is an article in the Columbia Journalism Review written by a media insider.
We're talking about a guy.
Who is deeply connected.
He used to work for the New York Times.
In fact, the Columbia Journalism Review is edited by a guy, Kyle Pope, whose wife, Kate Kelly, is a reporter for the Washington Bureau of the New York Times.
So we're talking now about a part of the journalistic establishment.
And this is a giant article in depth.
And it goes on for, it seems like, about 100 pages.
It's four parts long.
And the striking thing about it is that in systematic detail, even though it has a kind of friendly bias toward the media, it goes on to say, guys, you really blew it here.
And not only did you blow it, but the fact that you blew it And your refusal to take accountability for that is really eroding public trust in the media.
You have essentially thrown the rulebook out.
And the article has chapter and verse.
It just goes through things in a very systematic way.
And it shows that the reason that only...
That of 46 nations, guess which media, which country's media has the lowest trust?
And so ours, and I would argue with very good reason, 83% of Americans see fake news as a problem, and 56%, mostly Republicans and independents, but also some Democrats, say that, quote, the media is truly the enemy of the American people.
Now, why would people come to such a judgment?
Because they know that the very institution that they're supposed to trust systematically and knowingly lies to them.
And this is really what this guy is exposing here.
And at the end of the article, this is the part that kind of caught my attention.
He itemizes all the ways in which the media kind of threw out the rulebook.
He goes on to say, for example, But the media treats it as an informed source,
a reliable source, again, all unnamed.
A second thing that is brought out in the article is that when you do an article attacking someone, it was customary in journalism to go to that person and get their side of the story.
Ask them, is this really true?
Did this really happen to you, Mr.
Trump? Did you really do this?
But the media began to report all kinds of accusations against Trump while never reporting any, quote, other side of the story.
Why? Because they acted like there was no other side.
This is simply what happened.
And so we see here, this is the journalist saying, and this I think is worth reflecting on, quote, I've avoided opining in my more than 50 years as a reporter.
This time, however, I feel obligated to weigh in.
Why? Because I'm worried about journalism's declining credibility and society's increasing polarization.
My main conclusion is that journalism's primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media's own lack of transparency about its work.
This combination adds to people's distress.
Trust about the media and exacerbates frayed political and social differences.
So here's a guy from inside the establishment pointing his finger, and I think rightly, justifiably so, at the media.
And so far you've had discomfort on the part of the media.
But no attempt to really respond.
In a way, his article is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
He goes, the media lacks accountability.
They're not transparent.
They never admit to their errors.
And his own article is proof that that's the case.
Because you would think that there would be a kind of serious accounting in which people would go, let's take a look at this.
Let's take a look at this, the way that this guy is indicting our whole profession.
And showing that those of us who hold ourselves to be reliable, balanced, factual, empirical, are in fact not that way at all.
And that the public distrust of us, far from being unjust, poisoned by Republican rhetoric, no.
It is the earned distrust of people who have figured out that these guys are a bunch of termites and jackals.
They are the enemy of the American people.
They've certainly been Acting like it and one defining feature of enemy of the people is that they don't stop being enemies of the people when you point them out.
A new year is a good time for a fresh start.
Now, the phrase literally means an opportunity to begin something again.
You know you need a fresh start in your eating habits, right?
How many times last year did you say to yourself, I need to start eating better?
Well, eating the right amount of fruits and veggies every day is almost impossible.
I have a much more convenient, practical way for you to make that fresh start with Balance of Nature.
Now, Balance of Nature is sourced from 31 whole fruits and vegetables.
You'll get maximum nutrition with their star product, Fruits and veggies in a capsule.
Debbie and I take them every day.
I want you to do so also.
And right now, Balance of Nature has a great New Year's offer.
$25 off plus free fiber and spice with your first preferred order of fruits and veggies when you use discount code America.
The offer can end at any time, so go ahead.
Take advantage of it. Call 800-246-8751.
That number again, 800-246-8751.
Or go to balanceofnature.com.
Use discount code America.
Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Larry Correa.
He's a best-selling novelist, famous for the Monster Hunter series.
He's a popular blogger, really expert on the Second Amendment.
He wrote an essay called An Opinion on Gun Control, which was a huge internet sensation.
He's worked as a gun store owner, firearms instructor, military contract accountant, and he has a new book, In Defense of the Second Amendment.
Larry, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me. Sometimes I interview people on topics that I feel like I know as much as the author.
This is not one of those cases.
So I want you to take this occasion to sort of educate me about the importance of the Second Amendment.
Let me begin by asking you this.
It seems like in a recent case, the Supreme Court affirmed Second Amendment rights in New York, at least in so far as it said that the concealed carry restrictions that New York was trying to impose had to be set aside.
So my first question is, is the Second Amendment in real danger and where does that danger come from?
Bye.
It is, and that has been a continual mission of the hardcore left is to disarm Americans and to strip our rights away.
The Second Amendment is absolutely vital because it's, you know, all about the checks and the balances.
And a lot of people think of the different parts of the government checking each other and their authority.
Yet there's more to it than that.
The people are the final ultimate check against a tyrannical government.
And you can't have all the tyranny that you would like to have and the true control, absolute control, unless you have a disarmed populace.
And so this Supreme Court decision you referenced, New York State Rifle, Bissell v.
Bruin, was a huge win for the side of civil rights and civil liberties.
In that the Supreme Court smacked down some of the worst gun control arguments.
It reaffirmed that we do have an individual right to keep and bear arms, including those arms that are useful for such things as defending ourselves against things such as a tyrannical government.
So a lot of cases have spun off of this in recent months, and it's a very exciting time in this aspect of the battle for civil rights.
As you know, Joe Biden has made an argument that echoes a broader theme on the left, and that is that, number one, the whole idea of a sort of armed citizenry is an artifact of an earlier place and time and doesn't apply to today.
And Biden has even gone so far as to kind of scornfully say, well, listen, if you want to mount a rebellion against the Or even your rifle is going to do it.
You're going to need some nuclear weapons.
So I think he's mocking the idea that there is any contemporary viability or legitimacy to this case for the Second Amendment.
What would be your response to Biden?
Tell that to the Taliban.
I have a whole chapter in the book about that, because there's this modern interpretation from the left that the Second Amendment is irrelevant because they have F-15s and we have AR-15s.
Joe Biden likes to make that joke over and over again, and every time he does, it's for the first time for him.
But really what I think is that they don't understand what they're talking about.
And I go into great depth history, logistics, numbers, because basically if a fraction of a percentage of gun owners were to resist a tyrannical government, even armed with nothing but rifles and pickup trucks...
It's still a force that is orders of magnitude greater than anything that we faced in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
I even go into like the first opening parts of the Ukraine war with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
An armed populace is extremely difficult to fight with advanced weapons systems.
An insurgency is extremely difficult to fight with advanced weapons systems.
It doesn't matter how many nuclear weapons you have.
Unless you're willing to use them on cities where their voters live as well.
And the thing about the F-15s, one of my military contracts I used to work on was keeping the wings on fighter jets.
What a lot of people don't realize is the people that maintain these weapon systems, fly these weapon systems, they're us.
The Venn diagram of gun owners and people that do these jobs, they overlap.
We're almost a stack of pancakes.
The gun industry is very much involved in the defense industry.
And so the very people they expect to bomb, it's our friends, our family, our loved ones.
And the only thing separating those advanced weapons systems from the people they expect to use them on is a chain link fence.
I mean, quite literally.
This is not a war zone where you have clear lines, where there'd be tyrannical government on one side and the populace on the other.
No, it's all of us together.
And I really, really wish, my most fervent prayer is that Joe Biden and Eric Swalwell and people like that would quit being so flippant about this.
They're talking about the big red button on the Constitution.
They're talking about the emergency kill switch that the founders put on our experiment in the Republic.
And so I really wish they'd stopped.
And the part that galled me with this last one was Joe Biden was at a Martin Luther King Jr.
memorial event when he started talking about how he'd just kill American people with an F-15.
The thing about that is Martin Luther King fought for peaceful resolutions.
And not only that, he also, if you know your history, he had his Second Amendment rights taken away by the government.
Martin Luther King applied for concealed weapons permits so he could have a gun to defend himself in public, and the government wouldn't let him do that because he had upset them.
And so it was really interesting to see a man advocating for violent government tyranny against people at an immoral event for a guy that the government did the same thing to.
Wow. Let's take a pause, Larry.
We're going to come right back and pick this right up and also go into the, I think, probably the single biggest factor that causes people to have anxiety about the Second Amendment.
That's the issue of mass shootings.
We'll be right back. We all know our digital privacy is under attack.
Big tech steals your private information, your pictures, your chat, your email.
This is very bad stuff.
So is there a better way?
Well, yes, there is.
Secure, it's spelled S-E-K-U-R, offers secure instant messaging and email hosted in Switzerland without using any of the big tech platforms and using Swiss privacy laws, which are the strictest in the world.
Debbie and I signed up for Secure.
We're using it. We love it.
We think it's great.
Now, Secure's proprietary technology allows you to communicate privately without fear of spying from big tech companies, your email provider, or hackers.
Use Secure to chat or email with everyone, including non-secure users, thanks to Secure's unique features called Secure Send and Chat by Invite.
Secure is a separate email and messaging application that guarantees your privacy, and we certainly need that these days.
Go to secure.com.
That's S-E-K-U-R dot com.
Go to secure.com.
Use promo code Dinesh to get 25% off for the next 24 months.
Secure.com.
Guys, I'm back with author and Second Amendment expert Larry Correa.
We're talking about his book, In Defense of the Second Amendment.
By the way, on social media, you can follow Larry at...
At Monster Hunter 45.
At Monster Hunter 45.
Larry, we're talking about the Constitution, and, you know, I think it's funny how the Second Amendment has become...
We have these basic rights that are outlined, and the left tries to take explicit rights, the Second Amendment, but also to some degree the First Amendment, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and...
Either restrict them, constrain them, even pull them out, and then the left inserts rights into the Constitution that sort of aren't even there.
So it seems that part of what's going on here is a kind of hijacking of the Constitution itself, and the attack on the Second Amendment is just a part of that larger attack.
Would you agree with that assessment?
I do, yes. And I go into this in the book quite a bit because I talk about how the Second Amendment is one battle of the culture war, though it's a very fundamental one that's been going on for a very long time.
I've been involved in this fight for about 30 years now.
And during that time, I've watched the evolution of it, and it's become almost a religious argument.
where you have people who have their articles of faith, they believe what they believe, and they refuse to be swayed by logic or reality, and any problem is met with kind of almost a mantra. Guns are bad, guns are scary.
I go into all of them.
I go into 30 years of insults, all the stuff they say about us, and I refute Because the thing is, facts are actually on our side.
Logic is on our side. But it is definitely connected to other aspects of the Cold War.
In fact, by trade, I'm a novelist.
That's what I do is I write science fiction fantasy novels.
That's what I did before I did this.
My background is in the gun business.
And I've watched this the entire time in both industries I've been in.
There's this whole cancel culture kind of attitude where there's someone who's speaking opinions different than us.
They must be silenced.
They do that with guns. They do that with books.
They do that with movies. They do that with documentaries.
They do that with everything. So yes, I do believe it is all interconnected.
In this book, though, I do try to keep it primarily just to the gun debate because I am trying to sway fence-sitters, so I wasn't going to go after any other things that I may disagree with because I think that the ability to defend yourself is a fundamental truth that all people, all rational people, can agree on, regardless of what their other politics are.
I think you're talking about reaching people in the middle, people on the fence.
And my guess is that the one issue that gives those people some pause is the issue of these mass shootings.
Because on the one hand, I agree when people say, you know, it's the bad guy who's pulling the trigger.
I do agree with that. But at the same time, somebody's Likely to say, well, that bad guy does require a mechanism to carry out his badness, and that happens to be this highly lethal instrument called, let's call it an AR-15 or some sort of a, quote, weapon of war.
And so the left's point is that if you take away the weapon of war, you might still have bad guys, but they would be less efficient in carrying out their evil schemes.
How would you answer that?
I actually go through history and examples from around the world that that's simply not true, that they're incorrect about that.
They like to make the passion argument that whatever gun it is they're trying to ban today is too super lethal and it was inconceivable at the prior times it was a weapon of war.
Well, the weapon of war thing falls apart because all of our common guns, most of our hunting rifles, most of our duck shotguns, they've all been weapons of war at one time or another.
Even the lowly revolver was a weapon of war.
They've all been weapons of war.
So that's irrelevant. What they're really trying to do is they're trying to ban guns that are common and useful for armed self-defense.
And in that respect, then if you look at the true meaning of the Second Amendment, we are supposed to have those kind of guns.
Now, on the combating the mass shootings, this is something I've got a lot of personal experience with because I was a firearms instructor for a lot of years and I armed a lot of people and trained a lot of people.
What stops a violent encounter like that?
What stops a mass shooter, a mass killer, is a violent response.
That violent response can either be immediate by someone who is there, or it will be in 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes when the police arrive, or Uvalde, Texas, an hour and a half.
But that's what stops these events, is a violent response.
If you disarm the people who could provide that violent response, then more people will be killed.
And then the bad guy can work until the police arrive.
However long that may take, the body care will be higher.
And I go into the numbers, I go into the stats, I go into the historical examples, I go around the world.
Trying to strip guns away from the people just enables the killers.
And I use examples from countries that have gun control that Americans cannot even conceive of.
So strict that we can't even imagine.
The media likes to act like mass killings, mass shootings are a uniquely American thing.
They are not, and I prove that.
They are actually pretty common around the world.
When I say common, these are almost statistical anomaly events that are tiny, and orders of magnitude more regular crime where people can defend themselves happen.
But I've armed a lot of teachers.
In my state, we have armed teachers, and I taught a lot of teachers how to carry guns in school.
It provides a first line of defense.
This is a voluntary thing.
It's not a mandatory thing.
It's just who wants to do it. We know for certain that criminals, mass killers, target gun free zones.
They have flat out told us that.
They have written in their manifestos, I am going to target the following places because I know that the people there will not be able to fight back.
And they have specifically said that.
Yet we continually try to take guns away from the good people, and we continually try to strip them of their rights, and we create more places, gun-free zones that are just hunting preserves of innocent people for bad guys to victimize.
So the way they go about this is completely backwards.
And I try to break it down logically and also emotionally because there is nothing worse than being disarmed and helpless when a horrible thing happens and the government has stripped you of your choices and your ability to fight back.
Guys, this is really an eloquent and powerful book.
It's called In Defense of the Second Amendment.
The author, the guy I've been talking to is Larry Correa.
Larry, really appreciate your comment on the podcast.
Yes, thank you.
Thank you.
My dad really didn't believe in the stock market.
He was kind of a put your money in the bank kind of guy.
But I discovered over time and in the early 1990s that investing in the stock market can be highly profitable.
It 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 decimates 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.
I've had her on the podcast.
She's extremely good.
She and her team can help to protect you and your wealth during these unprecedented times.
Go to friendofdinesh.com and book your complimentary introductory call today to see if you qualify.
Again, it's friendofdinesh.com Today, February 6th, is Ronald Reagan's birthday.
I should know that.
I wrote a book on Reagan, Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.
But Debbie had to remind me, and I remembered it was in the month of February, but I wasn't sure what day.
Well, today. And this got me thinking a little bit about, well, the legacy of Reagan, the great achievement of Reagan.
I think Reagan was the greatest president of the 20th century, easily.
The second position there, probably Teddy Roosevelt.
Now, Reagan was not the most influential, perhaps, president of the 20th century.
I'd have to give that to FDR. But FDR's influence was, in many ways, negative, harmful, destructive.
FDR, for example, coddled fascism in all kinds of ways.
He blocked anti-lynching laws.
I've written about all this extensively in some of my later books, Death of a Nation, Hillary's America also.
So if FDR is the most influential president, now the worst president of the 20th century, I'm tempted to say Carter, but it's not Carter.
Carter's bad effects were moderated by his incompetence.
It would have to be LBJ. LBJ was a really bad guy.
And Debbie's kind of smiling here because Debbie went to the school associated with LBJ, namely Texas State, where you have monuments to LBJ all over the place.
But LBJ, the effects of the Great Society have been almost uniformly bad.
It did have some effect in reducing poverty, but it also destroyed the black family along the way.
It created many of the cultural pathologies that we live with today.
But let's come back to Reagan.
I think Reagan will be remembered as the president who won the Cold War without firing a shot.
That's a phrase borrowed from Margaret Thatcher.
But he also revived the American economy and he affirmed traditional values in a way that couldn't be more relevant today.
We realize as we look at the fraying fabric of our society that the kind of America that Reagan evoked, an America defined by individualism, by family, and by that he meant the nuclear family, by our local associations, our civic associations, But also local communities.
And then patriotism.
All these elements of Reaganism are sorely needed today.
But there are a couple of things about Reagan that I think are obsolete, and I want to point out what those are.
One is, Reagan always believed that the greatest threat to America came from abroad.
And this was true in Reagan's time.
The greatest threat came from the Soviet Union and from the Soviet Empire, but it's no longer true.
And this requires a major revision of our thinking.
Our domestic enemies are far more dangerous.
They do far more harm.
To us than do foreign enemies.
Now, part of the way they do that is by enabling foreign enemies like China.
But the Chinese threat to America could be much more easily handled if we didn't have a left and if we didn't have a Biden administration that was eager to make friends with China at every stage.
I also have to qualify another feature of Reagan, which I happen to share temperamentally, but I do not share intellectually.
And that is this kind of overweening optimism.
Reagan's was always kind of the cocky kind of toss of the head, the ironic smile, the things will get better.
And even when Reagan had his moving letter announcing Alzheimer's, I continue to believe that America's greatest days are still ahead.
I don't believe that. I have to say right now, I don't believe that America's greatest days are still ahead.
Now, not to say that things can't be turned around, but you have to be in willful denial of reality today to look at what's happened to America over the last decade or couple of decades and go, oh, wow, we're moving in the right direction.
America's best days are still ahead.
No, that Reaganite optimism.
Is obsolete.
Now, we're still sustained by hope, but hope is a very different thing than optimism.
Optimism is the belief that things will get better.
It's a kind of prophecy about the future.
Hope is a much more cautious belief.
And hope is rooted in, I would argue, a more theological sentiment about the universe.
We are praying, we are trying to make it such that things get better, whether they get better in fact or not, may be out of our hands.
By the way, Reagan also believed in the so-called 11th commandment, don't criticize your fellow Republicans.
And I do think that we could benefit from a little more of that today.
And by that I mean Trump, for example, pays no attention to this.
If someone gets into the field, he starts blasting them.
I don't think Reagan would have done that.
Reagan's view was that we Republicans, for all our differences, and we do have moderates, and we do have people who are more on the right, Reagan's view is we are still on the same side.
And by that he means We are fighting against a common enemy, and that enemy is the radical left.
And so we should not treat people who are on our own side as if they are indistinguishable from the enemy.
They're not. They might be defective in certain respects, but nevertheless, they still are on our side, and so we should try to find common ground with them.
We can make critiques of them, but while making those critiques, we should also at the same time emphasize, I do agree with you on this, and I do agree with you on that.
I think a little bit of that Reagan, I would call it this larger sensibility, would help the Republican Party at a time when it really could use an infusion of some of that Reaganite spirit.
I'm talking about the Anthropic Principle, and the Anthropic Principle is a An important principle in science, in modern physics and astronomy and cosmology, and it refers to the fact that the universe has to be the way that it is, as old as it is, as large as it is, have the forces as strong or as weak as they are, each one of them, the gravitational force, the strong nuclear force, the so-called weak force.
All of this has to be, let's call it just so, in order for our universe to Have created life in order for us to be there, in order for us to be able to turn back around and look at and understand that same universe.
Now, leading scientists have acknowledged the far-reaching implications of the anthropic principle.
And notice that even though these scientists are not friendly necessarily to God, nevertheless, look how much they concede in what they say about the anthropic principle.
Here is Fred Hoyle, who is, by the way, a prominent atheist for a good bit of his career.
I'm not sure how he ended up, but here we go.
Quote,"...a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with the laws of physics." What does that tell you?
That there is an overpowering intellect that has arranged these dials in this way.
Here's physicist Freeman Dyson, who I would describe as spiritual but not religious.
By the way, somebody who knew Einstein, someone who taught for much of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, one of the great physicists of our time.
Quote, The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.
Now, look how far Dyson is going here.
He's stopping short of invoking some kind of a supernatural deity, to be sure.
But he's attributing to the universe a degree of consciousness, a degree of knowledge.
What sense does it make to say the universe must have known?
We were coming.
Does the universe itself embody some higher consciousness, that consciousness that has foreknowledge that human beings are going to be, quote, at the end of the line?
And here's astronomer Owen Gingrich.
Now, Owen Gingrich is, in fact, a Christian, taught at Harvard for many years, now emeritus, I believe.
He writes that the anthropic principle, quote, means accepting that the laws of nature are rigged Not only in favor of complexity or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind.
To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way.
Now, this is a statement that you could write a whole essay on because the universe itself is matter.
It's forces and it's matter.
There is, in the universe itself, no obvious indication of mind.
It's quarks and electrons.
And everything from you and me to trees to stones to stars and faraway galaxies are made of the same stuff.
And yet, says Owen Gingrich, To create mind, to create a completely different type of entity.
Think of mind. Mind is not a thing.
Your mind doesn't have any weight.
If you put it on the weighing scale, well, you can't.
If somebody asks you, what is the length of your mind?
You can't say.
Does your mind have any kind of physical mass?
No. So, yes, you have a brain, and your brain weighs a certain number of ounces, and the neurons in your brain do as well, and so those are physical objects, but the mind that somehow comes out of that is a non-material thing, and it doesn't have those physical properties.
Here's astronomer Robert Jastrow.
He writes that the anthropic principle, quote, is the most theistic result of Now, Jastrow died a few years ago.
He was an astronomy professor at Dartmouth.
I actually got to know him pretty well in those days.
Our association was mainly over politics.
Jastrow was, well, he's Jewish.
He was an advocate of Israel.
And he was political, and I would say slightly right of center in that regard, mainly because he was a Zionist.
But then when he wrote his book, God and the Astronomers, it was to many people and many scientists and me, it was a surprise because we didn't realize that Jastrow, although again he maintained his kind of professional agnosticism, I don't know, merely telling you what science is finding out.
Nevertheless, he did not hesitate to draw out the implications that science is producing, as he says in this quotation, a, quote, theistic result. So, when I come back tomorrow, I'm going to pick up the difficulty that the anthropic principle causes for skeptics and for atheists and how they try to find a clever way around it by positing that there were just very lucky or there may be multiple universes.
All kinds of ways of getting around the simple fact that we live in a universe that appears to have been designed by a designer for us.
Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
▲
Export Selection