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Feb. 8, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:44
STATE OF HIS MIND Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep513
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Coming up, I'll give you my take on Biden's state of the union.
Unfortunately, he didn't give us an update on the state of his mind.
John O'Connor, trial attorney, author, podcaster, expert on Nixon's Watergate scandal, will join me.
We're going to talk about the classified document scandal as it involves both Biden and Trump.
Harvard fires a prominent left-wing activist posing as a misinformation expert.
I'll tell you why. And I'll look back to Pope Benedict's pontificate to ask, how did the Catholic Church end up with a suspect character like Francis?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I don't know And usually in those days when I would listen to Clinton, I would to some degree marvel at his political artfulness.
I would also catch him out on a bunch of things.
I knew that Clinton was being slippery over here.
He was doing kind of a clever new math over there.
And I was thinking about objections to what Clinton was saying, refutations of his arguments.
But it was a sort of a civic and intellectual exercise.
With Biden, I feel like I am listening to a known con man.
And that's a whole different experience.
There's no reason to refute his arguments.
They aren't really arguments.
They're just blatant falsehoods, crass emotional manipulation, all that kind of thing.
And so no wonder Republicans now are far more openly contemptuous of what they're getting.
They don't follow the old decorum.
By the way, I think this is a very good sign that the Republican Party doesn't play by the old rules.
Sitting cow, tepidly applauding at every idiotic statement.
Because it's not that the idiotic statement is false, because I'll see leftists.
Well, you mean...
Dinesh, are you saying that you don't want the price of insulin to come down?
Are you saying that you don't want people to get better health care?
No, that's not the point.
The price of insulin doesn't, quote, come down.
You take money from somewhere or you make a mandate that imposes a cost somewhere else.
Remember, double entry, bookkeeping.
So the question is not, is it better for the price of insulin to come down?
But was this particular decision a good one?
Again, there was some booing when Biden talked about immigration.
No surprise. He's the cause of the problem.
Fentanyl. No surprise.
He's at least partly the cause of that problem.
Now, people are talking about a little bit of other stuff with regard to the State of the Union.
First of all, the bizarre show of affection, I guess I could call it, between Jill Biden and Kamala Harris's husband.
I mean, I realize it's slim pickings in both households, but this particular union of the business, it's just a bizarre thing.
I don't even know what to make of it.
And so I'm just going to...
They're really close, says Debbie.
All right. More interesting to me is the exchange between George Santos and Mitt Romney, where Mitt Romney gratuitously says to Santos something like, well, you don't belong here.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
And of course, there the Never Trumpers are like, look at Mitt Romney.
He's just a paragon of honesty.
He's not a paragon of honesty.
First of all, who decides if George Santos belongs there?
It's obviously the voters, not Mitt Romney.
Who appointed him like the nanny of the Senate?
Well, George Santos isn't even in the Senate.
So even if Mitt Romney were the appointed nanny of the Senate, he would have no say over what's going on in the House.
This guy is just a, let's call him a moral megalomaniac.
He's just astonished at his own rectitude.
And he's become a tiresome buffoon.
So my advice to Romney is to zip it.
Let Santos worry about himself.
In fact, I think probably Santos has at this point a brighter upward future than you do.
You're on the downward slope.
Santos will see. All right, let's talk a couple things about the speech.
Biden begins with a sort of almost a cosmetic show of bipartisanship congratulating Kevin McCarthy, but then quickly pivots to a completely left-wing laundry list, assault weapons ban, codification of abortion rights, new tax on billionaires, new protections for labor.
And so let's ask...
You know, if you just put this stuff on the table, stuff that is not a question of meeting you halfway, we're not going to be doing these things.
And so the chance that we're even going to have a serious conversation about it is quite literally zero.
It's purely symbolic.
It's performance artistry.
I guess you could call it campaigning for 2024.
But the idea that we're talking here about responsible governance, nothing could be further from the truth.
Some people on the left are praising Biden for, you know, having kind of boxed in the Republicans on Social Security and Medicare.
I think this is just fakery.
They invented this idea that Republicans are trying to slash Medicare, slash Social Security.
Now look, at some point...
Long-term entitlements do need to be reformed.
This idea we can't touch social, we can't touch Medicare long-term is extremely irresponsible.
This is a kind of a train wreck that is coming our way and it is the responsibility of leaders to see the incoming train and see that we are on the tracks and see that something does, in fact, long-term need to be done.
But it needs to be done, of course, in the right way.
It's not being done now.
And so Biden didn't box the Republicans in on anything.
The Republicans were never there in the first place.
And finally, I kind of was bemused about Biden's, you know, Tyree Nichols business with the, well, you know, black people have to have the talk, as he calls it.
This is Biden feigning inside knowledge of the inner city.
Black people have to have the talk with their sons about how to deal with the cops.
And he goes, I never did.
Well, actually, white people have to have the talk as well in America today and certainly in certain parts of America.
Obviously, Biden is a product of a completely different generation.
And so the situation was different decades ago.
But are you telling me that in rough neighborhoods and inner cities, whether the—we're not just talking about black neighborhoods, but— Hispanic neighborhoods or white neighborhoods, ethnic neighborhoods in Queens, New York, where Italian Americans and Irish kids, ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago.
You don't have to have some sort of conversation with your kids about how to deal with the cops.
Hey, listen, you need to follow orders.
If they tell you to step out of the car, do that.
Put up your hands. Do that.
Give them your license. Do it slowly and deliberately so it doesn't look like you're reaching for a weapon.
Don't start swerving.
Certainly don't strike out at the cops.
I mean, this is common sense.
And the idea that there's some sort of a racial disparity here, I think, is just the usual familiar political opportunism of the left.
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So go ahead. I want to welcome to the podcast my guest, John O'Connor.
He's an experienced trial lawyer.
He's a former assistant U.S. attorney in Northern California.
He's also host of the Mysteries of Watergate podcast.
You can follow him on social media, Twitter.
It's at the John D. O'Connor, or his website is just postgatebook.com.
John, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
I want to start, you're an expert on Watergate, and I want to start by just asking you, as someone who's sort of been through all that, and then seen the scandals of the last...
Well, last several years.
Looking back, does Watergate appear to be almost, gosh, small potatoes, no big deal compared to the kind of stuff that we're dealing with now?
Oh, very much so.
I wrote a book called Postgate, Dinesh, in which I talked about how this was a journalistically impelled scandal.
And the book I wrote talks about how that journalism was false journalism.
But again, the post was somewhat invisible.
To criticism, and has been for 50 years, but it was very small potatoes, and very inaccurately, Nixon was inaccurately portrayed.
He had the campaign, this is not a campaign operation, and John Mitchell, it's now admitted by all, had nothing to do with this.
It was not originated, the burglary was not originated in the Oval Office.
Now, is it fair to say that Nixon...
Well, I mean, first of all, what you're saying is that what's been happening to Trump over the last several years happened to Nixon.
And that's interesting because it shows that we have a sort of a precedent for all this.
And maybe this is part of what is driving the energy of the left.
In other words, they were successful with Watergate.
Nixon decided to quit.
And so they go, wait a minute, why isn't Trump getting out?
Why isn't he essentially moving into a quiet, private life?
We got Nixon, didn't we?
Why can't we get this guy?
Well, that's what investigative journalism was after Watergate.
It's about getting scalps.
It's about being consequential.
And changing the world. And if you're going to change the world, you've got to put on a jersey.
So most people that go into investigative journalism come in from the left.
People who take the business curriculum or Western history don't go usually into journalism.
And so that's what we have.
And we have social media now and more local radio talk shows.
However, the mainstream media is still acting as the Washington Post did.
And I'll give you one little bit here.
A dean of a major journalism school told one of his graduate students when Trump came into office, we're going to Watergate him.
I've been talking to other journalists, we're going to Watergate him.
And that's exactly what they tried to do for four years.
And to some extent, it worked.
To some extent, it worked.
Let's talk about Biden.
What struck me as interesting is that the moment that the classified documents, when the news came out, and it's an interesting question how that news came out in the first place, because I'm sure this was not something that was happily and voluntarily put forward.
They must have put it out as damage control of some sort.
But the moment it came out, the immediate media reaction was, Well, this is a very different situation from the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the classified documents over there.
So let's talk a little bit about your take on the Biden classified document scandal and what it means.
Well, first of all, what Biden did bespeaks intentionality and it also is clearly concealment.
Trump, everyone in the world knew that Trump had backed up moving vans to the White House on January 18th, reported on CBS, CNN. He was not trying to get away with anything.
Now, he may have had an overblown idea of what executive privilege is and what personal effects are.
That was his complaint and it should have been litigated in a civil way.
And it wasn't. Of course, we know about that.
The Biden people weaponized the whole thing, made it into a criminal case.
But to say, and so all the comparisons are favorable to Biden.
Whereas what he did was, number one, he stole government property.
There's no doubt about it. You take boxes and you don't report them.
You're stealing property. Number two, the type of documents he had bespeak intentional curation.
Someone selected the jewels.
If I have my mother's best jewelry and leave the trinkets behind, my siblings can accuse me, rightly, of knowing thievery.
And that's what happened here.
You had presidential briefings from 2013 to 2016 that could be very useful.
That's the other thing. There's an inference of use.
I mean, another point that seems to me obvious is that look at the duration.
In other words, Biden's documents evidently go back to his days in the Senate.
And I think I was listening to Senator Mike Lee saying, well, listen, it's not so easy to get classified documents Out of the office and into your own possession when you're in the Senate.
They come to you in a certain way.
So it's not quite the same as your president.
You've had your term. Your people are packing up a bunch of boxes.
The wrong documents get in there.
This is a case where intentionality, again, Biden must have wanted to take those documents and went to considerable effort to do it.
It's not easy to do. Right.
And the Penn-Biden Center was not begun until 11 or 12 months after his term ended.
And so someone had to select those documents that were to be brought to the Penn-Biden Center.
So you're not just bringing any trash you've got.
You're not bringing old copies of The New Yorker over there.
You're bringing things that you think are useful in that center.
So once again, it's not only intentional when he takes them, but it's also...
Intentional when he moves them around.
And further, Dinesh, he's dividing them up in some way.
Some documents are going to Rehoboth Beach, some are going to his house in Wilmington, whatever.
So there certainly looks like use, curation, and use.
And we have also an example of Hunter Biden basically giving an email that is almost a repeat of a classified document when he is pitching Ukraine, the Burisma people in Ukraine.
In 2014, he gives this assessment of the drilling activities off of Crimea, the effect of Russian actions, and the effect of possible US sanctions.
But he does it in a way that makes it clear that it is not Hunter Biden who is an expert.
He is copying something.
He is not trying to audition as the world's expert in foreign policy.
He is auditioning as a person who has access to classified documents.
So there is intentionality in letting people know that he had a classified document.
You could only read that email as such and say, okay, we're getting something.
This guy is really connected.
He can get us the highest jewels of intelligence.
And so who knows what he's getting as his dad's in office.
I mean, the thing about that is that that takes it to a whole new level because now not only do you have the intentionality, but you have the evident desire to convert what you have into cash.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, we'll pick this right up with John O'Connor.
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Code Dinesh. I'm back with John O'Connor, a trial lawyer, former assistant U.S. attorney in Northern California, host of the Mysteries of Watergate podcast, and the website postgatebook.com.
John, we're talking about Biden and intentionality now.
Merrick Garland, I think somewhat reluctantly, named a special counsel in this case.
What can you tell us about the special counsel and do you think that there's going to be a real hard look at this or do you think that this is one of those operations where you got a guy that you kind of know and you know he's going to kind of pretend to look at it and he's going to essentially whitewash the whole matter so it doesn't become a real investigation.
What can we hope for in the scrutiny of what Biden has done?
Well, unfortunately, the appointment of a special counsel protects He protects Hunter Biden on these things, protects Joe Biden.
Why? Because the special counsel, Robert Hur, can select his staff.
If this were handled by the Justice Department, not everyone in the Justice Department is partisan or going to look the other way.
There are some very, very honest people in there who will not be compromised.
And now we have, as in the Robert Mueller team, Mueller did not pick his people.
I know Mueller. It was his deputies who picked nothing but partisans.
Her is going to do the same thing.
Her's a well-known candidate.
So all this is going to do is protect.
It is not going to be to investigate fully and fairly.
Wow, that's actually what I feared and suspected, but this is...
Alarming confirmation that that's true.
Now, let's pivot for a moment to Trump because you had the Mar-a-Lago raid.
And of course, there it looks like they are pushing full speed ahead.
My question is, is there any there there?
I realize this is part of an overwhelming, desperate, let's get Trump on something.
I mean, this was ratified again a couple of days ago when I see that they're trying to sort of resurrect the Stormy Daniels controversy in New York.
So it's part of a relentless get-him-one-way-or-the-other campaign, but are they going to be able to make any headway here?
And doesn't Trump have an obvious defense, which is, hey, wait a minute, if Biden's got these classified documents, why are you singling me out for special prosecution?
Well, there's a big distinction.
Merrick Garland has not opened up a criminal proceeding as to Joe Biden.
So if he lies, cheats and steals, he is not obstructing justice.
Now, once her gets involved and subpoenas people and so forth, well, okay, you can obstruct that.
But what happened was Garland opened a criminal case Before there was any indication of a crime, I've seen the referral letter from the archives.
It's vanilla. It doesn't say anything other than, hey, we got Trump's documents.
There were some classified, some unclassified.
And he kind of kept them not in a...
A detailed way. He had classifieds next to unclassified.
Well, that's not a crime. But what they did, though, by opening a criminal proceeding, any lie, anything that obstructs the production of evidence can be considered obstruction.
So like Nixon and Watergate, Nixon did not know what had happened in Watergate, and he was puzzling about it forever.
John Dean did know. So Nixon did a couple things that were technically obstruction, one in particular, one act.
And they're going to try to do the same thing to Trump.
I don't doubt, but that they're going to have some evidence that Trump said, no, don't give him that document.
For instance, he thought the letter from Kim Jong-un was personal.
So he thought he had an objection to delivering that.
Well, if he told somebody, don't give him the letter, I'm just making this up, don't give him the letter from Kim Jong-un.
Technically, they can charge with obstruction of justice.
Theoretically, he had to give it over when there's a search warrant, a criminal proceeding.
And then after that, the proceeding continues.
So that's what they're doing.
This is all technical.
Remember, the Democrats, the left, they're big on process crimes.
You start something, and that's what Comey was doing in Russiagate.
He was trying to rattle Trump so much that he would make a bad move and they would get him for obstruction.
And they almost did it.
And you can just feel the frustration in the Mueller report of all the times that Trump almost obstructed justice.
Well, anybody who practices law knows that your client almost obstructs justice all the time.
You don't do it. You think, well, gee, Mr.
Lawyer, do I have to give him this document?
No, you got to give him the document.
Is that obstruction? No.
But that's the best they could get on Trump.
But they wanted process crimes And they're going after him now, and I fear, from just some of the leaks I've seen, they may get him.
So, I just have to be...
I mean, I'm cynical about the intentions of the investigation here, and I think with good reason.
I mean, it seems like...
Talk about what it is about...
It seems like the Nixon and Trump situations are somewhat anomalous.
And by that, I mean, they didn't seem to...
They tried to go after Reagan on Iran-Contra.
I'm sure they weren't happy with either H.W. or Joe or W. But it seems that there's a particular venom that I see with Nixon and now resurrected with Trump.
What is the reason for that?
It's all visceral. When the recent Watergate shows were on, like one produced by John Dean on CNN, every now and then they just gratuitously throw in Trump.
Oh yes, Trump and Nixon.
They both can be cartoonish figures to the left.
And Nixon was never a He's a Hollywood guy.
He was never a great glad-hander.
Like, Bill Clinton was always charming.
John Kennedy's charming.
Barack Obama's charming. Trump, to a lot of people, rubs people the wrong way.
He's a bull in a China shop, and that's why he got elected, frankly, because people were disgusted with the China shop.
So, they're very much similar in that sense.
What I would say about Nixon is, both of them have sort of a certain contentious personality.
And so when met with issues, Nixon becomes churlish, Trump becomes combative, and it's easy to say, oh, look at this guy.
He's a terrible guy. That's all it is.
It's visceral, nothing, not a lot of substance to it.
Very enlightening. John O'Connor, love to have you back sometime.
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
You've been a great guest. Great to be with you.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Harvard University has, well, happily terminated one of its...
Fellows or faculty members, a so-called disinformation and misinformation expert named Joan Donovan.
She joined the school in 2019 and she has to make her exit by the summer of 2024.
In other words, she's been notified that this is sort of her last year.
She can't raise money anymore for her projects and she can't hire anybody.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about misinformation because this term, which has now entered our vocabulary, is to me such a disturbing and twisted term, not because it doesn't have a clinical meaning.
I mean, I fully understand that someone can be misinformed.
Oh, sir, you're misinformed.
The sky is green.
No, the sky is blue.
You're misinformed. I get it.
But on the other hand, on any relevant political topic, it's not so clear.
Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan.
Is that misinformation? No, it's not.
The Democrats did found the Klan.
They revived the Klan under Woodrow Wilson.
Now, the Democrats would say, well, it's not right, Dinesh, because the parties switch sides.
So there's always a counter-argument.
And that's kind of my point.
It's not a simple matter of information or misinformation.
We're talking about arguments backed up by evidence, and the evidence is obviously disputable.
It's questionable. Here we go.
January 6th was an insurrection.
Is that misinformation?
Well, it depends what you mean by an insurrection.
It obviously wasn't an armed uprising like the attack on Fort Sumter or the eruption of the Civil War.
On the other hand, you did have people go into the very building where the congressional officials were deciding and ratifying the count of the election.
So, depending upon what you call an insurrection Or what you think the motives are of the people who went in there, the term insurrection is or is not misinformation.
The vaccine is dangerous.
Is that misinformation? Well, it depends, A, what you mean by the word dangerous.
B, how dangerous.
In other words, what is your level of risk tolerance?
You might be willing to say, listen, I don't want to get COVID no matter what.
I'll take the vaccine, whatever its side effects are.
It's not dangerous for me because it's totally worth it.
And so anyone who says it's dangerous is putting out misinformation.
But on the other hand, for someone who goes, listen, yeah, it's true that some of the effects of the vaccine could mirror the effects of COVID.
I mean, you can get myocarditis from the vaccine perhaps, but you can also get myocarditis from COVID.
But here's the difference.
You're not getting COVID voluntarily.
You may or may not get COVID, but you're walking in or you're being forced to get the vaccine.
So you're putting yourself in that risk situation not really by your own choice or it's something that you've undertaken on your own volition.
So, the point being here that the term misinformation is very poorly applied to these complex situations.
And yet, here you've got this, and you can tell from the work that she's put out.
I mean, this is someone who wrote a book called Meme Wars, The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America.
You're obviously dealing with someone of subgroup.
Not of the level of ability and intelligence that you normally expect, let alone someone who has leverage or influence on what is being banned on social media, allowed or not allowed in the debate.
This is like turning over a debate on physics to some guy who's like an introductory physics student at like Penn State and saying, listen, you decide what it's appropriate to say in this argument about a medical diagnosis or this argument about black holes or this argument about the relationship between the quantum theory of gravity and Einsteinian relativity.
I mean, none of this would make an ounce of sense.
And yet, you've got these now self-styled experts who are essentially modern-day frauds.
They're the equivalent of what Mark Twain called the Duke and the Dauphin.
You remember those two scam artists in Huckleberry Finn?
Well, Joan Donovan is a scam artist.
And it's a grave indictment of Harvard and other universities that scam artists like this are now all over the place.
They're deans, they're appointed to special projects, they're members of the faculty.
And so this is a small, you know, gain.
Apparently Doug Elmendorf, who's the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, had some sort of a falling out with this woman or came to see that she's...
More of a scam artist than Harvard can normally tolerate, and so they're letting her go.
But here is, by the way, one of the spokesmen for the Kennedy School, James Smith, quote, Harvard Kennedy School is committed to the teaching and study of misinformation and disinformation, and other faculty members are leading significant projects that address these topics.
So apparently Harvard wants to stay in the misinformation-disinformation business with or without this woman, Joan Donovan.
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Feel the difference. I just read an interesting article on, this was actually on post-liberal order, substack.com, written by a guy named Gladden Pappin.
And the value of this article is it's an interview with Viktor Orban, the longtime prime minister of Hungary.
The interview was conducted in the Castle Hill in Budapest.
And Orban is talking—well, he really addresses two topics, only one of which I'm going to talk about today.
I might pick up on the other one tomorrow.
The first topic is—he talks about Ukraine.
And his second topic is the broader issue of Christianity— And conservatism and Western civilization and is Europe moving away from that?
And that's a very interesting, though somewhat separate topic.
So let's talk about Ukraine.
And Hungary, as it turns out, has...
A lot to do with Ukraine.
Unlike for us, where the Ukraine is remote, it's far away, it's basically as far away, further away than Vietnam, Hungary has an 80-mile border with Ukraine.
There are close ties, particularly in the border regions, as is often the case.
You'll find in the border between Italy and France that the Italians are somewhat Frenchified and the French on the other side are somewhat Italianified, if you will.
And similarly, you've got common cuisine, things like that.
So, in fact, when Ukrainians fled across the border, some of them came into Budapest and into Hungary.
Orban is close to the situation, closer than we are.
And he says the problem is the way that we understand Ukraine and the way that the media covers Ukraine, this is an issue of being, quote, on the right side of history.
This is straight out Bidenism.
And it's also an issue of there are the good guys, the Democrats, and the bad guys, small d Democrats, and the bad guys, the authoritarians.
And so Putin's an authoritarian, apparently Zelensky, although this is itself somewhat questionable, is a Democrat.
But this is not where Orban is going.
Orban is saying that, listen, if you take up the, quote, right side of history approach, then the question becomes, Then why aren't we even more on the right side of history by committing all in to the Ukraine war?
Why don't we commit hundreds of thousands of troops?
Why don't we threaten to deploy nuclear weapons?
Why not go to the end, if you will, if you think, if you think, that this is a fundamental matter of right and wrong, up and down, being on the right side of history or on the wrong side of history.
And his point is we don't do that because we don't really believe it.
There's a mismatch between our right side of history rhetoric and the incremental approach that is taken to the war.
And that's Orban's point.
How do we know what is the right increment?
How do we know when to dial it back or dial it up?
We need a criterion independent of saying it's the right side of history.
Now, Orbán's point is that, look, unlike the United States, Hungary is in a situation where it's a relatively small country in a pretty dangerous neighborhood.
So they make these kinds of careful calculations all the time.
And so this is what qualifies the prime minister of a small country to speak about this, not to mention the fact that That Orban's been Prime Minister for a really long time.
I think his tenure goes back to Bill Clinton.
So think about it. This is a guy who's essentially been Prime Minister through Clinton, through W, through Obama, Trump, now Biden.
So this is a guy with a lot of political longevity.
And what he does is he says, listen, there's a strategic paralysis in the Ukraine war now.
And the reason for this paralysis is this.
The West doesn't really want a ceasefire.
Because think of it, if there's a ceasefire, do we stop being on the right side of history?
Somehow the right side of history has made a deal with the wrong side of history and they've come to some middle ground.
The problem with phrasing and constructing it this way is that you can't agree to a ceasefire.
Well, what's the other option? The only option appears to be total victory, and yet we're not willing to take the risks.
We don't want World War III. Nobody's willing to blow up the planet over Ukraine.
And so what happens?
We're suspended in between this.
We want to win it all, but we can't win it all, and yet we're not willing to take what normally happens, a negotiated ceasefire, a cessation of hostilities.
Both sides get something out of it and then peace is restored because that appears to be a defeat for the right side of history.
The other thing I found insightful about this interview is that Orban lays out what he calls, this is the way the Russians see it.
And in any conflict, it's really important to understand how the other side thinks.
It's not a concession to Putin or to the Russians to say, what are the Russians?
What is their view of the matter?
And he says their view of the matter is this.
Time is on their side.
The West is famous for getting all worked up and then getting tired.
Look at Afghanistan. Look at Iraq.
And then basically putting their tail between their legs and running off.
So the Russians are like, A, we just need to wait this out.
We don't have to win. We just need to wait this out.
Number two, we do need and we will insist upon a buffer between us and NATO. So either we're going to have a Ukraine that is somewhat subordinate to us.
That, of course, was our original intention.
This was Russia's original intention in invading to bring Ukraine to heel.
But there's a second option that's often not talked about, in part because it's a rather uncomfortable option.
And I would call that the level Ukraine into a wasteland option, because that also achieves the goal.
Think about it this way. If you turn Ukraine into another Afghanistan, where you've basically blown up everything and all that's left is dust and mountains, then you've created a buffer.
No one's gonna wanna live there.
People who live there, it's gonna be sort of a no man's land between Russia and NATO. So Russia's point is, you're not going to get Ukraine one way or the other.
Either we're gonna get it, or we're basically going to grind it down so that there's no, in effect, country there.
Yeah, there may be people living in the hills, but it's not gonna be an asset in your column.
So I think this is important to understand because we now recognize what their objectives are, And we also have to realize that we're going to have to carry this forward, not just with idle and irresponsible rhetoric.
We're the Democrats.
You are the authoritarians.
Or we're on the right side of history.
You're on the wrong side of history.
We live in the future.
You live in the past.
No one outside of this sort of progressive liberal orbit believes any of this.
And yet this is the sustaining rhetoric that has brought us to this unhappy point.
Guys, I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel and consider becoming a subscriber or even an annual subscriber.
Last night I did my weekly live Q&A and this was right about the time that Biden was doing the State of the Union.
So it's kind of a chance to get me...
Uncensored, spontaneous, unchained, able to not only speak to topics that I can't sometimes go all out and speak to on the podcast, but also topics in which I can respond directly to your questions.
That's the cool thing about locals.
It's a way of being a kind of inner circle.
Of the stuff that I'm thinking about or working on.
I also have a bunch of movies on the Locals channel, including, by the way, 2,000 Mules.
More movies going up all the time.
And you get those movies free if you become an annual subscriber.
Now, the annual subscription is $50 a year.
That's less than $5 a month.
And it's a good deal for all the exclusive content, the movies and the live Q&A. I'd like to make a brief comment about the papacy of Pope Francis.
And I see this Francis guy.
He's a very unimpressive character.
Part of it, of course, is his reflexive, thoughtless, left-wing ideological bent.
Part of it is the kind of idiot grin that he seems to have made a staple feature.
Maybe that's something that he can't help.
I remember the line from The Sound of Music, how do you solve a problem like Maria?
Well, I'm always thinking, how do you solve a problem like Francis?
How do we kind of get Francis?
Now, the answer, of course, is that Benedict...
The earlier pope retired.
Now, popes aren't normally supposed to retire.
It's kind of a lifetime appointment, and you can stay in the job until the lights go out.
And then the cardinals get together.
The smoke arises out of St.
Peter's in Rome, and they pick a new pope.
But with Benedict, he retired more than a decade ago, and then he lived We're good to go.
Benedict had a personal secretary, an archbishop named George Gainswine, a much younger man.
This man was in his 50s and 60s while Benedict was in his late 70s and then 80s and, of course, died at age 95 eventually.
But this guy, George Genshwein, has written a book called Nothing But the Truth, My Life Beside Pope Benedict XVI. I tried to go on Amazon and order the book.
I found I couldn't do it.
Apparently, it's been published by Mondadori, an Italian publishing house.
Maybe it will ultimately be translated.
But it's apparently the story of how there was a kind of inside movement in the Vatican to undermine Benedict.
So this shows you that there are...
Corrupt forces in the church that are trying to, well, I won't say undo the church, but at least move the church in a dramatically different direction.
At one point, I think it was John Paul II who said the smoke of Satan is within the church, and I believe that that is true in its broadest sense.
I believe that's true not just speaking about Catholics or Any particular denomination, it's true of Christianity in general, that you can say the evil one has made his way, not just into the church, you know, outer portico or lobby, but right into the church itself.
Now, Benedict was, I think, being a scholar and a theoretical man, if you will, seemingly not all that good in engineering his own succession, because it seems to me...
If you really believe in what you're doing and you really believe it's important for the church to maintain its traditional, which is to say its enduring, which is to say its eternal character.
Church doctrines don't really change.
The mass is the mass.
This is the way it's done around here.
If Benedict believed that and thought it was important to continue that, not only would he continue it, which he did, But he would make sure that he promoted people and brought people up who would then be his successor and could continue his legacy.
So I think impressive, though, Benedict's legacy is, and of course, intellectually, I think his legacy remains unvarnished and will last a long time.
Nevertheless, it was a defect.
It was a failure that Benedict's successful A papacy.
Remember, Benedict came picking up, if you will, the mitre or the baton from John Paul II, but he seems to have dropped it, and now it's ended up in the clutches of this more suspect character named Francis.
I'm discussing the anthropic principle, a remarkable principle in modern physics and cosmology.
And it's a principle that says that the constants and forces of the universe have to be at a precise, exact value in order for the universe to generate not just life, but also intelligent, conscious life.
And some people, when they listen to me talking like this, sometimes wonder, well, this is all very fascinating, Dinesh, and I suppose you're almost running a parallel track to theology or a parallel track to what a pastor does on Sunday.
How does this sort of directly relate to the Bible?
How does it help us in any way to understand, for example, what's going on in the Bible?
And so I want to do today a short detour.
I'm actually veering off my text.
And coming up, I'd like to apply the notion of the anthropic principle, perhaps surprisingly, to the book of Job.
This actually arises out of a conversation that Debbie and I were having about the book of Job.
We're in the process, by the way, of just reading our way through the Bible and then having discussions about it.
Well, the book of Job is of course very famous because it shows the trials and tribulations of Job, but it also shows that in the end God appears to Job and Job submits to God. Now, some of the atheists have looked at why Job submits to God and they say, wait a minute, Job kept asking God, why is this happening to me?
And by extension, why does suffering and evil happen to people, especially people who don't seem to in any way deserve it?
Let's remember in the book of Job, it is conceded that Job is a righteous man.
We know this because God is speaking to the Satan, as they call him.
And there's a mutual agreement that Job is an honest man.
Job is not sinned.
He's not being punished for his sinfulness.
This is part of a wager between God and the Satan.
And yet when God shows up to Job, he says something really strange.
Let me just read a few lines.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell me if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions?
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
And then God goes on like this.
Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb?
Have you ever given orders in the morning or shown the dawn its place?
Now, when skeptics and atheists reflect on these passages, as they do in some of their literature, they go, here's God showing up to Job, and God is basically telling Job, listen, you're an idiot, I'm the boss, I made the world, and so you better shut up and submit to me, and Job does.
So, from the atheist point of view, Job is a little bit of a coward.
He doesn't actually get a good reason.
God never fully explains why this is happening to Job.
God never fesses up and goes, Hey, listen, I had a bet with this other guy.
We just decided to do this for you to see who would win the bet.
God does none of that. God appeals, if you will, to the complex architecture of creation and says to Job, You really don't understand that, do you?
Now, here's my point.
The anthropic rule demonstrates that in order to get this universe that we have with beings like us in it, there is a formula to do it.
And God used that formula.
Another way to put it is that God made the universe in the way that you have to make it in order to get humans.
Let me put it somewhat differently using a simple example.
If I want to get the number four...
I can do it in one of several ways.
I can get 2 plus 2.
That's 4. I can do 1 plus 3.
That's 4. 3 plus 1.
That's 4. 5 minus 1.
That's 4. But those are the ways to get 4.
I can't do 20 plus 20.
I can't do 50 minus 10.
I'm not going to get 4. So the point being, if God wanted to make creatures like us, That can relate to him in this way.
Then he used the appropriate, quote, laws and formulas to make the world.
But that means that the world had to be made the way that it is.
You can't just say, well, listen, just let's alter the speed of light.
Let's alter the tectonic plates.
Let's alter the gravitational force.
And let's still get a universe.
It makes no sense.
That's like asking God to use numbers to get four, but to use 57 and 36 to get four.
That's just absurdity.
That's nonsense. Omnipotence doesn't mean that.
Omnipotence means God has unlimited power, but unlimited power to do what it is possible to do.
So what I'm getting at is that God's answer to Job is not, I know more than you, you shut up.
It's rather, Job, you're like an ant that has wandered into the cathedral of Notre Dame.
You're looking around and saying things like, I don't see a good reason for these columns.
Why do we have all those gargoyles?
What are all those silly paintings on the ceiling?
What kind of idiot did that?
I demand an explanation.
And the architect of the Cathedral of Notre Dame is saying to you, no, listen, there's a good reason for all this.
The cathedral had to be built this way in order to have this particular effect that we desired.
But you know what?
You're an ant. You don't have the comprehension to be able to appreciate the overall scheme, the overall design of the universe.
So I'm not asking you to shut up.
I'm merely asking you to recognize the limits of your own knowledge.
The human mind is not the same thing as the divine mind.
And the omnipotence, the omniscience that went into making the universe, that is something that not only human beings can't do, but it's very difficult even for human beings to comprehend.
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