All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 14, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:16
DEFENSELESS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep517
| 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, I'll talk about the cluelessness of Biden's defense policy, a policy that's leaving us well...
Defenseless. Yair Netanyahu, son of the Israeli Prime Minister, is going to join me.
We're going to talk about the history of Israel, but we're also going to talk about the parallels between the left in Israel and here in the United States.
In the second interview, I'm going to talk to author Spencer Clavin.
We're going to talk about the greatest threats facing Western civilization.
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 Biden administration a few weeks ago released its National Security Strategy, a sort of manual for how it sees the world, the threats that are out there, and how it expects to deal with those.
Reading this document is a little dismaying because you get the idea that although the United States has the resources to defend itself, has the intelligence to be able to spot what the threats are, it's not as if they're not obvious, Yet, there's almost a willful disregard of the fact that we live in a dangerous world.
And so, as you go through the different sections of this national security strategy, you see sections on climate change, sections on gender, sections on protecting, quote, our democracy, sections on inclusion,
transparency, quote, investing in women and girls, the Africa Build Together campaign, Exposing disinformation, everything except a clear statement of this is the danger we face, an emerging powerful alliance between China and Russia and Iran, all of them individually posing a severe threat, but combined their threat is quite serious.
And yet, no real discussion of U.S. national interests, no discussion about the vulnerabilities of the American population.
So it's almost as if you're standing on a train track, and here is this locomotive coming at you with blinding speed.
Now, you have the ability to jump off the tracks.
You have the ability even to sort of blow up the locomotive if you have to, if it's posing a serious threat to your life and to your liberty.
And yet you are kind of whistling, composing a poem, thinking it would be nice to, noticing objects and checking out certain flowers and trees.
This is the tone of this Biden national security strategy.
Let's remember China already has a navy that is bigger than the United States.
Let's remember that China has now developed largely the capacity to launch an attack upon Taiwan, which would be very difficult to see how the United States could effectively prevent, could effectively stop, and without incurring just unbelievable escalation and unbelievable casualties, not just over there but also over here.
The United States needs to work assiduously to make closer alliances with Japan, with Australia, with South Korea, with India.
Now, it's in the interest of these countries to do this, and yet you have no sense of urgency on the part of the Biden Defense Department or the State Department that we need to cement our alliances because we need to protect ourselves and our interests all over the world.
You don't get any feeling for that in this national security strategy.
Also, you can see that the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians are all hard at work in our hemisphere.
They're hard at work in Venezuela.
They're hard at work in South America.
They're trying to build a local base where they can launch operations, military operations against the United States.
And so some form of the Monroe Doctrine, stay out of our neighborhood, would seem to be vital.
Let's remember, this is exactly what Russia is asserting over the Ukraine.
It's exactly what China is asserting over Taiwan.
Hey, this is our neighborhood.
These are our kind of people.
Taiwan is really a part of China.
The United States, on the other hand, should consider some equivalent statement about our neighborhood, which is the neighborhood of the Americas.
And yet you get no sense that the Monroe Doctrine is even under consideration in this foolish and short-sighted Biden operation.
And so the conclusion is, you know, regimes that operate like this.
And when you're a rich country and a powerful country, you can afford to do this for a pretty long period of time.
But eventually, things catch up with you.
Eventually, your enemies catch up with you.
Eventually, you find that other people have grown stronger while you have stayed the same or you've grown more feeble and weaker.
And then comes that horrible day of reckoning where it's time to acknowledge that your power has diminished.
You're not the big lumbering giant you thought you were.
The world remains as dangerous a place as ever.
And now you have a shriveled and perhaps more precarious place within it.
Well, just when you thought it couldn't get any better, Mike Lindell and MyPillow are launching the MyPillow 2.0.
Now, when Mike invented MyPillow, it had everything you could want in a pillow.
But now, nearly 20 years later, Mike Lindell has discovered a new technology that makes MyPillow even better.
The MyPillow 2.0 has the patented adjustable fill of the original MyPillow, but now with the brand new fabric that it's made with a temperature regulating thread, the MyPillow 2.0 is the softest, smoothest, and well, coolest pillow you'll ever own.
Say goodbye to tossing and turning and flipping your pillow over in the middle of the night.
And more great news on this front, the MyPillow 2.0, buy one, get one free.
That's right, a buy one, get one free offer with promo code Dinesh.
The MyPillow 2.0, machine washable and dryable, made in the USA, comes with a 10-year warranty.
And a 60-day money-back guarantee.
So go for it. Call 800-876-0227.
That number 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com.
Don't forget to use the promo code.
It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh. Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
This is Yair Netanyahu. And if the name rings a bell, no surprise, he's the son of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Yair is an MA in Diplomacy.
He's also a columnist, a conservative activist, a radio host. He also has his own podcast. And you can follow him on social media. On Twitter, it's at Yair. That's Y-A-I-R Netanyahu.
At Yair Netanyahu. Yair, a pleasure. Great to have you on the podcast.
Thanks for joining me all the way from Israel.
I want to talk about your country, which has always fascinated me, but Debbie and I were in Israel in December for the first time, and you get just a tremendous feeling of being in the land of the Jews and in the land of the Bible.
You see all around you the signatures and the monuments and the various writings that point to ancient Israel, and yet you have the modern Jewish people who are now back in Israel.
And yet, when I come back to America, I see and hear and read the left, and they present Israel as a colonizing power.
Israel as a kind of occupier of that land.
It's Palestinian land.
So let's start by talking about that, because it seems to me that's the core issue underlying everything else.
Talk about Israel's historic Jewish identity and put in context this debate that we hear about today.
Hello, Dinesh. Thank you for having me, first of all.
So this is very unfortunate because it all comes from a lot of ignorance and just plain, you know, people that don't learn about history, basic historical facts.
So everybody is familiar with the Bible and, you know, the whole stories of the Bible is happening to Jewish people in the Holy Land in Israel, including the New Testament, by the way.
But it's not just the Bible.
It's real archaeology.
Everywhere you dig, In the land of Israel, you find Hebrew inscriptions from 3,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, etc.
So the Jews were living mostly throughout history in the land of Israel, in their own land like any other people.
And then with the Roman occupation, the Romans ruled the land for many, many hundreds of years.
And there were several Jewish rebellions against the Roman occupation of the Holy Land.
I'm talking about roughly 2,000 years ago.
Now, one of the last big revolts was called the Bar Kochva revolt that managed to get independence for the Jews for one year.
That was around 130 A.D., Now, after the Romans brought all their legions from around the world, from around the empire, from Germany and from France and from Italy, they crushed the revolt and killed many Jews, of course. And one of the punishments that they did to the Jewish people was changing the name of the province.
It was province of Judea.
That was the official name in Europe and the And in the Roman Empire of the province, like there was province of Italia, or province of Gaul for France, or province of Britannia for Britain.
So Israel was officially known as the province of Judea.
But then when they crushed the revolt, they made a punishment for the Jews.
And Emperor Hadrian changed the name of the land from province of Judea to province of Palestine.
Now, he called it Palestine after the long extinct people, even 2,000 years ago, they were already extinct, called the Philistines, if some may recall from the Bible.
The Philistines were from Greek origins who came from Greece and settled along the coast of Israel 3,000 years ago, more than 3,000 years ago.
Now, they were exiled and went to oblivion around 500 years before the Roman Empire by the Babylonians.
But the name of the coast stuck in Greek languages.
So then when the Romans came, they named the whole country after this long extinct people of the Philistines in order to disconnect the connection between the Jewish people and their land.
But even after that, Most of the Jews stayed in the land of Israel for many more hundreds of years throughout the Christian Byzantine Empire until the Arab occupation in the 7th century, Arab Muslim occupation of the 7th century, where the Arabs did something that no previous occupier and invader did before.
They dispossessed the Jewish people from their farms and from their agriculture lands.
And back then, most people were farmers and made a law that only Muslims are allowed to own land.
And that pushed most of the Jews out of the Holy Land, although they still stayed in places like Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and other places.
Now, you say, okay, that was more than a thousand years ago.
Maybe since then, they created their own independent country and nationality.
But that's not the case.
The Arabs, when they, short after, after they occupied the land, they lost the land to the crusaders.
And then the Muslims regained the land, but it was not the Arabs.
And later on, the Turkish empire took control over the land.
So it was never an independent Arab country.
And the Arabs never called that land Palestine, and the few Arabs that did live in that land never called themselves Palestinians.
But most of the land was empty and desolate.
You can see by Mark Twain's records of the famous American author Mark Twain who visited the Holy Land In the middle of the 19th century, he was not a Zionist.
He was not Jewish. It was even before Zionism.
He had no agenda. He just described what he saw in his pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
And he wrote in his book, it was a complete, desolate, and empty land with hardly any people there.
And that was in the middle of the 19th century.
So we own this land in modern time as well, because when Jews came back From Europe and the Middle East on big numbers in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the land was empty.
The land was not an independent Arab country.
It was an insignificant part of the Turkish Empire, of the Ottoman Empire, that wasn't even its own district.
It wasn't even its own province.
It was an insignificant part of the Syrian province.
That's why some of the Arabs that lived there called themselves Southern Syrians.
They never called themselves Palestinians. Let me follow up with a question, Yair.
You're saying a number of things really fascinating.
One of them is that the name Palestine is itself a colonial name, by which I mean the Roman occupiers of that land who were ruling it from afar.
Imposed that name to sort of obliterate Jewish identity.
The second thing you're saying, which I didn't know, I thought that after the destruction of the Temple 70 AD and then the Jewish revolts of the late 2nd century, the Jews scattered at that point.
But you're saying, no, there were many Jews who remained in Jerusalem and the area around Jerusalem and only left with the Muslim conquest of the 7th century.
Correct. And also important to emphasize, after the 7th century Arab-Muslim occupation, they still didn't, you know, the Arabs still didn't settle in the land in vast numbers, and they didn't build any new cities.
and the land was empty as well because it changed constantly hands between the Arabs, the Turkish, the Muslims, the Mamluks, the crusaders from Europe, etc.
And then in modern times, it's not like, okay, that's ancient history.
So when the Jews immigrated to Israel in modern times from Europe and the Middle East, the land was an insignificant part of the Turkish Empire.
And then in the First World War, the British conquered the Middle East from Turkey.
The British and the French occupied the Middle East from Turkey.
And then there was a global convention in San Remo in Italy, where the winning powers, which was America, Britain, France, Russia, and Japan, Came together and decided how to split the map of Europe and the Middle East, reshuffle the map of Europe and the Middle East after the First World War.
Now, in that convention, Turkey officially gave up their claim to the land of Israel, to the Holy Land, to the British Empire.
So now the British Empire was legally entitled the owner of the land because the Turkish Empire, who controlled it for hundreds of years before, officially gave up on their control.
Now, the British declared a mandate of Palestine.
They called it Palestine after the ancient Roman name, that's like everything from Latin and Roman stuck in all of European languages.
And in the mandate, it says, mandate means that a European colonial power control a land, but only temporarily.
And it's designated to be an independent country for the local, for the natives at some point.
Because back after the First World War, colonialism and colonies were out of fashion.
So there was the control of the British Empire through a temporary mandate.
Now, in this mandate, it's It specifies who are the natives that are supposed to inherit this land and create an independent country after the British leave.
And in this British mandate, it says specifically that the Jewish people are the ones that are supposed to inherit the mandate of Palestine and create their own independent country.
And by the way, that creates the present-day Israel.
West Bank, Gaza Strip, and what later became the country of Jordan.
Israel renounced its claims over the country of Jordan in the peace accords in the 1990s between Israel and Jordan.
And then this British Mandate of Palestine was ratified in the League of Nations.
And later on, like everything else from the League of Nations, it was ratified in the UN. It was ratified in the British Parliament and in the US Congress.
So So this is also international law that Israel is entitled for the land of Israel, including the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
This is part of the British law, the UN Charter, and the American law.
And no other legal changes has ever made in the land because...
There was the UN declaration calling for the separation for creation of two states in 1947 between a Jewish state and an Arab state in the matter of Palestine, but that was rejected by the Arabs and it was never had any legal importance because it was a General Assembly decision and not a That's a wonderful account.
And let's take a short pause because when we come back, I want to fast forward and talk a little bit about contemporary Israeli politics.
You don't have to live with aches and pains.
Debbie and I started taking Relief Factor a couple of years ago.
The difference we've seen in the pain in our joints, nothing short of amazing.
Aches and pains are gone thanks to this 100% drug-free solution called Relief Factor.
Now, relief factor supports your body's fight against inflammation.
That's the source of aches and pains.
The vast majority of people who try relief factor love it.
They order more because it works for them.
Debbie's a true believer.
She can now do all the exercises that for a while she wasn't able to do.
So relief factor has been a real game changer for her, her aunt, other members of our family, guys here in the studio, and many other people.
You too can benefit. Try it for yourself by ordering the three-week quick start for the discounted price of just $19.95.
Go to relieffactor.com or call the new number.
It's 800-4, the number 4, RELIEF, to find out more about this offer.
That number again, 800-4-RELIEF. Or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. I'm back with Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Israeli Prime Minister.
He's also a columnist, a conservative activist, a radio host, a podcast host.
You can follow him on Twitter, at Yair, Y-A-I-R, Netanyahu.
Yair, let's come to contemporary Israeli politics.
You're in a very unique position.
You're the son of the Prime Minister.
You're watching these...
Both domestic and international issues play out right in front of you.
Talk a little bit about what it's like seeing Israeli and international politics from your unique angle.
Well, Israeli politics is nasty and very tough, especially if you're a conservative politician like my father, who is being very successful in representing his voters and not being like just a wishy-washy conservative, but a real conservative who's delivering for his constituency and for his country.
That's because our media is very, very, very hardcore, progressive, and they're ruthless, just like, I guess, the American media for conservative politicians or activists, and it's tough.
Yeah. That's actually very interesting to me because when Debbie and I came to Israel in December, we got the impression, maybe an illusion, of a kind of relatively cohesive Jewish community that has common objectives, that protects a common heritage and a common history.
So, for example, as you know, in America, you've got leftists who knock down monuments.
They don't like George Washington.
They want to change the name of anything named after Madison.
In Israel, we didn't see any of that.
And yet what you seem to be saying is that there are parallels between the left in the United States and the left in Israel.
Can you say more about that?
Well, it's true for the most part, but not for the small radical left-wing minority in Israel, which is very anti-Zionist, very anti-Jewish traditions and faith and everything.
They are exactly like...
It's a small minority in Israel, but they control all of the media, all of the academia, all of the Supreme Courts, and the bureaucracy and deep state in Israel.
And they are very radical, very violent, and some of them are communists, basically, and they see Israel as an illegitimate country that's supposed to stop being a Jewish state and should become just...
Like any other country, with no national identity, with no Jewish background.
And that's a big problem for one specific reason.
Because unlike America, you guys have 300 million people and coming from all backgrounds, Israel is the only Jewish country in the world It's in the size of New Jersey, and it's only 9 million people, out of which the Jews are only 75%, or you can count it as 80%.
And the Arabs, mostly Muslims, are something like 20%.
Now, if we change our immigration laws like they want to, the radical left in Israel, that means that Muslims and Arabs from out the Middle East will pour in to Israel and immigrate to Israel.
And we also have a border with Egypt that has a border with African countries.
And we had a problem from huge illegal immigration coming from our southern border, from Egypt of Africans, illegal immigrants.
By the way, my dad is the only one who ever did something with it.
And he completely stopped the illegal immigration by building a fence along the Israeli-Egyptian border, which stopped the illegal immigration completely.
But still, they want to change our immigration law to make it possible for tens of millions of people in the Middle East and Africa to immigrate to our country and that will be the end of the Jewish state, obviously.
When you're talking about the left dominating these key institutions, media, academia, the legal profession, I mean it's very eerily similar to the United States, but if they are a relatively small minority in Israel, How have they been able to accumulate so much power?
Is it because they happen to be in these kind of key professions?
Is it that they have developed an effective strategy to take over those institutions?
How do you trace the power of the left to make it such a threat if they don't have widespread popular support?
It's really interesting.
I think the core of their control is through the Israeli Supreme Court, which took throughout the decades powers with no consent, without a vote from the people, from the parliament and from the government, and became the real ruler of the land, which is the Supreme Court.
And unlike America, the American people has a say who will be the Supreme Court justices by electing a president and electing a Senate and a Congress.
In our system currently, and that's why there's a whole, you know, that's a big battle going on right now in Israel, our, the current conservative government is trying to change it.
And, cause right now the Supreme Court justices are elected by themselves without any, without any say of the politicians and the parliament.
So never, of course not the government.
So the people are going and voting in elections, but it means almost nothing because the real rulers of the land, the people that have all the powers are the Supreme Court justices that never been elected by the people.
And from there, it's like they made laws, and it's not laws because it's not by the parliament.
They made decisions to make sure that only their kind of very radical kind of AOC kind of people, and Bernie Sanders kind of people, will be able to be nominated to the Israeli top bureaucracy and to the top officials in the police.
Academia, they maintain a monopoly of the radical left in the Israeli media market through regulations that they control.
And now this reforms in the conservative government trying to change it and make our system more like the American system or the Canadian or the British system.
Well, Yair, I actually had no idea that the courts in Israel were this kind of self-perpetuating body that was not really accountable to any of the other branches of government.
Listen, you've been a great guest.
I want to thank you for joining me.
Very illuminating stuff.
Guys, check out Yair Netanyahu on Twitter, at Yair Netanyahu.
Yair, a pleasure. Thanks for joining me.
Thank you. It was my pleasure.
Thank you. Thanks to your support, Patriot Mobile has emerged as one of the leaders in the parallel economy.
And they have big news. Patriot Mobile now offers service with all three major networks.
This means if you're with the big three and like the service but don't like the values, you can still access the service with Patriot Mobile.
They also offer a performance guarantee.
If for any reason you're not happy with your coverage, you can switch between the three major carriers for free.
Patriot Mobile is America's only Christian conservative wireless provider.
It offers nationwide coverage on the best 4G and 5G networks.
So you get the same great service while supporting a company that fights to preserve our God-given rights and freedoms.
This new year, resolve to stop supporting companies that don't align with your values.
Patriot Mobile's 100% US-based customer service team makes switching really easy.
Just go to patriotmobile.com.
P-A-T-R-I-O-T-M-O-B-I-L-E dot com slash Dinesh or call them at 878-PATRIOT. Get free activation today with the offer code Dinesh.
Once again, it's patriotmobile.com slash Dinesh or call 878-PATRIOT. I want to talk about the so-called Black National Anthem.
Now, there's a photo that's a meme that's gone viral on social media of Carrie Lake sitting there.
and sitting, refusing to stand for the so-called Black National Anthem while it's being sung at, before the Super Bowl.
And Carrie Lake made the following statement, I'm against a Black National Anthem for the same reason I'm against a white national anthem, a gay national anthem, a straight national anthem, a Jewish national anthem, a Christian national anthem, and so on.
She's making the point, and I think it's a little hard to argue with, that the purpose of a national anthem is to be for the whole nation.
The national anthem is a kind of unifying song.
And yet, I want to point out that this so-called Black National Anthem was, it's a beautiful song, by the way, written, I should point out, by a Republican.
And it's a song that was dubbed the Black National Anthem by the NAACP. This was actually in 1919, at a time when the situation facing Blacks in this country was quite precarious.
Now, the Star Spangled Banner was composed in the 19th century, written, of course, by Francis Scott Key, 1814.
It didn't become our national anthem until 1931.
So, interestingly, it's a fairly recent vintage as a national anthem.
Personally, I'm not sure if I like the Star Spangled Banner better or America the Beautiful better.
There's some argument that the Star Spangled Banner is really difficult to sing, but, of course, Debbie sings it beautifully.
So... So, the thing that worries me about all this is not even so much the issue of the Black National Anthem, because I actually went back and looked at the introduction that preceded the song.
They didn't call it the Black National Anthem.
In fact, they just said, hey, listen, now we're going to have the singing of Lift Every Voice, which is actually the name of the song.
And then there was a beautiful rendition of it.
Now, what worries me rather is this, and that is that I don't think we, in effect, have a national anthem anymore.
This is another way of saying that the country is so divided that even though we like to have these unifying symbols, they no longer, as a practical matter, do unify.
And this is true not just of the national anthem, where, as you know, you've got people who want to take a knee, they want to I refuse to sing the national anthem.
So the national anthem has now become essentially a Republican anthem.
It's become a conservative anthem.
It's our anthem. It's not their anthem.
Why? Because they don't want it.
They don't want to sing it, and we can't really make them.
And so I think some of the resentment toward the so-called Black national anthem comes out of this.
It's like, hey, listen, if, you know...
If you will take a knee and won't respect the national anthem, why should we give any kind of deference or respect to the alternative or rival anthem?
In fact, your reason for taking a knee, Colin Kaepernick style, is that the national anthem represents a racially repressive republic.
So in the name of race, you won't do it.
You're taking a knee. So then when you produce your black national anthem, we're going to, in effect, take a knee, which is kind of what I think Harry Lake was doing.
I'm not really going to...
I'm going to pretend like nothing's really going on here.
But the fact is, as I say, we don't have a unifying anthem anymore, just like we don't have a unifying flag anymore.
If you start flying the American flag on the typical campus, you'll find a lot of students will either revile it or make nasty remarks or they will ceremonially burn the flag to show that they oppose American foreign policy or American race relations. And so these symbols of unity no longer have the effect of unifying. And I think that is a measure of the fact that our country is so divided. I think it's probably good to keep
the...
Keep Lift Every Voice.
There's no need to call it a black national anthem.
Half of the problem arises out of creating a sort of second national anthem.
Quite frankly, if you dubbed it the national hymn or essentially a song to celebrate the expansion of our liberties, in other words, the founders are the ones who put our liberties into place, but our liberties were not extended to every group.
So Lift Every Voice is a way of demonstrating the fact that the sweep of American history has been toward greater inclusion.
The vote extended first to blacks, then to women, and so on.
And in that sense, it would be unobjectionable.
The broader problem, which is to say the polarization, the division of our society, that's something else altogether.
That's not something that can be solved with a song.
I just saw an article about the volatility, the uncertainty in the U.S. economy.
It made me think right away, I'm really glad I own gold.
And despite the U.S. blowing through the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling in January, the White House is still pushing spending.
While our national leadership has buried their heads in the sand when it comes to fiscal responsibility, well, hey, it's time for us to pull our heads out.
Now's a great time to diversify into gold with Birch Gold.
That's why I buy gold. In times of high uncertainty, instability, bad policy, we want something dependable.
Birch Gold makes it easy to convert an IRA of 401k into an IRA in precious metals.
Think about this. To dig our country out of this mountain of debt, every single taxpayer in America would have to write a check for $247,000.
That's not happening, and things even seem to be getting worse.
Protect yourself with gold today by texting Dinesh to 989898.
With an A-plus rating with a better Business Bureau, thousands of happy customers, countless 5-star reviews, Birch Gold is who I trust to protect my future and yours.
Get started by texting Dinesh to 989898 today.
Guys, I want to welcome to the podcast Spencer Claven.
He's an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books.
By the way, one of my favorite publications.
Features editor of The American Mind and host of the Young Heretics podcast.
He has a new book.
How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.
Spencer, welcome to the podcast.
This is a, well, I'd have to call it a big book, and by that I mean a book that is taking a sort of encyclopedic view of our civilization, and you identify five broad crises that we face.
I want to recite each of them in turn and have you just briefly spell out what is that particular crisis.
So let's begin with the crisis of reality.
What's that? Sure thing.
Well, each of these crises, as you say, is taking a look at a whole range of things in the news and discerning what's under the surface, kind of under the skin, some of the big questions that we're up against.
Because the good thing about looking at things that way is A lot of these questions have been around for a long time and we have resources in the wisdom tradition for dealing with them.
The crisis of reality boils down in one sentence to a question.
Is there anything absolutely true, no matter who says otherwise, no matter who votes it down or not?
Is it just my truth, your truth, or is there an absolute truth?
I draw on the works of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the great originators of the Greek philosophical tradition that comes down to us to argue that, in fact, it's not all just change and power politics.
There is such a thing as truth.
We can know it. We can progress haltingly toward it.
And the great texts from Athens especially, but the pagan philosophies of Greece and Rome in general, can help us to discern where that is in a world of virtual reality and And ever-changing, competing truth claims in politics.
So I take it that the adversary of truth here is relativism.
And of course, that's a very old argument that goes right back to the, you know, you can get the traces of it in Plato's Republic.
So this is the crisis of reality, affirming the existence of reality against various forms of relativism.
What's the crisis of the body?
Well, another very old idea that we've been up against for a long time is the idea that our bodies are just kind of clay jars to be discarded, that we're sort of sparks or magical floating abstractions who need to get rid of this flesh because we die, it breaks down, it's all kind of a burden. And this goes back to the Neoplatonists, some of the disciples of Plato, as we were discussing earlier, who thought that this was all just kind of a mistake and that we
needed to rearrange or just escape our body altogether. And I argue in the book that that's rearing its head once again in the transgender extremist movement, the uptick in gender dysphoria, and some of these tech proposals to alter the human body to enhance it beyond its normal limitations. What I argue is that these propositions never work out that well, because what we really are is embodied souls. The Greek word is hylomorphism, that we're form in matter, and it's not by escaping or remolding our flesh,
but by living through it that we find our salvation. Fascinating. So in other words, the human beings are a, let's put it, a synthesis or unity of spirit and matter and the attempt to somehow divorce one from the other or declare that one is either a fiction or optional.
I think what you're saying is that that's nonsense, that to affirm our full humanity is to affirm ourselves as embodied beings.
Exactly right. That's true.
And a lot of the claims that you see are kind of offered, oh, we're going to go beyond our humanity.
We're going to become posthuman or transhuman.
What they really boil down to is dissolving the boundaries of ourselves altogether because it's exactly as you say, neither one of these parts of us can be dispensed with.
That's why Christianity preaches the doctrine of the incarnation because actually the flesh is not just a kind of accident and neither is the soul an illusion.
The flesh is the medium of the divine and our bodies are the language of our souls.
Let's talk about the crisis of meaning, the third of your five crises.
What's that? The crisis of meaning has to do with whether there's anything beyond the physical world. Richard Dawkins famously coined the term meme, which we still deal with today online.
Those images that we circulate and replicate again and again comes from a Greek word, mimema, meaning an imitated thing, something you imitate and reproduce.
And of course, this goes right down to the bottom of reality if you believe in the theory of evolution, that images and indeed people and entities, organisms constantly reproducing each other and competing with one another.
But a reproduction is a reproduction of something, and an image is an image of some original.
The question of meaning is, where is the original that we're all making copies of all the time?
Can we believe in one, or is it all just imitation all the way down?
The pure materialists of radical evolutionism would have you believe it's just copies, we just replicate forever, and it's basically a competition of strength.
I would argue that the fact we do Experience imitation all throughout the world actually suggests that we're pointing up towards something higher, some original ground, some absolute meaning to our bodies, to ourselves, to our culture and indeed to the creation of the universe.
Well, Spencer, what an interesting way to put it.
You now have the crisis of religion, which I'm going to skip over because I think people sort of get what that is.
I want to go to your fifth crisis, the crisis of the regime.
And in this context, you have a very interesting phrase, anacyclosis, which I guess means the cycle of regimes.
Are we now in America facing a regime crisis, perhaps similar to something that the Soviets faced?
In the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In other words, are we facing an existential question about who we are?
Talk about the crisis of the regime.
What is that? Yeah, unfortunately, the answer to your question is yes, I think. And this theory of anticyclosis can help us to understand why. As you say, the Greek word just means the cycle of regimes, the repeated cycle that history has kind of gone through again and again.
The Greek historian Polybius, who was writing about the Roman Republic, observed this when he said, you know, you start with a monarchy, a king or a strongman, but that devolves into tyranny because of course you know the sons of the king are corrupt.
And then you have an uprising of the aristocracy, which devolves into an oligarchy because humans are corrupt even if they're in groups.
And then, of course, the people rise up and you get what we would call a democracy that then rapidly devolves into what the Greeks would have called an occocracy.
Mob rule is the word there.
Then, in that chaos, you have a perfect opportunity for a strongman, a king, to seize power and take control.
Again, you see how communist revolutions start with the revolution of the people and end with the iron fist of a strongman.
And that's the idea there.
Our regime, the republic, is designed to be a perpetual motion machine that balances these different forces against each other.
Three different kinds of government and rule balance together.
That's our checks and balance system.
That's our republic.
But it depends on civic love, what the Greeks would have called philia, friendship, and that union between citizen and citizen, which is why the major toxic threat to our regime is identity politics, the attempt to divide us up into these groups that are warring with each other rather than understanding one another as neighbors and as neighborhoods within a regime that binds us together as fellow citizens.
Folks are getting just a small glimpse.
I'm going to have Spencer Klavan back because these topics all require deep dives.
But here we've done just a sort of, I would call it, putting our toes in the water.
But this is a book that you really should check out.
It's called How to Save the West by Spencer Klavan.
By the way, you can follow him on Twitter, at Spencer Klavan, K-L-A-V-A-N. Spencer, a great pleasure.
Thanks for joining me. Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Dinesh. This was wonderful.
I appreciate it. It's time, guys, 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?
Eating the right amount of fruits and veggies every day, however, is almost impossible.
I have an easier, more convenient 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 these capsules every day.
You should do so also.
Right now, take advantage of Balance of Nature's New Year's offer.
Get $25 off plus free fiber and spice with your first preferred order of the fruits and veggies when you use discount code AMERICA. The offer can end at any time, so act now.
Call 800-246-8751.
That's 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com.
Use discount code America.
In my continuing discussion of Christian apologetics based on my book, What's So Great About Christianity?, I've been focusing on physics, the idea of the universe having a beginning, the idea that the universe is also, well, let's call it a designer universe that seems to point to an intelligent designer behind it.
But now I want to continue my discussion of the argument from design by moving to biology.
A new chapter in the book.
This is chapter 13.
It's subtitled, Evolution and the Argument from Design.
And we're going to focus on evolution now for several days, in part because it's a deeply misunderstood topic inside of Christianity, particularly evangelical Christianity.
But also because it is a weapon for the skeptics and the atheists to say, hey, we found a way to have design, or more accurately, the appearance of design, without a designer.
This is the great accomplishment of Darwin.
Richard Dawkins, the biologist, says Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist designer.
And the reason he says that is because Darwin supposedly showed that you can have things that look designed, but in fact, they're not designed externally.
They are merely adapted to the continuing pressures that are put on by an environment.
So this is an important idea.
And if you're going to defend Christianity, it's important to defend Christianity here, in the sphere of biology, and using the tools of modern science.
Not rejecting modern science and going, oh, it's all nonsense, it doesn't really work, carbon dating doesn't work, the biologists don't know what they're talking about.
But rather, look carefully at what modern science does and doesn't show, and then compare that to what the Bible does and doesn't say.
So that's what we're going to do in this section.
Now I want to begin by talking about an Anglican theologian named William Paley, who wrote a book around 1801, 1802, which was called Natural Theology.
Now, one of the things that Paley did was that he looked at various things in nature, including, by the way, he looked at human beings.
And he noticed that human beings have a lot of features.
That seemed marvelously adapted to what we need in order to function as human beings.
In other words, human beings appear to be a very complex creation.
I use that word very carefully, creation, with precisely the kind of design features that a creator would implant in a created being.
Let me frame Paley's argument in his own words.
Quote, And he does it with the means of a brilliant analogy.
In Crossing a Heath, a Heath is kind of a pasture, Paley writes,"...suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever." So Paley's saying, if I see a stone, I kick it, eh, I don't really know where it came from.
I don't really need an explanation for it.
It's there. It could have been there for who knows.
But, says Paley, quote, suppose I found a watch upon the ground, I should hardly think of the answer I had given before.
In other words, if you see a watch, it makes no sense to say, oh man, what?
That watch could have been there forever.
Nobody created that watch.
The fact of the matter is we know, even if you don't understand the inner workings of a watch, even if you don't know who made the watch, even if you don't know Where the watch was made or even when it was made, the fact that that watch was designed and produced, and the watch doesn't provide an explanation for itself.
It requires an explanation of a watchmaker external to the watch.
What Paley is saying is that even if the watchmaker is not on the scene saying, hey, I made the watch, you can tell from the watch itself that it requires a watchmaker.
Paley's argument. He says that the watch, and in this case he's talking about human beings, would appear to require, to demand a divine watchmaker. Now a couple of decades ago this idea was challenged by Richard Dawkins in a famous book Well, a book that is certainly famous in certain quarters.
I've read it very carefully.
I think it's Dawkins' best book, and it's called The Blind Watchmaker.
And basically what Dawkins says is Paley was, quote,"...gloriously and utterly wrong." Dawkins argues that Darwin has discovered a way for nature to produce the appearance of design, and not just the appearance of design, but very minute and complex design without the intervention of a creator.
So Dawkins says that the, quote, blind, unconscious, automatic process of natural selection, we'll talk about natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, but this process of natural selection provides, quote, The explanation for the existence, an apparently purposeful form of all life, it is the blind watchmaker.
So we now have two rival explanations, the divine or creationist explanation and the rival, atheist, undesigned evolutionary explanation.
▲
Export Selection