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Feb. 15, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:54
A NEW GENERATION? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep518
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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 consider whether Nikki Haley, who's just announced her president, Does she represent a new generation of leadership for the GOP? I'll show why the attempts by James Clapper and others to dodge responsibility for their Hunter Biden lies is utterly disingenuous.
A North Korean refugee, Yeonmi Park, joins me.
We're going to talk about ideological insanity in her old country and her new one.
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.
Nikki Haley is now in the ring.
She has announced, she made a video yesterday, I believe, Basically saying she's running.
And now that means that the Republican race has Trump and it has Nikki Haley.
I think it's likely to stay with those two for a little while.
So it's pretty interesting that Nikki Haley decided to announce early.
Nikki Haley, you all know, she's the former UN ambassador under Trump.
She's former governor of South Carolina.
She was the first female Asian American governor.
She was the first Indian American to serve in the cabinet.
Hey, if she gets elected, she would be the first woman and the first Asian American to lead the Republican administration.
That's if she wins the nomination.
Now of course she is a long shot to do that.
Nikki Haley, by the way, in her video was very careful.
She didn't mention Trump.
She said nothing negative about Trump.
By and large, she stayed away from criticizing Trump now.
Now, she was critical of Trump in the immediate aftermath of January 6th, and I've talked about that.
But here, she focuses on the need for, as she puts it, a generational change, which is to say a new generation of leadership.
And I think there is some sense that that is coming, that needs to come both in the Republican and on the Democratic side.
Notice that in the House, for example, Nancy Pelosi has now stepped down as the leader, and Hakeem Jeffries has taken her spot.
As I think about Nikki Haley, and I like Nikki Haley, I also think that by and large, a good number of her comments on foreign policy are sound.
She's sometimes called a neocon, but it's not obvious to me that she is.
Let's look at some of the things she's saying.
China and Russia are on the march.
True. They all think we can be bullied and kicked.
True. You should know this about me.
I don't put up with bullies, and when you kick back, it hurts them even more if you're wearing heels.
Little spin on the female angle there, but true.
She also goes on to say, She draws a contrast between America and And these autocratic societies like Iran and China and Russia.
And by and large, for all the flaws that we have here, and you know that I'm not really hesitant to point those out, the lines between the free and the unfree societies have become more blurred because of the actions of the Biden regime.
But nevertheless, I would say, still on the balance, true.
Nikki Haley wants to, quote, rediscover fiscal responsibility, badly needed, secure our border.
That's, of course, Trumpian agenda.
Strengthen our country, our pride, and our purpose.
To me, that is an evocation.
Well, it's an evocation of Trump, make America great again.
It's also an evocation of Reagan.
CNN took the opportunity to note Nikki Haley's entering into the race, but they said, here's the sort of full list of the potential Republican candidates, and I want to go down that list quickly and kind of comment on it.
Of course, we know about Trump and Nikki Haley.
Nikki Haley, I think here I would have to say at the beginning, is mainly going to get the anti-Trump early sympathies.
I wouldn't say votes because nobody's voting anytime really soon.
But you can imagine, for example, suburban women who are kind of allergic to Trump.
Now, I think some of those women have come back into the fold.
They're like, you know what? We don't care about the mean tweets.
We want Trump back.
Things were a lot better. The price of eggs and butter alone is a pretty good indication of the way in which our lives have changed for the worse.
But nevertheless, there's going to be some residue of suburban women who are like, we need to have something different than Trump.
And Nikki Haley becomes that sort of anodyne, that safe, that sort of reliable, more mainstream Republican, old-style Republican, somebody who is bridging the gap.
Even though in some ways Nikki Haley goes, I'm the candidate of the future, I see strong hints of Reaganism in her.
And that's also my concern about her, which is, does she realize that That the landscape of American politics is different now.
Ron DeSantis is on the CNN list as well.
He should be. I think he would be the most formidable alternative to Trump.
And in fact, we know that because the Trump people are treating him that way.
Mike Pence, I think, going nowhere, although Mike Pence may well enter the race.
Tim Scott, again, a nice guy, little too establishment-y.
I don't think somebody with real national prospects at this We're good to go.
I like Pompeo.
I think that he does understand the foreign policy landscape very well.
I'm not so sure about the domestic, but I'm sure this is something that he's also paying careful attention to.
The idea that Liz Cheney, I mean, look, the fact that Liz Cheney got a massive thumping in her own home state, where she used to win by 70% plus, really tells you she's become persona non grata in the Republican Party.
She actually, she's a case where she would be better off perhaps running in the Democratic Party or more likely taking a job as the head of some liberal foundation or some liberal university.
I think that's usually the left's familiar payoff for people who do their bidding.
Which is what Liz Cheney has been doing.
But essentially in terms of elected office, I think Liz Cheney has taken her career prospects, lit a match and set them ablaze.
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James Clapper wants you to know that he's really sorry.
He's really sorry to announce that he has the clap.
No, not exactly. He's really sorry for his role in the Hunter Biden laptop cover-up.
Remember, Clapper was one of the officials who said it was Russian disinformation.
This all, by the way, goes back to an October 19, 2020.
Think of it. Right before the election, article in Politico, Natasha Bertrand.
Hunter Biden's story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.
And this was a who's who of the establishment.
But now, a couple of the key figures are backpedaling, notably Clapper.
But not just Clapper.
There are a couple of others.
There's also another fellow who was in that list, Thomas Fingar, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence.
And what they're now saying, which is fascinating, is that Politico is to blame.
The media is to blame. The media misconstrued what these intelligence officials told them.
Klapper says the following.
He says, number one, he goes, I never said that it was a Russian disinformation operation.
He goes, I said that, quote, it had the earmarks.
So earmarks here meaning sort of clues of Russian disinformation.
He goes, number two, he goes, all I tried to say is that in his view, meaning as I see it, The Russians are, quote, involved in the Hunter Biden email issue in some capacity.
In other words, not necessarily that the whole laptop was faked, but they might have somehow put their fingerprints on it in some unspecified way.
And three, Clapper says that he admits there was no evidence to prove this, but he says he was going by his gut.
To summarize, Clapper is now saying, I never said that.
I put all of this much more speculatively, more from the point of view of personal perspective.
And I said that there's a sort of an indication here that it could be, but I didn't say that it was.
And pretty much the same deal is coming from the other guy, Fingar.
He says, quote, that the media and politicians have willfully or unintentionally misconstrued these statements.
Now... Here's an interesting question.
Let's say that's true.
I mean, we can all believe Natasha Bertrand is a kind of professional liar.
In fact, she's found that professional lying is very good for her career.
And Politico is also, at least in many respects, untrustworthy as a source.
But here you have, right after this article came out, not only was it amplified in innumerable media outlets, The Atlantic, The New York Times, etc., etc., but prominent Democratic officials jumped behind it.
Jen Psaki, Susan Rice, Kate Bedingfield, Andrew Bates, they shared the story on Twitter, and they used it to defend, say, the Hunter Biden, say, look, the intelligence officials have already spoken.
We can forget about that.
That's a Russian disinformation hoax.
And then Biden himself brought it up in the debate.
So Biden himself is standing behind the statement by these intelligence officials.
And here's my point. Let's say that the media misconstrued it, whether deliberately or unintentionally.
Why didn't these 51 officials speak out then?
Why didn't Clapper step forward and go, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute.
I never said that this was Russian disinformation.
I just said it seemed to me like it might be.
This is just something I'm calling from my gut.
I have no evidence that it is.
So Clapper said none of this.
And I think the reason is obvious.
Clapper, at the time, wanted the lie to be perpetrated.
He wanted to help Politico.
He wanted to stand behind a lie so that the media would promulgate it and it would hurt Trump and it would help Biden get across the finish line.
Now that Republicans control the House, now that there's not only all kinds of talk but all kinds of preparations for hearings and investigations, And a good number of these 51 officials are likely to have subpoenas if they don't already have them on their desks.
Now they're starting to shift the blame.
It wasn't us, the officials.
The media got it wrong.
See, you can easily believe that, can't you?
No. The media might have gotten it wrong.
The media is all too willing to be deceived.
So what we have here is essentially a group of bad actors.
The 51 crooks, former intelligence officials who knew they were lying, or if their statements were misconstrued, were perfectly okay at the second stage to let the misconstrual, to let the lies stand, which makes them accessories to it after the fact.
If I say something happened and the cops run with it, and then I go, no, the cops were misunderstanding me, but then I don't stop them.
I don't say to the police, hey, listen, don't go arrest that guy.
He didn't do it.
You're misunderstanding what I told you.
If I stay quiet...
Then I'm obviously complicit in the duplicity in the first place.
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This Pete Buttigieg character is a very strange individual.
He bikes to work reputedly or reportedly.
He takes long periods of time off of various kinds of gay marital activities.
He is often talking about things that seem very remote from his job.
His job, by the way, is...
Now, he's a former mayor of Fort Bend, Indiana.
It's not clear he's even qualified for this job.
And he acts like he doesn't have a job.
He acts like his job is to be sort of all-round pundit of progressive causes.
The last I saw him on social media, he was talking about the fact that, you know, there's just a lot of white guys in construction.
And probably too many.
He goes, because if they're building something in a black community, the black people in the community look around and go, what's up?
How come the jobs aren't going to us?
This is the kind of stuff that Pete Buttigieg obsesses about.
And while he's obsessing about it, really bad things happen.
Planes don't take off.
There are long delays and breakdowns at the airports.
And this guy is blissfully indifferent to all that.
Recently, he was making jokes about balloons.
Again, he's making jokes about balloons like, Oh, we've got some balloons to worry about.
So this is Pete Buttigieg.
And some people think this is a guy who's qualified to run for president.
Wow. Now, there's something very bad that seems to be happening right now in Ohio.
Essentially, a massive train accident involving 50 train cars, East Palestine, Ohio.
And the Democrats are like almost silent about it.
In fact, the only one who spoke up is Ilhan Omar.
I mean, it's actually, to be honest, to Ilhan Omar's credit, we need congressional inquiry and direct action from Pete Buttigieg to address this tragedy.
I was a little surprised from Ilhan Omar.
And then I saw a funny post in the Babylon Bee.
They go, Ilhan Omar is making a huge mistake.
She thinks this is happening in Palestine.
She thinks this is happening over in Israel.
Now, once she finds out that it's Palestine, Ohio, she's going to lose all interest in the subject.
Because it's not the Palestinians, you see.
Well, back to Pete Buttigieg.
This guy said nothing about what's going on.
Let's look at the scale of this.
Well, it's an environmental disaster.
If you look at the photos that are posted all over the place in news reports, it's a little bit like an apocalypse horror movie.
I mean, a giant black cloud arising.
Apparently, the...
There are chemicals that entered the environment and entered the drinking water.
This is the Ohio River basin water, which 5 million Americans drink out of.
That's where they get their water.
Apparently, animals in a fairly sizable radius are falling ill.
Some have even died near the train derailment site.
And this is all very bad news.
But right about the same time, Pete Buttigieg was giving a talk.
Quote, It couldn't be a more exciting time for transportation, he says.
It's had its challenges.
We faced issues from container shipping to airline cancellation.
Now we've got balloons and the audience goes ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha so he's acting like the balloons are some sort of a transportation issue I guess Peripherally, they are.
They could affect airline travel, I guess.
But finally, Buttigieg, you know, talks about the topic.
But I think he's a pretty good representative or metaphor for the general callousness of the Biden administration.
These people genuinely don't care to them.
It's all a big joke.
I think to some degree, it's all a big joke that they're even in office.
So they just carry on as if these things aren't serious.
Though the balloons, well, you know, we're taking note of them.
By the way, there were three under Trump.
No one's ever seen those balloons.
Why isn't there video footage of them?
But the point of saying there were three under Trump is essentially to say that it's not a big deal.
Stop worrying about it. And similarly here, you can look at Buttigieg as either being out of touch or it's a kind of cunning diversionary tactic.
In other words, you've got something really bad going on over here that shows Buttigieg and the whole operation to be completely incompetent.
And they go, hey, listen, let's talk about balloons.
Let's talk about why there aren't more Latinos and African-Americans in the construction industry.
So this becomes a way of trying to pivot people.
It's like when you have a small child and they grab your face and flip your head, like, look over here!
Look over here, Dad! So this is what they're doing.
They're trying to move our attention away from scenes in which you've got animals dying off, fish, chickens, and livestock.
You've got people worried about the kind of water they're drinking in.
You're worried about long-term effects in terms of illness.
And you got this guy in charge, basically having a gay time of it, beat Buttigieg.
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You'll feel the difference. Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome back to the podcast someone who's a real heroine to me.
And this is a young woman named Yeonmi Park.
She's a North Korean defector.
She escaped as a refugee from North Korea.
She fell victim and her family did to sex trafficking in China.
They escaped to South Korea by walking across the Gobi Desert.
Somehow she made her way to America.
She's now a US citizen.
She graduated from Columbia University.
She wrote a marvelous book called In Order to Live, a North Korean girl's journey to freedom.
And now her new book, which I just finished, a great book, it's called Wild Time Remains.
say, well, if you think about it, a little bit of a haunting title.
Yanmi, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
Let me start with the title of your book, While Time Remains, because I think it contains a little bit of an ominous warning, namely that, hey, America, I've come here I see a free society, but I see a free society moving in the wrong direction.
You better get your act together while time remains.
Is that the message of your book, or how would you put it?
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what I meant.
It's a, when I came to America, as you can see in my book title, a North Korean detector search for freedom in America.
I thought I was coming to the land of the free and home of the brave.
And I was landed on the university.
And you would think that America was an idea, you know, marketplace is where we can think for free.
In North Korea, thought crime was real.
The most interesting thing that I had on my body was my tongue.
My mom told me not to whisper because the birds and mice couldn't hear me.
And now, in the university, the professors would shove ideas down because in the name of having a safe space, in the name of not offending people's feelings, they were shutting down all the ideas and only one idea that is political correctness.
So you found when you were at Columbia that, weirdly, you're in a place dedicated to the free exchange of ideas, but in a way reminiscent of North Korea, there's an official ideology.
It's no less ruthlessly enforced than it is in North Korea.
Maybe in North Korea it's being enforced by the government, but it seems to me here it's being enforced by private institutions and by the government.
Would you agree? Yeah, what is really obvious because in North Korea, everything is in charge by the regime.
In America, actually, I know you're the movie maker.
And when one of the producers in Hollywood was trying to make a movie about my first book, and I got a script from the producer, and I was reading the script.
It says, somehow, China was my promised land.
Chinese authorities were helping me and gave me refuge and protecting me.
I literally got him off, like, what are you talking about?
He said, this is the only way we can make a movie about North Korea in the current Hollywood.
I was like, I'm not gonna make that movie, but that's when I realized our institutions, education, media, I mean, all the big tech got rejected by Chinese Communist Party.
Their policies are heavily enforcing the idea glorifying the CCP. I was demonetized on YouTube, making videos about how North Korean modern-day slaves are existing under the Chinese Communist Party, and how I was being sold as a sex slave in China.
And those videos were getting demonetized and censored.
I mean, Yanmi, let's take stock of this because of how insane it is, right?
We all know, I've talked on the podcast about, there are certain topics on YouTube where even in their guidelines, they admit that they're doing censorship.
They talk about COVID. They talk about election, questioning the election.
They talk about the trans issue.
But here you are, you're describing your own first-hand experience.
With regard to escaping from North Korea, with regard to China, and then you're making a critique of Chinese policy.
You're not talking at this point about COVID. You're not talking about the U.S. election of 2020.
And you're saying they still demonetized you on YouTube.
The irony is that I was actually making these videos during the time of MeToo and BLM protests, right?
They were denouncing slavery in America all day long.
They were denouncing any discrimination all along and they keep saying that silence is violence.
So I was using my voice to speak for the voiceless.
And of course, when you talk about wrong slavery, when you talk about wrong injustice, that's when they go against and they shut you down.
So the hypocrisy of the American elite and these institutions, and they are indoctrinating American minds in university and public schools that I'm realizing waging my son in this country right now.
It's not merely the fact that it's the wrong kind of injustice, but look at the scale of it.
You have people who say things like, well, in the university, so-and-so made an inappropriate sexual suggestion to me, and that's a form of sexual violence.
Having read your earlier book, You describe in fairly riveting detail that what you and your mom, the kind of things that you went through are almost indescribable on a podcast.
And so you're talking about horrific things done against women, something that not only happened in the past, but is I'm assumed to some degree going on today.
And that is nevertheless, it doesn't fit the narrative.
And so they're trying to shut it down.
And this is YouTube, which is, by the way, owned by Google.
So the most powerful organizations in our culture are now on the side of the censorship regime.
So you must find this a little terrifying and a little creepy to have come to experience this and experienced it here.
Yeah, the tactics that current Americans left in using is exactly what happened to North Korean people.
They would literally divide people based on what their ancestors did.
Currently, Americans are divided by the skin color.
They decided who's an oppressor, who's oppressed.
In North Korea, they divided North Korea into 51 different classes based on what my great-grandfather did.
If he was a landowner, they'd say, my genetics is oppressive.
My blood is tainted.
Therefore, I'm in a lower caste.
Now in America, my son, who's half-white, now he's privileged.
He has oppressive blood.
Because supposedly, he's a great, great, great, I don't know how many years he goes up, might have a genetic, but he doesn't.
His parents were from Ireland, you know, fleeting the potato farm.
They didn't have a slave. They were like working-class people.
And using this kind of race to making people divided, this is exactly what the Communist Party did in North Korea.
Let's take a pause, Yanmi.
When we come back, I want to talk to you about the peculiar reaction that you get from progressive liberals when you talk to them about your story.
And I also want to talk about a specific incident that happened to you in the Chicago area.
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Use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with the brave Yeonmi Park.
She is the author of In Order to Live, A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom, but now the new book, While Time Remains, A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America.
I just finished reading it.
It's a terrific book.
And you can follow Yeonmi Park at Twitter.
It's at Yeonmi, Y-E-O-N-M-I, Park, and then N-K, N-K for North Korea.
Yeonmi, you say, I'm reading now really from the preface, when I tell my American friends and colleagues that certain developments in the United States remind me of North Korea, they typically cock their heads and smirk.
And then you go on to say that as you talk about the fact that a small elite in this country, just like over there, is setting the agenda and ruthlessly enforcing it against the common people, they kind of look away in embarrassment.
Talk a little bit about what you think is going on with these progressives.
There appears to be a kind of unwillingness to face reality.
What do you attribute that to?
I think that it's really going towards the destruction of critical thinking.
In North Korea, we didn't even have a world for critical thinking.
There's a lot of words that we didn't have because the regime was not letting us to think.
The reason why I'm fighting for freedom of speech is that humans are unique.
We think by talking.
So if you do not let people talk, they cannot think.
So in America, okay, for these trigger warnings and a level of safe space, they do not let us talk about many things, mostly anything they disagree with.
And I think that's the biggest power that I see in America.
And I actually generally ask people, do you really not censor yourself?
And they all just... And when they're laughing at North Korea, like, are they crazy or are they stupid or robots?
Why would they not start a revolution?
In North Korea, if you stand up against the regime, you are going to kill three generations of your family.
In America, currently, you stand up against political correctness, you might lose your, like, livelihood.
You might destroy your reputation and dignity.
Even that little consequence, people still not standing up, most of them.
Remarkable. Let's talk about Chicago.
You were on Michigan Avenue in Chicago with your two-year-old son.
You were attacked by a couple of women who I guess grabbed your stuff.
They began to fish through your purse.
They punch you in the chest.
Talk about what happened after that.
So yeah, this is the time of the Berlin protest where my mom was also residing in Chicago with me.
Seeing the city was burning down and the grocery stores were getting looted.
I could not go there to buy milk for my son.
There's a checkpoint. I mean, these are real gang mafias.
Media was saying, oh, there's really no violence.
One day I was walking on the Michigan Avenue and get robbed by these women.
And afterwards, that was what really woke me up about America.
These women were, unfortunately, black women.
And I was, unfortunately, an Asian person whose, like, skin color is not oppressed, right?
So the people around the street circle around me and yelling at me that I'm a racist because I was trying to call the police on these criminals.
I mean, what you were doing, you say, you describe it, you were trying to turn on your phone so you would record who had robbed you.
You were trying to probably call for help.
You go, one person shouts that you're a racist.
Another person says, a person's skin color doesn't make them a thief.
Of course, you're not saying that their skin color made you a thief.
They actually robbed you.
They punched me too.
They were like, you're kidding me.
So of course. They seen that I was beating up.
And they still do that.
In their eyes, they cannot think critically.
Like in North Korea, after my escape, somebody had a picture that Kim Jong-un was fat.
Like, I never... I mean, all I believed was that she was suffering like us.
And these people, all they could see was how these people can harm somebody.
They are victims, right?
These black women were victims.
They could never ever do something and oppress them to other persons.
So, they lost common sense.
And they were yelling at me, I'm a racist.
And that's when I realized it's not just universities are crazy.
This ideology sifted through all the public, now even just on the street, that common sense is lost, that we do not defend the victims, actual victims.
Do you think, Yanmi, that all of this has been made radically worse because of COVID? And I say that because the justification, you know, there's a pandemic and censorship became far worse than it was before due to that.
People are spreading misinformation about health, even movements and social control.
The idea that you could stop a church service, the idea you could make businesses close down.
Under normal conditions, I think this could not happen in America.
But in fact, when I think back historically, it's only happened in wartime.
In wartime, the country does become a little bit of a police state, but then after World War I or World War II, the police state is dismantled and life returns to normal.
But it seems to me with COVID, that became a sort of police state situation.
And there are lots of people who want to keep it that way.
Even now, they don't want to take down the COVID restrictions.
They seem to like the idea of having this level of enhanced social control.
What do you think? It's really I blame the left.
I was living through this time and there are people literally breaking into stores, breaking into children's hospital.
They would set fire on these prescription drugs so people could not take this medicine.
It's an absolute pure evil act.
But the mayor would not order police to arrest these criminals.
Just standing there watching these people.
So it's really depending on who deserves justice or not.
They don't get arrested.
There's no rule of law.
That was a complete chaos.
And I don't think that was even COVID. They were really trying to...
Whatever it is, they were going to get Trump out of the office.
I think that's why they were...
I mean, we were literally in Chicago, we were thinking, if Trump gets elected, this city is going to go under fire.
We need to flee this city.
Chicago was going to get destroyed.
In some sense, when Biden was elected, okay, now maybe some rule of law can come back, because now they have to defend some, you know, safety.
I think there's a lot of factors of the pandemic.
They're using this to, you know, I'm going to protect you.
Therefore, I need to take some rights away from you.
But then also, it was all for taking Trump out of the office effort that they were just showing us what happens if we disagree with their elites.
Unbelievable. Great book, guys.
You got to get it. It's by Yeonmi Park.
It's called Wild Time Remains, a North Korean defector's search for freedom in America.
Yeonmi, great to see you and thanks for coming on the podcast.
Thank you for having me.
Hey, I'd like to invite you to check out and perhaps become a subscriber to my Locals channel.
Now, Locals is a subscriber channel where I post exclusive content.
I also interact with my followers and subscribers.
I do a weekly live Q&A. In fact, I'm going to do one tomorrow, Thursday.
I usually do this on Tuesday, but it was Valentine's Day, so...
No can do. So tomorrow at 8 p.m.
Eastern. And Locals also has a bunch of movies.
My movies, but also movies by other independent producers, including 2,000 Mules.
More films going up this year.
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And so check it out.
Sign up at dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
That website again, dinesh.locals.com.
When capitalism and free markets are under attack...
It helps to try to understand how markets work so that we can make an intelligent defense of them against their socialist and progressive critics.
In this respect, an important figure, not very well known, It's the University of Chicago economist Frank Knight.
He wrote a book that came out, gosh, I guess almost 100 years ago now, called Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit.
And in it, he made an argument that, again, I don't think is well enough known, but it's quite profound.
He draws a distinction between risk and uncertainty.
He says that risk is an unknown outcome whose probability can be calculated.
That's risk. Think of it.
Insurance companies operate on risk.
So while I don't know what the chance is that I would, for example, be a victim of an accident in the next five years, insurance companies, by taking not just me, but putting me into a group Let's say men of a certain age are able to make very good predictions about the likelihood of those kinds of events.
And of course, insurance is a way of hedging, is a way of protecting ourselves against risky possibilities.
But Knight goes on to argue that uncertainty is something different than risk.
And in fact, this has given rise in economics to the term Knightian uncertainty.
So what's uncertainty?
Uncertainty is a A risk whose probability cannot be calculated.
Let's say, for example, a Hollywood studio is about to release a new genre of movie, a new type of movie, very different from any movie made before.
Or even I'm about to release a movie this year.
How do I know in advance how that movie is going to do?
Well, I can say, well, it's kind of a hot topic, or I can say it seems very timely right now.
But what's timely right now may not be timely four weeks from now or eight weeks from now when I release the film.
Similarly, even though I think it's a hot topic, is it the kind of hot topic that's going to make people go, listen, I'm going to jump into my car, I'm going to go to the theater?
I don't know. And I have no way to know.
And no matter what kind of data I run, I'm not going to be able to predict the success of a future film, even based upon looking at my previous films.
So that is what Knight, Frank Knight, calls...
It's different than risk.
And that cannot be insured against.
And that, Frank Knight said, is what entrepreneurs do.
Entrepreneurs, in other words, are rewarded not for the fact that they take risk because certain of their risks can be insured against.
So, for example, let's say the risk that their office will burn down.
You can actually take out insurance against that.
There are other types of risks that you don't insure by taking out insurance, but there are measures that you can take to reduce that kind of risk.
Let's say, for example, you're about to release a product and it's a specialized product in the health area.
Well, you can bring in a committee of specialists.
They can test the product and reduce the risk of that product having, let's say, bad side effects or not receiving a good risk.
If you're not sure whether the product actually works, there are all kinds of things you can do to bring that risk, the risk that it won't work on a large scale, bring that risk down.
But on the other hand, there are some risks that you cannot bring down.
It's in the nature of the entrepreneur to be able to try to assess those risks.
And Frank Knight says some entrepreneurs will overshoot and some will undershoot and some will get things completely wrong and others will get things precisely right.
And those are the entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurs that are able to get it right, or even better, have a record of getting it right again and again and again.
Those become the most successful entrepreneurs.
So profit, says Knight, is not the result of taking a risk.
But profit is the reward of operating in a world of uncertainty, where the risks cannot be calculated, and therefore the benefits go to the guy who happens to get it right.
Now very interestingly, as a corollary, and I won't get into this, Knight argues that socialism doesn't work, and socialism doesn't work because there is no way for people to take responsibility for uncertainty.
When you have a bunch of capitalists, one guy's trying this, another guy's trying that, you can always tell, well, this guy got it right, and therefore he's rewarded or she's rewarded for that, and those guys got it wrong, and they're punished for that.
But, says Knight, the problem of risk is a problem even in a socialist society, because even in a socialist society, if you're making cars or computers, you don't know in advance what the market for them, what the demand for them, what the level of consumption for them is going to be.
And so... But what you have, the difference between a capitalist system and a socialist system, is in a socialist system, you face uncertainty, but nobody takes the responsibility for getting it wrong.
While evolution is taught as standard fare in American high schools and also American universities, it's treated as not a theory so much as a biological fact, the fact of evolution, as its champions like to say.
But nevertheless, the American public remains kind of dubious, kind of skeptical about evolution.
About 20 years ago, there was a comprehensive survey showing that only 45%, well, 45% of Americans said, I don't believe in it.
And the scientists were like, what?
This is like saying, I don't believe that the Earth is round, or this is like, I don't believe that the Earth is, you know, millions of years old.
How can you deny this kind of reality?
And the scientists typically dub the people who don't believe in evolution as creationists, as if to say that they are all kind of Bible thumpers and these are people unfamiliar with the basics of science.
They're going simply based upon a crude reading of the first book of Genesis.
And now there are a group called the creationists.
And to be honest, the creationists themselves are a somewhat diverse bunch.
Most of them are biblical literalists, which means that they read the Bible in a literal sense.
If it talks about God creating the earth and the sun in one day and then on the next day, they go, that's got to be a day.
That's got to be 24 hours.
And that's the meaning of literalism.
You take it literally.
Now, there's a quite distinct creationist belief that's sometimes confused with the earlier one, and that is that the Earth is 6,000 years old.
Now, that is obtained not by using any computation of days, but it's used by a kind of adding up of genealogies.
Notice the Bible has a lot of genealogies and the So-and-so begat so-and-so who begat so-and-so.
So you take an average, let's just say a generation is 40 years, and you kind of do the math, working your way back, and that's kind of how you get the 6,000-year idea.
But I think part of what the creationists are about is they're basically hanging tight To the words of scripture because they believe that if any part of the Bible is shown to be inaccurate in any way, then gee, how can you trust any of it?
How can you trust the message about the crucifixion, about the resurrection, the message about salvation?
So they take a kind of all-or-nothing view of the Bible, and I think this explains a little bit of their kind of doggedness in rejecting anything that even seems to go against the literal word of Scripture.
So I kind of respect their dedication, the moral fervor of these creationists, although I'm not sure I agree with their reading, not just of the scientific evidence, but even of their reading of Scripture, and we'll come to that.
But I think that the broader anxiety about Darwinism in our culture is not simply the result of creationism.
So, what is it the result of then?
Why is it that a number of people who wouldn't say that they're creationists, who wouldn't say they're biblical literalists, nevertheless go, I smell a rat when it comes to evolution.
Now, It was said that the wife of a London aristocrat, when informed about Darwin's claim that man is descended from a kind of ape-like creature, so not from the apes, but rather that apes and man have a kind of common ancestor, she said this.
She goes, My dear, let us hope that it is not true.
But if it is, let us pray that it might not become widely known.
Now, this woman is raising a kind of interesting question.
Why would she say that?
What she's saying is, gee, what does it do to a society?
What does it do to man himself to teach him that he's nothing more than an animal?
Maybe man will start acting more like an animal.
Consider this sort of disturbing thought.
Let's say your neighbor came into your house by force, stupefied you with blows, dragged your wife, your daughter to his own spot, his own place, to forcibly mate with her.
And then most people would consider this a shocking outrage.
But let's remember that kind of behavior is completely common in the animal kingdom.
My point being that if human beings are nothing more than animals, what's to stop us from acting that way also?
So, we also know that ideas of social Darwinism, an attempt to apply Darwinist principles for society, produced eugenics, it produced survival of the fittest, It produced forced sterilization.
In the Scopes Trial, it wasn't just about evolution.
It was really also about the fact that Williams Jennings Bryan was a strong opponent of social Darwinism.
And that's why he, a national figure, in fact, a figure who had run for president, stepped into the fray.
He saw himself as defending the dignity of man and the Bible against the acid of evolution.
So, of course, a lot of scientists and biologists today say, well, that was social Darwinism.
That was a real misuse of Darwinism and of biology.
That's not really going on today.
But as I'm going to show tomorrow as I pick up this theme, it is going on today, although in a slightly different way.
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