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Feb. 17, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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STARVING GRANDMA STORIES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep520
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Coming up, I'm going to ridicule the Democratic allegation that Republicans want to starve Grandma by cutting her Social Security benefits.
I want to explain what the real problem is with these unfunded entitlements.
Debbie's going to join me for our weekly roundup.
We're going to talk about EMP, electromagnetic pulse threats to our country, the FBI's egregious violation of privacy rights, and some mass shooting incidents, including one at Michigan State University.
This is the Dinesh Chaturthi 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.
There's a huge amount of demagoguery coming from Democrats and from the left on the issue of Social Security.
Now also, Medicare, it's pretty much the same line of attack.
Republicans are trying to cut your Social Security and Medicare, and we won't let them.
Biden, of course, echoes this theme at the State of the Union.
Republicans start booing him.
And Biden goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I'm not saying all of you.
I'm saying some of you.
And okay, well, okay, okay.
Well, I guess we agree then.
So the press portrays this as a kind of rhetorical victory for Biden.
He cunningly got the Republicans to sign on to no cuts in Social Security or Medicare.
Of course, the Republicans were disgusted because they weren't proposing cuts to Social Security or Medicare, and they don't like the issue being subjected to this kind of demagoguery.
Now, the Democrats have one piece of evidence going for them and that is that there were some Republicans who are talking about reform of Social Security.
And they were talking about the fact that the system, and by the way, this is 100% accurate, is in long-term actuarial trouble.
And so at some point, the money runs short or runs out.
And so there needs to be a deeper fix So what's going on here is that the Republicans are talking about long-term reform and the Democrats are acting like any discussion of even long-term reform is an attack on Social Security and is sort of a threat to cut Social Security now.
So this is what all the obfuscation is all about.
And of course, in pure demagogic style, here's Nancy Pelosi.
She posted this. You've paid into Social Security every paycheck.
It's your money.
But some Republicans want to cut your lifeline.
And she goes on to say, Democrats will keep fighting to make sure they don't sabotage Social Security behind the scenes.
Now, the phrase that caught my attention here is, it's your money.
And I did the following quote tweet of Nancy Pelosi.
I'm going to read it. I've been paying into the system since 1983.
If it's my money, why can't I have it all now so I can invest it and provide for my own retirement?
Could it be because you and your crooked gang have already spent it?
And don't have it to turn it over to me.
So this is the dirty secret of Social Security that people like you and me pay into the system and we have been led to believe and this kind of illusion, this lie goes all the way back to FDR. FDR actually knew it was a lie, but he wanted to set the system up this way.
And so he gave people the idea that there's some sort of an account, kind of with your name, that the government has.
Almost like a bank account, except this isn't with the U.S. government.
And as you put money into the system, it goes into sort of your slot, and it's being held for you, and it's accumulating interest and growing so that when you need it, you're going to get it.
The reality is not that.
The reality is that as you and I put money into Social Security now, the government immediately spends it.
And who do they spend it on?
Older retirees who are taking money out of the system now.
So that as we get older, we are going to be, quote, paid back.
And we're not going to be paid back.
The vast majority of us are going to get less out of the system than we paid in.
But nevertheless, we're going to be, quote, paid back by the earnings of younger people who are going to be in the workforce when you and I get out of it.
So this is the scheme.
It's a real, I don't know if a Ponzi scheme is quite the right term for it, but it's certainly a Ponzi-ish scheme.
And why did FDR design it this way?
Well, he was very explicit about it.
He said, I designed it this way so no one would ever be able to stop the program.
He wanted the program, in a sense, to be his legacy, to run in perpetuity.
And I think what FDR didn't realize is that not all demographic groups are of the equal size.
And so, for example, when you have a large group, in this case, it's the baby boom.
I'm at the very end.
Debbie, I think, falls outside, technically, the baby boom generation.
But nevertheless, as this generation retires, you have a giant number of people who are making demands for Social Security benefits, for Medicare.
And you've got a smaller cohort of younger people entering the workforce.
It's almost like saying it was one thing for the baby boom generation to carry its own parents on their shoulders.
That's like an elephant, you know, carrying a human being.
But now we're moving into a situation more closely resembling the opposite.
The human being is scaring the elephant.
And this is where the problems of Social Security come from.
The Democrats are acting like there's no problem.
No discussions need to be had.
Any talk even about long-term reform is an attack on the system.
We the Democrats stand like Spartans in the past, ready to protect your Social Security benefits.
That's the true irresponsibility.
It's kind of like in a family, if you've got a husband or a wife who's like spending the family into bankruptcy and the other one goes, hey, let's take a look at it.
Let's make sure we're not overspending here.
And the wife goes, you're trying to cut my benefits.
You're trying to cut my spending or vice versa.
The point being that that's the person who's being truly irresponsible.
Why? Because they're not paying attention to the problem that does need to be addressed and does need to be in some ways solved.
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Don't forget to use the promo code DINESHDINESH. In the last several days, we've seen all kinds of strange events occurring around the country.
Train derailments, just another derailment just yesterday, multiple train derailments at the same time, objects in the sky being shot down by the U.S. military, Chinese balloons drifting across the United States, apparently making their way to Canada.
Back in the U.S., another balloon in South America.
And so Debbie and I are like, what's going on?
So the one thing that you want to focus on is something that people don't like to talk about, but is something that we should at least be aware of, and that is the possibility of some kind of an EMP or electromagnetic pulse attack.
Right. And it's really, our grid system in the United States, you know, we have several, right?
They're all very antiquated.
And it also could be the reason why all these trains are derailing as well, because our infrastructure is extremely old.
So that kind of all ties in.
But this particular threat is very real.
And In many instances, people think, you know, oh, it's just, it's only a conspiracy theorist or a talking point.
But it actually is something that if it were to happen, and, you know, these are a lot of sources.
This is actually from the Washington Examiner.
It says, imagine an event that took out the majority of the power grids in the nation.
Not only would our grids be down, but all modern automobiles, telephones, communication equipment, computers, refrigerators, air conditioners, heaters, internet computers would be destroyed.
And even if people did not panic, they would soon begin to die.
So this is...
And think of those who are dependent on electricity for oxygen, kidney dialysis...
Or, you know, another mechanical means to stay alive.
They would all die within a matter of hours.
So this is very real.
And this is something that, you know, we love to spend money on other countries like, you know, Ukraine.
We just gave them, you know, a ton of money again.
Why don't we invest our money where it matters for our livelihood here in America?
And that is strengthen our grid system to sustain such an attack.
And it's not out of the question that China could do that.
Because these balloons, while they claim were only used for weather monitoring, They could actually have that nuclear bomb, whatever goes off in the air, in the atmosphere, to actually take down the grids.
It's very high in the atmosphere, so it could definitely do it.
They could do that.
What's to stop them?
I mean, we didn't stop them initially from doing this.
They had, what, more?
We didn't seem to know about the balloons at all.
And even if the balloons themselves are not the vehicles of the attack, they could be the prelude to it.
So the balloon is a way of checking things out.
It's almost like the criminal scouting out beforehand to figure out where are the points of vulnerability, where do I need to attack...
Let's remember that a traditional type of attack, you know, where troops come surging into your borders, I think that kind of attack the US could easily repel.
Even a direct nuclear strike may not work.
First of all, we have ways to defend against that.
Second of all, we have a nuclear capacity of our own.
But this kind of an EMP attack is directly paralyzing to the whole citizenry.
In a matter of time, I mean, don't even count the people who are immediately affected, like someone, let's say, who's on dialysis or needs treatment.
But by and large, think of all the people who rely on a supply chain.
All the food that shows up in our grocery stores comes as a result of...
Yeah, and not to mention all the electric things they're pushing, like electric vehicles, electric ovens.
Think of all of that.
That would go kaput, right?
But the interesting thing is that EMPs can also be a natural form of geomagnetic disturbance, right?
It could be like extreme solar geomagnetic disturbance.
That is not man-made.
So, you know, if we're going to protect our grid, we have to protect it from all kinds of things, right?
Not just man-made like China and Russia potentially and even Iran.
I've often said that Iran loves to have their grip on Latin America because it would be a short-range missile for them, right?
It's only 1,300 miles away from Venezuela to Miami.
So all they need to do is a short-range missile and take out our grid system and there we go.
So it's extremely disturbing that they haven't done that.
They desperately need new innovations in the United States to mitigate the threat and the damage of these EMP attacks.
I mean, the thing that frustrates me is that these things are not hard to figure out.
My fear is that none of them are actually happening.
Because you're dealing with an administration and I guess it was yesterday or the day before I was reviewing the Biden kind of defense manual where they talk about their priorities.
And, you know, honey, I mean, their priorities are things like, you know, gay month and like Africa.
Honor Africa Day.
Racial diversity.
Equity and inclusion in the military.
They act as if the military has nothing to do with being a military.
It has nothing to do with defending the country.
It has nothing to do with assessing threats or meeting them.
It's an extremely disheartening and, to some degree, if you really dwell on it, frightening situation.
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I talked about this on the podcast yesterday.
Which is to say I talked about how the FBI, right after January 6th, was pressuring banks to supply information to the FBI about individuals who had any connection with Washington, D.C. They went to Washington, D.C. They stayed in hotels.
They made credit card purchases in the larger D.C. area.
And the FBI puts out a wide net Now, how do we know about this?
Because an FBI agent, a former FBI guy, George Hill, testified before the House Judiciary Committee, and he goes, the FBI was chasing people with absolutely no prior indication of having committed a crime.
These were not the people who, quote, went to the Capitol.
The FBI had no idea if they did or didn't.
They just said, let's catch everybody who was in the larger D.C. area, and they were making their field offices Follow up, get this bank information, and then go check out those people.
Look at their names, their social security numbers, perhaps their bank records, their criminal histories.
This is a gross violation of privacy and a violation of our individual rights.
Why? Because the government does have the right to take a look, but only if there's probable cause.
Well, I mean, also, you have to go back to the hearing with Nicole Parker, right?
Is that her name? Yes, that's her name, yes.
Where she said, she actually admitted that the FBI, part of the FBI, was so politicized that they were playing politics.
And that's exactly what these guys were doing.
They were playing politics. Anybody associated with Donald Trump, bad.
They must be white supremacists.
They must be terrorists.
I mean, it's just...
It's raffling. Apply the logic to, let's say, the riots in Portland or even to the leftist activists who showed up for the Kavanaugh protests.
Or even more recently, there are these huge demonstrations.
Where was it? I think this was in Georgia, where they took over the Georgia Legislative Chamber.
Yeah. So, okay, let's run an FBI check of everybody who was in Georgia or traveled to Georgia from anywhere else in the country, make banks turn over their information, go check them out, look at that criminal.
The FBI wouldn't dream of doing this.
So right here you have a dramatic illustration of how This lens is focused only one way.
And now I'm quoting George Hill.
There's no evidence of a crime being committed here.
He's talking about January 6th.
He goes, we cannot open up preliminary investigations on someone for using a financial instrument, like a credit card, in the district.
And then he goes on to say that it was very good that the Boston FBI, the one...
Said no. The Boston FBI goes, we don't have enough.
We're not going to be checking people out just because they bought a train ticket or got on the shuttle or went to a restaurant.
Well, if you recall, some of our friends that went to D.C., we met some people.
They were, like, super nervous about it because they're like, you know, I did go.
I did attend. I did pay for a hotel room, a flight.
Well, we know a couple, and he's an attorney, so they have that kind of legal savvy.
They notice people going toward the Capitol, and they were like, hey, listen, something is not right here.
Let's go back to our hotel.
Let's kind of get out of this environment.
So even though they were not...
In the Capitol at all, they just decided that things were taking a bad turn.
But again, according to this FBI net, their names would come up.
Let's go look them up. Let's go see what their backgrounds are.
So this is just downright wrong, and yet it's going on.
So I'm glad the House is on it.
Now, the House has the power to expose it.
But ultimately, the FBI can keep doing it.
This is the point. So, it seems to me that the way to really up the ante here...
Impeach Merrick Garland.
So, impeach Mayorkas, impeach Merrick Garland.
Once you put people in the impeachment hot seat, the whole situation changes.
First of all, the power of the House to investigate expands dramatically.
Second of all, Merrick Garland is going to be extremely nervous because, let's think about it, it's not necessarily that you have the votes to get rid of him.
But you can use leverage to get rid of him.
You're impeaching him, but now Biden comes to the House and goes, listen, I need to get this budget through.
We don't want to shut down the government.
And then the House goes, well, listen, we'll meet you halfway on that.
Get rid of Merrick Garland.
So there's all kinds of ways to kick this guy to the curb.
And I think it's time to start putting on some kicking boots.
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We think about the FBI in terms of the abuses of Trump, the Mar-a-Lago raid, the targeting of January 6th protesters.
We've also heard about FBI raids on pro-lifers, FBI surveillance of parents who show up at school board meetings to protest what's going on in their children's classrooms.
But here's a new one. The FBI apparently was about to, and I'm happy to say that this was then thwarted, about to open up surveillance and spying on evidently traditionalist Catholics who liked the Latin Mass, meaning the Mass said in Latin, and also liked the Rosary.
I kid you not. So this may seem downright crazy, but apparently it started with the Atlantic Monthly writing an article about the rise of the so-called, well, the Atlantic called them radical traditional Catholics.
So they call them rad-trads.
And who are these radical traditional Catholics?
They apparently believe that Pope Francis is a bit soft, and they put forward their rosary, they're proud of the rosary, and they like the Latin Mass.
And the FBI takes this article about the rad trads that's in the Atlantic Monthly and basically goes, okay, this is something we need to look into.
And so they create a forum for targeting these rad trads.
To see if they pose a danger to the national security, danger to other Americans.
Are they plotting some kind of terrorist actions?
And so on. And by the way, the whistle was blown by Kyle Serafin, who's an FBI whistleblower.
And he goes, hey, listen, the FBI's Richmond division thinks it's going to protect Virginians from white supremacy because the white supremacists are now hiding out with rosaries and advocating the Latin mass.
That is crazy. Apparently, one of the FBI sources was the SPLC. Big surprise, the Southern Poverty Law Center.
This is like an outfit that spins out lies.
And so the SPLC and the Atlantic.
So what I want to say here, honey, is I mean, the FBI is to blame here.
But I also think that there is a this is where the left wing media is.
these fictitious plots.
Oh, you better look at the radical traditionalists.
Oh, you better look over here, you've got these people who go to mega churches.
And so, and then the FBI jumps on it and goes, yeah, here's an article, here's a study from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Now, just to finish up the news part of it and like you to comment on it.
So then, apparently a whole bunch of attorney generals, including Virginia Attorney General Jason Meares, who's Hispanic, he's Catholic.
This guy jumps on and he goes, listen, anti-Catholic bigotry seems to be festering in the FBI.
The Bureau is treating Catholics as potential terrorists.
And he says, basically, you better stop this right now or all these AGs are going to be stepping forward and using the legal system to protect the rights of their constituents.
Now, the FBI immediately backed off, and they go, oh, you know, error.
And by the way, the FBI rarely admits errors.
They normally, they'll sometimes stop doing something, but they will never admit that they were on the wrong track.
They act like this was just part of some generic investigation.
Oh, no, we weren't really doing anything.
So that's the normal FBI MO. But I think in this case, they were so freaked out at the FBI because they were like, we have no basis for talking about traditional Catholics as being domestic terrorists.
And so they essentially go...
No, we're closing down this particular investigation or this particular forum, and we are not going to be giving the same amount of credibility to these left-wing websites, not to mention the Southern Poverty...
Well, it should be called the Southern Poverty Lying Center, because that's ultimately what these people...
What do you think about the fact?
It just shows how...
You've got this symbiotic relationship, right?
The media, the FBI working in tandem.
With the left. And as you know, the left wants to demonize Christianity.
I mean, they do. That's kind of a weird thing to say, demonize Christianity.
But they are. They're making us bad guys.
Also, there's a tweet from AOC, right?
Right. About saying that the Super Bowl ad...
She's like, oh, Jesus wouldn't want to partake in this Christianity fascism.
Well, first of all, the ad couldn't be more mild.
It's essentially about sort of Jesus gets us.
That's the theme of the ad. I think it's called he gets us.
And that Jesus related to all kinds of people, that Jesus, even though he might have disagreed, or even though Jesus found certain types of behavior and conduct objectionable and sinful, Jesus never failed to engage.
That's the theme of the ad. That's it.
And here's AOC raging, this is fascist, these people are fascists.
But this is it.
They want to group us together with white supremacists, fascists, and they don't even know the meaning of the word fascist because they themselves are fascists, right?
Fascists. And they want to say that we're also terrorists.
So the whole notion that if you're white, if you're a Christian, if you're a Catholic, you must therefore be a terrorist.
Right? This is the very destructive and poisonous rhetoric of the left.
We have been aware of it for some time now, but it's even more dismaying that this is not just rhetoric out there.
It'd be bad enough and irresponsible enough of just out there in the media, but the fact that a government agency is taking the prompt to then open up these investigations, the very fact that this investigation was opened up in the first place, is a very disturbing sign.
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There was a recent shooting...
Mass shooting at Michigan State University.
Initially, I thought this might be done by a student.
There might be something, some Incident involving a student, but it turns out, no.
The shooter was, what, an older guy?
He was a 43-year-old black man.
43-year-old black man.
And I want to highlight that for a minute because this mass shooting has had a more muted response than other mass shootings.
Why? I think it's because the perpetrator is black.
Now, usually, for the media and for the left, the approach is sort of like this.
If there's a mass shooting and a white guy did it, white supremacy is to blame.
But if there's a mass shooting and a black guy or a Hispanic guy or an Asian guy did it, then let's not even talk about white supremacy because we really can't.
Let's focus on the gun.
The gun is to blame. So that's really what happened in the Michigan State.
They would have loved to go with white supremacy, but since it was a black guy, it's like, okay, we got to go to like option B and that is guns.
So every time there's a mass shooting, it's about the gun.
And of course, the demand is for these kinds of guns, not all guns necessarily, but certainly these are dangerous guns.
The AR-15 need to be outlawed.
You, Debbie, has been looking into this and you've got some really good thoughts about it.
Well, I mean, as you know, I have a concealed carry license.
I've had it for about eight years now.
And I should practice more than I do.
I never have time to go to the range.
You're pretty good at the range.
I am pretty good, but you do need to practice a lot.
You need to use your weapon a lot.
So I was looking into facts versus fiction on the mass shootings.
And it got me thinking about the assault weapons ban that was established in 1994 during...
Clinton, right?
It was a 10-year ban, and it was really for semi-automatic weapons.
And so what happened was in the 70s, there were a lot of mass...
Well, I should qualify that.
There were mass shootings.
And of course, Congress does what Congress does.
They're like, oh, we have to stop these mass shootings.
Well, really, statistics didn't really go their...
I mean, mass shootings are a tiny, tiny portion of...
Let me read that.
So basically, U.S. firearms homicide by the numbers.
And I'm reading from a website called usconcealedcarry.com.
They have great information.
They are nonpartisan.
They don't care. They're not pro-gun.
They're not against guns.
They're just facts.
And they cite all their sources.
And they cite their sources and everything.
And it really says that only about 0.1% of firearm homicides are mass shootings.
Think about that.
We hear more and more...
In fact, we talked about the EMP attack.
That would like...
This would dwarf in comparison because...
I mean, just to digest, 0.1%.
Now, 1% is 1 in 100.
0.1 is 1 in 1,000.
So of 1,000 incidents...
One is a mass shooting.
So we're dealing here with the problem that it's kind of an optical illusion because we hear about it, gets a lot of press.
But on the other hand, it is not by any means, not even close to the norm.
Yeah. And so the majority, the majority of shootings are actually committed by a family member or acquaintance in a home, you know.
61%. 25% are committed by a stranger, like as in a robbery.
14% are committed by an intimate partner, as in...
So kind of a relationship gone bad or estranged.
So, you know, again, mass shootings account for a very, very tiny, tiny percentage of the...
I didn't know about the fact that there was this 10-year ban.
And the question then becomes, if the left is right, then during that 10-year ban, because guns were perhaps more difficult to get, they were certainly illegal, was there a sharp decline in mass shootings, yes or no?
Not a sharp decline.
There may have been a slight decline, but not sharp.
But interestingly, what there was an increase of were bombings.
Between 1994 and 2001, many Americans died under that surge of bombing.
And so it's interesting because deadly acts of terrorism don't need a gun.
So here I'm going to read, this is documented by the Heritage Foundation.
In Spain in 2004, a bombing, 192 deaths.
Great Britain, 2005, bombing, 52 deaths.
Japan, car ramming and stabbing, 7 deaths.
China, shovel loader, 11 deaths, 30 injuries.
Mass stabbing in China, 31.
So it goes on and on.
Car ramming, bombing.
And then interestingly, in 1994 in the United States, we had someone called the Unabomber.
Do you remember that? Yeah, I do.
Lots of people died under this guy.
Started in 1994. He was sending packages with bombs.
He was sending packages with bombs, yeah. And then in Oklahoma City bombing, we all know that one, April 19th of 1995, Timothy McVeigh bombed the, what was the name of the federal building?
The Oklahoma government building.
But I think, tell about that because I think what's fascinating is that McVeigh, what provoked McVeigh by his own understanding to want to do that?
Yeah, so it was a reaction to Ruby Ridge.
And to Waco.
So in Ruby Ridge and Waco, in both cases, the government uses the pretext of going after, quote, illegal guns.
Right. And they go and they, what are they, first of all, in Ruby Ridge, which came first.
Right. They go to this rancher, or they claim he's a militia guy.
Exactly. What did they do, shoot his wife?
They shot his wife and killed her, yes.
And trialed? Yeah, his 14-year-old son, I believe, also died.
But again, this is going after people.
So during all of this time...
Of course, having these high-capacity weapons that people have had the right to do, all of a sudden they became the criminal.
And so the FBI, the ATF, they use this excuse, right, to go and confiscate their weapons.
I mean, in the case of Waco, you had this guy, David Koresh, I think his name was, and he was kind of a weirdo, maybe a little bit of a cultic type of guy, but on the other hand, and apparently his group had stockpiled weapons, but they didn't use the weapons.
There was no indication that they were even plotting anything insidious.
And what you have is a massive federal raid on Waco and all kinds of people killed by the US government.
And so it looks like McVeigh was like, okay, well, you know what?
I'm going to give you a taste of your own medicine.
So I think what Debbie's getting at is that you have this supposedly Garden of Eden that's created by outlawing guns, but it's no Garden of Eden.
You've created all these criminals of otherwise law-abiding people who just own a gun.
Yeah. And you go after them and deploy all this force against them and also the real bad guys figure out other ways to blow things up.
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Now, in fairness, when they introduced the song at the Super Bowl, they didn't call it the Black National Anthem.
Evidently, it's a song that was dubbed by the NAACP in about 1919.
This is the Black National Anthem.
And that was prior to the U.S. having a national anthem.
The national anthem, although composed in the 19th century, was made into the sort of official national anthem, I think 1931, so more than a decade later.
In any event, they play the song, the so-called Black National Anthem, and there you have this viral photo of Carrie Lake, and she's just sitting there like, I'm not going to be standing for this one.
She doesn't take a knee, but she's kind of avowedly disinterested.
She doesn't... It's true.
For sure. And I'm not sure that it's ever going to be repaired.
So I do think that people are going to continue to do this.
And they use the flag and the national anthem to protest.
As you know, I love to sing the national anthem.
I've been doing it for many, many years.
And And I, you know, I don't look around.
When I sing the national anthem, I actually face the flag.
I don't perform it.
It's not a performance. I'm going to sing a solo.
I sing and I look at the flag and I put my hand on my heart and I sing.
I'm not watching people to see if they're standing or sitting or kneeling.
I don't do any of that. I do that in honor to the country that has given me and many others so much.
And that's why I do it.
Because it's an anthem that means more than just words that, you know, Scott, what is his name?
Francis Scott Key. Francis Scott Key wrote down in 1812, right?
The War of 1812.
So for me, it's more about that.
It's not about protesting things.
And I don't know that this is going to stop this whole protest.
Well, to be honest, I think that Carrie Lake's reaction and also the conservatives who ridicule the Black national anthem are to some degree retaliating against that kind of protest because they're like, well, listen...
If there are things that we consider to be sacred, and sacred here used in a broad sense that it reflects something that moves us, something that brings out a sense of gratitude in us as immigrants, and you're going to then trample all over it.
What you're telling me is that you don't actually care about my feelings, and ultimately you're happy to desecrate my symbols.
You know, it's kind of like saying, I'm going to come into your church and I'm going to take the Eucharist and just sort of throw it to the wayside.
Well, I'm going to be like, well, I'm going to do that in your mosque for the same reason, because if you show that kind of disrespect to things I hold dear, why should I cherish what you hold dear?
So then when suddenly it becomes, let's all stand up for the Black National Anthem, It's like, actually, no, I think I'm going to sit this one out or I'm going to be, you know, humming another song or I'm going to be laughing and telling jokes while this is going on.
And you go, well, this is shocking behavior.
No, it's not shocking behavior.
In context, it's understandable behavior.
Well, the song is actually called Lift Every Voice and Sing.
It's a good song. It's a good song and you should lift your voice and sing along.
But it doesn't say lift up your voice and stand up and sing.
I'm just saying. Well, and the point also being that...
It kind of shows you that when you have an act of any kind, there's an underlying context that establishes the basis for the act.
And so if you don't have that context, and this I think is the effect of the breakdown you're talking about, then the act itself becomes stripped of its significance.
Think of even something like the phrase, I do.
Well, the phrase I do in a marriage makes sense if you're standing at the altar.
And if there's a clergyman there, and if people are respectfully standing in the...
But if they're not, and you're in a completely different context, the whole thing becomes alien.
So that's the point I guess I want to make.
The anthems, particularly national anthems, have a certain kind of ritual and sacred significance.
Our national anthem has been trashed every which way, and it's no surprise that as a country, We now have some question about whether the people who live alongside us are genuinely our fellow citizens.
Yeah, they're around, we inhabit the same space, we breathe the same air, but we don't believe the same things or we don't cherish the same things.
And it does raise the question about what does it mean to live even in the same country?
I'm continuing my discussion of evolution and exploring, A, whether it's true, B, is it incompatible or contradictory to the Bible, and C, how should we as Christians think about this?
Now, when Darwin published his magnum opus, it was called The Origin of Species, or just Origin of Species.
It was immediately embraced by one of the activist atheists and also kind of a minor scientist, Thomas Henry Huxley.
He's sometimes called Darwin's intellectual bulldog.
He was a sort of aggressive champion of Darwin's theory.
But he was also kind of a hater of the Catholic Church and of Christianity generally.
And he, of course, immediately saw that evolution could be used as a kind of battering ram.
And here's Huxley even saying, one of its greatest merits, in my eyes, is the fact that it occupies a position of complete and irreconcilable antagonism to the Catholic Church.
So this is what attracted Huxley.
Notice that his attraction isn't primarily scientific.
It's really, you may say, ideological.
And yet you might think that Christians uniformly were opposed to evolution from the very beginning.
I want to emphasize that this is not the case.
The number of Christian sources, both Catholic and Protestant, were very intrigued by the theory.
Sometimes they were fully convinced by it.
Sometimes they were partially convinced by it.
Sometimes they found it unconvincing, but nevertheless, they didn't take the view that it was anti-Christian or sort of overthrew the Bible, or either you believe the Bible or you believe evolution.
The Dublin Review is a good example.
It's an influential Catholic journal, obviously out of Ireland, and it wrote a long review of Darwin's Origin of Species, mostly positive.
It expressed a few reservations, but they were relatively minor.
Darwin's leading supporter in the United States was a man named Asa Gray, a biologist at Harvard.
And very interestingly, this guy Asa Gray was a devout Christian and he wrote to Darwin and said, listen, the Bible tells us that God made man and God made all the other species, but the Bible doesn't say how.
Your book, The Origin of Species has helped us to see how it happened or how it could have happened.
And Darwin was kind of excited by this.
In fact, he said that this angle, this way of looking at it, quote, pleases me especially, and I don't think anyone else has ever noticed the point.
In other words, Darwin did not see evolution as being any kind of a challenge, let alone a debunking of the Bible.
There have been other prominent biologists, a guy named Theodosius Dobzhansky, think of Polish origin, a Darwinist, but also a Christian.
Pope John Paul II signaled a greater Catholic acceptability of evolution when he said it is, quote, More than a hypothesis, meaning it's not just a theory.
It's not just a conjecture.
There appears to be a lot of powerful evidence going for it.
C.S. Lewis, interestingly, has no criticism of evolution in all his various works, which means that he was certainly familiar with it as a prominent intellectual.
And he probably didn't see any big problem with it.
And even today, we have prominent biologists like Kenneth Miller at Brown University and also, of course, Francis Collins, the head of the National, well, most recently the National Institutes for Health, but also the man who was critical in leading the Human Genome Project at the governmental level.
These are all practicing Christians.
Now, What can we say about evolution?
There has been a group, and it's generally called the group associated with creationism or intelligent design, and these guys make some critiques of evolution that we should take a quick look at.
They say, wait a minute, look at something as complex as the eye.
How could the eye, not just the human eye, but even the animal eye, have evolved like little by little by little?
To the degree evolution is incremental adaptations and then the more advantageous adaptations succeed.
How can you account for something that seems to be required that you build it all at once, namely the human eye?
We see, if we look at the fossil record, that at one point you have this sudden massive appearance of all these new life forms.
This is called the Cambrian explosion.
And the Cambrian explosion appears to have occurred all at once.
Now, I don't mean literally all at once in the sense that it all occurred overnight.
It actually occurred over several million years.
But nevertheless, There's no indication that all these life forms that kind of pop out in the Cambrian period, that the groundwork for them was gradually laid over the millions of years before that.
So where'd this explosion come from?
And then finally, what the intelligent design critics say is they go, look, it's one thing to talk about microevolution, but a whole other thing to talk about macroevolution.
So microevolution is evolution within a species.
Now, we actually know that microevolution can occur.
Why? Because you'll see, for example, different types of dogs.
They're the same species.
They're all dogs. But it's very possible for even human breeders to produce new traits in dogs through breeding.
So if it can be done humanly through artificial kind of organization, isn't it possible that nature could do exactly the same thing by putting certain types of environmental pressure on certain types of dogs?
Certain traits are more advantageous and they survive and other ones do not survive.
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