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Feb. 24, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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PUTIN’S CULTURE WAR Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep524
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Coming up, I'll review Vladimir Putin's latest speech in which he accuses the West of cultural depravity and aligns himself with traditional people around the world.
Consider whether Ukraine will become Russia's Vietnam or ours.
Former Levi's top executive Jennifer Say joins me.
We're going to talk about how her career was derailed by political incorrectness.
And why is Roald Dahl's publisher rewriting, rewriting his books?
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 war in Ukraine rages on with no clear end in sight.
Now, why is there no clear end?
The answer is that for the West, it's a proxy war.
If it were a war between Russia and Ukraine, the war would long be over.
But essentially, the NATO countries and the West have mobilized behind Ukraine and supplying Ukraine with heavy weaponry and sophisticated technology, not to mention strategic counsel.
So this is really a war between Russia and the West fighting sort of in a disguised form or maybe not so disguised form.
Here's Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary.
He goes, Ukraine can't win because the entire, I'm sorry, Russia can't win because the entire Western world is lined up behind Ukraine.
At the same time, Russia is a nuclear power.
Nuclear power cannot be cornered because they may trigger a nuclear war.
We need a ceasefire and peace talks, and the sooner the better.
Now, this is just the simple common sense of the matter.
But if you look at the comments right below, oh yeah, this guy's on the side of Putin.
Oh yeah, this guy's a pawn of Putin.
And this kind of rhetoric has now become depressingly commonplace in our debate.
I'm sure that one could say the same about what I'm about to say, which is I'm about to look at Putin's latest speech and notice that it contains some disturbing elements of truth.
Oh, Dinesh is on the side of Putin.
Oh, you can't say it. That's only helping Putin, Dinesh.
I'm not on the side of Putin.
I'm on the side of Ukraine.
I don't like the amount of money that we've committed to this war because it seems to me out of line with our national interest in the matter.
It's not to say I'm in principle opposed to helping Ukraine.
Somebody said, you know, Dinesh, you can give them 50 cents and that's going to help them win the war.
Or you can give them a reasonable sum of money that will help boost their chances in at least staving off a Russian success, which I don't think is good for our interests.
I would go, yeah, that makes sense.
But it seems to me that we have nefarious and perhaps even hidden motives in the war.
And that is why there is this kind of absolutist commitment.
Russia must be defeated.
Russia must retreat completely.
This is not normal behavior for the United States, and it appears like we're protecting bioweapons factories we have over there, or we're protecting secrets from coming out that we don't want to come out from Ukraine.
Here's Putin in his recent speech delivered, I think on the 21st of February, State of the Nation.
He says, under the guise of words about democracy and freedom, he's now talking about the West.
He talks about the West spreading, quote, neoliberal and inherently totalitarian values, an interesting equation between those two, hang labels on entire countries and peoples.
I'm sorry to say this is going on.
Publicly insult their leaders, suppress dissent in their own countries.
That is also going on.
Diverting people's attention from corruption scandals.
That's also true. There's no question that the Biden regime has corruption scandals in Ukraine and involving Russia, and all of that is being suppressed in the media.
Now, interestingly, Putin goes on to distinguish between the West and the elites of the West.
He also does the same thing in Ukraine.
We are not at war with the people of Ukraine.
The people of Ukraine themselves are a hostage of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters who actually occupy the country in a political, military, and economic sense.
So what he's saying is that the Ukrainian democracy is not a real democracy.
It's a propped-up democracy.
By the way, it does suppress, as sometimes happens in wartime, All kinds of it suppresses the opposition, heavy regulation, heavy censorship going on in Ukraine.
All of this is not reported, at least not reported widely in the Western media.
Then he goes on to say this.
He talks about people in the West, Western elites, quote, On the Russian Orthodox Church and other traditional religious organizations of our country.
And then comes, I think, the key passage.
Look at what they are doing to their own peoples, the destruction of the family, cultural and national identity, perversion, abuse of children, up to even pedophilia, which is declared the norm, the norm of their life and clergy, priests are forced to bless same-sex marriages.
And then Putin goes, well, God bless them.
Let them do what they want. What do you want to say here?
Adults have the right to live as they want.
We have treated this in Russia.
We will always treat it this way.
No one intrudes into private life.
We're not going to do it. But I want to tell them, look, excuse me, the sacred scriptures, the main books of all the other world religions, everything is said there, including that the family is the union of a man and a woman.
But these sacred texts are now being attacked.
The Anglican Church, for example, has been reported to be planning, though only just yet, to explore the idea of a gender-neutral God.
What can you say? God forgive me, they don't know what they are doing.
Millions of people in the West understand they are being led into a spiritual catastrophe.
The elites, frankly, are just going crazy, and it seems there is no cure.
But these are their problems, as I said, and we are obliged to protect our children, and we will do it.
We will protect our children from degradation and degeneration.
Whoa. Touche.
Right on. No disagreement whatsoever with what Putin just said.
Oh, Dinesh, you're playing into the hands of Putin.
Oh, who cares?
We're assessing something as to whether it is true or whether it is false.
Admittedly, bad guys can use true things in order to make their case as a form of propaganda, so to speak.
But that doesn't make them less true.
In fact, it makes the propaganda more believable.
Why? Because it is ultimately built on a foundation of what I would have to call regrettable truth.
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I wonder if when we look back on the war in Ukraine...
We will see it as another Vietnam.
Now, of course, when I say another Vietnam, it's not clear who's Vietnam.
It will be a Vietnam for Russia in perhaps the same way that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a generation ago became A kind of Soviet Vietnam leading to a kind of ignominious retreat.
Or, and this is a point that often gets missed, will it be our Vietnam?
In other words, will the United States hang in there in Ukraine for So, month after month, and in fact year after year, the Vietnam War at the beginning appeared like it would be short-lived.
The United States just stepping in the shoes of France that would pretty soon be all over.
But no, it dragged on and on and on.
And each time we were assured, Americans were assured that just by deepening the commitment a little bit more, putting in more effort, more money, and of course in the case of Vietnam, more troops, that this would then settle the issue and it never did.
As we look at Vietnam, just understood to be the greatest tragedy for American foreign policy in the 20th century, the only clear war that America lost, there's no other way to put it, and it was at the loss of 50,000 lives.
It was at the loss of almost immeasurable amounts of treasure and obviously a deep blow to psychological morale.
So we don't really want to go through that again, do we?
And if we look at Ukraine, things are different in one important respect.
The United States is not committing troops, and I don't see any imminent reason that that would change, at least not without something else changing.
But on the other hand, you have other similarities.
Ukraine, like Vietnam, is like at the other end of the earth.
So you've got a very faraway country where America's ability to project power is inherently more limited.
It's easier for us to do it on the border or in Canada or even in South America, our backyard, than it is to do it in faraway Asia or in this case on the border of Russia.
The Vietnam War was defined by a kind of, we don't really know what we're doing there.
The normal reasons that people go to other countries and fight over there is to conquer those countries, to rule them, maybe a projection of imperial power.
That wasn't motive. The United States never intended to rule Vietnam.
So there was a purposelessness to the Vietnam War.
Same, by the way, I think here in Ukraine.
Why are we actually committing so much?
It's not that we're committing something.
Why are we committing so much to this war that doesn't seem to involve our safety, our national security at all?
There's the question not of helping, but as I say, of how much to help and what does it mean to win?
What are we going after?
Are we actually trying to, quote, roll back the Soviet Union?
Are we trying to overthrow Putin?
Are we trying to have a change of regime in Russia?
Do we want Ukraine to flat out win the war?
Do we think that's a realistic possibility?
Do we think the Russians, this big country with a small country next door, are going to say, okay, yeah, you know what?
You beat us there in square.
No, the Russians are not going to do that.
That's unlikely to be the outcome.
Plus, you're dealing with a nuclear-tipped power, which is a whole different ballgame.
I think I've mentioned on the podcast the old joke, what do you call a dictator who has nuclear weapons?
And the answer is, sir, which means there's a kind of appropriate caution when you're dealing with nuclear-tipped powers just because of what they could kick off.
So I think that this Ukraine thing is not well thought out.
We don't have a good strategy.
We don't have a good endgame.
We're committing far too much of our treasure.
We're undermining our military capacity in other places.
And then look, when the thing turns out to be a disaster, the media will immediately close shop, close the books on it.
Avoid any post-mortem examinations.
It's a little bit like with other disasters that we see in domestic politics.
Hey, nothing to see here, guys.
It's just time to move on.
Whatever we did over there, let's not talk about it too much.
Let's just move on to other things.
When you ultimately created a situation where you never knew what you were doing, you shouldn't have done it that way in the first place.
And yet you persisted even in the face of criticism, all of which, by the way, you dismissed as being nothing more than being in bed with the enemy.
And so all of this kind of suppression of legitimate debate is having a very bad effect on our Ukraine policy.
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I want to do a short segment here on, well, let's call it on bad reasoning.
Now, by bad reasoning, I'm speaking in terms of almost formal logic.
I'm speaking in terms of reasoning that is sound in moving from a premise to a legitimate deduction.
So let's take the classic example.
Here's the premise. All men are mortal.
Socrates was a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.
Now that is sound reasoning because A, the premise is true, all men are mortal, and then the reasoning from the premise to the conclusion is sound, and therefore the conclusion can be trusted because true premise and sound reasoning from the premise to the final result.
Now, I see that this rule violated all the time in American political debate.
And I want to give you two examples of this.
First, we're seeing in the media a lot of this kind of exaltation now.
Fox News hosts knew that the 2020 election was not fraudulent.
And therefore, and they even admitted it.
We can see this from their text.
This is the left talking. And therefore, there was no fraud in the 2020 election.
This is almost a classical logic 101 error.
First of all, the premise is false.
Fox News hosts did not know that there was no fraud in the 2020 election.
They couldn't have known. They were talking to each other by text immediately following the election.
And yeah, they made some derogatory comments about Sidney Powell.
They make some derogatory comments perhaps about Mike Lindell.
They make some derogatory comments about what is known at that time in the immediate aftermath of the election.
But that's all that they knew about.
If you interviewed the Fox host today about the 2020 election, you might get a completely different answer.
They may not be able to say the answer on the air, but they might think a completely different answer.
So if the premise is false, Fox News hosts knew the election wasn't stolen, then all the conclusions that come out of that will also be false.
Here's another example, a different example coming from the train derailment.
Here's the reasoning. The train was derailed.
During the Trump administration, there were deregulation rules passed, and therefore Trump is to blame for the derailing of the train.
This is false reasoning.
Why? It's false reasoning because, first of all, what are the regulations that Trump got rid of?
How do we know that it was those regulations that caused the derailing of the train?
The train could have been caused even by some other cause that would have been in place even with regulations.
So unless you can show that Trump removed a particular regulation and then evidence shows that it was that regulation that caused the train to derail...
You're talking complete nonsense.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
In this case, the premise may be true.
Trump did deregulation.
But the conclusion doesn't follow because the reasoning from the premise to the conclusion is unsound.
It would be really nice to have a political debate in which...
And this is actually, by the way, one of the arguments for free speech.
In free speech, you can point out these errors.
But when they suppress speech...
What happens is the media continues to say the same rubbish, one thing after another.
And it's so mindless that if you're in your car, you're paying attention to something else, you're not closely focusing on what they're saying.
So you're not able to uncover, hey, that's a false premise.
Hey, that's false reasoning. And they're counting on your ignorance to go, oh yeah, that's right.
There was deregulation.
Therefore, that's why the train derailed, man.
That's why the train derailed. So this is the level of discourse that I see in social media.
And I think, man, we should be doing so much better.
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I want to talk about the English writer of children's books.
This is Roald Dahl.
And he's the author of a whole bunch of really marvelous children's books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory being perhaps the most famous, Matilda, many others.
In fact, Debbie and I were having a little humorous conversation.
Debbie's like, Dahl, that sounds kind of like an Indian name.
And I'm like, well, yeah, but that's D-A-L. This is D-A-H-L, and his first name, Rold.
I've never known an Indian called Rold.
I said, I think it's kind of Norwegian or Swedish, and Debbie just looked it up, and sure enough, he was born in Wales, but he is of Norwegian immigrant parents.
In any event, what I want to describe is quite disturbing.
Essentially, his publisher, now that Roald Dahl is no longer around, this publisher is rewriting his books.
In the name of political correctness.
They're changing sentences.
And this raises all kinds of disturbing possibilities.
Are they going to go back and rewrite Shakespeare?
Are they going to go back and...
Or for those of us who are writers, can we look forward to the fact that, you know, we think we're writing, like, lasting works of importance for posterity, but later, some other little dude shows up, some other elf, and he goes, you know, I'm going to rewrite delicious books.
You know, I don't like the title, The End of Racism.
I'm going to call it The Beginning of Racism.
I mean, what kind of madness is this?
Who thinks this is okay?
It can't be okay.
So here we go. Let me give you a few examples because this just shows you the state of where we are now.
And the blame goes to puffin books.
Puffin books. I mean...
This is like, I mean, first of all, the word puffin is a huge giveaway.
I mean, teabag publishers have decided to rewrite his books.
I mean, wow. You know, I mean, Bend Over Ink is rewriting Roald Dahl's books now.
Anyway. Puffin is evidently a division of Penguin, and they're rewriting his books concerning weight, mental health, gender, and race.
This is even beyond the normal definition of political correctness.
So apparently in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he talks about small men and small people.
So the cloud men have now become cloud people.
They just change it, you know?
And then in Matilda, there's Miss Trunchbull, and she's called a most formidable woman.
Oh, no, she was apparently called a most formidable female, but they now changed it to woman.
A new line is added in the witches.
So there's a paragraph that says, witches are bald underneath their wigs.
And the new line is, this has just been added by the publisher.
There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.
I wonder who at Bend Over Books came up with this particular, you know, addition.
We need to make an observation about wigs.
Yeah. And look, this stuff is so stupid and so moronic that even Salman Rushdie, not exactly a sensible guy in the normal circumstances, All of this is true, but it's understated because what is going on is just quite outrageous.
It's quite stupid. And it makes...
It kind of shows you how this mentality consolidates itself at a publishing house of all places.
I mean, I don't really know what things are like at Puffin Publishing House.
Now, it's not as if this is entirely new.
I'll give a single example.
When I was in India, I became a fan of Agatha Christie.
And I came across one of Agatha Christie's books.
Now, it had the N-word in the title, but you've got to remember that the N-word itself came out of a song that Agatha Christie describes.
The song is sort of the centerpiece of this little horror and detective story.
It was called Ten, Little, and Then the N-Word.
This was the original title of the book.
And I was like, oh, wow.
And I always say I was in India.
This was not an issue in India.
So I read the book.
It was a good detective story.
In fact, one of Agatha Christie's best works.
When I came to America, I discovered that this title had been changed.
And the same book was now titled Ten Little Indians.
Initially, I thought they meant Indians from India.
But then as I read, I realized, no, they now meant Ten Little Native Americans, I guess they would say today.
And apparently, even that became politically incorrect, so that in more recent years, I noticed the book's title has changed again.
And now there's a movie whose title has also been changed, and it's called And Then There Were None, which is, by the way, the last line of that little rhyme or poem that Agatha Christie was alluding to.
So you can see that even here, but that was a singular example where, of course, the offensive term was genuinely and is genuinely offensive, and it wasn't the title of the book.
So we've gone from that to now, let's go to this children's writer.
Now, again, Puffin Books is like, we want all children to enjoy reading these books.
So they're defiling literature.
And Roald Dahl is, I mean, I'm not saying Roald Dahl is Shakespeare, but this is literature that can have lasting value.
Books that are appealing to children and tap into a real vein of the child's sense of wonder, the children's sensibilities, can be books that last for a generation or more.
So I think this is atrocious behavior.
I hope that Puffin Books retracts.
I hope that they hear from a lot of powerful and smart and influential people who genuinely love literature saying that you people are an abomination.
You shouldn't have done this in the first place, but undo all this nonsense and restore Roald Dahl's books to the way He wrote them.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast Jennifer Say.
She is an American author, she's a filmmaker, a business executive, and a retired artistic gymnast.
Now, she's also a top executive.
She was a top executive at Levi Strauss Company in 1999, rising to brand president until in January 2022, she was asked to resign.
And that's what we're going to talk about.
By the way, her new book, Levi's Unbuttoned, great title.
And you can follow her, her website, jennifersay.substack.com.
Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
Here's an article about you, a prominent article in the New York Times.
She was a candidate to lead Levi's.
Then she started tweeting.
It sounds like tweeting proved to be your downfall.
Let's start by talking about your career at Levi's.
Was it a happy career?
Did it just sort of take a sharp turn?
Talk a little bit about that, and then we'll come to what happened to you.
Yeah, it did take a pretty sharp turn in March 2020.
I started at the company in 1999 as an entry-level marketing assistant.
I worked hard and rose through the ranks and became the chief marketing officer in 2013.
Held that job for eight years, which is a really long time to Hold that post and be successful in it.
Helped lead the brand back from near brink of bankruptcy, honestly, in 2011.
I loved the company.
I loved the brand. I'd worn it since I was a small child.
I loved it there.
I built a strong team and friends.
I felt very much a part of the culture and excelled there.
In 2020, in the fall, I was promoted to brand president.
So I oversaw all the product development, all the jeans people wear, the store design, all of it, as well as the marketing at that point.
But just a few months before that, in March of 2020, I was very outspoken about school closures and restrictions to children.
And so, yes, I tweeted about it, but I also wrote op-eds and appeared on news shows.
And eventually, after a two-year conflict, I was told I needed to resign because I was a reputational risk to the company.
That wasn't true.
Our brand was doing great, recovering from COVID. But essentially, you know, they didn't like what I said.
I challenged a key pillar, apparently, of the Democratic Party platform, right?
Stay closed until zero COVID. And so I was too dangerous to have around...
Let's probe that a little bit further because it seems to me that it's not that they had a vaccine mandate and you refused to take it or they had a mask mandate.
What you're saying is that you were fired for your views.
You were fired for what you were saying in the public domain and they claimed that it was hurting the Levi reputation and the Levi brand.
Now, Let's walk through a little bit more, because I think it's good for people to understand how this kind of thing gets started.
Does it start where your immediate supervisor goes, hey, listen, you may want to cool it, you may want to cut it out, and then you go, no.
Let's walk through the process of how this escalated over that two-year period.
Yeah, sure. And, you know, sort of what they say publicly is different than what they said internally.
You know, internally, it was reputational risk.
Externally, what they've said is challenging public health restrictions put our employees at risk.
But the public health restrictions I challenged had only to do with children.
And there are no children that work at Levi's, so I'm not sure how it...
No child labor? No child labor.
And I challenged... Primarily public school closures.
And it should be noted that my peers were all sending their kids to in-person private school.
So the hypocrisy for me just was too glaring.
And my own children go to public school.
And I was representing 50,000 public school children in San Francisco, where I used to live.
But the way it starts...
No, my boss, who was the CEO, was sort of delayed in coming to me directly.
It's a big conflict avoidant.
He had his... His team members, my peers do it.
I first got a call from the lead of corporate communications saying, people are noticing what you're saying and they don't like it.
And I said, so, you know, I'm advocating for children.
I have a long history of doing so in the world of athletics.
This is really important.
Your own children are in school.
And she says, but people are upset, employees.
And so you have to watch it.
And I said, no.
I essentially said, no, this is too important to me.
Kids' health and well-being is at risk.
And she said, hold the line.
I kind of didn't know what that meant.
And I asked her, are you telling me I have to stop?
She said, no, I can't do that.
And I said, then I'm not going to.
And then for a year and a half after that, I got a call every other week from some peer employee telling me I needed to stop.
And employees, a very small group of angry, punitive employees were angry and emailing HR. I think it was a tiny group, honestly.
I wasn't privy to it.
I just knew that it was happening.
And then a Twitter mob, relatively small, started calling the ethics hotline to say it was an ethics violation and should be Not sure what ethic I was violating and should be fired.
And so eventually they got sick of it.
And in January of 22, my own boss, who throughout this period had engaged and called me every name from...
You know, Trumper to racist.
Eventually, he got tired of the noise, and he told me I needed to go, and they would give me severance of a million dollars, which I rejected, because it would come with a non-disclosure agreement on the terms of my leaving, and I wanted to be able to talk about it to people like you, because the censorship is what has created this problem.
If we could have had an open, honest debate about the impact to children, schools would have opened sooner.
So I was not going to give up my voice.
I mean, I think this speaks to something, obviously, in your temperament, because you had a great job.
You were perhaps even in line for a bigger job, and you were willing to put it all on the line.
Why? It's such a good question, Dinesh, and it's one I get asked all the time.
And when people ask me, my general response is, why aren't you?
If you're not willing to...
What are you willing to stand up for?
And it was a difficult decision.
Like I said, I love the company, I love the product, and I was in line to be CEO, which would have been an amazing opportunity.
But I couldn't compromise on those two values, those principles of freedom.
And doing what's best for children.
I just couldn't. I can't describe it.
I couldn't. You know, I'm about principle, not party.
And I wasn't going to further a lie that the Democratic Party was propagating, that closed schools were not dangerous, that anybody...
Or we're not harmful.
That the masking of small children, toddlers and diapers made any sense at all.
I wasn't going to further that lie.
If we do that, if we further lies, we are no better than an authoritarian regime.
These things were all propaganda.
And people like me were vilified to keep everybody else silent.
And I was not going to participate in that.
Jennifer, let's take a pause.
When we come back, I want to talk about new studies that have, in a sense, completely vindicated your position, and I want you to talk about those, and we're going to see what now.
So we'll be right back. Debbie and I started taking Relief Factor a couple of years ago and the difference we've seen in our joints the past couple of years, nothing short of amazing.
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Guys, I'm back with Jennifer Say, the executive who was basically pushed out, fired at Levi Strauss, Levi's, for her advocacy for children against these mask mandates.
Her book, Levi's Unbuttoned, her website, jennifersay.substack.com.
Jennifer, it turns out that when you were younger in your career, you were in the world of gymnastics, you were outspoken in that sphere, and you sort of were vilified a little bit for that, which maybe prepped you for what was to come in the replay, but talk a little bit about the gymnastics, because it seems like that is part of the formation of your character.
Yeah, it certainly is.
You know, I had an unusual childhood as an elite gymnast.
By the time I was 10, I made my first national team and was training six or seven hours a day.
I was a 1986 national champion, but when I left the sports, I was very damaged, essentially, and somewhat broken, despite my successes, because the training culture is incredibly abusive, emotionally, physically, and now we know there's widespread sexual abuse as well from the Larry Nassar case and conviction.
I wrote about this in a memoir in 2008 because I continued to struggle as an adult with the repercussions of that abusive culture.
I was very honest about it.
And you're right. It was sort of my first mini cancellation.
I was really dragged and called all sorts of terrible names, rift or liar, you know, everything to sort of undermine what I was saying, which was ultimately very true.
And I was redeemed 10 years later when Nassar died.
I was convicted of horrific crimes of sexual assault against hundreds and hundreds of young athletes.
So it kind of helped me strengthen my backbone, ignore the haters.
If you know you're speaking the truth, you have to continue, especially when it's to protect kids.
And ultimately, I held that close to me.
I wish someone had stood up for me, an adult, a common sense adult, when I was enduring These brutal training practices.
And no one did. They all went along with the narrative of shiny, happy little gymnasts winning gold medals.
And we were suffering.
Wow. Here's the New York Times.
This is Brett Stevens, February 21.
The mask mandates did nothing.
Will any lessons be learned?
And he's quoting the Cochrane study, a British non-profit, authored by Thomas Jefferson, an Oxford epidemiologist.
And these conclusions are just sort of stunning.
He says, quote, What about the N95 masks?
He goes, makes no difference.
None of it. What about the rules that told policymakers to impose mask mandates?
Quote, they were convinced by non-randomized studies, flawed observational studies.
And then he sums up, there is no evidence that many of these things make any difference.
I mean, this could not be...
First of all, this is unusually sharp and definitive language from a prominent scientist.
And it seems to be a stunning vindication of lots of people who have been saying this from the very beginning, including you.
So I'd like to have your assessment.
How do you feel now?
I mean, it's almost like, can I get my money back?
I mean, you pushed me out over something so stupid, and now everybody knows it was stupid, so can we at least get an apology?
If you ran into the CEO of Levi's in the hallway, what would you say to him?
I was right. I want an apology.
I don't feel particularly vindicated.
First of all, that piece written by Brett Stevens was in the opinion section.
Where is the science desk?
Why aren't they writing about it?
They're the ones that furthered fear and insisted that anyone questioning mass was evil.
It's been silent from the science desk.
That's where we need to hear it from.
And of course, they had a conservative opinion writer write it, you know, because most of the readers, if you read the comments, are dismissing it.
They're saying there's no way.
This is, you know, propaganda.
But to your point, it's based on the Cochran study, over 70 RCTs showing that not only mask mandates, but masks themselves don't work.
What are we doing? And these studies were all on adults.
There have been no studies on children.
So if they don't work for adults, how do we think a two-year-old wearing diapers with her shoes on the wrong feet is going to wear a mask in such a way that it's going to work to limit the spread?
It's absurd on its face, and it always was.
And Stephen says we should all feel vindicated, but I don't, frankly.
I want an apology from the New York Times.
I want Maybe not that job back because I don't want to go there, but I want another job.
Levi's has said publicly that I was pushed out of the company for challenging public health guidelines.
Why? I was right.
And so I just, you know, even though there is some resolution on the matter at this point, there's also resolution on the matter of school closures having been harmful.
That makes no difference for me and people like me who were shunned and ostracized and pushed out of our jobs.
So I feel we're far from truly vindicated.
Now, Jennifer, you're a marketing person, and I assume that part of that is trying to understand people's psychology, right?
Because that's what marketing is.
You're appealing to the psychology of people to try to get them interested in a particular product.
My question is this. From the people who were tormenting you when you were at Levi's, get her fired, get rid of her, to the people now who, despite data, are like, no, the mass mandates were important, mass work...
How do you explain their psychology?
Is it that these are like little fascists in our midst who are just driven by some sick human totalitarian impulse?
And if it's not that, what is it?
I try to be a little more generous in understanding folks so that I can kind of build bridges, which I've failed to do so far, but I still believe I can.
I think it's a desire to People want a framework for how to behave.
You know, in the past, that's been religion often, and I think there's a secularization happening.
And without that, people still have that impulse.
And these COVID guidelines provided a framework for how to behave to be good, to be virtuous.
And You know, it excused any type of cruelty.
In fact, it justified cruelty in punishing people like me and punishing children and punishing old folks dying alone in old age homes.
It's horrible what we did to people.
Women gave birth alone.
But it's like this, you know, virtuousness that was, you know, adopted with religious fervor, justified and excused all things.
Inhumane behavior. But I think ultimately it's this sort of desire to belong and behave in a way that is virtuous and part of the group and the in crowd.
And I think it's really dangerous, but I do think it's a human impulse.
I think it's a human impulse that has not changed across time and geographies, and it can be applied in a really dangerous way.
Well, Jennifer, I think that is a very provocative and insightful observation.
Hey, Jennifer Say, thank you so much for joining me.
The book, Levi's Unbuttoned, the website, jennifersay.substack.com.
There's a new movie coming out from the creators of I Can Only Imagine. Debbie and I got to see it.
It's called Jesus Revolution. It's based on the true story of Pastor Chuck Smith in Southern California in the 1970s and how he opened the doors of his languishing church to an unexpected group of young people looking for love and truth, hippies, and it led to the greatest faith revival in American history. Again, it's called Jesus Revolution. It's got a great cast, Joel Courtney, Jonathan Rumi, who we all love in The Chosen, and Kelsey Grammer. It's rated PG-13 for some drug use being authentic to the time,
so some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
Jesus Revolution will be in theaters everywhere beginning February 24.
Debbie and I loved it. Great movie.
You will too. Go see it.
For tickets and showtimes, go to jesusrevolution.movie.
Again, that's jesusrevolution.movie.
Darwinian evolution is a plausible, a convincing theory.
But it is also a theory with clear limits.
And I'm going to talk in the next couple of days about what those limits are in some detail.
But I want to begin by spelling out the implications of the theory having these sharp limits.
What it means is that the theory explains what it does, but it doesn't explain life.
It's true as far as it goes, but it doesn't go all that far.
And the champions of evolution, at least the public champions of evolution, people like the biologist Richard Dawkins or the philosopher, the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, they show no awareness of these limits.
They act as if evolution is some kind of all-purpose explanation.
It can account for life.
It can account for culture, ethics, human behavior.
But this is to go, I'm arguing, way beyond the evidence.
So I think that people like Dawkins and Dennett are, I'm going to call them, metaphysical Darwinists.
Why? Because they smuggle in a whole bunch of metaphysical concepts into their Darwinism.
So it's not science.
Some people call it scientism.
But it's making an ideology ideology.
That's not an ideology.
Biologist Stephen Jay Gould once called these same people Darwinian fundamentalists and he meant that as an insult.
And I think you can see what he's getting at.
He's saying they're using a powerful but quite circumscribed theory to account for phenomena, including IQ, that lie outside the theory's actual biological reach.
Now, let's focus on the first of the three things that evolution cannot explain.
I said yesterday that evolution can't explain three things.
The first is the origin of life or the basic unit of life.
I'll come to that. It's the cell.
Evolution cannot explain consciousness.
And third, evolution can't explain human rationality or morality.
But we're going to focus here on the first of those three, the origin of life.
Now, Darwin assumed when he advanced his theory that life is already there.
So let's start with life, he goes.
How do we go from one life form to another?
Now, there have been a whole bunch of scientists who have said, well, you know, we think we can find the origins of life.
And we think we can even, if we can't find it, which they haven't found, We think we can maybe create life in a lab.
In 1953, there was a lot of excitement.
A fellow named Stanley Miller, he had generated amino acids by sending an electrical discharge through a combination of water, hydrogen, methane, and ammonia.
And people thought, oh wow! This is showing that life is nothing more than a combination of chemicals, and if we can figure out the right chemicals, the right temperature, the right, quote, conditions, if we can simulate what life might have been like in the very beginning, maybe we can even create some kind of living creature through a pure combination of chemicals.
But turns out that the excitement quickly subsided, and not only did the experiment go any further, but it was It became clear that the atmosphere of the early Earth was completely different than the one that Stanley Miller assumed.
And so, I think where we are now, biologist Franklin Herald, in his recent book on the cell, he goes, the origin of life is, quote, one of the unsolved mysteries in science.
It's not to say that science will never solve it, but it's very clearly saying that science has not.
Now, let's turn to the simplest living cell.
The simplest living cell turns out to be one of the most complicated structures on Earth.
It contains more information in it than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The genetic code, this is Richard Dawkins himself, quote, is truly digital in the exact same sense as a computer code.
This is Dawkins and he's talking about the original cell.
Dawkins says that each DNA molecule is an algorithm in biochemical code with a built-in capacity for transcription, that would be amazing enough, and replication.
The code can multiply itself.
Franklin Harreld, in his book on the cell, says that the cell, even a bacterial cell, quote, displays levels of regularity and complexity that exceed by orders of magnitude anything found in the non-living world.
Besides, quote, a cell constitutes a unitary whole, a unit of life in another deeper sense.
Like the legs and leaves of higher organisms, its molecular constituents have functions.
Molecules are parts of an integrated system and in that capacity can be set to serve the activities of the cell as a whole.
In other words, the cell is not a bunch of independent units each doing their own thing.
They function in combination as a whole, almost like a kind of Strategic attack in a chess game.
All the pieces are mobilized to a particular purpose and each piece is functioning as part of that.
So here's the point.
A, there are really two points.
One, the cell shows the marked signature of design.
How could something, a kind of mini supercomputer, be there at the start?
And number two, and this is really the crushing point, This basic template of life did not evolve.
Darwin doesn't claim it evolved.
Not a single competent biologist in the world says that the cell itself evolved.
No, the cell was already there, and the cell then became the basic unit of evolution.
Evolution presupposes that this basic template of life, with all its complex machinery of RNA and DNA, came fully formed with the first appearance of life.
And scientists have found that the first traces of life go back between 3.5 and 4 billion years, a relatively short time after the Earth was formed.
So here's the Earth, the Earth is formed, and then relatively early on, boom, here comes the cell, here comes life.
And evolution can't account for that and it doesn't even exist.
Doesn't even pretend to.
So how can the kind of random combination of chemicals automatically produce this highly complex unit called the cell?
The simple answer is it can't.
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