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March 2, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:05
IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep528
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Coming up, what does Marjorie Taylor Greene really mean when she talks about a national divorce?
Is she talking about secession?
Is she talking about something else?
I want to argue that some form of a divorce is already going on within America.
I'll comment on how Ron DeSantis cleverly took over a progressive college and turned it unwoke, and why today's generation is far from the smartest in history.
It actually might be one of the dumbest.
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.
I want to further discuss Marjorie Taylor Greene's idea of a national divorce.
Now this is an idea that has stimulated a lot of comment, a lot of it derisive from the left, most of it very uninformed and sometimes uninformed on both sides of the debate.
But let's begin by thinking about what Marjorie Taylor Greene meant by this because the concept of a national divorce can be understood in more than one way.
In fact, I can think off the top of my head of at least three or four ways that we can interpret it.
So one way to interpret it would be, for example, secession.
We split the country into two.
And of course, that has some sorts of operational difficulties.
It's not quite as simple of north-south or east-west.
It would have to be a very complex division.
So that's option, but it's only option number one.
Option number two would be that we create parallel societies to Americas inside of America, something I've argued for and something that to some degree is already happening.
I'll say more about that in the next segment.
But that's the second option.
A third option is decentralization of power.
Take power away from Washington.
Now we can see that people in Washington won't want to give up power without a fight, without a struggle.
But nevertheless, the idea of dispersing power to the different jurisdictions, that way red states can live the way they want, blue states can live the way they want, the federal government oversees the process, but it's not the kind of nerve center of making decisions for the whole country.
So, these are three different ways to think about the so-called national divorce.
Let's listen to Marjorie Taylor herself, because she gave a lengthy interview in which she spelled out her thoughts about it, which I think are quite provocative.
And the first thing she says is that many Americans are giving up.
They're sick of the talking heads to just complain about problems and politicians who don't fix anything, while the right keeps taking beatings and abuse from the left.
So this is her point, that our starting point is kind of the Texas motto, we're not going to take it anymore.
It's not enough just to sit around and analyze and comment and do depressing shows, hopefully mine not included, in which people just talk about how the world is coming to an end and how this is going to make you really angry and next time it's going to make you angrier.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene is we need a way out of this.
And it's hard to say that she's not right about that.
Now, of course, there are some people saying to Marjorie Taylor Greene, well, listen, you know, let's remember that California used to be Nixon country.
It used to be Reagan country.
And look at even people like Pataki and look at people like Mayor Giuliani.
They were elected to power even in New York.
But Marjorie Taylor Greene goes, well, that may have been true once, but not now.
She says, quote, the red California that gave us Reagan is gone.
And that was a long time ago.
California is now like a weird communist country.
And it's true. It may well be today.
We used to always think and take it as a premise, it's better to live in America than anywhere else.
But there may be lots of places now in the world that are better to live in than, say, California, given the sort of, not only the confiscatory taxes, but the repressive regulations.
She goes on to say Matt Gaetz is right when he says our government constantly cheats on its own people with foreign countries.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene says marriage counseling we all need.
What she's getting at here is, I mean, think about in marriage, of course, infidelity is a way to betray marriage.
And when you have political leaders in this country that would rather seek the welfare of She goes on to say, In order to protect ourselves and our kids from the abusive left is the bold action that needs to be taken.
So here she's getting to one interpretation of the divorce and that is federalism.
Now federalism is in no way a national divorce.
I mean the American founders favored federalism.
They favored dispersing power to the states.
They wanted a central government to do certain essential things, but they limited the power of that government.
And it became a characteristic of our society that we have limited government as opposed to the unlimited government that you have in other democratic societies.
You think about a country like England, which is a democratic country for sure, but they have a parliamentary system of government.
And parliament, you may say, is king.
And I mean that phrase almost literally because just as the king had almost unlimited power, it could essentially vote to take away your house or suppress this guy's free speech.
Parliament has that kind of power, even now.
It's restrained somewhat by the common law, but otherwise it has virtually unlimited power in principle, but not in the United States.
And then, says Marjorie Taylor Greene, just like the prodigal son, once the left gets to truly live in their own filth that they've created without us, then they will be able to realize the error of their ways.
So here she's pivoting to the other definition of a national divorce, which is, hey listen, Let the blue states make decisions and live with the consequences.
If people want to see rampant crime on the streets, they want to see homeless people intruding on you, insulting you with obscenities, sitting outside your home or your apartment, defecating in front of you as you walk by.
You know what? That's your America.
You do that. You live with it and see how well you like it.
Don't make us live like that.
Don't make us subsidize your disgusting ways.
So this is, I think, a kind of clarification of what Marjorie Taylor Greene is getting at.
She's not specifying a particular remedy.
She's not saying, let's secede.
What she's saying is, let's think of ways in which we can break this logjam in which the left is repressively Shutting down our basic rights, our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, our freedom of movement.
They're trying to make us live in their America, and we won't.
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I'm continuing my discussion of Marjorie Taylor Greene's idea of a national divorce, but I want to argue in this segment that this is something that is already going on.
It's not a separation of America, but it's a separation of the two ideological camps within America.
Now, I've argued for some time and I also argue in my speeches about how we have to create our own America inside of America and live in it and police it, defend it.
And that means creating our own schools, a massive project, but we have to do it, our own colleges and universities.
I don't think we need to build hundreds of brick and mortar institutions.
I think we need a few of those.
But we also need a high-quality online education offered at a very low cost.
And the beauty of this is not only does this provide an alternative to what's in higher education, but it destroys the existing model of higher education, which relies on parents putting their lifetime savings aside.
And then putting it at the altar of sending their kids off to schools that often do nothing more than ideologically indoctrinate and corrupt your children against your values.
But let me focus now on just the simple fact that people are voting with their feet against Blue America and moving to Red America. And by the way, that's a pretty good sign of which system is working better, right? I mean you have what Hayek called a framework of competing utopias.
The blue states are building their utopia, if you want to call it that. I don't even think they would call it that.
But they would say, well, it's necessary in the name of equity.
nonsense. But nevertheless, they want to build their own society.
Let them. We're building our own.
And the question is, let's look and see where people are migrating.
And it turns out, it's pretty obvious, people are leaving the blue states and going to the red states.
And there's no movement the other way.
That's comparable. So, nine of the top ten states gaining population were red states, led by Florida.
Seven of the top ten losers are blue states, led by New York.
Now, here's the LA Times reporting about California.
The California exodus has shown no sign of slowing down.
Even as the state's population dropped by 500,000 people, 500,000 people left California between 2020 and 2022.
But now, the number of residents that's leaving has surpassed 700,000.
So California is, I won't say emptying itself out, because there are a bunch of people left there, but a lot of people are leaving, and they're leaving because they're disgusted by California.
Now, it's kind of crazy because some of the left-wingers who look at us go, well, no, no, no.
People are leaving the blue states and going to the red states because the climate is better.
Well, I mean, that argument would apply to a point with, say, New York and Florida.
And in some ways, even Trump sort of endorsed that point by saying, oh, this is really why people are moving to Florida, not just because of DeSantis, whom he calls DeSanctimonious.
He has three or four variations on DeSantis' name.
But nevertheless, the point being this, it doesn't explain why people are leaving California.
The climate's amazing. The The climate's beautiful.
California, I think, is far and away the most beautiful state in the nation.
I say that as a former Californian who got up and left.
So I am part of this migration.
And why are people leaving?
Well, I mean, one factor, I guess, is economics.
And so we see this in people moving, for example, from California to Idaho to Utah to Montana.
Real estate values are better.
It's easier to open a business.
And you don't have a 9, 10, 11, 12, 13% state tax rate.
Think of it. You have a federal tax rate.
And if you move into the upper brackets, 37, 38, 39, and then you add a California rate of, what, 12, 13%, You're at a 50%.
You're paying Scandinavian taxes in California without, by the way, well-run Scandinavian services and well-run Scandinavian benefits.
The Scandinavian welfare state works because they tax you a lot, but they also have well-provided services.
California does the former, but not the latter.
So economics is one reason why people are participating in this kind of National divorce.
And here, I mean, they're moving out.
They're moving out of the red states.
It may not be a formal divorce, but it's like, I quit.
I'm out of here. They're moving out of the blue state, sorry.
And the other reason they're doing it, I think, is political freedom.
This is often the ignored second component because here's DeSantis.
He talks about Florida. He goes, Florida is where woke goes to die.
And where woke goes to die is also where freedom comes to live.
And so people want economic prosperity and they want opportunity, but they also want a chance to live their own lives.
And that is perhaps the most obvious definition of freedom.
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I want to talk to you about something that I'm going to call DeSantis University.
DeSantis University. Now, that's not its official name.
We're actually talking about a college called the New College of Florida.
The New College of Florida is a progressive, left-wing institution.
By the way, it's almost two-to-one, female-to-male.
It's got a huge so-called gay, or I guess they call themselves quote.
Queer and trans community.
Some of the professors are trans, openly so, and so on.
And this doesn't, by the way, distinguish the new College of Florida because there are other private liberal arts colleges that are like this.
So in that sense, you can say you've got a college in Florida that looks a lot different.
Like some of the worst colleges in Portland or in the West Coast or in the Northeast.
But the difference, of course, is that the New College of Florida is a public institution.
It's funded by taxpayer money and it's cheap.
It's only $7,000 a year, which means that a lot of people who can't afford to go to more pricey sort of progressive institutions can go here and they do.
Now, A lot of times when conservatives encounter these progressive institutions, we just invade against them.
We decry them.
We expose them.
We describe what they're doing.
I do a good bit of this on the podcast.
And I also advocate for alternatives.
But DeSantis figure out there is an alternative.
And there is an alternative available to us politically.
And that is, why just complain about this left-wing, state-funded institution?
Let's take it over.
Let's actually run it our way.
And that means not running out the leftists who are in the institution, but changing the composition of the faculty over time, changing the composition of the curriculum, changing the mission of the university.
Why don't we take this hippie college, if you will, with all its diversity, equity, and inclusion, all its left-wing indoctrination, all its speech codes and enforced orthodoxy, And let's create a new orthodoxy.
And so DeSantis began to appoint new members to the board.
He started appointing political guys from his own team, academics like Mark Bauerlein, a very prominent English professor who used to teach for many years at Emory University, I believe, Chris Ruffo.
And he brought these guys onto the board and they began to expose the deficiencies of this college.
Number one, a whole bunch of students drop out before the end of their first year.
Number two, a whole bunch of them get no jobs after they leave.
Why? Because they're essentially majors in indoctrination.
They spout left-wing garbage.
Who wants to hire that?
What kind of skills is that?
How does that prepare you for the workforce?
And three, the few guys coming out of this college that get jobs Make a lousy income.
In fact, their median salary is $32,000.
Now, I'm not sneering at that salary, but I'm saying you could make that salary just by not going to college.
Lots of people, in fact, who are welders and people who work on oil rigs make three times the salary and they don't have a college education at all.
So, basically, this college in Florida, because it values indoctrinated, spouting indoctrinated propaganda and activism over productive work, is producing these losers who are essentially a drain on society, many of them. So, new board.
New trustees, new majority, new vision.
And I think over time, we're going to see also new faculty.
One of the board members, I think, very coolly said, let's fire the entire faculty.
Now, ordinarily, you can't fire faculty because some of them have tenure.
They go, no, listen, we're...
But there is a way out.
There's a loophole. And the loophole is, and by the way, this is a loophole exploited by the federal government, national emergency.
If there's a national emergency due to COVID, the old rules go out the window and you take on so-called emergency powers.
Well, the trustees can say this college is facing a financial emergency.
It's not viable as an institution unless we do something drastic.
And that means, professors, all of you are going to see a pink slip on your desk tomorrow morning.
Start clearing out.
And we're either going to rehire you based upon new considerations, new criteria, new interviews, a new process, or we're just going to bring in a bunch of whole new people.
So that proposal, somewhat radical, and maybe it needs to be done in a kind of a measured, well-thought-out way, hasn't really advanced very far.
But what has advanced is that this new board at this college has already now outlawed the DEI bureaucracy.
So no more diversity, equity, and inclusion.
They are officially a school that is committed to what Rufo calls the principle of colorblind equality.
So we're back to Martin Luther King here.
We're going to be judging people on their merits and by the content of their character, both, but not by the color of their skin, not by their sex organs, not by their gender, not by their nocturnal habits.
That's all out.
The president of the college, Patricia Oker, a standard academic feminist left-wing type has been given the boot.
She's out. She's been replaced by DeSantis' first commissioner of education, Patricia Oker.
And so good things are happening at this college.
This is really why I call it the DeSantis University.
And I think an important principle that's being illustrated by DeSantis here is that when you have power, don't just complain about stuff.
Use your power and do something about it.
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An Arizona rancher is facing murder charges for shooting an illegal migrant on his property.
Now, not all the details of this case are known but what is known is a little disturbing.
At first, it emerged that this rancher, his name, by the way, is George Allen Kelly, was arraigned on first-degree murder charges.
And also, shortly after the prosecution added two charges of aggravated assault.
Now, when prosecutors do that, you might ask, why are they doing it?
And I think, in general, the reason they do it is they are a little doubtful that they're going to get a conviction on the murder charge.
So they throw in some other charges, some lesser charges, in the psychological expectation that the jury acquits or Or hangs, refuses to convict as a hung jury on the more severe charge, the jurors might go, well, yeah, but let's vote guilty on the lesser charges.
So it's an attempt to get some of what you originally wanted.
It's kind of a sneaky tactic.
Think about it. In some ways, I think prosecutors should be forced to choose.
I mean, did the guy murder the other guy?
Yes or no? And if you think he did and you're going for a murder charge, that's all you should be able to charge him with because obviously if he murdered the guy, he committed aggravated assault.
But if you think it wasn't murder and it was aggravated assault, charge him with that.
But our law allows prosecutors to go with this kind of double-barreled approach, which I think is somewhat problematic because I think it's a little bit of a ruse to get lesser convictions when you can't get greater ones.
Now, interestingly, the prosecution has sort of thought better of it, and they changed the charge from first-degree murder to second-degree murder.
So now he's facing second-degree murder.
And according to the prosecution, this guy, Kelly, quote, used a rifle, a deadly weapon.
He intentionally placed an unnamed person.
Well, the person has been named.
It's Gabriel Cuen Butima, an illegal from Mexico, to In reasonable apprehension of imminent physical injury, that's the aggravated assault part of it, and then he's charged with second-degree murder in killing that guy.
The judge gave him $1 million bond, and since that's a great deal of money, he is held on this bond.
Although I'm not positive if he's still in confinement or if he was able to postpone and is free.
I think I saw something about him walking to court which suggests that he might be out.
So I don't want to be wrong about that.
Now, apparently, let's talk about Kelly's side of the story, which is this.
He completed chores on his ranch, which is near Keno Springs in Arizona.
He came to his house to have lunch with his wife when he heard a single gunshot as they ate.
Now, the gunshot goes off.
It's on his property, by the way, and his horse is obviously frightened by this loud explosion and starts running away at full speed.
Kelly looks around and he sees a group of men moving around the trees around his home.
They are armed, he says, with AK-47 rifles.
They're dressed in khakis, they have camouflaged clothing, and they're carrying large backpacks.
Wow. Wow.
None of them were known to him.
He had not given any of them permission to come onto his land.
So then, says the defense, Kelly was, quote, understandably concerned and reasonably feared for his safety, his wife's safety, his animal's safety.
He calls U.S. Border Patrol and he talks to them and he tells them that he needs immediate help.
And he tells his wife to stay inside, stay silent, stay away from any windows and he goes out to the porch with his rifle.
Now, says Kelly, And evidently,
Kelly is saying that he accidentally shot one of these guys.
He was not aiming to kill them.
He was aiming to scare them or to drive them away.
And this was inadvertent on his part.
More is going to come out as this case goes to trial.
But if the facts are as this guy Kelly describes, it's hard for me to see any jury convicting this guy on second-degree murder.
Second-degree murder means that you killed someone without justification, without being in fear of your life.
And you did it in the heat of passion.
That's the meaning of second-degree murder.
It's a crime of passion. So the idea was he didn't premeditate this.
He didn't set out to kill him.
But no, if this is a guy who sees people on his property—now, of course, they weren't in his house, but they were on his land— And they were sufficiently disruptive to fire the initial shot.
And if it can be shown that a shot was fired before, which immediately creates a sense of danger.
I mean, just a bunch of guys on your property doesn't by itself to me create imminent danger.
But a bunch of guys in fatigues who are heavily armed and already fire an initial shot.
It seems to me in this particular case, if I were on the jury, given the facts as I've outlined them here, I would vote not guilty on the second degree and I would vote not guilty on the aggravated assault.
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There are two interesting developments out of Seattle that I want to comment on in this segment.
The first one is that the city of Seattle has settled, by paying money, and probably a lot of it, to local businesses in the so-called CHOP, Now, CHOP, of course, is the acronym for the Autonomous Zone that was created in Seattle.
You remember this around the time of the George Floyd protests?
A bunch of lawless activists took over a whole area in Seattle.
They called it an Autonomous Zone or Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
That's jazz or Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.
That's where you get CHOP. And they basically pushed the police out, and the police agreed to leave.
So you had an area that was open to crime, to marauding, to lawlessness, to all kinds of harassing of local businesses which were treated as if they were the problem.
They caused the George Floyd incident because, you know, they're symbols of white supremacy.
And so these local businesses were dealing with rampant violence, with drug markets, with armed warlords patrolling the streets.
Now, interestingly, the city of Seattle tried to cover all this up because later, when it was brought to court, a federal judge noticed that the city of Seattle had deleted thousands of text messages involving the city's mayor, I mean, now the former mayor, the police chief.
And others, all related to the handling of the autonomous zone.
It's almost like they gave themselves away and they were going to be busted in court so they engaged in what can only be called suppression of evidence.
And it reveals quite obviously that they had a lot to hide.
They were, in a sense, legally ashamed of their behavior.
They didn't want the judge to find out about it.
And the judge levied sanctions against the city for engaging in this corrupt and lawless practice.
And now the city decided if we go to trial, all of this is going to come out.
We don't want it to come out.
So we are going to do what we can do.
Namely, we're going to pay these people under the table.
In other words, we're going to pay them through a negotiated settlement.
And very often with those settlements, there's a clause at the end that says you cannot disclose the terms of the settlement.
This settlement is completely confidential.
So it protects bad guys from their bad behavior by preventing it from getting public exposure.
Basically, you buy your way out of the problem.
So it's good news for the local businesses.
I'm sure they deserve the compensation they got.
They were clearly damaged by the bad behavior.
And this is really why I think if today it makes no sense to live in a place like Seattle, because you're vulnerable to this kind of thing.
In some senses, you've got to say, you can't complain too bitterly when this happens to you.
Why? Because you're opting to set up shop in this kind of a venue where you have crazy people on the local council.
You got crazy people making the rules you live under.
So you have to expect to live under these crazy rules and then fight back in court if you can.
So I realize some people go, well, listen, I don't have a choice.
I was raised in Seattle.
My business is here.
It's not easy for me to move.
So I understand, of course, the difficulties.
I'm just saying if you do have a choice, don't go to Portland.
Don't go to Seattle. Why walk your own way into a hellhole?
Now, another example, this is on the lighter side.
Seattle is the first U.S. city to ban discrimination based on caste.
Is this a problem in America?
The caste system was developed inside of India.
And in the Indian caste system, you've got four categories.
The Brahmins on the top, they're the priestly class.
Then the warrior caste or the aristocrats, that's the Kshatriyas.
Then you have the business class, the Veshiyas.
And then you have the untouchables, who are sometimes called Dalits.
Evidently, there's an Indian woman.
I've mentioned on the podcast before, she's half-crazed.
Her name is Kashama Sawant.
She's basically an Asian-Indian Marxist.
Evidently, she wanted to make a display of her own inside knowledge.
She makes this proposal to ban discrimination based on caste.
In other words, no Brahmins refusing to do business with untouchables.
No Brahmins running across the street because the shadow of the untouchable crossed them.
First of all, this is not a problem.
I'd like to see a report showing that this kind of, let's call it, intra-Hindu discrimination.
Discrimination that's occurring not just among Indians, but inside of Hindus, occurring in Seattle.
This is crazy. This is like kind of saying, listen, in Seattle, we need to have a rule that prevents any Hutus from spearing any Tutsis that live...
Look, that's a problem in Rwanda.
It's not exactly a problem in the United States.
So this, to me, is nutty.
There's some colleges, by the way, again, in a kind of demonstration of wokeness.
You've got colleges like Brandeis University, apparently Cal State, and no surprise, Brown University, that also have anti-discrimination, well, they have anti-discrimination against race, against gender, national origin, sexual orientation, and now the new one,
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Our schools, and in particular our public schools, but to some degree what I'm about to say applies to private schools, are failing our students on so many different fronts.
They're failing them by refusing to allow philosophical and ideological diversity, differences of political views that should be normal in America and Should be protected by canons of free speech that are not just applicable to the country as a whole, but even more applicable to education because it's really important to be able to engage in spirited exchange of ideas without fear that what you say is going to be somehow demonized or banned.
And yet this has now become normal.
This has now become a routine.
But in a way, schools are failing students in the most basic way.
They're not teaching them anything.
They're not teaching them useful knowledge.
They're not even teaching them interesting knowledge.
They're not teaching them historical knowledge.
They're not teaching them reading, writing, or arithmetic.
I have in front of me two exhibits I want to present to you.
The first is a talk that was given by the historian Forrest MacDonald in his Jefferson lecture.
This goes back to 1987.
He gave the talk in Washington, D.C. I was at the talk.
And he's talking about the American founding period.
And I just wanted to read a few lines because they're so eye-opening.
And he talks about the fact that people sometimes think, you know, we can redo the work of the founders.
In fact, we can do it even better.
We'll get rid of all the bad stuff that they allowed.
And MacDonald says that before you say that, let's just pause to think about who these people were.
He says, to put it bluntly, it would be impossible in America today, and he means for any generation, any generation alive now, to assemble a group of people with anything near the combined experience, learning, and wisdom of the 55 authors of the Constitution, that the 55 authors of the Constitution took with them to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.
He says, here is a couple of titbits to corroborate this point.
He goes, to enter college in the 18th century, which students, by the way, did typically at the age of 14 or 15, He says, it was necessary, among other things, to be able to read and translate from the original Latin into English.
Now, he's quoting from the requirements at King's College, which is now Columbia.
He says, quote, the first three of Tully's select orations on the first three books of Virgil's Aeneid and to translate the first ten chapters of the Gospel of John from Greek into Latin.
As well as to be, quote, an expert in arithmetic.
And basically, Forrest MacDonald says, is there anyone in American universities today who can do this?
Who could meet this requirement?
Probably not even one person, or one or two.
Then he goes on to say, you know, although we think the framers are these amazing people, he goes, in 1787, you could have assembled five or ten other groups of Of people of the same size, 55 people, who were comparable in education, in learning, in stature to the founders.
So it's not like we went and got our 55 best men and everybody else is a dummy.
No, his point is you could have done that five times over and you'd still be able to get an excellent group.
He says, remember, Jefferson was not at the convention in Philadelphia.
John Adams wasn't there.
Hancock wasn't there. This is John Hancock.
Noah Webster wasn't there.
Richard Henry Lee, Sam Adams, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, Fisher Ames, John Taylor, or John Jay.
None of them were present. And so you got the 55 distinguished founders, but all these guys weren't even there.
And then he goes on that even if you look at a local state convention, this is the convention in Virginia.
It includes...
Not counting five who are already in Philadelphia for the National Convention, but this includes John Marshall, Patrick Henry, Edmund Pendleton, William Grayson, and James Monroe.
So the point he's getting at, McDonald's point, is that the founding was America's golden age.
And it's an age that cannot be repeated, and in fact certainly has not been repeated.
But that's the founding. Let's now fast forward to the early 20th century, so about 100 years ago.
And I just came across, somebody posted a, and this is just from a school in 1910 or 1911, and these are the requirements for the 8th grade.
The eighth grade. Let's compare it to what an eighth grader today could do.
And I'm just going to read a few of the things that they ask you to do in the arithmetic, in the grammar, and the geography sections.
Here are some questions. A man bought a farm for $2,400 and sold it for $2,700.
What percentage did he gain?
Now, a simple math problem.
I think I could do this one in the 8th grade.
But there are a bunch of them that I would have to work at.
Write in words the following.
.5764..658.0965.
A school enrolled 120 pupils and the number of boys was two-thirds the number of girls.
How many of each sex were enrolled?
Again, a simple algebra problem.
The number of boys is X, the number of girls is Y. You can work it out.
But I don't think a whole bunch of 8th graders would do too well at these problems, particularly if you're doing them in a timed test.
Let's go to grammar.
What properties have verbs?
William struck James.
Change the voices of the verb.
Adjectives have how many degrees of comparison?
Compare good, wise, beautiful.
Diagram. The Lord loveth a cheerful giver.
I mean, I see a lot of students staring with mouth open, eyes wide, vacant looks.
And, you know, I look at these students and I think, well, I can see why American education is flat on its back.
And I don't really blame the students, right?
I mean, they're undoubtedly the stupid products of the system, but they're not the cause of the stupidity.
The cause of the stupidity, of course, is that their teachers and the bureaucracy and the system has not awakened that curiosity in them that's going to enable them to learn.
I don't even want to go into the geography because here we go.
Just one example. Name and give the capitals of states touching the Ohio River.
I can't do that one.
Now, in my defense, I wasn't born in the United States, and my comprehension of U.S. geography is still not what it should be.
Debbie can probably do it.
But I bet you most eighth graders could not do it.
And this is true of all the geography questions that I see on this list.
Every single one of them would be too difficult.
And all of them together would probably stump just about anyone except a kind of geography whiz.
So, no, we haven't come a long way.
We've actually deteriorated and degenerated.
And this is simply a way to say that we need to start getting our act together again.
I'm going to sum up and conclude my discussion of evolution and the argument from design.
And I want to do it with a very elegant quotation by the physicist Stephen Barr.
He says this, he says that when carefully examined, scientific accounts of natural processes are not about order coming out of chaos.
He says that...
When we see situations that seem haphazard, things that appear kind of coincidentally or by chance and they seem to be kind of arranging themselves in some pattern, he goes, when you look closely, quote, we find in every case that what appeared to be haphazard had a great deal of order built into it.
And then, of course, comes the implication, the punchline beautifully delivered by Barr.
He goes, what Dawkins, he's talking about Richard Dawkins, does not seem to appreciate is that his blind watchmaker, that's the title of Dawkins' book, The Blind Watchmaker, and Barr goes that Dawkins' blind watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley's watch.
Paley finds a watch and says, hey, how can such a thing have come to be by chance?
Dawkins finds an immense automated What factory that blindly constructs watches?
And he feels like he's answered Paley, he's refuted Paley.
But, says Barr, that's absurd.
How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of explanation than the watches themselves?
So, let me rephrase this point slightly.
What Barr is saying is that there is a massive order built into the universe, and it's the job of science to excavate the order.
The order's not obvious. That's why it's taken 2,000 years, or actually several hundred years of scientific investigation, to ferret out this order.
But the order was already there.
We just didn't know about it.
Even evolution depends on that kind of an order.
So, Dawkins' so-called refutation of Paley is a joke.
It fails completely.
Paley was right all along, although the evidence for Paley is much stronger today and is somewhat different, although it incorporates the evidence that Paley himself submitted.
So, what are we saying here?
We're saying here, really, that the problem was never with evolution by itself.
The problem is with a kind of, let's call it metaphysical Darwinism.
Evolution is a scientific theory.
Darwinism is a metaphysical stance and a kind of political ideology.
Darwinism is the atheist spin imposed on the theory of evolution.
As a theory, evolution by itself is not hostile to the Bible, it's not hostile to religion, and far from disproving design, evolution reveals the mode by which design has been executed.
But a lot of scientists, I'm sad to say, have been conned by this atheist tactic.
Atheists use Darwinism and the fallacy of the blind watchmaker to undermine belief in God.
And a lot of scientists who aren't very adept at thinking philosophically, they go, yeah, man, that's really smart.
That's a really good way to think about it.
And so they jump on the atheist bandwagon.
They allow themselves to slide almost unwittingly from evolution, which is a scientific theory, To Darwinism, to metaphysical Darwinism, which is not.
So they become pawns of the atheist agenda.
Now my message to Christians is, hey, don't be scared of science and don't be scared of the evolution debate.
Why? Because there's nothing about it that threatens our faith.
The Christian position is this.
God is the creator of the universe and everything in it.
And the evolution debate is about how some of these changes came about.
So, for the Christian, the evolution debate comes down to competing theories about how God did it.
I'm not saying you have to accept evolution if you don't want to, but I'm saying even if you don't accept it, don't be frightened of it.
It's not a refutation of the Bible.
It's demonstrating merely the means to the end of creating this kind of multiplicity of life that we see on the earth and as part of this grand universe that is so carefully orchestrated or designed.
My view is that Christians and other religious believers should embrace evolution while rejecting Darwinism.
So theists can be champions of science while at the same time exposing the way in which Darwin's ideas are being ideologically manipulated.
You know, there's a debate about whether to teach evolution or intelligent design in school.
My point is, it's the ideological indoctrination masquerading as science.
That's what should be fought and exposed in the classroom.
Evolution should be taught, but it should be taught without the metaphysics of Darwinism.
Instead of suing to get theories of creationism and intelligent design into the classroom, Christians should be suing to get atheist interpretations of Darwin out.
And think about it. There's a way to use the First Amendment, the no-establishment clause.
You're not allowed to teach metaphysical doctrine in an anti-religious way.
That's what's going on.
That's a religion unto itself.
So, Christians can affirm that evolution, rightly understood, is okay.
It's the book of nature and the book of scripture.
Not contradictory and no surprise because they were written by the same guy.
In fact, both the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture affirm the notion of a universe and its creatures that are the product of supernatural design and divine creation.
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