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March 8, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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ADMISSION OF GUILT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep532
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Coming up, a startling admission by US intelligence agencies that Ukrainians blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
I'm going to tell you why that isn't and cannot be the full story.
Something weird is going on at Fox News with Fox, with Tucker Carlson, with January 6th, and I'll talk about what that is.
Journalist and author James Rosen joins me.
We're going to talk about his new authoritative biography of the early life of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
This is the Nash-Jasuza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
How would you describe the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline?
Let's think about this. You've got this giant pipeline.
There's Nord Stream 1, by the way, and Nord Stream 2.
They stretch 760 miles from the northwest coast of Russia all the way to a place called Lubman in northeastern Germany.
And somebody put explosives.
And this was around the area where the pipeline goes close to Norway.
And boom, blew up the pipeline.
The pipeline has been crippled.
It's been damaged. And I think there's only one word or two words to describe what happened, international terrorism.
Somebody did that, and it's either, well, I suppose you could also call it an act of war, but it's one or the other.
Now, when this first happened, there was almost a kind of unanimous chorus in the Western media.
The Russians did it.
And on the face of it, this is absurd.
The Russians benefit from the Nord Stream pipeline.
They pushed hard for the building of the pipeline.
They negotiated and got the deal with Germany.
They make a lot of money off the pipeline.
It creates also politically German dependence on Russia.
So the Russians have no reason to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline.
Well, the Western press was like, yeah, well, they're doing it because they want to make it look like we did it.
So they're doing it to score points.
And even though it's kind of like someone, you know, beating themselves up in the face and then saying, oh, you know, my boyfriend abused me.
So they were implying that this was Putin's motive for doing this.
Well, it was never really all that believable, but these days much of what we hear in the Western press is not believable.
In fact, it's propaganda that is sown by the intelligence agencies.
Then several weeks ago, Seymour Hersh, a long-time, a lifelong leftist, He did a bombshell post on his Substack, I believe, but certainly he did a blog post basically saying, I have evidence that the United States Navy divers from Florida blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
And he gave a lot of detail, which came out of nowhere.
The most he was able to do is point to sources that were inside the US government that told him this.
And then there was a kind of long silence, the media sort of not touching this article.
It's sort of radioactive, even though Seymour Hersh has a record of breaking major stories.
I believe he broke the story of the My Lai, the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam era.
Nevertheless, this article has gone, you may say, untouched by the Western media.
I talked about it on the podcast, but its coverage has been very muted.
And now something very interesting from the New York Times, quote, intelligence suggests pro-Ukrainian groups sabotage pipelines, U.S. officials say.
Now, according to this New York Times article, a huge change, obviously, for the first time here is a major media outlet acknowledging our side blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, but they're saying not Biden, and they're saying not even Zelensky.
They're saying this is not something that was done by kind of Ukrainian officials, per se, but some kind of renegade Ukrainian group.
U.S. officials said, Now, first of all, I want to contrast the precision of detail in the Seymour Hersh article with the absence of detail, the vague insinuations.
Well, yeah, it was the Ukrainians, but no, no, it wasn't really the Zelensky people.
In fact, they don't even know who it was.
It was some Ukrainian group, but we don't know which group.
This is all extremely fishy.
Okay. And another thing that's worth noting here is that Seymour Hersh is not named in the New York Times article.
They give no credit.
They make no reference, even though I think it is manifestly obvious that they would not have written this article if it wasn't for Hersh's article.
It's Hirsch's article that put the truth, I think it's the truth, on the table.
And then the intelligence community was like, whoa, now we've been going with this lie and we rely on these gullible or sneaky US media jackals who have no commitment to truth, who are professional liars, and they're very happy to go with our lying narrative.
But now this guy Hirsch, this old school leftist, has like blown our cover.
So we need a fallback narrative.
What am I saying here?
What I'm saying here is that this new narrative is also cooked up.
Let's look here. How does the New York Times know any of this?
Quote, new intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials.
Who are these U.S. officials?
It's certainly not the Secretary of State.
It's certainly not KJP, the press secretary.
No, these are people in the same intelligence agencies that sowed the first lie.
They're now coming back with, let's call it, the fallback lie.
So the fallback lie is we didn't do it, Zelensky didn't do it, but it was some renegade group.
Now, why do I not believe a word of this?
Because no renegade Ukrainian group could have done this without, I won't say without Ukrainian support, but without US support and without Western allied support.
So is it conceivable that Zelensky could have done it on his own and is denying?
It's possible, but I think unlikely.
Why? Because you're talking about a pipeline that actually runs very far away from Ukraine.
You're talking about a pipeline that is underwater with an extremely heavy Western military presence hovering over it.
So Seymour Hersh's narrative is that the Norwegians worked with U.S. intelligence to identify a vulnerable spot where the pipeline could be blown up.
That makes total sense. On the other hand, a bunch of random Ukrainians decide, oh, you know what, let's put on our swimsuits and our diving uniform.
Let's go around Norway and do this without the U.S. knowing about it.
There is no way it would happen that way.
So what I'm trying to say to you is we're getting something that is closer to the truth.
But it's also a lie.
Maybe not as big a lie as the original one peddled by the intelligence community, but let's call it a second-order lie.
And if we're skeptical, and we have to be skeptical these days in the way in which we read the news, we'll realize that just as we didn't really fall for the first lie, we shouldn't fall for the second one either.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H, Dinesh.
What is going on at Fox News?
The first day, Monday...
You had Tucker Carlson come right out the gate with several really bombshell clips and revelations about January 6th.
He showed, for example, that Ray Epps was lying when he told the House Select Committee that he was heading back to his hotel, but he couldn't have been doing that because there he is on videotape.
So Ray Epps was caught, you may say, with his pants down.
We saw a really touching scene with the shaman guy being escorted by two Capitol Police officers through the corridors and then into the Senate chamber.
And so here's a guy serving, what, 41 months in prison for what?
Being escorted by two police officers who could easily have told him to leave, pointed him to the door, ushered him out.
They didn't do that. And the reason for not doing that, which is that they wanted to tamper down the situation, it makes no sense because not only did you have the two cops and this one, you know, shaman guy, but they go walking by a whole bunch of police officers who don't even really bat an eyelid, don't even look up at him.
Everything is fully under control.
And yet they...
So here you got this guy and he's not well.
I mean, he's mentally unwell and he's serving 41 months in prison.
Why? Why? So these are the kind of almost chilling facts brought forward by Tucker on Monday.
And then on Tuesday...
Nothing. A dud.
The dog that didn't bark.
Suddenly, no more footage, no more clips.
And so, I'm sure I'm not the only one watching this thinking 40,000 hours of footage, and you got three little clips, Josh Hawley jogging with others across the corridor, and Ray Epps, and the shaman guy, and we're done?
What? Now, Tucker had some other stuff going on.
He had the terrific Julie Kelly on.
He talked to a former Capitol Police officer.
But it almost like the story, you know, petered out.
It's kind of like a rocket that sort of lost its fuel.
And this makes no sense.
Is it because there's no fuel?
No. In fact, there is a prominent social media personality who's like, now I think Kevin McCarthy should have given the footage of Dinesh D'Souza.
And here's one difference between Tucker and me.
I don't work for Rupert Murdoch.
No one really tells me what to do.
That's why I made 2,000 Mules.
And if you'll notice, 2,000 Mules went unmentioned.
Well, it didn't go unmentioned.
Carrie Lake brought it up. One or two other people brought it up.
Guests on Fox. And you should have looked at the face, the ashen face of the Fox hosts when that happened.
And basically, all the major hosts at Fox were under clear orders.
Not to mention 2,000 mules.
And what does that tell you? That they are not ultimately their own person.
They ultimately work for Fox.
I mean, this should not be a big surprise.
Who pays their multi-million dollar salaries?
It's Fox. And so who tells them what to do?
Fox. Now, I agree that because Tucker has good ratings, he has more latitude on Fox than probably any of the other hosts.
But Let's look at this.
You had Tucker on Monday, and it caused a big stir.
So you think, here's a guy in charge of a huge story, Fox is a news network, and they should be running with it.
But see, I had the same question about 2,000 Mules.
Here's a big story, here's a movie that everyone's talking about, and wouldn't a news network want to run with it?
And the answer was, no, not in that case.
And as it turns out, not in this case either.
So something's going on.
Well, listen to this.
Here's Chuck Schumer on the Senate floor around 10 a.m.
on Tuesday. Rupert Murdoch has a special obligation to stop Tucker Carlson from going on tonight, from letting him go on again and again and again, because our democracy depends on it.
So here's basically a, you can call it a salvo, a warning, a public call on Rupert Murdoch to shut up Tucker.
And I normally would go, this is just partisan, you know, nonsense.
Tucker is not going to be fazed by it.
He's going to be, you know, out there guns blazing on Tuesday night.
And then, no, it's almost as if Schumer's prediction came true.
Somebody put the leash down or somebody put the edict down.
It came down from above.
And that's it.
Now, what would be the motivation?
Of Fox to want to shut up Tucker Carlson on this.
Obviously, their motivation to go ahead with the story is they know that's what their audience wants.
But on the other hand, it seems like there's some sort of a feud going on between Murdoch and Trump.
2000 Meals got caught up in the middle of that.
They didn't want to talk about election fraud or 2000 Meals, not because of the Dominion lawsuit, but because it would help Trump.
And think about what this January 6th business is doing.
It's vindicating Trump.
It's showing that this was all an orchestrated lie aimed at making Trump look like he instigated an insurrection.
There was no insurrection.
Trump didn't instigate it.
But I think the reason, if they are shutting up Tucker Carlson, the reason they're doing it is because they don't want to play into the hands of one Donald J. Trump.
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Feel the difference. Two Americans are dead, killed by the Mexican drug cartels, and this assassination, I suppose I would call it, occurred in Matamoros.
Matamoros is in Mexico, but it's right across from the U.S. border.
It is right across from the Rio Grande Valley where Debbie grew up.
And in fact, Debbie talks to me when we go down to the Rio Grande Valley about the fact that, hey, you know, people used to go all the time and maybe some still do over to Matamoros.
They come back across the border.
I think, honey, have you been a couple of times to Matamoros?
Not a Yeah, Debbie used to go all the time, but hasn't obviously been recently.
And it's known to be kind of dangerous.
In other words, it's a little different than Acapulco or Cabo.
It's a rough neighborhood.
But nevertheless, here are these four Americans traveling in Matamoros.
And I actually read, I sort of smiled because evidently they were going from South Carolina to Mexico and one of them was apparently getting a tummy tuck.
They were getting some plastic surgery, I guess, to reduce weight.
And two of them didn't come back.
And out of the two that did get back, one of them apparently got wounded.
So they were chased.
They were kidnapped at gunpoint and then they were shot at.
Two of them were killed and one of them wounded.
Initially, the news report said that this was a case where the drug cartels probably got it wrong.
They were identified as being cartel members or cartel stooges.
This, to me, makes no sense because apparently these Americans were driving a...
An SUV with American tags.
They were, by the way, African-American.
And so what's going on here?
Well... I don't know.
And it's not clear to me why this happened.
The obvious theory is that somehow the cartels wanted to kidnap these guys for ransom.
And there is a lot of kidnapping for ransom that goes on in Mexico.
But I'm not sure this is being done by the major cartels.
Why? Because the cartels make, and you want to digest this number for a second...
$50 billion a year.
So think, for example, of the net worth of a guy like Soros, which is about $20 billion.
That's his lifetime accumulation.
Double that to 40 and then add another 50% to $50 billion.
The cartels are making this annually.
It's a giant number.
So the idea that the cartels are like, well, you know, there's four African Americans, they probably got some cash in their back pocket.
This doesn't make any sense.
Debbie thinks, and we'll talk about this perhaps in our Friday roundup, that the cartels are like, You know what?
We're like a country now.
We're like a state within a state.
And by the way, the cartels have been greatly strengthened by Biden.
Why? Because Biden knowingly encourages this illegal traffic.
The cartels previously had only one commodity that they would trade in and that's drugs.
Now they trade in two commodities, drugs and human beings.
And I'm not just talking narrowly about sex trafficking.
I'm talking about the trafficking of humans across the U.S. southern border.
It's a very lucrative traffic because you're able to get people, not just from Mexico, primarily from Mexico, but also from all over South America, to pay, what, $7,000 a person, $14,000 a couple.
Think of how much for... These are people who essentially borrow as much as they can from family members, and they turn all that money over to the cartels.
And in some cases, they come here and work, and they have to make their final payment once they accumulate money in the United States.
So the cartels are just making money hand over fist.
And the Biden regime is the reason that they've gotten even richer and stronger than they have.
So I put some blood, not all the blood, but some blood, We're good to go.
But you don't really want the SEAL team to be visiting you at the Sinaloa Cartel or whatever these cartels are called.
I believe the cartel in question here is the Gulf, the so-called Gulf Cartel.
Lindsey Graham says now that he's going to present legislation to allow the deployment of US military forces to Mexico.
I'm going to think about that a little bit.
Not sure what I think about that.
But it does seem that the vulnerability of our southern border is an important contributor to all these sorts of ancillary problems.
And that is not speculation.
That is a cold, hard fact.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Guys, I'm happy to welcome to the podcast a new guest.
This is the veteran journalist James Rosen.
He's the chief White House correspondent for Newsmax.
In fact, he's been a Washington hand for a long time.
He reported on Fox News for Fox News for nearly two decades.
He's published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, etc., Atlantic, etc.
And he has a new book that we want to talk about, and it's a terrific book.
I just finished reading it.
It's called Scalia, Rise to Greatness, 1936 to 1986.
So this is really the early life of former Supreme Court Justice, the late Antonin Scalia.
James, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
Thank you, Dinesh. Thank you for having me.
Absolutely. And what a terrific book.
I mean, this is a book that brings Scalia really to life.
And I want to talk a little bit about his life and about his character.
But let's start with the distinctive element of Scalia's judicial philosophy.
The question I want to ask you is that we've heard a lot about...
The conservative judicial philosophy of original intent.
Original intent here meaning that a judge in interpreting the Constitution should begin with the obvious text of the Constitution, but when something is a little obscure, dig into the kind of surrounding circumstances and original motivation of the people who made that law to see what that law actually means.
And this appears to have been the sort of dominant conservative philosophy promoted by, say, the Federalist Society and so on.
And my question is, does Scalia fit squarely within this tradition?
Or is there a kind of Scalia take on this that's a little different?
So first again, thanks for having me, Dinesh.
This book, Scalia, Rise to Greatness, 1936 to 1986, tells the story of the first 50 years of Antonin Scalia's life.
It ends with him taking his seat on the Supreme Court.
Hopefully only two years from now, we'll publish volume two, which will cover his Supreme Court tenure.
In terms of the question that you asked, I would phrase it somewhat differently.
Until Scalia came along, first as a judge on the Court of Appeals, and then as a justice on the Supreme Court, there prevailed in legal circles a theory about how judges are supposed to go about their work. What does a judge do, after all? A judge tells us what a law or what the Constitution means. They might have two parties arguing before them over what the law means, the government and a corporation, two individuals, what have you. And the central business of judges is to tell us
what the Constitution or a given statute means. That means that they interpret these constitutional provisions and statutes.
That's called statutory interpretation.
That's what judges do all day long.
Until Scalia came along, what prevailed was a liberal notion called the living constitution.
This was the view that provisions in the constitution, such as rights, or any of the statutes that have been passed in the 200 plus years since,...should expand.
Their meaning should evolve over time in order to take account of phenomena that the founding fathers never could have envisioned, such as nuclear weapons or the internet or what have you.
uh... and in in order to accommodate notion of the constitution as a living breathing expanding document uh... to accommodate uh... modern phenomena uh... liberal judges would look back not they really would look at the text of the law because the text would stay the same and in order to accommodate the idea that the law should evolve its meaning should evolve over time and expand they would look to legislative history what was debated on the house floor
what was printed in committee reports that were published along the way as a bill approached final passage Scalia stood athwart all that he championed something called not original intent because Scalia famously said he didn't care if we should discover some secret note from the founding fathers that told us what their intent was with the constitution Scalia was the champion of something called original meaning.
a law, a statute, or the Constitution means what it was widely understood to mean at the time that it was enacted and signed into law.
Scalia believed it was wrong for judges and justices of the Supreme Court to graft onto existing texts, the text of the Constitution or the text of the statute, their own policy preferences to accommodate modern phenomena.
Scalia felt if you want to accommodate modern phenomena such as nuclear weapons or the Internet, you have a Congress to pass new laws for that purpose.
This was kind of a radical notion, believe it or not.
This idea that originalism, the original meaning of a law, should be what judges look to.
And Scalia had a way of finding what the original meaning of a law was, the text of that law.
So textualism, as I put it in the book, was sort of Justice Scalia's metal detector to find the original meaning.
Of a law or the Constitution.
And he felt that he was only modestly successful in spreading this philosophy.
But by the time he died, no less a figure than Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, another of the liberals on the court with whom Scalia had a wonderful personal friendship, pronounced, That we are all originalists now.
And Scalia achieved that revolution in the way lawyers and judges and even legislators go about their work, not by being in the majority of the Supreme Court cases that he was ruling on so often, but more often in dissent and through the force of his lively personality, his genius. And so his revolution on behalf of originalism and textualism is really one of the most important changes in American society of the last hundred years.
And that's one of the reasons why I undertook to write this book.
Well, that is elegantly stated.
And when we come back, I'm going to explore this theory a little further with James Rosen.
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I'm back with veteran journalist and author James Rosen, chief White House correspondent for Newsmax and the author of a terrific new book, Scalia, Rise to Greatness, 1936-1986.
James, you beautifully stated Scalia, the Scalia revolution, I suppose one could call it, on the court.
And I think if I'm right, that what Scalia was getting at is that if you're going to be a judge in a democratic society— You can't make up the rules as you go along because you don't have any popular consent.
People haven't entrusted you with that task.
They elect representatives to make rules through a legislative process, and the judge plays more of, let's call it the job of the umpire.
The judge's job is to look at the rules that were in the Constitution or the rules that were passed by a To balls and strikes and call ins and outs.
Am I right that Scalia had, in a way, a more modest job for the judiciary, not to try to be governors of the society, but rather to enforce or to carry out a set of rules that are in the law and in the supreme law that we call the Constitution?
Well, you have it absolutely right, Dinesh, that Justice Scalia held a very modest view of the role of courts and judges in our democratic system.
He campaigned actively as an academic in the years before he joined the appellate bench against what he called the imperial judiciary.
What you have is unelected judges reading their own policy preferences into the meanings of existing statutes and laws and constitutional provisions.
And so his view, for example, on Roe versus Wade, which he first publicly articulated in a 1978 AEI panel discussion on the imperial judiciary, was that this question of whether there should be a constitutional right to abortion had never actually been exhibited in the history of American society.
that in fact there had been laws at the local level, state levels, prohibiting this particular action for hundreds of years, and that it should be returned to the state's For democratic self-governance.
And that's precisely what ultimately happened last year, years after Scalia's passing, with the Dobbs decision from the Supreme Court.
But yes, Scalia felt that if the court, if a judge, is to say, well, 10 years after the passage of a given law, or 200 years after the passage of the Constitution...
Or any time in between, that law now should mean something else because there's new developments in society.
That was that in Scalia's view was the judiciary depriving earlier generations almost going back in time and stealing the liberty and the freedom and this and the self-consented governance of earlier generations who elected their representatives and their president who passed a given text of a law into law and was signed into law by that president and if Somebody comes along ten years later or 50 years later or 200 years later and says no it means this it means something larger
Then then people are robbed of their liberty There's another sort of wrinkle on this which I think our audience will find of interest One of the areas in which Scalia cut new ground as a judge on the appellate court was in linking Something called standing to separation of powers again.
What we've really been talking about is the separation of powers Which branch is responsible for doing what in our system?
and standing is the legal doctrine that accords someone who launches a lawsuit in the courts to have the right to do that. If you have standing, it's because if you're suing a corporation because they sold you a lemon of a vehicle, let's say, you have standing because you were the person who was involved in the transaction, let's say. If you're part of a class action lawsuit where tens of thousands of people used a certain product that was
found to be defective, you would have standing if you could prove you used the product. If you never use the product, you don't belong in that lawsuit and you have no standing. Scalia linked standing to the separation of powers and that had not really been done before. What did he mean by
If judges allow people to proceed with lawsuits when they aren't really a party to the dispute, when they really don't have any business being part of that litigation, if they don't have standing, and you let them in anyway to challenge, let's say, a given law,
Then the people who enacted that law as representatives of the American citizenry and the president who signed that into law, they are again being robbed retroactively of their freedom and their liberty and their right to self-governance because a litigant is being allowed into the courtroom today after the fact who has no right to challenge that law, no standing to challenge it, and may take the law down on that basis.
And again, it's an overreach by the judiciary to allow people who don't really have standing to enjoy that status.
So that was another way in which Scalia sought to protect the balance of powers, the separation of powers.
Scalia loved administrative law, and that's where, and we talk about this in the book, Scalia Rise to Greatness, how he came to prominence was as an expert in administrative law.
That has to do with the federal regulatory agencies like the FCC or, you know, any number of them, the FEC, all of the different agencies we're all familiar with.
But his highest love was for separation of powers.
Let's take a pause more with James Rosen when we come back.
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I'm back with the veteran journalist James Rosen, Chief White House Correspondent for Newsmax.
We're talking about his fascinating book, Scalia, Rise to Greatness, 1936 to 1986.
James, coming back to Scalia's philosophy for just a minute, it seems to me that there are, you know, obviously the Constitution is amenable to amendment.
That's one way you can, quote, update the Constitution.
You basically pass a constitutional amendment.
But there is some process in the Constitution for evolution, I would argue, because there are certain phrases in the Constitution that seem to be inherently subjective.
For example, the Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment.
Now, it could be that in the 18th century, cropping off somebody's ears was not considered cruel and unusual, but we would be deeply shocked if the government were to do that to someone today.
So, did Scalia make provision for the fact that, on a phrase like that...
The common understanding could, in fact, evolve, but it's a completely different matter to look in the Constitution and say, I kind of want to find an abortion right.
I don't see it anywhere in the Constitution, so let me infer it from the Fourth Amendment as a right against unreasonable search and seizure or some vague provision in the Ninth or Tenth Amendment, and then just conjure up a right sort of out of thin air.
Did Scalia make a distinction between places where the Constitution allowed some interpretive elasticity and places where it really was a con job?
Well, I think you've more or less accurately summarized Scalia's view.
I don't know that he ever would have embraced a term like elasticity, interpretive elasticity.
But yes, and you seized on the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
And with respect to that particular provision in the Bill of Rights, Scalia declared himself famously, and he never stopped hearing the end of it from his conservative friends, a faint-hearted originalist, because he could not bring himself to support something archaic that had been in use at the time of the founding, like the notching of ears and so forth.
Yes, he did believe that where a new phenomenon was concerned, such as nuclear weapons or the internet or what have you, either the Congress should make the new laws to accommodate for those new phenomena,
or the judge or the justices, when interpreting existing constitutional provisions and statutes, or at least for the Constitution, let's stick with that, If the practice involved was in use at the time of the founders, and there was such a thing as abortion back then, and it was prohibited, then he would stay with the original meaning and with the tradition that was in place at the time.
If there was no instance of the modern phenomenon occurring in the Founders' time, yes, he would then try to do his best to, I don't think that he would use the word evolve, but he would use the word apply the principles that were stated in the constitutional provision at issue and apply them to the new phenomenon in a way that would be consistent with the original meaning of the Constitution or the statute at hand.
Makes total sense. This book, by the way, I'm only discussing one aspect of it here, which is the sort of philosophical, the interpretive philosophy that Scalia is bringing to this.
This book is full of tidbits and anecdotes and things that make you sort of smile and chuckle.
Here's one that got me.
This is page 365.
Scalia is saying, there's not a whole lot of use in being an ethnic...
unless you're running for office or perhaps going through a confirmation hearing.
And I chuckled about that. First of all, I was thinking about George Santos and the fact that he was posing as, you know, claiming to be Jewish when he apparently isn't. But Scalia realized that ethnicity is not something to be traded on, it seems. And yet, the fact that he was Italian American made a huge difference in the virtual unanimity that got him through the Senate. It seems to me that he recognizes this. He's chuckling about it. And yet he's drawing attention to the
fact that he may be a hyphenated American, but he's first and foremost an American.
Am I correctly summarizing the Scalia temperament here?
With respect to the ethnic angle, absolutely.
He came from New York City.
He was born in New Jersey, but he grew up in Queens, in a multi-ethnic neighborhood, filled with Italians and Irish and Jews and Germans and all sorts of folks.
And he really loved ethnic humor.
He loved a good Italian joke.
He loved bantering back and forth with ethnic friends.
And the quote that you cited, which was only from two years after his confirmation hearing, It's him kind of looking back on the prominent role that his ethnicity played in his successful confirmation for the Supreme Court, 98 to nothing, and kind of having a laugh at it.
One of the revelations of this book is that Scalia, of course, we know that he detested identity politics, and he would never seek to portray himself as a victim in any respect.
But one of the revelations here is that he suffered anti-Italian prejudice more often than he was willing to let on.
More often, certainly, than he acknowledged.
And I came up with a number of instances where Scalia was sometimes insulted directly to his face on the basis of his Italian heritage.
And it happened with greater frequency than he cared to discuss.
But he persevered in the face of those setbacks and, of course, conducted himself in a way that, again, was absent any hint of the victim ideology or culture.
I mean, it's very telling, James.
I was only once or twice in Scalia's presence.
The guy I got to know a lot better was Clarence Thomas, and you could say the same thing about him.
He actually endured a good deal of prejudice, but I think it was almost a certain part of his character that refused to be defined by it.
So even though he would never deny it, I think he didn't want to let it that it affected him in some fundamental way or that it defined him.
In any case, fascinating stuff.
And this book is chock full of insight and ideas.
It's Scalia Rise to Greatness, 1936 to 1986.
James Rosen, delightful.
Thank you for joining me on the podcast.
Thank you, Dinesh. Drawing on my book, What's So Great?
About Christianity, I'm talking about the relationship between science and their supernatural, between science and God, between science and Christianity.
And I'm identifying a hidden philosophical commitment That is inside of science, but most scientists are not even fully aware of it.
The philosophical commitment is materialism or naturalism.
Now, what's materialism?
It's the belief that the material world is the only world there is.
There is nothing else.
We are part of the material world, and materialism is a...
Affirmation of that idea.
Naturalism is very closely related.
It's the idea that nature is all there is.
There's nothing beyond nature, nothing that transcends nature.
Spiritual experiences typically are dismissed because they are interpreted as nothing more than a kind of epiphenomenon or outflow of materialism and naturalism.
But by the way, this is a bit of a problem for science because there are lots of things that aren't spiritual.
A thought, for example, an emotion is not material because it doesn't have weight.
It doesn't have mass.
It exists, if you will, in an idealistic framework.
And so the scientist has to say, well, yeah, it's sort of not real.
It's illusionary.
Or it is something of a, again, a kind of an outgrowth of a material reality.
Your mind is nothing more than the movement and workings of the neurons in your brain.
The immaterial comes out of the material and is entirely a sort of subset of it.
Now, these philosophical doctrines, as I've said before, have never been proven, and they can't be proven.
How do you prove, for example, that material reality is all there is?
You can't. And scientists who think about it know that.
So they say, well, this isn't really our conclusion.
This is sort of our starting assumption.
And I think that's okay, as long as we know that.
As long as we know that science is not, in a pure sense, neutral.
It's not something that doesn't have any philosophical underpinnings that are based, you may say, on faith.
Propositions that you simply have to take as axiomatic.
By the way, the early scientists and the early mathematicians from ancient times understood the philosophical basis of science.
And so, for example, even Euclid is very upfront, if you will, in fessing up that his mathematics is based on axioms.
And what's an axiom? Well, Euclid says basically an axiom is something that you have to, it might be intuitively true, it may make sense to your gut, but it's not being something that you've set out to prove Let's take a simple idea.
On a plane, a flat plane, if you draw two points, there is one line and only one line that can go between those two points.
And this is a Euclidean axiom.
Now, I've never seen anyone prove this, and certainly if we go to non-Euclidean geometry, it's not true.
It seems to be intuitively true on a flat plane, but it's an axiom.
Euclid says, I'm not proving that.
That's my starting point.
And similarly here, the starting point of science is materialism and naturalism.
And if this seems like Dinesh is kind of I'm imposing something on science that's not really there.
Here is the Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin.
I'm now quoting him and it's a long quote, but it's a very important one because it puts his cards on the table, a rare thing.
Scientists don't often do this.
Here's what he says, we take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
Let's pause here and digest what he's saying.
He's saying that, contrary to popular belief, science often says stuff that is, on the face of it, preposterous.
Multiple universes, the idea of a space-time continuum.
I mean, stuff that makes no sense, even to the most probing mind.
And yet the scientist digs in and goes, yeah, that's how it is.
That's how it is. Believe us.
Take our word for it.
And he goes, when we scientists think about it, we realize that there's something inherently dumb, implausible about this stuff.
But why do we say it? Why do we say it with a straight face?
Quote, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It's not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world.
But on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori commitment to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.
Wow and wow again.
What he's saying is that materialism is our religion.
Materialism is our dogma.
Our entire scientific method, our entire apparatus of investigation is within the framework of materialism.
We do not allow ourselves to get outside of materialism because materialism is our starting point, our middle point, and our end point.
And he even says why.
The motive is Religious, or maybe I should say anti-religious, that materialism, he says, is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.
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