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March 10, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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A NEW DIGITAL CURRENCY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep534
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walzer, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
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Coming up, I'll talk about how the Biden administration is taking the first steps toward a digital currency with alarming implications.
Debbie's going to join me.
We're going to do our Friday roundup.
We'll talk about January 6th.
We'll talk about cartels and the kidnapping and murder of Americans.
We'll talk about the strange case of a San Francisco family that doesn't want to see the men who murdered their daughter locked up for the crime.
We'll tell you why.
This is the Next To Suzer Show.
America needs this voice.
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.
Technology, we know, can be a force for liberation, but it can also be a force for repression.
Now, for many years there has been circulating in the United States an anxiety that technology will produce a kind of comprehensive regime of repression.
And one of the ways to achieve this comprehensive control over the American people will be to move away from the dollar To a digital currency.
A digital currency.
Now, I suppose one could say that we have forms of digital currency today.
A credit card, I guess, is a kind of digital currency.
We have other financial instruments that would qualify as digital currencies.
But we also have dollars.
And dollars move around in the form of checks, but they also move around in the form of cash.
And arguably that when you have the dollar, you have something that someone can have in your pocket or someone can have, well, in a bank account, but it could even be a Swiss bank account because there are different types of currencies and you can trade one for the other.
The point is that your money is not entirely under the scrutiny or control of the government.
But in theory, if you had a comprehensive digital currency, and this could be done on a national basis, the United States, but it could also be done on a global basis, a single currency used by people all over the world, but it's a currency that exists only digitally.
So when you're paid, you get a certain sort of number, perhaps, which designates that this is the amount of digital money that you have in whatever unit it's called to your name, and you can spend out of that account.
But think about it, there would be government and maybe trans-government access to To that digital currency.
And it's not merely a violation of privacy in which the government would know how much is in your account or what you're spending it on.
But of course, it becomes also a tool to control you.
Because if the government knows, that could be the first step to the government taking it.
Your digital money or making your acquisition or spending of that money conditional upon you doing certain things.
You want access to your digital account.
Well, you have to take a vaccine or you've got to do this or you've got to do that.
So it's not merely what they know about you.
It is how much they get to control you.
Now, all of this is a kind of backdrop To a new bill that has been drafted by House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, Republican of Minnesota, And it is to stop the Federal Reserve from assisting in any way in creating a digital currency.
So when I saw that, I'm like, wait a minute.
Is the Federal Reserve actually doing that?
And as it turns out, President Biden in March of 2022 signed an executive order asking or not asking, requiring the Federal Reserve to, quote, research, experiment, and evaluate the risks and benefits of a digital dollar.
So, as it turns out, something is going on.
And even though the something that's going on is in the sort of, let's call it the R&D, the research and development phase, we don't have an imposition of a digital currency.
We have what's called the prelude to that.
Because before implementing these programs, they always like to sort of test them out, fool around with it, develop blueprints, create a bureaucracy to kind of develop this stuff, and then suddenly, boom, it's presented, it's advanced, it's in the form of a bill, the bill is making its way through Congress and so on.
So I think Tom Emmer here is trying to get ahead of the game and essentially spike this executive order.
Now, he's not going to be able to effectively spike it because Republicans only have one House of Government, and that is the House of Representatives.
This is not going to go through the Senate.
But I think it has the value of putting a spotlight on what is going on.
And that is the Biden regime is pushing the Fed to at least move in the direction of a digital currency.
And Emmer goes... Basically, quote, we should not be taking our direction from the Communist Party of China, because in China, they not only use digital currencies to know about what their citizens are doing, they use it to control them.
It's part of their imposed totalitarian communist system.
And I think what Tom Emmer is saying is that we don't want to be moving in that direction.
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New York City just settled a lawsuit with a bunch of left-wing BLM types.
These are the so-called mostly peaceful activists who organized a demonstration.
This is in summer 2020.
It was a riot, but the police were called in and the police had to use and did use batons and pepper spray on these rioters and so the rioters subsequently sued.
They sued the city.
And the city said, we agreed to pay.
And so think of how crazy this is.
You've got the BLM rioters getting $21,500, to be precise, a piece.
But the passengers and pedestrians who were harassed, the store owners who lost business and whose stores were vandalized and brutalized, they get nothing.
Now, this is all a very interesting thing to focus on because it really shows how these activists operate.
The left is saying, well, yeah, of course it's right and reasonable that these activists get compensated.
Sure, some of them were charged in the aftermath of the riots, but the charges were dropped.
Yes, the charges indeed were dropped, but not because these people weren't breaking the law, not because they weren't riders, not because they weren't damaging property, not because they weren't threatening or harming people.
They were dropped because basically the political New York City establishment was in league with the riders.
So the New York political establishment, the Democrats, had no problem with the rioters.
The rioters were seen as being on their side.
So they're like, oh, you can go, drop charges.
This is the double standard of justice that we talk frequently about.
There were 118 arrested looters in the Bronx in this particular series of riots.
The vast majority had all charges left.
And again, they're dropping now $20,000 in compensation to these guys.
Most of these guys, by the way, don't work.
They're full-time activists.
And this is the point.
This is how they get paid.
What I mean is that you've got this kind of dirty arrangement between left-wing professional activists who collect government benefits, don't really work, but they shake down these cities.
And the reason that they can shake down the cities is that the cities don't want to fight with them.
In fact, the cities want to pay them.
And why do the cities want to pay them?
Because the cities really are looting somebody else who's not present to object.
Namely the taxpayer.
The taxpayer is the guy footing the bill.
And they are supposedly, quote, legal observers, but they're not really legal observers.
They're legal partisans and they're, quote, collecting evidence.
They're taking photographs. Why?
So then they can turn around, these groups can, and sue the government and sue the city council and sue the city establishment to extract money out of them.
This stuff can be immensely profitable.
Here's a small example.
Michael Brown. This is the guy in Ferguson who was shot by a cop.
And of course, the mythology around Michael Brown is that he had his hands up at the time and he was like, hands up, don't shoot.
And you had all these activists, hands up, don't shoot.
The This was all based upon a lie.
Admittedly, a media-encouraged lie.
But the lie was the idea that this was actually what's going on.
In reality, Michael Brown was running toward the cop to attack him.
And in fact, this information was ferreted out in an inquiry that was commissioned and supervised by the Obama administration.
So the Obama administration's own inquiry showed that Michael Brown was not the victim.
That the police officer was justified in using, in this case, lethal force.
And yet Michael Brown's family got $1.5 million.
$1.5 million based upon a fraud, based upon a lie.
So there's a whole kind of industry of left-wing lawyers who get money.
And remember, the lawyers themselves keep some of that money.
So the way they operate is they tell these rioters, listen, we'll go to get money for you, but if you get $40,000, you give us $10,000 or you give us $20,000.
So the arrangement is what is called contingency.
We'll take a portion of the amount that we can extract.
And of course, these left-wing lawyers know people who are in the city establishment.
And the mayor, typically, we're talking about democratic areas like New York City.
They have a friend who works in the office of a mayor, another friend who works in the local law enforcement agencies.
So this is a ripoff scheme in which the taxpayer and the cities themselves are destroyed while the activists all make off.
And I think what makes the whole thing particularly sick is that not only are these people cashing in, but they're cashing in while pretending to be champions of social justice.
You know, it's one thing to have a criminal operation, a shakedown operation.
The mafia is shaking down money on Canal Street in New York City.
But the mafia doesn't pretend to wear a halo.
Don Corleone doesn't act like he's a choir boy or he's sort of a clergyman who's motivated by the welfare of society as a whole.
And the only reason that he's doing bootlegging and blackmail and prostitution and murder is because this is all very good for society.
No. His idea is, I'm doing this to protect my family, and I'm doing it because this is how you survive in a harsh world.
And yet, these social justice activists like to masquerade as if they are motivated by something other than crass self-interest.
As it turns out, they're not.
They're rip-off artists.
They aren't even willing to do an honest day's work.
They not only want to engage in the antisocial activity of doing riots, they want the cities to pay them for it.
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Debbie and I are here for our Friday Roundup.
And it's kind of fun.
During the week, Debbie looks around for stuff that she's particularly interested in.
And you kind of compile your Friday roster wish list.
And I'd like you to take the lead in the segments we do together because this is the stuff that you want to talk about.
And I kind of bounce off of it and react to it.
But I wanted to begin with this topic of January 6th because...
We've got to give credit to Jim Jordan.
He might have reluctantly agreed to do this, but this is something that people like Marjorie Taylor Greene have long wanted.
The release of the full footage.
Why? Because we know that the DOJ in these trials...
Now, in the January 6th trials, the defendants are entitled to look at video footage, but very often they don't get the full video.
They only get limited clips that pertain to that defendant.
And that's often inadequate because you can't see the context of what's happening.
Like, what's the crowd doing?
Are there police officers that are marching toward you, heavily armed, and blasting you with pepper spray?
Is that why you did what you did?
Interestingly, I saw a video clip of a man asking the armed Capitol Police, Hey guys, why isn't there more security?
What's going on?
Why are you guys just standing there?
Why aren't you doing something?
And that was really interesting because we had never seen that before.
And really, it goes to show you that they weren't all that interested in security on that day.
This is a key point. Here's another point.
There's an interesting video, again in one of the new videos, where you see this group of patriots coming in.
They're very calm.
They're very subdued.
And they're walking in between the ropes at the Capitol.
Right. In a line. In a file line.
In a line. So now ask yourself this.
Does this look like an insurrection?
In other words, people proceeding.
They're unarmed. They're proceeding in an orderly fashion.
And they're so well-mannered.
Contrast this with left-wing activists who start trashing the walls and writing all kinds of signs, defacing the place.
These guys are moving almost solemnly through a line.
And I think this is the reason a video like this is not released by the January 6th committee, because it undercuts the narrative.
So, you know, the left is now saying, well, we have videos of violence and you're showing the videos of nonviolence.
Well, the point is that these nonviolent videos that undercut the narrative have been suppressed.
The other videos were available from the beginning.
So this is the point of a partisan committee.
They put out their one side, they hide the other side.
Yeah. And unfortunately, I don't even think that these trials, quite apart from the biased judges and juries, are even fair because the Brady requirement of full disclosure is not being met.
And the judges are themselves colluding in not meeting it.
I mean, it's like the prosecution not disclosing other potential criminals in that case and excluding it altogether, right?
Making that person that they targeted the only suspect.
When in fact, there could be others, but they're excluding it because they don't want that narrative.
I mean, there are cases where someone who's on death row has been moved to life in prison or even exonerated.
Exonerated completely. Because of the failure of prosecutors to meet these Brady requirements.
And so I think that there is the potential over time to overturn all the January 6th convictions on this basis.
So this is something to keep in mind.
It may not be possible to do now under this regime because this regime is the perpetrator of these civil liberties violations and civil rights violations.
Yeah, and a friend of ours on Twitter, he's a fan of ours, on Twitter messaged me.
He goes, hey, he goes, what's up with McCarthy only giving the footage to Tucker?
Why don't they put the footage on one of the, obviously it would have to be a Republican, on his server.
They have the majority. Right?
On the server. House majority site.
Yes, and have the public view the 40,000 hours of footage that's out there because Tucker's team is not going to be able to do this.
There are two problems, I think, here.
One is the fact that 40,000 hours of footage is just not something one can reasonably review, even if you've got a team doing it.
But I think the second and bigger problem is that Fox is not a fully reliable place.
And by that, I mean not Tucker.
I don't have a problem with Tucker.
I don't have a problem with a lot of hosts on Fox, but they are under the thumb of upper management and the Murdochs.
If you can't report actual truth and news, then why do you call yourself a news organization?
Exactly. So look, so Tucker comes out early in the week and he puts out all this stuff on Monday.
And it looked like he was going to go all week.
More on Tuesday, more on Wednesday.
And then suddenly he pivoted.
Tuesday and Wednesday, suddenly you start getting interviews with people, fiery rants.
But I mean, the rants are recycled talking points.
We're looking for new footage.
You can't have 40,000 hours of footage and you've put out like three clips that add up to like two minutes.
So do you think that it's just that they're so overwhelmed that they should have maybe waited a little bit longer and had more footage, you know, come out?
I personally do not think so, and my reason is 2,000 Mules.
I think that what Fox decided, 2,000 Mules, quite honestly, we may have made the mistake, it's not a mistake as you normally do this, of showing them the film so that they can take a look at it, but they probably decided, let's stay away from this one.
So we gave them a tip-off.
Yeah. Because of the topic.
But it could be. See, the Murdochs don't care ultimately.
Their main goal is social respectability.
They want Fox to be able to sell ads to Nissan.
So they have all kinds of motives, including feuding with Trump.
All kinds of motives for blocking the kind of coverage that occurs on that network.
And I think that is the sad reality.
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I talked a couple of days ago about this very disturbing incident involving the cartels, Mexico, and the murder in Matamoros, or in the Matamoros area, of a couple of Americans and the wounding of a third.
So these are four We're good to go.
It raises all kinds of questions.
It raises questions about the border.
It raises questions about the cartels.
It raises questions about the security of Americans going to Mexico, which a lot of Americans do, sometimes for casual purposes.
If they live near the border, they go over to eat and they come back or they go on vacation or they go to get dental work done and all kinds of things.
We know a guy who goes to get his dental work done in Mexico because it's a lot cheaper.
And Debbie's all over this topic and knows a lot about it.
And the thing that you were telling me that really struck me is that although we should talk about the latest incident, there's a kind of context, there's a background to it.
And you've been tracking this stuff for at least a decade.
For a long time.
So back in 2010, it was actually September of 2010, a man by the name of David Hartley was jet skiing with his wife And they were jet skiing on this lake that basically separates the United States from Mexico.
And it's called Falcon Lake.
And they were just having a good time.
I think they were taking photographs of this old church that's kind of sunken a little bit on the side of the Mexican side.
And all of a sudden, these Two boats come after them, like speeding boats come after them.
And when they saw that this was happening, they took off, right?
And as the chase began, they shot him in the head twice.
He fell into the water, so his wife knew he was dead, but she was trying to recover the body because she wanted to take him with her, and she couldn't do it because they were coming after her.
So, again, this was something that was, it made headlines.
It was during Obama, and I was like, yeah, look, Obama's president, what's he gonna do? Nothing.
That was my attitude.
But what's really interesting is that there was a war going on between two cartels in South Texas, Los Cetas and the Gulf cartels, which apparently, still happening today.
And that is why these four people were kidnapped, those two cartels fighting again.
Here we are, what, 13 years later, right?
So the war between Los Cetas and Gulf Cartels began in January of 2010.
And it's engulfed the entire Tamaulipas border region.
That's where Matamoros is.
And also gone into Nuevo Leon, Veracruz, Hidalgo, all on the border of South Texas.
Okay? After years of working together, each group possesses intimate knowledge of the other's operations.
So this is a very sophisticated...
Cartels, right? But interestingly, in this case, this guy was, he worked for a US oil and gas company with operations in Reynosa.
So they lived in McAllen.
And if you're familiar with the Rio Grande Valley, McAllen is to the west of Brownsville.
Right? And there's Brownsville, Harlingen.
And I would always joke about the fact that we're only 30 minutes from the border where I grew up.
And you talked about this, you know, when you said that I visited Matamoros a lot.
The last time I was in Matamoros, I want to say was 1993.
Yeah. We went for vanilla.
We went to buy vanilla, but believe it or not, they have these huge bottles of vanilla, super cheap.
We went for that, but I was really creeped out just in general because there just was a lot of crime in Matamoros.
I mean, even when... I think?
I mean, I just make a quick comment here, which is that this shows you really how most of the world is.
It's dangerous. It's corrupt.
Normal features of life are to get, you know, a brother like nabbed and then they want money for his return.
The United States has been a refuge from all this.
To some degree, we can even understand the motives of the illegals because this is what they're running away from.
Their motives are understandable and even commendable.
Now, what's the reason that they would want...
Was he in a shootout?
Why would they kill this guy? So here's the thing.
What's the motive here? Again, the motive is the same motive that they gave with the four people that were just kidnapped, right?
Mistaken identity.
They thought that this guy was an operative.
Right? And so they claim mistaken identity.
But listen, whatever you claim, the fact that these people are doing this and get away with it, because to this day, 13 years later, these people have not been held accountable for this man's murder.
13 years later.
And I seriously doubt that the people that did it to these people that just got kidnapped, same thing's going to happen.
But I have some suggestions, maybe in the next segment, of what we can do to stop the cartels.
And it's really going to be something that will not only stop these horrific murders from happening to Mexican citizens and American citizens, but perhaps even solve our immigration problem, illegal immigration problem altogether.
We'll take it up in the next segment.
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I'm back with Debbie. We're talking actually about the kidnap and murder of two Americans in Mexico.
Debbie was laying the context for it.
And you made the point that in the David Hartley case, but also in the new case, the current case, they invoke mistaken identity.
Now what I find strange about this is that you got four black guys.
From, was it South Carolina?
In an American vehicle.
They didn't rent this car in Mexico.
They're driving their own car, apparently, with U.S. license plates.
So, is it reasonable to say that they were mistaken?
According to the Mexican authorities, they thought that they were Haitian drug smugglers.
Which, again, doesn't make sense because what do the, what does the Gulf Cartel and the Los Cetas Cartel or whatever?
The two Mexican cartels.
Yeah, what do they care about, Asian drug smugglers?
I mean, it just doesn't make any sense, right?
And again, U.S. license plates, really?
It wasn't a rental car?
See, I think that in these cases, they like to say mistaken identity because they don't want to give Americans the idea that it's unsafe to go to Mexico, that you're vulnerable if you go.
So they say, oh, listen, no, the cartels are there, but they only kill each other.
They really, once in a while, they can be, they mistake somebody else for being in the cartels, and that's why they get a bullet between the eyes.
But in general, there's no targeting of tourists.
There's no going after foreigners.
I think this is why they put other, what is it?
Mistaken identity. It may or may not be mistaken identity, but that's why they say mistaken identity.
But you promised in the last segment that you have, you think there are things we can do.
Yeah, there are things we can do.
Number one, these these organizations, these cartel organizations are terrorists.
OK, let me say it again.
They are terrorists.
They terrorize Mexican citizens daily.
You know, sometimes we do kind of like, you know, say, hey guys, why are we having so much illegal immigration?
Why are these Mexicans coming over?
The vast majority of Mexicans that come over, that cross the border, do it because of fear.
Fear from these cartels.
If they have kids or whatever, they grow up, they want to recruit these kids into the cartels.
If they refuse, they kill them.
I mean, this is brutal.
They chop their head off.
They chop their legs off.
They hang the body parts off a bridge to kind of signal that, look, we're in control.
I mean, these are tactics that they have learned from Hezbollah and Hamas.
These torture tactics.
They also have done the tunnels.
They have tunnels that they build from Mexico into the United States border.
And they learned this from where?
From Hamas, right?
The Palestinian tunnels.
The Palestinian tunnels. That evade Israeli checkpoints.
They have learned this.
So, see, my beef with our government, and I'm sorry to say both Republican and Democrat are at fault in this, is the fact that we have ignored this way too long.
Way too long. We should have military presence on the border.
We should have military presence in Mexico.
This is a war zone.
And yes, we're worried about the Ukraine war with Russia and all of that.
Let's protect the Ukrainian border from incursions by Putin.
Afghanistan, all those things.
But this is on our own border.
And our citizens, we have probably about a million people a year go to Mexico for procedures.
Medical procedures. Why? Because they're too expensive here, so they go there.
We are seeing so much crime and corruption in Mexico that I believe that not only to keep our people safe, but to keep the Mexicans from coming over, that is the only way we're going to solve this problem.
Well, the Biden administration talks about, we want to improve the infrastructure on the other side of the border that will reduce the incentives of people to want to come over.
Now, that, in principle, is commendable.
But their idea is, we've got to do it by fighting climate change.
We've got to provide finance. And Debbie is providing a much simpler, more obvious solution, which is, hey, listen, if you make the lives of the people, and let's just, at this point, talk about just on the other side of the fence.
Obviously working in coordination with the Mexican authorities, listen, we're going to crack down on cartel activity on a kind of buffer zone between Mexico and the United States.
This will make the lives of those people a lot safer and reduce the incentives of people trying to jump the fence.
Yes, and not only that, but we have such a huge drug problem.
Fentanyl, crack, cocaine, everything, right, that they bring over.
Marijuana. Well, I think that this is another way to stop that from happening.
And I mean, what better way to do it than do it now?
Don't wait another 10 years, 20 years, whatever.
Don't just talk about it.
Do something about it.
And this is something that both parties should agree on.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Debbie alerted me to a, well, I'm about to say, I was about to say hilarious, but it's really not hilarious.
It's a case that involves a murder.
But there's a kind of delicious and peculiar irony to this case because it involves some parents of a murdered victim who don't want the murderers to go to jail.
And it has to do, as Debbie will explain, with woke ideology.
Yeah, so this woman named Jen Angel, okay, and I think the name of her establishment was Angel Cates.
So she's a baker. She's a baker.
Yeah. Yeah, and anyway, so she was savagely killed during a robbery several months ago, and her family and friends are urging authorities not to jail her assailants to align with her social justice beliefs.
Yeah. So let's describe some details.
So apparently this woman was in a car and she was carjacked.
These people smashed her car window.
They grabbed her purse.
Somewhat foolishly, she chased after them.
And apparently she ran after the getaway car, but she got caught in the vehicle door and she was dragged, smashing her head on the sidewalk.
She went into a coma. She was taken to the hospital.
she died. Now you would think that the parents of this woman would be furious and they would want these perpetrators brought to justice and usually for progressives when something like this happens to them it's a little bit of a wake-up experience right? They go, it was Irving Kristol who said really years ago that a neo-conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. Well evidently here not only was the victim not mugged by reality, when her parents say
listen our daughter would have taken the view that these criminals are the victims of society.
Yeah, but check this out.
So she's a longtime social movement activist and anarchist and did not believe in state violence, carceral punishment, or incarceration as an effective or just solution to social violence and inequity.
So basically this woman did not believe that criminals should go to jail.
That's it. And really, in some senses, that is the true meaning of defund the police, isn't it?
Because defund the police means you don't have any money for police departments, which means you can't have police.
And so you have basically a lawless society.
Yeah, you may have social workers who show up at the scene and try to talk the perpetrators out of doing the bad stuff or just taking care of the criminals once they are left bleeding or dead on the sidewalk.
This is what apparently this nutcase, and she is a nutcase.
I'm sorry that she was a victim.
Yeah. Yeah. But she's a victim of her own ideology.
She's got some friends that are nutcases.
So Angel's friend, Emily Harris, who is an anti-prison director, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the baker was her first political mentor and believed that using prison to punish individuals actually prevented both victims and aggressors of crimes from actually healing.
Well, unfortunately, this is a woman who can never heal because she's in the grave.
I mean, that's the point is that crime can reach proportions where you...
This is not all a matter of sitting down afterward.
And you know what? Here's the deal, guys.
So let's say that this woman doesn't want the perpetrators or her friend doesn't want the perpetrators to be jailed.
Well, you know what?
That's fine and dandy for her crime.
However, these guys are going to do it again and again and again again.
to other people who do want them in jail.
I mean, this is why our laws talk about crimes against the state, because if you go and rob somebody or murder someone, yes, you are committing an offense against them, but not only against them.
You're committing an offense also against the laws of society.
And so here's a case where I think the authority should say, well, it's very interesting that you have these views and you can do interviews with the media or write an op-ed in the San Francisco Examiner or the San Francisco Chronicle about this.
But frankly, from the point of view of the state, we don't care because this is a crime that needs to be punished and it needs to be deterred.
And those are the dual motives.
But, you know, hey, we're talking about a woke...
Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to say.
This is in San Francisco, where the crime is only going to get worse.
And sure, I mean, the criminals think, you know what, this is a safe haven for me.
The homeless people think it's a safe haven for them.
So, you Well, so far, it's been the position of the progressive left that petty crimes, small crimes, shoplifting, looting, these are kind of okay, especially when they are draped in the sort of garb of social justice.
I'm not aware of a DA saying that a murder should go unpunished because, you know, the victim was woke and the family is woke and they don't really think they should do it.
Yeah, but this is a murder. Yeah. This is a murder.
So I'm guessing that they will still proceed with the prosecution.
I mean, I hope they do. It'll be downright insane if they don't do that.
But I think the reason we're talking about it's a window into the demented psychology of these people who, in a way, even when the horrors of the world are brought right in front of them...
They don't see it. They don't see it.
It doesn't disturb their woke ideology, which kind of almost is an ideology of blinders.
I'm now moving on in my discussion of Christian apologetics to a new chapter in the book, What's So Great About Christianity?
And we're going to be focusing on the limits of reason.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant famously said,"...in showing the limits of reason, I have made room or cleared the way for faith." In some ways, that could be the motto of this chapter.
And we're going to be discussing in some depth the philosophy of Kant.
Kant is, by the way, the greatest of all the modern philosophers.
This is not just my view.
In fact, it's probably the consensus view of the philosophical community.
So the greatest of the ancient thinkers...
The prize is probably between Plato and Aristotle.
But among modern thinkers, it's not even all that close.
There are a number of important modern philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, more recently Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger.
But Kant is commonly acknowledged, at least in the professional community, to be the greatest, the most towering of those names.
My chapter title is The World Beyond Our Senses, Kant and the Limits of Reason, and the opening quotation is this, We shall be rendering a service to reason should we succeed in discovering the path upon which it can securely travel.
Now, I want to unpack this statement because I think it's a very important and profound one.
There are many people who make assertions, sometimes assertions that have no support behind them or assertions that are just preposterous.
And the assertions, they think, can be validated simply by saying that this is reasonable or this is logical or this makes sense.
And what Kant is saying is, all right, before we do that, before we assess the value of your statement as reasonable, more reasonable or less reasonable, let's ask a prior question that we never ask.
What is it that reason can, and also by implication cannot, know?
Now, this question doesn't normally occur to you because many of us have this idea that reason applies pretty much to everything.
Everything operates under the domain of reason, after all, kind of what else have we got?
But Kant's point is that it may be that you don't have anything else.
But even if you don't have anything else, why can't we use reason to discover the limits of reason?
Think of it this way.
It may be that the only way you can travel is by boat, but there are certain places that boats can't go.
Boats can only go to places that have ports and harbors.
Boats can't travel, at least not by themselves, on land.
They have to be put on trucks and then moved across the country, for example.
So, just by saying, all I got is a boat, It doesn't follow that the boat has unlimited, you may say, ability or scope in order to go from place to place.
Boats can go where boats can go.
And that's what Kant is saying about reason.
Let's use reason.
Reason itself becomes the mechanism by which we discover the, let's call them the outer limits of reason.
Now, as I say, atheists and many others don't think about this.
It's never occurred to them.
One of the reasons Kant is so great as a thinker is he takes things that are right in front of you and he makes you look at them and realize that they are much more mysterious than you think and they're less obvious than you think.
And so atheists think, you know, look, we're champions of reason.
They call themselves, you know, brights and things like that.
And they say, we are far superior intrinsically from people who rely on superstition.
They rely on faith. Now, the point that we're going to examine is, what if you are considering a question that goes beyond the scope of reason, in which reason doesn't even reach, in which reason is completely silent?
And my question to you is, what's wrong in considering that on the basis of faith?
There is no reason that's even applicable to the matter.
So let's take a simple example that illuminates the point.
What happens to you after you die?
Well, the simple answer is, nobody really knows.
Or to put it differently, no one knows on the basis of reason itself.
Why? Because all our empirical knowledge, empirical knowledge is actual knowledge of the world, knowledge that's not just deduced from an axiom or a premise, but knowledge that is observed in the world, no one really knows what comes after death.
And so you can't even say with probability that there is an afterlife or there isn't.
Why? Because probabilities only apply to known things.
Since I know that a coin has heads on one side and tails on the other, I can assign a 50% probability to getting heads.
But if I had a coin, I had no idea how many sides the coin has.
I couldn't assign any probabilities at all.
I know nothing about the subject.
So the point being, what is wrong in having faith?
This is kind of the question that Kant is raising on a matter on which reason cannot adjudicate truth.
These are some of the questions that we're going to get into.
My point today was merely to introduce a very complex but highly interesting topic to which we will return next week.
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