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March 14, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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THE NEXT OBAMA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep536
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Coming up, I'll evaluate the presidential prospects of Gavin Newsom, whom Democrats are touting as the next Obama.
I'll examine the degree to which woke policies brought down Silicon Valley Bank.
I'll examine the degree to which woke policies brought down Silicon Valley Bank.
Representative Ken Buck joins me.
Representative Ken Buck joins me.
We're going to talk about big tech's war on free speech.
We're going to talk about big tech's war on free speech.
And by the way, if you're listening or watching this podcast, make sure that you hit the subscribe are touting as the next Obama.
And by the way, if you're listening or watching this podcast, make sure that you hit the subscribe button whether you're listening on Apple or Google or Spotify or watching on Rumble.
There's a little subscribe button.
And on Rumble, if you hit the join button, it'll also allow you to join my community at Locals.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
And I'll see you next time.
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.
I want to talk about the, well, a little bit, the end of California, the fall of California.
And it's an ominous topic because the fall of California could be a precursor to the fall of America.
California is America's most beautiful state.
It has been for quite a long time America's richest state.
Of course, there are other wealthy states, New York, Texas, but California has been number one.
It has huge and important industries that are distinctive of California.
We think most obviously of Hollywood, but California now has also been the center really since the Silicon Revolution of high tech.
If you go down to Southern California, the San Diego area, biotech.
Let's not forget agriculture, all the oranges and avocados that are grown in California.
So this is a rich, beautiful state, and it's being ruined.
And it's being ruined by a man who actually wants to be president.
So if you want to know how can the California model...
Well, it would be exported if Gavin Newsom becomes president, which he very much wants to be.
And the Democrats are pinning a lot of hope in this guy.
In fact, I call him the White Obama.
We should call this podcast the White Obama.
She's like, no, no, that's a little bit risky.
You can say that, Dinesh, but don't call it that.
So we're not calling it that in the thumbnail.
But Newsom is kind of a dashing guy, and he's trying to be the progressive white knight.
And the latest scheme which really epitomizes or encapsulates the craziness of California is reparations for slavery.
Reparations for slavery.
Now you may say, wait a minute, I didn't really know that California had slavery.
It didn't! California was not a Confederate state.
It didn't have slavery.
But nevertheless, there are blacks in California.
And so the idea is we've got to give these descendants of slavery reparations.
So California set up something called the Reparations Task Force.
This was created by a law in 2020.
And here's the point. And California now is one-party states.
So they pass whatever law the progressives come up with.
It goes through and bills kind of have a natural way of passage.
They get through both houses of the legislature and then the governor signs them.
So here you've got this task force, and it started out with the idea, well, let's give every black who's descended from slavery, and they, by the way, they're very clear, this will apply to most blacks living in California.
They say that there are 1.8 million black Californians who had an ancestor enslaved in the U.S., and they want to give them each over $300,000.
Think about this. Think about the effect of this on white Californians struggling to make a living.
You take $300,000 per person.
And now, this is a crazy scheme.
And we don't at this stage have to get into the merits of it.
Reparations doesn't work on so many levels intellectually.
But see, Newsom doesn't care.
And the task force doesn't care.
Because this is a matter of trying to implement racial politics.
The idea is let's try to buy off the The black vote.
And then we'll turn to the Latino vote.
And this is how Democrats operate.
It's not based upon, is this something that's meritorious?
Is it deserved? Can you really show that these descendants of slavery would be...
I mean, when you normally make a case for reparations, you have to show that, but for the offense, these people would all be worse off.
But think about it.
If slavery had never existed in the United States, none of these people would be in America.
I mean, unless they came later as a tourist or came later as an immigrant, they wouldn't be here at all.
So they would be living now in Africa.
And how could you make the case that they would somehow be better off over there?
I mean, no one even dreams or even attempts to make this kind of case.
Now, California is currently running a massive budget deficit projected at $22.5 billion.
This program would cost another $640 billion.
So there's really no money for it.
And California is kind of going down the tubes now.
You can say, well, and this is California's normal answer.
Well, let's tax the rich. Well, the very rich in California already pay the overwhelming chunk of taxes.
In fact, the top 1% pays over 40% of all the Cal.
They're already milking.
They're already extracting what they can from the very rich.
And you may say, well, okay, well, let's raise the state income tax.
Well, California has the highest state income tax in the country.
I think it's now 13 or so percent.
Contrast that, for example, with Texas, zero percent.
So you might wonder, why did Dinesh move to Texas?
Well, Debbie is the main reason, but this is the second reason.
It's kind of nice not to pay state taxes, to have a state that has no local taxes.
The federal taxes are high enough.
Now, this committee that got together to propose reparations, they don't even care about the cost.
In fact, they weren't even asked to provide a plan for how you can pay for this.
And of course, the program has not yet become law.
But programs move very quickly from idea to law in a one-party state like California.
So look, they're pulling the state into the ocean.
They're creating, if you will, they haven't had the big one, the earthquake, that's going to destroy the state.
But there are other ways to destroy California other than an earthquake.
And my point is that, all right, if you want to go ahead, do it.
But don't destroy the rest of the country.
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There's a telling new piece of information concerning Biden's disgraceful withdrawal from Afghanistan, from Kabul.
And this, if anything, puts the Biden people in an even more A deplorable light.
In fact, it doesn't make the U.S. military look very good either.
Now, a little bit of background just to refresh your memory.
In July 2021, Joe Biden abandons Afghanistan.
He does it by abandoning the Afghan Bagram airfield in the middle of the night.
I mean, essentially, they just turned the lights out and took off.
They didn't even tell the Afghan commander who only found out about the departure two hours after it happened.
As we know, the United States left behind all kinds of military equipment, Humvees, uniforms, rations, even all kinds of sports drinks for the Taliban terrorists who were just downright delighted to find this huge stash of weapons gifted to them.
worth tens of millions of actually perhaps billions.
I'm not sure. I don't remember the number now.
The Taliban takes over the Bagram Air Force Base, which, by the way, is about 30 miles north of Kabul.
And if you'll remember, there was an ISIS suicide bomber who murdered 13 US servicemen and women and 169 Afghans as well.
And this guy was one of the guys that the Taliban released from a prison at the Bagram base.
By abandoning Bagram, we turn over the Taliban.
They release the guy who turns out to be the suicide bomber.
His name is Abdul Rahman.
And he sets off this explosive that causes all this carnage.
Now, our story picks up right here.
It involves a sergeant.
His name is Tyler Vargas Andrews, US Marine Corps sniper, and he was serving in Afghanistan at that time.
Turns out that he spotted the suicide bomber.
He recognized that this guy was about to do something bad.
He might not have known how many explosives the guy has on him, but he recognized him, he stood out, and he requested authority from the U.S. military to shoot.
This is where things take a very bad turn.
He says, I requested engagement authority while my team leader was ready.
The response, leadership does not have the engagement authority for us.
Do not engage.
So... Tyler Vargas Andrews kind of panics and he demands to talk to the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Brad Whited.
He says, please come to the tower.
Please take a look at what I see.
And so they're waiting for him.
And in the meantime, some other operations guys came up there and they confirmed that, yeah, this guy looks like a suicide bomber.
They confirmed Tyler Vargas Andrews' assessment of the situation.
Well, eventually, this Colonel Brad Whited shows up, and they show him the suspect, and they show him the evidence, and they show him the photos.
The suicide bomber was with another guy, so they show him photos of the two men, and they say, he asks you, do you have a clean shot?
And they go, yeah, we do. We can totally take this guy out.
And they go, do we have your permission to do it?
And he goes, I don't know.
I don't know. And then Tyler Vargas Andrews says, me and the team leader asked, well, who does?
Because this is your responsibility, sir.
It turns out that despite several efforts...
Tyler Vargas Andrews could not get the clearance.
And so he doesn't take the shot.
And so the guy goes on to do the suicide bombing.
And here's the very sad kind of denouement or conclusion to the story.
What happens is that...
Is that a friend of Tyler Vargas-Andrews comes to him and tells him, Hey, listen, I've got an Afghan interpreter who's in the crowd.
I'm trying to get that guy out.
And so Tyler Vargas-Andrews rushes down into the crowd, gets the guy out.
Then the interpreter tells him that they have five family members still there.
So he's waiting for these family members to try to get them out.
And then, boom, the explosion goes off.
He feels a wave of pressure.
He's flung to the ground.
And guess what?
Basically, he loses his right arm and his left leg.
Now, how do we know all this?
Because Tyler Vargas Andrews testified recently before the GOP House.
Think of it. The Democrats never call guys like this.
Why? They want to hide this kind of information.
So Tyler Andrews would have been willing to come tell his story all this time, but it took the midterm election result and the Republicans to take the House.
By the way, have you read any news stories about Tyler Andrews?
No. Again, it's not because the media doesn't know about this.
They just don't want to report on it.
So this is the environment we live in now.
Major stories, important information is withheld by the media.
It's not shown to us unless we, our side, brings it out and puts a spotlight on it.
So you see the importance of us having the house, by the way.
This is because it is our only mechanism right now To bring these kinds of truths before the American public and also we're grateful.
Debbie was saying, well, yeah, but the press still won't report on it.
And that's probably true.
But at least now we have social media platforms, including, thank God for Elon Musk's Twitter, to be able to blast this information out.
And we're building our own channels that are pretty big.
Yesterday's podcast, by the way, what is it, honey?
160,000 views on Rumble alone.
That's about how many people are watching CNN right now, about 160,000 people.
So we're building our platforms.
It takes time to do this, but we need to get stories like the important story of Sergeant Tyler Vargas Andrews out so people realize what an unmitigated disaster Biden policies are in Afghanistan and pretty much everywhere else.
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The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the largest U.S. bank to fail since Washington Mutual Bank failed, going back now I guess a decade or so.
And Silicon Valley Bank failed because it made a bet We're good to go.
And by the way, just right before that, there was Jim Cramer.
You know, this is the crazy guy that you see on, what is it?
Is it CNBC with wild gesticulations?
He acts like he's really knowledgeable.
This guy is known for making one of the...
This guy has like a horrific track record.
So if you listen to Jim Cramer, well, you're probably...
You probably lost a whole bunch of money.
But right before the collapse of the bank, he's like, well, Silicon Valley Bank, you know, recommended and so on.
So... This really shows you that a lot of the experts don't know what they're talking about.
Now, there are community banks around the country.
A lot of them invest conservatively.
They offer a low return, but they are cautious about where they put their money.
And Silicon Valley Bank took high risks.
It didn't hedge its bets.
Now, I guess you could say that Silicon Valley Bank did hedge its bets by going woke.
And by that I mean that they cultivated politicians, they cultivated environmentalists, they cultivated all these people by going really into identity politics and also going into the climate change industry big time.
In fact, I saw a guy complaining on social media that 1,900 climate companies are going to be devastated because this bank has gone under.
And I was thinking, first of all, great.
But second of all, it shows you the degree to which this kind of climate racket has penetrated Silicon Valley Bank.
Now, the head of risk assessment at Silicon Valley Bank is a woman named Jay Ursapach.
And it turns out that this woman is majorly woke.
Her main focus, as it turns out, is not, in fact, risk management, but rather, quote, And they go on to say in this statement, which I don't need to read, that they think that having a diverse community at Silicon Valley Bank, quote, improves innovation.
Now, first of all, I'd like someone to point to a single, reliable empirical study that shows that if you put, let's just say, you have two choices.
You put a highly diverse group into the room, chosen on the basis of diversity.
And in the next room, you put a non-diverse group picked solely based upon merit.
In other words, you let the chips fall where they may.
It could be all whites. It could be all Asians.
It could be just whites and Asians.
No blacks. No Hispanics.
It doesn't matter. You go with a merit group, and then you go with a diversity group.
And let's see which one is more successful in managing a company or, by the way, doing any other test of academic merit or economic performance.
So, this diversity is a dud.
And interestingly, this woman, Jay Ursapah, was apparently on a kind of a global diversity tour to promote kind of lesbian rights when all of this happened.
So, nobody was watching the store.
And this is the point. I'm not suggesting, some people have suggested, but I'm not suggesting that woke policies destroy the bank.
No. The bank was actually destroyed by very bad bets, very risky bets that it took at a time when they should have known.
It's really obvious in this economy that the Federal Reserve is trying to tame inflation, which, by the way, the latest inflation numbers just came out.
Inflation is now hovering at about 6.5%.
And while that's lower than the 8% or 9% that it peaked at, it's still a bad number.
Let's remember that sort of good inflation is around 1% or 2%.
A healthy economy that's growing at about a 2% clip can afford to have inflation of about the same level.
But the Fed is now trying to squeeze inflation out of the economy and there's only really one way to do that and that is to reduce the money supply and Push up interest rates.
But of course, pushing up interest rates is going to reduce bond value.
So the Silicon Valley, people knew that.
But they probably bought into the Biden administration's propaganda.
Hey, listen, you know, the economy is going to be just fine.
Inflation is going to be transitory.
All of this is just like a, it's like a passing rain shower, a passing storm.
It's all going to, so the Silicon Valley, you know, I think this is great.
We're going to be able to, we're not really, and as a result, they put the whole Think of what they put in jeopardy.
All these new companies trying to raise capital, all these deposits, all this liquidity.
And not only now is Silicon Valley Bank kaput, but Signature Bank.
By the way, Signature Bank is another woke bank.
It was hit with a sell-off.
Shares sunk 30%.
And in fact, regulators have taken over Signature Bank.
And I was thinking back, Signature Bank, you know, I've heard that name and I remembered.
Signature Bank are the people that debanked Donald Trump.
So here's another woke bank.
So a little part of me is like, this stuff is, these people are getting their comeuppance.
They don't make decisions based upon sound economic reasoning.
But what I am worried about is that the Fed is now in a very tricky position because if they raise interest rates now to curb inflation, they're risking more bank failures.
But if they don't raise interest rates, they decide, okay, we'll hold off, then we're going to see major inflation.
So either way, economically, I think we have some hard times ahead.
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Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast, welcome back to the podcast, Congressman Ken Buck.
He represents the 4th Congressional District in Colorado.
He's also a member of the House Judiciary Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and he has a new book out.
It's called Crushed Big Tech's War on Free Speech, a topic of great interest to all of us.
Ken Buck, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
Let's talk about this problem, which all of us have been kind of dimly aware of, but we're now seeing in various ways, notably with the Twitter files, The way in which the censorship operates.
And it appears to be a almost terrifying sort of octopus that involves the government and a whole assortment of government entities.
It involves the non-profit sector and all these so-called kind of intermediaries.
It, of course, involves the digital platforms themselves.
Talk a little bit about How big this problem is now?
And then I want to start talking about how we can start to deal with it because it almost appears like it's created a new regime unto itself.
It's so interesting, Dinesh, because I think as Republicans, as conservatives, we want more speech in the marketplace of ideas.
We want people to be able to express themselves and then to compete with each other.
We do it within the Republican Party, which some people think is one of our weaknesses, but certainly with the general public, we want folks to be able to express themselves.
The left has a completely different view of this.
They want to make sure they suppress Conservative speech and then amplify speech from the left.
And so almost every opportunity they get, we see them using favorable platforms to do this.
So when it comes to the big tech platforms, they're monopolies.
And personally, I don't have anything wrong with people being big and successful.
And sometimes monopolies operate just fine.
But when you have a monopoly over the flow of information, over the dissemination of information, And you are woke, and you are left-wing, and you live in California, in Silicon Valley.
It ends up that those platforms are using their speech in a way that discriminates.
And not just discriminates, but I really believe they are winning elections based on what they've done.
They changed. Google changed its algorithm.
In June of 2020, so that everybody who searched for Donald Trump got negative articles and everybody who searched for Joe Biden got positive articles.
And they obviously you can't measure just how many people change their vote or or went from undecided to one candidate or the other.
But that kind of almost subliminal messaging has an effect.
And I think it has a very large effect.
And we're not going to win elections in this country.
We conservatives are not going to win elections in this country.
We're certainly not going to win presidential elections if the left is able to use these platforms in the way that they're using them.
Now, it seems that the first step is just to expose this, right?
To bring it to public light.
I think, fortunately, with Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, he did something I didn't anticipate that he would do, which is he did a sort of a crime scene investigation of his own social media site.
And that's how we get all this new information.
Is there a way for the House to haul Google and YouTube and Meta And I don't just mean Mark Zuckerberg to say a few generalities about the Hunter Biden story.
I'm talking about getting into the algorithms and the way in which these companies operate so that we can get comparable exposés of information on those platforms to what we have on Twitter.
Is there a way to get that kind of data from these guys?
Yeah, absolutely. There is, and we're doing it.
So in the Judiciary Committee, we look at antitrust issues, and we also look at some constitutional privacy issues.
In the Energy and Commerce Committee, they have responsibility for Section 230, as well as some of the other privacy issues.
So between the two committees, we will be looking at Big Tech and we will be calling in their executives, hopefully their chief executives, and getting testimony about what they knew and when they knew it.
Now, as I understand it, it's very clear that the First Amendment says that the government can't restrict speech.
And so I think that the Biden people seem to be saying, all right, well, we can't do it directly, but why don't we use the Stanford Internet Observatory?
And why don't we use the Aspen Institute?
And why don't we use all these other go-betweens?
And by the way, some of those go-betweens are non-profits that themselves get money.
So you now have this kind of private-public partnership, if you will, to promote censorship.
Let's take a pause because we're coming up against a break.
But when we come back, I want to ask you...
This would seem to be a flagrant constitutional violation.
How do we get it before the courts and specifically the Supreme Court?
So the Supreme Court, which is the custodian of our First Amendment rights, can say, this is a serious violation.
This needs to stop.
So we'll be right back with Congressman Ken Buck.
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You'll feel the difference. I'm back with Congressman Ken Buck, 4th Congressional District of Colorado, a member of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
We're talking about the ideas in his new book.
It's called Crushed Big Text War on Free Speech.
By the way, you can follow Ken Buck on Twitter, at RepKenBuck.
Ken, I was asking you about the Supreme Court and the First Amendment.
And if there are serious First Amendment violations that are systematically occurring in not just speech, but political speech, the most important type of speech in a democratic society, how do we get this before the court so the courts can not only know about it,
but act on it? Yeah, so one of the things that happened last week, I sent a letter to the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, talking about and asking him for information about the State Department funding organizations That then put out information to advertisers,
one of the lifeblood for news shows that talk about the sources, the platforms, the shows that use disinformation and the shows that are accurate.
It just so happens that the State Department is funding an organization that lists many, many right-of-center shows as disinformation.
New York Post, you know, on and on.
And then all of a sudden, the Washington Post is a reliable source of information.
And so they're trying to funnel advertisers' money to left-of-center news shows.
And they're doing it with taxpayer dollars.
That's what's so upsetting. It's not just a private meeting where President Biden says you should do this.
They're actually using taxpayer dollars.
Congress didn't appropriate money for that purpose at all.
So they're going beyond the scope of what they've been given the money for, and they're trying to change the landscape in terms of the information that's available.
Now, as those cases rise, they get to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court has ruled very clearly in the past, for the last 50, 60 years, that what the government can't do directly, it can't do indirectly.
And that's where I think we'll start getting good Supreme Court opinions about what the left is trying to do.
I mean, I know when the FBI responded to the Twitter files, the FBI said something to this effect.
You know, we don't control Twitter.
We simply make suggestions to them about things that we think are disinformation.
But again, this is not a case where the FBI occasionally tosses a name Twitter's way and says this guy is putting out false information or disinformation.
There's a whole portal.
There's a whole system in which all these government agencies are feeding not just tens or hundreds, but thousands and tens of thousands of names.
I think the Stanford Internet Observatory was boasting that they got something like 2 million tweets to be either deplatformed or tagged during the run-up to the 2020 election.
So you've got... I mean, I'm just going to call it a censorship industry.
And all of this is there.
All of this has gained traction in the name of fighting disinformation.
I think you point out who gets to say what's disinformation.
Very often, they're just taking the left-wing line.
If you don't agree with it, that's disinformation.
Are you optimistic that given how entrenched all this has become, With the media, by the way, which, you know, we think of the press as fighting for First Amendment rights, but no, they're on the side of the censor.
So are we going to get out of this mess, or is this going to be something that we live with over many, many years?
Well, I think we're going to have to live with it over some time, but I do believe that the American people deep down inside revere freedom of speech and the ability to express ourselves.
It's one of the things that makes us different.
Our neighbor to the north, our neighbor to the south, our European neighbors, folks who share most of our values don't share The same degree of freedom when it comes to speech that we do.
And so I think that the American people, when they learn more and more about how the left is censoring speech, are going to be upset.
And I think they're going to change the landscape as a result of what the left is doing.
But I mean, it's a little bit of a catch-22, right?
Because think about it. If they're censoring the information that's getting out to the American people, then the American people don't even know that this is going on.
I mean, for example, the latest episode of the Twitter Files was called The Censorship Industrial Complex.
All this fascinating information, all this detail.
And then the next day I look at the New York Times.
No mention of it.
And then I thought to myself, why is that?
And I realized, of course, it's because the New York Times is part of the censorship industrial complex.
So this is like saying that the mafia newsletter didn't cover the latest expose on the mafia.
They're part of it. Well, and that's why more people need to watch Dinesh D'Souza and we need to make sure that we get the message out to America.
But you know, they can't censor C-SPAN. I can go to the floor and talk about these things.
We bring it up in committees and people watch that.
I don't know who's awake at 2 in the morning when I'm talking on C-SPAN, but people watch that, and it's really important that we speak with a voice that's loud enough to break through this, as you put it, and it's a great term that I'm going to use in the future, this censorship industry that exists out there.
Awesome stuff. The book, guys, is called Crushed, Big Tech's War on Free Speech.
Congressman Ken Buck, thanks very much for joining me.
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Use discount code AMERICA. There's an interesting article by a left-wing historian named Daniel Besner.
Now... These days, when you read the literature of the left, it is mind-numbingly predictable.
It's kind of an echo chamber.
The reason I'm talking about this article is it's a little bit of a departure from that.
Even though it doesn't reflect my view, it's an interesting view that I want to share with you and comment on.
He has a review essay in the New Republic, and he's talking about the use and abuse of the term fascist.
He goes on to say, first of all, everywhere he turns, he says he keeps hearing the word fascist.
And he goes, that tells me that the word fascist is kind of losing its meaning.
I agree. I think in this respect, fascist is used sort of like racist.
And it's not to say that you don't have real racists, but it is to say that 90% of the time when you hear the word racism, it's used by someone who hasn't thought about it, has no real definition of it, and simply is using it in a manner that can't be...
Given any sort of stable or coherent meaning.
In some respects, it's like, I disagree with you, so you're a racist.
Now, Daniel Besner is addressing fellow progressives on the left.
He's writing, after all, in the New Republic, a left-wing magazine.
And he goes, I keep reading that leftists keep telling me democracy is in danger.
He goes, democracy is not in danger.
There's no evidence that democracy is in danger.
And in fact, there's no evidence that democracy is being threatened by some sort of fascism of the right.
He says that the very fact that we keep hearing the term fascist Shows that the use of the term is inversely proportional to the real danger posed by fascism.
In other words, we're hearing fascism talk, but we're not seeing any actual fascists.
And he says, quote, if there were actual fascists running around, you wouldn't go around calling everyone a fascist.
And this is really true. Think about it.
If there were real lynchings occurring in America, would anyone need to stage a lynching?
No. But the reason people stage lynchings is that there aren't real lynchings and they want to create a sort of a fake substitute.
Similarly, if there were people who went around frequently in public life, let's say on social media, using the N-word, wouldn't we hear about it?
I keep hearing about all the racist speech on Twitter, but I never see any.
Even though, arguably, I have a lot of people following me and I follow who are on the right side of the aisle.
We're supposed to be the white supremacists, but again, if I keep looking for white supremacy and I don't really see it, in fact, most of the So-called white supremacy I see as black guys who are making jokes about white supremacy and being victims of it.
Now, Daniel Bessner goes on to argue that if you really think about it, if you compare Trump with, say, George W. Bush, he goes, who's the real fascist?
He goes, we think of fascism as a militaristic ideology.
He goes, who started the Iraq War on a kind of bogus pretext?
Who said that there were weapons of mass destruction, false information, used the false premise to justify a war?
He goes, that was Bush. No.
That wasn't Trump. Trump actually wanted to get out.
So he goes, what this tells me is that the Republican Party is, quote, moving away from fascism.
Now, I say all this because to me, I'm just chuckling because I can just see all these New Republic readers who have been subjected to this interminable kind of barrage of fascist, fascist, fascist, the right is fascist.
Now reading this guy who goes, well, no, it looks like this is not the case at all.
And then he takes up, Daniel Bessner does, he takes up the rise of groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
And he goes, well, you know, I often see the left telling me that this is evidence of these sort of authoritarian, militaristic, fascistic individuals on the right.
And he goes, wait a minute. These people are like...
Small potatoes compared to the real militias that we saw.
He says, think about something like the Oklahoma City bombing.
That was, by the way, 1995 in the Clinton years.
He goes, wasn't the militia movement more active and stronger then?
He goes, look at the damage that they did in 1995.
Can you see anything comparable now?
Oh yeah, there are guys who went into the Capitol and walked around.
Somebody even broke a window, Dinesh!
Somebody even broke a window!
Yeah, so this is the point.
Daniel Bessner is getting a sense of proportion to say that even if, I mean, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are not fascist, by the way, I'm just going here with the left-wing terminology of it and I'm simply making the point that here's a left-wing historian who's smart enough to see that when you compare the scale of things, the January 6th incursion is nothing compared to some pretty grievous terrorist incidents going back a
couple of decades ago. And finally, Bessner concludes by saying the reason we keep hearing all this excessive nonsense about fascism is that the progressive left is trying to invent an enemy.
He goes, for a long time, liberalism had the Cold War.
Communism was the enemy.
There was the Soviet Empire that was the menace.
And that was the common enemy that kind of rallied everybody in kind of joint opposition.
But he goes, but now, since we don't have that, the left has to sort of manufacture an enemy.
And a convenient way to do that is to find fascists, even when the fascists aren't around.
Guys, I'd like to invite you to check out my Locals channel.
I'll be doing, in fact, my live Q&A tonight, and it's a way I interact with members and subscribers to my Locals channel.
By the way, if you're watching on Rumble, watching this podcast, there's a little join button that you can hit, a little red button.
Just click on that, and it'll make you part of the Locals community.
In fact, it's free. You can sort of check things out, and then if you want to become a subscriber, you can.
By the way, I have a bunch of cool films up on my channel, including 2,000 Mules.
The way to find out more is to go to dinesh.locals.com.
Love to have you along for this great ride again, dinesh.locals.com.
I've been discussing the issue of reason, human reason, and the limits to human reason.
And today I'm going to provide just a very brief introduction to the most important work that We're good to go.
Anglo-Saxon thinkers.
We think of Locke, we think of Hume, we think of people like that.
But Locke and Hume are, in a way, in the second rank compared to a figure of Kant's stature.
And again, this is my view, but it's also the mainstream view of modern philosophers or philosophers alive today.
Now, Kant wrote three major works.
One, the most important, The Critique of Pure Reason.
Another very important book called The Critique of Practical Reason.
And the third is The Critique of Judgment.
Kant also has an elaborate moral philosophy that we should go into some other time.
Here is the philosopher Schopenhauer writing about Kant.
This is Schopenhauer. He says Kant's teaching produces a fundamental change in every mind that has grasped it.
The change is so great that it may be regarded as an intellectual rebirth.
In consequence of this, the mind undergoes a fundamental undeceiving and thereafter looks at things in another light.
Now, it's very rare that you can say this about anybody.
You can say it to some degree about Einstein, that you're not quite the same person once you have a grasp of what Einstein is saying.
But Einstein is talking about things that are remote, things like getting on a light beam and traveling at light speed alongside another light beam.
So this is exotic stuff that is really beyond the reach of normal human experience.
The genius of Kant is that he says something shockingly new about reality that's in front of us.
The reality that we observe and experience every single day and Kant notices something about it that no one seems to have noticed before.
So Kant takes our most fundamental assumptions and turns them into questions.
We sort of think that we are skeptical, we're analytical, we've reached the ground floor of awareness and attention, and Kant shows us, no, there's a whole other floor beneath the ground floor that you think that you're standing on, and you need to examine that.
Now, before Kant, most people, I would say all people, kind of assumed that our reason and our senses give us a, let's call it undiluted or unfiltered access to external reality, the world out there.
And so the only limit to what we can know is determined by reality itself.
If there's only so much reality, well, that's all we can know because there's no more reality out there to know.
But what Kant really shows is that when we pay careful attention to how we gain access to experience, we realize that there is a whole second limit to what we can know.
And that limit is imposed simply by us being the kind of creatures that we are.
That there's not just limits imposed out there, but there are limits imposed in here because we are human beings and we have A certain apparatus for apprehending or knowing reality, and we cannot go beyond that apparatus.
So, let's get into this a little bit.
Kant says in his critique of pure reason that all human knowledge is based on experience.
And this really seems obvious.
We gain access to reality.
How? Through our five senses.
The sensory input is then processed through our brains and our central nervous system.
So, every thought...
Think about it. Every thought you have, even wild products of your imagination, these are based upon things that you have seen or heard or touched or smelled or tasted.
If I ask you to draw a creature from outer space, let's just say an alien...
You might draw a creature with like seven eyes and ten legs, but you have no way to conceive or portray a creature except in terms of human experience.
Think about it. What are you doing? You're taking human experience.
We have eyes, so I'm going to put seven eyes.
We have ears, so I'm going to give the creature ten ears.
And we have two arms and two legs, so I'll give the creature fifteen legs.
All you're doing is extrapolating from your experience.
But what Kant is saying is it is a simple fact that our five senses are the only lens for perceiving external reality.
And now Kant asks a very startling question.
How do we know that our human perception of reality corresponds to reality itself?
Most philosophers just kind of took for granted it does.
And this belief persists today.
Normal people go about the world.
I see a car. It's got to be there's a car.
And because I see it that way, therefore the car is that way.
So this is what we call common sense.
And so powerful is the common sense that people become sometimes, and when they hear me talk about this stuff, they get a little impatient.
They get a little bit annoyed, even indignant when Kant's question is put to them.
They act as if the question is some kind of a skeptical trick.
Like asking people to prove that they really exist.
The point I want to make, and we'll continue with this tomorrow, Kant is not a skeptic.
In fact, he sees himself as providing an answer or refutation to skepticism, but he does it by taking the skeptical case seriously.
How do we know things that we claim to know?
We cannot really map out the boundaries of reason before we can answer this simple question.
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