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Coming up, I'll reveal how Biden's policies have contributed to an emerging banking crisis.
January 6, Attorney Joseph McBride joins me.
We're going to talk about new revelations about that day, but also what the authorities knew in advance.
I'll expose the IRS as a ripoff operation by focusing on an attempt to take a man's whole life savings for a minor reporting infraction.
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With the second largest bank collapse in the United States, Silicon Valley Bank, the largest bank to collapse since Washington Mutual Bank failed several years ago.
And then some other bank failures in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
Signature Bank, for example, has now been taken over by regulators.
There are other banks that are in trouble.
And so we have both a policy question and a personal question.
And the policy question, of course, is, What is going on in the banking system?
The banking system has relied for a long time on having a small amount of reserves.
And banks, of course, take in money from people like you and me, and then they lend that money out.
So when you go into a bank, it's not flush with cash.
It has some cash in reserve.
Enough to typically satisfy depositors who want to make withdrawals.
But if everybody wanted to make a withdrawal, the government, the bank, wouldn't have the money.
Now you can say, well, yeah, but banks are insured by the FDIC. But the problem here is that the FDIC doesn't have the money either.
The FDIC has a relatively tiny reserve when you compare it to the vast volume of bank deposits across the The country.
I've got some numbers here which are pretty eye-opening.
Well, here we go. This is the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund.
It has $128 billion in it.
128 billion is a lot of money, but what is the number to cover all deposits in U.S. banks?
Well, that number runs into the trillions.
So the FDIC can only address, it's almost like saying I've got the ability to stanch a flood occurring over here and a flood occurring over there, but if a flood breaks out all over the place, then there's not a whole lot we can do.
There's been a debate, which is useful, but to me, a little bit of a sideline about whether or not the FDIC is bailing out Silicon Valley Bank.
And I saw some parts of a spirited discussion between, well, two guys I know, and like Vivek Ramaswamy, who's now the Asian Indian guy running for president, very smart guy, and David Sachs, who's a friend of mine from his old Stanford days.
When he wrote a book against political correctness at Stanford, this is when David was a young guy.
He's now, of course, a prominent figure in the tech world.
They were debating this issue of the bailout and Vivek Ramaswamy saying, this was definitely a bailout.
Taxpayers are on the hook for this.
And he had a point. What he was saying is, hey, listen, the FDIC is supposed to insure deposits up to $250,000.
Well, why say that if you then turn around and go, well, it doesn't matter if your deposits were $5 million.
We're going to cover those also.
Because now you're ultimately playing games.
You're saying one thing when you really mean if you want to say all deposits are covered by the FDIC, then say that.
So that's Ramaswamy's point.
David Sachs' point is, well, there is an important distinction here.
What the FDIC decided to do is we're going to bail out the depositors who had their money in the bank because they're sort of not at fault.
They thought they were just putting money in a bank.
They trusted the bank.
The bank didn't give them any warning that there was anything amiss.
And then boom, the bank collapses in 48 hours.
So David Sachs is drawing a distinction between bailing out the depositors, legitimate, and not bailing out the investors and the people who sort of were trying to make money off of Silicon Valley Bank.
In other words, think of Silicon Valley Bank itself as a stock.
And if you bet on that stock, well, hey, you're taking a risk the same way as you do with any other stock.
Stock goes under, a stock loses value, well, then you lose money in the same way that if the stock made money, you would get to keep it.
You wouldn't be like, oh, wait, I'm going to turn it in because this is an unexpected gain.
Unexpected gains and unexpected losses are normal in the stock market.
Now, there's a bunch of shareholders that are suing both Silicon Valley bank executives, and they're also suing the signature bank executives for really two things.
The first is... They're saying, you gave us no indication that you were making such risky investments.
In other words, you are buying these bonds.
And if interest rates just notch up a few points, down goes the value of these bonds.
And then you've got to replenish that capital.
Otherwise, you don't even have enough reserves.
So you created a run on your own bank.
And you've done that by putting our money, meaning shareholder money, at risk.
So the first part of the lawsuit is you didn't disclose to us the level of risk that you're taking.
And the second, of course, is that these executives, some of them, sold stocks as the bank was going down.
In other words, they cashed out because it's almost like, you know, the Titanic is going down.
If I can put some stuff into lifeboats, I'm going to do that and I'm going to make out okay and I'll leave the shareholders kind of holding the bag.
So both in the Signature Bank case and in the Silicon Valley case, you have these executives.
And by the way, let's keep in mind these executives were, for the last several years, posing as the most enlightened and compassionate, lovely people.
They're all concerned about social justice.
They're concerned about the climate.
Notice that when things start getting rough, they're grabbing their stuff.
They're taking stuff that belongs to other people.
They're making misrepresentations.
They're running for the exits.
So suddenly all this virtue kind of goes out the window.
Look, this couldn't have happened to a nicer, by which I mean, of course, lousier group of people.
I obviously don't want banks to fail.
I like to live in a system where the banking system is stable.
I think our banking system is stable.
But nevertheless, what's happening here, and by the way, it's part of it is being driven by Joe Biden's inflationary policies that then caused the Fed to put on the brakes.
And it's this kind of Loosening of the economy through inflation and then tightening of the economy through monetary policy.
This is, in fact, if you are looking for a root cause, a government role in this banking crisis, this is it right here.
Markets go up, but as we've seen recently, they also come down.
Smart investors know how to take advantage of the market, but you've got to protect against the downside.
We're in a rocky economy.
Look at these banks going under, stocks skidding and sliding, Biden at the helm.
this is a time to be cautious, not reckless.
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Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome back to the podcast someone who's, well, become a friend, Joseph McBride, founder of the McBride Law Firm.
He represents a number of the January 6th defendants and he's been on this issue.
You can follow him at Twitter at McBrideLawNYC or his website McBrideLawNYC.com.
Hey, welcome to the podcast, Joe.
Great to have you. You released just a couple of days ago a really interesting document.
In fact, I noticed that Julie Kelly commented, I've never seen this document before.
An elaborate pre-planning scheme by the Capitol Police for what was going to happen on January 6th.
Talk a little bit about where you got the document and talk about the significance of it.
What's in the document?
So, Dinesh, it's good to be on.
It's great to see you. And as always, very much appreciative of your work.
So, got the document about a year ago.
There are actually two documents.
There's one that pertains to the Metropolitan Police Department.
There's another one that pertains to the Capitol Police.
So, the big one pertains to the Metropolitan Police Department.
That was given to me by somebody from the private world about a year ago.
So that document had been circulating.
It was leaked. I obtained it through private hands.
And I sat on it for a while, wondering, sort of seeing how the government was going to deal with it once it knew it was in circulation.
And what did the government do?
Apparently, the government moved to have it suppressed.
Not maybe moved in court, but they made it subject to the protective order.
And what they did was they shielded it from the prying eyes of the public.
Government should have never have done this, right?
It's wrong. I obtained it through private hands.
I did not obtain it through the Relativity Database or anything like that.
So I was well within my rights to share it.
I chose to share it at this time because the government has long been on the record saying that, you know, the idea that plainclothes officers were in the crowd on January 6th Be the Metropolitan Police or Capitol Police was simply a lie.
And that attorneys like myself or commentators and political journalists like yourself who made such a comment in that direction are peddling in conspiracy theories.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
This document unequivocally proves it.
The Capitol Police document as well, it's about 20 pages, something like that.
And on the first paragraph of the page, they speak about concerns about Antifa.
And in all of our trials, we've spoken about Antifa at length.
Judges have shut us down.
Prosecutors have mocked us, told us that it was a figment of our imagination and that our clients were lying.
Turns out the Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police shared the same concerns as a Trump supporter who showed up with protective gear on January 6th.
Now, one of the things that emerges in the document is that these guys were planned to have undercover police guys dressed apparently as Trumpsters, MAGA hats, the whole gear, the whole thing.
Are you saying that that happened?
And second of all, do you have, can you see on the videos that there are people who are Either noticeably or that can be identified as undercover police officers who are egging on the crowd or participating with the crowd or climbing up on things.
How can we match up this planning document with what is actually seen on the video?
There's body cam footage.
There's body cam footage of the officers In their undercover gear, walking around with the clothes on.
They are wearing what I would describe as sort of pro-America, back to blue sort of gear.
So, you know, not everybody that was a Trump supporter had a Trump hat on.
Some of these guys did, but most of these guys have face masks on.
They dress like a lot of the other people you see there that day.
You know, they have the gaiters on their face.
They have hats on.
They have jackets on.
They have some type of pro-America gear on.
They're walking around.
They're interacting with people in the crowd.
They're certainly climbing up the sides of stairs.
They're climbing up things. They're talking to people.
They're participating in chants.
At one point, somebody's like, hey, watch out over there because Antifa is all over there.
And they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, Antifa, Antifa.
That's what we're here for.
They make their way from the street level.
I'm all the way up to the steps, to the Western Terrace of the Capitol, up the side of the steps and then on top of the Western Terrace.
If you followed those people and you went up to the top of the Western Terrace or possibly inside of the building and you did it because you followed their lead and you thought that what they were doing was okay, you were trapped.
There's no two ways about it.
And the government is going to have a hard time explaining this.
All types of information is coming out now.
They're going to fight us tooth and nail on it.
We are asking for the court for time to be able to process this and to draw up motions on these matters.
But, you know, we have an uphill battle because, as usual, everybody wants to hurt us and nobody wants to help us in D.C. When we come back, I'd like to pick up on a word that Joseph McBride used, entrapment, and explore this a little further.
We'll be right back with Attorney Joseph McBride.
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You can follow him on Twitter, at McBrideLawNYC.
His website, McBrideLawNYC.com.
We're talking about January 6th.
Joe, you mentioned this word, entrapment.
And you also mentioned the uphill battle in which you're trying to navigate against swamp judges and swamp juries and the whole kind of contaminated DC environment.
The question I have is this.
I mean, it seems finally that there is new information coming out about January 6th.
Tucker Carlson, of course, had some videos a week or so ago.
Let me start with that, because there was new information on the shaman guy, Jacob Chansley.
But there was then a sort of, as far as I could tell, an abrupt halt in the videos.
I mean, if you have 40,000 hours of footage, it's preposterous to me that you'd find three clips.
Speaking honestly, do you think that Fox kind of got to Tucker and shut him down because expectations were so high?
And while what was delivered the first day was pretty impressive, it appears like, what?
That's it? There's nothing more?
What are your thoughts about this?
So my inclinations are, I think I share what the general public shares, right?
Tucker's team is incredibly talented.
They did, in their defense, have a limited time to go through this stuff.
We've been going through this stuff for two years.
They had a few weeks. But within that time, they were able to focus on Jacob Chansley and the lies about Officer Sicknick.
I thought they did a good job there.
I did think that on the second night that something distinctly different happened.
There are different theories about that.
One theory is that the producers or the higher-ups at Fox News likely shut them down.
I think that that makes sense.
I can speak from experience from having gone on Tucker's show.
You know, I have been over the target on his show with regard to some similar matters.
And, you know, I kind of got shut down too.
And when you're over the target, people get very uncomfortable And the powers that be tend to pull the plug on situations like that.
I think we shouldn't give credit where credit's due.
Tucker did a good job of opening the door and refreshing the recollection of the American public to say, hey, look, these are two shiny examples of lies, blatant lies in your face.
Jacob Chansley got a tour.
We all knew that happened.
They didn't share that information with his lawyers.
He's doing four years in jail because of it.
That's a grave miscarriage of justice.
And Officer Brian Sicknick Turns out he was walking around and he was alive and well and died from natural causes, you know, a day or so after January 6th.
It had nothing to do with January 6th.
So the, you know, peddling the misinformation was proffering this story to the public that Officer Sicknick and other officers died on January 6th.
And that was a blatant lie.
I think it's incumbent upon myself, good professionals and people like you, Dinesh, and the American public to demand answers, to demand justice, to demand information, and to demand access to the rest of that video footage so we can make a determination about what happened that day.
I mean, it seems to be obvious that this should be released because if you put it out into the public domain, suddenly you now have the ability to identify people maybe who weren't previously identified and so on.
Now, let's talk for a moment about this entrapment issue because I take it that you believe, and I do too, That there was an element of choreography here.
Obviously, the FBI didn't stage the entire Trump rally.
That was happening anyway, but they knew it was coming.
And so the question I have is this.
Is it possible that the authorities decided, look, what we need to do is to get some people from this rally, which is going on out there, Into the Capitol.
And we have to get them into the Capitol at a time when the members are in there, because that will create an immediate sense that they are doing something horrific.
And then we have a crackdown.
And the purpose of the crackdown is to shut down the debate about election fraud 2020.
That's our real objective.
And so light security...
Someone taking down the fences.
You've got people like Ray Epps and others egging the crowd on toward the Capitol.
Then, as you say from this document, you've got lots of police plants who, at the very least, are doing nothing to discourage people from going into the Capitol.
So... Will we ever really get to the truth of this?
Because the left is really indignant.
They say, well, of course we have some plants and the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers because we're monitoring these extremist groups and we should be monitoring them.
That's a whole different thing from saying that we created an entrapment scheme.
How do you think about that issue?
Well, I agree with you.
Looking back in this retrospectively, it's very obvious to see What happened and that Trump supporters were, in fact, entrapped.
There are two sort of theories of entrapment.
There's old school entrapment, where you're induced knowingly by an officer, and then there's entrapment by estoppel.
Entrapment by estoppel is when you, Dinesh, as a reasonable person, rely on representations made by the government or somebody who appears to be in government, either by writing, by publication, or by words.
So, for instance, when the President of the United States says in good faith, Walk down to the Capitol and have your voices heard, because he knows there are eight protests down there that are allotted for the Capitol grounds.
People turn around, they look at Constitution and Pennsylvania avenues, and they see that they are sectioned off as parade routes.
And those parade routes take you directly to the Capitol grounds, where eight of the allotted protests are.
And then you cross this boundary into the protest land, and then you're accused of being illegally on Capitol grounds.
That is entrapment by estoppel, 100%.
When an officer waves you in or is standing by a door and lets you walk in and other people are walking around and he doesn't say, hey, stop, that's entrapment by estoppel.
If you have other officers who are saying, hey, come this way, hey, do this, hey, do that, that is old school entrapment.
And you also have a theory of defense, what's called outrageous government conduct.
And under that theory, it's like the government's conduct was so outrageous that day, they just departed from norms of regular policing and regular doing things the right way, that but for their outrageous conduct, most of what happened would have never happened that day.
Do I think that the truth is going to come out?
I absolutely do, because the amount of information that's out there is overwhelming They're not going to be able to surprise it in the day and age that we live in.
I'm just more concerned about what they're going to do between now and the day that that happens in order to make dependence on the government sort of a permanent thing in this country.
Wow. Thanks very much, Joseph McBride.
Great to have you as always. I'm looking forward to having you back as these developments continue to unfold.
God bless you, Dinesh.
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Recently, the GOP-led House of Representatives repealed a congressional provision allocating almost $80 billion to the IRS to, over 10 years, hire a whole bunch of new agents.
And the House Republicans said, listen, you don't need the money.
You're going to just use this money to badger, harass, and rip off the taxpayer.
And I want to focus on a particular case that seems to show the IRS doing exactly that.
I know about the case only because it wound its way up to the Supreme Court.
And the Supreme Court basically weighed in and slapped down the IRS for imposing really a ridiculously excessive penalty on a guy for not reporting his foreign bank accounts.
Now, let's go into the story a little bit because the guy, his name is Alexandru Bittner.
He was born in communist Romania.
He moved to the United States when he was a young guy.
But then when the Soviet Union collapsed, he moved back to Romania from 1990 to 2011.
So he lived in the post-Soviet bloc for about 20 years.
Now, he was a really successful guy.
He had a bunch of businesses and he opened up a whole bunch of foreign bank accounts.
Then later he moves back to the United States and he discovers that he is required, as someone who has these foreign bank accounts, simply to file a report with the IRS noting that he has these bank accounts.
He says, I didn't even know I was supposed to do that, but he hired an attorney and the attorney said, I'll prepare the documents for you.
And so he filed them.
Now the IRS basically said that this guy did not file these timely reports.
For five years, 2007 to 2011.
Again, reports that he didn't know he needed to file.
And so the IRS decides to fine him.
Now, the correct amount to fine him, because apparently there were five years and he didn't file a report for five years, is $10,000 per year.
So the amount that they could fine him, remember, when you don't know there's a law, it doesn't excuse you from having to follow the law.
You still have to do it.
And so the IRS should have probably fined this guy $50,000, which was a small fraction of the total amount of money in those accounts.
He could easily have paid it.
But the IRS decided not to do that.
They decided that for each account that he didn't file a report, It's a separate violation.
And it needs to have a $10,000 fine attached not to each report, not each annual report, but to each particular accountant.
Because this guy had a whole bunch of accounts, it turns out that the IRS stuck him with a penalty.
Let me look for the actual number here.
It was a penalty of $2.72 million.
And let's remember, this is not even money he owes the IRS. This is not taxes that are due.
This is simply fines for failing to file a report.
And by counting all the accounts and multiplying it across all these years, they go, oh yeah...
We're $10,000 per account per report, $2.72 million.
So this goes up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court takes a look.
First of all, the Supreme Court takes a look at the law.
And Justice Gorsuch writing for the court goes, wait a minute, the law doesn't speak about any accounts.
It doesn't say that if you have one account, you file one report.
If you have 10 accounts, you file 10 reports.
The law simply says that you file an annual report, one report.
For all the accounts. So if this guy didn't file the report for a year for 10 accounts, he's only due one report.
You want to fine him $10,000?
That's the correct amount. You can't decide on your own IRS. Let's just basically, you know, shake the guy down and count each account as requiring a separate report.
So this was essentially, you must almost call it a devious scheme by the IRS. And the point I'm trying to get here is that when we're dealing with the law, the IRS is supposed to be, think of it, they're supposed to be the guys enforcing the law.
But what they're doing is manipulating the law and going above and beyond the clear language of the law to stick this guy with a fine for, again, not taxes due, but not filing reports.
And so what does the Supreme Court do?
They reverse the decision of the lower court.
Lower court sometimes can be kind of, you know, they defer to the IRS. You're the IRS. You know how to calculate these things.
No, Justice Gorsuch goes, I'm looking at the law, and the law talks about reports.
Now, interestingly, this was not really an ideological decision because I'm looking at the dissent.
The dissent is Amy Coney Barrett, Justice Thomas, Elena Kagan, and Sotomayor.
So this is a case where you do have a majority on Gorsuch's side, and I think that's the correct side.
But the real point I'm trying to expose here is to show that the concerns that the House Republicans have about the IRS seem to be justified.
It's not merely a tax collection agency.
It's also kind of, as this case shows, a harassment agency.
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Go to patriotmobile.com slash Dinesh or call 878-PATRIOT. I want to talk about the corruption of the think tanks and the way in which think tanks are compromised, in this case, by getting a lot of money from the defense industry.
Now, the reason this is important is that you've got these prominent think tanks.
I'm thinking of places like the Atlantic Council, the Hudson Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and they are all in on the war in Ukraine.
Yeah, more arms for Ukraine.
We can't let Ukraine lose.
What's this about World War III? That's all nonsensical rhetoric.
So you have these warmongering think tanks.
And I haven't mentioned it, but I'm a think tank guy myself.
I spent... 20 years of my career, well, not quite, almost, in the American Enterprise Institute, about 11 years, and then about seven years at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
So I know these institutions extremely well.
It seems like, increasingly, these are institutions that used to rely to a large degree on individual donors, sometimes small donors or big donors.
Places like Heritage, small donors and big donors.
Places like AEI, bigger donors and corporate donors.
And there always has been an issue of what exactly is the relationship between these corporations.
As long as it's pretty generic, a corporation goes, well, I like the fact that the American Enterprise Institute is pro-free market, then it's okay.
Because that actually represents the thinking of the scholars at the American Enterprise Institute.
They're not kowtowing to get tax benefits to a particular company.
It's a whole different matter when the very large defense industries which benefit from war, why?
Because they sell war material and war equipment, are the ones bankrolling the think tanks that are sort of storming the intellectual barricades and the media barricades for the war to not only continue but to ramp up.
Now, a researcher has taken a look at the flow of money from these big defense contractors to these think tanks, and it's pretty eye-opening.
I mean, above and beyond the money, by the way, there's also a flow of personnel.
You got guys from Boeing and Northrop Grumman who end up at the think tanks, and then they go into government, and then they go back to the defense industry.
So you've got this revolving door.
Think of the guy who's running the Pentagon, Lloyd Austin.
Before he took this position, what was he doing?
Well, he's on the board of directors at Raytheon, a massive defense contractor, and that is actually pretty normal.
So these are corporations.
These defense corporations, they produce intelligence reports through the think tanks.
And the intelligence reports say, you know, everyone to the barricades.
And then a media environment is created that riles up Congress.
Congress allocates the funding.
The funding goes to the defense industry.
So the point being that none of this is really based upon the needs of the country or the national interest per se.
It's based upon really what benefits not America.
It's not America first.
It's Raytheon first and Boeing first and Northrop Grumman first and so on.
Let's look at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In their reports, they disclose who gave over $500,000 to this think tank.
There we find Northrop Grumman Corporation, massive defense contractor, who gave between $200,000 and $499,000.
General Atomics, Energy and Defense Corporation, they make predator drones.
Lockheed Martin, another company called SAIC, which provides information technology to the military.
You come down to $100,000 to $200,000, Bechtel, Boeing, General Dynamics, again, one defense contractor after another.
Now we go to Center for New American Security, pretty much the same names.
Over $500,000, Northrop Grumman Corporation.
$250,000 to $499,000, Lockheed Martin.
And you come down to the Hudson Institute, a A conservative-leaning think tank, but nevertheless, we're not going to spare them.
Large donations, General Atomics.
Again, a defense supplier.
Lockheed Martin.
Northrop Grumman.
Go to the Atlantic Council.
Largest contributors, Airbus.
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Corporation, International Institute for Strategic Studies.
This is actually based in London.
Contributions over £100,000.
Airbus, Boeing, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon.
£25,000 to £100,000, Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems.
We go on to the Australian Policy Institute.
Pretty much the same story.
Boeing, Lockheed.
Is that when you look at these reports from the think tanks, you go, here's an important study looking at the defense capabilities of Ukraine and Russia.
And you think this is an objective study produced by some sort of academic who's taking a year off at Emory University, is now coming, let's say, to the Hudson Institute.
But you don't realize that there are also other factors at work.
These think tanks are dependent upon these donations that they get, particularly now that some of these think tanks, ever since they went sort of never Trump, I'm now talking about the right-leaning ones, they began to jeopardize their support from donors, both small and large donors.
They become more dependent upon the lobbying industry.
They become more dependent also on digital donations from places like Google and Facebook.
They become more dependent on donations coming from other countries like Qatar and so on.
So you've got a compromised pink tank sector.
I guess that's the point I'm trying to make.
And therefore, we have to take their research with a grain of salt.
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The atmosphere on the American campus continues to display its...
Deep intolerance.
I want to continue a story I've talked about earlier, the aftermath of the protest at Stanford.
This was the protest that shut down a judge from speaking, Judge Duncan, Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit.
And in that case, the dean of diversity or the vice president of diversity was egging on the protesters and was lecturing the judge about how he shouldn't be, his opinions are not that important compared to dividing the community, as she put it. And so this kind of stuff has now become depressingly normalized.
And there's an aftermath of that that I will get to.
But I also want to pivot to a new incident, which is Charlie Kirk was speaking at UC Davis.
And a whole bunch of activists, apparently trans activists, showed up.
And there are videos now on social media.
They're screaming. Antifa shows up.
They were trying to apparently barge their way into the event.
And the sad thing is all of this was incited.
And I use that word carefully.
In fact, keeping in mind the way it is misused in connection with January 6th.
But incited by the president of the university.
I don't know the guy's name.
This black guy, I see him on social media.
And he's like, Charlie Kirk is a divisive figure.
Charlie Kirk is coming here to say loathsome things.
We're going to be monitoring what he says to see if there are some criminal violations.
So this is the president of the university giving the idea that a criminal or a potential criminal is coming to campus, someone who might need to be prosecuted.
And sure enough, these activist students go.
We've got to stop this guy.
So this is a guy, I think, who is proving to be a very dangerous figure in blocking free speech, blocking a mainstream conservative from coming to campus and talking.
And somehow you now have this idea that because students need to have a safe space, if somebody challenges their ideas, you are a threat to the university environment.
Apparently the university environment has now got to be re-crafted in a way that no one's ideas are fundamentally questioned, at least not the ideas that are coming from the left.
We'll see how that all plays out.
But coming back to Stanford, this judge, by the way, what is his real offense?
His real offense supposedly, this kind of makes me chuckle, is that he misgendered a litigant who identifies as a woman.
Now let's look at who this litigant is.
The litigant was apparently twice convicted for receiving child pornography.
So we're dealing basically with a kind of at least aspiring pedophile.
And evidently the judge misgendered the pedophile.
And so the Stanford students who are yelling and screaming and want to shut the judge from speaking are rallying to the defense of a pedophile.
That's the situation, I think, as objectively as I can put it.
Well, Stanford apologized.
The president of the university and the law school dean, a woman named Jenny Martinez, signed a letter saying this should not have happened.
We are committed to free speech.
And guess what? Jenny Martinez goes back to her constitutional law class, which she teaches at Stanford, and she discovers that the whole whiteboard is covered with posters and basically attacking her.
Basically taking the side of the Dean of Diversity and saying that Stanford was wrong to apologize and that they have every right to shut down a judge who, as they see it, is coming there to peddle his intolerance.
So in other words, the Stanford activists think intolerance is good because it's blocking the judge's intolerance.
And the judge was basically going to read.
He even had a prepared speech.
And he's a mild-mannered fellow because if you watch the video, he's like, Can you reach out for an administrator to come and help adjudicate the situation?
So he couldn't be more polite and easygoing.
But no, the radicals are the ones who inflict violence and then they accuse the speaker of violence, rhetorical violence.
But which is worse, rhetorical violence or real violence?
So real violence is being deployed by the left supposedly to block this rhetorical violence.
The protest in Dean Martinez's constitutional law class apparently was almost a third of the whole law school.
So think of it. They've got that many activists.
Now, when I was in college, there were activists and you could round them up and they looked like a pretty large number, but then compared to the full size of the school, they were a tiny faction.
But apparently here in the law school, they riled up enough people or they corralled enough people.
The students, by the way, who didn't participate, there are a couple of them quoted in an article that I read in Free Beacon.
And they say, you know, this was the true intolerance because they keep talking about people.
We... We don't want the judge to speak because we need to have an inclusive environment.
They go, there's nothing inclusive about this environment.
In fact, we are in this class intimidated and we are glared at by the protesters for not joining.
They're like, what's wrong with you?
Why are you here only to study?
Why are you here only to learn the law?
Aren't there other better things to go to college for?
Isn't that why you're really in law school?
To learn to become a professional agitator?
Don't you know our real techniques?
We basically cause trouble and we sue the city.
We find friendly Democrats running the city.
They agree to pay us a settlement.
That's really how we make money in modern-day America.
This is the new leftist modus operandi.
Get with the program, guys.
Why are you studying the Constitution and contract?
So this is really what our universities have come to.
And at some level, I think I have to say objectively that there's really no saving them.
we need at this point a new model altogether.
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The philosopher Immanuel Kant famously said that by showing the limits of reason, I am clearing the way for faith, religious faith.
Kant was a Lutheran and as far as we know, a pretty devout one.
Now, some people think that Kant's philosophy is skeptical in the mode of Hume and Berkeley.
But in reality, Kant is answering skepticism, but he's doing it by taking the skeptical argument seriously.
And the skeptical argument is, how do we really know that our perception of the world out there corresponds to the world out there?
How do we know that these are the same thing and that we're getting reliable knowledge of the world through our senses?
This is a question, by the way, that goes to the very heart of modern Western philosophy.
Let's remember that Descartes kind of locked himself in a dark room asking the simple question, if I can't trust my senses, how can I know anything?
How can I know for sure something that I can know beyond not just reasonable doubt, but beyond any doubt?
If we fast forward a little bit from Descartes to Locke, Locke noticed something about objects in the world.
He noticed that they have what he called primary and secondary properties.
So a primary property is a property that the object has in itself.
Look, for example, at a stone.
It has weight. It has mass.
Even if you and I were not in the room, but there was a weighing scale, the stone would still register a weight.
Those properties, which Locke calls primary, are independent of us.
But now think of something else.
The stone has a certain color.
Let's say gray, or it has a certain odor.
And so Locke says those are the secondary properties of the stone.
Why? Because they depend on us.
They depend on us and our senses.
If we didn't have a nose to smell it, there's nothing called smell that exists apart from the human faculty or the animal faculty of being able to smell something.
The stone only has a color because we have eyes that can see color.
If somebody was colorblind, they wouldn't see color.
And of course, if you just break down the stone into its smallest constituents, all you get are atoms and molecules.
You don't really get any color.
There's no color there in the stone is kind of Locke's point.
So right away we see with Locke, he's making a distinction between the world, that as he sees it, is independent of us, and then the world that is dependent on us, the world as it is perceived through human faculties and human senses.
Now, the philosopher George Berkeley comes along and he sort of radicalizes Locke's insight.
He radicalizes it by saying, wait a minute.
You, Locke, appear to be saying that qualities like weight and mass are intrinsic to the stone, but color and smell are only seen through my senses and through my mind.
But Berkeley goes, that's not really true.
If you pay careful attention to observing a stone, you'll notice that all of the stone, the weight, the mass, the sort of solidity of the stone, the smell, the color, are all being perceived by you in your mind.
Remove your mind and ask yourself, what's left?
And the answer is nothing.
There's no stone. The stone exists in your perception.
So what Berkeley is getting at is that the whole world, all of it, comes to us through our perceptions.
And therefore, Berkeley says, we often think that our perceptions are representing or reflecting a kind of independent world that exists outside of us and separate from us.
But Berkeley says that if you pay careful attention to...
Perception, you notice that the perception is all you have.
You can never separate your perception of the world from the world itself.
You can never say, here is the stone, and here is the stone as observed by me.
No, there's only a stone observed by you.
There's no independent stone that can somehow be subtracted We're good to go.
What do you experience? You experience the touch and the feel of the water, the sound and smell of the ocean, and that's it.
And if somebody were to ask you, well, isn't there a separate ocean that exists apart from your perception of it, you'd have to say, no, I can't be sure that there is that at all, because all I have, if I really focus in, all I have are the perceptions, and that's pretty much it.
Now, Kant is very aware of all this.
Hume, by the way, is operating very much in the same tradition as Berkeley.
In fact, Hume sort of radicalizes Berkeley by saying not only can we not be sure about the world out there, we can't even be sure about ourselves.
Why? Because when we think that we are having feelings and we are having perceptions and we are observing this and we are thinking that, Hume says, no, you have thoughts.
The thoughts exist. But where's this we?
Where's the I? Where's the independent being that somehow is having these perceptions?
No. As far as you're aware, there are the perceptions.
You're conscious of the perceptions.
And I suppose you can infer that there must be some I that's having them.
But even that is a mere inference.
Hume says, you don't have independent knowledge of this I. So, see how far skepticism has gone.