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March 27, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:35
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF CORRUPTION Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep545
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Coming up, I'll expose the Southern District of New York as the launching pad for the left's war against Republicans, starting with Trump.
I'll reveal how the Capitol Police has infiltrators among the January 6th protesters, egging the crowd into the Capitol.
And commentator CJ Pearson joins me.
We're going to talk about why race doesn't matter.
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And if you're watching on Rumble, please do the same.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We are back from vacation.
It was a really good one.
And Debbie was threatening not to return.
She's like, I'll follow you a week later.
She loves Punta Mita.
That's where we went. It's called Punta Mita, Mexico.
And honestly, I had never heard of it.
Debbie found it online. She showed me some pictures.
It looked really, really nice.
And we had some last minute anxieties because of some of the incidents that have occurred in Mexico.
Is it really safe? Turns out this is a very safe part of Mexico.
Anyway, we had a great time.
I might be looking a little bit of a shade darker, but it was a wonderful 7th anniversary getaway for both of us.
Well, I'm back to reality and we're back to what's happening with Alvin Bragg in New York.
And I guess this is the week where we're going to find out if Alvin Bragg is going to push ahead with this prosecution of Donald Trump.
I mean, let's take in the sheer spectacle of this.
Indicting? The leading, first of all, indicting a former president.
Unprecedented. Number two, indicting the leading candidate of the opposition party with the obvious and apparent goal of putting him out of contention.
Now you might say, wait a minute, if Trump is indicted, he can still run.
Yeah, but the idea is to discourage his donors.
He's under indictment.
He might be found guilty of a felony.
After all, This is New York.
The jury is going to be as bad as it is in Washington, D.C. for the January 6th defendants.
So even if the case has very limited or virtually no merit, I mean, think about it.
Are we literally talking about Stormy Daniels again?
Apparently, yes, we are.
And all of this, if it goes forward, I think the grand jury may be having some anxiety about it.
Because the grand jury is recognizing, first of all, that this is a very murky case.
Number two, the chief witnesses have...
Well, virtually no credibility at all.
A disgraced lawyer, Michael Cohen, who actually was found criminally convicted, served time.
Stormy Daniels, a porn star.
I mean, these are your star witnesses.
And I'll talk in the next segment about the merits of the case, but you'll see how both of them explicitly disavow that what Alvin Bragg is trying to say took place, took place.
They deny under their own signature and in their own words that it took place.
So we'll come back to that.
But this is a nest of corruption.
And I'm not talking about Trump.
I'm talking about the Southern District of New York, the venue through which Alvin Bragg will, if he goes ahead, push through this prosecution.
In a way, I think he's in a almost impossible position because if he backs down now, it's almost like he'd have to resign.
Because this is like a case of threatening prosecution.
I mean, think of it. Barricades were put up for an imminent arrest.
The media, of course, has descended on New York en masse.
There are two left-wing protesters out there.
Get rid of Trump with like 70 reporters all, you know, running video and taking photos.
So the circus has already begun, but apparently there are no elephants.
So this is a case where Bragg has got to either go ahead, which I think in desperation he's going to try to do, and he's going to use the corrupt venue or the corrupt operation of the SDNY to push through with it.
Now, I'm familiar with these SDNY characters, the Southern District of New York.
These are people who are very used to operating in a very underhanded way.
People sometimes say things like, well, why would Trump make a payment to Stormy Daniels even if the money came through Cohen?
Why would he do it if he's not guilty?
This is like the same people who ask things like, well, Dinesh, you pleaded guilty to violating the campaign finance laws.
Why would you do it? Why would you plead guilty if you didn't violate them?
And the answer was, there are a number of defenses available to me, but because of the conduct of both the SDNY and cooperative judges, in my case, a judge named Richard Berman.
So we went to Judge Berman and said, hey, Judge Berman, I'd like to show that I've been selectively prosecuted.
No American in the entire history of the country has been even charged with doing what I did.
First time offense, no corruption, no quid pro quo, small amount over the limit.
Show me one other case where this was even prosecuted in this way.
Prosecuted as a felony as opposed to a misdemeanor with just a warning.
And there was no such case.
But what happened is Judge Berman, working in conjunction with the STNY, basically goes, I'm not going to let you go there.
I'm not going to allow that line of questioning. In fact, I'm not going to give you access to your FBI file, which would show that you were kind of highlighted as a political opponent of Obama.
It shows the political motives for the selective prosecution. I'm not going to let you go there.
What I'm getting at is there is a despicable operation in New York. It's like these are hit men with legal credentials and with judges in their back pocket or with judges who are willing to do their bidding. Of course, in my case, it wasn't Alvin Bragg.
It was the Asian-Indian ruthless careerist named Preet Bharara.
And this same operation, which has been deployed against one person after another, is now being deployed against Trump.
So while I'll discuss in the next segment the merits of the case, in some ways you've got to realize when you're dealing with the SDNY, the merits of the case don't seem to matter at all.
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Use discount code AMERICA. I'm talking about the potential for a Trump prosecution, the Stormy Daniels case all over again.
And, you know, thinking back to my own case, the prosecution unable to come up with a comparable case.
When I went to my sentencing, they produced a whole bunch of cases and just lied about them.
In other words, left out a whole bunch of significant facts.
I mean, real judicial malpractice produced by the city, by the Southern District of New York, under Preet Bharar, the prosecutor, was a woman, a different person.
I actually forget her name. But in any event, she's a very forgettable individual.
But they go to the judge and they say, oh, Dinesh should get two years in federal prison or he should get a year in federal prison because look at all these other cases where these people got these sentences.
And what they did was leave out significant facts in all those cases, like a repeat offender or a guy who had, this was not a case of giving $20,000 over the limit, but $200,000 or $600,000 over the limit.
Or you had a person who was trying to buy a federal judgeship, so in other words, getting a corrupt deal with a politician.
All of this was left out.
And my lawyer Ben Brafman found it and showed the judge.
And you think the judge would at the very least, if he wasn't going to hold these guys in contempt of court, would at the very least say, guys, you've got to stop lying.
You can't show me cases and leave significant facts out.
But the judge was perfectly okay with it.
It's almost like he was used to it.
It's almost like he was in on it.
It's almost like he knew that lying is part of what these guys do.
And their goal is basically to get this conservative dissident, this anti-Obama guy, get him to be treated severely.
And I, Judge Berman, I'm not going to do exactly what the prosecution, but I'm going to hit him in my own way.
So this is how this operation is carried out.
Now, let's turn to the Trump case for a minute.
Here is a statement from Michael Cohen's attorney named Stephen Ryan.
It's dated February 8, 2018, and he's writing to the government.
And he says very clearly, in a private transaction in 2016, before the U.S. presidential election, Mr.
Cohen used his own personal funds to facilitate a payment of $130,000 to Miss Stephanie Clifford.
That's Stormy Daniels.
He says neither the Trump organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms.
Clifford and neither reimbursed Mr.
Cohen for the payment directly or indirectly.
Boom! This is actually Michael Cohen himself speaking through his attorney, denying that he got reimbursed, denying that there were campaign funds used.
And then here, separately, is an official statement from Stormy Daniels, dated January 30th, 2018.
I'm just going to read the keep.
Over the past few weeks, I've been asked countless times to comment on reports of an alleged sexual relationship I had with Donald Trump many, many years ago.
The fact of the matter is that each party to this alleged affair denied its existence in 2006, 2011, 2016, 2017, and now again in 2018.
I'm not denying this affair because I was paid, quote, hush money.
As has been reported in overseas-owned tabloids, I'm denying this affair because it never happened.
I will have no further comment on this matter.
Think about this. If you take this case to court before a jury, right here, we have reasonable doubt.
In other words, even if you say, well, we don't know what really happened and people sometimes deny that what happened happened and they have motives to do it and so on, the simple fact of it is, do you really think you can get a conviction Unless you're not dealing with the real jury at all, but as sort of a sham jury, a Stalinist-style show trial, where the trial is only being put on as a kind of public performance.
The outcome is foreordained in advance.
The jurors will convict no matter what.
Even if Trump never met Stormy Daniels, he's still going to be convicted.
Unless you think that American judicial system has been reduced to that.
If someone is even going to remotely apply the doctrine of reasonable doubt, and you have two key witnesses, Michael Cohen...
I used my own money to pay Stormy Daniels.
I never got reimbursed.
And then Stormy Daniels, I may have gotten paid, but it might have been a shakedown.
In any event, the affair never happened.
I can testify truthfully on my own behalf that it never occurred.
How can you possibly convict anybody on those statements or based upon those facts?
And by facts here, I mean these are legally admissible facts that will be brought up and there's probably a whole lot more to go with it.
So the whole thing is a farce.
And already I noticed some on the left are beginning to pull away from this sort of Stormy Daniels case.
They're putting now more hope in the Georgia case or they're putting more hope in the special counsel, Jack Smith and the Mar-a-Lago raid, the confidential documents case.
But it looks like this case is whatever happens this week, whether there's an indictment or no, it's going to end up as a dud.
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You'll feel the difference. There's a lot of stuff going on in connection with January 6th, ongoing trials, new information that's coming out.
Rather than try to sweep it all into a single segment, I think today I'm going to focus on just one thing, and then I'll tell you more about some of the others as the week goes on.
So the new development is that we now have federal prosecutors admitting in court.
That Metropolitan Police Department undercover officers acted as provocateurs at the northern steps of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
Now, you'll remember, you may remember, I had January 6th attorney Joseph McBride on, and he talked about this.
He talked about the fact that there weren't just FBI instigators.
FBI plants at the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers.
But there were also Metropolitan Police dressed up in sort of MAGA outfits or Back the Blue or just American patriotic gear.
And they were in the crowd and they were egging on the crowd.
So we had this coming from a January 6th attorney, but what we didn't have is all the video showing it.
And what we didn't have was the prosecutors admitting it.
Yes, this was true.
We did have our guys. They were doing this.
That video is, in fact, accurate.
Now, there's one of the defendants.
His name is William Pope.
He's from Topeka, Kansas.
And he has asked the judge, a fellow in Judge Contreras, Rudolph Contreras, US District Judge, I need to have the video that shows these undercover metropolitan police doing this stuff.
And the prosecution is like, no, no, judge, you can't give him the video.
And the judge is like, well, why not?
Isn't he entitled to the video?
Yeah, but he wants to release the video publicly.
So, if you give the video over to the defendant, he's welcome to.
In fact, in this case, this William Pope fellow is representing himself.
There's nothing to prohibit him from releasing the video.
No one denies the video is authentic.
It's video that was taken, really, by the government itself.
But we have the assistant US attorney.
This is Kelly Moran. The defendant is not entitled to undesignate these videos to share them with unlimited third parties.
His desire to try the case in the media rather than the court of law is illegitimate.
No one says he's trying the case in the media.
He's just releasing the videos because he thinks the public would like to know that you see undercover cops Not only egging the crowd on, rah, rah, rah, but pushing them and driving them in the direction of the Capitol.
It's almost like they want them to go into the Capitol because they are trying to lead them into a trap.
And that's really, I think, the larger significance of this.
It's not just a matter of video coming out.
And it's not just a matter of having instigators.
It's that the instigators are directing the crowd into the Capitol, where, of course, they're all going to now face...
More than 1,000 of them, maybe as many as 2,000 of them, charges for offenses as simple as just walking in and then walking back out.
Now, let's turn to some of this video.
We're aware of the contents of it, and I want to relay what that is.
Here you are. You got undercover metropolitan police officer telling one protester, go up to the building.
Go join him then.
And the guy actually doesn't want to do it.
He goes, no, I got my bike here.
I need to guard my bike.
So here you have the undercover cop trying to egg this guy to go in toward the Capitol and into the building when the guy doesn't really want to go.
Think of what's going on here.
It's not that he committed a crime and then they decided to go after him for it.
They're trying to lead him into committing a crime.
The cop is doing this.
Another case, you have Officer One joining in chants of, drain the swamp, our house, our house, our house.
Now think about what that means. Think about the chant.
It's our house. A lot of people were under the idea that because the Capitol is the people's house, there are no limits on when you can go in there.
This, of course, is wrong.
And it's not the case that just because it is, quote, the people's house, you can walk in at any time.
No, there are times when you can visit the Capitol.
So it was not a good idea to go into the Capitol.
But what I'm getting at here, here's a metropolitan police officer by shouting, our house, our house.
He's egging on the crowd and thinking, hey, listen, that's like your house.
There's nothing stopping you from going in there.
Feel free to go right in.
The police are encouraging the criminal activity that they will then turn around and And apprehend these people for.
The cops are joining in not just USA chants, but they're directing people.
Come on, man. Let's go. Let's go.
Keep going. Keep going.
Keep going where? Keep going toward the Capitol.
And here is our defendant, Mr.
Pope. He goes, quote, This video clearly evidences undercover law enforcement officers' Because the government can claim it didn't happen, but here it is.
Here's the video evidence that it does.
And then, of course, the government, which knows that releasing this video to the public is going to be damaging.
Damaging, of course, to the bogus narrative of January 6th.
They're basically saying that if you release the video, it could put the officer's lives at risk.
The good old lives at risk.
Quote, there are very specific and highly worrisome risks associated with the specific videos the defendant seeks to share en masse.
So this is a case where the government now is afraid of releasing true information.
This is, by the way, like censoring true information about COVID. We're good to go.
I don't think that Judge Contreras is buying all this.
We'll wait to see how he rules on the release of the videos.
But the good news is that the content of the videos is already largely available.
And let's just say that the officers are doing exactly what we suspected them of doing, namely trying to create a crime or create crimes, even in cases where no crime had taken place.
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Guys, I'm happy to welcome back to the podcast our friend CJ Pearson.
He's a PragerU personality, host of the weekly online news series, The Wrap-Up.
And you can follow him on social media at TheCJPearson.
Well, there's also, of course, at PragerU, which is the PragerU handle.
CJ, welcome to the podcast.
Great to have you.
You're a bright and...
You're outspoken young conservative.
You don't seem to hold back.
And I thought I'd start by talking about, you know, we have all this woke indoctrination in the schools and the universities.
You somehow seem to have broken free of it or immunized yourself against it.
Talk a little bit about how it is that you saw through it and then what emboldened you to sort of become an intrepid challenger of woke orthodoxy.
Yeah, well, Dinesh, first and foremost, thank you so much for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here.
And, you know, you hit on it.
You know, every single institution, educational institution across America is rampant with indoctrination.
Now, I often say that, you know, you're not getting colleges teaching students how to think anymore.
You're getting colleges teaching students what to think.
But for me, you know, I kind of had a little bit of a dry run of that growing up.
I grew up in a household raised by my grandparents who We're on the left.
But, you know, just in a similar story that you see often in the Black community, they're pretty conservative.
You know, I grew up going to church every single Sunday.
I grew up, you know, learning about the importance of family and faith and also of fiscal conservatism.
And when I first, you know, got politically involved in the second grade, because we had a mock election for the 2008 election, I remember watching that debate.
I'm probably aging myself, but only as much as a 20-year-old possibly could.
But I remember sitting on the floor of my grandparents' bedroom watching Candy Crowley moderate the debate between President Obama and then Senator John McCain.
And just thinking that, you know, what they were doing was really important.
You know, I had no idea what they were talking about.
I was a six or seven year old kid, but I wanted to know more.
And when I started looking into the platforms of conservatism and liberalism and all of those things, I realized that the values that my grandparents had instilled within me were conservative values.
And a funny story about that is I later voted for John McCain in that mock election decision.
I don't know if I would replicate today.
But I did in that election and I came home and I told my grandparents, hey, I voted for John McCain.
And they said something that I didn't quite understand then, but now I understand a lot more.
You must think that you're white.
And implying that because of that decision, you know, of course, I was...
Acting white by voting Republican.
And I had no idea what identity politics was and definitely didn't believe the color of my skin should dictate my politics.
But unfortunately, it's something I've become well acquainted with in the years since.
The way in which the left attempts to weaponize people's identity and use it to supplant their ability to think freely.
And it's not something that I wanted to embrace.
And it's actually something I actively reject.
Let's think about, CJ, when your grandparents said that to you, I want to now probe their psychology a little bit.
And my guess is that the reason they thought that, of course, in going back, it wasn't that they were subjected to woke indoctrination.
I think what happened with them is that they believed that...
An underdog community needs to have solidarity.
It needs to come together.
And so it became very easy for the left to convince a lot of blacks from the civil rights generation that a single point of view is a necessary way because we sort of have to...
locked in our arms as we marched down in Birmingham or Selma or Montgomery.
And so the whites are on the one side and the blacks are on the other.
Now, in my view, this was always a bit of an illusion.
Martin Luther King always had massive support among whites in the North.
The media, of course, largely white, was very much on the side of the civil rights movement.
So the civil rights movement was never an exclusively black cause, but it may be that this is the roots of the...
And then, of course, identity politics has picked up on this and now turned, it seems, race and not to mention gender and transgender into a virtual sacrament.
I mean, has it disturbed you the degree to which we've seen that kind of hardening or reification that's occurred in our culture?
Yeah. You know, completely.
And it's just such a, it's so detached from reality that it's almost nonsensical, right?
You know, you're talking about, you know, the black community specifically voting 93% of the time for an ideology that doesn't seemingly care about us at all.
Look at the state of black America and every single inner city in America that has been almost exclusively ran by progressive politicians for decades.
And look at what's happening in Chicago.
Look at what's happening in Detroit.
Look at what's happening in all of those cities.
You see crime. You see destitution.
You see poverty. You see failing schools.
I recently did a story here at PragerU about how 55 schools, 55 schools in Chicago had students who weren't proficient in either math or reading.
This is a reality that I think that we have to really just come to terms with.
Do we deserve better?
And I think we do.
And we should stop settling for less and start settling for more.
But yeah, to your point, it's so interesting to me how the left has really been able to gaslight A significant portion of the American people into believing and actively voting against their interests, you know, because at the end of the day, you know, you can you can take this message to the black people that you care about them, you fight about them and all those things.
But the reality has never really given that impression.
And I think that at the end of the day, I think we deserve more as a community.
And it's conservatives who have been giving more to the black community.
It's never been the left historically and today.
I mean, my view of identity politics is that those identities that are highlighted by the left are, in fact, part of the wider ensemble of identities that we all have, right?
Because we have multiple identities in the world.
And I don't just mean that we are individuals or Americans or black.
Where we have different roles and responsibilities as a son or a brother or a husband.
So we have all these different roles and identities.
Interestingly, the left appears to oppose the identities that they don't like.
They don't like the individual. They don't like the individual identity, the minority of one.
They don't like the national identity.
They treat nationalism actually as a virtual synonym for fascism.
And they highlight the racial and the gender identities.
And those identities become supreme, even though I think in people's lives, they're not necessarily supreme at all.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
We're all multifaceted human beings.
And it's interesting, too, because it's like the left actually wants you to think with the identity that is the most easily for them to victimize, right?
So they don't want you to think of yourself as a Christian, even though the majority of the black community is.
They don't want you to think of yourself as, as you said, a nationalist, because that's a dirty word.
and you know, you shouldn't love your country that much, apparently.
And it really just exposes them for who they are.
They want people to see themselves as victims.
They want you to associate yourself more so with slavery as a black person than black Wall Street.
They want you to associate yourself as a victim of bigotry if you are gay, but not anything else, not a person of triumph.
It's so interesting that, you know, we're just coming out of Black History Month.
I really find it so interesting that they love to talk and reduce Black history to nothing more than slavery and Jim Crow and segregation, when there are tons of stories of Black triumph, you know, throughout American history.
Those stories would actually give Black people hope to go.
So they don't talk about those stories.
And again, it just shows that what they're doing is actually quite malicious and quite nefarious.
And it's why I've been such an outspoken opponent of critical race theory, because I think to teach young Black children that regardless of how hard they try, how hard they work, they will always be Black in America, they will always be oppressed in America, is the actual opposite of what education is supposed to do.
Education is supposed to cultivate leaders, cultivate people who can You know, have some ingenuity about themselves, have some ambition.
Telling someone that regardless of how hard they work and how hard they try, that they will never, ever, ever achieve anything does not create leaders, does not create victors.
All it does is perpetuate victimhood.
Let's take a quick pause.
We'll be right back with CJ Pearson.
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I'm back with CJ Pearson.
He's a PragerU personality, host of the weekly online news series, The Wrap Up.
You can follow him on social media at the CJ Pearson.
CJ, you were talking about victimization.
Now, I can understand if someone is a victim...
There's a certain degree of consolation that provides you because you suddenly realize, hey, I've been mistreated and not only can I be fired up by the rage of injustice, but I now have an explanation for why I'm not doing as well as I should.
Somebody mistreated me.
What I want to ask you is, how is it possible for people who are not directly experiencing victimization in that sense?
Nobody's calling them the N-word.
Nobody's treating them badly.
They're just entering school.
They're in class with other people.
They seem to be on the same plane.
They realize it's not that white girls won't date them.
They don't have that experience. And yet, they buy into the victimization, which is, I won't say imaginary, but at the very least, it's just historical.
It's something that your great-great-grandfather experienced, but somehow you can feel the lash even though nobody has lashed you.
And I want to get at why that is attractive to people.
Why do people feel it's really cool for me to be a victim even though I'm not?
Because it's become an entire industry, right?
It's a commodity these days.
Look at Prince Harry. This is someone who even came from one of the most wealthiest families that you could ever imagine, but has somehow found a way to try to make us all feel bad for him as if we grew up in Buckingham Palace.
Like, what an infliction to have to go through.
But, you know, it's interesting, but I think it really just goes to the old adage, like, be present where you are.
We thankfully are our grandfathers, our ancestors' wildest dreams, especially if you're a minority in this country.
And for you to think that you're a victim when they went through a lot more than we ever did, and likely ever will today, is just really absurd.
And it's also a really sign of the privilege we have as Americans.
That we are so privileged that we live in such a great country, we enjoy so many freedoms, countless liberties, that we literally create problems for ourselves because we just need to feel like, you know, there's something special about us.
And unfortunately, we have confused being special with being a victim.
Like I saw, you know, this story yesterday from the New York Post about how a transgender woman cried at an airport because, quote, her testicles were hit by a TSA agent.
That is the most bizarre sentence that I've ever read in my life, but it's so 2023.
But again, another victim story, but it's becoming so absurd that I think people are just starting to realize that we can't live in this delusion forever.
You know, in the 1980s and 90s, when I first became, was writing about politics and writing about some of these racial issues, people would talk about cultural breakdown in the black community.
And what they were thinking about here was just things like broken families, parents not either present at home or able to cultivate study habits, low rates of entrepreneurship and business formation.
Now, many of those Some people even use the word pathologies, are now rampant in American culture.
I see them in white communities, no less than in black communities.
It's only, it seems, certain immigrant communities, not just, by the way, Asian Americans, but also immigrants from Trinidad, immigrants from Nigeria, pockets that are removed from American culture, which are holding on to those cultural values.
I'd just like you to comment on the idea that, do we need We're good to go.
No, I think you're exactly right.
I think we have to go back to the basics and the fundamental values of what made America America and what made our country great to begin with.
You know, things like we were talking about earlier about the lessons that my grandparents taught me, the importance of faith, the importance of family, the importance of education, but also the importance of relying on yourself to get to where you want to be.
And not having and trying to find someone to blame for the state of your life or your affairs.
But, you know, you made a really interesting point.
I've seen it in my travels and so much.
It's so interesting. The immigrant community in America today, and this, I think, is a really big indicator of why we are in the situation that we are as a country.
They love America more than Americans love America.
I think that's truly concerning because they know what true despair is like.
They know what true tyranny is like.
They've seen the effects of socialism.
They know it's not this rosy idea that is this infinite solution to all of our problems.
They know that it actually destroys and never creates.
But that's the thing.
We have to have a revival, not of just spiritual and cultural awakening.
We have a revival of nationalism.
People should love America, and they should not be ashamed to love America.
And I think that it's sickening in the way in which the left has somehow found a way to demonize the greatest country in the world and somehow demonize, having pride, the place where we live, the place where we work, and the place where we grow and raise our families.
You're raising a really key point, and it's tricky because I find in my own case that my love for America is diminishing a little, I'm sorry to say.
And I say that because it's not that I don't love the ideals of America, but when I look at America, and particularly as represented by the Biden regime, things it's doing around the world, for example, the attack on the mores of traditional cultures all around the world, it's almost as if And to some degree, we have become the evil empire, at least in our policies.
And I think what you're saying, we're not disagreeing, really, is that we need to recreate the America that is lovable.
You know, Edmund Burke said, to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
And I think that's a little bit of what Trump says when he says, make America great again.
He means, in part, make America lovely and make America lovable again.
Hey, CJ Pearson, thank you so much for joining me.
me a real pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
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On our recent vacation last week in Punta Mira, a very beautiful pocket of Mexico, right on the ocean, Debbie's like, we need to do yoga!
And so, believe it or not, in seven days, we went to three.
Was it three, honey? Three yoga classes.
And they do the stretching, which is really good for us and good for my joints.
It makes me feel great the rest of the day.
But toward the end of it, they also do yogic meditation.
And Debbie's chuckling because she knows what's coming.
But the funny thing is they have a little bell and they kind of tinkle on it.
And you're supposed to...
And this was our yoga instructor.
She'd be like, clear your mind.
You have... No place to go, and you have nothing to do, and you have nothing to think about.
Essentially, empty your brain.
And afterwards, Debbie and I were talking about it, and Debbie goes, well, did you empty your brain?
And I go, well, I tried to, but I found myself really focused on the euthyphro problem in Plato.
And she goes, what are you talking about?
And so I want to actually tell you what I was thinking about when I tried to empty my brain.
So there is a problem that's called the Euthyphro Dilemma.
It's named after a platonic dialogue called the Euthyphro.
And basically, Plato, well, a little bit of a background on Plato.
Plato is always making the case for the philosophical life.
Let's remember that in Plato's day, and to some degree this has been true through the centuries, people have advocated different types of ideals about what is the best kind of person to be.
Is it best to be a soldier and exhibit the virtue of courage?
Is it best to be a poet like Homer or Milton and essentially be an artist, a novelist, we would say today?
Or is it better to be a priest and pursue the ideal of liturgy or holiness or the spokesman or mediation for the gods?
Or is the rational, the philosophical life in pursuit of wisdom the best?
So you can see with Plato, he's always in his dialogues conducting a little bit of a polemic against the others.
A polemic against the poets.
In fact, Plato says the poet should be banished from the Republic.
Why? Because in Plato's view, or actually in Socrates' view, Plato's speaking through the mouth of Socrates, the poets are liars.
Just like a fiction story is a lie.
It's made up. It's not true.
Plato's point is you shouldn't tell people things that aren't true.
And so... So Plato disses, as we would say today, the poets.
He provides a rival to the ideal of the soldier.
In fact, Plato argues that the philosopher embodies the virtue of courage, just as the soldier does.
And finally, Plato is conducting a little bit of a polemic against the priests, against the people who claim to speak for the gods.
And this is the root of Plato's so-called yutifro question.
And here's the question. Is something good or bad?
Because God says it is.
Or is something good or bad because it is good or bad in itself?
And God simply affirms what is already the case.
So God is on the side of good, yes.
But not because good derives its goodness from God's say-so.
But it is good already.
It would be good even if God didn't exist.
But God comes around and goes, Oh yeah, that's good.
And I recognize it to be good because I'm God and I'm on the side of the good.
And this is Plato's point.
Plato wants to make the case that That goodness and badness can be disentangled from any source in God per se.
God is merely, you may say, showing up to recognize that something is already good.
And Plato presents this not as a conclusion, but as a question.
Does goodness and badness derive its goodness and badness from divine degree?
Or is it good or bad in and of itself?
And I was thinking about this problem.
I thought to myself... There has to be something wrong with this Platonic formulation of it.
It doesn't really make sense to me.
And I was thinking that it doesn't even make sense to me in the context, not just of Christianity or the Christian gods, but it makes sense even in the context of the Greek gods.
So when we think back to the Greek gods like Poseidon and the river god, or let's think of Aphrodite.
Aphrodite is described very often as the goddess of love, the goddess of eros, the goddess of romance.
And we sometimes think that what this means is that Aphrodite was an advocate of romance and Eros.
So Aphrodite recognized and celebrated Eros, or Aphrodite is used in a metaphorical sense to picture Eros, but actually none of this is the case.
In the Greek understanding, Aphrodite is Eros.
Aphrodite doesn't have eros as an attribute or quality.
That's not like Aphrodite has hair and Aphrodite is a woman and Aphrodite has two feet and Aphrodite in that sense also has as one of her qualities eros.
No, the idea is that eros and Aphrodite are inseparable.
They're one and the same.
Aphrodite is a kind of embodiment of Eros and not a mere advocate or representative of it.
And I think this is really important because this is also the case in Christianity.
Goodness is not an attribute or quality of God.
God is not just good, but God is goodness.
And God is goodness in the sense that God cannot be anything other than goodness in the same way that God cannot be anything other than wisdom and cannot be anything other than omnipotence and cannot be anything other than perfection.
God is those things.
Those aren't just qualities of God.
Now, see, with human beings, we talk about the qualities.
This guy's a really good guy.
But the reason that that makes sense is that this guy has the option to be a bad guy.
So, goodness and badness become qualities or attributes of human beings, and I think this is what leads to the Yutifro dilemma.
Plato is applying the exact same understanding to God, as if God, like a human, is going to be either good or evil.
Now, admittedly, for Greek deities, some of them were evil.
But again, as I say, if Dionysus represents drunkenness, it's not that drunkenness is a quality of Dionysus.
He's a guy who likes to get drunk.
Drunkenness is Dionysus.
That is his nature.
So in that sense, I think the yutifra dilemma is an attempt to confuse or muddle attributes that are distinctively human.
with attributes that or with qualities that are in a very different way characteristic of the divine.
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I'm continuing my discussion, drawing on my book, What's So Great About Christianity, of the philosopher Immanuel Kant and the limits of reason.
Now, I recognize, I've recognized from the outset that Kant's ideas are a little counterintuitive.
They produce a almost visceral resistance in us.
Why? Because we're We're all conditioned with, I'm going to call it the illusion of realism.
The illusion of realism is that the world as it is, and the world as we experience it, are the same.
That there's no difference between the one and the other.
So the notion that reality is Different from how it presents itself to us.
This seems weird.
It seems absurd. It seems unreal.
It seems almost impossible to take seriously.
So we resist Kant emotionally.
And sometimes when I talk to people, they're a little impatient.
And they feel like they don't even need to answer the arguments made by Kant because they don't even think that there's any merit to it.
And the reason that they feel this way is because of, let's call it, common sense.
Common sense says that if I see a pen, well, there's got to be a pen because how else am I going to see the pen?
That's kind of common sense reasoning.
But let's remember common sense has been wrong many, many times about the world.
Common sense is wrong about the fact, it was common sense for a long time, that the earth is stationary, that the sun must go around the earth.
That's how it appears to us, and that's how it must be.
But no, in fact, that's an illusion.
The sun is stationary, or it's the earth that goes around the sun and not the other way around.
Common sense tells us that an object left alone will automatically be at rest.
But no, modern physics tells us that an object left alone will move in a straight line at constant speed.
Again, common sense turns out to be mistaken.
Common sense tells us that space and time are absolute.
There's space and there's time.
And space and time are kind of just the way we experience them.
And yet we learn from Einstein and in other ways that space and time are not absolute in this way.
And all of quantum physics, for example, a massive violation of common sense.
Remember, the scientists who put forward these ideas initially were dismissed as crackpots, as absurd, couldn't be right, but it's turned out that they are right.
Kant thought that he was producing in his philosophy a Copernican revolution in human understanding.
So let's think of the Copernican revolution.
The Copernican revolution was that Copernicus came along and said, listen, I don't have any independent evidence.
I can't travel around the solar system and show you that the earth goes around the sun.
But what I am going to do is I'm going to tell you that if you presume it's that way, If you take seriously that the Earth goes around the Sun and not the other way around, all the rest of our measurements and computations will fall into place.
They will make sense. And so shifting the basic premise or the basic assumption makes all the difference.
Helps you to see the world in a clearer light.
And that was Kant's point.
Kant's point is that when you realize that reality as it is...
It's not the same as reality as it comes filtered to us through our senses.
Once you realize that those are two different things, there is the noumenon, which is reality in itself, and there is the phenomenon, the phenomena, reality as we experience it.
Once that distinction really settles down in your mind, you begin to see the world completely differently and the common sense realism through which we've lived most of our lives is exposed, at least philosophically.
As a pragmatic matter, I realize it's perfectly fine to go around thinking, hey, there's a real pen out there because after all, there's no harm in thinking that the sun rises at 7 a.m. in the morning either, even though in fact you know that it isn't quite that way.
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