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March 30, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:21
DON’T BAN TIKTOK Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep548
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
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Coming up, you might expect me to be in favor of this proposed legislation to ban TikTok, but I'll tell you why I'm not.
It's a dangerous patriot act for the internet.
Somehow the stormy Daniels prosecution of Trump has gone on vacation.
I'll have some fun with that.
I'll also offer my thoughts on the fabled Don Quixote and what happens when an individual begins to think he's a different person than he really is.
By the way, if you're watching this podcast on Rumble, make sure to hit the subscribe button.
Same if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify.
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.
What do you think about the idea of banning the Chinese A social media app that is called TikTok.
Now, TikTok is an app.
You've probably heard of it.
You're also probably not on it.
But a lot of people are on it.
In fact, close to 94 million people in the United States, mainly young people.
Debbie's daughter, my stepdaughter, is a big fan of TikTok.
In fact, regularly shows up at the house citing things that she's seen on TikTok.
And of course, Debbie and I habitually chuckle and laugh that TikTok is considered a valid and reliable source of information.
But to her, it is.
She gets her news from TikTok.
Now, There are a whole bunch of people, many Republicans and many Democrats, both, that seem to be, and I mean, this is interesting, right?
In a time of political division, this is one thing on which it seems that establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats seem to grunt, let's ban TikTok.
And there is a proposed legislation that is called the Restrict Act, Which is supposed to be about banning TikTok.
I'll talk about it in the next segment because it's really not about banning TikTok.
In fact, it's about doing a whole bunch of other things that I don't think we want to do.
It's a very alarming thing.
And dangerous piece of legislation, a Patriot Act for the Internet.
But I'll come back to that.
I want to focus now on an article that I just saw from Rand Paul.
It's published in a local paper in Kentucky, The Courier-Journal.
And it is a full-throated defense.
Yes, a defense of TikTok.
Now, Rand Paul makes several arguments that are worth considering and I want to highlight them and comment on them.
The first thing is he says that Congressional Republicans have come up with a national strategy to permanently lose elections for a generation.
Ban a social media app called TikTok that has 94 million primarily young Americans use.
So we're starting off with a sort of prudential argument.
Hey, listen, lots of young people use TikTok.
They obviously like TikTok.
They're fans of TikTok.
So you want to take away their TikTok.
Well, what are they going to think about a party that's trying to do that?
Now, Rand Paul realizes there are Democrats who are pushing this as well.
But he goes, look, the Democrats are really clever.
They know how to push something.
And then when it's enacted, they blame the Republicans for having pushed it as well.
So this is something that will be a millstone around the neck of the Republicans.
That's point number one.
Number two, Rand Paul goes on to say the complaint, of course, is that TikTok is bad.
TikTok is doing a lot of bad things.
TikTok is promoting a lot of misinformation.
TikTok is run by China so it can become an instrument of Chinese propaganda and therefore we should, says Rand Paul, do what? Act like China? Ban it the way the Chinese would ban something that they didn't like? Something is propaganda or misinformation or disinformation so let's get rid of it. Suddenly we've become fans of cancel culture. So Rand Paul right away is noting the paradox, the irony, the seeming contradiction
upon the one hand conservatives deploring this war against misinformation, a war that by the way is disproportionately or almost exclusively targeting conservatives And then Rand Paul says, you want to basically join the cancel culture team, in this case, by going after TikTok.
Do we really want to emulate China's speech bans?
And then Rand Paul goes on to make an argument that I really wasn't familiar with because I'm not on TikTok.
When I heard about TikTok, I actually downloaded the app.
I thought maybe one day I'll make some TikTok videos, but you know what?
I haven't made any yet, so I'm not really on the app.
But according to Rand Paul, TikTok is not, in fact, a kind of...
Go to TikTok and search for videos advocating Taiwan's independence or criticism of Chinese Premier Xi Jinping.
He goes, videos are all over TikTok that are critical of official Chinese positions.
Now, I can't verify myself that that's true, but I'm going to take Rand Paul's word for it.
In other words, that TikTok, in fact, even though it was set up as a Chinese company, it is in some way, I don't deny, or I wouldn't deny, behold into the Chinese government.
But nevertheless, if it's providing a wide range of views, Rand Paul's point is, this is not a kind of simple case of of outright Chinese propaganda.
And then, finally, Rand Paul makes the point that this game of censorship is not something that those of us who believe in free speech and free market should support at all.
He makes the point that we need to have more speech, not less speech.
If you don't like TikTok, don't use it.
If you're critical of what TikTok does, make a critique of it.
Make a video and, hey, post it on TikTok.
If TikTok, well, TikTok might censor my video.
Well, guess what? We're all living in a world where Facebook censors our videos and YouTube censors our videos.
So it's not exactly like censorship today is a kind of unique property of TikTok.
TikTok in this sense...
Stealing our data.
The Chinese government collects data.
Well, yeah, guess what? Mark Zuckerberg collects data.
And I don't trust him any more than I trust the Chinese government.
In fact, many people have made the point that America's digital platforms are very much in cahoots.
They're very much in league.
They're, in some senses, beholden to the Chinese.
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I'm continuing my discussion of TikTok, the Chinese run app, very popular in America, very popular in other places in the world, popular also in China.
although restricted in China.
And there's an attempt to restrict or block TikTok in the United States.
This is the so-called Restrict Act.
And the Restrict Act is being promoted as the remedy for TikTok.
The bill, by the way, is sponsored in the Senate by Mark Warner and John Boone.
So this is really the establishment wings of both the Republican and the Democratic Party.
And when you look at this Restrict Act, it sends a chill down your spine.
Why? Because it's a remedy that is far worse than the disease.
You might think that this is a bill to ban TikTok.
And in fact, Josh Hawley...
I think thought it was exactly that.
Josh Hawley has been crusading for banning TikTok.
And then it seems he finally read the Restrict Act and he goes, I'm not quoting him, the problem with the Restrict Act is it doesn't ban TikTok.
It gives the president a whole bunch of new authority and it does nothing to stop the CCP, just ban TikTok.
So seemingly Hawley is saying I would prefer a different law that is narrowly tailored to TikTok.
But I want to focus on this restrict act because of how creepy it really is.
It is an act that defers an enormous amount of authority to the executive branch.
And think of how little we can trust the executive branch.
We're talking here about Joe Biden himself.
And we're talking about his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan.
And we're talking about his secretary of commerce.
So this is basically a baleful, untrustworthy crew.
And what are they given the authority to do?
It turns out they're given the authority to make a kind of national security assessment of, you guessed it, all of social media.
The entire internet.
We're not even just talking about Twitter and Facebook, Meta and YouTube and TikTok.
We're talking about VPNs.
We're talking about all kinds of cryptography.
We're talking about all sorts of software programs that the internet functions on.
Basically, it's a wide open field.
The law is very vaguely worded.
The president and the secretary of commerce are in charge of a quote, setting up a quote systematic framework to track quote certain transactions.
What's a transaction?
Basically a dealing between two or more people on anything at all.
And it is all in the name of protecting the national security.
But who gets to decide what the national security is?
There's almost unlimited discretion for the president, the national security advisor, and the secretary of commerce.
Yeah, they decide the national threat to national security.
And then what does it do?
It gives the president and it gives his team the...
An unbelievable amount of power.
They have the right, for example, to do surveillance.
They have the right to do confiscation.
They have the right to seize your property and your devices on the basis that they, quote, pose an unacceptable risk to national security.
But again, national security is not defined here as someone attacking us.
It can be that if you question elections, you pose a threat to national security.
If you provide information that they deem false about a virus, you are a threat to national security.
If you call for Republicans to rise up and organize, you can be, that's a threat to national security.
This is a prelude to an insurrection.
So in other words, this is an almost unlimited grant of power.
Think of it as a Patriot Act for the internet.
And nothing could be, in a way, more scary because of the way that the Patriot Act has been abused in the time since 9-11 time and time again.
The Patriot Act has been invoked to do surveillance on Americans who are not even suspected of committing any crime.
Collecting their data, snooping on their private activities, looking at their banking information, and then also going after people in many cases where the government itself is the orchestrator and driver of the plot.
So the Patriot Act is now totally discredited.
If it were up to me, I would get rid of it completely.
And the idea of extending it as it extends it here, looking Look at the penalties under this so-called Restrict Act.
Penalties for things the government doesn't want you to do are between $250,000 and a million dollars and imprisonment, quote, for not more than 20 years or both.
So in theory, the crimes under this Restrict Act can get you 20 years in prison as well as a million dollars in confiscated funds.
So the bill itself is not specific to TikTok.
It's specific to the entire network of communications that we loosely call the web or the internet.
It gives government way too much power.
The remedy is far more dangerous than the disease.
I'm perfectly happy to live with TikTok.
In fact, I'm unclear whether I even support the idea of banning TikTok by itself, but I certainly don't support the Restrict Act.
It's a terrible idea, and I hope it goes down to defeat.
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Manhattan DA's Prosecution of Donald Trump.
In the Stormy Daniels matter, now you might say, wait a second, how do you prosecute somebody for, quote, paying hush money to a porn star?
We're leaving aside the facts of the case.
Did Trump have an affair with Stormy Daniels?
Did Trump reimburse Michael Cohen, the attorney who made the payment?
Leave all that aside. What is the illegality here?
Well, the illegality supposedly comes in the form of a campaign finance violation because, again, the Manhattan DA has the job of proving that this was, in fact, this money was taken from campaign finance funds.
And frankly, even if it was, normally this kind of offense is treated as just nothing more than your campaign has to now reimburse those funds.
Remember, Obama had campaign finance violations totaling Hundreds of thousands of dollars and all they said was, listen, pay the money back.
End of story. So the idea of converting this into a felony, which carries, by the way, four years in prison, just downright absurd.
The whole thing is preposterous.
But guess what? After we heard that an arrest of Trump was imminent, Trump is going to be in handcuffs, Trump himself seemed to think this was actually going to happen.
And we saw police putting up barricades around the courthouse in a sense to keep people away in case there was like an outburst or protest over all this.
And then suddenly the air seemed to go out of the balloon.
A day passed, and two days, and three days, no rest.
Well, they might be reconvening on Monday.
And then we hear now, they're on break for a month.
What? A month!
Yes, a month. So, I don't really necessarily want to go into the sexual analogies here, but since we're talking about Stormy Daniels, I mean, legally, this is a total coitus interruptus.
It's like, whoops!
You know, not going to happen.
And Alvin Bragg, I think, is in a very awkward position here.
In fact, the media, by the way, is totally covering up for him.
Here's an article in Politico.
Manhattan Trump grand jury set to break for a month.
Now, they realize that this is sort of shocking news, so they have to immediately dilute it.
And so the subhead, a previously planned hiatus would push back a potential indictment.
Are you seriously telling me that they were on the verge of indicting Trump and then they decided, hey, listen, it's our previously planned month-long vacation so let's take it and we'll come back and consider the matter.
No, that's not actually what's happening.
That's just the propaganda that the people who are doing this from the DA's office are leaking to Politico, which of course is gullibly and just going ahead and willingly transcribing the obviously brazen nonsense that's coming out of Alvin Bragg's office.
I showed Debbie a video this morning, very amusing, and it's by this woman who makes satirical videos called Conservative Mama.
She sometimes plays more than one part in the video.
So it's Conservative Mama, and then she has another person who looks like her just visiting her.
And in this case, what happens is Conservative Mama is playing the liberal who is baking a cake because she's so excited that Trump is about to be indicted.
And her friend comes in and goes, what?
What are you doing? And she goes, I'm making a cake.
I'm so excited. They're finally going to get him.
They've got their ducks in line.
And then the friend goes, I don't know how to tell you this, but they're not indicting him right now.
Well, they're going to indict him today or tomorrow, right?
No, actually, they're taking a break.
A break? What kind of break?
How long is the break? One month.
Oh, you mean? Well, maybe it takes a little more time to get the ducks in a row.
And the friend's like, yeah, you know what?
I guess it does take a lot of time to get the ducks in a row.
I think what this is all reflecting, of course, in this case in a satirical way, is...
Is that this case is proving to be a total bust.
I mentioned on the podcast a day or two ago, Stormy Daniels has a public statement going back to 2018 basically saying, not only did I not have an affair with Trump, I've never had an affair with Trump.
Now Stormy Daniels is saying something different today, but she's contradicted by her own And then you have Michael Cohen's attorney writing on Michael Cohen's behalf saying, hey, listen, there was money that passed between Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels.
It doesn't say Stormy Daniels.
It mentions her real name.
I think it's Stephanie Clifford.
Stephanie Clifford received a payment, but no, that payment was never authorized by Trump.
It was never reimbursed by Trump.
It was not reimbursed by the Trump Organization.
It wasn't reimbursed by the Trump campaign.
And it's signed on behalf of Michael Cohen, Michael Cohen's attorney.
So how do you win a case when your case is blown out of the water by the two primary witnesses?
By the way, neither witness being a kind of Himalayan rock of credibility, right?
You have Michael Cohen, a convicted criminal who served time in prison.
You've got a porn star.
So right away, you're starting off with massive credibility problems.
So you can kind of see how this whole thing has blown up in Alvin Bragg's face.
And Trump, by the way, had a sort of indiscreet tweet.
It wasn't really Trump's tweet.
It seems like he shared it, but it was about Trump, you know, holding a baseball bat in front of Alvin Bragg and Trump talked about death and destruction.
Trump, I think, rightly deleted the tweet.
In fact, his lawyer said somebody that somebody who's posting on Trump's social media can't put it up without Trump having seen it, so they've taken it down.
I think that's a very good idea.
But this is an indictment that I think we are safe in concluding today may not even happen.
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Feel the difference. At a time and in an era when a lot of the news and information I give you on the podcast is negative, it's bad news, it's bad things happening to the country, there are a few bright spots and one of them is school choice.
There's a veritable school choice revolution that is rolling across the country Welcome to my show!
We parents need to kind of take control of our children's education and not delegate it to the schools.
But number two, you also had parents for the first time having their kids learning from home.
And so parents realized, look at the stuff that they're teaching our kids.
Look at the indoctrination.
Look at the craziness.
Look at all the sexually explicit and perverse stuff that's being propagandized on our kids.
And parents are like, enough is enough.
We're out of here.
And so, of course, one option is homeschooling, but that's not practical for everyone.
Or send your kid to a private school, but that's often expensive.
Remember, if you send your kid to a private school, not only are you paying the private school tuition, but you then also are paying taxes, property taxes and other forms of taxes that are funding the public school.
So you're really paying twice.
So the basic idea of the school choice revolution is to take these dollars that the government is allocating to schools and put it in the hands of the parents and the kids.
In other words, these scholarships, as we now call them, are given to the parents and the parents are able to choose.
Do they want to send their kids to a public school?
Okay, then you assign the money over there.
On the other hand, if you want to send your kid to a private school or a Christian school, you assign the money over there.
And so this is a wonderful thing.
By the way, the idea goes all the way back to the 1980s.
In the Reagan era, we used to call it vouchers.
But very interestingly, the idea never really got off the ground.
Public schools were really powerful and many Republicans in Midwestern states and elsewhere supported public schools and they would not hear of this idea of taking, as they called it, public school money and allowing parents to deploy it toward private schools.
But all of this has changed.
And the latest guy to jump on the bandwagon, Ron DeSantis.
Now, Ron DeSantis, when he jumps on the bandwagon, usually declares it's his bandwagon.
And so, sure enough, here we go.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed universal school choice into law.
Now, I want to emphasize right away how good this is.
This is universal school choice.
This is not a case where You're basically picking kids who are from really poor families or a particular neighborhood and saying, listen, the schools in inner-city Milwaukee are terrible, so we're going to give those parents a choice.
No. Every parent in Florida has a choice, and that means that all 1.3 million students in Florida can now decide if they want their money allocated to a public school or to a private school of their choice.
And the press release from Florida says that this will, quote, further cement Florida's position as the nation's leader in school choice.
Now, there are other states that are actually, have already passed school choice legislation.
This is worth noting.
There are six states that have already passed it.
Utah... Iowa, Arizona, West Virginia, and Arkansas.
Very recently, I think I saw on television, Republican Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signing the Education Reform Bill, which expands school choice dramatically and actually adopts a plan for the state to adopt universal school choice by 2025, by the academic year 25-26.
There are more than 50 school choice pieces of legislation that are making their way.
And apparently states that are now in line, these are obviously Republican states, that could potentially pass school choice legislation in the near future.
Idaho, Indiana, Ohio, and Wyoming.
So... We're good to go.
Not one is proficient in reading or math.
Think about that. Normally, there's a distribution.
It could be that a school has gotten really bad and there's only a handful of kids who can do the work.
But think of how bad a school has to be where there's no kid who's actually proficient in either math or in math.
Or in reading. This is a scandalous situation.
It disproportionately, yes, affects minority communities, but it's a nationwide problem.
School choice is not going to be a panacea.
There are problems of wokeness in private schools, just like in public schools.
There are Christian schools that are way too namby-pamby and not explicit and bold in teaching Christian doctrine.
But courts, by the way, have held that there's no bar in allocating this public money in a non-discriminatory way where parents can choose between public schools and private schools and Christian schools.
So even though this is not a sort of one-step solution to all our educational problems, it's certainly a positive start.
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transgender so-called day of vengeance is going ahead for April 1st. Even after this terrible Nashville massacre, this mass shooting by a transgender domestic terrorist against Christian administrators and Christian kids, I mean nine-year-olds.
And imagine if patriots had a day of vengeance.
Think about how Merrick Garland would react, how the FBI would react.
So it appears that transgenders, far from being a victimized population, are a protected category here.
They're able to go ahead with this obviously provocative attitude.
And threatening call to hatred and call to violence.
Here's a hate group mobilizing hatred on its behalf.
How else can you read the phrase, a day of vengeance?
Now, I saw this morning that the FBI said that they will release the shooter's manifesto, quote, I'm thinking, are you guys really slow readers?
How long is this manifesto?
Is it 8,000 pages long?
How long does it take to review it?
If I were reviewing it, it would take me about an hour.
So why haven't we got the manifesto already?
Are you waiting for sort of the atmosphere to calm down, for people to move on to other issues, for something else to be in the headline, and then you sort of release the manifesto in the hope that it will not garner too much attention?
I think that the FBI here, again, is hiding the manifesto for the obvious reason that they don't, it doesn't fit their narrative, does it?
The narrative is that the Christians are supposed to be the evil ones, the transgenders are supposed to be the targets of Christian hatred, but here we have a situation that is the exact reversal, the exact opposite.
Now, all of this as often happens with the situation.
I'm thinking about what's happening day to day.
And then I step back and think to myself, how do we make sense of this broader phenomenon, the broader phenomenon of people?
And we've got a bunch of them now in our society.
You'll sometimes meet someone and they're like, I'm a teacher in an elementary school and three of the kids in my class claim to be transgender.
And I'm thinking to myself, not only is this a phenomenon that's very odd happening to young children, it's seemingly never happened in previous generations, this whole notion that I am X. As biologically, physically, naturally, or in the world, but in my mind, I'm really why.
Now, of course, the phenomenon itself is not new.
I mean, just think back to people, and this has happened all across the West.
You've had people who are generally confined to lunatic asylums who say something like, I am Napoleon Bonaparte.
Now, what do they mean when they say that?
What they mean is that in their mind, they're Napoleon.
They realize that they're not Napoleon's height.
They don't wear Napoleonic outfits.
They don't ride a horse like Napoleon, and they don't have troops that are at their behest.
They're not, in fact, the Emperor of France, but in their mind, they're Napoleon.
And so, they would say to you, using rhetoric very familiar, I'm really Napoleon, or I insist that I'm Napoleon.
Usually when people say that, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're Napoleon.
Of course you're Napoleon. And of course if the person persists too much, you diagnose them as suffering from some delusion, and maybe in the end you even bring out the straitjacket.
So, we have this phenomenon.
So, what's the real difference here?
If a man says, in my mind, I'm really a woman, or a man says, in my mind, I'm really Napoleon.
In both cases, they're claiming that a certain interior psychology, evident to no one else except themselves, trumps or overrides their biology.
This, by the way, is also a theme in literature.
Think, for example, of Don Quixote in Miguel Cervantes' classic work of that name.
Don Quixote is someone living in the early modern period in modern Spain, but he decides that he is, in fact, a knight-errant from the Middle Ages.
Not just that he decides that he is, in his mind, living in the Middle Ages and that he's actually a knight.
You can say that Don Quixote believes that he was born in the wrong body.
He's not a man of the 16th century.
He's a man of the 13th or the 12th century.
And he is born into a different station in life and he has a completely different mission defined by being a knight.
Now, his trusted aide, Sancho Panza, kind of goes along with this, but recognizes that it's ridiculous.
Sancho Panza is constantly pointing out to Don Quixote, no, that's not a dragon, that's a windmill.
No, that's not a magical helmet, it's a barber's bowl that he washes after he conducts a shave.
And so, Don Quixote is really a story about the tragic and comic results of In the end, it's a delusion. In the end, it breaks down.
In the end, there's no getting away from reality.
And I think that these examples both of Napoleon and of Don Quixote help us to understand that reality always wins in the end.
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There's a new survey, a value survey that just came out in the Wall Street Journal and it is extremely disturbing and a sign that we're seeing a Breakdown across American society.
Now, probably the breakdown is across Western society.
Many of the same twisted pathologies we see in America, I see in Canada, in Australia, and across Europe.
But, again, the United States was seen for several decades as a little bit of an exception to the European rule.
And so, for example, if you take the subject of religion, you saw over the years declining belief in God and Christianity across Europe.
But there were still pretty high rates of belief in America.
Church attendance may be sporadic or irregular, but nevertheless, the vast, vast majority of Americans, is there a God?
Yes. Do you believe in Jesus Christ?
Yes. Should people follow the Ten Commandments?
Yes. And these things could be taken for granted.
In fact, they were seen as italicizing the ways in which the United States was different from its, you may say, parent civilization in Europe.
But now let's look at the results of this Wall Street Journal survey.
It's a poll of 1,019 adults conducted in March with a small margin of error.
And this is the percentage of people who say that these values are very important to them personally.
And it shows the change by age group.
So you can see not just for the whole society, but for young people.
And this is showing the direction in which society is moving.
So I'm going to focus on the older group, 65 plus, as compared to the younger group, which is 18 to 29.
So, patriotism. For patriotism, there is 60% of Americans say patriotism, older Americans, very important.
But younger Americans, it's only about 20, 22 or 23%.
Having children.
Obviously, older people aren't having children, but for younger people, the number is very low.
23% say having children is, quote, very important to them.
Religion. Religion.
For older people, about 55% of people say religion is very important, but only about 31% or 32% of young people say it's very important.
Hard work. This is so telling.
For older people, 75% to 76%.
Very important to me.
And for young people...
Just over 60%.
So even something that goes beyond, we're not talking here about social values, but the simple idea that working hard is really important because working hard is the means to moving up the ladder, and yet you now have a Still a majority, but not a huge majority of young people saying, yeah, work is important to me, and presumably a bunch of people saying that it's less important.
So another telling result of the survey has to do with the question of tolerance.
And tolerance, which was deemed very important as a value in society.
In fact, over 80% of people said tolerance is one of the bedrocks of American society.
That number has now dropped to 58%, which shows again that you have people who are not only more intolerant, But actually see intolerance as a kind of virtue.
They see that it's not good to be tolerant from their point of view.
Now, again, there's a majority of people who are in favor of tolerance, but my point is it's a declining majority, and with trends moving in this direction, that group could become a minority.
Not a good sign for society, for sure.
Michael Schellenberger, who is an astute analyst of these sorts of things, makes the interesting argument in his substack, interesting essay that he writes about the sort of wokeness, wokeness as a religion.
And I thought of Michael Schellenberger in the context of Tucker Carlson saying that transgenderism is a kind of anti-Christianity or rival form of Christianity.
Schellenberger is making a softer version of this argument and maybe in a way a more convincing one.
He says that society is becoming increasingly secular.
People are dispensing not only with the idea of God and Christianity, but also the Christian moral code.
But they're not dispensing with the idea of needing a moral code.
And so what are they doing?
They're taking the kind of old religious strictures, thou shall not do this and thou shall not do that, but now applying that in a secular domain.
So thou shall wear a mask.
Thou shall get vaccinated.
Thou shall not misgender someone, even if they're a mass murderer.
Thou shall make sure to use people's right pronouns.
So what you have here is a perverted, a twisted, a secularized morality that is trying to maintain the firmness and the censoriousness of the old morality, but having dispensed with the old commandments, with the old thou shall nots.
And so, I guess Schellenberger's point is that the new morality is in a way more debased.
It's more senseless.
It's more irrational.
The old morality at least served a purpose.
There may have been times it degenerated into superstition.
There may have been times when it went too far.
But nevertheless, its purpose was Was social harmony, social cohesion, getting people to make something better of themselves, whereas today's morality is aimed at or has the effect of producing social disintegration, social division, and in the end, moral chaos.
I'd like you to check out my locals channel.
I put a lot of the Dinesh uncensored, Dinesh unchained, the stuff that I can't put up on Facebook or YouTube.
Essentially talk honestly and frankly about the stuff that's going on in the world.
I also do a live Q&A in which you can interact with me directly in real time.
That's typically once a week on Tuesday night.
And I put up a bunch of films in my channel, including 2,000 Mules.
The films are available for free if you become an annual subscriber to my Locals channel.
But you can check it out for free.
Go to dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
Again, it's dinesh.locals.com.
I'm continuing my discussion of Christian apologetics, but we now move from discussing the philosopher Immanuel Kant and the limits of reason to a new chapter.
The new chapter is called In the Belly of the Whale, Why Miracles are Possible.
And I use the example of the belly of the whale because of Jonah being in the belly of the whale, something that would seem to be impossible.
How can a guy live in the stomach of a whale for three days?
It seems that we live in a world of scientific laws.
Many people think the universe is closed in the sense that it operates purely according to laws internal to the universe.
And they go, given that, you can't really believe in miracles.
At least you can't believe in miracles today.
So this is going to be the subject of our chapter, Miracles.
And I'm not so much going to focus on this miracle or that miracle.
I'm going to focus on the very idea of miracles.
Is it possible that miracles can occur in an age of science, in an age where we think of the universe as following these natural laws?
Some people think, wow, in the 21st century, this idea of a virgin birth, changing water into wine, resurrection from the dead, it just seems far-fetched.
It seems virtually absurd.
But I want to show in this chapter, and again, I'm going to do it not by appealing to revelation or sacred scripture.
I'm going to do it based on reason alone.
I want to show that the idea of a miracle is completely consistent with modern science and And in fact that the most famous argument made against miracles, this was an argument made by the philosopher David Hume, can be shown on the grounds of Hume's own philosophy, on the grounds of Hume's own work, to be invalid.
Now, before I get into this, I want to emphasize that miracles are very central to Christianity.
And not only that, but they are central in religious terms only to Christianity.
Christianity, in a sense, depends on miracles.
Now, in other religions, let's take Judaism for a moment, you do have miracles in the Old Testament.
I mean, I mentioned one, Jonah and the belly of the whale, parting of the Red Sea, you can certainly name others.
But Judaism doesn't really rely on miracles.
Even if you subtracted all the miracles, Judaism would remain largely intact.
But not Christianity.
Think about Paul, the first letter to the Corinthians 15-14.
He says,"...without Christ's resurrection," quote,"...preaching is useless, and so is your faith." In other words, what Paul is saying is that the resurrection is not sort of incidental.
It's absolutely central.
It's the miracle on which everything else depends.
Now, turn to Islam for a moment.
The Prophet Muhammad did not claim to have performed a single miracle.
But Christ performs miracles all the time.
He walks on water. He quiets the storm.
He feeds the multitude.
He heals the blind. He even brings Lazarus back from the dead.
So, only if miracles are possible is Christianity believable.
Now, the biologist Richard Dawkins sort of tries to take advantage of this.
He realizes that miracles are not only a critical or fundamental aspect of Christianity, but he notices that miracles seem to intrude on the territory that is claimed by science.
In other words, Richard Dawkins notices that science and religion, Christianity, don't operate in independent domains.
A few years ago, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould made the argument that, listen, there's no reason for science and Christianity to fight because they're talking about two different things.
Science is talking about facts and And religion, specifically Christianity, is talking about values.
And since facts and values are two different things, facts are about the way things are, and values are kind of about the way things ought to be, these two can carry on as friends.
They're operating in independent sort of areas of investigation, and this so-called war between science and religion doesn't need to happen at all.
But Richard Dawkins says that that's not true, and he gives the example of miracles.
He says, look... Science makes claims about nature.
Science might say something like, you can't bring a dead man back to life.
And a miracle is, well, Christ did.
He brought Lazarus back to life.
So here is not a case where science is in one track and religion is on the other track.
On the contrary... Both science and Christianity, in this case, are making a specific claim about what is possible within nature itself.
After all, Lazarus wasn't...
We weren't talking about something happening in another universe or in heaven.
This is something that happened on Earth.
So... Quote, science is based upon verifiable evidence, says Dawkins.
And that's the key term right there.
It's a term I'm going to focus on in a laser-like way.
Science is based upon verifiable evidence, he says.
The miracle stories of Christianity are, quote, blatant intrusions into scientific territory.
Every one of these miracles amounts to a scientific claim, a violation of the normal running of the natural world.
And he says, consequently, any belief in miracles is flatly contradictory, not just to the facts of science, but also to the spirit of science.
And his conclusion is that scientifically-minded people in the 21st century ought to reject miracles.
So there you have it, a kind of clear statement of the supposed impossibility of miracles based upon the supposed.
We'll see how supposed it is.
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