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April 3, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:11
THE ARRAIGNMENT Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep550
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walzer, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth. Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com. Coming up, arraignment for Trump.
It's here tomorrow. I'll go through the process and talk about what happens next. I'll also reveal what it is about Trump that causes Democrats to go insane.
A poor guy is facing 10 years in prison for what?
Making memes. I'll talk about that.
And Colonel Grant Newsham joins me.
We're going to talk about China's militaristic plans for the future.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble, make sure to hit the subscribe button on the podcast.
And also, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please do the same.
This is The Dan Sousa 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.
Donald Trump will be arraigned tomorrow in New York.
And it's really hard to believe we are...
We've reached this point.
You remember when there was the Mar-a-Lago raid some weeks ago?
That was an outrage.
People were like, I can't believe they're raiding the home of the former president and the leading candidate of the Republican Party.
And now, upping the ante even further, They're going to charge Trump criminally with a felony, maybe more than one felony, but at least one, and a felony that would carry with it the possibility of going to prison.
And Trump is going to have to go through this process, which is going to take weeks, perhaps months.
Now, this is something that I've actually been through and I've been through in New York.
I know this process really pretty well.
And it's an undignified process because step one is that you arrive and they typically put you in handcuffs.
It was an eerie feeling for me, geez.
What is the point of this?
Well, it's not that they expect me to break and run.
I surrendered voluntarily.
So the point of it is the humiliation.
That is the point of it, to make you feel like you're a prisoner, that you're a captive.
And notice that this is being done before you're convicted of anything.
Number two, you're fingerprinted.
And again, it's the indignity of it.
You can't say to them, hey, listen, you already have my fingerprints.
I have fingerprints that I've taken on multiple occasions.
I'll submit my fingerprints.
You're welcome to put them in a database.
But no, their idea is we have to fingerprint you.
That's the idea. And number three, a mugshot.
Debbie was saying right before the podcast, if I were the authorities, I wouldn't release Trump's mugshot.
Now, Trump may want his mugshot released.
We don't know. But a mugshot is going to be taken.
It's kind of funny because all over social media, for the past several years, people like, you, Dinesh, you know, you're a criminal, and they post a mugshot.
The mugshot that they post is not my mugshot.
In fact, it's a mugshot that I took myself for one of our movies.
Was it Hillary? Hillary's America.
And we took other shots, basically, with me and Debbie posing and smiling with the Department of Justice paraphernalia.
But in any event, it has come to this.
Here's Trump with a recent statement.
He says, It's hard to disagree with him.
This is, in some sense, very sad.
It's really a tragedy.
But at a different level, it is a wake-up call.
It is an indication that the left is not going to stop.
If you ever thought it's like, America, live and let live.
America, you can do your thing.
I'll do my thing.
No, this is sort of like your neighbor who decides that you are going to do it his way.
And if not, he will bring you down to heel.
He's going to jump the fence.
His dogs are going to come into your yard.
He's going to administer sex education to your children.
If you resist, he's going to come into your house and take away your guns.
None of this is really fanciful anymore.
This is not like wild speculation.
This is stuff that the left has shown that they are very willing to do and are looking for opportunities to do and are looking for occasions like COVID and so on to generate the public fear That allows them to be able to do it.
Now, I'll be talking about this all week and I just want to focus today.
By the way, Trump says that he's going to make a statement tomorrow, Tuesday, at Mar-a-Lago.
Debbie and I got an invitation to go to Mar-a-Lago.
We are not going to be able to go.
Well, Because you were here doing the podcast, so we're not going to be able to attend.
But there is some question about what Trump is going to be able to say.
Why? Because there are some news reports that the New York authorities might go to the judge, who by the way is a left winger, and say to the judge, please impose a gag order on Trump.
And the effect of a gag order would be that Trump would Would be prevented, by the way, with the potential of going to jail for 30 days if he doesn't obey, of not speaking about the case.
This is one of the ways, by the way, that the prosecution and very often friendly judges, prosecution friendly judges, silence the defendant while the prosecution is leaking to the media, putting out false stories, or putting out its side of the story, if you will, while on the other hand, Trump, who by the way, is in the process of running for president, is on this critical matter forced into complete silence.
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As I reflect upon the Trump indictment...
I try to think to myself, what is the left up to here?
Now, just the last couple of days, Debbie and I were in California.
In fact, we were doing an event with our friend Harmeet Dillon.
It was really fun, a wonderful group.
Harmeet's organization is doing really good work.
And in fact, I've invited her to come on the podcast and talk about it.
But we were discussing around the table at dinner what the left is trying to do.
And interestingly, there was a guy at the table who was not a huge fan of Trump.
In fact, I would guess he's leaning toward DeSantis.
And he made the point that the left is, to quote him, playing 3D chess.
Now, what did he mean by that?
What he meant by that is that they are Indicting Trump because they want Trump to become a martyr.
And they want Trump to become a martyr so that the Republican Party unifies around Trump.
Suddenly DeSantis' candidacy becomes unviable.
DeSantis is now measured only to the degree that he cheerleads for Trump.
It's Trump and Trump dominates the news over the next several months and people are hardly talking about anything else.
Republicans almost create a litmus test in which you are either all in for Trump or will have nothing to do with you now or in the future.
So Trump then becomes the nominee.
But he is a weakened nominee.
He's weakened both by the indictment itself, and there could be more than one indictment, potentially a Georgia case, potentially a case brought by the special counsel.
So here you've got this legally besieged We're good to go.
I don't think that this theory is actually right.
First of all, I don't think Democrats are thinking in this strategic way.
If you talk to Democrats, and it doesn't really matter if they're political strategists or they're candidates or ordinary Democrats on the street, most of them are driven by this not only visceral loathing, but I would say visceral fear.
It's a visceral fear of Trump that is really without rival.
I've seen in the past Democrats, I mean, they certainly feared Reagan because they recognized that, first of all, Reagan won 44 states in what was thought to be a close election.
He won 49 states the next time around.
So Reagan had this kind of connection with the American people that the left found really terrifying and they couldn't understand it and they responded to it with a certain kind of sputtering disdain and rage.
And so there's some similarities between that and the way that the left reacts to Trump.
But with Trump, they are driven to paroxysms of absurdity.
And there are people on the left who genuinely believe that Trump is on his way to becoming Hitler.
And so I think for the left, Trump scares them like nobody else does.
And I think the reason for it is this.
The left has become accustomed to doing politics in the kind of normal way in which Republicans by and large agree to operate within the boundaries, within the gates, within the parameters established by and large by American political convention.
And that the typical Republican, even the fairly stalwart Republican, even a Ted Cruz or even a Josh Hawley, even a Marco Rubio, these Republicans who would not be called by and large rhinos.
These are Republicans who are clearly conservative in their philosophy.
You can continue the list.
It's Tom Cotton.
There are many others. These Republicans, nevertheless, do not take on the left in the way that Trump does.
Trump has basically just taken all the premises of the left.
You can't say this. You can't do that.
You can't negotiate directly with a foreign leader.
You can't question this.
And Trump goes, why not?
I'm going to do it. I'm an outsider.
And it's this outsider...
It's not just that Trump is an outsider.
Trump is an outsider who brings with him a larger-than-life quality and a certain willingness to take on taboos and sacred cows.
And for these reasons, Trump becomes a menacing figure of a magnitude that certainly, when Debbie and I talk, we're like, we've never seen anything like this.
It is utterly unhinged from reality, but in a sense, it creates its own political reality.
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I want to talk about this outrageous case where a joker, a meme maker, this fellow named Douglas Mackey, was recently found guilty of a federal crime for making a meme about Hillary Clinton in 2016.
But before I get to that, I want to lay a broader context by quoting a recent statement by Vivek Ramaswamy, the young Indian guy, who I'm going to have on the podcast, by the way, coming up shortly.
Anyway, he goes, America now has a two-tiered justice system.
And he gives three examples.
Trump is indicted while Clinton pays a small fine.
This is for campaign finance offenses.
Antifa and BLM writers roam free while January 6 protesters are imprisoned without bail.
And his third example, Douglas Mackey faces 10 years for the same joking memes that Christina Wong posts with impunity.
So let's take a look.
Here's Douglas Mackey, who posted the following meme.
And you can tell he's a smart aleck.
He obviously thought this was really funny.
And he has a poster of African Americans for Hillary.
And he says, avoid the line, vote from home, text Hillary to 59925.
So what he's basically saying is, you know, if you want to vote, you can skip the line.
You don't have to vote that way.
You can vote just by sending a text.
Now, obviously, he's joking.
You can't vote that way.
And this kind of stuff is not only all over the Internet, but it's something that's been joked about for...
For decades. I remember going back to the 80s and 90s, people joking like, hey, listen, we better get the word out of the Democrats.
Make sure you vote on Wednesday, election day.
Give them the wrong information.
They show up on the wrong day.
Obviously, this has always been intended as a quip and a joke.
And that's how Mackey intended it.
But nevertheless, the Justice Department pretends like, oh, this is election suppression.
This is a guy trying to discourage African Americans from voting.
And it goes before a jury in New York, a left-wing jury.
By the way, the juries in New York, not a whole lot different from the juries.
In D.C. that are considering these January 6th cases.
And the jury finds Doug Mackey guilty.
And now this poor guy is facing, I kid you not, 10 years in prison.
10 years in prison for a meme.
Now again, to get a sense of how corrupt and one-sided and vicious this is, I have in front of me...
A very similar post put up in the same year, 2016.
And here it is. You can maybe take a quick look at it if you're watching on Rumble.
This is a post by Christina Wong.
Twitter handle is MsKristinaK, K-R-I-S-T-I-N-A Wong.
And I'm going to read it to you.
Hey, Trump supporters, skip poll lines at election 2016 and text in your vote.
Text votes are legit or vote tomorrow on Super Wednesday.
Now, think of it. This meme is, in all respects, in all substance, identical with the Douglas Mackey meme.
And yet, what's happening right now to Christina Wong?
As you might suspect, nothing.
She's not charged. She's not arranged.
She's not facing any kind of penalty.
So what does this really tell you?
What this really tells you is two things.
Well, the first is that there's a two-tier system of justice.
That's the obvious conclusion, but that's not the real conclusion I want to draw.
The real conclusion I want to draw is, where are the Republican DAs?
I don't know where Christina Wong lives, but there are Democrats who do this kind of thing.
Some years ago, it emerged that Rosie O'Donnell had committed the same campaign finance violation that I was charged with, but five separate times.
And she had done it with intent to deceive, using fake names, changing her name, spelling it five different ways, giving different addresses.
And so it was obviously Rosie O'Donnell in every single case.
So, again, what happened to her?
Nothing. Why?
For some reason, it seems like Republican prosecutors, Republican U.S. attorneys, Republican DAs are very reluctant to pursue this kind of thing.
But now that it's really obvious that the Democrats are going after our side, It's really important that we up the ante and give them a taste of their own medicine.
So if Christina Wong lives in Texas, lives in Florida, lives in Missouri, lives in a red state, I'm not sure if she does, but if she does, then the appropriate next step is to charge her, to indict her, to go after her, try to lock her up for 10 years, because Why is the left, when are they going to stop this kind of practice?
They're only going to stop when it starts happening to their side.
Remember on Twitter, once the left started getting banned, they began to scream their head off, oh, what about free speech on Twitter?
It was almost like Elon Musk played a joke on them by saying, okay, here's a taste of your own medicine, and that's the way that the left discovers the virtues of free speech, and in this case, of equal rights under the law.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Colonel Grant Newsham.
He's the author of a new book we're going to talk about.
Couldn't be more timely.
It's called When China Attacks, A Warning to America.
Now, Colonel Newsham is a retired U.S. Marine, served in the Indo-Pacific region for decades.
He's a former U.S. Foreign Service officer who covered both East and South Asia.
He's an attorney who's lived in Tokyo for more than 20 years.
This is the guy who knows Asia and who knows China.
The book again is called, When China Attacks.
Colonel Nushim, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
You make the argument in this book that China's goal is not simply to help usher in a multipolar world in which there are numerous independent foci of power.
China wants to replace and displace the United States and eventually become the world's sole superpower.
Now, are you saying that the Chinese plan is to do this sort of step by step?
In other words, Taiwan first, the larger Asiatic region next, and then make a play for more global domination.
How is China planning in the long term, we know the Chinese think that way, to replace the United States?
Well, make no mistake, as you've laid it out, that is China's objective.
It's not just to replace us, but rather to dominate us, ideally to destroy us.
But China has an opportunistic approach to these things.
But at the same time, they look at the whole map, they look at the entire globe, And they have established themselves on every continent, starting with a commercial presence, economic presence, which leads to political influence.
And ultimately, there's a military objective to all of this.
So it's like somebody who is at the same time checking every door to see if it's locked or not, and where you find an opportunity and you push.
And I do see things coming together over Taiwan in the near term.
And that would best be looked at as a first step, really, to a much larger, longer sequence of events that is ultimately intended to bring us down.
I do want to talk about Taiwan.
Let's look at the broad range strategy first because in the book you define the different elements to it.
The first element I think people are more familiar with, intellectual property theft, cyber, espionage, commercial and military surveillance, the latest news about the Chinese balloon collecting intelligence information.
But you also list biological and chemical warfare and specifically mentioned COVID-19.
You mentioned economic warfare aimed at putting us out of business, psychological warfare, and then proxy warfare.
Say a little bit more about this broad strategy which seems to encompass financial elements, mental or intellectual elements, and then of course military elements.
Sure. It is usually important to remember, of course, that while China does all of these things, or some of them, just about anywhere on Earth, the U.S. is the main target.
We're the country that they see as being the one obstacle to Chinese domination, and they're probably right about that.
You know, biological warfare.
You know, that's usually something we think of in a sort of an all-out war, and only then.
But the Wuhan virus, the COVID virus, it certainly came from China, and China certainly used it at least opportunistically, almost as a test run, once they saw that it was out of the bag.
And you look at what the effect it had.
It stopped our economy, It just caused immense political chaos, got Americans to give up rights that nobody ever thought they would do.
And the effect of that has been the equivalent of winning a nice big battle, and that is effectively biological warfare.
Now, the chemical warfare part of this is also referred to as drug warfare, and the Chinese refer to it that way.
And that has been immensely successful.
And by that, I'm talking about mostly these days, the fentanyl scourge, which killed 70,000 Americans last year, 70,000.
In the entire 12-year Vietnam War, 55,000 Americans were killed in one year.
Well, 70,000 Americans have died.
Most of the fentanyl originates in China, and China could stop it if it wanted to, but it doesn't want to because it's been a very successful assault, but the Americans have not recognized it as an attack from China.
There's the economic warfare that you mentioned as well.
Think of it, since China got into the World Trade Organization, but even starting before that, look at the rush of American industry, American business to China.
And to build up, the idea was, well, if we build up China's economy, they'll eventually liberalize, become like a really big Canada.
But also there was a huge sort of...
greed aspect to this and the Chinese properly played on that.
They got Wall Street, too much of America's CEO and business classes, to throw their weight around, use their influence, and get people to actually think, well, you have to be in the China market.
If we do anything to challenge China, well, they won't do business with us.
But you can get your enemy, your main enemy, and that is China's expression.
When you get them to think that they absolutely have to do business with you, well, that has been a huge psychological warfare advantage, success.
And you can see how these things tie together.
The economic warfare destroys Americans' neighborhoods.
It makes them susceptible to chemical warfare.
The dependency America has built upon China causes them to really tie their hands and refuse to really go after the Chinese Communist Party.
And it was the Trump administration that was the first one to ever do this.
Now, another thing that's worth pointing out, where it doesn't get the attention it deserves, is the way that China is setting up really a military infrastructure throughout the world to eventually allow the People's Liberation Army to operate around the globe just like the Americans do, and with the idea of eventually surrounding the United States, as hard as that is to imagine.
And that's where the so-called Belt and Road Initiative comes in, all this overseas Chinese economic investment.
In particularly ports, airfields, things that work very nicely for a military.
And if you look at the scale of this, it is breathtaking.
And the fact that this has been allowed to happen without anybody really doing much about it or even saying much about it, once again, you've got to hand it to China that that is a very successful form of political warfare.
Yeah. Let's take a pause.
When we come back, I want to talk specifically about Taiwan, but also about Ukraine.
We'll be right back with Colonel Grant Newsham, the author of When China Attacks.
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I'm back with Colonel Grant Newsham, author of When China Attacks.
Notice the title, not if, but When China Attacks.
You can follow him, by the way, on social media, Twitter, at Newsham, N-E-W-S-H-A-M, Grant.
And, Colonel Newsham, we were talking about the success that China seems to be having on multiple fronts.
Is it unfair to say that the Chinese recognize not only the vulnerability of U.S. business, the sort of desire to get along, but they also recognize that things go a little easier for them when there's a Democrat in the White House?
And especially a Democrat as seemingly both physically and mentally feeble as Biden.
Am I exaggerating when I say the Chinese must look at him and go, this pathetic spectacle is a kind of symbol of what America is right now.
I'm afraid so. China does look at who is in the White House, and it's not just President Biden, but the people around him.
There's simply no nice way to say this, that if one is even a remotely competent counterintelligence officer, you recognize the number of people around President Biden who have done business with the People's Republic of China, particularly helping Chinese entities navigate their way around obstacles in the United States and effectively apologizing.
For the PRC and stressing, stating that it's not a threat to anybody.
And unfortunately, this administration has got too many of these people and the Chinese know it.
The Chinese did not like the Trump administration.
They absolutely hated Mike Pompeo, Matt Pottinger, Dave Stilwell, Miles Yu, Pete Navarro.
They hated them and wanted them gone.
Well, they got their wish. And I would note that this 20 plus years, 30 years of accommodating the PRC has in many respects been a bipartisan achievement.
With both Republican administrations and Democratic administrations really doing their best to accommodate the country that seeks to destroy us.
But Beijing definitely does consider who is in the White House, how much backbone do they have, how much resolve do they have.
And that does shape the equation from China's perspective, particularly in terms of whether they will make a so-called kinetic move somewhere.
Kinetic is the Today's word for just means shoot, a shooting war.
And unfortunately, this does really matter.
And I'm not sure who in this administration scares them.
And that is one way to look at.
It's an important thing to consider.
Now, what analysis can we use to connect what's going on in Ukraine with China's plans in Taiwan?
I say this because if I was a defender of the Biden regime, I would say, hey, listen, We are actually trying to deter China, and the way we're trying to do that is by making an example out of Putin and the Ukraine.
Here's Putin trying to invade a country and get away with it, and we've mobilized a broad resistance of industrialized countries, mainly in Europe, but also elsewhere, Australia, Canada.
And so by teaching Putin a lesson, we're sending a message to Xi that this kind of adventurism in Taiwan would meet with a similar coordinated response.
What would you say to that?
First, it would have been better to prevent Putin from invading Ukraine.
And that is something that needs to be addressed all the time.
This should not have happened. But it has happened.
What's going on, and how I look at it, is that Xi Jinping is looking very carefully at how Putin's experience in Ukraine has gone.
And they're learning the lessons.
They see what not to do, what to do differently.
And I will bet that that is how they are adjusting their...
They're preparations for an eventual assault on Taiwan, assuming Taiwan doesn't give up beforehand.
So what's the lessons?
Well, you hit hard, you hit fast with everything you've got.
You isolate the target in Taiwan.
So there is no supply, no resupply coming in.
There's no internet.
There's no way to use public opinion in their favor.
And then you make it clear to the Americans that, well, this is a domestic matter.
You stay out of it, or it's nuclear war.
And if you have a certain type of administration in the White House, well, they just might say, well, it's too bad what's going to happen to these 23 million free Taiwanese but can't be helped.
So I'm afraid that China is in fact learning the lessons, but not in the way that some people think they are, but rather to make sure that they don't make those same mistakes.
At the same time, it's sort of a win-win for Beijing because Russia is getting worked over and it makes China the dominant partner in this relationship.
And yes, there's no love lost between China and Russia.
In large parts of the Russian Far East, China reckons were stolen from them.
They expect to get them back.
But for now, there's an alignment of strategic interests and both of them hate the United States, want to destroy it.
So I'm afraid that what's going on in Ukraine, actually, we may see the effects of it in Asia.
There was a deal, of course, cut before Putin went into Ukraine, and that was that when the time comes, Russia will repay the favor.
China has provided military support, huge financial support, just thoroughgoing diplomatic and political support for Russia throughout the Ukraine period.
And as noted, they expect that Russia will return the favor if the time comes.
I don't know if you would call yourself in the prediction business.
You begin the book by really outlining a Taiwan invasion scenario.
And not in the general sense, but you go into it specifically.
Like, what would the response be from the United States?
What would Australia do?
What could local regional powers like India or Japan do?
What will they do?
What are they likely to do?
It made for a pretty chilling reading, I have to say.
So let's just close by me asking you, if you were advising the U.S. government and they were to ask you, give us your best sort of timeline for when the Chinese might pull the trigger on Taiwan, would you say in a year, in three years, in five years, or at some longer unspecified future date?
Well, I would say that 2024 onwards, and why do I say that?
In early 2024, Taiwan is having a presidential election.
If a pro-PRC candidate wins, at that point, I think China might back off and think, well, we can bring Taiwan into our loving embrace with using this quisling to do it.
Even if most Taiwanese don't want it, if you get a ruthless enough leader, he can sometimes use his power authority to take a country where most people don't want to go.
So then I think they might consider political warfare that they've been waging against Taiwan fiercely for decades, that maybe that's the way to go.
But if the candidate wins from the party that wants nothing to do with Communist Chinese domination, at that point, I think the gloves come off and China gives very, very serious thought to militarily attacking Taiwan to bring it into the fold and enslave the people So that's where I would look at the real time to pay attention is early 2024.
And from that point onwards, I would stand by.
And as you've noted, the Chinese do consider who is in the White House, but they also consider the state of affairs in the United States.
And if Americans are at each other's throat, if one side thinks the other side should be destroyed, the other side sees the other side is trying to destroy them, and we're spending money like drunken sailors, that our priorities are elsewhere, that they might like what they see, and that just might be something that encourages them to go ahead with a fight, with a shooting war.
So I would say early 2024 onwards and watch that Taiwan election.
Scary stuff indeed.
The book is called When China Attacks.
Colonel Grant Newsham, thank you very much for joining me.
Pleasure. Thank you very much for the opportunity.
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The free speech battles continue on the campus and I want to update you with the latest in the Stanford Law School free speech fight.
You might recall that this erupted when there was an organized demonstration, a disruption, a heckling of a district judge, Kyle Duncan, who was going to give a speech.
I believe the topic of the speech was fairly benign.
I think cryptocurrency, something like that.
But the students began yelling and screaming and an administrator intervened, not on the side of the judge to ensure free speech, but on the side of the hecklers, basically chastising the judge for attempting to divide the community with his speech.
Well, the dean, Jenny Martinez of the law school and also the president of Stanford apologized for this disruption.
The dean of diversity has apparently been put on leave, but there was further protest at Stanford.
And the Stanford students, the activists, were arguing, in effect, that sure, the judge may have a First Amendment right to speech, but they have a First Amendment right to attend and to yell and scream and to shout him down.
Let's call it a heckler's veto.
They have a right based on free speech to exercise this heckler's veto.
And now the dean of the law school, Jenny Martinez, has written a fairly detailed letter in which she lays out how Stanford Law School approaches this matter And how it's going to approach it in the future.
She makes a couple of points that I want to highlight.
And the first is she says, look, even though Stanford is a private institution and is not in that sense bound by the First Amendment, let's remember the First Amendment places limits on government institutions, not on private institutions.
She says, nevertheless, there is a free speech provision in California's own laws.
And so Stanford, as an entity in California, is obliged to respect those.
She goes on to quote a legal expert on the First Amendment, and this is Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
Chemerinsky is on the left, but he's been around a long time.
And he makes the point that, quote,"...freedom of speech does not protect a right to shout down others so that they cannot be heard." And this is a critical point that, no, it is not true that you get to shout someone else down and claim that you too are exercising your free speech.
Now, why do you not get to do that?
Because first of all, there is an appropriate time and place for everything.
The judge has a right to speak.
Remember, he's an invited speaker.
He was invited by the Federalist Society on the campus today.
This is a scheduled event.
The people who are coming there, who, by the way, have free speech rights, also have a right to come and listen to someone that they want to listen to.
And then also the dean makes a point that can easily get forgotten.
She says Stanford as an institution also has its own free speech rights, which means that Stanford can stand, as academic institutions should, on behalf of free speech and recognize that, look, We are a law school.
What are universities about but places where people can engage in ideas, including disagree with each other?
And what's the point of legal procedures where you go into a courtroom, you've got a prosecution, you've got a defense, you've got an adversary system that is the essence of our legal system.
And so the point being that this idea that I can't stomach someone who's saying something I don't agree with is antithetical to what universities are all about and is certainly antithetical to what the law is.
It's all about. The dean goes on to say that we are committed, Stanford Law is committed, to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
This is unfortunate, but nevertheless, they have dug in on this.
But she says, quote, that the university's commitment to DEI can and should be implemented in ways that are consistent with its commitment to academic freedom.
In other words, just because you're heated about the trans issue or about the race issue doesn't give you the right to trample on free speech.
And moreover, she goes on to say to the activists, listen, if you're expecting the Stanford Law School to keep jumping in and taking your side on every political issue of the day, take positions on trans rights and take positions on laws that other states are passing, she goes, we're not going to be doing that, quote.
At the same time, I want to set expectations clearly going forward.
Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is not going to take the form of having the school administration announce institutional positions on a wide range of current social and political issues, make frequent institutional statements about current news events, or exclude or condemn speakers who hold views on social and political issues with whom some or even many in our community disagree.
So all of this, I think, is, by and large, pretty good stuff coming out of Stanford.
In fact, so much so that Judge Kyle Duncan has praised the Dean, Jenny Martinez, by saying that, quote, this letter provides a solid basis for improving intellectual climate at Stanford.
But then he makes a key point, assuming its powerful words are backed up by concrete actions.
And Here is where I have a little bit of pause because the dean goes on to say that the students who disrupted the event are not going to be disciplined.
They're not going to be held accountable in any way.
She makes the argument that that's because an administrator kind of sided with them and almost made them feel that this was okay.
But the dean goes on to say, Jenny Martinez, it's not okay and we're going to make sure that there are procedures in place to make sure this doesn't happen in the future.
Of course, the Proof of the pudding is going to come in the enforcement of those policies, and we'll have to see if there's a repeat of this kind of incident at Stanford Law School.
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That's 800-246-8751. Or go to balanceofnature.com. Use discount code AMERICA. I'm discussing the possibility of miracles in an age of science, and I'm doing this by focusing on...
A famous critique of miracles that was made by the Scottish philosopher David Hume.
Now, Hume, in his book called An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, launches an argument against miracles which goes like this.
A miracle is a violation of the known laws of nature.
How do we know these laws?
We know them through repeated and constant experiment.
And therefore, if someone reports a miracle and says, I've witnessed a miracle, you have this guy's testimony.
Against the weight of established and verified and known laws.
And therefore, says Hume, everyone's got to side with the laws against the so-called witness and no rational person can believe in miracles.
Now, how do we answer this kind of argument?
I'm going to answer it by referring to the work of Hume himself.
And I'm going to focus on this issue of known laws of nature.
And verified scientific laws and principles.
I'm going to argue that yes, a miracle by definition is a violation of the known laws of nature because under normal circumstances, dead people don't come back to life and blind people don't see.
But I'm going to show that these scientific laws that Hume is appealing to, these known laws, are on Hume's own account, using Hume's own philosophy, empirically unverifiable.
And that means that there are no known laws of nature.
There are scientific findings and scientific laws, but those laws are open to future revision and replacement.
So violations of the known laws of nature are quite possible, and therefore miracles are possible.
Now, the way to dive into this is to focus on a more modern group that came after Hume, but is in a sense reflecting Hume's philosophy.
This group is called the Logical Positivists.
Now, lots of people are logical positivists today who have never heard of logical positivism.
How is this possible?
Well, they're arguing the principles of logical positivism, even though they may not be familiar with that label.
Now, here's what logical positivists say.
They say, by and large, they say science operates in the domain of laws and facts.
And science is different in this respect from, say, philosophy or history or, well, history operates in the realm of facts, but philosophy or theology or religion, because they would say that philosophy, ethics, and religion operate in the domain of values.
And the idea here is that facts are knowable, they are verifiable, scientific laws can be verified, but of course, moral values and philosophical propositions are subjective.
The people who talk like this are all around us today.
They speak with a kind of pompous air.
They're generally pretty well-educated.
And even people who don't agree with them sometimes have a hard time figuring out how to answer them.
Now, for the logical positivists, there are two kinds of statements.
There are analytic statements and synthetic statements.
Now what's an analytic statement?
An analytic statement is a statement whose truth or falsity can be established just by looking at the statement itself.
You don't have to go outside the statement.
So if I say, a bachelor is an unmarried man, That's an analytic statement.
Why? Because everything that you need to know, a bachelor is by definition an unmarried man.
You don't have to go outside the sentence to establish, if you will, the veracity of it.
It's true, you may say, by definition.
It's true. In and of itself.
For Hume, mathematics is a classic example of these analytic truths.
So 2 plus 2 equals 4 is true in a sense by definition.
It's always and everywhere true.
It's true in a sense without having to look at the world and start counting.
2 plus 2 is always 4 and mathematical truths are to this degree analytic.
And then you have Synthetic statements, which are different.
A synthetic statement is an empirical statement, and its truth or falsity can only be established by kind of going and checking.
So if I were to say, for example, that there's a dog that is barking in the next room, That's not a statement that's true in and of itself.
It may or may not be true.
To find out if there's a dog, I've got to listen.
Oh, there's something barking. I've got to go open the door and look in the next room.
Oh, there's a dog and it's barking.
So an empirical statement or a synthetic statement can only be verified by checking the facts, by taking a look at the data, so to speak.
Now, here's what Hume is saying.
He's saying that analytic statements are true A priori.
A priori means they're true in and of themselves.
They're true in advance of having to look at any data.
Whereas synthetic statements are true a posteriori.
Posteriori means coming after.
So you can only verify a synthetic statement by kind of going and checking.
And after you have reviewed the facts, you can go, yeah, this synthetic claim is true or it is not true.
Now, what is the point of this distinction?
The point is that Hume draws on this distinction between analytic and synthetic statements to say the following.
He says, listen, all statements in order to be meaningful must be analytic.
Or they must be synthetic.
They must be true by definition, or they must be true by checking the facts.
And he concludes, based on this, that metaphysics, theology, any claims about God or morality, are nonsense.
They're not even untrue.
They don't make any sense.
Why? Because they're not true analytically.
God isn't true by definition.
And he goes, and they aren't true synthetically either.
There's no empirical way to verify the facts about whether or not there's God or whether there's an afterlife or whether miracles are possible.
He goes, since it's impossible to verify these things either analytically or synthetically, they are basically meaningless statements.
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